The recent actions of Darren Bent on Twitter has struck some real controversy in the footballing world. The internet is having a huge impact of the daily lives of everybody and this is just another reason why privacy and confidentiality has been such a big issue in recent years. Twitter and other online technology are making it more and more difficult to keep events and personal details under wraps. Even more spectacular we saw Tranmere Rovers were up in arms after a company that they had appointed to find them a buyer put the club up for sale on eBay.

We recently saw twitter up for a possible nomination for the Nobel peace prize concerning the riots after the election in Iran. Without twitter and other new strives in technology, there would have been a lot less coverage of the events and a lot more cover-ups.

We can certainly say that we’re entering a new era of freedom of information with constant battles over privacy. We can only expect more innovation so who knows what is around the next corner.

Don't miss the next episode.

Microsoft and Yahoo have both agreed to sign a 10 year deal for Microsoft’s Bing to power Yahoo’s searches. Their main goal is at “changing the search landscape.” This deal means that Bing will be powering Yahoo’s searches and Yahoo, in return, will be selling premium advertising for both Yahoo and Microsoft and sharing the revenue between them.

Microsoft has big plans for the future of Bing and Yahoo through this deal and wants to make searching on the web more efficient and better value for advertising.

"Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” says Ballmer.

"Success in search requires both innovation and scale. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness." he concludes. The financial details of the deal are not clear; however neither company had anything bad to say about the implications.

However, this is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to buy Yahoo! They tried to make them an offer of a huge sum of $44.6 billion back in February 2008, but their former chief executive Jerry Yang declined their proposal and the deal seemed to fade away. Since then, Yang has been replaced with Carol Bartz and claimed that any partner trying to make a search deal, they are going to need “boat loads of money and solid technology”.

Microsoft now has the technology to carry this deal through, which leaves the money. When reports of the deal first became public, there were rumours that Microsoft would offer Yahoo $3 billion, however there has been no mention by the companies of money being exchanged upfront.

Analysts have warned that antitrust regulators could possibly stop the merging of the second and third ranked search engines in the world. For example, Google and Yahoo had to drop plans of forming an advertising partnership in 2008 due to the US Department of Justice.

Hopefully this will be a step forward in the search engine world!

Ph.Creative got together last weekend to take part in the DLIB (Downtown Liverpool In Business) 5 A-Side Football Tournament. 20 Corporate Companies from around Liverpool each put together their best 7 players to battle it out against each other in what turned out to be a hard 8 minutes a game.

As I regularly play 5 A-Side and manage a Sunday League Football Team, Bryan made me captain and chief organiser for the event. This gave me the responsibility of encouraging 6 of our finest to involve themselves in what I kept referring to as team bonding, we’re as Bryan and Steve said losing wasn’t an option... the pressure was on.

We arrived at Peter Lloyd’s Sports Centre before noon, where we signed in and received our fixtures for the day. 4 leagues with 5 teams in each league. Unfortunately a team had failed to turn up; meaning we only had 3 games. The 2 top teams of each league went through to the knock-out stages.

Since Ph.Creative had become my Sunday League Football Team’s sponsor for the forthcoming season, I supplied the kits which included Ph’s logo on.

Team selection was a simple ‘pick numbers’ which left Bryan, Alex and myself on the bench.
Daz, who was the extra man for us, was our keeper for all our games. First on were Craig, Steve, Paul and Joel. It quickly became apparent the team we were playing, were much better than we were, and by half time (4 minutes later) we were 5-0 down. Steve, the athlete of the team, dropped out first so I ran on to take his place, there wasn’t much I could in 2 minutes, but was lucky enough to score for us.

Team Ph didn’t get a break and were straight back on for the 2nd game. Bryan, Alex and I replaced Steve, Craig and Paul. Both halves we conceded a goal with both keepers making great saves. 2-0 felt disappointing as we could have beaten the opposition.

Because a team had dropped out we were given a 5-0 win, which turned out to be our only win of the day! Our last game we played were probably the best team in our league.

Alex, Steve, Paul and I started the half, which ended 1-0 to us with Alex scoring. 2 quick substitutions were made at half time, with Bryan and Craig coming on for Alex and I. Before you could say ‘that was a good half’ we were 3-1 down.

The results didn’t matter at the end of the day, everyone enjoyed themselves, and we’re now talking about making Team Ph a regular thing, so if you’re a local company and fancy playing against us, get in touch!

In today’s world with everyone & everything eco-friendly what else can save the planet?

Well, it’s the simple font. The font, overlooked by many but used by everyone is now doing its bit for the planet.  The Ecofont, designed by dutch designers, SPRANQ, is surely the next generation in fonts. Ecofont has been designed to not only increase environmental awareness but to save you money.  The font has been designed by cutting out the maximum amount of black area from the font whilst still remaining legibility. The result is a ‘holey’ font that uses up to 20% less ink thus giving printer cartridges a longer life.

The image above illustrates how the Ecofont works. You’ll see it has been created by cutting out parts of the letter. At 60 point it’s not that appealing however at a more useable point size of 10 or 11pt, it looks great. The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows and Mac OSX.  By introducing the Ecofont into your font library is going some way to help save the environment.

Other cost effective ways are;

• Print only when necessary
• Use a modern, efficient printer and use unbleached paper
• Paper choice, take the environment into account. Look at recycled materials
• Invest in environment-conscious innovations 

The Ecofont is based on an Open Source font and is FREE to use. You can download your FREE version by visiting:- http://www.ecofont.eu/downloads_en.html

So goodbye comic sans, hello Ecofont Sans. Enjoy and use responsibly!! 

Internet Explorer 6 has taken some nasty blows recently as it grips on for dear life in the browser war. To the merry cheers of web developers everywhere, Google’s YouTube announced they were soon stopping support for the 8-year-old web browser. This follows on from such other large sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg all prompting IE6 users to upgrade.

The issue here is that for many years, IE6 has been running on empty due to technological advances in web development but many web users are reluctant, ignorant or restricted in upgrading to a newer version, despite the major security issues it raises. This causes a major headache for web developers, as providing support and maintenance for websites in IE6 requires a big commitment. They’ve tried everything to persuade IE6 users to upgrade, from browser detection scripts to out right blocking of IE6 visitors.

The opinion of what to do with IE6 has caused splits in the development community. We all want to phase out IE6, it’s just a question of how it should be done. Is it moral for us to force users to upgrade their browser?

The aforementioned websites are some of the most visited sites on the web, so to have the backing from them seems to be exactly what we developers have been waiting for.

The web is at a really exciting stage right now, there’s loads of interest in HTML5 and CSS3, which will change the way we build and style websites. The problem just now is that IE6 is restricting the development and implementation of these new technologies (on a large scale, at least) because it doesn’t support HTML5 or CSS3 very well.

Once IE6 is dead and buried, the web will change forever.

I had a look at our own IE6 visitor stats and they’re showing a nice decline over the last 12 months. This month last year, www.ph-creative.com received around 8% of traffic from IE6 users, this month we received around 5%.

So is 5% of traffic worth the extra development work that the other 95% don’t need? Should we follow the large websites and stop IE6 support? Let me know what you think!

One of my favourite parts of a web development project is adding Google Maps to a web site.
They’re really simple and easy to add and can give your site that extra edge.

So how do you add a google map to your site?

First, request a free key for the Google Maps API here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
Add your web site URL and click Generate. You’ll need to login to your Google account.

You’ll then receive a key which looks similar to this: ABQIAAAAdUEEB1I-1xZFGV-lVIIV2hSY58pY9NDKjzY52-otgNxuDuzzFxQc9CiP4oV_Q6plISDwk2vmhPkYAw

Now add this script below in the Head of your web page, note we’ve added the new key to it.

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2&amp;key=
ABQIAAAAdUEEB1I-1xZFGV-lVIIV2hSY58pY9NDKjzY52-otgNxuDuzzFxQc9CiP4oV
_Q6plISDwk2vmhPkYAw" type="text/javascript"></script>

We’ll need to add another script next, with the coordinates of the pointer on the map.
Use our Google Maps Coordinates Tool to generate Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates. Simply drag the pointer to where you want it or type to search, and then copy the coordinates.

We’ll now add our second script in the head below the one we’ve already added, note we’ve added the coordinates. The number 14 for map.setCenter is the zoom, which you can change.

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
function load() {
if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
map.addControl(new GSmallZoomControl());
map.enableScrollWheelZoom();
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(53.34870686020199, -6.267356872558594), 14);
}                          
var marker1 = new GMarker(new GLatLng(53.34870686020199,- 6.267356872558594));
map.addOverlay(marker1);
}
//]]>
</script>

We also need to change the body tag to load the map:

<body onLoad="load();" onUnload="GUnload()">

And last but not least you need to add the div in the body where you want your map to go.

<div id=”map”></div>

How easy was that?
You can then start being creative with your maps! Here are some examples:
www.hipentertainment.co.uk/contact-us.phuse
www.ehjoinery.com/contact-us.phuse
www.germwarfare.co.uk/contact-us.phuse

I’ll post a blog on how to add more than one marker on a map soon, so keep a look out!

Have you got a large Twitter following? Great! How many of those are real people? Oops, it’s probably a lot smaller than you think.

As the world’s Internet population flocks to Twitter, so do the spam bots. Following and re-tweeting just about every user on there. Having a large following may look impressive to other users (and possibly encourages more users to follow you), but this number is being bloated by spammers and giving you an unrealistic view of your Twitter popularity and influence.

Take a look at Rex7, a Twitter power user with over 60,000 followers. Rex7 recently decided to arrange the “largest tweet-up ever” in his city of St. Louis, Missouri, with fellow Twitterer Prebynski (who has a large following of over 20,000.)

Unfortunately, for Rex7 and Prebynski, only 19 people showed up. Wow, so what happened? His Twitter followers turned out to be nothing more than hollow, automated, spam accounts.

So who’s to blame? Twitter, the users, or the spammers? I’m sure Twitter itself could do more to protect its users from spam (In fact, I’m sure Twitter are doing more to protect the user base.)

The problem here is that people are desperate to increase their followers, it’s a massive popularity contest. Some people are so desperate, in fact, that there are services out there actually selling more followers, as the BBC reports.

I don’t understand it myself, surely having 500 real, dedicated followers is more valuable than 5,000 followers who aren’t listening to what you have to say?

As long as you remember to post interesting tweets, follow interesting people and re-tweet useful posts, you’ll gradually gain a strong, dedicated following.

Is there a guaranteed method of a successful viral marketing campaign? Does it happen by accident, or is it carefully planned out? I guess it depends on the campaign itself. Is the content itself unique enough that everyone just has to show their friends? Or is the planning and execution just so well thought out that you’re just too impressed not to pass it on?

Either way, if you get a good mix that works, you can grab the world’s attention overnight. I’m going to compare to different kinds of viral videos and that factors that make them a success in very different ways. I’ll be focusing on planning, execution and success rate.

First up, the one we’ve all seen a hundred times before, it’s the Star Wars Kid. This is a great example of one of those videos that you just had to show everyone you know. The video came about completely by accident and had absolutely no execution other than being uploaded to a popular P2P file sharing client.

Who would’ve thought the he would become the most viewed video on the Internet? With viewing figures well over 900 million, countless features in computer games and TV programmes, it just goes to show that some videos don’t require a marketing team and advertising budget. From a commercial point of view, the video doesn’t advertise or endorse any product (maybe that’s why it’s so successful?)

Next up is this brilliant piece of creativity from Japanese band SOUR.

The video is a promotional music video for their new single. It was shot simply by using their fans’ webcams from all over the world. The planning and execution on this one must’ve been going on for months. Success rate? It’s unfair to say, but the video already has over 140k views on YouTube alone and it was only uploaded 6 days ago. As previously mentioned, this video is to promote the band’s new single, will it have an affect on their sales figures and fan base? The organisation and choreography is nothing short of genius. We hope this gets the attention it deserves!

Of course, these two examples show both extremes. Zero planning an execution leading to massive success and lots of planning and execution leading to moderate success. The idea is to find a good balance. If you’re reading this and thinking about launching a viral video, then you’re already in the planning stage. The key is to make sure the success rate justifies the planning and execution time.

So what to do next? Find a creative company that specialises in viral marketing campaigns, either to drive the campaign for you or just to give you a bit of advice and ideas.

We’ve noticed recently the amount of offer based emails we’ve been receiving and how some companies need to think a bit more about the end goal or the offer and how others companies simply don’t think at all! The amount of daily emails received that get deleted straight away because they’re either too text heavy, written poorly, too confusing or just designed badly with no call to action is actually quite scary and just wastes everyone’s time.

So, here are a few tips to for email templates…

Keep the Design Simple - Too many emails try too hard. The most effective templates are the simple ones. A nice mast image that reflects the brand is sufficient. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. But most of all, keep it clear.

Strong Call to Action – The   main reason for sending the email should be obvious as soon as the email is opened. Don’t hide the offer, shout about it. Make sure the recipient can see it. If you’re using a button to link to a landing page, ensure the button stands out enough and makes you want to click it.

The Incentive – Its all very well having a strong call to action but the recipient does need the incentive. Make sure its inviting enough to action. Would you want it? Everyone loves a bargain or even better a freebie. Make it worth their while!

The Landing Page – Now that you’ve got the recipient to the landing page, don’t bog them down with too much information. You’ve got them interested, you don’t want them frustrated because they can’t find out what to do next. Use the principles that you’ve learnt in the email template. Present the information is a clear and informative way with a clear set of instructions on the next step.

This is all fairly obvious but surprisingly overlooked by lots of companies. If you can follow these principles next time you’re designing an email, you’ll probably find your email has a bit more sticking power than others!

Conversion is a fickle subject. You may not know this but, conversion rests upon opinion and shrewd judgement rather than figures. I'd like to share something I’ve learned about conversion which you may find interesting, it is a little tip bit I’ve used for some time now to increase website conversion. 

To increase conversion you take on the arduous task of testing and tweaking, a paradox which sometimes leads to dead ends. Testing and tweaking is a practical solution to increase conversion when you're already making sales. However, if you're not making sales then you need to take a step back, take an objective look at your content and ask yourself “am I connecting with the readers key needs?” and “am I capturing and engaging the reader?” or “am I sparking their interest?”

There is a common theory that on average a reader will view a product 7 times before making a purchase. It is no surprise then that long copy converts, but lots of content makes no improvement if it doesn’t engage the user in a way that captivates and stimulates their interest.

To stimulate the reader and increase conversion I use what I like to call the “lightbulb moment”.

The lightbulb moment happens when you spark the interest of your potential customers by telling them something about the product/topic that they didn't know. To achieve the lightbulb moment we need to take an objective look at the product we’re selling and compare it to the market we’re selling to and more importantly, what will stimulate the customers interest and spark the lightbulb moment.

The way I like to do this is to create a list under the concept of “you may not know…”

So to do this, visualise the product, think about the market and write down some bullet points.

you may not know: “you can actually…….”

you may not know: “it’s actually really simple and easy to…”

you may not know: “that other products don't xxxxx because….”

The whole idea is that debunking the readers micsconceptions with your positive facts about the product/topic stimulates them to understand that you and this product know better, that you understand it more and that you know how to make their life easier. This happens subconsciously and leaves the reader gagging for more information.

Capturing the readers attention like this leaves them with a desire for more information, you’ve effectively hooked the reader into a position were they want to be persuaded, so now it’s time to engage them again and again by bombarding them with more facts and give them a proposition or an offer they can’t refuse.

By creating and following a structure around conversion for each webpage of a site you can more effectively split test conversion because you will understand that each paragraph in the content has a purpose which is aimed increasing and developing conversion.

Do you understand conversion?

Head over to http://www.ph-creative.com and drop us line so we can give you the wealth of insider experience we have been using to increase clients conversion for years.

PS* We just updated the PH University! http://www.ph-creative.com/login.phuse