Intranets: Spending money to save money

In a time where efficiency and cost effectiveness are being scrutinised it is important to ensure that your company has the right tools.

Intranets are fast becoming recognised as an essential tool for business.

Jakob Nielsen has recently commented on the 10 Best Intranets for 2008.
It is interesting to see some of the trends amongst the top ten winners:

• Sharepoint is the most used product
• Finance is most represented sector in the top 10 winners
• ROI is measured with substantial cost savings for the top 10 winners
• BA achieved a cost saving of £55 million
• Campbell Soup Company achieved a 727% visit per day increase after redesign
• Personalisation has become a trend
• Feeds are more prevalent
• Company news still dominates the homepage
  

The cost of an intranet can vary considerably. Interestingly, the top 10 winners have users that range form 200 to 50,000 staff. This shows that finding the right technology to meet scope and budget effectively is possible at all levels.


Jakob Nielsen is regarded by many as the Godfather of usability.Nielson’s research and analysis takes a very clinical approach. His studies are almost too scientific and tend not to address other fundamental keys to success:

• Design
• Implementation
• Real world situations

Aqueduct has launched two global Intranets for our clients in the last quarter. Our experience reveals that besides the features and products there are many more factors that contribute to the successful launch and adoption of an Intranet.

If you are interested here is a link to the ’10 Best Intranets of 2008’ report summary.http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html

The full 362 page report can also be purchased via the same link.

Turn digital pennies into business pounds

In this economic climate, every hour and pound invested in marketing has to be justified. Smart use of digital is compelling for any marketer. It needn’t be expensive, and if your digital spend is mostly going on, say, technology or consultancy, your focus may need to change. 

Make use of free (or virtually free), open, flexible and easy to integrate solutions that require little or no IT dependence.

In this post, Aquduct gives insight into 10 high-value initiatives marketers can try with digital - that won’t cost the earth.

1. Get your customers to work for you – use your website for “crowdsourcing”. Get your customers to contribute to product development (such as New Look), technical support (such as Apple) or other parts of your operations.
2. Retain and share your internal knowledge – make tacit knowledge work harder. Don’t rely on just one person to know about something in your organisation. Create a free hosted wiki (with PBwiki for example) or ask your IT team to add an open source wiki (such as Twiki) on your own network.
3. Make it easy to update your website without relying on IT – use an open source (such as MySource Matrix) or even hosted Content Management System (such as Wordpress) with the rich features you want, whether blogs, forums or workflow.
4. Scale your web hosting to what you actually use – many companies pay for more hosting than they need, or aren’t making the most of online-served applications. Consider scalable hosting solutions from “cloud” services offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
   
5. Add free “widgets” to your website – these are free bits of code you can add to your website; everything from Google Analytics to stock price feeds and bookmark sharing links.
   
6. Use more multimedia – video is now very economical to create and share online. Services such as YouTube and Vimeo allow you to embed quality video on your website without the headache and cost of hosting.
7. Have a presence on other websites – not all your prospects will even get to your website. Be where they are – it’s easy and free to create a group in Facebook, respond to relevant blogs or bookmark your top pages on Digg or StumbleUpon.
8. Build a community on your website – if Facebook and MySpace don’t suit your needs, create your own social network with free hosted tools such as Ning.
9. Get a branded, unique presence on all things digital – use products such as Umee to establish a rich branded presence on social networks, create your own widget for others to use, or build bespoke applications on the iPhone, Google phone or Facebook.
10. Conduct live testing on your website – use Google’s Website Optimiser to run tests of tweaks to key pages on your website, see the results and act on them.
    

Things we’ve learned on t’interweb

My mother has a habit of reminding me that “if your Father was alive he’d not be able to cope”—a situation she wholehearted ascribes to Modern Technology.

She has a point. Said Father used to drive out of his way to find a garage with petrol attendants, as he couldn’t work out how to fill up himself.

Fitting then to dedicate this inaugural What we’ve learned on t’interweb to him. Start spinning, Pa.

Beta path to here
What we'll all be doing in a year's time: the web's Top 100 Beta sites.

Earn 1,000s while working from home!
No, seriously. How the blogosphere has become the mainstream.

Web 1 + 1 = 2.0
Struggle with forms? Now you can have someone help you. Just like in the real world!

Do you know the way to San José?
Googlemaps become collaborative!

Site Specific Browsing—the web becomes app-lified
Be very afraid Mr Gates...
The Mozilla Prism project
Site Specific Browsing for Macs

Safety goes viral with our latest shocker

Our work for Network Rail continues to break new ground.

Blast From The Past sees us promoting the Safety 365-related portal—Safety Central—with a nifty bit of send-to-a-friend.

And what better way to leverage such cutting-edgeness than with a spot of recycling?

Watch the spot here.

Infernal communication

Without them, commerce would collapse quicker than a short-sold sub-prime shack in Santa Fe. So why (oh why oh why) do employers—and agencies alike—delight in repeatedly patronising the real engines of enterprise—employees?

No, we don’t know either. Thankfully, EDF Energy and English Heritage agree—and have appointed us to two of the most challenging internal communications exercises we’ve done in ages.

Both organisations understand that their brands are by and large determined by the behaviors of their people.

EDF Energy after all, have a product that no one can really see; English Heritage a remit so wide it is difficult to comprehend.

In both cases, people really do make the difference. Brains = Brand = Bottom Line.

It’s just the kind of challenge we relish—joining-up the behind-the-scenes bits other agencies cannot reach.

We’ve been appointed by EDF Energy to look at Employee Engagement activity—and by English Heritage to work on Brand Values for their Properties and Outreach department.

Digital trends for... Financial Services

Based on our digital trend watch and experience with clients in the financial services industry, here are eight key trends we're observing:

1. Consumers expect to use financial software direct through their web browser, and perform immediate transactions online 24 hours a day. Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming more common in financial services – global derivatives solution provider SuperDerivatives for example adopts a solely SaaS model for its products
2. Consumers have more choice about who they use for financial services, and have access to data about the relative benefits are between companies. Both businesses and individuals typically deal with a number of different companies to meet their needs, and switch more regularly than in the past
3. Leading financial service companies are providing live, historical and forecast data online that is both relevant and meaningful. The web is uniquely positioned to offer a personalised view on not just key financial data but on how it is interpreted and displayed
4. Successful companies in this industry are highly interoperable. Their data and transactions can work in conjunction with a variety of different systems and they are agile enough to adapt to changing market situations (e.g. mergers and partnerships, or responding to market gaps). Xero is an online business accounting package - they partner with a range of banks to seamlessly connect up with live bank data
5. Financial services companies are increasingly recognising the importance of building a strong brand and maintaining brand reputation online. In a highly competitive market, a perceived brand of trust, transparency and ethics helps to reduce doubt and increase customer retention. Particularly important for upcoming IPOs
6. User interfaces for financial systems have traditionally been quite complex, technical and data driven. Now, user interfaces and usability are becoming more valued in complex functional systems to increase their adoption and effectiveness
7. A growing number of companies are using digital channels to support risk management. For example, measuring risk from trends of historical transactions and current market conditions. As we have seen recently, high risk strategies can pay off in the good times, but can be disastrous in the bad
8. An emerging trend is to replace traditional B2C relationships with direct C2C or ‘P2P’. Zopa provides a means for people to replace the role of banks in lending. Betfair enables people to replace the role of bookmakers in betting.

Money can't buy you love

I think my life may just have ended.

I find myself – for hopefully the first and last time – in complete and utter agreement with likes of The Daily Telegraph, Apoplectic of Tunbridge Wells and every other gout-ridden Establishment Old Fart.

So – in a cheap attempt to reconnect with my more youthful self I pose the following Design Choice question:
Our new currency: WTF?!

Seven new coins, the reverses of six bearing crops of the Royal Arms that complete a whole shield when arranged appropriately.

The designer, Matthew Dent, described by the Royal mint as “a professional graphic designer”, imagines “the coins pushed around a school classroom table, or fumbled around with on a bar – being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them.” That’s almost as brilliant as when PwC Consulting became Monday.

And of course for the jigsaw to work we’re all going to have to keep hold of the increasingly meaningless one and two pence pieces.

When currency design works it delivers an insight into a nation’s psyche and history; it stands as statement of intent or of achievement.

This stands for quite possibly everything that is wrong about a) our country, and b) the world of design. Smug, style-obsessed, and were we to be totally honest with ourselves, not as good as it used to be.

Oh, and two more things.

Matthew, you’ve left off Wales, your birthplace.

And when arranged correctly I can create the shape of the male genitalia.

Bring on the Euro.

Digital trends for... Tourism

Based on our digital trend watch and experience with clients in the tourism industry, here are eight key trends we're observing:

1. Consumers are doing more research about destinations and product online, and increasingly booking online too
2. The traditional distribution model is flattening out as consumers go direct to tourism authorities and even product operators rather than travel agents
3. Online intermediaries and aggregators such as Expedia and Hotels.com are taking a growing share of consumer attention
4. Consumers highly value and expect comments from peers, using sites like Trip Advisor before choosing a destination
5. Online competition for the same and similar destinations and product is fierce - effective digital marketing, differentiation, cross-selling, on-trip and after-trip communication and nurturing consumer loyalty (and ultimately advocacy) are paramount
6. Tourism websites are investing in innovative tools and user interfaces for consumers to find, filter and build custom itineraries of product - examples include Hotel.com's Vizualiser and Ving Travel Finder
   
7. Effective tourism operators have a presence where their audience are online, whether that be YouTube, Myspace, Facebook or Trip Advisor
   
8. Tourism websites are increasingly incorporating social media onto their websites - be that traveller journals, photos or video.
   

Digital trends for... Recruitment

Based on our digital trend watch and experience with clients in the recruitment industry, here are eight key trends we're observing:

1. Job seekers do invest time in finding the right job, and are often early adopters of new technologies to help them do so
2. Employers are also seeing the benefits of new technologies and recruitment pricing models, moving to more direct resourcing (in response to high cost and low results with traditional recruitment agencies)
3. In the current economic climate, the job market is losing liquidity – there’s a glut of candidates for some sectors and roles as people lose their jobs, and a shortage for others as those who have jobs are less likely to leave
4. Passive candidates are doing more online to manage their career – online CVs, job notifications, LinkedIn profiles, networking, email referrals
5. Recruitment companies are differentiating through personalised value added services for career development, not just job matching
   
6. Use of online social/professional networking is growing by recruiters, particularly in graduate markets (formalising referrals is part of this)
7. Innovative lead generation techniques have proved effective, even if just in the PR they generate (e.g. TMP Worldwide have used Second Life and PlayStation games recruiting for likes of KPMG, IBM, GCHQ)
8. Recruitment companies are investing in technology to improve matching of quality candidates to employers (e.g. scanning CVs and job posts for keywords, using candidate profile data and networks to ‘guess’ who can provide fair references, ‘Career path’ services to plot typical job routes)
   

Website bounce rates are rising. What should you do?

Increasing proportions of users are leaving websites on the page they land on (known as the bounce rate). We explain what’s happening and what businesses can do to slash bounce rates.

What's happening?

• Although internet usage has grown rapidly, consumers are spending less time on each website they visit and a lower proportion of prospects are converting to customers
• The buying decision time is considerably shorter and more brutal than in the past
• Stats show that significantly more users exit websites on landing pages than any other
• Your landing pages make or break deals

What we recommend businesses do

Make a good first impression

• Research shows that users judge a business by its website in as little as 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard, Carleton University, Ontario)
• The visual look and feel, and perception of depth or clarity on landing pages is critical to whether a user will do business with you
• Consider using visuals or animation to quickly capture an emotional response, but only if they are fast loading and don’t hold up access to other information or links on the page
• Aqueduct recently enabled Enjoy England to reduce the bounce rate on their homepage from 32% to 19% in the first month following visual and usability changes – equivalent to annualised retention of 600,000 unique visitors

Be aware that users don’t always land on your homepage

• Google searches, ads, related site links and email links often land users on different pages or campaign microsites
• Make sure that all landing pages perform as well as the homepage in presenting information, links and calls to action – don’t trap users to a dead end or make it easy to exit rather than buy or explore further; provide access to everything without being cluttered
• Aqueduct have recently advised Laureate, a provider of online masters degrees, on optimising their ‘splash’ pages – a subset of their main website to attract prospects who follow certain PPC ads

Make landing pages personally relevant to each user

• Make sure that users do land on the relevant page – don’t always link to the homepage from emails, ads or third party sites if there’s a specific part of the site that users are expecting or will more directly meet their needs
• Appeal to different user segments – recognise that there are many types of users going to your website for different reasons (such as prospects, existing customers, investors and media). Group relevant links or information together and signpost adequately for different user segments
• Use personalisation to target what you put on landing pages specifically to each user – set cookies to pre-empt needs for future visits; pass campaign type with ad links; pass user information with email links
• Aqueduct has recently re-engineered the website for ICAP, a FTSE 100 financial services company. Landing pages now better appeal to different user segments and balance content and links with a simple uncluttered interface.

Monitor and act on your landing page stats

• Use Google Analytics and more comprehensive tools (such as Crazyegg’s heatmaps) to analyse the bounce rate, number of pages per visit and how users are exploring landing pages
• If your bounce rate is higher than 40%, and average pages per visit is less than 3, it’s a sign that people aren’t staying – make some changes to your landing pages!
• Google’s Website Optimizer is a great way to implement and track refinements to your landing pages
• Beware the ‘Google Bounce Factor’ – if your bounce rate is 60% or more, it could also negatively affect your Google ranking
• Check that a high bounce rate is not down to simply ‘exiting’ to one of your other services (e.g. a secure login environment)