Customer Data Platform - Some Key Requirements

There's a growing trend in the digital industry to create or use Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). I will be hopefully covering this technical solution in future posts. However in the meantime iIf you are looking to implement one, here are some key (technical) requirements to consider:

• It provides a central unified customer data repository
• It allow simple / easy integration from a range of different data sources
• It supports a decoupled digital architecture, ideally via web services architecture
• It is able to elastically scale as demand and integration needs grow
• It is is resilient e.g. it provides fail-over (cold or warm) to separate disaster recover locations

The 7 myths of Search Engine Optimisation - Part 2

Part 2? Have you read Part 1 first?

Here's the second part of my post on the myths of SEO:

SEO can be done once and then stopped (even if you’re top ranked)
I can imagine many people reading this are saying to themselves.. “Hayden, you’re an SEO consultant. Of course, you’re going to tell us that you’re still needed once you’ve done your job”. However (with some poetic license and a very high-level perspective) there are only 4 factors that affect a website’s organic positions:

1. What goes into creating it
2. What other sites link to it
3. What changes the search engines make
4. What your competition (or their SEO agency) does 

Each of these could change on a daily basis. You only have some control over the first item (the content, code and other technical things), a little control over who links to you and then no control over the third and fourth factors.

Or more succinctly put… whatever search engine ranking position you have today (and yes, even if you have managed to get to the top) may not be the one you have tomorrow. And with no effort devoted to maintaining what you have achieved, it is increasingly likely that you will drop in the rankings just as quickly as you rose.


Ranking is the same for all users in all locations
There used to be a time (a long while ago) where you only got one set of global results from a search engine. Then things improved and now, even for the same brand of search engine (Google, Bing, etc.) you get different results if you are:
- In a different country
- In a different town
- Logged in to your Google account
- On a different device – see below
Note: This does make life difficult for SEO people who have to tell clients “I know you think you’re not on the first page, but you are on my device” or vice-versa.


Desktop and Mobile versions of Search Engines rank sites the same
No. They. Don’t!
And now… if you think you’re able to get away with creating a responsive website that shows just the same heavy images in desktop view and in mobile view, but just scaled down using the browser… as of this month, you’re probably going to get a surprise.


SEO is a ‘black art’ practiced by techies
Sure, there is a certain amount of technical optimisation that must now go in to any organic improvement piece of work. But there’s loads you can do as part of your marketing or PR day job for SEO.
1. Write articles you want to read & share, on topics relevant to terms you want to place for in the search engines
2. Structure your content to make it scan-able, readable and understandable.
3. Ask for links back to your website from partners, suppliers, journalists, etc.
4. And finally, stop believing in SEO myths

The 7 myths of Search Engine Optimisation - Part 1

Recently I had to give a presentation on Digital Marketing to a client. One of the key slides we focused was on the topic of “SEO Myths”.

I have therefore decided to write these myths up a post for others to add to and discuss.

Reaching 1st position in Google is the only aim of SEO
This is wrong advice in a couple of key areas:

1. What terms are you actually focusing on? If you’re either striving for a top place ranking on an obscure term or alternatively trying to be top for everything… think again. You should be looking at those terms that meet your KPI’s (e.g. deliver conversions) and have enough search volume to justify the effort of attempting to reach first place
2. Sometimes 2nd (or 3rd, etc.) place is good enough. If you’re targeting a popular search term and have reached the first page in Google, but there are bigger, more reputable and faster sites above you, you might be content with that (especially if it gets you decent & quality traffic)

A single teenager in a bedroom can out-smart Google
You still hear this sort of phrase spoken by people in the marketing industry “I know a genius, they have worked out how to ‘beat’ Google and get my sites to number one”. And each time… I feel myself suppressing a small scream. Why?

1. Just one person (who does not work at Google) who has only amassed knowledge from reading books, blogs and other such material on the subject of SEO knows everything on the subject.
2. Google hires offices full of very (very) clever people… many of whom have PHD’s and such qualifications, to constantly revise their search algorithms and the influence of different ranking factors. And even most of them don’t know everything on the subject.
3. You never ‘beat’ Google. It’s not a fight or a race… SEO is both an art and a science to getting your website legitimately up the rankings of the most popular western search engine.
   (and even if you temporarily manage to boost your rankings via less-than-legitimate means... there's a chance you'll get found out)

You can ignore SEO by just creating good content
OK, yes the creation of well written content helps SEO. But that content must also be:

• Relevant: Or else you’re just producing off-topic copy that serves no optimisation purpose 
• Structured: If you’re not adding layout, headings, bullet points, etc. then you’re not producing content, you’re just typing. 
• Linked: Are you creating lots of ‘orphaned’ pages to drop visitors into from other campaigns such as email PPC, etc.? Please don’t!

What's in a name?

"So why did you name your company Ideal Interface?" is a question I have heard quite a lot in the 11 years since it was founded.

This article may explain:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ideal-interface-hayden-sutherland/

Digital Architecture fundamentals

As part of a recent project, I was asked to come up with some architecture fundamentals of a digital system (not just a one application system, but a more complex and integrated solution assumed to be for a larger organisation).

Here’s my list:

• The architecture of a system or integrated systems needs to align to (or fit into) the overall ‘As-Is’ and ‘To-Be’ enterprise architecture of your organisation.
  
• Those creating the architecture need to first understand the business goals (e.g. the customer experience and commercial aims) and the major applications that ‘the business’ are likely to need in the medium term or have signed longer-term contracts with.
  
• A loosely coupled architecture provides the flexibility to use best-of-breed solutions from a range of vendors. The opposite is that either through design or legacy system adoption, your architecture shackled to one key supplier who is then possibly also integrated directly to multiple other systems… this obviously creates a dependency upon this key supplier, making them harder to subsequent remove and replace. Adopting a loosely coupled architecture also means you are not tied to specific front-end software, allowing your organisation the flexibility to either buy or build (typically using agile product & developers) to create the best user experience possible.
  
• Where possible, create a single in-house database, that can be updated by any other integrated systems… ideally in real-time. You don’t have to store all data that exists in every other integrated systems in this central repository, just those that you may need to align other data to at some point in the future.
  Note: It is possible that this service could also be provided as another integrated system, but for overall speed, agility and ultimately data ownership you may find it best that this database sits within the boundary of your main architecture. However, this does come with additional considerations: there is an overhead in managing and administrating a significantly large database, plus the data model used needs to be sufficiently flexible and scale-able to handle a variety of requirements over time.

Can your site cope with sale volumes?

Right now the Marks & Spencer website is saying it is unavailable.

The M&S sale has started today. But it is not even possible to look (let alone buy) their products online.

Digital Agility Needs A Digital Core

The ability of any organisation to remain flexible and adaptable to changes in market conditions, improvements in technology and evolving customer needs is now becoming essential. Outdated business models, approaches and products & services no longer keep a company competitive and ultimately successful.

Having the ability to swiftly deliver and manage rich online experiences and digital functionality across multiple channels and touch-points is almost mandatory now.  But this requires a core digital core architecture that allows Information Technology providers (either in-house or as vendors) to respond quicker and quicker.

Note: It also requires a change in the organisation's mindset

Large-scale agile creates new dependency issues

Organisations moving to a more digital-led model typically adopt and use agile development techniques. This move is usually coupled with a significant technology migration to cloud-based services. All this large-scale digital transformation change brings some new challenges to dependency management.

Agile development teams delivering this change can be organized to minimise dependencies, plus the agile process itself provides significant support for mitigating dependencies within teams (e.g. co-location, face-to-face meetings, etc.). However any large scale technology change will create unavoidable wider dependencies across teams/projects/programmes and the coordination of these dependencies can create new challenges, especially when:

1. Different teams/projects can have conflicting priorities
2. Multiple teams/projects have different sprint & release cycles 
3. Backlogs and priorities change quickly

Hopefully I will get around to explaining the best way to improve this....

Basic blogging guide for SEO

I sometimes get asked by clients for a quick guide on how to create blog posts that help with website Search Engine Optimisation. 

So here is a very quick guide to writing blog posts for SEO:

• Create blog posts regularly (one per week is better than 3 in one week & non for the next two)
• Create one post for each subject (e.g. one keyword / search term) as prioritised in your keyword strategy* 
• Write approx 300 words (if many more are written, consider dividing the post into two or more)
• Write normally and don't worry about 'old school' keyword stuffing
• Title = approx 55 characters
• Meta Description =  approx 155 characters (but we are seeing examples where this can be up to 300 characters for some clients now)
• Meta Keywords = [ignore these, most search engines do too]
• Analyse the traffic to each blog post (where this traffic comes from, bounce rate, conversions generated, etc.)
• Do more of what work and do less of what doesn't

*What do you mean you don't have a keyword strategy?

Digital Transformation Isn't Going Away

"So, what is next after digital transformation?" I was asked the other day.

"Nothing" I replied. "Just more digital transformation"

What does it mean to be a digital strategist?

When people ask what I do, I usually give the reply "I am a Digital Strategist". 

(Although my 6 year old son says that "Daddy helps people with the Internet" - which is probably an even better response).

But explaining this role further really means you have to describe the current state of business and technology, which are now are merging closer than ever before. The digital and physical worlds are rapidly blurring, so that in many cases they are the same thing and nearly everything in business is now software). 

To keep pace this this change organisations are embarking upon transformation projects to help them stay relevant in a digital-first world and to be able to quickly adapt to constantly evolving customer needs and market demands. I therefore firmly believe it as the role of the digital strategist to help these companies onto and along this transformation journey.

So what does a digital strategist do day-to-day?

Consult:
This could mean you carry out market assessment, benchmark competitors, analyse existing business processes & capabilities (and provide suggestions for new ones) and help with the selection of other marketing and technology platforms & partners. In short, you provide senior level recommendations and clear actionable advice based upon real experience and first-hand knowledge of how digital can help businesses overcome their challenges, without creating new ones.

Bring about change:
From helping to provide the initial roadmap and requirements, facilitating the creation of more positive user experiences, through to actually delivering and managing the migration to new systems and ways-of-working, clients can need assistance at any point in the life-cycle of a change to more digital and customer-centric processes.

Have a passion for digital
Whether in your spare (spare??) time you attend tor get involved in technology meet-ups, build mobile apps, blog about the latest digital innovations or just read about online practices...  you tend to find that digital is not just a job or a role, but a way of life that you believe can make real improvements in a constantly changing landscape.

Oh the irony

Facebook is buying print ads to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica scandal

https://qz.com/1236981/facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-buy-newspaper-ads-to-say-sorry/

<insert punchline here>

Digital Transformation needs a mindset change

I believe that digital technologies are changing every industry. Or to put it another way, I've yet to meet one that remains unaffected. And therefore companies have quite rightly identified the need to reinvent their business models, products and approaches to just survive in an environment that is changing faster and faster each day.

Therefore just meeting the digital challenge (let alone trying to innovate ahead of it) means creating new ways to solve industry-wide problems in new ways... often with software rather than physical objects.

In other words.... organisations  now need to change their way of thinking as well as completely amend their investment in new technology, business models, and processes.

In my view this is the way they can truly create the most value for their customers (and employees) and therefore compete better in an ever-changing digital economy.

But just changing the skills needed for digital transformation isn't enough.

Forget advanced SEO fix the basics first

I had a prospective client approach me the other day about conducting what they called "advanced SEO tactics" for their site.

They had obviously read some SEO blogs and thought they needed to apply some clever technical (and in some regards... slightly dodgy / grey hat) practices in the belief that this would instantly give them a boost in their organic rankings.

Now its kinda hard to tell a client "no" who is keen on learning all about digital marketing, especially when their heart is in the right place. But in this instance the client hadn't implemented some pretty basic 'white hat' SEO techniques already, such as:

1. Creating an XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) that updates regularly (e.g. daily) 
2. Optimising all page titles
3. Optimising all page meta descriptions*

*yes, I know that meta descriptions are not a direct SEO ranking signal for the main search engines and I hope by now you have deleted your meta keywords!

However I firmly believe that fixing and optimising these on-page factors.. allied with a decent approach to content creation, will have more of a long-term & quality improvement upon a site's rankings than the latest technical SEO ideas.

Do you live in the 'Bot-infested Badlands' ?

News Corp announced last week revenues of $2.18bn for the last 3 months of 2017. But aside from the 3% year-on-year improvement, the biggest headline grabbing phrase was reserved for CEO Robert Thomson describing the dysfunctional digital environment as "The bot-infested badlands".

This is clearly him positioning his brands as the quality online publishers and the opposite of the digital locations that are "hardly a safe space for advertisers, whose brands are being tainted by association with the extreme, the violent and the repulsive".

https://newscorpcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/q2-2018-press-release_final_02-08-2018-1230pm.pdf

Define your Content Strategy

You hear the term banded about a lot these days, from PR companies through to senior managers in businesses... they all want to have and own your organisation's Content Strategy.

But what's your definition of the term Content Strategy?

Here's mine:

"A Content Strategy should aim for the creation of engaging and appropriate content that delivers improvements in the agreed Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)"


Those KPI's most often being:
- Increase online visitors & sessions
- Increase online engagement (most likely reported as a reduction in page bounce rates)
- Convert lookers to bookers (or into whatever your main commercial goal is)

What's yours?

The Four Technical Pillars of Digital Transformation

There's no doubting that the path to successful Digital Transformation involves changes to: people (e.g.skills), processes, products (e.g. the creation or improvement of customer facing software) and proposition. The temptation is therefore to assume the technology will just "sort itself out" without an investment in thought, effort and finances. 

So what technology is now supporting the transformation to digital?

Here's my top 4:

The move to cloud

The use of online cloud-based services such as Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) means that issues such as the hosting and the scaling of digital platforms becomes an on-demand Operational Expenditure (Opex) rather than a Capital Expenditure (CapEx) cost. With this high cost barrier now radically changed (as we create a shift from one column to the other on the Finance Department's spreadsheet), this means that demand and growth of online services are easier to deal with.

The digitisation of services
The conversion of the physical into software has been happening for some while. We've had digital media players and MP3 collections for many years now and you only have to look at how many of our daily tools are on our mobile devices, including: cameras, credit cards, health meters, maps, messengers and travel tickets. Now, with increased processing capability everywhere, what else can now move from being tangible to tap-able?

The creation and use of APIs

Organisations increasingly want simpler user interfaces that present and collate functionality and content from multiple systems behind the scenes. Your users don't care if your systems are having to pull together multiple source of data to present their online information in the way they want it, if you don't they will get frustrated (and consequently look to go elsewhere). Building Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for each software system  enables this flexibility by providing the means for others to remotely invoke your applications functionality in a system-to-system way.

The adoption of DevOps

As the speed and complexity of digital delivery increases, companies realise they must integrate software development and IT operations. DevOps is the newer approach to this, where continual deployment becomes the norm and the ability of your tech team evolves form just being able to create stable code, to also deploying this code to a stable managed (typically cloud) environment.

Stop thinking Digital Transformation is just a bolt-on

Enough!

The next person I hear who states that "we are using online as just another retail / communications channel" or something similar is:

1. either getting a piece of my mind

or

2. a clip around the ear

You don't "just do digital" by bolting it onto your tired and outdated business processes that your company probably inherited from the 1950s. 

Yes digital is set of technology driven  business changes that you either implement or you more than likely fall behind. But just hiring a decent technology team to add something to your current ways of working just isn't going to cut it!

Murdoch upset with Facebook again

The billionaire publisher is once more annoyed at Facebook for making money promoting newspapers' content.
So unsurprisingly he demands even more money.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/22/rupert-murdoch-facebook-should-pay-news-publishers

“If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies,” 

Mobile Page Speed, SEO and AMP

You may have heard about it, but Google announced yesterday that:
"starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html

So how does this affect Mobile Search Engine Optimisation?
Well... Firstly don't panic. Website speed is already a ranking signal for desktop search and following yesterday's announcement this signal will now come into effect for mobile sites in July.
So even though Google is almost certainly tracking page speed already, it will not have an effect in the SERPs until later this year, so you do have 6 months to make changes to your site.

How does this affect AMP?
The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an open-source initiative to improve the performance of web content on mobile devices. They are useful lightweight versions of your web pages that are hosted elsewhere (not on your own website) for speed, which in-turn improves their changes of being downloaded and read. However there is no direct link (yet) between Google's mobile organic rankings and AMP, plus there is no organic site penalty for not having it.
But even though the two things are separate, they can work together to get more website traffic and therefore conversions. This is because AMP can have their content displayed in a carousel at the top of the Search Engine Results SERPs. And therefore, even without PPC AdWords appearing, both AMP and organic search ranking of pages can push your content to the top of the search results in your mobile browser.
Note: We are also seeing the content/layout and even the appearance of this carousel change in the SERPS over time and location, so its display there should not be guaranteed.

What can I do about it?
Therefore we recommend to all clients and the wider online community that:

• Site owners minimise all page weight wherever possible (e.g. reduce the use of scrips and keep images to the lowest size possible - one client website has a strict policy that no image must be greater than 200k)
• AMP is considered a technology on websites that have content that does not dynamically change all the time (e.g. it is not advisable for eCommerce or fast-moving information sites).
• If you are in doubt... ask your SEO consultant.