The physics of Social Media

Newton's laws of motion are three basic rules of physics that govern how forces and things behave when you start to involve movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_laws_of_motion

And strangley, as I observe Social Media being used by a growing number of organisations I meet, this has made me think back to my old physics lessons I had as a boy. I've therefore asked myself if there is any similarity between the laws that Sir Isaac Newton came up with and certain behaviour around the adoption & use of Social Media.

First law:
The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force.
(Or to translate that... you carry on at the same rate unless something pushes you in a different direction)
Now you've probably heard loads of examples where social media allowed disparate individuals to communicate and act, however their velocity is anything but constant. Some trends go as quickly as they come, whilst others linger and develop..... often with no logical reason.
But like Newton's apple, everything in the real world (e.g. not in outer space) is subject to gravity, including some Social Media ideas that quickly bring users down to Earth with a bump.
E.g. the recent "Qantas Luxury" hashtag campaign that spectacularly backfired on them.

Second law:
The acceleration of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass.
For this I initially thought you could substitute the word "body" for the word "rumour" and the law still stands. A single person can post an opinion on a blog and it is instantly put out into the digital ecosystem (albeit with very little impact or velocity). But get a few people agreeing with this opinion and it becomes amplified and accelerated across the social web.
However mass (aka substance or Klout) does play a role in determining the proportion of the effect Social Media has. For example a 'retweet' of a charitable cause on Twitter by a popular person such as a celebrity will have far more effect that someone with very few followers doing the same.

Third law:
Newton stated in his third law of motion that "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction" and this is never more true than when new technologies and processes are involved. You see, for every person who is an adopter and user of social media, there's a person who is only too happy to highlight the risks and negative side.

Regardless of the rules, its clear that Social Media (like my old Physics classmates and I) still has a lot of learning ahead.

Conversion Optimisation makes a difference

I was lucky enough today to quickly get into a seminar at the
Conversion Conference. Thanks to both Paul Rouke
(http://www.paulrouke.co.uk/) and a friendly organiser, I managed to
listen to Paul Francis from Dominoes Pizza give a case study on how
the company improved an already great website.
Note: from the response of those attending on Twitter and what I saw
myself, this event should be a fixture in the diary of all serious
ecommerce managers.

This fascinating 45 minute presentation explained how both moderated
and un-moderated (remote) usability sessions not only proved that a
complete redevelopment of their ecommerce platform was not necessary,
but gave powerful insight that led to a suite of smaller changes. This
in-turn led to a significant financial improvement of the site. For
example just changing a button colour from red to green on their
checkout had a £2.6million uplift!

So next time the boss says there is no value in usability testing or
that once a site is built it is complete..... Tell them this little
story. This is further proof that an ecommerce site is never perfect
and you should always look to improve it by testing with real users
over and over.

Organising a Tweetup

At the beginning of 2011 I was handed the organisation of the Ealing Tweetup by Mark Hillary http://twitter.com/markhillary as he left for Sao Paulo in Brazil.

It wasn’t something I was planning to take on, as I had enough responsibilities already (running a digital consulting business as well as being a husband & father) and to be honest I was enjoying being a participant in London’s biggest ‘social’ Social Media based event….. rather than the person who had to sort it out.

However 10 months on and several Tweetups later, I’m writing this post on the eve of another Ealing Tweetup. According to the site used to pull the attendees together, almost 40 people are likely to turn up at the Rose & Crown in South Ealing tomorrow night (http://twtvite.com/ealingtu11).

So what have I learnt from the experience?
Well…. I’ve met some great people, increased my musical knowledge (a little) and help keep going an event that brings virtual friends together. Its not been easy at times… but I now know that (with the help of some very generous sponsors) this social networking thing can be fun!

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 4

For the last few days I've been posting useful things to do on the run-up to peak Christmas online trading and ensuring your website can cope with the demands of your visitors . Here's my final post on the subject (for now):

Speak to the business
Understand the marketing activity planned over the festive period and the dates that they are aiming for most impact. What are their targets compared to last year? Rather than add to your load, they may be able to stagger their campaigns and flatten out demand over a more sustained period.

Have a plan for failure
You may see this as a little defeatist, but I always recommend having something up your sleeve in case the worst does actually happen. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to put an alternative site in-place within minutes and it may even be the case that you actually turn your site off when it comes under unprecedented demand. However the worst experience to give to your users is a very plain “site offline” message. Nothing says ‘go away and don’t come back’ like a server error page. At the very least make sure this page (probably a customer 500 error page) has some useful information such as your telephone customer service number and a list of your stores.

In summary…. There are still a number of actions you can take to try and de-risk the situation. Keeping your site stable over the peak period will then allow you to focus on the functionality and performance improvements in the new year, so that you’re more prepared for future peaks in demand.

Previous postings are here:
Part 3
Part 2
Part 1

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 3

To help your company get through what is expected to be the businest online Christmas yet, I'm put together some helpful tips.

Set up your own monitoring
Some hosting companies provide a website monitoring service and others may even report on availability as part of a service level agreement. However I would personally have an alternative monitor that is within my control to provide an agnostic perspective. Although it is possible to build your own, there are a number of services out there that can go beyond a simple ‘ping’ of your homepage to confirm it is there and working. Some of the more developed monitoring services can also: check the availability of specific stock, confirm the whole transaction process is working, as well as checking & recording the response time of key pages. Often it is possible to predict problems before they happen. Websites tend to go slow before they break, so getting an email or SMS alert one evening that things are taking a longer than average time to respond… may be an indication that you’re about to lose your site completely.

Try to stress test before the peak comes
I know it is not always possible at the 11th hour to test an eCommerce site to the peak levels expected of the coming Christmas trade. But actually knowing how your site responds under high volumes has huge benefits regardless of the outcome…If it fails, you know when (and hopefully how it fails)… and knowing is always better than not. It may also give you a good indication of other remedial action you need to take. But if it passes and actually stands up to your anticipated load, you have the confidence to keep trading.

Previous posts on this subject are here:
Surviving Christmas Part 2
Surviving Christmas Part 1

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas - part 2

To help you get through peak Christmas trading this year, I'm posting as series of helpful tips.
Here's a couple more:

Optimise your images
eCommerce websites are not just made up of code, they typically include a lot of visual assets as well. Users downloading pages including high quality images and possibly video from your servers at busy times can cripple your hardware and bandwidth, degrading everyone’s experience. Ask yourself “Do I really need that huge photo on the homepage?” and even if the answer is ‘yes’ you should check to see if you can compress it even slightly with no obvious reduction in quality. Remember… compressing images to optimum levels should be part of your regular website publishing process and just because you have a great data connection in the office, don’t always assume your user has one too.

Speak with your hosting company
A lot of website availability issues occur when systems are subjected to unpredicted demand. You should already have some idea what your busiest day and hour figures are and when in the next few weeks this could be (if you also do your analysis right, you should also have a good idea of your peak visitors and transactions – see point 1). If you haven’t already, talk to your hosting company and share this information with them. Ask them what they can do to maintain site availability and what monitoring / alerting they have in place. Also discuss with them the possibility of temporarily boosting your bandwidth to higher levels should you need to.

The previous post is here:
http://press20.blogspot.com/2011/11/surviving-peak-ecommerce-christmas.html

Surviving a peak eCommerce Christmas

So how is your website going to get through Christmas? How can you test things to ensure you can survive this year's busiest periods? Here's some pointers to guide you....

Check your figures
Look back at your website analytics from the same period last year and see what volume of visits (not just unique visitors) and transactions you had back then. Dig down into the detail and record not just your peak daily figures, but your peak hourly or even your minute-by-minute maximums.Then multiply these numbers by the growth you’ve have had over the last year (always rounding up your figures, as it is always better to err on the side of caution). This will give you an idea of the peak figures you can expect in the next few weeks.

Check if you actually have any problems and what they are
If your site actually broke during peak trading last year (rather than just went slow), identify exactly when and how it broke. Speak with your IT Operations team to see if they can provide more detail about what happened and what action they took.Note: If you have hit similar peaks to last Christmas over the last year of online trading, also check to see if you had a reoccurrence at these points. If you haven’t, then you may have less than an issue than you thought.

Twas the month before Christmas...

Imagine the situation.... you've recently moved departments and been put in charge of your eCommerce website. However it is just a couple of weeks until Christmas peak trading. Perhaps you've also been told the site almost broke around this time last year and fear for the worst. Is it too late to do anything?

Don’t worry, there’s always something you can do to help your site survive peak holiday trading. Christmas and sale shopping are both a blessing and a curse for online retailers, as unlike their store counter-parts, website managers don’t have the ability to queue people out of the door and around the block. Instead sites have to be permanently available to deal with visitors, but when they want to arrive….

This is great for the bottom line if you can cater for this demand. But it is bad for business both financially and reputation-wise if you can’t.

Over the next few posts are my list of key things you should do to survive Christmas peak eCommerce trading....

Some Facebook comments now indexed by Google

It's been widely known that Facebook does not allow search engines such as Google to index its content. It does what it can to stop the Googlebot getting in (and instead Facebook has done a deal with Microsoft for Bing to power its internal search). 

However, If you use your Facebook account to post a comment on a website that uses Facebook Comments, your comment can now be indexed by Google's web spiders. This is because Google has developed its software to be able to run some JavaScript, which Facebook Comments uses.

This means it will now be searchable in Google's index and could help your SEO efforts. 

Prepare yourself for an eCommerce Christmas

If you run a transactional website you just have 2 weeks to prepare for the busiest online shopping of the year! Get ready...

According to Amazon, Monday December 5 at 9pm will mark the peak of this year’s online Christmas shopping season in the UK. For other retailers the key date is sometime the following week, when people start to focus on the presents they need to get and panic buying sets in.

IMRG calculates Europeans will spend 52 billion euros online this year. This forecast is 20% up on last year, which was higher than anything else before it.

So.... "Will it meet this lofty projection?" I hear you ask. 'Quite possibly' is my view, as eCommerce sites try to market to their potential customers is as many ways as possible. And with newer innovations such as Facebook stores (FCommerce) in the mix, there's now even more ways to transact online.

Are your sites ready?

Photos from #ishopkent2011

Here are some photos I took from Friday's #ishopkent2011 eCommerce in Kent event & awards.

Note: these may not be great quality, bit if you attended please use.

The day that Social Media died

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the eCommerce in Kent (iShopKent) event. The topic I was supposed to talk about was 'Social Media for Retail', however I think I managed to shake things up a bit.

And it wasn't my criticism of Google Plus while Jon Marsh from Google was in the room that raised the most eyebrows.... but this slide:

The whole idea behind this image, besides a bit of shock to the system after the lunchtime recess, was to communicate that if you are a company looking to use channels such as Twitter & Facebook to get your message across... you don't need Social Media, you need Social Business.

So as far as the attendees were concerned, Social Media needed to die and we should have had a minute silence.

Perhaps that's what the attendees would have preferred as well... :-)

Google’s new AdWords algorithm

Ip

We all should know by that Google makes around 400 changes a year to its search algorithm (yes, that is over 1 change a day), with some such as the recent 'freshness' update being more significant than others.

However last month Google made a change to its AdWords algorithm which is significant in several regards
1. This affects Google's revenue if they get it wrong
2. This affects advertisers (e.g. those with fixed PPC budgets may find they get more or less for their money now)

What actually changed was an update to the 'Quality Score' factor that is given to each advert within Google's pay-per-click system. Quality Score in the past has previously been an arbitrary weighting that was given and that meant more experienced online marketers could mysteriously bid less than their competitors and still get a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP's).

More and more is now gradually known about Quality Score (mainly thanks to Google posting blogs and videos on the subject) and it is now widely accepted that it is a mixture of three things:
a) the historical performance of the advert (what percentage of people actually clicked on it)
b) the relevance of the ad text to the search term (e.g. are you actually advertising for what people are seaching for)
c) the quality of the landing page (how relevant is the page you're actually taking users to?)

Google has now put a greater emphasis on the landing page quality, which to me makea a lot of sense. All too often you get taken from a PPC advert through to a page that has very little to do with the craftily-worded advert.

I just hope they also factor the page speed performance into account as well!

The Great Google PPC scam?

Does your company spend money each month on Google advertising? You know, that small little Pay-per-click campaign you started a couple of years back for a pound per month, that you now have to spend a few hundred quid a week or more on?

Well, according to one train of thought it could be costing you more than it needs to. And the company you have to blame is?.... Google.

Yes, that's right, the 'do no evil' company is possibility affecting your bottom line says Vinay Sahni:

https://plus.google.com/104371975904409493484/posts/XFYfF1jujdE#104371975904409493484/posts/XFYfF1jujdE

How?

Well, have you attended an Internet exhibition, bought an Internet industry magazine or even just purchased a business publication recently? And did a 'free Google advertising' or similar leaflet fall out of it offering you £50 or £70 of free keyword advertising?

Sahni states that this activity (e.g. giving ad vouchers to those who don't currently use PPC) is not just encouraging more people to use Google's advertising system, it is driving the price up.Yes, his theory is that the online auction of keywords is skewed when you let more people bid on the same terms and giving (potentially less-experienced) users into the system with what really is free money. Like a person who enters into an auction with someone else's wallet, the theory is that everyone else using their own money has to bid that bit more to beat them. So overall the rising tide of cost makes more money for Google at no loss.

Although a good theory, I don't actually buy this. Plus there are several possible flaws in the argument:

1. Google is actually losing money giving away vouchers (Assuming there are other bidders who are prepared to pay but were out-bid by someone with a free voucher)

2. Its not always about paying the highest price for some keywords. Often a more cost-effective campaign can be run by targetting lower positions (although you could argue that these are still more expensive with free bidders loose in the system)

3. The price of keywords will find its automatic level once the free bidders go away again (although its not often I've seen the price of keywords drop over time).

4. Sahni is forgetting Google's Quality Score weighting of PPC adverts (e.g. how well your advertising matches what users are looking for r how relevant your ad is). This secret scoring system is designed to reward PPC advertisers who take the effort to optimise their online advertising. It therefore means that those who know what they are doing don't necessarily have to bid more than those who are using a free voucher.

 

There's no proof that Google does NOT return the price of keywords back to the proper market price over time and indeed this would be a huge reputational and business mistake if it was ever the case.  However the fact remains that you should always monitor your PPC campaigns to ensure you are always getting the best return on your marketing spend.

 

A Multi-Channel Future - are you in denial?

If you work in retail these days you have to get used to a customer who is increasingly tech-savvy and multi-channel minded.

Gone are the old days where stores would offer a 'price matching guarantee' to anyone who found the same product only in a competing branch nearby or glossy catalogue. Now they have to offer the same deal to any reputable online source too or face some pretty strong criticism (usually on social media networks Luke Twitter or in blogs).

And its not just tightly-clasped black & white printouts that nowadays get shown to store staff to price match. Its now incredibly easy to take a picture with your smartphone camera, submit the image to a site or application and get an almost instant price from a number of highly-competitive online retailers.
Note: If you haven't tried it already, Amazon's iPhone app does exactly this.

In my opinion some retailers are most definitely still in denial about the whole multi-channel approach. They don't want to join up the sales channels in an effort to win the sale and their store staff on commission are not encouraged to tell customers that the same product is not out of stock on the company website.
And why should they? Unless there is some way of attributing an online sale to the physical visit, then there's no value in them giving the company website address. To them they might as well tell the potential customer to go next door to the competition....for all the financial good it will do them.

But is doesn't have to be like that...... Does it?

27% of smartphone owners will shop online this Christmas

Smartphone usage for online shopping purposes is on the rise and
Christmas peak trading is almost upon us. Therefore if you don't have
a mobile commerce site that provides information, displays products at
competitive prices and ultimately has the ability to sell via a
portable interface..... you're missing out on the biggest sales
opportunity of the year.

This holiday season millions of smartphone-weilding shoppers will be
looking to transact online for everything from presents for their
nearest & dearest, to the latest designer outfit to look fantastic at
the office party.

According to Deloitte's 2011 Annual Holiday Survey 27% odf those who
owned a smartphone (e.g the Applie iPhone or one of the many Android
devices) will use their phone for Christmas / Holiday shopping. The
study also highlighted that consumers with smartphones will more
generically use them to:
find store locations (67%)
compare prices (59%)
obtain product information (51%)
shop online (45%)
scan bar codes (40%)

Retailers now need to tap into this market. They may even want to
provide services that will encourage smartphone purchases such as WiFi
connectivity in store (useful if your products are sold out in a
physical location, but still available via your online store) and QR
Codes (to tie together the online and offline worlds).

Google is killing Sidewiki

So, Google Sidewiki is going the same way as Buzz and that other thing
that nobody used..... (Wave wasn't it?)

This news must hardly come as a surprise to those who actually used
the product. It never really got mainstream acceptance in the way that
some other Google products did, even though it was pretty useful.

Google's approach creating a range of different products and
killing-off those that don't work, is a double edge sword. Yes they
are willing to crowdsource approval of their efforts and see which
ones are viable in the longer term, but it does create a bit of upset
with those who were keen users.

Personally I'm a little sad to see it go, as I was a user of it for a
while when it first launched. I either used it to make notes against a
site, like a schoolboy writes in the margin of a literature classic or
as a form of private digital vandalism.

Making blogging easier

Keeping a blog can be a hard old job sometime. For me, its proved to be difficult to combine long working days, parental responsibilities (I've just become a dad for the second time) and some form of social life on top.

 

I use Blogger.com as my blogging platform of choice, as I like the tools available (compared to WordPress for example). However I have also used the email to blog solutions such as Posterous.com from time to time and find them incredibly easy to use..... and perhaps if I was starting over again, I would now use such as service.

 

Its therefore very helpful that Blogger now provide similar email to blog functionality. Something that allows me to compose and post my thoughts, without either needing to log on to the main site or write an article in a word processing package and then cut & paste the words across when I get an internet connection.

 

Progress!

 

BTW: This posting is actually my first posting using this service.

The five signs your digital strategy sucks

Does your company have a digital strategy and do you recognise any of the points below?

1. Digital strategy? Oh yes, we’re working on that
   I hear this type of phrase a lot these days and typically what it actually means is “we don’t really have a digital strategy, but I’m not prepared to admit it”. If you don’t actually have a plan in place for how you are going to assess, approach, deliver and maintain your company’s online presence…. then you need to strongly consider getting this done soon (and be honest about its existence & progress).



2. It’s full of social media bullshit bingo
   http://press20.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-media-bullshit-bingo.html
   Well…..If it doesn’t contain the obligatory mention of Facebook & Twitter every other sentence, how can it possibly be about digital? Wrong!
   Sure, there’s a world of engagement out there via the main and niche social networks, but don’t forget the basics of a decent online presence (via any device) such as making sure your corporate website works on all the main browsers and in an accessible way.
   


3. It’s purely about technology
   Focusing just on the IT within your digital technology is missing the point. You also need to map out and understand how you are going to develop: business processes, customer segmentation, etc.
   


4. It’s not about technology at all
   Missing out the tech part is just as bad as basing your entire plan around it. You still need to cover how you’re going to implement new tools to help you: create better online functionality, improve data integration, measure customer interaction quicker & better, etc. and remember to think about how this will develop this over time.



5. It's a bolt-on to your existing business strategy
   If you haven’t considered an integrated approach to marketing and sales online, then you’re not giving full consideration to the channels available and more importantly…. digital’s more pervasive role within your business to: reduce costs, enable customer, staff and even customer-to-staff communication.

I'm sure there are a lot more sign-posts that a digital strategy sucks big time..... Any suggestions?

Mobile devices and our data consumption

The continued popularity of mobile devices has now driven demand for smartphones, tablets and netbooks. This has consequently had a significant impact upon the type and rate of our digital media consumption.

Once we just used the humble desktop (or laptops if we were fancy and flushed with money), but now at home, at work and on the go we use mobile devices such as: iPhones, iPads and a legion of Google Android powered devices more than ever before.

We’ve apparently now become Digital Omnivores, using Internet data from a variety of sources and many at the same time. I know, because my own browsing and other online behaviour has changed in the lst few years since I've had a smartphone (or few).

As well as sitting down with a laptop most evenings to continue working, I also now regularly burn through over 1.5 gigabytes of mobile data a month on my mobile (mainly accessing email and Twitter through the day, when I'm not within range of a public Wi-Fi node). I also have the fabled "multi-screen experience" when watching the TV at the weekend now, as the iPad tablet comes out to check program schedules, background information on news stories or the Twitter back-channel gossip on the latest pop star wannabies.

And I can only see this trend for increasing data consuption to continue, as devices get faster and deliver a more interactive experience.

Digital strategy – times they are a changing

“May you live in interesting times” is supposedly the English translation of a Chinese curse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
And although the phrase may not have exactly been as written, the sentiment behind it is clear…… when things are changing, life is hard.

Corporations are also finding the current business climate difficult. We are quite possibly on the brink of another global recession and consumers & businesses are clamping down on spending. Some analysts are even saying that we may need to rethink finance, consumerism and even our way of life. Things are…… interesting.

But the Internet is OK isn’t it? Well, quite possibly it is if you look at it just as a network of inter-connected machines that exchange data. But if you are the person responsible for crafting your company’s (or client’s) digital strategy, then you don’t just have to revise it yearly to follow the organisational business plan… you need to evolve your thinking far faster to stay abreast of the latest innovations and thinking.

Only a few years ago, Social Media wasn’t of any real concern to the digital strategist. Yes, it was there in the form of blogs and forums, but it never had the numbers, passion and backing until the major social networks gained traction. Now these same networks are releasing feature after feature all the time, gaining users across the globe and affecting the way people communicate and live.

And that’s just one factor at work. When you combine others such as : local search, augmented reality, QR codes, mobile and more….. all developing and innovating in their own ways, any digital strategy is already out of date by the time its written and printed out.

What’s therefore needed is for a digital strategy to be a living document. Taking this concept further, an agile approach is needed not just in its creation, but in its maintenance and implementation. In essence, I think that the thoughts driving y online improvement forward need to exist in something more like a Wiki than a Word document.

The main issue in my opinion is that although this idea is perhaps a practical way to address the ever-changing Internet landscape…. this approach would conflict with the typical process-heavy structure and governance within most corporates. It is therefore a shame that the very companies that need such a flexible approach are the very ones least likely to implement it.

Digital strategists are indeed living in interesting times.

Social Local Mobile - innovation begins now

A recent study predicted that the value of online shopping through the web and mobile commerce will grow to £33.7 billion by 2015, representing an annual increase of 4.5 per cent.

Even Google have recently shown their aim to target mobile devices by the purchasing of Motorola Mobile and got social with the release of Google Plus (no, I don't use it either). They also have a pretty big hand in location-based online search and offers via the Android mobile operating system.

Sure.... 2010 was really the year of Social Media, 2011 is the year of mobile and location-based services such as Foursquare are stil growing in use. However, for me it is the combination of Social, Local and Mobile together that now forms a digital trinity of innovation, instant access and ease of use.

And I don't use the word innovation lightly, as I believe that this combination of technologies is where will see the next tide of Internet innovations come from. The next year or so are going to be really intersting and I'm looking forward to watching how back-room developers and start-ups take advantage of these and come up with fantastic concepts that leverage the always-on and socially-conncted online population.

Is mobile your company's biggest challenge?

So..... 40% of Fortune 500 companies claim their biggest mobile challenge is developing their online services across multiple operating systems and devices

 do they?

Well fragmentation in the online industry isn't anything new for web developers. We've been living with this since the the days of the Mosaic and Netscape browsers (and if you don't know who they are, then I'd stop reading this blog now if I were you). This confusion was then multipled with the arrival of Microsoft 16 years ago, who then went onto make a complete mess of browser standards, that we've been living with ever since.

However things have got even more mixed-up in the last few years with the growth of the mobile channel, fueled by smartphones and tablets such as Apple's iPhone & iPad, as well as a host of Google's Android mobile OS powered phones. For me 2011 has definately been the long-awaited "year of the mobile". Although this is a title that online marketing consultants have been foretelling for the last decade, in my opinion this year is it and according to research from Gartner.... smartphone sales globally will reach 467m in 2011.

But the fragmented mobile landscape is directly affecting many organisations’ plans to implement an effective mobile channel. No one device or operating system entrely rules the roost (at least not in the UK) and right now if a company plumps for just one.... typically the iPhone... then it is excluding a huge user base. But to try and get comprehensive market coverage is an expensive and exhaustive process....

Google & birthdays - personalisation to make you smile

Today is the 14th of September, my birthday. And when visiting the Google homepage this evening I saw a great 'Google Doodle', that of a birthday present and a cake with a candle in it.

"Oh" I initially thought "it's Google's birthday as well as my own". But then thought back to reports I had read recently about Google's birthday being in January or a range of dates in September including the 15th .... but not the 14th. Had Google got its own birthday wrong? Was a server giving the wrong date and showing the present and cake image a day ahead of time?

No!

Google knows my birthday thanks to a complete profile of me I entered some while back. It would therefore seem that some clever programmer there has created a small bit of personalisation code to display this image when the anniversay of my birth comes around.

Clever, engaging, thoughful and just a little bit all-knowing. Just how I like my search engines.

My favourite error page

OK, not the most inspiring of blog titles, but bear with me....


I was about to watch some stuff on Youtube earlier today, to catch-up on some videos posted by far-off friends, when I got the message below. Now an Error 500 on a website is usually a sign that something is wrong... its the online equivalent of a car breakdown. Its not like its stablemate, the 404 (page not found) error... which is the web equivalent of a dead-end sign, an indication to metaphorically turn around and retrace your route using the back button. Oh no... the 500 error says to the user "something so important has gone wrong, that even we don't know how to fix it".

So its actually quite welcome to see a company at least communicate that its aware of the issue and (albeit jokingly) planning on doing something about it.

Well done Youtube for dispatching a team of highly trained monkeys to deal with my problem. I'll be back soon.

Ealing Tweetup - the biggest ever

It isn't often you get home from an infomal local social media event, exhale gently and take a while to relax... but then isn't every day you help run one of the UK's largest digial events and quite possibly the biggest Tweetup ever.

If you're not aware of what I'm referring to... on Thursday 1st September the Ealing Tweetup took place. This involved: two bands, 200 people, free drinks, senior London politicians and almost £1000 raised for the Ealing Mayor's fund to help those affected by the recent Ealing riots.

But don't just take my word for it, here's what Ealing Councillor Bassam Mahfouz said about it:

"A synonym for fantastic live music, great company and flowing drinks the Ealing TweetUp has become an event that draws the good, the bad and even the politicians together in the name of social networking. Addictive, welcoming and energetic every attendee left wanting more whilst others are joining twitter in their droves just so they can get an invite. With over 200 tweeters, we may have to move the #EalingTU to the Wembley Arena before long."

Blame Social Media - then think again

Social media has been blamed for the riots across the UK last August and since then there have been numerous several cries from politicians and other senior people to shut social networks down to stop them being used for organising disorder.

As you may have read in a post I did on this several weeks ago, I thought the whole idea of blaming social media itself pretty ludicrous. http://press20.blogspot.com/2011/08/dont-blame-social-media-for-unrest.html

But politicians and leaders carried on this chain of thought, all the way up to the front doors of the social network providers. But there it seems to have stopped thankfully, as now senior UK politicians have backed down in their rhetoric to shut down or restrict networks such as BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook or Twitter.

After apparent 'positive' discussions a Home Office spokesman said that the “The Government did not seek any additional powers to close down social media networks.”

Hurrah.... we don't yet live in a dictatorship.

So I have a mobile app developed - now what?

In today's final guest post from Mark Walsh from Nation of Apps, he answers questions on the important subject of what to do once you have your mobile application actually developed for you.

Do I need to promote my mobile app once it has been launched?
Well actually, the promotion should start before launch so that you have already generated interest in the app and your target audience are waiting in anticipation. Once the app has been launched you then have about a week to really push it and take advantage of being featured in the ‘new app’ sections of app stores. After this, you need to follow an ongoing programme of activities to maintain interest in your mobile app.

So how do I go about promoting my app?
There are a number of ways to promote your app and many depend on the type of app and target audience. Some ideas are:
- Consider a website to promote your mobile app
- Consider the use of social media to promote your app : Twitter, Facebook
- Present a YouTube video
- Post blog entries on your and other people’s blogs
- Consider getting app reviewers to review your app at launch to generate interest.

What if my app doesn’t work properly and I need to get it modified?
If bugs are found, resilience is poor, users are having navigation issues etc. then it is possible to get the application developers to make the necessary changes and re-deploy the app.
However, if this proves to be the case, you may well have missed the boat as it is likely users will have stopped using the app and maybe even deleted it. The app will also probably get bad reviews which will impact future uptake. It will be very difficult to recover from this and that critical week 1 impact will have been lost.
This is why thorough app testing is vital. Prior to launch, not only must the app be tested for technical issues but it should be tested by the target audience to ensure they ‘get it’. They need to know exactly what the app does without having to stop and think, be able to navigate easily, and achieve the desired result intuitively.

Mark's details:
company site: http://nationofapps.co.uk/
blog : http://www.nationofapps.co.uk/news-mobile-application-development.html
Twitter: @nationofapps

The financial low down on mobile applications

Following on from yesterday's post about getting your app right first time, Mark Walsh from Nation of Apps anwers more questions. This time around the finances involved.

So how can I make money from my App?
There are two main options to consider regarding mobile application monetization.
1. Offering Consumers A Free App And Make Money From ....
- Advertising
- Charging for extra functionality
- Charging for upgrades
Free apps receive significantly more downloads than paid for apps therefore you are guaranteed more downloads and could then use this as an opportunity to make money from displaying adverts, offering extra paid for app functionality, offering paid for functional upgrades.

2. A Paid For Mobile Application
You can charge consumers to download your app. If you are planning to do this ...
- How much would you charge?
- What do you base your charge on?
- Have you researched what a consumer might pay for a similar app?
- Are you prepared for less downloads than if your app was free and possibly have a more aggressive marketing campaign?

3. How much does a mobile app cost?
Mobile application development cost can vary depending on the type of app required. The key factors that have impact on the cost of an app are:
- How many features will need to be incorporated
- Complexity of the features within the app
- Goals and expectations
- Has a similar app been developed before or is this completely be-spoke
- Time required to create a good design
- Estimated app development time / duration.
- Server development and infrastructure costs
- Amount of project management required
- Amount of testing required

So is it a good idea to try and get the cheapest app developer I can find, or should I use a mobile application development company who might charge me more?

There are ways of paying less than the going rate to get a mobile application developed, but the old saying ‘you get what you pay for’ very often applies.

Inexperienced mobile app developers can leave you with a mess of poor quality code that is unreliable and impossible to maintain. In addition to this, using offshore app developers can lead to communication issues and difficulty in them understanding the culture of the target market. The risk exists that you will end up with an app that you can't use properly, can’t maintain, and gets bad reviews because it crashes or behaves erratically.
It’s a common occurrence in mobile application development that clients come to us to recover ‘botch jobs‘ whereby attempting to do things on the cheap has backfired and proved a false economy. For all the above reasons, it is therefore vital that you understand the risk of cutting corners and recognise the value of handing the development of your application to a reputable mobile application development company.

Mark's details:
company site: http://nationofapps.co.uk/
blog : http://www.nationofapps.co.uk/news-mobile-application-development.html
Twitter: @nationofapps

How to get your mobile application right first time

I get asked quite a bit these days for advice on mobile platforms & applications. So I have asked Mark Walsh from Nation of Apps to answer a few questions on developing and delivering the right mobile app for businesses.

Once I have an idea for a mobile app, what’s the best process to follow to get it right first time?
There are a number of things that need to be thought through in detail. This starts with defining your mobile application requirements.
- What do you want your mobile app to do?
- What do you want to achieve with your app?
- Who is the target audience? Personas, Demographics.
- Do you have branding requirements?

How should I decide what platform to build for?
One of the key drivers to answer this question is regarding who will be using the app. It is important to understand your target audience and what mobile devices they use. Analytics from websites and apps that your target audience currently use can help with this. If you find the trend to be specifically more Android orientated, or iPhone orientated then there’s your answer.
If the app is targeted for specific business users, then it may well be that Blackberry should be the choice. It has been a common strategy for companies to develop mobile business applications first for iPhone, however this approach has often been flawed and the target audience found to be predominantly Blackberry users.

Mark's details:
company site: http://nationofapps.co.uk/
blog : http://www.nationofapps.co.uk/news-mobile-application-development.html
Twitter: @nationofapps

eCommerce Programme or Project Manager? Part 2

This is the second of 2 postings on the difference between an eCommerce Progamme or Project Manager. The earlier part can be found here.

Responsibility
It’s a natural effect that the bigger the amount of work to be done, the more there is at stake throughout a business. Although this risk is typically financial, it could also have other important effects on your existing business. With this risk comes the responsibility of reporting it to senior people (with the aim that they can mitigate it as much as possible)… who in-turn may have directors, owners or shareholders to keep happy.
Keeping the senior stakeholders informed on a large online project can often be a role in itself and I would always recommend that the Programme Manager contributes or even runs the regular senior meeting attended by all relevant parties. The ability to participate in or even chair these sorts of meetings typically requires additional communication, influencing, or other skills that are usually beyond those needed of a Project Manager.

Coherence of Effort
When your ecommerce requirements need a programme of work, then it is essential to have a coherent overview of all effort. This is to ensure that there is no unnecessary overlap or conflict in tasks & deliverables. Although a Project Manager will be responsible for the effort within one project, the eCommerce Programme Manager must understand all possible touch points across all pieces of work for all projects. If there are any interdependencies, the programme manager must be responsible for ensuring that each Project Manager is aware of them and takes on the responsibility to their project.

Ultimate Value to the Business
A project manager has key performance indicators to report on, mainly that of the project running on time, ins cope and to budget. These are the main factors for a project to align to its business case and if it will be ‘judged’ as a pass or fail.
The ecommerce programme manager however must look at the overall value to the business for each component of the programme of work. They must be able to justify why each piece of work is important to the long term return on investment of ecommerce to the organisation.

Prioritisation
All of the above lead into prioritisation of effort and resource allocation – which is fundamentally different between a project manager and a programme manager. The programme manager must have the ability to override a project manager’s plan for the ‘greater good’ of the ecommerce programme of work and delivering the maximum value to the business.

In summary, there are significant differences in both roles and as the key stakeholder of the you need to decide which one(s) you really need to ensure all your initiatives are a success in the long term.

eCommerce Programme or Project Manager? What's the difference?

I’ve been asked the question several times before, so it is good to be able to explain what I believe is actually the difference between and eCommerce project or programme manager

For me the distinct difference between an eCommerce Project and an eCommerce Programme Manager is the basis of what drives their day to day activities. In essence this can be broken down in 6 areas:

Scale
Although the size of the project should not necessarily dictate whether you need to use a programme manager or not, there’s a growing view that when an eCommerce or Multi-Channel project gets to a certain size you move on from needing ‘just’ a project manager. The counter claim is that a project manager should be sufficient to run a single project no matter what the size.
I’m firmly in the latter camp on this one and believe that one eCommerce project should have one project manager… but here’s the important point: when a project is too big for a single person to manage effectively (e.g. a complete green-field project for a multi-national retailer) then it should either be broken up into phases for serial delivery over time or treated as a modular programme of work. For a programme of work, you would then need a programme manager and potentially multiple project managers.

Hierarchy/People Management
Not all programme managers are good people managers and just because someone manages a number of project managers this does not necessarily make them a programme manager.
But once you have both a Programme Manager and a Project Manager working together… then it is an obvious step to have the more junior person report into the senior. I have also seen situations where the Programme Manager has either had matrix or proper line-management responsibility for other members of the delivery team, such as business analysts and the PMO (Programme Management Office/r) or any resource that does not need to be dedicated to a single project for its entire duration. Let’s also not forget that that the practice of eCommerce has been established in many organisations for over a decade now and that you may find a Programme Manager having management of the ‘business as usual’ work-stream as well as delivering new functionality.

Update 19/8/2011: the second part can now be found here .

Why your eCommerce Project needs an eCommerce Project Manager

Let’s imagine a situation that is becoming a pretty regular occurrence these days…
You have been given the go-ahead for developing (or re-developing) your company’s online store or multi-channel retail proposition. As the ‘business stakeholder’ you are far too busy running day-to-day operations (or fighting fires) and do not have the bandwidth to deliver this work yourself. You have a ‘sizeable’ budget to implement the right solution without cutting any major corners, but you have to have it live within pretty tight deadlines and it must be ‘right first time’
(Question: Does anyone get told “oh, its ok if you screw it up this time around, you’ll have plenty more chances to get it right in the future except politicians?”).
There are a number of things you can initially do to get things on their way, but here’s why I suggest you look at getting an eCommerce Project Manager in first.

1. Market knowledge
Unless you have recent prior experience of the eCommerce landscape (e.g. the vendors, products, prices and all their associated short-comings) then you are stepping into a virtual swamp, where three letter acronyms (TLA’s) abound and the initially-offered price of some web services could be overpriced from anything between 20% and 300% … or beyond.
Someone who has managed a project similar to the solution you are looking for should have some idea of the available services and be able to hold your hand through the early stages of the project.

2. You don’t always have the right person internally
It is an obvious statement to make, but to stand the best chance of having a well-managed project you need a project manager with the relevant experience. If you do not already have someone within your organisation that can correctly fill the eCommerce PM’s role then you really need to look outside. I’ve seen all sorts of people in the past drafted into the role who were clearly not able to run the online project. Examples include: a graphic designer who was friends with the chief executive’s wife, an IT manager who clearly had other important things on her mind (like running the IT department) and a member of the ecommerce team who “didn’t have anything else to do”. In each case project either failed to deliver completely or had to be rescued by stakeholders and/or external assistance.

3. If you don’t…. it will be you that gets asked to deliver it…

In essence….. If you really want an eCommerce project run well and do not want to be given the run-around by the project, then you need the right person to manage it.

10 things to consider when building a new website

We often get asked to provide best-practice advice to clients about their websites and I felt it was best to put this information in the public domain.

1. Before you start – Take time to understand the purpose of your site and who your users are


2. Build on good foundations – Get the site map and user journey right and the structure and navigation will become apparent


3. Content Is King - What is the message and is it conveyed correctly? Without engaging content people will leave and not return


4. Present the content in a coherent way – Web pages are often structured to be a familiar UI to the user, allowing them to instinctively know how to use and navigate to the content they want to find. Presentation and navigation needs to be clear engaging and guiding in a way that represents brand values correctly online.


5. A site is for life - Content is key to engagement but be sure there are people and processes in-place to keep it up to date


6. Compatibility – There is a growing number of browsers and devices in the market today, so check your site has cross-platform compatibility from desktop to mobile.


7. Don't Exclude – Ensure every visitor can use the site. Accessibility is increasingly more important with new legislation being written and passed all the time.


8. Standards should be followed. Wherever possible:
   a. Use text and not images (able to be read by screen readers). This also helps with SEO as search engines can search all the text on the page.
   b. Use web-safe fonts (or approved webfont rendering techniques)
   c. Make navigation and links accessed via the keyboard
   d. Make images and headings are appropriate to the content and use correct alternative text.
   e. Test, test and test again.


9. Less is more – A simple interface can say a thousand words, by minimising visual clutter a message and key points can be strengthened. Good use of whitespace to ensure the areas of the page are clearly set out and uncluttered.


10. Engagement – The web is becoming a more social arena having the ability to contribute, share and interact with the site will help to develop a community and a reason for return visits.
    Note: Special thanks to Ben Kilby for initially putting this list together

Don't blame social media for unrest

I live in Ealing in West London, where some of the riots took place the other night. I spent a lot of time listening to police sirens & helicopters overhead and throughout the disturbances I followed the news online (via the BBC) and on Twitter & Facebook.

In the last few days a lot of things have been cited as the cause of these riots, however one constant theme mentioned by Newspapers, TV & Radio channels is that "Social Media is allowing people to riot".


Quite frankly, this topic is a pathetic attempt to create headlines that are nonsense. Riots have existed before social media, and before TV and other channels. Note: I've yet to check if there was 'technically' a riot before the invention of the printing press... but you get my drift.


Social Media, just like the telephone and every other method of communication we have is not the cause of social unrest.... it is merely a facilitator, the channel via which people now interact with each other. Blaming it is like blaming the air for transmitting an influenza virus.

And just like air, Social Media has become just another thing we now take for granted in our modern lives. However there have been calls by some political leaders to shut down various social media (most popularly Blackberry Messenger / BBM because it is far less traceable). But as several overthrown rulers of several North African countries will testify.... trying to shut these sources down really didn't help matters....

Mallify : Facebook Commerce made easy

John Smith is Sales Director for Mallify, a social commerce application that enables businesses to have a store in Facebook. He’s taken the time to answer a few questions on his product.

a) How would you describe your product to a non-technical audience?

Mallify allows you to set-up a store with the Facebook website. It therefore makes use of the social shopping experience that can happen between users, encourages viral activity, lets them like and recommend & products and this way spread them to each-other. However the most important thing about Mallify is that enables them to buy your products directly with Facebook, so you don't lose customers by navigating them away to another website.

You get an F-Commerce store that is easy to set-up and easy to administrate. You therefore save time, use your own e-commerce processes behind the scenes and you don't even have to learn, trust or use a new online sales system. It’s a really flexible solution, where you can add and sell your products in your own way, get the customer data you wish and also use the payment gate/method you wish instead of being forces to use someone else's choice.

b) What are the key benefits:

Mallify has a number of benefits, but the main three are:

1) Most simple
It is really easy to start, understand and use Mallify, thus getting you trading online quickly and having an immediate short-term benefit

2) Most flexible
From a mid-term perspective you can customize your store and your products to fit, therefore running your online business how you want to.

3) Most social
By launching your store on Facebook, you not only joint the World’s fastest growing marketplace, you do it in an environment that encourages social sharing and group activity, thus helping to boost interactivity, engagement and therefore sales conversions in the longer-term.


c) Do I need to install any specific software?
No specific software is needed, only Facebook in any modern browser. Mallify is simply a Facebook app (approved) that you can easily add to your Facebook Page within a minute, this makes it easy to set up.

d) How do I get my products, prices and inventory into it?
The simplest way is to add the products manually into our system. For doing this we have a
special interface, the same one used to maintain your inventory (change prices, update the info, etc).
After you have created you Facebook Page you simply add the Mallify Store app to it. When this is done you will get a Mallify Store icon on your personal Facebook page - click on it and you will end up in the administration area where you can add, edit and delete company information and products.
As an administrator of the Facebook Page you can directly see statistic and sales, you can also add pictures and text to your store without leaving the Facebook Page.
If you're using a common e-commerce system, you can connect it to Mallify via the "Integration plugin". Just send us an e-mail and we will give you access to our API.
In our "Enterprise” price plan we even can build an API integration to your chosen system.

e) What payment service providers can I use?

The current supported Payment Service Providers (PSP’s) are DIBS and PayPal. However we are planning to quickly add more to our list as we have clients requesting them.

f) Is it secure?
Our system (the one that is storing your products, personal information, etc.) is well-secured using an SSL certificate .The payment process is further secured by the Payment Service Provider.

g) What is the cost of your service?
We have 3 plans and each plan has a set up fee which covers the implementation and API integration. The price plans are on our Facebook page - and at www.mallify.se

Here is a quick summary:
Basic: £50 per month
Pro: £170 per month
Enterprise: £425 per month

h) Do you provide me with any help to set up my online shop?
It’s easy enough (and have a free 30days trial) to start by yourself. However should you need help there’s a support team available and further assistance is provided in higher
price plans. We can even do all the launch work for you - it's in the "Enterprise" plan
i) What UK/European clients do you currently have?

Hammarby Fotboll
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hammarby-Fotboll/165865959828

Live Loud
https://www.facebook.com/liveloudbyzabina

Gynna P
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gynna/109626499119307

Childrens Gift ideas (launching v. Soon!)
https://www.facebook.com/childrensgifts

plus many other in a free trial phase right now.

Screen scraping: not dead, just renamed

A few years back I blogged about the act of screen scraping and why it was wrong to do this.

Since that time I've seen clients (primarily eCommerce ones) develop feeds for:

• Affiliates



• Google product search



• 3rd party applications (e.g. Mobile apps)



• and other such things

This however means that a decent website may quickly end up developing a number of different feeds that all do different things. It can therefore create a mesh of XML files & API's that can become quite complex to maintain and manage.

One approach is to create a single feed that is then used for everything, perhaps going via a marketing agency, who can then reformat it for different purposes. However this can turn out to be a pretty bulky file (e.g. if you have a large catalogue, this can quickly become several megabytes in size) or can contain details that you might not wish all parties to have (e.g. links to your hi-res images from your Content Delivery Network that you may be paying by the megabyte for).

So I was reasonably interested in this article from eConsultancy that seemed to address this very issue. Had they really found a decent solution to this problem? One that I think will only get worse over time as the needs of eCommerce sites grow.....

Well the answer lies in this part of the posting:

Next-generation data feed solutions allow feeds to be generated and deployed
quickly and at low cost by extracting the ‘front end’ product-related HTML code
from the website, with no requirement for any ‘back end’ data – or expertise on
the part of the merchant. By harvesting elements such as pricing, availability
and product attributes directly from the merchant’s website, it is possible to
ensure that the extracted data feed is comprehensive and accurate

So let me get that straight. This 'next generation' method doesn't use an actual data feed from the site owner. It works by 'harvesting elements' from the HTML of the merchant's site without their actual involvement.

And that's not screen-scraping how exactly?

US to see continued growth in online commerce

Today's post from eMarketer shows a slow but healthy grown in the both the number of online users (penetration) and the percentage that will purchase goods or services.


So whilst over 7 out of 10 of American internet users are now utilising eCommerce sites to make their purchases, this ratio is continuing to increase over at least the next 4 years.

This means that almost 30 million extra US consumers will transact online. Which can only be good news for the country's precarious economy right now.

Also, with half of American retailers planning to sell overseas in the next one to two years, UK retailers now need to look to protect their market share and also develop their international online sales ability.

Share and enjoy

OK, perhaps I was a bit critical in my recent post about oversharing on Twitter and obviously not everyone who positions himself as an online curator is as bad as I pointed out. In fact, isn't everyone who retweets interesting stuff and posts links carrying out some form of curation?
(In that case, that makes nearly everyone on Twitter an online curator of content in some way).

The altruism of online sharing is a concept I'm looking to further explore as I try to understand more about its impact and viral nature. To me it is still a mystery why are certain things far more "sharable" than others and the idea that there is a magical viral formula that brands can tap into this to try to reach their influencers and customers is not something that rests easily with me.

I sometimes find sharing hard work. It is not all the time that I remember to pass-on what I find... perhaps because I'm too busy trying to absorb what I have learnt.

However, when I do share things and this gets passed around the Internet... there is a certain amount of pleasure I get from knowing that I have also helped someone on their knowledge journey.

Perhaps its this joy we need to preserve and increase (and perhaps its why the top online curators seem to enjoy what they do so much).

SEO - justifying the time & effort

Yesterday an article I contributed to was published. You can read it here: http://directorsof.com/network/advice/07/21/is-my-digital-marketing-agency-taking-me-for-a-ride

For this article I was asked for advice on a hypothetical dilemma, where a website is getting no Search Engine Optimisation benefit after five months of an agency working for them. And whilst this was a fictional problem, it does highlight the real issue a lot of companies have with SEO services...... "how do I know they are giving me value for money?".

As I highlighted in the posting, there are some things it is possible for an organisation and its search agency to influence, whilst there are others (e.g. the work done by competitors and their SEO agencies, plus the workings for the search engines themselves) that are beyond their control. And as the popular phrase states: "Only worry about those things you can change and don't worry about those you can't".

But that's easier said than done, especially for a client who may not know which is which and therefore makes unrealistic demands upon their agency. It is really only by having a collaborative approach to SEO, with both the company and SEO agency understanding and working together to optimise things (such as their site and in-bound links) to get the most benefit.

Failing to do this may well mean the client underestimates the time and effort gone into the optimisation efforts and raises questions such as the one raised.

Embracing digital isn’t always easy – but it can be worth it!

Stop thinking of digital as an addition to your organisation and make it part of your day-to-day work, culture and business drivers.

Amazingly I still hear prospects and contacts saying how they are “adopting digital” or “embracing social media” within their company, when in fact what they really mean is…

“We’re going to continue to do what we’ve always done, but mention the occasional online buzzword when it suits us or when we think the boss is looking”

Does this sound familiar?

OK.... yes some do go part of the way and try to bolt-on digital ways of working to their standard practices. For example you see this when a company pilots something like an enterprise collaboration tool as a replacement for their Intranet, when they only have internal network access for their staff (or take on a Social Media marketing person, but then block access to the sites need because of ‘firewall’ policies).

However the truly evolved organisation is one that does actually take digital to the core of what it does and use it in the most relevant and productive way. This is typified when an organisation automatically writes normal press releases that are optimised for the keywords they are targeting as part of their SEO efforts. Or when it considers the mix of products it sells across different channels before it buys or manufacturers them (rather than selling the same stuff on its website as it sells in its stores).

This adoption doesn’t just result in a more connected company that can hopefully take advantage of more opportunities and learn to discard the negative ones quicker… but somewhere that hires & retains the most innovative & forward-thinking staff… plus one that can hopefully react to market pressures quicker.

Can you over-share on Twitter?

Being a content curator on Twitter is a great gig….. You get to Tweet about everything you like and hopefully build a reputation as a content sharer the process.

The less-than-generous may say that these self-indulgent personal brand builders merely pump out regurgitated opinions and provide shortcut links inks to a multitude of sites that their followers mindlessly click on and consume.

Whilst this opinion might be a little harsh on most Twitter users, there are a few points that some online content curators don’t want you to know.

They over-share….

In other words:

1. They don’t actually read all those links they add into their Twitter posts



2. They copy tweets (and pass them off as their original finds) rather than retweeting



3. They work out how often to tweet the same thing to get maximum exposure

Now some of us have been guilty of doing at least some of these either in the early days of twitter or when evolving our usage & knowledge of the social media platform (in fact, I sometimes duplicate the tweets that link to my blog as I have an international readership). But some online curators still do these things (and more) just in an effort to build a bigger following and increase their curated influence.

So do you know an over-sharer and isn’t it about time to call the serial offenders out?

The benefit of foresight

As a director of a digital consultancy and web agency, I get asked to pitch for work quite a bit these days. Often these requests are of the “we know what we want, how cheap can we get it?” sort… However these projects invariable end up with the client changing their mind once we have engaged with them and shown them what is now possible with the latest tools & technologies, an improvement on the user interface they thought they needed or more manageable in the longer-term.

However we always prefer to be part of any web project before this stage and to be involved in the pre-project planning (and sometimes ONLY involved in this stage if that is what is needed)/

The pre-project work means that we can:

1. Understand & document the business proposition and processes (multi-channel delivery, content management work-flow, etc.)



2. Define the overall scope and help detail the business requirements
   


3. Map typical customer profiles (e.g. CRM personas) to user journeys



4. Understand the non-functional requirements such as volume (how many) and performance (how fast) criteria
   


5. Provide best practice on product/vendor and service suppliers
   


6. Work with the different internal departments (e.g marketing, eCommerce, distribution, customer services) to prepare them for the
   project

We have found that helping clients at this early stage can not only help them start and deliver a project that is right-first-time, but one that is better suited to their needs going forward. Only then would we look to help them with: project/programme management, user experience, website design, development, testing, launch and subsequent online marketing skills.

It is perhaps a shame that this doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

Social Media Bullshit Bingo – some suggestions

I’ve had a bit of feedback on my earlier post about Social Media Bullshit Bingo and a few people have asked me for suggestions of words they can use to play this game. So here is a list I have put together from my own experiences (plus a few from some Twitter buddies who I asked back a few weeks ago when this whole idea initially took shape).

Facebook
Twitter
Social Graph
Google+
Crowdsourcing
Transparency
Influence
Authenticity
and finally Amazeballs (thanks to http://twitter.com/bobblebardsley)

Note: This is not an exhaustive list, as I am sure you will have your own and terms will evolve as new products and services emerge or grow in prominence (for example, Google + would not have been on the list just 3 weeks ago).

However, if you think there are any blindingly obvious ones that I have missed and that other game players could benefit from them, then please feel free to add them in the comments section below

Social Media Bullshit Bingo

You’re probably already familiar with the office game called ‘bullshit bingo’ where you sit in a presentation given by a consultant, middle manager or other person full of their own self-importance. If you’re not, then I will quickly explain… you each have a set of ‘meaningless’ words that could be uttered and the first person to hear a given number or all of them has to shout “bingo”.

By ’meaningless’ terms, I’m referring to those buzz words that you typically heard in meetings, but in reality: have no real function), are nonsensical or are just plain bullshit. “Synergy”, “proactive” and “ballpark” were used all the time and most people had no idea (or cared about) what they meant. Consequently the bullshit game grew in usage during the heady 1980’s when people thought that being a ‘Yuppie’ was the best thing ever… kinda like Social Media is now.

To be honest I’ve not heard “bingo” shouted at the back of a presentation in quite a while. Now eleven years into the new millennium, you'd think people would have learnt that using this hyperbole is pretty pointless and only succeeds in separating the presenter from the audience . But perhaps not…. Because I think there’s now a new game to be played.

Social Media Bullshit Bingo

So how do you play it?

Well, in a very similar way to the original game actually. Each person has a list of the popular terms used in Social Media circles and brings them along to a presentation given by a consultant (or self-professed social media expert, guru, etc.) Then, as the presentation starts, you listen carefully for your chosen words and terms. A prize of your collective choosing then goes to the person first to shout out “Bingo” at the top of their voice.

Have fun playing the game and let me know how you get on!

Smart phones need smart power

I’ve been off on holiday recently and for most of the time I didn’t use the voice dialling or Internet capabilities of my mobile. The HTC Desire that I exchanged for my 3G iPhone last Summer stayed indoors most of the time, while I mainly spent my days with the family &friends out in the sunshine.

Note: The main reasons for this were that we couldn’t get a signal where we are plus Mrs Sutherland had made it expressly clear that I needed to stop checking the thing all the time (or nasty & painful things would have happened to me). However, there were times when I needed to take my smartphone with me, to use as a compass, GPS, camera, map or (heavens above) for calling someone should an emergency occur… such as when I went mountain biking.

But after only a few hours of light use, my phone would run out of power and I was typically left with a useless oblong weight in my pocket or backpack. Put quite plainly, my smart phone’s battery is the device’s worst feature and probably the key reason why I will change it as soon as I can. Yes, I am aware that I have significantly contributed to its now incredibly short battery life and can either buy a replacement or even another one as backup… but that’s not really the point. The fully-featured and far more powerful laptop I am currently using to type up this blog posting is older than the HTC, it would cost about the same amount to buy (if I had bought the HTC off the shelf and considering it has paid-for Windows Vista installed, compared with the free Google Android OS on the phone, makes the laptop a bargain!), gets daily use and is powered via the mains intermittently and wherever possible. Yet, it is the mobile phone that is now plugged into the only available power socket….

Surely if available battery technology is not sufficient to power the modern smartphone for longer than a typical business day…. then manufacturers really need to look at the ways they can optimise the power usage of the device or be more honest about the longer-term battery life that users can expect.

In short, I really think that these days smart phones now really need smart power ….

Did Twitter Bring Down a Newspaper?

Oh my… a week is a long time in politics and a day is even longer in media, regardless of whether its online, TV or in print!

Yesterday I asked if a new media outcry could hurt the News of the World? And today in a surprise announcement we learn that this Sunday’s edition will be the last, as News International tries to urgent fix a huge hole in the bottom of its boat by sinking the entire ship and not making the then-editor walk the gang plank.

Social Media has gone into overdrive this afternoon, heralding a moral win for online (and in particular Twitter) in bringing down a 168 year old newspaper.

But hang on… was Twitter really solely responsible for the demise of a newspaper by attacking its advertising source in a torrent of Tweets to brand owners and industry figures?

In a word…. No!

Certainly Twitter played a part in getting the upset across but other things in my opinion had a far greater hand, including: Rupert & James Murdoch, traditional & competing media sources and Hugh Grant (yes…. the actor who was exposed by News of the World employee Paul McMullan, but then subsequently turned investigative journalist himself, bugged McMullan and in April publish his findings in The New Statesman).

But in my mind it wasn’t really any of these that finally brought about the end of a Sunday tabloid that was untimately known far more for its star-snooping ‘exclusives’ than for real journalism….. it was the paper itself with its now-exposed immoral and illegal activities.

Good riddance I say……

Could a new media outcry hurt the News Of The World?

Unless you’ve been living under a stone the last few day, or only read the front pages of certain News International newspapers, then you will no doubt know that there’s been a complete outcry at the activities of the sleazy UK Sunday newspaper the News Of The World. The moral outrage has taken place between people in true ‘word of mouth’ (e.g. over the breakfast table) style as well as in the traditional media (TV, Radio and non-New International papers).

However, new media has definitely played its part in communicating just how horrified normal people are at the underhand activities of a weekend tabloid (that seems to have more snooping resources than Mossad or MI6).
Today a sustained online campaign brought Twitter to life in a way I haven’t seen since the Royal Wedding back in April . However this action didn’t target the newspaper itself (for it seems to be in some turmoil as a consequence of an outwardly-facing PR melt-down and an internal & parliamentary witch-hunt for the head of the ex-editor and now Chief Exec of News International, Rebekah Brooks ), no this Twitter campaign went for the life-blood of the newspaper… it advertising revenue, by asking the brands that advertise in the paper to reconsider their budgets in the wake of the recent scandal.

Only time will tell if this action has any effect

The decline of Facebook?

“All good things must come to an end” goes the phrase, but is the beginning of the end up for Facebook?

I’ve currently no hard statistics to back up my claim, but I suspect we are now seeing the peak in Facebook’s: domination, user numbers and therefore its hugely-overated potential market valuation.
Why do I say this? Well, for two reasons:

1. Twitter
What started off as an also-run to Facebook as a way of connecting everyone is now turning out to be an increasingly-popular communication tool. For me it has replaced SMS for a lot of my messaging needs and now is the first social media platform I check before I get out of bed in the mornings (and indeed the only one I consume until the car radio goes on as I drive off to client offices).

2. Google Plus
Let’s face it, it took a while for Google to get there and indeed a lot of people (including me) still don’t have access to it… as it is still in ‘limited field trial’. However, if the Demo (http://www.google.com/+/demo/) is some indication, then further attention will be quickly drawn away from Facebook to Google Plus.

And where will this leave Facebook… well only time will tell and I wouldn’t start drawing any comparisons with MySpace just yet (at least not until everyone who requested access has tried and complained about Google Plus).

How Google Plus can gain ubiquity

Following on from my earlier posting on Google’s introduction of Google Plus, I was taking along a further understanding of its potential thanks to the comments by my old friend Boudewijn.

His comment below really struck a chord with me:

If they'd make something that has the wow-factor of wave, would focus on cellphone users, and that would enable commerce without pushing it in the face of the casual user... then we'd have a winner.

And he's right (in my opinion). If Google were to develop their new Google Plus social networking platform to be ubiquitous to the ever-growing mobile internet population and to incorporate payment functionality... such as their Google Shopping Cart product, then they may be able to take on the might of Facebook as the default social platform for posting, sharing and interacting with friends and other contacts.

Without that ubiquity, Google Plus could just be another social media also-ran.