Twitter for Marketing and PR

Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Mike Carter

As discussed earlier this week, the guys over at HubSpot have a great webinar that is now available online. So if you want to learn a little more about how to use Twitter to your advantage, this is a great place to start.

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The Achilles heel of the Rightmove model

Posted on October 10th, 2008 by Mike Carter

According to Wikipedia, the definition of Achilles’ heel is -

is a fatal weakness in spite of overall strength, actually or potentially leading to downfall.

It seems like the heel could be exposed over at Rightmove. According to Estate Agent Today, 75% of Rightmove subscribers are threatening to leave. If this happens, one of my biggest concerns with their model will devastate them virtually over night. According to the Carter-pedia rules of online ad models :

if you are a pay to list website, those ‘payees’ supply all your content. if that content goes away, so does that audience

I remember last year, asking the sales reps at the Rightmove booth (at Agent Expo) about the contract lengths. According to them, 80% of their customers were on a month-to-month basis. And he said that with a smile. Of course he did not notice I was from Zoomf :-)

A sure sign of keeping clients happy is the willingness for them to sign longer-term contracts with you. It’s what we did at Doubleclick and I think anyone would tell you this is good business practice for online advertising.

Now let’s do a simple napkin analysis. If 75% fell away, what happens :

  • obviously revenues are hit and RM cannot advertise as much
  • audience (traffic) will drop.
  • instead of 700k properties to look at (or whatever the number is), you’ve got that much less inventory
  • gumtree starts receiving a lot more advertising
  • google de-ranks them across natural search due to decrease in breadth of content
  • stickers come down and hopefully ours go up

Now that’s the short list and we’ve all heard about Rightmove being in a weak position before so all of this is said with a grain of salt. However, the Achilles’ heel is the part that starts the domino effect for them.

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Pay your council tax, and in return, have your house destroyed.

Posted on October 10th, 2008 by Mike Carter

We all pay council tax in the hopes that we can live in a clean environment, garbage free. Well last I checked, part of my monthly bill goes towards refuse and I’m a stickler for making sure I’m getting value for my tax dollar. Even to the point where I recently started a blog tracking this behaviour for my neighborhood in Camden Town. (the trash was picked up the next day, the power of citizen journalism!)

Unfortunately for a couple in Washington in the US, their garbage collection almost (or has) destroyed their home. Too bad the driver didn’t use that parking brake. Someone is about to lose their job and it has nothing to do with the credit crunch.

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