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My AFF Level 1 Skydive

By dave | Published: June 15, 2011

My mate Colin had been going on about how awesome skydiving was for the past year and his constant ramping on about it every time we went for a beer, which of course is a regular event, was starting to do my sweed. I decided to do it just to shut the annoying tit up and got booked up for my AFF (Accelerated Freefall) Level 1. Most people do a tandem first time they jump, but I didn’t like the thought of having another man strapped to my rear so I thought I’d go solo and pull my own chute. The AFF course consists of 8 Levels which upon successful completion puts you a step closer to achieving BPA ‘A’ license. Once you have achieved your BPA ‘A’ license you can jump at all drop zones that are open to the public worldwide.

There were four of us heading down to the drop zone that day, myself, Colin who has been jumping for a while, Andy who was doing a tandem and my brother who was coming along with us to watch. Powered up on a dirty breakfast from the garage to nuke the pound a pint night we were all suffering from the night before, we hit the road with The Strokes on full volume.

We arrived at Netheravon drop zone in Salisbury at 8:30am. I grabbed a cup of tea and shortly after heard my name called out over the base loudspeaker. Yeaa buddy!.. time for 6 hours of ground school! Ground school familiarises you with the mechanics of the equipment you will be using, how to control and position yourself in free flight and most importantly, the safety and emergency procedures/drills.

I was introduced to my instructor ‘Bish’ who was a military lad and had over 2500 jumps to his name, with only one malfunction, which was reassuring to hear! Since Netheravon is a military base many of the jumpers there are from different parts of the military, but mainly army and paratroopers.

Ground school kicked off with a brief on how my equipment (Parachute rig and altimeter) worked, that was followed up with some questions to check if everything has sunk in.

Next up we took a full rig into the hanger and Bish went through the stages of unpacking it and explaining how it deployed and inflated. Bish explained the potential nuisances that can occur after deployment such as line twists, collapsed end cells and how to deal with these if they occur. He also showed me how to use the toggles to brake, flare, turn and collapse the chute on landing. This was again followed by a round of questions to ensure I had absorbed everything.

We then left the hangar and headed back to hut where we starting going through what was required of me to complete the AFF Level 1. The next 4 hours was spent going over and over the jump and emergency drills. If you don’t know what is meant by a hard arch, you will do by the end of ground school and you’ll be shouting ‘LOOK, LOCATE, CUT AWAY, RELEASE, ARCH’ in your sleep! A hard arch is pointing your belly out and bringing your arms and legs as far up/back as you can. This changes you centre of gravity from your head to your centre torso and stabilises you in free fall.

The AFF Level 1 jump procedure goes a little like this:

  1. Instructor 1 shouts ‘Are you ready to skydive?!’
  2. I shout ‘HELL YEA!’
  3. Instructor 2 moves to outside of plane door, I follow and take a crouching position half in, half out of the door  and instructor 1 stands inside to my right
  4. Turn to the right and shout to instructor 1 ‘CHECK IN’ and wait for his nod
  5. Turn to my left and shout ‘CHECK OUT’ to instructor 2 and wait for his nod
  6. Look up and out at the propeller and shout ‘PROP’
  7. Raise yourself about a foot up and shout ‘UP’
  8. Lower yourself again and shout ‘DOWN’
  9. STEP OUT and hard arch

Right about now you will be requiring a new pair of pants.

  • Wait until you have stabilised and check your heading and altitude
  • Shout altitude to both instructors and wait for acknowledgement from each
  • Do three practise pulls by bringing your left arm forward so you can read your altimeter and your right arm back to grab a firm hold of your pilot chute toggle
  • Perform a stable free fall from 12,000ish feet to about 6,000 while responding to any hand signals from instructors and checking your heading and altitude every few seconds
  • At 6,000 feet wave off with your arms to show you are going to deploy parachute, reach back and throw your pilot chute out hard to the right
  • Count 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000
  • Look up and check your chute asking yourself the questions, ‘Is it big and rectangular? If not, can I land it? Do I have any nuisances? If so deal with them’
  • If the chute has a serious malfunction you immediately look down and locate both cutaway pad and reserve handle. Pull down hard on the cut away pad and then do the same with the reserve handle and follow this with a hard arch.
  • If all goes well you won’t have had a malfunction and will be sailing under canopy at about 4,000 feet!
  • Check altitude again and all round awareness
  • Check left and pull down left toggle to turn left
  • Check right and pull down right toggle to right
  • Pull down both toggles and hold for 5 seconds, do this twice
  • Move to holding area which is the area above your specified landing zone
  • Have some fun swooping around for the next 3000 feet while overlooking the beautiful Salisbury countryside!
  • Head full throttle towards your landing point and about 10 foot off the ground flare the chute and land, preferably not on your arse!

So, how did it go?! It was honestly the most exhilarating ride I have ever experienced. I’ve done some crazy stuff, or at least I thought I had, but nothing had compared to stepping out of a plane at 13,000 feet. The initial few seconds were complete sensory overload with an adrenaline rush like nothing else. After a few seconds realization kicks in and it’s a bit like ‘Sh*t the bed what am I doing, right yep ok arch, check alti..’ and you are going through your drills. One thing that I distinctly remember was the sense of speed I got as we fell through some thick cloud and the noise from air blasting past your ears at over 120mph. Free fall lasted about 45 seconds but felt like it went in about 10! Before I knew it I had waved off, thrown my chute out and started counting 1000, 2000.. and then WHAM.. chute is inflated and you go from 120mph to about 20mph dangling by rope at 4000 feet. I sat there for a couple of seconds looking down thinking “This is quite high to be dangling from these bits of rope, haha’. The few seconds after the chute inflated was actually the scariest part of the jump for me, looking down I think a bit of vertigo kicked in! I went through my canopy drills before moving to my holding area. I was a little concerned that if I did turns that were too aggressive I would collapse the chute but ‘Bish’ assured me I wouldn’t and to have some fun trying it, so I did! I played about for about 10mins before I was coming in to land. The wind had picked up quite a lot and ‘Bish’ had got on the headset as he wanted me to land slightly differently since there was risk of the strong wind blowing me out of my holding zone. I flared as instructed by ‘Bish’ at only 3 feet from the ground and landed so softly I over compensated and fell back on my arse! The wind then got hold of my chute and started to drag me so I pulled one of the lines in quick to collapse it. I stood up, wrapped up my chute and said to myself ‘what the **** did you just do David?!’ I was so buzzing from all the adrenaline I burst into laughter and stumbled over to check in. To summarise, it was the maddest thing I have ever done and experienced. Sometimes I look back and think I must have been absolutely nuts to do it, so I’m booking my Level 2 in for July haha, rock on!

 

 

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Festival websites: as important as the line up?

By gemma | Published: June 9, 2011

It’s festival season and with so many choices out there people are now checking festival websites more and more to tell if it’s the one for them.

As well as account management for web, I moonlight in festival organisation and have been noticing the importance of a good festival website a lot more since I have been able to understand what a website needs to convey to an audience, and how important that first impression is. A website is the face of your business and it will be viewed more times than if people were stepping through your office door.

Line-up is an important factor when choosing your festival but as long as there’s at least one or two acts on the menu that people will want to see, then the rest of the line-up doesn’t matter too much.  People don’t just see festivals as a place to dance but as a place to be at home, on holiday and involved.

Most people will check a festival website to get the feel of the festival and ask questions like:

Will I like the atmosphere?

Will I like the people?

Will there be enough things there to keep me occupied when I’m not dancing?

Is it kid friendly?

So; that all-important home page of your festival site needs to convey the personality of the festival in one quick blink of an eye.

I myself have been pulled in by festival websites before and I have bought tickets based on the personality I picked up on when I first entered the site.

Here are some examples of websites that match their festival personalities:

Boomtown Fair

From the opening page you can tell that this festival is lively, opinionated and swaying towards a circus environment. The age range would be 12 upwards. This is exactly what it says on the tin.

Secret Garden Party

This website’s homepage tells me that it’s going to be beautiful, interesting, verging on magical and slightly unreal.  From ages 0 – 100. Again; this is exactly how I have experienced it.

Global Gathering

This website is in the style of a magazine and reminds me of the feel of Ibiza. It tells me it’s going to have a commercial line-up and is for older teens and young adults. You will be awake all night!

So yes, a festival website is almost as important as the line-up itself.

If you run a festival or indeed anything festival related you should be asking yourself what personality your current site is projecting and also what you want it to project. Do the two things match? If not, time for a change perhaps?

 

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This month is all about Gorillas!

By emily | Published: June 8, 2011

I have been painting two life size gorilla sculptures as part of Bristol Zoo’s mass public art event; “Wow! Gorillas” The event is all about bringing together residents, visitors, schools, artists and businesses for a fun and engaging shared experience for the whole of Bristol.

After submitting designs for the project in February, sponsors were invited to browse the entries and pick their favourite. My design ‘the City Gent’ was chosen by medical insurance company 425 Direct we worked together to tailor my cheerful city gorilla to suit their brand. We have renamed the finished Gorilla ‘Cheeky Check-up’ he’s had a fine reception from fans of Emily Trotter Illustration on facebook!

A few weeks after my first commission I was contacted by Bristol Zoo to ask if I would consider painting a second Gorilla. My response of course, was yes please! The Bristol Rovers FC wanted to commission an artist to create a special design incorporating their logo, branding and the passion of their fans. Bristol Zoo recommended me for the task as I have worked with them on several projects over the last few years, including three large scale murals, more information on the first mural can be seen in this news article.

I met with the Bristol Rovers and their sponsor Jelf Lampier and together we agreed to dress our gorilla in their team strip. I suggested painting the fur and face in the team colours and as a homage to the pirate in the Rovers logo we all thought an eye patch would be a fun idea! The name of the Gorilla was decided by the fans who were invited to vote for their favourite, the winner is ‘Irene’, from the Bristol Rovers song ‘Goodnight Irene’.

I painted Irene in the Galleries Shopping Centre, Bristol over the bank holiday weekend. It’s always a great experience painting in public, even more so when you’re painting a life size, furry blue gorilla with an eye patch!

Both gorillas are now painted and varnished, and waiting to go out on display for ten weeks this summer. There are about 60 gorillas in total, all painted by local artists, all to be positioned around Bristol and surrounding areas from July 4th. ‘Cheeky Check-up’ will be displayed in Queens Square, Bristol and ‘Irene’ will be displayed on Gloucester Road, Bristol.

Bristol Zoo will be printing a map with a trail to see all the gorillas, for updates on Wow! Gorillas be sure to follow @BristolZooGardens and @EmilyTrotter on Twitter!

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Hosting and why it matters

By ben | Published: June 7, 2011

Disclaimer: As well as Nudge Digital, I’m also a Director of Network EQ (www.networkeq.co.uk), a hosting company specialising in managed virtual servers. My views may be biased but I’ve tried to present a fair and balanced point of view.

As web developers we rely on web hosting, the same way taxi drivers rely on cars and surgeons rely on scalpels. Hosting is one of the many tools we use to do our job. There seems to be four camps when it comes to hosting and developers:

  1. Bargain basement hosting – Cheap shared hosting accounts, usually in America. This solution is usually the preserve of the bedroom developer, they’re buying the cheapest hosting they can find in order to keep costs to a minmum. Usually ends in disaster and causes a lot of stress for the developers and client.
  2. It’s not my problem – Let the client worry about hosting, it’s their site after all and developers shouldn’t have to mess around with such trivial things as hosting. Some clients will insist on this approach, but the chances are your client wouldn’t recognise a hosting package if it hit them in the face and I think it’s part of our job to help them out.
  3. Host in-house – Some developers have servers in their office; while I agree this can be a good approach for certain situations (e.g. if you have a Subversion server), if you’re hosting production websites on internal servers it’s going to end in tears as your internet connection probably isn’t as fast as a data centre’s, you probably don’t have UPS (and you definitely don’t have diesel generators) and if it breaks at 3am who is going to fix it?
  4. Do it properly – This is the approach we take at Nudge. We have reseller and affiliate accounts with a hosting company who know what they’re doing. Yes, it’s more expensive than the other options but it’s more reliable and more likely to end up with happy developers and a happy client; saving you time and money in the long run. The hosting company looks after keeping the servers running and we look after making the websites and earning affiliate commission.

Here’s a few reasons why having a good hosting partner is really important:

  • A good hosting company will help you figure out your requirements and help you troubleshoot problems (such as Apache configuration or PHP modules). Obviously you need to roughly know what you’re doing, but there’s a big difference between talking to someone who can’t pronounce Apache in an Indian call centre and speaking to a geek who can write bash scripts while standing on his head blindfolded.
  • Test machines are really useful during development, and this is much easier to achieve with virtualisation. If you’re trying to replicate a problem on a customer server you can just take a clone and then play around with it. Or if you want to test out a new platform (e.g. Plone) then you can fire up a server for a few weeks to play with it. So make sure you choose a hosting company who offer virtual servers.
  • As web developers we all know how important speed is when browsing websites. Make sure you choose a hosting company based where the website audience is based (for most of us this probably means the UK). Choosing a cheaper provider abroad will mean all your hard work optimising images, minifying JavaScript and implementing caching will be undone by the huge latency between the server and the website users.
  • I think it’s important to choose a hosting company who you trust for support, that way you can happily send your customers to them for support queries. This means you don’t have to spend your time troubleshooting hosting issues and acting as a middle man between your client and the hosting company. It also means your client will likely get 24/7 support rather than 9-5 support. Dealing with support queries and recurring billing isn’t something you should be doing as a web developer, so outsource this to your hosting partner.
  • You should probably choose a company that matches your values, especially if you’re referring clients to them. This way, if your clients like working with you then you then they’ll also like working with the hosting company, meaning everyone is happy!
  • Finally, make sure you’re earning affiliate commission from all the clients your refer. Most hosting companies have partner programs aimed at web developers, so ask them if you can earn something back for all the customers you send their way.
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Beware the bedroom developer

By ryan | Published: June 3, 2011

So you want a website, what do you do?

Surf the net looking for companies, or ask around and find out that you mate’s cousin’s dad drinks with a bloke who knows someone who will do it for a hundred quid.

Both of these avenues are fraught with danger, you should always consider more than cost alone. Just remember the old adage – ‘pay peanuts, get monkeys’.

Let’s consider some points;

Location; Do you want someone local, or someone who is prepared to travel to meet you? This means regular meetings, where you can maintain an overview on what is going on, provide input on the next stage.

Reputation; are they going to get around to finishing your site? Is the quality going to be there? Will they be able to maintain your site? Will they provide you with a complete solution (SEO, advertising, hosting, and updates), there is more to development than just banging out a couple of pretty pages. Also consider if you like them, you don’t want to work with someone you don’t like.

Charges; is the price that is quoted the final cost, or will little sneaky stealth charges find their way onto you bill? The aforementioned services (SEO, advertising, hosting, and updates) may be extra.

Skill; can they make exactly what you want? Many ‘bedroom developers’ use ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions and just add plugins – this is just jigsaw making, my five year old could do that. I’m not saying that open-source packages are bad, but a skilled developer will be able to customize it to fit precisely what you want and handle the problems when things go wrong.

Professionalism; will you get a contract? This will ensure you know fully what you are getting and you get what you want. Will you be provided with some form of project management? Being provided with details on timelines, risks, budget, and progress can reassure you that your system is being developed to the right standard any saves wasting time (and therefore money).

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Five tips to search marketing success

By bella | Published: June 1, 2011

Get savvy with SEO

  • While there’s no substitute for engaging, well presented and well written content, the hallmarks of good organic SEO should never be overlooked. A few of the myriad techniques include ensuring a decent spread of industry and geographic-specific key phrases relevant to your business, product, services or location. If you operate in regions beyond your local area, say so. Ensure every page is crawl-able, with HTML links, a hierarchical sitemap and FAQ page. Lastly, always read your copy aloud. If in doubt, hire a search engine specialist, preferably one who excels at copywriting.

 

Use Google webmaster tools

  • Google’s webmaster tools are excellent and again, free. Gauge how your pages are ranked, get a pulse on your popular search queries, see any flagged alerts, and check your Rich Snippets are marked up correctly to ensure you’re publishing information in a correct format. Don’t forget to submit an XML sitemap first.

 

Use Google Adwords effectively

  • You can focus on very specific areas in Adwords. There are new features that enable you to attach maps to your ads but be sure to choose only the regions you want to target within your Adwords account as there’s no sense in having your ads show up to people in regions who wouldn’t be likely to visit your business. Set a budget to end on a certain date and be watchful but remember it’s worth speculating to accumulate. Set the right landing page for your ad and audience too. Google offers excellent help videos so do your homework beforehand.

Encourage Reviews

  • Make sure your customers know they can leave a review. Most customers will leave a good review if you’re a decent business and you want to build up a high volume of positive reviews on your site. Keeping in touch with your customers via an email list is a great way of informing and encouraging them. Try to develop loyalty programmes where you’re in touch with customers regularly. There’s nothing wrong with contacting your Facebook fans and asking if they wouldn’t mind putting their opinions on sites like Facebook, Google Places or Yelp. There are customers out there who want to speak positively about you – let them help your business by saying it online.

Is Social Networking for you?

  • While some kind of social networking presence is advised, it isn’t for every business. Is your time better spent in other areas including traditional marketing, improving your website and building better products and services, which will help garner reviews and their own social signals? If you’re going to pursue a social networking campaign, ensure it’s authentic, sincere and creative in his pursuit, and the results should pay dividends.

Check out the Nudge Twitter feed!


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Google Chrome OS – Should I get it?

By tom | Published: June 1, 2011

I have recently been looking at how useful the new Google OS would be in my day to day life. It’s an interesting exercise as I use the web every day for a good proportion of the time available, it’s just what happens when you’re working on the web.

So I was pretty interested to see Google’s latest attempt to move us all into “the cloud”, a term that is bounded around daily by people that either intrinsically understand it or those who view it as some kind of rain-causing nuisance. The point of the cloud is that your data is available instantly wherever you log on to your account, so no more memory sticks or CDs loaded with your precious files. Firstly, you need to look at the positives and negatives when it comes to storing all of your worldly data on some omnipresent weather structure:

Positives:

  • Your documents and settings are instantly synchronised across any Chrome system you log on to
  • You don’t have to worry about your work being backed up, Google’s got it covered
  • You can collaborate in real time with others on your work
  • Your documents can be accessed via the web interface, so you don’t even have to have a ChromeOS laptop, or even a computer – you could use your mobile phone or any other web-enabled device

Negatives:

  • Google already hold a vast amount of information about us, whether we like it or not. Their data retention policies mean that they can store data indefinitely. Do we really want them to know about what documents we read, where we’re going on the internet, even our Facebook data?
  • If you don’t have an internet connection, you won’t be able to access the most recent version of the document, if at all.
  • There’s probably lots of stuff on your computer that you don’t want others to see. No one is a saint, and with this ever-increasing culture of digitising everything we could be exposing ourselves to a lot of uncomfortable situations if such data was discovered.

Anyway, that’s just one part of an argument that isn’t neccesarily what you came to read when you clicked on this blog post. Lets look at more of Chrome OS’ features:

It’s fast

According to the Chrome OS featurelist this operating system will boot in 8 seconds (i.e. from when you press the power button till when you can log in). That’s fast. Windows 7 by comparison takes 1 minute 34 seconds from the time you press the button. There’s not even enough time to grab a coffee with Chrome.

It’s always connected

Chrome OS automatically connects to your preferred Wi-Fi or 3/4G signal as soon as the computer boots up, so no more hunting around in settings to connect up. “You’re on the web right from the start”… spooky, eh?

Cloud based experience

As discussed earlier, this operating system will allow you to maintain one copy of all of your files, documents, etc. This means any time you log in with your Google Account everything will be exactly as you left it! Nifty, I think!

Security

Chrome OS comes with several security features that allow for protection against viruses, forced attacks and several other nasties. One such method is “sandboxing” which means applications are given their own container that allows them to access CPU, memory and files in a separate “box” to those of other applications running at the same time.

Who’s it for?

Looking at the features of the operating system and the general ethos of the architecture, I’d say the users of this product fall into these categories:

  • People on the go
    This case is probably the one that will attract the most people. The joy is that you will be able to connect to wi-fi with your Chromebook and all of your files will be synched instantly. Imagine you’ve completed your business proposal on your home desktop pc and saved it into Google Docs, now you’re on the move up to Hemel Hempsted and you forgot to put it on your laptop the night before…. Massive issue! Or is it? Log in at the Holiday Inn and receive the latest copy of your document as soon as you log in
  • People who don’t need all the bells and whistles
    My parents aren’t exactly tech-savvy. Progress for them stopped at the microwave. I can see this system being particularly useful as there’s not much to break, in the nicest way possible. This could be a really useful system for getting people into the net who would otherwise find the prospect of a fully-featured OS daunting.

I’m not going to buy it, but I know a lot of people that will.

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Why does technological freedom matter?

By ryanw | Published: May 25, 2011

Most people don’t put freedom and software together. Software’s just software right? It’s just stuff I run on my computer (or my phone) to get things done. Most of us don’t take much notice of changes in terms and conditions and will happily click accept without reading the contract (and we’ll leave whether this is legal for another day). This is often a bad idea. Some of the terms and conditions would make your eyes water if you actually read them.

Freedom is important in our gadgets as well. If we buy gadgets we expect that we should own them, rather than loan them from the manufacturers, and yet, increasingly it is the case that we do not own the products we buy.

The problem here is that the manufacturers know that taking an interest in these things is largely the preserve of geeks such as myself, the rest of the population being mostly distracted by shiny new toys. People are often happy to sacrifice their freedom for shiny trinkets up until the point at which it begins to effect them negatively, by which point it’s often too late.

So what does a lack of software/hardware freedom cost us?

It’s worth running briefly through a few case studies to show how a lack of freedom in hardware and software could affect your everyday life.

Google Docs

“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.”

The above would appear to suggest that anything you upload to google docs is belongs to google, and they can do what they like with it. I’m not entirely sure I’d be happy with Google owning the content I create, and certainly for any company with their own intellectual property this could be a problem.

Amazon Pulled 1984 from Kindle

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
Amazon couldn’t have better illustrated that Kindle owners own neither their device nor the content they purchase for it. And that it happened with the book 1984 by George Orwell would seem to be such delicious irony. Similar incidents have occurred with Steam deleting peoples games.

Sony PS3

There are more issues around the PS3 than we could fit here so I’ll just boil it down to a few essentials. The first and most obvious example is that the device was originally shipped with the ability to run other OSs such as Linux. It was an advertised feature, and people bought the device expecting to have that feature. It meant that people could take a PS3 and have it do computing tasks, which proved quite popular in scientific communities. It was something of a shock then when Sony removed the feature in an update. Sony were legally able to do this because of the terms and conditions under which the devices were sold. Actually, perhaps sold is the wrong word here…

We could also look at the work of George Hotz, who had modified the PS3 to enable it to run homebrew software (that is software made by amateur developers). He also published the security keys to enable others to do this, and ensure that people could modify their devices (after all, Ford don’t stop you putting go faster stripes on your Ka so why should Sony stop you adding bits to your PS3?). Sony got the lawyers out.

Installing Software on your phone

So you’ve got a nice shiny new phone. Sadly, if you bought an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, etc) you’ll only be allowed to install the software Apple say you can install. Alternatively if you have an Android device, you can install any software you want. If you want to install something from outside the market, no-one will stop you. I know which I prefer!

How does it affect software quality?

On the more closed ecosystems such as the iPhone/Pad/Pod (I’ll just call it iOS from here) or Xbox or Playstation a centralised control of software distribution can actually seriously affect software quality. Let me provide a quick example.

Imagine that I develop an app which is on Android (not exactly open but considerably less closed) and iOS. A few weeks after release I find a bug. This is a major bug which affects security. On Android, I can roll out an updated version as soon as I finish making it, immediately offering my customers protection from whatever threats may exist. On iOS, no such luck, as anything I submit must go through Apple’s vetting procedures. This takes a while.

What of competition?

On iOS Apple tend not to approve anything which competes with their own software and services, and actively change rules to ensure that this continues.

Software Patents

On a more techie note, the raft of patents out there for utterly trivial ideas (not even the technology to implement those ideas, just the ideas themselves), some of which are so utterly generic as to give the owner power over any number of inventions, and this has become big business. Patent Trolls are an ongoing hazard for anyone wishing to innovate in technology, and the big companies regularly buy up packages of patents, or defunct companies with a portfolio of patents, to secure their competitive position in the market (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/20/google_acquires_modu_patents/ for example).

What Can I Do?

You can make a difference by voting with your wallet. Buy devices that are open (quite difficult) or at least less closed. Buy software that you actually own, rather than rent. If in doubt, Open Source will always give you the freedom you deserve.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The EFF are an organisation which are attempting to fight these issues, and can be found at http://www.eff.org/ for those who are interested. On their site you will find loads of helpful information about freedom and how it affects you.

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Measuring the ROI of Social Media

By jason | Published: May 24, 2011

Article 4

So, what does it all mean?

The key here is to use those metrics that are relevant to illustrating changes in performance against your original goals. i.e. the reason you entered in to this in the first place.

If your goal was to create more enquiries or sales then this can tracked and measured via unique links or promotional codes. Dell Computers, for example, sold over $6M worth of PCs via Twitter in 2009! It just took the right traceable promotional IDs to monitor it.

Gauging awareness could be quantified by determining the number of ‘passive’ followers through to those ‘active retweeters’ that pass on your messages or repeat your content to others. The classic viral mechanism that means you are getting something right!

For those campaigns implementing their social media campaign as part of a broader customer interaction strategy, we could correlate and compare activity against the number of calls to your CSR department or reduction in the number of complaints?

If your aims are to support the brand and position yourself in the market, then there are text analysis tools that will help to determine the sentiment of social media content and produce statistics that reveal positive, Neutral and negative feelings from ‘active’ followers. Are any changes in sentiment related to a certain business activity or the release of some company news?

Sentiment of followers content Q3, 2010

Good text analytics tools will not only separate mixed polarity phrases such as ‘great food but service was terrible’ but will have the ability to ‘learn’ over time via additional rules.  Categorising and then acting on these types of comments can provide invaluable market intelligence and future actions.

Article 5 will consider how KPIs should be influencing the evolution of your on-going social media campaign.

 

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Measuring the ROI of Social Media

By jason | Published: May 13, 2011

Article 3

How do I go about measuring success?

The good news is that we have the tools to help measure a whole series of different aspects of social media interactions and levels of engagement.

However, before we measure and make observations on our ROI we need to establish the initial investment and on-going costs as in any marketing campaign. Although there aren’t necessarily any direct costs involved in engaging with social media portals there are always indirect costs such as time, promotions or incentives.

  • How many hours per day will be focused on managing the content?
  • What level of interaction / level of activity do you want to achieve?
  • How many social media platforms are you going to use? One, two, three or more?
  • How many people will be looking after the campaign?
  • Are you providing special offers or running competitions?

Now we have some idea of costs, we can start thinking about what types of data we can start extracting and what it means to the business.

So what can we measure? Depending on your business type, market sector and goals, some measurements will be more pertinent than others but can include quantitative metrics such as:

  • Hits / Click-throughs / unique visitors / repeat visitors
  • Followers or friends in your network
  • Number of Comments and re-comments
  • Number of Tweets or retweets
  • Number of Likes, dislikes and recommendations
  • How often your content found in other websites, blogs or other feeds?

There are also, however, qualitative interpretations to be made such as:

  • Network structure analysis. How are people connected to you? Are they direct connections? Recommended via other people. Are there followers influencing other people on your behalf?
  • Sentiment. What is the tone of conversation or discussions from your followers? Is it positive, negative or neutral? Are there trends, themes or commonalities in their topics of conversation?
  • Interest levels. Do some subjects or comments attract more attention than others? Is this providing you with valuable market intelligence?

Great, now we have a whole set of metrics, feedback and intelligence we can use but how and what do we benchmark them against? Your competitors performance? The number of enquiries or sales month-on-month or year –on-year? Against other more traditional offline marketing initiatives?

Article 4 will discuss what we can do with our measurements, how we can start extracting business intelligence from them and what they mean.

 

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