McCain – the oven chip people – have a new website which is an interesting example of how brands are responding to the demand of the online audience to find more useful information about the product. The site contains simple messaging about the product, information about the nutritiousness of their food. There is flash animation here but it doesn’t get in the way of the message. The site is indexed Continue reading →

Our friends at Field Fisher Waterhouse last week opened up an office in Second Life. Since Second Life has its own rules, customs and IP practices, there is intriguing potential here for an entirely new practice. The PR positioning is shrewd. London lacks the service companies for tech businesses that are common in Silicon Valley. FFW is staking a claim to that business. It’s a clever move.

Matt Cutts – a key Google blogger – is a great critic of companies who try to spam the search engine index by buying links. This practice of buying text links is “illegal” according to Cutts, and Google penalises it when they can find it. Why do people do it? Simple: it works. Contextual links have the power to drive a company to the top of a search engine like Continue reading →

Dell’s users have been thronging their new feedback site IdeaStorm demanding that Dell retain Windows XP as an option on new computers. They feel that Vista is a “young operating system with its own problems”. The post that requests XP be retained has received 13,328 endorsements. Dell offered to retain XP for business users earlier in the month. As of last week, Dell have agreed to reintroduce the XP option Continue reading →

In Tuesday’s FT Chet Henderson of Unilever Insight (the multinational’s research arm) discussed with Carlos Grande why the company had taken the decision to move 80% of its market research to the web. “Internet response are more honest than those gained by traditional methods,” Henderson observed. The article points out that the market researchers hope to save 10% to 20% of the cost of traditional methods. Grande estimates Unilever’s annual Continue reading →