The UK’s top five online embarrassments

Online blunders can be highly embarrassing. From sending an email to someone other than you intended, to falling for the ever-present ‘you have won $1-million dollars in the Nigerian lottery’, they’re all pretty blush-worthy. Net Imperative recently listed five of the UK’s biggest online blunders, as polled by Humyo.com, ranging from saucy emails spreading like [...]

Branding innovation with Facebook

Recent research reveals that advertisers are taking advantage of social networking tools such as Facebook, to boost their branding presence. Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Kraft, for instance, are all using Facebook to generate consumer insight. For example, Coca-Cola’s main page on Facebook now has over three million ‘friends.’ Michael Donnelly, Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing says that the fan-page was [...]

South Africa’s global image boosted by peaceful elections

This month, a media report issued by Media Tenor has indicated that South Africa’s recent peaceful elections have boosted the country’s image in television news ratings globally. This is expected to boost coverage on Africa as a whole, particularly around issues of democracy, which have seen an increase of positive coverage in the last few months.
Issues [...]

Online dating

I heard of online dating a few years ago, but didn`t pay any attention. I thought that people who used these services were, well I`m not going to say it outright, but let`s just say it rhymes with “Vespa”rate. Until I started paying more attention, I hadn`t realised how so many people were using the [...]

Not-so-special assignment

Hubby and I were both looking forward to last night’s episode of Special Assignment, which was advertised regularly on SABC3 in the past few days, promising to look into the myriad of ads lately spoofing the ANC. I wanted to learn more, particularly about whether Zapiro intends to permanently remove the Zuma shower tap, [...]

Are you a man or a machine?

Have you noticed how more and more websites are including puzzles presenting a string of distorted letters and numbers when you sign up for their services or log in? These puzzles are called captchas and are supposed to be easy for humans to read and retype, but hard for computer software to figure out. Captchas [...]

Pony purchase goes sour

A large generalisation is being made here, but could we agree (more or less) that most consumers who walk into a shop have a relatively basic knowledge of how much they can spend; that they have an ability to read prices; and that they are able to do basic tasks of mathematics, such as adding [...]

Facebook doesn’t make us stupid, Google does

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short piece about whether Facebook use makes its users stupid. I concluded that it did no such thing. After doing further research on the good, the bad and the ugly of the internet, however, I have come across an interesting article which doesn’t say that Facebook use makes [...]

Spam sucks

Spam comprises between 80% and 85% of all the email in the world, and some would place this number as high as 95%. Spam mail is something that can be annoying, to say the least, and so I’ve decided to dedicate some time to determine what spam actually is.
Some internet sources say that spam can [...]

Starbucks uses social media to brew its new campaign

According to the New York Times, Starbucks has launched a new ad campaign aimed at a new generation of coffee drinkers. The coffeehouse chain is putting up new advertising posters in six major cities in America, and to further spread its message, it is attempting to make use of the power of social media by [...]