Shoe retailers Barratts have increased their email conversion rates with sales from emails accounting now for 10% of the companies online sales. So how have they done it?

Google has done it again. If you use any form of Social Media in your marketing mix you really must read this article.

Here is an exclusive screen shot of the new Twitter interface and I have to say - I for one love the new improvements.

In marketing the 'feel good' factor is always mentioned in meetings, but can it be measured?

Well, it's starting to be. Mappiness is a social experiment to measure the happiness of the UK at any given moment - and you can join in right now.

It's a well known saying that 'there is no such thing as a free meal'. The recent surge in the utilisation of Social Media by marketeers is largely down to the fact it is free.

But free seems to be coming at a price.

Facebook have just announced plans to let their Open Graph search engine begin to draw in content from outside of Facebook.

For a while now there has been speculation that Facebook is trying to produce a 'Social Semantic Search Engine' to serve up search results based on user information rather than 'html content' as google does.

I'm a huge fan of Orange. I love it as a colour, I love it as a drink and I love it as a mobile phone provider.

For me, Orange get it right so often.

Did you know the first .com site was registered on March 15th 1985? And contrary to popular belief, the .com boom hardly started as a big bang with only five other .com sites being registered that year.

The first site was registered by Symbolics Inc and can still be found on the internet today at www.symbolics-dks.com (could this be the first World Heritage Web Site?).

Is it just me or do you find it odd that Google's main competitor is a social networking site and not another Search Engine?

On March 6th Facebook achieved the seemingly impossible. It became (admittedly for a brief moment) the most viewed web site in the U.S. Facebook has long been seen as the main competitor to Google. Not Bing, Not Yahoo. Not Twitter.

The internet has constantly bounded forward at an alarming rate. I remember when we early web designers gushed at being able to make text blink on and off. Wow.

It's hard work to gain favourable opinion from the paying public and to build that all important 'Brand Loyalty' so is it any wonder some brands look for short cuts?

Attaching a famous personality to your brand is a short cut to public approval.

You know you are doing well when you start to make people nervous.

The internet has certainly changed the world we live in - particularly when you rely on advertising revenue to survive.

Still wondering if making a substantial investment in the internet is for you? By 'substantial' I mean a web site that you treat like a business with budget invested in customer research, getting found, updates, etc.

Hell hath no fury than a pie fan scorned.

I'm sure you all have a friend or colleague whose job it seems to be to scour the internet looking for interesting offers to forward to you.

My desk is wrist deep in other peoples business cards. I see so many of them, some good, some bad but very few 'clever'. We've been scouring the internet for some ideas for great business cards. Hopefully it might provide you with some great ideas to make your business card get noticed...

Want to see the next two 'big things' for us media types to play around with?

Big thing number one: Moving images in magazines.