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This sounds like the Groupon stories.

Cupcake maker does a discount offer, gets inundated with the response, that she has to take on staff to cover the orders which in turn means each cake is sold at a loss due to the overheads.

Marketing wise, total success, business wise total disaster.

I agree with you, it's the business management. This maybe a bitter pill to swallow if like the majority of us you are a small company, as the buck probably stops with you.

Big companies get it wrong all the time. How many times has there been marketing publicity and promotion, but no thought went into increasing bandwidth and capacity, so the company ends up with it's website going down as it can't handle a spike of interest. This then turns into negative publicity

Government depts are also pretty good at doing this. Big TV campaign for tax credits or new passports, and boom, their website falls over

I think most youngsters would disagree, as they seem to be permanently attached to their smart phones. Plus it's all about apps now, rather than just mobile websites. Anyone with a website that doesn't scale down and is usable on a smart phone is throwing away potentially 20% of their traffic.

What is nice though, the current generation of smart phones seem to have now done away with the throw away replace handset every 12 months culture, that Nokia and the likes were very guilty of.

Used to be a nightmare, another upgrade, another new phone to work out

Now you keep your iPhone/Android for a few years and customise it and update the software. Nokia missed the boat, and missed this critical change in usage.

Nope missed it, but read the book, fascinating read called Vulcan 607.

Yep the Victor Tanker boys really were the unsung heros. Rule books out of the window and balls of steel


Yup, remember we all went down to Portsmouth to watch Hermes come home. To think she's still going strong! Saw her a couple of years ago leaving port in Mumbai, although now called the INS Viraat as she got transferred to the Indian Navy in '86. According to wikipedia she will be in service until 2020! Not bad for a boat laid down in 1944!

Is it me or has devbalic reworded Dreamravens post?

...finger sliding to the ban button as he waits to hear an interesting reason why...

Blimey can't believe it's been 30 years!

Not forgetting the tragic human cost, and politics aside, it was another fine example of British make do. A bunch of ships that were about to be scrapped or sold, and aircraft that were well past their sell by date

My personal favourite is the Blackbuck raid by the Vulcan bomber, saved from the scrappie, asked to do a role it wasn't designed for, and took just about the complete air to air refuelling capability of the AirForce to get it to the Falklands, bomb the runway, and then safely back to Ascension Island.

From Nelson to Afghanistan, our kit maybe old and our numbers small, but you can't beat a bit of British Ingenuity and Dunkirk Spirit

Poor old Nokia's woes seem to get worse each quarter

"Nokia is cutting another 10,000 jobs globally and has warned that second-quarter losses from its mobile phone business will be larger than expected...

...Nokia's shares have slumped more than 70% since February 2011"

BBC News - Nokia cuts another 10,000 jobs as losses deepen

I bet they wish they could go back to the 1990's...

Google will only reference a few links from things like forums, blogs etc, any duplicates are simply ignored. But there is varying opinions on having a load of unrelated web links in things like signatures. If they are related, then I can't see what the issue is, but the Google god is continually shaking the tree at the moment, and link building profiles seems to be high on the agenda.

To play it safe, I've dropped our job board links, as I'm concentrating on links back to the directories. That said, the keyword I was using for our job board has dropped in the rankings ever since I removed it from my signature

Coincidence? Who knows, but it seems to be a bit of a battle ground at the moment.

wages? Nahhh he does it for the love

Why not try a simple straight forward approach that once set up, requires no effort and gives you free marketing.

Ask your webdev to add some social networking buttons on your site, so people can like/recommend to Facebook directly from your site. So everytime someone "likes" your business, your weblink and whatever is in your description meta tag will be then posted to that users wall, which is viewable by all their friends.

Likewise, if someone shares your link via twitter, because they clicked it on your homepage, it will be seen by that persons followers. For example, yesterday one of our sites had 5 tweets (someone clicked on the tweet icon), but we actually had 27 clicks back to the site from twitter.

Maybe not that exciting, but we didn't do anything, and 27 visitors arrived from twitter. If just one of those then converted, then not bad for zero effort.

Here's a fag packet set up that I'm sure your web dev could quickly rustle up for you:



You can use the same formula for Digg, Reddit etc. Now if you had something like that on every page of your site, or the important ones, then it gives you more potential for exposure.

Saves messing about and updating fan pages and tweeting, and once it's there, you can forget about it and carry on plumbing

It's hard work trying to keep up with Google, go away for a week, and everything changes!

So Google Places has now been fully incorporated into Google+ and is now called Google+ Local.

The idea is for it to eventually become a onestop shop, ie you search, get reviews, book a table if a restaurant, get the contact info, oh and the map All without leaving Google+

Business owners can still list and edit their businesses via Google Places but visitors will see your full listing via Google+

One controversial change is to convert your old star ratings into a numerical rating. From a Search Engine Point of view, this now means instead of having a potential 5 stars displaying under your listing results, (which used to make you stand out) you now get a more boring "x Google reviews"



So au revoir Google Places, and hello Google+ Local

Here's Googles official page: What happened to Google Places?

Whats the general verdict? Smart move, needless tinkering, or more repositioning of Google+