- by Daryl Swinden

Why the Cookie Law is like speeding

With little over a month for compliance of the EU legislation are you on schedule?

On 26th May 2012  owners of EU websites that have cookies are expected to provide the visitors an opportunity to authorise the use of cookies*. The user must have a right and the opportunity to change their mind at a later date.  There is however an alternative. Remove the cookies altogether!

All bar a very few cookies that are deemed essential are affected – the vast majority of cookies do not fall under “essential” and must therefore be dealt with. Unfortunately, the law doesn’t specifically differentiate between those that are more intrusive than others however, unofficially those that don’t deliver information around sensitive data are not deemed high priority issues.

Ironically, in order to remember if a user doesn’t want you to store cookies on their device you would need to store a cookie – which is contradicting the law.

If a user clicks ‘No’ to cookies there goes your tracking and insight out of the window and potentially, functionality for the user will be impeded.

The method of authorisation is up to the website owner – this can be in the form of a pop-up, an information bar or any other ideas you can think of – so there is some creativity around the solution.

The issue is that huge players such as Google & YouTube don’t seem to be joining in on this. This is giving other organisations false confidence in avoiding the law too.

If they aren’t complying you don’t need to right?
Wrong!

Think of it like speeding in your car.

Your mates (Google & co) are saying “It’s fine – you can break the law a bit, we are doing 90mph in a 70mph limit and are getting away with it.”

But for you surely just a bit over the limit is OK, we all know that 75mph is not as bad as 90mph right?

‘Slightly’ non-compliant is better than “totally” non-compliant, but we should remember in the eyes of the law, both are non-compliant. It only takes a police officer to be having a bad day to be punished for 75mph, yet an officer on a good day may waive you.

Breaking the law is breaking the law, no matter how close to the law you are. If you do break it, you risk ending up at the ICO’s ‘speed awareness course’.

Yes, I think we all agree it’s an obscure law, penalising those that use cookies effectively & harmlessly – enhancing the user’s experience, as well as gathering information to further improve customer understanding. It is law, so we can moan about it all we like but it’s inevitable and best to just get on with it.

Those trying to avoid this law may likely go through a lengthy legal battle with the varying data protection authorities in the EU.

Volume is providing solutions for our clients, and can help with yours too. If you have concerns over your compliance get in touch to discuss how we can help.

For a review of the ICO’s guidelines click below:

ICO guidance.

*some cookies are exempt from the law however, these really are few and far between.

- by Josie Rogers

Solving the multi-device challenge with HTML5

The multi-device user experience

Users are more demanding and expect a high quality experience. We are now working in a constantly connected environment where people access the internet from a number of devices via desktop, tablet or smart phone. Many people own more than one internet connected device. In fact, Cisco predicts that by the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth.

The difficulty to overcome is that mobile users expect a web browsing experience on their phone that is comparable to a laptop or desktop PC. With multiple mobile O/S platforms to support, this leaves developers with a challenge – creating a website that will provide an engaging experience across each and every platform and browser. With so many constraints to think about, what is the best solution?

Enter HTML5

HTML5 techniques help bridge the gaps between desktop, tablet and mobile experiences however, many have been unsuccessful in their attempts.

The original HTML was invented over twenty years ago. It has gone through a number of updates, but it’s been more than a decade since the last one.

The web is accelerating – over time the internet has got better and now has a better degree of dependability. With modern browsers, we are now seeing more developer issues being solved. Updates to HTML standards and specifications bring a number of key benefits:

  • Rich and dynamic creative content e.g. videos, graphics and audio can be added into a webpage more easily without the use of plug-ins
  • The video experience is superior, as it is native to the browser
  • Location can be tied into your web applications
  • Load speed times can increase. In a world where every second counts, this has a positive effect for reducing page abandonment
  • HTML5 runs across mobile devices including all smart phones and tablets giving a consistent experience for all, thus helping developers solve the multi-device challenge

Let’s see it in practice

We’ve recently launched a new digital interaction application for Zebra Technologies built using HTML5. In browsers that support HTML5, you really experience the difference from Flash-based solutions. The site uses HTML5 video which enables the video to be viewed across a number of devices, without having to use plug-ins (that relies on the user having plug-ins installed) leading to a better user experience. Take a look at the Zebra Virtual world for transport on your mobile, tablet or desktop now and let us know what you think!

The latest addition to the Virtual Zebra world has been built in HTML5


 

- by Joe Duffelen

The Future is Mobile

The question used to be: do you have a mobile phone? Now we’re asking; what’s  your smartphone? Apple?, Android? or Blackberry? Last year something happened that has never happened  before; according to Henry Blodget, the number of smartphones sold exceeded the number of personal computers (PCs) sold.

With a rapidly growing smartphone and tablet market, the operating system developers and manufacturers face a strong battle to become the dominant player within this competitive space. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Android and Apple are the current market leaders and arguably other manufacturers and operating systems are falling at the wayside. Surely, for them, it is now too late, or perhaps not! The Business Insider slide deck by Henry Blodget reveals that over half the mobile audience in the U.S does not use a smartphone; so if IDC’s predicted 49.5% increase of smartphone purchases occurs by 2015, there is certainly room for Microsoft, Blackberry or any other manufacturer to establish themselves as market leaders. Although time is of the essence and they must move fast.

Is your business mobile?

The Financial Times cites a JPMorgan prediction that 657 million smartphones will leave stores in 2012 and IDC predicts smartphone sales will rise to 982 million in 2015. It has been a prediction on the tip of many industry experts’ tongues for a while; organisations will NEED to be mobile savvy. Fast, relevant and easily navigated information is what is wanted by  every organisation and every user.

From a business perspective, this can also only mean two things. Your web presence needs to shift from the desktop to the mobile device and you must discover how you engage and transact via the mobile medium.

What is the way forward?

At Volume we have developed a number of mobile apps, mobile sites and mobile-optimised sites:

Our own web site www.volume.co.uk is mobile-optimised. The site is developed using the latest technology (MVC HTML/CSS2/CSS3 and jQuery) to ensure the user experience is of the highest quality if viewed on a smartphone or tablet device. 10% of the people who have visited the Volume website in 2012 have come from mobile devices.

If a user visits your website through their smartphone or tablet device to only discover the website to be incompatible this could mean a number of lost opportunities; a sale, a lead, a potential business partner?

Then there are Mobile apps. Mobile application software is designed specially to offer the user a seamless experience, for a specific product, service or game. Volume designed and developed a mobile app for Zebra Technologies, ZipShip. This was intended to allow Zebra printer users to search for available printer consumables and media for various Zebra machines, cancelling out phone calls, emails and the waiting game; making the process mobile and instantaneous. The beauty of ZipShip is the convenience, ease of use and captivating trance it has on a consumer; there are no distractions, just you and the product you need to be delivered when and where you want. There is obviously one implication to consider when creating a mobile application; an app is only available on the specific operating system in which it was designed for – to make it available on all operating systems could prove costly. Therefore research into your target market is essential to ensure your mobile application is relevant and used.

‘Mobile optimisation versus mobile apps’ is another blog. For now, I will leave you with this: Dan Frommer from the Business Insider quoted Matt Galligan saying;

…the future of mobile is the future of everything.

So watch this space and think carefully about how your business can be active by preparing for the mobile take-over, instead of letting it become something you employ once traffic to your website and online sales begin to decrease.

- by Josie Rogers

Turn up the Volume!

Festivals are a great way to enjoy live music and with many festivals popping up all over the UK, festival organisers are always looking to raise the bar in festival quality. Technological innovations have always played a part in improving the festival experience for example, the introduction of festival radio meant that people could listen to live music from different stages, as well as hearing all the backstage gossip. More recently, silent discos have proven to be massively popular at many UK festivals such as Brownstock, Vfestival and Creamfields. Part of the popularity has come from being able to listen to what you want, wherever you are. What if you could take this a step further by listening to live music being played on another stage via your mobile? This could help you decide whether you want to go and watch it live and also ensures you don’t miss a thing. Also, wouldn’t it be great if you could also check out what the line-up is and see which of your friends are also at the festival?

This got us thinking about how we could enhance the festival experience. The result was a state of the art mobile phone app, which will bring cutting-edge technology to the Caversham Festival, an annual community festival organised by Reading-based charity, Readipop.

 

Festival Enhancing Features

  • You will be able to check the in-built festival guide to discover the band line up for each stage
  • Plan your own entertainment itinerary
  • See what food stalls have to offer and find out where on site they are
  • See what/when workshops are happening
  • Redeem special discount vouchers for money off purchases from stall holders
  • Tell your friends about what you have been doing using Facebook and other social media integration

And the best bit

Most impressively, the mobile app will enable you to ‘Turn up the Volume!’. Through your smart phone, you can listen to any of the music being played on any of the stages with its radio-like live-streaming functionality. This means you could be with friends at the main stage and quickly check out what is happening on the floating stage. Of course all of the content will be recorded as it happens and instantly uploaded to the Caversham Festival website, where you will be able to listen and even watch your favourite bands, or the ones you missed, when you get home.

Go on, take a sneak peak!

Here’s a few snaps of how the app will look, we will let you know when it’s ready to download!

At Volume we’ve created other trend-setting mobile apps and so it is great to have been able to turn this expertise to charitable use. We specialise in delivering projects totally in-house from the creative concept, design, digital execution, software development, social media management and marketing strategies through to market analysis. This made us the ideal people to deliver this gift to Readipop, as creating a mobile app includes most of these processes.

Volume’s Chief Executive Chris Sykes is thrilled to be involved with the festival:

“We were impressed with the passion and hard work Readipop puts into the Caversham Festival and the local community. The least we could do was to try and help to enhance the festival experience, whilst utilising the very latest mobile technology. We’re all looking forward to the 8th of July. It promises to be a fantastic event.”

The Readipop Caverhsam festival is in its 14th year and is a way for the local residents of Caversham and wider Reading to celebrate the place we live. The festival will feature live music, an arts trail, fairground rides, children’s workshops, good food, over 40 stalls. Most of the content of the festival is made up from local bands, groups and clubs and showcases much of the work that Readipop helps to create throughout the year.

This year’s Caversham festival will certainly be something to look forward to with the added experience from the innovative Smartphone app, hopefully see you there on the 8th July!

- by Rachel Adams

Is video the king of content?

Videos, blogs, podcasts, infographics, articles. Content is king, content is everywhere – and sometimes a little overwhelming from the sheer volume. This is why brands have to be clever and inspiring to cut through and reach their target market.

So how do you stand out from the crowd? Well it was announced recently that when a brand posts images on Facebook they are 7x more likely to appear in a fan’s home feed. Pinterest (yes we know, everyone’s talking about it) has now taken this to the next level -focusing predmoninantly on images.

Then we have the classic video – are videos still engaging, interesting and worth the budget? We say yes. 60 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, an increase of 25% since May last year and 4 billion videos are streamed each day, also an increase of 25% in the last 8 months. YouTube is currently the 4th most visited site in the UK (after Facebook, Google UK and Google) according to Alexa. This shows the importance of video as a content type, and people’s affinity with it.

Professionally-produced video content can be pricey but that’s not always the case – a clever idea simply executed can sometimes be even more effective than a Hollywood production. No campaign demonstrates this more effectively than this recent video released by The OCD Foundation. The video is just one second long, so the user has to constantly click ‘play’ again and again to read all of the information displayed so briefly. This can be frustrating for the user, in the same way it’s frustrating for a sufferer of OCD to deal with the associated symptoms.

We believe in the power of video. According to Forrester Research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. We’d like to invite you to see if this is true through this show reel.

 

- by Joe Duffelen

‘Digital interaction applications’ – what are they?

Platform and device-neutral digital interaction applications are the latest concepts set to drive engagement with an organisation’s customers and prospects.

SO, WHY AND HOW ARE DIGITAL INTERACTION APPLICATIONS SO EFFECTIVE?

WHY?

A digital interaction application will offer visitors a vibrant user experience; a site so interactive and interchangeable it becomes a personal website for each user. The website will appear to mould itself to the individual, creating dynamic, relevant content evading all the waffle that no one wants crowding their page.

HOW?

Digital interaction applications host the vital qualities to not only engage a user but gather and filter the information that the user provides, in order to tailor the website to their needs. Digital interaction applications utilise game design techniques and mechanics to enhance non-games in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used. This can be called ‘gamification’, making technology more engaging by encouraging users to participate in desired behaviours and by taking advantage of the human psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. Digital interaction applications can encourage people to perform tasks that are ordinarily considered as tedious, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out online forms or viewing web content. With this in mind, marketers are now beginning to use gamification techniques for improving customer engagement and encouraging positive website usage behaviour. So, with the ability to create a highly engaged and active user, through the digital interaction application specifications, combined with the correct tracking and online intelligence, the creation of the personal website begins.

 

ALL WELL AND GOOD BUT HOW WILL THIS LEAD TO ROI?

1. Longer session times:
It Is far from a well-kept secret that the longer someone spends on a website, the more they will engage, the more they will interact, increasing the chances of that user purchasing a product and/or service.

2. Higher response rates:
The dynamic, relevant content that is available to the visitor encourages the individual or organisation to become more approachable. Once familiar with the site, each user will understand that a digital interaction application will not bombard them with irrelevant content yet provide pertinent information and opportunities leading to a more responsive user.

3. High instances of recommendations and referrals:
High response rates and satisfied customers lead to more recommendations and referrals which ultimately lead to greater ROI.

4. Better analysis and insight into customer preferences and interactions:
The whole concept enables the company to evaluate what its target audience really wants. Is there a demand for more training tips? A need for insight into the latest products? Being able to physically see how consumers are shaping their digital interaction application offers immediate insight into the user’s needs and demands and then how and what to sell to that particular user/organisation.

 

A GREAT EXAMPLE OF THE ABOVE is:

Dell’s Small Business Solutions Centre

The Dell Small Business Solutions Centre offers small businesses the opportunity to better understand their IT needs and to find out more around the various server and storage solutions Dell can offer them. The Volume-developed multilingual application helps educate users and facilitates the decision-making process through better knowledge and understanding.

The Volume Technology Team created this in JavaScript to ensure the user experience is neither governed nor restricted by Flash or video, and is therefore available on all the modern devices that so many small-business owners use today. No longer will the user be restricted by HTML and video but greeted with open arms by the limitless virtual environment.

The whole concept is tied up with a full ‘Content Management System’ that completely puts the ‘interaction’ into digital interaction applications by enabling all content to be updated in real time and in multiple languages.

Dell Small Business Solutions Centre

THE FUTURE

I know full well that I am not the only one to have been captivated by a computer game for hours on end, where the treasure must be found, the enemy must be stopped or that triple backflip must be perfected, despite three days of trying already. Well, now that ‘corporate’ website wants a change in this direction (perhaps not the shooting or backflips though). I’m not saying that every website needs to become a digital interaction application because there are some that work the way they do. However, take the first step in establishing whether the forever transforming world of ‘online’ suggests your product, service or organisation could embrace this new, innovative concept.

- by Josie Rogers

What are the top five organisational concerns with social media? How can you deal with them?

When talking about social media with clients, there are a number of questions that commonly come up. Many stem from the challenges of adjusting to using social media as a new way of reaching customers and advocates. I have highlighted the five key concerns we get asked and how we help alleviate them.

The five most common concerns organisations have about using social media are:

1. Brand damage
2. Compliance issues
3. Lack of expertise
4. Difficulty in measuring ROI
5. Resource constraints

Brand damage

No one wants to be the next #McDstories gone sour or be the next brand caught deleting negative comments. On a less viral level, no one wants customer-retention issues stemming from slow responses from those in charge of running the social profiles.

One way of avoiding brand damage is to educate your staff through professional social-media workshops and clear social-media guidelines. This should help avoid situations that leave the profiles open to brand damage; it will also open doors to would-be brand advocates among your staff, who can represent the company, the brand and the products and services via their own social profiles.

Compliance issues

Have you ever seen a brand with myriad social-media accounts that all seem to do the same thing? How do you control the setup of new and random profiles? By putting policies and processes in place, there’ll be a clear process for account setup, which will avoid the proliferation of new accounts that serve no purpose or duplicate effort.

Develop clear and concise social-media policies, and ensure that employees contributing to social media have read and understood those policies. They should provide guidance on setting up and running accounts, and engaging with stakeholders.

Policies are great, but how can you ensure that they result in socially-savvy employees representing the brand in a productive way? Training, of course! Face-to-face or online-based training sessions give practical guidance on social-media activities, and on combining activities to engage an audience and generate leads. You can find out more about the benefits of training in one of our earlier blog post: Is training the answer to the social dilemma?

Lack of expertise

Are you planning to start social-media initiatives? How do you plan to integrate all of your planned social-media activities to ensure you’re driving value for the brand? Do you know what to do in order to achieve your goals?

When choosing to partner with an agency or consultancy, it is important to look for a proven track record of tangible success in social media – campaigns that deliver value and ROI. At Volume, we work alongside brands and provide expertise (from a number of social-media tactics to a fully integrated strategy supported by best-of-breed social tools) to ensure that our clients get the best return from their social media activities.

Difficulty in measuring ROI

How do you actually measure return on investment. What do you count as a success?

Start by setting measureable objectives you are looking to achieve. For example:

  • Site traffic generation
  • Interactions and engagement
  • Re-syndicated content
  • Event registrations and attendance
  • Leads

It is possible to use social media mapping tools such as SociView™ to understand your social media real estate, assess and rate your social instances to see how well they are performing. Each topic area is given a score based on the following:

1. Visibility
2. Influence
3. Relevance
4. Activity

Armed with this information, you can see how well your accounts comply with set score levels, and from there, ensure that accounts continue to perform well in a valued-added way.

Resource constraints

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has searched a brand’s social-media pages, groups and feeds eager to find specific information, only to discover that the last updates were a few months ago.

All too often, accounts are set up by keen but busy people – a few months on, the realisation hits that the resource needed to maintain the profiles negatively impacts their day job and primary objectives. Or people move on leaving accounts dormant.

We help minimise the time and resource needed to manage clients’ social media real estates by using a managed service. We monitor mapped social-media presence through SociView and ensure that all accounts comply with predefined target scores. Alternatively, we offer a range of social media support services to help  build and manage social media presence to ensure that clients gain maximum value from social media activities.

Do you face any other challenges when dealing with social media? How do you deal with them?

If you are interested in finding out more about our social-media services or SociView, get in touch: info@volume.co.uk

- by Rachel Adams

Demystifying Facebook Advertising

Facebook has 845 million active monthly users and 2.7 billion daily likes and comments. Facebook is completely unprecedented, and let’s face it, a marketer’s dream. This you probably already know, but despite the capabilities and power of Facebook – people still seem to focus on Fan Pages and neglect the incredible power of Facebook advertising.

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook advertising already – now’s the time to get on board. Mobile advertising is coming as early as March 2012, and with 50% of Facebook users accessing the site with a mobile phone, it’s already being estimated Facebook is going to make a staggering $1.2 billion in just 12 months through mobile advertising alone.

So if Facebook provides brand pages that are free, why bother with paid for advertising? Well, Facebook advertising doesn’t stand alone and should be just one element of an integrated campaign. It supports the classic Facebook brand page and shouldn’t be considered a substitute.

What can be achieved with Facebook advertising?

When creating a Facebook advert there are two options – drive traffic to a Facebook page or an external touch point. When using Facebook advertising it is about 40% cheaper drive traffic to a Facebook page than an external website and so absolutely the route I’d recommend. If people are taken out of Facebook the bounce rate is likely to be higher.

Now here’s the key – most people use Facebook advertising as a way to get more fans/likes. This is where the problem lies. It should be used to achieve a business objective so the ROI is apparent. For example – we used it to drive downloads of our mobile application Bleat and our clients are using it to generate leads.

How Facebook advertising works

There are a few options when creating an advert:

Sponsored story:
when a user likes a page or post, it creates an advert using that person’s name, the action and the Facebook page then shows it to all their friends. The theory being that users are more likely to take action if there’s familiarity. This only works well if a page or post already has quite a large number of likes.

Source - facebook.com

Drive traffic to a Facebook page:
the title of an advert will automatically be the name of a page. You can either:

  • Promote a page: type in whatever text you like to support the advert, and pick an image if you don’t want to use your page’s profile picture.
  • Promote a post: if you have a particularly engaging wall post then this could be for you.

Drive traffic externally:choose a picture, headline and body copy.

Picking a target audience is where Facebook is brilliant. You can pick specific age, gender, country, city, marital status, workplace, education and most importantly – their likes and interests. You can even target specific fans of other Facebook pages.

Once that’s done a bit like Google Adwords you select your budget (daily or lifetime) and then pay for either clicks or impressions. Always go with clicks – this way you’re guaranteed results. It will automatically suggest a maximum bid (for the advert to appear in place of other ads) based on your target audience e.g. 66p per click, but often you’ll pay less than the max bid. A big factor in price difference is the target country, the UK and US are generally pretty expensive as you can see from this list from Social Bakers of the average cost per click by country.

Does it work?

Yes – if you do the legwork. If you just drive people to a Facebook wall, you’re not going to get a lot of likes. The user will be confused. You need to set the user’s expectations in the journey they’re about to take. Firstly give the user a reason to click on your advert in the copy and take them to a customised Facebook landing page. It should be related to the advert and shows something the user is expecting to see, but make sure it’s engaging.

The trick here is also to include a ‘like gate’. Tell the user to like the page to access the page/content/something special. This way you guarantee yourself a social opt-in. What’s behind the like gate should be related to your objectives – so if you’re generating leads maybe have an embedded form which they fill in to receive an incentive.

The Results

Without going into too much detail we’re currently running a client campaign. They’ve gained well over 3,000 likes at an average cost of 16p. A good percentage of those likes have converted into leads, and the average number of interactions per fan hasn’t dropped either. In a separate campaign we received 13% more likes than clicks – this means 100% of people who clicked actually liked the page and people who saw the advert but didn’t click went and found the Facebook page within 24 hours.

And now mobile advertising is coming. Customisable Facebook landing pages don’t work on a mobile phone so best practice will differ, but first get on board and start using it and you’ll no doubt reap the benefits.

If you have any queries about social and integrated campaigns, contact us: info@volume.co.uk

- by Rachel Adams

Print ain’t Dead (honest)

In a digital age, full of digital communications and digital conversations – it’s sometimes easy to forget the joy of a simple letter or package through the post. Stored in an over-stuffed drawer I have birthday, valentines and congratulations cards spanning back to 1999. I keep them for sentimental reasons, but I don’t keep sentimental emails in a special ‘memories’ folder.

That’s the beauty of print or what we now call ‘tactile communications’. They can give us a sense of excitement, bring back memories and make us feel special. That’s why it’s so disappointing when spam fills up our letterboxes with ill-considered and badly designed mails that don’t consider our needs, wants and preferences.

Print isn’t dead, it’s just often misused and abused. Here at Volume we have the capability to create completely personalised direct mail material… and no, this doesn’t just mean adding the customer’s name at the top of the letter.
So, let’s put this into practice. I’m guessing at some point you’ve probably ordered a pizza from your local take away. Having once ordered a pizza, subsequently you probably received their latest menu through the post. With personalised print, why send a whole menu when the pizza company could send a personalised voucher for your favourite pizza? This not only potentially reduces postage costs, but also means you’re more likely to react to the menu or voucher because it means something to you!

Our clients are already seeing the benefit of this, and personalised print campaigns are hot off the printing press (quite literally) with more coming through the pipeline. Those customers are using it to retrain loyalty, improve open rates and make sure that customers are reacting to their content.

The best print campaigns are not only personal but they can also be fun too! That’s why for a client we recently created this ‘dress up’ direct mail (pictured below). This allowed people to ‘pop out’ the clothes and attach them to Fred as they pleased.

So when people tell you print is dead, think about how much you value print. On Tuesday if you receive an e-card instead of a Valentines card, tell us then that print is dead. Print is moving with the times: becoming more fun, more personal and more competitive. It sits in a support role for digital – not to compete against it.

To find out why print ain’t dead, visit our website or follow our print Twitter feed.

- by Daryl Swinden

The data laws will be changing; are you prepared?

Data drives business, provides marketers with valuable insight about consumers and enables highly targeted communications and response-tracking of campaigns. With new developments and engagements around social media (see our social insight blog), it undoubtedly is evolving into a more powerful resource.

But isn’t ‘data’ still something that just geeks worry about? Surely its impact is negligible on professional marketers who are pushing the boundaries for creative, social and integrated campaigns?

Well, something is coming to the data world that will affect all of this.

It’s the new EU Data Protection Regulation. This new legislation will look to standardise the data-protection laws across the 27 EU member states including the UK.

But you’re not affected, right?
Wrong.

EU Data Protection Regulation - DMA warns of fears it will damage UK businesses http://t.co/JXKi3wfD
January 25, 2012 4:48 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@DMA_UK
DMA UK

 

Whilst still in draft format, this proposed legislation will at best be an extra headache for business and at worst, could totally break the marketing model as we know it.

With this new regulation, we are going to have to rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it.


There will be even more emphasis on the ability to use an individual’s data - only if they are happy for you to do so. The multi-billion-pound marketing industry that uses this information is of secondary importance.

Of particular interest in the new revision are the following categories:

Explicit

Piggybacking the oh-so-popular cookie law, consumers (and that includes business consumers) will have to give “explicit consent” for an organisation to use their personal data for marketing purposes – even if the consumer has had a previous interaction. So “inferred consent” will go out of the window. Clearly, if this consent can’t be proved, then potential contact databases will have to be scrapped and started again. And nobody wants that, right?

You never saw me, right?

Individuals will also be able to request the deletion of their data – in what’s called a “right to be forgotten”.  This is the first proposed regulation to deal with social media and data protection, but will have far-reaching implications across all marketing activities. The additional administration of this, coupled with the impact of customer profiles and trends, will have both financial and planning implications.

Tell me about me

Right now, individuals can request a copy of their data.
Why aren’t we all inundated with these requests? Well, there is currently a nominal fee of £10 to obtain this information. It is proposed however, that this fee will be scrapped – meaning that these requests are likely to come thick and fast.

When is a number not a number?

When it’s an IP address.

IP addresses are a digital marketer’s dream – they allow us to recognise users. This then means we can run analytics and analyse web behaviours.

Well, it now transpires that these IP addresses are considered personal data. Even though they’re just numbers and you can’t communicate with people via an IP number.

Size matters

Companies with over 250 staff will need to have a designated data-protection officer.

 

Don’t panic just yet though. The legislation is purely draft at this stage. Bodies like the DMA will be fighting the corner for the industry and hope to make sure common sense prevails in some of these areas.

And realistically, by the time all the bickering about what is acceptable to all parties has died down and we have a new regulation, we may be three to four years down the line.

What is clear, however, is that change is happening, and whatever it entails, you should be prepared for a more transparent and open relationship with your data subjects. Those companies that will succeed are those that start planning and incorporating this into their activities now, not in four years’ time.

You can fight it, or accept the inevitable.

Is your organisation prepared for change?