Interesting article at Wired Magazine called Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media.

“Having a website will no longer be enough for driving schools to survive in a highly competitive market and must embrace the opportunity to grow their business using the internet. Whilst many driving instructors don’t even have a Facebook account, those that are well acquainted with the user interfaces on social networking sites have the advantage over their competitors.”

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Many Ebay sellers will be affected if the strike goes ahead. Demand is said to be high for alternative courier services and especially for guaranteed Royal Mail services like Special Delivery.

Small businesses must face the fact that they will be impacted by the postal strike and those that depend on the Royal Mail must communicate with their customers in advance to ensure that espectations are realistic.

Most customers will be entirely reasonable so long as they are not led to believe something which could never happen, i.e. a prompt delivery of documents, cheques or goods.

With a little planning, the postal strike could be a marketing success, or if events are left to take their natural course then some companies may face serious problems when their mail doesn’t arrive.

App Bank has a simple and intuitive interface which means that non-programmers now have the tools build a Facebook app themselves without engaging the services of a professional.

AppBank is free to use and even pays people to create applications with it.  According to AppBank their top-earner makes $769 a month.  At the moment only users in the USA and Canada can take advantage of the revenue stream from Facebook advertising but that is sure to change in the future.

Whilst AppBank provides the tools to build a facebook app, there will be many businesses where they will still want to hire someone to do this for them. This will enable new companies to provide these development services where ideas people don’t need costly programmers to build their envisioned application.

If you want a Facebook application created for your company, get in touch with Simon Says Media.

With a hat tip to MomGadget.

History was made last week when  a high court injunction was served on the user of a Twitter account using the tweeting service’s own platform.

The Guardian reports:

The legal tradition of serving court papers to a defendant could be consigned to history, after the high court ordered an injunction to be served via social messaging service Twitter for the first time.

In a ruling on Thursday, a judge in London said that an anonymous Twitter user accused of impersonating a right-wing blogger should cease their activities and reveal their identity to the court. Without any other way of contacting the individual in question, however, the judge agreed that the best way to serve the injunction was through a message on the popular web service.”

“Online advertising expenditure grew 4.6% to £1.75 billion in H1 2009, overtaking TV for the first time.”

The IAB states that the UK

“remains the world leader in terms of market share for online, with the medium accounting for 23.5% in the first half of 2009.”

The IAB also points out the growth in paid-for search, accounting for almost 60% of online advertising expenditure.

As new websites are launched and battle for advertising revenue, fragmentation of the market will continue and put more pressure on TV broadcasters.

Photo by Trounce

Scientists have now  discovered that how you write “shows if you’re a liar“. They already know that “people hesitate more when they lie and some companies already use this fact to see how long it takes people to tick boxes when filling in surveys online,” he said.

No doubt as technology evolves it will become easier for the average mortal to determine whether or not he is reading truthful hand-written statements.

Marketing Guru Bill Glazer’s most successful campaign was his hand-written sales letter. If techniques advance to enable us to spot lies more easily, then campaigns like Glazer’s will only work if your pitch is genuine.

Crooked campaigns had better stick to email.