Monthly Archives: July 2009

Stupid things you hear in PC World #1: “Macs don’t have 2 button mice”

Posted by David Hurst on July 16, 2009 3 comments

I do love to have a browse around PC World from time to time, or as I like to call it, “The Toy Shop”. Such an occasion for mindless wandering and perusing of gadgets I want to buy but don’t need, occurred today, and with it the customary experience of hearing somebody spouting forth crap about computers. Often it’s the PC World staff that are the guilty parties, but on this occasion it was a kid, or rather, group of kids. Anyway, I figured this might make a nice periodical feature for my blog, so without further ado…

I was just having a look at the new MacBook Pro 13″ (very nice looking laptop I must say, but my aging MacBook Pro 17″ has some life in it yet) when a group of kids saunters over to stare at the 24″ iMac. I know this to be the very pinnacle of home computing, because I have one myself, and what’s not to like? The 2 foot screen is very nice. The performance is fabulous. The design of it is awesome. The new keyboard I will admit to not liking at all – why have Apple chopped the number pad off? I have several of the newer aluminium keyboards (with full number pad) and it is definitely the best keyboard Apple have ever made. It is the one area they struggle with. Don’t even get me started on the Mighty Mouse – I have a drawer full of ‘em as they invariably get swapped straight away for a Logitech.

Anyway, first of all this kid calls the screen “crap”. Are you kidding? And the design he labeled “ugly”. Neither statement could be considered remotely accurate. The screen is fabulous, with vibrant colour reproduction and excellent even brightness levels. The design of the iMac is an example of genius. You only have to walk down the PC aisles in PC World to see a plethora of tacky copies of the elegant iMac.

Next to come out of his mouth was: “Macs have only just got a two button mouse”. What? General rule of thumb: don’t present yourself as some sort of expert when you have zero knowledge of the subject matter. Apple were the first computer company to offer a computer with a mouse, and all Macs have supported two button mice for years. The Mighty Mouse has been out for at least 4 years, and that is a two button mouse. In fact it has four buttons plus a scroll ball (first to do that too). All modern Apple laptops also have a right click function – you tap the trackpad with two fingers. Failing that, just hold CTRL and click.

Then, the real reason for the Mac slagging – the price. As they gasped at the thought of paying £1,149 for a state of the art home computer, it became evident that a 24″ iMac was far beyond their expectations. Well, you get what you pay for fellas. My first laptop, at age 18, was a basic machine (Olivetti Echos P100 to be precise) and it cost me £1,500 and took me four years to pay for. Today, you can buy basic (and very crappy) laptops for £280, so yes, maybe £1,149 seems like a lot. Look at what you get though: it will out-perform a same-specced PC and run Windows; it comes with a load of quality software – not crappy bundled trials and second rate packages; it runs a stable and secure OS that doesn’t crash or contract viruses; it’s a pleasure to use, and; much more. All this makes the iMac a very sensible choice for a home computer and worth the asking price.

Not convinced?

Consider this: I have an iMac G5 17″ here in the office. It’s over four years old and it is still in daily use, running the very latest OS happily. Find me a four year old PC that can run Vista. In fact, my brother still has my old PowerMac G4, which is now six years old. That too is running the latest OS. The 24″ iMac will last easily 5 – 6 years, whereas most PCs are done after 2 – 3 years. On top of that, Macs have a second hand re-sale value, whereas second hand PCs are virtually worthless.

Factor in all these things and you will find that the iMac represents extraordinary value for money, particularly when you can get the 20″ version for £949. Can’t expect the average PC World punter to understand that though – they buy, and are sold to, purely on numbers. This one has more numbers so must be faster, right? Wrong actually. But that’s another post for another day.

Facebook notifications not working

Posted by David Hurst on July 7, 2009 49 comments

I’ve finally fixed this annoying problem.

Users of Facebook will be familiar with the notification icon in the bottom right of the screen that lets you know when people have commented on your activity etc., and I’m guessing that if you’ve stumbled on this page then your Facebook notifications have stopped working too.

The fix is simple:

  • Click on the notifications icon to open the Facebook notifications window.
  • Click on ‘See All Notifications’ at the bottom.
  • In the list of authorised applications on the right hand side, under ‘Other Applications’, tick the box next to ‘Feed Comments’
  • Job done!

Yep, you never unticked the damn box in the first place. Who knows why this happens?

I hope this post helps you out – leave a comment below if so.

Online Marketing Show 2009 at Olympia, London

Posted by David Hurst on July 1, 2009 1 comments

Myself and some of the HigherSites team headed up to the Online Marketing Show at Olympia on Tuesday this week (30 June). It’s always interesting to see what other companies and industry professionals are doing, particularly when online marketing is such a rapidly developing field, and on the whole I thought the show was very enjoyable, with some good speakers and seminar sessions. So here are a few of the highlights and lowlights of the show, from my perspective. For those that don’t know me, one of my fields of expertise is online marketing (search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, social media etc.) and I am a Google qualified professional.

Show Overview
The show is put on by Marketing Week and is split into four distinct areas, with online marketing being just one of these. However, it was clear that online marketing is what most delegates were interested in, and I feel that Marketing Week completely underestimated its popularity, given that the Online section was the smallest. The result of this was that the show was very crowded and that the seminar sessions were universally over-subscribed. There simply wasn’t enough space for everyone to sit and listen, so delegates were forced to stand around the edges of the theatre areas in large crowds, straining to listen to the presentations. Others sat on the floor for long periods.

Clearly, online marketing is what marketing agencies are most interested in, and I hope Marketing Week adapt their show next year to reflect that fact.

The Venue
Olympia is a reasonable venue – much the same as any other conference centre really. It’s the usual story with the catering: exorbitant prices; low quality, and; not enough seating. If you can, try and plan your day so that you don’t need to eat there (unless you particularly want to part with £2 for a small bottle of water and over £4 for a pre-packaged sandwich).

Olympia is easily reached by Tube. If you’re travelling from the West Country, as we were, I recommend taking the M3 straight in to Richmond, parking at Old Deer Park Car Park (about £8 all day) and jumping on the Tube at Richmond station, which is no more than 5 minutes walk from the car park. This puts you straight on the District line and you change at Earl’s Court for an Olympia train.

Multi Variate Testing
The first session we attended (and by “attended” I mean: “jostled for space and craned our necks to see and listen from outside the theatre area”) was all to do with multi variate testing. If you’re not familiar with this area of online marketing / usability, it’s all to do with displaying multiple versions of a page and gauging which version delivers the best results. This sort of testing fits neatly between website development and online marketing, because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the design and development process and provides increased levels of success to online marketing efforts. A page layout ceases to be the preference of the designer or the website owner, and becomes a proven formula for success, as dictated by the website users.

It really is amazing how the tiniest changes to a page layout can have a dramatic impact on the conversion rates of any calls to action on that page. This sort of testing is an absolute must for any website owner that needs better conversion levels. Remember: online marketing only delivers traffic to your website, it is the job of the website to convert that traffic into actual business.

Augmented Reality
This area of marketing is not really something I see myself ever getting involved in heavily, but it is something that is going to be huge. I can’t really explain it as well as a simple video demonstration can, so if you want to know more, do a search for “augmented reality” on YouTube.

I have already seen this technology in action, so it is here and now and available, but it is very expensive at the moment.

How 140 Brands Use Twitter
No matter how proficient you are in a particular discipline, it’s always worthwhile to have a look at things through another expert’s perspective. This particular session was lively and fast-paced with an excellent speaker. I picked up a few points that I will apply to my own use of Twitter and the company use of Twitter for clients as part of a social marketing package. It was particularly interesting to look at how major brands are using Twitter to good effect, and how many different ways there are to use it.

I thought the speaker did a particularly good job of getting across one of the key points of using Twitter for marketing. I have previously tended to caution customers not to use Twitter as a “PR megaphone”, but I like hers better. The analogy was of engaging with guests at a party. No-one will engage with you if all you do is talk about yourself! Online marketing with Twitter is all about engaging with people, and to do that, you need to be interested in what they have to say, even if sometimes you might not like what they say!

SEO is dead! Long live the new SEO!
I was drawn to this session by the exciting title, but the reality is it failed to deliver. Some of the content was largely similar to the content that I present in my own seminars and workshops, but this is no surprise as much of the content comes from the collective mouth of Google anyway. The theme of the session wasn’t really developed well enough, and I felt it could have been better. The speaker seemed more interested in plugging his own business and stand.

Unfortunately he made a bit of a gaff by introducing Microsoft bing as some sort of next big thing, and seemed to indicate that websites should be optimised specifically for bing, and if your current SEO company hadn’t told you about it, you ought to sack them (said as a bit of joke). Unfortunately, during the Q&A, one bright spark put his hand up and asked for some more specifics on how a website should be optimised for bing, which the speaker was unable to give, because of course nobody knows yet. Microsoft don’t publish their search engine algorithms for us to exploit, and as it is a brand new engine, it will take time for this information to filter through. But, given Google’s massive market share, I don’t think I will be spending too much of my time worrying about bing just yet.

Conclusion
So, I only managed to catch 4 sessions during the day, but with the exception of the last, the sessions were very useful for me. The stands were pretty much all SEO companies or email marketeers, so these didn’t hold much interest to me, but for a traditional marketing agency looking to branch into digital, I imagine there would have been plenty of potential partners there.

I am scheduled to deliver a 1 hour session on SEO and Social Media at Business South West 2009, and whilst I haven’t finalised my material yet, I took a lot of pointers on how to make my presentations even more lively and interactive. Good stuff.

Overall a good day, and definitely worth going, just a shame it wasn’t organised a bit better and given the attention it deserved.