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This week saw the launch of the Search & Social Media Marketing programme at the University of Salford - and as one of the course partners, MEC was out in force to support the opening night of learning.

Over the next ten weeks, twelve individuals - myself included - will be given an insight into all aspects of how search engine optimisation, PPC and social networking can form part of a successful marketing campaign. Along the way, we'll be getting to know more about things like advanced keyword selection, Google rankings, as well as site auditing and structure. In addition, the programme will endeavour to teach us about how an effective project can be created, managed, monitored and reported - earning all participants while an industry recognised qualification on completion.

In case you missed it, Global Radio last night announced the formation of the new Capital Network, an amalgamation of London’s Capital FM, the six Galaxy stations operating in Scotland, South Coast, Birmingham, and Manchester, Yorkshire and North East, and local stations Red Dragon, Trent FM, RAM and Leicester Sound.

From January next year, this new network will be branded 95 – 106 Capital FM, The UK’s No.1 Hit Music Station”, and will run networked programming across all non-breakfast and drive-time shows.

I reckon the best thing about the internet in general is that it's always one step ahead of you. Need to quickly edit an image, but nowhere near a copy of Photoshop? Quick bit of Googling takes you to pixlr.com and a browser based version of it that does the job lovely. Suddenly find yourself thinking about songs from the playgrounds of your childhood? Some guy has already uploaded the lyrics to "My friend Billy..." to odps.org. Trying to edit a thousand PPC creatives at once? Well up until a few years ago you'd have been shafted. Anything you wanted to do to your account had to be done via the engines themselves or through cumbersome Excel sheets. Everything took ages.

While devices such as the iPod and the Kindle heralded digitally-driven changes in the consumption of music and printed media, the classic TV-watching experience has yet to undergo the same overhaul.  Despite the popularity of Youtube, "timewasting" video-viewing is still seen as more of an adjunct to traditional primetime viewing rather than real competition for the experience of watching big-budget TV on an HDTV/3DTV screen.  A recent NYT & CBS survey found that 88% of Americans still pay for a monthly cable subscription, with only 15% even contemplating replacing it with a service such as Hulu.  However, as two heavy-hitters step into the arena, things may be about to change.,

It was an unusually glorious day on the streets of Fallowfield as MEC Manchester descended on Platt Fields Park to begin the first leg of their annual Behaviours Day. As boys and girls from every corner of the office began to arrive at the park's Lakeside Centre, there was a hint of trepidation in the air… What tasks would they be forced to perform? What had the Mediator Team been cooking up for the afternoon sports events… and what was that weird giant egg by the side of the lake all about?

With so much of 2010 seemingly devoted to one of its arguably cooler competitors, you'd be forgiven for thinking Research In Motion (RIM) had resigned themselves to a quiet year.

But while the BlackBerry manufacturer is far from making the grandiose claims we've come to expect from its self-important rival - it has had something of a busy week. In the last seven days, there were some big announcements from RIM, as well as further speculation about plans for a gadget to rival the iPad. So what's going on? Is the company making a renewed effort to convince consumers that Apple is not the only fruit?

Early this week Yahoo, published their own style guide for writing, editing and creating content online. The unexpected part of the guide however, was the keyword research tools it suggested. Among others Yahoo listed a tool from Google Adwords as one of the best keyword tools around. The reason this was unexpected was because most SEO’s remember when Yahoo represented the king of all keyword research tools. Yahoo also used to own the popular keyword tool Overture until its death in 2008.

Amid months of speculation, FIVE has been sold to Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell for £103.5m. Previous owner RTL says the deal with the Express owner is based on a fair evaluation of the channel's worth excluding advertising revenue.

At the Marketing Week Live! event on 30th June, David Howlett spoke about the need for and value of new research methods that go beyond measuring consumers' 'liking' of brands.  As David pointed out, respondents who say they like a brand or even that they are likely to buy it, do not necessarily go on to do so.  We like lots of brands we don't buy and buy lots of brands we don't necessarily like.

Well, almost half, 49% had searched for more information on a brand post their pre-roll experience - 15% took a direct action, 8% visited the brand site, 3% purchased something - all in accordance to Factory Media's recent survey (1k participants).