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A letter was sent today from a coalition of representatives of employees in the creative industries, that is nicely covered here at the Guardian online.

Essentially, they are saying that the government and broadband providers need to clamp down on illegal file-sharing, as otherwise, jobs will be lost because of the lack of money to fund new music, TV, film and other creative content.

Right question, wrong answer.

Here are some things that the ‘rights’ industry can do to stop illegal file-sharing:

Allow all licensed TV content to be available online in the broadcaster’s on-demand system without limitation on time or format

We see media consumption behaviours where people treat file-sharing as their own personal video recorder (PVR). So rather than trying to remember to programme their Sky+ or V+ boxes to record the content, they just go online when they’ve missed it and watch it then. They might do this every week, or they might choose to ‘catch up’ on an entire series over a few days late on in its season run.

This is the one type of behaviour that consumers find easiest to justify morally. After all, they could have set their own PVR to ‘series record’ which would have enabled all of the above behaviour, so they see no difference between getting it from the hard disk of their SKY+ box, or a bunch of their peers who also want to catch up.  And there are benefits as well to the consumer of getting illegal content of this type in that it can be portable. How many people do you see on the train or at the airport watching content on their mobile device. Not all devices are easily supported by the on demand services and licensors are reluctant to release their content to go mobile. With illegal downloads consumers can move it anywhere they choose, and provided they only use it themselves and don’t sell it on, they see little moral issue with that.

There are rights licences that prohibit a local broadcaster from delivering over IP. So for example, the BBC may show something on TV, that then is not available on iPlayer. Or it is only available in a streaming format and not a download format. This is just encouraging the same behaviour as they again don’t see why it shouldn’t be available. In fact, they’re often upset that it’s not because they relied on it being there. I remember a recent series of Dr Who that we wouldn’t let the kids stay up to watch, so planned on watching it on iPlayer the next day… but it wasn’t there. No consumer understands why this should be the case.

They also don’t understand that when they miss the first two episodes of Ashes to Ashes (I’m not BBC bashing by the way, just they’re the shows I love and come easiest to mind!), and decide they’ll save them up for watching together just before the final episode airs, only to find that they can only watch last week’s episode.

Leverage the long tail, and make everything available for download purchase

Currently, there are artists missing out on royalties not because their work is being stolen, but because their publishers won’t make it available. In the old world, works were ‘deleted’ from the back catalogue, never to be issued on vinyl or CD again. When iTunes came along, we all believed that this would never be the case again, but I challenge anyone to go and find Freaky Realistic (best band that ever came out of Peckham), Half Man Half Biscuit (best indie band ever, Gawd rest John Peel), the Mighty Lemondrops… or of course The Beatles – I’m guessing you’ve heard of them? The only way to get any of these in digital format, is to buy a CD and rip it (in the case of the Beatles, and still also technically illegal in breach of mechanical copyright), or to download it from another charitable fan who wants to spread the love. in the case of the latter, again, the attitude of customers to this situation morally is that it’s fine. They don’t see any other way to get the content; and to be fair, there is no other way.

Well, there are two things going on here. The first is that the labels, either through contracts or other whims are not making available old back catalogue content. The second is that there are still artists and their management who are resisting digital; again for reasons that no consumer can understand.

If everything was available for legal download, through a variety of providers (we need more choice than just iTunes, and we need companies like Tesco Digital to get better support) then all of the reasons for customers to download that are outlined above go away.

Amazon’s whole business has been built on the concept of the ‘long tail’ the thought that they make everything available, and although they might only sell one copy of a particular book every year, there are millions of other books that they also only sell one of, rather than relying solely like the high street retailers do, on big new releases. iTunes is also doing well in this way, but the ‘long tail’ is longer than we all thought it was, and we need to get to the end of it as best we can at any rate.

Don’t make us pay twice, or even five times!

I have bought The Wizard of Oz five times over.

Two VHS copies, one was worn out, the other damaged by a small child. So then we got a DVD. One was lost, the next scratched to hell by small children and the final one is hanging on by a thread as it’s been through the Disc Doctor scratch repairer a couple of times now. Surely, I am buying the rights to watch a title, and not to own a physical object? The video and music industry have relied on new formats for years to revitalise their sales, and the advent of digital is bringing that model to an end. Once content is safely on the hard drives of their customers in HD format, then they have no need to re-purchase their content, except in the case of data loss (you see where working for a storage company finally comes in to this stuff eh?!). But equally, if I have purchased £100’s of titles from iTunes and have a hard disc crash and lose everything, iTunes knows what I’ve bought already. Why on earth should I have to pay again to re-download it? If they want to charge me a nominal fee to cover their bandwidth costs, that’s fine, but I object strongly to buying the same content over and over again.

This is why it’s so refreshing that Tesco Digital offer their ‘backup’ service, where once purchased, content can be downloaded whenever you want. We need more providers like this, and we need the rights holders to make this easier for digital music providers.

This is another reason that the consumers we talked to cited for downloading. They have no idea how to ‘rip’ a DVD so that their kids can watch it on TV, so instead of doing that, they download it. What’s the difference? I’m entitled under the licence for the DVD to back it up, so why can’t I get that backup from someone else? It’s the same content?

MAKE IT CHEAPER, make it easier and make it better

If there is more available in the catalogue, if you are making content incredibly easy to access, if you are offering people the chance to download instead of buying a PVR, then all of these increase the overall volume of people willing to pay for digital content. However, the price point is currently too high.

More volume, easier to access means the price can come down and still mean more money flowing in.

Why does track 8 on an album that the band threw in when they were short a track at the last minute, cost the same on iTunes as the 2 tracks that were number 1 hit singles across the world? If you think the album as a format is dying, it’s because iTunes is killing it! Whereas putting 20 tracks on an album used to be an artist’s way of making an album of more value to the purchaser, today they’re punishing them because it costs more!

Pricing is also anti-competitive. If someone like Tesco wanted to sell tracks at 39p each, or ‘bargain bucket’ albums for £4, they couldn’t because the labels won’t let them. Because iTunes carries so much weight, the labels don’t want to offer content for sale to anyone else cheaper for fear of upsetting iTunes. It is completely bizarre that I can walk into HMV or Sainsbury’s and pick up a CD or DVD for £3, but if I want to download that same content from iTunes it might cost as much as £10.

Finally, if you want to beat pirates, make it easier to get content, and offer more than they can; i.e. make the experience better.

Peer to peer filesharing and downloading is not an activity easily accessible to most computer users. When they do get it up and running, they are faced with a variety of different formats, and potentially having to do codec conversion and all sorts. If consumers can get content easily, they will pay a premium. If you can save a consumer 30 minutes of messing about then that’s immediately worth 25p-50p.

If you would rather they watch your version of Night At The Museum 1, then make it so it has interactive features and stuff that pirates simply wouldn’t be able to replicate. Formats like X-Box and Blu-ray offer that kind of opportunity for an interactive layer, that could easily be replicated onto desktop computers and portable devices, in such a way that it was impossible to pirate.

I would never watch a ‘cam’ recording of a film made by a guy in the cinema with a handheld video camera. Why not? Because it’s illegal? Well, sure, but mostly because it’s terrible quality. I would rather wait and pay for the DVD. The same principle applies, make all ‘official’ content high quality and an end to end experience.

Finally…

If the media industry addressed all of the points above, the market for illegal file-sharing would shrink to miniscule amounts. None of the scenarios outlined above are of consumers as criminals, but currently, technically, everything outlined above is an offence. Would you rather we go after these people? Or should we just make it easier for them to get content legally?

The longer the industry persist with the models they’ve been used to, the more reasons they create for people to actually download illegally, and the more consumers they turn into criminals. And rather like the old adage about soft drugs leading to hard drugs, if people are used to downloading Dr. Who because they missed it on Saturday, they’ll start to question why they shouldn’t download DVDs that they’ve never purchased, and will therefore begin stealing revenue away from the industry, whereas if they’d remained in a legal environment, this would never happen.

To paraphrase Billy Bragg from a Radio 4 discussion a few weeks ago, he said that the music industry’s commercial was fundamentally flawed – and he was talking about downloading and digital distribution. He said if it persisted it would die, and I agree with him.

What’s the alternative?

Well, they could load all of the responsibility for keeping their revenue streams intact on to us, the taxpayers. They could make the government and courts deal with offenders. They could put levies on our broadband service. All things that they are lobbying for.

But what this all ultimately does is make the consumer pay more and more for what is actually a problem the industry itself could solve if only they changed their thinking. I lobby the government to say no to these lobbyists, and encourage the unions to look back to their employers to solve these problems, not the government; after all it’s the employers in that industry that hold the ability and power to make these changes, and to dry up file-sharing forever.

The world I work in goes through phases of interest in a variety of themes (you could call them ‘fads’ but they’re not), services, or trends. In 2007 it was Second Life, in 2008 it was Facebook, in 2009 it is Twitter.

These phases of interest have a lifecycle:

1. low adoption, early interest – we start playing with something and start to speculate on what its potential might be
2. it goes mainstream inside the industry and we and a number of leading brands take it seriously and start generating value from it
3. it becomes ‘Conference-fodder’ and we start celebrating its potential in public
4. the press (either industry-specific or mainstream) get hold of it
5. we broadly understand it, and how to use and not use it, but by no means have we established the ‘rules’ or what is ‘best practice’ or what the specific measurable value is, but intuitively most of us can see it and have a good feel for how to do it and not do it
6. everyone wants to be an expert in the field, and suddenly we are overwhelmed with ‘experts’ in the medium because it’s obviously the trending topic that is about to go mainstream. We get dedicated conferences, even though we’ve already talked about it endlessly already, but of course we need these to help educate those who are just coming to it and want to understand it.
7. it becomes more widely understood – we and our customers understand clearly what its value is, how to do it well, and how to measure that value, and we find something else new to talk about.

At some point in this, the thing either goes mainstream, or it goes back to its former audience. Example: Facebook went mainstream, Second Life went back to its old community.

Where are we with Twitter? Well, we’re at stage 6. Everyone is a social media expert. Everyone still seems to talk about Twitter, even if there’s nothing new to say; but we do need to talk about it because there are still business as usual marketing and brand teams who don’t fully understand it and want help in establishing what ‘best practice’ means for them. So we should be moving from internalising our talk on Twitter within ‘the industry’ to externalising it to the people who need to know, and we should begin to define our specific expertise, are we behavioural experts, measurement experts, brand messaging experts, tools experts, or are we simply Twitter experts, who know all the tools, all the latest developments of the API and the latest on how people are using it?

However, we’ve missed some vital stuff out;

1 - We’re not helping brands establish ‘best practice’ - we’re just still harping on about how great, or frustrating, or inspirational it is. Twitter conferences are attended by the Twitterati, and we aren’t helping brands make sense of it, and people who have never used Twitter before are suddenly social media experts who want to help big brands despite the fact that they are only a couple of pages ahead of those brands (this is a huge area to claim expertise in), and their advice is largely based on intuition or casual observance. This means that the brands we work with are prone to influence by anyone who seems to be an expert regardless of their real credentials, and without an understanding of the value that they are expecting from that expert’s advice.

2 – Measurement – aside from an intangible brand affinity, and building emotional ties to a brand, what is the value of doing Twitter well? We haven’t yet sat down and isolated whether or not a good Twitter engagement will affect someone’s propensity to buy, or recommend or advocate a brand. We need this measurement to back up the advice we give clients, and real experts need this to provide evidence that they have given good advice.

So, what am I going to do about it?

Here’s my social media for the (brand) masses manifesto:

We will make Social Media ‘Business As Usual’ - Well, first, I’m never going to call my self a social media expert – instead I’m going to continue to be an Experience Director at a digital agency (my day job), helping design and create user experiences that flow seamlessly from channel to channel. Why wouldn’t that extend to Twitter? Well it does. A few years ago we decided that it was just as much our responsibility in the Total Experience Design philosophy, to consider customer interactions in store and in the call centre, so these other digital channels should be simply part of business as usual for anyone working in digital media; and it’s their job to understand them. We will still get specialists, in the way that we get usability, SEO and accessibility specialists, but the mainstream of agencies need to know a good deal more than their clients on any of these topics, and social media is included. (Interestingly, I have met some call centre experts, but I’ve never seen them on Twitter. Nor for that matter have they cold-called me on my home phone… )

We will go in pursuit of best practice – We did it for SEO, accessibility, usability, why won’t  we do it for social media? Yes, there’s a bunch of Top 10 ‘how to’ tips out there, but they’re full of subjective advice like “a sure fire way to lose followers is…” How do we know that? What’s the trade-off? Does losing those particular followers matter if we have certain objectives? We’ve got to evolve industry-wide advice, that it is accepted is based on good solid fact. Most of today’s social media experts rely on a single case study. One thing they did well, probably when Twitter was in its earliest days to drive their credibility. Now that the Twitter user base has changed, its usage profile has potentially changed, and our ‘experts’ need to be a mix of ethnographic observers of all social media users, they need to be statisticians and coders, able to use the API to find and predict patterns and behaviours, and they need to be brand and copy experts (NLP experts even), skilled in language, tone of voice and the art of emotional engagement and persuasion. My part in this? I will see what I can distil out of the ether, and our own more scientific studies of Twitter trends and behaviours, and industry behaviours, and contribute that to the mix in an open forum. Which means I’m going to need some of the following…

We will find measurement strategies and evidence – We’ve got to come up with some hard solid facts that back up our advice and the behaviours of the brands we work with. Measuring the value of engaging with users in social spaces is key in reassuring an Executive board that the advice we are giving is sound business sense, and not just because it will be a laugh! My part in this? I hereby commit to producing a solid, statistically sound study that puts a monetary value on Twitter users for a well known business; and I commit to doing that before the end of the year (well, don’t want to overdo it do we? Hopefully it will be sooner!)

We will not Tweet on… – Twitter conferences need to be for our clients. We have to show them best practice, measurement and tools. We have to give them evidence on what works and what doesn’t. If we as an industry talk about Twitter, it should be about driving best practice, measurement or tools. Let’s keep our own Twitter Tweeting between us, and aim and shape it constructively rather than trying to compete for followers against each other. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will never go truly mainstream and we’ll all be pondering why we spent so much time and effort talking about it, but equally it becomes inside our industry, the most powerful networking tool we have….

Ok, must go and read that Tweet Hugh Mcleod sent out yesterday titled “The Death of the Social Media Expert” – you might see this post revisited! :)

I’m not going to say much about this, as it’s not really material to make a lot of in a company blog; but I did want to record these pages, because you thankfully very rarely see it. Before I do, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and to the staff of Air France at this difficult time.

We’ve talked before about contingency planning for all businesses on the web. Sadly, Air France had to to activate their worst case contingency plan yesterday. The page shown here appears on surfing to airfrance.com, and provides a main link to a site about the disaster, then much lower priority links to the business as usual sites. Note that there is no branding, it’s very sober and the link to the disaster contingency site is very factual.

Thankfully most of us work in businesses where we are not faced with potential contingency situations that require such a sober response and our contingency planning can be a lot less complex. You can however, learn a lot from companies like Air France, who on the face of it did this very professionally and competently.

I’ve recorded the other sites where the announcement appears, and the contingency site as well – which lives on a completely different server from the main Air France site.

You’ll notice that all of the other Air France sites have a consistent and similarly sober link to the contingency site, and that the announcement itself is incredibly brief, and again, has no branding. See below:

A newer challenge is how to deal with other media outlets, particularly social media outlets. Currently, Air France’s 5 or 6 Twitter accounts are simply frozen where they were. Below is the French regional account, that has a fare promotion to New York. There are numerous Facebook groups and fan pages, below is one fan page. This again, is simply not updated. I guess that social media is new enough that for Air France, it has not made it into an updated contingency plan. Take the opportunity now to rectify this if you’re in the same position.

The advice for PR people planning this kind of contingency, is not to take control of all of the social media outlets, but rather to brief all staff who run Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. with a standardised message to put out on these channel in case of this kind of contingency. For this reason, it’s important also that anyone doing social media outreach ‘registers’ themselves with their PR team. You can action the implementation of that message in a global email to the whole company, making it easy to manage communications and timely action.

To those that run these sites and accounts, if you’re not getting any advice because your PR teams are tied up dealing with media, just put a straightforward factual message like the one on the first screenshot above with a link to airfrance.com and don’t update the site or account until you get some PR advice. Then take a look back at recent posts to see if there’s anything you might want to remove, even temporarily because it’s too lighthearted. Put yourself, as best you can, in the shoes of someone who has lost a family member to assess what is and isn’t appropriate. Do not attempt to provide a real-time update on the situation, leave that to the centralised information source on the main contingency site.

There’s a much harder question, which is should you allow comments and posts from users to continue? I think the answer to this one, is you should allow them to continue, but monitor very, very closely to see what is being said. There is a chance that they could create a misleading impression of what is actually happening, including much speculation about the causes or voices in the conversation that seem on the face of it to be informed, but actually are not speaking from a position of expertise or knowledge. If this is getting to the stage where there is serious misinformation, then taking the thread down would be an appropriate course of action – however, make it clear why you have done this (“to ensure that our customers get accurate and consistent information”) and repeat the simple statement of the facts and links to the official updated information, then close the page to new posts. And don’t forget your auto-responders; nothing worse than starting to follow Air France on Twitter to get a light-hearted auto-response.

Again, my sympathies, respect and thoughts go to all of the families of passengers and crew as well as those searching for flight AF447 and the staff of Air France at this difficult time.

Even when you work with world-class brands (retailers, mobile phone companies, finance companies, all sorts…) they still ask who in the world does digital customer experience the best. So, often they ask “who is the best in our industry online?” and often ask us the same question more generally, looking to find examples to follow from other industries who do a good job online.

Unfortunately when asked “who does it well?” I tend to answer that nobody, in my humble opinion, has really got everything right. There are loads of sites that do a small number of things, or even just one thing really well, but nobody has the whole package. So as part of our Experience Planning offering, we’ll collate companies, sites and brands that have relevance to our customer or their customers.

And because we’re using our philosophy of Total Experience Design, that aims to draw out the magic things you do to make a complete customer experience, regardless of the channel in which it is executed it happens that quite often, we’ll also pick up on the fact that the best thing some companies do on the web isn’t their website. It might be a product, an innovation, a service, or even simply an attitude. When we designed and built www.virginmobile.com in the UK for example, I always look back and say that the best thing that site did, wasn’t done by the site itself. It was the fact that you got your phone the next morning.

Zappos is one of those that does at least one thing exceptionally well; and that’s customer service. The Zappos story is well documented, and we often talk about the number of blogs, Facebook groups and Twitter comments that laud their attitude to their customers and the things they do to make their customers’ experience much, much more delightful than their competition.

The most poignant story is that of a woman whose mother had died. Consequently she needed to return some shoes to Zappos and because she was obviously much more concerned with her mother’s death, was going to be late returning them. How did Zappos respond? They sent a UPS truck to pick up the shoes at their expense (normally you have to take them to a depot), and shortly after, sent her a bouquet of flowers.

The blog post in which she documented this ends:

“IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.

With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.”

So, I was asked this same question by the guys from the Windows Live team at Microsoft as we were hanging out on the roof of Tao nightclub in Las Vegas at MIX09 (you meet all the best people there).  “So what’s a really great website?” I think it was John, asked, and I wheeled out my Zappos story for them. They looked at me like I was kinda weird, and got me another beer, so it was interesting when I got an email from Angus the other day titled “Zappos really is the bomb” – apparently this is some quaint Australian or American phrase for “Really jolly good”.

This is the story as it unfolded on Twitter, that I tell here for three reasons: a) how good are we at finding ‘world class’ and predicting the brands to succeed! (Ha!) b) exactly how that service promise translates into everyday life, other than the big stories that get told over and over, and c) to show how a company uses Twitter well also!

@jsenior posted this to Twitter:

@anguslogan, who is known for having rather tasty taste in shoes responded:

@jsenior, knowing how important and influential Angus knows himself to be speculated on whether Zappos might source said shoes for him? Either that, or he really wasn’t looking forward to walking into a store to actually buy them to take back to Redmond for Mr Logan. Or maybe it was the thought of the TSA opening his luggage and finding them there… anyway, he responded:

And it was at this point, that @zappos_service waded in with this:

Which linked to the offending, er I mean, inspirational shoes, on a site pointing at them being for sale at another store, and not at Zappos.

To which, Angus’ response was naturally:

Quickly followed by an email to me, and two others to re-tell the story.

When you get things right in creating a relationship with customers, this is what happens. They respond emotionally in a way that out-does logic and rational thinking any day. When it comes to choosing where to look for (admittedly rather crazy) shoes online? Where is Angus going? Even if the delivery is a bit pricey (which it’s not by the way – they do free delivery too!)

So, if you’re a bit shoddy at keeping the website up to date, or you can’t quite beat the competition at delivery prices, but you can do service like this, customers will forgive you. Why? Because they love you!

How does Zappos do this? Again, it’s well documented, but they ingrain customer service right from the start in everyone that works there and they empower staff to make decisions, and use budget to help customers – which is presumably money they divert from above the line advertising, due to the serious word of mouth marketing they get as a result. To make sure they get the right people working for them, they even offer to ‘buy out’ new trainees. They offer them a bribe to leave on the spot after a week or so of training. Those that survive are the ones they want.. those that take the bribe are equally happy, but not ‘Zappos material’.

So the challenge is, to look at the overall customer experience; end to end, and to plan experiences that delight throughout, not constrain yourself to an interface.

Ok, next question: “What’s the best checkout process in the world?” – and no, it’s not Amazon… yawn.

I was lucky enough again to be able to present at MIX this year (you can see some slides from it scattered in this post and the video link is here). MIX09 for me was the first time I’ve really seen design be the major talking point and a key focus for the Microsoft organisers.

A lot of this boiled down to one man: Bill Buxton. Bill is Principal Researcher at Microsoft and a very well respected product designer. His book Sketching User Experiences was given away to the MIX09 attendees for free, and he hosted the keynotes for the conference.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a terrible reader. I happily read snippets online, but rarely dive into and finish an entire paper book! What this means, is that I save my reading up, and then discover whether or not I am in step with the people I am reading. The fantastic thing is that when I read Bill’s book, I discovered, that thankfully I’m in step!

Total Experience Design was a term we coined to encourage our teams and clients look at the user journeys that are outside of the media for which they were traditionally responsible. So if you’re designing a website, don’t be afraid to think through why people want to shop in the first place, and what their experience is when they unwrap the product you ship them.

In the early days, this was a mandatory for us for some projects. Particularly when we were doing projects that involved a specific physical context. For example, self-service check in kiosks at the airport. There’s just no way that a digital designer should work in isolation of an understanding of the context; the environment of an airport terminal (very distracting, thereby reducing the reasoning powers of even the most intelligent passenger to that of a 5 year old!), the kiosk housing and display (that can be used to help people focus more on the application by ensuring they don’t worry about their bags being stolen) and of course the operational factors of queuing and staffing in the terminal.

But we also started to do this when we had no specific idea what a user’s physical context might be i.e. “they could be anywhere”. When you do this, you uncover interesting things that you otherwise would have found hard to think of. In other words, you have an innovation framework.

The other philosophy that was reassuringly in step with the thinking of the designers that we admire (who mostly come from the industrial design space) was that ‘design’ is an integrated discipline. Some of the best innovations we have had, have been from sessions where developers are working with designers, and somebody technical says “hey I can do X…” where X is something that perfectly meets the problem we defined, and is very technically feasible.

The other factor that led me to this talk at MIX09, was that increasingly, especially since Microsoft Surface arrived in our offices, we are looking at digital interactions in the physical built environment; shops, galleries, hospitals, etc.

So if you put all those things together, you can see why i talked about how we should be collaborating more with the people who engineer the built environment. And also, how we have to think about user journeys that don’t begin and end in store, but almost certainly start on the web, or a mobile device, flow into a physical environment, and then back out again.

When you do this, you can see how a web user journey for example, researching product, or outlining your requirements for a mortgage, should be port able into the shop or branch, where you can work through it with an advisor, before taking it back to your home or office, where at your leisure you can think it through and go on to buy.

So this MIX talk was about thinking this through, to take people through the concepts of Total Experience Design, collaboration (the new new renaissance!) and experience planning, but also to see where this collaboration might lead. To do this, we did some very early stage thinking with some of the brightest minds in the Architecture world.

Anyway, that’s the history, and a rough overview of the talk. What I’d really like to know is what you think. I had some great feedback on the day, but I’d like to know more on where you think this is going, or anything you think we’ve got wrong.

Ok, without more ado, here’s the link. I’d love to see the comments on this page fill up…

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C08F

And if you want to tweet your way through the video, please do using #mixpd just like it says on screen!

Thanks to all the guys back in the office who helped me with this: Hannah, Dean, Sari, James, Colm. You’re fab!

 Addendum: Colm sent me through a link to this blog, which touches of some of the aspects of Total Experience Design, and the need to consider a wider context of use: http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2009/04/rethinking-package-design.html Obviously I had to go comment on it also, so read down to see my thoughts on it.

Cheap flights, Ryanair, flights to Ireland, cheap holidays… not words you’ll normally find me uttering, but words that will take on a whole new significance if the latest ‘lesson in social media for corporates’ plays out as I think it might.

Thanks to Travolution for spotting this and flagging it up on Twitter:

Stephen McNamara from Ryanair said:
"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.
"It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.
"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel".

So what did they think would happen? Well, there are some moments in life where you stand at the edge of a precipice, and running down the hill behind you is a herd of cattle. You just know where it’s going to end…

The blogosphere is an important place in eCommerce. Search terms like cheap flights are hotly contested and consequently very expensive to buy. The particular term cheap flights might easily cost a search marketer like Ryanair £1 or £2 a time. Therefore, natural search, or appearing high in Google or Live search is pretty important; especially if users are consciously or subconsciously filtering out the paid-for results.

In many fields blogs rank very highly for certain search terms, usually because they are actually about the thing people are searching for. Just go type Microsoft Surface Europe into Google and you’ll see what I mean…

So if a thousand bloggers all get outraged by Ryanair calling them idiots, and they write about things like cheap flights, or Ryanair themselves, then when I go searching for cheap flights Ryanair, all I’m going to find in natural search results in a few days are a thousand people railing against them and their stinky attitude to the real digital world we all live in.

For a company that forces us to book and check in online, it’s a bit backward isn’t it? I mean, we all fly with them (when we just can’t avoid it of course)…. whereas a company like Virgin America absolutely embraces digital social spaces (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, you name it). They even cater to them on board, and are not afraid to participate in conversations in the blogosphere, or Twitterverse.

So if bloggers out there talk about cheap flights and Ryanair a lot, maybe even link to their website (famously designed by students at the local university 8 or 9 years ago) then Ryanair will see their cheap flights search listings (see what I did there?) drop like a stone to be replaced by a whole bunch of ‘idiots’ who really don’t like them.

Actually.. Ryanair don’t seem to optimise on ‘cheap flights’ but hey, I’m sure the ‘idiot’ bloggers will do them some reputational damage anyway! And anyway, I don’t like being called an idiot. And yes, Ryanair employees should be engaging with their customers online, in the airport and in the air of course.

(cheap flights, cheap flights! Pass it on!)

And in case you’re wondering where this all sorted. It started here: http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/02/what-happened-when-a-blogger-d.php And that… is even more surprising than their Chief Exec’s comments! Read it, seriously, you’ll be surprised at how wrong you can get participation in the blogosphere.

Addendum: Oh, and no this isn’t an anti Ryanair campaign.. I’m just predicting the future. As usual!

(NB: You might be looking for this post on Air France, apologies for the bad link on Twitter.)

For those of you not in the UK, this will seem a little weird, but yesterday, 6 inches of snow pretty much ground our country to a halt. (Don't ask.. but to be fair, it was our worst snow for nearly 20 years) Anyway, this blog isn't about local authorities and train companies being caught off guard by so-called adverse weather conditions. And it's not about the fact that they couldn't open schools or grit roads, but that they didn't make the best of their digital communications tools to get information out there quickly to the people who cared. And that, is a global problem... not one peculiar to us Brits who can't work out how to get out of their driveways if there's a severe frost!

But... it's not hard; and I know this from real life experience because I've worked with several airlines and other companies that simply have to have a contingency plan to communicate quickly in case things go wrong. So here are some of the lessons learned that can easily be applied by a small primary school as by a local authority or an energy company.

I'll try to distil them in to some simple tips and gotcha's!

Timeliness:  "No news is just as good as any kind of news"

Don't have a bloated procedure for sign-off of 'statements' to the public and don't hold back from publishing if you have no information. If I go to a school website to find out if the school is open or closed, and it has nothing to say at all about the weather, then I'm going to call the office. If it says "We will have to take a decision on whether or not the school will open today. Keep an eye out here for more news when we have it." then I'm not going to call the office to be told that there is nothing to know... I'm instead going to wait patiently! If you're going to have to later on in the day accept that you got caught out by some bad weather, it's also ok to say early in the day that you've been caught out and are unable to provide any good information right now. Sometimes the window for this is very small, in my school example, it may only occur to a parent to check at 8am, and they may have to leave the house at 8.30am...

If sign-off and approval are important, then do it now. Don't wait til you need the statement - get a generic statement signed off that could be modified to fit a number of situations, then make it, or a series of statements available to the people who publish information on the site. Leave them in a text file on the web server itself so that someone could find them even if they forgot where to look for them.

Make the site publishing tools accessible from anywhere

I learned this the hard way a long, long time ago. Since then, I've always specified in anything we do that the content management system has to be accessible from anywhere. No VPN, no special software, etc. I need to be able to walk into an Internet cafe and use someone else's PC and it should work. In more sophisticated situations where security has to be tighter, we don't make the whole site accessible in this way, just some specific bits that come in to play when a contingency situation arises.

I can well imagine that yesterday a lot of phone calls went like this: "Sorry, I can't update the website until we can get someone in the office" - "Can you talk me through it?" - "Erm.. not really." Which is probably the reason that The Royal Borough of Kingston's website was updated finally at 4pm today. When they discuss why things are this way, no doubt the IT security guy will get it in the neck!

Have somewhere to put it...

The simpler your website template, the easier it will be to put emergency information up quickly. A blog site for example... no problem, you just create a blog and it appears at the top of the home page. But if your homepage has a big Flash movie in the middle of it, you need to find something simpler, something that is just text based, that can be put above the Flash, or replace it entirely. Either that or try to get a Flash developer into your offices through a foot of snow...

So a contingency plan can be as simple as knowing which module on your home page you can change to be a text only box into which you can hand-code links to other websites, or other pages on the site. This allows you to put up a simple "we're working on it" message, right through to a more comprehensive; "Go to this website for info on X, and this site for info on Y, or call us on... "

Some emergencies can last a long time, and develop their own entire sets of information that will evolve into a series of categories. For example, the Buncefield Oil Depot explosion. This will start in a pure crisis mode - What happened, where it was, what was affected, was anyone killed? This would be coped with in that module we talk about above. But then after a while, you will start adding in things like which roads are closed. Where do people affected get immediate help with accommodation or food? A whole variety of information that is tough to plan, because you don't know you need it until someone hands it to you. So you need a framework that is infinitely flexible. But actually, this is very simple. A top level of category (home page) with some custom text, and a series of sub-pages that can be created at will when a new category of information appears. Don't worry about having a clever 4 section IA. People will find the information so long as it is clearly named, no matter how many categories you end up with.

An emergency mini-site

However, this new requirement for all these pages totally trashes your existing website structure. So, you have to plan for a worst case scenario. A scenario where potentially, everything else on your website is largely irrelevant because 99.9% of the people coming are only looking for one thing. So in a case like this, you might as well kill two birds with one stone, and replace your home page with a new page that only deals with this emergency and a series of sub pages related to it. But do it in a way that is very light on file sizes, images, etc. This will also dramatically help the site cope with the increased demand being placed on the website. Make the design of this very light and text heavy. The 'branding' should be restricted pretty much only to a logo in a header, and use the style sheet from the rest of the site. If you don't do it this way, and you forget to redesign this template when you redesign the website, it won't look too bad if it's not on the current design.

When we covered Steve Fossett's round the world flights (Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer), we had near the end, an unbelievable amount of traffic for our amateur operation and the site went a bit slow. So for two hours, we flipped a switch that turned the website into one page, that simply showed where Steve was, and about 100 words of copy describing his status. We dropped all the other images in the site. This was the same mode we would have used had something terrible happened to Steve, which fortunately it didn't. All that 'flipping the switch' did, was change which home page site visitors were directed to. So the old homepage was still there, but visitors were just being directed to our light one instead. if you want to get really sophisticated, you could do a little bit of javascript in the header of every page on the site that checks to see if the site is in this mode. This way, even if people return to old bookmarks, or find specific pages on a search engine, they'll get redirected to your emergency page.

When we weren't using it, this site was simply one page with an empty navigation menu based on a very simple template, that was invisible to web users and search engines. We could edit the text in the content management system, as well as add new pages that would automatically appear in the menu / navigation on every page that had that template. For clients who have complex emergency plans, we pre-populate some sample pages with content from their contingency plan.

You can also use this mini site to be a bit more useful! In the context of that explosion, or a flood say, you might publish the claims hotline numbers for all the major insurance companies. Put yourself in the shoes of your users. What will they need? What can I do to be the most helpful to them in their time of need. Don't say "Most insurance companies have a claims hotline - call that" - instead, go and find as many numbers for those hotlines as you can and publish them. It's not hard for you to look them up once, as opposed to the hundreds of people affected having to do that over and over. Don't worry if you can't find all of them... better to be some use than no use.

Then at some point, you'll downgrade the emergency, but want to make this point of reference still available. So in a case like this, you'll put your site's home page back to normal, but make a link to your mini site from that home page, with a one line update on the emergency maybe.

To put that in the context of someone who had trouble yesterday: National Rail. They have some fantastic information systems, and feeds, but they were pretty unavailable because of the demand on the website. If they had said that they would sacrifice bookings and other business as usual activity, or at least demoted it to a link to their 'normal site', then their homepage would simply have been a list of the status of the main rail lines in the UK. Seeing as many of them were: "No service" - this would have really helped reduce the amount of traffic to their site as people would have got what they wanted without clicking on a thing.

Finally - The Goony Bird Story

I don't know where this phrase came from, but it was used a lot by the PR pro's I worked with at Virgin and a few other places. It basically refers to a rather silly 'and finally' story that would be running whilst at the same time something very sober was going on.

I think it harks back to a newspaper that was doing something like giving news of the death of a monarch, "britain mourns" kind of thing, and below it, or close to it was some silly feel good story "and now, on a more cheery note!". The two just didn't look right together, and it was entirely inappropriate to be bringing such tragic news whilst at the same time being so frivolous.

In the context of what we are doing here, it basically means that you should re look at content for its appropriateness in the emergency that you're dealing with. For example, if you're being criticised for not being responsive enough or prioritising the wrong things, yet you have a story about your latest investment in a local school for clowns... it's not going to send the right message. Similarly, if your welcome tagline is "Howdy Babe" yet people are coming to the site because their neighbourhood has just gone up in smoke, they're not going to appreciate it. So just re-look at these pieces of content and little touches through the eyes of someone coming there in an emergency - and just know how you're going to deal with them if that does happen.

In summary - this is really simple stuff, and if I were to pick out just three rules to prioritise above all of these it would be:

1 - have an element at the top of your homepage that you can take over with simple text and HTML

2 - make this element manageable from any PC anywhere (with appropriate password security of course), and by people with a variety of skills ("yes I can talk you through it on the phone!")

3 - get something up there soon - even if you have no news. And update it - even if there is still no news and that update is simply to change the 'last updated' time...

And the very last and relatively new tip is "Use Digital Social Spaces"

It's ok to go to the places on the web where people are discussing what's going on and offering that help and information there. Whether it's a Facebook group sprung up around your company, town, brand or school - or Twitter, where you can see clearly people asking questions about the things happening (go search for #uksnow in Twitterscan or Twitscoop to see what I mean). Information spreads much faster here, and the tools are much more accessible. So if I am receiving information on the phone or radio from colleagues, and can't get it on our website, there's no reason I shouldn't start putting it out on Twitter - even if that means going and finding the people who want the information and sending it to them directly. I could have seen someone in the national traffic control centre yesterday spending a bit of time to calmly inform of major road closures on Twitter, or for someone at Transport for London's control room to be putting out news about when buses were due back on the roads, or when tube lines reopened.

So come on, my local council, train company, electricity company and others... it's not hard! Actually - maybe this message is to web designers. Come on guys - think ahead! Every site we at EMC Conchango work on has a contingency plan of some sort; some more complex than others for sure based on the risks that they face. For some it's as simple as knowing which module on the home page they could replace. Others have networks of contingency sites that hopefully never do anything; but it's always, always thought about for all of them.

It's a few weeks now since I got back from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA. This was a different conference for me. Normally, I would be at a conference to present on topics like Experience Design, Digital Innovation, or some user interface related technology / design topic. And this would be to a mixed audience of business people, designers and developers.

However, there I was at a conference with 6,000 of the most technical... well, the word they would use to describe themselves is 'geeks', so I'll use the same word! I have to say, 90% of what was going on went completely over my head. As they all dived into their "300" and "400" sessions I took comfort in the Microsoft shop and got some Zune accessories!

I was there because we had been working with Nick Lansley, Head of Research & Development at Tesco.com. Tesco.com is the world's largest online grocery retailer, and is a significant part of everyday life in the UK and other parts of the world.

What we had been working on was an innovation project. A project that was aiming to drive additional value for Tesco customers, whilst at the same time as driving Tesco's business. Its working name is Tesco@Home and it lives in your kitchen or close by!

Here's what we did:

The Day 2 Keynote - Tesco and Conchango are at 1h34mins - high quality WMV

A more in-depth walk-through on Channel 9 with technical depth from Matthew

At Conchango, we do a lot of innovation work. In fact, this work is increasing day by day, as many of our customers are realising that simply keeping their heads down, and trying to carry on as usual despite huge changes in the business and consumer environment, they would rather generate new value through innovation. Not only are these new business models that work better in today's climate, but they are driving brand and emotional connectivity to their customers. If we make things memorable and differentiated the customer is likely to repeat their interaction and is likely to tell others (loyalty+experience=advocacy - something I'm now calling "Carbone's Law" after this guy).

Total Experience Design is what allows us to uncover potential solutions that are outside the 'usual channels'. This is work that is very tightly focused on an insight into users or customers, and aims to drive out through an experience planning process, things that will make a tangible difference not only to a business bottom line and brand perception and differentiation, but also to customers' lives. The nirvanah for these projects is to create functional brand utility. Something that is tightly associated, or even locked into, the brand, but is just quite simply 'useful'.

This isn't a case of going out and asking customers what they want - although we do this, what we don't do, is just go ahead and do what they ask. As Henry Ford is often famously quoted as saying; "If we had gone and asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'". Our job is to understand the feedback that customers give, and derive through insight and careful process, their true needs and motivations - then to create solutions that help them meet those needs. In this way, we can come up with the car, when people thought the best they could get was a fast horse.

We ran this process with Tesco, and acknowledged and gained more insight into a variety of needs from customers. Mostly these were around the fact that although they were incredibly loyal to Tesco, the online grocery shopping experience is fundamentally flawed. Not through design, but simply by its nature. An online grocery shop means you have to coordinate your own personal diary and those of the other people in your household, it also means finding 50 or 60 items in a store that holds 30,000 products.

A lot of initiatives on Tesco.com have been around trying to reduce the headaches that these fundamentals cause customers and they've done an exceptional job at making what at first use might be a 90 minute process down to about 20-25 minutes.

With this project, we wanted to go further though, and create a tool that would surprise customers.

Once Total Experience Design drives out the customer touchpoints we believe we can affect, the Experience Planning process sets out a series of Experience Principles. These are things that we know our solution needs to be, or needs to feel like. They are not tangible solutions or designs, but they inform that design and help you know when you've succeeded.

In the context of this project, these principles, were things like "Surprise Me" - this principle was about getting away from the perception of some that Tesco is trying to take over the world. The result of this principle was that we allowed customers to plug in their own messaging, email and social networks, as well as their own calendars using public services like Windows Live Calendar or Google calendar. All that Tesco do is provide a useful tool to bring them all together in one place. The expectation from customers is that Tesco is trying to own their lives - so we upset this perception and pleasantly surprise them by offering an open tool that allows them to use what they want, and away from any potential 'big brother' fears that Tesco is spying on them.

The other experience principles drove out things like the ability to create shopping lists as and when you think of things, with minimal interaction or friction. For example, simply waving a barcode at your webcam when you've run out of something without having to write it down, or wait til you 'go shopping' to remember what it was.

Leaving aside the insight on Tesco customers, and our ongoing insight into technology, social and other trends, that we have been gathering and learning over the last two years, the actual design and build process for this application took about 10 weeks. From idea to working prototype. Not bad.

The result is an application that is well crafted from a design and user experience perspective, and incredibly well architected technically. It only requires a small amount of re-plumbing work once the relevant API's from Tesco, Microsoft and Google are in place, to make it appropriate for taking out to test in real customer's homes.

The classic way businesses would have done this was to envision such a project, create a business case, probably then validate that business case using expensive management consultants, and then secure a large amount of money to deliver the whole thing and take it to market. This way of approaching innovation is quite frankly crazy. For every idea that you have that might actually work, you'll throw away 5 or 10. As Bill Buxton says: "Don't be precious about your ideas, just be good at having lots of them".

So, creating small innovation projects that last no longer than 12 weeks, that have relatively small budgets, and takes them out to test market quickly is exactly the right approach. You have to be prepared to throw a lot away though; but in the long term this is still more cost-effective, as the £3million you saved when you didn't roll out a huge new service that then turns out to be a big white elephant and ultimately gets canned, goes a long way in several 12 week chunks... and then ensures that when you do put a 'bet' on something, that its value to the business and to customers has already been proven in the real world and it's a pretty sure thing.

The other thing that made this project work, was that it had buy-in and support from the top level of the organisation. When you do things that are potentially business changing, the only way you can drive them through to the general blank looks you get from many of your colleagues is if you can say "The CEO wants this" - in this case, we had that level of support and it helped the project get delivered under-budget and ahead of schedule, as well as hitting all of Tesco's objectives for it.

Innovation is the way to survive global recession. Those that do it well will profit in a way that is not at the expense of their customers, but in their interests. A clever trick, but one that's been done before many times. This isn't the first downturn we've ever had...

Finally - back to the Tesco@Home project... An interesting thing about this was that we developed this application to work on the PC's that Tesco customers have in their homes. Consequently, it was designed to work on Windows XP and Windows Vista. So you can imagine our slight recoil of horror when Microsoft told us that they were going to run it on an unreleased brand new operating system: Windows 7. So it was a pleasant surprise when we loaded it up and it all worked! Testament to the engineering effort that's gone into Windows 7 I guess. Oh, and the quality of our engineering too!

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. We had a great team from Conchango and Tesco working on this - and some unbelievable professionalism and support from Microsoft during the latter stages and into PDC itself. Anyone who says that Microsoft "doesn't get it"... well, see for yourself before making your mind up.

Nick enjoyed it too! You can see how much right here: (Nick Lansley's blog on the topic).

Thanks all for making this thing happen. Looking forward to getting into your homes soon to help us test it out in real life!