Kristi Barrow

It seems to be the week I reminisce about my old employer, Expedia. Check out Tim Hughes’ thoughts on: Expedia trialling Wotif display format in Australia. Expedia.com.au has previously trialled this around 2006/2007.

The Expedia.com.au blog has been surprisingly quiet recently. In fact the last post was over 7 months ago. Have they given up on the idea of the blog?

Interesting article in the SMH yesterday, claiming that Bebo is shutting down it’s operations in Sydney due to lack of traction in the Australian market. Facebook dominates the social media pace in Australia.

The iconic Australian blues group, the Backsliders have launched a new online store to sell albums, posters and other merchandise.

www.eesti.org.au
Krustyfries has launched the new website for the Estonian community in Australia, at www.eesti.org.au.
The aim of the new site was to create a destination to inform people on what is happening in the Estonian community in Australia. The site features information on the latest events, news, consular and passport information and Estonian language classes as well as articles from the community newspaper, Meie Kodu.
The key client functionality for the website was that it had to be easy to update the …

Last week, I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in a discussion panel for the current AGSM MBA full-time class on Online Marketing.

Joining me on the panel was Christina Thurn, Senior Producer at Disney interactive and Ross Mcdonald, Industry Marketing Manager at Google.

An interesting piece of research came out yesterday from Audience Science proclaiming consumers prefer behavioural advertising to contextual advertising online. It makes a lot of sense, people are more likely to be interested in ads that appeal to them, rather than advertising which is confined to the context of what they are currently looking at.

Last Friday I was invited to the inaugural Xpand Xpresso Breakfast. Xpand is a recruitment firm specialising in IT and digital media recruitment. Nick Holmes à Court, CEO at BuzzNumbers, spoke on Actionable Insights into Social Media.

Most of the audience asked questions around whether big corporates were actually listening or even cared about their presence in Social Media, how the Buzznumbers technology worked and ways companies could get a head start on seeding influencers.

In what appears to be a reactive move against Google, Yahoo Search Marketing in Australia has come up with their own stimulus packagem the Yahoo Big Bang.
Yahoo (and Ninemsn’s market share) is barely 10% these days in Australia, however 10% is still a sizeable audience that you shouldn’t miss out on!
Yahoo is offering:

A FREE Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign for 3 months*
Campaign set up and optimisation handled by Yahoo! certified local specialists. This means that all the hard work is done …

2009 is the year of the Stimulus package, and Google has jumped on the Bandwagon offering a $75 Adwords credit to new accounts.  The Google offer aims to help Australia’s 1.88m small and medium-sized enterprises speed up in the economic slowdown.
Although $75 doesn’t go very far, it’s not a bad deal for businesses new to Adwords to try the tool risk free.
The offer is only available to new accounts and you must register by the end of June 2009.
Read all …