In Conversation with… Little Orchard

Posted in Tom's ramblings) on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 by admin

I headed down to see our friends at Little Orchard yesterday, to appear in the latest episode of In Conversation With…, their series of live video interviews with members of Manchester’s creative industries. It was great fun and I would highly recommend it to other agency bosses and bigwigs (there are many bigger wigs than me appearing in the coming weeks). I’d also suggest you talk to Little Orchard first if you have any questions about video, be it for the web or any other use. We’ve recommended them to our clients and had nothing but glowing feedback.

Check out my episode below – it starts about two minutes in.

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The March of Progress

Posted in Tom's ramblings) on Monday, July 26th, 2010 by admin

It’s a trite truism that the digital world moves fast. Everyone here at the ANDDi mill is working in a job that didn’t really exist twenty years ago. Every day we’re learning about new technologies that can enhance our output, allowing us to create ever more intelligent, engaging work for our clients. But unfortunately, not everyone moves at the same pace.

Some of our clients sell into markets where internet use is, shall we say, patchy. We’re not talking about the third world here. We’re talking about large corporations. Unfortunately many large companies still keep a strangehold on users access to the web, through maintaining old versions of web browsers and imposing draconian restrictions on internet access.

The result? A poor experience for our clients’ customers. We take accessibility requirements into account, and (under duress) we can design sites that degrade reasonably right back to Internet Explorer 6 (still used by 6% of web users I think – all in large corporates I’m willing to bet), but when companies lock down images, scripts, videos, Flash, plugins, etc etc, it becomes pretty tricky to create an engaging experience.

My point? We need a change of attitude from large corporations. Shutting their staff off from the finest aspects of the digital world does nobody any favours. It leaves them blind to big developments and social shifts, and it limits their access to powerful tools and information. The potential benefits of more open access need to be more carefully weighed against the security threats this incurs. And for the sake of their own safety and sanity, they really need to get people off IE 6…

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UKFast SEO Roundtable: Content is King (as long as it is delivered quickly)

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 by admin

Yesterday I took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by UKFast and soon to be disseminated via eConsultancy. Around the table were Matt Rycroft of Creative Suit, Craig Stone of CSI Media, Terry Heffernan of High Position, Lawrence Jones of UKFast, and finally me. The debate was chaired by UKFast’s communications chief Jonathan Bowers, to whom my thanks goes out for the invite.

Prior to the debate, all the participants were asked to come up with five top tips for successful SEO in 2010. Mine were as follows:

1. Know your product: is search the right marketing medium for product promotion, or should it be brand/thought leadership?
2. Know your audience: understand their language and perception of the market
3. Separate SEO (the work you do on your site), from Search Engine Marketing (the work you do to drive traffic to your site)
4. Don’t underestimate the workload SEO/SEM campaigns can place on you the client, however much you outsource
5. Content is king: links are nothing without context

As a man with a strong content proposition, I placed the emphasis on number five, fully expecting to hear dissenting voices around the table. Amazingly, just about everyone concurred: the biggest challenge and greatest focus for companies undertaking SEO campaigns in 2010 is the creation and placement of a sufficient quantity and quality of relevant content.

The only alternative view came from Lawrence from UKFast, who suggested a much greater emphasis on performance. Given his company’s investment in a high performance broadband network and fast servers, you might not be surprised at this message. But the case he makes is compelling: his clients have seen measurable leaps in search ranking when they have moved their sites to his network, or subsequently upgraded their server platforms.

It seems entirely reasonable that Google would take performance into account in their rankings – after all, it has a dramatic effect on the user experience of the web, something that is close to Google’s heart. A site that delivers the answer to the user’s query quickly provides a better experience than one that delivers it slowly.

I am convinced, and will be taking site performance very much into account in future conversations with clients about SEO.

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Social Media: Digital PR vs Digital Marketing

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 by admin

Incredibly, 40 years since the inception of the internet, the digital marketing goldrush continues. Today (still) everyone wants a slice of the social media pie, which is leading to some interesting conflicts and collaborations between marketing agencies.

PR agencies are laying claim to social media as being naturally their space. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense: social media is an ideal way of conducting ‘public relations’ since it provides a powerful medium for conducting conversations between a brand and its audience.

But most PR agencies are not in the business of public relations. They are in the business of media relations.
This is an entirely different – though no less valuable – skill set, focused on building up influence with a small group of professional advocates/advisers within a given sector – usually journalists and analysts. Creating stories for this small group of people with the aim of having them share those stories with their audiences is very different to managing a large audience directly.

The skills required for a more direct approach to the audience/prospect have much more in common with the skills of advertising or direct marketing. Sure the message has to be made appropriate to the medium, but it is hard to argue that PR agencies are better placed to handle this challenge than their marketing agency counterparts.

More important is the skill to manage the reaction and interaction with the audience, and shape that interaction to drive specific outcomes. This is where a sales-focused marketing agency really has the edge.
An effective social media strategy requires a combination of talents, creative, practical and operational, and with the space still evolving, no-one yet has the definitive answer. But as a general rule I would propose this:

If you are looking for help to manage your brand’s interaction with key influencers in social media channels , you probably want to talk to a PR agency. If you want to leverage social media channels to talk to your audience directly with clear outcomes in mind, talk to a digital marketing agency (ideally, us).

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I measure my value in Google rankings

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, October 12th, 2009 by admin

People like the digital world for many reasons. One of them is its measurability. You can put a fairly definite number on the impact of most digital campaigns: how many clickthroughs, how many emails opened, how many Facebook fans etc.

But how meaningful are these metrics?

Check out this guy: http://www.baronseries.com. He calls himself the “#1 Wealth Coach”. His justification? In brackets alongside this statement: “Google and AOL.”

That’s right. His justification for this bold statement is that he ranks highly for a given keyword on Google and AOL. Their search algorithms are so powerful and authoritative that they can bestow market leadership on a person.

Back in the real world, this is of course nonsense. But it’s a lesson: it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers of the online world and begin to measure yourself on increasingly abstract metrics. But there’s only one metric that really counts: success, usually measured in pounds and pence.

Measure the direct impact that digital marketing campaigns have on your business and you’ll never go far wrong.

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Social Media: Not ‘How’ but ‘Why’?

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, September 21st, 2009 by admin

Lots of organisations are coming to believe that they ought to be engaging with social media in some way. The clamour around Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has led bosses and staff alike to believe they need a presence on these popular channels, and others.

I’m all for this new-found enthusiasm, but it is raising some problems. Because social media channels are fairly straightforward to set up (by design), many groups are leaping in with both feet, starting up pages here and feeds there before they’ve asked the crucial question. Because the answer to ‘how do we do this’ is so simple, many groups are failing to first ask ‘why should we do it?’

Without answering this question, it is impossible to set objectives. Without objectives it is impossible to decide on an approach, or to measure the success of that approach.

We believe there are three fundamental reasons why you might consider social media from a campaign perspective.

• Reach: Create content that is ripe for sharing and you will increase your reach beyond the prospects you know about to their friends and family that you don’t. Incentivise prospects to share content by ensuring that it adds value to their day through entertainment or education.

• Reinforcement: As any good PR will tell you, your message has a lot more impact when it comes from an independent source. There’s all sorts of stats out there about this, but suffice to say I trust recommendations more than I trust adverts. If you can achieve ‘Reach’ the chances are that your message will also be reinforced.

• Reaction: Social media tools are by definition about two-way communication. Anything you share can usually be responded to or commented on. If you want to know what your audience thinks of you, or of your partners and competitors, you should at least be listening to social media channels.

Before you set out on a social media journey, decide which of these outcomes you are seeking to achieve. Put some metrics against them, and then design your strategy and your content appropriately.

If you’re stuck, you can always give us a call.

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Roadblocks and Speedbumps on the Digital Journey

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 by admin

On my way out to lunch today I spotted a ‘QR’ screwed to the bottom of an advertising hoarding. For the uninitiated (just about anyone outside marketing*), QR is short for ‘Quick Response’ – it’s a visual code like the one shown here** that allows someone with a cameraphone and the appropriate software to access a web page without typing in the address.

The idea of QRs is summed up in the name: they are meant to make it quicker for people to respond to an advert, usually by navigating the user to a page on the mobile web. The problem is that very few people have the appropriate software on their phone, and even for those that do, there’s no single standard. Finding and downloading the relevant software for your particular phone is often complicated.

This is a massive barrier to entry for those who might use the system: so big you could call it a roadblock.

These barriers are common in the digital world. Some are small enough that you might call them speedbumps rather than roadblocks. For example, asking people to register before they can access a web service is often necessary. It will deter some people – how many will depend on the appeal of the application and the complexity of the registration process – but it doesn’t render the system unusable. Other barriers, from poor design to bad technology choices, can be almost impassable.

When we’re creating digital strategies for clients, and designing the solutions to their challenges, it is our responsibility as a digital agency to understand the journey that their target will take, and eliminate or minimise the barriers along the way. That means choosing the right platform or gateway, designing sites and creating content that is appropriate to the audience.

Sadly, too many digital platforms (and projects) that we see look great on paper but just don’t deliver in practice.

*BTW I know that QRs come from the logistics industry originally and that they were designed as a barcode replacement but that seemed an unnecessary complication for this piece.

**If you do have the Kaywa QR Code reader on your mobile device, you’ll find that this code links back to this blog.

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Joining the conversation on 5 Live

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 by admin

While off on paternity leave I was asked to appear on the 5 Live breakfast show – my second encounter with Nicky Campbell after defending social media on The Big Questions a few months back. This time the topic was ITV - they wanted to know what impact digital media has had on its (terrible) financial results.

The answer is both ‘lots’ and ‘relatively little’.

I say ‘lots’ because no-one can ignore the competitive impact of various digital media sources. OK I’m at the front end of the curve, but if you list the sources of video media I have available in my living room today, it is clear that ITV faces an uphill battle. My choices include:

• Freeview, currently offering me 92 channels
• Sky, offering a maximum of somewhere over 600 channels
• Sky+ (soon to be HD) offering a backlog of stuff I definitely want to see but haven’t had the chance
• Media PC, with access to YouTube, Vimeo, Miro, iPlayer, 4OD, iTunes etc etc etc
• BluRay/DVD player with a variety of bought (The Professionals boxset is a favourite) and rented (the excellent Watchmen most recently) content

The vastness of web video available through the media PC alone could keep me occupied for months, during which time I would never need to experience Britain’s Got Talent (sorry, not a fan). Facing competition like that, ITV’s audience will inevitably degrade, and its advertisers will find other places to spend their money.

Yet today ITV still pulls in the big audiences. The final of Britain’s Got Talent drew in 19.2 million viewers: incredible given the competition listed above. Coronation Street has a consistent audience of over 8 million; Emmerdale over 6 million. So far the advent of all these digital media options has done relatively little to diminish the power of ITV over the nation’s viewing habits.

But as far as I’m concerned, it is only a matter of time. With so much choice and an increasingly fragmented cultural scene, the likelihood of these audiences – and almost more importantly the advertisers – sustaining these figures seems unlikely. When I followed up the FiveLive interview with a phone-in show on BBC Wales, not one of the callers supporting ITV’s future was under 30. This may say as much about the audience of that show as the audience of BBC, but it seems unlikely to me that when offered the choice listed above, the next generation is going to choose ITV.

As we progress along the adoption curve for digital media, ITV will have to work hard to maintain its place in the national culture. And without a serious rethink, I don’t fancy its chances in the long term.

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Northern StartUp 2.0: Digital Advocates

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, July 27th, 2009 by admin

I sat on a panel at the most recent Northern StartUp 2.0 event last Wednesday, alongside Mike Perls from MC2, Richard Gregory from Latitude and Kevin McKay from McCann Erickson. Exalted company into which I was grateful to Manoj Ranaweera, chief exec of Northern StartUp 2.0 (NS20, or #ns20 on Twitter) for having placed me.

The aim of the event was to provide feedback and wisdom from ‘digital advocates’ to a series of pitching tech start-ups. Like a very friendly Dragon’s Den for the web and software world.

Four companies pitched: PhoneFromHere.com, PostureMinder, WebVM and Manoj’s own edocr.

Three of these businesses were familiar to me as a regular attendee at NS20.

PostureMinder is run by Dr Philip Worthington, an entrepreneur we’re hoping to work with on another project. It uses a webcam to monitor a computer user’s posture and give them regular reminders to help them avoid/ameliorate back pain and RSI. The application is strong but they just need one big breakthrough to get it into the workplace in a large enterprise.

edocr is a product that I’m gradually getting to grips with. A giant, interactive document repository with nice bookmarking and sharing tools, its original aim was to be the ‘YouTube of documents’. I always understood the value of edocr, just never its revenue. But with each new iteration, it gets closer to being a business that I can see drawing income. The big challenge is the competition, threatening to pull ahead on features driven by external investment.

PhoneFromHere.com is a sometime client of ours. Last year we helped it get some of the recognition it deserves by helping with an entry for the Big Chip Awards: it won. The product/service allows the addition of a phone service to any webpage: no need for a software download or even a phone. If you have a microphone and speakers, you can literally ‘phone from here’. When I first heard about it, I and many others in the audience were very sceptical. Do people have the requisite hardware? Will it not confuse? A year or so later and there were no such questions in the room: it was almost universally accepted as a great idea. How things change in this world.

The company I didn’t know was WebVM, or Web Video Marketing. A licensee of the FLIMP video marketing package, this company supplements that service with its own video production team. It seemed an OK proposition for smaller businesses, but really it doesn’t offer anything other than the content that can’t be replicated with off the shelf tools (e.g. YouTube). And as my bulging inbox will testify, there are a lot of video marketing companies out there.

Overall though, a great, if under-attended event, and further evidence of the strength of the start-up community in the Northwest. The next event will be a barbecue some time in August. Check the NS20 site for more information. Baby duties permitting, I’ll see you there.

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‘Trans-Media’: Controlling cross-platform campaigns

Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, July 20th, 2009 by admin

One of our colleagues/competitors Paul Fabretti over at Amaze coined a term recently: ‘trans-media’. I chastised him for creating yet another buzzword in an industry stuffed to the gunnels with them, then quickly conceded that I would be trying to use it as soon as possible.

By ‘trans-media’, my understanding is that Paul meant a digital campaign that operated across multiple platforms (it could arguably also be called ‘cross-platform’). This is increasingly the nature of digital campaigns: information might be launched into the cloud via email, twitter or YouTube and customers or prospects might respond via a microsite, forum, or MSN. For both outbound and inbound communications, the options are growing constantly, and each individual will have their own preferred ways of receiving and sending information.

This presents digital marketers with a number of challenges, both strategic and technical.

• How do you choose the best channel for outbound communications?
• Do you try to steer people down specific response channels?
• How do you maintain a consistent view of a prospect across the different platforms?

The fact that the first two questions are becoming so pressing explains the number of adverts for ‘digital strategists’ in the marketing press. Every agency is desperately trying to recruit people who know the answers to these questions and other ones like them. They are questions that can be answered in part empirically by looking at user profiles and numbers. But they can be answered much more quickly and completely by someone with the right intuition and experience. Someone who lives constantly with digital media and has a grip on its evolving etiquette. Paul is one of those people and, I’d like to think, so am I.

The last question is the more technical. At the moment you can buy an off the shelf solution (such as neolane) but this is built for enterprises, with (I imagine) all the integration challenges and cost that implies. It is also not what I would call ’social media native’ – it wasn’t built with the current web environment in mind.

You could assemble an array of off the shelf tools and manage them manually. But this is enormously time consuming and lacks scalability. Not attractive. Our ethos for And Digital has been refined and refined to a single phrase: “Join the conversation.” We want our clients to be able to engage with customers across a range of platforms in a seamless fashion. To do that we can’t afford to have a solution that is manual and clunky.

So we have to find another answer. We’re keeping the details under our collective hat for now, but when the time is right we will reveal what we’re calling Project CANDDi. Parts of it are already in the field…

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