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.

Number of followers or ‘likes’ doesn’t mean anything to management (or to your bottom line), so instead look at who specifically is following you, identify how many are in your target audience groups, and then measure how they’re interacting with the content you post (e.g. sharing it, commenting on it, asking questions, etc.).

3. Compliance-friendly Twitter
Participants were impressed with how Lloyds TSB had managed extending its customer service arm into Twitter. By identifying itself as the official account for Lloyds and clearly telling users not to tweet their personal details, the bank has created a commendable compliance and user-friendly Twitter presence.

When questioned about concerns over security, participants were surprised to learn Twitter has actually helped fight fraud in some cases for Lloyds – for example, users being able to immediately report suspicious emails and texts falsely claiming to be from the bank asking for their personal details.

For staffing the Twitter operation, Lloyds followed the same advice we always give for social media: pick staff with the right knowledgebase who are already using the network and train them up with house rules and ideas for content on how to engage on the company’s behalf.

By now you’re probably wishing you’d taken part in the discussions…but it’s not too late! Leave your thoughts below and if you have any questions, feel free to post them here or contact us directly.

Next week a little reaction from the mobile debate.

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’.

In the round table discussions some interesting approaches to using the social sphere successfully and in an ‘obedient’ fashion were discussed. Here are some tips from people who are making it work that we extrapolated from the tables, interestingly they all appear to have synergy with the advice we provided in our presentations:

1. Start Small – Taking small steps into social media can be an effective way to
   ensure that senior stakeholders and legal teams get used to the idea, and are
   more open to further development. Consider testing the water with a campaign
   that has a definite end date. Establish success criteria, run the campaign and
   use the results to either encourage further uptake, or disregard/refine your
   approach.
2. Have a cross-channel strategy – For peace of mind. Get down on paper a procedure that describes what you will do if things do go wrong in the social landscape. Identify potential escalation points and the correct channels to use to deal with them. (You might need a press release at some point)
3. Getting buy in – Senior stakeholders can be nervous about embracing social media. When proposing uptake concentrate on presenting the high-level combination of benefits rather than the detail.
4. Resourcing – As Mark Sherwin proposed in his effective digital strategy piece, identifying people within your organisation who already understand and use social platforms to become your voice is often a great way to hit the ground
   running. One major bank told us how they had pulled people from their call centre who were already keen on Twitter, trained them and now use them to provide customer service via the channel.
5. Educate your staff and your customers – If both parties in a social interaction are aware of the boundaries then social platforms can be used effectively to mutual benefit. For instance, understanding when a conversation needs to move to DM on Twitter will ensure compliance. Produce, and present clearly, carefully worded instructions and guidelines for staff and customers.

What do you think about these tips? Go on, speak your mind below

Here are yesterday’s slides:

Part One – Introduction, Research, Rich Media and Blogging
Part Two – Social Networks, Mobile and Websites
Part Three – Effective Digital Strategy

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.

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….

The Good
The GA team has promised that the new interface will (and does) bring us lots of new features, and in the near future too. For example you can now benefit from the rather cool “real time” overview which shows what users are currently doing on your site. You can find out how they are getting to you and what they are currently doing – maybe a bit big brother watching, but everyone I’ve shown it to loves it.

We can now finally have more than one dashboard! I can now finally have a “set” dashboard for each of my roles: editor, admin, dev/hosting, etc. without having to either log in/out four times or sacrifice dashboard real estate for my reports.

Another great little feature are the “social” integration reports: originally you had to rely on scanning your ShareThis or AddThis reports to see how people were using your site to make social engagements e.g. social bookmarking, tweeting about an article, etc. However, the new GA interface brings this into your main system – and currently supports the two players mentioned, along with their own Google Plus buttons. You can also extend other facilities using the new “tracksocial” method on your code as well – more info can be found on Google’s Social Interaction Analytics page.

The dedicated “mobile” section is also a nice thought – though all the information contained here was readily available from the old interface, the GA team have nicely grouped it and taken it out of the main section. It keeps the mobile fans happy with being able to easily see traffic that’s hitting your site via mobiles/tablets.

My favourite feature however, (closely followed by the gimmick real time feature) has to be the visitor flow. This is a clever bit of functionality that allows you to easily see how visitors have interacted on your site – including entrance and exit pages. Personally I think it shows a lot of information in a more friendly outlay and allows you to get the information you want a lot quicker than fishing through half a dozen reports in the old interface. So definitely a thumbs up here for that report!

The bad
As you’ve guessed, the new interface isn’t all plain sailing! In fact, I’ve had a tantrum or two when unable to easily find some of the reports I used for different clients on reviews. After searching and searching, I eventually found them as secondary dimensions.

I also don’t think the GA team has done the best job to help users migrate over easily. They still haven’t created a way to migrate custom reporting over (so it looks like you’ll have to manually do that) and more worryingly, they removed the familiar “help” link which was always useful to not-so-familiar users. This would have been handy for users unfamiliar with the new reports – but instead you now need to trawl through the web for unofficial help.

And the plain ugly…
The “review” panel for the list of accounts you have has gone in favour of a god-awful search/listing feature. You no longer have a nice tabled layout showing some “brief” summary information (and whether your site has gone up/down) in traffic percentage. It’s all gone in favour of a cumbersome and ugly listing, which if you have anything more than 20 or so accounts/filters, you’ll need to rely on the search facility as you won’t be able to find jack I’m afraid.

Next, if you’re logged into GA and looking at a particular profile, don’t open another tab and load your site, as GA decides to take over that page and throw the in-page analytics all over it. Bit annoying if you forgot about it – but luckily with a quick click you can get rid of it.

Oh, and I nearly forgot: the continued reliance on flash – yep there’s more and more flash being used each time. Glad GA looked after their own “android” followers and left us “Apple” fans out in the cold. Not sure how well the apps that can be found in the app store will work after the change – can only keep my fingers crossed!

So what do you need to do?

1. Have a good look round and get yourself familiar: if any of your other departments use GA you can easily expect to have a hundred and one questions coming through shortly! Maybe a pro-active approach would be to run a GA training session on the new interface (always a great way to show off the new features).

2. While checking out the new features, make sure you’re tracking code is up-to-date and you’ve set up the account to allow cross-domain tracking and that you’ve activated the great search tracking feature they offer. You may need to speak to your developer about the search parameter to set this up, but believe me it’s worth it – those search reports are worth more than their weight in gold for improving the visitor flow on your site.

3. If you’re using any custom reporting try and take some manual copies of how you have built them as you may well need to re-build them yourself soon unless they do get the migrate tool sorted quickly.

4. Have a look at what you’re using on your site now for social engagement: if it’s not AddThis or ShareThis have a think about changing. It’ll allow you to more easily track whether they really are being used and what is being talked about from the site to social media.

5. Set up your new dashboards as they don’t come over (as far as I can see) from the old system, and remember – you can now have multiple dashboards so no need to struggle fitting everything on the one dashboard!

No, I’m not talking about QVC or similar shopping channels, I mean using your mobile, tablet or laptop to buy something while watching the TV. According to Ofcom we all do it all the time anyway, sitting there with our laptops, or tablets surfing the web while watching the latest episode of our favourite series. So it’s no real surprise that it was announced today that BSkyB has invested significant amounts in Zeebox – ‘The new way to watch television’.

So what does it do? Well it’s an app for your device that knows what you are watching, it can show you what your friends are watching and lets you interact with them, and it offers you tags that are related to the programme you are watching which will link you to places where you can find out more about the subject, or buy stuff mentioned in the programmes you are watching. If Joe Bloggs is plugging his latest book it will provide you with a link to hop off and buy it before he’s told you the plot.

Is that something we will all be getting into soon? It could be.

I am wondering how Ofcom will reconcile this development with its product placement rules. Currently, “There must be ‘editorial justification’ for a product to be placed in a programme”. But what if everything in, or mentioned on a programme is buyable? Somebody on Eastenders shouts “don’t use that hammer on him Fred”. I’m sitting on my sofa and reminded that I meant to buy a new hammer, and there in front of me is a link to the Screwfix website. How much would Screwfix pay for that I wonder, and is that product placement in the current sense?

It doesn’t seem like it will be long before every SKY TV programme will be analysed for selling opportunities, and retailers will have to pay in a similar way to PPC works now to have their links at the top of the list. Another whole new industry courtesy of the digital revolution.

About 12 years ago my old boss went to a seminar in New York, which rather than showing the web the way it was in those days, showed how it might evolve. He regaled us with an account of one presentation where they were watching a stylish old 30’s movie, all Art Deco and lavish. At one point the presenter clicked on the film, precisely on the part of the set showing a fabulous art deco table lamp. The action froze, a dialogue box appeared showing the lamp, its price and a link to the shop where it could be bought. It turned out that the whole film, actors’ clothes, wallpaper, furniture and so on was purchasable. Now that will be a very interesting way to fund the production of a new TV drama, or film. Anyone want to go into business?

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!

Woodward’s analysis of the situation was summed up by the journalist Jason Cowley thus: “The laughter and derision will continue until a new chief executive and distinguished coach are appointed and the RFU demonstrate they are a fit and proper institution rather than an old boys’ club of incompetents and can create a system and development programme that begins to reverse such alarming decline.”

Harsh words! But what do they have to do with membership organisations?

Well, firstly the RFU is in effect a membership organisation owned by its member clubs that is beginning to lose the respect of its membership due, it seems, to partisan decision making. Whether true or not the image of a self-serving ‘old boys club’ is one that is hard to shake, and is similar to the way many communication experts have heard other organisations described in young membership workshops.

Secondly, maybe describing the hierarchy at the RFU as ‘incompetents’ might be a little strong, but certainly there would appear to be a reluctance to embrace change and explore new ways of doing things across the boards of many establishments, not just the RFU.

And finally, if organisations cannot make themselves more relevant to their younger potential membership by understanding what they need, when they need it as well as how and where to engage with them, they may well be heading for an ‘alarming decline’, just like the RFU.

This and other themes will be the focus of our report into membership organisations. We intend to explore them further via an online survey and interviews with senior stakeholders across a variety of organisations in the UK and Australia. If you would like to contribute to the research please register your interest here, and please feel free to contact me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or leave a comment below.

On completion of the survey, you can choose to be one of the first to see its results and receive a copy of our report. You will also be invited to a free breakfast seminar, at which we will share the findings of the report and offer further insight into how we anticipate organisations can meet the needs of their digitally native membership today, and tomorrow.

In the Trends section of the London Evening Standard on Monday, Joshi Herrmann (@JoshiEHerrmann) wrote an interesting, and in places amusing, article about his and others’ attempts to cull the number of friends they have on their social networks. He mentions David Shing (@shingy) from AOL who last month said that ‘the age of treating the web as a popularity contest is over’. Shing apparently ‘predicted that the next phase of online usage will be unfriending and unfollowing, as people try to reduce the noise of their social networks and make them more relevant again’.

So what criteria do people use when deciding to cull? Herrmann, in getting rid of 300 ‘friends’ used ‘the social pint formula’. Would he enjoy sitting down for a pint with this person? If not – the chop! On this basis one must assume that Herrmann doesn’t have any brands as his friends, and if this trend is in fact that, and not just a journalistic aberration, then it seems feasible that not many other people do either. This appears to be the case according to a recent ‘Digital Life’ survey by TNS; nearly two-thirds of Brits don’t want bothering by big-name brands on Facebook, Twitter etc.

For a long time we have said to clients that to be successful in the social space they must not push traditional sales messages and that they need to adopt the tone of the medium (or a suitable personality), listen as well as talk, and wherever possible offer some sort of value, opinion, or insight.

This of course has been difficult for some organisations to grasp, as illustrated by numerous social media experts’ presentations where an image of the marketer shouting his message with a megaphone is replaced by a ‘listening ear’, or a two-way conversation.

However, marketers want to be strategically proactive and usually in a manner that they can control, so in entering the social space they tend to rely on traditional messages and services, press releases and product promotions, rather than tactical intervention on social ‘issues’. It’s important to remember here, and the clue is in the title, that ‘Social Networks’ are about interaction.

In an interesting comment piece on The Drum website, Jonathan Priestley (@Jonpriestley) from Umpf describes how Dove ‘saw the popularity of its Facebook page soar, when it made a comment about an incident of bullying that had apparently taken place to one contestant during a weekend broadcast of The X-Factor’. 2000 ‘likes’ and 100 comments in an hour left Dove with an unexpected success, but how could they capitalize on this? Jonathan offers some interesting tactical and strategic options that might well have seen Dove owning the anti-bullying debate. But as he rightly points out, the moment that Dove, or any brand, attempts to revert to self-serving promotional activity on the back of such social success they run the risk of turning their audience against them, or at least being ‘unfriended’.

In his piece Herrmann quotes the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of a friend. I have to say that in my version of the dictionary, his definition does not appear. However in my version, one of the definitions is ‘One who is not an enemy, or is on the same side’. This seems to me to be a suitable description for brands to remember, since if they have any chance of remaining relevant in the social space they will need to demonstrate that they are in fact on the same side as those who befriend them, and give them a reason to remain friends.

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.

What has this got to do with World Usability Day I hear you ask? Well the answer is simple. The site wasn’t usable! It was innovative, it was stunning and one that everyone in the industry admired technically, but as I pointed out in my newsletter it had fundamental flaws. Principal among theses flaws were basic errors that suggest despite the enormous budget available, simple tests were not conducted. The site didn’t work properly on an Apple computer, required a series of plug-ins for anyone to get it to work correctly, and crucially at a time when the vast majority of Internet users were using dial-up connections, it was ridiculously slow to load. It was dead in the water before it started.

It is tempting to think that back then there was little awareness of usability issues, but this is patently not the case. Below I have pulled together some quotes from usability advocates from the 90s and 00s which are still relevant today. So the information was there but then, just as in some sectors today, getting organisations to invest in Usability practices was tough, despite the obvious benefits of identifying usability issues early on. We might have expected someone on the Boo.com team to test the site, and maybe they did at their own T1 offices on a PC with all the required software installed. But after launch the cost of improvements and changes became exponential and investors fled.

It is a salutary lesson to everyone: test early, test continuously and understand how people want to access your digital presence. That way both the user and the organisation will be happy.

• “If there is a choice, test early, because more than 50% of all defects are usually introduced in the requirements stage alone.”(Edward Kit 1998)

• “When systems match user needs, satisfaction often improves dramatically. In a 1992 Gartner Group study, usability methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%.”(Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

• “The average UI has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%.” (Landauer, 1995)

• “Savings from earlier vs. later changes: Changes cost less when made earlier in the development life cycle. Twenty changes in a project, at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35, would cost $22,400. Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600. Savings = $16,800.” (Human Factors International, 2001)

• “One study estimated that improving the customer experience increases the number of buyers by 40% and increase order size by 10%.” (Creative Good, 2000)

• “A bad design can cost a Web site 40 percent of repeat traffic. A good design can keep them coming back. A few tests can make the difference.” (Kalin, 1999)

• “The magnitude of usability improvements is usually large. This is not a matter of increasing use by a few percent. It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales.” (Nielsen, July 1999)

After mulling over the design brief set by Cardiff Council, our students Sarah, Ashleigh, Alex and Harry were given a week to go away and do as much research as possible based around stats, facts and how creative ideas could in some way change people’s commuting patterns in and around Cardiff.

We began with an initial discussion on how we could really hope to change people’s habits. We talked about ideas around awareness on climate change and how by making one small change, it could make a big difference.

However, we knew that using climate change as a hook for people to alter their behaviour in today’s current climate was not enough; people now worry more about their finances and grabbing a bargain than global warming. This fed into the idea that to change people’s patterns we would need to reward them in some way which would make it attractive to change.

A week passed and the students arrived back to present their ideas. These were pure pen to paper at this stage but what they had brainstormed was very viable and something that could really add a fun aspect to the campaign and to commuting.

The idea was to pull together our everyday toys – i.e. mobile phones, the internet and social media – and make these the drivers behind the campaign. They talked about placing items around the commuter routes, which could be then collected via your phone by using QR codes or even photos. The more items you collected via your route the greater the rewards. These ‘rewards’ could then be converted in to discounts off items in your favourite shops.

The next stage of project is to create a face for the campaign:

What could it be called?
What could be its mark?
What are the items to collect?

We all agreed that the campaign could have a real fun side to it, which would then lend itself well to the likes of twitter and facebook. This would help drive the idea that by making one small change could make a big difference.

Stay tuned for an update of the students’ progress after the next group meeting. In the meantime, if you would like to speak to Ed about the work the students are doing, you can email him on edward.richards@precedent.co.uk or find him on twitter, @eboyrichards.

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”.

So it was with a sense of revelation that I recently read an article titled ‘Universities Enrol for Marketing Masterclass’ in Marketing Week. It would appear that University of Exeter will have no such problems shortly since at the time of going to press they were advertising for a position which is described by Stuart Franklin their Director of MarComms as follows:

“The new head of marketing role is about a much more considered approach to how we develop academic programmes and drive value from them. We want to look at our programme portfolio so we can come up with a way of assessing performance, look at how we bring new programmes to market and put more rigour into any process than we currently have.

This person needs to be aware of what academic programmes cost to teach, whether it is a declining or growing market, and what competitors are doing. They will help develop programmes that are attractive to the market and manage them in a more organised and overt way than we have in the past.”

What an inspired and forward-thinking appointment that will be. I look forward to meeting the appointee and maybe hearing how the role pans out. Certainly with the need for ever-more sophisticated and targeted marketing activity capable of making one university stand out from another, this is a significant step, and one which I hope succeeds. Maybe my old client will apply for the position?