We’ve recently updated the boyzone website with a section specifically for Ronan Keating to help with promotion and news for his new album “Winter Songs” and his tour which starts in Australia in the New Year.

Each of the Ronan pages includes links to his official sites and to social network sites along with a Twitter feed which brings in tweets from Ronan in real time. A feed to the “Ronan” category on the site selects specific Ronan news to bring into the page.

In a survey 61% of people said that internet retailers need to offer a more flexible service, such as in-store collection.

The research also claims that about 75% of retailers say online sales have increased compared to this time last year, while 85% expect them to increase over the next 12 months.

Ian Geddes, retail consulting partner at Deloitte, said:

“Online retailing continues to rise at a much faster pace than the overall retail market. As recently as 2005, the online market was worth under £9bn. By 2010, we forecast the market will be worth more than £25bn. While this is still a relatively small part of the total retail market, the influence of online has a much wider reach. The digital age has embedded itself in mainstream life.”

Now could be the time for smaller retailers to jump on board and offer services that the bigger companies can’t. Appealing to a local niche market could be one way of doing this by offering either free delivery or collection from a shop.

According to research published by Ofcom more people from older age groups are joing social networking sites.

People aged 15 to 24 who have a social network profile has fallen from 55% in the first quarter of 2008 to 50% in the first quarter of 2009.

At the same time British 25- to 34-year-olds who have a social networking profile has grown by 6% to 46%, and the proportion of 35- to 54-year-olds by 8% to 35%, according to Ofcom’s Communications Market report.

Nielsen Online figures quoted by Ofcom seem to back up this data. Social networking site Bebo, which is most popular among younger users, experienced a 17% fall in unique users from June 2008 to May 2009.

LinkedIn, a site primarily used for business networking, saw its UK audience rise by 63%.

This latest research comes as publishing group DC Thomson revealed today that it has agreed to buy ITV’s Friends Reunited social network for £25m. The Beano owner, one of Scotland’s largest newspaper and magazine publishers, said Friends Reunited will sit within its Brightsolid subsidiary, which operates genealogy website FindMyPast.com. DC Thomson plans to combine FindMyPast.com with Genes Reunited, a Friends Reunited subsidiary, which will create the biggest genealogy business in the UK. This merger again indicates the growing interest of older internet users in social networking sites as family history is of most importance to older age groups.

We hope that the new site will be more interactive than the old one and so we have based the whole site on a blogging platform – a method of delivery that we recommend to a lot of our clients.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the very early days of Recorded Devilery one of our first clients was the popular boy band, boyzone. When the band went their separate ways in 2000 we worked more closely with Ronan Keating helping with web marketing and video diaries from his solo tours.

In November 2007 we were approached once again by the band to produce internet sites and content for their UK tour which has just come to an end and was successful enough to launch them into another recording career.

Our role with boyzone initially was to produce a web presence that would act as a source of information and entertainment supporting their UK arena tour. Prior to the tour our strategy was to produce audio and video podcasts from video interviews shot with the band in which they talked frankly and exclusively about their separation and the years apart. This content was delivered through boyzonetour.tv, a site specifically set up to deliver audio and video content, and also through the ever popular iTunes and other podcast sites. This allowed us to get maximum penetration for the content and drive traffic back to the boyzone sites where tickets were made available for the upcoming dates.

When the tour got underway we followed the band on the road and produced a series of video diaries featuring interviews with the band and exclusive footage from behind the scenes. In order to achieve this we partnered with a sponsor in the form of Stobart Group, who saw value in aligning their brand with a band on tour. This sponsorship enabled us to produce high quality video coverage and build up a regular and enthusiastic user base for the web sites.

As part of the marketing and promotion for the site we produced a short video promo which was used on the boyzone sites and associated fan sites as well as being shared by fans on social networking sites and youTube.

Over the period of the tour we have built a valuable user base and a foundation on which to help the band launch a new recording career and support their record label in marketing products. There are plans now for a new tour next year in which the web marketing will again play a significant support role.

This important ecosystem is under threat as hill farming becomes more and more difficult and our role at Recorded Devilery is to tell the story of the many and varied types of activity and businesses that exist in and around the Yorkshire Dales.