The BBC recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of its first ever TV broadcast. After seven decades 90 per cent of UK viewing is still linear – we flop in front of the box and watch whatever’s on.

With Netflix poised to launch TV streaming services in the UK and Ireland early next year, this is set to change. LoveFilm, now a subscription service with 1.4 million members, will be stiff competition. So will Google be when it expands into film rental via YouTube, alongside Apple’s film and TV show rentals through iTunes. Meanwhile, broadcasters and cable TV providers like Sky, Virgin and BT increasingly offer on-demand services. Read More »

If you’re anything like me, you’ve let a bit of dust accumulate on your once proud and shiny LinkedIn account. Outdated information, neglected networks, a CV that could use some spiffing up—it’s a classic case of LinkedIn lethargy.

Well, the website has been doing some interesting things lately, like its job application button, and is really beginning to stake its claim as the anti-Facebook.

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Facebook has released some intersting stats on its Open Graph features for media partners, which include Yahoo! News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily,  that it announced at f8. We already know that Facebook is a major driver of news traffic with twice as many getting their news via Facebook than any of social network, but the amount of traffic it is drving on a daily basis is striking.

The Guardian is picking up around one million pageviews a day while the Washington Post is getting 3.5 million monthly readers for its social reader app. The Independent has in excess of one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts and Yahoo News has seen a 600% increase in traffic. Read More »

A few weeks back a post went up about how twice as many get their news via Facebook, which underscored its position a place where increasingly a lot of people pick up and share news.

Facebook has just published a list of news that is being shared with its 50 most shared stories of 2011. It is a real mix from the serious, the top most shared story was about the the Quake and Tsunami in Japan, to the ridiculous. The third most story is headlined ‘No, your zodiac sign hasn’t changed’. I don’t even know where to start with that one. Read More »

As the saying goes, the customer is always right, which is why marketers spend significant amounts of time and money investigating, through user groups and forums, what it is their customers want. But for the online retailer, whose business success relies on correctly displayed content, understanding what the customer wants is often made more challenging when their actual online behaviour contradicts what they might say in a focus group.

That’s why multivariate testing becomes such a vital tool in the optimisation of websites, removing the guesswork! But without strategic use, the impact will only ever be short-lived. Read More »