Welcome to the Marketing Improvement Guide to the Agile Marketing Department produced
in conjunction with Chiasma Research, a leading technology consulting company.

The bi-annual MI study of Data Privacy compliance among FTSE100 companies is now available to download with our compliments. In this year's study we have found an improvement in some areas - most notably the prevalence of Privacy Statements. However, the ability of major organisations to handle data privacy queries is still lamentable. On average only 50% of FTSE100 companies seem able to handle these enquries at all well. Other notable findings were that still comparatively few sites use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technologies to encrypt pages that capture personal data.

We are often asked about the number of companies in various EU countries. All too often people assume there are many more more large and mid-sized companies than there actually are. For example, of the 21 million businesses in the EU, only 9% employ more than 10 people and only 1.5% employ more than 50! What's more, if you map the geography of WHERE businesses are in the EU, you find that fully 40% of EU GDP comes from within a triangle with its corners at Liverpool, Berlin andd Paris! Sobering thoughts when you are trying to plan a pan-european B-to-B strategy!

The UK Information Commissioner has recently produced a very useful guide for marketers who use Electronic Marketing techniques. The guide explains how the Electronic Commerce regulations and the Data Protection Act 1998 should be implemented in practice.