Digital Business

Focus on the outcome

Several years ago when working for one of the world’s largest software companies, I was having a conversation with a colleague whose background was software development but who was now in marketing. He was extolling the virtues of the latest version of the company’s software development tools.

It was interesting to a point, and I pointed out that I was probably not the best person to try and excite about the details because I was far more interested in what the tools did rather than how they did it. He was shocked at my attitude. I remember the look on his face. His expression looked as though I had just blasphemed. How could I work in that company and not be interested in the nuts and bolts of the ‘how’ of the software rather than the ‘what’ of the results of using the software?

The advertisements of the time for that product had a theme of moon landings and a line which went something like “Just imagine what could have been done in 1969 when getting those now famous Americans onto the moon if they had this product“.

The problem with that campaign was that most people who would be using the software were not trying to get astronauts to the moon. Most software developers wanted to do far more basic things in their daily work lives and do them slightly faster than previously possible. The launch of that version of the product was a flop and it took them another two to three years with the launch of a new version and more down to earth ambitions for the product to take off (if you’ll excuse the pun).

This story is commonplace in businesses which have technical products. Often, the technical people become wrapped up in splendid details and features but become detached from why their customers would benefit from them. That’s basic sales and marketing knowledge but it is surprising just how much it continues to happen.

Last night I ran a presentation at the Hull Digital networking event about 2-D codes which is a technology that enables people to scan a code on, say, a poster using their mobile phone which then might take them to a mobile web site, or which will dial a number for them, or send a text message.

This is all very well, but I focused on the opportunity that the technology represents rather than the technology itself in my presentation. 2-D codes happen to be good at connecting offline marketing (e.g. an ad in a magazine) to online resources (e.g. a mobile web site). But the opportunity which is more interesting is, for example, that of enabling two different companies with different specialisations in marketing to work together in partnership to offer clients new solutions.

This is approach is far easier for people to comprehend than an approach which talks about features. I know you need people who are good at understanding the features of a product or service. I couldn’t do my job without a team of expert web developers who know how it works. But clients don’t care too much about the ins and outs of a product. They just want to know if you can help, what the outcome will look like and when you can do it by.

It’s simple to understand, but often people forget to do it and end up losing opportunities to help their clients and to gain new ones.

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The platform is coming back

Whatever people say about Microsoft, it has made computing accessible to millions of people around the world. It has never been the most innovative company in the computing world but it has always made it that bit easier for more than just highly technical people to do things with computers. There will probably be a plethora of people commenting about the innovation they may or may not have suppressed in computing, but the fact is that over the last fifteen or so years having a computer in your house has not only become normal, it has become essential. 

So, Microsoft technology is not the most exciting technology but it is probably the most important technology that is out there in the world. Their technology has enabled masses of people to get onto the internet, write documents, send and manage emails, and manage your documents for a relatively good price. And more importantly, Microsoft has got people into habits from which other software developers have taken advantage by developing slicker, more flexible and more imaginative alternatives. 

But the biggest thing that Microsoft has done is build a ‘platform’ upon which most of us rely for our PC’s, laptops and servers. Without a common platform, software and computing would be a whole lot more expensive than the prices we are used to today. I can see the swarm of comments building for this post already from ‘open source evangelists’ already. There are plenty of excellent open source applications out there which are highly innovative.

The next big thing ‘boring but important’ change to a platform received further coverage on the BBC with the headline ‘Adobe Flash secures set-top deal‘. Many households with more than one TV in the house but ‘the box’ lives in a different room to the home computer. This has long been talked about. Microsoft and Apple have been building products to enable ‘digital homes’ so we can stream music around our homes from one computer or watch TV through our ‘media centre’. But they have never really been anything other than gadgets. Our internet service providers have been setting us up with bundles of TV, satellite, internet and mobile for some years now too, foreseeing the convergence of all our communications from one provider.

But that’s where the convergence stopped. As the communications cables came into our house from one provider, they split company inside the house and went their own ways to the devices which specialised in being connected to them. The good old TV, albeit an HD-flat-screen-surround-sound-digital panel thing, still has an entertainment spot of its own in the house. The PC or Mac is used for surfing the web to watch videos, collaborate or just browse away the hours looking at stuff you had no idea you were interested in until that very moment. But try surfing the web through your TV and it has been a pretty clunky affair until now. TV’s were not designed to cope with the rich animations and web sites with which we have become familiar. Watching TV through your laptop becomes a very solitary affair which is the opposite to how we have used TV’s for decades. 

But this announcement from Adobe moves us into the next phase of our PC’s, TV’s, DVD’s and mobile phones. Installing Adobe technology into the next generation of TV’s will start to enable web browsing and using rich internet applications in the manner to which we are used to on our laptops and desktops. People will be able to surf the web through their TV’s in a familiar way and, for example, they will be able to download or stream BBC TV programs from the iPlayer and watch them on their TV’s. 

Soon after, we will see the move of the Adobe platform onto mobile phones to enable richer applications to be used on them than is now possible. There is Adobe technology out there which allows this to a certain extent but it is not good enough yet to be able to maximise the potential of the mobile phone to publishers, broadcasters and software developers. When this happens on mobile phones, we will see an explosion in the media which is streamed through them as well as the applications which are used on them.

So, as this activity happens in the background, quietly getting on with building the platform the results of which we will soon become familiar, just remember the name of the company Adobe and have a look at this site and get a feel for how the next platform is being built and what it will mean to you. It’s not the most exciting read you will have, nor may it seem to be terribly important. But, it will be part of your life in the very near future.

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Exclusively everywhere

The publishing world is going mad. Digital technology is disrupting everything that they used to hold dear. Newspaper publishers are seeing their printed paper circulations dropping,  along with the advertising revenues that went with them. At the same time, having given away their online versions for free and keeping them subsidised by the online advertising, the online revenues are not keeping pace with the decline of the offline versions. This is not news and it is well documented in the well written article about the demise of the newspaper as we know it by Clay Shirky. 

There is a lot of talk in the publishing world about what the industry does not want to be. It does not want to be like the music industry which is trying to keep up with its customers who want to download music. The publishing industry does not want to lose control of its content. It does not want to see authors going direct to consumers and negating the need for their editorial, production and marketing skills. Nor does it want to be in the situation of the newspaper publishers. 

The publishing industry is in a position where devices are starting to become good enough for people to buy eBooks in significant numbers now and publishers are becoming increasingly anxious to adapt to the changing scene amongst their consumers. Their concerns over which format to use and which device will be the ‘killer device’ are growing. Unlike the music industry, publishers have never needed to think about which device to publish their books for. The device was the paper and print. If you publish regluar novels which just has text and no illustrations there is one format for you. If you publish cookbooks, for example, then you need a format which can handle the more complex text and images.

Amazon looks like it will introduce its Kindle 2 device into the UK soon for which publishers will have to provide their eBooks in various formats for Amazon to add in its own digital rights management. Waterstones favours the Sony Reader device and they require eBooks delivered in a format which only really suits novels which contain plain text. There are numerous eBook reading devices on the market and several different formats into which a book can be turned into an eBook. 

Publishers are now having to adapt their skills in print to digital skills to ensure that they are prepared for when their sales of digital books move from being a noticeable item on their top line to a significant part of their bottom line. And, instead of thinking about what they don’t want to be, they should start to think about what they want to be. And there is a model which they should consider.

Computer games developers and publishers have always needed a device to be purchased on which their games can be played. In the early days, it was a computer. Then specialised devices came along and the manufacturers of the devices started to battle it out for domination and Sony was the early winner with the Playstation. Microsoft brought out the Xbox and Nintendo discovered a new market with the Wii. 

But the games publishers and developers learnt fairly early on that the platform did not affect their development and publishing of games. The games developers (the equivalent of authors) created ever more immersive and graphically stunning games to make the most of the power of the games consoles which could be played on either an Xbox or a Playstation. They just developed ‘compiler’ programmes and ‘architectures’ through which their games adapted to the platform for which they had been purchased. Games publishers want to be able to distribute their games onto as many platforms as they can.

The good thing about books unlike a newspaper is that they are likely to be read again. Not read as many times, perhaps, as often as a track is played on a MP3 player, but an eBook has a longer life than a newspaper article, nevertheless. A game is likely to be played several times before it swapped or exchanged. Of course, most games come on a disc. But, increasingly, games are being played online and soon they will be downloaded to consoles when broadband speeds increase. So, in that sense, publishers will be ahead of games developers. 

A game can be rented from Blockbuster for a few nights, or purchased from the store or online. eBooks will need to be adaptable enough to allow different forms of ownership and payment such as borrowing from a library, renting from an online store, as well a perpetual licence when bought outright. 

Book publishers should think like this too. They just need to carry on finding good authors, and marketing the books well and let the device manufacturers fight it out amongst themselves on which device will be the most popular. In the meantime, they need to grow their digital capability to be able to deliver eBooks in several different formats and study how companies like EA Games work to get some ideas.

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You may know someone like this. They appear to be exceptionally confident. They dominate conversations and walk into a room or a meeting and take command of it. You might feel a little intimidated by them. They say things at you and you wonder why you had not thought of that idea yourself and it is so much better than any idea you could possibly have ever conjured up. This person might tell you to do something and so you go and do what they tell you without thinking about it too much.

That’s the way it has been since you were at school. People say things to you and you listen and act upon what you are told. That confident person might have been your teacher, your boss, or a colleague who was always louder than you. But, as you grew older and more experienced, you started to think for yourself. The people who were the loudest often were the ones who took your idea and labeled it as their own. You started to see that actually the loud people, or the exceptionally confident ones were quite often very good at saying things but not so good at thinking about things. They did not have the monopoly on ideas that you thought they had and they needed you more than they would have cared to accept. 

In the armed forces, there are lots of people who are loud and confident. You are trained to lead and to project an air of confidence. But this was quite often a veneer of confidence and you spent a lot of time telling people what to do if you were a platoon commander. But, if you stepped back from the noise, you started to notice something. More often than not, the people who were very influential were the quiet ones who observed and listened before saying anything. All their words were used carefully and minimally. Their confidence was not projected through a one way barrage of information and orders. Their confidence was projected through their quietness and their ability to inspire others and to use the strengths of the team that surrounded them. 

In the business world, advertising agencies have been great at saying things to their client’s customers for years. They have been very effective at sending messages to people and telling them to do things. Buy this washing powder, eat this food, rub this cream in or buy this car to become this sort of person. Some of the world’s most talented people went into advertising and they still do. They are brilliant at saying things. 

Over the last few years, we, as individuals, have realised that we have a voice too. We can write our views up on a blog, comment on other people blogs or views, and we can do things which were once the private domain of the corporations which controlled what we saw, read or consumed. 

This has meant that advertisers are changing their ways. We are not prepared to listen to the message of one advertiser on their product or service. We will check what everyone else thinks about their product or service before we buy it. The loud, confident broadcasts are becoming less and less impressive. Now, the quiet noise of the people tells us whether the advertiser is right about the product they are pushing or not. 

An example of this is a recent story of two developers I know who have built a simple to use tool called ‘ImageSizer.’ These two bright and self-effacing individuals have spent their spare time building ‘ImageSizer’ to help people quickly re-size batches of digital photos and made it available for people to download for free. Quite quickly, it started to appear on lists on the web recommending top tools to download. Downloads went from one hundred in a month to almost a thousand in a week. It kept appearing on lists and the number of downloads increased. Soon, a computer magazine picked it up and asked if it could include ‘ImageSizer‘ in the free CD on the front of its publication which went out to 20,000 subscribers. 

Although the product is free, it is a good lesson in the fact that today people find out about products and services by hearing about them less through the loud noise of traditional advertising and increasingly through a network of people on the web recommending things. Further to the ‘ImageSizer’ story, the developers receive suggestions and requests for improvement to the tool from their users regularly which helps them to keep ImageSizer relevant and useful to what people want from it. 

So, now think back to those people who exude confidence, start to question their substance and find out whether what they are saying is correct from the network. We are in a far more democratic society than we were ten years ago and it is a far better world for it.

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Use Advanced Search to find candidates

It must be very hard to be a recruitment consultant or headhunter these days unless you are adding a lot of value to your clients. It’s so much easier to find a selection of candidates for a role, and then filter through them to a build a shortlist before inviting them for an interview. For a few hundred pounds per month, as an employer, you can access a site like ‘Monster‘ and search through a vast database of candidates.

You can also use services like ‘LinkedIn‘ to find prospective candidates to where business people will list their career history, skills and experience.

In certain sectors of the economy there is bound to be a larger supply of candidates then there are positions open. Many of my oldest friends are in this industry and make a good living from it. But with the vast majority of recruitment consultants are not very good at illustrating how they add value to their clients.

Every day our office receives calls from recruitment consultants trying to help us fill the roles we have open and which are advertised on our web site. I admire their enterprise for calling and trying to place their candidates with us. But their calls meet with our policy on not using headhunters to recruit new people.

Our experience with headhunters has been disappointing. When we have accepted the terms of a headhunter who then sends us candidates for our project manager or developer roles, their candidates were no better than the individuals we found through the online services like ‘Monster’ or through networking.  The difference is that you pay a large percentage of the successful candidate’s first year salary to a headhunter and you can save yourself some time trawling through the online services.

But the fact is that many headhunters send us the same candidates that we have found ourselves through the online services. Furthermore, we can find potential candidates through LinkedIn for free, bar the time spent contacting them.

So, the difference between paying 25% to 30% of the first year’s salary of a successful candidates salary through a headhunter and what you pay to trawl through ‘Monster’ yourself is so wide that you would expect a recruitment consultant to add something more valuable than if you did the leg work yourself. You would expect them to have vetted them to check their suitability, skills and experience for the role. This is simply not the case in our experience.

Digital technology and social media tools are shedding light on the mediocre and poor headhunters who add no value to the challenging task of hiring good people into a business. In the current economic climate, recruitment companies are going to have to work hard to show their value to clients. They used to take the leg work out of finding candidates by going down to the Jobcentre for you or placing ads in newspapers for juicy sounding jobs to attract prospective candidates.

You can do most of this yourself by simply learning to use the advanced search functions in the online job sites now. Top recruitment companies now have to do more for the large fees if they want to survive rather than using hope and ‘mud-throwing’ as a strategies to get a candidate to ‘stick.’ You would, at least, expect them to have a rigorous selection process themselves. The good ones will do this. Most of them don’t.

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Image by forcevive via Flickr

 

‘Mobile mania’ is abundant. Everyone is excited about it in the publishing world. Books on mobile phones, learning on mobiles (aka ‘m-learning’), broadband on mobiles. You name it, everyone wants everything on their mobile and wants their mobile to do everything, according to the mobile handset manufacturers and network providers.

Of course, network operators want to grow their revenues from data charges because their revenue from voice is being eaten away by competition and regulations. Cynical? Me?

Some interesting meetings recently with publishers have also revealed much the same excitement from them about mobile learning and books on mobiles. I have previously written about eBooks on mobiles and my views on that are clear. Learning through a mobile phone is another topic of interest to debate.

The number of people who own a mobile in Africa and Asia is generally greater than the number who own a laptop or PC. That’s not a surprise and mobile networks are enabling commerce in developing countries in ways which have not been possible before their arrival. For example, a fisherman off the west coast of Africa can call several ports to check where there is a lack of fish so that he can get the best price for his catch.

In India, where I spent six weeks with 3 Mobile in October 2008, 3G networks will soon arrive enabling greater potential for commerce and information transfer to more people. In the ‘West’, eBooks is the fastest growing category on the iTunes App Store. Publishers are getting excited, understandably. 

I believe that these numbers hide some truths, however. In the training business where I have spent the last 12 years of my career selling and marketing elearning, books, classroom training and distance learning, one of the most tricky items to sell and to show value for the benefit is elearning. Publishers sew seeds by giving away some elearning courses for free to gain interest, usage and to help install any plug-ins needed to run the elearning on PC’s and laptops. The publishers then get excited about how many people have downloaded the free elearning and cite it as evidence that people want to the stuff.

Of course, the question they rarely answer is how many people who downloaded the free course actually completed it? There was never an answer.  So, the implication is that people get the free course, look at it for a bit and then lose enthusiasm for completing the course. People are buying eBooks for their iPhones, for sure. They seem to be willing to pay more than for games and they are very keen to pay less than US$1 for them. But, what type of books are they buying in which subjects? 

Also, there is the challenge of infrastructure to support mobile learning. As web developers, we test sites we build for customers on several different operating systems and browsers. In the mobile world, there are something in the region of half a million combinations of operating systems and mobile web browsers. There are specialist content management systems (CMS) which are designed to handle this challenge, but you then have to start running two CMS’s to reach your mobile and PC customers.

Furthermore, what are the data charges that customers in Africa who want learning materials are willing to pay? Also, many customers in Africa and Asia are likely to be on pre-pay plans which means their connection with the network is likely to be intermittent. 

I think publishers need to slow down before they start committing to mobile learning and concentrate their resources carefully on providing more robust learning options for their customers such as rich Internet applications first. Mobile learning will become more achievable as a business proposition, but I believe it is just a nice way to deliver small bites of learning, news and information to encourage customers to take advantage of resources which are near to them. 

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You have to admit, it’s an exciting time right now. When the numbers that the business reporters talk about that have been lost in our banks (and I mean our banks) have so many zeros on the end of them that you don’t know whether you are in Zimbabwe, in Sir Fred Goodwin‘s pension committee, or AIG‘s “How can we make this seem less than the world’s biggest ever corporate loss Committee“, then you know you are in trouble.

Funnily enough, I read an article yesterday saying that Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway fund had fallen by 9.6% in the last year. That does not seem too bad at all in these times!

But what it highlights is one thing which we all need all of them time when in sales and marketing, and that is information. I learnt from an early age in business that if you don’t ‘know your numbers‘ about your sales pipeline, your forecast, your actual sales, or the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, then you are not doing your job correctly.

With information comes insight. With insight comes the ability to make judgements and plans. Without information, you are guessing at best, and speculating at worst.

Any digital marketer worth their salt will know about Google Analytics. It is a free tool which allows you to gather information about your who is using your web site, where they have come from and gone to after visiting your site.

With the increasing movement for creating desktop applications which connect with databases on the web, there comes new opportunities for understanding your customers and the effectiveness of your marketing. eBay Desktop and the BBC iPlayer are examples of these types of ‘Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s)’ which are making web based tools available on your desktop

Today, I saw that developers can now build these RIA’s and incorporate Google Analytics tracking code into them so that  marketers can track not only what customers are doing on their web sites but also in their desktop applications. They build them using tools like Adobe AIR and Flex.

Marketers are able to be accountable for their campaigns to depths not possible five years ago. A marketer will be able to see what type of PC you are using, where you are using it, what you are reading, what interests and what encourages you to buy in detail from wherever you access their site.

You might think that you have stepped off the bus into ’1984′ with this type of talk.  Or you can think of this as a good thing because it will save you time in future because you will find what you are looking for more quickly.

Whatever your thoughts, if you are marketer, you can be more confident that you know exactly how well your products are faring in detail, unlike our investment bankers who seemed to have lost track of business basics in the last few years.

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Knowing what a client wants to achieve is a basic need for an agency developing digital solutions. Yet, this is very often difficult to achieve in the fast moving world of digital design and development.

It is tough enough sometimes translating a designers web site design into something which a web developer can make work behind the scenes in a web solution.

A client may not be able to give their objectives for several reasons. For instance, they may not want to reveal their budget for what they are asking you to do so that you don’t bill up to their budget for something that might be achieved more cheaply.

Or the client may have a whole string of ideas which they would like to have included in their project which, in fact, is a ‘wish list’ rather than a brief and they are looking for some guidance on how to make it work.

It could be that the client does not know what they want to achieve but they are being forced into a position where they feel they need to catch up because their competition is ahead of it.

In the end, our job as an agency is to understand a clients’ objectives for their project. Of course, we can build their ‘wish list’ but it generally makes for a bad project which takes a long time to build, it may not do what they hoped for, it may cost them a lot of money and time, as well as causing business relationships to break down.

Finding a client’s objectives makes our job so much easier. For example, an agency will need to know how much revenue they would like to generate. Or how many people they want to reach, money they wish to save and so on.

And it takes trust from the client that we will keep their objectives confidential. It is all about trust. Trust takes time to build (as well as a few contracts!). But, objectives are the basis for delivering a good project for a client.

Get beyond wish lists and get to objectives.

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If you have not heard of Adobe AIR before then it may not be a surprise. However, if you are a marketer and you have not heard of Google Analytics then I would be flabbergasted.

Tracking your visitors and web traffic through the use of Google Analytics is an essential activity for most web marketers these days. This data is one stream of many pieces of information being fed to you all day and everyday as part of your job. It’s a tsunami of information which needs to be tamed and used effectively.

This is where Adobe’s AIR comes in nicely. You don’t really need to know much about AIR if you are not a developer. You just install it for free on your PC or MAC and forget about it.

Then you can download a free tool from the Adobe web site called ‘Google Analytics Reporting Suite’ which sits on your desktop and provides a very nice way to analyse your Google Analytics information in a much more user-friendly way than from the web site.

In the jargon, this is called a ‘Rich Internet Application’ which is software which allows you much more control over how the information that is important to you gets displayed. It’s good and you will see a lot more of these sort of tools which take information from the web and present it to you in a much better way than previously possible.

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Keeping it simple in sales is very important.  To paraphrase Ivan Misner on ‘Entrepreneur.com’ ’Learn how to communicate what you do in a way that’s relatable to your customers and their contacts.’ It’s good advice but surprisingly difficult to achieve.

I have just started a new role with an excellent company of software developers who are very skilled and whose business has been expanding very nicely in the last year and a half despite the difficulties in the economy.

I have come aboard to find us new clients in order to profitably continue the growth.  I have been tasked with developing our strategy for finding and delivering new business. This is a great challenge and it is fun.

The first thing I have asked them before I start talking to prospects is a simple question “What do we best and better than anyone else?” It is always interesting to hear what people think and say when they are asked this question. It is a question which is quite difficult to answer and I am working on it with them.

We need to ensure that we can tell our customers exactly what we do because if we don’t know how can our customers and prospects expect to understand?

I am working on this now before moving onto reworking how we express our services on our web site.

Here is our web site. www.mmtdigital.co.uk If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the message on about what we do, I am very interested to read your suggestions.

Thanks

Will

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