Mark Pack

Posted on: January 6, 2010

Posted in: Featured, Politics, Video

Comment on This Video

Share This Video

Embed This Video

Audio:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Slides: Creating a new website for an MP

Transcript:

Hi, thanks very much for hopefully paying attention to me.  I thought I would talk a little bit about one specific project I was involved in, which was launching a new website for one of our MPs, Lynne Featherstone, earlier this year.

And essentially, one of the main challenges was that Lynne had already over several years, accumulated a very large number of different online presences, including you can see that maybe the clipart in the top left-hand corner there — her very first website back in 1999.  I will confess to having used the marquee HTML code in that.  But she’s also accumulated a blog, You Tube, Flickr, and also obviously, if you’re in Parliament, there are — many sites like that work for you, which have also important information on them.

So one challenge is how do you integrate all those different social media presences into something that is in someway coherent.  But the other challenge — other than getting the remote control working obviously — the second challenge is how to innovate because it’s still the case and it’s interesting that I think a couple of other people mentioned this in their presentations earlier.  It’s still the case that the traditional media and the online media really love writing stories about how people are using the online world in interesting ways.

So the reason I’ve got picture of The Sun up there is in fact during Ming Campbell’s as leader of the Liberal Democrats, when I was working for the party, the best coverage The Sun gave him during his time as party leader — and it was an unadulterated positive piece — was about the fact that he had started using Facebook.  Outside politics, that love of the “Ooh, it’s an exciting story that the media has,” applies very much as well.

Many of you may recall the recent positive coverage Ocado has got for its iPhone app.  Really good iPhone app and very nicely done PR launch and so on.  But actually, if you think about the number of people in the country who have iPhones and who are Ocado customers, the amount of coverage was really quite out of proportion to that number of people.  But the media love those sorts of stories.  So the second challenge is very much about how do you get positive media coverage out of these things.

And the third challenge is actually the opposite.  Not about integrating, but about dispersing.  I have a picture of a fisherman up there, because there’s a good saying that I like to use which is like “You have to go fish where the fish are.”  And in politics, what that means is you can’t really expect people to come to a political website; you have to reach out to them in different places where you might be able to catch their attention.  Hence the fact that Lynne had accumulated over several years, such a wide range of other online presences.

So on the one hand, you want to integrate and have a coherent approach, but on the other hand you need to reach out to all those different people.  I should say, by the way, that fisherman is my namesake, which is rather lucky for me.  I mean obviously, one of the problems people often face is there are other people with a similar name online who do all sorts of dubious things.

A friend of mine has — unfortunately shares the same name as a porn star, which does make, I think, a slightly tricky situation sometimes if he’s sending in job applications and firms are Googling them.  But luckily in my case, as far as I know, that’s a completely respectable fisherman.

But in terms of, sort of, the other final challenge is, I love this quote that “The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.”  I have to apologise, I don’t actually know who said it.  It’s a quote from an unknown Norwegian I found on the Internet.  So the photo that goes with it is similarly a photo of an unknown Norwegian I found on the Internet.

So if anyone does know where the quote comes from, by all means, let me know.  But I think it sums up the situation that brands and politicians and firms with products often find themselves in.  Lots of people are willing to talk about them, not always saying the things that you want them to say.  And the way to have some sense of control isn’t to send the lawyers on dawn raids to ISPs to try and close things down; it’s actually to beat the critics at their own game, it’s to have better content the people are more interested in than the critics are.

So what was the solution?  Well, I thought just a little bit about the technology.  Part of the solution was to use WordPress for the new site, because WordPress has several advantages out-of-the-box.  Lots of people use it, it’s pretty robust.  It’s very search-engine friendly, particularly important if you’re trying to catch people’s interests when they’ve not explicitly decided to come to your site, you’re trying to pick up traffic through search engines.

It’s also very social-media friendly.  There is a huge range of plug-ins available to integrate WordPress with Flickr, and Twitter, and You Tube, and so on.

And because they’re such a vibrant development community, you can be pretty confident that whatever the next big thing is, there will be a whole host of WordPress plug-ins to choose from to integrate it with the WordPress site.

And also — I mean, it’s never quite true that you don’t have any developer locking — always the sales picture is always about how, you know, you’ll be fully independent; you won’t be terribly locked into us for ever and ever and ever.  It’s never quite true that you’re fully independent, but there are some big advantages with the WordPress in terms of open source software.  And I’d underline MySQL database that gives you quite a lot of independence if things do happen to go wrong at some point.

But then the interesting, the innovative solution was to come up with the idea of a live stream.  And I didn’t come up with this myself, so I should make that quite clear.  Simon Dixon from Puffbox who did the actual programming for Lynne Featherstone’s new site came up with it.  And basically, the idea was to say, well, if you got all these different social media presences, almost all of them generate RSS feeds.

So what you can do is pull those RSS feeds together into one as it were a jumbo {?} RSS feed that produces an automatically updated live stream of all the different things that you are doing online, but it’s all in one place.  Now, said like that, it actually sounds really quite an obvious straightforward thing to do.  But you actually see very few people do it.  And so I think that’s worked really well.

And as it turns out, I was — when we were planning this, I was wondering, well, it’s dependent on RSS; how many services, how many bits of information we’re going to pull in by RSS.  There was only one thing (inaudible5:50) Parliament’s website that didn’t quite provide a decent RSS feed for one particular source of information, which is the early-day motions that particular MP has signed.

But other than that, RSS could be used to pull everything in altogether.  The other — another key part of the solution was something which I thought I’d mention because I think people often assume this is only for big e-commerce sites, which is actually providing multiple user paths to find content.  So if you’re coming to an MP’s website, people might be interested in information about that particular area, they might be interested in information about a particular issue, or they might be interested in particular type of information.

And actually in this case, through the menu bar at the top, it provides very simple different groups through to that content.  And also I mentioned that because I think you often look at sites that are aimed at the small to medium-size audience, which don’t seem to be trying to provide different groups for those different sorts of people who might be visiting the site.

And I’ll finally mention — also just begin to wrap up — just mention some fun numbers.  Numbers can be fun; they don’t have to be scary.  The three numbers I wanted to mention is; firstly, on the front page of Lynne’s site, there is a button to click on for blog, and a button to click on for news; equal prominence.

So, but it’s interesting that three-quarters of people go for blog rather than news, which I think says something very striking about what people’s expectations are about websites that are blogs as opposed to websites that are providing news.  And again, I think that’s quite useful, almost the internal marketing message there, very often about the way to present information.  Secondly, for no apparently good reason, the number of comments on the site has gone up by around 20 percent.

That’s telling me I’m nearly after time.  Excellent, and I’ve nearly finished my slides, it’s good going.

So I thought I’ll mention this statistic because I think it’s quite a good example of how unexpected things can happen, and it’s always sensible to test.  Even looking at all the new sites now, I don’t really know why that’s happened.  But it has and hey, it’s up, which is good.

And the third thing I would mention is because the site puts You Tube films much more prominently, Lynne has started doing rather more You Tube films.  And what’s interesting is because they tend to be about particular issues in her constituency, they’re geocoded, they appear on Google Maps.  Well, I say they appear on Google Maps, Google almost acts randomly as to whether or not it puts geocoded You Tube films on Google Maps, and they do sometimes take a long time to appear.

But when they do, around one in three of them get a significant — by which I mean 25 per cent or more — boost in the number of users they get, which I think is quite a useful bonus.  And you know, it’s quite hard to predict in advance which are the ones that will get the boost in traffic, but knowing that there is another route to reach an audience.  So I think using You Tube films via Google Maps is a much underused opportunity.

And then just finally, because I know how do you prove ROI and all of that is quite often an issue that comes up.  And just to say, ROI doesn’t have to be all about actually providing numbers with decimal points.  I don’t think people should be too afraid to think, well, the only way you can prove your ROI is if you got, you know, a regression equation and you got decimal points on graphs and all of that.

I think qualitative information can be really important.  For any of you who’re familiar with the British political blogging sphere — scene, you’ll know how unusual it is for Ian Dale and Sunny Hundal to agree on anything; they both agreed that they thought the site was fantastic, but also by looking at the other blog posts that people write in response to site being launched and comments on the site, a quick numerical count showed over 95 percent of the comments were positive.

Not a rigorous, focus-group type bit of research, but actually a very useful, very simple way of proving that overall business works.  In a way, that is often again more amenable to the small and medium size, I think clients who’re not able to afford the really big in-depth research.

So that’s it, thank you very much for your time.