Kevin Harrington // marketing // blog

According to my satnav information there are more speed cameras in the UK than France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Portugal combined! Here is the list of the number of cameras by country:

I’m not sure, but I think Belgium may beat us per capita.

According to the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the “median” gross annual earnings in the UK are £20,801. If you are earning that sum a year it means that half the surveyed working population earns less than you and half more.

The BBC analysis of the ASHE survey shows that the top 25% of people have a gross annual salary of £31,759. The top 10% is from £44,881 and a gross annual salary of £58,917 gets you into the top 5%.

I was rather enthused about Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. I Tweeted about this a few days ago saying, “Giving Bing www.bing.com a go. It’s good and localisation seems to work well. I also like the ‘format to phone’ feature; ace on Blackberry.”

Today I was further impressed by the following email that I received:

Hi Kevin,

I’m writing on behalf of Microsoft to invite you to a discussion about Bing, the new search engine that recently launched in beta in the UK.

The session will be a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding the use of Bing on a phone, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you’ll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.

This will take place in the next couple of weeks, so if you’re interested in coming along, or have any questions, just get in touch and I’ll send you some more details.

Thanks,

Colin Mercer

Excellent, cooking on gas, was my thoughts. I replied straight away and guess what? The email bounced with this message:  

Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender　

This is the mail system at host safetwo.sceur.ch.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

Perhaps Bing will struggle against Google? Or perhaps this was a freak occurrence.

Apparently Colin works for 1000heads. He was representing Life Without Walls which is a Microsoft sponsored initiative run by 1000heads that organises events, social gatherings, trials and a host of other enlightening activities.

So, have a guess what this is all about:

Since 1997 there has been much discussion of the use of focus groups, handfuls of people picked to be representative of a target demographic, then questioned in relative seclusion.

I’m thrilled to say this all about politicians. It is an extract from the BBC News Magazine.

The rather disgaceful scenes being enacted in Westminster do at least have some benefits. Finally we have some debate about our elected politicians and the need for them to be in touch with the UK public, and not just their constituency party club members.

>>> read the full article

Perhaps a few conventional marketing approaches would help them?

In the annual shareout of awards, The Stopgap Group(Stopgap, Rightstop, Fitzroy and Courtenay) won the award for ”Best Medium-to-Large Recruitment Firm to Work For“.

They collected the award at the big recruitment industry night, hosted at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, at the annual Recruiter Awards for Excellence. 

Stopgap, one of the UK’s leading marketing recruiters, had been nominated in not two categories: Best Recruitment Firm Website and the Best Medium-to-Large Recruitment Firm to Work For.

Well done Stopgap and thank you for your work on our current projects.

I found this quote today:

I started the £1k FTSE 100 Confidence Project in January as a personal show of confidence in the UK equity market. I was fed up with the doom and gloom and was convinced that the equity market had priced in bad news. I invested £1,000 in a FTSE 100 ISA tracker from the Halifax and commited to reporting its performance on my blog.Speed Communications – Wadd’s PR Blog, May 2009

You should read the whole article. It’s good to see someone putting their money where there mouth is and keeping at it.

Google Phone

I’m rather excited by the pending arrival of the Google Phone, G1. But it will be a quandary for me.

Out of principal I would not buy an iPhone as I find their distribution approach offensive. I don’t want to move to O2 and I don’t want a new phone number. These are both things that were demanded at the UK launch of the iPhone.

This resulted in me finally abandoning Sony handsets (having worked for them in the 80s and 90s there was a bit of a loyalty) to get the functionality I wanted. I migrated to Blackberry Pearl 8100.

But the Google Phone is looking very exciting. That said, there are mixed views about the launch. Do I depart from Blackberry in favour of Google?