The art of blogging

People keep talking about how you should have a blog on your company website, but they hardly ever explain why. So here goes:

1. Blogs can give your company a bit more personality, provide a behind-the-scenes peek, make you seem more individual to your web visitors.
2. You get a chance to air thoughts/opinions or talk about subjects that either aren't directly related to your company, or that you might not be quite ready to bill as the 'company line' - it depends how far you want to take your blog into the realm of the 'personal view'.
3. Most importantly, blogs can be very good at driving traffic to your website. Especially if they are quoted by other bloggers, who then link back to them - search engines think sites that are well-linked are more trusted, and so you'll come higher up the rankings.
4. Because you should update them fairly regularly, they help keep your site fresh. New content encourages repeat visitors.
5. They give visitors to your site a chance to interact, by commenting on what you've written. Sometimes the arguments that go on in the comments are more interesting than the blog post itself!
   

Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself if you're thinking about having a company blog:

• Whose blog is it? At tictoc any of the staff can add to the blog - some companies keep it as a personal view from one of their staff, usually someone at the top.
  
• What's it for? Sometimes it's about issues that are relevant to your company, sometimes it's about a whole load of other stuff that has no direct relevance to what your company does. Sometimes it's a mixture of both.
• Who's going to make sure you blog regularly? There's no point having one if it's rarely updated. Make a commitment, and give someone the time and responsibility to make it happen.

And here are some other things to bear in mind:

• If you use a blogsite for your blog (i.e. blogger or wordpress) your own company site will not get any of the benefit of having a blog. All that traffic will be driven to another site - it won't help your own rankings at all. It's not difficult to get a blog built in to the Content Management System of your own site.
  
• Do be a bit careful about the content on your blog. Don't be defamatory, be careful if you're going to be provocative - remember, this reflects on your company, and technically your company could be liable for what's said on it.
• Know how you're going to deal with comments. Not all comments will be supportive, and you should make a decision about whether to allow comments or not. If you do and someone makes a comment you're not happy with, make sure you respond to it (calmly) rather than ignoring it.

By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 October 2008
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The ups and downs of selling online

Recently e-consultancy has done a couple of stories about selling online and I thought I'd pull out some of the most relevant stats for you, and point you towards the original articles.

The first stat that I thought was interesting was that online sales are generally estimated to make up 7-15% of a brand's sales. e-consultancy was averaging it at 10%. Although that may work very well for high street brands, we think the story's very different for small independent retailers - if you're in a niche market and online suddenly opens you up to customers without a geographic boundary, you can suddenly reach a whole lot more people. We know that one of our clients is currently taking more than 50% of their sales online.

Interestingly, a number of the brands that e-consultancy originally noted (Feb 08) weren't selling online still have no plans to go online in Sep 08. Whether that is because they figured they'd already lost the battle (I can see that Morrison's and Somerfield may feel that Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have already beaten them and pilfered all their potential online customers) or because their sales are such high-volume and low-value (though with Asda's George going online, Primark and H&M have more to lose) that they figure it's not worth it, I am surprised that such big brands are still unable to take advantage of online selling.

And then finally e-consultancy summed it all up in a lovely little article that pulled together the drawbacks of not selling online - apart from the loss of a revenue stream that most retailers would be very pleased to have in today's economic climate. Two in particular stick out for me - the obvious one that without online you're limiting your customers to buying from specific geographic locations where you have stores, and to your trading hours - online neatly leaps these two hurdles. And the second one is that you are immediately losing out to your competitors - who can bid on your brand name in an effort to snaffle your customers, or where your customers choose to shop from them because your brand isn't available online. Very few brands have such customer loyalty, or such brand exclusivity, that a customer would refuse to buy elsewhere. Online makes is so easy to search for particular products and compare prices that brands who aren't online are definitely losing out on sales.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 29 September 2008
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Wall of Websites

The developers were feeling that there was something missing from the room and so we decided to print homepage screen shots of our websites. We started with just the most recent projects, but quite liked the result so ended up printing most of the sites from the last two years, over 80 screen-shots!

We've reached such a height up the wall that not even Tomek could stretch to and so we will be continuing to wallpaper around the room as new sites are launched.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 22 August 2008
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Brands poor at Search Engine Optimisation

New research reported in today's Revolution shows that the majority of brand advertisers do not have an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy, negatively impacting on their natural search listings. Essentially, their sites are not search engine friendly, meaning that they rank lower on search engine listings.

Search engine optimisation covers a range of things - from some technical stuff about how your site is built (e.g. sites built entirely in Flash severely restrict Google's ability to 'read' them), how the URLs of pages are set up, to the content and copy on your site, and how your headings show. All tictoc's sites are built with SEO in mind - we covered a bit about SEO in our most recent seminar, and we'll probably cover it again in future events.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 20 August 2008
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Silver lining for etailers

New research shows that the current economic situation may have a silver lining for etailers - although 64% of respondents said that the economic climate would force them to reduce their overall spending, 56% said that they would continue to shop online as much as they are already, while some will even spend more.

The report, by E-consultancy, also looks at the importance of price, user-reviews and recommendations for consumers when online shopping.

Responses show that price comparison sites are becoming more important - the report suggests that retailers should be submitting their product feeds to price comparison engines to take advantage of this - and that user-reviews are also of growing importance, particularly to the younger market (72% of the 25-34 age group said they would be more likely to read online reviews, the figure for over 55s was 53%).

Matthew Tod, one of the authors of the report, commented "We can see from this report that silver surfers are not into social media or comparison engines and are intending to spend more as the downturn does not touch them. But on the other hand a whole group of more financially pressed people now use social media to make decisions and then comparison engines to find the best deal. Complexity rules and simple strategies will fail if online retailers don't understand this."

By Kate Wooding
Published: 15 August 2008
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Are rising prices driving online shopping?

Realised we hadn't mentioned anything about credit crunches or rising fuel prices on the blog (well it's summer, we've got better things to think about like flying ant days and playground games), so thought I would remedy this with a positive little story about how rising prices might actually be driving online sales. Online sales have been rising steadily since forever, and it must be difficult to separate the many factors that contribute to this, but it seems that some clever people think that we might be using online shopping to avoid travel costs (like fuel), or to avoid overspending on shopping trips. Read the full article at e-consultancy here - it also links to a great article by Lorraine Paterson about how to improve eCommerce sites from a usability point of view.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 25 July 2008
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The rise and rise of mobile sites

There's an article in this week's NMA about how 60% of consumers think it's important to be able to access the internet from their mobile, and 65% of those who are planning to buy a phone in the next year will be looking for a good mobile internet experience. Surely the iPhone and Twitter are partly responsible for this rise?? There are a couple of things this means for the digital industry - firstly we'll all need to make sure that the sites we build are easily 'readable' on mobiles and secondly more brands are demanding mobile-specific sites - sites built specifically for mobile access. Will it be restricted to certain sectors? The NMA article suggests that banks, sport, travel, social networking, local amenities/guides and ticket purchasing would all benefit - and having mobile access to Wikipedia would settle a few pub arguments - and make pub quizzes a cinch!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 19 June 2008
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Online winners and losers

It's been a season of weird online trading stories with some of the big players taking substantial hits on the high street and others doing phenomenally well. The one thing that can't be denied is the undoubted success of the web in this story! Below are some snippits of winners and losers in the etail environment.

Sainsbury's has announced 'exceptional' online sales growth over the Christmas period. The company said the improved etail results helped it achieve its overall £2.5bn sales target three months ahead of schedule.

Amazon was the most popular retail site over Christmas accounting for 9% of visits to all retail sites.

Shares in HMV have jumped 15% after the music and books retailer said it had a "highly successful" Christmas period. Like-for-like sales at its HMV stores in the UK and Ireland rose 14.1%, while sales at its Waterstone's bookstore chain rose 4%.

Marks and Spencers was hit by poor Christmas sales with UK like-for-like sales falling 2.2% in the last three months of 2007, however website sales were particularly healthy, up 78%.

Tesco said its online businesses had a "very successful" Christmas, with total sales up 24%, helped by strong demand for MP3 players, digital cameras and laptops.

Webs the future!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 January 2008
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Happy, stress-free Christmas Shopping

In an article published in The Sunday Herald recently, it was stated that more than 27 million people are expected to shop online over the festive season turning Britain into the biggest online retail market in Europe.

Total online sales are set to reach £40 billion this year and are predicted to quadruple to £162bn by 2020 when they will account for 40% of all UK Retail sales.

According to uSwitch, UK Consumers could save more than £13bn a year by shopping online! Some of the most popular products bought online are music, films and concert tickets. More than half of online shoppers (53%) by music and films online; 35% buy tickets for events over the internet and about a third purchase books, clothes and sporting goods. Grocery shopping online is also becoming more popular.

Here are links to some of our eCommerce websites:

Guitar
Scotch Whisky Shop
Just Dogs
Royal Mile Residence
Woods of Windsor

Source : The Sunday Herald, Naomi Caine

By Melanie Russell
Published: 30 November 2007
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