minus27music

Reporting Tools – Word Clouds

I’m sure you like I are looking for good ways or tools to liven up client reports and other work related documents. Having been a fairly avid user of wordle.net, I had a little look around for other tools that may be available.

Tagxedo.com is a great tool, almost a step up from wordle and has a few more options. For instance, you can enter a URL and the tool creates a word cloud based on the content of the site. Below is an image based upon mikejeffs.co.uk.

Word Cloud from Tagxedo.com

As well as being able to choose from a number of colour schemes, you can use a variety of different shapes.

mikejeffs.co.uk word shape from Tagxedo.com

There are a couple of other sites out there, but for me they’re nowhere near the mark: http://www.tocloud.com/, and http://tagcrowd.com/.

Tagxedo has also had good reviews from TechCrunch and donwasteyourtime.co.uk, let me know if you use it, or if you find any other useful online tools.

Trusting Social Media

Image by Intersection Consulting

The Social Media Bandwagon

Image via Flickr Creative Commons - juaniraola

The world of social media has transformed the way marketers interact with their consumers, moving away from previous tools such as email marketing. The idea of sharing something isn’t new these are the the equivalents to ‘word of mouth’ and latterly the ‘send to a friend’ function.

Whilst checking my Twitter feed this morning I was drawn (and subsequently re-tweeted) an interesting article by Econsultancy: “Why your best social media strategy might be not having one.”

The article details the risks involved with adopting a social media presence for a brand. However, it wasn’t long ago that these types of articles were being written about email marketing and online marketing generally. Indeed whilst at a previous job, I experienced the difficulties associated with consumers trust towards email marketing, when personalisation and segmentation of email marketing were at its peak. In fact it would be fair to say that trust was issue with online marketing from the outset. It is only now that we are more familiar with the process that we have begun to trust and in some cases rely on the web.

There is undoubtedly a difficulty in obtaining ROI figures for social media, and as mentioned in the Econsultancy article companies are effectively giving away their personal relationships with consumers, whilst the Social networks develop based on the data gathered. Can this behaviour be attributed to social media as a tool (and perhaps even a weapon) being an unknown entity.

Further from this are we creeping from personalised marketing, where marketers could suggest, to consumer controlled marketing where the brand has little impact on persuasion. It’s easy to see why brand’s are adopting social campaigns, equally it is obvious that brands are adopting them without having any kind of strategy. It may well be a case of jumping on the bandwagon, and the consumers are driving it.

One Device World

Image provided by Expansys

It’s has been announced today that Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer is to cut around 7,000 jobs.

The cuts include removing 4,000 positions held at Nokia whilst moving another 3,000 employees to Accenture to work on developing the Nokia and Windows OS. According to Marketingmagazine.co.uk Nokia employs around 2,400 staff in the UK, and they will be getting rid of around a third of these (700). The reductions in total sum approximately 12% of staff worldwide with the UK being heavily affected together with Denmark and Finland.

Once a giant of the mobile phone industry, the development of smartphones and the release of the iPhone and Google’s Android OS has seen Nokia spiral in the wrong direction over the last few years. Despite still maintaining a significant presence in the lower end mobile market, their recent releases: Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 have failed to make smartphone consumers switch from exisitng devices made by Apple, HTC or Samsung.

The interesting point here is a growing trend within the phone sector of brand collaboration. As with laptops and computers a decade ago, manufacturers are becoming wise to consumer use and ultimately having to use better equipped brands to cope. In the same way that netbooks made by Samsung or Toshiba use Windows 7, are we seeing the start of mobile phones becoming a force in the gadget world.

You can already log into Xbox Live via Windows 7, watch TV on the internet, you can use the internet on your smartphone. So surely this is the start of a long term demise for laptops and games consoles? And indeed a new fight between arguably the ‘big 3′ of the technology world – Microsoft, Apple and Google. For once it appears as though it is the software calling the shots, and how accessible that software is. As we know from PC’s, Microsoft are pretty adept when making their software cross compatible.

Surely then it is the beginning of the end for all other media devices – the DVD player, Sky Box, Mp3 Dock Station.

Short Share URL’s

Brandflakes For Breakfast

This is another step in total domination by the social network Twitter, I have to confess I initially wasn’t convinced by Twitter and did prefer Facebook. However, I now use my homepage feed as a constant source of information on a daily basis, much better than FB and minus the self involved status updates!

Here’s something I thought I would share with everyone. Brandflakes For Breakfast have recently posted about Hashify.me which allows users to share files, documents and images as shortened URLs, following on from the 140 characters that we have adopted into everyday society.

This is a cool little tool and certainly one that I’ll be making good use of. Brandflakes for Breakfast is part of the Humongo online library, and has some really useful insights into the online marketing world.

Let me know if you use it and how you get on.

Ben Howard – Old Pine

I was introduced to the music of Ben Howard about 6 months ago. It is certainly unique. With delightfully unpolished acoustic guitar and a perfectly imperfect vocal melody, I’m a big fan of his style.

His latest track has cemented his songs into the most played on my mp3 player, and despite not currently over taking my favourite ‘Move Like You Want’, ‘Old Pine’ has the same catchy pace as his tracks from EP “These Waters”. I can’t wait to get hold of his latest release “Soldiers”, which I believe you can get for free via his website.

Meanwhile, here’s the beatifully shot video for ‘Old Pine’.

Maybe That’s What Life Is

Here’s today’s video – Mike Jeffs -Maybe That’s What Life Is.

Let me know what you think…

Hello world!

Welcome to mikejeffs.com The site is a way of expressing the two main interest that I have  - online marketing and music. Why these subjects you might ask – find out on the about me page.

Feel free to get in touch if there’s anything you’d like to see on the site.