I was thinking about this point earlier so this post validated what I was starting to realise. There’s a lot of buzz around the blogging phenomenon but the numbers show that there are only four million active bloggers in Europe. However, European bloggers are very attractive to marketers as these consumers are young, early adopters of new technologies, and heavy Internet users. They also trust each other and are more open-minded than the average online consumer. Source: Forrester: Interactive Marketing All Forrester Research There are 56 million blogs in the world. Of those 26 million +/- are real, so Europe … Continue reading Forrester: Only four million bloggers in Europe (20%)

 Update to the earlier post.  The increased phishing in the first half of this year, is resulting in significant increases in fraud attempts through Banks’ online banking throughout the world. More of us are getting conned into giving out our bank details over the internet. Phishing fraud uses emails and fake websites to trick customers into revealing their username and password. Between January and June this year there were more than 5,000 cases. That’s compared to 312 in the first six months of 2005. Source: BBC – Radio 1 – News – Online banking fraud rockets   Technorati tags: fraud, … Continue reading BBC – Radio 1 – Online banking fraud rockets

Ozrisk continues with part 2 of a brilliant definition of Islamic Banking.  I have added a feed in the sidebar to track the Islamic Banking tag at wordpress. One of the best ways to understand Islamic banking is to gain an understanding of the products that are considered acceptable. Several of these are covered below. Source: Islamic Banking Products « Risk Management in Australia Refer here for my posts as to why I believe this is important.  Ozrisk is providing the background and the understanding of Islamic Banking. Our brain has to move beyond the news headlines of today, see the demographic … Continue reading Islamic Banking Products « Risk Management in Australia

Mark live blogs from AdTech. Online advertising is booming on the agency side, but lacking on the demand (advertiser) side. On the other hand, advertisers – the ones spending the money – continue to be cautious, pragmatic and still in need of more education/hand-holding before they commit more of their budgets to online vehicles Source: Mark Evans :: AdTech: Day #1   Technorati tags: marketing Continue reading Mark Evans :: AdTech: Day #1

 Jim has used compete.com to compare the top bank sites.  Their estimate of unique users is based on their online panel in the US. Using Snapshot, we found 31 financial institution sites with one million or more unique users in September: Rank/Unique Visitors (millions) 1.    17.1            Bank of America 2.    16.7            PayPal 3.    11.9            Chase 4.    11.4            CapitalOne 5.    11.3            Citibank 6.    10.0            Wells Fargo 7.      6.2            Discover Card 8.      5.6            American Express 9.      5.3            WAMU 10.    5.0            Wachovia Source: NetBanker 2.0: The one-million club: 31 U.S. financial institutions with seven-figure site traffic Right away, I was struck with Paypal. Only … Continue reading NetBanker 2.0: The one-million club: 31 U.S. financial institutions with seven-figure site traffic

From FinServ ….  Barclays are bringing in fresh non Bank, and people with less traditional bank background, to rejuvenate their branch network.  …..  hired Helen Dodd from Tesco Source: FinServ Blog : Barclays — Serious about Retail Banking   Technorati tags: branch Continue reading FinServ Blog : Barclays — Serious about Retail Banking

This piece from Dan Frost at the San Francisco Chronicle about sums up Web 2.0 as well as anything I have seen so far.  Well done Dan. Behind the random silliness of YouTube videos and the juvenile frivolity of MySpace Web sites lies a powerful idea: Everyday people are using technology to gain control of the media and change the world. Source: DIGITAL UTOPIA / A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet This quote from O’Reilly continues the theme.  Winners on the Internet “have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence,” O’Reilly … Continue reading DIGITAL UTOPIA / A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet

 Fascinating post from Grant who takes a somewhat unique analytical approach to considering Smith Barney’s marketing “working wealth”.  (Thanks Nishad for the tip) It is a pleasure to report that the SmithBarney campaign is a superb piece of consumer centricity. It addresses the barrier in place: the fact that most consumers fail to fail to how money makes money. Now, I know this complete confounds the financial industry. “What’s not to get?” they want to know. But that is the point of consumer-centricity. It doesn’t matter what we think. It matters what the consumer thinks, and the further they are … Continue reading Parsing the symbolic logic of the Smith Barney campaign