With a little inspiration from Hitwise, I had a look at quick look at the trends for large Polish websites in Google trends, but searches from Irish IP addresses. As you would expect, this trend has a southward feel to it as many return home again.  The largest of these sites being visited form Ireland was www.nasza-klasa.pl, the largest polish social networking site, keeping you in touch with friends both home and abroad. From a high of 20k daily visitors in July 2008 to half that now it really shows the rate of decline the speed at which people decided

Nice to see some updates on the electronic side of some of the media with Independent Digital giving stats for their properties for March 2009. In the chart the blue line is independent.ie and the red are, collectively, the other sites. The average for the month was 113,256 the newspaper site and 26,800 for the others combined. I would point out that the figure for March 7th look a little spurious, but it’s the one published in the report. The spike on March 23rd can be put down to primarily to a sporting weekend of the Grand Slam and the

Here’s a really good example of merging mediums, there are plenty, but I liked this one for its simplicity and a small bit of ‘wonder would that happen here?’ A Taco chain in Florida Taco Maker reported a 21% increase in Q1 sales, crediting a promotion it ran between radio advertising and mobile handsets for the increase. I don’t think there are many companies that can boast a 21% increase in sales, let alone double digit in Q1. They developed a new character called Juan Maker, and Mexican-American character that made radio appearances to chat about his freebies. These were

Personally, I think that, for many companies, it junk – pure and simple. Companies investing time, effort and presumably money to put up 140 characters at a time of absolute inane rubbish. Where’s the ROI – how is this being measured and, more importantly, why are you doing it? Someone told one of the big chiefs that it’s the ‘next big thing’ and so someone else dived on it. I could spend a lot of time on this – but I don’t have it handy – so I will have to accept the fact that companies are going to participate

In the last ground of electronic ABC figures there were some extra interesting stats furnished by the Guardian. They launched a mobile site earlier this year and they gave a first look at some of the data.  Overall they had 27,324,309 unique users to its site in April – making it the most visited site out of all the UK morning papers. But the mobile site attracted 101,000 and 2.1m page impressions during the month. More interestingly, two thirds of that traffic came from either an iPhone or iPod Touch. “The Web” seems to feature very high on the agenda

This morning, Vodafone delivered their annual results. Overall, pretty healthy on the surface as they turned €41b and EBITDA was €14.5b. But they had a charge against that of nearly €6 (impairment charges) ‘primarily in respect of Spain’ – and said no more on that. Its wasn’t the only lack of transparency, possibly as they are Preliminary results, with more details to follow? As a  Nation we are now, bundled into ‘other Europe’ so its impossible at this stage to get comparative numbers about our usage etc against our compatriots around the world. All it reveals is that, as of

I sometimes get the feeling that business are all too willing to abandon their “heartland” (traditional media) in favour of the new holy grail (new media). I would hurriedly say that I believe that a business will not prosper in today’s climate without an online presence. But, it’s the marriage of both that critical. Your offline presence can, and will, drive your online traffic. So, how you project yourself offline should be carried through online. I did some work for a company and one of the areas I looked at was their web traffic and where it originates. By way

Dominos (www.dominos.com), in the USA anyway,  have taken a real leap forward in my opinion with their new mobile coupon offering. For some time now, Dominos have encouraged customers to ‘opt-in’ to their mobile medium i.e. give details of nearest store, mobile number and permission to be contacted via text. They have partnered with www.air2web.com/ who look after the mobile coupon marketing for them. Opt in customers then receive ‘mobile coupons’ which they can use when they are buying online or online via dominos mobile site. As dominos know the geographic location of customers (because of the store location) they

With the R word abound, coupons are resurgent but their route to the consumer is changing. Some time back, I worked in the Directory business. Our core product was print and we were constantly battling against a rising internet tide. Instead of building boats, we were trying to build dams and continually sought ‘hooks’ to get households pick up the print edition. One of the enticements that worked particularly well was a section of printed coupons. Testimony to their success was the fact that renewal of the coupon business was near 100%. So the advertisers were getting a satisfactory return

Google gives you every opportunity to make sure that your business not only appears in its search engines, but that it also has a ‘local’ dimension to it. Some companies seem to throw their hat at the whole search scene as they feel that, in the greater scheme of things, they, as a local business, won’t be found. But the search engines and SEO in general really do place an emphasis on companies being locally found. In the USA it’s a tad more sophisticated with Google primarily using the searchers IP address to ‘geo-locate; US IP’s are in general much

A post on the Google Analytics blog informed all that Google was going to change the information that it reports in the referring URL when search results are clicked. From their example of the new referring URL they gave a string, which when it is laid out and the ampersands removed, contains like this. There is no definitive source for the meanings of all of some of these parameters, speculation at best on many of them: http://www.google.com/url? sa=t source=web ct=res cd=7 url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN & rct=j q=flowers usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w & sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw However the parameter  “cd=7” looks like it’s the part that tells you

Looks like another bad say at the Ad office in 2009. New forecasts by Zenith Optimedia suggesting that worldwide Ad spend will be down by 7% – a drop of almost $31b to $453b. To put that $31b in perspective, it’s about half of the planned total Irish Government expenditure 2009. The only winner is online growing about 8% overall to $54b (display down, search up). The big losers are newspapers declining by about 12% nearly neck and neck with magazine advertising falling 11%. Unless the traditional media (all formats) actually begin to ‘hunt the money’ and go after the

Two relatively new search engines to have a look at. One looks like a mega spam fest and the other, while narrowly focussed, is very interesting. www.stumpedia.com is the first and I think it really has a short life span. It allows registered users to submit sites then other registered users vote these sites it up or down the search results! As I said – spam heaven. I registered and searched for ‘Ireland’ where there were four, yes 4, results returned; “Dublin” returned no results at all. Whilst I wish them luck in the venture and as much as I