By , Head of Digital Marketing

Missed the last month’s Precedent Digital Finance Forum? To our delight, the roundtable discussions quickly sparked participants swapping success stories for overcoming compliance restrictions and old fashioned thinking towards social media and blogging.

Here are just a few of the tried and tested solutions cherry picked as highlights from those roundtable talks. Have a read through and let us know your own experiences in the comments.

1. Thought-leadership and social media: the perfect match
Rather than use social media and blogs to push products, offering helpful and impartial information hasn’t just proved an effective strategy for major players like City Index or Lloyds TSB, it’s also bang on trend.
Stats from Google Insight reveal that DIY-style searches are significantly on the rise as users discover that adding ‘how to’ to a search string lets them skip the sales pitch and get straight to the content.

2. Softly-softly catches management approval
If you’re working at a less digitally forward-thinking institution, members of the forum found starting with a small and easily approved by compliance piece of digital activity gave them the stats and evidence for management to green-light larger initiatives.
The bottom line being if you’re speaking to management, talk return on investment and not blogs or Twitter. This means setting up the right tracking in advance – whether it’s Google Analytics for your website, buzz monitoring for the web as a whole, or bespoke tracking for your social media profiles – and knowing what metrics to track and how to interpret them.

(more…)

Adrian Porter – Head of Strategic Research

As promised, here is the first of a short series of follow-up blogs on our second Digital Finance Forum. Please feel free to comment below, and let’s keep the conversation going using #PrecSem.

After our initial forum in September last year we anticipated that compliance issues would be high on the agenda for delegates attending the forum yesterday at the Merchant Taylors Hall in the City.

With this in mind, as those of you who attended yesterday discovered, we attempted to recruit two, or three people with experience of dealing with compliance to help us facilitate a panel debate on the subject.
The irony was of course that none of the people we approached could get the clearance from compliance to participate. Excuse this use of text speak but,  – LOL!

However, we were determined to embrace the subject and tryto focus on positive approaches to common problems, rather than turn the morning into a ‘compliance-bashing exercise’.

(more…)

By John Campbell, Regional Director Scotland

Any improvement in digital connectivity speeds across Scotland will be very welcome – in rural communities and remote towns we still watch the Windows egg-timer ask us to be patient or we notice our mobile phones give up on that last download as we leave yet another 3G or even GPRS zone. Therefore, recent positive talk from those involved in the Scottish Government Action Plan and the use of terms such as ‘digital boost‘ in Scotland fill me with hope.

At Precedent we strive to deliver optimal digital experiences and we need the connectivity promised. Personally, and from a Precedent viewpoint, I can’t wait.  We are told the best internet speeds we can expect are up to 300MBPs with a current average of 6.8 MBPs.  Working recently in the north of Scotland I achieve a broadband speed of less than 1MBPs and even when home working (a working style keenly promoted by the Scottish Government), in commuting distance from Edinburgh, I get little more than 2MBPs!

What will 4G on mobile and the implementation of super fast broadband mean for Scotland? Opportunities for companies and the economy to grow through digital innovation and for rural communities to feel fully part of the worldwide internet cloud.  I look forward to seeing the timeline as the plan is launched, but 2020 does seem all long way off.

By Craig Cartwright, Technical Architect

Well it’s the end of an era for Google Analytics: come end of January 2012 they plan to replace the current interface we have all learnt to love and use with the new dashboard and features that they’ve been promoting for a while (Some may have already jumped shipped to the new interface as we’ve all had the chance for a while to change to the new!).

So what does this actually mean for all of us? And is it time to panic? Well I’d like to think that it’s nothing too serious to worry about, and for most, it will all be fine. But for some of the regular users like me that use some of the more obscure reports, it does mean some annoyance as they are being laid to rest (RIP).

But before running for the hills (or the likes of other great analytics packages such as Mint, etc.) be aware that some of these reports can still be found – but in the strangest of places – namely as “secondary dimensions” or via “advanced segments” for some of the traditional reports. As per the old interface these act as additional “parameters” for filtering reports. For example, the great old screen resolutions reports is now stored/shown as a secondary dimension in the browser report.

So what’s the hype or moan about? Well, with my like for spaghetti westerns – here’s my take on the good, the bad and the plain ugly….

(more…)

By Adrian Porter, Head of Strategic Research

I am currently researching Precedent’s next sector report which will identify and offer solutions to some of the challenges that professional and trade membership organisations currently face in the contemporary digital environment. Its working title is ‘Membership Organisations – Big Questions – Digital Answers?’ My initial fact finding has involved a lot of surfing in order to identify key themes that describe the problems that organisations are facing.

One of the major issues seems to be a membership base that is getting older, and the fact that it is more often than not these older members who are most active in the management, direction and administration of the organisation.

Professional organisations are struggling to attract younger members. Sure they have the full attention of the youngsters when they are training, or they are aiming for some letters after their names, but after this engagement levels drop off considerably, if not entirely.

There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I will feature here in the run up to the release of our report (eta February). However, I was reminded of one of the reasons on my commute home earlier this week. I was reading the Evening Standard, and my eye was taken by Sir Clive Woodward describing the RFU as ‘a laughing stock around the world’. Woodward was criticising the RFU’s structure and decision making processes, particularly with respect to the appointment of Martin Johnson as England team coach by Rob Andrew. Despite the resignation of Johnson following the world cup debacle, Andrew has taken no responsibility for England’s failure in the tournament and is likely to be in charge of appointing the next England coach too!

(more…)

By , Head of Strategic Research

When looking for inspiration and a slightly different angle for a blog to mark World Usability Day I happened across a newsletter that I wrote in June 2000 titled ‘Dotcom Disasters’. For those of you who were still in short trousers at that time, the summer of 2000 was the beginning of the Dotcom collapse that saw funding pulled from numerous high profile Internet start ups.

At the time the most prominent failure, and the main focus of my missive, was a site called Boo.com. It had received over $200m worth of funding, assembled a highly talented and creative team with the remit to develop an innovative, state of the art B2C website selling sports wear. This it had done, and a year previously had launched in a blaze of publicity, albeit five months later than the initial publicity had promised. However, within a year Boo.com had failed and gone to the wall.

(more…)

By , Head of Research

I remember sitting with the Head of Marketing at a top English university a few years ago talking to her about the challenges she was facing at the time.

One of her grudge bears were technical problems regarding source material. In effect, she wanted the course database to be a single source containing multiple versions of programme descriptions that could be used according to audience and requirement. So for instance, the same source could be used in a printed prospectus, a departmental flyer, on the university website, a departmental website and could be used as the programme specification. Her frustration was that with multiple-person access to this database and in some instances more than one database, descriptions were often changed without notification.

One of her other challenges was an old chestnut that I’d heard before about how to ensure that academics were ‘happy’ with her interpretation of their courses. She cited a conversation with an academic who had asked her to up the marketing-ante with regards to his particular course as his student numbers were low. She said that she wanted to say that it was because “his course was ****, not relevant anymore, and that he had not let her edit in any significant way its description in the prospectus”.

(more…)

By , Head of Digital Marketing

Speaking as someone whose iPhone 3 (yes 3) is finally showing its age, I was certainly disappointed yesterday evening to find the iPhone 5 is still locked away in some Apple logoed vault in America.

However, after reading reviews and reactions from the tech industry, I must admit excitement over a couple of very cool advancements:

1. The iPhone Assistant came true!
Keeping its old name of Siri, after the start-up purchased by Apple last year for its amazing voice technology, the idea of a cyber assistant that can understand both my casual voice prompts and Canadian accent fills me with a sense of excitement. Especially for the clever ability is has for interpreting meeting appointments in your calendar and offering you reminders based on your location (so when I leave the office for my meeting it helped me reschedule, it also stops me from forgetting my Oyster card on my desk – nice).

(more…)

By , Head of Digital Marketing

As highlighted on Mashable, artificial intelligence (along with some truly remarkable voice recognition technology!) is coming to the iPhone 5 in the form of iPhone assistant and it’s going to mean big changes for businesses who aren’t already actively engaging in their wider web presence.

The iPhone Assistant has an eerily smart ability to take verbal, casually worded requests and turn them into search terms it then sorts and rates for you based on existing criteria. To see the old version in action, check out the YouTube video by Siri, a start-up acquired by Apple last year, who’s original app has been in development ever since in preparation for today’s iPhone 5 unveiling.

Because the assistant feature uses user generated web content to assess search results, whether or not someone liked your business on Facebook or put a favourable review for it on Qype will suddenly have the power to determine whether the assistant feature even bothers to show your listing to its human master.

(more…)

By Nicholas Oliver, Project Manager & Creative Technologist

This morning, Rory Cellan-Jones posted on the BBC blog about an FOI request that had been made in order to better understand the government’s software expenditure.

Can Whitehall open up to open source

What’s Whitehall’s attitude to software procurement? A cynic might sum it up as “nobody ever got sacked for buying Microsoft”.

With such a large number of government websites out there and over 294,000,000 pages being indexed by Google on the .gov.uk domain, I thought it was worth a deeper look to better understand where open source software was being used to best effect.

Starting out with one of the world’s most popular open source content management system, Drupal, a number of colleagues had a dig around to find some websites that were being powered by Drupal. A pretty sizeable list of 26 websites appeared:  http://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#UK

(more…)