The Revised E-Privacy Directive aka the “Cookie Law” is due to be enforced from the 26th May 2012. The synopsis is that if you are tracking users and capturing data on them, you MUST ask them for consent or you cannot track them. Unfortunately for web marketers, in order to be compliant, analytic packages are also included in this scope.

This deck summarises the impacts and explains the detail, along with some information on what companies are doing to work around the inconsistencies in the law.

This article below was written by our guest author, Wedge, and is reproduced from his blog with his permission.

Perhaps not everyone has the right / permission to publish articles on your intranet. It’s likely that a percentage of your workforce are able to contribute directly, but a larger percentage can only contribute indirectly (perhaps through comments or updates).

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I know that it’s traditional to save these types of predictions for the turn of the year but to avoid competing with the year-end deluge of fortune tellers, I thought I’d share my predictions now.

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If you sell stuff direct through your website there’s an obvious metric that you and your boss will be obsessed about: revenue. Having revenue as your metric gives you a big, single focus when it comes to improving your site. There are all sorts of things you can do: you can optimises your checkout process to make it as quick and easy as possible; you can test various product combinations and hope to increase the size of the shopping basket; you can improve the descriptions of your products. The list is endless and there are loads of helpful articles all over the web to guide you on what to do. Read on…

Medical data which is presented to patients is often impenetrable, scary and hard to understand. In this excellent TED talk by Thomas Goetz, the argument is made that it doesn’t have to be like this!

A brief synopsis:

• How behavioural science can be used to change patient behaviour.
• Current trends in the display of medical / pharmaceutical data.
• Simple ways to make these readable, relevant and useful.

Unless you’ve been lost in the jungle for the duration of the Naughties, you’ll have noticed the huge impact that social media has had on everyday life, from statuses about what our friends have eaten for dinner, to tweets breaking new news first.

Without a doubt, this change in social communication in our personal routines has also impacted how we communicate in a work environment.  New ways of communicating with colleagues have emerged, making internal comms simpler, easier and more diverse than ever before.

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Proving it works
So, you’re running monthly emails and collecting open and click-through data to present to your boss. If he knows his stuff, he should really be saying, “So what?”

Open and click-throughs are not an end in themselves, it is the conversion rate that is far more interesting and provides more useful data. For example, if a key objective of your email campaign and website is to generate online customer enquiries for sales staff, you should be measuring the rate at which email recipients are submitting a sales enquiry. This way you can say to your boss, “January’s email campaign went out to 5000 people and generated 50 enquiries”. You can then take that data, match it with end sales data and in turn calculate an ROI. 

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Trying to predict the future is tricky at the best of times, but I think it is perfectly possible to use current trends to illustrate future developments. Using trends like this does work. A famous example is “Moore’s Law“. In 1965, the Intel co-founder  Gordan Moore suggested that the computing capacity would double approximately every two years. Broadly speaking he’s been proved correct and the development curve has been exponential from the monstrous computers of the 1950s through to the supercomputers of today. Semiconductor companies have based billion pound budgets on Moore’s prediction.

Throughout the 20th Century there has been a trend of rapid and continuous improvement in nearly all fields of human endeavor. We have progressed from the Model-T to the Bugatti Veyron, from the Wright brothers and their rickety bi-plane to the Euro-fighter. From the 8-bit website of the 1980s to the web 2.0 website of today…

The overarching trend is of rapid and innovative technological development. So where is this development curve taking us? Is it possible to pick trends applying to the web and web devices? Yes, I think so. Read on…

The screen preview shows the search keywords highlighted on the destination page

Pioneering the way yet again, Google, the head honcho of search engines, has recently implemented a handy new feature that allows users to view a screen preview of sites returned in search results.

Search users can left-click on the site description to view a screen preview of that page, which also highlights where the keywords used in the search are featured on the body page.

This feature cranks search optimisation up a notch as it empowers users and allows them to make even more informed choices about the websites they visit.  It also places further emphasis on the importance of using keywords effectively throughout your website.

Microsoft has implemented a similar initiative with their ‘new kid on the block’ search engine Bing: this however, merely provides the user with additional information in text format about what can be found on sites returned in the search.

Google’s initiative is more in tune with users’ needs and requirements, and is another key milestone in enabling users to navigate the vast amount of content on the web more effectively. Here are some screenshots of the major search engines to illustrate his new area of competition.

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In the last supermarket retail hours of the day hoards of commuters can be found huddled around the reduced section looking for a discounted dinner time treat. You can eat like a King on less than a fiver, as long as you do not mind eating all you buy that day.

Banner space inevitably works in a very similar way enabling advertisers to get hold of cheap and unsold banner space from ad exchanges through bidding. Ad exchanges are platforms to help advertising companies buy and sell space online and are becoming more and more popular.

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