You probably already have a website. You might quite like your website. It looks nice and you seem to get plenty of visitors. So it’s doing its job, right? When you first had your website built did you have a clear objective, did you know what you wanted to achieve once the website was up […]
Jamming at 10: Friends or Foes? Friends schemes discussed.
First let’s wish a Happy Birthday to JAM (Journal of Arts Marketing) which has just celebrated its 10th birthday! And is it still jamming at 10? I think so, with this excellent issue dedicated to Friends and Membership schemes in the Arts. Very timely this, it arrived the day after I went to the excellent […]
Selling to new customers is just so costly
We all know the old adadge that selling to new customers costs a lot more than selling to existing ones, so perhaps we should just stop chasing new ones – in these austere times that might make sense. However, as I’ve mentioned here before (Customer Acquisition vs Customer Retention), it does seem that going after […]
My newsletter’s not SPAM!: 5 things to remember
One question we keep getting asked is “how do I stop our newsletter being thrown into the junk mail box?”. If you are involved with email marketing, and I include newsletters in that, then this is obviously an important consideration. Avoiding the waste basket has been the goal of direct marketeers since direct mail started […]
The press is dead, long live the press!
“It’s not a good time to be talking about press and public relations” says Heather Maitland in the opening salvo of the latest JAM(1), but then goes on to do just that. And quite rightly too. The problem it seems is over saturation (read competition) and it has always been thus: proprietors were complaining of […]
Being much more personal
I just read a short, but great blog from Adam Thurman on the Mission Paradox and following on from my blog the other day about email marketing seemed very timely. The one bit that says it all: “If I say the word “marketing” and all you think about is ads or Facebook you are thinking too […]
Have you got 5 minutes to spare? Then do some basic SEO.
Just been having a look around some of our friends sites and I am still surprised at how many don’t get the basics right when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). I think the trouble is most people think that SEO is hard and takes a lot of work. Well, it can be time consuming […]
Is Google Priority Mailbox the end for email marketing?
First of all let me say that as a consumer of vast amounts of email this is a great development from the recipients side of the equation – and it will become the norm. Hotmail is following a similar path and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it turn up in desktop apps such as […]
Another version of Cinderella from Birmingham Royal Ballet?
Further to my post the other day about David Bintley’s incredible new version of Cinderella, we find that BR are actually producing a second version! The same score, on the same scale and with the same ambitious production values… but with a very different choreographic team. Following on from the hugely successful Ballet Hoo! project, […]
Which Comes First: The Design or The CMS?
Working with CMS: Content Management System In today’s web world any kind of design, which is going to be continually updated with content, needs a CMS. This database stores your site content and allows the site admin to work with an interface which means you can then add, modify and remove content at your will. […]
Creating Cinderella
Birmingham Royal Ballet have an exciting project on at the moment. Later this year you will have a chance to see David Bintley’s new production of Cinderella at the Birmingham Hippodrome. This promises to be an exciting new interpretaion of Prokofiev’s ballet with John Macfarlane’s designs providing a very dramatic backdrop. One of the things […]
Is the web finding it’s feet?
Social media is finding it’s feet. As I have mentioned in previous blogs it takes a long time, years, for something to establish its own identity and not just be a fancier (and maybe more useful) copy of something that has gone before. Social media is perhaps the start of the web moving into it’s […]
Magnificent Maps at The British Library
A new, free, exhibition opens on April 30th at The British Library called Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, running until September 19th, it brings together some of the most impressive wall maps ever created – some of which have never been exhibited before. Why are maps so fascinating? I just find myself being able […]
British Library unveils UK Web Archive
The British Library has unveiled an archive of UK websites (full story) to prevent a black hole. The project has been running since 2004 and aims to avoid “a digital black hole in UK web history”. One of the problems they face is copyright. They hope that Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 will be extended […]
Birmingham Royal Ballet website – generated with Repertoire
Birmingham Royal Ballet published their planned productions for the Birmingham Hippodrome today and you can find the listing here. What is great, for us, about this is that it shows some of the new features in Masque Repertoire (our content management system for the performing arts), allowing all the information about a production to appear […]
Birmingham Royal Ballet wins South Bank Award!
>Birmingham Royal Ballet has one an award for Director David Bintley and his ballet E=mc² at ITV’s The South Bank Show Awards. “Based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, E=mc², choreographed by Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Director David Bintley, enjoyed its world premiere at Birmingham Hippodrome in September 2009 as part of the triple bill Quantum Leaps […]
How many flavours of JAM do you have?
Segmentation is based on a principle: everyone is different; and a hope: but in certain aspects they are not that different – people can be grouped together based on some similarities and grouped in large enough bundles to make marketing cost effective. “Segmentation is a compromise between the homogenous mass and the single individual”1 Segmentation […]
Navigation – when every page is the home page
Interesting time over the weekend. The back button on my browser stopped working! You really don’t realise how much you use it until it’s not there and it really makes you appreciate good navigation on websites. How easy is it to get to what you are looking for? How simple to get back to the […]
When is technology successful?
I think of technology as anything that is developed to make our lives easier and more productive (although not necessarily better). However, not all technology developments are successful. Some fail to be adopted and vanish into the blue yonder, possibly even some good ones. Some get remembered as a quirky or amusing anecdote, most disappear […]
Purcell 350th Anniversary celebration by HYM
I went to a splendid concert by Harrow Young Musicians last Sunday at St John’s, Smith Square. The first half was a lively combination of steel pans and symphonic winds and the second half featured tenorCarlos Nogueira, accompanied by the HYM Symphony performing “On Wenlock Edge” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. However the main focus was […]