Of course, we include all of the Social channels when developing digital strategies for our clients and we are big fans of Facebook as a means of finding and developing relationships with brand advocates.

All of the above are easy and straight forward to use, so straight forward that even my mother has managed to join the online Social crowd (and I used to have to reset the clock on her VHS every time we went from summer to winter!)

Google +1 isn’t. When they announced +1 I was interested. I followed the links and opted in to the trial for +1 on Googles experimental page. Then I discovered I had to have a Google profile so I created one and joined the experiment again. Nada.

I’ve just conducted a straw pole of the agency and most hadn’t heard about it (a bit worrying) and those that had have had the same experience as me. Explanations such as ‘maybe it’s not available in the UK yet’ are all well and good but nobody’s telling us that.

My point is this. If this is Googles big grab for a slice of the Social pie they’ve made it far too difficult. I don’t want to have to be logged in to Google as I search the web. I am more than happy to be on Facebook and login to this when I want to. If I find something I like on a site I am browsing and I think my friends might be interested I have no problem clicking the Like button to broadcast the fact to my friends on Facebook.

Facebook is an environment for me to share things with friends and family around the world. That’s why I am on it and that’s why I created a profile and added friends over the last 5 years.

Google is a search tool. I don’t log onto it to share things with my friends or colleagues nor will I considering how complicated they are making it to even join the experiment. Google are going to have to entice me with a lot better reason to join than the fact I might be able to see a recipe that my mother +1’d as she won’t have.

If you enjoy fixing bugs in other people’s code then unfortunately you’re not the right person for us…

If you’re keen to learn, prepared to work hard and won’t complain too loudly when asked to fix bugs in other people’s code when the need arises then please get your CV over.

See the full requirements over in the Jobs section.

Global Beach took care of all design, digital marketing and technical aspects of the project. Catering for time-poor high net worth individuals, extreme ease of navigation and intuitive interface is of utmost importance. The bidding process and each member’s personal page is optimized to make the overall user experience fast, engaging and straight to the point. Victor’s bespoke platform is able to handle a sophisticated database and to alert each member on customized rules, across different channels (email, Victor’s community, mobile network, etc.)

Peter Cameron, Global Beach’s Managing Director, says: “It is a pleasure when an ambitious client comes to us. Victor challenged our assumptions given the revolutionary values the business model is based on. And trust me, this is not an easy task. We have been developing bespoke, luxury-market oriented solutions for a long time now. But Victor makes the impossible reality: anyone can now travel like they have their own jet. When they want it, how they want it.”

Further areas of development are mobile applications and Social Media integration which are underway. Members will be able to indicate their preferred routes, book flights or individual seats, place bids for seats,  monitor their requests on the move, and be alerted on their personal smart phone or tablet, with only two things: a PDA and a passport.

Jonathan Sumner, Managing Director of Victor, commented: “We went to Global Beach because they are well known for their expertise in the digital luxury sector. Their insights about our particular target market were invaluable, and their approach is to work very closely with the client throughout the development process. We trusted them to deliver the complex solution we required to make this business a success and we were not disappointed “

Also, a niche-oriented social media strategy will increase the outreach of the product and contribute to spreading Victor’s values across a segment of discerning travelers in Europe. All this will make Victor’s members experience a revolutionarily easy way to enjoy private aviation when they need it and how they want it. At a competitive price.

‘The Unbroken Line’ is a new exhibition at Crewe, the home of Bentley Motors, which provides a remarkable window into the secret world of Bentley design. It examines the tools, processes and skills of Bentley’s 100-strong design team. And it shows, through some of the most important historic Bentleys ever brought together, how the design of a Bentley has evolved from the fast and furious 1920s through to the present day…and beyond.

Today at 11:40 p.m. the first two sections of the exhibit were rolled live, with more to come in the following weeks, for a total of twenty different spaces and themes.
Global Beach has developed the virtual tour avoiding the use of Flash for universal accessibility and to engage with iPad, iPhone and iPod users.

Paypal.co.uk was elected best website of the year by the people’s choice website award initiative by online research agency MetrixLab. It has gained the highest average score on content, navigation and design in the finance category. Also, the websites is the most popular in the same category, following the growth in visits, usage and conversion throughout 2010. PayPal website’s architecture was redesigned by Global Beach to enhance acquisition of new customers and engagement with activation of users, increasing on-site activity. Other goals were to effectively communicate PayPal’s brand values and value proposition, while retention was another target, with the goal of boosting the time spent on each product’s landing page. In regards to the volume of traffic, the new homepage reduced bounce rates by 6%, which meant an increase in engaged visitors of more than 100.000. The three main sections of the new website doubled their click-through rates, while bounce rates from the same landing pages were reduced by 40% – 50%, ultimately underlying more effective user journeys. The new design also increased the time spent by users in the different sections, while inducing more clicks in those pages.

The page views of these products were substantially increased by 200%. The new site went live in early May, 2010.

The full list at http://www.websiteoftheyear.co.uk/

A solution is to be found with the new service that Facebook launched in the US and more recently in the UK and Ireland, which is an dedicated account manager for your Facebook Business Account. As far as I know, you can only get this service if you manage a large number of marketing campaigns on the social medium, which means that in most instances you will have to ask your agency to do it for you. We had one instance where we used the service and it went smoothly.

If you would like us to manage your Facebook ads, let us know.

We also undertake this approach for a lot of the pitches we are working on and this provides us with data we are able to share without breaking any client confidentiality. Having recently conducted such an approach for the Charity sector we have a wealth of information regarding the type of experience users are looking for from a charity website, including the look & feel, the donation process and what makes users want to make a donation to a particular charity.

In the first of our planned series of reports we have put together the results of our research and are happy to share this with the sector as a whole. Always remembering that it’s one thing to collect the data and quite another to interpret it and turn it into the right end user experience.

For instance, I’ve got a friend who used to work as a DJ, and he is incapable of going into a club or bar without immediately checking out the equipment used there and seeing how it’s set up. Equally, it’s impossible for me not to get advice from anyone who’s ever worked behind a bar whenever I make a complete hash of trying to pour a drink into a glass without creating enough head to have my own foam party.

The environment that I’ve mainly worked in (digital agencies) means that it’s also against the law of nature for me to have a website open in front of me without some designer or even project manager make some comment about how good or hideous the design or layout is. At which I can only shrug my shoulders and say I don’t really care how it looks as I’m a back-end developer (insert your own joke here) and as long as it works I’m happy.

Now, when I come across sites that don’t work properly, a variety of thoughts go through my head, foremost among them is deciding how annoyed to be at the incompetence of the developers/testers of the site to bring a halt to my journey so abruptly. Two factors govern how many times I scream at the monitor that I could code better than that; one, deciding whether the site belongs to a small shop and probably maintained by novice self taught coders using a variety of help manuals or a large corporation with enough resources to keep a whole army of programmers on. If I decide on the former then most of the time I would chuckle to myself, make an ‘ah bless’ comment and then move on. However, if it’s the latter then I would tut loudly and start making a mental list of what coding error could have possibly caused the problem.

The length of this list would be determined by my second factor, whether the error is actually an error or whether the site just doesn’t do what you or a 1 year old would expect it to. If it’s an error, then I would move on fairly quickly, as even programmers are human and will make mistakes. However, if it’s more of a case of extreme bad planning and thought then I get really annoyed. The prime example of which is the Transport for London site (TFL), (for those of you aren’t in London and really couldn’t care less about what happens inside it, tough) earlier this summer a cycle hire scheme was launched and you can now buy access on their site in order to use it. All well and good, you pay either £1, £5 or £45 for a day, week or year’s access respectively, great. There is an option when you sign up to decide whether you want to automatically renew your access subscription as it expires, useful, but I decided not to at the time. However, being human and therefore also certainly likely to change my mind I later decided that I would like to enable this option. So I logged into my account, full of hope and confidence and found out that the system wouldn’t let me do this one simple thing! Investigating further, it appears that once my subscription is expired the system will no longer let me alter settings in my account, and that I would have to ring up TFL and get someone there to do it!

To me, this is just mind boggling, firstly, what sort of lazy programming (and testing) let this bug get released into the world? My head is full of images of lines of code gone wrong that would lead to this. Secondly, seeing as it’s possible for their customer service team to do this at their end, it would suggest that the core functionality of the site allows this function, and it’s just the customer facing website that is defective. In which case, it’s been over 6 months since the scheme was launched and this problem reported, so why is it not fixed!? We are talking about TFL, a large corporation with a pretty hefty budget at its disposal for this sort of thing and not a corner shop with a shoestring budget. Plus, in my head, unless it’s such a monumentally badly coded site, it really shouldn’t be that difficult to fix.