Archive for the ‘Consultancy’ Category

How to deal with the EU cookie law

April 30th, 2012

On 26 May 2012, the EU e-Privacy Directive will come into force in the UK. It’s known as the ‘cookie law’ because it requires all websites to get the informed consent of users before setting a cookie (a small text file that remembers details such as logins and email addresses) on their computer.

Businesses that don’t comply could face a fine of up to £500,000 as well as negative publicity. Here’s how to make sure you stay on the right side of the law:

1. Do a cookie audit. You need to be aware of exactly what cookies your website is using and what they are used for.

2. Get rid of the trash. This audit will probably reveal a lot of cookies that aren’t really used for anything anymore. These should be removed from the site immediately.

3. Classify your cookies. You need to break down the cookies your site uses into the following categories:

i. Essential. For example, a cookie used to mark a visitor as a logged-in user

ii. Non-essential but benign. For example, remembering a user’s email address on a login form. This isn’t essential for website functionality but makes it easier to use.

iii. Moderately intrusive. These cookies are used to track user behaviour but in a minimally intrusive way. For example, the default cookies used by Google Analytics are available only to the owners of the site the user is browsing and don’t reveal personally identifiable information.

iv. Highly intrusive. For example, the Facebook ‘Like’ button or cookies that track products you’ve looked at on a retail website and send you adverts for those items when you visit other sites. Highly-intrusive cookies leak user information to third parties or track personally identifiable information about your users.

4. Don’t worry about the essentials. You don’t need to get user permission for cookies that are essential for the operation of your website, such as remembering logged-in users.

5. Create a compliance plan. For all the other classes of cookie you need a plan to answer two questions:

i. How can we prevent our website from using this cookie? This is something for your IT/web team to determine.

ii. How are we going to ask the user’s permission to use this cookie? For example, you could have a pop-up box, ‘cookie status’ bar or warning bar on the website. Each option has pros and cons you need to analyse.

6. Decide how risk-averse you feel. Breaking the law can carry a fine of up to £500,000, but anything other than minimal compliance could put businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Unfortunately, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is currently giving out mixed messages – suggesting it may not prosecute businesses using less-intrusive cookies.

7. If you’re conservative, cover everything. A risk-averse business should implement a plan to require user consent for all non-essential cookies before the 26th May.

8. If you’re feeling brave, do nothing. Businesses with a larger appetite for risk or those for whom highly-intrusive cookies are important for revenue can adopt a ‘wait and see’ strategy. As it becomes clearer how the law will be enforced and what breaches the ICO prosecute first, they can implement an appropriate compliance plan.

9. If you’re in the middle, just go for the worst offenders. The middle way, and one that will be appropriate for most online businesses, is to require consent for (or simply don’t use) highly-intrusive cookies.

10. Stay up to date. This law is big news for any business with a website – and particularly those with e-commerce platforms – and no one is quite sure how it will be applied. Keep your compliance plans handy and be ready to implement or change them depending on how the law develops.

Want to know more? Please contact Richard Fergie

Social Search And Personalization: A Turning Point For Brands

April 13th, 2012

With Google’s privacy changes implemented on March 1st and pending changes such as the EU cookie law, there are a lot of people trying to explain how privacy and personalization works for users, and for many, the noise only complicates things further.  To cut a long story short though, it’s a golden opportunity for your brand and you can’t afford to miss out.

Here’s the lowdown.  Even if you’re not signed in to Google Plus, or Gmail, YouTube, etc. (which are all under the same umbrella anyway), and even if you’ve turned off your “web history” settings, your Google search results are still somewhat influenced by your past activity, your tastes, and even the general public. This may sound like a stormy time for some sites, as SEO transitions into part of an overall online marketing strategy (which it should have been all along, right?) that focuses on getting an effective brand and social influence and letting users determine how well a site fares.  But for established and upcoming brand names alike, this may be the perfect storm and the perfect time to take charge.

Branding has become easier on Google, with results for brand names inclusive of search results natural and paid (which is proven to be most effective when both are active), followed by social profiles such as Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In,  along with video profiles, your location info, reviews and news about your brand, and even sites related to your brand.  Gone are the days where businesses felt like they had no control on how their brand was represented on natural search and maybe just stuck with paid search (I can think of many big name brands that once fit this category).  But times have changed.

Not too long ago, Google worked on making results more favourable to the country/market you are in.  But this has been magnified since, looking at your locality in more detail.  Results in New York are way different from those in Los Angeles these days and completely different from those in Europe.  Many consumers now are always logged in to one of the Google-owned sites, and often never bother to log out and the results start to cater to their interests.  Now whether this is good or bad for consumers is a different debate all together, but in this current set up, each one of us is now developing Google’s algorithm!

Google itself has focused on helping brands understand search, and they should, as it helps their own brand too.  Whether beta trials on verticals (image, video, rich snippets, local, etc) or helping to develop pilot programs on Google, it was the big brands who they contacted and wanted to get involved.  And search started being more human, whether quality control teams on Google’s end, or even how Google plus totals are becoming an influence on some rankings. More and more we are all becoming a part of a global development team, whether we know it or not.

And the reality is that getting a new brand established solely using a natural search strategy is harder to do in this day and age.  There is more competition for one, fewer unknown niches left to capitalize on, algorithms that favour sites with a good presence overall (and thus more resource to keep tabs on a multi-level strategy), while consumers communicate, share and look for each other’s favourites. The last part is key, many look for each other’s favourites, not exploring new ones, and this is a big debate too.  Does the current set up of social search and personalization allow for brand favouritism and less negative sentiment to show? Unfortunately to some, yes.  You’ll need more firepower, more resource, more people on board to get a message across. But if you are a major brand name…… you have no excuses.

Need more info on how it all works?  Well, drop us a line and let our team of consultants at Reform help guide your brand into a stronger search and online strategy.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Multichannel, Omnichannel And The Rise Of Customer Power

March 30th, 2012

This month I attended the British Retail Consortium Multichannel Conference and the Retail Week Conference. They may have taken me out of the office for three solid days, but they gave me the opportunity to hear the thoughts of both high street stalwarts and online retail innovators.

On both occasions I had the pleasure of hearing Ishan Patel from Aurora Fashions talk about the brand’s ‘omnichannel’ approach – essentially spinning multichannel that bit further by championing a blended approach that affords the customer a seamless brand experience at every touch point.

As someone who only last summer struggled to describe a product seen online to a Whistles shop assistant, who was then unable to access the website in store to help me find it, this is heartening news; Patel explained, quite rightly, that the introduction of Wi-Fi in store is as just as much for the benefit of staff as for customers.

Bringing kiosks into store was another topic of debate, as they give many retailers the opportunity to offer a far greater inventory than their store footprint will allow in stockholding. The kiosk’s lighter weight cousin, the iPad, is also increasingly being adopted to give shop staff far greater flexibility of service.

However, putting the customer at the core of your strategy was the common theme across both events, with many warning of the risks of focussing too hard on technology or channels. But with this current rate of change, it’s hard not to get carried away with the technology and available data and forget customer behaviour and motivation.

For example, recent statistics published on shopping cart abandonment have shown an increasing trend, but when is an abandoned cart actually an abandoned cart – rather than items simply being saved for later?

Having received three retargeting emails from retailers in as many days, I was surprised by their uniform lack of sophistication. Most shoppers won’t have failed to check out by mistake. We’re increasingly transferring what used to be browsing behaviour in shops to browsing online, and with the added benefit of being able to ‘file’ the things we have our eye on while we make up our mind.

That means our thought processes will vary depending on the products. I’ll read book reviews and immediately add them to my Amazon basket via the app; or I’ll see clothes in a magazine and go online to put them in the basket, but I might even try them on in the shop before I buy, either in store or online.

The point is that emails just telling consumers that they have abandoned their basket are of no use at all. What smart retailers will do is to think about my customer behaviour and send an email telling me that ‘there are only three of these left in stock, so checkout now to avoid disappointment’, or ‘we see you liked this item enough to put in your basket, can we suggest these similar products?’

It is this type of approach, with data being used intelligently to derive insight and thus add value, which will drive deeper engagement and, ultimately, better sales.

Blog post by Lucy Mann, Business Development Director at Reform

Why businesses need a digital audit

August 16th, 2011

Economic recovery or double-dip recession? Business targets achieved or way off the mark? Regardless, now is an optimal time to assess your digital marketing capabilities, to shave off any inefficiencies (both in terms of Pounds and practices) and to bolster your revenues and profit margins. Yes, you heard me right: digital can be inefficient. Comparative to traditional marketing it might come cheaper, but there are swathes of improvements to be found and made. These are improvements that lurk in the data and in day-to-day operations.

The best way to make these improvements is to have a digital expert audit your SEO, PPC and social media efforts. An audit provides the best opportunity for you to discover meaningful ways to extract full value from your digital endeavours. This is because an audit not only tells you where your digital practices stand in relation to current industry best practices, but also gives you an actionable strategy to close whatever gaps exist between where you are and where you ought to be.

It’s easy for the people behind brands to become overwhelmed by and abandon the very technology meant to enhance their digital efforts; technology can be a false friend that way. It’s also easy for the people driving a brand’s digital presence to get complacent once their efforts have achieved a certain level of success. With today’s economy demanding more output from less resource, unless a strategy is failing outright, people don’t have the time to see if that strategy could be improved. It’s easier still to leap into new digital channels before creating a sustainable strategy because of the sense of urgency created by the impression that every other brand is already on Facebook or Twitter. You feel like you need to run to catch up, but what you wind up doing is running just to stay in place. And along with all that wasted effort is wasted money.

The easiest thing of all, however, is to seek expert assistance in assessing and addressing the gaps between where your brand currently stands and where it would stand if you optimised your approach to digital.

Reform’s SEO audit takes into account overarching brand objectives and makes suggestions for website changes in that specific context. It also provides a thorough examination of every aspect of your website and guidance on how to comply with SEO best practices, adherence to which will culminate in the brand’s increased presence in natural search results.

Our PPC audit uses the same holistic approach. Rather than examining individual AdWords campaigns, a brand’s PPC strategy and performance are looked at in their entirety and refined to better meet the brand’s online objectives. This can range from increased share of voice on Google to increased website traffic and increased revenue from ecommerce.

Our social media audit simultaneously demystifies the world of personas as well as the best methods to engage with customers. It lays the foundation for the brand’s influence to grow and to improve its ability to listen to, interpret and participate in important conversations. Consultants performing a social media audit are careful to identify different target markets and create optimal strategies for each. They also take the time to build your brand’s personas; they don’t just look at what the competition is doing. This is not an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses; it is an exercise in developing a mature, sustainable strategy to drive your brand’s objectives.

Each audit will separately improve a brand’s digital performance. Taken together, the audits provide a powerful mechanism by which to enlarge a brand’s entire digital footprint.

These audits – separately or together – also save money by increasing efficiency and making digital efforts more effective. Ultimately, the consultants who perform audits deliver strategies that allow brands to squeeze more out of less by creating greater efficiency and greater efficacy – a fitting solution in today’s economy.

Blog post by Samantha Horwitz, Product Development and Projects Director at Reform

Google updates: Panda/Farmer

April 21st, 2011

Over recent weeks the internet has been alive with commentary on Google’s recent changes to its search algorithms, labelled by some as “farmer” and others as “panda”. The changes that were initiated in the USA are now permeating Google sites worldwide with changes now evident on google.co.uk. Some of these changes are perceived to be having a devastating effect on websites who are seeing traffic levels fall by up to 90%.

The SEO implications

For a bit of background, “farmer” and “panda” are the same thing, explained in detail here – http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071 and http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/ (Summary: “content farms” were the initial target, hence the name “farmer” while “panda” was Google’s code name for the very same update).  However, in the UK, it is often referred to as the latter.

The principal impact of the changes appears to be a downgrading of many of the most used article repositories, such as Ezine articles and Suite101, which has in turn had a knock-on effect on businesses that interact with these sites as part of their SEO strategy. For years, the SEO mantra has been ‘content is king’, which lead many sites to add as much templated content as possible to their site (and towards their site), often overlooking the quality of the source. This artificial inflation of a site’s amount of content now leaves them vulnerable to plummeting rankings and the associated ramifications.

Our take on the Panda update (Reform UK)

With the advent of the Panda update, we’ve seen a considerable shift in the type of sites being affected. Even those sites with significant brand authority have seen a large drop in visibility, resulting in a drop in traffic. For information sites this is problematic, but for e-commerce sites, this can be catastrophic.

The primary targeting has been towards uniform content on sites, such as articles that have been syndicated on sites which have no other content. However, it’s not just the sites that syndicate, it’s also their primary sources of content, the articles sites which have taken significant hits. Even for those sites that do not syndicate content, sites that rely solely on strategies like this for link building and that use templates for elements like product pages seem to be suffering as well.

Well known sites like Play.com have lost around 10% of their visibility and the associated level of traffic. This is possibly a very low level indicator that the real world weight of brands could be having less of an impact on their search rankings. There have also been a large number of well-regarded tech sites seeing significantly decreased rankings, such as Techworld & Techradar.

Our take on the Farmer / Panda update (Reform USA)

Names aside, all of these updates (Farmer, Panda, Caffeine, even Google Florida) are similar in many ways but from an SEO perspective it is important to understand that the changes will impact on a number of strategies.

Many websites rely on “tried and true” strategies and continue with them because they have brought positive results in the past.  In particular site owners have a had a penchant for allowing users to add content at will, which in turn helps make the site larger / more content rich and therefore more favourable to Google.

Other sites will automate content and templates to bulk up the site and catch keywords.  Another possibility is that they will see that a certain link strategy (whether ethical or not is not the question here for once) brings them good returns and stick with it.

However the recent changes to at Google suggest that while content may still be king, they are taking a much more qualitative view on the value of content and so webmasters and their SEO advises need to wise up to the changes.

How to counter the losses – 5 key points:

  1. Think long term strategy, not short term fixes
  2. Don’t keep using out-dated strategies
  3. Do your research thoroughly
  4. Constantly innovate in your optimization
  5. Audit your content

Reform has worked with a number of clients around the world developing long term and flexible strategies that maximise the benefit of existing content and infrastructure while providing an ability to move with the times.

Reform can also help you to move forwards with a balanced and ethical SEO approach that is in tune with your strategic goals in other marketing channels including profile building and social media.

Data, data everywhere! But how do businesses extract the insight and innovation to drive growth?

January 28th, 2011

Digital data is the new due diligence (DD) of business planning. A recent Accenture report “Will Marketing Get The Message?” concluded that leading growth companies, recognizing that digital technologies and social media, have taken marketing to a new level of rigour. 60% of the growth companies surveyed by Accenture said that they extract and translate customer and market data into strategic insight.

So how do businesses unlock this growth opportunity? Reform gathers, monitors, interprets and reinvests digital data sets every day for clients, and these are some of the trends that we see, both in terms of effective data-led strategies, but also the pitfalls to realising growth.

Search data – both external and on-site – can help inform businesses on what the universal demand is for products and services, which businesses are stealing market share, which price points are most attractive to customers, among other insights.

Analytics data tells businesses why people aren’t buying their products, which products are more/less appealing, what customers’ average order value is, etc.

Social data tells customer service teams pinpoints customer complaints – and indeed gives them a real-time response channel, where untapped communities, tribes or potential customers can be found, what the media is saying about the business and how this is impacting on share price.

So why isn’t every business tapping into the digital goldmine? Collecting the data is the easy part. However here are some of the pitfalls that we see across client organisations:

  • Data gets silo’d within marketing and left to the devices of the online, direct marketing or CRM teams.
  • Businesses are gathering so much unfiltered data that they find themselves drowning in it. They can’t extract the useful information from the pointless.
  • There is a huge data analytics skills gap. And data interrogation skills – few planners challenge the data in a real-world context. Too many inexperienced online marketers take the data at face value. Data in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.
  • Data doesn’t get filtered, formatted and interpreted into meaningful management information. It languishes in the world of clicks and ‘likes’ and bounces. This means nothing to C-suites – and why should it?

 

If the first decade of the new Millennium was about gathering and digitising the world’s information, the second will be about filtering and translating it into knowledge, insight and innovation that will bring brands closer to their customers and businesses closer to realising significant revenue growth.

There is gold in them there hills. So let’s grab our spades and get digging.

Blog post by Amanda Davie, managing director of Reform.

How do clients value a professional service and how does a professional services business grow?

September 10th, 2010

Many professionals will argue that their work is undervalued by their clients. For example, a recent article in “In Practice” highlighted the problems that accountants face in differentiating themselves, that project managers face commanding premium rates, that marketing managers endure identifying their added value and that poor old lawyers face as they bounce from caseload feast to famine. The article goes on to blame the lack of ‘visibility’ of the services for the predicament in which the providers find themselves and claims that the issue for accountants is exacerbated because so much of their work is ‘compliance’ driven.

Compared to the sales person that wins the big order, or the production engineer that saves thousands through a design change, it is easy to see how professionals can struggle to make their contribution seem more tangible, but the compliance argument is more difficult to swallow. Although there may be external commercial codes that drive some ‘compliance’ issues, basic professional services are no more or less than basic sales or manufacturing processes. A sales person needs to identify potential clients, communicate with these clients, and hopefully secure business. An accountant needs to identify financial data, organise the data, and hopefully report it in a cogent format.

You can’t really ‘value’ the sales process or the accounting process as such, but you can differentiate between a successful process and a less successful one. In the same way you can’t value the heart or the brain as more important, but you can identify a more efficient heart. So the question professionals should ask themselves is not “how do I value my services?” but “what makes my services more valuable?” or put another way “how can my services add value?”. For the generic professional service provider this question is largely redundant, you simply “do the bookkeeping”. For the more ambitious professional the question becomes much more relevant but it immediately raises the further question of relevant to who?

A sports team would on balance like a player with a more efficient heart, a nuclear facility on balance would like a scientist with a more efficient brain. An FMCG client may value getting management reports within 24 hours of the month end because it helps to optimise working capital requirements while a hotel may require a neat macro that cross correlates marketing spend with occupancy levels. Global service providers can overcome these challenges by employing thousands of practitioners, in many disciplines, that ‘exercise’ accumulated intellectual property for a vast array of clients.

For a smaller professional services business like Reform this ‘all things to all people’ option is not viable. For these businesses specialisation is the key. If hearts is your speciality then find the strongest hearts and don’t try to provide them to nuclear facilities, focus on the sports teams. Sadly this is easier said than done because (1) a nuclear facility will call you with a very lucrative contract , (2) the market for hearts to sports teams is too small to justify, or most likely (3) sports teams don’t know how to differentiate the value of different hearts.

So while the basic processes that professionals provide may be less tangible they are at least understood, and understood to be required. Low value added businesses can be scaled by providing more mundane services reliably and efficiently over the long term – think utilities. But for more aggressive businesses the key is not in the knowledge base or the process of utilising that knowledge base, scalability comes from perceptive ‘exception management’, in large enough specialist markets where clients can be made aware that the services are indeed ‘most valuable’.