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.

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).

Yet news, views, direction and updates should come from the content experts, not always via the Comms Team’s interpretation. The content expert may need some guidance as to how to write a great article for the intranet. All content authors should have some good practices to guide them, but people who’ve never written for the intranet might benefit from some structured and specific guidance.

You could choose to provide a template in Word to download from the intranet for people to use. Alternatively, a simple checklist might help people draft their article in an email to their manager and the Comms Team.

Intranet article template / checklist:
Craft a template or checklist using the following ideas as you deem appropriate. I offer these ideas after years of experience editing and publishing, working with content experts who did not consider themselves to be writers or communicators.

Start by laying down some memorable guidance about short sentences (twenty words, never ever more than thirty), lots of paragraph breaks, and the need for sub-headings. Explain how the conclusion must be at the top of the article, with background, reasoning and context at the end.

Writer’s name (the person drafting the words):

• Owner’s name (the person responsible for the message):

• Required publishing date (do not say “as soon as possible” as that will mean ‘never’ to a busy intranet manager):

• End date (is there a date when this content *must* no longer appear online?):

• Suggested location (perhaps it’s front page news, perhaps it’s a blog):

• Title (active, obvious, says what it is in five or six words):

• Summary [if required] (not to be confused with the ‘opening paragraph’) The summary might be shown on the home page or landing pages, and it’s absolutely vital in helping people choose to read the article. Suggest a word count of thirty or sixty, depending on the layout of your intranet.

• Now, repeat the idea about the need to top-load the article with the conclusion / required tasks / call to action.

• Suggest a total word count of 450 for news pieces and 750 / 900 for reference articles. Short articles can link to longer reference pages for context.

• Remind the writer of the need for a sub-heading, it will almost certainly get read.

• Keywords (now that the article is written, what are the key concepts and topics? Keywords / tags help contextualise the article, aid the search engine and help people find it in the future):

• Image – if a graph or chart (a ‘functional image’) is supplied, it can be presented on the left-side of the article; if a ‘nice’ photo is supplied it can be shown on the right-side of the article. If no image is supplied the intranet manager might look through the image library for something suitable. Non-functional images go on the right-side of text to enhance the readability of the article.

• Links (the writer may not know how to insert hyperlinks within the text, but nearly every article is enhanced by providing links to further contextual information. Encourage linking to info rather than uploading Word documents):

• Documents (if absolutely necessary, publish Office documents / PDFs alongside the article):

• You can suggest that bold and italics should be used, but sparingly, avoiding emboldening entire sentences. You can suggest that the call to action is repeated in the last sentence.

Let me say that some of these ideas seem so obvious that you might be tempted to dismiss them. Stray at your peril!

Imagine if Penny doesn’t put her name at the bottom of her article, because in her mind ‘you know it’s from her’. But what if you send it on to the intranet manager / publisher for further editing and publishing? The identity of the author could get lost or confused along the way. Missing meta-data just provokes back-n-forth emails.

Authors, like me, believe their article will get read (because it’s ‘important’), but the truth is that only parts of it will be noted. So, top-loading the article with the conclusion (inverted pyramid, anyone?) and front-loading paragraphs with active keywords, together with sub-headings, will all help the important content of the message to be read.

A template or checklist like this isn’t going to teach anyone how to be a good writer, that takes more than a pro forma. But hopefully the author will appreciate how drafts get edited for clarity and flow before publishing.

Aside from good writing practices, what would you add to these template / checklist suggestions?

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www.interact-intranet.com

We’ve been invited to apply to become a rosta agency for a large global pharmaceutical group. The procurement department have sent me a lengthy questionnaire. It’s all pretty standard stuff but I really enjoyed responding to one of the questions they asked because it required me to dust off my crystal ball. Here’s the question:

How do you see healthcare digital coms activities in the next 5 years in terms of growth, challenges and changes?

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 soothsayers, I thought I’d share my predictions now.

1) Use of digital communications in the healthcare sector will increase considerably. I’ve always considered the healthcare industry to be a late adopter of web technologies due mainly to regulatory risk. However, a better understanding of these risks and how to mitigate them is now causing the industry to come out of its digital shell. I strongly believe we’re going to see an explosion in investment online.

The healthcare industry is a laggard when it comes to adoption of internet technologies

2) Healthcare companies will find focused and valuable ways to use social media but overall, social media hype will die down as they realise (through a better understanding of analytics) that they need to get The Fundamentals right: website, search, and how to optimise these. As has always been the case, The Fundamentals, will continue to drive much bigger volumes and conversions than social media.

3) Mobile channels will grow in importance to the point where they become one of The Fundamentals I talk about in 2 above. However, whilst the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt internet technologies up until now, we’re going to get a leapfrog effect with the industry’s adoption of the mobile web happening in tandem with most other industries. By and large, regulatory risk is the same both for the desktop web and the mobile web.

4) Healthcare companies will become more sophisticated when it comes to measurement of digital activities and data associated with these. Senior managers will demand greater evidence of business value delivered and business performance improvements. This challenge by senior management and stronger focus on real goals will lead to much more strategic approaches to digital activities (this is why I say in 2 above that social media hype will die down).

5) We are going to see more care being delivered online by doctors, hospitals and caregivers (check out this 5-year study regarding virtual care of HIV patients http://blog.hospitalclinic.org/en/2011/03/assistencia-virtual-eina-control-vih/). Healthcare companies will see this as an opportunity to partner with caregivers and will help develop virtual care programmes tailored around their own products. A great example of this is Ethicon’s Realize My Success programme in bariatrics https://www.realizemysuccess.com/launch.htm .

6) Wide adoption of smart phones will mean healthcare companies will find better ways to engage with their sales reps and provide much more on-the-road support, training and collaboration between sales reps. We’re going to see the mobile intranet really taking off for other employees as well.
I’ve most probably missed some really obvious predictions (and no doubt some less obvious ones too). If you’ve got any of your own, do please share them by posting a comment below.

Most of our clients are marketers working in consumer healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical device companies. They don’t sell products online. They want their customers to come to the site, learn about the product and then go and buy it in a shop, ask their doctor for a prescription or perhaps place an order via a sales rep. The point at which money actually changes hands is far removed from the website visit. As a result we often find that these marketers focus on metrics like unique visitors and pageviews – metrics that tend to make senior managers’ eyes glaze over. This is bad news if you want to persuade your boss to give you more budget to invest in online.

At Content Formula, we try to help our clients identify metrics that are more closely linked to the end sale because it’s these kinds of metrics that senior management really want to see. Finding the right metrics means identifying specific website goals that can be measured by tools like Google Analytics. It’s not always an easy thing to do but if you ask yourself the question “what do I want users to do when they come to my site” you can start to come up with some good ideas. It’s also important to limit the number of goals you have on your site. One goal is ideal, two or three is ok but any more than that and it is starting to look like you are not focused on your business objectives.

Here’s an example for you. Imagine you are a product manager trying to market a stapling tool to surgeons. You’ve developed a cool interactive demo video which you know surgeons find very persuasive. You set up two goals on your website. The first one is a video view – i.e. each time a visitor views the video to the end, that counts as one goal converted. The second goal is a “get a rep to contact me” form. You place the form right next to the video but the goal is only counted once the visitor has hit the submit button on the form. In effect, you’ve created a two-step sales funnel. Once these goals are set up you could start measuring yourself and then perform simple tweaks to improve goal conversions. By using A/B testing techniques you can easily test different tweaks against one another. We think that’s pretty cool but you can you see that your boss will be super pleased when you go to him and tell him that not only have you generated X sales enquiries but you know that for every 20 visitors that come to your site, one submits an enquiry. In fact, tell him that and he’s likely to give you more budget to spend on search advertising to drive more traffic to your site.

Hopefully you can see how forward-thinking marketers are adopting the same metrics mindset as online retailers and applying it to their digital activities. They are finding ways to demonstrate to senior management the effects their digital activity has on driving down brand spend and driving up revenue. This approach to digital analytics encourages continuous and incremental improvement and enhancement of ROI rather than big-bang site launches where ROI begins to fall from day 1.

At Content Formula we provide special website support packages aimed at helping clients optimise their sites through incremental improvements. If you’re interested, please get in touch with Dan Hawtrey

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.

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.

Here in the Content Formula office we regularly use Skype to instant message and share information with each other. It works as an easy way to get an answer quickly about a project or just to arrange an in-office meeting.   It also helps to share information or pose a question to a whole group in one step, and everyone can then benefit from the answer.

Yammer is also a useful micro-blogging tool for your company as it works as a social networking site, bringing teams together and providing a platform for work and ideas to be shared. Unlike a discussion board, it has a less formal tone and is very familiar in layout and design to that of social networking sites used for personal use. Learn more about Yammer.

Yammer received $25 million in third- round funding highlighting the applicability of such a collaboration tool within large companies. Today the social networking tool for the corporate world has more than 1.5 million corporate users spanning 136 countries and is continuing to grow in popularity.

Whereas Twitter and Facebook can be used to sprinkle the public domain with corporate messages, they are viewed as informal and personal platforms, as compared with Yammer. Many employees are keen to clearly distinguish between their personal and professional lives, and that is reflected in the demand for different social tools for different situations.

We get a lot of clients asking us to help them find new ways of engaging and increasing communication between employees. From chat forums to discussion boards and Twitter feeds there is always something to suit your organisation and its culture. It is important that these tools are not viewed as invasions of privacy or to keep tabs on people, but as a hub for new opportunities and to improve communication within your business.

The clear benefits of using social media tools as part of your internal communications strategy are that they build strong interaction between departments and an easy and accessible way of finding information and sharing announcements, news and queries.  A marked 67 per cent of people believe that fellow employees can help them do their job better (Harris Interactive and Tact Knowledge Systems). It is part of horizontal communication in that all employees at all levels are accessible all the time offering quick responses rather than waiting on email responses or returned telephone calls.

Why not seek some new ways to socialise your internal communications?  Get in touch!

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. 

Similarly, alongside your email campaign you might be running a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign with the same objective. Knowing conversion rates for both campaigns will help you determine which is the most effective and where you should concentrate your resources.

Creating distinct URLs
Simply collecting clicks and opens stats from your email software only provides half the story as you cannot determine which email click throughs ended up as a conversion on your site. In order to track the full user journey from email click-through to conversion it is vital to tag your email campaigns. This sounds more complex than it is. If you have Google Analytics on your site, you can use Google’s URL Builder to create tagged links that you can paste into your email. There are 3 tags that you need to provide so that you can track your campaign in Google Analytics: campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name. 

Based on the campaign describe above, logical names for the tags could be: 

Campaign source: newsletter

Campaign medium: email

Campaign name: january_2011

Using the Google URL builder you would end up with a link that looks something like this:

http://www.acme.com/product_enquiry.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=january_2011

Tracking conversions
A final thing that you must remember to do is set up your goals in Google Analytics so that it knows when a conversion has been achieved. Again, this is a lot easier than it sounds. Using the example above, your goal is to generate online customer enquiries. In order to do this, you’ll have a form on your website where customers fill out their contact details and ask a question. When they click “submit” they are then taken to a page that says “thank you, we will be in touch shortly”. This page is the goal as it is the last step in the customer’s journey. You need to copy the link to this page and enter it as a goal in Google analytics (find out exactly how to do this here )

All the building blocks are now in place. Once your campaign has gone out you will be able to fire-up Google Analytics and track conversions. Go to Traffic sources > All traffic sources. Then select the Goals tab. Then select Campaign from the drop-down menu (see the image below). There you can see all your campaigns along with their various conversion rates. Go show those numbers to your boss!

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.

1) The changing interface
For the best part of 100 years humans have been slave to the QWERTY keyboard. You are using one now, no doubt. User Interface designers have had a nightmare trying to move away from this because it works well and everyone is habituated to it.

There are signs though that QWERTY might no longer be a necessity. Apple’s iPhone and its touch-screen interface have led a revolution in public acceptance of the touchscreen interface and their software based keyboard is intuitive and popular. Touchscreen interfaces are even now being adapted to be tactile. Will we be using QWERTY in another 100 years time? No, I don’t think so.  QWERTY is actually quite inefficient. It takes time to learn and even experienced and practiced typists can’t type as fast as they can speak. Voice control would be the perfect way to control machines, but it has been tried many times and so far has proved ineffective. It is still being developed and I hope that someday computers will get smart enough to work with us vocally.

What else could there be? Well, for that I think it’s time to turn to Sci-fi films like Minority Report and Star Trek. In these, computers are always controlled by gesture and the really interesting thing is that these films are beginning to spawn real life babies – E.G. Microsoft’s Kinect gesture motion interface or this example brought to life in 2008. If  reliable voice control continues to elude developers, then I suspect gesture control is very much on the horizon. It’s the logical step forward from touch-screen.

2) Connectivity
It used to be the case that you had to use a 3.5″ floppy disk to move a file between computers. If you were lucky it wouldn’t corrupt on the disk, and if you were even luckier you’d have the right software to open the file on the other computer. Things have moved on somewhat since the 1990s and it is becoming simpler by the week to transfer data and connect devices together.

Most homes are now wi-fi zones to which computers, game consoles, TVs, phones, slates, printers, music systems and even Umbrellas are connected. These devices also access data from the web and increasingly it’s possible to share data easily and natively between them. How many of you have sat in front of your TV and watched a movie from your PC? I think that we will see a rapid increase in the number of devices we’re able to interconnect, and the complexity of the connections they are able to make. The connected home is fast becoming a reality for those with the time and money to make it so. I think the trend will take us far beyond just our houses and flats.

3) Mobility
Right there with connectivity is the ability to move your information around with you as you move around the world. We’re pretty used to being able to do this in 2010, but it wasn’t always the case. Even 10 years ago it was rare to find anyone connecting to a website by means other than a PC. Then data networks advanced to a point where browsing from mobile phones became possible and there was a positive explosion of new devices and data tariffs to the extent that in 2010, it’s unusual to find someone under the age of 40 who doesn’t check their email or update Facebook from their phone.

Concepts like Google Docs (you can access your files from any web browser), apps like Spotify or iTunes (you to take your music with you wherever you go) and social websites like Facebook (you can keep in touch with your network anytime, anywhere) have enabled us to access what we want at will from an ever increasing range of platforms.

The technology we use to consume the web is obviously going to have a massive impact on the way the web is built, and the way companies offer up website data for consumption. It used to be enough to create a mobile version of your website by ripping out the big graphics and making it all quick and simple to download. No more. The rise of the mobiles led to the creation of apps, which are now driving companies to create whole new interfaces for their website – delivering data on demand and in new ways. This is only going to accelerate. The potential for apps is limited only by the creativity of developers within the constraints of the technology. This trend is really about the freedom of data. Data is no longer locked into a website, it’s becoming available for everyone to access in different ways.

Conclusions and a quick example
Just like our Grandparents have had to become silver surfers in order to keep up with modern life, I think we’re going to face a similar struggle to learn new systems and new interfaces (probably whilst watching our kids in bemusement and befuddlement).

I don’t see any reason why the pace of change will slow and I think that more than ever before we’ll be interacting with devices in what seem like unconventional ways to us right now. We’ll also carry our lives around with us, accessing what we want when we want it.

I’ll finish with a quick example of what the interconnected and advanced web could bring us. This was born from a discussion about the future of mobile apps that I had with Dan recently.

Currently, diabetics have to monitor their blood glucose levels closely and follow a regime of injections. In my hypothetical future I see people with diabetic implants that report on blood glucose levels directly to their hand-held data device du jour. The device would alert them if there is an issue and it would also alert their doctor who could then send them messages or make an appointment. The device could order new shots of insulin automatically based on how many had been injected and how many the medicine cupboard reported it contained.

Exciting or scary, it’s certainly going to be fascinating living in the 21st century.

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.

This shows the full page view with a really interesting website being previewed on the right!

Bing have something similar, but it is a poor cousin.

As for Yahoo, it's very much status quo. Although they have included features such as the Search Pad to help searchers jot down notes. I'd like to see the usage stats for that...

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.

In fact, according to a recent study by New Media Age there has been an increase in advertisers moving their budgets to ad exchanges as opposed to buying directly from publishers or ad networks.  This not only saves money but also time as these opportunities become more accessible.

However, there are still a number of hurdles stopping those wanting to investigate this area further. Many media agencies are still not offering ad exchange services to their clients preferring to sell on full rate displays through ad networks.

To help build your knowledge of banner exchanges and how to get yourself a bargain banner follow Content Formula’s quick guide to banner exchanges:

• Ad exchanges are effectively middle-men who gather unsold inventory from publishers and make it available to advertisers.
• Advertisers bid for display space through the exchange and the highest bidder gets the placement. It’s very similar to Google Adwords.
• Bidding happens in real time. This means that the advertiser’s bid is submitted and accepted (assuming it is the highest), and the ad is placed at the moment the end user loads the page onto their browser.
• Ad exchanges use a software platform to facilitate and automate the whole bidding and placement process. Some exchanges enhance their service by providing conversion optimisation, allowing advertisers to concentrate their bidding on the inventory which deliver the highest conversions.
• Be aware, unlike buying direct from the publisher, when using ad exchange the advertiser does not know where their ad is placed. This is because publishers don’t want to affect the rates at which they sell their premium space.
• Not knowing where ads get placed opens up a risk to advertisers whereby their ad could be placed on inappropriate sites for their brand. The industry has therefore developed platforms and systems which guarantee “brand safety” and squash this risk.

Content Formula has a close relationship with one of Europe’s leading ad exchanges. If you want to hear more about how ad exchanges can save you money, get in touch.