Mobile Marketing : Online solution for a retail customer to enable them to easily communicate with their customers via an opt-in text messages for products and services. Features included message personalisation, campaign maintenance and delivery statistics. We’re really pleased with this work.

Web Consultancy : Helped a major Irish Travel Industry organisation in developing theit online marketing strategy including more than a hat tip to a stragetic use for all things social media and web 2.0.

Project Management and System Specification : Project Management for a major overhaul of an online booking engine and website, along with the specification of widget based affiliate system.

Viral Marketing Tools : We are just finishing up a project with a financial institution that involves widget development (both javascript and flash) and embed capability on websites, blogs and social network sites such as facebook.

Joomla Development : We have also recently completed a major Joomla implementation, which included the development of new modules and components for easier client maintenance, data extraction and customer support.

Wordpress Development : In tandem with all of these, we have been kicking along with some of our core web development skills in developing Wordpress based sites, and designing bespoke plugin features where necessary.

We’re looking forward to a bit of a break over the next few weeks…

Thing is, we’re trying to gather some old, SIM free mobile phones together to do some serious testing. Those we have asked, have pretty much already donated their old models to the the very worthy Jack and Jill Childrens Foundation.

However, iff you have a mobile lying around - we will pay for postage and packing, and will in turn donate to the foundation in about 3 weeks time - on project go live. Drop an email to kevin[at]electricmill.com

Why not buy a few SIM free phones? I may have to, but would prefer not to; these will be used for a week or so, and no more.

So cue Side Project #2. If you live in Ireland, chances are you are either interested/intrigued/repulsed by house prices. This national obsession with home ownership is well recognised.

For reasons to profound to delve into here - planning regulations for residential or commmercial development - are also keenly followed by the media as well as by the public.

While individual county and city councils provide access on their websites to this information - and the information is also provided in regional and local newspapers - it is inevitably hard to get at.

Electric Mill Side Project #2 is Planning Buddy - a website that easily allows a user to create alerts based on particular named locations of interest to them.

For example, I live in Strandhill, Co Sligo. My account on planningbuddy.com is filtered to trigger emails based on matches of “strandhill” in Sligo. I can also receive these alerts as an RSS feed if I so wish.

In my “spare” time - I also maintain a community website for the area . For that site, I have configured a widget from within my Planning Buddy account - and placed this small piece of HTML code on the community site; Suddenly, anyone who visits there, has an instant view of the latest planning applications in the area. The widget is fully configurable for things like colours and so on, so that it fits nicely with what’s there already.

At the moment, Planning Buddy correlates just over half of the councils in the country including Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Kerry, Leitrim, Limerick, Louth, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary North and Waterford.
In order to get an understanding of what counties to include next, we’re asking for visitors to the site to suggest what counties might be completed next ; we will then look to facilitate this by building bespoke scraping rountines.

In the background to all of this, we’re currently working on expanding the reporting side - for example comparing applications per county per month, downloading the data, etc.

We’ve already had some queries from people that want to advertise on the site and that’s nice - we’ll be looking at this type of scenario and others over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we would be delighted if you could send any comments or suggestions as to how we might improve what’s currently there.

I’m talking here about someone that writes a less than complimentary blog post on a product or service; I am not talking about conversations and threads on an online forum, etc.

Most businesses will have little experience about how to engage properly with negative commentary from bloggers, who by definition will be pretty savvy communicators.

The jump from email, phone and forum dialogue through to discussion on the bloggers site - an away fixture if you will - is a lonely place to be slugging it out in defence of a product or service.

The thing that’s missing for me though in these encounters is the success rate or closure rate for the blogger vs. how it could have been achieved through “traditional” avenues?

Does the public dialogue and exposure help solve the problem?

Does the service provider often just dig their heels in and say “feck you” to the negative criticism of the blogger - thinking that it will go away.

The latter is the worst case scenario for the blogger - probably more than made up for by increased traffic and just a little more profile.

The worst case scenario for the service provider is in how their brand name will probably now be submerged in negativity in their first page of SERP’s.

From that perspective alone, they should be swallowing their pride, desisting from cease and desist and such foolishness, and attempt to make the customer happy - regardless of the feelings of indignation, anger and loathing that they feel.

His talk centred around his motivation and proposed proposed model for giving away his next book for free.

This was a pretty painless 30 minutes for a quick whip around of the notions of free that we are all familiar with, but have not maybe considered for our own businesses.

Yet everyone is familiar with the low cost printer where you pay premium for the replacement ink; or the cheap flight where you pay for onboard entertainment and refreshment; or most annoying of all, the cheap “razor system” with the expensive blades.

Most of the models that Anderson discusses not surprisingly, were based around publishing and books, with the ideas and statistics being particularly interesting. For example, making selected chapters available in PDF format, giving away audio versions, etc;

An example was given from Make Magazine where downloadable instructions were getting something like 5.7% click-thru rates on embedded advertisements. Impressive.

So what is the motivation for giving stuff away for free? Of course it has to be based on selling the customer something else. Free is the way to maximise the audience - you give it away in the expectation that you will be able to sell other products or services. Anderson’s own expectation is very simple - with free books, he believes he will sell more speaking events.

The link to the show notes and podcast are here - i really like his take on what makes books indispensable -

“excellent battery life, fanstasic sceen resolution, portable, looks good on your shelf and easy to flip through”

Think Microsoft Word or PDF files and you are pretty much along the right tracks. The reason for this of course is very simple. All the types of bodies that I have mentioned use a website that serves up pages through a Content Management System (CMS).

The main purpose of the CMS is to serve up this content; bread and butter functionality within these systems do not generally include specific capability or integration of data from other applications - at least in my experience. Likewise, the possibility of the provider providing bespoke services development around data integration is unlikely - it is just not their core business.

From a technical point of view, this would be the main reason why we don’t see easily accessible, drillable data; It would be unfair to suggest to think these are the only ones of course - you know what I mean….

In the UK, campaigns such as Free Our Data sprung up in reaction to these limitations and lack of availability. Closer to home, Conor at web2ireland outlined his thoughts - ambitious ones - for an API for Government which garnered a lot of comments.

That’s the background, what about an example?

At the beginning of 2006, Electric Mill were doing a fair bit of healthcare consulting, and it seemed like a good idea to think about clever ways to present information that people were interested in.

At the time, Hospital A&E attendance figures were hotly discussed, disputed and most importantly compared. We’re still listening to these claims and counter claims 2 years later.

So the obvious example then was to use these up to date and well maintained figures - and present them in a way easy to report and compare. Both the Health Service Executive and Irish Nurses Organisation maintain daily figures. Who is correct? - we’re not going to call that - but we did understand that the method of collection and reporting varied between the two.

So with a little bit of midnight coding, we came up with an easy way to compare A&E attendance figures in Ireland - you can read more about the background to the thought processes and the midnight coding here.

While we gathered and inputted both sets of figures from the HSE and INO, in the end we turned off the latter results; but even just with the one set of figures you can easily compare, graph and export to Excel, figures from each hospital on monthly intervals.

There were two downsides to this process. The first was obvious - we manually entered the figures for a 12 month period. This was pretty laborious. The second was a tin hat of sorts. In late May 2006 - the HSE changed their method of reporting. This meant that direct comparison of figures with the INO was no longer possible, and also the data input method we had originally developed needed modification. Hands up - we just never got around to it, which was a bit of a shame.

In a future post, we will introduce another Electric Mill public data project that we think Irish people will find useful. More anon.

We developed a small PHP based application to enable staff to easily import and validate data from a Lotus Notes system through an administration console, while at the same time enabling the public to easily search and view the same data.

Things were slightly complicated by the fact that the application was to seamlessly integrate with an existing ASP.Net CMS application - particularly with regard to the overall look and feel. the illusion to be created was of one system.

It would not be the first time that PHP has been asked to co-exist on an IIS server. We did our research, developed the system, did test installations on a QA box - and were happy with the upgrade approach that should be taken on the live implementation.

The upgrade of the live system went smoothly as planned - but then something cropped up which we didn’t expect. The style sheets which we had copied from the main CMS system (in order that the new application would appear to be pretty seamless) was refusing to load properly in all browsers - Firefox, IE and Safari.

Loading the CSS file directly into the address bar of the browser, and then looking at the page info of the file, we soon found what the problem was. The stylesheet was being incorrectly identified as text/html rather than text/css.

Searching for a fix to the issue (which seems to be an IIS one) didn’t turn up anything which we could used. We tried a few things, took on board some suggestions, but nothing worked - we still had the same problem.

In the end though, the fix was quite simple. We added the following line to be the first line in the offending style sheet.

<?php header(’Content-Type: text/css’); ?>

problem solved.

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”

So successful campaigns are just pot luck then? Explain that to the customer you’ve just sold your ideas on viral internet marketing campaigns.

Read the Full Article.

Business Models for Web 2.0 Companies

Christian Leybold of BV Capital provided a good overview of business models (all advertising) and statistics - sites used as examples during the presentation are BV investment companies)

Opening line that presumably will follow through the presentation - Follow the traffic (and then worry about the money). According to Christian, some 8 of the current top 20 companies in Alexa traffic rankingswere not in it 3 years ago.

Less than 4% of advertising revenues go to the social networks - compared to the traffic these sites get, that’s a pretty small slice. Could virtual items be alternative to ads - incredibly popular example is Cyworld (Korea).

With social networks you cannot afford to spend money in acquiring users, you must have critical mass and you must scale, scale, scale. Gave example of fotolog.com - $12m invested, 12m accounts created so a buck for every single user account. Tiny amount compared to silly times in the late ’90s; clarifies that we don’t confuse investment cost with customer acquisition cost - the latter figure of course is next to zero.

So why is advertising on social networks difficult? You need to know what cusotmer wants NOW! People in social networking mode are not in buying mode; at the same time high repeat users are extremely attractive to advertisers given the profile they are exhibiting.

So how do the leading networks increase ad revenue? Myspace and Facebook are launching today (”Selfserve” and “Pandemic”) solutions for this; very different to google adsense, targeted to usage patterns on the network. While facebook developer platform has been succesful, it is poor in terms of monetization. Summing up - scale audiences are becoming their own ad networks.

What can you do if you are not MySpace and Facebook? Gave example of Glam Media. Buys advertising in bulk from advertisers that fit with the brand. Also Peanut Labs : aggregates “Gen Y” surveys from market research firms. Incredibly, people happy to spend 15 mins filling out survey for a 50 cent reward - people lose track of time when they are online…

Why does Video work online? the fact that you can track via analytics who-watched-what is attractive; video advertising is great for brand awareness; gave all the well known examples of monetisation - pre/psot roll, invideo, promotialal content, sponsorship, search/display advertising, Pay per view. Of course, advertising works best if the content is differentiated and long (no point in a pre-roll on a 1 minute clip). trad. media companies have discovered that it is better to put out popular TV programmes via ad supported model online, rather than using PPV. North of $20 on CPM for video.

Then talked about local advertising - a huge market, but presenting ads in local content skyrockets ad prices (at least 3 times as expense for Adsense local adverts, e.g. restaurant+dublin). So though local advertising is attractive, the cost is prohibitive; local businesses by and large are not familiar with online process and fail to see how they can track and assess how well they are doing. Coupons in local press are where it’s at for them, and what these businesses are familiar with; Getting scale for keywords like “dentist” in local area is very, very tough and very tedious to scale in each market. you could partner with some one elses salesforce, sell some one elses ads, or charge users for premium content. A bit like Angies List -they provide reviews of local businesses, often interviewing people as they leave stores. Then uses a subscription model, often along the way providing coupons from selected businesses; Another provider is Reach Local - they provide a managed service to small businesses for google ads; focus is on easy to understand Ad sucess metrics and reports.

Conclusions - Christian thinks we are on the cusp of seeing ho advertising will REALLY work on social networks. For local online advertising though, it will continue to be difficult.

Designing for a Web of Data Tom Coates of Yahoo is an engaging and energetic speaker and gave a good presentation to a packed audience. My only quibble was that while he had every right to talk about Yahoo product and specifically Flickr, a key theme of his talk - “gather all the data you can” - is probably an easy one to promulgate in the context of online photo storage. Please note that some of this was difficult to capture because some of the messages were contained in the slides (keep an eye on Web2Expo Site/Slideshare) for slides over coming days…

That said - data is the most important thing (echoing Tim O’Reilly here) - the pages are actually less of a big deal in todays web.

Toms 5 key Points of Designing a web for Data

1. You site is not your product

example of twitter - twitterific built around the api; the product is a mechanism for the person to commuicate, but the website is only a tiny part of it; only 10% traffic is generated from it - the rest from the API. this is indication of web data. other examples given pownce, last.fm, etc.

the web of data bleeds into the real world -

- physical object responds to/viduslaised data from the network - eg nabaztag, ambient orb, wattson; all of these are wifi enabled devices sucking data from various sources. also mentioned waeather underground - home weather stations, but also people just entering weather data directly.

2.Play well with others (why it’s good to design for recombination).

Lots of opportunities for your product to do well if you play well with others. why would you open your product?

- drive people to service

- people will pay for them

- as advertising or to put yourself into the ecosystem

- makes your servie more attractive with less central development

The network effects has great potential as a result.

- Examples : map mashups in general - stamen designs do nice stuff.

- talked about Yahoo FireEagle - service about location. currently 50k geotagged location in wikipedia.

3. You can never have too much data (how to make excess manageable).

4. Ways to make a data service

- open up a dataset of your own

- build one with your users

- enhance one dataset with another.

flickr has gone up 500m photos in last 30 days 1.8 billion photos currently. amazing.

capturing metadata

- at production time

- direct analyis of the thing concerned (speech, facial)

- user contributed

- behavioural analysis

5. Hierarchies can not take the weight (from navigation to path finding - from hierarchic to weblike exploration).

Gave examples of redesign of Yahoo UI over the years and Amazon - how you can burrow into the data, coming from different angles;folksonomies and taxonomys can live ok together; top navigation is just a jumping off point; use visual hierarchies to guide user.