Search the FTSE 100 - if you can

Do you think that having a search facility on your site is a fairly standard best practice these days?

I do.

And yet 17% of the FTSE 100 do not have a search box (or link to a search page) on their home page. Why is this?
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Posted on April 3, 2008 by Lucy and filed under All stakeholders, Basic materials, Best Practices, Consumer goods, Consumer services, Financials, Ideas and Trends, Technology | Leave a Comment

Want to know what the corporate giants do?

IntranetAre you interested in corporate intranets? What about finding out what the world’s biggest blue-chip companies do behind their firewall? How do they manage information and communication across such big organisations?

IBF are hosting a 24 hour online collaborative event focused on intranet innovation, and are expecting hundreds of the world’s largest organisations to join in, sharing best practices and learning from each other.

Astonishingly, this is a chance to visit some of the world’s most advanced intranets, corporate portals and information workplaces - behind the firewall! This should be an extraordinary event …
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Posted on March 20, 2008 by Lucy and filed under All stakeholders, Best Practices, Ideas and Trends | 1 Comment

Target shoots itself in the foot

According to the New York Times, Target (who are a US retailer) have an official policy not to reply to bloggers. Shaping Youth, who discuss marketing’s influence on youth, were complaining about a rather unpleasant ad run by Target - and were given the response that:

“Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets … This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest”

Oh dear. This incident has caused some waves across the blogosphere as blogger after blogger picked this up. And now here I am commenting on it - from across the Atlantic. Bad publicity certainly goes far!
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Posted on January 30, 2008 by Lucy and filed under All stakeholders, Best Practices, Consumer goods | Leave a Comment

Put your brochure in their pocket

Have you considered using podscrolls to communicate more detail about you?

Podscrolls are like presentations, or brochures, and are composed of a series of images, but they are read using an iPod or other personal media player with a colour screen rather than on paper. These were first used by travel guides (Rough Guides), but potentially have a lot of different applications.

Accenture are using them in their Careers section to enable prospective candidates to download brochures for reading later - on their ipods.

I can see that this might work for documents or presentations that you’d like people to review, re-read, and think about, and it is certainly convenient - no need to carry about a document in case you’d like to have another look later.

However, the pixel size is small (320*240) so you probably wouldn’t want to put your annual report or financial statements on podscroll.

But do you have manuals - either for your end customer or for your staff - that it would be helpful for them to have available in a size that would fit in a pocket? Or price lists? What about other presentations that people could download and read on the bus without having to get out their PC?

I’m going to be looking out for interesting uses of podscrolls, so if you come across something, do let us know.

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Lucy and filed under All stakeholders, Best Practices, Careers, Consumer services, Ideas and Trends | Leave a Comment

Want to talk to Coca-Cola?

I have now managed to get onto Coca-Cola’s new mini-site (launched on Wednesday, apparently). I couldn’t find it before because the link from the press release didn’t seem to work - now there’s something that should always be checked - but Google found it for me. Of course.

Do you think this site is designed only for the British? It has a UK URL, and the audio clip used of their focus group contains some quite strong northern British dialects, which maybe people coming across this from abroad may struggle with. It reminds me very strongly of the Nick Park adverts for electricity … and if it is UK only, why?
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Posted on January 18, 2008 by Lucy and filed under All stakeholders, Best Practices, Consumer goods, Customer, Ideas and Trends | Leave a Comment

keep looking »