VCLEVER BLOG
The Government’s Growth Voucher scheme will be coming to an end soon, but there’s still time to save 50% on strategic advice that could take your business to the next level.
We’re an accredited digital technology adviser for the UK Government’s Growth Voucher programme, which means you could benefit from our personalised strategic advice and have 50% of the cost refunded to you by the Government (up to a maximum of £2,000).
Our expert advice on the internet and digital technology could help you win business, improve your customers’ online experience, simplify your sales processes, or ease your administrative burden. (more…)
We’re delighted to announce that we’re now an officially accredited adviser in the field of digital technology for the UK Government’s Growth Voucher Scheme.
Growth Vouchers
The UK Government’s Growth Voucher programme is a way to encourage small businesses to receive strategic advice to promote growth. A voucher entitles you to 50% off the cost of strategic business advice, which means you could benefit from tailor-made strategic advice on the use of digital technology and have 50% of the cost refunded to you by the Government (up to a maximum of £2,000). (more…)
The Heartbleed security vulnerability has been well-publicised, but advice on what to do varies wildly. We’ve been updating our clients and thought we’d publish our thoughts here.
What is it?
Firstly, if you haven’t heard about it (which would be quite an achievement), Heartbleed is the catchy but alarming-sounding name given to an error in the code of a bit of widely-used software called OpenSSL, which encrypts data on ‘secure’ websites. OpenSSL is used on maybe around two-thirds of secure sites on the web (so that’s two-thirds of sites that start with https:// and have the little padlock symbol displayed). The error allows an attacker to trick a website’s server into giving them a small random chunk of data from the server’s memory, which could be anything – something harmless, some sensitive data, a password, or an encryption key.
Some reports imply that hackers are just taking specific data at will, but they have to go through multiple attacks, getting little chunks of random data at a time and hoping they turn up something useful. It’s still not good, but it’s not the same. And the chances that you have been compromised are probably very slim (more…)
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Google have just rolled out a change to Gmail that has a few email marketers making ridiculously OTT statements like “Gmail blows up email marketing”. The update means that images within emails will now be displayed by default. Far from being a bad thing, as email marketers ourselves, we absolutely welcome the change. Here’s why…
Tricky Gmail
Gmail has come in for some stick from email marketers as a few of its features can make life a little difficult when you’re trying to make sure a beautifully-crafted email looks as it should and actually stands a chance of being read by the recipient. One such feature was the introduction of the tabbed inbox which has the effect of automatically filing away ‘promotional’ emails in their own special place where they can be easily ignored and may never see the light of day. In addition, Gmail also presents a number of barriers to measuring how effective a campaign is (i.e. tracking such things as who opened emails, which device or email client they used, and where they were located). (more…)
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There are a few basic rules to follow if you represent a brand trying to leverage the power of social media. Chief among them should be Don’t hold a Twitter Q&A session at exactly the same time as you deliver earth-shatteringly bad news to your customers. That’s what British Gas decided to do today when they got their Customer Services Director, Bert Pijls, to answer questions on Twitter using the #AskBG hashtag on the same day that they announced a 9.2% price hike. (more…)
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Google recently unveiled Chromecast, which looks like it could really shake up the internet TV market or even the wider TV broadcasting market
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmpOis2UEJg
Chromecast is a little dongle with an associated app that will wirelessly stream media from phones, tablets and PCs to any TV with an HDMI port. That means you can watch Netflix or YouTube videos on your TV while controlling the action with your phone/tablet/PC (and you can even switch between different devices midway through). All for $35 too. Looks great to us and such a better direction than Google TV.
We wrote about Google TV here on our blog 3 years ago and it’s interesting looking back at our opinions then and what has transpired since (particularly the failure of Google TV to take off). (more…)
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Chances are you’ve heard about the ‘EU Cookie Law’. If you have, you might very well be confused or worried about its implications and what exactly you should be doing about it. If you haven’t, and you own or run a company’s website within the EU, then you need to take note and you probably need to take action (but don’t panic, because it’s not as bad as you might think).
What is it?
The EU Cookie Law as it’s being called is actually part of a European E-Privacy Directive. It was brought in by those helpful people at the EU to protect your privacy. They think people don’t know what cookies are or what they do (which is probably fair) and that the way to tackle this is to get every website to ask their users to opt in to the use of cookies. Although, browsers allow you to change your privacy settings, apparently this is not enough. There have been a lot of people throwing their toys out of the pram about it (also probably fair), because its most severe interpretation would have every website presenting new users with a big banner asking for their permission to use any cookies (and then only using them if the user ticks ‘yes’).
Read on to see how it affects you
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I’ve just signed up to a new site called Kohort. What is it? Well, I’ve got no idea.
Will it be the next big thing? Who knows! But one thing’s for sure – they know how to build intrigue and create buzz, as people are scrambling to reserve their ‘handles’ despite not having a clue what on earth Kohort is.
So, how have they managed this without even announcing what the product is?
Firstly, they haven’t just popped up out of nowhere. (more…)
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How do you show that a recruitment consultancy is open, up-front and friendly? How can you illustrate that they’re not like everybody else? And how do you get that message across to a target audience of seasoned recruitment consultants?
These are questions we asked ourselves when fulfilling a brief to create a new brand for a recruitment consultancy that places outstanding consultants into in-house roles. We were tasked with creating a brand identity that would reflect openness, community, friendliness and being experts at the very specialist thing they do. (more…)
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Aleksandr Orlov – founder of comparethemeerkat.com – is currently on the lookout for a UK ambassador to help raise awareness of the terrible problem facing Meerkovo.
A joke? Well, kind of, but this is actually a serious job up for grabs, which is currently being advertised on Guardian Jobs (more…)
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