If I were to ask you about Facebook, would you refer me what kids use daily in the social networking site? Or maybe the movie “The Social Network” about Mark Zuckerberg, its founder? Or, refer to the recent controversial IPO, now looking like becoming one big lawsuit?

Facebook has come a long way since it was first launched in 2004. With something like over 900 million users, this is a serious web portal—one that is a major player and well recognised and used the world over.

Whatever you may think of Facebook, it is by far the most popular social medium in the world today, according to a study done in 2009. And, not only is the medium popular socially, it is now used by serious marketers as part of their communications strategies.

According to Wikipedia, “Facebook has now been involved in campaigns for True Blood, American Idol, and Top Gear. News and media outlets such as the Washington Post, Financial Times and ABC News have used aggregated Facebook fan data to create various infographics and charts to accompany their articles.”

In light of the state of play, what are you doing to incorporate this medium as part of your marketing communication mix?

At JG Marketing we now offer Facebook business pages and Facebook campaigns as part of our suite of services available for our clients.

Facebook business page design is just one part of a web design package, we offer our clients. Facebook business pages have proved that this social networking platform can improve business revenue.

Not only do you interface with your customers in an informal setting, but with Facebook business pages, you get the ability to attract new users to your products and services. You also get a chance to develop a lasting relationship through tthis mediu,. This is a constant link similar to that encountered by current Facebook users.

At JG Marketing, we have been providing web-based marketing communication solutions since 1997. I have seen many portals come and go since then. And, I am convinced that the Facebook phenomenon is here to stay.

Connecting with your customers at a personal level on Facebook is a great way to keep them interested in your products. Your competitors may probably be doing this already. So, if they are doing this, you should consider doing likewise.

Our Facebook business page designs are designed to match with the products and/or services you want to promote. The graphics used can be from your existing sales material, website or whatever you currently have. We give this a social networking twist.

We can bring your Facebook page alive with rich content directly from your website. Automated posts originating from your e-commerce website about specials or posts coming in from your corporate news feed into your Facebook page, any type of data can be used to keep your Facebook business page active. We help integrate any available information source with your Facebook business page design.

If you want to look into Facebook business page design, get in touch with us.

Smart phones and tablets are now more and more prevalent. These portable devices seem to be everywhere. On any any day, it seems that wherever you go someone is looking at his/her smartphone or using a tablet to play a game or browse the internet.

And, if you’re like me, you could well be one of these people.

So, are you taking advantage of this new state of affairs? Is your website optimised for viewing in the smaller space of mobile communication?

Time was when web access was via a fixed line service on a desktop of laptop computer with a large screen. With more bandwidth available and broadband connection more the norm, the rich content accessible through your computer browser has never been better.

However, with the spread of smart phones and tablets, mobile devices that are not only portable but wireless is now more common and could easily become the norm in the near future.

To take advantage of the growth in mobile devices, how are you approaching the use of your website on such media.

Many, if not most websites, suffer in many ways when viewed on mobile phones or tablets. The most obvious problem, of course, is screen size. The limited space provided by these wireless devices means that text and graphics designed for large monitors will not translate to the smaller size.

Then there is the problem of viewing only one window at a time. Multi-tasking and easy movement between windows is not possible in the current state of mobile technology.

Navigability orfyour website, again designed for large monitors, where dropdown menus,  navigation  bars, tabs and other link choices are not always available or easily translatable to the smaller viewing space of mobile equipment. We note that we don’t have the useof a mouse or pointer like we do on a computer in a mobile phone or tablet

Again we get less flexibility.

Not all websites are accessible on mobile devices. Flash animation is one area of concern. PDFs is another, as well as videos, though this is now not as much a problem as only a year or two ago.

Other difficulties include broken pages and compressed pages. Many mobile devices break down pages into segments, with each treated as a separate page. Add slow download speeds and navigation difficulties and more problems are encountered.

Of course, because of size, pages tend to be compressed or squeezed to fit the screen. Thus, content viewing, graphics and text will suffer.

What I’ve included  here is only a partial discussion of issues, constraints and considerations posed by use of mobile media in the viewing of your website.

At JG Marketing, we offer communication solutions that cover mobile and wireless solutions. We can provide you with websites that take advantage or work around the challenges of the smaller space, slower downloads and the like.

I will bring up some more thoughts and ideas on this issue in a future post.

Your website is there to show off content. That may be about your company, your products or services, how to order, news stories on your company, a blog maybe and so on.

Your website may also show pictures of your products, the management team, your sales team, your last company picnic and so on. It may also feature a flash presentation, videos and more.

Now, this content has to be of interest to the viewer, relevant and helpful. Ok, so far.

But, what about search engines? Search engines’ reason for their existence is to index website content. You key in a bunch of keywords, press the button and voila you get listings of the sites that carry these words. And, usually, depending on the keywords, there will be quite a number of listings, which could even run in the millions.

Sometime back I wrote a post on why you need to update your website regularly.  When I first started designing websites for my clients, I reminded them that these had to change the look regularly. They had to look like there was something new, as well.

Now, back to search engines, which index your webpages regularly. Your robot.txt file may request a revisit say every month. Now, if the search engine finds nothing new after a few regularly visits, it will revisit at longer intervals or worse, stop visiting your site.

Which brings me to why you need to put new content on a regular basis. Exactly for the reason that search engines want to see new content. And, if there is nothing new. Well, your site’s ranking will suffer as a result.

While link building, keyword density and so on are still important, content is still king. Now, certain SEO practitioners may disagree, but I believe that regular addition of content is important for the reason given above.

While a new look may interest a viewer, the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo, don’t look at a site. They crawl the site for keywords and index this.

What hurts is when the site is left unchanged for a long time, with no new content. Then one day you check for your search engine ranking on a keyword or keywords only to find that you have not only dropped a few rungs, but even several pages.

If you need help to keep your site fresh, let us know at JG Marketing.  After all we are there to help.

Many words have been put together in praise of Steve Jobs. I must confess that I have already done so in my facebook page and thought of doing so in this blog. But, allow me to do so in a slightly different way.

Before I bought my first Apple Mac, I had two PCs, one of which was the original IBM personal computer. Wow, what I paid for it then would buy me super computing power. 20 MB hard drive and 512 kB of RAM and a floppy drive. With a printer it cost me around $6700 in 1986. A lot of money then and compared to what you get for that sum, still a lot now.

And, I will never forget the sales guy asking, “do you really need that much RAM?” This was when 252 kB was a lot. Remember that only a few years previously 512 kB in a main frame was considered very good. But, I digress.

What I did with the computer is pretty much what we all tend to do now: word processing and spreadsheets. I looked at desktop publishing and wasn’t quite convinced with what was on offer. In the end, I went for the familiar and settled on a typesetter, complete with processor, with the chemicals to develop bromides. Again, I digress.

Well, this preamble brings me my first encounter with the Apple Mac. It was a Mac IIx, I think. The actual machine was not that important. What is important is the software, which only ran in the Mac then. It was Quark Xpress. This was desktop publishing that was pretty much WYSIWIG, and at a price that was within reach.

Previously, I looked at Ventura, which I believe ended up as Pagemaker, the precursor to InDesign. I also looked at ReadySetGo. Not bad, but what impressed me was a PC-based software which had very good WISIWYG but cost something like $5000 just for the software. I’m glad I didn’t go with that, as Quark Xpress has been the platform, I’ve carried through the years.

So, in 1991, I got my first Apple Mac. And, I have stuck with Quark, despite their really crazy pricing. Anyway, they came to their senses some 10 or so years ago. Most probably this was because of the pressures brought to bear by Adobe, with InDesign. Again, I digress.

Quark eventually went to the PC a few years later, but I have stuck with the Mac platform for DTP. I admit to getting a number of PCs through the years, but none of these were used for desktop publishing.

Now, to Steve Jobs. In one of his career/life’s moves, he studied calligraphy. Great. His love for this led him to appreciate typography and printing, including one of the many things involved in this industry which was measurement. Printing used the Imperial foot as a measurement. More importantly was the unit called pica
Pica is a typographic unit corresponding to 1/72 of a foot. Hence, the pica is 1/6 of an inch. The pica has 12 points (units) of measure.

So, where is this heading. Well, let’s cut to the chase. The Apple monitor to this day uses this measurement. Not as picas, but pixels. Hence, this consideration was front of mind for Jobs when he developed the first Apple Mac. Admittedly, it was a small screen (7”) but it had 72 dots per inch (dpi). This closely matches the printing measurement.

Believe me that this was very important to us doing typesetting. And, the legacy today is the look of the monitor more closely resembles the printed page. Note that PC monitors are on the main 96 dpi. I won’t go into the differences, other than to alert you dear reader of the differences in colour for Mac monitors compared to PCs. The latter’s images appear darker.

Anyway, Jobs’ forward thinking helped place Apple Macs as the tool of choice in DTP for a long time. A legacy that continues today.

Like any tool in marketing communication, those used to develop a website have their particular purpose. One of those used in developing websites, is animation. I refer particularly to the use of Flash.

When bandwidth was limited and download speeds were still 56 kbits/sec, animation was limited in scope and very slow to download. One only has to look back at the slow speed of file download and the constant temptation to press the “skip” button.

With more bandwidth, faster download speeds and current state of the web, these problems are now no longer relevant.

So, do we just adopt the use of Flash on every website? I use a very limited version of flash on my website. One that more resembles a marquee, with a feel similar to a slide show.

With a number of clients, I use different types of Flash animation.

One I particularly like to highlight is fa division of a client of several years. I refer to Aztex Sodablast—a division of Aztex Pty Ptd.  Note the unique way that the flash animation works, from the above photo of the home page. (You can check the site's flash animation, by clicking here.)

Animation of the photos changing mimics the process of soda blasting. The disappearance of the photo to reveal another underneath is similar to the effects of surface blasting.

I’d like to think that this is similar to the use of onomatopoeia in poetry, where the sound of words mimics what the word represents. Anyway, you get what I mean.

Let’s not limit the approach of bringing animation to your website. There is just so much scope with today’s technology. And, there's pretty much no limit.

If you want to bring a great Flash effect to help highlight your products or services, JG Marketing Services can help.

If you're looking at refreshing your website, with or without flash, why not contact us to discuss your requirements.

Sometime back I wrote about refreshing your website. Really, if you think about it, if your site looks the same everytime someone pops over for a visit, it looks the same and there’s no reason to visit again, right?

Well, not wanting to be guilty of saying do as I say, not what I do, I’ve updated my site ever so slightly.

BTW, note that with updates to this blog, the content changes on my website, but the look stays the same.

Well, now some very subtle changes to featured pics (with actual changes to some text) means that we now have a slightly different look to jgmarketing.com.au.

So, hope you like it.

Here’s a link to the site.

Again, I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Take care.

Jamie Oliver is more than a celebrity chef with a bankable image. At heart he is an entrepreneur. And looking at the many ventures he has been involved with, this entrepreneural vent is obvious.

He has gone from his initial television appearances and extended his brand by opening restaurant chains,f ood shops and taking time out to design consumer cooking products. He uses his name and his celebrity status by working this into a range of  interrelated interests.


A The golden rules of brand extension use the strength of Oliver’s reputation and strength of his brand to extend this. Diversification allows you not only sell more products but also to spread your risks. As whatever you sell when you reach a point of saturation, diversification allows you some protection from that saturation by selling other products.

Of course, there are no guarantees of continued success. A successful television show may be axed if ratings fall or production companies want a fresh face. (Jamie Oliver’s early setbacks in television attest to this being something that is always back of the mind.)

Consider also that if a show is dropped, this will affect other products, e.g., book sales will suffer without the support of a television show.

Diversification offers a degree of protection if say Oliver’s television shows are dropped, as restaurants, consumer products and so on will still be there.

They also have a potential of developing a momentum of their own.

Brand extension also has some risks associated with it.

A known name can help achieve market acceptance. The Jamie Oliver brand helps sell his range of kitchenware, cookbooks and the like.

However, a brand given to a poor product or a good one that doesn’t excite the public’s imagination can damage the parent brand. And, by extension even ruin the goodwill that may already have been built into the original brand.

When you extend  your brand, you  have to control your affairs, you will have to build values people associate with around the branded products.

Oliver developed an image of straight-talking chef, who was passionate about good food being available to the public.

It is also important to note that it is important to stick to your knitting. Oliver concentrated on food and cooking. All his business ventures centred around these.

Brand extension is also achieved by partnering with others. Oliver always tried to hire talented people, develop them in his organisations and he looked at successful businesses to partner with to develop products that would carry his brand name.

Also, by diversifying into other products and business ventures, Oliver has created a platform that allows him to survive in business even his television celebrity status should begin to fade.

It's been a while and am remiss updating my blog. Let me touch on a favourite subject: headlines.

I am reading a book on copywriting and the way the author presents this subject is different to other books I've read previously on the subject. In future posts, I will cover some new and some old points that I have rediscovered.

In a previous post, I harped about headlines, or rather, the lack of it.

Have your ever considered that just about any sales message, whether in print or on-line needs a headline--a good one.

Let’s face it, the headline of your sales message is what pulls a reader or visitor to your website. I would say that it would be responsible for up to 80% of the response from that sales message. So, let's face it, the success or failure of most marketing efforts rests very much on the power of your headline.

In a print advertisement, 10-20% of your prospective readers will read your ad. That’s it. So, if you have a so-so headline, you can lose pretty much all the prospective readers of your ad.

To capture your prospective reader, you need to grab him/her with a good, punchy headline.

As covered earlier and again here, a headline is just so important. Even poorly written ads have been successful because of the overwhelming power of a good headline. Your prospects will decide whether to read your sales message in only two or three seconds. That is all the time they will give you to scan your headline. Really, you and I are no different.

We do not READ a newspaper, we SCAN the headlines - article headlines and ad headlines. We are looking for only for what interests us at the moment we read.

Consider how you would read a newspaper. You scan the headlines and then proceed to read the body of the article, if the headline interests you.

A headline comprises the first words at the top of a newspaper ad. It is the title of your article, the subject line of your email or letter, or the top of your web page. Some quick pointers:

Make sure that your headline is the first group of words that your reader sees. I’ve seen fancy layouts with the headline buried in the body of an ad. So, subtle and yet so easy to miss. We’re not out to win awards for ad layouts, but to make sales is something that I believe in.

Ads that go against this point put their logo on the top, where the headline should be. If you just want to get subliminal messages through, without trying to get your reader to go through the body copy, this might work. Otherwise, it’s a complete waste of time.

The headline should pull in the reader with some sort of promise. Once, you get the reader’s attention, the eyes will be pulled down to your logo, as part of your signature. 

Of the readers who will see your ad, something like 10-20% will have an interest in your message. If you miss out on these readers, you’ve just done your money.

The headline should not only have a promise, it should be catchy and noticeable. Some headlines just describe the product that’s advertise and that’s it. Ho-hum. “1 tonne widget”. So, what’s the promise. Mind you if someone is looking for a 1 tonne widget, this could be enough to pull him/her through the body copy.

Now, why not something like “You can save money with our 1 tonne widget”, better yet, “How you can save money with our 1 tonne widget”.

Note the use of the word "you" in both headlines, making the appeal directly to the reader. Also note the appeal to the hip pocket nerve, to get the reader’s curiosity going.

Let' not forget that we will not interest all readers, only the 10-20% who may be in the market for a 1 tonne widget. And, since the reader’s curiosity is piqued, he/she will read on.

Now lose the reader at this stage, and he/she will go no further.

So, some thought should always be put in a headline.

When I write ads, I usually put as much work in the headline as I do with the body copy. I will touch on body copy on another post.

Until then...

Let's face it today, many things are becoming commodities. Generic branding which started not that long ago, is growing. Price is now pretty much the main deciding factor. Or, is it?

I recently read a book about Jamie Oliver, the chef and entrepreneur. In the footsteps of many ahead of him who extended his name and personal brand to other products and services, e.g., cookware, cookbooks, shows and the like, Oliver has expanded his now familiar face and name to other income streams.



With a friendly and affable persona, Oliver started his brand with an appearance in a TV documentary. His style and approach to cooking, plus his personality, of course, made him an ideal candidate as a TV personality.

He did three series as "The Naked Chef" and then came "Jamie's Kitchen".

Oliver then expanded to other areas from there including setting up his own production company, Fresh One Production Company.

Jamie Oliver made a few mistakes along the way, but he had his sights well set at expanding his brand. He also did a lot of work for the public, including a School Dinners campaign and  Ministry of Food. The former effort was aimed at improving the quality of school meals. The latter was aimed at encourage cooking in a housing estate.

Not averse to controversy, Oliver used shock tactics to make consumers think about animal welfare standards.

Again, these efforts help build on his persona, his personal brand.

With the development of his name, his brand, his persona, Oliver went into partnership with different enterprises and manufacturers to build restaurant chains, a party planning business, "own brand" line of herbs, sauces, oils and kitchenware.

And, he even got involved in multimedia activities, which includes a video game and video downloads for mobile phone users.

So, the brand expanded and developed.

While it may not be the way to develop your business, it is a means of building a brand, albeit in a more personal and persona-based business.

I'll cover some of the lessons Jamie Oliver learned in building his brand in future posts.

Until then....