The idea came from this website: www.changeyourworld.org.uk it’s a really great website from Sustrans, showing how you can use your daily commute to do your bit for the environment.Suntrans are hoping to encourage, us (i.e. lazy commuters) to ditch the car for just one journey, and walk, cycle, or use public transport instead to help reduce car traffic by 10%.

So go on - take your first steps now at www.changeyourworld.org.uk

This was one of comments on Kia’s international business blog, Kia-Buzz (www.kia-buzz.com). Since it was opened in September 2007, bloggers from more than 155 countries have visited the blog and left comments on Kia’s new vehicles, motor shows, design issues and marketing strategies. The company staff listened carefully what people say and sometimes they ask questions to them. There have been lots of controversial topics and debates since they started the blog.

To manage its blog effectively, Kia carefully selected 11 blog writers within the company, from different departments and regions. Some of them are graduate trainees and some others are manager levels, and the company thought having writers with different backgrounds and age groups can help understanding customers with various occasions.

The blog has become one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing tools, due to companies’ growing need to interact with potential and existing customers. One of the earliest and the most influential company blogs was Fastlane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/), a company blog in General Motors (GM), managed by Bob Lutz, the vice president of the company. It was created in January 2005 to listen customers’ complains about one of GM’s car brands, Pontiac. When Fastlane was launched, many consumers were amazed because Bob Lutz and professional staff wrote posts, listened what they said, answered questions and reflected their opinions on real products!

Until a few years ago, having a home page was everything in Internet marketing, to deliver a company’s message to consumers and give them a nice company image. The growth of Internet has been encouraging consumers to be actively involved in companies’ marketing and production activities. They are not just sitting and waiting for the products and services anymore, but also they try to give their opinions on productions and companies’ activities directly.

These active customers, also called pro-sumers, demand high level of access and interaction in the company’s decision-making process, and blog was the best place for them to communicate directly to companies. This new trend on web is called ‘BR (Brand Relations)’ that covers the area that Public Relations could not reach-approaching each customer’s mind directly. According to this trend, a blog is one of the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to listen directly what customers want.

However, is it really useful? Should every company start a blog?

A blog is a completely open space, so if someone starts to talk about a specific topic, others can freely react with their comments. It is a place that totally relying on public opinion, so it is hard to predict what kind of reactions that public will make on a post. This means, sometimes it is much more difficult to manage a blog than a website’s contents management. Debates are often happened on company blogs between consumers, but also between a company and consumers, and how the company reacts can contribute or damage its brand image, because even though a blog is just a blog, people who write comments and join debates can be serious and they have a power to spread the story and comments.

Therefore a blog should be considered as a seed of conversation that can create either positive or negative buzz and it is treated as a part of Marketing and Branding tool. Then these points might need to be discussed fundamentally before launching a blog:

1. Who is going to visit the blog? and who should be the writer of the company blog?
2. How they should react when there is a negative comment?
3. How a company should reflect and monitor people’s raw opinions on their strategies?
4. What kind of topics need to be selected and discussed?

Yes, it may be just a blog that anyone write anything, but depending on how to manage it properly, it can be a key tool of integrated marketing communication, a really effective new media tool that helps developing communication plan in traditional media channels, or a good contribution in developing brand equity by focusing on consumer involvement and preference enhancement.

On 26 February, Naver (www.naver.com), the largest Internet search engine and a portal service provider in South Korea (5^th in the world), announced that it officially introduce Creative Commons License(CCL) to its blogs and café services (web community service) and began a grand campaign for promoting CCL with cartoons, videos and so on. As for the largest portal service provider in user size at home, Naver has been struggling with copyright infringements, content and blog posting piracy activities of users.  With this announcement, Naver becomes the third next to Daum (www.daum.net), which has already adopted CCL to its blog and café (community) services in 2005, and Paran (www.paran.com) in 2007. In addition, the largest social networking service provider, Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) also decided to adopt CCL as its official license and copywrite protecting method, starting in May 2008 (creativecommons.or.kr). 

  [Naver’s CCL page including CCL introduction cartoon, movie, FAQ]

What is CCL?

Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c) (3) tax-exempt charitable corporation. Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Their licenses help content owners keep their copyright while inviting certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” copyright (creativecommons.org).Using a Creative Commons License (CCL) means offering some of individual’s right to any member of the public but only on certain conditions.[conditions that a content uploader need to select before post a content, source: creativecommons.org, 2008]Conditions are symbolised and easily attachable to contents. There are four conditions when a content creator can use on a post:Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.Non-commercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes onlyNo Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

‘Free Cultural approved for works’ seal. Creative Commons recently added the seal to Creative Commons Licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. According to Wikipedia, Free Cultural Work is defined as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose. It also describes certain permissible restrictions that respect or protect these essential freedoms, but it distinguishes between free works, and free licenses which can be used to legally protect the status of a free work. The definition itself is not a license; it is a tool to determine whether a work or license should be considered “free.” When CCL is added on content, it means the owner of the content will get the appropriate license expressed in three ways such as: a. Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete
with the relevant icons.
For example, means it allows others to download the content owner’s works and share them with others as long as they mention the content owner and link back to the original content page, but they cannot change the content in any way or use them commercially.  shows the content is downloadable and redistributes the original content, and they also translate, make remixes and produce new stories based on the original work. However the content needs to be non-commercial in nature.   means the content is allowed for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the content owner.b. Legal Code. The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court (an example of the legal code is available to view at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode).c. Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use. (creativecommons.org)

How it works

Examples below show how CCL works in a South Korean community portal site Daum.
When someone writes a post, CCL information will be shown at the bottom of the content uploading tool, and the content uploader can select CCL conditions. When the post is uploaded, CCL is displayed at the right-bottom of the post, showing what the condition of this content is.

[The content upload is completed and CCL is displayed within the content]

It has been three years since the introduction of Creative Commons License in Korea. So far, Korea has emerged as the third or the fourth of CCL user country in the world except USA. Additionally, Naver’s CCL policies were expected more to invigorate CCL in the near future. On the other hand, Naver’s announcement about CCL has triggered enormous concerns in Korean blogosphere. Some of them were worried about possible side effects of unintended commercialisation of CCL, which could lead to emphasising the role of CCL as stirring up people’s sense of copyright orderliness rather than real Open Culture. But most bloggers were for it in view of CCL promotion in Korea and expected its impact on spreading CCL in Korea (creativecommons.or.kr).

Now surprisingly enough, while this maybe a bit controversial for the ‘purists’ among us, it is not entirely alien. There are always the established principles that should underpin a good piece of well-crafted copy, but it is also true that introducing humour or trying to do something different with your content can take it to the next level. And that’s exactly what this does – by subverting the user’s expectations, the writer starts to draw them in, intrigue and amuse them and hopefully, provoke a response.

So perhaps what we should be saying is: if you’re going to use wordplay, don’t just be careful – be clever about it. As we always say, the key to success online is in understanding your audiences. An intelligent tweak of wordsmithing can add spice to your content, but if you pitch it wrong then you could both alienate your audience and devalue your online offering.

Have a look at the article and see what you think: ‘Made You Thunk: Engage Your Readers With Typos and Misquotes’ – and in the words of author Nick Cernis, ‘Use your new power responsibly!’

With the rise of the ’social web’ there are endless places where people are discussing anything and everything online, including your brand. These conversations can be both good and bad, hence responding, leveraging and monitoring (or whatever else you should do) are now a priority. In fact, this probably explains why we always have a waiting list for our digital marketing seminar (just helping our marketing team - this one is for you Fiona

So what are people saying about you online? Or to be blunt - how much does your brand suck? Obviously our digital marketing team are the best people to answer this question (sorry, yes, I will stop this self promotion now. Adam winks at Dean and they high five each other). However if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can still measure some aspects of this by following Jeff’s simple advice in Business Week. The magazine should be at your local newsagent. (OK, it is official I’m now worse than a used car salesman - I’m even promoting Business week!).

Anyway, if you really are on a shoestring budget (you are screwed) or for any other reason can’t get a hold of the magazine. Here’s the advice in a nutshell:

1. go to Google
2. enter your company’s brand followed by the word ’suck’
3. the number of results is your Google Sucks Index (GSI)
4. compare your index with your competitors’ (and laugh out loud)

The moment of truth - Do you suck?

And today is the New Year’s Day in many Asian countries including China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and many more.  Wish you the happy new year of the rat, especially to someone who was born in the years of the  rat, 1996, 1984, 1972, 1960….(I won’t say who they are..=p) 

 Ok, here is the answer;

Why does Google Analytics report values that are different from some other web analytics solutions? Different web analytics products may use a variety of methods to track visits to your website. Therefore, it is normal to see discrepancies between reports created by various products. However, we generally believe that the best way to think of metrics across different web analytics programmes is to think in terms of trends, as opposed to numbers by themselves. One example is to compare related metrics, such as page views (e.g. 15% of traffic went to page x). In addition, the comparison of data over time could be valuable; information such as “conversions increased by 20% over the past 3 months,” or “our site gained 10% more page views in the month of March.” In most cases, you will notice that different analytics solutions, though different in numbers, will generally depict the same trends.While we are not able to provide side-by-side comparisons of Google Analytics with other web tracking solutions, the following list points out some of the main reasons why your actual numbers may differ:

• Terminology: The terminology used in one programme may not mean the same thing or may not be measured in the same way as in another programme. Page views are generally similar between vendors; however, it is much more difficult to define a visit or a visitor. In Analytics, if a user comes to your site twice within thirty minutes without closing his/her browser, it will be registered as one visit. Other web analytics solutions may treat this behaviour as two visits, depending on their definitions.
• Tracking methods: There are two main methods of tracking activity: cookie-based and IP + User Agent.
  • Cookie-based tracking relies on a browser setting the cookie. If cookies are disabled, cookie-based analytics programmes (such as Google Analytics) will not count the visit. This would exclude, for example, hits from a robot or spider.
  • IP + User Agent tracking typically uses log file analysis for its data. This may report higher numbers than reported by cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits.
• First-party vs. third-party cookies: Even among cookie-based tracking solutions, there is a difference between first-party and third-party cookies. Because third-party cookies are set by a source other than the website being visited, they are often blocked by browsers and security software. Google Analytics uses first-party cookies.
• Third-party images: Some browsers give users the option to disable images that are requested from domains other than the current page. Disabling such images will prevent data from being sent to Google Analytics.
• Filters/settings: Many web analytics solutions provide dat_ filters. Differences in the way that filters are applied, or creating different filtering altogether, can drastically affect the data in your reports
• Time zone differences: If your Web analytics solutions group data using different time zones, your daily or hourly data will be affected.
• Visitor browser preferences: Visitors must have JavaScript, images and cookies enabled in their browsers in order for Analytics to report their visit. Depending on their method of collecting data, other analytics solutions may still register these visitors.
• Caching: Google Analytics directly calls Google’s servers each time that a page is visited, even if the page has been cached. Other analytics solutions may not record an additional visit if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache.

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?page=troubleshooter.cs&problem=gatsc&selected=a4h5_a4h5t6_&ctx=gatsc_a4h5_a4h5t6__55614&aw_referral= 

These reports are also closely linked to our seminars on the same topic.  At the end of 2007 we ran a very successful seminar based on the findings of the Modern Universities report and we will be hosting this again in the spring of 2008. 

We will follow this with a second seminar to launch the new report on the Traditional Universities report – a practical and thought-provoking seminar aiming to surprise, educate and ultimately provide university marketeers with the tools and knowledge to improve their organisation’s online offering.

We would like to hear from people interested in this area… so if you have any feedback, good or bad, feel free to leave us a comment.
 

Tell me I’m curious, John it’s quite alright to respond through the comments on the blog that’s what they’re there for, I’m looking forward to hearing your views

Email from John Smith

Surely the point behind a blog on a companys website is a desire to communicate, if not excite and engage, with the audience (clients or potential clients). A blog who’s tone of voice is superior and condescending and who’s subject matter is neither fresh or exciting, will do nothing but alienate the audience it is aimed at.

Just have a look down at the comments and feedback. No comments, no comments, no comments, no comments, no comments…

Has this piece of communication failed? Are your audience unaware or do they simply not care about what you are saying? Or worse, is the tone and content of your communication actually turning people off?

A blog with no interaction is no more an effective piece of communication than scrawling a message on a toilet wall.

Surely a ‘communications agency’ would be more aware of the power of any piece of communication it generates and be more interested in getting the right message across, rather than ticking the ‘ive got one of those’ box.

So, is the writing well and truly on the wall for the Precedent blog?

Its a tactile and audio interface called ‘Shoogle’. (I can’t help wondering if the name would make any sense to those not lucky enough to be born in the west of Scotland…)

Shoogle is a lovely piece of software that enables users to check their mobile’s battery life and for unread / unheard messages by just shaking the handset.

So, you shake your phone and a combination of sound and vibrations mimics blocks or liquid trapped within. A phone full of liquid equals a full battery, just a few drops inside means time to find a charger.

Now, if someone develops a universal charger that works for every kind of mobile my life will be complete…

If you want to see, and hear, Shoogle in action visit the microsite:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jhw/shoogle/index.html

Sustrans’ Connect2 is competing to win £50 million for walking and cycling as part of The People’s £50 Million Lottery Giveaway.

At Precedent, we’re backing Sustrans and we’d like to encourage you to do so too.

Find our more about the project at:
http://www.thepeoples50million.org.uk/projects/connect2

You can vote online for Sustrans now at:
http://www.thepeoples50million.org.uk/vote