Flash based SCORM e-Learning

Posted on July 18, 2011 by admin

I would love to tell you who this project was for, and show you screenshots, but I’d have to kill you, probably. I had to sign not just one NDA, but five before I could start work on it, including that I couldn’t work on it in a public place. So it’s pretty hush hush.

What I can (probably) say, is that it was for a global consumer electronics manufacturer that you have definitely heard of. The project was a piece of e-learning content designed to educate retail staff around the world on how to sell the product.

The solution comprised 20+ screens of Flash-based content, including video, a soundtrack and a quiz, and was designed to meet the SCORM standard for e-learning so that it could be uploaded into the client’s in-house e-learning tools. It was based on a SDK supplied by the client and was authored in Flash, with content separated into XML files to allow localisation of content.

The design and layout of the slides was looked after by the ever-capable Oli Horsman at Olice. I added support for reading in content from the external XML files, the quiz and a customised player for the overall application. Once we had everything working to the client’s satisfaction, I packaged up the content and tested it, to make sure that it would work within the client’s e-learning tools.

I’m pleased to say that not only was the client delighted with the slides, but their technical teams were very happy with our implementation. The package passed testing first time, and went into production in time to support the product’s launch.

I just wish that I could show it to you, it looks great!

Pick your flavour with Pure360

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Matt

As part of Pure360‘s campaign for Internet World 2011 they decided to run a competition where you could design your own ice cream flavour, with the most interesting entry being rewarded with 4 litres of the stuff.

You can see the entry web page at http://www.pure360emailmarketing.co.uk/pickyourflavour. It’s a lovely bit of Flash (with a straight HTML alternative for iPhone/iPad users), designed in-house by Pure360, animated by the super-talented Oli at Olice Productions, with the final assembly and email form done by yours truly.

The competition has been well received, with a ton of entries, some of which even Heston Blumenthal might think a bit weird. I’m looking forward to seeing who the winner is, then popping along to Pure360′s stand for some free ice cream!

New Website for Promat Ireland

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Matt

We’ve recently completed a new website for Promat Ireland, a leading provider of passive fire protection and high temperature insulation products.

The brief was to refresh the website, making the content and appearance consistent with Promat’s other English-language websites, such as the UK, DURASTEEL, DURAWALL and spray products websites that we’ve previously developed. We also took the opportunity to improve the search-engine friendliness of the site and the accessibility to partially sighted users.

The website was also migrated onto the web hosting platform and content management solution we’d previously built for Promat UK, bringing with it economies of scale and a single user interface for updating content. In fact, economies of scale meant that there was room in the budget for a new case studies module, enabling Promat to present their existing case studies in a more user-friendly manner.

The final part of the project included training and supporting Promat Ireland’s staff so that they could use the CMS effectively, along with refresher training for some of the UK team. Most of the delegates had only basic experience in producing web content, so we not only taught them to use the CMS, but gave them a solid grounding in web essentials, including some basic image editing and optimising website content for readability and search-engine indexing.

Smart Sales Presentations using Adobe Flash and MDM Zinc

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Matt

We were recently asked to help an agency client with a project to build a presentation that a pharmaceutical company’s sales team could use to present to medical practitioners on a tablet PC.

The presentation involved the usual set of screens, animated text and images, all of which the client’s staff were very comfortable producing, and made a great job of.

What they weren’t so comfortable with was a request to include a cost calculator application, originally presented using Microsoft Excel, incorporating fields, formulae and graphs, with results being printable and able to be saved in CSV format. As the presentation was for medical use, all work had to be done very carefully, as any errors in formulae or rounding could be very serious for the client.

The preferred solution was to take the Flash presentation as produced by the agency and convert it into a Windows executable. This generally presented few problems, though the agency still uses ActionScript 2, which meant that we had to delve deep into our archives for code to format numbers, produce graphs and print neat pages – all things that are far, far easier with ActionScript 3.

The tricky bit though came with saving data to the desktop, one of those things that seems trivial, but that recent versions of Flash quite reasonably prevent, as it has fairly hefty security implications.

The solution was to use MDM Zinc – this lets you compile a SWF file into a native Windows (or Mac, or Linux) executable. Zinc comes with a fairly hefty function library that lets you do all sorts of things that a proper application can, including reading and writing from the file system. As an added bonus, Zinc enables you to give the application a pretty icon, set copyright information and the other bits and pieces that make a project look altogether more professional.

Zinc’s not cheap – £200 or so, but it’s perfect for a project like this where a little bit of programming on top of great design work can result in a reliable, pixel-perfect presentation.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Matt

Just a quick note to say thank you to all our clients and collaborators for making 2010 such a fantastic year.

Obviously I have to say that the highlight was the birth of our daughter Scarlet in November, but we’ve been lucky enough to work on some great projects including websites for Pure360, Promat, Ruby Weddings, AMF Bowling and Hollywood Bowl, Flash competitions for a big office-supplies client and desktop sales tools for a major pharmaceutical company.

We’ve also done a fair amount of consultancy work, including helping a client develop a set of pan-European promotional campaigns for 2011, working on website benchmarking for a big blue-chip and develping social media skills and planning with seemingly everyone.

2011 looks like it’s going to be even more challenging. 2011 seems set to be the year of the app, with mobile and tablet apps going mainstream as sales and marketing tools. Looks like we’re going to have no choice but to hire some more employees!

Introducing Scarlet

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Matt

You may have noticed a distinct lack of postings over the last few weeks. Apart from spending time looking after our lovely clients, the main reason has been the arrival of our lovely baby daughter – Scarlet (3kg / 6lb10oz – Sagittarius).

Needless to say, it’s been a thrilling, if slightly fraught experience, but I think that we’re all doing remarkably well. Scarlet is feeding and sleeping well and we haven’t yet turned into sleep-deprived zombies. In fact, it’s amazing how much you can get done with a small baby on your hip or even better, asleep in the corner of the office!

We’ve been trying to take things relatively easy in the run-up to Christmas, though we’ve got a few exciting projects on (of which more later), and of course we’ll be continuing to support clients on a day-to-day basis.

A bit of advice about Twitter

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Matt

Following on from last week’s article about LinkedIn, here are some thoughts on Twitter. Again, complete ignorance is assumed, but even if you think you know about Twitter, it’s worth reading, as most businessess don’t really use it effectively.

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s Twitter profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Tweets can be compared with the status updates that users make in social media networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. This means that all tweets are in the public domain and can be searched. Senders can also send messages directly to an individual user, or forward received messages to their own network (known as retweeting).

To group posts together by topic or type, users make use of hashtags, which are words or phrases prefixed with the # symbol. Similarly, the letter d followed by a Twitter username allows users to send messages privately to their followers. Otherwise, the @ symbol followed by a username publicly states that the attached tweets are a reply to (or just mention) any specific users (who can find such recent tweets logged in their interface). The ‘Twitter Lists’ feature makes it possible for users to follow (and mention/reply to) lists of authors instead of following individual authors.

Twitter is free and all users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, external applications (notably including those developed for smart phones), or SMS, although the availability of SMS services varies by country. The service currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.

The use of Twitter’s API for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter. Notable examples include software/services such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, which enable users to send and receive messages from Twitter and other social networking services within the same user interface.

Twitter has also spawned an ecosystem of other services that compensate for its limitations. Services such as bit.ly and tr.im shorten URLs to fit within the 140 character limit, services such as TwitPic enable the hosting of images and services such as What the Trend provide analysis.

The service’s nature makes it a very flexible tool, though one that is hard to define. Although it is primarily used by individuals to post their thoughts and forward content, it also has business uses, for example to alert followers to new content (estate agents use it to alert clients to new properties, Dell uses it to alert followers to special offers), whilst some companies proactively search for mentions of their name to identify problems or dissatisfied customers.

So how should Twitter best be used? In most cases your company should:

Create a profile and customise it

Pick a username that includes your company name. Add a good quality icon , biography and a link to your company website. You can also customise your profile page by creating a custom background image. This offers some interesting possibilities, as you can customise the background so it includes your logo, reflects your brand and contains links to your company. If you do business in more than one language and/or country, you should have a separate Twitter profile for each and keep content in that language only.

Use a tool such as HootSuite to manage your social networking activity

Tools such as HootSuite enable you to manage social networking activity from one convenient interface, including sending and reading messages, and will make your social media activity much more efficient. Although prices and features vary, a free service is usually sufficient. Most will also let you set-up searches, so you can monitor posts for mentions of your company and particular keywords. If you get a lot of tweets sent direct to you, or you want a number of employees to be able to collaborate, consider using CoTweet, a business-orientated tool for managing your company’s Twitter activity.

Integrate Twitter into your existing monitoring activity and learn about your followers

Use Twitter to follow industry commentators, competitors, vendors, client contacts and anyone else that may give you opportunities or good ideas. You should also try to keep track of any key industry figures that follow you, as you may want to tailor posts to their interests.

Tweet and retweet interesting snippets

Use Twitter to send messages to your followers. What to write will depend on your objectives, but good subjects are business wins, new website content, personnel changes, special offers and links to other content that followers may find useful. Frequency can be anything from weekly to several times a day, with quality and variety of posts more important than quantity.

Ask questions and converse

Keep track of who your followers are and ask questions that will prompt responses. For example, is a potential new feature of interest? Is a new piece of legislation a concern?

Promote and integrate with other media

Make sure that potential followers are aware of your Twitter presence by linking from your website, other social media pages and in printed material. There are lots of simple pieces of code that will let you display your tweets on your website, but don’t be tempted to echo your tweets as LinkedIn or Facebook status updates, you should tailor them to what you are doing on those networks.

Help your employees use Twitter

If you’ve got employees who frequently use Twitter, help them benefit the company by providing them with suggestions of material that they might like to include in their tweets. This can be particularly important in the run-up to events such as trade shows and product launches. You should also ensure employees know who to contact with sales leads, technical support issues or other intelligence that they might encounter whilst online.

Tweet at regular intervals and don’t fixate on the number of followers that you have

Most businesses tweet to keep their clients aware of them and what they are doing. If you’re going to do that, you need to be a regular and noticed presence, but not so much that you are a nuisance. The best way to do this is to make your tweets regular and at the times of day your audience will be likely to see your tweets amongst the others in their feeds. In a B2B context, mid-morning or just before lunch can be ideal, in a consumer context, late afternoon might be better. Also, don’t treat the number of followers as a goal. Five good clients who read your tweets and respond are likely to be far more valuable than fifty that ignore your posts.

A bit of advice about LinkedIn

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Matt

One of my main projects at the moment is helping a blue-chip technology company’s resellers get to grips with Social Media. I can’t really talk about the project, but what I can do is share some of the fruits of the work.

One of the main questions I get asked at the moment is what companies should be doing about Social Media. I’ll answer that in a future article (it’s a biggie), but for most businessess that sell to other businesses (B2B), we feel that the most important Social Media tool is LinkedIn. Though as ever in marketing (and life), what you do should reflect your objectives,and in some cases, other tools may be more important.

Why is LinkedIn so important?

Because it contains potentially very useful information about individuals, be they current or potential clients, suppliers or competitors.
Because LinkedIn is somewhere others will look for information about your company and employees.
Because you can find a great deal of useful information and potential sales leads.
Because it can help you build closer relationships with existing contacts.
Because it can also be very useful as a recruitment tool.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, many organisations we’ve worked with over the last few months were new to it too. Here’s a quick primer for the uninitiated.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking tool based around a website. It is mainly used for professional networking. The basic version of the service is free, though there is a premium version with extra features.

The purpose of LinkedIn is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users create a profile for themselves, including details of their job, employer, professional interests and a photograph (for identification). They can then invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection.
This list of connections can be used in a number of ways:

A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (second-degree connections) and also the connections of second-degree connections (third-degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone a person wishes to know through a mutual, trusted contact.
The contact network can then be used to find people and business opportunities. (Unless you subscribe to the professional version, you’ll only see extended details for third-degree connections and higher)
Users can broadcast short messages to their contact network by updating their status and details of status updates from their network in a similar way to Facebook.
Users can recommend other users, providing short professional references.

LinkedIn also allows companies to create profiles for themselves. Company profiles also contain details of employees and allow you to post job listings. Company profiles are useful to people looking for further information about your company, who would like to work for you or who want to find a suitable contact person.

Another feature is LinkedIn Answers, which allows users to ask questions for the community to answer. This feature is free and is similar to Yahoo Answers, though the main difference from the latter is that questions are generally more business-oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering questions is known. This can be a useful source of business opportunities.

Finally, the searchable LinkedIn Groups feature allows users to establish new business relationships by joining industry, professional, alumni and other relevant groups. These groups then enable news, discussions and job vacancies to be shared between members. LinkedIn groups can be open or closed-membership and created in any subject and by any member of LinkedIn. Some groups are specialised groups dealing with a narrow interest or industry whereas others are very broad and generic in nature.

So how should LinkedIn best be used? In most cases your company should:

Create a company profile

This should include a logo, description, specialties, locations, statistics and contact details. It only needs to be updated if major changes (such as a takeover) occur.

Post job vacancies on the company profile

Job postings on LinkedIn are free, so can be a useful way of attracting additional candidates.

Encourage employees to create a full profile (including a connection to the company), develop a list of connections, request recommendations and regularly update their status

This should include a good quality photograph, summary, employment and education history and a link to the company’s website. It’s possible to add large amounts of personal information, such as reading lists, blog entries and Twitter posts, but this isn’t really necessary.

Employees should be encouraged to develop their list of connections, though quality is better than quantity. A good rule of thumb is to only request a connection with someone that you would exchange business cards with and create a professional relationship.

Employees should also be encouraged to ask for recommendations from their connections, basically short references that can be seen as part of their profile, though again, quality is better than quantity.

Finally, employees should be encouraged to regularly update their status, and keep track of their connections’ status updates. This will help them develop closer relationships with their connections, and may well be a source of business opportunities. Updates should be kept short and relate to business. New business wins, project completion and upcoming events are all good subjects. Personal subjects are acceptable, but it’s better if they relate to business in some way, such as an ‘out of office’ before a forthcoming holiday, or are momentous announcements, such as news of a birth or a marriage.

Use LinkedIn to research companies and individuals

LinkedIn profiles can tell you a lot about a person – their employment history, who they are connected to, their status updates and via what groups they are a member of, their professional interests. This information can be help you tailor your approach to the company and the individual.

Make use of LinkedIn Groups

Joining LinkedIn Groups can be an excellent way to develop business relationships and develop contacts. It can sometimes be worthwhile to create your own group, for example, for your resellers, employees or end users, but only if you are sure that it doesn’t duplicate an existing group and that the members will make it a vibrant community.

Make use of LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn answers is an excellent way to get answers to professional queries, for example, how to get a French phone number without having a physical presence in France. It can be worthwhile using both to ask questions, and to look for questions relating to your company’s specialties that you can answer. Answering questions can not only be a source of business opportunities, but can build general goodwill and word-of-mouth about your company.

Consider advertising on LinkedIn

Whilst it’s not cheap, advertising on LinkedIn offers an almost unique opportunity way to get your message in front of a highly targeted audience.

Integrate LinkedIn with other media

Wherever you currently display company and employee contact details (for example, on your website, promotional material and business cards), add links to relevant pages on LinkedIn. This will make it easier for others to find details of the company or an individual.

LinkedIn supports profiles in multiple languages, so the company profile should be written in the major languages that the company does business in, whilst individual profiles are written in the languages the individual uses for business.

Whilst LinkedIn is the dominant business social networking tool in much of the English-speaking (and non-English-speaking) world, there are also networks that dominate particular countries and regions, particularly China, Russia and Brazil, so if you do business there then you should make sure you have a presence there.

Hopefully you’re now full of enthusiasm for LinkedIn, if you’d like a bit of help in embracing it (such as producing guidelines for employees, advertising on it, or monitoring activity) then give me a call on +44 7956 326656.

Google Makes Website Forms Easy

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Matt

‘ve mentioned before how online services make capturing data from websites much easier than in the ‘old’ days, but if your needs (and resources) are more modest, then Google Docs’ form and spreadsheet tools are an even quicker and easier way to collect data from your website.

Since the tools are free, put no limit on the number of submissions and require no software to be installed on your website, Google Docs are a great choice for creating forms like “Contact Us”, RSVP’s or even for simple polls and surveys.

Forms can span multiple pages and contain fields such as text (short and paragraph), multiple choice, checkbox, scales, grids and lists. It’s easy to create forms and you can you can play around with them to your heart’s content, moving fields, editing supporting text, changing themes and so forth. It’s very intuitive and Google does all the hard work so you don’t have to. You can opt whether fields are compulsory, though you don’t get advanced or custom validation of email, postcodes, account numbers etc., but it’s probably more than enough for most people’s needs.

The main downside is that you don’t get much control over the formatting of the form. Forms include references to Google and you are limited to one of 95 themes (you can’t create your own), although if you really want to, you could embed the form within your own web page and use CSS creatively. Here’s a simple example I created to show a friend. Notice how you get to write the title, introduction text, plus title and subtitles of each field.

And here’s the underlying spreadsheet, with details of a couple of tests that I submitted.

I won’t bore you with the details of how to actually create a form, as there are plenty of resources on the web (here’s help from Google). What I will tell you though, is how to get an email sent to you when people fill and submit your form, as it’s not obvious.

Create a new form (if you haven’t done that already) in Google Docs and close the window. Now open the corresponding spreadsheet in Google Docs and choose Share > Set Notification Rules. Select the “A user submits a form” option and how frequently you would like to get notified. If it’s a “Contact Me” form, the “email right away” may be a good choice but for polls, you may use the daily digest feature.

Amazing what you can get for free, isn’t it?