Welcome to Tactical Thinking Regular thoughts on web marketing & winter tourism from Tactic Group

Last week, amidst the delivery of a web marketing pitch, I was asked about the negative branding impacts social media could have on ones business. The client was particularly concerned with the open interactive company-specific groups, like those becoming common place on Facebook.

I addressed the concern by discussing constructive feedback and by pointing out that complaints or negative comments made by customers are not always a bad thing. On the plus side, they provide the business with an opportunity to respond publicly and they often bring up concerns that the management may not have been previously aware of. David Alston, a guest on Lee Odden’s Top Rank Online Marketing blog summed up the social media complaint responding benefits (wow, that’s a mouthful) very nicely in his last post Top 10 Reasons for Monitoring Brands in Social Media.

“A complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving abilities. A posted complaint may also draw out other comments from people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach out to them as well. And who knows, impressing customers with great customer service may generate some positive posts about how you resolved the problems.”

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Today is May 1st. Aside from being the 56th anniversary of the day Mr Potato Head was introduced to the public (a historic day indeed), it is also RSS Awareness Day.

As enthusiastic purveyors of RSS here at Tactical Thinking, we were as keen to play our part in the initiative as kids were eager to stick plastic eyes and ears into potatoes in the 1950’s.

So why do we need an RSS awareness day? Well, as useful and powerful as RSS is, it has yet to become a mainstream technology in the big picture of global internet use. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately we’ve noticed many RSS-themed posts popping up on blogs of all shapes and sizes. What’s caused this little surge in interest on the topic of RSS? That would be the up-and-coming ‘RSS Day’ on 1st May.

What’s the purpose of RSS Awareness Day?

All blog writers want more readers. We all know there’s a thirst for knowledge around the world and many of us have something worth sharing, so this awareness day is simply about making the knowledge-sharing process much easier (and less time consuming). As the old proverb goes, ‘Time is money’.

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As Doug mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been in Japan working with WSG Media for the past month. Although I’ve been back in the office for almost a week now my ‘to-do’ list seems not to be decreasing in the slightest. Instead it’s growing at a rather alarming rate.

Nevertheless, I did find the time to edit this fun little movie about our trip and thought our readers here at Tactical Thinking might enjoy some ‘light-hearted’ viewing. Enjoy…

The trip was very successful. With most of the research done and new material currently being written, things are moving along nicely. Keep your eyes peeled for further mentions of this new publication from WSG Media – it’s completely under wraps for the time being though, so my lips are sealed.

It’s something we’ve been waiting a while for here at Tactic Group, but yesterday it arrived. The guys over at WordPress posted a sneak peek of the new version (version 2.5), of their formidable blog engine.

Being ardent WordPress fans here (as it powers Tactical Thinking and is our recommended weblog solution), we’re very excited at this news. Since reading about the usability and interaction design work by Happy Cog I’ve been itching to see the end results.

The re-designed administration interface looks just as good as the new features sound. Features such as a customisable dashboard, built-in photo galleries and Gravatar support. To give you an idea of the emphasis on this major new release:

This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

We’ll be giving this new version a whirl here in the next couple of days, as it’s reputedly very stable, and will post our early thoughts as we put it through its paces.

Update 26.03.2008: View a short screencast of the new WordPress in action.

For the last few weeks Tactic Group’s very own Keith Stubbs has been out on assignment in Japan – “Enjoying the powder and sake”.

While Japan is in peak-season and enjoying some great conditions he’s been touring various resorts updating reviews for the World Snowboard Guide, writing dispatches for various magazines and also finding time to research a new book.

Keith is joined on the trip by Steve Dowle of WSG Media, snowsports photographer Camilla Stoddart, and two female pro-riders from the UK – Posy Dixon and Vicci Miller. The journey has taken them from Nagano to Hokkaido, via Niigata; riding many new resorts along the way—and it sounds like they’re having a blast.

Regular updates and stunning photos are being posted on the WSG Japan 2008 blog. Beware – reading their adrenalin-fuelled dispatches is guaranteed to make you very jealous!

Following on from our last post on the different methods for sourcing photographic material, this week we’re bringing you Tactical Thinking’s 5 best web-based photography resources.

As a group of individuals we’ve been creating and applying web imagery for quite some time now and during the course of our web careers we’ve come across many different image resources. In fact, there are so many to choose from that this post was actually much harder to write than we first anticipated.

Gone are the days when you would send away for a stock photography CD and hope they had what you needed. Now it’s simply; ‘find a site that caters to your needs, sign up and start downloading’. What an easy life.

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A recent report published by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) contains a number of interesting messages.

Most importantly for our industry, the most popular products/services bought online by European shoppers were travel tickets (54%) and holidays (42%).

With a huge 80% of European internet users claiming to have made a purchase online these figures make a pretty strong business case for investing in online marketing.

Another key finding of the report shows how web users are researching their purchases more. Read the rest of this entry »

The year was 1993 and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released a new web browser called Mosaic. This wasn’t exactly front-page news to many, but in certain geeky circles it was a watershed moment.

The breakthrough of Mosaic was its ability to display images embedded on pages (rather than in a separate window) – paving the way for the web to metamorphasise from a black-and-white, Times New Roman world into the colourful, visually-rich medium it is today.

Fast-forward 15 years—through the rise of e-commerce, dot-com boom and bust, the blogoshpere, web 2.0 and the social-web—and good imagery is one of the most important aspects of success on the web.

If you are on the web to do business high-quality, relevant photography goes a long way to promote your products or services to potential customers. Along with killer content it can persuade and influence, turning visitors into buyers.

However, one of the trickiest (and often most time consuming) decisions marketers have to make when producing a new publication, whether it be print or web based, is the sourcing and selecting of photographic material. Of course, this becomes even more problematic when it’s a specific ‘niche’ that you’re promoting.

Not that winter tourism can be described as ‘niche’, but the particular image your business is looking to portray within this industry may be just that.

Finding appropriate shots is the first and, in most cases, the hardest step. There’s just so many considerations; quality, file size, colour scheme, cost, legalities of use, the list goes on.

Many of our readers will have come across at least one of these problems before. So we’ve decided it time the Tactical Thinking team bring you a series on how to source, select and utilise photographic images. To kick it off, this first post discusses the different methods of sourcing photographs and the pros and cons of each. Read the rest of this entry »

A fun little link for today. The guys and girls at Netlife Research in Oslo have released this year’s Bad Usability Calendar.

For the last three years they have produced these fantastic calendars; with each month humorously illustrating a usability faux pas to avoid.

The 2008 calendar has a focus on those ‘web 2.0 for the sake of it’ annoyances and is very good. 12 new examples of how not to build your site.

It’s available as a PDF in various sizes and languages and should be on the wall of every web design office. Enjoy…