So, Facebook… The biggest social network in the world right? Universally loved for allowing you to put your life online and share it with your nearest and dearest. Universally hated for using that information to deliver targeted adverts to you and share market information with commercial companies. It’s a fact that most savvy Facebook users are aware of, I’ve talked about it in a previous newsletter in fact, Facebook is a product which you get for free… sort of. In return you are their product, your personal information, tastes, usual behaviours, etc are all up for grabs to any company that can afford it. It’s a fair deal really, the experience of Facebook is certainly worth the exchange of that information almost a billion other people agree so don’t break into a sweat upon reading the previous sentence.

So with that business strategy in mind the more time you spend on Facebook the more targeted adverts hit you and the more money Facebook are able to make from you. You’ll notice these around the sides of the Facebook experience pretty much everywhere and much like Google’s placed adverts they are often freakishly accurately targeted. In fact I just logged into Facebook and was offered a 5k race and Max Payne videogame, Facebook knows I did a half marathon a few months ago and play games. This isn’t a bad thing per se, I see advertisements I might actually care about, but wait… think for a second. Where do you do the majority of your Facebooking? (Yeah it’s a verb now too.)

If you’re like me (a regular Joe really) then you have a smart phone like half the population does now. This probably means you have a neat little Facebook app that gives you access to the whole experience in a very simple touch-screen manner, customised for that experience and buttery smooth compared to loading the Facebook site in a mobile browser. So how much advertising have you ever seen in your mobile Facebook experience? That would be a big fat zero right.

If you’re an iPhone or Android user you have a pretty slick Facebook app which serves all the functions of the site but would be completely ruined by an advertising panel. I’m a Windows Phone 7 user and although there is a Facebook app it’s a blue moon before I use it as Facebook is tied into the OS all over, I can pop anything straight on Facebook without having to leave my current context, be it a photo, some music, mid messaging conversation, so there’s clearly no room for advertising there either. It seems like a big loss of money if the 3 leading smart operating systems can’t generate ad revenue for Facebook. Mobile is big, very big and only getting bigger, vast numbers of people are switching to using a mobile device for the majority of their online life. One look at the graph below will show you how much Facebook’s “page-views” have decreased and how it’s hit their revenue. Yet their number of users continues to grow, so it’s an artefact of platform transference amongst users and Facebook's inability to capitalise on that in any real way so far.

And this is how I think we’ve got to "App Center", Facebook’s senior execs got worried, they could see that pattern emerging, see they were gaining nothing from it and had to react. So a platform was designed to tie into the many millions of apps Facebook currently has, surely a smart move as those apps already have many millions of users. Apps tied into your Facebook social experience exist on all the smartphone platforms but historically it hasn’t been particularly easy to find these. Facebook connect and its ability to get you playing with or competing with your existing list of friends is a really great proposition, far better than Apple’s laughable game center for example. Would you really be playing Draw Something so much if you couldn’t just jump into games with your Facebook friends? At launch this isn’t going to generate any revenue for Zuckerberg and crew as such, it will of course be linking to apps that are on other store fronts, iOS, Android Market, etc.

In the long run though it’s that targeted data that I mentioned earlier that could swing this in their favour. If you boot the App Center and it offers you 5 recommendations on your smartphone platform that you’re genuinely interested in the you’ll probably buy them at some point. Facebook know’s what you like so it will offer you accurate recommendations. This means their conversion rate in the app center is going to be really high and in the long run they’ll be able to cut deals with the providers of those actual app stores to make kick backs on each app purchased using those referral links, thus they magically start making money out of mobile. In this way App Center is an advertising vehicle but it’s not in the form of some sort of annoying ad, it’s an app selection assistant linked to the ecosystems you’re already invested in that will seem personal to you.

So are they just going to offer you other people’s apps? It doesn’t seem like there’s enough money to be made there to justify that. Well no, Facebook has its own apps of course, usually taking the form of web apps that you play in your browser. They’re usually small freemium titles, Zynga really capitalised on this market for example with Farmville etc. Would people like to play these on their mobile without having a poor smartphone browser trying to compensate for not being a desktop PC? Of course they would. This is the other fork of Facebook’s plan for app center, they’ll also offer mobile optimised versions of their webapps. You’ll likely have to be connected to play just like the original web browser app but the experience will be mobile optimised, running within App Center, so you can continue your experience regardless of what device you’re on. Currently it seems that this is a longer term plan and seeing paid-for web apps in this context could be a way off but it would certainly be a revenue stream.

How the platform owners themselves will react to this should be interesting to see too. Google have no trouble allowing other stores on Android, after the Android license has been paid for usage of the OS on a device the manufacturer and owner of the device are free to install whatever app stores they like. Apple, however have not allowed this historically, their ecosystem is tightly woven into their i devices and the Apple App Store is the only way to buy apps on the device. Some companies have switched to creating web apps that execute as well as any native app through the Safari browser to circumvent this but the idea of the App Center taking payments for people to gain access to web apps right on Apple’s device will illicit some sort of response. Apple have tried to staunchly avoid this kind of in app payment system in any kind of app previously, if it happens on an Apple device is has to go through Apple. This is Facebook we’re talking about here though, the reason many people buy an iPhone in the first place, if anyone can cut a deal with Apple they can.

One thing is for sure, Facebook will be attempting plenty of strategies like this over the next year to maximise their return from that mobile market. They’ve been slow to react to it up until this point so the response now will be a quantum shift in their thinking and it should be interesting to watch.

Another month and another monthly mind cleansing Grinds My Gears.  Earlier this month I read a news article that really rattled my cage. Schools are being urged to introduce more ‘female friendly’ physical education lessons into the national curriculum.

Now, when I was in high school, and I’m talking seven years ago now, my understanding of physical education was that it was physical. It was a lesson that incorporated putting into practice what you learnt about how the body works, repairs and can be conditioned. However, it appears that over the years it has changed to be a lesson on learning who kissed who, looking cool and being lazy.

The WSFF (Woman’s Sport and Fitness Foundation) want to introduce activities such as Zumba, the new Latin dance craze that is sweeping the nation, and rollerblading to young girls P.E. lessons. Personally these sound too much like a cop out of sport and exercise. Now I’m not completely cold hearted, I understand that secondary school can be a hard time for some girls and that they are finding themselves and don’t always feel completely comfortable in their skins. However British kids are the heaviest in Europe, there are always new debates on introducing healthy school dinners, increasing tax on sugary snacks and drinks. It is just common knowledge that you should exercise as well as eat a balanced diet to stay at a healthy weight. Modern British kids have got a lazy diet as well as a lazy lifestyle.

Another big part of P.E. is learning how to work as a team, and heightening your competitive drive. These are both characteristics that young girls are going to need and demonstrate when they leave school and enter working life. Within the digital industry, you need to demonstrate a focus to go one better than your competitors, push the boundaries further. To achieve these goals you need to be a key member in a team that share your goal values. All aspects of a digital project are vital, from the initial immersion sessions and briefing to the coding and go live. Pulling together as a team and having a “make it happen” attitude is something that will get you far in the industry, especially for women in this predominantly male industry. Demanding equality in the workplace and simultaneously disadvantaging girls at a key stage in development is a contradiction in terms. The easy way out is not usually the path to success.

The irony with this laziness rant is that I am in the business of making processes easier for people. In a way you could say that I am helping make society lazy.  Peoples lifestyles are all turning mobile, everyone is looking for new ways of altering their lives to be quicker and easier which is great and hugely positive. But even those in the industry know the importance of getting physical, playing a good old fashioned team sport or going for a run. Something that still involves some proper athleticism, not just exercising your fingers updating a Facebook status during PE.

Because, encouraging already dangerous levels of laziness in kids is, my fellow class mates, what really Grinds My Gears.

Eurgh, it's a very wet Third Thursday!

The Office Spring Clean - when it was sunny (once).

Other links referenced...

• 4Music & Capri-Sun
• Tap & Say - iPhone App
• Mobile Downloads Milestone

GIVE YOUR WEBSITE A LIFT

Your website is now live. It is targetted, user friendly, with a strong identity and you proudly declare, “it's doing its job brilliantly”. Until you find out that after a simple Google search, it is languishing somewhere at the bottom of the 7th page.

Why is that?!

You simply missed a step. The SEO step. So what is Search Engine Optimisation all about? There is obviously a lot of literature and experts in the field, but I thought it would be helpful to give an overview of some of the basis.

In a nutshell, SEO helps your website earn more visibility by rising up search engine’s ranking of pages. How do you achieve it? There are a few key areas to consider as they all influence SEO.

WORK YOUR COPY

The quality of your copywriting takes an important place in SEO as it's what Google itself scans when it reads your website. Which in turn determines whether your web is more or less related to the search and what its ranking ultimately becomes. 

Think carefully about your URL

Does it contain the main keywords that summarise your proposition? Is it nice and short? Easy to remember? Is the location of your target important enough to go for a .co.uk rather than a .com? All these questions need to be thought about carefully.

Metatags, Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Within the header of your html code you should place a meta div to hold a short description of your website as well as selected keywords. Avoid using the same keywords for every page: mix it up so it relates directly to the page it’s on.

Find quality keywords

There are some tools you can use to check the most popular keywords and to compare their popularity on the web: Google’s Keyword Tool and Google’s Insights for Search. You might think, let's take the 5 most popular ones, but the most popular will probably have a lot more competition. Ideally you want something that lots of people are searching for, but hardly anyone has optimised for. If you are a small fashion boutique, selecting "clothes" will not give you much credit. You can't realistically expect to compete with Topshop, H&M and all these mega fashion stores. Instead, you might consider "independent fashion shop" or "fashion boutique". Focus on your added value, price, quality, services. Anything that can set you apart from your competitors.

MULTIPLY LINKS

How do users make their way to your website? In real life, you make contacts, impress them and they recommend you. They ‘redirect’ people to you. On the Internet it's the same, but with links.

From website to website

Other websites might be interested in what you’re doing and link to you. And if the websites that link to you are trusted and respected, the better quality the link will be and the more Google will value it. Essentially it’s like someone voting for you: but if the person who is voting is Dior then that will carry a lot more weight than a site nobody has heard of or ever visits.

Social media

You don’t need to rely solely on begging people to add a link to you from their site, social media can also do a pretty good job for you. Twitter, Facebook and many others help redirect users to your website. When people read an interesting post, they’ll gladly follow the link. People will have a look at your website from there and share it with their friends. They might even “Google +” it, which makes you literally jump up the ranks. To summarise, the more traffic you generate thanks to link-throughs, the better ranking you'll get.

Blog and newsletter

Brilliant, you now have plenty of quality websites linking to you. But what’s the point of all your efforts if your Bounce Rate (the percentage of traffic that comes to one page on your site and then leaves without navigating elsewhere) is reaching the sky and your users’ time on the site is low? You have to create reasons for your users to come back. Refreshing content is not enough, you need to develop loyalty. If you have an online weight-loss programme, a dedicated newsletter with a special offer might boost your percentage of return visits, a weekly article about a great success story might grab people’s attention, testimonials are always great to read and share. Something that makes you rock and up to date. This will drive people's interest and engage your target audience so they keep coming back.

 AVOID DISAPOINTMENT

Ages to load

What would you do if you were waiting for a page to load for 15 seconds? Three seconds online is already too long. After a long sigh you’ll leave the page. Don’t lose quality because of poor hosting or enormous images that take forever to appear.

Page errors

When a link to your site is posted elsewhere, you need make sure that the links are up to date. If you want Google to take you seriously you’ll have to apply a no-broken-link policy. Same thing goes for your broken pages. Making your 404 page look nice might keep your users happy, but sadly Google doesn’t care: it just sees an error 404.

Where is your content?

Even before starting the design process of a website, you need to define your objectives from an SEO perspective. This will help inform the architecture of the site. What pages need to be surfaced earlier and which are less important and can be found deeper in the navigation. Google reads your primary, secondary, tertiary navigation differently and will rank your website according to its information hierarchy. Surfacing your key content will also help users to find what they want quickly. That's two birds with one stone.

To summarise, Google takes into consideration four key areas when deciding how it ranks pages: 

• The credibility you create via your Link-Through Rate and the traffic it generates on your website.
• The engagement you foster by encouraging people to re-visit.
• The relevance of your website defined by the quality of your content and keywords. 
• The quality of your website by providing a nice user experience: no broken links, quick load-time, easy and straightforward information architecture.

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But have you ever wondered whether it will always be this way? Will there be a time when people stop using traditional search engines altogether? 

Think about it: when you want to find how to get somewhere, you open Google Maps. When you want to buy an affordable lamp you visit IKEA. Want to listen to music? Spotify. Do we even need to search anymore: when we can just go to our trusted online places? Does this herald the end of Google a few years down the line?

I was arguing this point with a friend who believes the exact opposite will happen. Yes, we are getting better at finding what we need without always searching for it first, but what search gives us is the ability to explore and push what we already know. You may go to your favourite bakery to buy your favourite pastry every day, but sometimes it’s nice to try all the apple pies from nearby bakeries, too, just in case.

Just over a year ago we released our first app into the App Store and Android Market under our own brand. Since then we have released many more and at one year we can report downloads of 2,114,510 with roughly 5% conversion on iOS and 2% conversion on Android. We’ve also seen month on month growth and some enormous spikes when we have managed to chart highly for a period of time. During those times we were looking at 25 000 downloads per day!

We have a dedicated team in our Bangkok office working on updates to these apps and further titles. This team more than pays for itself each month and made it to profit after 6 months.

Click on the icons below to see a list of all our apps current available on Apple and Android

1. Make something people want
I know, crazy! This might seem blindingly obvious but we get a lot of proposals from people where this simple rule has not been followed. The key is to make something people are already searching for. It's ok if there are other apps doing reasonably well in your category. Research how well they are doing and, if you believe you can, build something better. Better doesn't have to mean more features. Our preference is to target simpler than the competition but offer a better user experience. You get maximum ratings love for good UX.

2. Optimise your app name & keywords
If the title of your app and its core keywords match the terms your potential customers will be searching for you will start getting traction due to a better ranking position. Having an off the wall funky name comes with a serious health (and marketing budget) warning!

3. Make some of it free
Releasing a free app with in-app purchase has been the most successful method for us. Let people try the app and, if they find it useful, a good percentage will decide to upgrade. While this works well it can confuse some users who expect to pay up front for the app. To satisfy both you can do two versions. Free with in-app purchase and straight paid for. You should release the paid one first, then follow up with the free to create more buzz.

4. Localise
Translate your description, keywords and screenshots into different languages. There are companies who can do this for you. It may also make sense to build a localised version of your app as well but I would wait until you have been successful in English first.

5. It’s the freaking weekend!
Launch your app at the start of the weekend. As a new app on the scene you get a bit of a promotional boost on new app listings. The weekends (especially around holiday seasons like Christmas) are natural spikes in App Stores so the combined effect is pretty impressive to get things started. Then make sure you release regular updates, ideally once every month or two. You don’t have to change much, fix a few bugs; maybe tidy up some design elements but the release of an update also gives you a promo lift. Remember to request a developer release date and publish at the start of the weekend.

PS Because you have been so good and read this far here is a seriously hot tip! Sign up as an Apple affiliate and always link to your app using that url (for example, look at the link on the Apple icon I added above).

Even if the user clicks but does not install your app you will still receive a percentage of anything that user then spends in the App Store for the next 3 days. Free money!

This month I’m dedicating Grinds my Gears to something that annoys me 100%. That means it annoys me to the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM. No more of me can be wound up because there is no higher percentage. No, it is not possible to annoy me 110% or 150% or any other higher percent than 100 because that is the limit for me to offer. If I were to use a higher percentage then I would be lying, it just wouldn’t make any sense. It would make me sound like I didn’t understand how percentages work. So why on earth do people find it necessary to go over the 100% limit when trying to express themselves?

Whenever I hear someone say "I give 110%" it makes me want to scream. What do you do stick an extra arm on yourself and give that?

When I’m watching the X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent and Simon Cowell says to a grandma with a dancing dog, "A billion percent YES”, I want to yank his high trousers up even higher and give him the biggest wedgie ever seen.

When I’m playing netball I get asked to “Give 150% for this last quarter” I think well if you're going to go over 100% why stop at 150%? Why not ask me to give a gazillion percent? You obviously don't want me to try that hard. 

Using an impossible percentage doesn't actually mean anything, it just makes the person saying them sound stupid. In fact the business world, especially marketing, is full of people and companies trying to big themselves up with annoying sayings and phrases that, in my opinion, just sound ridiculous and make me think they are full of crap. So why do people insist on using them?

A goldmine for this is The Apprentice, a show full of driven young professionals too busy trying to come up with bullsh*t quotes, that they don't focus on what they are actually supposed to be doing. A girl on the last series announced “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit if there are footprints on the moon” Which I found hilarious! Not only do you sound like an idiot but what are you actually saying? You want to fly to the moon? You'll need more than Sir Alan’s £250k to do that I'm afraid. The extent to which these exaggerated sayings and arrogance is becoming accepted (and almost expected) really hit me yesterday when I saw an article in the Metro about a bloke who had that very "sky's the limit" quote tattooed all up his arms. Don't encourage these people!!!

In a business sense I'm sure at some point we've all found ourselves sitting in a meeting listening to people use phrase after phrase of meaningless sayings and their point is lost amongst all the crap. And I just think, in a cynical time when everyone appreciates honesty and wants to save time and money, just get to the point. Don’t fluff it up. Don't think "outside the box". Be original. Don't "push the boundaries". Take a risk. Don't "harmonise the brand experience". Be consistent. And most of all, don’t tell obvious lies that make you look stupid. If you're going to try your very best at something, rather than say I’m going to give 110%, say that you're going to do your very best and I might actually believe you.

Because stupid sayings that we now accept as standard is what really Grinds my Gears. And you can trust me on that 110%.

A fascinating new 175 page report by agency Dare, takes a look at a load of research from a variety of sources and gives a snapshot of how we, as Britons, behave digitally. We thought it would be helpful to pull out some of the key themes and what this might mean for the industry – just in case you don’t have time to read all 175 pages yourself!

How important is “the internet” in Britons’ lives?

If you work in this industry, as most of our subscribers and blog readers do, the tendency is to imagine the whole world connected at all times. But then when you think about it, you probably think that the internet is probably far less important if you’re a Welsh sheep farmer, for example. And you’d be right. But nevertheless, in the UK 30 million of our 62 million population go online every day. On average, we each spend 28.5 hours a month online. And a whopping 45% of internet users in the UK do so on their mobile devices.

Think about it. Nearly half of your users will access your site at some point on a mobile. For those who aren’t too bothered yet about how their sites render on a mobile device, perhaps the time is right to think again? (Incidentally, talk to us – we can help).

Battle of the sexes

The internet – it’s a geeky thing, right? And girls aren’t often geeks. Wrong. In the UK more women are online than men (51.3% vs 48.7%). What’s more, women are heavier users of the internet: UK housewives spend almost half their leisure time online.

In fact women spend significantly more time on social networks, online gaming and shopping online, as well as using email and instant messaging. Men trump women on sports, cars, watching videos and using search engines (women preferring to use social networks to get advice and information).

The next generation

What can we say about those Britons who have never known a life that isn’t connected? Not surprisingly, they are becoming more connected than ever before with 41% of 12-15 year olds having internet in their bedrooms, up from 10% in 2009. 35% of this group also own a smartphone.

Back in the day, computers were for browsing information online, the TV was for watching programmes and movies, and mobiles were for calling or texting your mates. Nowadays, people only spend 32% of their time on mobiles speaking or texting. In fact, even calling your mobile a ‘phone’ is a bit misleading; it would be like calling the outfit you are wearing, your ‘trousers’.

There is no suggestion that kids will watch less TV shows in the future, but the devices that they access this content will blur. Children said that they would miss the internet more than they would miss TV given the choice, but that is probably because they can do everything they need to: from social networking to catching up on a TV show or watching a movie, through the internet.

It’s entertainment, Jim, but not as we know it

In fact, as internet-enabled TVs become the norm, so disruption to the viewing experience will start to take, and probably in ways that we haven’t thought about yet. Increasingly all devices will be able to do all things. Approximately 1/3rd of UK viewers watch TV on their computers or mobile device.

We’ve said for a while that the use case will determine the medium. So, the traditional TV will be a large screen that sits in a family room for enjoying shared entertainment with friends and family; tablets and laptops will be for a personal experience (either you don’t want to disturb something else that is going on in the home, or you are out and about) or may act as a way of enhancing the viewing experience by providing games, information and interaction around another event. Mobiles will be more of the same but naturally lend themselves more to cases where people are on the move. All devices will talk to each other and pull content from the Cloud into logical collections of content based on user preferences.

Apple vs Android

Apple’s strength in the Smartphone market is partly why it is also the most valuable company on the planet. But, the adoption of Android is something to behold. We’re finding that the vast majority of sales of our apps in Asia are on Android devices. Globally, there are now 300million handsets and growing: 700,000 new Android devices are activated every day. That’s the equivalent of twice the population of Cardiff on a daily basis, switching to Android.

Interestingly, search behaviours are different when people access their computers and when they are on their smartphones. Smartphone users won’t go beyond the first page of search results and also tend to search with a brand in mind. This gives an advantage to companies you have heard of, rather than lesser-known companies selling the same type of products.

In fact, mobile search has quadrupled in the last year and that has resulted in an increase of mobile retail traffic of 181%. Yet, 83% of users report problems ordering goods and services on a mobile. It seems that brands haven’t yet really woken up to the importance of mobile: they still see it as a lesser priority especially at a time when everyone is watching costs and investing carefully. But this is missing a trick. Having a site that doesn’t fall over on a mobile is one thing, but having a mobile site that has been designed from a UX-perspective with the mobile user in mind is a different thing. It’s the difference between saying you are a child-friendly restaurant because you have a battered old high-chair in the back or going the whole hog and having a child’s menu, a soft-play area and a clown who wanders around performing magic tricks. The only thing is, in today’s world, we all need to be child-friendly (or mobile-friendly to bring the analogy back on track).

Next time we’ll look at more of the report: specifically drilling down on the way people behave online.

You can download the full report, Digital Britain - the truth about we live tody through technology, here.

Boom, it's Third Thursday! (actually fourth... oops!)

Links referenced...

• Winsor & Newton Facebook Competition
• 4Music - The Crush
• Thoughts on SXSW
• And we forgot we also re-launched Oxygen Finance!

So this month for some unknown reason I put my hand up and volenteered to do "grinds my gears". It's taken longer than expected to find something that actually annoys me but here it is... the subverting of hackathons into investment competitions.

What is a hackathon? In its purest form its a gathering of geeks where you get together, share ideas and build something you find interesting. Ideally you make new friends, team up and help each other to get something in a good enough state that it can be shown working. This is hacker / maker culture in action.

Now there are many different kinds of hackathons. Some are community driven like barcamp or Super Happy Dev House, others are company sponsored like Google hack days. Then there are more business or ideas focused ones like Startup Weekend. All are awesome in thier own way.

So what's my beef? My issue is recently I've seen more events with more emphasis on pitching where the prize is the carrot of seed stage investment. While this may seem like a good thing it changes the vibe of the event for me. Many of us are not really interested in investment or incubation we just want to make friends and hack. If you are ready for investment it's not hard to find and connect with the right people.

Thinking about it from the investor's perspective I can understand it makes sense to host these events. You have money you wish to invest in technology startups. What better way then to invite a load of geeks to come and compete to build startups out of thin air then pick the winners. But if this is the motive lets call it what it really is. It's a pitching / investment / recruitment competition.

Also it should be clear from the events website what the deal for the "winning" team really is. How much equity is expected in return for the investment, what other strings are attached. All too often these questions are left unanswered and that is what grinds my gears.

Hold on! Rather than moan I think it's time I did something positive about it. We haven't had a Super Happy Dev House in Bangkok yet so I'm volenteering to organise one in April (date and location TBC). Lets get back to old school hacker culture. You bring your laptop, we will provide food, beer and enough coffee to keep you awake till the morning. Have fun, make friends, code on whatever you like, just leave the elevator pitch at home.

If you are in Bangkok, tell us which weekend works best for you.