In a recent post on Seth’s Blog, Seth explains that we’re all irrational and describes how around 40% of auctions on e-bay sell for greater than the buy it now price. In the cold light of day, it is irrational. But there’s a reason why this happens: in an auction of this nature, whether it’s [...]

Being in business development and marketing for as long as I have has turned me in to a bit of a cynic. Google has made its online office tools, Docs, Spreadsheets etc. available as a hosted solution free for educational organisations in the US, and announced in this post, (Official Google Blog: Nonprofits mix it [...]

Today, a colleague gave me great example of when expectations don’t appear to matter. He’s currently going through the painful process of selling/buying a home and has had to engage with different agents to view properties and so forth. He reported a concerning trend: agents appear to be over-valuing properties to get the instruction. Once [...]

The Guardian reports on the falling profits in mainstream music. The supermarkets have got in on the act and do what supermarkets do best: they squeeze suppliers’ margins and commoditise products. More evidence of the Individual Revolution: there’s more profit in the specialist, niche markets as Adam Webb discovers. However, it is beyond the mainstream [...]

I finally completed my ‘brain-dump’ of my experiences with Google AdWords. This is only part of the story, of course. If done well, AdWords will get you visitors. Without putting as much effort in to the rest of the strategy, you’ll end up just paying for visitors to land on your site, and disappear without [...]

In such a crowded world, with so many messages, so much media, life has become about relevance. In this recent post on Campaign Monitor’s blog, the author describes how he received an Email from someone he knew, someone he had agreed to receive Emails from about a subject in which he was interested. He’d given [...]

Some time ago, I engaged the services of a supplier, offering a service to me that required a deep understanding of the business in which I worked. That supplier knew their offering well and provided excellent service to a wide range of clients. With this project, they failed – why? Because they didn’t understand the [...]

I recently read this post on the official Google blog. It clearly demonstrates Google’s leverage of a willing audience to upsell products. That, and blowing it’s own trumpet, of course. Google has built a massive audience of its blog, many receiving posts using an RSS reader or just visiting the site regularly, I noticed that [...]

Official Google Blog: 9,000 and counting This month, we passed the 9,000 mark for enterprise buyers of the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini. That’s a great beginning, but we want to reach out even farther, which is why we’re embarking on a partnership with Ingram Micro, one of the largest global distributors of [...]

Having spent my fair share of time exhibiting at trade shows and other similar events, it’s always frustrating hearing exhibitors bemoaning the outcome of such events: people all to often see trade shows as a sales opportunity when they almost always aren’t. It’s a show. Delegates go to a show to see, to gather information, [...]