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Written by Simon Bennison
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Friday, 05 February 2010 16:57 |
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I really can’t type this fast enough.
I found out just now about a phenomenal mess up by Vodafone on Twitter, when the brand tweeted this massively offensive statement today:
By the time you read this it may already be huge news. If not by then, certainly by tomorrow.
Here is a quick screenshot of their attempt to put things right, by seemingly messaging each and every one of their followers to apologise:
At Alienation Digital we are always evangelising the strengths of Twitter to clients and prospective clients alike because there has never been a platform like it in terms of narrowing the distance between you and your customers online.
However, if it’s going to work you really need to have trust in your staff.
I feel the implications of this are going to be huge.
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Monday, 21 December 2009 17:10 |
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The 'Fail Fast' philosophy for working online is something we have often discussed at Alienation, and it came up again at the ‘Maximise Your Online Profits!’ Ecommerce Event that we recently attended. The event highlighted the extent to which this strategy is employed by other companies that are really successful online.
At the event, Barrhead Travel Marketing Director Mark Brock spoke about the learning process that has led to it becoming one of Scotland’s leading ecommerce companies. By being prepared to fail, and set up to evolve, Barrhead Travel has learned how to maximise its website’s potential as a customer service channel, as opposed to merely a sales tool. Mark spoke of how he wished he’d realised this when Barrhead Travel first started out online, but if they had waited apprehensively then surely they would never have got to where they are now.
Matt Round from Amazon.com, the multinational ecommerce retailer, echoed this sentiment. According to Matt, Amazon are constantly refining and testing new changes to the website. But far from setting themselves up for failure, the team at Amazon always tests new changes to web pages alongside the old pages, and they are always ready to make another change based on the results.
Ever thought the Amazon website was too cluttered? Well they tested a de-cluttered version of the website against the existing site, and noticed a considerable drop in customer satisfaction and purchase statistics, so they changed it back. When they trialled a new welcome message, they noticed an upturn in purchases so they kept it. Amazingly, Amazon still considers itself to be in the embryonic stages of its development; it has got where it is by learning from multiple failures and turning them into success.
Of course, the ‘Fail Fast’ philosophy doesn’t mean setting yourself up for a failure. It’s about constantly trying new things, optimising your website in new ways and comparing the results to the old way: constantly evolving and improving on your current position. If something fails, you can fix it quickly online.
By being prepared to fail and willing to give things a try, many online companies have managed to succeed in a big way.
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Written by Neil Barr
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Friday, 16 October 2009 15:08 |
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There are right ways to do things, then there’s the ‘sometimes no response would have been better’ way.
Firstly, let me explain, this is not a rant about poor spelling or grammar (before people pick this post apart). Nor is it about dyslexia, those with English as a second language, or even just those too busy to check what they’re typing before it’s sent. This is about customer service and why it is important for an organisation to make sure all their staff know the right way and the wrong way to deal with customer issues – especially when email is now the main method of communication.
Recently we’ve had some very serious concerns about one of our suppliers. They are a data centre we lease servers from to host some of our client sites. Although we have used them for many years, it is only recently that we have had concerns about the level of service. Increasingly we get conflicting information from them, or wildly inaccurate information. Some of the more extreme circumstances have involved down time for our clients and a very worrying tendency to resolve everything by just wiping drives.
Due to the issues we’ve had, we made a complaint to senior managers – or the ‘Big Kahuna’ as they like to call him. From our fairly detailed complaint, this is the response we received from a senior team leader;
Hello,
We do apologize for any inconvenience this mau hav caused you cause and will make every effort to avoid this occurring in the future.. As we do not install Codlfisio on our installs it is often harder for some technicjo9ans to diagnosed boser ss; such as this. It apperas that your cold fusion services are now running and you now have winVNC installed so you can resolve manye remote connectivity issues tonight
I have appli9ed a 1 month credit to you account to help yhou dtrhough the recovety process.
Please note, we’ve not edited this in any way. So, it begs the question, which company in their right mind would allow staff to respond to a serious complaint in this manner?
We now have even less confidence in this organisations ability to provide a professional service. Instead of taking the complaint and turning it around to their advantage, this hastily and shoddily put together response has pushed the issue in to the ‘off the wall’ category.
With email, Twitter, SMS and other ‘instant’ communication methods within reach of most employees, that allow them to send out messages before they’ve even had time to consider the correct response, it is now more critical than ever to ensure that everyone in your organisation – from the bottom up – understands the old adage “think before you leap”. Just because you know the correct way to respond (or even the basics of a spell check) doesn’t mean your staff do. Years of good work can be undone in the instant click of a button – though in this case, maybe they should have simply thought twice before typing with boxing gloves on.
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Friday, 02 October 2009 13:53 |
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Well done to Malcolm Coles for using his Econsultancy blog to highlight the impact that negative press stories have had on search engine listings for the cervical cancer jab.
The need for SEO to support a website is a topic often discussed with clients at Alienation. For many businesses, attracting visitors from search engines is key a way to raise awareness amongst their target audiences, to attract enquiries or enhance online sales. There are however many organisations for whom SEO has an even more important role to play, such as this cervical cancer immunisation example and the NHS.
The NHS has a responsibility to ensure people are finding correct and balanced information. It simply cannot afford for people to get the wrong advice online because their search has returned ten sites on the first page featuring negative, poorly researched, or incorrect tabloid stories.
Link building is an important part of any SEO campaign, and I hope Malcolm Coles’ idea catches on. Crucially I hope it works.
Yahoo! Site Explorer currently counts 11 inbound links to the main cervical cancer vaccination page, I hope that this number increases immensely over the coming days. In fact it would be fantastic if a major news website such as the BBC were to pick up on this story to add some real weight behind a link.
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Written by Ken Beattie
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Wednesday, 29 July 2009 10:18 |
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High quality lead generation is probably one of the hottest topics of interest for many companies at the moment. The recession has really forced companies to become hunters of business rather than farmers of accounts. But how do you come by good leads?
In my opinion, there is no cure all solution, but there is a definite starting point. First of all you must have a good, market resonating business proposition. This should be a product or service differentiation, not just differentiation on price!
The next step is to ensure that ALL of your employees understand this proposition and get used to communicating. It should be clearly displayed on the first page of your website, you should employ a number of techniques to get the word out there and you must back up your proposition with case studies which legitimise your claims. You could set up an email marketing campaign backed up by a telemarketing or sales follow up, a seminar series, partnership programme or direct mail. However, one lead generation tool that is often overlooked is the company website.
This can be a great source of leads. One company I was recently engaged by saw a lead generation per month of ZERO (thats nil points) rise to 5 per month on a continual basis by improving its website and optimising it for search engines. They did no paid search, purely organic, keyword analysis, optimised well, good links to other sites. They offered free downloadable white papers and updated their news: crikey there are so many sites that don’t even do this on a regular basis!
Within 90 days, this company converted a customer who enquired via the web into a sale in excess of £150k. They are working on a second. For the cynics, and I am old enough to be one, no inbound telephone call AND no direct or indirect marketing to either target had taken place. You will have to take my word for that!
So the web works. Not just for the business to consumer side, not just for items under £50k but for much much larger deals than that, and in B2B marketing too. Happy hunting!
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Thursday, 07 May 2009 10:36 |
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For some it’s an opportunity to have more control over your own image on Google, for others it’s simply another way for Google to have more control over you and your online presence.
Last month, Google set up Google Profile to “give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name”. The tool allows web users to set up an online biography, upload a photo, include links to other social network profiles, and tell people about your location. This is nothing new: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo et al. have been providing this platform for years, but none of them have the control that Google has over the Internet, none have close to the same number of users, and importantly none of them have the diversity of products that Google has. Wired Magazine thinks you should “be afraid”.
For many, the main concern is that Google are developing more and more tools that have the capacity to build complex profiles of all of us. Similar reservations have been voiced many times before: when Gmail introduced advertising that targeted keywords in your emails; when iGoogle gave you the opportunity to unite all of your information sources in one homepage; and when Street View introduced unparalleled interactive maps of our cities.
As a digital marketer, I rely on Google for so much of what I do. From Analytics, to AdWords and organic search listings, I utilise the power of Google every day to enhance our clients’ presence on the web. We provide search engine marketing and social media optimisation to help our clients maintain control over their online image.
Perhaps the key point is that you have control. You don’t have to fill your profile with everything about yourself, you can be selective. You can create the image that you want the world to see.
Ten years ago, when Microsoft was omnipotent, how many people outside of the software industry predicted that their success wouldn’t last? How many predicted the arrival of a Google, or Open Source Software?
If people don’t want to use the Google Profile they won’t, and if it starts to look like Google are monopolising the way people interact with the Internet, people will begin to look elsewhere. I just wonder when and if this will happen. Who’s out there to take on the mantle and shake things up again?
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Wednesday, 01 April 2009 08:46 |
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LSI is a system of indexing that looks for semantically similar words in order to measure the relevance of a page. Where search engine optimisation previously focused on repetitions of keywords, LSI scans entire documents to look for common themes, synonyms and meanings.
There is already evidence that Google is experimenting with ranking sites in this way. You can test this yourself by performing a search with a ~ symbol before your keyword.
For example, a search for ~Scotland returns results with semantically similar keywords highlighted in bold. Scotland is at the top of the results, but you can also see that Glasgow and Edinburgh have been returned as highlighted words in the search.
Try the same for the search ~apple and you’ll see that the third and fourth hit for the search are from the Microsoft website, highlighting the word ‘Windows’.
According to the traditional wisdom of search engine optimisation (SEO), optimising for the keywords ‘Glasgow’ or ‘Windows’ should require repeats of those keyword throughout the page.
If the search engines fully embrace this method of indexing, this will revolutionise the search marketing industry. What do you think?
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Wednesday, 18 March 2009 14:48 |
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If you’re proud of the work you’ve done for a pitch, should you publicise it even if you didn’t win the contract?
Advertising agencies often do a lot of work that never gets made, work for themselves, make up a client, or even make an ad for a client that isn’t theirs just to show what they can do; like Lee and Dan did with their VW ‘indestructible’ advert. They’re no longer allowed to show the ad on their website for legal reasons, but the old adage is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. VW felt that the film was ‘bringing the brand into disrepute’ but I wonder how much new work Lee and Dan won as a result of their short film?
What about publicising design work that you did for a pitch that you didn’t win, do the positives outweigh the negatives?
A recent agency website that we visited had published blog posts on its homepage about work done for pitches they didn’t win. The message that this communicates all depends on the reader, but which way do you see it:
A: “We go in for a lot of pitches that we don’t win”, or...
B: "We did this and it wasn't considered good enough for the client", or...
C: “Let’s not let good work go to waste, you win some you lose some. We think this is great and we hope you do too”
I would be interested to get some opinion on this.
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Thursday, 12 March 2009 11:41 |
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It's official because Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all say so.
Whilst this exercise was undertaken with a certain amount of tongue in cheek, it is true that people are increasingly associating high search engine rankings with strong, well established and high quality businesses, particularly if the online environment is central to your brand. If your business model relies upon online sales, distributes information online or is simply looking to reduce overall marketing costs, then it is essential to optimise your website for important and relevant keywords.
Of course, in many markets it is also essential to understand that many of your competitors are already doing just that and it can therefore be difficult to compete for the short tail, high volume, but broad and general keyphrases. Lower volume, long tail phrases should not be discounted and in many cases, the aggregation of more niche terms can account for not just high volume but also qualified searchers who have a clear intent to find websites like yours, and to buy your products and services when they get there.
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Friday, 06 March 2009 10:09 |
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We were discussing search engine optimisation (SEO) at Alienation Digital headquarters today, and when the topic arose about where we feature for keyphrases such as 'web design glasgow' and 'web design scotland' I was pleased to say we're doing ok. Of course Aidan and David were keen to raise the benchmark on this and wanted to know how we are doing for 'web design UK'.
"Well, that's more difficult" I explained, "I mean the number of pages competing for that broad search term is 52.5 million".
"What about 'web design on earth' then? Who's top of the listings for that?" asked David.
So this is my mission, my calling if you like: To get Alienation Digital listed as "the greatest web design agency on earth".
I'll keep you posted on how I get on. |
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Written by Neil Barr
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Friday, 27 February 2009 00:00 |
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At Alienation Digital we are passionate believers in Open Source software. If you don’t know what Open Source is, it’s basically free software that belongs to everyone. You can use it, adapt it, share it, sell it on to anyone.
Almost every web design project we complete these days uses Open Source software at its core. Take for example our many Open Source Joomla web sites. Joomla is a fantastic award winning content management system for web sites that is free to use and has many thousands of extensions that can be plugged in to it to extend its features.
Many customers are wary of Open Source. They can’t understand how it can be given away free and people still make money from it. The point is, all users and developers of open source code share in the benefits. We can then pass on those benefits to our customers by offering functionally rich web solutions at a fraction of the cost we were able to do only a few years ago.
It wasn’t that long ago that even we at Alienation were sceptical about Open Source products. At that time the market hadn’t matured enough. These days there is a plethora of solutions to choose from, all very robust, feature rich with large communities based around them. We’re so committed to it that we have developed Open Source products ourselves that are free for the web design community to use.
Therefore it was heartening to see the UK Government is now backing Open Source for use in public services. The Australian Government did a similar thing a few years ago. Both governments see the benefits in value for money, freedom and robustness of the solutions.
Only the other week we had an interesting conversation with a customer who hadn’t heard of Open Source and was sceptical about the benefits. Hopefully the backing of Open Source by the UK Government will go some way to showing how mature the market is and how much of a no-brainer it is. It’s win-win for everyone. |
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Written by Simon Bennison
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Monday, 02 March 2009 00:00 |
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So, I read that Baroness Greenfield instigated a debate in the House of Lords to discuss how the “dangerous submersion of our culture in screen technologies”, particularly social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo, have created a decline of attention spans in general, and a rise in ADHD in particular. Neurologist Greenfield believes that the need for ‘immediate reward’ that social networking provides stimulates similar chemicals in the brain to those leading to drug addiction.
Now that is powerful. Of course, it’s too early to prove any of this but it is interesting to read the article on the Guardian website just to appreciate her sheer confidence in the theory.
Is this not a little reminiscent of older generations in the 1950s worrying about the dangers of rock’n’roll?
Ignoring the warnings, Alienation are prepared to place our long term attention spans at risk by wholeheartedly embracing on screen technologies and are always on the look out for new opportunities to make the most of the web. We’ve recently set up an account on Twitter as a place for ideas and thoughts that will filter into the rest of the work we do, and allow us to share the things that inspire us with a larger audience. Despite the monumental scale of Facebook, it’s still early days for social networking.
I loved the way Avinash Kaushik summed it up on his own Twitter account; "OH: Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better." |
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Written by Neil Barr
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Wednesday, 04 March 2009 13:33 |
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Back in 2000/2001 when Alienation was a mere toddler, we made it through the bursting of the so called dot-com bubble. Fast forward to our approaching teenage years and now we have a full blown world recession to deal with. But, are tech companies going to be the winners this time around?
We can discuss endlessly whether the market has really matured or whether facebook, Twitter, flickr or even Google still have a lot of growing up to do, but nobody really denies that things have moved on significantly since those early years. When I first started Alienation, many understood they needed to ‘get a website’ but few understood why, what to do with it once it was there and that the Internet was more than a glorified brochure stand with pamphlets that nobody read and were out of date before they were printed. These days we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of what the technology can do to really enhance our lives and for the need to position internet marketing at the core of your business.
Stripping away the media hype from the daily round of ‘credit crunch’ news no one should forget that for every loser, there is probably a winner. This time around is it the technology sector – or more specifically the Internet sector – that will come out the winner? Whilst all around, everyone is proclaiming doom and gloom, life for many businesses continues as before – except now they are finally realising the true benefits of using the Internet.
The general feeling seems to be that web design and digital marketing companies are doing extremely well at the moment. Companies are finally switching on to the cost savings that can be made by transferring offline processes online, or how measurable the results of digital marketing can be, compared to traditional marketing. The difference from before is that now businesses truly understand why they need to be using the Internet and why it should be core to a long term business and marketing plan.
So whilst we ponder how on earth we’re going to get all this work out the door and if we can fit a mezzanine level in to the office, remember not all news is bad news. As we head towards our teenage years there is a real sense that we are truly growing up in every way and that some busy and exciting times are on the horizon.
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