Foreign Perspectives » Marketing

How complete should a holiday destination be?

Arnold — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:58:35 +0000

Most people are still in search of their ideal holiday spot I’m sure. But what is “ideal” anyway?

Obviously it should take into account your interests and those of the group which you’re travelling with. But is it enough to consider each of those individually? What if there was a single spot that took account of all possible interests?

Argueably, orlando vacations would be very close to allowing for all possible interests. Granted, not quite in a single spot but in a fairly compact region you can take in theme parks, beaches, wildlife, museums and just about everything else that you can imagine.

Does that make it “ideal” though? Not for everyone certainly but it is very close to ideal for an awful lot of people.

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A good start for the new OU vice chancellor

Arnold — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:42:33 +0000

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

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Another year, another potential documentary: this time setting up a B&B in Northern Ireland

Arnold — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:27:19 +0000

It’s been over a year since our last enquiry re participating in a documentary so we were overdue for this one.

Thus far we’ve been getting enquiries from the various “moving to France” TV series producers but this time it’s in connection with the possibility of us setting up a B&B back in Northern Ireland.

As with the French series, there are surprisingly few people who meet the criteria for the series. For our first one for instance, we met all the criteria but weren’t able to move in January so missed the time slot for the filming.

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The McDonalds approach to blogging

Arnold — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:41:03 +0000

Thanks to the free wifi service offered in McDonalds it seems to be attracting an increasing number of itinerant bloggers.

Almost every time we’ve been in lately (and, yes, we’re one of that band of McD bloggers whilst we wait for our ADSL connection) we’ve seen someone whipping out the laptop in a relatively quiet part of the restaurant. Thus far, our record is four separate surfers but I’m sure that’s a record that’ll soon be broken.

It’s not really surprising that they’re attracting these folk: after all that word “free” is quite a pull. What is more surprising though is that the majority of these people are lugging around full size laptops rather than running with the likes of my trusty Aspire One. After all, at under £200 for quite a usable machine it’s not out of the question to buy one pretty much just for the holidays and these days you can even get them “free” with some broadband packages.

Is it a worthwhile marketing strategy for McD though? Well, in that the restaurants obviously need a connection of some sort for their credit card machines it’s largely a no-cost service for them so there’d appear to be no downside in offering it. Moreover, few of the itinerant surfers leave without buying something so it would appear to be all upside for McD at the moment. Whether that would continue to be the case were significant numbers of surfers to start using the stores is another matter. It certainly works fine if there are a handful of people using the service but if there were, say, 10 or more then a) the seats are going to be taken up and b) the service is going to slow down. Still, at the moment, it seems like a great idea.

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Is your blog a Rolls or a Trabant?

Arnold — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:57:33 +0000

Much as we might laugh at the Trabants that East Germany used to turn out as being unreliable and prone to break down, sadly that’s what many blogs seem to look like these days.

Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

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What about the tile issue?

Arnold — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:59:52 +0000

Tiles are a bit of an oddball topic in our house at the moment as we’re looking at redoing both the bathroom (probably) and the kitchen (definitely) which are both more ancient than I’d care to say here. Like really ancient.

Now one common theme in relatively old bathrooms and kitchens was the tiling which, in our case, is just about everywhere and also looking particularly dated in some respects too. So dated that the OH has provisionally ruled “no tiles at all” as a starting point and that’s even including some of the really modern styles like the glass tile which is used really imaginatively in some designs we’ve seen lately.

Of course the problem is that tiles are definitely required in some areas if you’re wanting a new look that will actually stick up the the wear and tear that both rooms get on a regular basis so we’ll have something of a compromise I expect.

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Another upgrade to the bathroom in prospect?

Arnold — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:49:05 +0000

Much as we would like to have been able to leave the bathroom well alone after our last experience with a plumber, it’s starting to look like we’ll have to undertake a more major upgrade to the bathroom and possibly something really major will be needing done to the kitchen as well.

That being the case we’ve started revisiting the bathroom faucet issue once more. Although we had all of these replaced earlier in the year if we’re needing to redo the whole bathroom this time then we’d be wanting to take a little more time over the issue rather than going for the quick fix option that we did the last time around.

Regardless of the work needing done in the bathroom, the kitchen is definitely going to need some quite major work done on it over the next few months courtesy of the leak (or, probably, leaks) that we’ve developed. Quite where we’d start on that though is an issue for another day!

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In the eye of the beholder: it is a listing service or a free website service?

Arnold — Wed, 20 May 2009 12:23:13 +0000

I run a series of interlinked holiday accommodation listings sites which started as something of a sideline for me but which is slowly becoming a significant income generator for me.

Now, in the early days it was quite clearly a straight listing service. I typed up the entries as they came in and they were displayed on the site as a great big list. Nice and simple if somewhat time-consuming.

As it grew, I figured that a database was the way to go and in the second year that went live. By then the original 20 properties had grown to over 100. Mark 1 of that simply replicated the original hand-produced site and a version of that is still around to this day because the hand-produced format is much more effective in SEO terms than a written for database site is for various reasons.

With the dramatic reduction in the work required from me to actually add the information, I broadened the amount and variety of information that the property owners could add. That increased so much that I figured after a while that I should write a new-generation version of the original site to run alongside the original version but targeted at a different market. The increase in information meant that properties now had a little website each with several pages on it.

Interestingly though, I’ve recently come across a free accommodation property site that has come at the problem from the opposite direction. What they do is get the property owners to add a whole lot of information and they produce a little website for them which gets listed by them.

What’s clear is that we’ll both likely meet in the middle several years down the line as I’m in the process of souping up the mini website that my listing service generates and already some people are quoting that address as “their” website address which presumably will become more common as time goes on. In fact, it’ll become more and more of a website generation facility over the months to come as that’s my main area for development this year.

The question next year though will be: how do I promote it to the owners? The listing service aspect will clearly remain but there’ll also be the aspect of building almost custom websites for the owners (surprisingly easy to do). In fact, thanks to the recent change of hosting service I’ll even be able to let each owner use their own domain to point to their “mini” website (which will potentially be larger than many “proper” websites).

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Would you, should you or can you advertise on Twitter?

Arnold — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:49:01 +0000

Although you might not think there was a whole lot of scope for advertising in a medium that only gives you 140 characters to play with, there are a growing number of ways to advertise through Twitter although whether or not they’re actually effective is an entirely different question.

The means for handling the advertising varies quite a bit as you’d expect for a fairly new type of media. For instance, since the tweets themselves are rather fleeting affairs on the tweet streams of the more prolific twitterers, Twittad takes the approach of using the background image to place the main advert and uses the tweet stream to announce that the twitter account is sponsored. The system works in a similar way to blog sponsorship platforms which is to say that you write up a little profile of your twitter account and advertisers can choose you based on that or alternatively you can choose some advertisers. Payout seems to be around the $2.50 a week level which is OK in that you don’t need to do much for that.

Another service that’s possibly more interesting to the advertisers than the twitterers is Twtad which works on the pay per click model. The problem with this one is that the payment is typically 5 cents or less which would be alright for a system that was entirely automated but this system isn’t. Since click-through is typically quite low this system isn’t really worthwhile unless you have LOT of followers (10,000 or more perhaps) and if you have then you should be able to pick up more money elsewhere.

A more comprehensive version of this is Be a Magpie which is an automated service offering pay per view, pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale. You can set it so that you have to pre-approve tweets but leaving it on automatic seems best and will put a Magpie tweet every 5 ot 10 (you set the interval) of your tweets. All else being equal this one seems by far the best bet for the twitterers in that once it’s set up it can be fully automated. It’s good from the advertisers point of view too in that it offers the four different payment methods.

The latest entrant seems to be Betweeted which I gather operates on the basis of the twitterer choosing advertisers to tweet about so is quite similar to the usual blog sponsorship services. So far it’s only for US bloggers and nobody else can even register to look at how it works.

So, you can advertise via Twitter, but the question is: should you? If you followed the original principles of Twitter ie that it’s a service for “friends, family members and co-workers to stay connected” then the answer is probably not. After all, you wouldn’t hand out advertising leaflets to these people, would you? However, the service has moved a long way from that and most people have followers who are complete strangers and lots of others are tweeting to promote themselves or their business, in which case the answer is: why not? Aside from advertising third parties, more and more companies are moving on to Twitter to promote their products and, of course, there’s always been the self-promotion of bloggers tweeting their posts (some cross-promote their tweets on their blog) so advertising is very much a feature of Twitter that seems here to stay.

Finally, there’s the question of effectiveness of Twitter advertising ie does it actually work? Well, I’ve been tweeting my own blog posts for a while now and it would appear that it’s quite an effective way of gathering new readers for the blog so presumably it would be equally effective for advertising tweets, or at least those that fit in with the general interest of the followers.

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Isn’t it amazing just how different marketing for men and women is?

Arnold — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:21:21 +0000

Wendy’s been updating her image over the last week or two which means that we’ve been hitting the clothing shops in quite a major way over that time.

The first thing that struck me is that there are an awful lot more womens’ clothes shops than there are aimed at men. Of course, that’s always been the case but one consequence of that much greater number of shops is that there’s a corresponding increase in the range of shops available. Thus, whereas you’ll typically get shops aimed at young women, less young, middle aged, a little older, small size and large size with everything in between, you’ll generally only get one for young guys and a more mainstream one with little in-between.

On the cosmetics front, the male market remains largely untapped which is more than likely down to the embarrassment factor whereas by contrast there are many more female aimed ranges and in a typical shop you’ll find a lot of the stands thronged with women. That’s even before you consider products that are exclusively female such as those for treating vaginal dryness: even if there were an equivalent condition in men one suspects that sales would be virtually zero because of the embarrassment factor in asking for the stuff.

Despite the much smaller range, she’s threatening to update my own image.

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