Matt Cornock

Category: Marketing

  • The Times paid-only subscription goes live

    I’ve mentioned the (questionable) usability of The Times website (thetimes.co.uk / thetimes.co.uk) subscription service in a previous blog post, however now the ‘free trial’ is over.

  • Nightly Bile Beans – Design tips from adverts that last 150 years

    One of the stand out signs in York is that of the ‘Nightly Bile Beans’ on Lord Mayor’s Walk. For over a century (I’m guessing), this simple advert (pictured below) has informed millions and made the brand a household name, at least in York.

  • Top 10: Marketese – Marketing words to avoid

    Don’t use meaningless marketing words like ‘best’, ‘greatest’ or ‘incredible’. People are smart (mostly), and if not smart then they’re sceptical. When writing for the web (or any marketing copy) using words like ‘the best…’ or ‘amazing’ is a waste of space and damages your keyword ratio.

  • Twitter Open for Business (and for Dizziness)

    Twitter has recently woken up to embracing the B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-customer) community, encouraging C2B (customer-to-business) and C2C (customer-to-customer) relationship building with it’s Twitter for Business 101 pages. In other news below, I am stunned by the use of scrolling text.

  • How I lost all my images on Google Image search: the perils of default settings

    Although I like to consider myself quite well versed in the art of SEO and visibility on the web, I did have a ‘slap-forehead-moment’ a few weeks back. I’d recently reinstalled Drupal (which this site runs on) to the latest version. However, what I failed to remember was that I’d created my own robots.txt and .htaccess…

  • Social media outsourcing can be embedded (Reflections on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

    The archaic need to keep users on your site and your site only, really isn’t relevant for modern web usage. The latest contribution from Jakob Nielsen ‘Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky’, should certainly not put you off using social media and networks within your business. My argument here goes against his snapshot that social media…

  • Updating a large site

    Apologies for not updating the site recently. Lots going on at work has encouraged me to spend less time infront of my PC monitor at home. I’ve been converting thousands of words worth of Word docs into pretty, clean, HTML ready for uploading to Moodle. Then (strangely) converting the tidy formating back into Word to…

  • Murdoch charging for online news – seems a bit backward to me

    The recent suggestion by Rupert Murdoch that he will be charging for online news provision starting sometime in 2010 goes against all intuition. Here’s my analysis and predictions. I mentioned the story to two people already and they both said ‘Well we’ll use BBC News instead…’ – who will pay for online news or celeb…

  • Compare the meerkat

    Compare The Market’s recent (and still current) ‘Compare The Meerkat’ campaign has undoubtedly become engrained in the minds of the UK public. On a recent trip to London Zoo, guess what everyone was saying near the meerkat enclosure? Three months ago, would we have been able to buy meerkat garden ornaments? The reason why it’s a…