Happy Herring

"Great use of social media @wagamama_uk Couple lead Wagamama photo competition: A couple from..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:57:41 +0000

“

Great use of social media @wagamama_uk

Couple lead Wagamama photo competition: A couple from Brentwood is in the lead in a Wagamama national noodle month photo competition that could win a trip to Japan. Wagamama has invited customers to upload pictures of noodles on restaurant visits to its Facebook page. Jennifer and Andrew Dashwood-Begg from Queens Road, Brentwood, are currently topping Wagamama’s photo competition for their snap of daughter Jennifer, aged 15 months. The couple, both 29, currently have almost 10,000 Facebook likes for the picture taken at Wagamama’s Lakeside restaurant two weeks ago. If they still have the most likes by 31 March they will win a trip to Japan.

”

- Propel newsletter 27th March 2013 (via spectacularmarketing)

Video

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:42:39 +0000

For the hardcore g33ks (like myself, obviously), hilarious...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:48:53 +0000

For the hardcore g33ks (like myself, obviously), hilarious comments on insanity in popular programming languages. Let’s talk about JavasScript.

Improve your online business - improve your links!

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:29:00 +0000

Improve your online business - improve your links!:

Here is a good run down of what you need to think about when building links to your website in 2013. After the Penguin update that Google released last year it seems clear that people who focus on building organic links with high content value, user centric websites are the winners.

When it comes to SEO, the only long term strategy guaranteed to work is not to cheat…

WHAT MATTERS: IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE YEAR IN MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY & ENTERTAINMENT

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:25:26 +0000

WHAT MATTERS: IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE YEAR IN MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY & ENTERTAINMENT:

Via Anil Dash I stumbled over this short and exciting presentation about changes in the media landscape triggered by social and app platforms. It is over a year old, but still feels very relevant. Also read Anil Dash about stop publishing web pages and get with the stream.

Best password usability rant ever.

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:37:53 +0000

Best password usability rant ever.

Working with Jessica’s Recipe Bag is something I very much...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Working with Jessica’s Recipe Bag is something I very much enjoy. Since cooking is something close to my own heart I love being able to help others find new recipes, try new ingredients and spend more time exploring their kitchen tools.

To get the concept of Jessica’s Recipe Bag, weekly recipes with all the fresh ingredients needed to cook delivered to your door, across in a more personal and visual way we decided to produce a short video. I think it came out really well.

Concept, design and production was done by Jelly, and working with them was a pure delight. Quick, spot on, attentive, and with an understanding that a new startup isn’t made of money…

The voice is actually one of my colleagues at Jessica’s, Sarah, who I think sounds lovely. Relaxed, personal, friendly, just like we want to think of ourselves, really.

Of course we gave the video the hero position on Jessica’s start page, and also included it at the top of the sidebar in all the blog pages, making it very hard to miss.

Serendipity in the age of online shopping - Flavrbox

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 15:53:26 +0100

Serendipity in the age of online shopping - Flavrbox:

On my food blog Tummyrumble I blogged a bit about a new-ish subscription delivery service called Flavrbox, delivering samples of exciting food stuffs to your door every month. I quite like it. For a longer review, see Tummyrumble.

"Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not..."

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:24:00 +0100

“Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not a process partially vetted by informed human analysis.”

- “Google Maps announces a 400 year advantage over Apple Maps” by Mark Dobson

The clearest case yet that pure reliance on algorithms will fail with such large scale, real world scenarios. So instead of Apple testing the quality of its software, that task was placed squarely on the shoulders of its users.

Entering through the side entrance

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:26:00 +0100

While reading an article about the future of journalism, an interesting topic indeed, I found this gem of an insight:

What is the nature and purpose of a website when most of the inbound traffic comes from search and social? Four years ago, many news sites saw half their traffic come to the home page. By traffic I mean inbound uniques, not page views, not the returning visits of loyal users. Today, due to continued growth in traffic from search and social, home page traffic is typically 25 percent of inbound audience. That means 75 percent of inbound traffic is going to story pages.

The person who said that is Richard Gingras, director of news and social products at Google.

Following my own and customer site stats closely I know that a lot of web visitors bypass the start page, but that in some cases as much as 75% head straight for a specific page is mindboggling.

Have you checked the statistics on your website to see which pages people actually see first? Is the majority of visitors really arriving at your start page, or do they jump from Twitter, Facebook and search engines straight to a sub page on a specific topic or about a certain popular product? Do they from there ever go to your start page at all?

Perhaps you’ll even find that one or a few specific blog posts attract almost all of the traffic from search engines, and if the visitor land directly on that page and then immediately leave… …did you really leave a lasting impression on that visitor? Did they even realise what you sell?

In physical terms, this is a little bit like people entering a super market through the side entrance, picking up what they need and then cleverly bypassing the tempting aisles and displays next to the cash registers as they leave, again using the side door. This is not what the supermarket wants, they want you to get a good look at the displays they so carefully designed to make you spend a few extra pounds on candy, magazines, offers and bargains!

Obviously, the learning from this is to spend a good deal of time designing your website sub pages in such a way that wherever a visitor enters, links to your top products, your email marketing signup form or booking form are readily visible. Don’t just focus all your attention on the home page.

As an example, take a look at the website me and David Knight from Euged built for Jessica’s Recipe Bag. The main purpose of the first version of the site was to act as an informative website explaining the concept, and collect email addresses from interested people while we were working towards launching the “real” website with the online ordering functionality.

With social media and shared links to blog posts written with search engine traffic in mind being the main sources of visitors it is incredibly important that every single page in the website clearly shows the key benefits of joining Jessica’s Recipe Bag, and has the ability to collect the visitor’s contact details.

To ensure this we put the email sign up form right at the top in the sidebar of every page, where it is hard to miss, allowing people to leave their contact details on every page of the site:

So here’s an exercise for you: Go take a look at your website. Click through the start page and go a few pages away. Is it instantly obvious who you are and what you can do for the visitor? Every single blog post you write should make this clear, it needs to be a part of the basic page template. If you sell something online, a strong call to action to learn more about your product or service is a no brainer.

Before you start spending time and money changing your website though, check the data. Take a look at your website statistics and see where people actually enter your site. Are they using the front door, or entering through the side entrance?

Tip: If you use Google Analytics, the easiest way to review this is the “Landing Pages” report under the tab “Content” in the left hand navigation:

The above screenshot shows the stats from my food blog Tummyrumble. As you can see, the sub page about benefits from following a Low Carb High Fat diet gets more than 5 times as much traffic as the blog start page!

I would venture that this isn’t uncommon for blogs in general. When it comes to a business website the picture may be entirely different. Do go take a look!

When hotels get it right

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:55:00 +0100

Internet access often is a pet peeve of mine. Wait strike that.

Lack of internet access, often is a pet peeve of mine.

When in a cafe, pub, restaurant, waiting room, hotel room, train carriage… Any place where I spend a lot of time, often idling waiting for someone or something, I want access to the internet. From my phone. My Kindle. My iPad. My laptop. From whatever device I have with me at the time.

Businesses not taking advantage of my addiction to being online are missing out on a marketing opportunity. While I don’t want to pay for internet access when out and about (although I might if I could pay for just the minutes I used without having to pull my credit card out, now there’s an idea for someone…) I am more than willing to part with my email and even other personal information.

When I last was in Sweden I stayed at Hotel Tylösand, just outside the town of Halmstad on the west coast.

Great hotel. Beautiful rooms, located more or less on the most beautiful sand beach in Sweden, a fantastic restaurant (Akvarell, without a doubt one of the best places to dine in the area), excellent conference facilities, very much part of the Halmstad night life in the summer (I hardly think owner Per Gessle would have it any other way), luxurious spa and gym facilities. Heck, they even have a decent website!

There is this one thing they really nailed though. Yes, internet access.

From the moment you set foot on the hotel grounds, all you need to do is start your device, connect to the free WiFi, hand over your email address, and you are online. Nothing much special about that, you can do the same thing at Starbucks. Except that when I’m saying “from when you set your foot on the hotel grounds” I am not exaggerating.

This particular hotel has made sure to cover the entire beach area, well beyond what can be considered being a service for their hotel guests, with WiFi! You can literally move around all over the hotel, from your room to the spa to the restaurant, and all over the beach while still getting your Twitter fix and posting your Instagram photos.

Awesome: since this is a public beach, they reach every beach visitor, all of them a potential paying customer at the hotel facilities.

Or consider this: earlier this summer they hosted a conference for a big Swedish IT company. How happy do you think their geeks were when they could mingle on the beach while online? And how much social media marketing of the IT company, and indirectly the hotel, happened as employees shared updates, photos and videos throughout the conference days?

Who wouldn’t share a sunset like this one to all their social networks, bragging about where they are?

Sure, there is an ulterior motive to this: marketing and data collection.

Everyone who wants to connect to the WiFi using their web browser are first brought to a “virtual reception” where the spa, restaurants (they have several), upcoming concerts and so on are presented.

Since you don’t have to be a guest at the hotel to enjoy these things it makes sense to make as many people as possible aware of them. Especially people lying on the beach, enjoying the sun! Why make plans for lunch or dinner in town when you can walk over to the hotel and spend your money there?

To then get access to the actual internet you have to give up your email address. At this point the hotel of course asks if they are allowed to send you marketing about what’s going on in and around the hotel. They don’t ask for much, just your email. While that generates a very unsegmented database, it provides for very quick growth in volume.

Hotels of the world, please follow the example set by Hotel Tylösand. See free WiFi for your guests not as a cost, but as a marketing opportunity. It would make my digital life so much easier.

Parabolas = boring, cardioids = love. Don’t know what a...

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:47:05 +0100

Parabolas = boring, cardioids = love. Don’t know what a cardioid is? Check this great #video.

Is your website bringing home the bacon?

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 18:06:00 +0100

Why do businesses have websites? Sounds like a dumb question, perhaps. The answer I’d like to propose is:

To attract people from the relevant target groups, and contribute directly or indirectly to sales.

I can sum that up really succinctly: make more money.

As obvious as that sounds, quite often when I look at a business’ digital presence (website, social media, mobile app etc) it seems like nobody ever bothered to thoroughly answer that simple question, “why”.

Without defining the reasons for being on the web, it is impossible to set goals. Without goals it is impossible to measure progress. Without measuring progress it is impossible to know whether or not your efforts online are contributing to your bottom-line.

Converting traffic to business

Before talking a bit more about goals, and measuring progress, let’s define how a website actually drives business.

What makes the web unique compared to old forms of marketing is first and foremost that it’s interactive. People don’t just read, they perform activities. Ideally when that activity is completed you gain something of value:

an item sale (cash in the bank, great!),
a reservation (soon to be cash in the bank, nice!),
an email address that you can market to (potential future cash in the bank!).

In geek speak, this is called “conversion”. The website “converts” visitors browsing the website to value, or to actual customers. Not all conversion needs to be related to a transaction though. Coming back to the goal of your web presence, a conversion can be defined as anything that drives your business.

It then becomes apparent that you must continually work with your digital assets to optimise for conversion! As a business owner, you want to make it as easy as possible for people that find you online to “convert” to a customer.

Define your business driving goals

Unless you know what the business driving goals of your web presence are, you can’t optimise the process of completing them. Always start with defining the goals. They can be simple things, like:

Make a reservation
Order a product
Subscribe to our newsletter
Test post code to see if we deliver in visitor’s area

But they can also be less direct, such as:

Get re-tweets on Twitter
Build “likes” on Facebook
Website traffic from Google AdWords
Increase traffic to the charity section on our site

You want your goals to be quantifiable, measurable, and in a direct or indirect way linked to the success of your business. Review your goals continually, and revise the numbers you are working towards so you and your team know what must be achieved.

Make your desired goals obvious

Here’s the part that so many get wrong. Make it as simple as possible for those you are trying to reach to complete the activities contributing to your goals.

A few simple examples:

If you want people to book your restaurant, don’t hide the booking tool on your “Contact Us” page. Place it on every page!
If you want to build “likes” on Facebook, make it obvious for people to find your Facebook Page and give them a good reason to “like” it!
If you are selling a product, make the price and the “order here” button as obvious as possible!
If you want to get more re-tweets of your blog posts, make the content useful, exciting or funny, and use relevant hash tags to get in front of people who care.

Introducing another geek term, the visual cues to start an activity that contributes to a business driving goal are called “Calls To Action” or CTA for short.

Your CTAs need to be obvious, clear, prompting the user to take action, and always front and center! As an example, look at the Freebookings website:

There is one primary goal with the Freebookings website: get the visitor to sign up to the service. The way we achieve as high numbers as possible are:

Benefits clearly listed on the start page, right at the top.
Buttons to sign up right below the benefits, saying in the button text that it’s free.
An off colour and highly visible button to sign up at the top of every page.
Focused and relevant text and video content, explaining the functions and benefits of the service, and customer quotes supporting our claims.
A box and button to sign up in the right hand column of every sub page.
Links in text, driving people to the sign up page, and additional buttons on pages where it is likely the visitor has received enough information to make a decision.

I think usability expert Steve Krug put it best when he said “Don’t make me think!”

Track, analyse, improve

Once you know your goals and have defined how your web presence supports them, you must find ways to measure progress. This is where working in digital is amazing: data, data, data. There are ways to track and measure almost everything we do online. When it comes to your website the tool of choice for most is Google Analytics, for the simple reason that it’s free…

For other digital assets, such as social media profiles or mobile apps, there is usually some other form of tracking software. Sometimes, a simple spreadsheet and a daily or weekly tally of your performance indicator is all you need.

With good tracking in place, it is easy to see things like:

which of your blog posts are getting the most attention in social media,
where in your order process do people stop and leave your site,
which sections in your website get the most traffic,
where do inbound visitors to your website come from,
what time of day do you get the most engagement on Facebook,
which subject lines on your email newsletters get the highest open rate,
and so on…

Thus, when it for example comes to your blog content, with this information at your fingertips you can decide to create more content of the type that gets the most visits, “likes” and re-tweets. That’s obviously the stuff your potential customers want, so keep giving it to them!

What the data won’t readily tell you though, is why a certain piece of content performs better. Or why people drop off from your ordering process at the step where you ask for their age and weight. Or why so many people arrive from TripAdvisor compared with Qype…

This is where you must analyse the numbers and make theories as to why people behave the way they do. If you can, go out and ask a few of your customers questions that help you understand what’s going on.

Use the information to continually tweak and improve your web presence, and the way you communicate. The analytics data will tell you if your changes actually lead to an improvement: did conversion go up, or did it remain on the same level?

Tweaking and improving your digital assets is an art form in itself, and there are several techniques like A/B testing and multivariate testing that have developed over the years to stop you from “flying blind” when trying to optimise your digital assets for conversion. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Got any questions, or a project you need help with? Get in touch!

“For every Android tablet in use today in the world,...

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:58:44 +0100

“For every Android tablet in use today in the world, there are 6.6 iPads.”

Note that the iPad has over 90% share of the tablet web usage in the UK and Scandinavia. The article also mentions that there seems to be a connection between how affluent a country is and the volume if iPads.

Conclusion: if your restaurant’s website still doesn’t work flawlessly on iPad, delivering a comfortable and exciting experience, sort it out.

Oh, and why this domination? Is the iPad simple “a better tablet”? I think there are many factors contributing to this remarkable position, not least being one of developer attraction (and thus loads of apps) through creation of real revenue streams.

Editing photos in Flickr using Aviary

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:29:19 +0100

Can’t believe I missed this! While tagging up a photo for Jessica’s Recipe Bag in their mouthwatering Flickr photo stream I noticed a link in the Actions menu I hadn’t seen before: “Edit photo in Aviary”… I clicked it, and got this beautiful HTML5 (hey, works on iPad!) based photo editor where most common image edits are easily done, and the photo then saved back to Flickr.

Beautiful implementation, simple controls, so fast… Love it! I was gutted when the old editor, Picnik, which was developed by Google disappeared.

Apparently Aviary has been integrated with Flickr since April, it has just slipped under my radar. Sure, Facebook may be the biggest photo sharing site in the world, and Instangram the sexiest, but Flickr remains my favourite. It is also one of the few online services I don’t hesitate to pay a subscription fee for.

Read the full low down on the Flickr and Aviary love affair at TechCrunch.

Website done!

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 09:37:00 +0100

Happens every time. Putting the actual site layouts and content structure together takes no time. Getting the actual content in place, so slow. I’m even guilty of this myself!

These days, the technology is usually very much the simple part. What makes a brand stand out is all about dedication, unique content, attention to detail. That can’t be faked or even outsourced.

I must say, I like my brand new logotype and the business cards I had printed over at MOO.com. Love their services. Note the thin red inlay between the front and back of the cards… Lush.

Thank you very much Mathias from Early Media for sorting me out with such glorious graphics!

London's world of food, from A to Z

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:56:19 +0100

London's world of food, from A to Z:

It’s rare to come across a great blog concept these days, but this is one that caught my eye. A journey through London’s world of food, from A to Z, in the form of reviews and video interviews with restaurateurs.

They recently did N for Nigeria, just around the corner from where I live.

Great combination of unique content, food adventure, business marketing and platform for the two guys behind it, Alastair Humphreys and Tom Kevill-Davies.

Think you want to be a chef? Here's a way to find out...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:36:00 +0100

Just finished reading “Down and Out in Padstow and London” by Alex Watts. If you don’t know who Alex Watts is I’m not surprised. Here’s a man who seems to have figured out what’s important in life. Being built up and torn down by the media and tabloids isn’t part of that.

In the book he tells his story of going from a two bit hack journalist and hating every minute of it to a life spent cooking for a living.

It’s a journey from sedated, safe cushiness through do or die, abuse filled (but willing!) slavery to reach his goal.

The tale is fraught with horrors, laughter, hard, grafting work and personal insights. Yes, there’s a lot of blood, sweat and even tears as well.

Having followed Alex’s blog, and his Twitter feed (@AlexWatts), for a long time I’m not sure why I didn’t get around to reading his book until now. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with even a remote interest in the London restaurant scene, or with ambitions to change to a life in professional catering.

Read this book. Think twice about it. If it doesn’t deter you, you are more than a little bit insane, and then perhaps you have what it takes to make it.

Even if you aren’t interested in restaurants, catering, tales of abusive head chefs and gruelling 18 hour days, there is an inspirational quality to this book that makes it a great read. There are books about climbing the Everest, trekking to the South Pole, running hundreds of miles through the Namibia desert… I’d put Alex’s achievement right up there with those. Perhaps with a more satisfying ending.

Verdict: Loved it, couldn’t put it down.

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone."

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:41:25 +0100

“A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.”

- Tyrion Lannister, see scene in this clip

Consider the unforgiving funnel

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:39:00 +0100

Consider the unforgiving funnel:

Seth Godin on conversion of audience to taking action. Signing up. Paying. Sharing with friends. Your job as a business owner and marketer is to get as many as possible to take action. Not many do.

Maybe it isn’t a funnel though. Since mass marketing no longer seems to work very well, is there a better simile, a mental model that serves better? With so many touch points, in so many channels, and so many ways to reach a customer, a funnel seems like a blunt tool. Maybe a maze with lots of dead ends is more correct… And your job is to open up the dead ends and align them with your business’ door.

Personally I like the Customer Decision Journey more than the ancient funnel. Check it out: Aligning with the Consumer Decision Journey

If you have five minutes to spare, here’s a great video presentation covering the concept.