David Bowen commentaries

In his regular columns for the Financial Times and ft.com, senior consultant David Bowen has pursued themes ranged from customer relationship management and career marketing to ‘ethical’ retailing and royal family sites. His collected Financial Times and ft.com columns from January 2001 onward are indexed by theme and available for viewing on this site.

You can access articles directly by selecting a link below.

  • How now to optimise your showing on Google As the world’s dominant search engine starts playing favourites in the race for prominence on its results pages, company web managers will miss a trick if they don’t play the game, Rob Curran says.
  • What will be... and what may be From convergence to a social media bubble, a foretaste for web managers of the year to come, from David Bowen.
  • Why the web’s mourners are dead wrong The latest obituarist for the website blames its demise on a nest of apps, but far from facing a poisoned fate its importance will increase, David Bowen says.
  • What to make of Google+ The arrival of Google+ Pages has caused a scramble among companies for a strategy to exploit this latest social opportunity. But which one, asks Robert Curran.
  • How Nestlé applied itself to apps An early launcher of a corporate app, the Switzerland-based confectioner shared the lessons of its development at a recent meeting of the Web Effectiveness Network, Scott Payton reports.
  • Where there’s no consensus on convention Accepted wisdom has its value – as in the positioning of a car’s accelerator and brake pedals – but on the web there is surprisingly little of it, David Bowen says.
  • What makes the best web managers To run a corporate web presence successfully requires a blue-chip skills portfolio that combines often contradictory attributes, David Bowen says.
  • How Twitter should really be used to manage reputation The corporate rush to install Twitter monitoring services could damage the credibility of social media channels for customer communications, David Bowen says.
  • Where motor companies are driving their sites The carmakers’ online ‘stands’ show a much less uniform commitment to style and innovation in communications than might be expected, David Bowen says.
  • BRICs fail to build on the web Developing world corporate websites cannot be bundled together, says David Bowen. But there are clear reasons why they are failing to catch up with the pack.