Tag Archives: communication

The opportunities of Podcasting

Posted in Classic shows on by Paul Boag

There has been a lot of talk about Podcasting over the last couple of weeks with the latest version of iTunes now supporting the technology. But what exactly is a PodCast and how if at all, can it benefit your organisation.

Sometimes it feels like the whole world has gone iPod crazy. iPod has spawned the next generation of music devices and single handedly changed the fortunes of Apple. But even though it is near on impossible to have avoided the iPod you may yet have escaped the phenomena of Podcasting.

What is Podcasting?

In many ways the PodCast is a natural extension of blogging. It allows anybody with a microphone and an internet connection to publish a radio show/blog that can be subscribed and downloaded to any MP3 player. PodCasts cover every imaginable subject from science fiction to gardening and are produced by enthusiastic amateurs and large corporations alike. They range from being entire radio shows such as those published by the BBC to short 5 minute bulletins.

It is still very much an emerging technology but it has seen much larger adoption than many other such technologies especially among the younger iPod generation.

How could it benefit my organisation?

Although largely untested I believe there are some real business opportunities in Podcasting. Podcasting provides a powerful new marketing and communication medium that is almost completely unexploited.

Of course the opportunities for organisations to utilise PodCasts are largely limited to those groups who are trying to reach the demographic that uses MP3 players. Currently this seems to be teenagers, students and young male professionals with disposable income. However there is an expectation that this audience will broaden significantly over the coming months.

Higher education PodCasts could contain hints and tips on university life, interviews with existing students and even demo tracks from student bands.

Nevertheless, for those trying to reach this demographic there are some interesting opportunities. Take for example the higher education sector that is always looking for new ways to attract school leavers. They could use popular existing PodCasts to advertise their courses or even run their own casts. These could contain hints and tips on university life, interviews with existing students and even demo tracks from student bands. Many university student unions also run their own radio stations which could be tapped for content.

With a bit of imagination it soon becomes apparent that PodCasts are an excellent way of connecting with a generation who are extremely unreceptive to traditional forms of marketing.

Click here for additional uses of Podcasting in the educational sector

How do we create a PodCast?

Because Podcasting is designed to open up broadcasting to everybody the process of producing a PodCast is very straightforward and there are many pieces of software that automate much of the technical process.

The real challenge is ensuring the quality of the PodCast doesn’t undermine the message being communicated.

The average PodCast listener is used to quality media and as a result has high expectations. The production value will be key to the Casts success. A combination of good content, professional vocal presentation and quality music will make your PodCast stand out from the crowd. In many cases finding this balance can be hard to achieve and could require the use of professional agencies to assist in the production process at least initially.

Looking beyond the PodCast

I would like to leave you with one last thought. At the end of the day a PodCast is just a downloadable MP3 track and so there is no reason why you need to limit the content you produce to a PodCast. What about broadcasting directly from your site or allowing users to subscribe to an email version of the Cast. Podcasting really has opened up a world of possibilities.

RSS web feeds set to explode

Posted in Marketing on by Paul Boag

If you do not know what an RSS feed is or if you have not added one to your site then now is the time to act. Microsoft is the latest in a long line to integrate RSS into their product offerings.

Microsoft has recently announced that their next version of Internet explorer will use RSS to inform users of changes to their favourite web sites.

In my two previous entries on this subject, I have explained what RSS is and why you should add an RSS feed to your site. However, since those articles the adoption rate of RSS has sky rocketed. Microsoft’s major competitor in the browser market, Firefox, has already integrated an RSS reader into its browser, while Yahoo and many others allow users to add RSS feeds to their personalised homepages.

The number of sites offering RSS feeds has also increased dramatically largely fuelled by the almost universal adoption of the technology in blogs. However, RSS is not just the domain of blogs and technology sites. Major sites such as the BBC have also adopted the technology believing that it is a valuable communication method with its users.

Microsoft’s adoption of RSS in its next generation browser is part of a wider move to integrate the RSS format throughout its upcoming version of windows. Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team said:

"We want RSS everywhere. I want it in more than just the browser and aggregators. We want to help RSS get even bigger and better than today."

To learn more about RSS select one of the articles below:

RSS explained

Why add a RSS feed to your site?

Does your email marketing break the law? 10 hints to best practice

Posted in Marketing on by Paul Boag

I found an excellent resource some time ago addressing the new legislation regarding email marketing. I suddenly remembered it today while listening to a lecture on the subject and thought I might post some information on it here.

The resource I am referring to is a fact sheet produced by Scottish Enterprise that can be downloaded in PDF format from their site.

Download the fact sheet now (PDF – 265kb)

The fact sheet largely discusses the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communication (DPEC) but has an excellent section right at the end referring to general best practice.

Best Practice in email marketing

Inform the user

If e-mail addresses are to be used for marketing purposes, this should be clearly stated at the point of collection.

The ability to opt-out

Once informed, the user should be able to refuse permission for their e-mail to be used for marketing purposes (i.e. opt-out).

Keep it relevant

If e-mail is to be sent to those with whom a customer relationship exists, the content should be in reference to similar products and services.

Do not share email addresses without permission

If the e-mail addresses are to be shared with third parties, this should be clearly stated at the point of collection.

Do not harvest email addresses

E-mail addresses should not be harvested (e.g. copied from websites) and used for marketing purposes without the recipients’ knowledge.

Option to unsubscribe

Recipients should be able to refuse permission for further marketing messages to be sent to them at any time.

Do not hide identity

Your identity as the sender should never be disguised or concealed.

Do not hide the option to opt-out

In every communication, recipients must be given a simple and clear means of opting out from receiving future e-mails.

Honour user requests

When an opt-out request is received it must be honoured, with the contact details ideally being "suppressed" rather than deleted.

Cultural considerations in marketing

Posted in Marketing on by Paul Boag

If you are looking to promote your web site through email or other online campaigns you will find no shortage of advice on how best to go about it. However one word of warning, if your target audience isn’t American it might be worth taking the advice with a pinch of salt!

Generally I try and discourage my clients from doing unsolicited email campaigns however occasionally it is appropriate when they want to reach a very specific target market for the first time.

When I do run email campaigns for clients I tend to prepare several different approaches and test them out on a small sample of the entire email list. This helps me to gauge which email will get the highest response rate and therefore use that on the rest of the list.

Now as I don’t specialise (or even entirely approve) of unsolicited email campaigns I felt I should do a bit of reading on the subject before I sent out a campaign for a client who was aiming at a niche U.K. audience. Unsurprisingly I found huge amounts of advice on the subject. Most of the articles I read seemed to agree on a very specific approach to email campaigns involving "benefit selling, "calls to action" and numerous other catch phrases.

Uncomfortable with the hard sell

I have to say I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the whole thing. It all felt very heavy handed to me as if I was forcing my clients product down the reader’s throat. However who was I to argue with the experts and so I dutifully followed all the guidelines the various articles laid out. Nevertheless I couldn’t shake my apprehension so decided that I would write just one of the sample emails in a style I felt comfortable with. The results were extraordinary! The formula based emails failed dismally while the email I wrote myself received a very impressive click through rate. So was this due to some natural genius on my part? Unfortunately not.

A difference of culture

I concluded that the problem with the formula based emails was that they were based on advice taken from an American model of selling. I am convinced that my British audience found the emails I sent too "in your face" for their tastes. Instead of being inspired to respond they found the emails intrusive and heavy handed.

In contrast the email I wrote from scratch took a much more gentle approach. I apologised for writing an unsolicited email, introduced myself and explained why I felt they might be interested in the web site I was promoting for my client. The tone was almost apologetic and yet still communicated the key messages. However most importantly it was personal. I gave the impression that the email was sent directly from me and specifically to that individual. It didn’t appear to be a mass email and in fact I had several people write back thanking me for taking the time to tell them about the site!

Conclusion

Because of the nature of the internet it is easy to forget that it is made up of many cultures. It is so important to be sensitive to these cultures and ensure that your communications, whether they are on your web site, via email, or through direct advertising, take into account the target audience you are trying to reach.

Virtual communities – the benefits

Posted in Site content on by Paul Boag

Virtual communities can be a powerful tool in helping you do everything from increase brand loyalty to improving your website.

Virtual communities offer lots of exciting opportunities not only for companies with products to sell but also for charitable, voluntary and government sites who are looking to enthuse and excite people about their goals and vision.

I believe passionately in virtual communities. Back in 1994 when I was an art student working for IBM I wrote my dissertation on virtual communities and the benefits they offered. In those days online communities were new and exciting (like most things on the internet) and I had all kinds of idealistic visions of them breaking down social and racial barriers as well as allowing access to the disabled and immobile. Well pehaps I was somewhat naive (after all I was an art student!) but I do still believe they have a lot to offer. This article aims to define exactly what a virtual community is and then look at some of the benefits it brings:

What is a virtual community?

A virtual community is any place groups of people talk together on the Internet; in mailing lists, in newsgroups, in chat rooms, or on Web sites. Virtual community can also cover more specialized situations, such as long-distance education or shared project work spaces. And it can describe some communications that aren’t discussions, such as posting customer evaluations or answering opinion polls. Whenever people are aware of each other’s presence on the Internet, they’re likely to consider themselves part of a community.

Below I briefly cover the different kinds of virtual communities:

Mailing list

E-mail discussions within a group of subscribers are the simplest and most familiar form of virtual community. Anyone who can read and send e-mail can create a mailing list virtual community, although there are more elaborate tools for administering large lists.

Newsgroups

A worldwide system of discussion groups, also called Usenet, are the most abundant source of communities. Whatever the topic, there is a newsgroup devoted to it. Like e-mail, you post a message to a newsgroup and come back later to see if you’ve received an answer. Newsgroups are simple to participate in (if you have a newsreader), but somewhat difficult to administer.

Chats

Discussions that take place “live” (in real time) in chat rooms are the quickest way to connect with people on the Internet. In addition to traditional chat rooms, there are chat rooms in which you can move through a graphical world and others in which you can build your own text-based world.

Web-based discussion groups

Discussion groups linked to a specific Web site are quickly becoming the standard for site-based virtual communities. Like e-mail and newsgroups, you post a message to a discussion group and read the response later. You can participate in Web-based discussion groups on any site that hosts one, and build your own either by hosting it yourself or by using one of the many free discussion group tools like World Crossing .

Why launch a virtual community?

Here are the three best reasons to launch an online community:

You have a vocal, enthusiastic, and involved group of users who could help each other in using your product or services.

Do you get lots of e-mail every day? Are your users constantly offering you suggestions about how to improve your product or service? Do you have customers at all different levels of expertise who could help each other? If so, you might benefit from building a place where your customers can ask each other questions and exchange ideas.

You’re interested in developing a new product or service and genuinely want input and knowledge from other people.

Does your company do original research, either developing new products and services or entering a new business area? Are you forever cornering friends and family members with your next great idea? Do you have a genuine passion that keeps you out and asking questions? If so, you might build an online study group where you can bring other passionate people together to discuss new areas of research.

You have a “natural” community of product or service users, associates, and suppliers and want to give them a place to talk to each other.

Is your product or service directed towards a naturally cohesive group of customers? Do these customers have a hard time finding each other? Are they underserved by existing online communities? If so, you might build an online community where your customers can find each other and talk about their mutual concerns. This is particularly relevent to charities or voluntary organisations who attract people who are passionate about a certain subject. This gives them a forum to share that passion and spur each other on.

So there you go, a basic introduction to virtual communities. Obviously there is a lot more that could be said. After all I wrote a whole dissertation on the subject. Virtual communities offer lots of exciting opportunities not only for companies with products to sell but also for charitable, voluntary and government sites who are looking to enthuse and excite people about their goals and vision.

Success criteria

Posted in Web strategy on by Paul Boag

One of the first questions I ask a client interested in developing a new website is, “what are your success criteria?” How a company evaluates the success or failure of its website is fundamental to how that site is built and maintained.

Establish measurable goals

As a website developer I may build an incredibly popular website which receives tens of thousands of visitors a day but if those visitors fail to make purchases, when this is a key success criteria for the client, then I have failed in my job. A clearly defined set of success criteria will help to ensure a website is built in the most appropriate way as well as make sure goalposts don’t move too far through the lifespan of the project. In practice it is all about communication. Like most projects, if goals are not clearly defined up front and a mechanism is in place to measure if those goals are met, a website project can soon turn into a battlefield. The client is left disappointed with the end result which hasn’t lived up to his or her expectations while the developer is exasperated believing the client asked for one thing but in reality wanted another.

Dealing with multiple objectives

So when I talk about success criteria what exactly is it that I am referring to? Well to some extent that depends on the individual website. A community website is going to have very different aims and objectives to say, an e-commerce site. Often it is impossible to define a single criterion but rather there are a number of factors that the client wants taken into account. In these kinds of situations it is important to prioritise the criteria. For example, I have recently been involved in a lot of work for the National Trust. Like most client they didn’t have a single aim for their site. They wanted to disseminate information to the public and to their members. They also wanted to increase the number of people becoming members through the site. Moreover they wished to make their site visually more attractive and easier to use as well as meeting the need of visually impaired users. The list went on. It took sometime of working with the client before I felt confident in the priority of these goals.

Be specific

It is important to note that broad goals for a website, such as those mentioned above are not the same as success criteria. Success Criteria need to be more specific and more measurable. For example my interpretation of a site being more usable may have been different from that of the Trusts. What were needed were tangible goals we could agree between us. Instead of a vague goal of improving usability it would have been better to specify a percentage increase in the number of users moving deeper into the site or staying longer. Equally talking about increasing membership could mean very different things from one person to the next. As a developer I may have believed a five percent increase was reasonable while the Trust may have expected something much higher. It is vital to be specific and that all parties involved are fully in agreement with any criteria set.

Be realistic

The final point worth making is that it is extremely important that any success criteria set are realistic. A one hundred percent increase in company turnover within a fortnight of the site going live just isn’t going to happen! No self respecting development house is going to sign on to that. Success criteria should be set at a realistic level and achievable within a realistic timescale. I also don’t believe that it is particularly appropriate to make success criteria a contractual obligation on the development house used. My reasons for this are the client often hugely affects success criteria themselves. The development of a website is a partnership between the developer and the client. The client obviously has a huge impact on the final deliverable and so cannot blame the developer when not all the success criteria are met.

The blame game

It is an inevitable part of web design that not all your objectives are going to be met in the first pass. The trick is not to turn things into a blame game but rather sit down and analysis why things didn’t work out as expected. Where your criteria unrealistic in the first place? Where there factors which you could not have predicted at the outset of the project? There is a whole host of reasons why objectives weren’t met. Once they have been identified the next step is to either set new objectives or look at new ways of addressing the existing ones.

I strongly believe that establishing clear success criteria in the early stage of any web development project will facilitate the smooth running of the project and ensure better communication between client and developer. However it is important that any success criteria laid down remain flexible and don’t turn into a club to beat each other around the head with!