Category: Uncategorized

  • 100km In The Dark for Macmillan Cancer Support

    In around seven weeks’ time I’ll be attempting to cycle 100km (62 miles) overnight around the cold, dark streets of London to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support. My nan died last month after battling cancer for much of her life so this feels like a nice way to remember her and help others who…

  • UK 1st March: New digital marketing regulations

    Attention all digital marketers covering the UK! Important new regulations came into force at midnight on 1 March 2011 designed to give consumers more comprehensive protection online. In short, the Code of Advertising Practice (CAP) has been extended to cover digital channels including websites and social media channels. This means that the same rigorous rules…

  • The end of an era

    I started up the UsefulTechnology blog way back in April 2005. In those days computers hadn’t been invented, everything was black and white, and I hadn’t even been born. Back then, my work was focussed on technology, but mostly clever things like Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook 2003, so that’s what I wrote about and…

  • 20 of the best social media campaigns ever

    Thanks to Fuel Lines for spotting Forbes’ recent article on the world’s best buzz-generating social media campaigns. It’s a fascinating list, which I’ve repeated below, and it’s worth reminding ourselves how much ground we’ve covered as a marketing profession. So many of these successful campaigns started out as a test, a pilot, a trial to…

  • Using Outlook Rules to ease e-mail overload

    Rules are instructions you set up in Microsoft Outlook to have certain e-mails managed and delivered in a special way. For example, you might want all e-mails from a certain person delivered to a specified folder, or perhaps you’d like to hear an alert sound whenever you receive an e-mail with certain words in the…

  • Facebook connector for Outlook, and more!

    Outlook users who dabble in Social network sites like Facebook and LinkedIn (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t dabble these days?) will be delighted with the hot Outlook Social Connectors released yesterday. With these add-ins you can connect your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Windows Live accounts to Outlook, allowing you to see updates and recently posted…

  • Archive and analyse Tweets–new free tool from Microsoft

    Twitter fans listen up! Today Microsoft released a great new tool called The Archivist which allows you to create archives of Twitter topics for saving, exporting, and analysis. Why might you need this? If you’re interesting in monitoring your own Twitter activity to see what you tweet about, when, and from where, The Archivist can…

  • Free World Cup application for Windows Mobile phones

    Breaking news: there’s a FIFA World Cup tournament this year, and it starts on Friday! Yay!   Footy fans all over the world will be willing their teams on. And what better way to keep up to date with all the latest news, scores, injuries, and penalty kick disasters, than with a free application from…

  • Add 2010 FIFA World Cup fixtures to your Microsoft Outlook calendar

    The UK TV schedule for the first stages of this summer’s FIFA World Cup tournament is now available and football fans can quickly add the all-important dates to their Microsoft Outlook calendar with this simple technique courtesy of the UsefulTechnologyBlog: Click here to download this Excel file. Save the file to your desktop. [optional step]…

  • Custom Shapes in PowerPoint 2010 – Fantastic!

    This has just made my day. No, make that my week, or maybe even my month! The PowerPoint Team Blog has announced that custom shapes can now be created in PowerPoint 2010 (get the free beta here) with the new ‘Combine Shapes’ feature hidden deep within the application. If you’ve ever struggled to recreate a…