Comrz Social Commerce Blog

Facebook has forgotten its Users

Sun, 26 May 2013 12:35:00 +0000

I recently clicked on a video link from Facebook. Facebook sends me nice alerts, usually many times each day.

I had one recently though on Statins which I wanted to check out, so I actually clicked on the link they sent me and got the wonderful screen above.

The video thumbnail is on the left in case you were wondering, and then there’s the massive panel of ads on the right, both highlighted.

Facebook has forgotten its Users

I can see why Facebook might have ended up with this screen design. They need to appease their shareholders, including the members of the Facebook team how have shares and options.

They might also find that having the comments prominently visible drives up engagement, and provides them with more tools to provide recommendations to users, to further drive traffic.

From the user’s perspective the screen looks and feels pretty bad. There’s absolutely nothing engaging about it. If it wasn’t on Facebook, no one would stay on it for more than a few milliseconds.

It’s fairly clear that the content should have way more priority, even if it’s as simple as making it bigger.

The person who’s sharing it should also be more prominent, after all it’s the combination of the content and the person who shared it that made me click through to the page.

Wasted Ads

Now, I’ve not once clicked on an ad on the right-hand side in Facebook, I don’t even notice them. I may have clicked on something that’s been snuck into my feed, but never on the right. They take up a good 80% of the space dedicated to content on the page.

Does Facebook not monitor the fact that I never click on those ads? It might make sense for it to do so, so it can stop wasting the bits and bytes, and actually deliver a screen which is more tuned to what I actually do. Like watch the video.

More Ads

The feed ads are just a part of life by now, but Facebook will now be adding video ads as well, I’m curious to see how those will work. Will we get a Facebook ad before a YouTube ad before the YouTube clip we clicked to see.

Will it completely kill the user experience?

Where’s the Follow-on

If I hit a screen like that, where do I go next, you would have thought Facebook with it’s massive profiling would be able to provide something a bit more meaningful than the mix of blank space and ads that it has going.

It could for example take a leaf out of Mashable’s playbook where there’s always the newsfeed below any content you’re viewing.

I’m hoping that Facebook hasn’t gone so far that it’s leaving its users behind. The downward slope is a slippery one which can be hard to climb up again. Just ask My Space and Yahoo.

Responsive Design in Affino

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:38:00 +0000

We’re getting ready to move Affino to being fully responsive. This will be the major initiative over the coming months now that we have the auto-scaling cloud infrastructure in place.

Big Bang

There will be a switchover from the current way Affino page designs are created to a new responsive approach, like moving from analogue to digital.

We won’t have dual Design Centres in Affino at any point, it’s a one-off transition to the new Responsive Designs when you update to Affino 7.5.

Legacy Design Freeze

Once you update to Affino 7.5 all the legacy designs will be frozen. All the existing Skins will keep on working, but you will need to create new responsive designs moving ahead.

This way your existing site designs won’t be affected by upgrading. You will though want to make sure your designs are finalised before upgrading since it will no doubt take some effort to create your responsive designs.

Transition

We will have the means to transition the existing design components you’re working on so that most are simply transitioned, e.g. Design Styles, Design Menus, Main Menus, Form Styles.

Others such as Design Objects can be transitioned through a one-off manual transition which will create a new single-column Design Object that you would then arrange on the grid as required.

Fundamentally though Affino will still use the same elements we have in place, just in a much more wysiwyg fashion with easier design interfaces.

Adaptable Methodology

It’s very clear that we’ll need to be adaptable in our methodology whilst we roll out the new responsive design centre, once we come to the practical rollout issues on the design side.

We’re working to have the best methodology up-front though, so input and feedback is essential at this point. The better quality of input we get now, the more likely you are to get what you want when the new responsive design centre is rolled out.

New Design Interface

We envisage a new design interface which will be WYSIWYG. You will have a grid-based structure, with gutters, and can drag in the design elements which will automatically snap to a column. You can then drag them to span multiple columns / gutters.

As soon as you’ve selected the initial settings, the Design Elements will immediately display wywiwyg. You can then edit them in a similar way to how Live Design works on the display side.

There will be options to select the view width, to match the available breakpoints, so that you can preview the design at any point as it would look on any device. You will also be able to show / hide the grid at any time.

Relative Fonts / EMs

We like this approach best of all since it deals with the issue of text Zooming:

http://blog.cloudfour.com/the-ems-have-it-proportional-media-queries-ftw/

Font sizes in EMs, layout and positioning in PXs / Percentages.

We’re aware that we will need to work with percentages and other approaches depending on the Design Element / scenario, nothing is one-size-fits-all.

Q: What are your thoughts, do you have a preferred alternate approach?

Q: Can you see any issues with this?

Framework

Golden Grid System (GGS)

We’ll be developing our own framework within Affino to deliver on all this, but we do like many of the principles of this one, Golden Grid System (GGS) as a reference point:

http://goldengridsystem.com

In practice we’re looking to have this all wysiwyg in a new page designer, so all the media queries are handled automatically by Affino, although we’ll leave it open so that if you want to extend them you can.

Q: We also like their principle of 16 cols for full screen, 8 cols for tablets and 4 cols for mobile. What are your thoughts on this?

Q: Would you want more control over breakpoints, or have other column numbers as a principle?

It makes sense to set breakpoints on the page design level.

Q: Would this be by assigning Breakpoint Profiles to the Skins (page design) or as a global principle, i.e. these are the breakpoints we’ll be using across all our designs?

SASS / SCSS

Q: Does anyone have any views on SASS / SCSS?

http://sass-lang.com

Single Skin

To make things simpler, given the inherent trickiness of moving to Responsive Designs, at the outset there will just be a single responsive skin per channel. We might then review this again in the future.

We will however feed the correct image sizes etc. if the pages are being browsed from a mobile.

Design Elements

We will only be transitioning a subset of these across to the new Design Centre. We want to make sure we’ve got the right ones, it’s going to be essential that you let us know which ones you expect to use moving ahead.

Some, like the remaining legacy Flash ones won’t be transitioned.

Q: What Design Elements do you envisage using for your designs moving ahead, please take a look at the reference page here:

http://www.comrz.com/affino-design-elements

We’re also developing new responsive friendly Design Elements, and are introducing new tablet friendly navigation elements like a channel navigator. You can see it in action on the USA Today site:

http://www.usatoday.com

Other Principles

CSS Only - no Tables
No inline styling (although there might be exceptions)
Code Compression
JavaScript optimised and crunched as far as possible
HTML 5 media players
Design Styles and Form Styles optimised for Responsive Designs
Responsive image elements
Responsive video elements
Flexible layout
Interaction elements can change between layouts
Web font support
Vertical and horizontal screen orientation
Correct image resolutions should be served for mobile devices (avoid heavy resizing in client end)

Input / Feedbask

We’re kicking off the development process so tis is the last chance for you to give us input and feedback on the ideas above.

The sooner you send through your thoughts the better.

Getting Started with SEO on Affino (Updated)

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:30:00 +0000

Increasingly Affino training involves conversations on how to get started with SEO, here’s the Quick Start guide on SEO with Affino. SEO is one of the three key ways to promote your site.

This is Not an in-depth guide on how to use each of the Affino elements or on specific SEO strategies, rather it is to help you get started with the basics, i.e. a ’What to do’ rather than a ’How to’. Some of which happens in Affino, and some of which happens externally.

Before You Start

Refresh your Brand Profile

The first thing you need to do is to create your brand profile, or update it to include the essentials outlined by Stefan in his great ’Creating the Perfect Brand Profile’ article.

Keyword Strategy

Based on your Brand Strategy identify the initial keywords you want to promote. These are based around your products, services and more importantly on what you would search for to find your products and services. Essentially these are your target customers’ interests.

Build up a hierarchy of keywords (Topics) in a simple indented list, just starting off in a Word document, e.g.

Affino
- eCommerce
  - Store
  - Shopping Basket
  - Checkout
  - Coupons
  - Discounts
- eCommunity
- eMedia

You’ll use this to help identify the key word and terms you’ll be promoting your site on.

Cover the Essentials

The Essentials are: Personality, Unique Content and Currentsy, see my post here. If you don’t get these right, forget about any of what I’ve outlined below. You’ll just be wasting your time and money.

If you have them covered, and are committed to them, then they will be the cornerstone of a great site.

The Essential Affino SEO Elements

Zones

Update your Zone so you have the right site information and SEO settings. You can always change these, but get the basics set up straight away. Make certain your site Keywords are in place.

Log Settings

Turn on logging so that you have the essential data available to you in your Affino Analysis Centre. This will allow you to evaluate your future campaigns.

Zones

Update the Zone (your site information) to be as relevant as possible. Make sure you’re using the best domain as your Zone Domain and Enforce it. This will ensure all the domains pointing at your site will map on to the preferred one and it will concentrate your ’Link Juice’ giving you the highest rankings.

It’s key to note that having multiple URLs on the same page content is a very bad thing as far as search engines are concerned and you will be heavily penalised for it. Affino uses canonical links to minimise this wherever possible on the content level, but it’s essential that the domains are managed to minimise duplicate URLs as well.

Keyword Manager

Go to Publish, scroll to the bottom and start setting up your Topics. Make sure you have your keywords in place and in particular your Topics. The Topics are the key areas of interest for your site, these are essential to help you target your users’ interests.

You can always update your Topics and re-index your content, but get the basics right from the beginning so you minimise the amount of re-work you need to do.

Channels

Make user you’ve got meaningful names on your Channels. You can also add more SEO friendly Titles and Screen Names (URLs) which supersede the names where appropriate and provide more meaningful search results on search engines. Make sure your Meta Data is as good as it can be since Channels are frequently the key landing pages on your site. Also have teasers where necessary, not just for the search engines, but also for your internal site searches.

Sections

Sections are typically not as important as Channels or content, none the less make sure you’ve got meaningful names, titles, screen names and Meta Data in place. Teasers can be very important for sections as they help clarify the type of content contained in it for end users and contain the most important terms.

Over time you’ll refine this based on how your pages are listed in the search results. Try and ensure that your section names are different from the channels so as to not have duplicate terms in the URL.

Content and Media

Have great titles, teasers and meaningful content. Use related content extensively and link wherever possible. Include relevant media which in turn is named relevant names. Tag your content with relevant keywords in the Live Editor and use the Heading buttons (h1 h2 h3) for your headings.

Products

Products are an extension of content, but have their own specific requirements. It’s essential with your products that you use the correct product codes and display them prominently. It’s to make sure that related products and accessories are highlighted on the page, and use known product categories. If it’s media, e.g. a Harrison Ford movie, make certain it is tagged with the relevant meta data.

It can also be beneficial if you’re targeting value customers to highlight discounts, specials and other benefits of purchase such as free shipping. All of these can be factors in users landing on your products pages and converting.

Registration

Update your registration so that the Member Types and Interests (done via the Demographic Profile) are mapped on to the Topics. This is not so essential for the SEO side, but is a key driver for all the recommendations your site will be making to the users, and can be used to drive auto-related content.

Topic Channels, Gateways and Landing Pages

Now that you’ve done the hard work, Affino can generated automated landing pages for you and build pages on-the-fly around specific topics. Simply create your Skins to use the key highlights Design Elements (with the Channel Topic filter selected) and Affino will populate the pages with content around the key terms applied to the Channel. See the Social Commerce page on Comrz.

Here’s a useful guide with a lot more information.

Blog

Start Blogging and keep on at it. Few things will generate as much useful content and Link juice as a well maintained blog. It will drive incoming links, provide an extremely useful RSS feed, be the basis of your social campaigns and provide personality and Currentcy.

RSS Feeds and Social Campaigns

Set up the RSS feeds from your key content sections. For SEO purposes these can be both full content feeds or simply highlights feeds. These should be promoted on all the key pages and will come in very handy when you start link building.

Comments, Ratings, Sharing and Likes

It’s essential to generate as many in-bound links from as many high-profile and relevant sources as possible. A great way of doing this is by making the right sharing tools available. Affino shares directly to the leading social spaces, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are great drivers to get your content out and to get further inbound links.

eBusiness Dashboard

Set up your Affino eBusiness Dashboard so that it works for you. You can access it right from your Application Bar or from the Analyse control centre. This, along with Google Analytics, is the heart of your monitoring system and gives you real-time information on how well your site is performing.

Redirects

If you’re migrating content from other sites, or you’ve purchased additional high-value domains then set up Redirects to ensure that your Page Rank is mapped on to your site content. This is essential to prevent loss of rankings whilst transitioning sites and content.

Don’t Overload

There can be a tendency to overload your site for pure SEO gain, but that can work against you since people are less likely to link in to a site which is just perceived as link-bait. Keep your credibility and provide great content and a great service and the links will come.

Other SEO Essentials

Google Webmaster Tools

The very first thing you do outside of Affino is register for Google Webmaster Tools, go to your Zone and copy the link for your Sitemap and provide the URL to Google. Once in place, Google will get the sitemap and spider your site accordingly. Without this in place Google will miss out on a lot of your content and won’t index it. It will also take considerably longer for Google to start indexing your site at all.

The single most important factor now for Google is how long your site has been around, so even if you’re not live, get Google indexing your domain. Just make sure you secure the Channels you don’t want it to access. You’ll also want to do this with Bing Webmaster tools.

Google Analytics

The second thing you should do is set up your site on Google Analytics. It means setting up your Google Analytics Profile to ensure that Affino is passing through all the relevant data including individual order lines on online sales.

Firefox Extensions

See the image below. Firefox extensions are at the heart of knowing what’s going on with your SEO. I’ll do a separate post on this later, but essentially how we run things at Comrz is that we use Google Chrome for all our day-to-day web browsing and site management (because it is very fast) and use Firefox as an Uber SEO tool.

Getting Link Juice

Once you’ve to the basics in place and you want to really start promoting your site you need to go for Link Juice. A great place to get information (and tools) on this is SEOmoz. It costs for the premium services, but is money very well spent. Most of the information on what to do is free.

Essentially there are some directories (which you will need to pay for) and some key websites which will help elevate your Google Page Rank faster than having hundreds of lesser incoming links. It’s essential to make sure your site is listed on these sites from the outset as it is the fastest way to improve your Google Rank.

Get Social

There’s lots of reasons to get Social, i.e. have your Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc. pages up. One of the key reasons is SEO. These sites, and the right approach, can be key drivers for incoming links.

Using Social Connectors and Social Campaigns in Affino you can set up two-way integration between Affino and the key social media sites. These are fully automated and minimize your workload, allowing you to run your social campaigns right from your main website.

Smart Media

It’s increasingly important to create smart media as well, e.g. a great YouTube video. You can use it and associated links to directly promote your site. Frequently videos are ranked higher than content pages, especially if they’re YouTube videos.

Targetting the Top 100

The most laborious part of your rank boosting, but also essential if you really want to get traction, is doing Google searches on the key terms you want to target, starting with the most important ones. Wherever possible set up your profile on these sites; set up incoming RSS feeds from your sites if possibe; engage meaningfully with the communities; or pay if it’s worth it to get listed.

You’ll want to do this for all the sites where it’s relevant with relevant and meaning content. Don’t Spam the sites with content, it’s the fastest way to devalue your brand. Always think of it from the end user’s perspective. Are you adding value to the conversation. If not, approach the site later when you have something relevant to say.

Once you’ve done all the sites. Repeat the process every 3 months or so (or more frequently if the resources allow) since the top 100 will change significantly.

Analyze and Refine

Constantly analyse what’s working for you and what isn’t. Use the Affino eBusiness Dashboard, all the tools available within the Affino Analyse Centre, Google Analytics, Google Adwords (more on this later), and the SEO extensions to shape your SEO campaigns.

Always keep your site current and never lose site of the end-user experience, which should never be compromised for the sake of SEO.

What’s Coming

We’ve got some nice improvements lined up for SEO in Affino over the coming months. Key ones are the new SEO Import, Quick Tagging, Snippets and a great deal of code optimisation.

Analysis Evolved

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:12:00 +0000

The Analysis Centre in Affino has undergone a continuous evolution since we originally launched the very first version. Every single Analysis screen has seen two or more updates over the past year, some have seen dozens.

Recently we’ve accelerated the evolution considerably as technologies firm up and we’re able to roll out much smarter, more immediate analytics interfaces.

Previously a great deal of our focus was on the Dashboards, we found that in practice very few users ended up configuring these, instead preferring to use more basic tools which needed less effort.

It means that we’re now focusing more on ready-made stats interfaces which are optimised right from the outset to give you the best views of immediate activities whilst also giving you insight into long-term trends.

The one exception is the Customer Ladder in which all the metrics are customised by you, far beyond what was possible with the Dashboard.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/CustomerLadderAnalysisv2.png

Data Crunching

Besides the death of Flash, and the impact that had on most dynamic online analysis tools, we found that Affino collected too much data, too easily. On the surface it’s great to capture and retain every data point, but very quickly this incidental data starts to weigh down on performance and drive up costs.

We believe we now have the mix just about right by extending the data series to two years, and we’ll scale up from here. We have done this by doing a great deal of data crunching.

Aggregating data continuously to provide daily, weekly and monthly overviews essential for long term trends, cleaning up the millions of un-used underlying data points.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/SiteAnalysisv1.1.png

At the same time we’re also providing better insight into Now and the most recent trends.

Updated Analysis Centre

When you go to the Analysis Centre there is now an instant overview of the activity on your site, with live updates of how many members, guests and bots are on-site along with the latest activity. There’s also handy snapshots of the overall level of user engagement for the day and recent past.

The Analysis Centre itself is now organised into categories so that for example all the Promotional analysis tools are grouped. When you go into each analysis screen, you will notice that many are now much faster than previously. A great example of this is the Site Analysis

Updated Analysis Tools

It’s not every day we add completely new tools to the Analysis Centre, but we’ve launched three new ones in the last release in Message Campaign and Mailing List Analysis (see separate post here) and a great Social Wall which shows you the latest activity on your site.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/SocialWall.png

Customer Ladder Analysis, Campaign Analysis, Audit, Message, Site and Search Analysis have all had big updates and are considerably more effective.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/SearchAnalysisA.png

Better Stats vs Bots

One thing that gets in the way of great stats is Bots. Good bots are essential for the running of the net, e.g. Google Search bot, but malicious bots just adversely affect performance and any stats that are gathered.

We’ve always made a distinction between member access, guests and bots. Where traditionally there was a lag was in bot tracking in Affino, that all changed in Affino 7.1 which now has great Bot detection and we automatically distribute new bot lists to all Affino sites daily to reflect the latest bots detected across all Affino sites. This means much more accurate stats moving ahead.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/Bots.png

Instant Access

Another shift we’ve made with the Analytics is that we now provide much closer links between content and analysis. It is possible to see instantly the headline counts for messages whilst managing messages. It is also possible to directly link into the relevant filtered analytics for the message, same goes for message campaigns, mailing lists, campaign creatives, conversion events and much more.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/ConversionEvent.png

We’re just starting with this, in the future it will be possible to click directly to relevant stats on pretty much any content / user / campaign you’re running.

Second Life for Dashboard

Although the Dashboard v1 is on the way out of Affino, along with all the other Flash / Flex elements, it has now gained a renewed purpose with big performance improvements and much longer timeframes in the latest release.

We’ve also improved considerably the quality of much of the data and it’s a great way to identify the most popular parts, and productive members on a website at a glance.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/Dashboard.png

Page Dashboards are now also very useful again for at-a-glance overviews of how any page is performing.

User and Account Analysis

Outside of the Analysis Centre the most significant Analysis tools are found in Account and Contact management. You can go to the Analysis tab and get a great deal of insight into the level of engagement of each member of your community.

It combines many of the analytics tools onto a single screen, which is entirely focused on the individual, or in the case of Accounts, all the individuals within that account.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/ContactAnalysis.png

We have made this much more an effective tool over the past few releases, so you now have great insight into your user activity stream and engagement level.

Embracing Tux - Affino 7 on Linux (Updated)

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:30:00 +0000

We’ve already blogged on how Affino will be moving to Apache and Apache Tomcat for Affino 7. We’re going to be making one more further big move and Affino 7 will also run on Linux.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Affino last ran on Linux, and at the time there was simply no demand for it, surprising as that might seem. There was also still a fair amount of confusion in the market over proprietary software such as Affino running on Open Source platforms.

Everything has changed in the interim, and as Affino is now primarily a SaaS platform, the equation has flipped on its head. Since the vast majority of Affino sites run off the Amazon Web Services cloud, including all the Comrz run ones, the OS question has evolved more towards auto-scaling, rapid deployment, performance and cost.

Windows is effectively nowhere when it comes to serious automation and auto-scaling. Azure is the way Microsoft has chosen to go, and the alternative is to embrace Linux, Scalr and the OSS ecosystem.

We still love Microsoft and Windows and it will remain core to our Data platform moving ahead, but we see Linux playing a much greater part in the future for Affino application servers.

Affino 7 is already running well on Apache, and Tomcat and these are our Web and Java service technologies of choice moving ahead. They make it very easy for us to embrace Linux, and today is a red letter day as Affino is running on Linux again for the first time in the 21st century.

It’s early days yet, it will probably take a week to iron out the remaining issues, but the time is right for us to embrace Linux and the incredible automation it offers. It will allow us to realise a lot of the goals we have with Affino 7 in a much faster timeframe than we had anticipated.

Also, Affino on Linux is Fast.

Update - All Live Now

It took at bit longer in the end to make the full transition to Linux, we had to overcome dozens of bugs spread across most of the underlying platforms to do so. Fortunately the platform updates have been frequent, and during the interim all the platforms we’re using have improved a great deal to the extent that there are no longer any issues.

We’ve also had to deal with long running tasks, i.e. what happens if a task is longer than the life expectancy of a server. Once servers become disposable as they do on Scalr, i.e. they’re created whenever the demand requires and removed as soon as it subsides, it’s essential that long running tasks are handled gracefully. We will be using the auto-scaling in the future to distribute tasks across multiple servers as they become available to speed them up.

We’ve reduced greatly the time it takes for an Affino instance to start up since every second counts when sites are busy. This will be something we will be focusing on with every new Affino release. We can now also be less frugal with server resources and focus more on performance and less on stability since down-time is now virtually zero when servers fail.

We’ve further evolved the separation of files from the application servers. Most files now run from separate file repositories, whilst some are only kept for the life of the application servers. A lot of tuning has gone into this.

We’ve moved our search to Solr and as a result have set up a separate Solr cloud since the Solr indexes can’t run effectively on displosable application servers. No doubt we’ll extend this further as the need to scale the indexes arises.

Finally we’ve evolved the way we handle caching, since auto-scaling means we can now scale better to deal with demand peaks rather than simply serve cached content.

The benefits with the instant scaling and fail-over are immence and have been well worth the effort. We’re busy now at looking at what else we can automate.

Messaging v2

Tue, 07 May 2013 08:26:00 +0000

The new Messaging 2 suite in Affino is not simply an incremental update, it is a complete re-imagining of how messaging should work for businesses online.

It has meant a fundamental re-think of how bulk and targeted messages work, and breakthrough improvements for notifications and auto-responders.

Sales and Marketing Automation

Messaging is at the heart of sales and marketing automation. Typically though it is necessary to integrate with many different systems to achieve even the basics of an effective messaging campaign.

Although Affino’s Messaging doesn’t do everything that tools such as Mail Chimp, Mandrill, Hub Spot, Eloqua, KISSmetrics and Scout do, it does a big part of it, and a whole load more.

It also does it at no additional cost, with easy-to-use tools, and with no code integration required.

Message Campaigns vs Mailing Lists

The first big change with Affino’s new messaging comes with the splitting off of the mailing list from the messages being sent. Affino now has Mailing Lists and Message Campaigns in place of Newsletters. Mailing Lists manage the actual subscribers, whilst Messages are sent out based on your Message Campaigns.

This means you can target your mailing lists in much more creative ways by running multiple messaging campaigns against individual mailing lists.

It also means you can do much more to target your subscribers effectively, whilst maintaining a unified unsubscribe and bounced subscriber list across multiple campaigns.

Premium, Personal and SMS Message Campaigns

You can now run three distinct types of messaging campaigns. Premium messages act the same as the previous Newsletter messages. These are tailored messages which can have high design values and where the message content can be highly targeted, automated and personalised.

It is now also possible to send out bulk SMS messaged and Personal messages. Personal messages are instant messages which appear to be sent individually, but are in fact sent in bulk.

We have also made it much easier to send out individual messages and to test / preview those messages. You can now simply enter in the message content, and Title where they are being sent by email. You can then preview them, send test messages or simply dispatch your message immediately.

All messages are Smart messages

Every message in Affino is Smart. It is optimised, tracked, targeted and personalised. Additionally messages can be set to go out to tightly segmented groups, or be triggered by specific user activities (or in-activity).

It is possible now to set up messaging workflows so that messages are sent out based on a combination of activities. These are then all logged and you can analyse the success of any of your message campaigns over a period of time.

We have added many new triggers for sending out messages and responding to activity.

Smarter Segmenting and Targeting

There are many new methods for segmenting your message campaigns in Messaging 2. It’s always been possible to filter by security groups, member activity and customer status. More recently we added the ability to filter by specific purchases, gender and age ranges.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/DemographicFilters.png

It is now also possible to filter by client accounts, store credits and most importantly members’ interests.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/MembershipFilters.png

These filters are all ’live’ and can be used against all manual, auto-responder and auto-scheduled messages.

Clearer Messages

We’ve considerably refined the formatting and content of the messages in this release. Messages now look better across all major email clients, and we will continue to refine this on an ongoing basis.

It is now much simpler to style and frame your content, whilst the dynamic content population has been further refined by adding new interest filters on Campaigns.

The next step is responsive messages, which will be coming late summer.

Auto-Responders

We have added a host of new ecommerce, sharing, Facebook and credits triggers in the latest release. We have also made it easier to manually assign activities to users so that the notifications support offsite workflows as well as on-site ones.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/392/ConversionEvents.png

There are now dozens of user-based activities which can trigger response messages, and it is possible to create workflows on them with tight filtering gets sent a message.

Simply select the specific activity you want to track for the Conversion Event along with its frequency. There’s no coding required for any of the triggering or tracking.

Smart Messaging Workflows

We have added some great conditional workflows on Conversion Events in Affino which allow you to set up conditional message triggers in a way which was not possible before.

Every conversion event can be filtered so that they’re only triggered if other activities have / haven’t been completed first. This means that your automated responses can now be much more nuanced in their nature and timing. Which in turn are likely to drive up the level of engagement of your message campaigns.

Message Campaign, Message and Mailing List Analytics

Two of the best improvements we’ve made in Messaging 2 are the great new Message Campaign and Mailing List Analysis tools. These offer insight into the immediate status of any individual mailing, as well as the long-term trends for each of your campaigns.

They also offer insight into your sales and marketing automation since they track all your auto-responders in the same way. You can see just how many times auto-response messages are sent, and the success rates over time.

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Mailing List Analysis gives great insight into subscriber trends. The updated Message Analysis has some great improvements in benchmarking the success of each message against the overall success of any Message Campaign.

Getting Started

To get started with Messaging in Affino simply add a Mailing List, create a Mailing List Channel for users to manage their subscriptions, update your registration (and checkout) so that users can sign up for one or more mailing lists, and then you can place the Mailing List Sign-up element on whatever page is appropriate.

If you have a subscriber-base already you can import your mailing list subscribers, or simply use Message Campaigns to message out to all your users. If you want to use bounce handling (recommended) then use a Gmail address for handling the bounce-backs and Affino will automatically monitor them and sanitise the mailing list.

There is a handy Message To Do list which will take you through the tasks, and once you have your campaigns up and running and your auto-responders in place you can monitor everything using the Analysis Centre.

It’s good practice as well to create a Test mailing list and Test message campaign so you can try out different / new approaches internally prior to sending out publicly. It is also useful for testing new message designs for auto-responders without having to wait for them to be triggered.

Update

Affino 7.2 will have some useful updates, partly based on the comments. The first one is that we will no longer list out Mailing List subscribers on the main User and Contact lists, you will need to select the Subscriber option on the listing if you want to see them.

The mailing list signup process is now also much more streamlined and immediate, especially for guest users.

We’ve also added in a new level of spam sign-up prevention on the mailing lists. This improves the overall quality of your subscriber lists.

Update 2

More feedback and more improvements.

We’ve further refined the use sign-up process so that it is now as simple and straight-forward as possible. We’ve also improved the subscriber import process, especially for marketing mailing lists. It means it is no a much more seamless process to run your marketing campaigns.

You can now also view all your sent My Message and SMS messages more readily and Mailing List subscribers are also now easier to track against each list and campaign.

If you have more feedback then please provide it so we can make the messaging platform as effective for you as it can be.

Affino 7.1 Mindmap

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:08:00 +0000

Super Scaling

The biggest evolution for Affino with 7.1 is it’s ability to run on a super-scaling cloud architecture. Affino instances can now be created and dropped on-the-fly with minimal disruption to users and admins. It means we will be moving all Affino SaaS sites to the new infrastructure over the coming days as they’re updated to the latest release. For load-balanced clients we’ll be moving to auto-scaling so that busy sites ramp up to more servers during peak demand and back down again when demand eases up.

The net result of all the work we’ve done is that Affino sites will scale much further, be more responsive and incur less down-time.

Analysis and Insight

When you go into Analysis you’ll see an immediate change with live active users, usage charts, re-organised menu, and if you’ve set up your Customer Ladder you’ll see the level of engagement. We’ve added two key new tools for tracking your messaging: Message Campaign Analysis and Mailing List Analysis, and have updated Message Analysis. These collectively add up to a new level of insight into your bulk messaging.

What’s not so obvious is that we’ve completely re-worked all the analytics behind the scenes to be far more scalable. This has allowed us to extend the previous 3 month analysis timeframe up to two years. We’ve also updated a number of the analysis interfaces to make them more useful and productive.

Search

The third big Scaling related improvement is the new Search engine. Affino’s previous search struggled when it got to millions of content and media items. The new search is far more scalable. It is also far more capable in that you can do logic searches, range searches and much more.

Messaging

The single biggest project for this release has been the new Messaging platform. The new platform separates out Mailing Lists and Message Campaigns, and allows you for the first time to run SMS and personal messaging campaigns as well as premium email messages. There are also far more ways you can now trigger auto-responses, and demographically filter your target lists and it’s far easier to message than ever before.

Sales and Marketing Automation through the Customer Ladder

The Cutomer Ladder has been extensively evolved in this release, so that it will now be a critical part of the running of any Affino site. Firstly we’ve added conditional logic to the Conversion Events. This means they can be triggered (or not) depending on a sequence of customer / prospect interactions. We have added many more trigger events, so now Affino tracks users updating their information, adding products to their shopping cart, sharing via social media and email, and much more. We’ve extended the incentives and actions that can be taken when an activity takes place, so that it is now possible to message users personally or via SMS as well as give them points which act as store credits that can be used for purchases. The Cutomer Ladder Analysis centre has also been greatly improved to help track and target engagement, activity and members.

Recruitment

Recruitment hasn’t had top billing in Affino, but this release sees the culmination of two years work with an incredibly solid pro-grade recruitment platform. We’ll be posting more on that soon.

Design

Design Panels are a real breakthrough for Affino, and are somewhat overdue. You can now popup any of hundreds of variations in Design Panels. When combined with Sticky Buttons and the Mouseover focus, you can create a great and somewhat dramatic navigation experience. We’ve also added the ability to set the padding around images, and target them more effectively with IDs. The new Topic Filter and Ticke Design Elements will offer new dynamism and drill-down ability to any page.

Productivity

There are a couple of hundred improvements which can be classed as productivity improvements in one way or other, whether is is the great new relationship system, or the instant selections on popup selectors, or the auto-filling of Dynamic Forms.

Affino 7.1 Release - Super Scaling and Deep Engagement

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:06:00 +0000

Affino 7.1 is now out, and it’s a major release in every way. Whilst there are many aspects to this Affino release, the two key threads are improved scaling and greater engagement. Affino 7.1 has been significantly re-architected to scale with new search and analytics engines. With the release of Affino 7.1 we will also be migrating sites to our new super-scaling cloud.

We’ve rolled out big updates to many core Affino services including Messaging, Search, Analysis, Customer Ladder and Relationships. We’ve also introduced great features such as Store Credits for incentivising customers, and Design Panels for creating great popups.

The combined improvements in the Customer Ladder (engagement), Messaging and Analysis add up to a breakthrough for sales and marketing automation. The new Messaging Campaigns for bulk premium, personal and SMS messages, come with advanced targeting, filtering and triggering options and great analytics.

Site Search has been completely re-engineered around Solr which gives Affino greatly improved performance on searches, and allows for much smarter searching. Core management elements such as relating content have also seen big updates focused on making editorial teams much more productive.

Altogether there are nearly 400 great new updates in this release, many of which will be transformative when fully rolled out on existing Affino sites.

We have also fixed most of the identified low-level issues which arose from the Affino 7 launch, and which are inevitable with the introduction of such a significant new platform.

Upgrade Guidance

The Affino 7.1 release is a signifiant update, and unlike most Affino releases, this one takes some time to run as we’re completely restructuring all the analytics data and refreshing the search indices. Given how intense this update is on the infrastructure, and that your site will be moved to the new hosting cloud, it is essential that you co-ordinate your update with your account manager.

Also in this release is a significant change to how most images are presented as you can now set the margins around the main images using Design Styles / CSS. It is essential to review your pages to ensure that the images are presented as expected, and note that you can now optimise the layout.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update, Skin Update and finally Clear Guest Cache; all of which are available on the Settings > Update screen.

Key Enhancements

Messaging v2

Affino’s new Messaging platform replaces Newsletters of previous releases. We’ve completely reworked the bulk messaging approach in Affino and have rolled out new Message Campaigns and Mailing Lists. The new messaging platform is a major step forward for Affino and it greatly improves Affino’s sales and marketing automation capabilities.

Message Campaigns are a powerful new approach to messaging which allow for Premium, SMS and Personal bulk messages. Message Campaigns have highly nuanced filtering and can be used to create one-off messages, send out regular mailers with automatically assembled messages, and they can act as auto-responders or notifiers when triggered by Conversion Events.

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Mailing Lists act as smart subscriber lists which can be used in any number of message campaigns. They track both the subscriptions and un-subscribers.

Bounce Handling has been completely re-written. Now works very well and is fully SSL encrypted. Affino Bounce Handling now only works with Gmail / Google Apps Email accounts (ensure that you ‘disable’ spam handling on your Gmail account).

There are new Message Campaign and Mailing List Analysis tools which greatly improve your ability to track the success or your campaigns and the growth of your mailing lists. It is now much easier to spot trends over time, as well as see what the immediate follow-through is on any individual message that’s sent out.

Message Analysis has also been improved further by following the industry-standard naming conventions, plus a richer, more visual experience.

Analysis Centre v2

The Analysis Centre is now far more capable and scalable. When you go in to the new Analysis Centre you’ll notice that we’ve reorganised it according to activity, with useful charts on the right. We’ve added some key new analysis tools including Message Campaign Analysis and Mailing List Analysis, and updated most of the core analytic tools to make them faster, more useful and more accurate than before.

The Audit Centre is now far better tuned and makes it easier to track down activity, access and failed logins. Campaign Statistics now have a direct connection with advertisers, campaigns and creatives. Customer Ladder Analysis has had another major update which provides actionable lead generation. Dashboards now have a new lease of life as they now track up to the last two years (a big increase from the previous 3 months).

Message, Message Campaign and Mailing List Analysis screens provide dramatically improved messaging analytics over anything Affino has had before. You now have clear oversight on the impact of each message, as well as the campaign and mailing list trends.

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Site and Search, along with Contact and Account Analysis screens all get big updates. They’re extended back to the last two years whilst taking a fraction of the time. All of these updates are also just the start now that we have made the shift to the new data architecture. In the future we’ll be able to highlight trends throughout Affino.

Site Search v3

Almost all of Affino’s Display-side searches have been updated in this release. Affino now uses the Solr search engine for running searches which means that they are faster, more scalable, more accurate and more capable. Site searches are also more configurable for each Zone since we’ve rolled the Search Settings directly into the Search Profiles, giving you much more flexibility on how you tune your searches.

It is now possible to search using conditional logic, ranges, like statements and much more. It is also possible to switch the Site Search to search for Members rather than site content.

Customer Ladder v4

This is a very significant update for sales and marketing automation in Affino. Conversion Events have many key updates with new incentives including Content Subscriptions, i.e. users can automatically be subscribed to content alerts and Store Credits (points) for making purchases in the online store.

It is now possible to chain together Conversion Events, and it’s much more clear which events trigger others. It’s also possible to set up conditional logic so that events are triggered if user does a and b but not c.

Customer Ladder Analysis has been revamped again to be even more useful, and far more scalable. Wherever there is a user list it is now possible to pull up the full Contact listing, or to export the users using User Export. This allows you to quickly identify target lists and action them.

Affino also supports more Conversion Event types so that you can now track, incentivise and be notified the instant a shopping basket fails; when a person shares content, or sends an Ecard; a user changes their password, updates their profile; or views any content on a site.

Relationships v2

Relating content in Affino has taken the biggest step forward since we originally introduced related items. It is now possible to order related items; order related content panels; one-click relate / unrelate; create one or two way relationships between content; and have multiple different related content panels per Skin.

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Related Media can now be styled to display media previews, and related jobs are further refined to be more engaging. Added up this is a major improvement and will save a great deal of time for content editors.

Store Credits v1

Affino gets its very own Store Credits system. This is a big step forward and now allows you for the first time to incentivise customers monetarily for dozens of differing activities. As with all points systems you can issue points depending on spend, but you can go much further and provide financial incentives for sharing, answering questions, invites and much more.

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Store Credits work across multiple currencies and you can set limits on the percentage of an order they can be used for, and for the initial amount of credits required for them to be used. You can also set a point multiplier on individual products which allows for double or triple value points on certain products being purchased.

Store credits can also be used for returns and can be assigned manually to any customer at any time. Credits are made very prominent throughout and users can see their available store credits and spend on their My Accounts screen.

Design Panels v1

Panels are new popup page elements which are automatically displayed when a user mouse-overs a button. These provide far more powerful menu options since they can contain nearly any Design Element. This means popup logins, article listings, combination listings, videos, media thumbnails, countdowns and much more.

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New Affino Scaling Hosting Cloud

With the release of Affino 7.1, Affino is finally ready to super-scale. We will be moving all Affino SaaS sites to the new cloud once they have been updated. The new cloud runs on Scalr and Linux which is a big change from previously. There are some clear benefits and there may be some turbulence during the transition.

The move to Linux means that some URLs, especially for Design and Integration Scripts might break, because they’re now case sensitive. It is essential that you give your Affino site a thorough test, especially if you have many scripts. The great benefits for moving to Scalr are that at a minimum all sites will have fail-over protection, so that if your server fails, then immediately a new server is created. Load-balanced Affino sites will have a higher level of protection as their instance will simply grow with traffic, so a very busy load-balanced site might grow to 5, 10, or more servers at a peak.

Other Enhancements

Accounts - it is now possible to bulk assign Contacts to Accounts by looking up email addresses and companies associated with the contacts

Articles - the default publishing timeframe has been increased from 10 years to 100 years, i.e. Publish End is now default set to 100 years in the future; New Call To Action attribute allows you to create specific calls to action for each article, e.g. Download Report, Breaking News, Special Offer etc.

Article Listing DE - it is now possible to add a second right-aligned Title to any Article Listing DE instance, this means for instance that you can add a custom more link; a new option allows you to display the Original Section (small) above each article, especially useful for rich content sites

Application Bar - it is now possible to see the User Profile on the Security Panel; it is now possible to Relate to content directly from the App Bar

Article Export / Archive - it is now possible to export archived data prior to deletion using Article Export

Auto Related Content DE - New presentation style filter on content so that it is possible for example to separate out Auto-related Events and Products

Brightcove - Affino now supports Brightcove videos as a new media item type. You will need to use the full embed code as Brightcove does not support oembeds. It is also essential that you set up a Media Provider Profile on your Zone for your Brightcove account.

Bounce Handling - greatly improved, now works exclusively with Gmail. Works considerably more reliably than previously.

Broadbean Integration - big updates in Affino / Broadbean integration. Now pulls in much more job brief data, and handles the return path for job applications.

Browse Menu DE - now works with the Online Directory

Campaigns - it is now possible to go directly to the relevant Campaign Analysis screen from any Advertiser, Campaign and Creative; it is also now possible to filter Campaigns and Creatives by Topic, you assign Topics to them and then on the Campaign Theme assign whether the campaigns are targeted by the User’s Interests or by the Channel Topics; behind the scenes we’ve also greatly improved the scalability of campaigns

Catalogue Items / Products - it is now possible to display the Catalogue Attribute descriptions alongside the Catalogue Attributes on the live page

Charts - All the charts on Site Analysis, Contacts and Accounts screens have been extensively updated to be more useful, provide richer information and to work across all platforms

Checkout - Affino now restricts the checkout to showing only the latest 30 addresses for any user when checking out (there were issues with a user who had 700 addresses); product messages are now default checked where enabled; Store Credits are also fully integrated

Comments and Ratings - direct article and media links from comments notifications and the comments queue.

Control Centre - all popup mutli-selectors have been updated to be one-click select / de-select with an instant more button listing. This is a really great enhancement. It is now possible to minimise the top navigation, useful for smaller screens.

Design Menus - Design Menu font sizes can now be set using Point sizes.

Design Centre - many usability improvements

Design Styles - this release sees yet more improvements to your ability to style your Affino pages with the addition of Image Padding on Design Styles. All key images now have their own IDs and you can set the Top, Left, Right and Base padding directly on Design Styles. By default images will have 0 px padding on top and 5 px padding on left, right and base.

Dropbox Integration - updated to support v1 Dropbox integration. Upload limit increased to 1 GB.

Dynamic Forms - it is now possible to upload a media file along with each dynamic form. This means users can attach all kinds of media, including PDF, Image, Document and even YouTube video when submitting a form. It now is also possible to set pre-filled data on form fields, including first name, last name, job title, company name, country, email, mobile and phone. So when a registered user comes to fill out a dynamic (custom) form then selected fields will already be pre-filled with their data. We’ve also added a new Contact Email Address option to Dynamic Forms so that you can set the notification sender to be the email entered into the dynamic form. This way editors can directly reply to the senders.

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Email Addresses - more refined email validation

Events - events go from having panel navigation through to having vertical navigation and many more options for how you can present each event. This means that the events module has taken a further step towards being a pro-level events module and is no longer a simple events listing solution. Content is now much more approachable rather than simply having one big listing. It is now also possible to lock down event details further and set the order in which you display the navigation tabs.

Feature Scroller DE - Major enhancements to the features scroller so that it is possible to display arrow-based navigation overlaid on the Carousel; the navigation thumbnails can now be displayed top or bottom of the carousel; it is possible to display related articles overlaid on the Feature Image for richer more engaging carousels

Form Entries - improved protection against accidentally deleting any form entries. It is now necessary to click on the delete button and the deletion approval before you delete any entries.

Forums - it is now possible to let users Close forum threads, and a new Yesterday button added to the Today screen, if you missed the action from the day before. It is now possible to designate a key Issue forum and a key Project forum for each Zone. This means that each thread in any customer or public facing forum can be used as the template for an issue or project thread. Which in turn makes tracking customer projects far simpler.

Geo-targeting - updated Geo IP Address list

Incoming Feeds - Affino now provides more details on why incoming feeds may not be working. Affino also now impersonates Firefox when calling incoming feeds to ensure feed compatibility.

Low-stock Notifications - improved notifications

Member Search - refined experience for searching Groups, Members and Members who have viewed Profiles

Mobile - numerous further mobile optimisations including: Media Selector now optimised; Control Centre video guides now work better; Control Centre help now better formatted on mobiles; sending Ecards now looks better; content editing further optimised throughout

Opportunities - improved opportunities management with bigger, resizable fields and auto-links.

Orders - improved order search and filtering

Order Export - it is now possible to export far more details on each order, including full Invoice and Billing addresses, VAT, Net Total, Coupon Value, AWB Details and Shipping Price.

POP Mail - now with native SSL support. Note that you will need to use a Gmail account to for bounced email handling on Message Campaigns.

Predictive Search - improved formatting when no thumbnail present

Product Searches / Virtual Channels - added canonical links to improve Google indexing

Public Profiles - improved privacy and security on public profiles. Particularly important updates for recruitment sites with very tight privacy requirements.

Publishing - the default publishing timeframe has been extended from 10 years to 100 years; it is also now possible to bulk make articles live / not live on the Control Centre article listing; presentation styles are now always shown on each article in the Control Centre; it is now possible to define custom labels for many more article form attributes including: Text 2, Text 3, Text 4, Step by Step Title, Info Box Title, Code and Credits.

Recommendations - significantly improved recommendations, with a more randomised display of recommendations, i.e. user doesn’t always get shown the same set, plus the ability to see more recommendations on the screen at the click of a button. Recommended Jobs (Briefs) now much more effective with premium job highlights and dynamic rotation. Members now encouraged to update their profile based on each type of recommendation.

Recruitment - This is another major update to recruitment with multiple enhancements throughout. It is now possible to add a ‘Job Seeker’ profiling option so that only job seekers are presented with all the recruitment related demographic options; candidates can remove jobs they’ve applied for; improved job recommendations; improved navigation between search results, latest jobs, recommendations and ‘my jobs’; job recommendations are now also made on the basis of jobs searched for in the absence of user profile data. Jobs are now public by default; streamlined process for uploading CVs when a user is applying for a job.

Registration - the registration process has been refined somewhat, so that certain entry fields are now in a more consistent order and if there is only one Member Type option then it is set but no longer shown.

Security - new Admin IP Address option on Zones which overrides the maximum login attempts so that users based in company offices will not lock out all other users; further content checks to prevent malicious code

SEO - we’ve removed the Keyword Meta tag; we’ve also moved the Page Title Format from the Zone level to the Channel level. This will allow a lot more refined SEO on different types of content.

Sharing - sharing can now be tracked and incentivised by using conversion events, and it is now possible to bulk-share to your contacts and members of your Account. We’ve combined ecard and ‘send this page’ into a single function so that it is now possible to share from anywhere on the site.

Signatures - new option on the User Profile for globally enabling / disabling signatures

Social CRM - Opportunities and Contracts now moved to be with Accounts and Contracts so that all key Social CRM elements are now managed in one place; Further usability enhancements on Contracts and Accounts

Telephone Numbers - validation added to all the telephone number fields throughout Affino so that only numbers and + () - characters can be entered.

Ticker DE v1 - New Ticker Design Element which smoothly scrolls latest article highlights across. Simply select the Section you want to pull the headlines from, select the Design Style and configure how many you want to display, along with the timeframe.

Topic Filter DE v1 - New Design Element which allows users to filter the page content by topic. This way it is possible to have a Topic Channel showing content from all categories and the user can select just the categories they wish to read about / view / network on. Once selected, the page refreshes and shows content just from the selected categories.

Topics - new custom Topic link which can be used in custom scripts and Affino extensions

Twitter Integration - key integration update for Twitter v1.1 API, plus support for embedded Tweets. Just drop in the URL to the Tweet.

https://twitter.com/affino/status/307818812995141632

User Import / Export - It is now possible to filter imports and exports using Security Groups, Account Types and Accounts. It is also possible to assign users to specific security groups / accounts by including them in the CSV; it is now possible to import and export the custom Demographic Profile attributes for users; when importing users Affino can automatically pull in Gravatar Avatars for any matching email address

Users - it is now possible to add users where there are existing Mailing LIst subscribers with the same email address. The new registration simply inherits the email subscriptions. It is also possible to have Non-members; these are a new User Type which allows you to add user accounts to the site who can be attributed to content and events, but who are not full site members; it is not necessary to enter in elements such as emails and passwords for non-members. Privacy has also been evolved so that users designated as Private no longer appear in any of the public member listings except to the users themselves and to community moderators. It is now possible to suspend user syncing, this is especially important where some community members ‘over share’. Users can now also be unsubscribed from all messages and notifications and blocked from receiving them.

Who’s Online - can now be set to display all users, whether or not they have participated in the site. I can also be set to just display members of a specific Security Group, or members who are logged in on Team Time.

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

Fixes are elements which didn’t work as well as they should, and have now been made to work better. Minor enhancements provide subtle improvements that most people won’t notice, but which nonetheless improve on the overall Affino experience.

Accounts

Affino Updater

Applications Bar

Archiving

Articles / Article List DE / Article Import

Auto Related Content DE

Badge Highlights DE

Blogs

Button DE

Cacheing

Campaigns / Campaign Analysis / Campaign Themes / Campaign Banner Display

Catalogue Items / Catalogue Import

Checkout

Channels

Competitions / Competition Analysis

Contacts

Control Centre / Control Login

Conversion Events

Countdown DE

Coupons

Removed

No elements removed in this release, but expect quite a few to be trimmed in Affino 7.5.

Integration Updates

These are integrations which have had essential maintenance in this release, if you rely on any of them then you’ll want to update at the earliest opportunity:

Brightcove

Broadbean

Dropbox

Facebook

Salesforce.com

Twitter

YouTube

Component Changes

Affino benefits from using some great frameworks, here are the updates we’ve rolled out for these frameworks in this release:

JQuery updated to 1.8.3

JQueryUI updated to 1.9.2

HighCharts updated to 3.0.1

TinyMCE updated to 3.5.8

The Interest Graph

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:10:00 +0000

There’s a lot of buzz going around on the Interest Graph. The Wikipedia definition is:

"The Interest Graph refers to the specific and varied interests that form one’s personal identity, and the attempt to connect people based on those interests."

For us at Comrz, the Interest Graph is not just about the people connections (although that is important). It’s also about presenting users with the most relevant white papers, networking and purchasing opportunities. It’s about showing them the best videos and and the most relevant ads.

It’s also about making sure that people only get the messages they will actually be interested in, and that the content of the messages is focused and relevant.

The Unified User Account

The single most important factor in building up an accurate interest graph on your users is for them to have a unified user account. It means that all the interests are collated against a single user profile which is then used throughout your engagement with your customers.

The second most important element is to use the profile data you have to provide the highest level of personalisation throughout all your customer interactions. That engagement can be online, via messages, or even direct via telesales.

If you have a traditional online setup you will be running multiple different touch point solutions with your customers, everything from your CMS / Blog solution, networking / community solution, through to your ecommerce / shopping cart, campaign service, analytics services, forum software, survey software and much more. It’s essential that you integrate these all with your centralised user accounts. It is also just as important that you integrate back into the respective solutions so that you can act on these interests.

Affino does all of this with just a bit of setup.

Overt and Covert Profiling

Everyone has some interests, some more than others, but for most companies and websites only a subset is going to be relevant. It’s essential to identify these and shape your proposition and community around them. It’s also important to look at what other interests your community brings with them.

Affino’s Interest profiling starts with topics and keywords, user profiles, and conversion events. Topics define the set of interests which your site is targeting. They’re hierarchical so you can refine the targeting as far as makes sense. On small targeted sites it could only be a dozen terms, and thousands for large online communities and stores.

User Profiles and in particular demographic profiling allows your users and your team to build up a clear picture of your member’s interests. You can set up completion profiles to encourage users to fill these out (as LinkedIn does), and you can use conversion events to automatically identify users’ interests.

360 Degree Targeting

Most Interest Graphing solutions focus on identifying users interests, normally by providing integration APIs to connect into a myriad of tools. Typically these systems also have emailing / campaign banner systems attached which target users based on ther interests. They do tend though to be one-way, i.e. the information just goes in.

Affino takes this a lot further. Since Affino can deliver all the content, media, networking, campaigns, messaging and commercial elements online, it can shape the delivery based on user’s interests. At the heart of this are Recommendations, which can be placed throughout every page, and within newsletter messages. Recommendations in Affino cover everything from Jobs and contacts, through to event, blogs, products, videos and other media.

Every Affino release sees improved recommendations. Affno 7.1 sees more rotation, more calls to action, improved recommenation filters (so users aren’t recommended items they’ve already purchased or jobs they’re applied for).

Targeted Campaigns

When running an interest-focused campaign, it’s essential that it be as complete and consistent as possible. Too often campaigns fall down somewhere along the way. Since Affino can handle everything from the initial message send and banner displays, through to the promotional pages, signup and checkout it means that the path is much more likely to be smooth and without issues.

Behind the scenes, all content, campaigns, messags etc. can be marked up with Topics. These can in turn easily be matched with users’ interests. Topics can be used to auto-generate landing pages based on topics / interests. Campaigns and Messages can now also be filtered based on interests (Affino 7.1).

Targeted Leads

A big step forward in Affino 7.1 is that it is now much easier to use interests to drive lead generation. The Automated Customer Ladder can use conversion events to automatically assign topics / interests to users based on their activity. The events can also be used to trigger secondary events whereby sales / marketing team members can be notified of the leads, and can then apply additional filters on them.

Automation is Key

One of the most important elements for targeting interests is to make sure that you do it consistently, that it is fully personalised, and ideally with a high frequency, triggered by specific acts that will interest your customer base.

All of the profiling, content tagging, conversion events, newletters, campaigns and promotions can be set up to run automatically. That means zero effort on the live site, except where you’re evolving and testing futher targeting.

Affino allows you to trigger notifications based on all kinds of activities (and inactivity). It allows the notifications to be highly personalised, and filtered and targeted based on the users’ interests. It also does this all automatically based on the rules you define.

If you want to know more about how to fully embrace the interest graph then get in touch.

10 Steps Forward for Affino 7.1

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:09:00 +0000

The upcoming Affino 7.1 release is another significant step forward for Affino. It will see completely new search and messaging engines, greatly improves sales and marketing automation, much more usable relationship management, much improved stats and reporting, refined mobile experience, and smaller pages.

All of these key improvements aren’t simply incremental, they are dramatically better.

New Site Search Engine

Site Searches will be much faster and much more capable. You’ll be able to use conditional OR and NOT searches, check for word proximity, similar searches, fuzzy searches, range searches and phrase searches. Even better, almost everything will be indexed in near-real-time.

Messaging v2

We’re reworking the entire messaging system, so it will be much more capable, run powerful message campaigns, act as auto-responder, with multiple message type options including SMS. We’re also further introducing a completely new level of message campaign analysis.

Sales and Marketing Automation

Affino 7.1 has greatly improved sales and marketing automation, with a much improved customer ladder, reports and charts. This is a big deal for online sales, e.g. messaging a sales person when a shopping basket fails, or if a person has filled out a form and watched a demo video.

Updated Stats

We’ve reworked the way we log / crunch all Affino’s stats to restore Affino’s ability to track things up to the last two years. This means significant improvements to most of the analysis screens. Not only that, but the Dashboards will be useful again.

Improved Relationships

Related Items have been massively upgraded, all ajax driven for instant selections with the ability sort relationships plus create two way relationships instantly.

Smaller Pages

We’re crunching down the pages, removing a lot of the tables, shifting more to CSS, and building compression directly into Affino. This means even faster pages and the ability for your sites to serve more pages within each hosting band.

More Mobile

Improved mobile Control Centre, and significantly improved mobile interfaces on the live sites.

Improved SEO Management

We’ll be introducing some new SEO power tools for SEO pros to make tagging up an Affino site that much easier.

More Social

Updated Invite system so it can pull in friends / contacts from key social networks, notify of new friends joining and much more.

Even More Usable and Productive

We’re implementing another 100 or so important usability and productivity improvements in Affino 7.1. These will make many tasks significantly faster and easier.

Smooth Runnings

Affino 7 was a major new platform, and inevitably there were a number of issues that arose. Most were resolved in December shortly after release in the Affino 7.0.1 version. We’re looking to have fixed nearly every reported Affino 7 bug in 7.1.

It’s hard to stress just how much better Affino will be in 7.1, but we’re sure you will all notice the difference.

Mobile is a Game Changer for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:22:00 +0000

The above screen capture tells you everything you need to know about why it’s no longer enough to be in the top 10 on Google, as the world goes mobile. You now get 10 times as many referrals by being No.1 than you do by being number 2, and that ratio gets bigger by each position down the ranking.

66% of Search Screen is Paid-for

It also highlights the immense power that Google now has with search placements, when two out of the three top search results above the fold on mobile are now paid-for. There’s no way that Google can justify taking up so much of the screen space on mobile with paid for listings, and it goes a long way towards devaluing the SEO efforts that millions of companies are investing in.

What’s interesting is that if you use Google’s own search app on the iPhone you typically only get one ad shown, and you get a completely different set of results than if you use the main iPhone Web search. What is noticeable that Google sites, such as YouTube videos rank much higher on the Google app search results than they do in the general web search results. It means that in the app 80% of the initial screen is either paid for, or a Google property.

Winner Takes All

The world of search engine optimisation has entered an era where the winner takes all, where being the top ranked entry now can cost a factor more than it did previously, and where different entry points to the Google search engine give different results. It also means that increasingly the way to get the top rankings is to engage fully with all of Googles initiatives, whatever the cost.

The Alternatives

It also means that many companies will get a higher rate of return when investing in social engagement, more direct online sales and smart affiliations.

Google has to be very careful with how it evolves the paid-for search marketing over the next couple of years, or it could see a big dip in its earnings as companies no longer try to compete in the winner takes all gamble that is Google Search.

Better Relationships

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Affino is named after affinity, and it’s ability to bring together content, products, people, media, events and communications. These are the core elements essential to any online business. We have many great elements in Affino for showcasing and recommending relevant related items, and are now making it much easier to make those connections.

Even though it is possible to make all the relationships work, it has definitely not been as productive as it could be. That all changes in the next release.

Related Items is getting a big update in Affino 7.1. There are three key elements to the update, the first being the relating screens (see above), the second is smarter deleting and sorting of the related items, the the third is the ability to change the order in which related elements are displayed, e.g. have related Members above related Articles.

Smarter Selections

If you look at the screen above you’ll see five key improvements which add up to a lot of saved time for editors who spend much of their day publishing new content and pulling in the best matching content.

Smarter Search - Related Items now have the new search bar, with the most requested filtering options.
Smarter Sort - default the items are always listed reverse chronologically and you can click the column headers to change the sorting as required
Two-way Relationships - it is now possible to related both ways, instantly, simply by clicking on the relevant linking options. No need to track down the other item and link back separately
Pop-up Lookup - you can view any item you wish to confirm prior to relating, it will simply open up in a new tab
No More Paging - you no longer lose sight of the items you’ve related, simply click the more link to display further options

Order Order

Relating content and people can be a tricky process, especially where seniority is involved. Relating products and accessories, when done right, can have a significant impact on conversion rates (i.e. having the latest or most popular product highlighted first). Relating Events in the correct sequence is key to continued engagement. Relating programmes and other media in order make all the difference.

So in Affino 7.1 you will be able to select the order within each category, e.g. products, articles, media, and be able to select the order in which each category is displayed.

When coupled with all the other highlights elements such as the Auto-Related Items, Recommendations, Listings, Carousels, Recently Viewed Products etc. as a site owner you now have the ability to tailor how you bring content together with unprecedented precision.

And the Rest

We’re not stopping with Related Items, we’re going to be improving all the popup selectors over the coming weeks to make them as effective as possible. Starting with the media upload / selector.

Key Ecommerce Trends for 2013

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:24:00 +0000

Ecommerce is speeding up, and no one is safe if they’re not fully committed to meeting the evolving market head on. 2013 will see big winners and losers as more shopping goes digital.

Here are some of the key trends for the coming year.

Personalisation

Nothing comes close in importance to being able to tailor the buying experience for each and every one of the shoppers who comes to you, whether it’s online, on mobile devices, kiosks, in-store or via television.

The starting point for personalisation is the unified user account. This means offering a single login for the user across all devices, with instant syncing of user data across all different sales interfaces, or preferably using a single client-facing commercial engine across all platforms.

Product listings, product searches, recommendations, emailers and community engagement should all be tailored to the individual user. This should be done on recently viewed products, identified interests, and increasingly by using game mechanics to automatically identify and guide users’ buying preferences.

Cloud

The economics, scale and distribution of Cloud setups mean that companies must embrace cloud services in 2013. Even though there are still occasional headline stories on cloud provider down-time, cloud services are maturing rapidly, and in real-world scenarios downtime is becoming increasingly rare.

On the other hand the cloud costs keep on coming down, and the service levels are rising dramatically each year. It means the cost / performance / scale / reliability equation has now firmly swung in favour of cloud setups rather than in-house infrastructure for ecommerce.

Being able to deliver a rapid response, at scale, globally, is best delivered via cloud platforms. Solutions such as Scalr mean that it is now possible to automatically scale up and down your infrastructure. This means that you only pay for what you use, and can run much fewer servers as a baseline, even within the same day as demand scales up and down. It also means that you can address peak demand with the best response times.

Using Content Delivery Networks means that your media and static files are delivered locally, globally, with much faster response times. Using cloud-based storage networks with offsite backup networks means you dramatically lower the possibility of any data loss.

All in all, the benefits of of running your infrastructure on the cloud are now unavoidable.

Responsive Design (Mobile First)

The key trend for 2013 is the shift to mobile. Many research groups, blogs and commentators are estimating that 50% of digital sales will be done on mobile devices by December 2013. It may not be universal across all industries that the level will be that high, but it is likely to affect a significant number of sectors.

This means that companies need to shift to ‘Mobile First’ thinking, where the mobile experience is prioritised above all others.

The best way to address the growing Phone / Tablet market will be to develop responsive web interfaces. Most users will not download apps simply to purchase from every store they wish to buy from. Instead, purchases from the majority of online stores will be via the mobile / tablet browser. This is not to say that developing mobile store apps won’t be important, for most companies the priority should be the mobile web.

Responsive Page Design means that the web page automatically adapts to the device being used. Not only that, it adapts depending on if the device is being held in landscape or portrait orientation, providing the best selling interface throughout.

Responsive Design requires a different way of thinking to traditional web design, so needs to be approached in a fresh manner by organisations.

Orienting around Digital

Traditional retailers need to firmly shift their focus towards digital. Customers should be able to have a seamless buying experience wherever they are. Mobile sites, apps and in-store terminals should make it possible for users to buy anywhere, pick up anywhere, check stock levels anywhere and have goods delivered where they need them.

High Street stores can be great assets, but they’re too often run independently of the digital retail side. This means that increasingly customers are ignoring the benefits of having a store nearby and simply ordering online, often from a competitor.

Digital, used right, gives companies the unprecedented ability to get to know their customers, and to service them effectively. When that doesn’t happen, it lowers the overall quality of service customers now expect. The bar has been raised and companies must raise their game to meet expectations.

Integrated Campaigns

Too often commercial activities are run as a series of fiefdoms within companies, especially larger retailers. This issue is especially acute for traditional retailers, and distributors. The reality is that frequently what makes a retailer or distributor successful through their traditional channels is the opposite of what is required through digital channels.

Speed, timing and uniqueness are more important for digital commerce than traditional retail. Equally important is to have integrated campaigns. This means single seamless campaigns across retail points of presence, web and mobile, social and affiliate stores.

It means that when you’re running a promotion staff in-store and online are aware of it. It means maximising exposure and the benefit of the campaigns, and it means having a consistent tone of voice throughout.

For this all to work, it is important to have the correct management and workflows in place. It is essential that the fast elements (digital) work with the slower elements (retail stores), and that incentives are aligned throughout the organisation so that it is in everyone’s interest to make the campaigns work.

Affino’s Scorecard

Where it comes to personalisation, then Affino excels and the experience is contiuously improving. The integrated nature of Affino, the way it can act as a hub for social, commercial and media content, and all the personalisation and recommendation capabilities mean that Affino really stands out when it comes to personalistion.

It’s been four years since we moved Affino Serivices on to the cloud and it is now highly optimised to maximize the benefits of cloud architectures. The big platform upgrades we did with the move to Affino 7 mean that this year we will be able to embrace cloud services further for auto-scaling, more powerful searches, video transcoding and much more.

Responsive Design is the area which needs the most work in Affino, and is where we will putting in most of the effort over 2013. We have big plans (which are already underway) in this area so stay tuned.

There’s also work to be done on Affino for using it in retail stores, given Affino’s digital store background, however Affino’s ability to deliver a great iPad / Tablet experience, and the trend for stores to integrate iPads into their in-store customer experience means that this gap is a lot smaller than it used to be.

Affino’s ability to deliver campain driven ecommerce, and also excel at SEO, PPC and Social Commerce means that Affino can deliver on integrated campaigns in a way that few platforms can match. The ever improving Affino Webservice API means that it offers extensive real-time integration can be one on everything from content, products, event and media through to unified logins and user accounts.

If you want to know more about how best to react to the Top Ecommerce Trends, and are looking for a platform to achieve your goals, then contact us using any of the many options availble.

Affino 2013 Priorities

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 03:16:00 +0000

2013 is going to be all about being Responsive, so expect priorities to be very fluid to meet the ever evolving needs of the Affino community. One overwhelming priority we will have for 2013 will be Responsive Design. We’re going to be introducing Responsive Skins which means that pages will transform to fit any device, however they are turned.

The second Responsive element is that in 2013 we are going to turbo-charge Affino’s evolution. The past years have required a great deal of effort to evolve Affino to work on mobile and tablet devices; to become super-scalable and reliable; to run on the latest cloud-based architectures; and to have a new 21st Century management interface. All of those are now at highly evolved states.

It means that the Comrz team can now focus on rounding out Affino Social and Commercial platforms; do much deeper integration with the leading Social communities; evolve key communication and promotion aspects such as direct and real-time messaging, and a new approach to A/B and Multi-variate testing.

Below are many of the key challenges we will be tackling during the course of 2013. Expect the most productive Social Commerce platform to become even more so.

Responsive Design

We will be introducing Responsive Skins to Affino in the first half of 2013. Responsive Skins will mean that Affino pages will automatically re-organise themselves to provide the best experience whatever form-factor of device is being used to navigate the pages. This will affect how everything is displayed on Affino sites and is the major undertaking for the year.

As part of the process, the new Skins will be light-weight, fully CSS-based and Affino will have built-in code compression to minimise the page size.

Usability and Learnability

We will continue the major initiative to make Affino as learnable and usable as possible. This was what we spent most of 2012 on, and Affino is now much more usable than ever before. Key initiatives include new Setup Wizards, Control Centre Zone filters, and the new Media v3 management interfaces.

Continuing from last year we expect to make hundreds of further usability improvements throughout the course of the year and have already wrapped up some great ones for Affino 7.1.

Publishing

Relating content becomes dramatically easier in Affino 7.1 with one-click relating, direct access from the App Bar, two-way relationships, and new search and sort options on related items. We will be doing similar big improvements throughout Affino’s publishing interfaces so that the publishing experience will be second to none.

Media

We’re going to introduce the Media Centre v3 during 2013 which will be fully browser native. it means all the media management, players and Design Elements can be used on any device.

Promotion

Affino’s Promotion Centre will see big updates to the key Messaging and Customer Ladder elements. These will dramatically improve your Sales and Marketing Automation effectiveness. It’s hard to understate just how significant the improvements will be since they will absolutley market leading in their scope.

SEO will be greatly improved with deeper Google Webmaster Tools integration, as well as the roll-out of Schema Org support. We will also be rolling out a great new approach to A/B testing.

Social

Affino invites will make a big step forward with deep integrations to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail for highly Social engagement. New Real-time chat interfaces will greatly improve the direct-sales and support abilities in Affino and bring you closer to your customers.

2013 also sees the introduction of Newsfeeds and the new Social Profiles in Affino which will be dramatically improved on what is there today.

Commerce

Our biggest focus commercially in 2013 will be on Mobile Optimised Stores. Our aim will be to make Affino a market leading platform form mobile selling, and we’re already a long way down the road with this.

We will be doing a great deal to round out Affino’s other ecommerce capabilities with new Store Credits, Gift Wrapping, Coupon options and Bulk Catalogue item editor. Expect your online store management to take another big leap forward.

Integration

We’ll continue to broaden and deepen Affino’s integration with the leading communities and platforms. 2013 will see a major focus on deeper Social and Commerce integration. The aim will be to improve Affino’s ability to act as a Social Hub, whilst making for much more engaging communities.

We will also be greatly improving the ecommerce integration with the leading online ecommerce hubs, including Amazon and eBay. Of course we will maintain Affino’s existing 60+ integrations with many becoming more vital and useful over the course of the year.

Analysis

2013 sees the introduction of Affino’s Dashboard v2. This will be a fully native dashboard, and will do everything that the v1 Flash dashboard did, but at scale, and with great new export / import / reporting capabilities to match.

We will continue to evolve all the existing Analysis Centres and adding compelling new ones such as Message Campaign Analysis.

Enterprise

Finally, there will be a big push to make Affino more Enterprise grade with powerful Auto-scaling capabilities for the High Performance sites. We will also be introducing new management and security systems so that you will have more insight into exactly what’s happening on your Affino site.

A big push will also come with making the most of the new Affino Cloud Architecture which will allow us to optimise and evolve many core systems for greatly improved scale and performance. It means we will be able to reap the benefits of all the work we did last year to make Affino work on the latest generation software and hardware.

It’s going to be another exciting year, and as an Affino user you can expect your day-to-day experience to get a whole lot better with every release during the course of the year. For those selling, expect big improvements in your conversion rates, and for the commercial community builders expect far more engaged and vibrant communities.

Top 10 Affino Developments in 2012

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:12:00 +0000

I’ve been tweaking this list for a few days now, there are so many improvements in Affino over the past year. We completed a record-breaking 1,580 projects over 6 releases, and brought out Affino 7 during the course of the year.

1) Productivity

In 2012 our top focus was to make each and every Affino user as productive as possible. Users will now find that no matter what they do, it will be faster, more intuitive and will simply work.

We spent a lot of time meeting with, observing, and listening to the Affino community over the course of the year and have made hundreds of improvements to address pain-points and repetitive tasks. Anyone using Affino 7 will find that things get done much faster than ever before.

2) Control Centre Update

Every aspect of the Control Centre has been re-imagined, from direct URL access to all screens, through to smart sorting of all the Control Centres to show you what you have / haven’t worked on.

This meant going over each and every management screen in Affino and making it as effective as possible. Listing screens now all have smart searches and filters, they have smart links and better sorting. View screens have many more in-context lookups, have been simplified, and are easier to find. Edit screens have new instant lookups, improved help and improved feedback and previews.

3) Design Centre Update

The new HTML-based Design Centre has been a major undertaking. It’s already more intuitive than the previous one, and will be evolving rapidly over the year ahead. It’s a great new foundation for all the improvements we’re going to be doing on Responsive design.

4) Mobile / Tablet New

Affino’s newly mobile / tablet optimised Control Centre is a major step forward in making everything about Affino mobile and touch friendly. Affino now also has much improved Viewport support and better mobile Skins, and we have a great platform for moving ahead towards a Responsive world.

5) Checkout Update

The new Checkout was a project eight months in the making. To achieve it we re-wrote all the ecommerce engines from the ground-up. We also greatly improved and simplified the store management to make it much easier and more approachable for beginners.

6) Newsletter / Messaging Update

Affino has greatly improved messaging all round. Every aspect of how messages are generated, sent, personalised, tracked, bounce-handled, managed and viewed have been improved.

7) Customer Ladder Update

The new Customer Ladder Analysis centre delivers a far more effective experience, surfacing new leads, community leaders and productive members of the team. New incentives, Conversion Event chaining and triggers mean that you can now create advanced automated marketing workflows and responders.

8) Social CRM Update

Affino’s Social CRM had some important new capabilities including Project, Contract and Opportunity management. It also has greatly improved Contact and Account management. When combined with the automation of the Customer Ladder and Lead Generation tools, Affino is now a great online B to B sales tool.

9) Styling Update

Affino pages can be styled much more effectively than before as a result of the dozens of improvements we’ve made over the course of the year. All the Design Elements had a make-over. Design Styles are far more capable, especially for font styling. Design Menus have smarter layouts, and Forms have been re-styled so they look great on whatever device.

10) Recruitment Update

Affino’s Recruitment engine has been majorly evolved during the course of the year. It can now handle multiple territories; integrates with Broadbean and Bullhorn. It has greatly improved job matching and recommendations, along with CV and member management.

For the full breakdown of the top new features of 2012 see the Mindmap below.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year from the team @ Comrz

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:37:00 +0000

What a year 2012 has been, and at the end of it all it’s still here. We’ve played our first tunes on Mars; started blowing up tumours with virus payloads; had huge parties in London and a bunch of athletes turned up to join in; and spent more time looking at screens than at any point in human history. We’ve also seen the completely re-designed iPad and iPhone, who knew, along with the latest and greatest in Android and Windows Modern.

Affino has had a similarly exciting ride on to mobiles and tablets. A complete makeover, both slimmed down and way more capable. The average Affino site has seen big growth over the year, with the typical Affino site growing between 200% and 400% during the course of the past 12 months.

It’s all coming to a glorious end, and we hope you all have a great festive season and are ready for an even more exciting 2013. We’ll be doing our full wrap-up of the year, and goals for 2013 during the break so keep your eyes out for some laid-back reading.

See you in 2013.

What's New in Affino 7 - Video Guide

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:59:00 +0000

If you want a closer sit-back look at Affino then here’s a video guide to some of the great new features in Affino 7.

It’s quite detailed, so grab a cup of tea first.

We’ll make shorter guides in the near future. Meanwhile we’ve updated all the Control Centre Video Guides to showcase Affino 7 so you can see the latest and greatest directly from your Affino Control Centre.

Let us know what you think.

Multi-format Affino 7 - Desktop, Laptop, Tablet and Mobile

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 10:05:00 +0000

For the first time, Affino runs great on mobiles and tablets. It’s been a long-term project we’ve been working on for the past two years, and it will be a year or so until everything is likely to be perfect across all mobile platforms.

For anyone working in mobile, it’s a minefield, and lots of decisions have to be made along the way. I’ve posted previously about how under-developed mobile browsers are, but that has largely changed in the past year. For the most part they’re now great, in particular Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android.

With Affino 7 out initial target devices are the latest generation IOS (iPhone / iPad) and Android (mobile / tablet) devices. Mobile browsers will continue to improve in their capabilities and standards support.

When we brought out the alpha version of our mobile tech last year we did all kinds of optimisations to work around limitations with iOS 4 / Android Browser. Apple and Google have since then updated their platforms a couple of times (4 in the case of Google) and the browsers are far better than before. A side effect of the updates though was that all of the work-arounds we did for earlier mobile browser versions were broken when those browsers were fixed.

It has lead us to a principle for our mobile platform development which is that we won’t code for mobile browser bugs, instead we will do our best to work around the issues, and if that is not possible then the expectation is that the mobile browsers will be fixed soon enough.

We’ve tested Affino 7 on a lot of mobile devices. Many different Android phones and tablets (most of the leading ones and all Nexus devices), half-a-dozen iOS variants from old iPhones to the latest iPods / iPads and iPhones. We have also tested Affino on Windows Phone 7 and the Kindle HD. Both WP7 and the Kindle have some minor issues, but these issues are platform specific and the expectation is that they will be solved by Microsoft / Amazon respectively.

In practice 90% of users and above should have a great experience using Affino on their mobiles, and now that we’ve completed the initial phase of mobile optimisation, we will be accelerating to roll out mobile optimisations throughout all Affino’s interfaces both on the Control and Display sides.

Affino 7 on Mobile in Video & Images

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 10:04:00 +0000

Affino 7 has a mobile optimised Control Centre. We’ve tuned the interfaces to be fast and usable on the mobile. No need to Zoom or scroll around, just what you need where you expect it.

Here are some of the key management interfaces you will be using on your mobile:

Mobile Control Centre

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7MobileControlCentre.PNG

Mobile Social Centre

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7SocialCentre.PNG

Mobile Control Navigation

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7MobileControlNavigation.PNG

Mobile Content Search

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7MobileControlSearch.PNG

Mobile Article Listing

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7ArticlesonMobile.PNG

Mobile View Screen

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7MobleViewScreen.PNG

Mobile Edit Screen

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/Affino7MobileEditScreen.PNG

We really like what we’ve done so far, but it’s just the start. We’ll be tuning all Affino’s interfaces so that they’ll be as great to use wherever you are, and whatever you’re trying to achieve.

Affino 7 Release

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:24:00 +0000

Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.

Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.

New Look Affino

We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.

http://content.comrz.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/377/ControlCentre7.png

Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.

Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element of your page design.

Although all aspects of Affino have been updated in this release, some have been updated more than others. Newsletters, Recruitment, Customer Ladder and the Social CRM all see significant updates.

The new Affino 7 platform will allow us to roll out many great enhancements over the coming months, which simply weren’t possible on the previous architecture. It also means that Affino’s development will now accelerate as we’re approaching the end of a two year project to modernise Affino to the latest standards in website development.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a major release which you will need a new licence key for. Prior to updating you should update to the latest Affino 6 release, then request an Affino 7 licence key. Because Affino 7 runs on an entirely new architecture it will be essential that you liaise with your account manager for the update, and be prepared to do a thorough review post upgrade.

Unlike all other Affino upgrades, the upgrade to Affino 7 takes time, in particular re-generating all the Design Objects. Therefore the update must be scheduled for Offpeak hours, or with an awareness that the upgrade will take some time if done during daylight hours.

Depending on the size of your Affino instance, the entire upgrade process can take a number of hours. This is a one-off to upgrade your Design Objects to the new format. In practice most of your pages will start serving perfectly immediately, however some will inevitably take a bit longer as Affino works though each Design Object in turn.

Once your site is updated, you should run through all the usual updates and do thorough testing of your site. Affino 7 also runs on a new cloud architecture so your account manager will need to organise that for you. Much has changed in this release in how Skins are generated, and how CSS is applied, so it is essential that you check everything, in particular Custom Templates thoroughly. You will need to clear your browser cache and cookies if you are a site admin, whilst regular users / members should not have any issues.

Key Enhancements

More Productive

Every single Control screen in Affino 7 is now a great deal more effective than before. It means users can now learn much faster how to manage Affino sites, we’ve slashed the learning curve for every task. Experienced users will also benefit greatly since we’ve taken the best elements we’ve been trialling on different parts of Affino over the past year, and have now rolled them out to every screen.

Each Control screen can be accessed directly by using a friendly URL, e.g. /control/social or /control/articles. It means you can easily remember (or let your browser remember) your most frequently used Control interfaces.

All the screens are now designed to flow so that you can always seamlessly navigate between all relevant elements you’re managing with a single click. You no longer have to know where everything is, you can simply click through to them as you need to since we’ve added direct links to all the listing, view and editing screens where you need them.

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We have rolled the new Control searches to almost all modules, so you can search and drill-down to the content and settings you need faster. Where necessary we have also re-organised the management screens and you will notice that in many places the Help is now more helpful.

We have made big changes as well to the App Bar which has been touch optimised and has a much more powerful Browse Mode. For the first time editors will be able to change the country, logged in / out status, and the type of device they are browsing from. This allows for greatly improved customer support and service.

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Another improvement is that Affino 7 is simply faster than any Affino release since Affino 1, especially on the Control side. This means everything gets done faster.

Tablets and Mobiles

Affino 7 has been greatly optimised to run on mobiles and tablets. The Control Centre has been optimised so that it works seamlessly on tablets and mobile devices. This means that you can manage you Affino sites on the go, wherever you are. iPhones, iPads and Android tablets will use the dedicated new Mobile Centre, whilst iPads have an updated full Control Centre experience.

Affino Skins now support the Viewport tag, and the mobile CSS optimised Skins have been further optimised for mobiles and tablets. Future Affino versions will be further optimised to be more adaptive / responsive / grid based.

New Architecture

Affino 7 now runs on a much more scalable, automated architecture. For the first time Affino will run on ColdFusion 10, Linux, Apache, Apache Tomcat (Java) and Scalr. There are too many benefits from moving to this architecture to list out, but the key ones are: more scalability, faster development, more reliability and more possibilities for automation. We will also continue so support Windows running the same setup, but without the auto-scaling offered by Scalr.

In some cases Affino 7 has moved forward 5 years in advance of where it was with platform support. A great deal of effort has gone into making the move, but the payback will be immense over the coming months as we roll out great new functionality to Affino which up until now simply has not been possible with the previous cloud architecture.

New Design Centre

Affino 7 has a new Design Centre. It will be instantly familiar to you when using it, but it has been almost completely rewritten to create a platform which we can rapidly evolve. There are many immediate benefits: it’s more intuitive, faster designs, better styling and faster Skin generation. We have also removed many of the inconsistencies. We’ve managed to retain all the elements which made the previous Design Centre great, whilst opening up many new possibilities for further improving the Design Centre.

Affino 7 has a new Object Designer. This looks and works similarly to the previous one, but is now completely browser based and no longer requires Flash to run. It means it is faster and more intuitive in daily use.

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Design Styles have improved CSS support. It is now possible to fully style fonts, with much more control over how they’re styled and a complete separation between Titles, Headings and Normal text. Affino now also allows you to completely customise

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It is now possible to secure any cell on the live page. This means that you can control access to all design elements in Affino 7, creating different page layouts from different user groups all within the same overall page design.

Also new are Sticky Highlight buttons. These can be set to always stay on the screen when scrolling down. When you mouse-over you can set for the menus and buttons to stand out and the rest of the screen to fade out.

Added together, you can have much better looking sites than before. This release also means that Template Design is now a big step closer for Affino since we’ve developed most of the tech which will make it possible.

Recruitment

Affino’s Recruitment platform has been evolved a great deal in Affino 7. We have updated how jobs can be added; how they’re listed; how candidates can register; how jobs are pulled in from Broadbean, and much more. All these enhancements make it easier for new candidates to join, and for consultants to manage their jobs.

It is now possible to run multiple recruitment sites targeting different regions for the first time. Affino now handles Region Groups, i.e. South East / South West which include multiple regions, e.g. Counties / States. When coupled with the new Salary Management means it is now possible to completely tailor the jobs boards for each region.

Other enhancements include: Recommended Jobs now prioritise promoted jobs, i.e. those with brand logos; most Recruitment Brief (job) attributes are no longer required; some attributes changed to text to allow for 3rd party integration including start date and duration; job titles can be defined by sector; new Job Seeker option so that non-candidates don’t have to fill out such extensive profiles; CV management is also improved; it is now possible to map multiple consultants on to each recruitment sector; Affino now highlights similar jobs when looking at any specific job.

Other Enhancements

Analytics - the Analysis Control Centre has seen some of the biggest updates in this release, with major improvements of the Customer Ladder Analysis, Newsletter Analysis and the new Opportunities Analysis screens. Affino also has greatly improved accuracy with Affino Analytics. Improved Bot and Denial of Services detection, which means that Affino statistics now more accurately represent real world usage. Note that your Affino statistics will be considerably lower than before in many cases. Note also that they are now more accurate than Google Analytics in most scenarios.

Article List DE - it is now possible to select a Content Duration so that you can filter to only display the most recent content. This is especially useful for automated Newsletters where you just want to send stories which are new for the latest period.

Bot Handling - improved IP tracking of malicious and non-compliant bots

Broadbean Integration - Affino now integrates with the Aplitrack API for returning applicant data.

Campaigns - new Guest creative preview means you can now preview creatives for both guests and logged in members. This is essential when using custom creative scripts to ensure they work reliably

Carousels - new unified approach means that all the Carousels have all the great new consistent look and feel throughout

Checkout - new extended sessions for users when checking out, to smooth the checkout process, especially when it’s taking the use a long time to complete it

Cookie Bar - no longer has animation effect by default, can be turned on as required, less obtrusive now

Customer Ladder - is it now possible to chain Conversion Events together, i.e. one can trigger others off with delayed actions. This allows you for example to set up progressive access to new content on the site by incrementally adding users to new security groups. At the same time you can trigger messages to the users to motivate them to further engage.

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Design Images - new interface for viewing the images

Feature Scroller - new option to allow images to be displayed from secured media libraries, so there is no longer a need to have the media publicly accessible; feature images are loaded up sequentially so the first one loads up fast

Forums - reposting now includes media as well as text; it is possible to set forum posts as the Answer right from the Thread screens; improved replying; URLs automatically shortened on the display so that forum pages no longer break.

Gravatar Integration - Affino now automatically looks up users Gravatars on registration and user import

Help - inline help is improved throughout Affino. More still to be done, but now much more descriptive in many scenarios.

Imports - further checks and notices on imports to help identify any problems with the data being imported

Lead Generation - improved lead listing and export

Mac OSX Compatibility - improved handling of CSV imports

Members - improved member search

Newsletters - there have been many key improvements to Newsletters including: new Blocked list management whereby users can permanently block themselves from being added to newsletters; full tracking of message sends and reads; improved analytics; improved message formatting; improvements in message content; fortnightly message scheduling; newsletter subscription notices have an improved look, in fact there are many improvements to the newsletter sign-up process; greatly improved newsletter management

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Orders - orders are no longer deleted, which means that all failed orders are now logged permanently

Opportunity Pipelining - new Opportunity management to go with the existing Contract management. It allows you to manage your opportunity pipeline and provides basic opportunity analytics. When combined with the Contact and Account management, and Media management, it is the core of a simple but effective CRM. At some point this will be further integrated into the automated Lead generation and Store.

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Product Search - numerous usability and styling enhancements including: clear all option now resets the entire search; search URL improved for easier sharing; search filters are only shown if there are relevant options; filters are now remembered better when drilling down into the search results; it is no longer possible to set both price sliders to the same value; excluded words list now also works on the Product Search, resulting in much faster searches; new Class assigned to the Clear All option, and new character limit options on the search results; it is also possible now to show a border around each listed item, and to set the height at which the product panels are

Workflows - publishing workflows now apply to content which is pulled in on incoming feeds. This allows monitoring of content pulled in from external sources

User Export - Member Type added as a new export filter

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

All Management Screens are enhanced so aren’t mentioned below as is normally done. Instead listed are the elements which have had key fixes or minor enhancements on the display-side.

Article Paging

Auto-links

Blogs

Button DE

Campaigns

Carousels

Catalogue Items Import

Checkout

Comments and Ratings

Community Tools

Conversion Events

Cookie Policy

Coupons and Discounts

CVs

Dynamic Forms

Ecards

Email Addresses

Events

FAQs

Feed Listing DE

Forums

Groups

Incoming Feeds

Invites

Leads

Main Menu

Media Items

Newsletters

Online Directory

Product Search

Public Profiles / Profile Completion

Recruitment

Registration

Integration Updates

These are integrations which have had essential maintenance in this release:

Broadbean

Facebook

Gravatar

Google Merchant Centre

Twitter

User

Ztorm

Component Changes

Affino benefits from using some great frameworks, here are the updates we’ve rolled out for these frameworks in this release:

JQuery updated to 1.8.21

JQueryUI updated to 1.8.23

HighCharts updated to 2.3.3

TinyMCE updated to v3.5.7

What’s Coming Next

As with all releases there were some elements we really wanted in Affino 7.0, but we’ve had to draw the line somewhere. These will now be coming in Affino 7.x including: improved popup selectors, the new Media uploader, new Dashboard, new Social platform and new Search engine. We’ll also continue to evolve the Mobile interfaces quickly and complete the migration from Flash for the remaining few elements.