Government grants are available for East Midlands businesses looking to develop their strategic Internet marketing skills.

The £500 training and development grant is available from the Learning and Skills Council’s “Leaders  First” programme. This is an outright grant, and your business does not need to make a financial contribution.

That means you can have individual coaching with me for free, or you can attend my training courses for free.

An additional £500 grant is available if you are available to match the money, making a total grant of £1000.  That means you can have £1500 of management coaching, bespoke training, or public training courses at a cost of just £500.

We are working with an number of clients who are using the grant to use our training and consultancy to create a competitive edge with their Internet marketing activities. You might want to improve your Internet skills, develop a more effective Internet strategy, or use the training to keep pace with the rapid changes in online marketing.

The projects we have worked on include:

• developing a strategic Internet marketing plan
• planning a strategic search engine optimisation campaign
• designing and delivering surveys on the Internet
• improving Pay Per Click campaigns by developing in-house skills

Who Can Apply?

Businesses with between 5 and 249 employees are eligible to apply for the grant funding. Funding is available for the development of senior managers or key decision makers.  One grant is available per organisation, up to a maximum of £1000 grant.  You will need to undertake a skills diagnostic and develop a Personal Development Plan (PDP).  If your plan includes Internet Marketing skills, then the grant can help you along your way.

Get in touch if you would like to discuss your requirements, and I can provide details of next steps.

I spoke at a accountants’ conference earlier this week, and a delegate was keen to let me know only 20% of his clients use email.

Only 20%?  How can that be possible?

The Office of National Statistics have published a report that illustrates the kinds of people who do, and don’t, use the Internet. Approximately a quarter of the UK population doesn’t use the Internet.

The fractures appear along age, educational, and gender lines:

• 70% of people aged 65 or over have never used the Internet.
• 93% of people with a degree do have access to the Internet from home
• 29% of women have never used the Internet, where as only 20% of men have never been online

Other barriers might be geography, or cost

But perhaps most interestingly of all, 60% of the folk without access simply don’t want it,  or feel that they don’t need it.

Coming back to my accountant friend, he is based in rural Dorset and serving an older clientele.  On the one hand that would explain the lack of adoption of Internet, but my advise to his business would be to continue to test new Internet services for his clients.

Source:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/iahi0808.pdf

Barack Obama became America’s 44th President on 20 January 2009 at 12:00, and just one minute later at 12:01 the Whitehouse published it’s very first blog posting.

Change has come to the Whitehouse, and at least one of those changes is the aim of building community by using blogging, RSS feeds, and email newsletters.  These technologies were instrumental in the successful election campaign, and now they are being transferred to.

And the change wasn’t limited to just adding a blog.  The site has had a complete makeover.  Here is the new Obama verson of the White House home page, complete with compelling graphics, blog postings as the main content on the home page, videos to watch, Call to Action to subscribe to the newsletter:

Compare and contrast with the previous Bush version of the whitehouse.gov website:

Google Knows Who’s President

Speaking of change, it didn’t take Google long to update it’s database with  the correct information.  A search for White House displays the two lines of text in black from the newly revised meta description tag telling me about the new president:

On the other hand, at the time of this posting Yahoo! still hadn’t managed to update it’s database, telling me that Bush was still president:

I’m aware that my company website design is nearly three years old, and that the design is looking a little tired and is due for a website refresh.

Why not take a peek at the draft design of the new site. Your comments would be most welcome, keeping in mind this is a work in progress! The real site will not have my ugly face on the front, but it is a useful image to use at this stage!

The idea is to put a new “skin” on the site, retaining the existing file names in order to preserve all my search engine optimisation efforts.

I’ve worked closely with my graphic design partner to design something that looks corporate, and modern, and clearly conveys the key messages. I am also looking to include more Web 2.0 functionality, but I’ll let you know more about that later.

Further progress regarding the site development to follow-

I had a great holiday this summer, and whilst away I discovered a website that makes me laugh right out loud.

GraphJam puts music and pop culture in graph form. And if you are feeling clever, it has a toolbox that let’s you create your own GraphJams.

Let’s start off with the Beach Boys:

more music charts

Go ahead and let us know if you create your own GraphJams

Google is Super. We all knew that, but Google is officially the UK consumer Superbrand, as chosen by 2,200 UK consumers participating in an independent YouGov poll commissioned by Superbrands.

Google has knocked Microsoft out of the top spot, and together they sit in the top ten along with Mercedes-Benz, BBC, British Airways, Royal Doulton, BMW, Bosch, Nike and Sony.

Apple lurks just outside the top 10. Yahoo! lags behind way down at 75. Adobe scrapes in at a surprisingly low 278.

So what is a Superbrand?

‘A Superbrand has established the finest reputation in its field. It offers customers significant emotional and tangible advantages over other brands, which (consciously or sub-consciously) customers want and recognise.’ All Superbrands must represent quality, reliability, and distinction.

Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Superbrands Council which commissioned the research, said: “Lifestyle brands, particularly those in the technology sector, have considerably more sway with the public than everyday staples such as the supermarkets, which now seem further than ever from the affections of the British people.

“The results are also a further sign that Google is continuing its dominance in the UK. It is clear that Google is the brand that people value at work and in their personal lives.”

Are you ever tempted to create a bogus blog, and pretend to be one of your own happy customers? Attracted by the chance to write some glowing online reviews of your own business? How about asking your staff or marketing agency to create phony evaluations of your products or services?

Big changes in the law covering business blogging, social media and viral marketing techniques means businesses need to think twice before pretending to be the “voice of the people.”

The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations bans 31 unfair commercial practices designed to protect consumers from misleading, aggressive or unfair practices.

In particular, the legislation outlaws any marketing that is in fact a disguised commercial message.

In the online marketing world, banned activities for businesses include:

• writing fake reviews on sites like TripAdvisor or Google Maps
• creating fake blogs
• asking questions on Q&A sites, and then answering the question yourself
• editing Wikipedia entries under a false identity
• imitating a consumer
• falsely advertising on social media sites

The use of false Internet marketing techniques has spawned a whole new vocabulary:

Flogs or “fake blogs” posing as a consumer, but created by professionals with the aim of selling products. One of the best known phony flogs is “All I Want for Christmas is a PSP” – created by a marketing agency called on behalf of Sony; Walmart has done a fake blog and been caught and shamed, and so have L’Oreal and lots more.

Astroturfing or fake grassroots campaigns, such as those used during political campaigns.

The penalty if you break the law? A little visit from Trading Standards, followed by fines up to £5,000, and up to two years in prison for individual directors or senior managers who are guilty of “consenting, conniving or negligently” breaking the rules.

The British Library has got to be one of the best kept secrets for small businesses in the UK.

I spent a profitable afternoon researching a business project, and gained free access to industry reports that quite literally could run into hundreds of pounds.

The Business & IP Centre at the British Library, located next to St Pancras Station in London has masses of business information just waiting for you to come and use it. And it isn’t any stuffy library; it’s dynamic and beautiful and useful.

Online business databases, Market research reports, Trade guides, Industry guides, together with friendly and knowledgeable staff on hand to help you it.

And if you are local, then take advantage of their workshops and advice sessions.

Get yourself on the train to London, get yourself a free Reader Card, and get your business the information it needs.

It’s A National Treasure.

Listen to the automatic text-to-speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

One of the things I love about Britain is Radio 4. It’s great to listen to the news, listen to commentary, or listen to stories.

Sometimes it would be nice if somebody would read aloud to me all the stuff I have to read on my computer screen. I have to read a lot to stay abreast of Internet Marketing developments.

Speech readers used to be pretty rubbish, and I was wondering just how much they have improved in recent years

And so I’ve just tried NaturalReader, a free text to speech software application. It “reads” pages from Internet Explorer, Word documents, Outlook, PDF’s, and lots more.

I was very impressed, to say the least.

There is a free version, but I splashed out for the paid-for version(40 dollars) and got a much more natural sounding voice from a dude called “Paul.”

The software has the additional benefit of being able to convert your own text files into sound (MP3/WAV) files.

I did a little experiment converting this blog posting into an audio file: Listen to the text to speech conversion of this blog posting here (1 Mb MP3 file)

Clearly, it is an automated voice, but it is one I could listen to. The software was idiot proof to install, simple to use, and intuitive.

And many thanks to Andy from Local Conservatory for bringing NaturalReader to my attention.

I confess: I wilf.

Wilf (v) : aimless browsing on the web. Short for “What was I looking for…”

You know what I mean. There you are, working industriously. And then you follow an interesting link, or read your email, or write a blog posting. And forget entirely what you’re supposed to be doing.

I like to call it serendipity. Business managers like to call it time wasting.
A YouGov poll sampled more than 2,000 people, and two thirds of them confessed to wilfing. Apparently we spend two full days a month aimlessly surfing. Men are more likely to wilf than women, and young people more likely than oldies.

By the way, here’s where you can register to get paid to participate in YouGov polls.

And if you considered following that link, then you’re wilfing…

Be glad you don’t WILF in China: Internet addicts there are treated with electric shock, acupuncture and drug therapy.

Now, back to work!