At Flow we enjoy pooling information, sharing insights, having a good laugh and learning from one another. We do this by means of a communal email address that allows us to collate all shared content. Every so often, we like to share what we've been reading and watching ...
Social media is the lingua franca of communication in the 21st century. Snail mail is long gone, faxes have been replaced by scans and Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram are the quick-fire means of communicating with friends, family and the world.
Opening your emails every morning replaces the retro-style trip to the letterbox, yet, much like our strike-ridden postal service, this means of communication is never guaranteed, with many mails ending up unread in spam buckets or destined for the electronic trash basket.
Find out why people ignore your emails and how you can improve your open rate, to ensure that your message reaches its intended recipients.
The way we communicate our messages online has many of us wondering about specifics such as the optimal length of a blog post, or whether a brief tweet is more appealing than one that uses a full character allocation.
Research reveals that Facebook posts of 40 characters enjoy 86% more engagement than longer posts. Read why this is so, in a useful blog that will help you determine the ideal length of everything online.
Being at the forefront of the online communication industry means we place high value on the quality of our content. In the writing studio we constantly evaluate, debate and update our style guides to ensure all our “I”s are dotted and “T”s crossed. See how you fare in answering these 12 common grammar mistake questions.
From grammar lessons we go to teaching courses, in particular this interesting topic, "Wasting time on the Internet".
"We are awash in a new, electronic collective unconscious; strapped to several devices, we’re half awake, half asleep. We speak on the phone while surfing the Web, partially hearing what’s being said to us while simultaneously answering e-mails and checking status updates," says course developer Kenneth Goldsmith.
Read about the rationale behind Goldsmith’s interesting teaching course, and how it turns conventionality on its head.
And it’s not only university students who while away hours on the Internet. Toddlers old enough to grasp a LeapPad in their grubby mitts are engaging with simple games that set them up as prospective fodder for the iPad and android device market a few years’ hence.
Even kiddies’ favourite Mr Men books are not immune to the online revolution, as this tongue-in-cheek rendition of Mr Men books reimagined for millennials illustrates.
And as marketers continue to mould young minds, it’s important to understand their thinking processes.
A national survey by website Parent24 revealed that 38% of South African children surveyed would prefer Spider-Man for president. Following closely on the web-meister was Peter Pan's fairy friend, Tinkerbell, at 31%. What ever happened to Plastic Man?
On the topic of flexability, anyone who works with web analytics knows that a "bounce rate" is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. We found an entertaining second meaning of bounce rate that has nothing whatsoever to do with websites, and everything to do with goats.
There have been a couple of lively debates in the Flow office about the merits of using the bit.ly link-shortening facility. Many Internet users have been thwarted in their efforts to view links created via bit.ly, a glitch apparently caused by Google Safebrowsing.
Safebrowsing was designed for Firefox and Chrome browsers to highlight URLs deemed to contain malware or phishing content. But that’s all history now, according to bit.ly.
And as we approach the festive season and gather with our loved ones to celebrate, you might enjoy sharing this reminder of Christmas, South African-style with friends and family who won’t be making the trip home this year.
On a more sober note, spare a thought for the many victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The area remains dangerously radioactive, so the only way of capturing these eerie, post-apocalyptic visuals was by using a drone camera’s view of the disaster site 28 years on. View British documentary maker Danny Cooke’s video, Postcards from Pripyat.
