Just For Lookin' Thru

There’s a sense of urgency about getting people to your website in these cash-strapped times. Once you’ve got them there – a tactical and detailed exercise in itself – you have to keep them there, make them buy something, anything. The innocent browser will have little idea of the almost-science behind getting any website to sit at the top of the search engine list. If it’s not there, looking as though it’s the biggest shop in the street, browsers won’t bother to search far for it, will get bored and amble off through cyberspace. Opportunity lost. So how do you get to the top? Like any shop, it’s not enough just to be there, however great your products, your prices, or however smartly you’ve dressed your metaphorical shop window. Reputation counts, having a recognized name, a trusted history. Beyond that it’s necessary to get yourself noticed by the search engines before the customers can find you. There are things the search engines like, such as links from your website to other

Why bother with social media? Specialize in email marketing, business to business, using mailing lists. email campaigns are: Cost effective, immediate, flexible, interactive, measurable and environmentally friendly. Targetted emails are welcome whereas Spam is a nuisance so it’s important to research your mailing list, discover what the recipients are interested in, either hobbies or products, and narrow down the list so the campaign is more likely to hit interested people – and not be deleted before reading. Some companies opt to supplement email campaigns with occasional high quality postal mailings, ie brochures- their promotional material sending a tangible message of quality and style. This is a sophisticated method. The measurable element includes basic statistics such as how many emails were sent and at what time, then quantifies how many of those were delivered, bounced back, opened, read, how many were ‘clicked through’ to the company website or unsubscribed. Conversio

Be networking savvy with social media as well as business media. It’s no good using LinkedIn to ask frivolous questions such as ‘Hey, dudes, how’s the surf looking over at Porthtowan?’ You’ll be ticked off, ‘go to facebook’ and quite right. facebook is a place for friends, acquaintances, people you once met on holiday, or spent time with at college – fine for catching up with any news but less about making good business contacts. Linkedin is for AB users, 35-50 years old and wanting to use the site to make those good business connections and promote their own business, and you can manage your company’s reputation by monitoring www.twitter.com – the microblog site for brief updates (facebook also show status updates). Select all comments about your subject, sign up for google.com/alerts and twitter alerts. This way, you can begin new relationships with people who twitter, increase sales, and act fast to respond to postings, engage with complaints, and create opportunities to enhance y

Firstly, it’s essential to understand the brand. What voice does it have? Is it quirky and funny, elegant and classy, or practical and no messing? Secondly, this message needs to be designed and written in a fitting style and tone. Are the photographs transmitting the same message as the text? Quirky images and funny text or perhaps stylish photography and smooth prose. Thirdly, get the message out. So what’s the best way? Always holding the ‘character’ of the brand in mind, everything has to match; the website, links to Facebook and twitter, brochures and mailing material, flyers and posters. Sound simple? Hardly. Step one means taking the time to thoroughly understand not only the product, but the entire company and the guiding principles of the boss/es. This includes their personal values, such as whether their driving principles are money or perhaps the environment, and what is their behaviour. If this is a green company, do the directors drive low emission cars? Or, if the m

Loser Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) heads for London to attend his daughter’s marriage to a young man he’s never met. Estranged from his family, and close to being dropped from his jingle writing job, his isolation is flagged up by him being booked into a second rate hotel alone while the rest of the wedding party are all bonding in a rented house. Singleton Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) works at Heathrow and gets set up for a wretched blind date by a work colleague which only reinforces her sense of separation. Harvey flies into London and he and Kate miss each other twice. They meet only at the point when Harvey is sufficiently humiliated to feel the need to offload to a stranger and she’s it. Kate persuades Harvey to return to the evening wedding reception and he takes her along. Buoyed up by her presence, Harvey does the right thing at last, reclaims his dignity, the love of his daughter and some respect from his ex-wife. Billed as a romantic comedy, there are comic

Colin Firth is cast as single dad again, a role he plays convincingly. Recently the slightly harassed father of two small children in ‘Then She Found Me,’ this time his daughters are older, 10 and 16 at a guess, and his concerns are different for each one. Tragically widowed, he’s offered a change of scene – to leave the US and take up a teaching post at a University in Genova, maybe too early for his stunned daughters. His approach to them both is sensitive and relaxed but each character copes very separately with the sudden loss of wife and mother. The youngest girl is traumatized by feelings of guilt, an astonishingly natural and convincing performance drawn from Perla Haney-Jardine. Disturbing hallucinations cut her off further from her father and sister and, during occasional nightmares, her distress is searing. The older sister (Willa Holland) detaches herself from her father and sister, sampling the Mediterranean life of sunshine and sex, disguising her fragility by

Sara Maitland’s short story is set in the Arctic, filmed in barren icescapes and stony shores. Saiva (Michelle Yeoh) has cast herself out into the cold wilderness, cursed: all who love her are doomed, so she keeps moving, away from people, eking out her existence. Her only company is a baby she saved from a massacre when she was a young woman, and the girl is now full grown. The two women hunt seals, birds, deer, and keep warm under layers of wolfskin, pitching their yurt in bleak landscapes amidst the Arctic winds. The silence of the film is calming, the script is almost wordless, but the cinematography is rich with facial expression and graphic killing scenes. The film opens with Saiva hungry to the point of desperation. Cradling the head of one of her dogs, she soothes it, caresses it, then cuts its throat. The meat is tough but the two women have to live. Into this menacing territory stumbles Loki (Sean Bean), close to death and at their mercy. Saiva’s curiosity ab

Some stereotypes appear early on in this film about modern survival in America but these are soon forgotten as the story develops. Clint Eastwood acts and directs in this film about immigrants, attracted to play the part of the newly widowed Walt Kowalski. A Korean war veteran, he is deeply resentful of his Hmong neighbours, angry at the fall in standards, the unkempt lawns and houses, and by being surrounded by people whose culture he does not understand. America is changing, Walt is Polish and prejudiced but he goes to an Italian-American barber, is friendly with an Irish building foreman - his friends are all earlier immigrants or economic migrants from Europe. His new neighbours are Hmong, the teenage son, Thao, is meek, and Walt has no desire to understand them. However, they are forced together. The lad is persuaded to try and steal Walt's vintage car, a 1972 Gran Torino but Walt, being Clint, is no crime victim. During an interview on Radio 4’s Front Row, Eastwo

Stunning cinematography of slum life in India, oblique camera angles, great colour and lively footage of laughing, running children. The boy Jamal and his brother live in flimsy shacks, making small amounts of money any way they can. Orphaned when a gang kill their mother, the boys take off and live amongst the mountains of rubbish, grubbing around for survival. It is unclear why Jamal’s brother is unkind to the little girl who attaches herself to them but Jamal is sympathetic towards her and, for a time, they travel together. After a short, calamitous and fascinating life, the teenager Jamal is a contestant on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ watched by most of the country. He answers each question correctly, as each one is relevant to an episode of his extraordinary life. This gets him arrested for cheating because the quiz show doesn’t have the funds to pay his prize (although the reason for his arrest is not made clear in the film, and the clever reason for Jamal needing to

Love and sunshine for Vicky and Christina, two young American girls spending a summer in Barcelona. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is engaged and has come to stay with a family friend whilst doing research for her thesis. She is confident, mature and not to be trifled with. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is unattached, sexually available, sexually uninhibited and keen to be trifled with. When the two girls are approached in a restaurant by bohemian artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) with a direct offer to come away for the weekend with him and enjoy a sexual threesome, Cristina is game. Vicky agrees to go along as chaperone but barely tolerates Juan Antonio’s well rehearsed seduction techniques and apparently innocent openness. Cristina slips upstairs to his room for some eagerly anticipated lovemaking but falls ill and spends the weekend alone in her own bed, throwing Vicky and Juan Antonio together. Rebecca Hall is excellent as the modern, educated young woman with a life plan, a

Subtle, simple story written and directed by Becker about male friendship in rural France. A middle-aged, middle-class Parisian artist (Daniel Auteuil) returns to his boyhood home in the country – he is separated from his wife, his girlfriend has been cheating on him and his relationship with his daughter is strained. Both his parents now dead, he escapes from the difficulty of relationships with women and settles into his old family home to paint. He decides to breathe life into the place again and advertises for a gardener to restore the extensive gardens. (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) arrives on a rickety looking velo, and the two men recognize each other from early days at school. They seem only to have their shared beginning in common, their experiences and outlook on life are so different, but the two men become friends, gradually understanding each other’s perspective and developing a frank intimacy. Although ultimately the artist’s journey is one of redemption and trans

Boyle pits victim against criminal in this dual perspective novel about identity theft. Dr Dana Halter is deaf, and a teacher of the deaf, living her life to the full, working, engaged to Bridger, a computer graphics film editor, and attempting to write a novel about language based on a historical figure – the mute wild boy of Aveyron. Always running late, she gets pulled over for a minor traffic violation and she is plunged into chaos. Someone has been using her name and is wanted all over the States for various felonies. Already a character with attitude, Dana’s steady anger at the world and everyone in it escalates when she is thrown, pitilessly, into jail for the weekend where she suffers indignity and humiliation. Her rage continues unabated throughout the novel as she obsessively tracks the fraudster who is to blame, forcing her fiancée to accompany her on her quest for revenge. Fiancée Bridger is unfailingly supportive and kind, but she gives him nothing. Nowhere in the entire s