Managing disconnected information across the business is both time-consuming and costly. Every business knows that one copy of a piece of information or content is the ideal way to ensure consistency and timeliness,  whether online in websites, portals & intranets,  in proposals or other business vehicles.

Conversely, information flowing into the business such as web leads and customer interactions need capturing and tracking to ensure measurement, follow-up and actioning.

By integrating with systems such as CRM, extranets, intranets and billing systems you are able to re-use content. The content management system separates the content from its presentation - the look and feel; enabling the same piece of information to be used in many different ways.

Small Steps/Evolution not Revolution

Integrating a wide range of disparate systems can appear to be a daunting task. Multiple platforms with seemingly incompatible technologies, combined with a heavy reliance on highly technical knowledge can make the whole process look insurmountable. The solution is ‘small steps’.

Simply put, take one integration task, with high value to the business, plan it, implement it and use the result as the foundation for future integrations.

Let’s take a simple example, based on one of our existing, ongoing integration projects:

Our client is a successful, membership based organisation supporting certified professionals, who, in turn, are highly mobile, regularly change jobs and being certified in additional fields of expertise. Membership to the organisation was not mandatory but offered significant benefits, primarily with regard to industry awareness, training, and maintaining professional certifications/accreditations.

The client maintained their membership records in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM, however, this was not linked to their membership portal and all CRM updates came through the Customer Services department.

The initial ‘small step’ was to integrate the Members CRM record as the primary user record for the member’s portal. This enabled a single username and password for login, and gave users the ability to update their own contact details. A ‘Small Step’ that greatly reduced the calls to the Customer Service department, and additionally provided the springboards to allow further functional integration such as:

• Membership Renewal and Payments (bCommerce)
• Professional Qualification Registration and Management
• Consolidated Resources Libraries
• Member Polls and Ballots

The integrations are continuing including the provision of a new paywall based professional publication. Using a base provided by the intial integration many existing and planned services can be delivered to the members, growing the functionality in 'small steps' and providing an engaging environment to increase member loyalty.

At the end of May this year the European Union, via DIRECTIVE 2009/136/EC, brings into European law that users have to give their explicit consent to websites using tracking cookies.

"Third parties may wish to store information on the equipment of a user, or gain access to information already stored, for a number of purposes, ranging from the legitimate (such as certain types of cookies) to those involving unwarranted intrusion into the private sphere (such as spyware or viruses). It is therefore of paramount importance that users be provided with clear and comprehensive information when engaging in any activity which could result in such storage or gaining of access. The methods of providing information and offering the right to refuse should be as user-friendly as possible. Exceptions to the obligation to provide information and offer the right to refuse should be limited to those situations where the technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user. Where it is technically possible and effective, in accordance with the relevant provisions of Directive 95/46/EC, the user’s consent to processing may be expressed by using the appropriate settings of a browser or other application. The enforcement of these requirements should be made more effective by way of enhanced powers granted to the relevant national authorities."

So what does this actually mean for you and your users? Unfortunately, currently the answer is still not entirely clear.

The reason for this uncertainty is that there is considerable confusion about the directives implementation into UK law, with the Government lagging behind in their implementation preparations. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport are responsible for working on the regulations and how to implement the directive, whilst the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is responsible for the enforcement.

Recently a spokesman for the Governments Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that the Government were advising the ICO not to take enforcement action against companies due to delays in what they called 'technical solutions', but critically added that as long as organisations were working towards compliance they should not be punished.

Many companies are not even aware of the cookies that their sites create. So the first step is to speak to your website development agency or IT department and make sure you understand exactly what cookies your site(s) create and use. Then, it is our understanding, that you need to start planning towards compliance, as it appears that lack of action due to confusion is not going to be acceptable defence!

What value has your content?

Anyone who regularly deals with us will know we have a bit of a hobby horse we climb upon at every opportunity. It is a simple belief that content is what makes or breaks an on-line presence. To put this in perspective, if you have an un-navigable website, with 5 to 10 levels of menu to get to anything useful then your content won’t save you, however, taking a basically well designed site, poor content will guarantee a site failure. So as we have said many times before, content is king, but what is your content worth?

As we have discussed before (see  ‘Do you really “Get What You Pay For”?’ ) the internet is not free, especially if you are a content provider, yet at this time there is a major debate about how to monetise content delivery.

The 3 basic approaches seem to be:

1. Free Content but use and display advertising or additional services.
   This approach is most often seen extolled by open market exponents. The basic model is that all the content, be it written word, music, video or film, is free and that revenue is generated by using an advertising model. Typically, this model will include both paid for display advertising as well as ‘pay per click’, and sometimes degenerates into a mad round of popup windows and intrusive new browser instances. However, when done properly this can be an effective form, but you do need a good size audience to make this worthwhile. Let’s face it no-one will pay for an advertisement on your site if it only gets 2 visitors a week.
2. Teaser Content with full articles behind a ‘Pay Wall’
   This is the approach being taken by a number of traditional print media companies such as The Times and The Sunday Times. In the case of The Times, you are presented with a front page of the newspaper, with teaser articles on news, sport, business etc. When you click to access the full article, or any of the papers sections, you are presented with a subscription signup page. This approach is not unfamiliar to newspaper readers as they normally purchase their ‘paper’ from a vendor for a fee. Interestingly, there is a movement from the more radical ‘Free Content’ groups that say this is morally wrong and all news should be free. Well, we appreciate the ‘in an ideal world’ scenario, but in today’s world news gathering, reporting and distribution, including via the web, costs money and as such the news organisations have the right to choose to charge for access to their content. Thankfully, there are many free news services as well, so the consumer will, ultimately, make the choice as to whether a ‘Pay Wall’ approach works.
3. Knowledge Sales
   Anyone in IT will be familiar with this approach, as it is used by a number of the large consultancy firms. In its simplest form, the organisation writes a report on a subject that it believes has value to other organisations. This may be a market analysis or a comparison between different product vendors (very common in the commercial software markets). Once complete the organisation offers the report for sale via both traditional routes (i.e. printed report sent to you) and via digital delivery routes such as a pdf download from a secure area of a website. The key to this approach working is that you need to be a respected player in your given marketplace, and typically seen to be vendor neutral.

So firstly, we would suggest that you need to determine where in your business model the monetisation of your web content comes. It may well be that your website purely supports your other business activities and that the content should be free and help leverage your other offerings. It may also be that you have content that has specific value and you wish to derive a revenue stream from. It should also be noted that in today’s market you may be offering services over the internet. SaaS (Software as a Service) is a rapidly growing sector and provides a new level to the subscription model.  Your software as a service offering could be something as simple as an extranet for clients to access and log  fault calls, collect controlled product updates, for example new training material, while offering a secure user community for your users to discuss your products and services. All adds value and can be offered via a support contract type subscription. Of course you may choose to go further and offer true applications online like Google does with Google Docs.

Everyone is looking for new ways to generate a revenue stream from internet provided services. Twitter is still without a revenue stream, Facebook has taken the approach of in app purchasing and advertising, and Apple, at the current time, is looking at other methodologies.

The Apple situation is an interesting one, and worth watching. They have just altered their terms and conditions for the iOS app store to cover subscription services. Basically, if you want to sell a subscription service via the Apple AppStore, Apple will take a 30% cut for providing the payment processing, access to their user base etc. Now whether 30% is too much or not is not an issue for me. Apple has the right to set their pricing at whatever level they feel the market can bear. However, they also have a clause stating that you cannot sell your subscription elsewhere (for example on your own website) at a price lower than the app store price. That seems a little restrictive to us. In addition, they have also recently rejected an app because it did not offer the ability to purchase the subscription using their in application payments system, again their choice but when you consider that the only route to getting an app on the iOS device range is via the Apple AppStore this looks even more like restrictive business practices. Time will tell how this all plays out be it does lead to some very interesting times, both with service development on the web and with the monetisation of content.

The company names, products and service names used are for identification purposes only. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

You did WHAT!!!!

We have previously written about making a commitment to the various forms of social media out there. We have suggested that too many organisations go into these areas with good intentions but their commitment soon starts to wane and before you know it you have a twitter feed on your home page that had its last post 3 months ago. I know how difficult it is to keep the momentum going on these things, we suffer from it ourselves so fully appreciate that sometimes we should heed our own advise, but there are other pitfalls that you should avoid.

Let me give you a very simple example. I run a personal Twitter account that I use for non work related interests, specifically my robotics and boating hobbies. The feed is used primarily to ensure that I get to hear about things that interest me, so I tend follow a lot of special interest groups and a few special interest magazines Twitter feeds. Now these organisations and groups have all made the commitment to Twitter, and tweet regularly. However, none of us should ever use twitter without considering the systems and websites we link to, especially if they are our own.

I won't say who it is but a really rather good robotic hobby/news magazine have fallen foul of this very error. They have started (seems to be from the 15th Feb 2011) to tweet links to articles in their magazine that are not accessible to the general public. I am assuming that you need to be a subscriber or registered with them to access the articles and I have no issue with this, they are their articles and they have every right to restrict them to their subscribers. The issue I have is what is displayed to the non-subscriber who clicks a link.

Now you would expect some sort of message  like "This article is only available to our subscribing and registered users, if you wish to register and subscribe please complete the form below.....". What you get is:

So I think one of two things has gone wrong here:

• The articles should be available to everyone as a teaser and the website/CMS permissions are incorrect.
• The articles are secure and the message displayed should be to encourage you to register/subscribe.

Either way, it is  annoying to get an 'Access Denied' message, but to get one from a link sent to you by an organisation wishing to engage you and hoping to sell you some services? 

All I can conclude is that someone somewhere hasn't checked the end to end process. A lesson I am sure we all can take something from, I know I certainly can. Just pause for a minute and think what impact it could have to your business if you tweeted for just 1 week with links that displayed an 'Access Denied' message. Suddenly, the time to ensure the end to end process is ok seems like time well spent.

Addendum: as of 16:10 GMT today, the 'Access Denied' message is no more and articles are displayed, it appears the information is available to non-subscribers.

What are Javascript Frameworks and where do they fit?

There has been a lot of talk over the last 12 month of the world wide web providing a much richer user experience, drawing site visitors into a deeper relationship with content, increasing visitor loyalty and, subsequently, the number of return visits to your site. This is an excellent evolution of traditional websites into interactive, rich media tools for users. So how can you achieve this cost effectively, time efficiently and without the headache of maintaining large amounts of custom developed code?

That's where frameworks can help you. A framework will provide a set of tools, routines and controls, written in Javascript and CSS, that allow for the development of a much richer user experience utilising techniques such as AJAX, DOM and DHTML. Using a framework you only require your user community to have javascript enabled in their browser, rather than expecting them to have specific, third party, software and plug-ins installed. A situation that is often restricted by Corporate IT policies. 

At Eurisko we typically use either jQuery or Mootools, both of which have a large following in the commercial world and a large community of plug-in developers, many of whom are professional developers. The typical structure of a javascript framework can be seen in the way jQuery has built their's. The jQuery framework consists of a core module, and a UI module.

jQuery describe their core module as:

"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript."

So the core module provides us with all the library functions to do "stuff" on our site, but still requires us to develop the actual interface modules. This is where the UI module comes in.

"jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications."

So our UI module provides higher level functions to rapidly build interactive user experiences. Add to this the wealth of plug-in that are available, not just for jQuery and Mootools but for almost all the UI frameworks and you have a truly RAD environment. There are a lot of other javascript frameworks out there too, some offering just UI modules and others sets of libraries for custom develops. The list is really quite extensive including such names as Yahoo UI, Dojo, QooXdoo, Midori and many more. We have settled on jQuery and Mootools as we feel that these two frameworks provide the most comprehensive set of tool of any.

So Where Do They Fit?

The simple answer is that it depends on what you are trying to achieve and who your user community is. And, of course, the fact that however interactive your site is, nothing, and we mean nothing, can replace well written, appropriate and thoughtful content. Always remember your sites appearance supports your content but never replaces it.

That said, good content presented in an rich, interactive environment is always more engaging for the user, but let us not forget, as with most things, less is often more. What we mean by this is that these rich web experiences should be just that, a rich, usable enhancement to the user experience. A page with 5 animated areas, multiple popup information bubbles linked to mouse over events and tickers running top and bottom rarely enhance the experience but often distract a user. Use the richness that can be provided to give value to your user community. Some simple examples could be:

1. Increase the relevant information presented on a page by reusing an area with things such as rotating tabs and accordions
   Examples of this can be seen at Wessex Water, where rotating tabs provide eye catching information and increase the amount of service available to the user 4 fold. Or at 15 Hatfields, where a simple accordion provides a quick and easy way for user to access key information on the homepage.
2. Provide additional help and explanation on interactive forms
   Something as simple as a small question mark icon, that when rolled over displays help specific to the field of a form it is next to can hugely improve the usability of simple and complex data interactions with your users.
3. Create forms that allow optional fields to be displayed or removed as required 
   This can allow additional information fields to be displayed as required and based upon previous entries to fields on the form, displaying a simplified form for the user and helping to easy an anxiety they may have with large data entry tasks.
4. Present engaging animations to support primary content
   Simple things such as rotating images of products or services to support descriptive text can be hugely effective.

The list really does go on and on.

Now that these frameworks are readily available, and with the ability to integrate them into the content managed within a CMS, deeply rich user experiences can be produced, with easy reuse, and simple content control via your CMS. A managed website, providing controlled content, presented in a rich, interactive manner can and does bring real value to your site and the people who use it.

Do you really “Get What You Pay For”?

Philip Berne at SlashGear (http://www.slashgear.com) published an article late in June this year titled “You Get What You Pay For” (http://www.slashgear.com/you-get-what-you-pay-for-2391228). The article is an interesting comparison of two approaches used by traditional publishing houses to engage their audiences in the Web 2.0 arena, and questions the value of comments and posts by under-qualified, non-expert contributors, basically concluding that for the content to have real value the contributor needs to be someone with expertise, experience and reputation within the field. Oh and how are we paying for this free content? As Philip points out we are all paying with our time, and let’s face it, in this day and age, we are all time short and deadline pressured.  It is an interesting read and I would recommend having a look at it. Philip certainly has expertise, experience and reputation in his field.

His opinion and arguments set me thinking about the whole issue of the ‘free’ internet, and ‘getting what you pay for’ in the wider context of the World Wide Web. We are often approached by SME business who verbalise that their web presence is important to them and has a high profile within their business. They are often experienced internet users who have previously had classic brochure-ware sites and are looking to move to the next level. Many will have pre-assigned a budget but have not defined a requirement or functional specification, let alone the user journeys or usability considerations. Basically they know what they want in broad terms, and I quote “we like the BBC site and want to have something like that”, but believe that a free internet means this is a free or low cost method of marketing.

Let’s look at a couple of assumptions we regularly hear:

1. The internet is a cheap marketing tool : The internet is not cheap, if done properly it can be very cost effective, but it is rarely, if ever, cheap. Even if we put aside the cost of operational issues such as server hosting, design, site build etc., just keeping a site up to date with new and interesting content, ensuring that social media engagement is maximised, managing the aging of content, and engaging with your internal staff so that “writing a bit for the website” isn’t seen as a chore means a significant investment in time and effort. And as Philip points out in his article, time is money.
2. Design and Content are separate : Yes they are, but they cannot be considered in isolation. Firstly, design is not just about “colouring in”. A site does need to look good, that is a given, but is also very subjective. Things I like I know my business partners and co-workers don’t. However, design should cover many more, non-subjective areas. Brand re-enforcement, usability, and user journey definition are just the first few areas of consideration, and a practical view of the interaction of the design and the content you plan to present is essential. For example, what is the point of a latest news feed on the home page with 5 story summaries displayed if you only add news every 6 months? Recently, we have had a lot of requests for social media mash-ups on home pages. If you are only tweeting twice a month it probably isn’t appropriate to put that twitter feed on the homepage of your corporate site. Either ‘invest’ the time in tweeting regularly, or leave it off the page.

I won’t carry on and list lots of further examples as I am sure you see where I am coming from. The fact of the matter is that you can engage with the internet and World Wide Web at whatever level you wish to. Web design and delivery can be from next to nothing for a simple brochure-ware site to millions of pounds for a fully integrated internet delivery (BBC 2008 web spend was £110 million (source http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/29/bbc.digitalmedia )). But you must always bear in mind that when you enter this arena you only get what you pay for, be that in purchased professional services, engagement with your suppliers and copywriters and investment of your own time. If you like the BBC’s approach and want to do ‘something like that’ then go and do it, just don’t expect to emulate a multi-million pound site for a few thousand, and expect to continue your investment every day, with new content, site evolution and engaging more staff in your organisation into your vision of your company on the web.

I was sent a link by B2B Marketing for an interesting and relevant whitepaper, " YouTube: Best Practices for the B2B Marketer ", that originated from Google.

Although it is effectively a bit of 'self promotion', the advise that it contains about creating and sharing video content is relevant and thought provoking for any company considering using YouTube as part of their communication strategy.

Furthermore, the underlying principles of good content creation, regular uploads (tweets/updates/comments), cross promotion, tracking and analysis etc. etc. etc. are all equally relevant to Twitter  and Facebook.