The GottaQuirk eMarketing blog The GottaQuirk blog is a great resource for information about internet marketing. It’s an up-to-date resource on the happenings in the fast-moving eMarketing industry. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 64 5803

Articles from The GottaQuirk eMarketing blog

Top 100 Brands 2007-08-01 05:47:57 So, as I’m sure you know: BusinessWeek & Interbrand have released the new Global Top 100 Brands. There are no surprises and no new entrants in the top 10 positions, (last year’s positions in brackets): Coca-Cola (1) Microsoft (2) IBM (3) GE  (4) Nokia (6) Toyota (7) Intel (5) McDonalds (9) Disney (8) Mercedes-Benz (10) Many factors are taken into account when creating the Global Top 100 list. The criteria are as follows: To qualify, each brand must derive at least a third of its earnings outside its home country and have publicly available Marketing and Financial data (already eliminating Visa and Wal-Mart). Only the strength of individual brand names, not brand portfolios, are ranked (cutting out Procter & Gamble). Airlines aren't ranked, as schedules and routes' impact on sales can’t be clearly differentiated. Pharmaceuticals aren’t ranked as consumers relate more to the products than t ...

You lost them at hello 2007-07-31 07:28:24 With the sheer amount of mails I need to get through today I thought it a good idea to write about them. More specifically how to get your open rate up by paying attention to the line... The subject line. Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market your company. If you get it wrong however, it could be the most costly decision you’ve ever made. First off, people treat their inboxes as extensions of themselves. I’ve always believed in asking myself, "Would I mind receiving this mail in my physical post box?”  If you think about email marketing in this way, the battle is almost won.   Now take it a bit further, consider this: You’ve ordered your Skylectric racing set which you can collect from your closest, always efficient post office. You also note that you need to cancel your plans tonight, cause Alonso and your neighbour's 7-year old kid have nothing on you. You get to the counter, sign your name three times, do the th ...

Stopping spam comments gracefully 2007-07-30 06:16:43 As you know we did away with CAPTCHAs on GottaQuirk a long time and have tried various methods to prevent spam ever since. While we have had a relatively good success rate with our methods they were sometimes a little bit too eager to stop those comments from coming in. So we’ve decided to approach it a bit more gracefully. The spam checking routine will still do its bit, but instead of just blocking the comment it will now give you a second chance by asking you to complete a CAPTCHA. This way we can hopefully eliminate the chance of losing real comments while still stopping the spam. We will monitor the effectiveness of this method as well as some new spam checking mechanisms we have put in place and give you a report back in the next few weeks. PS: If you want to see it in action type the word "free" more than 3 times in your comment message e.g. free free free free. Comment on "Stopping spam comments gracefully" ...

Journalists hit the Web 2007-07-30 05:24:28 According to a Middleberg/Ross survey titled, “The Seventh Annual Middleberg / Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World: Journalists Use of Internet at All-Time High.”, (breathe) 98% of journalists turn to the Net for news and article ideas. The other 2% must still be doing it the hard way. Here are some snippets from the study: 92% use the web for article research 81% are using search engines 76% use the web to find news sources and experts for stories 73% of journalists use the web to find press releases 81% of print journalists find ideas on the web If journalists are turning to the web to research their stories companies are going to need to start taking offline and online reputation monitoring that much more seriously. If journos are hitting the search engines to find leads for stories companies need to start putting a lot more thought into pushing the negative mentions in the SERP's off of the first few pages. Rob wrote a great articl ...

Septic Squirrel 2007-07-29 02:30:17 Think this little bugger comes right off the pages of a list of superheroes that didn't quite cut it at DC and Marvel. Don't really see why not. Seems like he's got more personality potential than a do-gooder nerd who insists on wearing his underwear over a spandex suit. Comment on "Septic Squirrel" ...

He's blown it 2007-07-28 04:27:23 This is a bit of an old one but when my mum sent this Tide ad to me earlier in this week I was in hysterics. Skid marks, gross! To be fair it’s the funniest bleach ad I’ve ever seen. Comment on "He's blown it" ...

Gingerbread Haka 2007-07-28 04:27:08 Looks like these guys are raising an army to battle Lord Farquaad in retaliation to what he did to their mate in Shrek. Comment on "Gingerbread Haka" ...

Internet usage on the other side of the World 2007-07-27 06:34:22 According to comScore, the Asia/Pacific region accounts for one-third of the world's online population. With Internet penetration rates ranging from 3% in India to 65% in Korea. The comprehensive review covered 10 countries in the Asia/Pacific region. Some of the findings from the May comScore World Matrix review for the Asia/Pacific region are: 10% of the population, or 284 million people, accessed the Internet. Each person visited the Internet on average 13.8 days of the month and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,121 pages. South Korea has the most active online population with an average of 17.1 days, 31.2 hours and 4,546 pages! The global average is 17.1 days, 25.2 hours and 2,519 pages! South Korea has the highest rate of Internet usage at 65% of the population accessing the Internet in May, Australia at 62%, New Zealand at 60%, and Hong Kong at 59%. India was the lowest with only 3% China has the highest online population of 91.5 million but translates to ... Internet

Wake Up SABC 2007-07-26 04:20:25 On Sunday SABC 2's Weekend Live show was giving away 10 copies of a book on copyright protection called "From Edison to the iPod". To get a copy all you needed to do was fax them or visit the SABC website. Yeah freebies! Needless to say I went to sabc.co.za right away (who faxes nowadays anyways?). And that is where the fun began… sabc.co.za breaks apart in Firefox. Damn – I couldn’t believe it but I really wanted that book, so after clicking around aimlessly on their corporate site I went to trusty Google and discovered that each SABC channel has its own separate website. Great. So I select sabc2.co.za and surprise surprise it also breaks in Firefox. I couldn’t access the dropdowns as they dropdown on the other side of the screen - very challenging (read irritating) so I tried searching for the competition - nothing. So either the competition is not there (most likely) or it is damn near impossible to access. I tried again on Monday morning (mm ...

Online killed the TV star 2007-07-25 04:32:39 Back in April I wrote about how digital adverising spend in the UK had overtaken the spend on newspaper ads. Now comes a piece in BusinessWeek estimating that video ad sales will grow from $775 million this year to $4.3 billion in 2011. Unfortunately eMarketer expects that this massive growth will merely result in extended experimentation with the medium. In a nutshell, what the BusinessWeek article predicts is that only after 2011 will we begin to see advertisers taking online video seriously as a result of the distinction between online and television ads fading. As online video approaches television quality the entire medium will become more attractive to advertisers and will lose the impression that it currently has of being a user-generated realm. In theory this should allow for the traditional advertising executive's ego to find some room for exclusivity in an arena that is currently lacking a distinct hierarchy. One would expect this to result in budgets being gradually shi ...

A pee-peeing computer? 2007-07-24 09:04:59 So being the type of person who ends up spending endless hours in a physio’s office - no he isn’t hot - I do see potential in this little gadget. I’m quite sure that most people are spending more and more time at the computer  and as the hours spent on Facebook increase (and no, this isn’t something I would ever do) your posture goes from up straight to bent over like a geriatric ostrich. But now there is finally a way around this… I mean who needs ergonomic furniture anyway? So what is this new product you ask? The VISIOMATE from Thanko, is a USB plug-in which sits on your monitor and shouts at you when you are sitting badly or too close to the screen – and yes the Chinese did invent this. Though I could see this little device being a tad disruptive at the Quirk office – little electronic voices shouting abuse at various hunched over QuirkStars, I bet we'd see fewer hunch-backs in the future. Although I am wondering what this little g ...

A heart-warming tale about social networking success 2007-07-24 01:34:28 Back in the November of 2006 Rudi Cronjé and Paul White had a dream; they wanted to share their wit, wisdom and non-sequiturs with the world. Being copywriting students at Vega, they knew the importance of finding a platform that would get them noticed. They chose MySpace, a social networking site that would allow them not only to share their musings via the blog function, but also give them access to a large user base. They called their project HEADLINE payoff  and it was to become “the cheesiest, most chocolatey piece of word-sexxxy you've ever encountered in your lifecakes” (albeit self-proclaimed). HEADLINE payoff has certainly done well for itself. After just eight months, they’ve written 148 blog posts and received over 23 000 blog views. Their reader base has become a community within itself and is often invited to become involved in whatever the latest post is about, like with their Name Translator (a name-translating cauldron, to be precise). ...

Microsoft's Mishaps & Misadventures 2007-07-23 01:55:02 There was a post on Microsoft Watch by Joe Wilcox earlier this month, with a list of Microsoft’s unluckiest ventures. Readers were invited to add their points after the main article. Here are a few of my favourites (a collection from the initial post and the comments), or you can check out the full post here. I invite you to do the same and leave your opinion below. "The May 2000 "I Love You" virus which, for a brief time, made Outlook one hated email client. A rash of Outlook-spreading viruses followed. The Zune. Release of Microsoft Bob. Need I say more? Windows XP's New York launch about a month after September 11, 2001. Microsoft had to greatly mute festivities. Microsoft's paranoid corporate culture, which is an ongoing moment of bad luck. The company jinxes customers and partners every time it bases strategy on what competitors—or presumed competitors—might do. The Xbox360, a rip off that MS should be paying for until th ... Amp  Microsoft

Is the iPhone all it's cracked up to be? 2007-07-22 03:26:23 The release of the iPhone had pretty much everyone’s knickers in a knot but now that it’s been released the reviews haven’t been all been entirely great. This SimulScribe vs. iPhone parody made me giggle. Comment on "Is the iPhone all it's cracked up to be?" ... Iphone

Life without email 2007-07-21 02:38:50 I can’t even begin to imagine what life in the QuirkStation would be like without email or MSN Messenger. Although I must admit that this does look like quite a bit of fun! Comment on "Life without email" ...