24 Oct 2007
People go to tremendous steps to utilise mainstream media effectively. This week, one of my clients has fast-tracked a complete rebuild of their (generally underperforming) website in direct response to perhaps twenty-seconds of primetime TV feature on a highly rating show.
Cost is pretty much no object: the potential gains in brand and business development are entirely unrepeatable. Their marketing & promotion strategy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the single best TV spot outcome one could hope for is direction to a rich information portal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a comparably diminutive cost.
Not only do you get higher conversion rates than you would if a phone number were displayed, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more manageable rate than television would otherwise generate. This week I’m rapidly developing a new website for them, but also aiming to implement a new VoIP mechanism to effectively manage the anticipated telephone traffic surge. This is for a small business with no employees sitting at a desk 9-5 ready to take calls: they require a particularly agile strategy to appropriately leverage this media opportunity.
At the end of the day, the content of the actual television spot is relatively insignificant. If it converts to web traffic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in particular, telephone contact and subsequent relationships) is the crucial component in this marketing mix. It provides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource constraints. Operating on such a limited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it succeed: the limitation is in human resourcing and man-hours, rather than provisioning additional technology to achieve optimum capacity.
This client can respond to close-timeframe business opportunities in days, not months, chiefly through judicious application of Internet-based technologies (and a tremendously concentrated amount of hard work!)
23 Oct 2007
Education is everywhere and essential.
I have about three or four jobs in various workplaces to do with event production and IT development and design, and probably spend about 10% of my time as an educator. I probably spend twice that time learning new things and keeping on top of everything that happens in my corner of the world, but without that thirty-percent education time, the other 70% would be far less effective.
In that thirty-percent time, I stay ahead of the curve and similarly keep my employers ahead of the curve.
At Youthworks, I have spent less advocacy time of late, but the first several months there was alternately spent in learning how people were interacting with technology, and training people in effective (and efficient) use of it to solve ministry problems. My role was first and foremost to learn, and without that time the consequent project would be lacking in vision and engagement with actual need.
I’ve also recently been working again with a past employer, solving some pressing front-end development issues they have faced due to their need for quality training for staff. In the time I’ve spent there, I built a handful of frontend things mostly with technologies I knew, and spent some time looking into and creating solutions with one particular technology I haven’t had much experience with. This is ‘learning’ in a way that isn’t disruptive to conventional employment: my related expertise accellerated the learning to the point that it remained cost-effective for them to allow me to spend time doing that. Apart from that learning time, I implemented some quality testing systems and trained people in how best to apply them, and spent a few hours engaged in front-end development training with another employee.
In freelance work, I find that unless I explain my role and actions to prospective clients, there is a dramatic decrease in efficiency because expectations aren’t properly established. Part of doing this often includes explaining some things about technologies and techniques that are being used. In order for me to do my job effectively, I need to find non-technical ways to explain technical problems. That means avoiding non-essential jargon, having a cache of analogies to apply to a given situation, and patience to make sure everyone remains on the same page.
As someone who brings a particular area of expertise to a problem, it is my responsibility to share that expertise appropriately with everyone else on the team, as well as acquiring (learning) area-specific expertise from others on team in order to effectively solve problems.
There is absolutely no way to do a job properly without constant acquisition or transmission of knowledge. Education is key.
26 Sep 2007
I haven’t been this confused over a cool Internet service… probably ever. AmazonMP3 is simultaneously one of the most exciting things to happen in online music ever, and a source of great personal confusion.
I want to use it (and will) because it’s freaking awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t massively concern me… generally speaking, I can’t tell the difference (though I will continue to rip my CDs as lossless, mostly in case I lose them). What concerns me is the potential undermining of my CD-store perusing ways as a result! I haven’t had to consider this until now because mainstream music simply hasn’t been available in a relatively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, anyone can read them), DRM-free format.
It ships with artwork but that so doesn’t count.
Oh, so apparently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irrationally craving popcorn.
Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, meanwhile I’ll keep buying my grey-market imported CDs (which is completely legal in Australia and morally fine). All that’s standing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US shipping address for invoices, presumably, so I totally could just make one up. Not breaking any law that I’m under there. But whatever, it’s all too messy.
Yeah, that’s right, record companies screwed it up again.
We’ll get there, one day…
24 Sep 2007
Please do not do this.
Especially do not do this and say that ‘it works fine for us’ to visiting developers!
I’m currently installing a wonderful free XPSP2 image with IE6 from the lovely folks at Microsoft’s IEBlog that actually works when testing webpages for legacy browsers. Please do this instead!
20 Sep 2007
I’ve had a fairly painful day experimenting with the One True Layout Equal Height Column technique in conjunction with a design that requires lots of rounded corners in all the wrong places (no, design will not yield to CSS!) and put out a call for help on the WSG mailing list for the first time in a while.
That place is magic. Gunlaug Sørtun came back in under six hours with another technique I hadn’t even heard of that looks pretty good, the companion columns method. He also has a page dedicated to CSS table- styled columns, but it looks like it could involve a bit too much browser hacking (yes, IE) in order to be worthwhile.
More experimentation doubtless to come.