Now I'm sure that there are a lot of people know about two of the biggest shows on British television ...   more »

December is always the time of the party's and as I missed last year's eConsultancy party I was not going to miss this years.  Ashley and the team always put on a really good show.  They also managed to intertwine this with their Innovation awards. 

Paul Cook and PositiveFeedback were awarded the innovation award for new product development for their TagMan solution.  Now this is a solution which effectively by-passes the need to formal IT change management (we all know how long that can take and I think that from talking to colleagues in the WAA and around the UK - financial services are certainly not the best at that).  From using javascript you can edit the section where the tag is placed and change the page parameters instantly. 

Obviously, with a tool like this you need to be able to measure the page itself and note when they were changed and whether there was an increase in conversion - especially if you are changing the page title and the url structure for search engine optimisation purposes.

TargetStone Limited is proud to be a TagMan / PositiveFeedback partner.

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There was a very interesting conversation with Mark Patron (CEO for RedEye), Mike (BSkyB), Ashley (eConsultancy) and myself and we were discussing the benefits of segmentation and integrating non-web analytics data e.g. CRM.  Now this is something which was also mentioned at great length at the Customer Analytics conference arranged by Henry Stewart Events back in April.  Here we had a representative from Game talking how they were doing segmentation on their customer base (using their reward card as the customer identifier).  Using this methodology they were also able measure online and offline behaviour.

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Mobile Marketing 

I did have another very interesting conversation with a few mobile marketing experts (Dave Riley, Jana Ulaite and Anne Storeide).  Now lets look at the situation in UK - we've got cheap mobile broadband available from all providers (no longer just available to business), we've got mobile broadband with push email technology, we've got the iPhone (which I'm currently getting used to - shame o2 didn't tell me that its not compatible with Office 2000 nor tell me about some of the finer prints of the terms and conditions but, I'll blog about that later). 

So we're now in a situation where we can get instant internet anywhere and everywhere (well maybe not when on the London underground).  However, how many of us check our banking balances online or make payments via their mobile?  Despite the banks providing mobile services how many of us consumers take advantage of them?  Have a look at www.barclays.mobi .

Now I must emphasise that this is not a new concept.  I remember back in 1997/8 I had a friend called Jon D'Cruz and he was able to check his balance via text message (colour, WAP and XHTML compatible phones weren't around then). 

Anyway, getting back to the conversation.  Dave, Jana and Anne were all talking about the innovations in mobile marketing / entertainment however, they predict that this is something that won't take off till around 2010.  I wonder what you all think of that statement?  Please comment to this blog.

 

Finally,

 

Just want to say a thank-you to Ashley and the e-Consultancy team. 

Merry Christmas everyone.