This project by Tim Sherratt caught our eye for just these reasons and clearly demonstrates this methodology most clearly.

Some exhibition magic with Zotero and Omeka

We’ve looked at both Zotero and Omeka in the past for various projects because of their growing use by the research community. This project leverages existing data with an API, an open source CMS and some Python magic to create a new view in to an ongoing research project.

Breakfast is on us!

The ubiquity of digital technology means social reputation can now be created — or destroyed — in a matter of days, and we are only at the very beginning.  The question on everyone’s lips is: how do we leverage this extraordinary power?
Join us on Wednesday the 31^st of August 2011 at Pendolino Restaurant & Café at 9am, and we’ll offer you some answers.

Crucial intelligence for your business

You’ll hear the results of our latest research into social collaboration, the inexorable rise of reputation indexes and the implications for meeting the needs of your future customers in our changing world.

We’ll also prove why the retail sector (of both goods and services) stands to benefit more than most from adopting and using collaborative Internet solutions. In doing so, we’ll walk through several case studies — illustrating the success of those who got it right, and the key mistakes of those who didn’t.

Topics will include:

• Why organisations must engage in online collaboration to survive and succeed
• Key consumer behavioral concepts
• Predictions for retail in 2015
• How to employ behavioural design to boost collaboration
• How to cross-fertilise your campaigns and generate a critical mass of interest
• The critical position of reputation indexes and how to use them to leverage group reputation

Not simply another seminar, this two-hour briefing will be conducted in an intimate roundtable environment conducive to generating real discussion with ample opportunities to ask questions and bring thoughts to the table.

Seats are limited.  To RSVP call Kieran on 02 8405 6807 or e-mail kieran@houseoflaudanum.com Alternatively, if you’d like to get in touch to organise a private briefing for yourself or one of your colleagues then please contact Zina directly.

We have been building online stores with an add-on iPad point of sale system for a couple of years using the extremely secure Drupal framework.

Grandiflora was our first client, and we jumped at the chance at providing a seamless experience for their staff. They use their florist iPad POS to manage courier delivery as well.

You can use the iPad to take orders and process them, send receipts to a nearby wireless printer, and take customer details and add them to your customer database.

Credit card details or cash can be taken in a number of different ways depending on your choice of payment facility. We support Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, St George, NAB, Paypal, EWay and we’re working on more service providers.

The iPad is always in the secure hands of the staff member, and they can easily use it to show the customer something that might interest them. This really works well for retail iPad POS where you can conveniently demonstrate stock from a supplier site.

Staff and customers love the iPad POS. The benefits of connecting your POS to your website are many. Because your POS is driven by a website it’s effortless to manage inventory, and therefore you can keep your reporting in one place, and have seasonal sales and stock availability immediately to hand.

With an iPad POS you can flexibly meet the customer where they are, even at a market stall or their home if you are running a party plan business.

Prices are quite reasonable compared to an old fashioned unsearchable till! Our solutions start at $2900+GST – and that includes a website with a pre-rolled template.

Get in touch and have a look for yourself.

Most of your traffic will come from Google or other search engines. If you are lucky you will see a lot coming in from your affiliates (referrers) and other sites where you are active such as facebook. And you will see a bunch of visitors labelled as Direct traffic.

Direct traffic are visitors that either type in your address directly (rather than in to Google) or have bookmarked your address. Obviously Direct traffic will include all of your print advertising including bus stops and posters. There are some more examples of offline promotions at the Connect Arts blog.

Bringing offline online

There are several ways to deal with this. You can publish a new page on your site for just that traffic. The trouble is you might end up adding several pages (one for each publication) with identical content. Google cries when you do this. And puppies die.

Our preference is to use Google Analytics campaign tags. This allows you to identify traffic coming from a single campaign (say a Summer promotion) to an existing page. It also allows you to identify which particular media (eg: print rather than radio) and source (eg: bus stops rather than Drum Media). This is the method that Google Adwords uses automagically–also some EDM managers and other products that interoperate with Analytics.

The following are required tags

• Source–where was the advertisement? (2SER, SBS, Google, Drum Media)
• Medium–what was the platform of the advertisement? Radio, TV, CPC (cost per click online ads)
• Name –what is the name of the campaign you are running?

And these are optional

• Term–if you are paying to be advertised against a particular term. For example in the Yellow Pages
• Content–perhaps you are running a pair of ads in the same journal and the same month but on different pages

You can then build Analytics Goals and Reports around these data sets. By attributing dollar values to goals (or implementing Analytics E-Commerce integration) you can evaluate your offline marketing spend against its online performance.

The only trouble with these links is that they are long and ugly and difficult to type. The simple work around is to use an URL shortener to make it quicker to type. Or a QR code. See this post.

Short URLs and QR codes

If you’d like to talk to us about using campaign tagging for your next print campaign please contact Zina Kaye.

Someone asked me the other night what a QR code was (pointing to it on the connectarts ticket). That’s the beginning of the problem right there.

(QR codes are black and white square or circular graphics designed to be readable by a machine similar a barcode. They often encode links to websites).

The next is the required hardware and software to interpret them. You need a smart phone with a camera and a free piece of software to decode it. I have tried decoding many QR codes with several different phones and 5 different software tools. The only one I have successfully decoded was the connectarts one. I used Goggles (which is Google’s pattern recognition service–designed to recognise faces and architecture–similar to Shazam is to music).

The final problem is if your phone is flat you can’t write it down (although you could try).

URL shorteners are a group of web services that take a long URL (like http://houseoflaudanum.com/navigate/howtos/short-urls-and-qr-codes/) and convert them to something more manageable (like http://goo.gl/pTqjf). They came into their own with the Rise of Twitter and their 140 character tweet limit.

There are a couple of things to look at with URL shorteners. The style of redirect they use (301 or permanent redirect and 302 or temporary redirect) which determines whether Google likes them or not (SEO wisdom suggests that permanent redirects are favoured). Whether you can access their usage statistics. And their longevity–whether the company is here for the long term (ie: not tr.im unfortunately) and whether the links will be reaped (deleted) after a period of time.

You can also run your own URL shortening service. Organisations such as the Powerhouse Museum make great use of their own shorteners.

Often you will find that links that you tweet are shortened automatically anyway. Twitter had a relationship with bit.ly but now uses the http://t.co wrapper (not shortener) instead. These may or may not be associated with your activity, via your Twitter account details, which will determine whether you have access to the statistics or not.

You can intercept this process and make some adjustments (if you have time). The first is you can shorten your URL with your preferred service thereby giving you access to statistics. The second is that you can add an analytics campaign code so that you can attribute traffic using transiting that URL to a particular offline campaign (note: You should be doing this with QR codes too). This will allow you to determine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of that particular campaign.

If you’d like to know more about using short URLs or QR codes in your offline (or online) promotions please contact Zina Kaye.

“When we pop a photo up on Facebook, we will see a sales spike that is directly attributable and that’s pretty exciting.”

The Australian Ballet case study at Connect Arts

On the face of this we might assume that social networks + compelling picture = money. While this might be part of the story it is not the whole picture.

Conversion

The missing component is `conversion` or the ability to convert traffic into goals (or KPIs–key performance indicators). In this case the goal is ticket sales. Although you might have a lot of eyeballs captured by a picture like this without a path to the checkout the traffic generated is not performing well. Its like sale shopping at Myer with all the tills closed off.

If we were to look at the Australian Ballet scenario what we would hope to see is a clear path from their facebook presence to the checkout. This would be a simple matter–include a link directly to the booking page for the current performance that clearly encourages visitors to buy. Some shopping cart products even allow you to construct a link (that can be used anywhere on the internet) that adds a particular product (including its various attributes) to be added to a cart and the visitor directed in to the checkout part of the workflow (rather than the cart–the usual precondition for checkout). For example this link on my website that adds flowers and chocolates into the checkout lane of my favourite florist.
http://grandiflora.net/cart/add/…

Even if we don’t want to take it that far, getting these eyeballs to where they can see the buy button is the best way to convert them. Make sure that you take them to the relevant page (rather than the front page where they are likely to bounce) and ensure that the `call to action` or buy button is above the page fold (where the screen on a laptop would cut the page vertically–like the fold in a newspaper).

To take this one step further and make the whole thing work well in offline media (TV, posters, print media) all I do is tag the link with a campaign code and shorten it with a tracked URL shortener. See these two posts about that.

Campaign codes and Google Analytics
Short URLs and QR codes

Tune your content

We’ve taken this methodology into the wild with an international performance company. They mentioned that they had noticed traffic spikes after a particular TV series each night that it aired. A week in advance of the company’s appearance on the show we created a page about that TV show and the company’s long history of involvement in it. A very informative and well written piece supported by user contributed video (via YouTube) and images from the media. All broken links that we found in the wild that referred to this involvement we repaired and directed to this page. And this page had two clear calls to action. One to buy a ticket–another to book a workshop. All of this we monitored carefully with Google Analytics goal tracking to ensure that the traffic spike that we expected converted into sales.

Analyse, debrief, rinse and repeat

Four weeks later after the series finished we wrote up our report. We compared the final four weeks with the preceeding four weeks (during which the show was also on air and the company had had involvement).

If you would like us to help you tune your presence for conversion please contact Zina Kaye. She will be happy to talk to you.

We’re not quite yet there – everyone’s got work to do before the hard launch.

But this launch does feel amazing. Check it out !

Early in the piece we were contracted to produce a Business Analysis and pathway for the new DAAO with an eye on financial and data sustainability.

We conducted a 360° review, cross referencing current use cases with academic research requirements and new methodologies. We also interviewed stakeholders and potential investors in academic, arts, business and government and worked through a web of licensing issues. From this we developed a number of models and pathways and graded each for  likelihood of outcome given different environmental factors.

Our key argument remains that it is vital to maintain ground with this resource. There is no doubt that the reach of biography databases is much greater than imagined, and syndication multiplies the impact of what is essentially traded cultural capital. The DAAO therefore must remain current to be a viable source of data.

Our research made it evident that a stakeholder “user pays” model for this dataset is inconceivable without synthetic intervention. So the key outcome of the DAAO is a push to upgrade the ongoing freshness of the data through collaboration with contributors.

At this point we delivered the Business Analysis and we began the User Experience pass. We dialled up uber-UXer Lotte Meijer to collaborate, and set our top level goal to devise a way to encourage users to participate by contributing information about artists. Around the time of the first UX meeting, Mr. Snow and I went to a “happiness” lecture, and watched a Youtube video from The Fun Theory which is an initiative by Volksvagen. The premise is that you can change people’s behaviour by making things more fun. So this idea infected our process and we’ve delivered a complete interface that uses various game and fun tactics to encourage continued relationships from data contributors.

When it became evident that the brief required bringing Australia’s design history into the fold, we ran a Design Workshop that invited participants to contribute and discuss issues of interaction and research requirements from a design perspective. We also used this opportunity to test some of the search tools and interfaces we had selected to use in the DAAO.

We were very lucky that the DAAO team work so hard and are so great at logic problems! Gillian, Olivia Bolton and Jo Croucher were incredibly generous and giving in thinking and we had a lot of fun.  Each meeting ended in a big high as we worked through pumping out one creative solution after another.

The Software Requirements Specification (Technical Specification) was written largely by us in consultation with Gillian and her team. It documents the end to end features of the site and, along with its reference documents, forms the master build document for the DAAO going forward. It is a living document in that it will continue to evolve as features are added and refined.

Another key document that we produced was the UX wireframes for the site. They document features of each step of each user path through the site itemising each element and interaction of each page. Based on these we also produced a set of screen designs and style guide for the look and feel of the new DAAO. The SRS, Wireframes and Look & Feel are the documents from which the final site can be built.

We are now very happy that the baton for the build has largely been passed onto The Interaction Consortium who are working with Gillian and the DAAO office.  We continue to work on various parts, including branding, front end templates and user experience (UX) testing.

Go team ! We’re all looking forward to August!

Can you imagine that carrying 105kgs 6 hours on, 2 hours off for 11 days? Mentally and physically challenging – it’s going to be hard to keep the body going under those conditions.

Here’s hoping that Matt raises his target of $35,000 – every spare dollar helps him achieve his goal of helping young people with disabilities who are living at home and are at risk of entering aged care facilities.

If you are able to donate please go to http://www.youngcare.com.au/page.aspx?pid=710

Go Matt!

They were all very exciting and creative – possibly because they were made in Tasmania. I remember swimming across the wide bit of Gordon’s Bay with them one day and thinking “I wonder what these girls are going to do when they grow up.”

Well Rose Ertler and Liz Ertler are going strong making jolly music and Cath Erter has just launched the first in what we hope is a line of customisable kid’s furniture called the Zeppochair!

The Zeppochair is a corrugated cardboard chair for children. It comes flat-packed, so children can assemble and decorate the chair themselves.

So this post is for Cath – because the Zeppochair website has just gone live. And just at this minute the needs a bit of traffic help So this is a quick “how to” for Cath.

Being Search Engine Friendly

1. The text on your front page is very important. It should include the words – preferably in multiple combinations – that people search for when looking for your stuff. In this case:

“kids cardboard chair”

“kids furniture”

“eco-friendly furniture”

“folded cardboard”

This exercise can be made more fun by asking people questions in the field. I love nothing more than to accost random people and ask them how they’d search for this <look at this picture> on the internet.

Then get writing. You might say that a long paragraph of text and some text menu buttons all saying the same thing over and over again in different ways is boring. But it works !

This is ably demonstrated if you type in “cheap mobile phones” into Google. All Australians should get the same top search result for Simply Mobiles.

While you’re doing it, alt tag all your pictures with some of these keywords and phrases. Also – and I hate to say this to such a gorgeous site but here goes – use a menu on every page – even it’s a CSS menu that pops up when you roll over an arrow.

Living in an ecosystem which inlcudes other people’s sites

2. Websites living within the ecosystem are rated more highly. The Zeppochair is already on Madeit. How about encouraging earlt adopters to get the word out there on Essential Baby and other kid’s forum sites. Linking from other people’s sites is a way search engines accesses your reputation so the more linking the better !

Keeping an eye on things

3. It’s worth installing Google Analytics just to see if the changes that you enact are making a difference. Installing is as simple as signing up and putting a bit of code in each page that Google generates for you. It’s really useful if you do a bit of promotion and you want to see what effect it has.

Facebook Like button

4. The Zeppochair is already on Facebook, which is fab. It doesn’t raise your search engine ranking but it does increase traffic to your site.

Generating a bit of energy around your new site

5. New websites need a bit of a push to get them off the verge. The more jaw-droppingly fabulous your opening statement the better. Running a ridiculously generous competition where every 5th person wins may seem expensive – but the word of mouth on the internet it will generate is worth it.

Online reputation

6. I’ve written a whitepaper with Gay Flashman on how to harness your online reputation and turn it into sales. Email me if you’d like a copy.

Youtube

7. Video search results are big and getting bigger. People, including myself, love looking at a video explanation of something to get an idea of how it works. This is especially true of a product that you’re wondering about. A video will probably definitively answer the question “is this really as simple to construct as they said it would be?”

Ok – so if you haven’t already visited the Zeppochair site, please do.