Best of Alan – Newsletter

Meet Lucy Poole, our new marketing manager. Lucy’s extensive marketing background, including roles at NRMA and American Express, will provide lots of additional value to Zuni’s current offering.

We’re all enjoying her bubbly personality and positivity (her glass is truly half full) and we’re really excited to welcome Lucy to the team.

With only a few weeks to go before the new Privacy legislation comes to life, you might want to consider ADMA’s Data Pass. The Data Pass is an industry training program, designed to ensure your teams have a clear understanding of collection, handling, privacy and consent requirements. It’ll give your organisation a great point of difference and its online modules make it easy to complete.

Privacy Control

Over the last few years the amount of 3rd party tracking and ad targeting has increased exponentially. In parallel to this, public concern about data privacy has also exploded. In response to this concern there are more and more products freely available online. Disconnect.me is really cool in that it graphically shows all the 3rd party sites collecting users data. Ghostery.com is very similar and supports iOS and Android devices. HTTPS Everywhere creates an encrypted connection across all the sites you browse – the main drawback being that it only encrypts web surfing, it doesn’t protect users email, IM or other web services. There has, of course, always been ‘private’ and ‘incognito’ functions on browsers – but then everyone in the office will think you’re looking at porn.

Email and mobile stats from 2013

Over half of all emails are opened on mobile devices now – including 68% of Gmail and Yahoo opens. Android opens have doubled over the last 12 months to 14%. iPhone opens account for 25%. Webmail, browser based mail clients, are down 36% to only 18% of all opens. The combined share between Outlook and Android means that over one third of all emails delivered will have images turned off by default.

The need to design emails responsively, for all device types, and defensively, for image disabled display, is a whole lot more important now than ever before. See ExactTargets’ stats in more detail here.

DIY Customer Experience Design

Customer experience design, or ‘CX’ to use its fashionable vernacular, has rightly so become a key focus for lots of organisations. Fully mapped and documented customer journeys are an essential part of the process to cohesive customer experience design.

See the CX Journey Mapping Kit available online here to get some ideas on how the process works and what the outcomes are.

12 distinct social media personalities. Which one are you?

A survey, conducted by online bank First Direct, found that social media, and the technology we use to access it, could be changing our personalities in quite fundamental ways as some of us exhibit traits very different on social networks to those that we have in the real world.

Apparently the constant access available through mobile devices in particular is not only significantly increasing the amount of time spent on social media platforms it’s also driving fundamental changes in the way many of its users’ interact. Take a look at the 12 identified personality types identified form the study here – are you different online than in person?

Super simple content aggregation tool

Content marketing, particularly via the aggregation of external sources, is being used more and more by all sorts of organisations now. Kimono Labs provide a service that enables users to automate content collection from external sites by creating customised API’s – no more manual copy and paste, all the latest content is automatically added to the users own sites or apps.

The tool is really easy to use, just drag and drop. Once the API’s have been created users can then go on to embed the “scrapped” content into any website or application they own.

Bits and Pieces

• Hockey dis-incentive for loosing – no one wants Bieber!
• New privacy site lets you opt-out of mobile tracking in retail stores.
• Gmail is to add its own unsubscribe links in commercial emails – Is it ironic that you’re hearing about this via email?
• Some great protection for WordPress sites – http://www.wordfence.com
• How cool is the new M&S site! Looks like best practise in everything.
• Seen the new Lego ad take offs yet? Funny.
• Fantastic toolkit for brainstorming consumer centric solutions.