These are my links for June 9th through June 17th:
- Keynote: Three Ways Business Must Scale With Social Technologies – Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter on how brand discussions are now 'off domain' and companies (this carries through from large to small I believe) need to consider how by linking together empowered customers, internal teams and technology you can scale to meet the rising challenges off managing customers in social media.
- Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages – A cheeky tech way to get the power of Google Analytics from you Facebook fan page data by adding an image to your fan page. A great way to compere your site and social network data.
- Google Caffeine jolts worldwide search machine – Google has now successfully rolled out the latest changes to it's search engine, known as 'Caffeine'. This now brings you fresher, faster jolts of content and news as websites are archived more quicky page by page, meaning content published could show up on search results within hours of not minutes. Great news for content producers reacting to timely news content, and a move towards the power of the real-time web.
- Q&A: Chris Gorell Barnes on online video for brands – Chril Barnes from Adjust Your Set (great company name) on online video for brands – interesting idea about a 'holy grail' of linking mobile video with vouchers to bring people in-store, and using in-store video to enhance sales promotions. He claims online video can increase conversion by 100% and reduce product returns by 60%.
These are my links for April 27th through April 29th:
- Digital Economy Act: Don’t Forget The Wi-Fi! – More details on the Digital Economy Bill and its potential impact on reducing public wifi, this will be a major challenge area too for public service centres e.g. libraries. To me wifi availability is a major part of the sucess of Digital Britain and mobility of workers.
- Social Media Strategy Before Tactics – This is an absolute must read article, interviewing some of the good and great in online marketing (including Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki) about the relationship between strategy and tactics in social media. Unsurprisingly 90% think it's all about strategy, but some good views on just testing the waters first off, which will work best for a lot of big to small companies.
- Checkout optimization tips from Dr Mike Baxter – Interesting guide (for members only) about how improving the checkout experience of e-commerce along can create greater retention and less lost sales. Key takeouts: customers want simplicity (not crowded pages, pop-ups or warning messages) so declutter, and the confirmation message is a great place to post other purchase recommendations. Also using analytics is critical and few e-commerce people use them to their advantage: not using analytics funnels and deep analysis will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
These are my links for March 31st through April 6th:
- The Collective Intelligence Genome – Fascinating findings from research from MIT's Centre for Collective Intelligence showing ways you can use open source development or 'crowd sourcing' as part of a production or decision making process.
- One-third of users willing to pay for apps – Interesting mobile stats: just 35% of mobile users willing to pay for apps, highest in iPhone users, lowest in Android, although Blackberry users pay far more than iPhone users on average per app. This is definitely the growth area for digital content and services development, showing users will pay up for mobile content. But it shows that the serious money isn't in iPhone and producers should look at spreading their production and distribution across multiple mobile platforms.
- SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Regular readers of this blog will know I'm no big fan of SEO (or 'snake something oil' as one social media guy I know described it) but in recent months I've mellowed on the subject – when using good navigation, good content and good structures supports people to find and discover good content I'm all for it and there's no doubt it's the affordable way for a small business to draw traffic to their e-commerce site. This is a brilliant guide – one of those that you can read and learn about 80% of what you need to know about SEO in one quick hit. Which is good because it means less time spent reading about SEO…
These are my links for March 29th from 01:03 to 01:35:
- Taking The Tablet: 15 Ways Publishers Are Re-Imagining The Magazine – Great set of video and text articles looking at how publishers are creating new work and experiences for tablet readers (including Adobe AIR and iPad) which provide rich, multimedia ways for users to interact with texts and advertisements to create enhanced experiences which complement the high value and branding associated with the magazines. The aim being not merely to provide content but experiences which can be monteized.
- The Democratization of Video Content Creation – Visible Gains, the monetizing video service, sing the praises of cheap, portable HD cameras like Kodak Zi6 and Flip as a source for creating competitive advantage in the organisation: "buy handheld high-definition cameras and distribute them to your best spokespeople and writers. Today’s evolving marketplace requires that you create compelling content to engage your clients and prospects. These are wonderful tools that jump-start the process." My own HD camera weapon of choice is the affordable Kodak Zi6 (c.£70), an HD camera recommended to me by several video bloggers. With free edit software included, there really is no excuse needed to star video blogging and reporting on what your business does.
- Mediacamp Nottingham: social reporting from CreativeNottingham.com – Yesterday I was live reporting the Medicamp Nottingham (a digital media barcamp) event for my online community site CreativeNottingham.com. This was my first experiment in 'social reporting' – using online tools to capture and disseminate an event. Our experiment was all about real-time reporting – capturing as close to live reports as possible. This included using 'CoverItLive' to live blog key talks (which were updated in realtime on the website), very quick event reports (my the end of the day I'd worked out how to report, photograph the room and upload the blog post by the end of each session), short audio and video interviews with speakers and delegates and photographs uploaded throughout the day. We used our community website www.creativenottingham.posterous.com as a repository for media content. A good (tiring) day, lots of lessons learnt as to how to do it better next time.
- Does The Times’s New Paywall Add Up? – June 2010 (presumably after the election) will see a landmark event in UK online publishing: The Times will sit all their content behind a paywall costing online readers £1 day (the same cost as the print edition. Ouch). Commentator Nick Thomas at Forrester Research looks at the economics, which is likely to see a reduction in readership to a tiny 60,000. The Times believe the niche, commited readership will still attract quality advertisers. This is a significant event as other news publishers will be likely to either follow suite or move to freemium based models (under discussion for The Independent) embracing building larger pools of readers and online audiences. Murdoch may be a brave fool with this move, yet he may also have hit on a way to change the online economy – force those who value to pay.
- Women in TV: the missing 5,000 – A shocking report from the Edinburgh TV festival showing that 5,000 women left the TV industry last year, versus 750 men. The festival's panellists irated the audience by suggesting freelancers should pull themselves together, whereas many women feel the inflexible working practices mean that women are simply forced out of the industry when they want to start a family. The TV crisis is unlikely to see any major changes in working practices but hopefully sparking a debate will put the issue at the forefront of agencies like Pact and Skillset.
These are my links for March 23rd from 09:22 to 23:16:
- Scrolling and Attention – Jacob Nielsen, usability legend, with some very interesting research on user experience tracking in relation to below-the-fold content: 80% of users ONLY read what's above the fold, but some layout that encourage scrolling can still command attention.
- 5 days until Mediacamp, Nottingham’s first barcamp for creative media March 27 – If you're not following me on Twitter (please do, I'm @susioneill) I may have been remise to inform you that we're once again hosting another Mediacamp in Nottingham this Saturday. It's a day long energised discussion, presentation and exploration barcamp to discuss all aspects of how digital media is rocking our world. I'll be experimenting with social reporting, capturing highlights of the day for our website www.creativenottingham.com, and hosting a session to talk about the CreativeNottingham project and our plans. <br />
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The event is currently sold out – if you *really* want to come email me (susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk) and I'll see if I can help, otherwise they'll be live streaming of the main hall and live reporting on CreativeNottingham.com.
- How to build Augmented Reality into your digital strategy – Augmented reality – building in a layer of digital information and content into real world places – is the next real innovation from the future that's already hitting our world through services like Google Goggles and Layar. This article talks about how you can bring AR into your brand's digital strategy.
- Project Canvas is open and standardised – and great for consumers – The CEO of video-on-demand service Blinkbox counteracts Sky's claims that Project Canvas, providing a standardised broadband to TV service, will be bad for business. He counteracts that producers are aggregators will be able to delivery pay-as-you-watch programming and in will generative innovative 'apps' like for the iphone to provided added value services through the open network. I can't wait – this could be yet another exciting platform for technologies and video producers.
- Creative funding database – Although I'm sure this is probably the same data as the funding database on Business Link site, this creative funding/business support from the excellent Creative Choices skills website works very well, it's easy to use and seems to be pretty comprehensive.
- Conservatives’ ‘Cash Gordon’ web campaign backfires – And in the blue corner, the Tories have made a pigs ear of their latest venture to discredit Brown. 'Cash Gordon' site had a rent-a-crowd vibe, and was based on a back-end system used by right-wing lobbying groups against healthcare reform in the US. Trolls quickly hacked the site and used the unmoderated hashtag's on the site's display to make a disparaging remark or two. Well done Tories for going web 2.0, poor show on making such a #hashtag of it. Lessons learnt: although an election is a fast and furious thing, it's essential to allow time for user-testing of a site launch, rather than a very public flop.
- Brown outlines advanced UK digital strategy – As we're all on tenderhooks for the notice of the UK election date, the parties are lining up their policies. In the red corner, Brown the encumbent plans to introduce two new bodies to advance the digital economy, An Institute fo Web Science headed up by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and a digital public service unit led by Last Minute.com founder and digital inclusion champion Martha Lane-Fox (one has to have double-barrelled names to succeed nowadays in government). Whilst creating two new quangos, Brown dashes against the rest, replacing 'first gen' e-government with an integrated MyGov portal (cue expensive new makeover). It will be interesting to see how the development of this policy unfolds, particularly in line with the forthcoming digital economy bill and whether this does progress through parliament despite public uproar.
- Direct Marketing 2.0 – You are what you click – Net Imperative article briefing on how user insight and split-run testing can help to build better return on investment as part of a digital strategy. Some important lessons here like 'rubbish in, rubbish out' data sources, and the idea of an A-Z rather than A-B, testing iteratively all aspects of a campaign or conversion web page as an ongoing beta.
