It’s surprisingly easy to be a remarkable freelancer, to stand head and shoulders above the increasingly growing number of the self-employed. All you have to do is to behave professionally and produce outstanding work. Sadly, many freelancers have bad habits, which prevent prospects from hiring them, and send existing clients away to other freelancers. Read More By Managing Clients for Freelance Folder, 19 Jan 2011.
Category Archives: Research
The Educational Benefit of Ugly Fonts
A few months ago, I wrote a speculative blog post about e-readers. Although I love my Kindle, I worried that these new gadgets made the act of reading a little bit too easy, and that this visual ease might lead, one day, to a shallower engagement with our texts. It was a rather tortured argument, an awkward mash-up of McLuhan and fMRI research. I’m happy to report that a brand-new paper in Cognition by a team of Princeton psychologists (Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Erikka B. Vaughan) makes the same point I was trying to make, only much, much better. (They also have, you know, actual evidence.) Read More By Jonah Lehrer for Wired, 05 Jan 2011.
Head JS Script Loader
With Head JS your scripts load like images – completely separated from the page rendering process. The page is ready sooner. Always. This is guaranteed even with a single combined JavaScript file. See it yourself: Read More
Social Networkers Most Influential in Driving Brand Awareness
Online social “connectors”, people who share opinions with their social network, have been found to trigger the most online brand impressions in Europe. Forrester Research has analysed the peer influence behaviours of online Europeans, based on a survey of 14,000 people in seven Western European countries. The report, called “Using Social Media To Create Mass Reach – The 2010 European Peer Influence Analysis”, found that just 4% of online users in Europe are responsible for triggering 80% of “consumer brand influence impressions”. Forrester also found that only 11% of online adults in Europe create and trigger 80% of all the influence posts online. Read More By Katherine Levy for Brand Republic, 17 Dec 2010.
What did users search for in 2010?
Search engine Yahoo! has put together a list of the most popular searches on yahoo.co.uk in 2010 and it makes interesting reading. In with a bullet at number one is Lottery, a new entry, with Job Centre moving up one place from last year to the number two spot. Weather is there at number three. Celebrity and showbiz searches like Cheryl Cole, Big Brother and Katie Price come further down the list, suggesting that Brits are more concerned with money and the weather than celeb and showbiz (or the ones who search on Yahoo! anyway). Read more. By Sue Keogh for The Wall, 1 Dec 2010.
How popular is Apple’s iPhone [Infographic]
How big is Apple’s iPhone US and world mobile market? The answer might surpirse you. I could be wrong, but it is not as big as you might think. While it has a very healthy 28% share of the US smartphone market and growing (up 7%) it is Android that has the real wheels in this market. And overall? Apple has only a 2% world share. Sometimes with the mass of Apple headlines people forget that. Read more By Polly Becker for The Wall, September 20, 2010
How to Become a Thought Leader in Six Steps
It’s gospel that you have to cultivate your personal brand, particularly if you have designs on the C suite. But because everyone has a brand nowadays (Tom Peters describes it as “your promise to the marketplace and the world”) simply having one is insufficient if you want to advance. You can’t just be known as “the guy who speaks Spanish” or “the programmer who can explain things well” or “that woman in legal who gets things done fast.” That’s nice — but there are a million of you, and in a globalized world, your company can find an alternative to you fast. That’s why you need to establish yourself as a thought leader. Good employees and good executives are nice to have. Thought leaders are irreplaceable — and indispensable. … Continue reading
50 Ways to take your Blog to the next level
Blogging is as varied in its applications as using the telephone or taking a picture. The tool doesn’t predict the output. You might be using your blog to post recipes, or to inform the local community about information you find elsewhere on the web. Maybe you’re just trying your hand at writing, and the web is as good a place as any. If you’re looking to go beyond that, however, you’ll need to take steps to improve your blog from at least five different perspectives. In 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level, I wanted to share my thoughts on how you should consider your goal, your design, your content, how you promote it, and the business aspects of your blog. Please add to these ideas … Continue reading
Facebook beating Twitter at getting people to share
Facebook is significantly more effective than other social networks as a platform for sharing content, claims content distributor GoViral. It has revealed that the number of shares and subsequent actions such as commenting is almost five times higher on Facebook than on Twitter. GoViral said for video content it distributed in the third quarter of 2010, the average number of interactions on Facebook was 5.64 per 1,000 views, while Twitter resulted in just 0.75. Read more By Charlotte McEleney for Marketing Week, Oct 13 2010
The rise and rise of the Mommy bloggers – not just blogs about being a parent
The rise of mommy or mummy bloggers, in the US and UK, has become an evermore interesting group for marketers to tap, but it would be wrong to think that they only blog about motherhood and family. They’re writing about a lot. According to an eMarketer report in the US more than 12% of moms already blog and that figure is rising fast. Debra Williamson, a senior analysts at eMarketer, said that while blogs around parenting issues were the most common, the topics that mums are writing about go far beyond that and marketers need to look deeper as there are useful relationships to be formed with this group of online women. Read more By Gordon Macmillan for The Wall, September 30 2010