Shock horror Flash doesn't work on the iPhone or the "magical" iPad. Steve Jobs has declared its death, and decreed that it's not worthy of inclusion in Apple's market leading mobile platform. Dropping Flash in favour of HTML5 is akin to replacing floppy drives with CD-ROMS we are told. You don't need it, you will be better off without it, it's time to stop living in the past and embrace the future. Naturally Adobe (the makers of Flash) aren't too happy about having the door slammed in their face. Adobe tried launching a campaign online but were forced to accept they have lost the battle. However the war is only just heating up; Google's latest phones support both HTML5 & Flash.

The controversy has been fodder for bloggers, sparked flame wars between fans, and led to an awful lot of FUD (fear uncertainly and doubt) being spread online. This puts many of us in the industry in an odd position. For years Apple and Adobe have been the pillars of the creative industries. As developers and designers we have a love hate relationship with both companies. Designers need photoshop to get their work done, yet vent about it online. Developers love apple hardware, but have a hard time accepting the App Store's restrictions on how they can write their apps.

Which side are you on?
Despite what you read online I don't see a major split in the web community between HTML5 and Flash or between iPhone and Android for that matter. On the contrary, I see lots of overlap. In our industry it pays to have multiple disciplines. Lots of the popular games for the iPhone are written by people who are also Flash game developers. The people doing the cool 3D demos in HTML5 are often the same people who pioneered 3D in Flash. Those of us working on the cutting edge do not erect walls between technologies, we tear them down.

Flash has a long history of bringing innovations to the browser: animation, fonts, audio, video, 3D, and networking to name just a few. Recently we have noted interest and momentum building behind HTML5. It's about time browsers had native support for many of the things Flash has supported for years. The 4 "modern" browsers (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) are competing against each almost daily to take the crown as being the fastest, and most feature complete implementation. Competition is a good thing, after years of stagnation it's an exciting time to be working in the web. If you are stuck using a "legacy" browser (hint: the one with a blue e) do us all a favour and upgrade today, I promise you won't regret it.

Unfortunately outside of cutting edge Mobile web it's hard to fully utilise all the advances offered by these "modern" browsers. The elephant in the room remains every web developers pet hate; Internet Explorer with it's stubborn 50% market share. Even if Microsoft were to support full HTML5 and CSS3 in IE9 (unlikely), we won't see IE7 and IE8 disappear for years to come. Many sites are only just getting around to phasing out IE6. The key strength of Flash has always been that it's cross browser; unencumbered by the incompatibles and quirks that have plagued browsers. With penetration rates hovering close to 100% and a fast upgrade cycle driven by automatic updates it's no wonder Flash has become the de-facto standard for delivering video and rich experiences online.

So where does this leave HTML5 and CSS3?
Some features lend themselves to progressive enhancement, enabling HTML5 drag and drop file uploads or offline storage for those with capable browsers is an easy win. Using the latest CSS3 properties to render nice UIs while still degrading gracefully to support IE can be tricky, but is doable. It doesn't have to be pixel perfect, it just needs to work in older browsers. This leaves those features that you can't degrade gracefully without falling back to an alternative such as Flash. This category includes the much hyped video tag and canvas element.

Video support in HTML5 is still a bit of a minefield, there are 3 different codecs (H264, WebM, and Vorbis) that may or may not work in your browser, some with critical hardware acceleration, others lacking. In order to provide the best experience on the web and mobile you need to encode and deliver the video in multiple formats as well as providing a Flash version for those without HTML5. There are other rough edges too, such as fullscreen support; which depending your browser works differently or may not be supported at all. My advice to clients is to do what YouTube is doing and give users the choice to pick what works best for them.

This brings me to canvas element, a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. Many of the demos show it being used for amazing Flash like experiences. Unfortunately there are problems here too. when you do a lot of animation and graphics processing you are going to burn CPU. Lots of it. Technology can always be abused at the expense of your CPU, those annoying battery draining banner ads can be rendered using canvas on the iPhone too. Recently Flash player added code to throttle down processing on browser tabs that are not active. I expect a similar feature will have to be added to browsers to control canvas abuse. Then there is the legitimate concern of accessibility, while it can be a challenge to create truly accessible Flash, it is at least possible.

In conclusion
Despite all the challenges I think it's our duty to push for the adoption of the latest web standards. While I may not agree with Steve Jobs reasons for banning Flash from iOS, I'm grateful that the controversy has put the spotlight on HTML5. I take issue with the assertion that Flash is a dead technology, on the contrary I see Adobe continuing to innovate and evolve Flash for many years to come. When noise generated by all the bloggers and fanboys has died down, it will be left to us humble web designers and developers to make all these technologies work for users.

Newspaper owners across the land must have been breathing a sigh of relief when Rupert Murdoch stuck his head over the parapet and declared that he was no longer prepared to give his company's journalistic content away for free. Finally someone was standing up and saying what the vast majority of Fleet Street must surely have felt for a decade; if we want to prevent the newspaper industry going the same way as the music industry, we need to start putting a price on quality journalism.

To fill you in if you don't already know; Murdoch's plan is to erect a pay-wall around the Times Online and Sunday Times websites this summer so users will need to pay a charge of £1 per day or £2 per week to access the content online. He is also threatening to remove News International's content from Search Engines due to his insistence that Google et al are leeching it and becoming absurdly rich off the back of it - a fair accusation despite the rallying cries of the 'free web' evangelists.

Let me pin my colours to the mast; I believe in rewarding the quality, integrity and thought that goes into top-tier journalism. I believe we need to safeguard it as a legitimate career to prevent the next generation of free-thinking reporters becoming bankers, lawyers and web designers. I don't, however, want digital journalism wrapped in a sickly layer of advertising and i do want to dive in and out of content from different providers without paying for the bits i don't use. Demanding, aren't I?

News International's move is brave for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they are taking the gamble that the rest of the mainstream press will follow their lead. What they are demanding is a change in mentality of internet news consumers.

But in my view Murdoch's assumption of how online consumers perceive news is way off the mark. Rightly or wrongly, we simply don't attribute the same value to content discovered towards the top of a Google search or via a bookmark as we do to a tangible product we purchase in a newsagent. As such, if similar content is available for free from any of his mainstream competitors, Murdoch is going to lose all but the most partisan of his readership. So far, some months after the Wall Street Journal became the first of the mainstream to charge for its content, only the Economist has joined him in the UK and unless the figures start to look good pretty quickly, I would expect a fairly dramatic about turn after just a few months.

Whilst I don't think the traditional web user is ready to voluntarily pay for content they have been getting for free for a generation, I do think that the acceleration in uptake of mobile devices could be the catalyst that the newspaper industry is looking for in their hunt for revenue streams outside of advertising. The main reason for this is the emergence of the applications market. Suddenly digital content is available in product form. It is portable, available offline and, crucially from a revenue point of view, free from an expectation of freeness.

Apps such as the Guardian's are also superior to their mobile web cousins due to faster load times and the ability to tailor the content through the setting of personal preferences making it a smoother user experience.

When done well, the result is a premium product which users are willing to pay for. The Guardian iPhone App, priced at £2.39, for example, racked up 100,000 downloads within 10 weeks of launch and although that cost is a one off payment I believe that a licensing model where users pay a couple of pounds per month for the App would be met with a sizeable uptake and provide an ongoing and sustainable financing model.

Furthermore, if he carries out his threat to shut off the Search Engines, Murdoch is stifling a significant and valuable conduit to his content - latest estimates are that a third of traffic to the Times comes through search engine referrals.

As much as it pains me to say it, I agree with the premise of what Murdoch says but his approach is a metaphorical bludgeon. I believe that the way to monetise content is to look at the traditional web as a shop window, supported in part by a conventional advertising model. The main revenues should come outside of this traditional format and away from the expectation of free content and the enormous amounts of open source alternatives. It should come through the creation of paid-for applications for an ever-improving world of handheld devices, providing easily accessible content with real differentiation and quality that can be accessed where and when the user wants it; be that on the daily commute or on the loo.

In the words of Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater, "Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial [to the future of journalism]".

There should be no need to introduce you to Google Analytics, the most widely used web analytics application. The tool is powerful and FREE so it isn't hard to see why it is so popular. However, only a small percentage of users fully harness it's potential.

Google is constantly refining and adding new features to it's analytics service. Although you need to be a bit exploratory if you are going to make the most out of the 85 Google Analytics reports available. Lurking beneath the main dashboard Google Analytics gives you the necessary tools to analyse all of your website's data. Here are 5 under-used Google Analytics features you need to know.

1. Exclude internal traffic

Internal traffic to your site can skew your Google Analytics report. If you want to get a better picture of the traffic coming to your site, it is advised to filter out your internal traffic. Google Analytics allows you to set up a filter to easily exclude your own visits from the analytics results.

• On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on the Analytics Settings link.
  
  
• Then click on the Filter Manager link.
  
  
• The Filter Manager page will show you all existing filters for your site. Create a new one by clicking on the Add Filter link.
  
  
• In the new filter window:
  
  Enter the name of your new filter (ie: internal traffic)
  
  "Filter type" - tick the radio button "predefined filter"
  
  We want to exclude traffic from your IP address, so you will need to select "Exclude," "traffic from the IP addresses," and "that are equal to" in the three dropdowns.
  
  Enter your IP address (if you don't know your IP address, simply click on this link)
  
  Select which websites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate website profile(s) and then clicking "Add"
  
  Finally, click "Save Changes"

Your Google Analytics report should now exclude your own traffic and you can get more accurate tracking data.

2. Set up goals and funnels tracking
(probably the most important tracking feature to set up)

Google describes a goal as a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. Please note that if you have an e-commerce site, there is a more specific tracking feature for measuring your goals.

The "goals" feature is a simple way of tracking your business objectives for your website. A goal must be a measurable action performed by your website's visitors (such as a page view visit to a thank you page). So a business objective + a measurable action = goal

Check out these common examples:

Usually between the initial click and the visitor's action, visitors are required to make multiple steps to complete the desired action. This creates the "goal funnel", with each step being a measurable action. Your visitor can take two routes: 1) follow the intended path, which means the goal is "completed" or 2) decide to leave the process along the way in which case the conversion chain is broken and goal abandoned.

Google Analytics allows you to track visitors as they go through the different steps of the goal funnel and shows you how many potential customers abandon the process, and at which point. The funnels feature is an amazing and very valuable tool that will help you detect issues with your conversion process. With this precious information in hand, you should be able to address the sections of your site preventing you from completing your business objectives, informing future updates.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important actions when it comes to configuring your account. Here is how to do it:

• First you will need to define your goal funnel – When you are on your website, ask yourself what are the steps required to complete the goal? Once you know, write down the URLs that will define your funnel (or ask your developer).
  
  For example:
  1. start_registration.html
  2. enter_shipping_info.html
  3. enter_subscriber_preferences.html
  4. finalise_registration.html
  5. thank_you.html
   
• On your dashboard, click on "Goals" on the left hand side navigation and click on "Set up goals and funnels"
• Enter goal information.
  
  
  
  Note you have the choice between 3 different types of goal: URL destination, time on site and pages/visit.
• Enter goal details
  
  
  
  Set "Match Type" to either "Exact Match," "Head Match," or "Regular Expression Match. This mainly depends on the type of websites you have (ie: static vs. dynamic). You can read more about the difference between Head, Exact, and Regular Expression Match on Google Analytics help page.
  Select if the goal URL is case sensitive and finally you can add a value to a goal.
• Define Your Goal Funnel - Specify the URLs and name each steps of your funnel.
• You are done! You can now analyse your goals performance.

You will only be able to see your goals data in reports after a few days of activity but please note this feature is not backwards compatible. Once the data is collected, go to your dashboard, click on Goals and open the Funnel Visualization Report. Google Analytics will tell you the following:

1. How many people enter at each step of the funnel.
2. How many people abandon at each step.
3. How many people make it to the next stage.
4. How many people make it all the way through.

The funnel will look something similar to this:

On the left you can see how your visitors enter the funnel, on the right where they leave the funnel and where they go. Finally the middle part shows you how visitors progress to the funnel, how many continue on to each step. In the example above, you can see 33,376 started the process and 25,434 go to another section but approximately 10,000 users leave the site at the first step. We can see something must be wrong with the first step. However, the abandonment on the second step is lower, which is good. Finally, you can see the overall conversion rate is 9.98%.

If you need a bit more information about goals in Google analytics, I suggest you check out this very handy tutorial: "Google Analytics IQ Lesson: Goals in Google Analytics"

3. Set up Analytics Intelligence & custom alerts

Google analytics recently launched Intelligence Beta which is an "algorithmic driven intelligence engine". What does that mean? It means Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic, detects any anomaly in your traffic patterns and sends you automatic alerts of significant changes over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Clever eh?

You can also create your own custom alerts, where you set the conditions for the alert depending on what you want to monitor. Go to the left hand side of your dashboard and click on "Intelligence Beta"

You have 2 choices:

1. Set up your own custom reports for specific things that you want to monitor.
   For example, you could have just launched a campaign in a specific location and wanted to be notified how the campaign is impacting traffic from that location. You could also create another alert to see when the traffic from that location is decreasing, so you can find out when the campaign starts to run out.
2. If you are not very familiar with setting up "customised alerts" then you can select one of the templates on the "manage intelligence alerts" page. Just click on "copy" and modify the alerts so it monitors what you need.

Once your intelligence alerts are setup and triggered you will receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily, Weekly or Monthly Alerts on your Google Analytics account or sent by email if you requested that option.
For further information on the Analytics Intelligence feature, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.

4. Tracking traffic from social media

With Google Analytics you can by default analyse traffic mediums such as direct, organic etc. It also automatically tracks referrals from other websites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networking sites. However, in your Traffic Source reports, social network visits are grouped together with visits from all the other referral links to your site. If you are only interested in social network referrals there is a trick you can use.

• Select Advanced Segments from the lower left hand side bar in your Google Analytics Dashboard.
  
  
• Once in the Advanced Segment page, select Create a new custom segment.
  
  
• Drag the "source" box which is under "Traffic sources" to "dimension or metric" window.
  
  
• Select "Matches Regular Expression" from the "Condition" drop down. In the Value field, paste the following sources:
  
  digg|aim|friendfeed|econsultancy|blinklist|fark|furl|misterwongs|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|
  bloglines|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.us|feedburner|twitter|technorati|faves\.com|newsgator|PRweb|
  msplinks|myspace|bit\.ly|tr\.im|cli\.gs|zi\.ma|poprl|tinyurl
  
  If you wish to add more domains, simply add a "|"symbol between each name. However this field is limited to 256 characters.
• Name your segment (ie: "social network traffic"), click on "Create segment" and you are done! Then from your dashboard, click on "Advanced segments – All visits" and tick the box for the social networks traffic custom segment you have just created, finally apply the changes.
  
  
• Well done, you can now start comparing your social media traffic sources in relation to your overall site traffic.

5. Create annotations on reports

Google launched this very handy feature at the end of last year allowing comments on graphs regarding events that have happened. Users can either add shared or private notes on the dashboard graph. Every time you make a change to your site, be that technical, design, content or any other updates, make sure you add a note specifying what has been done so if the performance of the site improves/decreases, you can easily explain to your colleagues who see a spike or a dip the reasons why. Watch this video to see it in action.

The "annotations" feature is a great collaborative feature that brings intelligence to data and makes your stats understandable and shareable within your company. As Google explains "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers."

If you want to go beyond the tips we have discussed here and learn more, here is a list of Google Analytics blogs:

• Google Analytics blog
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Analytics Market
• Analytics talk
• LunaMetrics

I hope this post was useful and you will soon become a more knowledgeable Google Analytics user!

"Build software for yourself

A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You'll be the target audience and you'll know what's important and what's not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.” Excerpt from Getting Real by 37 Signals

It’s not exactly a tough concept to get your head around but the best businesses are usually born from a problem rather than a brainstorm on “What the World needs now” (is love sweet love?)

At Codegent we have worked with a lot of start-up companies and without fail their first task is to setup email services (we use Google Apps like everyone with a sane mind should), a holding webpage with sign-up form, Blog, Twitter account, Facebook page etc. so that the client can start pimping their hot new idea. Gary Vaynerchuk discusses the need for this in his fantastic book Crush It! 

Recently I had done this work for Tepilo & BIMA and I was moaning to Luke, our technical director, that it takes me ages to do, is a bit fiddly and that surely there should be a faster way of doing it? With all the DNS tweaks, server config & testing it can easily be a day and a half before we are all sorted.

Fast forward a few 4am-ers later and Luke invented DASH – Steamlined Online Business Setup.

What is DASH then?

DASH is a Web Application that facilitates the registration, setup and integration of all the online services you would typically want when launching a new venture. Of course you can choose to use as much or as little of it as you want – one size certainly does not fit all. The process ends with the generation of a basic but fully integrated website (Gallery powered by Flickr, Videos courtesy of YouTube, Subscriptions via Mail Chimp etc.) that you can content manage and manipulate as much as you like.

How long does it take? 10 minutes

Cost? $90

Here is a handy list of (some) initial features in DASH

• Domain Registration (or configuration of existing domain)
• Google Apps Core Services – Email, Calendar, Docs
• Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Rich Media – Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo
• Content Managed Website & Blog – Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous
• Email Subscription & Mailshots – Mail Chimp, Camapaign Monitor
• Monitoring & Optimisation – Google Analytics, Alerts, Twilert, Feedburner

I could go on telling you about storage, backup, surveys, e-commerce, event management, accounting… but I hope you get the picture.

If you want to be one of the first users to use DASH (we will be giving away some free accounts) then please sign up on getdash.com. I will be launching the product as part of the Digital Mission to SXSWi in Texas this March. Email me if you want to hook up for a coffee, chat and sneak preview.

“When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you're passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you'll truly use it and care about it. And that's the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.” (another one from Getting Real by 37 Signals)

2010 is certainly not the first to be touted as the ‘Year of the Mobile Web’ but with the recent launch of the Nexus One and the likely war that will be waged between Google and Apple, it may be the first to actually go some way towards fulfilling its billing.

Currently, 1 in 7 minutes of media consumed in the UK is via a mobile device of some description. That number is set to rise with the end of the iPhone/O2 exclusivity deal, the addition of the Nexus One to the market and the inevitable clamouring amongst the remaining handset manufacturers to catch up. Mobile specific content is no longer a differentiator for companies; it is fast becoming a necessity as users move away from their PCs.

As we become more proficient at sifting through the mass of information at our fingertips and with the evolving development of the semantic web, we are starting to browse for information less and scan for it more. The ‘Smartphoners’ are the biggest ‘scanners’ of us all as they hunt out that quick hit of data; be it social updates, news, directions or very specific information. More and more user journeys follow the pattern of;

search engine > top listed page > back to search engine > another top listed page

As a result, as smartphone market share increases, bounce rate percentages across the land will inevitably rise as users who aren’t finding what they need quickly head off in search of it elsewhere.

The challenge we will face as designers, developers, UXers and strategists is how to overcome this behaviour and capture a user’s interest before they head off into the virtual sunset. The type of thinking that we need to do as creators of content for the mobile web is no different to that which we need to do for the desktop web; there is just less margin for error.

Think in pixels - Information Architecture needs to reflect the hardware that the audience use and this will increasingly mean a screen resolution of 480 x 320. This means cut down copy, reduce layers of navigation and think about content weighting – what are the most important of all the important things you are trying to say? What about font size? Can you read 10pt Verdana easily on an iPhone? Do those beautiful, detailed icons mean anything to the guy scanning your site on his Palm Pre from a train?

Clarity of message – Keep it short, and to the point.

Take SEM by the balls– It is unlikely that a mobile user will get past the first 1 or 2 pages of Google results so to be in with a chance of getting that click-through you need to be running intelligent PPC campaigns (Google mobile still makes room for sponsored links both on its mobile site and iPhone application), have outstanding SEO or go niche – ideally a combination of the 3. Interestingly, Google's mobile search also has room for a couple of real time results so all the more reason to engage with your audience on the social web.

It’s all in the content – I know we always bang on about this, but it is with good reason. Why are your users coming to your site and how do they generally find you? Look at your analytics; what are they looking for and how can you better deliver this information? Smartphone users are less inclined to browse and if they aren’t quickly seeing what they are looking for you may as well wave them goodbye.

The smartphone world is the antidote to the big budget, FWA world of 27” iMacs and megabytes of Flash. It is all about simplification of your message and real emphasis on what audiences want. It is a world where vanity must make way for clarity of message and ultimately one that requires us as an agency to really earn our fees in the field of usability, audience expertise and successful user conversion.

Here are a few of the current heroes from the world of the mobile web;

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ - easy to use and the right mix of content. Most importantly it doesn't feel like a stripped back version of the full site and of course there is the iPlayer.
• http://touch.facebook.com/ - Everything from the full site, cut up into bite-sized pieces.
• http://mobile.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/home.do - a simple site that helps you find crucial information when you need it.
• http://onetrip.org/ - more of a web app than a site but worth mentioning as they have consciously gone minimal with no GFX to speed up mobile load time.
• http://m.google.com/ - everything you can do on the Google you can do here from searching to mail.

Getting something quickly is not the same as getting something of quality, more often than not the 2 things are directly opposed. Equally true is that unedited or unqualified information has little value in the long term. So why is the real time web getting everyone so excited?

I have always used the internet to research and learn, it is my first port of call when I need information. More often than not I begin my hunt for information on a search engine, hardly revolutionary I know. Being barraged by unedited opinion isn’t high on my list of wants when I’m trying to find information, so I wasn’t thrilled when I heard that Google, Bing and Yahoo were all falling over each other to be the first to provide real time search results. Needless to say, I for one was not immediately convinced by the value or power of the real time web.

It wasn’t until I watched @QueenRania speak about the power and influence of real time web, at the Le Web 09 conference in Paris, that I was forced to re-think. She spoke of how being a queen is ‘clouded in protocol’ that prevents her from being able to talk to people (or rather, people being able to talk to her) on an equal level. She espoused the virtue of the internet for making all equal, it is a forum where titles mean little and content is everything. So why not use this powerful medium to evoke change? It is not radical to suggest that the web can be used to change the world for the better, but can the real time web actually save someone’s life in just a matter of hours, or even minutes? Or can it rally the internet’s vast population of dormant, armchair spectators to turn their "analogue activism" into physical change? Queen Rania thinks so.

She cited the Ketsana typhoon and subsequent floods that struck the Philippines. This was a devastating natural disaster that left many people in life threatening danger. With the help of social networks, quick thinking locals were able to send real time information on the worst affected areas, directing aid to those desperately in need faster than would otherwise have been possible, probably saving numerous lives. What’s more, the sense of urgency borne out of seeing the situation unfurl in real time prompted people to donate money and volunteer their time through the likes of Twitter, Plurk and Facebook. This is without question, an example of the unique benefit of real time information being disseminated to a vast and proactive audience.

Queen Rania also talked about the recent post-election protests in Iran, a subject that was widely reported in traditional media, but only truly tangible when viewed through Tweets and live video footage from the streets of Tehran, seen in real time. The immediacy and importance of the situation was evident to all, and people from all over the world were spectators of live events as they unfolded in a country not commonly associated with media freedom. The real-time audience were able to feel a connection to these events that would not otherwise have been possible.

But people do not have long term memories, especially when it comes to online. And in the same way that real-time can cast a spotlight on a subject, it can take it away equally as quickly. A few weeks after the protests in Iran began, Michael Jackson died. Suddenly the web was awash with information on the King of Pop, Iran was old news.

Never before had a subject changed the digital landscape so quickly, rumour turned into speculation which turned into fact, all within minutes and all played out before our eyes. Proof, if it was needed, that real time information is a powerful force.

We just have to learn to harness this force, according to Queen Rania. She gave a rousing speech which I watched via a live stream. Seeing it live made it all the more impactful. She was there to ask the audience of Le Web to lend their online support to her charity, 1 Goal, which campaigns for the right of every child in the world to have access to an education. After her speech, I went straight to 1Goal and signed up, something I would not have done if I hadn’t felt so part of the moment. Whether I, and the countless others who signed up as a result of Queen Rania’s speech, go on to actively support the charity remains to be seen.

If nothing else, real time web can bring information from anywhere in the world to a diverse and receptive audience. But the information that is out there does not become valuable or important until there are subsequent physical and positive actions. We are privileged to have the world at our fingertips and up to the minute information at our disposal, however, as Queen Rania so eloquently put it "[…] online activism is fleeting when there is no personal effort involved."

It seemed like 2009 was a Social Media land grab of contacts and connections. Hopefully you are all building your brand presence and conversing regularly and honestly with your new found audiences. (If not please give us a shout!)

I think that one danger with embarking on an extensive Social Media strategy is that, due to its immediate and noisy nature, it can accidentally replace a solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plan. In my opinion 2010 will be a time to pull our heads above water, take a deep breath and think how we are going to work these new channels and manage these relationships in an appropriate manner.

Firstly, what is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management references the symbiotic relationship between an IT System and a Contact Strategy. It is as much about the technology and integration methods you adopt as it is about actual message content and frequency of interaction. Sounds complicated? Not necessarily.

Imagine a small company of four people each using Outlook. Invariably that creates four different address lists all living separate lives under the control of individuals. There will be duplication, out of date information and a lot of value living in the heads of single employees rather than in a company-wide system. What if, on the company file server, there was a simple Excel spreadsheet that each person kept up to date? So when your good client Rachel mentions in a meeting that she is changing companies and gives you her new details you give your own colleagues back in the office (and future colleagues) a fighting chance of keeping in touch.

Sounds better already but what about the scenario where Rachel is already talking about a new opportunity with you and another person in the company sends her a cold sales email asking if there was anything in the pipeline? You're going to look stupid and disorganised. Or what if Rachel says give her three months to settle in then get in touch. How is that hot lead going to be recorded and actioned at the appropriate time?

At this point it's clear that Excel is going get a little stretched and someone internally needs to decide the appropriate times to contact your customers and for the message and delivery to be consistent so you don't look foolish. Nothing annoys me more than three recruitment consultants from the same firm phoning me on the same day. It happens quite a lot.

Let's bring this back to the web because the game just got tougher. Your contacts don't just live in Outlook, your mobile SIM and your business card box anymore. They are also your twitter followers, facebook fans, LinkedIn connections, newsletter subscribers, RSS readers and the list goes on. How are we going to manage all of this then?

It's clear we need to consolidate our knowledge, organise what we can into one repository and get our story straight!

'Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to do and die'

So many briefs we get simply list out the contact functionality and platform presence that the client believes they need without much thought as to why they should be there and what they want to do when they court their potentially brand new audience.

With so many platforms to work on you must decide on where your presence is relevant and then communicate to the user your plan on how you will use them. One real life example of where we did this was with a high-end events client of ours. We decided on the most appropriate channels and then on the best use of each. We let our audience decide which suited them the best.

• Email Subscribers - I want to be marketed to about upcoming events and offers directly and in detail but in a consistent, timely manner via email.
• Facebook fans - I want to hear about new events, share and tag photos from when I go to them as well as RSVPing my attendance. NB We gave event staff a basic digital camera and told them to snap away to encourage the viral effect of tagging photos on this powerful platform.
• Flickr - I want to see the professional photography you have taken at each event and possibly use it in our press articles or for PR.
• Subscribe to the blog feed via RSS or Email - I am interested in your news and what you have to say as a company. I prefer my information more passively and I am looking for an industry focus.
• Twitter - I want to hear about your events and insights but not necessarily enough to be emailed direct. I might go to an event in the future if one catches my eye or take you up on a last minute special offer. Conversely I might be a very keen member eager to hear all the news immediately.

With these profiles in mind we developed a content and contact strategy based on frequency, date/time and weighting of message. Look at all these channels (and more!), experience them for yourself if they are not familiar and ask whether your audience is really here. If so, what would they want and expect from you?

The basics of CRM - what should you do?

• Get organised early in your campaign or company life-cycle and save yourself the pain and confusion of consolidation later.
• Try and store as much of your data centrally by integrating your systems - especially your website and your CRM or office management software. Software like Salesforce and all credible CRM packages have an API. Duplication of information is the ultimate enemy!
• Don't over complicate things. There is no need to become Big Brother and collect every morsel of information going. Concentrate on what matters to your business and make sure those priorities are communicated internally as well.
• Train your staff to use and believe in your IT systems. CRM solutions don't work if people do not use them consistently and regularly.
• Track now, analyse tomorrow - you may not have the budgets or resource to fully analyse your contacts and clients behaviour right now but one day you will. You can't work with what doesn't exist so insist on logging crucial data early. Just think of the critical touch points and store it in a database for future reporting when you have built up enough data to make the resulting information worthwhile.
• You can look smart with personalisation and segmentation but you can also look really stupid! When you begin to understand your audience better you can increase your effectiveness hugely by tailoring your message more to their needs. But assume too much and get it wrong and you are basically communicating the message, "We don't understand you."
• No dead ends - Great news, they converted and clicked on a link, signed up to your list or purchased something. Big tick in a big box. But what next? Never leave a contact with nowhere to go next. They will decide when the story ends.
• Be respectful - Let the contact opt out at any time or change their preferred method of communication and make sure all systems are updated to reflect that. For everything you can get right with CRM I would honestly say it's better to do nothing at all than rush in and get it wrong. Simply think to yourself, "If I were you, would I want to hear this?"
• Don't over complicate your strategy - I have seen clients get very excited about the possibilities of effective CRM. However they often make the mistake of taking on too much. My mantra is to keep it simple, understand it fully, give it time and then incrementally build. This is a continual conversation with your contacts so there is no need to throw everything at them all at once. The chances are they will be as overwhelmed by it as you are.

I hope this has been useful. I have kept this blog pretty simple and of course there is much more to CRM than what I have written here. However, before committing wholly to digital marketing I was a CRM Integration Consultant working in the mobile sector for clients such as Vodafone and Three. Even when we worked on massive systems and implementations the principles I have outlined above were still at the forefront of our thinking.

So it has finally happened… The non-tech world has realised that the way we consume news has changed irrevocably. Well maybe the Wider World is a bit of an overstatement, but just ask the Grey Suits at Carter Ruck and they will confirm what the cool kids have known for a while; Old Media is not dead but it simply cannot compete with the immediacy and the omnipotence of a million tweets when it comes to reporting events in real time. 

There was a time, not too long ago, where carrying a late edition of The Standard put you at the bleeding edge of the day’s news. Then came the evolution of mainstream media onto the web. Some (The Guardian & The Economist for example) achieved this better than others, but ultimately a lunchtime fix of the headlines moved from the Café to the desktop. As immediacy goes this was a big step forward. Allied with newsgroups and rss feeds bringing updates straight to you, with minimum effort and no cost, the thirst for immediate news was quenched if not sated. 

But we were still reliant on our chosen news providers or a limited number of bloggers to actually report on the news in a timely fashion. We were also restricted to one or, at best, a few opinions and viewpoints. Political leanings and personal agenda were present in the same way they had traditionally been with news agencies. There were also considerations such as time difference and legal restrictions that meant we weren’t receiving news on our own terms. 

Then came Twitter.

On Monday night The Guardian released the ultimate ‘anti-story’ informing their readership of an injunction that had been placed on them that was preventing them telling the world about a scandal involving an MP that they couldn’t name asking a question they couldn’t print of a Minister they were not allowed to identify. Crucially this amounted to a denial of a centuries-old and hard-fought right to report on the goings on within parliament. Quite a big deal.

The injunction was served by Carter Ruck, a law firm specialising in privacy cases in the press. They market themselves as ‘the UK’s pre-eminent media law practice’ but it turns out their expertise lies in Old Media, not Media of the New variety. 

That evening Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief, fired out a single tweet linking to the piece. He had in the region of 500 ‘followers’ – a pittance in Twitter currency. By the time he returned from dinner, the Twitterverse had gone into overdrive. By the following morning #carterruck, #trafigura, the company that turned out to be at the centre of the controversy, and the #guardian were all top trending topics. The majority of Tweeters were simply outraged at the attempted blockade of an ancient journalistic right, others had taken it upon themselves to sniff out the truth and publish it, free from the binds of legal injunction. Twitter heroes such as Stephen Fry added their considerable voices to the cause (c. 850k followers) and by lunchtime on the Tuesday, an hour before the Guardian were due in court to contest the gagging order, Carter Ruck had rescinded the injunction due, almost entirely, to the weight of public opinion coming straight out of the Twitter.

What the Guardian did was crowd source the freeing of information that would otherwise have taken them days in a courtroom and enormous amounts of money to release. And it happened in the space of a few hours. 

It is for this very reason that today, if something captures my interest, my first port of call is a Twitter search. I know that on there will be countless others interested and talking about the same thing right then, at the very moment that I want to discover more. This is fundamentally changing how people consume news. Anyone with access to the internet can now legitimately broadcast information, free from the restrictions that bind traditional media in the form of legal tethering and time (time difference, editorial lag etc) and countless others can consume it and make up their own minds as to it’s legitimacy in the context of the general noise around the same topic.

But how do the powers at be, the police, lawyers, politicians – people with a vested interest in protecting certain information – deal with this new world order? It is now almost impossible for them to control information because there will always be someone, somewhere with a laptop and a cause.

The reality is they can’t control it. The only long-term option open to them is increased openness. A global broadcast network of millions cuts through the PR and the spin and when viewed collectively and objectively presents the new media news consumer with the facts.

In this age of transition between the old and the new there are those who are adapting well and those who are struggling. The channels of truth have been multiplied a millionfold and the Politicians, Companies and Celebrities have now 2 choices; voluntary honesty or involuntary discovery. Power to the Tweeple indeed.

Our clients at Youth Music are always coming up with new and innovative ways to get young people involved with music and this summer's Youth Music Box is no exception.

Based at the Southbank Centre for the next 6 weeks Youth Music Box is an 'interactive musical experience', allowing you to create your own unique track and video in under 10 minutes.

You can then go onto the website, find your video, tag yourself against it and share it with your friends. For those that can't make it to the Southbank Centre there is also an online version where you can create and record your own music. We are currently working on integration of the site with Facebook to help spread the joyous sounds even further afield.

So after a hard weeks work getting the site ready for launch last Thursday, we felt it was only right to pop along and try it out for ourselves. Our verdict - great fun for everyone but remember... you are being filmed!

www.youthmusicbox.co.uk »

Exciting times here at Codegent, we've just completed and launched a new website for Nickelodeon.

Nickelodeon presented us with an interesting challenge, they needed a website that could showcase their on-air summer content. This content consisted of (amongst other things) a competition to find SpongeBob Square Pants' biggest fan. Here's an example of one of our favourite entries so far. The other main part of the site was TEENick, a magazine style show aimed at teenage girls.

The challenge came in finding a way to create a cohesive site that would encourage the 2 different audiences to engage and interact with these seemingly disparate elements.

We wanted to incentivise people to travel through to the different parts of the site so we designed 5 SpongeBob cards that we 'hid' on various pages. When a user found a card they could click on it and were then given the option to download and print the card. 4 of the 5 cards incorporated a marker which, when printed and held up to a webcam, would display a 2D message from a character from SpongeBob. Finding the fifth card unlocked an augmented reality, 3D SpongeBob which the user could interact with by pressing their space bar. You can view a demo of the SpongeBob AR here:

These cards helped us to tie the site together and to generate page impressions, however we didn't want to incentivise people to travel through the site if we couldn't be sure that they were engaging with the content, so we constructed a points system that rewarded good behaviour, such as commenting, rating entries, entering the competition etc. Points are accumulated during the visit and when you reach certain milestones you unlock Nickelodeon 'goodies'.

We also wanted the user to feel a bond with the site which is why we added a badge creator. This allows users to create a badge with their unique username and design, this badge is displayed whenever they leave comment on an article. Here's an example of the badges in action.

The competition has had hundreds of entries and from the stats we've got so far, page impressions and time spent on site is looking good. The augmented reality aspect has had great feedback in terms of how it looks but also how it gives the user something new, exciting and valuable in exchange for their time and attention.

Definitely something we want to do again soon!