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”.

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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).

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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.

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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

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My time at Precedent
By Matt Rickard, summer work experience in business development at Precedent

Continuing with our mini series, we hear from Matt who worked here over the summer.

During my summer holidays I realised it would be a good idea to get some work experience. So I set about getting some and it just so happened that our school had a few fiercely competitive slots open.

I looked for something that I was interested in and considering I am taking both IT and computing as A levels, Precedent fitted the bill perfectly. I wanted to learn more about what relevance both my subjects had in an actual computer based business.

I would be shadowing one of the directors of Precedent, Mark Sherwin. He then showed all the meetings I could attend which turned out to be around two a day. This gave me a chance to see how a digital project runs from just a brainstorm all the way up until final pitch in front of clients with lots in-between. Other than going to meetings I have been involved in market research and testing.

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In this, the fourth of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, talks through some deadly sins of social media, while giving three simple rules to help you succeed in the social space.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of how to capitalise on social media, I’ll do the obligatory ‘why social media?’ for any remaining naysayers: put most simply, social media is where your users live online. For anyone still questioning this, look at networks like LinkedIn and its growth rate of 100% per year, or Twitter and its over-representation of professionals, politicians, journalists, and generally high-profile, influential people tweeting and conversing every day.

Essentially, not engaging in social media is now the business equivalent of skipping your next 500 networking events.

Deadly sins of social media
Firstly, please put those press releases down and back away from the Twitter feed. Posting press releases to social media is like walking into a cocktail party wearing a sandwich board of your services and shouting your latest achievements into a megaphone at the buffet queue.

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By , Head of Research

It is with a sense of relief, and not a little gratitude to my colleagues, that I can formally announce the launch of our latest sector report: Integration or isolation? – The digital landscape for UK financial services.

I have been producing big reports into various sector websites for over ten years and the title of this one had me reflecting on the process that we undertake to get these reports ‘to press’.

As always the research and data collection is really the easy bit. It can be done in isolation. Just put me in front of a computer, leave me alone for a few weeks with a spreadsheet and ‘the job’s a good ‘un’!

It’s the concept, design, proofing and coordination of the people who help me bring the reports together that presents the biggest challenge – the integration.

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By , Consultant

At our recent #UsabilityFail seminar Mark Russell and I spoke about why you should stop wasting your marketing budgets on bad usability, covering the functional and organisation barriers that inhibit organisations from providing good online customer experience.

According to a recent report by e-Marketer by 2015 an estimated $51b will be being spent on online marketing each year.

So much money is spent and so much hard work is involved in getting people to your site which is fundamentally wasted if the experiences customers have on your site are poor. You should also be concerned that bad user experiences hurt your brand.

It’s easy to look at sales figures (or whatever success means for you) to quantify how well you are doing. With pride these figures get marched (well, sent) off to the senior management team where everyone pats themselves on the back for a job well done and left with the impression everything is going to plan.

But while this tells a usability story of sorts does this really indicate anything about the usability of the site and how satisfied your customers are with their experience on it?
For many years I worked for a website that failed to address the usability flaws in one of the most popular areas of the site because it provided the “least profit”. Investment was instead piled into those areas that were on paper the “most profitable” even though they were less visited.

This lack of investment where a larger percentage of visitors were most engaged ultimately turned people away from the profitable areas of the site. Why? Does a bad experience resonate with users much more than a good one? You can be certain of it!
We as website users take good usability and experiences for granted and so we should if you want your business to succeed online. Poor usability resonates with us and makes us more likely therefore to leave, complain and never return.

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In this, the third of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, considers why content is indeed king.

As a content specialist, I often meet communications teams who are really scratching their heads about their content strategy. Why is it so hard to get new content up on our website in a timely fashion? Why do we struggle to agree on what we should publish in the first place? Essentially, it’s because we’re all more than a little bit self-centred when it comes to our websites.

I spent one (particularly painful) writing for the web training session banging my head against the desk as my client insisted that every page must begin within a brand positioning statement. I’m all for being distinctive, but if your customer is looking to find out about your services or simply looking for contact information, they really don’t care that you’re a ‘friendly group of professionals with a flexible approach and a reputation for results’. Your customers are driven online to seek out information or to complete a task and while messaging should guide and be reassuring, your content must put their needs first.

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This is the first in a series of profiles we’re pulling together from across the company covering all disciplines, to give you an idea of what Precedent’s about, how we work as a company and the opportunities that come from joining our team.

Amy Sansom, junior developer, Precedent Edinburgh

Having spent several years playing with web design as a hobby, I decided to go on and do a conversion course in multimedia and web authoring. I was lucky enough to land a junior developer job with Precedent almost straight afterwards.

Since starting with Precedent I have learnt a great deal: we use a variety of CMSs and develop in a mixture of languages. I’ve had a chance to develop with new and emerging technologies while working so closely with the other departments has increased my understanding of the whole process from start to finish.

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