The Web at 25 - All grown Up
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This document provides information about an upcoming Allianz digitalization workshop, including details about the company hosting it. It will discuss the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web and topics such as social marketing, customer service, privacy, freedom of expression, and using big data responsibly. The workshop will be hosted by an independent web development company specialized in .NET, mobile, and responsive design solutions that has worked with Microsoft since 2002.
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The Web at 25 - All grown Up
- 1. Allianz Digitalisation Workshop: All Grown Up – The Web at 25
- 2. Who We Are An independent web and software development company specialising in .NET, Mobile, Responsive Design and Privacy Solutions Long-standing Microsoft partner. Working relationship with Microsoft since 2002. Work includes MSN Olympic Responsive site and Windows 8 App Exchange.
- 8. “Social Marketing is the New Marketing” • But customer service trumps marketing every time…
- 24. A new Magna Carta • Respect for Privacy • Freedom of Expression • A one-speed web
- 25. “Enjoy big Data Responsibly” • Gilbert@governor.co.uk • @gilberthill • www.cookielaw.org
Editor's Notes
- Hi, for those of you that I haven’t had a chance to chat with yet, I’m Gilbert Hill, MD of Governor Technology, and today I’m going to talk about the film Pulp Fiction, the game Flappy Bird and how both of these relate to current big trends in digital – (1) Big Systems, (2) Big Marketing, (3) Big Data, and (4) Big Responsibility. I’m going to cover a lot of ground, so if you have a question at any point, feel free to dive in. But first a brief bit about Governor Technology and where we fit in.
- Governor Technology is a web and software development company based in London, providing consultancy and build on web sites, mobile Apps and increasingly, online privacy. But the best way to see us is through 2 client stories.
- Interhealth has been a client of ours for over 5 years. They are a medical charity, providing support to humanitarian care workers across the world. This is accessed via their website which we built, where users can plan new trips, manage their vaccinations and have online web chats with a doctor. Building this required us to integrate 3 different backend systems in one place online.
- Next up is MSN, a client of ours for 10 years. In 2012, we built their responsive mobile sites for the Olympics and Paralympics. We were able to cherry-pick the best bits from their competitors (Sky, BBC) and come up with a best-of-breed solution in only 100 days from commission to delivery. The site was shortlisted for a DMA award, but to me the nice thing was to see MSN staff using it as a source of info because they liked it, not because management had ordered them to!
- But enough about us and on to the big trends I mentioned; the first and most obvious is the move to consolidation and standardisation. Over the years, we have worked with loads of CMS, as well as building our own. Now, we see more and more consolidation onto large, cloud-based content management, delivery and automation platforms, such as Adobe Experience Manager (which is the choice of Allianz). And for everyone else, as this market share chart illustrates, there’s Wordpress with a market share of over 60%. What I found interesting while researching this is that Wordpress has been around since 2004 and started very small, rather than this idea of it coming out of nowhere, and it required many iterations before it started gaining traction. So increasingly, more and more of our day jobs at Governor is migrating, integrating and supporting shifts to these platforms.
- And here you see the same pattern with CRM; Salesforce now dominates the market, and the new challenge for brands and their suppliers is to fettle the product and integrate it to the point where any barriers to adoption amongst users disappear. And to be honest, the role of the company website has changed fundamentally. I seldom visit a website via its homepage anymore, instead being led to specific content via search or a social media prompt. And particularly with financial services, I only want to visit your site to (a) get a quote, (b) check my T&C’s and (c) if I have a beef with them and want to find a contact to complain.
- But there are still ways you can differentiate yourself, providing your customer service and connectivity is fit for purpose. Here we see the web chat prompt box on the sky website; now, I resisted getting web chat on our own site for ages. Our inbound marketing Associate kept hassling me to get it added, which forced me to think why I found it irritating. When I gave it some thought and experimentation with other sites, I realised that it wasn’t the technology per se that annoyed me, rather the fact that when I did respond to the prompt, I hardly ever got a swift (human) reply. As we’re a small organisation, it was pretty straightforward to put a process in place in the office that if a web chat message came, someone was always on hand to respond within 1 minute. Actually, we only had about 3 interactions, which gives the lie to the excuse for non-adoption that you’d be snowed under, but one of those interactions eventually led to a sale.
- Which brings us to the next trend, BIG MARKETING. Rather than build something in the hope consumers will come, why not go to where they are all anyway – social media? Question for You all – show of hands: who here is on Facebook? Who is on Liknedin? Who is on Twitter? In financial services, I have seen a move from companies being in denial about social media and locking it down (story of Geoff Zeven, and the Goldman Sachs elevator) to an awareness in the C Suite that they need to be on it, but problems implementing that down the chain in the organisation. I always advise clients to start off by choosing the appropriate platform/s and simply shut up, lurk for a bit and then slowly, use it to connect customers with problems, with the people in the organisation who can help them. (Story of my Jawbone Up)
- If you keep to what people are already interested in and don’t try to broadcast or sell, you can make good progress; one example is Allianz’s own Football for Life Facebook page. Once you have built up decent audience (340k) in this case, you have a digital asset which you can flip if you wish into more commercial-focused areas.
- Of course, you still get social media fails, which are the ones which usually hit the papers. I was at the tennis recently and Aegon was the sponsor; they had a twitter wall, and were encouraging people to use their hashtag – so far, so good, and it is fun to see you own tweet appear at a big event. The problem is that Twitter is limited to 140 characters, and we have blapped off a good proportion of those on the hashtag here! There is a good reason most of the ‘big’ new companies have 4 letter names, like Uber. In fact, if you google it there is a site where you can buy a selection of pre-rolled cool 4 letter names and domains, for thousands of dollars a time.
- However, too often companies approach digital the wrong way around, as an afterthought rather than the starting point or being properly integrated. We were approached by a financial services company who are sponsoring the golf. They had done the sponsorship deal, booked advertising, and only then wanted something ‘digital’. They had the idea of a game, and asked me how I could make it go ‘viral’. My answer was, I can’t; which wasn’t what they wanted to hear. So, we went away and looked at some games which really had gone viral. At the time, the Flappy Bird game was really hot, made more so by the decision from the creator to pull the game from the Apps Store. If it was down to me as the financial services firm, I would have done some golf-themed quiz or better still a treasure hunt, with the prizes being half a dozen smartphones loaded with Flappy Bird. As this slide shows, phones with the game were going on Ebay for up to $8,000, so if you won, you would have bragging rights among your mates as well as the ability to seriously cash in. It’s just a bit of fun, but I think it could have made the press and got ‘sizzle’ in a way a golf game published by a boring brand never could.
- Trend #3 is BIG DATA. I’ve heard so much hype and guff around it, I sometimes feel like Samuel L Jackson here when I hear the term yet again. It reminds me of the hype around social media a few years ago, with ‘gurus’ being engaged by brands to show them how to act on platforms which they only dimly understand or where there is no real footfall. I sit on the DMA Big Data Group, and we see that takeup of big data in financial services has been slower than many predicted. This means Allianz is ahead of the game with their football FB page, but I wonder whether there has been reluctance elsewhere because big data gives transparency to the lack of impact of the vast majority of marketing activity. If you get social right you can punch above your weight (Richard and the IAPP group to BBC show) , but most single efforts are a dud – keep it up!
- But big data collection, management and integration is increasingly a part of daily life. 2 examples I’ve experienced lately; like most people, I’m lazy in terms of keeping my financial affairs with the same provider. I’ve been a Barclays customer for over 20 years; last year, my Xbox account was compromised and my bank card details were nabbed. The bank promptly shut down the card, but didn’t tell me. At the same time, Admiral, with whom I’ve had my car insurance with for 10 years, tried to take a payment on the cancelled card but couldn’t. At least they called me on the day it expired, warning me I would be uninsured. At which point, I explained the situation and asked if I could pay on the ‘phone. They said they couldn’t do that and would have to go through the whole process of getting a quote online. Frustrated, I then went to comparethemarket and found the cheapest 3rd party insurance from some outfit I had never heard of, as the car isn’t worth much. It all went ok, and I after checking the terms and seeing it would auto-renew, and forgot about it. The next I knew was when my wife called me, saying she had just been pulled by the cops in Woolwich for driving without insurance! The cops were very nice to her and my daughters, and they loved going in the police car (the driver even offered to turn on the blues and twos for them, but the car was impounded, she got 6 points on her licence and a hefty fine. I ‘phoned the insurance company, told them they had failed to honour their T&C’s, and they told me they had changed. They said their system had sent me an email, but had no record of this. The bit of the process whereby the ANPR database was updated was the only big data transaction which worked here!
- Here’s another example from someone I follow on Twitter. An ANPR-enabled, remote-monitored car park, with a drive-in-to-accept privacy policy. Clever stuff, and requires no physical oversight (it’s on the M3).
- And here’s what the remote operator might see. Which car is in which bay, and who owns it. All date stamped and building a juicy pot of data. Of course, this is very tempting to advertisers who conjure up visions of Minority Report-style interactive ads capturing people’s attention at just the right time with a targeted product for you. When in fact, the reality is more like this:
- The recent trial by Tesco of Face Recognition in their stores threw up a series of tricky technical and ethical issues; the tech can be tweaked, but is it at the price of privacy? Is it ok for me to be bombarded with hair loss ads because I’m bald? Or what if I’m a woman who has lost here hair as part of her treatment for cancer? It can all get quite CREEPY.
- There are some exciting possibilities for targeted advertising, but you need to remember that, JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE AND LEGAL, DOESN’T MAKE IT THE RIGHT THING TO DO. WE got into the area of privacy via the European Cookie laws of a few years ago. All you need to take away from this slide is that cookies may go away in the future, but tracing is still tracking. And if you have issues with your brand anyway, the public won’t believe you and assume the worst. When I was reading into the cookie law, I kept finding a piece about Stephen Fry’s webmaster discovering that Ryanair was using cookies to jack up the prices for returning visitors to its site. This became a big story at the time, and whether they actually did it at the time or had in the past didn’t matter, it was what people wanted to believe.
- And here’s a picture of Ryanair’s boss Michael O Leary, presumably telling his customers what he thinks of them. I must stress it was not proven that Ryanair had done this with cookies, but it’s what people wanted to believe , and in line with the image Ryanair Boss Michael O’Leary has built, which he’s now toning down.
- And WITH BIG DATA COMES BIG REPONSIBILITIES. Last year, US Store chain Target had the details and bank numbers of millions of customers looted by Russian hackers. All you need to take from this diagram is that the entry point for the attackers was via a third party contractors. When it comes to data security, YOU ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE CHAIN. And people have long memories; despite sacking the CEO and installing a former Head of Homeland Security, a year later Target Q1 profits are still down almost 20%.
- And if you are thinking or profiling prospects and customers, you can fall into the trap of weblining. This is the web version of redlining, which was exposed in the 60’s in the US. Basically banks, insurers and healthcare companies redlined whole neighbourhoods based on socioeconomic factors and race, cutting them off from products and services . If the regulators or public discover or merely believe that weblining is taking place based on our online acitivity, then you can have a market event in terms of brand damage./
- Coming back to our own story, once we understood the world of online advertising, tracking and the regulation thereof. We built our own software to enable website owners to analyse, manage and disclose use of cookies to achieve compliance with the Cookie Laws. Our software powers a lot of the cookie popups you see on the web. And guess what? I find them just as annoying as you do. We see the market moving away from cookie popups and privacy policies written by lawyers, almost designed not to be read (like the Apple T&C’s) , to a more accessible TRANSPARENCY POLICY, and it looks like the regulators are starting to see it that way too. Here’s an example of one in action on our www.eudataprotectionlaw.com
- IF you get to grips with privacy, you will be in good company; here is a grab from the jobs section of the IAPP linkedin group. There are not enough privacy professionals to meet current and future demand, so understanding privacy may be good for your career too!
- And the establishment is picking up on the debate too. Recently I’ve become involved with Tim Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation charity as an Associate CTO, and was at the recent launch of his Web We Want manifesto at the South Bank.
- Privacy is one of the tenets of a New Magna Carta he wants agreed by the next general election, with privacy, freedom of expression and a single speed web for everyone. One to watch…
- So in summary, consolidate your web ‘plumbing’, be human on social media, provide good service and enjoy big data responsibly! Thank you.