e-Marketing is a type of marketing that can be defined as achieving objectives through the use of electronic communications technology such as Internet, e-mail, Ebooks, database, and mobile phone. It is a more general term than online marketing which is limited to the use of internet technology to attain marketing objectives.

Dave Chaffey, working from a relationship marketing perspective, has defined e-marketing as:

Applying Digital technologies which form online channels (Web, e-mail, databases, plus mobile/wireless & digital TV) to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers (within a multi-channel buying process and customer lifecycle) through improving our customer knowledge (of their profiles, behaviour, value and loyalty drivers), then delivering integrated targeted communications and online services that match their individual needs. (Source: [1] with permission of the author)

Chaffey’s definition emphasises that:

1. It should not be the technology that drives e-marketing, but the business returns from gaining new customers and maintaining relationships with existing customers.
2. It also emphasises how e-marketing does not occur in isolation, but is most effective when it is integrated with other communications channels such as telemarketing, direct-mail, personal selling, advertising, publicity, sales promotion, and other promotional techniques.
3. Online channels should also be used to support the whole buying process from pre-sale to sale to post-sale and further development of customer relationships where this is appropriate.
4. It should be based on knowledge of customer needs developed by researching their characteristics, behaviour, what they value, and what keeps them loyal.
5. The web and e-mail communications should be personally tailored to individual buyers based on the information obtained in the research.

References

• Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2005) eMarketing eXcellence: at the heart of eBusiness. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK. 2nd edition. http://davechaffey.com/E-marketing

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Reuters - Research In Motion is launching an online application store that will let users of its BlackBerry smartphones download software for everything from news and entertainment to travel and games.

Reuters - Samsung Electronics on Tuesday unveiled Mondi, a mobile Internet device that it plans to sell through mobile service provider Clearwire in the second quarter.

WinFixer is a computer program that claims to have the ability to repair any computer system problem. However, due to its regular displaying of popup notifications, dubious installation (installing itself without the user’s permission), and advertisements of other products, WinFixer is generally regarded as a bogus adware program. The popup ads display insistent notifications to convince the user that something may be amiss with the computer, and WinFixer will be able to fix it, for a price.

Due to these problems, WinFixer could possibly be spyware or malware; no authoritative determination has yet been made. However, its misleading popups and forced downloads mirror the “marketing” strategies of many spyware programs. Some computers infected with this program do exhibit sluggish performance.

WinFixer’s claim:

WinFixer 2005 is useful utility to scan and fix any system, registry and hard drive errors. It ensures system stability and performance, frees wasted hard drive space and recovers damaged Word, Excel, music and video files.

In reality, WinFixer doesn’t do any of these things.

Links

Note

Most of these websites are selling products to remove WinFixer. If you intend to buy any of these products, including the well known ones (Norton and McAfee), do research on the products to make sure that they are effective and legitimate. In addition, if you prefer to remove the software yourself, please use the utmost caution when editing the registry values.

Links

• McAfee’s Entry on WinFixer
• Symantec’s Entry on WinFixer and removal instructions
• Spyware Guide’s spyware database entry on WinFixer
• WinFixer Removal Solution from Spyware Database And Removal Instructions
• Information about WinFixer from CounterSpy
• More Removal Instructions from Spyware Removal Guide
• 2-Spyware.com’s entry on WinFixer
• WinFixer/Vundo Relation
• WinFixer Virus Manual Removal - Vundo Variant
• Sysinternals’s Process Explorer

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AFP - Google on Monday formally launched a music search service in China that offers free downloads of licensed songs and is supported by advertising.

NewsFactor - Big Blue has lost some friends in the clouds. This weekend, IBM was in the eye of a storm dealing with companies such as Google, Amazon.com, and Microsoft. The Internet search giant, the online retailer and the software behemoth all withdrew support for IBM’s effort to launch a cloud-computing initiative.

Many Internet Explorer add-on toolbars monitor the user’s activity. When installed and run without the user’s consent, such add-ons count as spyware. Here multiple toolbars (including both spyware and innocuous ones) overwhelm an Internet Explorer session.

A piece of spyware rarely “lives” alone: an affected computer can rapidly become infected with large numbers of spyware components. Users frequently notice unwanted behavior and degradation of system performance. A spyware infestation can create significant unwanted CPU activity, disk usage, and network traffic—slowing down legitimate uses of these resources. Stability issues—application or system crashes—are also common. Spyware which interferes with the networking software commonly causes difficulty connecting to the Internet.

When Microsoft Windows users seek technical support—whether from computer manufacturers, Internet service providers, or other sources—spyware infection emerges as the most common cause. In many cases, the user has no awareness of spyware and assumes that the system performance, stability, and/or connectivity issues relate to hardware, to Microsoft Windows installation problems, or to a virus. Some owners of badly infected systems resort to buying an entire new computer system because the existing system “has become too slow”. Badly infected systems may require a clean reinstall of all their software in order to restore the system to working order. This can become a time-consuming task, even for experienced users.

Only rarely does a single piece of software render a computer unusable. Rather, a computer rarely has only one infection. As the 2004 AOL study noted, if a computer has any spyware at all, it typically has dozens of different pieces installed. The cumulative effect, and the interactions between spyware components, typically cause the stereotypical symptoms reported by users: a computer which slows to a crawl, overwhelmed by the many parasitic processes running on it. Moreover, some types of spyware disable software firewalls and anti-virus software, and/or reduce browser security settings, thus opening the system to further opportunistic infections, much like an immune deficiency disease. Documented cases have also occurred where a spyware program disabled other spyware programs installed by its competitors.

Some other types of spyware (Targetsoft, for example) modify system files to make themselves harder to remove. (Targetsoft modifies the “Winsock” Windows Sockets files. The deletion of the spyware-infected file “inetadpt.dll” will interrupt normal networking usage.) Unlike users of many other operating systems, a typical Windows user has administrator-level privileges on the system, mostly for the sake of convenience. Because of this, any program which the user runs (intentionally or not) has unrestricted access to the system. Spyware, along with other threats, has led some Windows users to move to other platforms such as Linux or Apple Macintosh, which such malware targets far less frequently.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Reuters - Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp plans to hire former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller to supervise the media conglomerate’s digital strategy, two News Corp media outlets reported and a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed.

Mobile phone spam

Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to consumers not only for the inconvenience but also because they sometimes have to pay to receive the text message.

Internet telephony spam

It has been predicted that voice over IP (VoIP) communications will be vulnerable to being spammed by prerecorded messages. Although there have been few reported incidents, some companies have already tried to sell defenses against it. [2]

Online game messaging spam

Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, or chatrooms or public discussion areas.

What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term is applied to all forms of flooding the game with messages; in case of MUDs, the problem is usually the same as with other chat services.

Many games have strict rules on what kind of communication is acceptable in the games. Frequently, the terms of service don’t allow promotion of external websites except on very strict terms (for example, URLs may be allowed on player profiles, but not anywhere else), and promotion of websites in-game is usually very much frowned on in any case.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Reuters - Egyptian authorities have released a 22-year-old Egyptian blogger and activist after nearly seven weeks in detention, an Egyptian human rights group said on Saturday.