Suppose you went shopping for a designer bag on the High Street one day. You head towards the Louis Vuitton shop, but before you go in, you see another bag shop next door. Something catches your eye, and you go home not with the Vuitton bag you had planned to, but with a cheaper alternative.

There’s not much Louise Vuitton can complain about there – you would have exercised your consumer choice as you saw fit. This is the analogy I keep coming back to when I consider the current legal tussle between Louis Vuitton and Google.

Briefly put, Louis Vuitton want Google to stop returning sponsored AdWords from other companies when users search for their brand name. We’ve all been there, if not when designer bag shopping, then in similar situations: you search for ‘Fox & Sons’, and a number of other estate agents’ ads appear. Search for ‘Interflora’ and the price-undercutting M&S flower service is offered (and that’s another case that has been taken to the courts, as well).

I try to look at every online situation from the user’s point of view, and here is where I think we see the kernel of the issue. If I am looking for, let’s say, Nike shoes, there is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a sponsored link that promises them at greatly reduced prices, only to find myself on a website with no Nike on offer.

For me, the real key is the wording. Offer the consumer some choice, sure – but make it clear exactly what is available, be it bags similar to Louis Vuitton’s ones, or shoes that are nothing like Nike’s, but which I might like anyway. If I click on a Google Adword and leave the site with no purchase, Google’s PPC model means that the site loses financially, and I lose my time. The only winner is Google.

That’s why, in my opinion, Google needs to refine its rules a little: not to crack down on bids for trademark keywords, but to insist on precise descriptions of what the user will find when they click through. Not easy in the small space available, but surely the way forward.

Well, we had a great time on Friday, hosting a coffee morning as part of Macmillan Cancer Support’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning.  It was great to see so many people!

We caught up with old friends as well as meeting quite a few new ones. But of course, there was a serious side to the event – raising money for a worthy cause.

With all the help and support received by so many, we raised the incredible sum of £214.84!

So a big THANK YOU to everyone involved.

Word spreads fast on Twitter, and how does it spread best? Through the power of the ‘retweet’.

To retweet (or ‘RT’ as it is called on Twitter, due to its defining character-limit) is simply the act of repeating someone else’s post. It implies a desire to spread news, admiration for, or appreciation of the original tweet.

It’s when a single tweet gets picked up and retweeted by thousands of users that you find why Twitter is regarded by some as the holy grail of marketing: word spreads, fast, and for free.

If proof were needed that business is sitting up and taking note of the power of Twitter, look no further than an in-depth analysis from Dan Zarella. A recent blog post from Fast Company scoured his report for just nine of the qualities most likely to get you retweeted – and pointed to his 22-page work on the same.

Who would have thought a mere 144 characters could be researched so thoroughly? Read these nine pieces of advice – and, if it gets your interest, the full report – and you’ll begin to understand why.

When a website does everything right, you find yourself wanting to tell others about it. That’s just what I’ve been doing recently with the online garden store Crocus.co.uk.

Great websites are the ones where you hardly notice the user experience, because everything’s so easy. Crocus really have this cracked.

I’m a gardening novice, so the vast product list ought to be bewildering. Crocus step up to the mark with some user-friendly filters. Just select the type of soil, or orientation of the bed, or season of flowering, or height of plant… you name it, you can filter by it.

Once you’ve put items into your basket – or rather, wheelbarrow – checkout is easy, too. For me, this is always the crucial test of a well-thought-out website. I’m giving you my money – make it easy for me!

So far, so good, but it’s when Crocus goes the extra mile that you really know you’re in good hands. I mentioned I was a novice gardener, so I’m really looking forward to the promised follow-up emails that are going to tell me when I need to tend to the plants I bought. It’s a very clever way of both keeping the brand name uppermost in my mind, and allowing me access to the vast amounts of knowledge Crocus have – with no inconvenience to myself.

Add to all this some excellent design, and I’m hooked (my first batch of plants is safely in the ground, and I’m itching to make another order). Large images make the site really appealing, and the photo galleries, showing close-ups as well as the plants in context, come into their own when you are trying to make decisions about whether or not to buy.

Hard to believe that at bottom, this is just a nursery, like scores of others. With careful application of best online practice, they’ve become market leaders on the web, and are presumably enjoying the dividends.

Whatever your business, you’ll find something to learn from Crocus. After all, wouldn’t you like people to be talking about your website the way I am telling friends, family, and now you, about this one?

These are wise words indeed from Mahtma Ghandi:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

It is certainly an ethos we believe wholeheartedly in and one we strive to maintain at Notting Hill Internet Services.

How can anyone not in these hard economic times?

Unfortunately, having had to make calls recently to some well-known service providers, I realised that there are some businesses out there who are sadly not familiar with Ghandi’s great words… shame.

We are joining in with the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and would like to invite you, your work colleagues, your friends and family to come and join in too!

The event is open to the public and will be taking place at our offices on Friday 25th September, starting at 8.30am and finishing at 12.30pm.  So why not pop in for a coffee before work?  Or take a break whilst shopping to get a reviving cup of tea?  We will also have a wonderful choice of pastries to tickle those taste buds – ignore the diet, this is for charity!

To let us know if you can join us, and receive more details, contact us today.

See you there!

It’s a known fact that people read quickly online – if you can call it reading, that is. They scan pages at a much faster rate than they would read a book or a newspaper.

It’s an odd phenomenon, and one which we can only assume has something to do with the infinite number of choices available to the internet user, and the task-based nature of most forays online.

Just as fast as our online reading habits, if not faster, is Google’s acquisition of new products and creation of new ideas. Sometimes it feels like they are putting out a daily announcement to inform us of the next big thing, always stamped with that Google logo, and their trademark ease of use.

Next on their list is the way we read newspapers online. As you may have noticed, papers have a hard time creating their necessarily expensive online presence. In the UK, we have some admirable newspaper websites, which become more valuable by the day as stories are archived for posterity. Both broadsheets and red-tops have poured millions of pounds into their development, but as yet, word is, have failed to find a way to fund them adequately. Advertising, subscriptions, restricted content, sponsorship… the jury’s still out as to whether any of these will really sustain such an expensive project.

For once, Google’s not claiming to have the complete answer, but in announcing Google Fast Flip, they do say:

... we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we’re looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

Fast Flip is a piece of technology which allows for super-fast browsing of newspapers, without waiting for entire pages to load. Now you can satisfy your desire to race through online text – until you find the portion you want to read, whereupon you can settle.

As with all Google products, advert placement is offered in the margins, which as a business owner, you may wish to explore. Will readers be going too fast to notice ads? No doubt many would see this as a fantastic opportunity for product placement beside content that millions will read, available even to those businesses whose budget would never stretch to an advert in the Times or Guardian print edition. Of course, the famous Google pay per click model means that if you aren’t noticed, you won’t pay.

Have you ever needed to convince stakeholders of the value of your website? Possibly you’re not even 100% convinced yourself. In either case, Google’s Internet Stats page is the place to visit for nifty soundbites. Next time you have to present to your investors, get colleagues “on side”, or even explain to Auntie Majorie why you’re putting money into your online presence, you’ll be able to pull out facts like these:

• Online spending in the UK grew 25% to £18.4 bn in 2008, outperforming the 2.1% increase in total retail.
• Over half (51.0%) of consumers are using the Internet before making a purchase in shops, educating themselves on the best deals available.
• Social networks have a penetration of nearly 75% among European Internet users.

Each of these little nuggets of insight speaks volumes, and should provoke useful debate in your own workplace. If you prefer a surprise, just hit the ‘random statistic’ button, and see what you learn.

It’s a small change – but Google’s making a big thing out of it.

You may have noticed, last time you visited Google, that the size of the search box has increased. There again, you may not have noticed: it’s quite a subliminal tweak, and, as search is, by its very nature, a means to an end, you may have had something else on your mind.

There was never any limit to how many words you could fit into that little Google search box, but it’s longer now, so you can see more at once.

So what is the point? Well, Google is trying to sell it as a way of emphasising that Search is their primary and most important product, despite their diversification into so many other areas.

Champions of accessibility and usability might hail it as a welcome step too: larger fields and larger buttons are easier to see, locate, and use.

Ultimately, I suppose, it’s a design tweak, and one we’ll all get used to. Where Google leads, others often follow, so watch this space for larger search fields across the other major search engines – and other websites.

If you’re in the selling business, Google’s Domestic Trends reports should interest you.

They are based on the idea that search data can inform us about the purchasing intentions of the populace. If people are searching for terms like ‘jewellery’, ‘perfume’ or ‘Tiffanys’, then we may assume that the luxury goods market is buoyant, the economy on the up. It’s much the same train of thought that led Google to claim it might predict a flu epidemic by aggregating the number of searches for ‘flu symptoms’ and similar.

On the other hand, if searches for ‘do it yourself’, ‘jobs’ or ‘unsecured loans’ are on the up, then we may all be in trouble – except, of course, for DIY stores, employment agencies and loan firms.

At the moment, the data refers to searches on Google.com, and primarily reflects habits in the USA – but we’ve seen most other Google services unroll to other countries, so I’d think we can expect a UK version in the near future. This free tool might just become one of the strongest at your disposal.