Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Jill McDonald, McDonald’s chief marketing officer in the UK and Northern Europe, hasn’t wasted much time since joining the company from BA in 2006.

She was named as the UK’s top marketer at the Marketing Society Awards in June, having helped to breathe life into the business and instigated more “rigour and discipline” in the way it goes about advertising.

Now, she tells us, the same thing needs to happen in its online activities. She says she wants to “take a step back as a brand and look at how we should be using the digital space”, and recently commissioned what looks like a fairly wide-reaching review of its web strategy.

We talk to her about what that might mean for McDonalds and how it measures success in the digital world.

In my post on Monday, I discussed the privacy concerns that have been raised in the wake of a court order, requiring Google to provide Viacom with 12TB of data that includes information on the viewing habits of individual YouTube users.

The YouTube case ties in with a broad subject that industry, privacy advocates and lawmakers have been grappling with.

That is, what privacy rights should consumers have in an age, when the technologies designed to track their online activities and to target them with advertising keep getting more invasive and advanced?

Firms are often told that the information they collect from users through their websites, especially email lists, is extremely valuable.

But most of the companies I have worked with over the years really have no idea how to use this information to boost business.

eBay has posted a letter to its 14m UK users detailing its fight against counterfeits and claiming it is a defender of e-commerce against the threat of uncompetitive commercial practices.

The letter, signed by 'Doug' (European SVP Doug McCallum), follows a ruling last week against eBay in the Paris commercial court.

Sending customers a welcome email message after they have registered on your site, or chosen to receive newsletters, is generally accepted as good practice.

But a recent survey found that 60% of firms weren't doing so, while many others were failing to respond promptly enough.

What should etailers be including in these welcome emails though? Here are ten tips...

Chris Anderson's 2006 book, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More ," didn't take long to go from the "tail" to the "head."

The popularity of Anderson's book is due to the fact that its thesis is both simple and powerful.

In a world where consumers have more choice than ever before and through the internet, the limitations of shelf-space have largely been reduced, businesses will be driven more by the sale of a smaller number of more products than they will be by the sale of a larger number of fewer "hit" products.

E-consultancy’s first Digital Sail Regatta took place last week, with seven yachts and one rib commandeered by some of the UK internet industry’s saltiest dogs.

As noted in my last episode of The Web Week in Review, a federal judge has ordered that Google turn over a significant amount of data to Viacom, as part of its $1bn copyright infringement lawsuit over claims of massive copyright infringement on YouTube.

This data details what videos individual users have viewed and includes their IP addresses.

I've recently seen a growing number of people encouraging businesses to look at 'cloud hosting' solutions such as Amazon's EC2 and Rackspace's Mosso.

Cloud hosting takes the concept of cloud computing into the realm of hosting.

Careerjet is a job search engine that began as a bet by its founders, Thomas Busch and Jean-Benoit Andrieu.

It appears they have won - it now aggregates content from over 59,000 sites daily, and currently displays upwards of 21m vacancies.

We talked to Busch about the site's development and the semantic technology behind its search functions.