Facttactic
Corporate and technical writers
I came face to face with amazing customer service at 3am on the weekend.
Ok, you may be thinking, what sort of customer service does any person need in the wee small hours?
Well, to be accurate, the 3am was in Bulgaria. At my place, it was lunchtime Saturday, and I was struggling with a dead-to-the-world website.
[Read more…] about when great customer service becomes great PR
This site is mobile responsive now and so is its sister site www.technical-writer.co.nz.
We made the upgrades in response to Google advising that mobile friendly sites would benefit from changes to its search algorithms released yesterday. If your site is not mobile responsive, it will still rank the same in desktop and laptop searches, but will suffer when people search from mobile devices.
[Read more…] about we’re mobile responsive now, did you make Google’s deadline?
Managing the content creation for new websites can be a crazy jumble of emails, spreadsheets, Word documents, draft pages, missing-in-action writers and management demands, so I was very pleased this morning to be pointed towards a sweet-looking, online tool for keeping the whole shebang orderly and workable …
Gather Content is a content management tool that looks to have all the features I’d need for my next project. Everyone works in the same system and all revisions are visible and shareable.
Ok, yes, haha, I haven’t actually tried the system yet, but the promise of content development clarity was a bit of a beacon that pulled me in.
Although, with recent news that Chinese will soon overtake English as the main language of the internet, maybe it would be of greater value to learn Mandarin before investing in a new English-language tool!
(In the past decade, English has shrunk from being 39 percent of all internet content down to just 27 per cent at the end of 2011, just 3 per cent ahead of Chinese, which has grown 11 per cent in the past 6 or so years.)
Here are some numbers: online advertising now accounts for around 10 percent of the total advertising spend in New Zealand; and the total online advertising spend for the first quarter of 2010 was $53.32m, up 12.31 per cent from the previous quarter.
It’s a not dissimilar level to the global online spend, with the Internet increasing its share of the global ad market from 10.5 per cent in 2008 to 12.6 per cent in 2009, (overtaking magazines for the first time) and expected to increase to more than 17 percent in 2012, according to communication firm ZenithOptimedia.
Put that alongside a trend visible mainly in the United States so far, where wealthy sponsors are starting to back online community newspapers to fill holes in local news coverage caused by shrinking newsrooms at traditional papers, and a pronounced swing to online communications is becoming clearly visible.
Or perhaps, more accurately, the value of online communication is being recognised and understood.
Do you get your news by picking up a paper from the dairy on the way to work, or is it easier to do some surfing at morning tea from your desk? Do you find products and services in magazines and newspapers or on TV; or do you turn to the net as your first port of call?
And, more importantly, where are your customers finding out about you? Online, online, online.
It is said that Google reaches about 167 terabytes of information on the open web but there are another 91,000 terabytes sitting in the ‘deep web’ that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other mainstream search engines can’t reach. Here’s an interesting article on 10 search engines, such as Infomine, DeepWebTech and Scirus, that can search the deep web to find those hidden libraries of knowledge you never knew existed.
When I first got the internet at home 12 or so years back, I remember the Actrix ISP guy telling me to make the most of it because, sooner rather than later, we’d all have to pay to view anything on the web.
Today, thankfully, I’m still waiting for that, and savvy businesses are making more and more online stuff free – many getting rich doing it.
Wired editor Chris Anderson for one firmly believes things are only going to get freer on the internet. In his new book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price, Anderson says, “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”
Tomorrow, though, the National Business Review starts to charge for ‘premium’ content on its website. The move comes as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation also ponders widespread charges for reading its news websites. So far, reportedly, it has more than one million paid up subscribers to its Wall St Journal online service. Which way, if at all, things will tip is still pretty unclear.
And will this trend extend beyond the grumpy old men of newspapers? It appears unlikely. The free internet has been a huge tool for smart PR campaigns (think the best job on the world) using free content and, of course, for the free spread of ideas and thought, in general.
UPDATE: I visited the NBR site Friday morning. Most of the top stories have Subscriber content next to them, and you must sign-on and pay to access them. Did I do this? No. Do I miss not getting the content? Yes. Is the content crucial for my work or life? No. Has the website now become a bit unhelpful for me? Yes. Does it make the site less worth visiting? Yes. Will the site lose a visitor and NBR advertisers a potential customer? Looks like it.