Gruden blog - Gruden life, the web, our latest projects

Breast Cancer Month: Support the cause

2009-10-08T22:15:47Z

Show your support for breast cancer survivors, and the ongoing research to stamp out the disease. Twibbon.com have launched a virtual pink ribbon which can be added to your Twitter profile picture to show your support during the month of October. Click here to get a ribbon displayed on your Twitter profile. You can check mine out on my Twitter page.

Leverage external benchmarking

2009-09-27T23:17:50Z

Most websites utilise web analytics to track usage and visitor behaviour. Some companies even take this one step further by studying competitor sites using a tool such as Hitwise. This is known as competitor intelligence (CI) or external benchmarking. But Hitwise isn’t free, and what if your company doesn’t have an analytics budget? This post will look at a few free tools that may help you gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your direct and indirect competitors.

Compete is a free tool that allows you to look at traffic trends of competitor sites. One advantage of compete is the level of detail that is available. You can compare up to five sites and filter by various metrics including visits and unique visitors. Competes data is accurate and reliable. Its source is 2 million US based users who have agreed to have their online activity monitored. However there are a few constraints. First of all it’s not possible to filter data based on a specific country, so when looking at the results remember that you are only getting a US perspective. Secondly, it’s rather limited in regards to timeframes with only 3, 6 and 12 months available with the free solution.

Finally, data is only available for large sites, ‘why can’t I see my website‘ for more details. The report below compares visits to three sites for the past 6 months; jbhifi.com.au, jbhifionline.com.au and harveynorman.com.au

In addition to traffic trend data, Compete also displays top search terms, top referral sites and top destination sites.

Google Trends for Websites launched in June 2008 has a couple of advantages over Compete. First of all it has a greater level of customisation, allowing you to filter by country specific traffic. For example, you can filter by Australian trafific from the last 30 days or go back and look at trends for a particular calendar year.

Again the data source is reliable and is a combination of Google search data, Google Analytics data, third-party market research and consumer panel data.
The screenshot below is a competitor report of the same three sites filtered by Australian data.

When filtering by country, Google Trends also gives you specific state data, allowing you to analyze the influence of your competitors at a more granular level.

For more information on Google Trends check out this comprehensive post by Avinash Kaushik.

Before we conclude, let me point out that some experts argue that external benchmarking is a waste of time. However, these arguments are largely based on comparing specific metrics such as conversion rates. Avoid comparing specific e-commerce metrics and you’ll find plenty of value in these tools.

In addition to Compete and Google Trends, there are a range of other free tools available that will give you insights into your (and your competitors) online audience. Also checkout Microsoft AdCentre Labs, Fireclick and Alexa.

Have you used these tools before? Let us know your feedback.

Apocalypse Now

2009-09-22T23:45:28Z

So most of you probably woke up today wondering why you missed the memo that Armageddon had arrived. Sydney’s dust storm is the talk of the town for the morning, so I thought I’d pop up a few photos taken by our staff around town in the early hours. Photographers AND coders, who knew?!

To App, or not to App? iPhone applications and your business

2009-09-18T03:53:09Z

The success of Apple’s iPhone app store has led to a stampede of brands creating games, services, and other applications as marketing tools. It’s an entirely new platform for most, and it is quickly becoming a powerful way to influence consumers. More and more, our clients are asking our advice on the value of iPhone apps. How do you decide if having one is a good idea for your organisation?

I came across a great article on BNET highlighting the five key strategies for making a smart application. The full article is distilled from a Forrester Research report on the topic, and is a useful starting point for any marketer looking to engage a digital agency such as Gruden to build an application for their business.

In brief, their key recommendations are to:

1. Make it Useful
2. Make it Interactive
3. Make it Entertaining
4. Make it a Mixture (Combining Utility and Intractivity)
5. Make it Free

However, before even embarking on the iPhone application discussion, it’s important to set out your key marketing goals to see if an iPhone application would assist with the realisation of these goals. It’s not very useful long-term to take up the “I’ll have what she’s having” approach if it’s not engaging your consumers.

The key question to ask yourself is what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to build brand affinity? Engage customers? Drive people to a physical location? A web site perhaps? There are many options, and many different ways to address these goals using various digital channels.

Additionally, look at the break down of your market segment and see what percentage of your audience are utilising iPhones. You may be surprised to find that many of them use other brands of smart phones, such as the Blackberry. In this instance, you’d be looking to build a completely different type of application. A majority of your audience may not even be using smart phones at all.

The Forrester Report, ‘Matching iPhone Capabilities to Customer Goals’, comments:

Simply building these richer experiences doesn’t ensure success. Companies looking to harness the power of these devices must design experiences that match appropriate device capabilities with user goals. To design successful mobile data experiences, companies must understand how people want to use mobile data channels, fit those data channels into multi-channel scenarios, and focus on their strongest capability — timeliness.

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone applications have been used by hundreds of companies in recent months to achieve outstanding marketing and branding results, and there’s nothing that turns a Gruden developer on more than getting the chance to show off the rich user experience they can create for mobile users.

Kraft’s iFood assistant, for example, combines both utility and interactivity. The application suggests recipes, lets users upload their own and share them, and assists users in creating shopping lists. Other apps by brands such as Target allow users to find bargains and locate their nearest shop.

At the end of the day, focus on strategy.

With the array of new, innovative technologies and marketing channels which have opened up within the last few years, it’s easy to get carried away in an attempt to stay ahead of the game. It’s important to set your key marketing objectives first and then match the appropriate medium by which you engage with your consumers, rather than the other way around.

Gruden launches SkillsDMC on Sitecore CMS Platform

2009-09-16T23:35:09Z

SkillsDMC is a not-for-profit organisation that facilitates education and training across the Resource and Infrastructure sectors. The SkillsDMC website provides tools, research and competency-based training resources to assist skills-short mining and infrastructure enterprises. The underlying foundation of this resource is a scalable, flexible and easily updatable content management system, Sitecore CMS.

Sitecore CMS allowed Gruden to build SkillsDMC a website which provided them with an intuitive user interface, and allowed our development team to provide them with highly customised functionality, streamlining many of their online and offline business processes.

The website included the integration of a forums module for the reporting, management and display of Training Package related feedback.

We custom built a Training Package administration area to support the management of large quantities of data, allowing SkillsDMC to easily build customised Training Packages online through the input and assignment of units of data (over 2,000 to date).

Gruden also implemented predictive search functionality to allow for users to quickly locate specific Training Package Information using unique reference codes.

Gruden is consistently abreast of the latest Sitecore technologies, attending regular webinars, conferences and partner briefings relating to the expansion, scalability and innovation of the Sitecore CMS and associated products. We have a number of trained Sitecore developers who are highly active within the Sitecore Developer community. Additionally, we have a strong working relationship with Sitecore Australia, ensuring that we maximise our partnership and provide the best possible solution to our clients.

Stemming from this is Gruden’s assurance that we have the capabilities to assist our clients in future-proofing their online solutions, constantly reassessing our client’s measurable objectives and online presence through strategy workshops and dedicated account management.

To take a look at the new site, head to www.skillsdmc.com.au.

Web Directions South 09

2009-09-16T23:13:07Z

October is going to be a huge month for the web in Australia with both the Web Directions South conference and the inaugural Web Week.

Web Directions brings together the many disciplines that shape the web – web design, front-end and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more – and gives delegates four tracks of presentations to choose from. It is truly a huge event, quite likely the largest web related gathering in the southern hemisphere.

Web Week is a week long celebration of the Australian web industry with events ranging from Webjam, to art exhibitions, to meet ups, to indoor rock climbing.

A very nervous Mark, speaking at the first Web Directions in 2004

I’m enormously proud to have been invited to speak at Web Directions South 09. My first large-scale public speaking gig was at this event in 2004, back when it was held in one big room with one big audience. Since then the conference has gone from strength to strength, increasing in size each year and so I’m equally daunted about speaking this time.

My talk this year is called “Speed matters”; here is the description from the conference proceedings:

As we build richer, more complex web applications it’s easy to forget that speed is the cornerstone of user experience. Bing have found that a 2 second delay reduces revenue by 4%. Google know that half a second delay drops traffic by 20%. AOL have shown that users with a speedy experience stay 50% longer than users who have to wait. The evidence is clear – speed matters.

What’s more, most latency comes from the front-end, not the backend so the fixes are not specific to a particular platform. This session will examine a range of techniques from DOM & CSS tricks to web server and HTTP tweaks that can help improve front-end performance by 25-50%.

Whether you’re looking to save bandwidth, increase your conversion rate, retain visitors, save time or just make your users happy – the speed of your site matters.

The conference is on October 8 & 9 with two days for workshops on the 6th & 7th. Tickets are still available so get along if you can.

Socialnomics 2009: The Social Media Revolution

2009-09-01T21:47:58Z

It still amazes me today how fast this shift has changed the way we communicate. This is a fascinating look into the changes within the digital sphere in the last 12 months alone, and a fantastic summary of the magnitude of the social media revolution. If you have 5 minutes, I highly recommend taking the time to watch the video below.

Gruden Launches Consulting WorX in FarCry CMS

2009-08-11T02:26:04Z

Today, Gruden launches Consulting WorX, an innovative online marketplace specifically designed to match businesses with consultants for various projects.

Consulting Worx is a new way of doing business that gives you and businesses a better work life balance as well as a great online network and community. Businesses simply post a new job and can choose either a self-service option, or have Consulting WorX connect them with the most suitable consultants to get the job done. Consultants can be selected for a job based on their experience, or can apply for a job directly via the noticeboard. Once introduced, all ongoing contact is then directly between the Consultant and the Business.

Gruden designed, developed and implemented the Consulting WorX application from the ground up, utilising the FarCry open-source CMS platform, with outstanding results. As well as scoping, designing and documenting the complex business model, Gruden implemented a clean, modern design, reflective of the Consulting WorX brand, with a focus on usability and consultant/business retention.

Consulting WorX provides a unique service to both businesses and consultants who seek to utilise the skills of home-based business professionals who value flexibility and experience. Take a look at www.consultingworx.com.au.

Jon Dee Launches Paper-Less Alliance

2009-07-16T06:46:22Z

Today marks the launch of the Paper-Less Alliance, a Do Something! initiative instigated by Planet Ark founders Jon Dee, Pat Cash & Tina Jackson.

“We’re calling on businesses to make a bigger effort in switching their customers and suppliers to electronic billing,” said Jon Dee, the Founder of Do Something. “Emailing bills and invoices instead of posting them is just one way businesses can save money as well as the environment.”Going electronic is common sense.

Getting customers to fill in electronic forms is far more efficient and cost effective than getting them to fill in paper-based forms. Storing your documents electronically is also much more effective and cheaper than storing them on paper in warehouses. Searching for bills electronically is also far quicker than searching for them in a lever arch file.

The aims of the Paper-Less Alliance are to:

educate Australian businesses about the efficiency and cost-saving benefits of reducing their paper use
significantly reduce the postage bills of Australia’s businesses
provide solutions, tools and advice that enable businesses to help the environment and their bottom line
recruit thousands of Australian businesses of all types to go ‘Paper-Less’
reduce the use of office paper by 20% within 5 years
maximise the amount of office paper being recycled

Gruden is proud to be one of the founding partners of the Paper-Less Alliance and the Do Something! campaign initiatives. Check out more about this campaign via the Paper-Less Alliance website, designed and developed by Gruden utilising Sitecore CMS, which celebrated its official launch today.

While many organisations have started using recycled paper and, in turn, recycling the paper they use, reducing consumption is the most effective way to go green and minimise demand on limited resources. Adobe provides a number of solutions that deliver cost, efficiency and environmental benefits through software such as Adobe Acrobat and Adobe LiveCycle ES. To understand how Gruden can help your company work smarter and be environmentally friendly at the same time, get in contact with us today.

Together, we can all go “Paper-Less!”

“Would someone please give this idea some shebangabangs!”

2009-07-08T22:59:18Z

Moving from Sales into my new role as a fully-fledged Grudenite Account Manager, I’ve been looking to some of my mentors and various industry mouthpieces for some inspiration on effective mechanisms for online/offline campaign integration, online campaign development and how to mould some structure around the concept of the ‘big idea’.

Life at the Bottom, a creative industry blog for young upstarts within the advertising, public relations and digital sectors provided just the insight I was looking for.

There is a common perception in the creative industries that a big idea is a complicated one. A loud and zealous client might complain, “This idea needs bells! It needs whistles! Throw in some cornices! And shebangabangs! Would someone please give this idea some shebangabangs!” To hell with shebangabangs! We need simple ideas. The ones that seem so simple it’s a ‘risk’.

The fact is, nothing rings truer. Last week, the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign picked up an unprecedented 3 Gold Lions at Cannes. The concept? A classified advertisement. As Mark Pollard simply puts it:
Content = Conversation = Content. Don’t use Social Media, let it use you.

Unfortunately, social media and the utlisation of online channels is in the too hard basket for many companies. In reality, if the ‘big idea’ is simple, digestable, relevant and entertaining, social media will do your leg work for you.