Top UK Online Marketing Bloggers

People often ask me to recommend great digital marketing blogs they should read. I have my own favourites, hand-picked over the years according to the usefulness of the content they share. For every blog I keep following there are usually two or three I ditch because they fail to blog regularly or to a consistently high standard. And every six months or so I crawl through my subscriptions in Google Reader and prune out any blogs that have fallen into disrepair. It’s a constantly shifting data source, but one that I couldn’t do without.

Today, rather than sharing the list of my all time favourite bloggers, I suggest you take a look at Lee Odden’s just released ‘Top UK Online Marketing Influencers & Bloggers’ list. I nominated some of the bloggers on the list and there are others that I hadn’t heard of until today, but have now started following.

In my opinion, the ranking, determined by Traackr, defies any logical explanation; why someone I consider a well-respected and popular blogger ranks so much lower than someone who doesn’t even appear to have a meaningful active blog presence doesn’t make much sense to me. But that is as we should expect from a largely quantitatively-driven indexing algorithm that reports on a single moment in time. So don’t pay too much attention to the relative placement on the list but focus instead on checking out those bloggers who write about stuff you find interesting.

And if you like what these bloggers do, don’t forget to let them know and to tell others about your great discoveries.

UK population mapped: It’s true, we Brits retire to the coast

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink…

Like most marketers, I love a good dataset. And the latest batch from the Office of National Statistics shows how the UK population has changed in recent years. The DataBlog team at The Guardian have mapped some of the key stats, including this interesting view showing the percentage of retired people by region that proves once and for all that we Brits really do like to retire to the seaside:

[click to enlarge]

Helpful stuff if you’re planning to geo-target your marketing and sales campaigns.

More reading and research:

The Guardian (interactive map): http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/jun/30/uk-population-mapped

The Guardian (the data):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jun/30/uk-population-growth-data

Interactive mapping: ethnic breakdown of England and Wales

We’re a very fortunate generation, in many ways. And one of life’s riches that we tend to overlook is the remarkable access we get to information and data about things our grandparents could never have dreamed of knowing.

Take, for example, this interactive map by UK newspaper, The Guardian, which uses data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to show the ethnic profile of districts in England and Wales. You can filter the view as you wish, and quickly see how the ethnicity of our population differs by area.

[click image to access interactive map]

Marketers can learn from this. Most businesses are sitting on a wealth of insightful data that others may find useful or interesting. What data do you hold that you could present in an engaging way and share with the public? How could doing this raise awareness of what your organisation has to offer or help establish you as an expert or thought-leader?

Or maybe you don’t even need your own data. What publicly-accessible data can you take and present in a more interesting way to create a social object that will help raise awareness of what you do?

Sharing data in our digital world has never been easier, and the rewards for acting transparently and responsibly have never been greater.

Think about it; this could be a great way to put your business on the map.

Further reading: The Guardian’s write-up on the new ONS data

What sort of person uses social networking sites in the UK?

I’ve been crunching data to get a picture of what sort of people visit the leading social networking sites. Here are three charts I created to show the distribution of age, education and income of users of the UK’s top 18 social networking sites in March 2011:

(click any chart to enlarge)

I last ran this data back in September 2010. You can find those charts here. Hope you find this useful.

List: Where’s Microsoft UK on Twitter?

This is a bit off my normal topic, but I’m often asked for this.

Here’s a list of Microsoft UK’s major accounts on Twitter. Click any link to find out more:

TechNet: http://twitter.com/AskTechNetUK

Internet Explorer: http://twitter.com/IE_UK

Microsoft Education: http://twitter.com/Microsoft_Ed_UK

Microsoft Business: http://twitter.com/MicrosoftBizUK

Microsoft Small Business: http://twitter.com/MicrosoftSB

Microsoft Wave: http://twitter.com/MicrosoftWave

Microsoft Hosting: http://twitter.com/MSHosting

Microsoft Partners: http://twitter.com/mspartnersuk

Microsoft Students: http://twitter.com/MSUKStudents

Microsoft NHS Resource Centre: http://twitter.com/nhsrc

Xbox: http://twitter.com/tweetbox360

UBelly Develop Community: http://twitter.com/ubelly

Bing: http://twitter.com/UKBing

Live at Edu: http://twitter.com/UKLiveatEdu

MSDN http://twitter.com/ukmsdn

TechDays: http://twitter.com/uktechdays

Visual Studio: http://twitter.com/UKVS

Windows Live: http://twitter.com/ukwindowslive

Windows Phone: http://twitter.com/WindowsPhoneUK

Windows: http://twitter.com/WindowsUK

UK, GB, England… Confused? Watch this!

This has very little to do with digital marketing, other than being a lovely online viral video, but for anyone whose life and work has anything to do with the UK, watching this should be compulsory:

The difference between UK, GB and England