Doing the usual rounds in my feed list led me to discover the Thresher’s 40% special offer whilst perusing Hugh MacLeod’s blog.

But due to a combination of not wanting to blog until I’d converted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and also being too busy neither did I email my circle of friends, clients and business associates to give them the good news - the offer was only from 30/11/06-10/12/06. So I kinda missed the boat on that one, sorry.

The only way you could take advantage of it was to download the coupon, in pdf format, and you’d need to know where to find it. That is, you’d have to find out from the Internet.

 Cue Stormhoek, a client of Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com, who told him about the special offer and how it was only going out over the Internet. Hugh, obviously being a generous soul, posted the news on his blog and with his not inconsiderable readership has become, I believe, part of this success story.

If you’d like to read up on some of the analysis of Thresher’s genius or blundering stupidity - depending on your viewpoint, why not check out Hugh’s update on Why the Thresher’s meme Went Viral

What I found interesting and enlightening about the post  was the combination of factors that led to the successful viral effect of the campaign. Now I suspect the marketing professionals would say the factors are all basic stuff when it comes to marketing. But it wasn’t that thought of it. Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe for a second that this was a happy mistake on the part of Thresher’s, no way!

If it’s any consolation I’ve got the coupon on my hard drive, forgot the deadline and missed out too. :(

Business ICT (part of Success Matrix) hosted a Web marketing and communications day today down in not so sunny Boston.

The line up consisted of Paul McIntyre on Search Engine Optimisation (I refuse to spell it with a z) Phil Crowshaw on Online Communication Tools and myself on Blogging For Business. Does that sound like a jazz trio?

I’d never met Paul before, and although I’ve heard many seminars and attended a similiar number of workshops on the subject it was good to hear someone talking sense about a subject and industry that is not without its critics. To sum up, his talk emphasised the need for good clean code using CSS, well-written content, and then all the usual requirements that make up a properly optimised site. Unfortunately, he had to leave after his talk, because of a heavy cold so I missed the opportunity to get to know him a little better - another time maybe. Paul runs Search High - www.searchhigh.co.uk

I took the floor afterwards in the run up to lunch and then Phil Crowshaw of Digital Media Active entertained us with a personal look into the future of online communications and the sort of tools that are available right now. Phil’s an entertaining and informative speaker so the session went very quickly  - and thanks for the insight into Skype Jyve Pro,

With Skype Jyve Pro experts can charge for their advice on a metered or fixed rate basis. The system manages sessions, tracks usage and handles payment.

Another of Phil’s projects is the ongoing www.expertsonline.tv site that for £27.00 a year gives you access to interviews involving a number of experts, mainly in the business development world.

Finally, Phil talked about the growth of video as an online medium, which is coming to the fore with the increasing capacity of broadband. And as he so elequently put it, ‘I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet’. A sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with.

This is a subject I’ve been discussing with associates for sometime now, and it’s good to see we’re not the only ones thinking along the same lines. When you consider the cost of print advertising, a short video clip placed on CD, or on your website, or even ina video blog can be considered excellent value for money given the amount of re-use it would get.

And only today it was revealed by The Wall Street Journal that CBS, News Corp’s Fox, NBC Universal and Viacom are in talks about creating a video website to compete with Google’s YouTube - a hot subject indeed.

Blow By Blow Productions web site  which we’re re-developing has a lot of information on what can be done with video to help promote a company.

A very enjoyable day - now back to the grindstone. :)

Quite some time ago I took the decision to move my blog away from blogger.com. There were a number of reasons for this. Slow response times, particularly when saving posts. Sometimes the saving process was aborted altogether.

Added to this was lack of facilities. No trackbacks or tags being the main shortcomings. All in all, the service was no longer fit for commercial use - in my opinion.

However, after researching the situation I knew it wouldn’t be straightforward completing the transfer to my preferred blogging software, Wordpress. And this is what put me off doing it sooner. Also, I decided I wouldn’t keep adding to the blogger blog, because if I had to resort to manually transferring information I would only be adding to the burden.

But there comes a time when you have to do something, and that time was yesterday (it’s now the early hours of Monday morning) because today I’m giving a talk on Blogging For Business and having a 3 month gap in my blog isn’t exactly a good working example!

Anyway progress was good up to the point where I was ready to transfer my blog from Blogger.com to my Wordpress installation. I set-up the Wordpress software, tested it and was happy with the results.

Now the bad news. Everytime I ran the import procedure the script came up with error messages. Resorting to the Wordpress support forums just proved my worst suspicions, and in fact for some poor souls the situation was alot worse.They’d upgraded to the new beta version of Blogger and the import script didn’t work at all.

I eventually found the answer to my problems and have managed to import the blogger files, but in doing so it has changed a number of settings in the software and I’m left with a heap of formatting and functionality issues that, quite frankly, will have to wait, because it’s now 01:30 and I’m going to bed!

Not an auspicious resumption to my blogging, but at least I tell it like it is. :)

So if you’re reading this, in business and thinking of starting a blog take my advice and avoid blogger.com.