If you’re an iPhone 4 wannabee – like a lot of us right now, signal failures or not – and a twitter fan then you probably can’t have helped to notice the sales promotion that was offered recently by a bulk-purchase discount website called Groupola.

Now, I’d not heard of Groupola before these last few days, but I sure have now, and that was obviously the point of their sales promotion – to raise awareness of the brand and to attract huge numbers of subscribers to their email list.

To that end there wasn’t anything wrong with what they were trying to do, and they won’t be the last brand to offer a heavily discounted offer in return for your valuable contact details – something a lot of people forget when they ask questions naively like “how can they offer these phones so cheap? It’s got to be a scam” – because of course it’s not – they’ve (hopefully!) worked out the average value of you as an individual to the business and bobs your uncle, 80% off an iPhone.

That’s all fine, I get it, no worries.

But why then has there been such an outrage on the web around this piece of SP?  Is it because it was a scam and the 200+ iPhones they’ve apparently “sold” were never sold?  I don’t think so and to be honest I have no reason to believe one way or the other but there are lots of people who don’t believe (me not being one of them!) but I think most of that is anger at not getting one and they’re bitter because they’re tight and don’t want to fork out £499 for a legit one from Apple.

Not getting your hands on one wouldn’t have been a problem if the site you were directed to via the “secret” link (which they then asked you to retweet in the same email so, not that secret then!) hadn’t spectacularly crashed out and simply stopped responding because of the huge volumes in traffic directed to the site.

And that’s the fail.  This brand grabbed a basic idea – give something amazingly popular away for next to nothing to raise awareness of your brand and your business model (this is after all what they do – bulk discounts) – but they failed to consider the technical implications of a major web traffic spike to their infrastructure.

You simply cannot do that with digital marketing because as we all know, or at least should know, technology, serving and all of that generally boring (sorry networks guys!) ugly stuff behind the scenes is just as important as the good looking sexy stuff in front of the web browser.  Forget that simple fact and you are doomed to failure.

Imagine if the BBC site crashed during the World Cup or Wimbledon coverage recently – like it did during 9/11 all those years ago when the web was still in infancy – or if something like the telephone system behind American Idol couldn’t cope with the calls during the show.  All stuff like this could be a disaster, and that’s exactly where Groupola now find themselves.

If they’d thought it through, up-scaled their server capacity, and put in place the correct pages to say “sorry guys, we’ve sold out, but here are the lucky real people winners” no one would have minded.  But they didn’t.  And the servers crashed.  And the rest is twitter history.

A lesson learnt for sure.  And possibly a world record set in how to quickly grow a mailing list and then lose it all to a huge unsusbcribe request 24 hours later.

Howard

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Related articles by Zemanta

• Apple admits iPhone signal fault (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Apple iPhone 4 on sale for £99 (guardian.co.uk)

Shouldn't this be a webpage?

First off, let me just state I don’t have an iPad (my boss does so I have seen one at least) and I haven’t yet had the pleasure of the new Wired magazine app.

But I’ve been thinking…

Shouldn’t Wired’s new iPad magazine app (soon to be “all tablets” apparently) actually be an HTML5 website? That would be truly cutting edge right? And accessible to all, regardless of platform, machine or OS?

And shouldn’t it be free? I know Chris Anderson has said a “freemium” version is on it’s way – which is great.

“For all asking about Wired iPad app pricing, it will evolve as we build new ecommerce methods. Freemium is in our future about 22 hours ago via web @chr1sa“

But right now, as far as I can tell, Wired’s app is just their version of a Murdoch’s Paywall. At £2.99 a month it’s not that expensive, but it’s not that cheap either. Actually scratch that.  it is cheap.  I’d gladly pay that myself.  I’ve bought the magazine for years and don’t see any reason why I am going to stop.  But it’s still not free is it!  Not that I necessarily think free is right – but I do believe Chris has said he does in the past once or twice. (I am, after all, mainly in the business of trying to sell stuff to people, and so are most of you I suspect!)

But I can’t help feeling for such a supposedly cutting edge geek-guide magazine, it should have been web-based, in a truly cutting edge tech, and “open”.  And that’s something coming from me, as someone who’s built his fair share of flash-based websites in the last few years and screw the UX! (I’m a changed man at my new agency, what can I say!)

Howard
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Woot! – Google released the Nexus1 phone that runs the latest version of the android operating system.

Cue Twitter going crazy with #nexus1 hashtags and a million phone übergeeks foaming at the mouth.

But you know what?

Who cares – I’ve already got my personal iPhone and I’ve got my work HTC Hero which runs android – so as far as I can tell, bar perhaps a few bells, whistles and a bit of a speed bump, i’ve got that base covered (and I still prefer my iphone).

The Nexus1 looks OK though, and sure, the OS is way better than the blackberry offering that was on my Storm, so anyone who’s never used an iPhone is going to love it – and in fact I am sure a lot of people who HAVE used an iPhone will love it to and switch across.

But is this the iPhone killer that so many people seem to be saying it is?

Erm, frankly, of course it isn’t!

iPhone was a smartphone killer because until it turned up nothing was doing the phone thing in any way decent compared to what the phone from Cupertino burst onto the scene doing. Blackberry was rocking the email world, Windows was doing it’s crashy bloat thing, and there was palm trying to keep afloat by producing the Treo (pre-Pré of course and how that shook things up right?!)

but when iPhone burst onto the scene it was all new, it was shiny, and it “just worked” – you’d not really had all of it’s features on a handheld device before in a form factor and such well executed good looking package until it came out – and that’s why it was the killer phone – because it was truly revolutionary, not because it did a few things better or in a different UI than it’s competitors were already doing – but because it was effectively doing them first.

So, in comes Google and Nexus1 – and you know what? It’s doing the same stuff as the iPhone and nothing really that different.

iPhone killer? get real – and if it does i’ll gladly swap my trusty 3G for a nexus2 in a years time.  But until google gets it’s thinking cap on and actually innovates in the mobile space I think the guys in Cupertino are probably sleeping easy at night and focusing on their iSlate concepts.

Howard

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what browser dot org

Not sure how long this has been out there, but it’s the first time I have personally seen it.  Seems Google are really stepping up the game in several areas and have now, in an attempt to push their chrome browser that little bit harder, launched the site whatbrowser.org to educate you, the average user (yeah right! not if you’re reading this rubbish!), on what a browser is, which one you are using, and that *shock* you have a choice to use something else – presumably aimed at the average IE user.

Well, it’s a nice enough if simply site, and the attached youtube video does a good job as well, but to me it feels a bit like teaching granny to suck eggs – but then I seriously doubt me (or you!) are the intended audience.

Worth a look though.

Shame chrome isn’t listed as another browser for the mac yet still though!

Howard

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There’s a few of these videos knocking about on Youtube and elsewhere, and I’m sure you’ve seen the like before.  But this is a nice one, with a few new stats in there for those persuasive soc-med presentations you need for clients and colleague who don’t get it yet.

Something I’ve discussed before here, but the connected TV concept being pioneered by Yahoo!, from their widget platform, working with the likes of Samsung and Sony, is starting to hit the mainstream.

Case in point – Sony’s new range of TVs have a user interface which will be very familiar to anyone with a PSP or PS3, and an ethernet plug right there in the back of the TV itself.

Connect them up, and using the XMB (as the interface is known) you can get content from Yahoo! right there on top of the TV image, or watch IPTV content from the likes of YouTube, CNN and so forth instead of anything being “broadcast”.

The name Sony like’s to call their people who work in this field (Convergineers) says it all.

Convergence isn’t something that’s “coming soon” any more.

It’s now.

Howard

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Yesterday I attended the Carsonified Future of Web Design 2009 conference in Kensington, London – a now annual event showcasing trends in designing for the web, be that the desktop version or the mobile “3rd screen” one.

I’ve been to a fair few of these events now (I think this was my fifth in total? Three FOWD and two FOWA?) and as time has gone on they’ve certainly got more and more slick, but followed the same quite casual yet confident approach that Ryan Carson, one of the founders of Carsonified (a digital company based in Bath), is so good at projecting (even down to his trademark hat which you have to be pretty confident to wear all the time).

Unlike previous conferences, and even the recent IDM event I attended (entitled Emerging Trends in Digital) I didn’t take a lot of notes during the day, and as such I’m not going to write a long review of the event.

Instead, I suggest this time you check out a twitter search for the hashtag #fowd which should bring you back a fair collection of comments, opinions and other random stuff thoughts all based (sometimes loosely) around the event – and who knows, if you’re one of the many I suspect who hasn’t enjoyed one of the great benefits of twitter, or even fully aware yet what twitter is really capable of doing in a collective sense rather than just being (in some opinions) a “I had a cheese sandwich for lunch” tool, this could be a good introduction?

The day went smoothly in the most – the morning certainly was great, with outstanding presentations from Mark Boulton on the subject of typography for the web (who knew Times New Roman was deliberately designed to bleed into the cheap paper that newspapers are printed on and become more legible because of it?) and an excellent, if short (but we knew it would be) talk on a radical new agency model being developed basing the entire creative process from brief to delivery on agile methodology borrowed from that commonly used in the programming world – I really hope to hear more on this in the future.

The afternoon, sadly, wasn’t quite so good as the morning (certainly at the start of it) with a few presenters (no specific names) tanking big time, some reading from printed sheets the whole way through a presentation and really not doing a very good job (I really hope that person doesn’t pitch present too much where they work!) and another, rather large corporation, deciding to do a truly dreadful presentation based on the book/film Watchmen, by Alan Moore (as if I need to tell you) and a) doing it really badly and, b) spoiling the entire story for a lot of people (me included) who haven’t yet seen the film!!!!!!

It pulled itself together at the end with a great pres by Molly Holzschlag and judging by the twitter backchannel at that time it was most appreciated by all.

I didn’t attend the after party, and I’m not attending the university sessions today, but as far as the confernce day went yesterday it was certainly a success.

Well done to Carsonified and the team who put it on – looking forward to #fowd 2010

@howard_scott

Last night I attended my first IDM event even though I’ve been a member of them for about a year now – actually it was a very timely piece of eDM that made me aware of the event so I guess from that point of view they know their stuff!

Entitled Emerging Digital Trends it had two speakers from very different areas, David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling, John Lewis and Katie Smith, Head of Digital Media, Macmillan Cancer support.

In addition to the two speakers there were also quite a large number of delegates from agency, client and consultancy sides, and I was pretty surprised at the turn out to be honest – pretty impressive.

When I write up events or conferences like this I tend to take short notes during the session itself and then blog it up on the train ride home – like I am doing now – so these are my interpretation of the event and obviously not official notes from the session itself.  Just to clarify…

…So, David spoke first, and went into some detail about what John Lewis have been looking into recently, and what challenges they have faced, and, looking forwards, what trends he sees that as a digital retailer could be important.

David started his talk on the subject of behavioural targetting, and how in terms of both email marketing and website strategy, John lewis have been paying this field a lot of attention.  As we converge in the digital and physical space he commented that in the future, he sees that in many ways our offline lives will be lived online – in as much as things we now take for granted as being not connected to the digital or online world will in fact become connected – but we won’t notice it.

He gave an example of how behavioural targetting is very easy to do in some ways, but it’s also easy to get wrong – using an amazon homepage example of when he bought his wife a Davina Yoga DVD, and for the next two weeks got nothing but Yoga DVDs on his custom amazon page (we’ve all been there David!)

With regard to a lot of the ad network behavioural targetting (BT) that is being offered by some of the biggest players at the moment, he thinks that it’s not really true BT in the strictest sense, but almost like a proxy via technology to really basic segmentation strategy based on the type of websites and nothing to do with behaviour itself.

In terms of email marketing, he’s been looking at RFM recently (Recency-Frequency-Monetary) and how it can be used to segment email lists and target consumers – but this on it’s own isn’t enough – and he believes that by overlaying BT on top of RFM you can actually end up with some very useful segmentations and targetting for your eDM comms.

For the website itself, he has looked into how they can replicate the excellent customer service they deliver in-store through their partners (I love how all John Lewis staff are partners personally!) within the digital environment – and he believes it’s pretty hard to do – but tools like basket analysis, post-basket contact, etc., can help to go towards that (would love to discuss this some more).

He also mentioned that goal tracking during user journeys was very key and also very hard at times.  For example, if a user is within the checkout page, the goal is pretty clear – get them onto the next page and purchase the items in their basket.  But, if the user is on the home page, what is their goal?  This is a much more complicated question and almost impossible to answer if they simply type in the URL and visit the home page afresh.

At the end of the day, it’s about using new tools to better suggest products to customers (in some way’s isn’t that what we are all trying to do?)

That’s current trends – so the future?

Well, from his own perspective, David highlighted the ways in which targetting may become more and more “accurate”, almost seeming like “magic” when we start to predict user behaviour rather than just respond to it – and with this in mind, he thinks PHORM is one to watch (right or wrong, they’re certainly one to watch I think!)

In terms of permission based targetting, he also sugested we look at APML.org – for details on APML, an XML based standard that “tells” advertisers and marketers what your ad preferences are in real-time and allows for very accurate marketing to travel around with you (I’ll def. be looking into this right away and posting my thoughts on it here – I have to admit I’d not heard of it before).

He belives that the best way to target your customers, is to get them to “design your emails and website for you” through intelligent suggestion, monitoring and targetting (seems like a good strategy to me).

He closed with an intersesting story.  Apparently, on their website, more people type the word “TOYS” into the search field, than do click on the top-level navigation button which is labelled as “TOYS”, even though it’s only 6 pixels away from the seach field   One for the IAs I fear!

After a short break for some much needed nibbles and wine, the second speaker, Katie, took to the stage.

Katie showed a very interesting and touching video about people with, or going through, or post, cancer and the issues they had to face for which Macmillan Cancer Support were there to help.

Katie pointed out that she isn’t a direct, digital or data person as such, more of a creative web designer and IA, but that she has been involved a lot in the more strategic elements of the online recently.

She also pointed out that on twitter she is @katie3059 (and if you’re interested, I am @howard_scott)

Digital, for her, has helped to clarify what they are as a brand, and it’s changed their positioning as well as their organisation as a whole.

People in general are now much more savvy [sic] when it comes to their own health, and the internet has played a massive role in that (who here doesn’t go straight to NHS Direct or WebMD when they find something weird going on? I know I do!)  As such, Macmillan have had to acknowledge that they, as “experts” need to provide information that the users will want and trust if they are to maintain a position as a major destination (something they achieved recently by merging with another cancer charity who were much more “techy” (for want of a much better phrase) than Macmillan.

One of the problems they face is that when people seach for them on google, they search for the word “macmillan” and so, when they do arrive, it tells them nothing about what they were looking for (as opposed to people who might end up on directline.com having searched the phrase “car insurance”).  In this way they had to try to work out what was an important goal for their visitors from the home page of the site – what did a visitor to the site really want when all they had typed into google was “macmillan”?

Katie also mentioned a couple of trends which they are currently riding on which are proving to be extremely valuable to them – user generated content (UGC) and social-network style community.

People with Cancer, or post-cancer, want two things when they look for advice.  They want expert advice, that they know is from a trusted and valid source – and macmillan can certainly provide this – but they also want reassurance and “insider information” telling them what it’s going to be like.  This is something Macmilland find hard to provide because they simply don’t know. This is where the users themselves can step in.  By providing forums, and other spaces on the site within which users can discuss their condition, symptoms, how an operation went, how they felt during treatment, etc., other people who want to know just how something is going to feel (because, let’s face it, it’s scary stuff!) all users can discuss just what’s concerning them with other people, and as we all know by now, people trust other people’s opinion on the web more than so-called “experts” in many cases.

This UGC aspect to their site, combined with the community they have enabled, means that the macmillan site can provide both the expert, medical, clinical advice patients want when they first do research into a cancer when they’ve been diagnosed with it, followed by the more human, personal, “this is how it was for me” kind of approach only the UGC can provide.

Katie referenced the site patientslikeme.com who have forums for almost every single ailment you can think of, and people who are more than happy to share it with other sufferers.

So, for a future trend?

Katie mentioned finally that they were looking into interactive conversation technology to help users of the site answer questions which they know can prove tricky if they’re not explained sufficiently.  She’s working with technology pioneered, apparently, by a company in the US called jellyvision.com, which kind of “prompts” a user through conversation style question-answer-question scenarios, each new question being based on the answer previously given.  (This is something I’ve seen on the NHS direct site myself, where in order to diagnose a condition, they ask you a series of pretty simple questions you can answer with multiple choice until you arrive at the end result).

Oh, and one last thing, Katie kept apologising for the state of her slides – I think because, as she said, she’s a designer at heart.  Katie, I honestly don’t think any of us would have noticed a great deal if you didn’t keep pointing it out – the content of your talk was interesting enough to make us overlook the slide design – and, let’s face it -it’s all powerpoint anyway!  It’s going to look bad

So, to wrap up, it was an interesting event – I met some knowledgeabe people on various subjects – interestingly there seemed to be people there from a whole variety of digital related fields – eCRM, Search, eCommerce, promotions, and I am sure there were more. There wasn’t anything too revolutionary presented in terms of future trends, although I am keen to now look into APML some more after David brought it to my attention, and of course PHORM was mentioned, but aren’t they often nowadays?

Thanks to the IDM for putting the event on. For those interested I should be getting the slides from it shortly, so when I do I’ll link them from this post.

Howard
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I’m always on the look out for places where digital technology in the (hate to say this) “virtual space” converges with the physical real-world, and this is something I know my colleague @Poate also looks for – but from the other side (i.e. I am digital, he is “real world” physical).

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

So, this is interesting to both of us, and I think it might be to you also.  I found this whilst doing my daily scoot of engadget.com, a nice work-in-progress example of a digital app, running on an iPhone, connected to an RFID reader, detecting tags in physical objects to play associated media clips back on the iPhone.

It’s obviously an early WIP judging from the size of the RFID reader attached to the device!, but it’s a good proof-of-concept and it shows just how handy RFID could end up being, say, for an in-store environment where the reader is in a kiosk, or just attached to some kind of large display, and the tags are in physical objects of some kind – say an SLP product promotion piece.

Check out the video below for bob the builder and moomins!

Howard

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