Take a good look at your website and check what data files are placed on user terminals and why they are in place. You might need to take a comprehensive audit of your website to see which cookies are strictly necessary and if they need consent. Your audit should include identification of high and low privacy intrusive pages on your site. Your finding could be presented in a way of a summary of findings, detailed findings against intrusive pages, data privacy risks and new technologies to be implemented. Its good idea to take this opportunity to do any tidying up of your web pages and stop any cookies that are unnecessary or old.

Therefore its important to see how intrusive your cookies are and consider changes in how you use them. Some of  what you find may even help users to keep their data safe. Try to use technologies to improve your site  and always make it clear when you are doing something intrusive. The more privacy intrusive your activity is, you will need to give it more priority to getting consent from the user. You should focus your efforts on complying appropriately to the law by providing accurate information and offering your user a choice.

Review your privacy policy and ensure it is consistently in compliance with the law and will be subject to any ongoing amendments. Make sure your privacy  policy is clear and as soon as you have the correct measures in place to comply with the law so we can do our job in making sure your campaigns are the best they can be!

Here is the IAB’s own site with examples of best practice principles: http://www.youronlinechoices.com

The UK law restricting cookies from websites will comes into effect on 25th May 2012, giving websites a year to comply with the new act. This gives time for websites to gradually phase in the right approach to recognise user’s online privacy concerns. The UK government has updated the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in response to the EU Directive to enforce the law.

Cookies are used for a variety of purposes but are generally used by third-parties to analyse our browsing habits and useful for us to remember log-in details on various websites. Most importantly the use of tracking cookies is what the EU law wants raise awareness of  by requiring websites to inform and gain users absolute consent for cookies, giving web users more control over their online privacy.

Settings within Microsoft IE9 and Mozilla Firefox already offer to protect users from sites that collect and keep browser data. Whilst Google Chrome are still working at integrating a non-tracking service into their browser. The new rule on cookies will be challenging and will ultimately ruin some users’ browsing experience but equally this law is needed to be brought into place to give consumers more freedom in about what companies know about them.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in charge of the implementing the law will be looking for a solution over the year for both online businesses and web users.

The Old Cookie Law

The former rule on using cookies to store information was that you had to tell users how you use cookies and how they can opt out. This information is usually shown in website’s privacy policies giving users the possible option of opting out.

This rule is set out in the Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR):

6. (1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not use an electronic communications network to store information, or to gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment -
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and
(b) is given the opportunity to refuse the storage of or access to that information

The New Cookie Law!

The new law now requires that cookies can only be placed on machines where the user has given their consent.

6 (1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not store or gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.
(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment–
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and
(b) has given his or her consent.
(3) Where an electronic communications network is used by the same person to store or access information in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user on more than one occasion, it is sufficient for
the purposes of this regulation that the requirements of paragraph (2) are met in respect of the initial use.
“(3A) For the purposes of paragraph (2), consent may be signified by a subscriber who amends or sets controls on the internet browser which the subscriber uses or by using another application or programme to signify consent.
(4) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the technical storage of, or access to, information–
(a) for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network; or
(b) where such storage or access is strictly necessary for the provision of an information society service requested by the subscriber or user.

There is a narrow exception to this change in law if what you are doing is absolutely necessary for a website or service requested by the user. For example a cookie used by a retailer to ensure a user has chosen products they wish to purchase and clicks to ‘add to basket’ for the site to remember what the user has bought. The exception to this type of activity will need to interpreted narrowly to comply with what is “strictly necessary” to limit the range of activity for the cookie to strictly relate to the service requested by the user.

If cookies are placed before a user has an opportunity to give consent, then the site is not compliant with the legislation. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will fine website owners up to £500,000 for any serious breaches in this law.  So be sure to make a distinction between ‘opt-in’ and ‘informed consent’ in your policy. Why not take a look at our best practices in how to comply with the new law.

http://www.facebook.com/shrewsburycollege

Shrewsbury College provides a wide range of apprenticeships, GCSE and A Level courses and HE programmes to its current students, and like any other college aims to ensure as many young people as possible know about the study paths available to them.

Potential students won’t necessarily end up on your website when assessing their options. So how do you target these individuals who are online but not affiliated with your College yet?

The Challenge?

Shrewsbury’s brief was simple: promote their courses and advice days to school leavers. They knew this demographic was likely to spend much of its time on Facebook, so they wanted to get the College firmly established on the popular social media platform.

The Natives got swiftly to work creating a Facebook Website to reflect the College’s brand in a more social sensitive manner. That’s what we Natives are best at!

What did Net Natives do?

Shrewsbury College’s new Facebook website shares information on advice days, courses and their latest news with existing and potential students.

We wanted to bring those who want to share their thoughts about the College together through interactive comments. This can be found under Shrewsbury’s news, where users can share their comments to let their friends and family how they feel about the college.

We are particularly proud of the “Click here to beat the queues” enquiry form for the Advice Days: a pop-up form allowing potential advice day attendees to select the event of their choice and secure themselves a place!
These were some great functionalities we enjoyed doing. We understand capturing the right information is important and that interaction is key.

The Result?

Shrewsbury College are now able to effectively engage with their target audience through their preferred medium of Facebook. The college can promote their advice days and capture specific information regarding what subject they are interested in and even where they are from.

It’s another thumbs up for the Natives!

There have been various rumours about Facebook making some big changes from February 29th, so we thought we would confirm what we know, and let you in on some of our thoughts about the implications to Facebook advertisers…

Facebook adverts body text cut to 90 characters

You might have heard a bit of banter in the social media world about the size of Facebook adverts getting cut down.  These rumours are true. Net Natives have had concrete proof, confirmation from our Facebook account manager, and it goes a little something like this…

“We are reducing the character count from 135 to 90 for body text in ads created on or after February 29th.”

So there you go, straight from the horses mouth, so to speak. Adverts reduced in text space by about 1/3!

Facebook want to be able to show more adverts, so shrinking the size of them seems an obvious way to do so. So far, only the ad copy is affected and there is no change to the images you use.

What does all this mean for you then?

More than ever before, advertisers on Facebook need to adopt both a scientific and creative approach to achieve success. Best practice is more important than ever and as well as doing all the right things, you need to be sure you are putting together a great, eye catching advert that your target audience won’t be able to help clicking on!

A few of the key points are listed below…

• Stand out from the crowd – With Facebook displaying up to 7 ads, yours must stand out amongst the other 6 and be the one to engage the user! You are effectively “in competition” with up to another 6 ads, so the quality of adverts now needs to be even higher.
• Even more specific targeting – The ad must be targeted even more specifically, to avoid “wasting clicks” on uninterested users (and wasting budget!).
• Use LOTS of variations of ads – It’s not enough to make just one ad that you think will work. How do you know if there might have been a better one? Simple: you make lots, and compare their performance against each other (we do hundreds per ad campaign!) – delete the poorer performing ads and allocate budget to the best ones – this ensures your money is spent on the most effective adverts.
• Mix both ad types – most people use the “pay per click” option – but it’s possible that paying for impressions as well as “cost per click” could work well with this environment.
• Long company names will struggle – One difficulty will be where the company name in itself is very long – it will become very tricky to get any decent amount of text in when the name takes up a large proportion of the available characters! Whilst there is no foolproof way around this, we would advise creating a very large number of adverts and comparing their effectiveness against each other; some with the name in the image, for example, others with a logo, call to action in the image, standard image, etc.

As well as the confirmed change from February 29^th, a couple of other changes which we are expecting to start seeing on Facebook are:

Featured Stories

Facebook is now beginning to roll out a new type of advert, which goes directly into the news feed. If you like a page, you might start seeing their ads appear in your general news feed (marked as “featured”), along with your friends updates. This will be a great new way to promote engagement with your page and ensure you are reaching as many of your fans as possible, without the same space constraints as the standard Facebook ad.

Mobile Ads

Facebook are likely to start featuring ads on its mobile platform, possibly as early as March. The small screen size of mobile devices means there won’t be space at the side of the screen to feature ads, so they are most likely to appear as stories within the news feed too.

More info coming soon from Net Natives

So that’s the lowdown on the upcoming changes. It’s going to be challenging to work with these new rules, but we love a challenge! We’re on it already actually – we are currently split-testing ALL our campaigns with 90 character limits before the deadline, so that we can see what difference the ad length change will have for YOU. We’ll publish this info as soon as we have put it together, but in the meantime get in touch with us if you want to know anything more about the upcoming changes.

Ben Verinder of the AoC on the importance of measurement and diagnostics in education marketing…

In a recent Association of Colleges Briefing for members we published a list of (hopefully) useful links to organisations specialising in studying the evaluation and measurement of communications. We did so as a response to a steady growth in requests for advice from College PR and marketing teams on meaningful metrics and targets.

This is an encouraging trend – professional communicators make decisions based on real facts (rather than, say, the media consumption habits of the Chair of Governors’ wife). Measurement allows a team to understand what worked and what did not and to demonstrate the contribution of communication channels to corporate goals. The first is central to continuous improvement, the second to what Westminster Council’s communications team calls ‘boardroom credibility’. (Talking of Westminster Council, they may be having a bit of reputational trouble with parking but they’re in fifth gear when it comes to evaluation.)

Less encouraging are the difficulties that too many College communicators face in attempting to measure and demonstrate impact. Some find themselves stuck in the budget bus-lane: funding won’t stretch to digital, social or traditional media monitoring tools or to reputation measurement any more sophisticated than student satisfaction surveys, and so the circuit of underinvestment continues. Without these tools it is very difficult to demonstrate impact and successfully negotiate for increased capacity.

So we see marketing departments without access to the Google analytics data of their websites, PR officers who have no idea of the audience reach of target media, communications directors unable to measure corporate reputation among key publics and thus demonstrate the result of (or, often, the need for) a PR campaign.  If they can’t measure the impact of their work, how can the finance director understand what they are driving at?

For other teams, there’s a deep, dark pothole separating corporate and communications planning. Sometimes this a reflection of the qualifications of the senior manager overseeing  communications; in our 2007 and 2010 studies of College communications, two-thirds of those looking after the public relations portfolio did not possess a public relations qualification. Sometimes it’s a reflection of what is called the ‘encroachment’ of marketing over other communications functions. In the same study, 70% of respondents said they have a marketing plan, but no PR or communications plan. Yet their College corporate objectives can only be achieved with the support of internal or corporate communications – whether it’s improving employee engagement, building the College reputation among key publics vital to a planning application (through social media, perhaps) or dealing with an emerging crisis. To put it another way, if your organisation doesn’t care about or understand your route-map then you are unlikely to be asked to take the driving seat.

For teams struggling with challenges like these, there is some good news. Firstly, take solace in the fact that you are not alone. More usefully, there’s a growth in sources of advice on low cost effective measurement and evaluation – including some specialist free-to-access blogs and social media groups. In some regions Colleges and other public sector bodies are tentatively sharing monitoring services. AoC regularly negotiates member discounts on media monitoring products too. For some Colleges, the outlook for professional communications has been transformed by the arrival of a senior manager with the right professional qualifications who can drive their agenda at board level. Sometimes training and development within the team – whether it’s a CIPR or PRCA or CIM course – is the best motor for change.

Whatever a team’s situation  – and here I must apologise for driving the idioms a lap too far – graduating from Sunday driver to racing ace generally involves focussing less on the usual tactics and PR ‘stunts’ and more on diagnostics and longer-term strategy.

One of the highlights of this week for us has been the excellent social media campaign for National Apprenticeships Week which ran from 6th-10th February.

Centered around social media giant Twitter, the National Apprenticeships Service used different “themes” for each day of the week, such as; the benefits of doing apprenticeships, thank you messages, and how people got their dream job via the scheme.

People were encouraged to tweet @apprenticeships with their experiences/thoughts about the scheme according to the days themes and to use the hashtag #NAW2012 (hashtags are a way of giving a tweet a “topic” – you are saying “my tweet is about #NAW2012 and I want people to know that and be able to search for it”.

The Results

• Almost 3,000 mentions on Twitter
• Trended in top 10 UK topics on Monday
• Over 500 related events around the UK celebrating apprenticeships
• 135,000 hits to website in 5 days
• Massive press interest nationally

We were really pleased to see such an important issue really ignite peoples passion on social networking sites – we all love sharing funny stuff, or things about ourselves/our own interests, but it’s always refreshing to see something that benefits the nation, people and economy having such a presence in the social media sphere. Top job NAS! Looking forward to next year…

It’s great when you see a major brand pushing forward with some really fun new ideas, and we were particularly impressed by Heinz recent “get well soup” campaign.

Visit the Heinz Soup Facebook page and you’ll land on a custom tab featuring the promotion.

The idea is that you can order custom soup cans, with a friend/loved ones name printed on the label, for just £1.99. Bargain!

Apart from being a great bit of fun, here’s what we like about the campaign:

• Already a much loved comfort food amongst the ill, the “Get Well Soon” soup idea strongly reinforces the brand message that you should eat Heinz soup when you’re poorly
• It also associates the brand with the idea of being thoughtful, and love/friendship – positive attributes to associate any brand with!
• You have to “like” the page to access the order form – great example of giving a worthwhile incentive to like a page
• The order form collects some useful detail including postal and email address, and has an opt-in mailing list checkbox
• The app features a gallery for users to specifically share soup-related stories, in addition to the Facebook wall. This is being used too, showing users are very engaged with the idea
• Considering they are actually selling the cans, up to 500 a day, they may be making almost £1000 a day on the sale of these soups. This will at least reduce the costs of the promotion!

So – well done to all at Heinz. Great idea, great execution. A great example of using social media to amplify your brand message.

We loved this infographic, not just for its cute graphics but also because it is one of the best “beginner” examples of how to actually get up and running on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the biggest social networking sites, and it occupies a niche in that it is just about business connections. Nothing to do with friends, holiday photos, relationships… just professional contacts.

Follow this guide and before you can say YES SERGEANT you will be linking away on the web’s most useful professional networking site… click on the image below to see it in its full-size glory.

Thank you to Mindflash for producing this top bit of content!

Want some help with getting LinkedIn really working for your business, or doing a professional advertising campaign on there? Send us an email or call 01273 734640.

You’ve probably heard of URL shorteners. People use them on Twitter all the time, to shorten space-wasting long web addresses into more manageable ones so they can actually fit in some other text!

Google has just launched its own one and we’d suggest you start using it right now. The reason?

Google’s URL shortener tells you how many people have clicked, where from, and it’s free to use

You just go to goo.gl and put in the URL you want shortened, and then it generates the short random link. You’ll then have a table below of all the URLs you’ve shortened, complete with stats on how many times the link has been clicked.

goo.gl in action!

Then click “details” and you’ll get to see what site the click came from (Facebook, Twitter, your site) and various other nuggets of info. If you are logged in to a Google account, all these details are recorded and you can see your past links stats (great for re-using them too).

Whilst engagement (likes/comments/shares/retweets/mentions) are all important, and often used as a measure of effectiveness – these don’t take into account the “dark figure” – those shadowy characters who are reading your content, but not interacting with it in any public way.

The "dark figure" of social media

This information is really valuable to marketers as it gives you a whole new insight into your fan/follower behaviour that “engagement” itself does not reveal.

Start using it today, and let us know what you think of it! Hopefully you will get a few nice surprises.

My band all love social media (hence me doing this job) and we’re always looking for fun ways to get our audience interacting with us. We’re doing alright – currently we have over 20,000 likes and a “talking about” of 1,666… not bad!

We’ve done loads of competitions and giveaways, encouraging shares/likes etc, but this most recent effort left us quite tickled.

What could be so good about this status, I hear you ask… well, the answer to that, is nothing but bare-faced cheek!

http://www.facebook.com/105132402861803/posts/309666289075079

So that’s over 1000 likes on a single status, with that status effectively being about… nothing.

I guess the main point of this post is – don’t be afraid to have a bit of fun. Amuse your fans and be a bit human! As important a marketing tool as Facebook is, sometimes you’ll get the best results by not taking it too seriously.

Happy posting