CharlesNeville.com

OK, so you’re remarkable, now what?

Why local business and tourist venues should enable customers to remark about them

We should by now all be aware of the importance of being remarkable, but one thing that’s often missing is making it REALLY easy for people to share that “remarkability” with their friends with the simple act of giving them a free wifi connection.

Mobile devices are getting smarter, more capable, high-speed mobile data is becoming more widespread, but that doesn’t mean businesses are off the hook when it comes to hooking their customers up to a fast, free internet connection (yes, I’m looking at you Hilton, Marriot and any other short-sighted money grubbing hotel that bilks their customers up to $20 a day for internet access). In fact sometimes the free wifi in itself is remarkable enough for a mention.

Given that very few data plans remain unlimited and in many cases a lot of people at a venue may be from out-of-country so have no data plan or desire to rack up huge roaming charges, it’s the very least you can do to be a good host.

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Make your customers look good

Here in the Czech Republic it’s a long weekend. And by long I mean very long; there are two bank holidays, on Monday and Tuesday.

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Use WordPress? Feel a Need for Speed?

Since Google have now been very public that site speed is a ranking factor, albeit a minor one, now is a good time to get testing your site’s speed.

I’ve been using Google’s Page Speed Firefox extension, you can also use YSlow from Yahoo. For either you’ll need to install Firebug first.

There are plenty of tutorials online for how to use these Firefox extensions, and each of them has built in suggestions and information on what it all means. Some of the suggestions can be a bit cryptic, also there’s a limit to how many of the suggestions you can implement (seriously, how do I ‘parallelize downloads’ by loading static files from different hosts and at the same time keep DNS requests to a minimum?).

Most of the suggestions (Enable compression, Leverage browser caching) can be handled using .htaccess rules, but some are a bit more involved. Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone 4 Ubiquity

With the release of iPhone 4, the UK joins the Czech Republic and Australia on the list of countries where all mobile networks (and Tesco, an MVNO) offer the iPhone. Apple have even just started selling the iPhone unlocked with no contract.

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Think Guerilla

Last weekend, with beautiful blue skies overhead, I went to the Prague Food Festival held in the gardens below the castle.

It seems I mistimed my visit however. The Festival’s version of crowd control was to close the gates for up to 2 hours at a time. They’d used this tactic before, last year, too. Imagine what an opportunity 200 hungry foodies standing in a line represents to build good-will (or even earn money) for an enterprising restaurant with some spare capacity.

Whenever there’s an event taking place on your turf, don’t just think you’re limited to playing by the organiser’s rules and spending money on buying a stand, stall or what have you. Some of the most memorable advertising around world sporting events has been by non-sponsors – freed from paying out vast sums to the event organisers, more budget can be directed to the creative and the media buy. We’ll be seeing the same again for the World Cup in South Africa. So-called ambush marketing is the big brands’ advertising version of guerilla marketing. If you’re a small business marketer, try thinking guerilla.