Posts written by Jon White

Engaging audiences through social media

By Jon White on 24 February 2010

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Yesterday I headed to the National Housing Federation Marketing Communications conference over in Russell Square to give a presentation on engaging audiences through social media. The conference was great and I really enjoyed running my session, so I thought I’d share some of the key issues that I identified as important to consider when looking to engage customers and prospects through social media:

  1. Do your research
    Before you start using a social media site, find our if your target audiences are using it and how they’re using it. Based on this you can decide which channels are appropriate for your business.
  2. Develop your own strategy
    What works for one company may not work for another so its important, based on your research, to work out how your company can best use these sites.
  3. Focus on the long-term
    Social media isn’t a tool to get a short-term sales lift. You need to be patient and focus on building relationships and your brand.
  4. Offer something interesting or useful
    This can be information and knowledge, exclusive discounts on products and services or even an alternative channel for queries and customer service.
  5. Understand that the power is with the consumer
    Social media should not be treated as any other sales channel and the focus should be on interaction on the terms of the target audiences.  If it’s not on their terms, at best they’ll ignore you, at worst there will be a backlash.

If you’d like to see a recording of the full presentation which focuses on generic social media strategies for business as well as specifically on housing associations, it will be available on our YouTube channel later this afternoon.

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Which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites?

By Jon White on 21 January 2010

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Between September and December 2009 we ran a poll on the Webcredible website asking the question of which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites? This may be a pretty generalised survey, which didn’t focus on specific sites, but the results (which we released yesterday) were interesting nonetheless. This is how they turned out:

  • Retail / ecommerce - 133 votes (13%)
  • Financial services - 164 votes (16%)
  • Local authority / government - 342 votes (34%)
  • Travel - 91 votes (9%)
  • Utilities - 116 votes (12%)
  • News / media companies - 69 votes (7%)
  • Other - 91 votes (9%)

Some of the results may not come as a particular surprise to many. The content focused sites of news and media companies do not tend to need to use the complex checkout processes that other sites use, and given the high levels of competition, travel and retail websites need to be pretty easy to use.

However, I would like to focus on the local authority and government sites which caught the brunt of over one third of the vote.

It’s true that local authority and government websites often have to offer a vast amount more information and functionality than their counterparts in other industries, which can make it more difficult to provide a great user experience, but there are some other reasons why they may have faired badly in this survey.

It could be a lack of investment in comparison to say online retail and travel companies, and it also could be put down to the fact that when using local authority and government websites, dropping off and using another site is often not an option (something which is common when poor usability is encountered in ecommerce and travel) so users will have to just grin and bear a poor user experience.

There’s no doubt that the usability of local council websites is improving, as shown by our most recent local council usability report and although there’s still much room for improvement, it’s certainly not the only industry sector where this is the case. So, do you agree with the findings? Let us know which what type of websites you find most difficult to use.

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PPC & SEO training special offers

By Jon White on 11 January 2010

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Back in October last year we announced our plans to run new training courses in PPC and SEO, and with the first sessions scheduled for February, we’re offering an introductory discount. If you’re looking to learn more about running pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimisation campaigns then you can get 10% off the price of the course.

See further details on the PPC training and the SEO training, then simply enter ‘newcourse-promo’ into the comments box when you sign-up for either course to receive the discount.

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Retrospective BA miles claims hinder online experience

By Jon White on 15 December 2009

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British Airways might have enough problems at the moment what with making big financial losses and reports that its cabin crew have voted nine to one in favour of striking over the Christmas period. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about a shortcoming I encountered deep within its website, specifically in the Executive Club section.British Airways plane

Firstly I feel I must insert a caveat here that I’m not knocking BA’s website as a whole, as it provides a very good user experience and actually topped Webcredible’s 2009 Flights Online Report. However, the problem I encountered came when looking to attribute BA miles to a previous flight.

When it comes to joining BA’s Executive Club and collecting miles, I’m guessing many people do it in the way I did – booked a flight, realised you could claim the miles, and signed up to collect them retrospectively – and it’s the retrospective element that I feel is slightly flawed!

Obviously if you’re a member when you book a flight, you use your frequent flyer number upon booking and the miles are added automatically when you’ve flown. When looking to add miles for previously taken flights however, I expected to see a clear link in the ‘Manage my account’ section, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. The left-hand navigation is actually very well laid out, but it’s really not immediately clear where the required section would be.

After a good few minutes of searching I did find it in the ‘Collecting BA miles’ section, under the ‘Flights’ sub-menu, right at the bottom of the main content on the page, with the link text ‘More about claiming missing BA miles’. Now in hindsight, this does seem like a logical location, but for new users it can be very hard to find and surely should be promoted much more actively (as they are the users likely to need this facility).

I admit this is a minor point when it comes to the overall user experience of a very good website. But, when it comes to recruiting new members to its Executive Club, this point could be important for BA.

Given the partnerships between airlines to gain rewards for one airline from flights on another (I’ve accumulated most of my BA miles on Cathay Pacific flights for example), customers don’t have to join BA’s Executive Club to gain rewards on BA flights, and herein lies the point. If users have trouble claiming the miles on retrospective flights on BA’s website then they may simply head to another airline’s site and use its reward scheme instead.

Photo credit:  lrargerich via Flickr / Creative commons

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Webcredible on YouTube and Flickr

By Jon White on 15 October 2009

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We’ve had presence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for over a year now, the blog’s been going strong for 6 months, so lately I’ve been looking into some other social media channels we can get involved in.  The result is the WebcredibleUK YouTube channel and the Webcredible Flickr photostream.

The Flickr photostream at the moment offers pictures of all our facilities that are available to hire as well as our new Webcredible branded polo-shirts to be worn by our consultants at exhibitions.  On the exhibitions note, keep an eye on the stream next week as we will be putting up pictures from Ecommerce Expo which we are exhibiting at on Tuesday and Wednesday.

At these types of events, we get a lot of people asking to view our presentations that they didn’t manage to catch on the day, so that’s where the YouTube channel comes in.  You can now see Senior Consultant, Abid Warsi’s presentation on mobile ecommerce usability from last week’s IMRG mobile commerce workshop - The presentation is split into four parts each in a separate video.  You can also checkout the demo videos of our accessible CMS product.

Let us know what you think.

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