Monthly Archives: April 2009

Recession? What Recession?…

I first attended the UK Internet World Show back in the heady dotcom boom days of 2000 and have attended every year since. In that time it has proved to be a good barometer of what’s happening in the industry, from the post boom bust ,with vastly reduced floor-space and low footfalls for a number of years, to the resurgence of interest in 2006 with the arrival of Web 2.0.

If the first day of this year’s show is anything to go by, with the packed Keynote and Seminar sessions, it looks like being one of the busier years. No obvious sign yet of weaknesses in the digital/online marketing space but I think 2010 will be the real crunch point.

Some highlights for me this year…

• A very topical keynote presentation for my current role by David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling at John Lewis (one of Le Creuset’s main retailers ) who gave his six tips for smarter e-tailing…

1. Evolution not revolution – importance of multivariate testing
2. Listen – importance of user surveys, testing and analytics
3. Keep it simple – small incremental changes not big overhauls
4. Get and keep the right team
5. Trade – it’s about selling product not functionality.
6. Keep Looking Outside – watch the competition, scan the horizon

John Lewis website has 45,000 products online and sales in 2008 of £327 million. They are certainly helping keep Le Creuset’s UK sales buoyant in tough times and we are very mindful of building on and not damaging that relationship through our own online activities.

• An upbeat, dynamic presentation by Alex Hunter, Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group on Brand 2.0 and how established brands can benefit from social media interactions with consumers.

• Virgin Eye – was presented as an innovative way of displaying social media virgineyecommentary but smacks a bit of style over substance to me and seems much more about Web 1.0 online press coverage display than anything consumer generated.

• An upcoming re-launch of ‘virgin.com’ will see more ‘social network’ capabilities incorporated into the site to allow user generated content to feature across the site. It’s being designed by Rokkan– the screenshots were a little small and flared out to see much of the current proposals but the banner artwork looked great. Presumably Rokkan’s experiences with http://community.virginamerica.com/ have added insight here.

• Popped by Ian Truscott’s Alterian presentation on The Marketing Director’s Content Management System. I know it’s early days for the Alterian/Immediacy/Mediasurface collective and I know that acquisition in the CMS space is often detrimental to the original products but I can’t help thinking they have an opportunity to really make something of this, particularly at a time when marketing folks the world over are very focused on driving website engagement and ROI.

• From what I understood from Ian’s presentation and few chats with Alterian folks, they are taking the ‘best bits’ of Immediacy and Mediasurface and combining in the core Alterian analytics and email campaign functionality to provide a potentially very dynamic platform for creating, measuring and incrementally improving websites. ‘Try, tune, repeat’ is the essence of what online marketers do – so anything that helps make this easier and more measurable has got to be a good thing in my book.

• Comments by fellow CMS geek Jon Marks here suggest that EPiServer had the ‘buzz’ this year in the CMS ‘Stand Wars’ with a bigger and more prominent stand than previous years. As an EPiServer customer it was an opportunity for me to give the senior management some ear-ache for releasing a new set of functionality before it’s been properly tested but in talking with their Product Development Director it was a reminder of how fraught the whole process of regression testing and releasing quality software can be. Still… hopefully a bit less haste and more attention to detail next time guys!

• Fortune Cookie’s Surface driven Smart Table and latest laser eye-tracking kit for usability were fun and we’ll be using this soon for an upcoming phase 2 user experience survey and redesign project.

• Post show drinks, which were attended by Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, gave me an opportunity to buy Tony a drink after many years of reading and valuing his insightful commentary on what is often a confused and complicated industry for buyers. We didn’t quite get him drunk enough for some ‘world exclusive’ soundbites but the incisiveness of the comments he did make about the history of the CMS space and the movers and shakers over the years certainly demonstrated why he has gained such a following for his work. I did like his comments about ‘SharePoint MVP’s almost religious fervour about their product’ and a question from one of the LBi guys about whether he receives hate mail from Microsoft employees.

And one major lowlight…

The continuing customer confusion and potential for cowboy vendors and dodgy practices around Search Engine Optimisation. Let’s keep this one simple…

1. Use a CMS that produces accessible and search engine friendly code – a mid-tier proprietary one like Alterian/Immediacy if you can afford it – or an Open Source offering like Joomla or Drupal if you can’t
2. Use your own website analytics and keyword tools to determine the most relevant keywords and phrases to your area of business
3. Create readable and logically linked web pages that focus on those keywords and phrases your users may be using to get to your site – put them in headings and links for added impact but not at the expense of usabilty
4. Build a useful and attractive enough site that relevant, more established sites will want to link to you
5. Tell the major search engines all about your site and what they should be looking at through their sitemap submission processes – Find Google’s here and Yahoo’s here

Above all – just focus on building a good website that over time you can make great!!! Avoid the SEO cowboys at any cost and tell any cold caller from companies like http://www.itscoldoutside.com/ to get stuffed!!! – Don’t waste your money on so called ‘quick wins’ that you’ll end up paying for in the long run.

10 things about me…

In response to Jon Mark’s personal meme tag… ID 42a4263e9ae40c23da79bd43370fd814

1. My interest in the web and communications technologies is driven by my chosen profession of marketing (22 years now) but also very much due to a genetic problem of premature deafness that has plagued my family for generations. Having grown up with two disabled parents (my father who is profoundly deaf and my mother, who has had Multiple Sclerosis since I was born) my interest in technology has been shaped by how it can help disabled people lead better and more fulfilled lives. The point here is that, for me personally, something very positive has come out of a difficult childhood and a growing disability – namely an exciting and fulfilling career.

2. I am a feminist. My household is female dominated with my wife, two daughters, a male cat (neutered) and a goldfish of indistinguishable sexuality. I have grown to accept my place but actually do believe the world would be much better off with more women in authority. Case in point – what is currently being described as a testosterone fuelled ‘male recession’ and also the appalling repression of women in Afghanistan.

3. Probably the most bizarre thing that has happened to me so far is ending up in a decompression chamber in Perth Hyperbaric Medicine Unit on Christmas Day and Boxing Day in the year 2000. I’m sure there aren’t many people who can, or would even want to claim this, and it is a lengthy story involving my brother-in-law (an experienced divemaster) and a dive computer enabled multi-level wreck dive on the HMAS Swan off the coast of Australia – that all went wrong!

swan_dive

decompression_chamber

4. I love writing. My education was disrupted at times by family circumstances (see point 1) but my main interests at school were history, art and writing. This was also the key theme of my early career where, as a public relations person, I wrote articles for lazy journalists. The buzz of getting articles published (more than often completely unedited) was a strong one and I guess a compliment but I hated the ‘relations’ side of it all – so moved on.

5. Whether it’s by luck or judgement I seem to have been on the spot a number of times when history has been made during the digital revolution of the last two decades – from being in the House of Commons when the first Digital Terrestrial Television transmissions were demonstrated, helping launch the first cable modem service (broadband) in the UK, to promoting some of the first 3G mobile phone services in the world – can’t claim much more than having just been there doing marketing stuff – but it’s been a lot of fun and provided some major learning experiences

6. I can still mono-ski. I learnt to water-ski when I was younger and have been delighted to discover on a number of occasions that this is a skill like riding a bike (ie you don’t forget how to do it). Even though I have added several stone to my 6’3” frame over the years I can still deep water start on one water ski. I’m completely exhausted after one lap of a lake but I can still ‘get up’ on one ski – that’s ‘get up’ by the way!!!

7. I love knocking walls down. Grand Designs is an inspiration and has led me to removing around 5 walls in my house so far to ‘open up the space’ – the problem is that after that new space is achieved I tend to lose interest and I’m terrible at finishing off all the fiddly bits – probably a bit like my approach to web projects 😉

8. I live in a strange hybrid world where my marketing colleagues think I’m a ‘techie’ and technical colleagues think I’m a very dangerous marketing person who knows a bit about IT. I guess this is akin to sitting on a fence – which at times is both painful and frustrating – but I really think our pioneering digital space would be made easier if more people would make the effort to cross what is often a wide divide – in both directions!.

9. My specific interests and experiences in content management started when I helped build NTL’s first public website www.ntl.co.uk in html way back in 1994/5 (where the URL directs to now shows the onward history of this). I still have that original site on a floppy disk and have looked at it from time to time to see just how wrong it was in the context of audience focused web development and engagement we strive for today. It was a frustrating experience to say the least – akin to my programming efforts on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum as a teenager (really showing my age now 😉 )

10. I am a frustrated biker. I learnt to ride motorbikes a long time before learning to drive a car and once you’ve experienced that exhilaration on two wheels – four wheels will never do – even several ‘track day experiences’ in very fast cars have failed to match up to it. I’m sad to say my choice of bikes was inspired by what became known as ‘the Top Gun bike’ – unfortunately I couldn’t quite afford the insurance on the 900cc version so had to settle for the 750cc one but it gives me a gratuitous reason to put a picture of that beloved bike on my blog – hooray!!! Why frustrated? Well having to weigh up the desire to own another big powerful bike with my daughters’ pleas that they don’t want daddy to die, is a tough one.

gpz900r

bike1

I’ll pass this on to some former blogging colleagues who may or may not wish to play but will be interesting all the same – @matthewgoode, @dmeineck, @rich_allen consider yourselves tagged

The global economic crisis is all Dave's fault…

I said this to my brother-in-law (Dave) at the weekend – and then went on to clarify. Other than the two articles in the new Wired magazine that I’ve commented on already, the other very interesting read was one quite compelling explanation for the current financial crisis and it is indeed to do with a man called Dave. 

David X Li is a Chinese mathematician who emigrated to Canada and while working for Barclay’s Capital in 2004 invented a new formula for managing risk – which ultimately led to the growth of the subprime mortgage market. The Wired article gives an excellent analogy (you can read here) to explain the thinking behind the formula but the bottom line is that although, on face value, it is a persuasive concept it didn’t work and now we are all paying the price.

The big problem here however is that the formula wasn’t just tested out by one or two traders – it was adopted by every single trader. As the article states more accurately, “David X Li can’t be blamed. He just invented the model. We should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it”

groupthink

To me this is one of the biggest and most explosive examples of ‘Groupthink’ in history. The speed with which the world now operates and the complexity and immediacy of the computer and communications systems we are surrounded by, means this was a scenario just waiting to happen. There is also something here about American business culture in particular that I have personally experienced, having worked for US run organisations for a fair chunk of my career. That ‘can do’ attitude that has built many a successful business can also backfire spectacularly when it is at the expense of ‘critical thought’ and valid opposing viewpoints.

These same issues can apply on an even larger scale and make concepts such as ‘collective intelligence’ and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – that are often fuelled by social media mechanisms but not always governed by clear thinking – as potentially quite dangerous. On this occasion, the US pioneering on the bleeding edge of technologies has provided a massive wake-up call!

Wired's predictions for 2020 and beyond…

crystalballIn the recent UK launch issue of Wired, a panel of experts and ‘professional futurists’ (how the hell do you get to be one of those ;)) gave their predictions for developments up to 2050.  The predictions made for the years up to and including 2020 are listed below… 

  • 2010 – Citywide free WiFi – ( I like the word ‘free’)
  • 2013 – Rapid bioassays using biosensitive computer chips (I think this means less animal testing – good news for rabbits 😉 )
  • 2014  – Care robots – (not your iRobot style ones but pragmatic machines to make life easier for those with physical difficulties)
    • Life browsing – (personal data management)
  • 2015 – Intelligent advertising posters (Minority Report style)
  • 2017 – Window power – (energy efficient buildings adding power back to the grid)
    • Intelligent packaging
  • 2018 – Teledildonics – (oooh missus! –  remote control sexual stimulation)
    • Active contact lenses -(like the Terminator head-up display)
    • Meal replacement patches – (taking nicotine patches a stage further)
    • Non touch computer interfaces – (wave your arms around like in Minority Report)
    • Nanotech drugs
    • Everything online – (the intelligent grid arrives)
    • Office Video walls – (like Quantum of Solace)
  • 2019 – Folk-art revival – (cause anybody can do anything online)
    • Electro sex – (these people are obsessed!!! – but probably right, as sex has driven most mainstream consumer tech developments in recent decades)
  • 2020 – Death of Web 2.0 – (a real dig at amateur journalism and the blogging generation)
    • A machine passes the Turing test – (artificial intelligence arrives and we’re all doomed if the autonomous US battlefield robots haven’t wiped us out already ;))
    • Space currency floated – (what are they smoking???)
    • Universal cloud computing – (if they can all stop arguing and ever agree on standards)
    • Genetic prophecy at birth – (survival of the fittest and a new super-race is born)
    • Humans visit Mars – (and find they didn’t learn any more than all the robots they’d been sending there for 30 years already)

Beyond 2020 some notable inclusions are…

  • 2021 – First global warming conflict – floods in Bangladesh lead to mass emigration and drought in South East Asia will cause battles for water
  • 2024 – Microbial diesel provides most of our fuel – (oooh cheap fuel again – all energy problems solved)
  • 2032 – Cancer no longer a problem – (that’s a relief then)
  • 2035 – China goes global and dominates the world economy and its worldview starts to change culture – (I’ll stock up on woks then)
  • 2045 – Super intelligence – machines will build other machines – (and we’ll all be moving to The Matrix)
  • 2048 – Space elevator – (I thought they were already building this? ;))

Notable exceptions…

Bit surprising given that those two really do have the potential to change the world – but as long as we get ‘Electro Sex’ at least we’ll all die happy!!!