This week there’s been two pieces of research that have shown that online spending is where ‘it’s at’ – as if you needed convincing.

A league created by analyst TNS Worldpanel revealed that in an annual top 10 list of favourite retailers in the UK, Amazon came 2nd (Tesco was 1st) and eBay came in at number 10 (full report), and research carried out by PwC and WARC shows that 2008 internet advertising expenditure defied the recession by being up by 17%, with the UK now said to be ‘the world’s most advanced market for internet advertising’ (full IAB/PwC report).

I don’t think that this marks the end for bricks and mortar stores or for traditional forms of advertising, but for brands, it’s now more important than ever to ensure their online offering is up to scratch. 9 out of 10 times the first place people go if they are interested in a product is the brand’s website. Apart from ensuring that a positive first impression is made, it’s important that the online design reflects the offline brand. Too often, websites are treated as the poor cousin of the print or TV ad. This is costing brands sales and customers. People online are less forgiving than in the real world. They have many more choices of where to go and within a single click, they’re at a competitor’s website.

Having said that, if online is used properly, it can also be responsible for increasing footfall to stores (I’ll post a full report on this soon). More and more, customers are going online to check the range of products BEFORE visiting the real world store (which could be a significant journey to some). Why risk a wasted journey? The reality is, etailers are simply not displaying their full wares online – for whatever reason – which is ultimately costing them sales online as well as offline.

The message from these reports is clear. It’s all about choice. eCommerce shouldn’t be seen as a threat to traditional retail, but as a key tool in a multi-channel retailing strategy. In a highly competitive market, it’s essential that you make your customer king. Allow them to shop and view on and offline. Give them as much insight and information at each touch point. Provide a 360 degree returns option. Everyone needs to up their game in this climate or risk losing customers to their leaner, more innovative competitors. Etailing and traditional retailing must work hand in hand to ensure survival.

The emergence and abundance of free content online over the past number of years has had a profound affect on the way many of us conduct our lives and indeed the way businesses conduct their business.
Whether email, newspapers, Skype, Wikipedia, Spotify, etc., how come we’re so deserving of all these free services when we were absolutely willing to pay for the same (similar) right less than a decade ago?

And how free is free? Is it sustainable? Must companies now monetise or die? Or risk asking Generation Free to pay for content?

These were some of questions being tossed around the basement in a slick-Soho bar last night at the UK’s Trade & Investment Chinwag discussion, cleverly titled Freeconomics.

A panel consisting of Azeem Azhar, managing partner at Open Capital Partners; Victor Keegan, technology columnist at the Guardian; the night’s MC Nic Brisbourne, venture capitalist and partner at DFJ Esprit; Charlie Blake Thomas, commercial director at Huddle; Alan Patrick, consultant at Broadsight and finally Bruce Daisley, representing YouTube.

On the agenda: free content, and at what cost does success at “free” come with..

For example, storage dependant sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, subsidies from display advertising can not meet the costs of scaling.

But what are the other options, and what issues do they bring? Why for example do Freemium models (free ‘basic’ and paid ‘pro’) work for some and not for others (think flickr vs Facebook)? Will we see a return of micropayments?

Before panic sets in, the panel agrees that a universal micropayment approach seems a bit far off, but would be a possible solution for a number of businesses struggling under the advertising decline, specifically newspapers.

Victor Keegan said if a micropayment system would have been introduced when the internet was still a nascent luxury, relegated to programmers and D&D enthusiasts, then “we wouldn’t be in this mess”.

He gives an example of a teenager sending a text-message, they don’t think twice about sending a 50-word text message for 18p, but scoff at the idea of having to pay for a 25,000 word email, simply because the micropayment system has always been there for texting, it is engrained in its structure.

Today’s generation has grown up with free email, with nearly limitless storage, such as Gmail, which was criticised last month when its servers crashed, rendering the service useless for a number of hours – invoking a strange kind of furore that could only be quelled by reminding users that Google offers the service for free, thus, no reasons to be angry.

It brings the question whether ‘free’ is really ‘free’, obviously Google serves targeting advertising to users in exchange for using the service, which brings up the question, who is the service for?

Charlie Blake Thomas said that Google really isn’t a service for us, the searchers, but actually for advertisers, where it gets its revenue from, we’re just the middlemen, acting as a muse.

Thomas said that understanding who the end user for your business is critical when deciding at what point will users pay, and how it fits into the overall business.

Azeem Azhar said that even though Google figured it out, thanks to the proliferation of open source software, we have witnessed the end of big companies making huge profits, such as Microsoft, or Google itself.

Azhar said: “It’s difficult for people to accept but the granduar of a huge company like Microsoft has been shifting to teenagers coding in their parents basement. It’s not the American dream.”

Alan Patrick said that open source software, such as Linux, has also shifted the economics to the user, when suddenly companies are forced to upgrade their systems on their own instead of those who created the software.

The people who have created this free software aren’t getting rich, but they’ve managed to offset costs by shifting the expenses to the user.

To the dismay of Nic Brisbourne, venture capitalists were given a lot of slag for the current state of affairs, by encouraging digital startups to seek out audiences with loads of free content without having a business models first or ways to monetise traffic.

But for new start-ups, is it better to have a premium product in which you can charge a few hardcore, loyalists, or free content to the masses at your expense, hoping advertising revenues will pick up.

A large portion of the evening was dedicated to talk about the newspaper industry, however the panel offered a refreshing view on the plights of print, opposed to what is being espoused in the media itself.

The introduction of new devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone could be an industry saviour, as paid digital content could translate better on these handhelds better than on a computer screen.

There is new innovation about, including in Japan where readers pay simply for a newspaper barcode, which allows access to online articles.

Newspapers are also looking at manufacturing their own proprietary hardware to carry about digital editions of their content.

The panel predicted that a number of newspapers will make the transistion online, its inevitable, but print will never completely die out.

Charlie Blake Thomas said that the industry needs to face its ‘Kodak Moment’ when the film company itself realised that the entire industry had shifted digital, and it had to react to stay in the game.

The panel said that newspapers are afraid to make the first leap because of the readership that could be gained or lost by making a miss-step. They asked for more collaboration between titles, but not mergers, as that would only inhibit innovation, allowing newspapers to wallow in complacency, like they have been doing for the past 20 years.

This week I’ll be going along to some of the protest marches being organised in London in response to the world’s leaders gathering in London this week for the G20 summit. I went along to the peaceful Put People First march from Embankment to Hyde Park over the weekend, and plan to tag along with the more radical group G20 Meltdown on Wednesday and Thursday this week. I’ll also be checking out the happenings at Climate Camp, and look forward to speaking with some of the participants about what is on their minds. 

You are welcome to follow my updates from the week via Twitter @lisadevaney — and I’ll also be posting my observations over on citizen journalist website DigitalJournal.com.

Read my G20 coverage to date here:

London Braces for G20 Protests Next Week

Day 1 of G20 Protests More Gandhi Than Rambo

I’ll also plan to pop into Brand Republic to report any interesting happenings when I get a chance.

If there are specific questions or activities you would like me to take quick peeks into, please send me a Twitter @lisadevaney, or email me at:

lisa@haimediagroup.com

Marching along with thousands of others this week,

-Lisa

Hello and welcome to this new blog from the team at 3Sixty .

Lots of people I meet know a bit about Bristol – almost everyone has a mate that’s gone to college here – and have a general sense that it’s a great place to live and play.

But what a lot of people don’t realise is just how vibrant the creative scene is in this city. In fact, if you read a lot of the trade press, you’d be forgiven for thinking that not a lot happens in our business outside of the M25. So the purpose of this blog is to get a bit of wider exposure for some of the best creative work coming out of our city, with a particular focus on innovation and uses of new technology. Hopefully as the months go by I’ll do my little bit to redress the balance.

Creativity needs feeding, and despite the Web opening up a whole new world of influences, there’s nothing quite like getting out of the office to get the juices flowing. And that’s one of the best things about being a creative agency based in Bristol – there’s never any shortage of inspiration on our doorstep. For example, there’s a great exhibition going on right now literally a stone’s throw from our offices. It’s called “Crimes of Passion” and is being held at the Royal West of England Academy. Given Bristol’s association with the elusive Banksy, it’s fitting that the exhibition celebrates street art.

A few of our team have spent some time wandering around the galleries and we’ve uploaded some of our favourite pieces from the exhibition to the 3Sixty Flickr account.

I’m not convinced that it’s possible to run a great creative business and have your offices in the middle of nowhere (or Coventry). It’s no coincidence that the agency scene in London is clustered around a few areas*, with plenty to feed the “sense of wonder” that’s vital for making those connections that produce great work. It’s hard to compete with Soho, but there’s a distinctive flavour to Bristol’s past and present that I think provides loads of fuel for the imagination. In fact, you could argue that agencies based in Bristol draw on a more diverse range of cultural influcences than their London counterparts. Will I start a flame war if I suggest that the London scene has a tendency to be re-inforcing and stifling of new ideas? Thoughts welcome!

I’ll be back next week with more…in the meantime if anyone from Bristol reads this blog and wants to feed us some ideas, please get in touch. If you’re not from the city, but want to know more about the agency scene down here, perhaps the best place to start is Bristol Media, which is a great network of creative and media people.

* I wonder how the staff at Ogilvy feel about being surrounded by bankers when they pop out for a sandwich in Canary Wharf at lunchtime?

An Econsultancy survey this week revealed that 75% of the top UK digital agencies don’t have Twitter accounts. Oops. Gotta love the irony, since these agencies usually boast that marketers prefer their agencies to practise what they preach, and should use the social tools they offer advice on, compared to what George Parker calls the BDAs (almost none* of which are on Twitter). It’s opened up the well-travelled discussion about why agencies don’t advertise themselves, or tweet, or have official Facebook pages and so on.

The full list of shame is available here. It’s a bit bloody, as there are plenty of comments from agencies cross that they were left off the list, but as in any assessment of the agency scene, there are many small agencies with energetic attention to any way of promoting themselves, and perhaps more cumbersome agencies that, arguably, have become a bit relaxed or paranoid behind their brand names.  Mind you, the list surveyed isn’t exhaustive or representative of the entire agency community, but raises interesting parallels between the blurring of the corporate and the personal opinion.

It’s good to see so many agencies allowing their staff to tweet (and blog) freely, and people do step up with personal accounts and regular opinion. Would it be possible to stop them, though?  There are notable instances where the tweeting and blogging individuals garner greater reputations and following than the agency brands they represent. I suppose it’s like having the columnists people bought papers for and not untypical for a business sector which is so personality driven. On the other hand, neatly put by one tweet “I asked if I could tweet about what I’m doing and got told nobody’s ever asked that before, can I get back to you”. They never did, and said twitterer left that agency shortly after.

* in Campaign’s top ten anyway – comments welcome

Follow me on Twitter

We are entering an age where publishers are becoming “Digital Windsocks”, following the audience and the advertising revenue, damaging reputations and quality of content quality in the wake.

The role of a journalist is evolving to include a greater understanding of search engine optimisation and interpreting data, but in the effort to appeal to search engines, is quality journalism suffering?

Yesterday, an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum brought together an expert panel to examine the editorial impact of SEO and to look at what the future for news production might be.

Andrew Currah, lecturer for Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University, and author of ‘What’s Happening to Our News’, which examines the changing business of journalism in the digital age, introduced the concept of a Digital Windsock.

Currah said now there is a focus to accumulate attention around news to build advertising revenue. Publishers are chasing clicks, but have no clear sense of how much the digital audience is worth or when digital revenues will recoup the costs of multimedia integration.

According to recent trends, most commercial news website traffic enters through a “side door” of search results and RSS feeds, leaving the site within a matter of minutes.

In the UK, 30% of time spent online is on 10 URLs or less, none of these are commercial news sites.

During his research Currah found that new forms of reading are emerging. People now power browse, looking horizontally through titles and a few lines down the left side of the content, scouring for anything of interest, before moving on.

He also found that publishers are now frequently looking towards experimental methods to take advantage of the user “clickstream” some even turning to neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the web user.

Publishers at the Guardian, Al-jazeera and the Times have recently experimented with an open-source approach to their websites, allowing the user to control and shape the content they want.

However, Currah warns of a dark side to the innovation and the pursuit of clicks, such as what happens to quality when content is shaped for the digital crowd, will new techniques like SEO lead to softening of the news agenda and will publishers continue to funnel resources into keywords instead of newsbreaking content?

The evidence is already apparent that the news agenda is as soft as butter. Scanning the ‘Most Popular/Most Read’ story lists from national news websites, it becomes clear that reader attention is concentrated around quirky content, clicks can give a good indication of audience interest and boredom, and the immediacy of clickstream is starting impact editorial decision making.

Currah predicts that the future will see a division between the Windsocks and The Anchors; those handful of publishers able to resist lure of clickstream.

However, it is certain that navigating the clickstream whilst maintaining editorial standards will require some sort of economic shelter, and it’s inevitable that Anchor publishers will provide this by using a mix of paid-for-content and advertising revenue.

It’s a combination that works, in my opinion, and I don’t think the Windsock concept is totally lost on the readers themselves. Those wanting unbiased, quality news content will pay for it if necessary, leaving the quirkiness and frivolous to those that don’t charge.

I’d like to highlight some useful Henry Jenkins research via whatconsumesme. Rather than tackling tedious definitions of ‘viral’, Henry explains the various motives behind why people spread media:

-  They are doing so because the brand expresses something about themselves or their community.

-  They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.

-  They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.

-  They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

On this it’s also worth talking about emotional currency.  We spread media in seconds via Twitter or email and we mustn’t forget that we often do so for the selfish reason of how something makes us immediately feel.  Dosh Dosh wrote an interesting article back in July which in some depth discussed the emotional reasons behind spreading media, be it joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. The truth is the ‘key’ to spreadable media falls in murky depths, somewhere between combining emotional engagement, an individual’s perceptual/communal reasoning for spreading media and brand messaging. The further we move away from the idea that spreadable media is “dancing kittens on boobies” the better. It’s growing out of teenage bedrooms and the potential advertising has to be a positive force in the world in enabling worthwhile conversations is being realised.

Where does internet meme fall into all this? Debunking the idea that content should be memetic, Jenkins adds:

“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.”

A very useful addition to existing remix culture discussions.

Jenkins also talks about the “human agency” in cultures, inherently describing them as something we collectively create. Letting people mess with your content builds brand culture, giving people a stake in its spread and ensures its sustainable awesomeness. Ad-vacate to advocate.
 

Today’s unresolved debate – where does social media sit? My my isn’t that the equivalent of a box of matches in a bomb factory! As a full service digital agency this is something we have been grappling with internally … are social media campaigns creative-led, PR-led or an SEO strategy. Do you really need a social media “expert” or should all digital disciplines not have a basic understanding of this concept, albeit through the lens of their own expertise? The problem with this question is that trying to answer it simply generates more questions… quite frankly it makes my head hurt.

In his recent Ad Week post Joseph Jaffe asks:

“Exactly where and when did the digital space earn the stripes and credentials to tackle the high roads of authenticity, transparency or peer-to-peer collaboration (just to name a few of conversational marketing’s core tenets)?”

Whilst Fallon’s marketing concept of “branded generosity” and our own approach to “building believable brands” may have only recently been explicitly declared, these approaches have been incubating over many years evolving in line with the consumer’s growing reluctance to accept advertising.

The fact is that successful PR and digital media have more in common than we might initially believe. Successful media campaigns depend on creative executions which engage the consumer, resonate with the consumer’s perception of the brand and reach the right audience in the right mindset.

Equally for PRs good consumer media relations rely on: an appreciation of the zeitgeist; listening to the publisher and understanding what the audience they are writing for wants to talk about then working collaboratively to deliver engaging news.

The mistake that people like Jaffe make in questioning “how ‘relations’ between corporations and journalists equate with real people hanging out with other real people” is that he is really referring to one type of PR – corporate PR. Conversely, consumer PR has always focused on talking to “real people”- the holy grail of a consumer PR campaign being to hear people talking (favourably) about your campaign in the pub and corporate PRs and consumer PRs have been at loggerheads for years over how daring they can be with a brand.

So, if we think about social media in terms of brands connecting directly with the consumer, traditional PR skills certainly apply – social media just removes the middle man.

Yet whilst PRs may understand how to talk to an audience and how to create news that engages this audience, only a limited portion of PROs have had sufficient digital / technical experience to have a thorough appreciation of how to exploit the full potential in any digital environment.

This is where the SEO specialists come in. These are the guys that understand inner workings of the web and how social media can most effectively be used to drive traffic to a website and whilst much of the value of a social media campaign would be lost if you fail to heed the wisdom of your SEO team, their skills have not traditionally focused on the social sphere.

Yet social media is not just about conversations within a digital space, we need to also consider the vehicle that brings people together. As consumers become increasingly accustomed to social media engagements, their expectations of how brands present themselves in the social media space are rising too and social media success can be highly dependent on the innovation and imagination of the creative team behind the concept.

We believe that the answer to “who owns social media” is found in its very essence: co-collaboration. Social media success requires multiple (often incompatible) skills which are rarely found in a single individual or department. So apart from taking two nurofen what am I going to do – continue lobbing a clients problem into a locked room with creatives, prs, techies, seo peeps, planners and a very brave client services person and come up with social media strategies that are considered from every angle!

Hello world.

In case you hadn’t guessed it from the name, but I’ll be writing about eCommerce and all things associated with it within the hallowed (virtual) walls of this blog. The key theme will always be around ideas to ultimately help you sell more stuff online, to more people, for as little marketing spend as possible! So if that’s what you’re interested in/dream about/live for – then you’re in the right place. Otherwise, go here.

So let me cut to the chase. I want to respond to a question that I’m regularly asked by clients, colleagues, journalists, prospects and peers in one form or another: “How do you ensure continued revenue growth (online) during a downturn.”

I could spend a long time covering everything from customer acquisition to conversion and retention but the reality is, it’s actually the same stuff you should’ve been doing all along that you need to continue to do. The trouble is, a vast majority of eCommerce owners (let’s call them eTailers) haven’t even been doing the basics right but they’ve still experienced growth over the past few years.

Well ding dong, those days are now over and the current recession is shaking the apple tree: If your eCommerce site is working hard for its money, then you’ll cling on and prosper. If you’re a ‘me too’ that fails to innovate, engage and attract, then your sharper, shrewder competitors will eventually win over your precious customers and you will lose business.

As a starter for ten, here are some basic tips to get you on your way to eCommerce Zen:

(For those more advanced readers, do bare with me while everyone else gets up to speed)

Tip 1: Understand your customer
Your customer is the most important part of your business (it’s amazing how often this is forgotten). It’s not the CEO and certainly not the design department’s urge to create everything in Flash – it really is the customer.

Bricks and mortar retailers practice this every day but it is strangely absent on most eCommerce websites. People are still being bombarded with irrelevant branding and marketing messages and the Splash page seems to be celebrating an unholy revival.

It’s more important than ever to now really understand your online customer. If you understand them, then you’ll know what they want to get out of your site.  Finding out about your customer is easy; use a quick online customer survey. 4Q, for example, do these for FREE. There is absolutely no excuse why you shouldn’t do this. It takes about three minutes to get it done. You’ll be amazed at what your online customer is willing to tell you.

Tip 2: Segment your email database
Segmentation is the first step to pushing relevant content to your customers. Sending product emails aimed at females to men is certainly not doing you any good. If you haven’t got a segmented database, then launch an email questionnaire with a few simple questions. Send this to your database and they will do the segmentation for you. This way you can also clean out any cold leads.

Sending targeted emails to a segmented database really will increase your conversions and make you more money – I guarantee it!

Tip 3:  Optimise your landing pages
You can easily extract what your landing pages are, (that includes your homepage), and how they perform using a tool such as Google Analytics. Once you’ve done this, check the pages with a really high bounce rate and related keywords from both natural and PPC and then measure how they perform over time.

Once you have identified the black holes, you need to get your landing pages up to scratch so that they can start delivering results. For example, if a visitor has searched for “child seats” and you get them to a page where they see car stereos… then it’s no wonder they leave you instantly. By correlating keywords to landing pages, the changes you’ll need to make become obvious.

This is what I call low hanging fruit. By doing a bit of spring-cleaning on your landing pages, you’ll very quickly start seeing some positive results. And yes, you may well need to create many of these pages but it really is worth it in the end.

Tip 4: Test your site
Testing is free! The CEO’s (him again) partner’s opinion is just as valid as yours but now you can prove which one is delivering better results using some basic A/B testing. Use Google Website Optimizer (it’s free, it’s good, there are many others out there but this is a good place to start) to setup your A/B or Multi-variant tests and see how the individual variations perform. Continue testing until you’re happy with the results you’re getting.

Tip 5: Act on your findings
Ok so not really a tip but all too often we see clients collecting vast amounts of data but then letting the reports gather dust. From all the above, you have to drive change. That might be tougher than you think. But if you thoroughly execute the recommendations above and then act on the quantitive data at your fingertips, you will reap the rewards and live to fight another day!

—-

Over and out.

 Today hundreds of bloggers around the world are celebrating Ada Lovelace Day by writing about women they admire in technology. Whether they be famous or just a friend or family member, the tributes are popping up all over the internet.

 Here’s a collection of a few women in technology I find inspirational:

 Esther Dyson — One of the female leaders who have shaped the internet.

Rachel Carson — Biologist and environmentalist who is the author of Silent Spring.

Heather Luttrell — President of online advertising company IndieClick.com. 

Sarah Platt — Web TV expert and head of Kinura.com.

Barbara Anglisz — Product Direcctor of Adept Technologies. 

Katz Kiely — Head of interactive agency Just-b.

Jemima Kiss — Technology journalist for The Guardian.

Aleks Krotoski — Academic and technology journalist for The Guardian.

Mena Trott — Founder of Six Apart, Moveable Type and TypePad.

Helen Keegan — Mobile marketing expert and Technokitten.com blogger.

Hedy Lamarr — Actress and early visionary for wireless communications technology.

Deirdre Molloy — Editor and Events Manager of Chinwag.com.

Courtney Pulitzer –  A networking facilitator between technology, art and charity professionals.

Florence Nightingale — wartime nurse who discovered poor hygenic conditions caused infection.

Ruth Fisher Rosevear — My grandmother, who was one of the first female graduates of chemistry from Cornell University.

And there are many, many more.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day,

-Lisa

 Hedy Lamarr