It seemed like 2009 was a Social Media land grab of contacts and connections. Hopefully you are all building your brand presence and conversing regularly and honestly with your new found audiences. (If not please give us a shout!)

I think that one danger with embarking on an extensive Social Media strategy is that, due to its immediate and noisy nature, it can accidentally replace a solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plan. In my opinion 2010 will be a time to pull our heads above water, take a deep breath and think how we are going to work these new channels and manage these relationships in an appropriate manner.

Firstly, what is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management references the symbiotic relationship between an IT System and a Contact Strategy. It is as much about the technology and integration methods you adopt as it is about actual message content and frequency of interaction. Sounds complicated? Not necessarily.

Imagine a small company of four people each using Outlook. Invariably that creates four different address lists all living separate lives under the control of individuals. There will be duplication, out of date information and a lot of value living in the heads of single employees rather than in a company-wide system. What if, on the company file server, there was a simple Excel spreadsheet that each person kept up to date? So when your good client Rachel mentions in a meeting that she is changing companies and gives you her new details you give your own colleagues back in the office (and future colleagues) a fighting chance of keeping in touch.

Sounds better already but what about the scenario where Rachel is already talking about a new opportunity with you and another person in the company sends her a cold sales email asking if there was anything in the pipeline? You're going to look stupid and disorganised. Or what if Rachel says give her three months to settle in then get in touch. How is that hot lead going to be recorded and actioned at the appropriate time?

At this point it's clear that Excel is going get a little stretched and someone internally needs to decide the appropriate times to contact your customers and for the message and delivery to be consistent so you don't look foolish. Nothing annoys me more than three recruitment consultants from the same firm phoning me on the same day. It happens quite a lot.

Let's bring this back to the web because the game just got tougher. Your contacts don't just live in Outlook, your mobile SIM and your business card box anymore. They are also your twitter followers, facebook fans, LinkedIn connections, newsletter subscribers, RSS readers and the list goes on. How are we going to manage all of this then?

It's clear we need to consolidate our knowledge, organise what we can into one repository and get our story straight!

'Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to do and die'

So many briefs we get simply list out the contact functionality and platform presence that the client believes they need without much thought as to why they should be there and what they want to do when they court their potentially brand new audience.

With so many platforms to work on you must decide on where your presence is relevant and then communicate to the user your plan on how you will use them. One real life example of where we did this was with a high-end events client of ours. We decided on the most appropriate channels and then on the best use of each. We let our audience decide which suited them the best.

• Email Subscribers - I want to be marketed to about upcoming events and offers directly and in detail but in a consistent, timely manner via email.
• Facebook fans - I want to hear about new events, share and tag photos from when I go to them as well as RSVPing my attendance. NB We gave event staff a basic digital camera and told them to snap away to encourage the viral effect of tagging photos on this powerful platform.
• Flickr - I want to see the professional photography you have taken at each event and possibly use it in our press articles or for PR.
• Subscribe to the blog feed via RSS or Email - I am interested in your news and what you have to say as a company. I prefer my information more passively and I am looking for an industry focus.
• Twitter - I want to hear about your events and insights but not necessarily enough to be emailed direct. I might go to an event in the future if one catches my eye or take you up on a last minute special offer. Conversely I might be a very keen member eager to hear all the news immediately.

With these profiles in mind we developed a content and contact strategy based on frequency, date/time and weighting of message. Look at all these channels (and more!), experience them for yourself if they are not familiar and ask whether your audience is really here. If so, what would they want and expect from you?

The basics of CRM - what should you do?

• Get organised early in your campaign or company life-cycle and save yourself the pain and confusion of consolidation later.
• Try and store as much of your data centrally by integrating your systems - especially your website and your CRM or office management software. Software like Salesforce and all credible CRM packages have an API. Duplication of information is the ultimate enemy!
• Don't over complicate things. There is no need to become Big Brother and collect every morsel of information going. Concentrate on what matters to your business and make sure those priorities are communicated internally as well.
• Train your staff to use and believe in your IT systems. CRM solutions don't work if people do not use them consistently and regularly.
• Track now, analyse tomorrow - you may not have the budgets or resource to fully analyse your contacts and clients behaviour right now but one day you will. You can't work with what doesn't exist so insist on logging crucial data early. Just think of the critical touch points and store it in a database for future reporting when you have built up enough data to make the resulting information worthwhile.
• You can look smart with personalisation and segmentation but you can also look really stupid! When you begin to understand your audience better you can increase your effectiveness hugely by tailoring your message more to their needs. But assume too much and get it wrong and you are basically communicating the message, "We don't understand you."
• No dead ends - Great news, they converted and clicked on a link, signed up to your list or purchased something. Big tick in a big box. But what next? Never leave a contact with nowhere to go next. They will decide when the story ends.
• Be respectful - Let the contact opt out at any time or change their preferred method of communication and make sure all systems are updated to reflect that. For everything you can get right with CRM I would honestly say it's better to do nothing at all than rush in and get it wrong. Simply think to yourself, "If I were you, would I want to hear this?"
• Don't over complicate your strategy - I have seen clients get very excited about the possibilities of effective CRM. However they often make the mistake of taking on too much. My mantra is to keep it simple, understand it fully, give it time and then incrementally build. This is a continual conversation with your contacts so there is no need to throw everything at them all at once. The chances are they will be as overwhelmed by it as you are.

I hope this has been useful. I have kept this blog pretty simple and of course there is much more to CRM than what I have written here. However, before committing wholly to digital marketing I was a CRM Integration Consultant working in the mobile sector for clients such as Vodafone and Three. Even when we worked on massive systems and implementations the principles I have outlined above were still at the forefront of our thinking.

I often get asked 'what makes a website design great?' So I thought I would put together what I feel are the 3 most important steps.

Step 1: Know your audience
Step 2: Know your audience
Step 3: Know your audience

This may sounds rather repetitive; however every design decision must come back to what your audience wants. So how do you get to know your audience?

1. Define Your Audience
   I have lost count of the number of times a client has returned a creative brief to us with the audience section filled out with “equal split male & female, Aged 8 – 80”. That’s basically everyone except the family pet.
   
   Obviously, from a communications point of view this isn’t very useful. You talk to an 8 year old girl, very differently to her 80 year old grandfather. What we do here at codegent is try to break down this age demographic by looking at the reasons they will come to the site; the 8 year old needs help with her homework and her grandfather is part of a lobby group looking for information.
2. Audience Interviews
   This step is too often forgotten in the design process; however nothing clears out the assumptions of a designer faster than a 5 minute chat with their audience. Ideally this is best done with a large sample size of random members of the target market but, as we all know, budget constraints don’t always make this possible. When this isn’t possible, we always make sure that we chat to at least a couple of people that fall into our target audience. It is an essential sanity check for all of our thinking.
3. Research
   Once we know who will be coming to the site, we will go out and find out everything we can about them. How much time they spend at a computer, which sites they visit every day, what sort of things are they comfortable doing online. All of these questions (and many more) help us build up a profile of the target audience. It is from this profile that we are able to establish the most effective visual language with which to communicate with them.

Once we have gathered all of this information and come to our conclusions, we present this back to our clients, as this will be the reference point we are going to justify all of our decisions back to when we are working on the art direction & information structure of the work being produced. All of this “design work” has to be done before we can power up photoshop and get stuck into the visual phase.

Last night we had the pleasure of taking out some of our wonderful clients from Youth Music for a night of good old fashioned campness.

We have had the pleasure of working with Youth Music for over 4 years now working on some really exciting projects with them, most recently Music Is Power and Underage Festival a competition giving teenagers the opportunity to perform at the Underage Festival this summer.

So when we heard that Priscilla - Queen of the Desert, the cult Australian film had just opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London - it was too much of a good opportunity to miss. There is a small taster of the experience in the video above :)

It turned out that we were all slightly under dressed for the night!? But a great time was had by all and we ended the night with cocktails - just because it seemed the right thing to do!

A great night, perfectly summed up by Dulcie from Youth Music

"I've vowed to make sure I have more sequins and leopard skin in my life now"

I think we could all live by that motto - Mark?

We were thrilled to be invited to the launch of Searcys 1847's new St Pancras Grand restaurant, in conjunction with GQ.

You know the usual thing with these types of affairs - you get a glass of champagne that is replenished before you get a third of the way down and then to soak it up you get 3 tiny hors d'oeuvre, so after a couple of hours you can't see straight.

The launch party at St Pancras Grand was different: the food, whilst still bite-sized, was absolutely amazing and there was plenty of it. It was quintessentially British food: bubble and squeak, fish and chips, roast beef and yorkshire pudding, as well as classic favourites such as oysters, smoked salmon.

Duncan Ackery, CEO of Searcys 1847, has selected an expert team, passionate about innovation, quality and service. Critically acclaimed, Billy Reid, is the executive chef. Having previously worked his magic at L’Escargot, the Vineyard at Stockcross and The Belvedere, Billy comes with excellent credentials and forms a formidable duo with Tom Aslanian managing the front of house.

How do we know all this? Well, we've had a long relationship with Searcys and have recently redeveloped a suite of sites for them including St Pancras Grand and 40|30, the restaurant at the top of the Gherkin (see McD's earlier blog).

www.searcys.co.uk

One of our clients, Cat Le-Huy, otherwise known as "Diz" has been arrested in Dubai for allegedly smuggling drugs. In reality, he claims that all he had were legal sleeping tablets that can be bought over the counter.

We've known Cat, who is head of technology at Endemol, since we started working with them on a variety of projects about 2 years. Cat is a great guy, very very smart and respected by the techie dudes within Codegent. It's a total outrage that he is still being incarcerated whilst it appears there is no evidence of any laws that have been broken.

This seems really surreal until you delve a bit deeper and see the ridiculous reasons they have given for holding foreigners in prison in Dubai. One guy was sentenced to 4 years because they found poppy seeds on his clothing which had fallen off a bread roll he had eaten at Heathrow Airport. Another had 0.003g of cannabis stuck on his shoe - according to an item on the BBC website.

Codegent regularly flies people to Asia, and Dubai is a common stop-over point. We can't risk any of our guys getting caught up in this nonsense so any flights that land in that country are now strictly off limits for us.

To find out more, visit the Free Diz website

To add your support, join the Free Diz Facebook Group

Codegent has launched a series of seven websites under a group umbrella for the rebrand of ICM, Europe’s leading privately owned, full service talent agency, to Independent.

The largest site of the group was for the modelling wing - formerly ICM Models. We decided to move away from flat html and design a richer flash experience that allows the user to fluidly browse through the model catalogue and pick the relevant, or most attractive, for their personalised casting room. The casting couch idea has been phase 2'ed unfortunately!

The re-brand was launched from the web so we hope their new, sexy online presence gets them off to a great start :)

Independent Models »
Independent Group »

In this age of spiritual emptiness have we lost the resources to be inspired by religion? And what can centuries old manuscripts teach us about the world today?

Codegent was hired by the British Library to help support the launch of their most ambitious exhibition of the year. "Sacred: discover what we share", which brings together the biggest collection of Christian, Jewish and Muslim holy books. The exhibition contrasts and compares beliefs and teachings to show that faiths share much in common.

In this major exhibition, the rarest and most exquisite sacred books and manuscripts presented and explored, side by side, for the first time.

A major event required a major bit of thinking from a smart digital agency. We're guessing that's why they called on Codegent.

Check our portfolio for a bit more information on how we worked with the British Library to support the exhibition online.

British Library 'Sacred' exhibition »

Codegent gets Paxmanned!

We have been working on the online political TV station 18 Doughty Street for the last couple of months and launched phase 1 last week. It seems to have taken off rather quickly and is already getting quite a bit of attention from other parts of the media.

The new campaigns section of the website will be discussed on tonight's edition of Newsnight on BBC2.

"The creators say that the mainstream political process is ignoring huge swathes of public opinion - a niche they propose to fill by running attack adverts (campaigns) sponsoring arguments on both sides of the political debate (or so they say).

Is this the start of a new Americanisation of British politics or have the authors misjudged our political culture?"

Well I guess we will find out the result tonight!

More column inches

This is becoming odd - four bits of press in the last 7 days. This time a double page spread in today's Guardian. Not about 'us' exactly (or at all, really if we're honest), but about the site we designed, built and developed over the last 2 years or so for Meet the Author.

Whilst it's still available, you can check it out on the Guardian Unlimited website here:

Read the article about Meet the Author in the Guardian »

Almost famous

It's been quite a good week for us in terms of press. We were in Marketing magazine for our latest Detox with Evian campaign. Then yesterday we were in New Media Age about the Passport to Music project we won for Youth Music. We also heard something is being written about us in AMO magazine.