While browsing through my Tweetdeck, I couldn’t help noticing the @NAB search column nearly full of praise from customers and retweeters. Disclosure: I consulted to this division of NAB (i.e. Direct Banking, which includes social media management) until a few months ago and I am still consulting to UBank at a different location.
A persona is a fictitious person that has certain defined attributes. In product marketing, we create personas for major groups of users who will use the product. For example, a word processor’s set of personas might include a high school student, a university student, a generic office worker, a specialist author, a manager, and so on.
In the world of black-hat SEO or spamming, a persona is usually a very shallow person, with no thought given to its creation. Beyond a rather implausible Western name and Gmail address, there is no sophistication, perhaps because the only purpose of that persona is to send once-off spam. Since you can create billions of fake Gmail/Yahoo/Rediffmail accounts without any worry, you can create a new one for each email if you wish. Continue reading
Anyone can start up a free Twitter account from http://www.twitter.com and can register from the home page. Registration is easy: the fields required for initial setup are:
Some months ago, Google announced that there would be no more private profiles in Google. It was around the time when rumours of Google+ started leaking out in the form of Circles.
Here is the wording (emphasis mine): Continue reading
I work mostly with large corporate websites and know that they are managed by numerous people, all with varying degrees of knowledge and care about the big picture. Hence they break all the time.
I usually choose Singapore Airlines (SQ) when travelling to Asia. Being a former frequent flyer, I don’t visit Flyertalk.com much these days, but I took a peek and found the current thread about SQ’s new website:
New singaporeair.com website issues
Hmm. It’s the first time I have come across a travel site with such a dominating calendar on the home page. There isn’t much information there until you click through to other pages. I trust they had good reason to change to a minimalist theme.
An ad for the BMW X1 caught my eye and I clicked through to BMW Australia — actually its ad landing page.
The price might sound high for the US or UK, but is what we have learnt to accept as “low” in Australia for this brand. So how would you explore this site?
Do you click the links on the left — the car or Build your BMW? You might, but I had noted the important words “no optional extras” for this price. So I thought I could find a page listing this model and all its features. Continue reading
I saw a retweet of this tweet by @codelust:
I don’t want to focus on the Indian tweeter, who later tweeted that he quit Facebook in 2010, but it got me thinking again about Foursquare. A few people I know who are active on Twitter and FB don’t bother with Foursquare. Continue reading
Did you know that you could check your YouTube video speed history, comparing your ISP with other states, country and the world? In the graph below, my ISP NetSpace (now part of iiNet) is the yellow line that’s going south. 
LinkedIn Labs has released a tool called LinkedIn Connection Timeline that enables us to view our connections over a time period.
In the last two years I wrote about online directories and real estate websites in the US. For a change I decided to look at Asian sites. So, I have just published a report on the Search Visibility of Singapore Banks in 2011 and it is available for download without needing to supply your email address or your first-born.
Why Singapore? Because it is small and has a small number of banks in a small geographic area. Why banks and not pizza shops? Mainly because I have specialised in banking websites in Australia for the past year.
Summary of findings: Continue reading
If you own an Apple iPhone 3GS, iPad etc, the latest update of the iOS operating system version 4.3 comes with a personal hotspot for Internet connectivity. This has killed the market for personal hotspot gadgets, currently costing around $200 from Vodafone, Huawei and so on.
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A personal hotspot enables you to connect a computer or tablet to the Internet via a cable, WiFi or BlueTooth. The device used to have its own SIM, thus requiring you to buy a second plan, but the advantage is that you can share up to five devices at a time. Continue reading
The CAPTCHA project is a worthy initiative from the Carnegie Mellon University and is commonly found on forms to reduce bot spam and exploits. I was reading an article at NAB’s Money Basics site and happened to notice the CAPTCHA text below the comment form:
