API's with everything

If you work in and around any sort of company that is undergoing a digital transformation, you will almost certainly hear the term "API".

Short for Application Programming Interface, put simply it provides a way for one system to be used by another in an agreed way. In other words, you can run some specific functionality or process elsewhere (e.g. within you organisation or across the Internet) via a set of published instructions.

APIs aren't a particularly new idea (I've been working with them since the 1990s), but they have grown in prominence and usage as other technologies and approaches such as Digital and SaaS (software as a service) have become more popular. It is therefore very likely that at some point or another most large organisations will have built APIs for their customers, or for their internal use.

Some  might therefore possibly state that we have currently "reached peak API use"... were it not for the likelihood that API development and adoption is set to increase further as more companies look to standardise and expand their digital integration capabilities.

It is also one of the reason's I called our company "Ideal Interface".

API granularity

Deciding how to design a digital architecture that provides optimum agility and scale-ability for your organisation is a challenge for many architects in the midst of a digital transformation. Deciding if you should use APIs in your integration layer is perhaps much less of a dilemma (hint: of course you must). But then working out how to design those APIs and the services behind them can be a new problem to solve.

I think this is an especially important decision, as it is quite hard to undo an architectural choice. Issues, can subsequently occur such as:

• performance bottlenecks (e.g. from too course a design)
• too much 'chatter' (e.g. from too granular a design) 
• the inclusion of too much (any?) business logic

All of which could have major implications in the future.

An agile mindset is not optional

Agile seems to be one of the most over-used words in business these days. For example:

Agile development 

Agile marketing

Agile architecture too ;-)

Done well, agile can produce prototypes and products very quickly and efficiently.

Done badly it can be an excuse for reducing the amount of time to create quality software or as a justification for only delivering partial functionality (for all of the budget).

Overall though... agility is a mindset, a way that organisations approach the task of creating value or improving the processes and products they have. And those that do not apply agility to their core will find they are not able to respond quickly or well enough to an increasingly swift competitive environment.

Or put another way.. which company wants to states as their vision or values that they want to be less reactive and more long-winded?

The Agile Architect

The technical or solution architect who has to align to an agile delivery methodology has a lot on their plate. In fact I have even recently written a post on The Agile Architect's Dilemma on Linkedin about the internal tug-of-war I am having between my agile and architectural approaches.

3 key areas they have to consider are:

Scale-ability / Scaleability:
To a certain extent this issue has become less of an issue with cloud-based services that have elastic capabilities to grown on-demand a volumes increase. However bottlenecks and latency can create problems, especially when using multiple different cloud providers or when API's are large & painfully slow. In short, not everything scales easily or linearly.

Micro-services / Microservices:
Rather than have monolithic points of integration (e.g. the above mentioned large APIs) the services that connect your different systems should be light and just based around specific functions. These micro-services allow incremental change and improvements to be made over time and better supports evolving front-end user experience requirements too.

Central data source:
Almost inevitably a digital architecture will need to store data in a single and centrally-hosted data source (e.g. a database). This repository of customer and operational data will need to be flexible enough to accommodate growing changes in storage and real-time data access requirements. However, no database (especially optimised relational database systems) can be expected to constantly change as the input and output demands of an agile development change too.

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?