Andrew Martin

Let it snow

Andrew Martin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:53:00 GMT

With Christmas, or 'The Holidays' as we call it here in the US (strange for a Brit to get used to), fast approaching we wanted to make a WPF app to help celebrate.

For all of you who love this time of year but possibly won't have a white Christmas where you live, here's your chance to enjoy one, on your desktop at least.

Download and run the app from http://www.metia.com/snow.exe and make it snow, best viewed on a dark background.

Metia = Good friends, Good times, Good Beer

Andrew Martin — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:13:00 GMT

Knew there was a reason I worked here. Steve can I move to our beer making division?

Found the image with Spezify

Maximising Marketing Efficiency - its science you know

Andrew Martin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:30:00 GMT

Recently, in a dead laptop battery on a plane moment, I was thinking to myself how has the drive towards technology and community affected marketing? Is there a formula or equation that I could devise to show this?

I started from the commonly held view that, historically, marketing was considered a black box into which money was poured and out came something 'creative'.

Moving on to where we are now, I began with the elements which are normally part of a marketing program:

People - you've got to have great people
Money - you don't get anything good for free
Tech - everything has some tech element
Customers - customers are at the heart of everything, right?

The next part of the process was to think about how these things interact with each other and this is what I came up with:

How I got there was, budget and talent are constants between old and new school marketing and have a combined effect. Technology allows you to be more efficient and effective in your marketing, enabling you to get more done and in essence multiplying your output. Finally, your customers can have an exponential impact on the effectiveness your marketing, so the preceding bit has to be to the power of customers.

Flow chart for dealing with blog posts

Andrew Martin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:05:00 GMT

Interesting image from Scamp about how the US Air Force responds to blogs

Tags: Scamp , US Air Force

Experience Experience Experience

Andrew Martin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:36:00 GMT

I enjoyed MIX again this year and some of the announcements especially around Silverlight 3 were great. The demo Jon Harris did of Sketchflow was fantastic and will allow us to continue to deliver better solutions to our clients.

If Ballmer was there he would probably be on stage ranting as normal but rather than the well known "Developer, Developer, Developer" this year it would be "Experience, Experience, Experience". Most of the sessions I went to focused on this and it's great to see that Microsoft is thinking in this way and providing the tools to allow digital agencies to deliver amazing user experiences.

One of the people I look forward so seeing every year is Lou Carbone and I think he puts it very well by saying Loyalty + experience = advocacy.

Tags: Silverlight , MIX , Sketchflow , Lou Carbone

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

Andrew Martin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:04:00 GMT

Funny video which was shown in a session the other day

Twitter is no longer useful

Andrew Martin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:13:00 GMT

I've been to many conferences over the years which have set up a dedicated back channel which has always added to my experience of the conference.

Twitter seems to be the back channel for SxSW and most people seem to be using it. I have an account but have never used it to tweet simply due to a lack of time and not wanting to start something which I simply won't be able to maintain in the longer term.

In my opinion the volume of traffic on Twitter about SxSW has made it unusable and has got to a level of noise where nobody would be able to keep up with it and get any value from it. Some sessions have been setting up specific hash tags such as #kebab which does give you a more focused feed but these aren't always set up or widely published.

Tags: SxSW , Twitter

Sunday at SxSW

Andrew Martin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:44:00 GMT

Our first full day at SxSW and off to a bit of a slow start for me. First session on accessible Flash and Flex applications wasn't up to much mainly due to the panel not knowing how to present.

Second session Designing for the wisdom of crowds seems much better.

Follow Paul on Twitter here http://twitter.com/PaulBurcher

Tags: SxSW

Austin here we come

Andrew Martin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:50:00 GMT

Paul, our Creative Director, and I have just arrived in Austin for SxSW.

Really looking forward to it as I've never been before and heard so much about it.

I'm just looking at the schedule and the most difficult thing is trying to work out which of the many sessions I try and make as there seems to be loads I'd like to get to. Think I'll skip the first thing yoga session.

Tags: SxSW

Designer - Developer Workflow

Andrew Martin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

The last couple of days finding out about the future of Silverlight have been great and I'm really pleased that we're at the forefront of this technology and the next couple of years should be exciting.

Most of the information I'm not allowed to share but there is one bit I can because we produced it, I've been meaning to blog about it for a while. Its about how you can structure the designer - developer workflow for increased business benefit.

We've delivered quite a number of Silverlight projects including some pretty large ones with tight deadlines and hard stops. This has meant that we've continually refined our processes to make sure we deliver these projects in the most efficient and reliable way possible.

What we've found is that by using Silverlight and the rest of the Microsoft product set we've been able to reduce the overall amount of time that it takes us to deliver projects.

The image above shows how this is possible but there are other bits which we've also implemented. One which is really effective is sitting the designer and developer who are working on things physically next to each other, not opposite but next to so that they can see each others screens and really collaborate.

We've found delivering Silverlight projects in this way so much more effective that we're beginning to build other projects in this way too and will continue to iterate on it going forward.

Tags: Silverlight , Developer designer workflow

Silverlight Partner Summit

Andrew Martin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:26:00 GMT

For the next couple of days I'm one of about 70 worldwide partners attending the Silverlight Partner Summit in Redmond.

I recently shocked somebody from Microsoft when showing them around the office and pointing out the size of our dedicated Silverlight team who have been working on nothing but for the last 18 or so months so it will be good to find out more about Silverlight 3 and the future plans.

Apparently "The Summit is designed for our most strategic partners and will provide your team rare, NDA-only access to critical product information." which should be interesting but does mean that I can't blog about it.

Marketing Technology - A brief description

Andrew Martin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:50:00 GMT

Most people who work in the marketing arena are aware of how technology is changing what they do. No longer is it acceptable for the marketing department of an organisation to act as a black box they must be able to demonstrate specific return - whether it be driving sales, reduction of costs or efficiency savings - on any expenditure made.

My view is that this naturally leads to the requirement of a technology element embedded into all marketing departments and programs. This allows for the capture and tracking of information enabling consistent reporting to see where further improvements can be made.

Recently while presenting on this I was asked what is the difference between some of the commonly used acronyms for some marketing technologies, while I was able to provide answers I went away to check that these were correct and this is how Wikipedia describes them.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) provides the software infrastructure to support Marketing Operations Management.

Marketing Operations Management (MOM) is a vision of end to end marketing optimization, from planning and budgeting, through marketing content management, to global marketing execution and analysis.

Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) defines a category of software used by marketing organizations to manage their end-to-end process from gathering and analyzing customer data across websites and other channels, to planning, budgeting and managing the creative production process, to executing targeted customer communications to measuring results and effectiveness

From these I would argue that EMM and MRM are interchangeable and either one is required before MOM is possible.

Tags: Marketing Resource Management , MRM , Marketing Operations Management , MOM , Enterprise Marketing Management , EMM , Marketing Technology

Twitter for Business

Andrew Martin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:53:00 GMT

Personally I'm not a big Twitter user and don't need to write lines like Hugh's cartoon.

I see the benefit of Twitter, my lack of usage is mainly due to the amount of time I have available rather than anything else. From a company point of view a lot of people use it and we use Yammer from an internal messaging perspective.

I came across this webcast by O'Reilly titled Twitter for Business which is an excellent intro and includes a number of examples to how companies are using it currently.

Tags: Twitter , Yammer , Gaping Void

What all web sites should have

Andrew Martin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:12:00 GMT

Selene Bowlby has written a post titled "15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have" which lists things every web site should have.

Good Visual Design
Thoughtful User Interface
Primary Navigation Above The Fold
Repeat Navigation In The Footer
Meaningful Content
A Solid About Page
Contact Information
Search
Sign-Up / Subscribe
A site map
Separate Design from Content
Valid XHTML / CSS
Cross Browser Compatibility
Web Optimized Images
Statistics, Tracking and Analytics

Most of these make sense but there are some others that I think could be added

Findability plan
Community / Social web elements
Mobile / print versions
Maintenance / update strategy
Date displayed when content was last updated / reviewed

I'm sure there are a load of others that you could add but the most difficult thing is to keep up with the rate of change. Therefore I think the most important thing is to have a web platform which is easy to adapt and change over time.

Tags: Web Development , Web Design , Selene Bowlby

Metia wins Web Marketing Association Award

Andrew Martin — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:55:00 GMT

Congratulations to the Virtual Event team here at Metia for their recent success in winning a Web Marketing Association Award in the Computer : Software category.

Here's to many more.