Digital Diary

Amazon looks to users to socially-share their purchases

2011-11-11T08:28:00.001-08:00

OK, I downloaded Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar" covered by Pixie Lott. Don't shoot me.

But what was more interesting was the fact that Amazon now allows me to share my purchase across Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.

This is the kind of retail social sharing that sites such as Blippy have built a business model around. Blippy is now known as the "Twitter of personal finance", facilitating discussion and comparison-shopping amongst its user base.

Amazon has been a pioneer in creating social content within the Amazon platform itself through user-based product reviews & customer discussions. However this new move allows Amazon to push content out into the establshed social networks. And there are two key benefits.

The obvious one is greater brand visibility on Facebook/Twitter through increased social interactions. But the second relates to search engine optimisation as social content becomes increasingly indexed and important to search algorithms.

I'm still not convinced that consumers want to share all their purchases socially - but we'll see.

And the Pixie Lott single was free. Not that I am looking for an excuse, you know.

Twitter's new Activity feed

2011-11-10T05:55:00.001-08:00

Today Twitter launched a new Facebook-style 'Activity' tab where users can view a stream of their followers' recent Twitter action. So you can see who your followers have recently followed, who they have added to lists, or what tweets they have added to their favourites.

Additionally, the 'Mentions' tab has been replaced by a "@username" tab. Here users can see an activity stream of those people who have retweeted, mentioned or followed them.

The Activity tab is a neat feature that gives users a better sense of what's going on in their follower community. No doubt it's designed to ensure continued follower-growth, but it will be most useful for brands & businesses. It will give brands extra reach because every time they are followed the 'Activity' tab allows a much wider audience to be exposed to that brand interaction and to potentially follow that brand themselves.

A beginner's guide to 4G mobile services

2011-09-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

4G is the name for the next (4th) generation of mobile services that are likely to be heading our way in 2013 and 2014.

But what are these new standards and what do they mean for consumers?

Well, first and foremost, 4G will mean much faster internet connections for our mobile and wireless devices. Initially, users will be getting mobile internet speeds that will be comparable with current home broadband speeds (from 1Mbps up to 12Mbs) but, ultimately, 4G will reach speeds of up to 100Mbps.

This will mean that users will be able to download all types of multimedia content on-the-move: from playing on-line video games, downloading movies (and other large data files) and watching streaming high-definition video content.

The international standards are still being agreed for 4G, but currently there are three different protocols in the mix. These are: WiMAX, LTE & HSPA+.

1. WiMAX
WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It uses microwave technology to create a network of hotspots (very much like WiFi hotspots) that overlap to minimise black-spots/areas without a signal. However, because it uses microwaves it has much less interference than WiFi and the range of each WiMAX transmitter can be up to 30miles.

In the US, the carrier Sprint is using WiMAX technology for its 4G services offering download speeds of up to 128Mbps.

2. LTE
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is a competitor standard to WiMAX. It uses radio waves and has been described as more of a 'successor' to the current GSM-based (Global System for Mobile communications) 3G mobile phone networks that we're all used to. It's called Long Term Evolution as it has been seen as the evolution of both land-line & wireless internet connections.

Verizon's 4G service (again in the US) is based on LTE offering data transfer speeds of up to 100Mbps.

3. HSPA+
This stands for Evolved High-Speed Packet Access. In essence this is an extension of the current 3G technology - and so has been dubbed near-4G. However it's not really a new 4th generation standard.

Now it's argued that the 'battle' between WiMAX and LTE is not really a battle of completely different standards. Being based on the same OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) there may be opportunities for interoperability between the two systems. And that would be a good thing from a user perspective - as the last thing users want is the 'gamble' of choosing one technology over another - only to be left backing the wrong horse.

However, as we've seen before with standards - these tend to get branded and badged (think Blu-ray vs HD-DVD) and, ultimately, consumers will select the handsets & tariffs that offer the most from these differing technologies.

The biggest issue will be the speed that the mobile and technology companies roll-out the infrastructure to support 4G. In the UK the mobile operators are still paying off the £21bn they spent on 3G licences and so are have been slow in moving towards 4G. Other countries, however, such as the US and Russia.are already rolling out services.

There's no doubt that wireless internet is the future of an 'always connected' society. 4G will bring the speeds that we're familiar with at home and will mean the creation of new services and business models that weren't previously possible.

Facebook introduces Smart Lists to compete with Google+ Circles

2011-09-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed when logging into Facebook recently that it's added functionality to the way that users can update their Status. The Status box now includes options for location, friends names and additional control over which friends get to see different status updates. Now some of this functionality was already available on Facebook - but this revision to the Status box makes it easier to control these features.

Additionally, Mashable this week also revealed some screen shots of Facebook's new Smart Lists. This will automatically group friends into one of three categories: 'work colleagues', 'old classmates' and those 'that live within 50 miles' of you. This is intended to mirror the Google+ Circles so that the user can more easily choose how to share information with different groups of contacts.

Users will still be able to create custom lists using an updated Friends List tool (see below).

Smart Lists are is currently limited to select users prior to its roll-out.

Facebook switches on new facial recognition software

2011-07-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Anyone uploading a number of photos with friends in them may have noticed the new "Tag Suggestions" system from Facebook. It uses facial recognition software to identify people's faces within your photographs as the photos are uploaded. It then groups the faces it recognises as the same and even suggests a person's name if they are a friend. It's really quite eerie.

As always there has been a great degree of controversy about this - but it looks like Facebook has silently rolled this out after an initial trial in the US. Once again users are opted-in to the feature automatically - but this setting can be changes within privacy settings.

It’s the utility, stupid

2011-07-18T01:26:00.000-07:00

Article first published as It's the Utility Stupid on Technorati.

Google+ is not a ‘product’ apparently. It’s still a ‘project’. And it’s out in what looks to be a limitedbeta release as ‘Field Trial’ – but which feels more like a ‘throttled release’as new users can then start to pass invites on.

Google clearly feels that this is all a work in progress.

However, it doesn’t feel like work in progress. It has hit10m users in a few short weeks making it one of the fastest growing networklaunches ever, according to Mashable.The interface is clean and slick – and Circles makes the concept of ‘groups’easy to implement and manage. Even the animationwhen you add a friend or contact to a group is a great little piece ofinteractive design.

And there are other features not found elsewhere. ‘Sparks’ looks like it could build into apowerful content recommendation engine, especially once Google+ gainsscale. It also provides a good benefit forusers to actually ‘Google +1’ content they find or that their friends maylike. It could also be strongopportunity to monetise the platform as brands looks to promote their owncontent.

‘Hangout’s are fundamentally video chat (though trying toget that to actually work is a little tricky) – and Facebook’s video chat viaSkype looks like it could trump that feature right off the bat.

And I suppose that’s the problem with Google+ so far. There’s no killer feature. There’s no compelling reason why this shouldbe my new social network of choice – no reason to give up Facebook. And I don’t need yet another network in mylife.

Even Google’s own FAQs include the question “Why don’t youhave killer feature X?”.

So far, I wager that a large proportion of Google+’s growth hasbeen driven by its limited access and exclusivity.

It’s the power of scarcity.

Everyone in the digerati wanted an invite and the power tosend invites. How many of Facebook’sNews Feed updates were posted from Google+ - just to demonstrate one’s own personalsense of digital status?

But where’s Google+’s utility? Where does it add value to mylife that no other platform does? Facebook created that social utility byconnecting people with their friends - and it became the dominant socialnetwork by doing that better than anyone else. And it continuously evolved functionality that was useful: from pokes, picturetagging, status updates to Like’s, Fan pages and Facebook plug-ins.

However, Facebook needs to continue being useful. As Mark Choueke says in Marketing Week, unlessit continues to evolve its utility, people will start to drift away from theconstant wall of trivial personal updates and stilted brand updates. (I’m really not sure I can take another brandasking what I am up to for the weekend, each Friday afternoon).

There is some interesting data that shows that although Facebookis growing globally, in some more mature markets Facebook is seeing adecline. For example in the US(according to Inside Facebook) it lost 6 million users during May this year andin Canada it lost 8% of users (1.52million out of its 16.6m base).

And this trend is mirrored in the UK. According to Hitwise,Facebook has also seen a declining market share losing ground to both Twitterand YouTube.

Now, of course, this doesn’t for a second mean that this iseven the beginning of the end for Facebook.

But it does demonstrate the need to keep things fresh and,most importantly, useful. It will beinteresting to see how Facebook’s Skype partnership adds to its utility and howGoogle+ intends to create some significant space between it and Facebook.

Facebook's new messaging sidebar

2011-07-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

Looks like Facebook is rolling out its new messaging toolbar. Now only the centre of the page scrolls down - so users can move down through the News Feed etc but their side menu (on the left) and messaging sidebar (on the right) remain static. The sidebar can be hidden -- but allows quick access to friends for messaging (including the new video call options). Looks like inter-friend messaging is Facebook's new push.

Spotify uses Klout Perks as part of social influencer strategy

2011-07-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

Spotify's much trailed launch in the US this week is being supported by a great promotional partnership with Klout, the social media scoring site. Klout has been using its "Perks" as a means of monetising its highly socially-engaged user base.

Nice to see a clear "Influencer Code of Ethics" too:

Klout will never sell or give away your contact info.
Participating (or not participating) will not change your Klout Score.
You are receiving the perk because you are influential and have authority on topics related to the perk. You are welcome to tell the world you love the perk, you dislike the perk or say nothing at all.
If you decide to talk about the perk, we will ask you to disclose that you received a sample(klout.com/perks/disclosure).

It's a good win-win. The Klout user base gets special access to products, movies or services and brands that pay for this get access to a potentially influential group of consumers.

Mashable's Google+ conversation driver

2011-07-15T05:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a really nice example from Mashable of pushing its presence on Google+ from its main website. Simple and effective.

Windows 8 points to convergence of gesture driven interfaces

2011-06-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

This month's sneak peeks at Windows 8 showcase an gesture driven interface more in keeping with smartphone and tablets.

It takes it lead from Window Phone 7's Metro UI and points the way for the ultimate integration of operating systems across mobile, tablet and desk/laptop computing devices.

Windows 8 will run two types of application: traditional desktop applications (such as Office) and more tablet/mobile-based apps that use HTML5 & Javascript.

The big implication for web designers will be the need to re-think website user-interfaces to improve the user experience for gestures-driven interactions. Anyone who's used a smartphone/tablet interface to browse websites will already have seen the difficulties.

A great introduction to Windows 8 can be seen below:

Twitter's Facebook-style pages

2011-04-05T04:37:00.000-07:00

Today Twitter announced that it's considering launching Facebook-style pages.

There's a two-fold danger.

The first is whether the strive for additional revenue streams means that Twitter starts to betray it's raison d'etre. How will Twitter pages fit with its 140 character proposition?

Secondly, Twitter pages start to become yet another property that brands feel compelled to get involved with - another platform to keep up to date and spend money on - without necessarily having thought through their objectives for them as another social media channel.

Twitter pages could easily become a brand solution in search of a brand problem.

Apple will make NFC mass market with iPhone 5

2011-04-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

There has been endless speculation on both the launch date (mid year, end of year?) and features of the next generation iPhone (bigger screen?, better camera?, Sony's involvement?, better resolution?, no home button?, different design?). But one thing that appears to be pretty certain (well, 80% likely according to Mashable yesterday and Forbes last month) and that's the fact that iPhone 5 will be equipped with NFC technology.

NFC (near-field-communication) is a set of short-range wireless technologies that will allow mobile/handheld devices to communicate over very short distances (ie a couple of centimetres). This has a great variety of uses - most importantly - allowing the mobile phone to be used as a payment card. Users simply swipe their mobile device over a special reader in-store (in much the same way as an Oyster card or some recent credit/debit card contactless payment systems). Ultimately, the mobile phone will become a new 'digital wallet' alleviating the need to carry multiple payment or loyalty cards.

NFC is already baked-in to the new version of the Android operating system, Gingerbread, and last December Google launched the world's first NFC enabled phone, the Nexus S. But despite the fact that NFC is already here it will be Apple's entrance into NFC technology that will make it mainstream.

Why?

Because Apple understands how to sell the benefit of technology not simply its features. The launch of the iPod is the perfect example of this. Of course other MP3 players existed beforehand - but iPod effectively made digital music downloads something that people could understand and, most importantly, see the benefit in doing. And they combined the technology with the fantastic delivery channel that is iTunes.

And so with NFC, where one of the original barriers to its adoption was the lack of a clear technical standard for NFC itself. However, recently a number of US network providers (Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T) have signed-up to the Isis NFC standard. This means that as Isis becomes the industry standard the largest barrier remains encouraging payment issuers & retailers to adopt NFC.

This is the kind of deals that brands such as Samsung and Visa are doing. They announced at the end of March that they will provide NFC payment services for the 2012 Olympics.

And this no doubt will be the focus of Apple's key partnership conversations over the next few months.

Photos via
Image credit
MacRumors

Google's '+1' Catch 22

2011-03-31T04:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Plus One. This will allow Google users to recommend sites and share them with friends. Clearly this is their answer to Facebook's ubiquitous 'Like' button. It's yet another foray for Google into social media territory after the disappointments of both Buzz and Wave.

Google's +1 button will be placed on their search results and even on publisher's/content pages. However the key question is how and where that recommendation is shared?

Google have said that initially +1 will only be accessible to a small proportion (c2%) in the US and that logged-in Google users will be able to share their recommendations via Gmail, Good Reader and Buzz.

But that, by default, limits both its appeal and its audience. Apparently a integration with Twitter is on the cards - but Google seem tight lipped about Facebook integration.

And that's the key issue - Facebook has become such a dominant platform that other social media tools need to plug into it to drive scale quickly. Just look at Path one of the newest entrants into the social networking space - they rapidly had to use Facebook integration to spread the word and bring in new users to their platform.

Additionally Facebook's 'Like' function has evolved over the last few years and drives user interaction at a number of levels - creating Fans for pages plus driving content sharing via a user's Newsfeed. Will +1'ing (terrible verb!) really be a useful interaction for a user?

+1 on it's own won't make Google's Buzz a credible social platform, and without a credible social platform what's the point of it?

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi you're the future of TV

2010-11-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

3D TVs may be the next big TV technology for the home, but this week scientists at the University of Arizona have created the first transmission of a "holographic 3-dimensional telepresence". As reported in the FT the system works without the need for awkward 3D glasses.

Often called "Star Wars technology" because of the scene in Star Wars where a message is relayed using a projected 3D image, the new technology captures the 3D image using a number of cameras at different angles.

Key to 3D imaging is the concept of the 'hogel' which is the equivalent of a 3-dimensional pixel. Once the image is captured is is encoded in a fast pulsing lase beam that creates hogels that are displayed on a new type of polymer that allows the image to be viewed from any angle.

The initial test transmissions are of a small monochromatic image that refreshes every 2 seconds - but expect the first holographic sets for home use within the next 7 to 10 years.

Facebook's privacy issues will be its downfall

2010-05-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

Sparked most by some of the changes announced at the Facebook F8 conference the last couple of weeks have seen another flurry of comment and debate on Faceboook's privacy changes.

Search Engine Land recently stumbled across the fact that that typing "how do I" into Google now brings up "how do I delete my Facebook account" as one of the top searches.

They also illustrate the increased search volumes for people wishing to delete their Facebook account.

Andrew Brown's blog on the Guardian website makes the excellent point that if people think that they are Facebook's customers they are very much mistaken. People are Facebook's product and it is the advertisers who constitute Facebook's customers. Now Facebook is a commercial organisation and, in order to maintain a free service for members, there really is only an advertising model at their disposal to generate revenue. I don't think many people would argue with that. The key issue is the way in which member's data and privacy has been eroded over time through numerous privacy changes that been have less-than-transparent to members. What most angers Facebook users is that with each new update the default Facebook privacy settings work in the favour of the advertiser and against the privacy of the user.

Andrew Brown points to a great graphic on The New York Times' website that illustrates the complexity of privacy options that Facebook users now need to navigate through together with the every-lengthening privacy policy itself. Some of these automatic opt-ins appear to contravene UK data protection legislation.

As a result there is a growing interest in alternative social networking models whereby the network's members have greater control of their data. One site receiving some attention is Diaspora. Diaspora defines itself as a privacy aware, personally controlled, distributed open source social network. The development team behind Diaspora are four New York University students. They claim that because social networking has only been around for the latter half of the decade we are yet to fully understand the privacy implications of providing personal information to a central 'hub' (such as Facebook) that then facilitates communications and content between people. Diaspora is different because as a peer-to-peer network each user runs their own 'node' (called a 'Seed') within the Diaspora network. As a result, the user retains ownership and control of their data.
However the fundamental question remains: how will Diaspora make money? Without a subscription or licence fee for users the only realistic option is an advertiser-funded model The temptation for the Diaspora team will surely be the same as currently facing Facebook: how to serve the needs of the advertiser to maximize revenues.

Concerns over privacy issues may well start people rethinking their need for a Facebook account - but whether an alternative model exists remains to be seen.

Diaspora launches this September.

Archiving the web - an update

2010-01-02T05:57:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I looked at some initiatives for keeping a permanent record of information on the internet.

Today the Guardian reports new legal powers being pushed through to allow the British Library and 5 other libraries to copy every free UK-based website in an effort to preserve the cultural content of the web for future generations.

According to the Guardian, about a third of all published work only exists in digital form. The powers to allow the key libraries to copy content were originally established in 2003, but delays in putting this into practice mean that millions of web pages have effectively been 'lost'. Approx 13% of internet references in scholarly articles become inactive after only 27 months.

The new powers would only apply to free UK websites ending with the .uk domain (and the forthcoming .sco and .cym domain for Scotland and Wales). However, the archiving of paid-for and restricted content has been delayed until after this year's election for "legal and technical issues" according to the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge. Certainly the issues relating to paid-for web content, especially around news and will be one of the hot topics for 2010.

The virtual reality web

2009-12-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

There is a raft of developments that may fundamentally change the way in which consumers interact with the internet.

New media commentator Stowe Boyd believes that the next evolution of the web involves some pretty radical steps:

“Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be”

One of the moves away from a document structure focuses on how the web will evolve into a 3-dimensional environment.

The technical limitations of internet speeds previously stifled the growth in more complex visual interaction with the web – but as broadband speeds really start to increase, due to both BT’s migration to digital exchanges and the advent of fibre optics broadband, speeds of up to 100mb/s are only a few years away. And we need to put that into context – only half a decade ago we were still talking about 56k dial-up connections – a 100mb/s connection is 2000 times faster.

And with that will come a richer interactive experience. Second Life is a great pointer of the direction this will take.

But it’s not simply within the world of entertainment and leisure that these environments are being created.

3B is a software company developing the next generation of 3D online experiences. It has developed a platform that enables users to socialise, shop and browse within a 3D environment. One of its current developments is to allow users to create 3D environments for their social networking pages across MySpace, Bebo, MetaCafe, Flickr and YouTube. And it’s just one of many companies looking to establish a more ‘real world’ means of shopping in the comfort of our own homes.

Whilst the majority of online shoppers are now comfortable with the online experience for purchasing music, DVDs and even electrical items, one of the main sectors that’s struggled for growth has been online grocery shopping. This is largely due to the sheer number of different items in different grocery categories needed as part of the weekly shop. The current online experience is extremely flat and rather unusable & clunky. And for FMCG marketers, branding and merchandising is a nightmare – with brands arranged alphabetically in lists.

The advent of 3D will create an in-store environment that we’re all familiar with – store layouts that start with the fresh produce sections and move through to beers/wines & spirits. Each consumer’s store layout could even be customised to match that of their local real-world store so they feel even more familiar with where everything is.

Merchandising and promotional activity in this environment also begins to resemble the real-world process – but with data on the individual consumer and an opportunity to talk to the consumer in a 1-2-1 environment, promotions can be even more compelling and finely targeted.

So, once again, the careful use of consumer data plays a key role in the development of internet.

Facebook mishandles privacy update

2009-12-10T02:54:00.001-08:00

Last week Facebook rolled-out a new set of privacy settings. If you're a Facebook user you can't really have missed it. You were forced to at least review the settings when you logged-in.

It was billed as putting the user in greater control of their data and the information that they share with others, with advertisers and with 3rd party applications.

However, after many months of critical speculation and reassurance that Facebook was taking privacy seriously, it appeared that some of the new default settings automatically made personal information available to more, rather than fewer, people (irrespective of one's previous settings). For example the default setting for member photos and birthdays used to be limited to 'friends' however, the new default setting extends this to 'friends of friends'.

It's not all bad news, however. Where a user wants to review and adjust their privacy settings the new Facebook controls allow customisation of almost every element including what information is shared by applications.

We all understand that Facebook has to evolve its business model. Its core asset is the data it holds on its members. However, the fear now is that to drive advertising growth it will start to push members into sharing more than they want (or more than they thought they had shared) simply because most users simply won't want to spend the time adjusting complicated settings, or they simply don't understand the implications.

However, as both behavioural targetting and social search become the new battlegrounds for both social networking sites and the major search engines - understanding what personal information is accessible by whom will become increasingly important.

The semantic web: the internet as a global database

2009-12-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

More and more data on the internet is being published in reusable and remotely queryable formats. Some of us may be familiar with XML which is way of structuring data so it can be interpreted by a variety of different applications and devices – for example RSS feeds are specified using XML

To make this really clear – here is an example:

We all have a common understanding of the concept of “a book”. We understand that are several elements to a book: it has an author, a publisher, a title and so on. So we have a common shared frame of reference for how we define a book.

However to a computer the concept of ‘a book’ is meaningless. What structured data formats such as XML do is to allow for the creation of common definitions so that, say, within the publishing industry information can be specified in the same way and shared easily between companies. So in the XML world a book can actually be defined as having a title, author, ISBN number, publisher etc. so that different computer systems and applications all ‘understand’ the definition of a book – and can then manipulate that data with a common frame of reference.

What this then means is that intelligent agents or spiders (essentially programs that crawl the web) can scan different websites, gather data and make valid comparisons. This is how price comparison sites such as Kelkoo and Confused.com work.

The next evolution of this is called the Semantic Web. “Semantics” is about the meanings of things and the Semantic web is described as a state of the internet where computers can not only recognise and compare structured data – but be able to actually understand how different pieces of information relate to each other.

“The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z)…and the properties of things (like size, weight, age and price)” (source w3schools.com)

This moves us towards the vision of the web originally envisaged by its creator Tim Berners-Lee as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange.

Back in 1999 he said:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize”

And even though a statement made a decade ago appears prehistoric by today’s fast moving standards, elements of this vision are taking shape.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organisation responsible for setting technical standards on the web. They are examining a series of standards designed to make data as openly accessible and linkable as possible and in which automated software can store, exchange, and use machine-readable information distributed throughout the Web. As a result, this will enable users to deal with the information with greater efficiency and certainty.

One element of these standards is called RDF (Resource Description Framework) and putting information into RDF files makes it possible for intelligent agents and spiders to search, discover, pick-up, collect, analyse and process information from all over the internet. In essence the Semantic Web uses RDF to describe the content and resources on the internet.

And as all data on the internet becomes part of this standard format, it transforms the web from a random collection of pages into one huge database with each piece of data connected to each other in a way that computers can understand.

So what does that mean for marketers?

Put simply, it means that the internet is going to get organised.

As search engines start to recognise semantically tagged data in their pages that they crawl, structured data as per the RDF formats will present far more compelling summaries of those pages in their search results.

It’s basically like current search engine marketing – but on steroids. In fact this aspect is often referred to as Search Engine Optimisation Plus (SEO+). Search is seen as the killer application for the Semantic Web that will finally drive its growth.

So at the most fundamental it means that marketers will need to start managing brands in the Semantic layer that the consumer cannot see as actively as they manage their brands in the layers consumers can see – that’s websites, online advertising etc.

Scott Brinker on the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog suggests that:

“Marketing becomes champion of the underlying data – good, accurate, detailed content and the processes by which to keep it up to date. This isn’t just old school “marketing data” ie the stuff of brochures and the visual corporate website, but rich, detailed information that’s historically been trapped much deeper in the organisation – information that can create value for the firm by its wide disseminations….this constitutes a new kind of market positioning and placement…semantic branding if you will”

And having data in a more accessible format will mean that organisations will look to build rich data applications over the top of this data.

One example given by Tim Berners-Lee is of being able to combine your calendar and bank statements. If both of these talked the same language then a user would be able to drag their digital bank statements onto their calendar and a series of dots would appear showing the user when they spent their money. Now imagine that you still can’t remember where a particular transaction happened – then you could drag your photo album on top of your calendar and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park.

And if we look at comparison or price aggregation sites, with the semantic web consumers will increasingly be able to make more accurate and reliable comparisons not just for more complex & configurable products such as cars, holidays etc, but also services such as builders, accountants and solicitors because the information on those products and services can be far richer and more structured.

Let’s take another example of a consumer searching for a ‘holiday’ in the future. The Semantic Web will allow people to use these ‘information agents’ and set them tasks such as “go and find me a holiday” that’s:
• In Greece
• By a beach
• But also has some historical interest
• That fits my calendar
• And fits within my budget

The intelligent agent is then left to instantly research the request, asking additional questions where necessary. An early example of this is www.tripit.com. With Tripit a user can simply forward their travel confirmation emails and the site and their Tripit “Itinerator” takes over and combines all the related travel bookings (from flights, car hire and hotels) into a single master itinerary. It then searches the Web to add related information such as daily weather, local maps, driving directions (for example to get from the airport to the hotel), city guides and so on. You can then access your itinerary from a mobile device or synchronise it with your PC calendar and share itineraries within group bookings to make sure there are no date issues or overlaps.

This will also be important to B2B marketers where our consumer habits of online research have been transported into the workplace and where businesses will need to create and manage their semantic data with increasing numbers of potential customers using search engines to research and shortlist suppliers.

Another example of the “Semantic Web” is something called ‘Friend of a Frien d’ (FOAF). And this is interesting because of its impact on the future of social networking.

FOAF allows people to describe themselves using an RDF format. You can describe personal details, hobbies, relations to other people & things. But what’s fascinating about FOAF is that there is no one central database or repository of information. Your profile does not exist only in Facebook, or Bebo or Myspace. It’s a piece of data searchable by any computer. Computers may then use these FOAF profiles to find and relate people to one another.

It’s the 21st Century equivalent of '6-Degrees of Separation'.

The chink in Microsoft's armour?

2009-11-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

Only a matter of a year or so ago it would have been almost impossible to see the nature of Microsoft's demise.

Sure, Google was the new force dominating the world of search & display advertising with the will and resources to keep pioneering: ...Maps...Earth...Docs...Analytics
...Wave. The list goes on.

Although Microsoft has tried and failed to compete in some of these areas, most especially in the search market with Bing, there has been no real threat to their overall stranglehold of the desktop operating system market with about 90% share (and with that, dominance in the office software market).

But things are not quite as rosy in the mobile/handheld operating system market. Recent figures from Gartner show that Microsoft's Windows Mobile lost 28 percent of its smartphone market share between the third quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of 2009. Microsoft is really being squeezed by open source operating systems (such as Symbian and Google's Android) and the core proprietary smartphone operating systems of RIM's Blackberry and Apple's iPhone. To put this in context Blackberry gained a 20% market share in Q3 this year and the iPhone 17% (source).

However it's the open source platforms that Microsoft has most to worry about. These are predicted to grow to around 62% market share by 2012, according to Gartner - and Android proves possibly the biggest threat. In under a year it's grown it's marketshare from zero to 4%. Handset manufacturers such as Samsung are attracted to Android as there are no software license fees - and this may ultimately limit Microsoft's ability to charge license fees in this market. Considering around 80% of smartphone purchases are private, rather than corporate, Microsoft cannot bank on revenues from the lucrative business market here.

And it's not only in the smartphone market that Microsoft faces a challenge from Google. Last week Google announced the open source launch of its Chrome Operating System (OS). Chrome OS will be based on the look & feel and architecture of the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS is specifically designed for notebooks and plugs into Google's cloud computing vision - with applications and data stored on the internet.

The beauty of the Chrome OS is that again there are no license fees. Considering that the hardware manufacturers largest direct cost is the the Microsoft Windows license how long will it be before Google launches an assault on the Windows market?

Yes, this is a long way off. There's no doubt about that. But looking at the way the mobile operating system has evolved in the last 12 months, I wouldn't bet against it.

Image (c) Softpedia 2009

The future's bright...the future's 3D

2009-11-18T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is 3D Week on Channel 4. They are running a series of programmes (including a Derren Brown Special and Friday the 13th) in glorious 3-Dimensions.

Coupled with the fact that there is not a single kid's movie released at the moment that doesn't have a 3D version (Pixar's recent 'Up', Disney's new version of "A Christmas Carol", "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs", "Coraline" etc) 3D is making a comeback and will dominate technology talk in 2010.

Things have changed since the old lo-fi red/blue glasses that were a part of the last 3D revolution in the 1980s. Modern 3D cinema uses new polarised 'clear' lenses for a greater sense of realism and depth (plus they are infinitely easier on the eyes). A real test of the power of 3D will be this Christmas with the launch of James Cameron's new film 'Avatar'. This is Cameron's first movie since 'Titanic' and promises to take 3D to a new level. Reports from early previews suggest that this pre-billing may not simply be hype and that the audience actually feels transported into the set of the movie.

But 3D is not going to be confined to the big screen. Recent 3D movies are also getting their release on Blu-Ray and DVD and next year Sky launches Europe's first 3D service via it's High Definition platform and showed some demonstrations at this year's Edinburgh Festival. The result is, apparently, very effective - and initial content will cover movies, entertainment and sport.

So what's next for marketeers? The advent of 3D TV clearly points to an opportunity for 3D advertising - not simply 3D versions of existing ads, but rather creating bespoke, engaging experiences that drive consumer cut through and maximise awareness. Such executions could exist both on broadcast TV but also, more interactively, on the web in glorious 3D.

But 3D took off in both the 1950s and 1980s and in both cases was only a short term fad. Are things different now?

Certainly the technology is much improved both in terms of the 3D effect itself and the comfort levels of the glasses users need to wear. Home entertainment manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, are also pushing forward even more sophisticated technology for LED/LCD televisions that limit the amount of blur seen in 3D movies. These more modern TVs use 'active shutter glasses' that synchronize with the picture from TV and allow the left/right hand images from the screen to be alternately received into the users left/right eye respectively - thus giving the impression of depth.

However, 3D will only truly become mainstream when users no longer require any form of glasses (what is often referred to as 'autostereoscopic' or 'glassless' 3D). This technology is available today for digital signage and advertising but requires 50 times the number of pixels than even current high-def TVs.

With the advent of ultra high-definition TVs around 2015 this may well be possible, however until then 3D is still some way off from being the standard viewing experience in the home.

Archiving the web: a record of history

2009-10-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone visiting the Amazon website last week would have been struck by a letter on the home page from Jeff Bezos informing UK shoppers that they could now purchase Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, for shipping to the UK.

Cue a flurry of commentary about the death of books and the demise of culture.

Inevitably we are moving towards a world of digital content. Blu-Ray may well be the last ever 'physical' entertainment media format. But as we move away from information being stored on physical formats (CDs/DVDs/paper/books) to data stored in the internet how, in the future, are we going to look back and understand the state of knowledge at a particular time in history?

The written word, stored on parchment and paper and filling libraries and archives has always provided historians with an evolving and largely permanent record of human history. Digital content, in contrast, is more fluid and more concerned with the state of information at the present time. New content trumps old content. Older information on the web is largely constrained to out of date blogs and websites rather than a systematic approach to archiving.

To put this into context the journal Science has found that 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months.

However, since 1996 a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive has been archiving digital content with the goal of building an 'internet library'. It has archived over 150 billion web pages and hundreds of thousands of moving images, live music files, audio and document texts. Its "Way Back Machine" is a useful tool that provides a snapshot of selected major sites over the years. Here is Apple.com back in in 1997.

The Internet Archive has also partnered with eleven National Libraries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library & The US Library of Congress) to create the The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The mission of the IIPC is to acquire, preserve and make accessible knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations.

However, no single project can ever hope to archive the entire web. The approach to preserving digital content may not be of major concern today because the web is simply too new. However as the internet becomes the de facto reference point for all human knowledge: it will become of critical importance.

Challenges for the ad-funded business model

2009-07-03T03:25:00.002-07:00

The 'ad funded' model has taken a bit of a beating this year. The big question is whether it can continue in a recession-hit media world.

Last month Blyk (the ad-funded mobile operator) withdrew their consumer offer and just this week Joost (the online video company) announced that market conditions meant that it too was moving away from a consumer focussed ad-funded model. These were both businesses heralded as at the frontier of the new media world and examples of how an ad-funded business model could be used to deliver new services to consumers on new platforms.

But that model is under severe threat.

Recessionary-driven declines in media spends have driven massive losses and cuts at ITV and focussed attention on the long-term viability of Channel 4. Newpapers too are suffering. And, to put this into a digital context, the first quarter of this year saw a 5% drop decline in online advertising.

So a new model has to be found as only the largest traffic sites can continue a purely ad-funded approach.

Surely it's got to focus on subscriptions. However, the print media industry let the genie out of the bottle with free content - and I think it's hard to see consumers willingness to pay for something that they have considered free for some time - unless there is an industry-wide approach. But who will blink first?

There are some interesting models out there. Spotify the online music service uses a blend of ad-based revenues and a subscription model. However, many people have asked how Spotify can actually make a profit and there is a good interview with Daniel Ek (the Spotify CEO) on TechRadar - although Ek does not directly answer the question as to how its business model really works. The core question for Spotify and others is what % of users will pay the subscription model when the free model is pretty good. The ads aren't really intrusive enough to make me switch to a premium version.

An alternative option is using micropayments for content. Here users buy premium content in return for just a couple of pence. However will users really want to make that 'purchase decision' every time they want to access/read a piece of content? And how will that work practically? The user would already have had to buy-in to the site producing that content and lodged some form of payment (in the same way that works for iTunes). The micropayment model has been mooted for over a decade - but is still not gained much traction. Perhaps the media downturn will see it dusted it off and reconsidered.

Breaking news

2009-06-29T06:34:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin recently predicted that by 2012 "there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US".

Now whilst that may be sensationalistic in terms of timescale - there is no doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In the six months to March of this year the decline in US newspaper weekday circulation almost doubled (Source: Bloomberg) and a number of historic US newspaper titles have already hit financial trouble.

Yes the recession has hit media spend - but the core issue is that more & more consumers are getting their news from the internet.

But that's not really new news. What is new is how the internet is increasingly becoming the source for breaking news.

Last Thursday night I was doing some things around the house with BBC News 24 on in the background. But rather than seeing a journalist on the screen - there was a caption with an image of the TMZ.com site leading with the news of Michael Jackson's death. For the next couple of hours the BBC's news was simply reporting on the news from TMZ and the LA Times. Mainstream news media reporting breaking internet news.

In September last year, Robert Peston chose his blog to announce the proposed Lloyds/HBOS merger before breaking the news on BBC.

More recently, with reporting restrictions in place, the news from Iran has been lead by blogs, Tweets and videos from people on the streets.

In a 24-hour global news cycle no single news organisation is going to have the coverage to capture every breaking news story. So thanks to Twitter, blogs & the camera-phone the power of the consumer-journalist is massive. News can be broken by anywhere, anywhere, at any time.

Social media is increasingly driving the news agenda.

The challenge for the established media therefore becomes two-fold:

How do they drive revenue from their online properties,
How do they continue to verify the myriad of consumer-journalist sources?

Are decision engines the Emperor's new clothes?

2009-05-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a big month for 'decision engines'.

First we had the build-up and launch of Wolfram-Alpha as mentioned a few weeks ago and now we have the launch of Microsoft's own decision engine called 'Bing'. Bing went live last week, a couple of days early. The earlier-than-planned-launch is a strong indication of the effort Microsoft has put behind it. Let's not forget how important Bing is to Microsoft. The majority of Microsoft's recent challenges to Google's search and online advertising dominance have failed to make an impact on their market share. Bing is the successor to Microsoft's Live Search. But what's different? And what exactly are 'decision engines', a term so new that there isn't a Wikipedia entry to define them yet?

Decision Engines are being positioned as the evolution of search. Whereas search engines 'simply' (and I use the word advisedly) return the closest match to a given search term, decision engines move us closer towards the 'semantic web' and artificial intelligence by using contextual information, together with the results of previous user's searches, to provide more accurate and more helpful results. Well that's the theory anyway.

But do either Wolfram Alpha or Bing live up to this?

Wolfram Alpha has hit the 100 million query mark, but getting an answer to your question is still quite hit and miss. It's actually quite difficult to think of a useful query that Wolfram Alpha has an answer for. Many questions still get a "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input".

Bing on the other hand might well be trying to position itself as a 'decision engine' but it's not as revolutionary as its pre-launch billing. It's more of an evolution of search, attempting to improve on Google's offering.

And there are some nice features: the image search allows you to filter images by size, style, layout etc. A neat feature. The video shortcuts allows you to play the video by just rolling over the image thumbnail in the search. But Bing has been criticised for delivering poorer results than Google. For a neat way of comparing Google and Bing, Blackdog have created a split screen site to search both sites at the same time.

Will it be enough to make inroads into Google's market share? Only time will tell. But from first impressions it's just not significantly different or better than Google to shift consumer behaviour.

There is a danger that the term Decision Engine is being used by Microsoft in order to create some new news: as an attempt to be viewed as creating something new rather than just going head-to-head with Google. But that's exactly what Microsoft is doing.

The Wolfram Alpha product may not be quite there yet, but it takes us much more into the area of decision engines and its evolution will be much more interesting and important to watch.

Data is relationships

2009-05-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

This is REALLY worth watching. We’re always looking for 'The Next Big Thing'. Many trends are just fads. But if we should pay attention to anyone, it’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

This talk at the TED Conference gives a great overview of the birth of the web as well as reintroducing one of his concepts called Linked Data. He believes that Linked Data is as important an idea as the invention of the World Wide Web itself. Berners-Lee suggests that data from governments, organisations and individuals should be opened-up so that others can share it and work with it.

He believes this transparency of ‘raw data’ will allow the relationships between data to grow increasingly ‘connected’ affecting every aspect of our lives, speeding up knowledge transfer and reducing the time needed to solves problems (such as the cure for cancer).

Is it possible to purchase reliable third party business email data?

2009-05-13T05:20:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to comment on this issue.

We have found over the years, that using 3rd party email data for acquisition activity simply does not work. It’s not cost effective and runs huge risks with destroying brand value - customers perceive unsolicited emails simply as spam.

Worse still, if brand owners use 3rd party email data as part of their overall email programme and the end recipient treats these emails as SPAM, this can have a detrimental effect on the brand owners’ on-going deliverability and IP reputation thereby affecting every subsequent email communication.

There are no shortcuts: brands need to embrace permission based-strategies to build prospects lists, through the use of white papers, online seminars and a whole host of tactics that build the brand and encourage opt-in. Another alternative is ‘piggybacking’ your message on other brand’s opt-in communications (through, for example, email sponsorship) where your brand can be taken to an unsoliticited but altogether ‘warmer’ potential customer base.

The young pretender?

2009-04-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

Funnily enough a conversation broke out in the office the other day about who or what could dislodge Google from its position of dominance. IBM ruled the technology world in the 80s, Microsoft in the 90s and Google rules in the noughties.

No sooner had we finished the conversation (ok, some poetic licence there) but I spotted this article about a web tool that "could be as important as Google". Wolfram Alpha is a free online tools that aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine. It's launching in May 2009.

Only time will tell whether it's got the power to ultimately challenge Google. But you heard it here first.

www.wolframalpha.com

Tokyo Tube Maps Digital Influence

2009-03-25T02:02:00.001-07:00

This is my favourite digital thing of the week.

The Web Trend Map is an annual publication that maps the 333 leading Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people. However, what makes it different to the normal “Top 10 lists” is that it’s been designed around the map of the Tokyo metro. It shows the reach and influence of different web properties and how they are connected.

Very clever.

Commvergence - the future of digital communications

2009-03-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

No 'commvergence' is not a typo.

I've been struggling for some time to keep track of my various email addresses (I have 4), social networks (Linked-In, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter), communication tools (Skype, Messenger), RSS feeds & mobile (SMS, email and so on). And that's not to mention the volume of emails, feeds, Tweets, pokes and messages that each channel produces.

Now I know that because I work in the industry I am bound to sign-up and try-out more channels/routes than most consumers. However managing digital communications is a growing problem for consumers. A recent survey from Emailvision has found that women are half as likely as men to read the email newsletters they receive and are more prone to cancel their subscriptions citing 'cluttered inboxes'.

So how will consumers start to manage? That's where I think that 'commvergence' will play a part: tools and service that bring together and unite different digital communications.

iGoogle goes someway in starting this. Flock and Swimwire are amongst a group of tools that allow users to aggregate their social networking sites. But other tools such as Fuser and Orgoo aim to provide access to all your email and social network accounts in one place. Orgoo is not yet in public beta, but Fuser is up an running and provides the familiarity of a web-based email interface to manage messages and contacts. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

What's clear is that it won't be long before Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! get involved. Because a one-stop-shop for online communications is a huge consumer need and will become a key traffic driver (and hence revenue) for those properties.

Twitter: the end of push marketing?

2009-03-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article this week on the Marketing Week website. It about whether Twitter means the end of 'push' marketing as more and more consumers filter their media through their own social circles. It asks whether because search behaviour becomes increasingly focused on consumers asking real questions of real people in real time, rather than of static web pages - that the days of interruption marketing may be nigh.

But rumours of 'push' marketing's death are greatly exaggerated.

Yes, its power is on the wain.

Yes, social media will grow as, if not more, important.

But for the meantime, push marketing has its place. And, ironically, the first sentence of the Marketing Week article proves the case:

"Twitter went mainstream one Friday in January when Stephen Fry appeared on Tonight with Jonathan Ross"

So Twitter went mainstream with a celebrity promoting the service on the mass communications vehicle that is a chat show.

Now there's a novel strategy.

Skittles: a great idea in need of a strategy?

2009-03-04T01:34:00.000-08:00

The new Skittles' global .com site (skittles.com) has garnered a huge amount of coverage over the last week. For those that haven't seen it yet the site has little content of it's own (simply product & content information) and instead uses iframes to publish content from Wikipedia (for the Skittles brand and company information), Facebook (the Skittles Fan page), Twitter (showing all live tweets containing the word 'skittle') and YouTube (a Skittles's channel showing advertising and user videos).

It's not unique - Modernista was playing with this a couple of years ago (modernista.com) but it is the first time that a brand has put it's global site in the hands of its consumers.

And yes, that's brave. It really shows a brand team understanding the fact that, in the world of Web 2.0, not every aspect of the brand can be controlled and managed.

Sure, there have been hiccups this week. Initially Twitter was set as Skittles' home page. However, the unfiltered feed started to contain significant amounts of bad language. Most recently the majority of feeds appeared to be marketing and sociological comments (with links to numerous blogs) on the brand strategy - rather than consumers actually discussing the product. So the home page has changed to the Wikipedia entry for Skittles.

But nevertheless the site has received an enormous amount of PR and publicity from the strategy. As Mashable says "Skittles is basically saying: "We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we'll just link to it and let you do your thing".

So as an idea it's generated a large share of voice online. But is there really a longer term brand strategy here?

For starters to view the site the consumer needs to state their date of birth (presumably there is a minimum age restriction - but that's not made clear) - so for a youth brand a large proportion of its consumers are potentially disenfranchised from entering - unless they lie about their age - simply because bad language/adult content could be contained in the UGC.

And there are technical issues with the site. It's not accessible (it requires the Flash plug-in and there is no HTML alternative). From a usability perspective the floating menu system obscures the screen and readability of the content behind.

But the biggest issue is simply this - what exactly is the longer term strategy? Ok, consumers may come today based on the hype. But what's going to bring them back? And when they are on the site - are they having a brand experience that builds brand equity or are they participating in a social media experiment?

Time will tell.

Should brands pay to Twitter?

2009-02-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of discussion this week on rumours that Twitter is considering charging brands to get involved with the platform.

Twitter is an innovative way to communicate with customers, but, as a paid-for communications vehicle, the returns are untested. There are many other proven digital channels that would take priority in a brand’s marketing budget.

Twitter’s dilemma is creating a business model and beginning to repay its initial $20m venture capital investment. To start by charging brands a subscription seems counter intuitive. Firstly, there’s the whole area of enforcement - how would brand involvement be policed? And, secondly, will enough brands get involved to create a sustainable business model?

Twittering takes a larger investment than the subscription cost - there’s the continual demand for content creation, and reaction to ‘Tweets’ that have a direct cost for brands.

A better approach would be for Twitter to monetise its site traffic through online advertising, or search, in a similar way to Facebook. Then it could allow brands that want to Tweet to continue their involvement, and prove the effectiveness of Twitter as its user base grows.

Introducing a paid-for-subscription service once the brand case has been made seems a wiser option.

Should brands develop applications for mobile handsets?

2009-02-16T05:23:00.000-08:00

There has been a resurgence in "app stores" driven by the success of Apple App store. Android, Apple, Samsung, RIM, O2 and Nokia (rumours) have all announced plans to move into the space.

So should brands look to develop mobile applications?

There is always a danger that brands ‘pile-in’ to a new way of getting in front of consumers. The beauty, and Holy Grail, here is that if a brand can create a compelling/useful application it will received regular on-going usage and potentially become a viral phenomenon. This was clearly demonstrated within the area of social network applications – eg Facebook apps where there was a rush to develop branded applications

In the majority of cases however these Facebook applications weren’t useful and got the minimum of on-going usage – with client picking up the (often) quite large development costs. Of course there are huge successes - Trip Advisor’s ‘Cities I have Visited’ being one. It’s a good example of the fact that the most successful applications will always provide a service for consumers

So brands need to learn the lessons from the world of social media before rushing headlong into the mobile application world. Building for the iPhone is one thing (it’s largely one handset and operating system) – but building for the myriad of manufacturers (eg Samsung, Nokia etc), handset variations and network providers (eg Vodafone, O2 etc) means that an added ‘watch-out’ for brands is that applications for mobile phones are more complex (and therefore expensive) to build

So what are the golden rules for brands in considering the development of a mobile application? Brand teams need to ask themselves:

“Would I/my customer really use this?”/ “would I/they want to send this to friends?” – many ideas fail to ever meet this most basic of usefulness/viral requirements
“Is credible brand territory” – Carling’s iPint is a great brand fit, but Aston Martin’s brand Nokia phone felt too mass market for the brand

If the answer to these is ‘yes’ then brands should minimise complexity of their mobile developments; focus on the most popular handsets rather than all possible configurations – and maximise the PR around it (that will put the brand in front of more consumers than the application itself will)

Broadband Britain and Cloud Computing

2009-02-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

There's been a great deal of talk recently about the return of the 'Cloud Computing' dream. Basically, applications and data held on the internet and accessed by consumers via browsers wherever they want.

A lot of the most recent discussions have been driven by the hotly anticipated launch of Google's GDrive (and Microsoft's competing Windows Skydrive). Both are online storage service where consumers will be able to store photos, documents and multimedia.

However one of the biggest issues that's rarely discussed is the fact that if more and more users will be uploading large files to the internet - the current breed of broadband service are not designed to cope with this. Most consumers purchase broadband based on the headline downloads speed (eg 8Mbs all the way up to the 50Mbs on offer via some current optical providers). The average download speed in the UK is 3Mbs (figures broadband-expert). But the average upload speed is only a tenth of this at a meazly 296Kbs (or 0.296Mbs). Just think about how long updloading a photo to a social networking site takes in comparison to downloading a music track.

This is because broadband in the UK is ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) meaning that the connection is asynchronous; larger/faster in one direction than the other. And this worked perfectly when the majority of content is delivered to the user.

But for the dream of cloud computing and, more specifically, online file storage - broadband providers will need to consider SSDL (synchronous digital subscriber line) services delivering much faster upload speeds. And this is something that's been missing from much of last week's report on Broadband Britain.

Mobile marketing in 2009

2009-01-16T05:21:00.000-08:00

Mobile marketing has been threatening to ‘go mainstream’ for over a decade. But the issues that have held it back have been its ability to live up to the promises of the technology companies. I always refer back to the infamous BT ads for their ‘Genie’ service that purported to allow consumers to “ surf the mobile internet”: the reality was a painfully slow connection delivering limited text based content, with terrible usability and high data costs (that were never transparent to the consumer).

As mobile internet speeds have increased through the advent of 3G and, more recently, HSPDA it’s been possible to create richer internet experiences for consumers: downloadable/streaming video and a richer web browsing experience. Certainly handsets such as the N95 started to live up to expectations. Yet the handsets were still clunky, technical and lacked true usability.

The iPhone changed all that –with a unique, intuitive user interface that (together with the uber-trendy Apple brand) has captured consumers’ imagination. This is the ONE mobile device that meets a multitude of needs: music player, mobile web browser, games machine phone.

And this is important. A critical component in whether big brands marketers will invest in mobile in 09 will be the extent to which the believe there is mass adoption of the technology. And we’re not quite there yet: the majority of mobile activity will still be text-to-wins, basic SMS communications and forays into mobile websites.

So what’s the outlook for 2009

Mobile data costs will be addressed by the networks: bundles and clearer tariffs will mean that consumers are more open to experimenting with mobile content
A core consumer shift will be that consumers will no longer need “log-on to the web” from their PC. They have the opportunity to will always be connected whether at home, work or on the move through a variety of devices that provide what we have called “pervasive connectivity”.

And with that mobile connectivity comes the possibility of a plethora of new services:

Downloadable handset applications connected to the internet providing up-to-date information on everything from flight and travel details to stock market prices and sports results
Location based services such as Google Maps that allow the consumer not simply to search for services – but search for services that are close to them.
Increase in viral content (video etc) delivered not just online – but seeded to be distributed via mobile handsets
Increase use of mobile internet and wap for promotional activity
We will slowly see SMS text messaging give way to mobile email and instant messaging this has a special relevance for direct marketers. No longer will targeting simply be about the right message at the right time – but the right message at the right time in the right place.

Bluetooth will also be a continued area of growth. Bluetooth becomes a great channel for brand interaction on the move. Last year's 'Lost' TV series launch activity at Victoria Rail station was a great large scale use of this with downloable video content, images and ringtones.

But one of the biggest opportunities for the mobile device will relate to the much trumpeted ‘mobile wallet’. True cashless payments services may be a while away....but certainly from a loyalty perspective the mobile handset becomes a perfect solution to the problem of consumer’s every burgeoning number of loyalty cards. ‘Orange Wednesday’s’ pioneered the use of mobile at POS, and we will see pilots for these kinds of activities along with mobile vouchering and ticketing.

Every sale counts

2009-01-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

You can't open a newspaper or turn on the TV at the moment without hearing more implications of the global recession and 'credit crunch'.

One of the key strategies for surviving an economic downturn is ensuring that every customer touchpoint is working as efficiently as possible. For a great many B2B marketeers often fail to maximise the impact of their web presence. But there are a number of techniques that businesses can employ in order to evolve their online presence away from simply brochureware to make their site support the sales process and demand generation.

Jakob Nielsen, one of the pioneers of website usability, outlines the three major goals relevant for almost all B2B sites:

1. Survive the screening process
In the consumer market around 67% of consumers use the internet to research products before buying (source: InternetRetailing Feb 2008). Again this habit has translated into the workplace with more and more employees using the internet to shortlist vendors in an initial research phase. This is where search engine visibility, homepage usability, website accessibility and content usability are essential. Additionally, ensuring that site content explains exactly what a company does (rather than the often impenetrable language of marketing-speak missions, visions and propositions) and signposting users to key elements of content is critical. Remember, first impressions count - and the website is the most influential first impression that B2B marketers can control. Even if potential clients are visiting simply to find contact information, make it easy for them to make contact in the way that suits them – email, instant messaging, telephone etc. (How many websites make it difficult to find the company’s telephone number!)

2. Build a reputation
This is where the internet excels and where companies can provide excellent post-sales support online at a fraction of the cost of other methods. However, this is the area in which many companies fail. A recent report by Transversal (March 2008) showed the dire performance of many UK firms when responding to customers’ emails. Less than half (46%) answered those questions “adequately” and the average time they took to respond was almost two days (46 hours).

3. Support your advocates
Nielsen recommends the creation of Advocacy Kits to make it easy for potential clients to access materials and information that helps them support the argument for a particular vendor. This may include links to external PR coverage, webinars, downloadable video and product tables together with PowerPoint slides (that clients can use in their own presentations) and downloadable White papers (using this as a potential value exchange to obtain some data about potential customers).

As with the B2C world, content is king. Building content distribution deals and gaining associations with the right industry bodies/brands takes the marketing message to a wider audience – hitting those business buyers who may be actively trawling the internet within their own buying cycle - and in an tougher economic client every sale counts.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-17T04:24:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a break for Christmas. More posts in the New Year.

Merry Christmas.

Missing a trick

2008-12-13T07:30:00.001-08:00

In the consumer space, company websites have evolved from the brochureware of the 90s into sophisticated, personalised e-commerce and CRM tools with the corporate website seen as a primary consumer channel. And this is reflected in consumer use: the ease and convenience of online shopping meant that online sales for Christmas 2007 were 30-40% higher than the previous year. Our experiences as consumers with sites such as Amazon are now setting expectations as to how easy to use B2B sites need to be, and how well product information is presented.

However in the B2B space there is still an overwhelming view that a company website is simply a source of information. Remarkably only 5% of companies look to their corporate website as an integrated part of the CRM and support process and 1.5% of businesses don’t even have a website.

Of course, the B2B sales process is more complex than consumer e-tail. It involves multiple stakeholders and departments, an (often) lengthy sales cycle and a focus on personal contact and relationships.

So part of the issue is that B2B sites are not often viewed as e-commerce channels where the final purchase can be made online. As a result they frequently do not have clear metrics set against them, other than the traditional measures of unique visits & page impressions. And because the true value of the site is not measured, the necessary budgets are not allocated to its development and evolution.

B2B marketers need to embrace online search

2008-11-27T07:14:00.000-08:00

Search is a key area in which B2B marketers are falling behind their B2C counterparts. Despite the huge growth in online advertising, business is not harnessing the internet to build brand awareness or drive product education. In fact, according to the IAB only 39% of businesses are using display advertising and less than 39% make use of online classifieds.

And these figures deteriorate further when we look at less frequently used online advertising media. If we take affiliate marketing, 67% of affiliates promote B2C merchants, 29% promote both B2C and B2B but only 4% promote B2B advertisers only (source E-consultancy, January 2007).

Why is this?

There are a number of factors. Firstly it’s a direct reflection of the lack of significant B2B-only properties & audiences in the space. However, despite the enormous size of the market, vertical B2B websites are only just starting to spring up.

Secondly there is the feeling that media planners and buyers lack awareness of these properties when planning online strategies.

[Source: E consultancy / Convera, Nov 2007]

Of course, some business sectors have been well represented in the online advertising space for some time – Technology being the obvious example.

And it is, perhaps naturally, in this sector where companies are pioneering. Take Second Life for example. Within the B2C space many brands have used Second Life less as a means of targeting specific audiences and more as a way of generating PR.

However, IBM’s large presence in Second Life has evolved into a real sales channel. Last year it opened a “virtual business centre” in Second Life, staffed by IBM sales personnel from around the world.

Clients looking to purchase hardware, software or simply get support in solving a business problem can actually meet with IBM sales personnel within the virtual business centre. The IBM avatar can interact and work with the Client avatar right up to the point of signing contracts and the final sales transaction, which are handled via a link to the main IBM website or by telephone.

“We seek to engage with clients in the way they prefer to engage,” Lee Dierdorff, vice president of Web strategy and enablement for IBM, said. “This may be over the Web, this may be over the telephone, and now it may be over a 3-D virtual world.”

So there’s huge potential for businesses to upweight their use of online advertising and other digital awareness routes.

Monetising YouTube and the power of content value

2008-11-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

Google is launching a new "incentivisation programme" where it will pay advertising agencies commission on video advertising as it tries to bolster ad revenues from its video properties, including YouTube.

So why does it need to incentivise agencies?

There are two key issues.

The first is the need to push the online video format, more generally as part of Google’s rather large entry into the display advertising market.

The second issue is the fact that YouTube has yet to make a profit or meet earnings expectations. So presumably the thinking is that “YouTube is about video – consumers expect to see video content here – we need to boost income - so let’s push video advertising via YouTube”.

Video advertising will become the de facto standard on the web – but the active debate is which online ad formats will work (pre-roll, post-roll, interstitial etc). One of the key stumbling blocks to date has been that online video advertising has been positioned in such was as to really pose a barrier to the online consumer experience....do I really want to wait 90 seconds watching a pre-rolled ad BEFORE I get to the content I originally came to see? And what do I think about the brand that puts that barrier in my way?

However what could really drive take up of on-line video ads is that YouTube has just announced a deal with MGM studios to offer full-length movies on the site (building on the deal with Lionsgate films earlier in the year offering short media clips). By effectively giving away content content with a high perceived value, perhaps Google belives that consumers will overcome any potential barriers/resistance to online video ads.

Ironically, it’s Google itself that is leading a joint-research project into how online users consumer online video. One would imagine that the results of this alongside an incentivisation programme would be most effective.

Obama, brands and disco dad

2008-11-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

An interesting question raised today was whether UK politicians will try and replicate President-Elect Obama's online strategy - engaging the young and politically disenfranchised to get involved or donate through social media.

The strange thing is that it's hard to see how that could/would happen with the current leaders of the 3 main UK parties. And that got me thinking about brands.

Obama succeeded in exploiting social media successfully because, as a 'product' he could naturally exploit digital media: he's young (well for a presidential candidate, anyway), he's different (his African-American background) and he's the challenger-brand (not rooted in the current establishment but an advocate of change).

In essence he had the brand credibility to be able to use digital media as a natural channel to communicate his message to his audience.

And it's much the same with brands. Not all brands will automatically be able to exploit social media in the way that say Apple, Radiohead, Innocent etc have. These brands have the intrinsic credibility built into their values that mean, like Obama, social media is a natural extension of how they communicate with an audience who are social-media-natives.

Other brands need to work hard to establish how and why they can get involved. Social media can't simply be a "me too" approach grafted on to a brand's communication strategy.

Consumers are far too savvy to accept that and those brands that try to muscle their way in end up looking like a dad at the disco (as one of my colleagues called it the other day): just like Mssrs Brown, Cameron or Clegg on Facebook, Twitter or Myspace.

So we got our first-internet powered President

2008-11-05T03:23:00.000-08:00

The outcome of the US presidential election was somewhat of a foregone conclusion.

For once the pollsters, exit polls and pundits called it right. But what's really interesting in the midst of all of the analysis was how the pollsters had probably under-represented the voting intentions of young Americans. Many of the US polling services only use landline numbers for auto-dialing respondents - because it's expensive and slow - which excludes the large proportion of young people who only have a mobile phone.

A poll earlier in the year from Harris Interactive found that one in five U.S. adults didn't have landline phone service, relying instead on mobile phones and VoIP. And for younger people aged 18 to 29, 49% are 'mobile phone only' users.

So even though a record turnout is expected, with a record number of newly-registered voters (including those turning 18), the actual number of young people voting will no doubt be much larger than previously anticipated.

But interesting to see how fast-moving changes in consumer behavior (particuarly the young) really need to be considered in all aspects of online research and analysis.

Could this be the first internet-powered US President?

2008-11-03T05:58:00.000-08:00

If you’ve followed the US election campaigns (and it's been hard not to) over the last few months, one thing that was truly amazing about Barack Obama’s campaign was his use of the internet and digital media.

Of course, we are all used to online political campaigning even in the UK (how could we forget David Cameron’s infamous Blog?) but Obama’s campaign has been significant in how he has used the very best practices from the world of online e-commerce applied it to raising funds for his campaign.

He has used every online device to encourage voters to donate: from mobile ring tones, to his own blog, email updates from the campaign manager &, of course, social networking. In fact Obama was dubbed the “Master of Facebook Politics” by the New York Times with about 1.5 million online ‘friends’ (compare this to ‘only’ 142,000 friends for John McCain).

All this has managed to translate the huge public enthusiasm for him directly into cash. To put this into context, in February of this year his campaign raised a record-setting $55 million— with $45 million donated over the Internet—without Obama hosting a single fund-raiser himself. The money just came rolling in and has allowed Obama to campaign harder and deeper than McCain - just look at Obama's 30min election advert over the weekend.

Why is this important? Because it’s a great demonstration of how online engagement & interaction can be used to drive consumer action. Now that Obama has seen that he can drive cash donations, the next challenge is to turn that into votes. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch.

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
http://www.new.facebook.com/barackobama?ref=s&refurl=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.new.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fq%3Dbarack%2Bobama%26init%3Dq

The changing face of networking

2008-10-26T01:33:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest developments over the past 18 months in the consumer space has been the rise of the social networks. This rapid consumer adoption of sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook has been quickly picked up by the business community with B2B social networking sites such as LinkedIn which, after seeing a slow start to member numbers 3-4 years ago, has doubled in size over the last 2 years on the back of the social networking boom.

The prediction is that consumer focused social networking sites will evolve away from their current generalist nature towards more specialist communities; whether that’s related to shopping (Yub.com), pets (fuzzster.com) or student travel (statravellers.com). This will become increasingly relevant for the B2B world where communities can be easily built on industry sectors. It’s always been true within the interactive and software world, where developer forums have been a key means of product development and solutioning, but these more specialist social networks are popping against wider industry sectors:

MedicalMingle.com for Healthcare professionals
Sermo, where doctors can seek advice and get access to relevant content
INmobile.org - a network for senior mobile telecoms executives
Adgabber - for the advertising community
E-Factor – a European-based network for entrepreneurs to share knowledge and advice
Damsels in Success – a women-only professional networking site, focusing on career and business issues.

B2B brands will need to understand how to ensure that they can leverage these new networks to drive awareness, seed content (as with the B2C world) and build customer advocacy.

Online PR is important here – the ability to get news out quickly, targeted to your specialist audience and often through trade bodies, can enhance influence in the marketplace and so improve the ability to get new customers considering you as an authority in your space.

And outside of the social networks themselves, the personal Blog has also been adopted by the B2B community. One of the most famous examples of B2B blogs is Darren Strange’s “Officerocker” that he created in the run up to the launch of Office 2007. Darren is the UK product manager for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and is credited with changing Microsoft Office into a personality rather than a faceless product through blogging. Since setting up the blog two years ago, “Officerocker” has allowed him to build a dialogue with customers, partners and press attracting around 250,000 hits each month.

Potentially one of the biggest (but currently most under-utilised) communication areas is RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to subscribe to an information feed from a website and view it within their own browser. What’s important about RSS feeds is that (a) the user has actively subscribed to that information, and (b) unlike email, there are no ISP issues to be navigated, so RSS means 100% deliverability of information to the user.

Some 80% of internet professionals are already using industry or sector-specific RSS feeds, and more than half of them (54%) have personalised homepages. [Source: E-consultancy / Convera, Nov 2007]

Amazon - The First 10 Years

2008-10-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

Amazon in the UK is 10 - it opened for business on 15th October 1998 and earlier this year opened a massive new warehouse in Wales.

There are many companies that claim to have changed the way we live – but few who, in reality, have ever done so. Amazon truly can claim to have changed the way that the world shops, forever.

What has Amazon achieved?:

It’s almost solely been responsible for driving mass adoption of online shopping (according to IMRG’s figures, 17p in every £1 spent in the UK was spent online in the first half of 2008)
It invested early, shunning short-term profits to develop technology and infrastructure that have giving it a long-term advantage over its peers
It pioneered and refined ‘collaborative filtering’ in the e-commerce space both in terms of website recommendations (‘customers who bought X also bought Y’) and also in terms of personalised email communications based on purchase history and items/categories viewed
It proved how the online business model could be extended from music, books and films to include almost every household item – in fact Amazon's logo is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing its to sell many products
It evolved it’s business model to
Allow 3rd parties to sell ‘new’ and ‘used’ goods on their site (often in direct competition with Amazon itself)
Allow 3rd party advertising to completely monetise it’s daily traffic
Allow 3rd party companies to make use of it’s server capacity (storage and CPU) through charging companies on a per-usage for accessing its APIs (Twitter, for example uses Amazon for it’s server requirements)
It’s taught everyone how a usable, e-commerce operation should work – it’s the benchmark for online e-commerce site design

Where does it go next?

Clearly an untapped market for Amazon is in the B2B market – especially for office supplies, equipment and furniture
Amazon Prime (it’s fee-based one-day delivery programme) goes someway to locking-in its high value customers – but with price comparisons for any product just one-click away, Amazon will need to consider how it maximises its share of customers’ online wallet

It’s biggest challenges?

Gaining a foothold in the download marketplace as more and more media moves from physical formats to purely digital – this is one area that Amazon has not pioneered or kept pace with allowing iTunes and other providers to steel a march (Amazon feels like a follower here)
Ensuring that it can continue to exploit tax loopholes for certain products (eg music/books/dvds delivered via offshore operations such as Jersey) to ensure it’s price advantage
Competition – other online companies (eg Play.com) and bricks & mortar businesses (eg John Lewis) are sharpening up their online offerings and now provide real price and service led competition

Can businesses actually make money with virals?

2008-10-02T05:45:00.000-07:00

Indirectly, yes. Viral marketing is simply about creating word of mouth, developing communications that raise awareness and drive engagement with a brand in the hope that it will be passed on. The same ATL success metrics of ‘awareness’ and ‘engagement’ still apply.
Word of mouth marketing is THE most effective marketing tool

What should marketers bear in mind when considering a viral for their company - Dos and Don'ts?

The biggest mistake that marketers make when creating viral campaigns is to think that a brief to ‘create a viral campaign’ will create one campaign or idea that will ‘go viral’ – the essence of what creates a great viral can be hard to pin down and therefore a number of different routes should be created and perhaps, one out of every 20 ideas will get traction and hit that all-important ‘tipping-point’
Ensure that viral is considered throughout development of all marketing elements to maximise impact and cost effectiveness – not just created as an ‘add-on’
Viral is NOT simply:
- uploading the latest TV ad to YouTube (unless it’s a gorilla playing the drums…..)
- simply creating a member-get-member mechanic or ‘send to a friend’ functionality – and does not even have to be about creating a ‘piece’ (ie a video, application etc). The US TV show has hit #1 in the DVD charts simply from the amount of online buzz and word of mouth content seeded throughout online communities and the press.
Therefore, how to seed the viral should be considered as much as the viral concept
Lastly measurement is key – and again this is something that should be planned at the outset – there are many ‘buzz marketing’ tools that can help in the tracking of campaigns and their impact

What makes a good viral?

Viral ‘pieces’ need to be easy to send on – it sounds like a basic requirement, but it’s often missed
Content and engagement is key: virals must be: engaging, funny, sexy or a weird for users to send on
Remember virals don’t necessarily have to be complex pieces: consider the recent Gap virals (and the successful if a little costly Thresher email from previous years) that simply offered customers a good deal (eg 30% off) on a given day / product

Email best practice

2008-09-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

It is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve cut-through with e-mail communications year on year.

DMA performance benchmarks are falling whilst the volume of e-mails people are receiving increases, even with ever more robust security and spam management by the ISPs. This creates and environment where improving performance means improving the quality of your communications both technically and emotively. To this end we’ve created a number of email basics for all our e-mail campaigns.

1. Improving deliverability

A brand/company’s e-mail reputation today drives their ability to get e-mail delivered tomorrow. And it’s an on-going cycle. The reputation of the brand’s/company’s IP address is the most important factor in an ISP either delivering the email to a consumer’s inbox, delivering it to their junk folder or simply rejecting it altogether. So how can brands improve deliverability? There are a couple of simple “dos”:

Do build your reputation slowly and avoid irregular send patterns
Do build volume to each ISP gradually or manage send volume over a period of time to build reputation – no sudden surprises
Do Manage new campaign volumes extra carefully for Hotmail/MSN and AOL accounts
Do Build familiarity with your IP address and be prepared to hold volume on troublesome ISPs
Do Change sending patterns slowly

In addition to building reputation, there are a number of companies with relationships with ISPs who guarantee (or certify) delivery of an email to a user’s inbox - for a fee (eg Goodmail). This is where the most debate in email marketing is most hotly debated – that certified email is in danger of creating a two-tier email system: the equivalent of first and second class post.

2. Minimise Spam complaint rates

ISPs monitor the number of customers who mark the mail using ‘Spam’ or ‘Junk’ buttons. Complaint rates are the number 1 reason why ISPs block or filter e-mails. Again there are some simple “dos”:

Do track complaint rates for each ISP for each campaign
Do remove inactive e-mail addresses after 6 months
Do use clear and specific subject lines
Do use clear ‘from’ labelling to identify your brand
Do test e-mail send frequency and it’s impact on rates
Do drip feed send to suspect ISPs so you can manage the situation
Do make unsubscribing easier for those that want to unsubscribe – if a consumer wants to unsubscribe – then don’t make it difficult otherwise they will just mark your email as spam.

3. Manage and reduce bounce rates

ISPs monitor the number of e-mails they reject and return (called ‘bounced’) – usually unknown or bad e-mail addresses. It’s a virtuous circle, fewer bounces today increases deliverability tomorrow, so:

Remove all hard bounces straight away
Remove all addresses that are soft bounced regularly, a typical rule is three soft bounces in a defined time period
Change the rule if bounce rates persist
Batch delivery to reduce risk of blocking due to high bounce rates

4. Understand how content filters work

ISPs use content filters to screen and detect spam by scanning the contents of all incoming e-mails. These filters are generally 3rd party tools employed by ISPs and use and email’s “subject line” extensively as a key contributor to spam scores. E-mails that fail content filters get bounced without even entering the recipient’s mailboxes. At best they may be delivered to a junk folder. Core to improving response here is:

Understand the tools, how they operate and test your e-mails against them before they are sent
Construct subject lines that are not seen as spam
Use mailbox delivery testing to ensure that e-mails get into inboxes rather than junk folders
Check that html is clean –
Content filters will send e-mails with missing tags or empty title tags to the spam filter
Avoid coloured backgrounds and links without http://’ prefix

5. Audit e-mail collection

The better the data you collect the fewer bad e-mail addresses. The better you keep the data up to date the less chance there is of bouncing

Cleanse existing database to remove duplicate addresses
Validate e-mail addresses on collection for correct
Adopt a double opt in to confirm that the e-mail address is valid and that the e-mail address exists, confirmed as willing to receive e-mails from you
Inform recipients why they are receiving the confirmation message and confirm what they can expect to get from you

6. “Sender From” Authentication

Sub domain authentication will re-assure ISPs that the e-mail comes from a genuine source so:

Your email should contain a white Listing Statement advising the recipient to add you to their ‘safe
Consider ‘CertifiedEmail’ status
A scheme that allows regular e-mail senders to get pre-authorised ‘white listing’ certification

7. Consider the timing of your e-mail

Your audience will be considering different things at different times of the week or the day so

Try sending your e-mail on different days: Does your message lend itself to the weekend? - Try sending on Friday morning.
Travel bookings tend to be made on Monday or Tuesdays – Try sending your mail on Monday morning
Try sending your e-mails at different times of day: Lunch time is a time when people open personal e-mails or for when they get home from work
Maximise impact by considering how time of day or week can improve relevancy for your audience

8. Include a prominent ‘permission reminder’

Give context for the message to reduce potential for the message to be marked as spam

Have a prominent unsubscribe link - if someone wants out, let them go and make it as easy as possible.
Set maximum width to 600 pixels
Avoid reverse text
Avoid vertically aligned content regions where height is determined by text –e-mail clients will display fonts with different leading
Include key non-graphical calls to action above the fold
Add alt tags to your images
Avoid padding and margin – Some e-mail clients do not display them
E-mail size should be under 20k

9. Have something relevant to say

What is the reason to communicate - Be newsworthy, informative or entertaining
Strength of message / offer – Be as relevant with the offer as you can to the target audience.
Segment your list and target your offer or information to the segment
Have a clear objective for your e-mail - What’s the one thing you want your audience to do as a result of reading your e-mail?
Ensure that you have a clear call to action above the fold

10. Continue the dialogue

If you are able to attract the user to click or interact take them to relevant content

Build specific landing pages for your campaign or take the user through to relevant on-site content
Meet the users expectation of the content contained there
Use similar wording and images
Re-assure them they are in the same place
Don’t just take people to your home page
Don’t present consumers with content that is not specific to the advert they have responded to

But most importantly, test, measure and test again. Each e-mail list will be different, fine tune your e-mail campaigns based on the timing of delivery and the relevancy for your audience.

Welcome

2008-07-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog.