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Hit Search Online Marketing: Digital Marketing Budgets to Increase by 17 Per Centby Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 2:19 pm Internet News A number of businesses are set to increase their digital marketing budgets by around 17 per cent this year. That’s the findings of a recent survey carried out amongst firms in both Britain and the US. Online marketing network site Econsultancy found that digital marketing would account for almost a quarter of total marketing budgets in 2010. Of all the firms that participated in the study, 46 per cent said they were planning to increase their overall marketing budget for 2010, while over 50 per cent of companies are planning to increase their mobile marketing budgets. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are set to come into their own in 2010, with 70 per cent of businesses looking to increase their spending on these areas of marketing in the next 12 months. Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said: “Digital evangelists have long been trying to get the big brands to spend more on online marketing (especially display advertising), and social media is now helping to give impetus to a second wave of marketers who are moving budgets online. “Why? Because they see digital as crucial to brand reputation, and they’re right.” Meanwhile, another survey released this week claimed that online spending on business to business marketing will grow by 8 per cent during the coming year, followed by a 14 per cent rise in 2012. Ref: HSLP0101AA207 A new online threat - The Clampi Virusby Andrew Redfern @ 2nd October 2009 3:52 pm Internet News A highly sophisticated new Trojan virus is currently spreading from the US to Britain. The Clampi virus infects computers when users visit certain websites that host a malicious code. This allows access to your computer for cyber criminals who will seek to capture sensitive information such as online banking log-in details. Experts have warned this new Trojan is one of the biggest threats to anybody who uses a Microsoft Windows operating system. Only computers running Microsoft Windows have been infected up to now and small and medium-sized businesses seem under particular risk of attack once infected. Investigators have found that the range of sites that Clampi is monitoring included banks, credit card companies, online casinos, retail sites, mortgage lenders and even government sites. Last month, attackers placed a virus in an advert on the website of The New York Times! The virus has already spread across hundreds of thousands of computers in the US and is now being detected in Britain. Orla Cox, from Symantec, an online security company, told The Times: The first big wave was in the US in July, but it is spreading around the world, particularly English-language countries. We have seen samples of it targeting UK high street banks. There is potential for another wave to come.” How to protect yourself against the Clampi Virus 1 - Make sure you are running antivirus software such as and a firewall on your computer. 2 - Install any critical updates and security patches for your operating system, all the latest bug fixes and patches are available from the Microsoft website. 3 - If you’re using a Wi-Fi network, ensure it is password protected and secure to prevent people hacking into your network. 4 – Consider using a separate account from your current account for online shopping. If you use a Credit Card ensure that it is a pre-paid card so if anybody does gain access to your details then the amount of money then can spend is restricted. 5 - When surfing the internet, do not click on any suspicious links, especially in emails from unknown senders. Web Translation Engine for Facebook usersby Andrew Redfern @ 2nd October 2009 2:48 pm Internet News If you are looking to translate your website into another language, Facebook has developed a free service called “Facebook Connect”. The Social Networking site has developed and used a similar application since January 2008, translating its original content into 65 different languages. Online Privacy : This Email is Set to Self Destructby Andrew Redfern @ 20th August 2009 5:36 pm Internet News Many users seem blissfully unaware that each and every time they send an email a copy is not only kept on the sender’s machine, but the recipient and even the ISP’s server. Now depending upon where about in the world you live, a copy of that record may also be request-able under a European Directive. Imagine if every time you sent a letter, the postman made a copy. Or whenever you, under a European commission directive, to dip into some of that data. There may however be a solution at hand. Seattle based researchers have a free self-destructing-email program. “Vanish” was created by Roxana Geambasu and Prof Hank Levy at the University of Washington. A delivery date set within the message and expiry date transforms emails to become unreadable when this date has passed. Even to the creator of the message. The need for the service implies that a user may have some sinister reason for privacy, but do they? Many users will have sent emails which contain private data such as credit card details or names and addresses. These message swill often remain until the user upgrades their computer. Similar sites have offered email services such as Hushmail which offered an encryption service. In 2007 Hushmail admitted that it wasn’t in fact as secure as it would like to make out as Canadian law enforcement had been forcing the company to decode the messages or face jail. “Vanish” operates in a more innovative manner, following the encryption process the message becomes useless without the “key”. Vanish splits the key into 10 parts then spreads those across 1.5m computers. Making it impervious to hackers as every second goes by less and less machines hold the key until eventually it can never be decoded. Clever. The Pirate Party UK launch with all guns blazing.by Andrew Redfern @ 12th August 2009 10:31 am Internet News Follwing the success of the Swedish Pirate Party a UK version has been launched with a presence on numerous internet social media platforms. Their official site states it’s three core policies as
and that has the central message :
The UK Party follows in the wake of launches in other countries and aims to participate in the 2010 UK General Elections. So far it has a Twitter feed, Facebook account and a Wikipedia page as well as blogs, forums and an IRC chatroom. The party leader is Andrew Robinson and yesterday he announced that the Pirate Party was now an official UK political party
It is generally difficult for one policy parties to break into the mainstream of politics however as a champion for internet freedoms it is sure to have some impact. It is already seeking donations and allowing visitors to it’s site to download and print campaign posters with maxims such as “Sharing is Caring” and “Our Copyright Law needs to be fixed”. Google, Yahoo, Bing Take The “Blind” Search Engine Challangeby Andrew Redfern @ 10th August 2009 11:15 am Internet News Each of us have our favourite, we are by and large mostly Google devotees. But are we right to be? are we loyal to the best search engine or do we stick with them out of loyalty. There has been a general view within the industry is that users are not as discerning as they would like to think. Google has become what “Hoover” became to the vacuum industry and this will only serve to reinforce the idea that to search on the we, means: to “Google”. I voted twice for the result which I favoured, by searching “HitSearch” I was presented with three different search results. At this point it would be nice to tell you the reader, that Google was hammered by Bing and that all the years we have been hoodwinked. Well not quite..but almost: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%. When you compare this against the 80% market share of Google and paltry 5% for Bing, Bing may very well be one to look out for in the future! New Corp announce pay per view structure for it’s online news contentby Andrew Redfern @ 6th August 2009 3:00 pm Internet News Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has announced that it will soon stop all it’s free online content in favour of a system of pay per view system allowing users to read articles for as little as 5 pence. Mr Murdoch said “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly, we intend to charge for all our news websites. I believe that if we are successful, we will be followed by other media. Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting” The corporation is looking for additional revenue streams after recently announcing big losses. They posted £2 billion loss for first half of 2009, a period which chief executive Rupert Murdoch said was “the most difficult in recent history”. News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US. This is system will be brought in across all their online versions. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times already charge for their content so this change will merely see the policy rolled out across the rest of the network. Analysts are now waiting to see if other new outlets will follow suit. Whilst rival publications are eager to highlight News Corps travails they are also not ruling out a similar model. The Guardian ran the following piece : “Who made the rule that everything on the internet should be free? It’s the question that beleaguered media executives around the world are have been muttering to themselves for months now. The only certain answer is that it was none of them, because when the decisions about internet strategy were being made in their organisations, none of the most senior bosses were particularly interested. Now, hit by the double whammy of a cyclical advertising downturn and huge structural change, the news business is going through the same pain that afflicted the music industry. After years of hoping the problem would go away, news organisations are desperately reaching for the same strategy adopted by the music bosses: shutting the paid-for door after the free horse has long since bolted.” Other Related Stories That May Be Of Interest:
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