Daily Digital - KMP's Blog

KMP is ClearDebt’s new Digital Marketing partner

2009-07-16T11:22:14Z

We’re really pleased to announce a nice win for KMP, as we have been chosen to develop and deliver ClearDebt’s new online strategy. We started speaking with ClearDebt’s Marketing Director, Andrew Smith, in early 2008 when he and a colleague attended one of our seminars on Web Content Strategy.

It must have been a useful seminar, as ClearDebt have kept in touch with us, and involved us in their rigorous selection process for a digital marketing partner. KMP’s all-round skills including online strategy development, website design and delivery, search marketing and social media expertise helped us to come out on top at the end of the process.

ClearDebt (link to the current, pre-KMP site) is a leading debt management resolution company that helps people with debts to cut the total they owe, freeze the interest they pay and remove any threat to their home. They also provide help and advice on how to avoid bankruptcy.

KMP Digitata’s Managing Director, Jon Keefe said that

“ClearDebt are a very prestigious and respected company, and KMP Digitata are delighted to be working with them to develop their digital marketing strategy”.

Andrew Smith, ClearDebt’s Marketing Director commented

“We are very pleased to be working with KMP. Their skills in Digital Marketing are central to us building our online presence now and in the future”

We’re looking forward to working closely with ClearDebt over the coming years, and to meeting many more interesting organisations at our seminars in the autumn - the schedule is being planned now!

Google Analyses Me. Result: Pass

2009-07-16T12:28:48Z

I’ve heard the statement “University just teaches you to pass exams” quite often since graduating in 2007 and entering into the real world. So imagine my nerves when I sat down in front of the computer to take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) exam and show that university wasn’t just an extended holiday.

“4 years of my life, £16,000 and a sheet of A4 paper saying degree on it. Does this mean I should be able to pass it?”

I am happy to say that a Google Analytics Certificate now has pride of place on my wall in the office. Although I find it slightly cheap that I had to print the certificate off myself. Where was the large hall, my name being read out, and me walking up to the stage to collect it out of the hand of Larry Page or Sergey Brin?

I’m the new boy at KMP Digitata and when I first arrived I had no experience of Google Analytics and so this was an opportunity for me to show some ability to learn and work quickly. I was also able show self restraint when I was given the company credit card to pay the $50 for the exam, Amazon did pop into my mind but was forced back by Completion Funnels and RegEx codes.

So now what? What does this qualification mean to me?

For me this qualification brightens up my office wall but more importantly shows my colleagues and clients that I have demonstrated proficiency in Google Analytics. I am now able to manage data to create reports displaying any information required about a website’s traffic and users.

The next step for us here at KMP Digitata, regarding analytics, is to look forward and towards the ‘Google Analytics Authorized Consultant‘ certificate. It’s a lot harder to obtain then the GAIQ award but we have taken the first step, and probably the easiest, by having two Google Analytic certified members at the company.

As for me personally I think I have space next to my Analytics Certificate for another one. Maybe Google AdWords is next……

@media review - Changing times

2009-07-08T09:53:09Z

Following on from Rich’s previous post ‘@media Review’, I am looking back at day one of the conference which was creatively rich in its line up of speakers.

This was my first @media conference, and I am sorry that I only joined it five years on, in the year that Patrick Griffiths decided to call it a day and hand over to Web Directions to take up the mantle.

Attendees were spoilt from the start with an excellent and somewhat different presentation from Andy Clarke, followed by five engaging talks from Simon Collison, John Hicks, Dan Rubin, Mark Boulton, and Jason Santa Maria.

Ok, I’ll now attempt to summarise day ones thought provoking, and inspiring deliveries.

Slide from Simon Collison – The process toolbox: Traditional techniques with a twist.

Andy Clarke

Titled ‘Walls come tumbling down’ after the 1980’s Style council song, Andy focused on changes in workflow methods for efficient creative output in these changing times for the industry and global economy.

Andy talked about designing in the browser and the benefits of liquid layouts. Design within the browser is a good thing as it means you are testing right from the start. Working with real content from the outset is also important to the process and designing systems not pages is key!

A rousing point made was that sites shouldn’t look the same in all browsers. Some may think this is obvious, others may find it an education for clients.

Andy’s post conference pub talk was equally engaging. We discussed Billy Bragg and the quality of Morrissey’s latest and possibly final release, along with some industry chat of course.

Simon Collison

Talking about ‘The process toolbox’ Simon presented a visually stimulating set of slides.

He talked about the unique quality of projects, bespoke jobs which require a personal approach. However, the case in point is, how can you work this way without losing time and money? That’s ‘The process toolbox’. It’s a selection of approaches which help create a clear roadmap through a job and also ensures that every designer or developer who touches it adds value. A couple of the most notable points I took from Simon were:

Have something visual in the workspace to be able to move around and work with

and

Leave out the parts that people skip

Talk with Simon extended to the pub where his passion for design was only interrupted by “rising UK actress” Rebecca Hall walking by.

Jon Hicks

Jon’s specialist subject, ‘Icons of interaction’ saw him talking about the importance of icons on the web. They’re not merely decoration, they’re for interaction too.

Jon also talked about using conventions to make things familiar. A glaring example of familiarity is the now renowned RSS icon. Why try and change it? We all understand it. Icons overcome language barriers and should be used to summarise text.

A couple of points to take away from Jon’s expertise in icon design are, avoid too much detail and noise, and very importantly choose the right metaphor.

Dan Rubin

Titled ‘Designing virtual realism’, Dan’s delivery was particularly poignant and somewhat of an eye opener in the understanding of using real elements over digital interpretation.

Design is all about ‘look and feel’ and web designers should work on the assumption that people know how to interact with something based on its appearance.

IF AN INTERFACE NEEDS INSTRUCTION – REDESIGN IT.

He also talked of context and creating illusion, ie: gradients and drop shadows as perfectly depicted in real life. A rich quote from Donald Norman (Author of The Design of Everyday Things) was a case in point to the delivery:

ATTRACTIVE THINGS WORK BETTER

In summary, the message is use real art/life as it makes the work feel like the real thing. Showing the real thing is always going to create more texture and feeling than a digital interpretation. A real call to arms for us designer to get our cameras and scanners out!

Mark Boulton

Mark presented on font embedding and typography. Mark discussed the movement towards font embedding in the browser, and the hurdles related to this, such as font foundries and licensing. He asked the question, Should we even make this move?

He looked at the elements of the user experience, being: Layout, Colour, Content, Hierarchy, Rhythm, Language, Type Setting, Grid, and Font.

Limitations have nurtured good typographic structure, and the overriding message of Mark’s presentation was

With type, you can’t not communicate!

Jason Santa Maria

Jason’s talk was titled ‘Thinking small’, to expand on this - small decisions can have a big impact. When creating the big picture it’s important to remember that it was made up of countless important tiny decisions. To lift a few points from Jason’s talk:

Sketch books are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker. Sketching helps you get acquainted with a job.

Also, be sure there’s enough contrast in font pairs. Smiles were raised in the auditorium when he revealed a slide which said:

I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they go by.

Last impressions

@media 2009 was a great conference and the deliveries and openness to chat after the event by the speakers only made it a better experience. Andy Clarke did say to me at the after-show party that the audience was particularly quiet. This was no reflection on the speakers. I left with thoughts on getting smart with processes, always add value - if it doesn’t leave it out; and getting some realism/texture in my design. People know how to interact with things. Let’s work with this.

A look at some recent online marketing campaigns

2009-07-06T08:40:57Z

As we are always looking for new ideas, here is a round-up of some recent Social Media Marketing campaigns which we feel are worthy of closer inspection.

Cadbury’s Creme Egg Twisted

In order to promote their new chocolate bar - “Twisted”. Cadbury have come up with the C.I.A. (Cadbury Intelligence Agency) in which you can enroll and then solve clues to track down escaped Twisted Bars on a map. They’ve got many of the social media bases covered with Twitter, Facebook and Bebo profiles.

Do you want to become a C.I.A. Agent?

So far nearly 10,000 users are registered on the site, and another 52,500 have become friends or fans on the social network pages. This is a reasonable number of participants but it’s possible that they could have done better. The different elements of the site feel disjointed and there is little opportunity or incentive to participate with other people. The social network pages have not fostered much in the way of discussion or media submissions so the amount of shareable content is mostly limited to that produced by the campaign agency.

Nothing To Hide - Air New Zealand

In order to let people know that they don’t add hidden charges onto their fares, Air New Zealand have created the “Nothing To Hide” campaign. They persuaded members of their staff to appear in promotional videos wearing body-painted uniforms. The videos a very tastefully done and the humor comes from the reactions of people in the airport and on board the plane.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In terms of interactivity, there is little direct participation between Air New Zealand and the viewers however by creating compelling content and using YouTube as a distribution platform (making the videos easy to share), they have achieved the goal of creating awareness. At the time of writing the four videos have racked up over 3.5 million views between them.

Prizes for Twitter Mentions

Creating brand awareness by giving stuff away is not a new idea, however recently Twitter has been the platform of choice for these campaigns. It’s worth noting that the most successful campaigns are the ones that appeal to typical Twitter users, giving away laptops and mobile phones is likely to be more popular than boxes of cereal or spa days.

SquareSpace

Squarespace (an online website building service) created a campaign in which they decided to give away an iPhone every day for 30 days to a randomly selected Twitter user who had posted an update including the tag “#squarespace”.

Things have not run completely smoothly for Squarespace however. Once it became apparent that Squarespace were giving away $200 Apple gift certificates, which could be use to purchase an iPhone (or any other Apple products), question began to be asked over whether the campaign was being deceptively marketed.

The results were still quite impressive, #squarespace was a regular entry in Twitter’s trending topics for several days and peaked at 0.8% share of all Twitter posts - not bad for a total of $6000 in prizes.

Squarespace's share of Twitter posts

MoonFruit

Following Squarespace’s lead, Moonfruit (another online site building service) created a campaign to celebrate their 10th anniversary by giving away 10 MacBook Pros to Twitter users posting the “#moonfruit” tag. The response has been spectacular even in the face of other events dominating Twitter’s traffic.

A simple call to action with a desirable prize

Just a couple of days into the promotion, the term Moonfruit exceeded 2% of all Twitter posts

Moonfruit's share of Twitter posts

Having learnt from the criticism given to Squarespace, Moonfruit have been very clear in their offering - a MacBook Pro, delivered to your door, wherever you are.

What are the important factors here?

Be creative - Cadbury and Air New Zealand score by coming up with original and entertaining content, prompting people to share it with their friends.

Be relevant - Squarespace and Moonfruit have used peoples desire to own fancy hardware to motivate them into spreading the brandname in a simple case of grabbing as much traffic as possible

In both cases, the measured output is a volume of online mentions, something which is more relevant than ever as real-time search is starting to become a major source of online attention.

@media Review

2009-07-02T10:34:23Z

Last week myself and Darren attended @media in London, a great conference with a stellar lineup of speakers who were more than willing to stick around and speak to you afterwards. I’m going to discuss a little about day two of @media 2009 and also summarise my thoughts about it. Although a slightly backwards way of doing things Darren will then follow up with his thoughts on the first day of the conference as it had more of a designer bias.

The hot topics panel from @media 2009. Left to Right - Jason Santa Maria, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Douglas Crockford and Chris Wilson

The sessions

Day two was aimed towards developers primarily, however there was some very useful info for everyone in attendance to make sure that no-one got too bored. With six sessions, and some suffering slightly from the @media party the night before there was a lot to get through, so let’s crack on.

Douglas Crockford

Doug’s talk was entitled ‘Quality’ and possibly not as the name suggests he spoke about coding quality and how to maintain code throughout a site or applications lifetime. He used the metaphor of Winchester House and software being the same with their constant evolution and hinted at how many sites are superceeded before they come out of beta. Overall an interesting look at an aspect of development that can often be overlooked.

Chris Wilson

Having recently moved from being the Head of Development on the IE team to being an ‘Open Web Platform Advocate’ at Microsoft. Chris’s talk focused on some of the many issues relating to web development and standards, not least the issue of font embedding on the web, I think we’ll cover some of those issues in another post soon. The beers Chris bought me helped to dull the pain that IE6 has caused for us front end developers over the years too!

Molly Holzschlag

As enthusiastic and energetic as ever Molly lead us through HTML5 using a cowboy analogy. She even brought out Bruce Lawson in a full cowboy outfit much to the attendee’s amusement. The basic gist of Molly’s talk was that you needn’t wait until 2022 (as predicted) to use HTML5 you can use it here and now and different browsers have implemented many aspects of HTML5 already.

Andy Budd

As we know usability is key for any website to be successful. For a user to achieve a set goal they need to be able to quickly and easily find the information they require or complete a set task. Andy compared shops and shopping centres with websites and how a user has to navigate around a site. He then moved on to how everyone is able to complete quick, easy, regular usability tests in order to receive feedback for designers and developers to work from. It’s definately something that we’ll be implementing in future.

Robin Christopherson

Robin works for AbilityNet, a charity to help disabled people to use the Internet and computers. He’s completely blind so uses a screenreader to navigate around his computer and the Internet. I’d seen Robin present a similar talk at the Future of Web Design earlier this year and was blown away by how he manages to get around some sites. I think Darren was similarly stunned when watching Robin give this presentation. To get an idea of the problems users having navigating sites with a screen reader, I suggest you watch some videos.

Hot Topics Panel

Moderated by Jeremy Keith, I’m told that the Hot Topics panel is an @media tradition, well the major talking point for this panel was when Doug Crockford suggested something along the lines of

“There’s so much wrong with the Internet we should stop and start again.”

He was deadly serious, now I’m not sure that I totally agree. The very organic nature of the industry means that we don’t know what is going to happen from one month to the next. We have to remember that this is a young industry in development that’s still in its infancy.

My takehomes

Overall it was a great conference and one I’d love to attend again. Not only the talks but the conversations we had with speakers, attendees and like minded people was excellent. The major points that I came away with were those of process and how implementing some of the things discussed by Andy Clarke, Simon Collison, Andy Budd and Doug Crockford for example can make us more efficient which with the economy as it stands can only be good for ourselves, our customers and our customers customers.

One final note

On another note, for those of you that hadn’t heard @media will next year continue but under the stewardship of John Alsopp and his team at Web Directions after Patrick decided to call it day.

Search Engines and Sandcastles

2009-06-19T11:30:05Z

With nearly 90% the population finding a website through the search engines, 21 billion web pages through which to search, and with an estimated 80% of Search Engine traffic coming through the Natural Listings, SEO has never been more important.

But if you are standing still, you are going backwards.

Long gone are the days when you could throw in a few meta tags, submit your site to search engines and watch as it moves up the rankings with the merest of tweaks here and there. As the Internet has evolved and so to has Search Engine Optimisation, into a fine, and in some well documented cases, dark, art.

There are many popular myths that surround SEO, “PageRank is all important”, many ‘flavour of the month’ practices, “I only need to focus on links” and many companies who, despite the impossibility of the statement, will “guarantee you number one position”. I tend to find these are the same companies who have “a special relationship with Google”. This always makes me laugh, how did they come about this “special relationship” could they be in possession of a series of incriminating photographs taken when Google was just an aspiring young search engine, trying to make it big? If the Chinese government struggles to influence the listings unnaturally, what chance Shady Dave Digital?

What a lot of companies need to realise is that there are no magic SEO beans that will take us to the top, the Search Engine giants make the rules and we, like it or not, have to follow these rules (with maybe a slight manipulation here and there to keep us ahead of the game).

However, SEO is a long term strategy, with positions gained through a balanced, ethical approach, which in turn creates an effective process that will deliver results. If you start off with the right tools heading in the right direction, you will create something that will not only last, but will continue to develop independently.

Ken McGaffin is often quoted along these lines when he states “create good content, link to great content and great content will link to you”. However, may I be the first the first to quote Jimi Hendrix when he remarked “and so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.”

*in my next update I will be explaining how Hendrix’s 1968 hit “Cross Town Traffic” is in fact a reference to Google Adwords Geo-Targeting.

A year in industry

2009-06-19T09:18:46Z

We’ve had two degree students Sam and Harvinder (Harvy) working with us for almost a year now and as their placements near their end we thought it would be worth taking a little time out to ask them about how they got on during the year, some of their likes, dislikes and most importantly how good they are at making tea!

How have you found your placement year at KMP?

Sam

Great, I’m sure that it might surprise some to hear me say it, with some of the muttering I do when I receive a new HTML Emails but honestly I wouldn’t change it. It has been an excellent learning experience with a steep learning curve and that’s what I wanted to get out of the placement.

Harvy

This have been a real eye opener for me. I can definitely say I have learnt more during this year than at any time at university. While university has given me the foundations in my field (coding and network systems), at work you put what you have learned to real practice. And it is not as if I have been working on just small scale projects (much like at university) I have been working on large scale systems like Manchester Airport, at first I was in awe of the scale and legacy of the system and I was scared of touching the code when it came to putting a change live, especially as the site is used by thousands of visitors a day.

So how has your work placement been different from university?

Sam

I feel that one of the main differences for me was the process involved with creative work. I initially wasn’t used to the process of having to get my work approved by another person, in university all of the work is my own or my groups and when coming into KMP and working for large clients I realised that there were strict guidelines which followed some briefs. This process was new to me and also had an impact on my time because i would produce numerous final versions where as at university I was used to sketching out ideas and only having to produce one final product.

Harvy

The main thing is that the workload is very different. In university everything is more laid back, with maybe a deadline once a week (obviously depending on the course). But here we turn things around in a fraction of the time, as this is what our clients require. I have found myself actually enjoying the pressure of conforming to deadlines. It’s like having an adrenaline rush but with the satisfaction you get from completing it on time. Also I have to interact with a variety of people, the first project I worked on involved me talking to a development team in Poland and a manager in Ireland.

What will you take from this placement back to university?

Sam

As I have mentioned I have had to improve my time management skills this year to keep up with the fast pace that the company works at. Another aspect I will take from it is my dedication to a project. I now have a realisation of how important the testing phase of a project is when you are catering for sites that such a large and varied user base.

Harvy

Definitely the time management and the pressure of working to a deadline. I will try and incorporate that into university life, along with the partying, of course. I am really surprised at how much work I have done in such a small amount of time (I guess I must have been lazy at university). I think this has provided me with motivation to do better in my course and work faster (thus giving me more time to party!).

How do you find dealing with different people in the company?

Sam

The benefit of working in a small studio is the chance to interact with all the different departments. Working within the creative team meant that I quickly got to understand their working methods and personalities and quickly found how they work differently to other departments. I have had to try understand the different roles the other departments have and try to produce work in accordance to their needs. I have learnt a lot about how people work in different ways and how a certain method of communication might not be the best for everyone.

Harvy

Having never worked in an agency before so it was interesting to see how everything fitted together. So, how you would have a sales team that would get the contracts and then CSM (client service managers) that provide the first point of contact for clients, followed by how the studio works together. The designers would mock up a page, then the development team would try to recreate the design with html and run the logic behind it. I was lucky in that I had a chance to deal with nearly all aspects of the company, so I has a chance to see how everything knitted together. I don’t think people have that kind of chance or experience.

How many tea rounds did you make?

Sam

I have dreams you know, dreams of making the greatest tea in the world. People would flock from the four corners of the earth to see me make tea but no one would be able to recreate it. Yeah that’s how good I am.

Harvy

What is this tea you speak of ROFL
One.

If you’re interested in doing a years placement at KMP then please get in touch via email or phone.

KMP Digitata delivers JetParks.co.uk in just 3 weeks

2009-06-15T08:37:55Z

The JetParks.co.uk website has been up and running for 2 weeks now and is already taking over 150 bookings a day, which is a great start for this newly-created provider of cheap Manchester Airport Parking. It offers passengers an alternative car parking option at a low cost, in a great location less than a mile away from the airport, and includes free transfers to the airport by the official Manchester Airport transfer team.

The website has a bright and fun look with a simple booking process, and also provides passengers with the all of the latest airport information and news. The whole project was delivered in just 3 weeks. Rhodri Edwards, Client Services Director at KMP, said “It was a real team effort to get the JetParks.co.uk site delivered on time and involved quite a few late nights and working through the weekend.”

Manchester Airport is delighted with the new website. Sara Joyce, Group Head of Web and Database, said: “KMP delivered a fantastic-looking website which is easy to use and was delivered on time, despite such a tight deadline. KMP was able to do this due its years of experience working with us developing our car park booking systems.”

There’s a lot of clever techie stuff going on under the bonnet to link to back office systems, give Manchester Airport control of parking numbers and quotas etc. but most users will never give a thought to that – they will only be concerned with how quick and easy the site is to use. KMP’s team of Information Architects and Web Designers have produced an intuitive and accessible website which is designed to make the process of booking a car park space as straight-forward as possible.

KMP is now working on delivering traffic to the new site with an SEO campaign, so you’ll be seeing more of JetParks and their character “Captain Parks” as the new site gains in visibility. You could even join the debate about whether Captain Parks himself is modelled on Client Services Director, Rhodri Edwards!

Two new faces in SEO/SEM at KMP

2009-06-12T16:11:49Z

KMP is delighted to announce two new additions to the team - Alex MacLennan and Daniel Ashcroft.

Alex MacLennan has been appointed as a Digital Planner at KMP Digitata, who will be supported in this new role by Daniel Ashcroft. MacLennan was previously managing PPC campaigns at Artavia Manchester, who have provided professional services to KMP in the past. The role will involve heading up the PPC and SEO functions, as well as supporting the account teams in facilitating blogging and social media campaigns.

Daniel Ashcroft - a Digital Marketing graduate from Hull University, joins after 18 months of world travel. KMP are also awaiting the return of Rob Sandbach, a Manchester graduate who has already worked for KMP for 6 months prior to travelling. He is currently visiting New York and is expected back from his round the world trip at the end of June.

KMP’s Chairman, Bill Daring believes that these new additions will greatly improve KMP’s offerings. “Alex is a fantastic addition to the team and I am looking forward to working alongside him at KMP. We have now strengthened our search marketing department and added capability to our social media marketing team .”

New MessageSender delivers even better mailing

2009-06-10T15:34:40Z

Back in the early days of email marketing KMP developed Ackura MessageSender; designed to help people with a non-technical background, such as marketing and operational personnel, to manage successful email marketing campaigns. You don’t need to know HTML to use MessageSender - creating, editing and sending your emails is very user-friendly and yet you can design very professional and eye-catching emails. MessageSender also has all the reporting tools you need to be able to monitor the success of your campaigns.

Over the years we’ve continued to develop MessageSender, creating PromoSender for organisations with a wholesale or branch structure. Using PromoSender Marketeers centrally can send standard emails to local offices or to their retailers. These can be customised and sent to local databases, and the central marketing team could see the results across the board.

The latest version of MessageSender has just been released, and has stronger CRM and permission marketing functionality, though, as ever, the emphasis remains on keeping MessageSender easy-to-use. For example, reporting can be done in more ways, and a simple click at the top of any column sorts the data by that field.

In terms of permission marketing and managing customer details, several improvements have been made:

Email recipients can link to a form to subscribe to your news, specifying which of your services they would like to be kept updated about.
Recipients can also adjust their name, address and preferences
A double opt-in – sending an email to a subscriber asking them to click on a link to subscribe. When this option is selected, recipients won’t receive emails until they have confirmed their address.
Automated welcome emails that, if chosen, can be a simple text email or full HTML based on users existing email templates.

As well as building a simple tool to make email campaigns as pain-free as possible, KMP also offers a good back-up service and help over the phone. This is a major reason for the continuing success of MessageSender, and why organisations such as Manchester Airport, Punch Taverns and Chester Zoo use MessageSender for their email campaigns.

To see a demonstration of the latest version of MessageSender, either over the phone or in your offices, give Julie Abbott a call on 0161 429 1498 to arrange a suitable time.