It’s quite strange going back through our history, all the way back to 1996, and track the major events for both us as a company and the Internet on the whole. Here’s a scrappy montage or you can look at the timeline here.

I think most of us know the world has moved on and continues to move with such a furious pace but coming from one of the worlds biggest marketing cheeses its a proper WTF moment. How much is real and how much is a stab at some controversial press is not clear but he is certainly echoing the thoughts of a lot of Internet marketeers. Should we sack the marketing department, hire some spotty-faced twitterers and retire to the Caribbean (where marketing is probably still alive  and kicking)?

No. Not yet. Not quite yet.

Here’s what he said:

“Strategy is dead. Who really knows what is going to happen anymore in this super VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world? The more time and money you spend devising strategies the more time you are giving you rivals to start eating your lunch.

“Management is dead. To win today you need a culture and an environment where the unreasonable power of creativity thrives. Ideas are today’s currency not strategy. Martin Luther King did not say ‘I have a vision statement’ did he? He had a dream. You have to make sure you have dreams and your brand also needs a dream.”

he then goes on to say

“The big idea is dead. There are no more big ideas. Creative leaders should go for getting lots and lots of small ideas out there. Stop beating yourself up searching for the one big idea. Get lots of ideas out there and then let the people you interact with feed those ideas and they will make it big.”

Now that makes a lot of sense. This is much more a reflection of the change in culture that is required by contemporary marketing agencies. Hopefully we’ll see the death of the HiPPO (Highest Paid Persons Opinion) and the growth of collaborative creativity. This has been a long time coming.

Say hello to the birth of Agile Marketing. It’s an exciting time.

We are almost 5 years into the current recession with no clear end in sight. Most of us have started ignoring the “we’ve bottomed out” rhetoric and just accept that it simply won’t ever be like it was before. In that sense, we’ll never actually leave the recession, it’s simply another phase of development in business. That, for me, is quite comforting and also quite exciting. As we evolve the way we do business and the way we spend money it turns up lot of opportunity. Opportunity is the fuel of innovation and business start-ups. Ignoring the opportunity or, worse still, waiting for the recession to end (it won’t) is the fast track to commercial suicide.

Understanding that this is not a classic recession ala the great depression (yet) is the first step in how to address the issues. Yes, we classically have low growth and bunch of other economic indicators that match previous recessions and it’s true, the world has broadly come to a startling stop. It’s also unlikely ever to turn so quickly and so out of control again, at least not in the conventional boom-bust cycle we’ve seen over the last 20 years.

A read an article about Digital Darwinism recently and as part of the blurb I read a rather humbling statistic: “Over 40 percent of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010.” This reminded of a Forbes article published a year ago that started with “The End is Near: Why 70% of the Fortune 1000 Will Be Replaced in a Few Years.”. The article went on to quote a study that stated between 1973 and 1983, 35 percent of the top companies in the Fortune 1000 companies were new to the list. Over the next decade from 1983 to 1993, churn jumped to 45 percent, and then soared again to an astounding 60 percent between 1993 and 2003. If the current trend continues, over 70 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will turnover from 2003 to 2013.

At this rate of change it will become the norm for companies to blossom, grow quickly and die – all in a period of less than 10 years. That’s pretty scary to some, it still makes me reel a little bit when I think how hard I’ve worked in business over the last 15+ years to get this far. The answer, as ever, is the ability the evolve and adapt to new market conditions and technologies.

So, get your brain working and think of new ideas; ideas that people might want. Today is a great day for a new start.

by Martin Dower

Devoted as I am to Safari it’s finally time to say goodbye and move over to the latest shiny toy in the box, Google Chrome. I’m not sure how I am feeling at the moment as I do love Safari for it’s integration into OSX but it’s just losing too much ground to Chrome. So, in a fanfare and a hail of bullets I quit Safari for the last time today.

Google’s Chrome just seems to run so much better on my MacBook and has a fantastic range of add-ins that I use a lot. In fact I would be tempted to say that Chrome has improved my productivity and certainly cuts down on the number of sites I have to visit and tabs I have to have open.

Being a huge 37Signals product user I’m able to slick-away the operation using Autosave, time and graphing, Campfire as well as more commonly used extensions such as Evernote clipper, Dropbox and Wikipedia.

Key headlines

• We are not gathering any more information – we are changing the way we gather and apply this information
• We are synchronising and unifying how we use information across all the data platforms including our core platforms as well as third-party
• The revised policy is being implemented on May the 1st
• We’ll never sell or pass-on your information without your permission

Privacy policies are updated on myBookingWizard.com and on Connected-uk.com

Since the last privacy ruling in 2003 the key change is:

• OLD : You must provide the option for users to opt out of cookies being stored on their device, changes to
• NEW : You must obtain consent for cookies to be stored on a users’ of subscribers device

It is interesting to note that the original ruling has been in place for over 8 years yet almost no site actually complied with this ruling. The ICO and EU have not provided specific processes for companies to follow, nor have they really provided much in the way of solid guidance.

What areas are going to be affected?

Most web assets make extensive use of cookies for a number of key functions.

• Analytics, conversion and performance reporting
• Function of the web-site
• Split testing

Exceptions

Not all cookies will require explicit consent.

• A cookie to remember goods and services for the purposes of “checking out”, ala e-commerce.
• A cookie that is used as part of the 7th Data Protection principle which states “Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.”
• Cookies that speed the loading of the page up by distributing the workload amongst a number of web-servers.

It should be noted that there is very specific reference to “Cookies used to recognise a user and give them tailored content”. This is NOT a permitted exception.

Timeline

The initial position is that everyone must be 100% compliant by May 25th 2012. This has, however, softened over time with the recent statement “There will not be a wave of knee-jerk formal enforcement action taken against people who are not yet compliant but trying to get there” coming out of the ICO

Misinformation

A whole industry is springing up around this date and most (all?) are using a fear/uncertainty/doubt close that entails a lot of scaremongering. Ignore most of it. With 4 months to go some are scaremongering with headlines like “Websites face £500k fine for breaching ‘cookie’ law“.

It is worth noting that there are larger fines available to the ICO, but this applies to all outbound marketing activities covered by the revised Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations and that definitely effects other activities covered by most organisations in such areas as unwanted emails and text.

Be also aware that some sites who initially (over)reacted to the new privacy rules have now softened their stance, presumably as it was having such an adverse affect on business.

It is also worth noting that hosting and operating outside of the EU won’t get round the problem if you want to supply goods and services into the UK (wow, that sounds like a minefield!). And finally, there are some differences in how this will apply in different EU states but the difference are far less than the similarities.

Effect on third-party systems (reporting and analytics, mostly)

It is also to be noted that the only site (of note) using the explicit system is the ICO site and they have seen a dramatic drop in the number of recorded visitors to the site. This drop has come about as less than 9% of visitors agree to the policy.

This is not to say that the overall traffic has fallen, far from it. Some reports suggest that the traffic to the ICO has tripled since the announcement.

This is, I believe, an issue that the various analytics and reporting providers should be providing a solution to now. We are already starting to see the effects of privacy as Google now scrambles around 30% of search terms, making them invisible to the web-site and therefore analytics and reporting.

The simplest answer is to adopt a cookie free tracking system with some hybrid cookie solution to sample user information. It’s pretty easy to do and provides, in most cases, a lot information. This can be done via Javascript or Apache log analysis.

However, for some, the user journey, mapping and conversion requires a way to recognise visitors and this is mostly provided via a cookie. It doesn’t have to but many folks are seduced by the allure of recording every (?) customer journey. Not really sure why they need to record every person’s journey, a 10% sample should probably do the trick nicely.

Effect on first-party systems

I would suggest the following should not directly be affected:

• Any system that can conclusively show it need cookies to provide data security, this should include login systems and services that store personal information.
• Transaction-based applications that require the use of a cookie to store data in between stages, much like e-commerce or online booking. A system that would be rendered inoperable by the absence of cookies.

Cookies are typically bad:

• in profiles to recognise different users
• in testing different content to different users
• to pre-popolute fields on the site based on previously entered information
• in remembering logins into secure systems (including forums)
• in taster-type applications that show user-journey specific content
• in sales stages display applications
• country selectors

So what now?

So there is not a threat of legal action if you are following the advice to achieve compliance. Interpreting the guidance, this suggests that by May you should have:

• Audited your current use of cookies.
• Updated privacy messages on your site to reference use of cookies.
• Implemented or be working on implementing a method of offering opt-in to cookies.

The first two items are pretty straightforward but the last one is more troublesome.

This also gives you the opportunity to test some of the solutions in a conventional A/B test environment, whilst you can. This is different to normal testing where we are looking for a (confidence probable) winner but a test to explicitly measure the drop in conversion rates.

However, if the press reaction to the EU Policy is good then there is an argument that overt cookie compliance or overly public displays of privacy (sound odd, I know) could actually increase the effectiveness of the web-site – but that a subject for another day.

We are aware that the outages are too frequent and we are taking this up with our supplier.

Thankfully, we’re not too reliant on inbound calls these days as all existing customers have alternative, and better, means to communicate with the us. We sincerely apologise if you are trying to reach us but normal service will be resumed soon, of that I am sure.

In the meantime you can reach us on 01422-382116 which is our emergency inbound number. Sorry again. Again.

Try it; click here

You could even use it on an image! Click on the Domesday Book to Book Now!

Next step? Launch from email I recon

Image courtesy of The National Archives

• Avoid opinion, professional or otherwise, let testing give you the answer
• Have a clearly defined and measurable target for the page, immediate conversion may hamper conversion down the track so keep your eye on the big picture
• If your brand is unknown then one of your challenges is credibility, otherwise the challenge is product/service communication
• Long pages need cues to help people scroll down, this can make or break a long page
• Consider infinite scrolling as a solution, harder to implement but it effectively “right-sizes” the pages to visitor needs
• Don’t sweat what is long and what is short

This post was prompted by a discussion on eConsultancy.

• 57% of visitors will abandon a website if the waiting time reaches 3 seconds
• Between 1995 and 2010, the average web page grew from 14k with 2.3 objects to 484k with 75 objects
• In 2009, Shopzilla became the poster child for web performance when it shaved almost 5 seconds from its page load times and increased revenue by 7-12%
• Amazon reported that 100ms improvement in speed gave a 1% increase in performance
• In 2008, Yahoo! reported that making pages just 400 milliseconds slower resulted in a traffic drop of up to 9%.

That’s pretty staggering and, in most cases, is an easy fix by cutting down files sizes, optimising code and reducing the amount or superfluous imagery. There are competing pressures coming from our “better connected” web. For example the Google +1 button and the Facebook Like button add over one second of load time to your page, according to a recent research study by TagMan, a tag management and acceleration company.

To complicate things further, Google for years has been telling anyone who will listen that website speed is as an important factor in determining rankings. “One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception,” according to a post published this week on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

It is widely preached that page load speed should be under the magic 2-second mark and Google will normally reward this speed with a better ranking. It is then a little surprising that almost half of the top 500 online retailers exceed THREE seconds. Mad.

Almost all of the approaches to speeding the site up will involve a technical understanding of what’s going on to deliver your web-site so it’s a subject to raise with your web development agency.