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Twitters importance to your social media plans

Posted By: John, 20 August 2010
We predict that Twitter will continue to be a big one to watch in the coming months and years for businesses seeking to engage with their existing customers and to break down the barriers of attracting new ones.

Twitter provides business with the opportunity to easily communicate easily with their audiences and when used effectively it becomes a very powerful component of a digital marketing strategy. 

What's more, as Twitter's plans to further itself and develop methods to monetise their platform, opportunities innovative businesses are likely to arise.

See what Twitter have to say about it themselves:

"Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter."

If you'd like to find out more about how The Yolk can help your business make the most of Twitter, including planning, execution & monitoring, please get in touch!

Tags: measurement, social media, engagement, Twitter

Google take steps to help protect mobile app owners

Posted By: John, 31 July 2010
Google have announced a big step forward in helping companies and individuals to protect the software that they develop for Android devices from being illegally copied. 

In a recent blog post on the Android Developers Blog, Android developer Eric Chu annouced the new Licensing Service For Android Applications.

The service offers an easy to implement approach to protecting software developed for Android 1.5 and above.

In the meantime, there is still no announcement of when an OS upgrade will be available for my Dell Streak!

Tags: mobile applications, android, software development

SQL Server 2008 "Saving changes is not permitted"

Posted By: John, 22 June 2010
With SQL Server 2008, MS introduced an updated Management Studio tool.

One change within this stops users from making many changes to a database once first saved. Changes, such as adding a new field amongst the existing fields, results in the following message:

"Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created. You have either made changes to a table that can't be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created."

The good news, is that in the vast majority of cases, the change that you're trying to perform is entirely harmless. Although the database table may need to be dropped and rebuilt, you'll end up with the data still in the table and working.

Even better news, you can override this behaviour in the MS Management Studio options, by clicking Tools > Options > Designers and unticking (or unchecking, I guess) "Prevent saving changes that require table recreation".

Tags: SQL Server

Website speed a big player in user experience

Posted By: John, 16 June 2010
Whilst I'm at risk of this blog already becoming a homage to Google, I can't resist posting a little more about them.

Tags: conversion, usability

Make people want your things - Google Style!

Posted By: John, 15 June 2010

Google have marked themselves out as a highly creative and innovative company and the beautiful thing about it is that this runs throughout their entire business.

Their search engine changed the face of the internet and turned them into the most significant operator online, but they have no intentions of stopping there.

The Google Search engine is a great brilliant piece of engineering. However the astounding thing about it is it's success in the marketplace. Google has an incredible brand, developed entirely online through word of mouth and user engagement.

Their most recent offering (at least the most recent one that I've found out about) offers you the ability to search online (through their own mobile phone software) without typing anything.

That's really very nice. The name is pretty nice too. Google Goggles.

But what's even cooler is how they go about telling us about it - and as you might expect, you don't need to read a thing. A charming, simple animation explains what the tool can do and it's hosted, or course on Google Owned YouTube. I've been a devout iPhone user since it launched, but Google have me thinking now!

Take a look at how Google are helping you to understand their easy to use product in an ease to follow video. http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#landmark

Google have said the tool will be available on other platforms too.

Tags: conversion, engagement

Budget analysed via Social Media

Posted By: Az, 27 March 2010
BBC have used Social Media in the correct way to help analys conversation around the new budget for 2010. Check out the BBC's article to watch the video and find out more... it would have been more fitting if they used YouTube so it could be embedded easily and virally expanded!

Related links:

BBC's Social Media and the Budget

Tags: measurement, conversion, social media, budget

Fry on Twitter

Posted By: John, 11 March 2010
Stephen Fry chatting about his Twitter phenomenon to .net magazine and potential power it holds! http://www.netmag.co.uk/fry/

Tags: social media, engagement, Twitter