As mainstream publishers and self-publishing authors rush to jump on the eBook bandwagon, taking short cuts with eBook conversion is producing sub-standard work that fails eager readers.

A long-standing stereotype, popular within the publishing industry, accuses self-published authors of weak writing, amateur design and layout, and low-quality production. They often receive criticism for their avoidance of editors and half-hearted proofreading too. While there are plenty of notable exceptions to prove the rule, there’s no doubt that the stereotype developed for very good reasons, chief among them the number of first-time authors who didn’t heed the advice that, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

The stratospheric growth of the eBook market, together with the relative ease, speed and minimal cost of eBook self-publishing, has raised the presence of ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ to new heights, but with one very important difference. eBooks level the proverbial playing field between publishers and self-publishing authors, at least as far as quality of production is concerned.

eBooks level the proverbial playing field between publishers and self-publishing authors, at least as far as quality of production is concerned.Unfettered by the demands and prohibitive costs of printing, some self-publishers are seizing the opportunity to distribute their work in eBooks as perfectly-presented as any that might come from a major publisher.

Yet, with more than a pinch of stereotypical irony, rather than raising their game and setting new standards, the majority of publishers are churning out eBooks of appalling quality.

I can’t help getting a sense of déjà vu.

In the ’80s, desktop publishing arrived in the form of software like PageMaker. All of a sudden everyone was a designer. In the ’90s, the addiction to WYSIWYG migrated to web editors like HoTMetaL, FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Then everyone was a web designer. Since 2007, when Amazon first launched the Kindle, a plethora of software and services has emerged for automating the process of eBook creation. As if by magic, now everyone’s a publisher.

For authors wanting to self-publish, there’s an understandable argument for automated manuscript conversion. It costs little or nothing, it’s fast, accessible and generally easy to use. Publishers would no doubt argue the same case, with added issues like dealing with large numbers of manuscripts at once, making efficient use of resources, and of course keeping a prudent eye on profitability. If they can export an eBook directly from Quark or InDesign and avoid the need for further intervention, why wouldn’t they? Well here’s the thing…

Automated eBook conversion DOESN’T WORK

It’ll generate an eBook in a given file format sure enough, but will it actually display and function faultlessly on the target device? Not a chance. Will the file be optimised for size (to minimise download fees from Amazon for instance)? Not even close. eBooks created via automation can be 30-50% larger than necessary.

In terms of display issues, typographical errors, missing page breaks and poorly-formatted text are the usual suspects, while an inoperative or unusable table of contents is the most common functional problem.

I’ll illustrate what I mean with a couple of examples of eBooks created using some form of automation. The following pages were grabbed from the Kindle App on an iPhone.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a free Public Domain eBook (and as popular as ever) so can be forgiven its imperfections. However, the lack of chapter heading formatting, paragraph indentation and page breaks are typical of what can be found in many paid eBooks.

Turning back to the contents from chapter one ‘breaks’ the page flow and chapter heading. Notice how the chapter heading is displayed in a different format to the first example above. The section links aren’t recognised by the app as the table of contents and the alignment of the numbered list is poor.

The Last Kingdom by bestselling novelist Bernard Cornwell, is the first in a series of six titles. Published in March 2009, it represents an early eBook effort by HarperCollins. No attention to heading size and the list of place names is virtually unreadable. Later titles in the series are better.

Another big down-side to automation is that it creates eBooks out of context with the media through which they’ll be consumed – i.e. eReaders like the Kindle, smartphones, and tablets like the iPad – all of which are web-enabled.

All these symptoms of taking the easy, automated, approach to eBook conversion conspire to dissatisfy readers…Think of a travel guide for instance. Along with all the details about what to see, how to get around, where to eat and so on, it’ll include hundreds of website addresses as sources of further information. In a printed guide they’ll obviously just be part of the text, but in an eBook they can, and should, be active links that launch in the reader’s browser. Simply exporting the print version of a book into an eBook format will miss that important opportunity.

Naturally, not all eBooks include lots of links. They’re likely to be as rare as hen’s teeth in a novel set in the Napoleonic Wars. However, without exception, eBooks should always link to at least their publisher’s and/or author’s website and to other titles that may interest the reader.

All these symptoms of taking the easy, automated, approach to eBook conversion conspire to dissatisfy readers, and that can’t be a good thing for authors, publishers, or the eBook industry as a whole. It’s not acceptable to say, “It’s only an eBook, so it doesn’t matter,” because aside from how a new eBook represents the author and their reputation, it’s a product that someone will choose to buy.

Customers should be able to expect that product to be of equivalent quality to its printed counterpart, and every bit as enjoyable to read. If that expectation isn’t met, they may think twice before buying an eBook from the same author or publisher again and they’ll be much less likely to make a recommendation or to write a favourable review.

Following the trend towards enlightened specialisation

Producing eBooks that display and function perfectly on the devices they’re intended for isn’t some far-off fantasy. The tools and techniques are freely available. They just need the human touch and a little time.

Automated conversion solutions will improve as software gets smarter at generating efficient eBook files and providing more flexibility for post-conversion editing. Nonetheless, automation will never rival the quality and finesse of a manually-crafted approach; the kind of approach already being used by the most savvy authors and publishers.

As the eBook market matures and customer expectations rise, attitudes towards production methods will inevitably change. In much the same way that desktop publishing and WYSIWYG web editors served to demonstrate how design and development are skills best left to the specialists, automated eBook conversion will likely be cause of its own demise. In turn, as opportunities for more sophistication emerge from advances in device technology, eBook production will become its own specialist domain.

The first social media integration benchmark study was published a year ago, with an interim report following six months later.

Both studies looked at the exhibitors at the 2010 Motorcycle Live show, with the intention of illuminating the status of social media within the motorcycle industry and also providing a meaningful barometer of attitudes towards social media among consumer-oriented businesses generally.

With Motorcycle Live 2011 just a few weeks away, the research has now been completely updated to show what progress has been made during the last 12 months.

More detailed background about why exhibitors at Motorcycle Live are ideal candidates for benchmarking social media integration can be found in the original study, but in essence it’s because they’re businesses of all sizes, with diverse products and services, and they represent a wide range of customer demographics.

Scope of Research

In order to provide direct comparisons with the 2010 results, the scope of the core research was the same as last year and focused on the visible level of social media integration each exhibitor has achieved with their website. Data was collected about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and RSS integration, as well as the use of social sharing tools. Where other social networks were evident, such as Flickr and LinkedIn, these were noted too.

The research also recorded whether or not the on-page SEO of each site had been given any attention (regardless of how effective that effort may have been) and if they were using a web analytics solution to monitor performance.

The Motorcycle Live 2011 exhibitor list was the starting point for the study. 186 exhibitors were listed, of which 178 had functioning websites. As with last year, the research quite intentionally avoided trying to track down accounts on social networks if the exhibitors’ sites didn’t publicize them.

Basic Promotion

Although the actual visitor volume is unknown, the Motorcycle Live website is the focus of all the show organiser’s online and offline marketing in the run-up to the event. Their online marketing includes event and exhibitor promotion via active Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels. At the time of writing, the Motorcycle Live Facebook Page has over 6,000 ‘Likes’ and the Twitter account has over 3,200 ‘Followers’.

Each exhibitor is given the option to provide some company/product/service profile information, which is linked to from the exhibitor list. As was the case last year, exhibitors are not charged for this and they are free to provide whatever copy and links they wish. The table below shows the extent to which this valuable opportunity was neglected, and how some businesses have still yet to embrace any kind of online marketing:

Out of the exhibitors who did provide information for their profile listing, only 6% bothered to go beyond basic contact details with a logo and some promotional copy about their business.

Although these indicators of basic promotion show, for the most part, an improvement over last year, it’s still disappointing to see that not a single exhibitor thought to include links to their social channels. While the initiative to do so should of course come from the exhibitors themselves, next year the show organisers might consider providing more guidance on how to make the best use of profile pages. Doing so would not only benefit the exhibitors, but the overall promotion of the event itself.

Websites, SEO and Web Analytics

The research investigated the 178 functioning exhibitor websites and, like last year, as well as looking for indicators of social media integration, it recorded whether or not there was any evidence of on-page SEO and the use of client-side web analytics. The findings are as follows:

Of course there’s no way of knowing how active and on-going the SEO efforts are, or indeed if any of the exhibitors actually look at and act upon the data provided by Google Analytics, but it’s still encouraging to see that more businesses are considering the importance of these crucial aspects of online marketing.

Having said that, it’s worth making clear that among those websites with some evidence of on-page SEO, there wasn’t a single example of a really effective, professional, SEO approach.

Three of the websites that weren’t using Google Analytics had implemented some form of basic visitor counting mechanism.

It’s alarming how many sites have been set up ‘on the cheap’, without any professional web design input, and which haven’t been updated in some cases for many years. Four of the exhibitors are still partying like it’s 1999 with outstandingly awful ‘framed’ sites.

Social Media Integration

The real focus of the research was on the current level of social media integration and how that compares with the findings of last year’s report. Here are the headline numbers:

3.9% of the exhibitors were linking to other social networks such as Flickr and LinkedIn.

In April’s interim report, I predicted that by the time of the new research it would be realistic to expect the number of socially-integrated businesses to out-number the rest for the first time. Well they didn’t quite make it, but with exactly half the sites examined now showing some sign of social media integration, the balance is just about to change.

The descending level of integration with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remains consistent with last year and isn’t surprising given the popularity and practical application of each channel. The higher than average increase in YouTube usage is interesting, and reflects the growth in demand for video content and it’s relevance to social sharing and SEO. The much lower than average increase in RSS feed provision can be attributed to the limited growth of blog implementations among the exhibitors.

Overall, the percentage improvements are certainly encouraging and particularly the growth in multiple social channels. However, it’s really important not to get carried away by the numbers. In practice, the level of social media use and website integration remains low with even Facebook only being linked to by 40% of the businesses in the research.

It’s also necessary to understand the real context of the research data. For example, to be counted among those with Facebook integration, an exhibitor needed only to have included a link to their Facebook page once somewhere in their site. In the vast majority of cases (even the ‘most improved’ businesses), button links to social networks have been added with little prominence at or near the bottom of pages. I suspect this will often be symptomatic of the battle between the old and new guard – where someone within a business ‘gets’ social media and understands the commercial value in taking the initiative with it, but the powers-that-be are, at best, reluctant. The compromise is a minimal commitment experiment. That’s a start, and better than nothing, but a long way from being a really integrated and competitive approach.

Of all the 178 websites examined in the research, social media appeared to be under-the-skin of the business, with real depth of integration, in less than a handful of cases.

In some ways, the use of content social sharing tools is the most telling about attitudes towards social media. Although the number of businesses that have implemented (at least token) social sharing since last year has nearly doubled, 13.5% is still a very low proportion. Bear in mind that adding social sharing functionality to any website costs nothing and is a powerful mechanism for enabling customers, prospects and peers to promote your products and services on your behalf, for increasing brand awareness and targeted website traffic, and it has a positive knock-on effect for SEO too. Where’s the downside? Why on earth wouldn’t you implement it?

Social Media Engagement

As I highlighted in the introduction of last year’s social media integration study:

Social media marketing is all about customer engagement, building relationships, earning trust, developing influence and managing reputation. At its core are interaction and conversation.

So having a presence on one or more of the major social networks isn’t enough. Those channels need to be properly resourced and fully integrated into an overall digital marketing strategy. If they’re not actively engaging customers (and potential customers) then there’s not much point to them.

Last year the research looked at the level of Twitter activity (of the exhibitors who were linking to their accounts) to give a simple benchmark of social media engagement. That exercise has been repeated again to give a comparison.

Although this basic comparison is far from robust as a measure of engagement, the doubling of average tweet volume suggests that businesses are becoming more comfortable with social media conversation and how to manage it.

A quarter of the Twitter accounts analysed had been established during the last 12 months. The most active accounts were tweeting between 3 and 4.3 times every day. Three of the accounts weren’t following anyone, and half of all the businesses were following under 100 accounts. A third of the accounts had less than 100 followers.

Last year’s report included a section on the great British bike manufacturer, Triumph Motorcycles, who remain one of the more socially-integrated businesses covered by the research. The Triumph website continues to include social sharing and links to Triumph’s active Facebook and YouTube channels. However, there’s still no sign of them promoting their Twitter account.

12 months ago, the @TriumphOffical account had over 1,700 followers, but wasn’t following anyone and no tweets had been made. It remains completely inactive, even though it now has over 5,700 followers. Meanwhile another account, @OfficialTriumph, which was set up a couple of weeks after the other one in 2009, has started being used. It currently has nearly 1,800 followers, it’s following 31 accounts, and has made 191 tweets.

Why the two accounts? Why does one have a far greater following despite the lack of activity? Why is Triumph fighting shy of actively promoting Twitter on the website? There may be lessons to be learned here about brand protection and the value of establishing a clear digital marketing strategy.

Motorcycle Brands In Focus

The big motorcycle brands didn’t fair too well in the 2010 benchmark study, so I’ve extended the analysis in this year’s report to show how things have changed. The table below is based on a dozen motorcycle brands who exhibited at last year’s Motorcycle Live show are there again in 2011:

Husqvarna, KTM and Norton have all made notable advances with their social media integration during the last 12 months.

Yamaha, Ducati, Suzuki and Harley-Davidson all seem to be continuing a policy of not linking their websites to their social channels.

Kawasaki, on the other hand, are linking to Facebook and Twitter, but in possibly the least useful way I’ve ever seen. Try visiting the Kawasaki site yourself and see if you can find the links.

In terms of social media engagement, the Twitter analysis showed that the motorcycle brands are all at the lower end of the activity (tweets per day) spectrum, with the exception of KTM who are the 4th most active of all the Twitter accounts examined.

Most Improved Motorcycle Brand

Of the dozen motorcycle brands analysed above, the one that had shown the most improvement in the integration of social media since last year was Royal Enfield.

In 2010 the Royal Enfield website was just linking to a Facebook Group. 12 months on, they’ve wisely ditched the Group and are linking to a Facebook Page, a Flickr account, and a YouTube channel. The site also includes a simple content sharing tool.

I asked Royal Enfield’s Dan Sager about the background to the changes and the advantages of the new, more integrated, approach. Here’s what he had to say:

Just because we’re one of the oldest surviving motorcycle manufacturers (110 this year) doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Social media works really well for our brand – on YouTube people can not only see but also hear our motorcycles and we’ve had nearly 90,000 views so far. Photostreams are useful too and Facebook is a quick and easy way to keep the public informed about what’s new. The only downside with social media is that you do need to keep on top of it to ensure it stays relevant, but it’s worth the effort.

Most Improved Business

Out of all the other exhibitors who aren’t motorcycle brands at the 2011 show, the most improved in its social media integration is the California-based motorcycle rental and tour operator, EagleRider.

Last year the EagleRider site had no social media integration whatsoever. Now they’re linking to a Facebook Page, Twitter account, and a YouTube channel. They’re also prominently offering Skype as a method of contacting their customer service team.

The EagleRider account on Twitter is the most recently established of all the accounts analysed, but is already above average in its levels of activity.

Best Integration of Social Media

So who’s the best example of social media integration? Who can all the other exhibitors learn from?

For the second year running, and still by quite some margin, it’s Gasthof Hochalmspitze, the Austrian hotel and restaurant run by British ex-pats Ros and John Gowers.

The website hasn’t changed since last year, and neither has the level of integration between it and the hotel’s social channels, but for now they don’t have to. Ros and John have continued to put social media at the heart of their marketing activity, with very active Facebook and Twitter accounts complimented by YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, social sharing, and an RSS feed from their blog. A year ago the @Hochalmspitze account on Twitter was averaging 2.6 tweets per day. It’s now averaging 3.4 tweets per day, which is second only in volume to insurance firm Carole Nash.

Commenting on Gasthof Hochalmspitze’s success with social media, Ros Gowers said:

One year on and our social media work is now so much a part of our daily routine, we forget what we did before! It has stood us in really good stead this year in maintaining and developing our customer base and our contacts with fellow providers across the globe (latterly this has started to include suppliers too) and importantly proved invaluable when our online ‘community’ actively supported us through a particularly difficult situation over the summer. We know there is still more to do in this ever-changing world – getting to grips with Google+ is a task for this winter for instance – but there is certainly no going back now! It is particularly rewarding to know that we have managed to stay ahead of the game.

The facility to create company pages on Google+ is expected to be launched in a matter of weeks, so the 2012 update on this research will likely include measures of its utilisation.

Social Media Integration in 2012 – The Road Ahead

The findings of this year’s benchmark study show that a growing number of businesses are realising the potential commercial value of social media and are taking steps to integrate it into their marketing strategies. Some are embracing it with enthusiasm and commitment, while others remain reluctant and unconvinced, but there’s no doubt that the relentless momentum of social media’s influence on the relationship between brands and consumers has an impact on everyone – and perhaps most of all for those businesses who choose to bury their heads in the sand.

Over the next 12 months the trend for increasing social media engagement will inevitably continue and socially-disconnected businesses will become the minority in the research for the first time. With many of the websites in the study being due for re-development, there’s an opportunity for some major leaps forward in terms of genuine social media integration.

As Royal Enfield have discovered, implementing a social media strategy requires resource, time, and effort, but the results are worth it. Training for staff and management is a key issue for many businesses, and recruitment is a consideration for larger brands. The most important thing of all is that, to be really effective, social media (and every other aspect of digital marketing for that matter) must form part of robust, and closely integrated, overall marketing strategy.

The big question is whether or not the big brands in the motorcycle industry will finally show leadership and demonstrate the kind of best practice that others can follow. There’s a little hotel in Austria that everyone can learn from.

Ruben highlighted the impact of Google Places along with some key trends in search behaviour, and the importance of web analytics, social signals and integration were all discussed.

However, the audience questions were dominated by concerns about the effect of Google’s Panda update, with several property investment portal owners describing dramatic falls in traffic over recent months.

The so-called Panda update is a significant algorithm change that Google began to roll-out in February, with a number of further revisions being implemented throughout the year. The aim of Panda is to identify low-quality websites and therefore improve the quality of search results provided to Google users.

Google publishes extensive quality guidelines via its Webmaster Tools service, and these should certainly be the first port of call for any site owner that believes they may have fallen-foul of Panda.

There’s heavy emphasis on the user experience, including (among many other things) ease of navigation, originality and authority of content, and the ratio of content to advertising.

Here are the slides from the presentation. It gives an overview of some key features of the Google Analytics solution in the context of web analytics in general and the event industry in particular:

It’s been known since last year that “social signals” (such as tweets, likes, shares and author authority) have some degree of bearing on search engine rankings and therefore that a successful social media strategy could directly impact on SEO results. Twitter’s influence was thought to be particularly potent, but in a blog post published last week, Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, suggests that content sharing via Facebook may be a more powerful factor.

The quantitative research found significant correlation between the level of content sharing on Facebook and high Google rankings. Specifically, links highlighted in “shares” seem to have the greatest correlation followed by those in “comments” and “likes”. As the chart below shows, links included in tweets also show correlation with strong Google results, but to a much lesser degree than the Facebook signals.

Chart image courtesy of SEOmoz.org

Unsurprisingly, link metrics continue to have a profound effect on search engine ranking performance, but it’s interesting to note that even these showed a slightly lower correlation than Facebook “shares”.

Considering the omnipresence of the Facebook “like” button across the Web it might have been expected to show greater correlation than content “shares”. Commenting on this, Rand Fishkin said:

In Facebook’s own environment, a “like” of content will show up on your own “Wall” and in “Most Recent”, but [unlike "shared" content] it rarely shows in “Top News” where most users scan and click.

If Google is weighing-up the relative importance of “shares” vs “likes” when determining the human value of content, then it makes sense for “shares” to be given more prominence. While a “like” is certainly an active vote of recommendation, “sharing” content is more considered and involved.

One of the important conclusions of the research is that strategy development for social media marketing needs to find innovative ways to earn and encourage content sharing across the Facebook network in order to maximise the cross-benefit for SEO.

In November last year I published a social media integration benchmark study that looked at how exhibitors at the 2010 Carole Nash Motorcycle Live show were getting to grips with social media.

The aim of the research project was to benchmark the level of social media integration within the motorcycle industry and, in doing so, provide a general barometer of social media adoption in the UK. The study focused on the visible level of integration each exhibitor had achieved with their website. Data was collected about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and RSS integration, as well as the use of content sharing tools.

Overall, the results were far from positive with 65% of businesses having no social media integration at all. The study concluded that:

…there’s still a huge gulf between the leading edge of digital marketing and the everyday reality for most businesses… the challenge for businesses is to understand the commercial relevance of social media marketing and to formulate realistic strategies for its integration.

Social Progress – Interim Research

The full benchmark study will be repeated shortly before the 2011 Motorcycle Live show, which is taking place at Birmingham’s NEC from 19th to 27th November.

In the meantime, 130 exhibitors who had little or no social media integration last year have been re-visited to find out if anything has changed over the course of six months.

• 20% now have some form of social media integration

  • 5.4% are linking to more than one social channel

• 7.7% link to a Facebook Page

• 4.6% link to a Twitter account

• 3.1% link to a YouTube channel

• 5.4% are offering an RSS feed

• 11.5% feature a content sharing mechanism…

  • …of which a third are using the Facebook Like button

The results are encouraging and mean that among all of 2010′s exhibitors the number with no social media integration has fallen from 65% to 51.5% – an improvement of 21%

Still a long way to go

It’s disappointing to discover that the big manufacturers like Kawasaki, Suzuki, Yamaha and Harley-Davidson seem to have made no progress at all in six months.

There are a number of companies who are active through social media channels, but are still failing to integrate their websites with their social marketing efforts.

Two of the websites examined were displaying Facebook and/or Twitter icons, but without making them links to the respective social platforms.

Best Integration of Social Media

In last year’s study, Austrian hotel Gasthof Hochalmspitze was highlighted as demonstrating the best integration of social media.

The interim research found that Surf & Turf Instant Shelters had made the most significant progress. Their site now promotes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr channels, plus an RSS feed.

Two other businesses that warrant a mention in despatches for their progress are DH Autos and Hadrian V-Twin Tours & Rentals.

Predictions for Motorcycle Live 2011

It will be interesting to see how the motorcycle industry continues to make progress with social media integration during the next six months in the run up to Motorcycle Live 2011.

The rate of improvement is unlikely to increase, but by the time of the next full benchmark study it would be realistic to expect that the number of socially-integrated businesses will out-number the rest for the first time.

Brand development through social media remains a big opportunity for those that can get their acts together, but it needs the major manufacturers to lead the way.

 

The January issue of Recruitment Consultant magazine includes an article on page 22 taken from a previous digital recruitment blog post by Heartwood Digital. The full article is republished below:

There are three key stages of the recruitment process where facilitation by an ‘expert interpreter’ can help a recruiter select the best person for the job:

• Specification – of the role itself and the person, skills and experience required
• Evaluation – of applicants’ skills and experience to make interview selections
• Interviews – asking skill-specific questions and ‘interpreting’ the answers for the recruiting management team

Hire Marshal is a web application designed to make the ‘evaluation’ stage of recruitment more effective and efficient and is an ideal compliment to a facilitated approach that’s relevant to both recruiters and their agencies.

Will Critchlow of Distilled

Hire Marshal gives you an easy way of creating application forms for recruitment. Multiple reviewers can then score applicants and decide collaboratively who to interview.

Hire Marshal has been developed by the team at Distilled, which was co-founded in 2005 by Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris and now has offices in London and Seattle.

The company’s core business is the provision of natural and paid search, online reputation consulting and web design services to organisations of all sizes from start-ups to multinational corporations.

I asked Will Critchlow to explain the background to Hire Marshal and the benefits it offers both recruiters and candidates…

Q1. What sort of issues with conventional recruitment processes prompted Distilled to develop the Hire Marshal solution?

Q2. Hire Marshal facilitates job application and applicant evaluation in order to select candidates for interview. What would you say are the benefits of anonymity and objectivity during this stage of recruitment?

Richard Baxter, of London-based SEO agency SEOGadget, used Hire Marshal very recently so I asked for his perspective on the system’s value to the recruitment process:

Dealing with CVs during the application process is tedious and can be surprisingly uninformative, especially when you’re reviewing a lot of CVs and cover letters. I used Hire Marshal to evaluate candidates’ answers to specific questions and used that output to make an interview decision. Specifically, we had 165 graduates apply for the two recent openings at SEOgadget, so Hire Marshal was a bit of a lifesaver on the initial “select for interview” stage. It was relatively easy getting to the top 10 interview-worthy candidates and we chose on a number of criteria based on the creativity and problem solving aspects highlighted in their answers. I ‘think’ we did about a week’s worth of recruiting in a day (that’s after we got the applications through).

Q3. Although Hire Marshal is squarely aimed at making life easier for recruiters, it seems to have advantages for candidates too. Have you found that Hire Marshal has given applicants more opportunity to demonstrate their skills and experience than traditional CVs?

Q4. Do you find that recruiters sometimes need guidance about the most effective ways to structure and word an application form, perhaps particularly when it comes to evidence-based competency questions? Is this something Hire Marshal provides?

A common problem experienced by candidates at interviews for senior digital marketing positions is that the management team doing the interviewing isn’t equipped with the role-specific knowledge to be able to ask questions that give the candidates opportunity to really demonstrate their competence. This won’t be a situation Will and his team have come across since they’re all experts in their field, but for many businesses it can be a serious stumbling block. Recruiting for a Head of Digital Marketing (or similar) is a good example and I’m certain that Hire Marshal can add some real value to this part of the process.

Q5. To what extent have you found the Hire Marshal approach helps to support the actual interview process? Can it change the dynamic of interviews for candidates?

Note Will’s point here about how using a system like Hire Marshal doesn’t make CVs completely redundant, but rather that one compliments the other in painting a picture of a candidate.

Q6. Hire Marshal is out of beta now. How many recruiters are using the service and what plans do you have for further developments?

In terms of cost, the Hire Marshal service is a complete no-brainer. For occasional small-scale use, the free account provides full functionality for a single job vacancy and even includes the review facility for three users. At the other end of the scale it’s only $99 per month for an Enterprise account that covers 20 vacancies at a time and up to 40 reviewers, which would be ideal for larger organisations and recruitment agencies.

The sign-up process is very simple and each account has its own secure dashboard with the ability to customise the logo and CSS used on application forms.

I’ve been really impressed with the Hire Marshal system and with Distilled’s commitment to its on-going development. I’d recommend you watch the short video below to find out more and then visit the Hire Marshal site to sign-up for a free account and evaluate how the service could improve your own recruitment process.

Adi Clark – Head of Insight

Q1. You’ve been working in roles focused around data analysis and insight for over ten years. Tell us a little more about your experience and how the use of business intelligence has evolved in recent years?

Although I’ve spent roughly half my time working for agencies and half on the ‘client-side’, it’s always been about using data to improve business performance. What ‘business performance’ means has varied from role to role, ranging from upselling dog food (from mid-range to premium product) to predicting which customers are most likely to cancel their broadband subscription.

There have been a number of changes over the years, but without a doubt the most important is the increasing appreciation and understanding of how vital the data ‘asset’ is. This has led to wholesale changes within some businesses; they’ve genuinely become data-centric. Tesco’s are the oft-repeated example, but the leading dot.com retailers should also be following this model. The knock-on effect has been increased data collection and a wider range of intelligent analytics tools.

Q2. In August 2008 you joined the NEC Group as their Head of Insight. Would it be fair to assume the company has a pragmatic and proactive attitude to business intelligence?

Absolutely! The NEC Group laid the foundations for the Insight team in 2007 and it was ready to go live when I joined. They’d invested heavily in it and it was their ambition for Insight that sold the job to me. I’ve had non-stop support from the very top since I started, and data and insight is part of the vocabulary here now!

Q3. What does your role as Head of Insight involve? It would be interesting to understand more about how you and your team work with other areas of the business to influence change.

The Insight team supports all of The Group’s businesses, so we have a diverse range of roles and responsibilities. For example, for our catering business we look at the profile of the audience of a forthcoming show to predict which lines are likely to be in most demand, and also what types of shoulder period offer we should try. With TheTicketFactory, we put a lot of effort in to our email marketing, targeting each campaign so that we only send relevant messages to our customers. We work with our organisers and promoters to produce detailed audience profiles, aimed at helping them fine-tune their marketing approach and potentially learn from changing profiles to change the content of the show.

For all of our businesses, we also support sales activity by providing traditional competitor intelligence, sector analysis and market research. We also carry out regular customer research to identify where we could still make improvements to our services, and we’ve recently introduced Net Promoter Score as a benchmarking measure.

Q4. The NEC Group has a portfolio of six websites and you’re using both Google Analytics and Webtrends to track visitor behaviour and performance. Why the combination and how would you say they compare?

We started with Webtrends a few years ago simply as a way of measuring traffic to the various sites. Over time the internet has grown in importance for all of our businesses, so by popular demand, we added GA last year. This has been well received within The Group because it allows managers with non-digital or non-analytical backgrounds to get their hands on some meaningful information within a few clicks, whereas Webtrends was commonly perceived as being slightly ‘techie’.

For TheTicketFactory we now track our marketing emails with GA, so we know exactly which tickets have been bought as a result of the emails we send. Coupled with analysis of order abandonment and sources, this is really powerful for us. Our use of GA has largely superseded the need for Webtrends, however we’re now looking at Webtrends’ VDM and Optimize tools so we can improve the experience of repeat visitors to our sites.

Q5. What other kinds of data do you pull together from online and offline sources? How important is data and system integration to what you do?

Like I said, this is something we’ve invested heavily in! We’re now pulling data from around 15 different internal systems, including our ticketing, catering, and event orders systems, plus we’ve bought some data from third party providers as well as using CACI’s Acorn data. We’ve combined this into a single customer view CRM database, which we believe is unique in both scale and scope, within our industry. To be without this now would be a return to the dark ages for us!

Q6. Where does predictive modelling fit in to all this? Can you explain why and how the NEC Group uses predictive modelling?

Primarily we use predictive modelling to identify those customers that are most likely to be interested in attending a forthcoming event being ticketed by TheTicketFactory. TheTicketFactory sells for venues across the UK and has literally hundreds of events on sale at any one time. Only a small percentage of our mailing list subscribers will attend any particular event, so we don’t want to annoy the vast majority of subscribers by spamming them with emails for events that they’re not interested in. We take great care with our mailing list, so we use the modelling to pick out only those that are most likely to be interested. This has proven to be successful both in terms of increasing ticket sales and reducing unsubscribes.

Q7. Would you agree that data segmentation is key to getting real insight from a tool like Google Analytics? What sort of advice would you give about segmentation or other techniques to people who are perhaps just starting out with Analytics?

Segmentation is an interesting one. I frequently hear or read my peers discussing the latest segmentation exercise they’ve done and how useful it’s going to be, but I think it has its limitations. Without a doubt, it’s better than having no understanding of your customer base at all, and it’s also better than having an overall ‘profile’ of your customer base. But we need to be careful about how we use segmentation, since there’s always an element of ‘pigeon-holing’ with it, even in the most informed analyses. Just because someone has been identified as belonging to segment 2, we can’t assume they’ll have all the characteristics of that segment. We need to take this into account when making decisions on how to interact with each segment.

In terms of techniques and approaches, it obviously depends on the skills, tools and data available. If all of these are low/limited, then a simple customer profile is achievable just by using a tool like Excel and a pivot table. With more data and skills, segmentation is a step up from profiling, but in terms of marketing, the holy grail is targeted, personalised messages based on predictive modelling.

Q8. How challenging is social media when it comes to conventional methods of analysis and profiling?

We used to ask an interview question along the lines of ‘how do you prove the ROI of social media’, and I’ve still not heard a convincing answer! There are plenty of tools available now that will report back on the type of ‘mentions’ made about our brands, but the automatic interpretation of these mentions is far from bullet-proof. Plus there’s no way of knowing what sorts of people (age, gender etc) are make positive/negative comments. So to answer your question, it’s extremely challenging!

Q9. Do you have any favourite examples of where the delivery of insight has had a big impact on the NEC Group’s marketing activity?

Our proudest achievement to date is the changes we’ve made to our email marketing program, and our weekly Ticket Factory newsletter in particular. This goes out to every subscriber every Thursday, promoting new on-sale events and other forthcoming shows, and used to be ‘one size fits all’ i.e. everyone would get exactly the same content. We’ve changed it so that every subscriber gets personalised content based on a wide range of factors, including the shows they’ve attended before, their click history, their gender, age and location. We now send over 125,000 versions of the newsletter every Thursday, and again we’ve seen fantastic results in terms of opens, clicks, sales, and opt-out rates.