Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

We’re all gonna die – marketing in a recession

There is a sense of pervading gloom in the air. We’ve read about it in the papers, we’ve watched it on the teeve and we’ve read about it online. The consensus appears to be that we’re all doomed. That’s right doomed! The easy credit of the 2000’s has dried up. Consumers are reigning in their spending on stupid luxury items and selling their boats, jetskiis, motorbikes and SUV’s. The repo man is very very busy. This miasma of gloom makes it very hard to sell some stuff and persuade people that they need a particular product or service. Regardless there …

Famous for 15 tweets

Last Friday when Oprah tweeted that she was joining the 21st century some Twitter folk lamented the gentrification of twitter. If Oprah tweets then her legion of middle American fans will tweet and suddenly I don’t look so cool or edgy anymore. Bugger! The truth is that twitter was already mainstream – Ashton Kutcher and Brittney are not quirky underground artists, they are celebrities through and through. The concern appeared to be that with Twitter becoming more mainstream it would be harder to become a twitter star. You would actually have to do something in order to be famous for …

Twitter tips

I first came across Twitter in 2007 and dutifully created an account. Then I looked at the question “What are you doing right now?” and thought “I am mindlessly looking at Twitter”. The question was a tough one, being a somewhat private person the idea of venting my most personal thoughts online was unthinkable. A friend joked that the best response would be “having a shit”. He may have been right. That Twitter could evolve into a rather nifty PR tool, a DM tool (sorry but it’s true) and customer engagement tool did not occur to me. I wish I …

No one should get left behind

I live in a beautiful place on the edge of the city. We’re on the edge of a forest and have a view out west over the city and to the You Yangs and the ocean beyond. Unfortunately it is also an area prone to bush fires. We have only been there a short time and this summer have evacuated 3 times. A guy I met last night has been there a month and evacuated 3 times. This is the reality of living in such a beautiful spot in the Australian bush. A worthy sacrifice for not living in the …

Why Facebook is (almost) doomed

Think about where you played as a kid. It may have been a local park, a suburban street for games of cricket or hockey, a local oval for football, a local pool in summer, a small creek in the country, or in your bedroom hunched over an early gaming console (for me it was the Atari 2600). Now think about your childhood adventures in the mall or at the movies. One activity represents an idylic childish innocence and the other a slightly less innocent commercial sphere. To completely bastardise French anthropologist Emile Durkheim one is sacred and the other profane. …

Looking forward and looking back

Each January the blogosphere is inundated with prediction lists. It is a chance for each blogger to prove how smart they are. Some lists are hugely intelligent and some are hugely indulgent. So in the spirit of indulgence I thought I would create my own list of predictions for 2009. But after some time pondering with a glass (or two) of wine I decided that a things that sucked about 2008 list would be the best way to look into the liquid crystal ball. Google dominance In 2008 Google consolidated its lead over other search engines. For a market to …

Comment spam

How do you know if the WordPress blog you have just launched and have been slaving over is going to be successful? You get picked up by the comment spammers. I love WordPress. And I love that it needs to be upgraded quite often to prevent nasty code insertions in footer.php. It means that there is a real live community hacking the code. Some are wearing white-hats and others black-hats. The comment spammers are such a nice collection of people I would like to tie them up and have a bunch of people poke them with sharp sticks before setting …

Neanderthal web, man

Scientists in the US will soon be able to do the unthinkable and regenerate extinct species like Neanderthals and Mammoths. This is done by building a map of the DNA and then re-engineering the DNA in an embryo or egg. Crazy stuff! Ethically I’m not sure where I stand so long as it doesn’t have anything to do with Jeff Goldblum wearing huge glasses and talking balony. It made me think about regenerating websites. How exactly do you work out that your website is the equivalent of a Neanderthal, hard working but simple and notvery smart. Bounce rates If people …

Ecommerce sales

I have been watching the reports about ecommerce sales with a strange sense of foreboding and opportunistic delight. The reports are mixed, but it seems that growth is softening – in some cases dramatically. Whilst Cyber Monday, the Monday after the US Thanksgiving holiday, recorded the second highest online sales ever at USD$846 million, growth is down by 2% for the season. In addition according to comscore the growth is being driven by heavy discounting which means narrower margins. In the US only 7% of all retail sales are online. In Australia it is likely to be significantly less, due …

Web Analytics Wednesday

Last night I went to the first Melbourne Web Analytics Wednesday in the sweltering back room at Loop Bar. The discussion was a little stilted at first but there was a strong turn out from Sensis, CoreMetric and other analytics and search folks. There was some discussion alluding to the convergence between Customer Relationship Management tools and web analytics. This type of integration can not only tell you lots about customer behaviour but also dig deep into key attributes of the customer like age, sex, likes, dislikes, profession and so on. The integration of web analytics and critical business tools …