By , Head of Strategic Research

After our recent membership seminar, I was asked by a number of people if we have any techniques for getting senior stakeholders to take digital seriously and release budget for digital projects.

The answer is yes, and of course the easiest way to secure buy-in and get cross-organisational support is to employ an agency like us to cut through internal structures and politics in a stakeholder engagement exercise that delivers a digital roadmap for the future. However, getting to the point of commissioning work like this is often too fraught with internal obstacles. I can say though that having worked with many very complex and multi-faceted organisations, it is evident that there are similarities between them which can be used as catalysts for change.

Where to start?
A digital vision needs to be owned by the whole organisation, which means it has to have buy-in from the top. However, as we all know it is often difficult to get the idea of a cohesive and holistic digital strategy across to those who are likely to release the budget to produce it. This is to say that unless your CEO is a digital evangelist, you will have to prove the benefits of digital first in order to get the idea of a digital future on the agenda.

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By Harry Rees

With graduation only three months away, and the final hurdle fast approaching, I felt my placement at Precedent could be my most important one to date. Previously I had been mentored by Ed Richards (senior designer, Precedent Cardiff) for a live brief at Cardiff Met. Within that short space of regular one hour discussions, I always took away something positive and a fresh perspective. Hungry for more, I was keen to reunite with my former mentor.

The two weeks I spent at Precedent where highly enjoyable and memorable. Not only did I learn so much about the industry I’m passionate about, but essentially what makes it so great.. and that’s the people!

Precedent’s friendly, welcoming vibe allowed me to slip right in and feel at home. They allowed me to explore creative avenues, ideas and thoughts in a number of discussions and presentations.
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By , Senior User Experience Consultant

Google’s gross annual revenue from mobile advertising is over US$2.5 billion per year*.

eBay expects mobile customers to buy and sell $8 billion of merchandise in 2012*.

PayPal expects to see $7 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012*.

Mobile is big business. Digital experiences that are locked in to where you are and what you’re doing, that emphasise convenience and cater for people on the move (and sat on the sofa) are making the most of mobile technologies and context-based services. Gesture and voice based interactions have introduced a new way of interacting with the web, driving innovation and influencing customer behaviours and expectations. (more…)

director at the IET, entertained and enlightened attendees at our membership seminar last week. Here Adrian Porter tells you what you missed at our first membership seminar.

Attendees at Thursday’s seminar to launch our new sector report, Membership organisations: big challenges, digital answers? were both captivated and entertained by Michelle’s account of how the Institution of Engineering and Technology is embracing the digital world.

In her role as Membership and Professional Development Director at the IET since 2006, Michelle has overseen a real life digital implementation journey that has its roots in the IET’s strategic vision and objectives for the 21st century.

Michelle started her talk by revealing a visualisation of the IET’s strategy, a remarkably concise and instantly understandable diagram that rather impressively represents the consolidation of a ’72 slide deck’!

Despite not being one of our clients, and with us not knowing exactly what Michelle was going to say in her presentation, the resonance between the approach adopted by the IET to their digital development and the recommendations contained in our report was quite deafening. Michelle showed us how consideration of the IET’s strategic priorities combined with an understanding of her members’ life stage engagement with the IET has manifested itself in an innovation roadmap which directly translates into a series of digital initiatives.

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By , Commercial Director

In our digital finance report Integration or Isolation? and subsequent digital finance forum we showed a range of great examples for social engagement in financial service organisations. This included the @RBS_Economics insight tweets, @SkandiaTeamGBR’s digital curation of its own content and other relevant information sources and @Zopa’s really personal customer service approach. We also looked at Fidelity’s proactive Facebook page and how some firms such as Investec are starting to maintain their LinkedIn company pages.

At the forum the biggest single issue shared with us during the roundtables was the challenge of compliance. Feedback from the event stressed how much marketers were looking to Precedent and similar digital agencies to answer their compliance challenges. Clearly we can’t alone answer what are often complex regulatory challenges. Keen to take on the challenge we proposed a roundtable event under Chatham House Rules to get marketers and compliance professionals together to explore these issues and hopefully find some positive recommendations.
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By , Consultant

If you own or manage a website and you don’t yet know that you need to comply with the UK privacy legislation (aka The Cookie Law), you’re probably in the wrong job.

The law was passed last May but UK websites have been granted an additional year by the Information Commissioners Office (or the ICO, the body enforcing the law in the UK) to implement this. If you don’t get up to speed and take the necessary steps, you will be liable for a fine of up to £500,000.

You have until the 25th May 2012 to become complaint, and time is running out.

What does it all mean?
In essence, it is now a legal requirement that you ask for consent (opt-in) if your site uses cookies (small packets of data). However, to confuse matters, if a cookie is “strictly necessary” for the site to function (such as for a shopping basket) you “might” not have to ask for consent. But what does “strictly necessary” and “might” mean?

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By , Head of Digital Marketing

Missed the last month’s Precedent Digital Finance Forum? To our delight, the roundtable discussions quickly sparked participants swapping success stories for overcoming compliance restrictions and old fashioned thinking towards social media and blogging.

Here are just a few of the tried and tested solutions cherry picked as highlights from those roundtable talks. Have a read through and let us know your own experiences in the comments.

1. Thought-leadership and social media: the perfect match
Rather than use social media and blogs to push products, offering helpful and impartial information hasn’t just proved an effective strategy for major players like City Index or Lloyds TSB, it’s also bang on trend.
Stats from Google Insight reveal that DIY-style searches are significantly on the rise as users discover that adding ‘how to’ to a search string lets them skip the sales pitch and get straight to the content.

2. Softly-softly catches management approval
If you’re working at a less digitally forward-thinking institution, members of the forum found starting with a small and easily approved by compliance piece of digital activity gave them the stats and evidence for management to green-light larger initiatives.
The bottom line being if you’re speaking to management, talk return on investment and not blogs or Twitter. This means setting up the right tracking in advance – whether it’s Google Analytics for your website, buzz monitoring for the web as a whole, or bespoke tracking for your social media profiles – and knowing what metrics to track and how to interpret them.

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Adrian Porter – Head of Strategic Research

As promised, here is the first of a short series of follow-up blogs on our second Digital Finance Forum. Please feel free to comment below, and let’s keep the conversation going using #PrecSem.

After our initial forum in September last year we anticipated that compliance issues would be high on the agenda for delegates attending the forum yesterday at the Merchant Taylors Hall in the City.

With this in mind, as those of you who attended yesterday discovered, we attempted to recruit two, or three people with experience of dealing with compliance to help us facilitate a panel debate on the subject.
The irony was of course that none of the people we approached could get the clearance from compliance to participate. Excuse this use of text speak but,  – LOL!

However, we were determined to embrace the subject and tryto focus on positive approaches to common problems, rather than turn the morning into a ‘compliance-bashing exercise’.

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By John Campbell, Regional Director Scotland

Any improvement in digital connectivity speeds across Scotland will be very welcome – in rural communities and remote towns we still watch the Windows egg-timer ask us to be patient or we notice our mobile phones give up on that last download as we leave yet another 3G or even GPRS zone. Therefore, recent positive talk from those involved in the Scottish Government Action Plan and the use of terms such as ‘digital boost‘ in Scotland fill me with hope.

At Precedent we strive to deliver optimal digital experiences and we need the connectivity promised. Personally, and from a Precedent viewpoint, I can’t wait.  We are told the best internet speeds we can expect are up to 300MBPs with a current average of 6.8 MBPs.  Working recently in the north of Scotland I achieve a broadband speed of less than 1MBPs and even when home working (a working style keenly promoted by the Scottish Government), in commuting distance from Edinburgh, I get little more than 2MBPs!

What will 4G on mobile and the implementation of super fast broadband mean for Scotland? Opportunities for companies and the economy to grow through digital innovation and for rural communities to feel fully part of the worldwide internet cloud.  I look forward to seeing the timeline as the plan is launched, but 2020 does seem all long way off.

By Craig Cartwright, Technical Architect

Well it’s the end of an era for Google Analytics: come end of January 2012 they plan to replace the current interface we have all learnt to love and use with the new dashboard and features that they’ve been promoting for a while (Some may have already jumped shipped to the new interface as we’ve all had the chance for a while to change to the new!).

So what does this actually mean for all of us? And is it time to panic? Well I’d like to think that it’s nothing too serious to worry about, and for most, it will all be fine. But for some of the regular users like me that use some of the more obscure reports, it does mean some annoyance as they are being laid to rest (RIP).

But before running for the hills (or the likes of other great analytics packages such as Mint, etc.) be aware that some of these reports can still be found – but in the strangest of places – namely as “secondary dimensions” or via “advanced segments” for some of the traditional reports. As per the old interface these act as additional “parameters” for filtering reports. For example, the great old screen resolutions reports is now stored/shown as a secondary dimension in the browser report.

So what’s the hype or moan about? Well, with my like for spaghetti westerns – here’s my take on the good, the bad and the plain ugly….

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