The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.
Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.
Benefits of the new implementation include:
- More reliable tracking capabilities
- Lighter code
- Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
- New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
- Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 29.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Development, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Our sites, Strategy, User experience, Web analytics, Web technology, ebooks box
A few random notes from the conference I attended yesterday…
It’s been good to hear just about all of the speakers today saying that the customer is now in control, not the marketers. Hooray, the penny has dropped!
Over the last few months, Intel has moved 70% of its marketing spend online, however most of the speakers (including Nike, Coca-Cola and Dulux) still think that the traditional above-the-line channels have quite a bit of mileage left in them yet and are planning their campaigns to be cross-media. But I guess they would be, given the subject of the conference. Nobody seems to be doubting the trend of marketing moving online however.
Some interesting perspectives on multidisciplinary teams: Nike have restructured all of their marketing away from product lines (apparel, shoes, equipment) to individual sports (football, running, etc) and within each of these areas, they work across all media. Conversely, Coca-Cola have separate teams for each type of media. Dulux also try to be quite tightly integrated – they came up with a single cross-media theme (“We know the colours that go”) then planned their campaigns across the different media around that.
Nike have an interesting approach of getting their creative agencies working together, in a what sounded like slightly forced arranged marriages, bringing talent in digital and traditional media together for particular campaigns, which they reckon leads to the best creative results. Looking at some of the stuff they’re been pumping out (Nike+ etc) you can see how this approach could work. I think I’d quite like to be paired up with a more traditional marketing agency and see what sort of cross-media ideas we could come up with.
Nike also try not to get too bogged down in business cases for the campaigns because a lot of the work builds the brand, which is hard to measure. They have a mantra: “If you build the brand, the business will come.”Another theme is around being useful to your audience – something you’ll hear social media bods like us rattle on about endlessly. However they weren’t referring to being useful within the online networks where their target audience hangs out, but around their brand promise. For example, Nike have moved away from “We sell running shoes” to “We can help you to succeed at running”, and Dulux moved away from “We sell paint” to “We can help you to get the right look”.
The chap from Dulux concluded with these tips for successful campaigns:
- Invest the time getting the strategy right
- Get the customer insight right (they spent a lot of time really understanding the customer journey of planning the decoration of a room to figure out where the customer wanted help etc)
- Come up with one simple media-neutral idea (“we know the colours that go”)
- Create simple, motivating objectives (“1 million requests for colour matching charts, across all media”)
- Measure
- [and our old favourite!] Continually review, revise, iterate and improve
One final point about customer reviews from UBISOFT. When they released the game Assassin’s Creed, the user ratings online scored higher than the reviews in the magazines. The lesson? Don’t be scared of allowing customers to review and rate your products online. Providing you’re not selling shoddy goods, people are kinder than you might imagine.
Tom wrote this on 27.02.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Events & conferences, Marketing, Social media box
Read the latest chapter in our ebook series and find out how you can make sense of the endless stream of data generated by your web analytics package. Define the numbers that matter and use them to generate actionable insights for you and your colleagues.
Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.
‘Essential Web Analytics’ is part of our FREE e-book – “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.
This is a user-friendly, no-jargon guide with great examples and useful tips of how to use the latest digital techniques to make your online campaigns successful. Essential reading for marketers.
Jenni wrote this on – 1 comment
It's filed in the Free things, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Web analytics, ebooks box
I’m a big fan of YUI (the JavaScript framework from Yahoo!, not the pint-sized popstar from Japan – no offence, Yui), and have been using it fairly extensively on the soon-to-be-relaunched goedhuis.com.
The main reasons for the love of this particular JavaScript framework are the vast array of well-documented and robust features you get for free, all of which are backed up with clear and helpful real-world examples on the main YUI site. It’s a great resource and has been a joy to work with on this project, a credit to the talented engineers at Yahoo.
Rarely is anything that simple though, and there have been a few challenges along the way on this project. I’d like to share some of these in future posts, but one problem I came up against recently was getting sIFR to play nice with the YUI TabView component.
FYI, the TabView component renders ‘navigable tabbed content’ in a format that is accessible for all users of the web, and Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR for short, is a rather snazzy method for rendering dynamic, accessible, rich typography in a web page, using a clever mix of Flash and JavaScript.
The particular issue I hit was with the sIFR-rendered Flash movies not displaying correctly, or even at all, when switching between tabs.
Fortunately, our friend TabView exposes a healthy dose of events that we can subscribe to, the ‘activeTabChange’ event being our knight in shining armour here.
Warning: non-technically savvy readers may wish to look away now…
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 26.02.08 – 12 comments
It's filed in the Development, Web technology box
Developers love new toys and when those toys make it easier to develop and build exciting new solutions then we love them even more. When I first heard about Amazon’s new web services I was quite excited, releasing their internal tools and services to the public is a great idea that will hopefully benefit us all. In this series of blog posts I will introduce each service and give an overview of how we could use them and why we should be excited! I will first cover the big three.
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”
Translated, this means that developers can create ‘virtual machines‘ on Amazon’s server. Amazon makes it easy to scale the resources your application has on offer, so as your application/site becomes more popular and demands more computing power EC2 helps you enable those extra resources.
“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.”
Translated, this means that developers can store any type of file (images, audio, html files, office docs etc) on Amazon servers where it is kept securely. These files can then be accessed anywhere in the world quickly and easily via REST or SOAP interfaces. S3 was built to be scalable so much like the EC2 it will add and remove resources as an when it needs them.
“Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time… Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database – real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data – without the operational complexity.”
SimpleDB as it says on the tin is a simple database, providing a lightweight alternative to system heavy databases such as MySQL or Postgres. SimpleDB likes to store ‘items’ within a ‘domain’, each ‘item’ can have many ‘attributes’ and each ‘attribute’ can have multiple ‘values’.
Here is the example table given by Amazon, as you can see each item can have multiple colours just like clothes in real life:
These items can then be queried much like a traditional database which means we can ask the database questions about its items and receive answers back, a query to retrieve all blue sweaters would look like (colour = blue INTERSECTION description = sweater), INTERSECTION acts like an AND.
If we add these three services together we have a very powerful platform on which to build new web applications. Now we know what each service does I shall give you a nice analogy of how they tie together.
Imagine a small pie shop that has a small but steady stream of customers, about 10 pie fiends per day. One of the pie lovers tells two friends about how great this pie shop is, they then tell two friends who then tell two friends etc etc, you know the story. Suddenly the little pie shop has thousands of customers coming from all over the place to get a taste of the now famous pies, however the owner of the pie shop is unable to cope with the demand, what they really need is a pie superstore! The next day they move down the road into the pie superstore and start producing and selling enough pies to feed a small army, everyone is happy… until the pie frenzy is over and the owner is left with too much pie making machinery, a huge lease to pay on the pie superstore and a smaller customer base of pie devotees. What would be ideal to match the dwindled demand would be a nice new pie convenience store, the owner ups and moves into a space where he can bake and store all his pies and still be able to cover all his overheads, once again everyone is happy.
As you can see, what the pie shop owner really needed was a shop that had ‘elastic’ walls. When the demand for pies was high they would be able to rent more pie making machinery and still have room to store them all, when demand was low they could return the machinery they weren’t using but still have room to store the already baked pies. All the luxury of moving into a suitably sized shop but without the hassle of having to buy and physically move all the equipment.
To move this into the online world, imagine a small Facebook application that only has a handful of users – the processing power, bandwidth and storage needed is going to be tiny. However, due to the viral nature of the web our small Facebook application could grow exponentially in a matter of days, demanding more processing power, bandwidth and storage. If we used traditional hosting then we may have to find a new host that can handle our demands (or pay through the nose for bursting our agreed bandwidth) but if we use Amazon web services then we don’t have to worry, our application can expand and contract as demand sees fit.
If you’d like to find out more then check out these links:
Amazon Web Services
Building Facebook applications on AWS
Next time we shall see what other services Amazon has exposed for us.
Edward wrote this on 25.02.08 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
Last night, while half watching an episode of Skins on Channel 4 and half messing about with BBC iPlayer, I spotted that a new episode of Ashes to Ashes was available to download. Slightly miffed that there didn’t seem to be any way of getting an update prompt when a new episode of a show is released I twittered a flippant (yet fortunately expletive free) remark.
Minutes later I found I had a new Twitter contact. Some bloke called James Cridland had obviously been tracking the keyword “iPlayer” and a quick visit to his site revealed him to be the Head of Future Media & Technology at BBC Audio & Music Interactive. Turns out that he was interested in finding out what I’d meant by my off the cuff tweet and I explained (in 140 characters or fewer) how neat it would be if new episodes would “automagically add themselves to the download manager. Or it’d prompt you. I expect you’re already thinking about this :)”… Of course, it turns out that they are. Because he told me.
Morals from this story?
Firstly, the BBC still kick ass.
Secondly, never underestimate the powers of your own actions online (no matter how insignificant or throwaway they initially seem).
Thirdly, the wealth of opinions about your entity (organisation, product or even person) have never been so readily available. Actively listen to your critics, users or visitors, like James is, harness that information… and use it to make something better!
What is tracking? (From the Twitter FAQ):
Tracking is an SMS or IM only feature that allows you to receive all twitters that match a word you’re tracking. For example, if you send track Obama, you will receive all updates that match “Obama.” All updates sent from tracking will begin with parenthesis. You can easily stop getting these messages by sending untrack Obama.
More about buzz monitoring
Read ‘Essential Buzz Monitoring‘, Chapter 5 of our FREE e-book – “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.
This is a user-friendly, no-jargon guide with great examples and useful tips on how to use the latest digital techniques to make your online campaigns successful. Essential reading for marketers.
Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.
Trevor May wrote this on 22.02.08 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, RSS, Social networks box
Here at NixonMcInnes we love all things social media so I couldn’t help but blog when I came across a new release of an uber cool web browser. It’s called ‘Flock’, is based on Firefox and has lots of wonderfully cool social media plugins that integrate seamlessly into the browser. After all, it does call itself ‘the social web browser’.
Why is it a social web browser? Does this mean it talks to you more than your friends do? No, of course not. That would be silly (cool, but silly). So what does it do thats different from Firefox. Well, the key bit for me is its integration with the various social web tools we all use. For example, it hooks right into Twitter, Facebook and and Youtube and has customised sidebars that allow you to see all your updates, actions, friends, status changes etc without having to go to the website.
It also allows you to upload photos into your social media accounts directly through the browser. Want to add photos to your facebook or Flickr app? Just click the upload photos icon, select the service you want to drop into and drag and drop. Lovely.
And a further note to cement its coolness, its allows you to blog directly from within the Flock browser – working with most blogging services like Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, MovableType, Typepad and WordPress. Nice.
Have a look for yourself, and let me know if you discover any other neat tricks it can do!
Matt wrote this on 19.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Interesting, Social media, Social networks, User experience box
Anna sent me a link to this new blog on the Guardian website. It’s the diary of a 19-year-old about to embark on his GAP-year travels in India and Thailand, hoping for ’swimming, sunbathing and partying’.
After the first post, the comments start flooding in, and the readers are aren’t unimpressed: “posh 19 year old goes to Thailand to find himself amongst all the other ‘gappers’, and we can follow his every move? wow.”
By the 4th comment, suspicions of nepotism start to appear: “who’s son is Max then? terrible terrible terrible, shame on you guardian”
By comment No. 20, he’s been rumbled: “Well, given that Paul Gogarty is a travel writer for the Guardian, I guess that answers the question about who he’s related to”
Ouch!
The final nail in the coffin is an astute reader who finds an article written by the lad’s father in 2002, about a holiday in Thailand, no less, mentioning his 13-year-old son, who would now be 19.
Game, set, and match.
This is very poor stuff from the normally very social-media-savvy Guardian. And the lesson to be learnt (putting aside the uninspiring subject matter of the blog)?
You can’t out-smart your readers. If you aren’t being authentic, you will be found out by the crowd.
Tom wrote this on 14.02.08 – 10 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Mistakes box
I was at an IAB event last week and watched an interesting presentation by Iain Tait from the talented gang at Poke. He talked about a book I hadn’t seen before called Made to Stick, which borrows from the study of urban myths to understand how as marketers we can create ideas that will stick. The take-home point was a rather satisfyingly cheesy acronym that sums up what makes an idea viral – S.U.C.C.E.S:
Simple
Unexpected (like the urban myth about waking up in a bath of ice without your kidneys)
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories
Thanks for the tip, Iain.
Tom wrote this on 13.02.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Interesting, Marketing box
‘War…[boom boom, bam bam, donk], what is it good for?’
Yeah brother. Well what about social media? [boom boom, dank dank, dom] Haaaaaa-bsolutely nuthin’...
(Or is it?)
This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. You see, I’m a bit crazy, a bit driven and I need to achieve. But I’ve been a bit like a rocket-jet without a steering wheel. I’ve achieved bits and pieces but at the highest and most important level, I’ve lacked PURPOSE.
Which has led me to question how I use my skills and especially those of the wonderful team we’ve assembled at Nixon McInnes. When such great people come together and gel, is it reasonable to allow them to work bloody hard in an interesting, fast-moving and fun area without occasionally stepping back and asking ‘are we really giving the world our very best here?’.
Isn’t that a responsibility I have to myself and my team, to check the reason why we’re doing what we do?
Another way to frame the same question is to look at our team, our skills, our knowledge and our passions and ask: what is social media *for*?
One thing social media can be harnessed for is improving how organisations conduct their marketing. This is our line of work, and we are building a good name and reputation for ourselves here. These days we tend to work with larger organisations and so our efforts can genuinely help our client’s consumers. So in a very very small way, we’re making a positive difference one project at a time.
But that’s not enough for me, and I don’t think it’s enough for our team.
I know you, dear reader, know this and don’t wish for me to patronise or come over all sandalwood and tie-dye (duuuuude), but this world that we live in has far greater problems than how to sell handbags. And so whilst as anyone who has worked with me knows I do have genuine passion for improving how big brands communicate with their consumers, I reckon I can recruit a whole new level of passion and energy for using social media to work on the world’s biggest and most real issues.
Here’s a few of the biggies off the top o’ me head in no particular order:
- Health
- Poverty
- Education
- The environment
- Politics & access to democracy
- Human rights
- Equality
You get the idea.
If it’s big, important, worthy and you (or I, more accurately) immediately pretend it isn’t there and wish it’d go away and stop interrupting your (my) thoughts about whether to buy the prawn or the roast beef sandwich, it’s probably on the list.
So this is pretty much where we’re up to, at the very start of this thinking and talking process as a team.
We’re absolutely not about to stop doing what we do, that’d a damn good plan B to tease us away from a Plan A that is currently fun and rewarding. But what we do is ever-evolving and adaptive and that is why we have survived and thrived over the years – and so we are about to start thinking about other things we can do in addition to our work harnessing social media for marketing. It’s another iteration of Project Nixon McInnes.
And please allow me to be very clear: this ain’t about Corporate Social Tickboxing either. This is about real differences made by harnessing our team’s unique blend of skills and experiences. And it’s not about not-for-profit necessarily. I guess the vision is of a blend of things: online communities, websites, applications & tools, channels, campaigns, resources, events (real world, even!) – whatever we feel can make a difference.
So here’s some questions for you, and I’d love to hear what you think.
- What do you personally think social media are for?
- Can social media be employed effectively to make even a tiny difference to these issues?
- What is it about social media that might help address these causes?
- Which projects or causes inspire, grip or otherwise distract you personally?
I look forward to the conversation now :)
Will McInnes wrote this on 08.02.08 – 12 comments
It's filed in the Business, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Social media, Strategy box
