We are trying something new (and foolish?) this month for our Third Thursday newsletter by putting together a video of codegent news. Just click on the player above to get the lowdown on what the agency has been up to recently and let us know what you think!

Our new office in Bangkok

Other links referenced...

• Our latest web app - Dash
• New launch - Pownum
• New launch - Hoxton Hotel
• David Heinemeier Hansson presents "Rework" - BIMA
• Tools to help publish, monitor & grow your social media presence - Social Media Monday
• To get in touch on our Away Day (Friday 21 May) email support@codegent.com
• Circus Training!
• We are hiring a developer & a senior project manager

We all get to that point, two or three years after launching our ecommerce website, sales growth isn't want it used to be, new customer acquisition is faltering, the site has lost its "magic". Yet we're all terribly busy maintaining it. How did this happen? How did our wonderful source of revenue become well, stagnant?

Don't fear Stagnation

Stagnation is a natural part of any system lifecycle. After the initial jump in growth you experience after implementing a new ecommerce offering, your ability to sustain it is limited. The features and quick wins that you achieved are already out there, you focus on ensuring the visitors are catered for and most of your effort goes into the day-to-day operations of running your site. Coming up with the Next Big Thing is increasingly hard. Frequently more money is pumped into Marketing, vastly increasing your cost per acquisition because your site simply isn't converting like it once was.

However, when you realise your site has stagnated, this becomes a wonderful opportunity for change.

Featuritis

Featuritis is a symptom, rather than a cause of Stagnation. Featuritis is a term coined by Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger on User Experience, to describe what happens to software when new features are continually added.

Thanks Kathy for allowing re-use of your work

She describes the point of the Happy User Peak, the point when there is just enough functionality to please the user, without leaving them wanting more, or conversely, reaching for the instruction manual.

However, after the initial stage of growth, it's very easy to get into the mindset of adding new features, sections and functionality to your site to help maintain the growth you've achieved.

Without pragmatism, not just from you but your Board, and quite importantly, your Helpdesk, you can easily find yourself responding to users' demands through continuous developments. Multiple exotic payment options, unnecessary wishlist & comparison pages, complicated delivery options and "me too" social media integration are just a few of the ways to add complexity that can frustrate a large percentage of your audience.

Operational vs Strategic

After successfully running an ecommerce operation for a year or so, it's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day operational tasks. Content creation (certainly for smaller shops), catalogue management, helpdesk management, can all make you lose site of the vision of your ecommerce store.

Econsultancy, back in the day, created an incredibly useful map of the tasks that need to be undertaken to run an ecommerce store. Taking the ACRA model - Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Analytics - these can easily be carved into a series of remits for you and your team.

If you find yourself consistently working on the Operational side of the business, with no time to work on the Strategy & Planning, then we have a problem. Not only are you not keeping an analytical eye on your competitors, you are also unable to focus on your vision and drive innovation - a quick route to stagnation.

Don't be reactionary

So, you've sat down with your Board, and said "I think our site has stagnated". My aren't you brave! There's often a compelling urge to scrap everything and start again, to rebuild from scratch and let's do it better this time.

However this is not only costly, but unnecessary and dangerous. Within larger organisations a considerable amount has been invested in integration, certainly with fulfillment and CRM.

Remember when you conducted Stakeholder Interviews at the start of your project? Do it again with your Board. Find out what the current perceived failings are - these won't just be quantifiable like sales and average transaction value, but emotional failings as well. Once you know this, then you can work on how to improve it.

A platform's just a platform

I'm not sure if everyone will agree with me on this!

Ultimately, a platform is just a way of skipping over building a database, business logic and an API yourself. If you've chosen a platform, then you were probably sold on features, but the real issues such as cost, integration, administrative overhead and scalability were why you bought it.

But do your customers care one jot what platform you use? Does your platform choice directly affect the experience that they have? Of course not. Which is why in most cases, a few pragmatic steps is all that it takes to get you back on track.

1) Understand what matters

Why do people actually visit your website? Do you know? We'd love to think that they're there to Buy Buy Buy! but often that simply isn't the case. What's going through their minds? What's their motivation? Are you catering for this, not only in your site content but in your marketing?

If you'd like to read more about this, here's a post on user-psychology I wrote for Econsultancy.

Just as we measure Conversion Rate, we can also measure how often users are able to do what they came to your site to do - a "Task Completion Rate". Remember that not every visitor comes to your site to shop. Just as we do when we enclose a Checkout, when your visitor knows what they want to achieve, your site should get out of the way and let them do it.

There are a number of tools to let you measure Task Completion Rate - predominantly based around user surveys. The most popular is called 4Q from iPerceptions and takes the form of a pop-under survey.

You can then measure your Task Completion Rate amongst a sample of your visitors and see in which areas you can improve. You may of course, have a site that doesn't cater to your users' needs. They may be looking for a store finder, or an offers section, or something that isn't currently in your strategy. In which case...

2) Go back to your IA

During the information architecture process, you should have come up with 3-4 user personas, with needs and wants and clear goals and motivations. However, if your site is failing, then either a) the personas are incorrect (which can certainly happen when these aren't based on user research) or b) the personas aren't being catered for. Either way, when visitors use your site "in anger", they will become frustrated and leave.

Once you have catalogued the objectives and motivations of your user personas, you need to see how well your site fits these. If you don't feel that the site fits, or your personas are wrong, then you should conduct a new round of user research. I always recommend doing this in the user's homes, so you can see the environment in which they interact with you, and the discussion becomes more of a "chat" than a survey, but this isn't always possible.

3) Simplification

Once you have a newly defined set of goals and objectives, you can simplify your site design to cater to these. John Maeda has a wonderful book called the Laws of Simplicity in which he states 10 (well, 9) laws that you can apply to any design or process to make it simpler. For example, whilst you can't remove elements that some users may find useful, you can Hide or Shrink them in the design. You can use this process to not only rationalise your product taxonomy, but also rationalise your language.

A case in point here, on a site I once worked on we had 12 different methods of getting help, none of which were labelled "Help".

4) Take time out

Pause, breathe and have a sit down.

As I said before, when you hit this point, it's very easy to run around, firing & hiring agencies and switching platforms in an urge to have something new. You can do this, sure, but it's not very Strategic is it? You need to take a little time out.

5) Visit some aliens

Go and visit another ecommerce operation, that has nothing to do with your business. You'll see that they have the same processes as any other business, a helpdesk, customer returns, a CRM strategy - but by doing this you can not only gather ideas, but share skills and see how their success can be adapted for you use.

6) Think strategically

Work out what makes you money. Start from "we receive money from our customers by" and work backwards from there. Look at your net margin, and what's actually driving value. See how you can align this with your customer's objectives, simplifying the process and creating an engaging experience, and you're onto a winner.

There are 2 things that you want to avoid when a user lands on your site; firstly scaring them off with too much copy, secondly not giving them enough information to enable them to use your website or even understand what you do. 

A video is a great compromise; it can explain your proposition in seconds whilst simultaneously increasing accessibility and engagement. Creating, producing and editing a professional quality video seems like a daunting task but in reality, with the right tools, it isn’t as hard as you might think.

We’re going to give you an overview of why video is a valuable asset for any site, and why we believe After Effects is the best product for the job.

The Importance of Video

Why a video? From information-lead films to arty stop motions, video allows direct, fluent and human communication. It could be shown on the landing page of your website and allow you to present your business in an instant. It can also be used to reach out from your site to create buzz around your marketing campaigns. 

Why After Effects?

Improving your video 
There are a myriad of tools that After Effects gives us. It allows us to remove all evidence of camera shakes, increase contrast, modify luminosity to bring out gorgeous colours and so much more. Visual and matting effects can also be applied to improve the look and feel you want to give to the video. Alternative video editing programmes, Premiere or Final Cut can handle most of these improvements just as well but what makes After Effects better is that it doesn’t stop there...

Tracking function, total symbiosis
We can create a multi-layer composition by integrating other videos, photos, texts or vector graphics into your video. Notice I said "integrating", beware, adding is one thing, integrating is another. Thanks to the tracking function, we can follow a point moving on the 'master' video and apply this movement to the new item we have layed on top. From this comes the impression of symbiosis, graphics follow the movement of the camera perfectly, they really feel part of the video.

The Third Dimension
After Effects now takes your video production to the third dimension. The 3D mode allow you to create a virtual camera over your composition, to allow you to change your point of view. You have complete control over this virtual camera, being able to configure the lens length, image area size, and aperture. This powerful tool makes it quick and easy to incorporate several lights with shadows and define their intensity, all of which will take your video new level of dynamism.

High Quality Manipulation 
With After Effects, time can be stretched and/or reversed. But crucially it will also smooth out the jerkiness usually associated with this sort of effect when it is applied with Final Cut or Premier. 

After Effects is integrated
After Effects works seamlessly with other Creative Suite software such as Illustrator, Photoshop (including it’s 3D layers), Flash, Premiere Pro and other QuickTime-based software. You can even import and manipulate audio files and render them in high quality in real time. It is even possible to export the composition from After Effects to Flash, to then make it interactive. Whatever the project needs, this level of integration gives you the flexibility to port your content across different software.

Fit the Web

Be versatile & be connected
After Effects contains an export module which will optimise your video for the web. With a couple of clicks you can export your film to web-friendly formats like QuickTime, AVI or MPEG-4, making it easy to put your video onto your website, blog, Youtube, Vimeo etc.

Mobile accessibility 
The latest version of After Effects integrates mobile-device authoring into its workflow and multi-device previews for most phones and PDAs. With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones, thinking about how to reach people on their mobiles is becoming a close second to reaching people on their PC's.

Video is a fantastic and popular way to reach and engage with people and any tools that help us do that better get the Codegent seal of approval!

The most exciting election in years finally came to an end this month. I didn't hear about our new Prime Minister on the radio, TV or the morning papers, I first heard the news, via a tweet. This seemed to be a fitting way to find out about the outcome of Britian's first Social Media Election. In this post I am going to talk about the various digital initiatives the 3 major parties put into place throughout this election but also, more crucially, the various digital initiatives which everyday people put in place.

The Tory's Cash Gordon website is an example of how dirty politics can go so wrong in this world of social media. The site was planned to be a social media game where Tories were given points for performing tasks such as recruiting friends and reading news articles. If the idea seems a little strange to your marketing ears, that is because this site was shoehorned into a site originally built by the Republican strategists David All Group. It was actually developed to galvanise opposition to Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. Several campaigns have been built into this template without really making any changes. Have a look at no energy tax to see how much customisation a $15,000 pricetag, gets you.

Blatant copying isn't even the biggest oversight of this campaign. As you will notice, it automatically pulls in any tweets with the Hashtag #cashgordon. This is all well and good if people agree with you, but it was only a matter of time before people were tweeting things like "Tories taste like cocks #cashgordon". They really didn't think that through.

So far the Tories aren't scoring high in the 'understanding social media' stakes, but wait, it gets worse. Moments later it was worked out (by people arguably more technologically savvy than the Tories) that html code could be sent via tweets, which would then run on the site. The first piece of code through the system declared in Large Red Type "David Cameron is a Cunt"... the next redirected the site to Rick Ashley's video "never gonna give you up" at this point the Tories were definitely rick rolled.

It was only a matter of time before someone tweeted some code to redirect the Cash Gordon site to a pornographic image of overweight gay OAPs. It was at this point the site was pulled off-line as the Tories went into 'damage limitation' mode. But the story doesn't end there, as far as social media is concerned, this was a triumph for the people who had sabotaged the site. And as often happens in cases like this, at this point the people of the social web move to the next stage, and start to create content. Within hours of this event there were hundreds of tweets / blog posts and satirical info graphics. Thus ensuring that this whole mess was spread even further around the web. One massive own-goal to the Tories.

Record numbers turned out for this election, I think this is down to the electorate being more informed about the candidates that they are voting for. The websites They Work For You and the Guardian's election 2010 site were able to strip away the legal language of the Parliamentary record, and tell you the voting record of any MP in simple terms For example, are they for or against the war on Iraq, are they for or against equal gay rights, and a dozen other key issues of the past 5 years. This meant for the first time "the man on the street" was informed enough to be able make their local member accountable for how they have voted on key issues important to them.

Voter Power finally put an end to the pub conversations which start with "it doesn't matter who I vote for". This site lays out in simple graphs how safe your local seat is, constituency size and percentage of discarded votes. I do wonder if this site was enough information for people from "Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough", (where they have the voting power of 0.253 of the Average UK resident) to "Afron" (where they have the voting power of 1.308 of the Average UK resident)

The site My Gay Vote was one of many niche sites which popped up informing voters on individual issues. All this information was delivered in bite sized chunks, designed to fit into 140 characters. As all campaigners tried to encourage the masses to share their message they became painfully aware that a tweet can move faster and is less accountable than a newspaper article. Negatively, depth of analysis is lost in a tweet culture where everything is reduced to black or white. Most of these sites don't show the source of their data and aren't "authorised" by a political party, which means that someone with a little Search Engine Optimisation experience can have an equal footing online.

Britain loves the underdog, and came out in force to defend Nick Clegg when he was attacked at the beginning of the campaign by the right wing tabloids. All over Twitter the ironic #nickcleggsfault Hashtag was attached to everything from "I have lost one of my socks #nickcleggsfault" to "Ash cloud is covering England again #nickcleggsfault". The irony of this is that when the parliament was hung and Nick Clegg assumed the role of King-maker, the #nickcleggsfault Hashtag made a resurgence, this time without the irony.

In a digital landscape where MP's records are easily digestible and where constituents are vocal in announcing their views and influencing their followers, does this mean people are going to stop voting along party lines and continue the march away from the two party system?

Guerilla Marketing campaign

In a world where people have become almost completely de-sensitised to advertising in any traditional sense of the word, trying to infiltrate people's consciousness is an increasingly impossible task. Smart advertisers recognised that the way to combat this apathy was to get their message into places where people wouldn't expect to find them, making them impossible to ignore. This practice has become known as 'Guerilla' Marketing.

Guerilla Marketing is all about surprising people, breaking their concentration and making them have an unexpected and emotional reaction.

Pioneered in 1984 by Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerilla Marketing was originally intended to establish a new tactic for small companies to keep up with the big players. Since then even organisations like Nestle, BMW and Unilever have learned to appreciate the advantages of a well developed Guerilla Marketing campaign.

Enough of the theory; here are some of our favourite examples of Guerilla Marketing campaigns:

If you think the first image simply shows a woman carrying a crate of beer, you have been taken in by a successful Guerilla campaign! This crate, looking like it only weighs half a pound, is a shopping bag in disguise.

This should make you smile. Hundreds of people appear to be coming out of a Mini Cooper, when in reality it is a subway exit. Well done, BMW!

Vacuum cleaner producer Miele is proud that their products suck :-)

Mr Clean puts other zebra crossings to shame...

As you can see, Guerilla Marketing campaigns include giveaways so that on closer inspection people realise that they are being advertised to, but hopefully the pay-off in terms of entertainment means they don't mind. The key is to add something unexpected and exciting to a space, not consume it with a corporate and boring advertising message.
Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Here are 5 golden rules, which you should keep in mind when creating your own Guerrilla Marketing campaign:

1. Don't forget to define your goals
Although Guerilla Marketing is all about creativity and the element of surprise, it still needs to be planed thoroughly. You still need to know what to do, where to do it and what you want from it.

2. Know your audience
Guerilla Marketing is effective because it is provocative. This is why it can bypass the 'corporate' constraints of traditional advertising. However, you also have to carefully consider your audience's sense of humour, you want to be memorable but not offensive.

3. Provocative or offensive?

This carries on from the above point. Prompting a positive emotion is what any advertiser wants, but in the case of guerrilla marketing you don't have to focus on humour. Appealing to people's sympathetic emotions can be just as effective.

However, you do have to bear in mind that there is a very fine line between being emotive and being crude. This is a good example of a campaign that manages to straddle the line well:

4. Be brief
A Guerilla campaign should appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly. The mysterious and temporary nature adds to the effectiveness. In a nutshell, don't let the joke get old.

5. Do your research
Don't be caught out by any unforeseen issues:

• Permissions: You're not Banksy. Contact the responsible authorities and make sure you have got all permissions you need.
• Law: Know and obey the law. There are some crazy rules out there which you need to be aware of. For example, in Switzerland you are not allowed to dance on bank holidays. In Maine, USA it is forbidden to display Christmas decorations after 14th of January. And in Illinois, USA it is illegal to whistle in public on Sundays. Those are just some of millions of unbelievable laws that might constrain you and your work.
• Protests: Check the animal and eco friendliness of your campaign.

All in all, everybody enjoys a little surprise, a thought-provoking impulse or a reason to smile in his/her everyday life. Guerilla Marketing can turn ordinary and mundane activities, like watching people leaving a subway station, into entertaining events. Advertising can be fun for everybody, who'd have thunk?