Comrz Social Commerce Blog

Affino 6.0.2 Release

markus@comrz.com — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:05:00 +0000

This is a minor bug-fix and enhancement release for Affino 6.0. It solves key issues with newsletter scheduling and a number of critical issues with other Affino elements. There is also a small number of minor improvements.

More significantly this release solves the remainder of the initial issues with Affino 6.0. We will continue to monitor any issues as they come in and may do another release in two weeks if required.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a minor release and there should be minimal impact. You will need to read through the release notes for Affino 6.0 if you’re updating from a previous release.

It is recommended that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update.

Enhancements

Badges Highlights Design Element – added new display modes so you can chose whether to display the latest activity per user, per activity, or per user per activity. Basically you can show everything your users are doing or just the latest things.

Catalogue Items – copying a product also copies the associated Catalogue Item, much simpler

Comments and Ratings – it is now possible to delete and display a moderated message, or simply to delete and remove

Detailed Standard Section – new layout options for defining fixed height rows and alternating row colours

Micro Blogging / Status Updates – prevent ‘twitter spam’ by preventing immediate duplicate content, i.e. users can’t post the same thing twice in a row.

Fixes

Application Bar – colours now hard-coded so as not to be affected by page styles

Campaign Analytics – fixed Campaign ordering so that campaigns are now correctly sorted depending on the column selected

Content Subscriptions / Campaigns – improved the way campaigns are counted in Content Subscriptions.

Design Objects – fixed issues with previewing Design Objects

Design Style – it is now possible to delete Design Styles

Documents – no longer breaks when paging through the documents listing

Dynamic Forms – fixed issue with blank line spacing

Dynamic Menus – menus no longer ‘jumpy’, won’t open many times in a row if you casually mouse-over the Smart Image

eCards – fixed broken link issue

Embedded Links – related channel links now correct

eTests – fixed issue causing eTests to break

Groups – fixed link issue with group invites

Highlights Scroller DE – now works reliably in the vertical view

Login DE – fixed styling issues

Media Library – fixed issues with the Artwork Presentation

Newsletters – fixed critical scheduling issue which was preventing some newsletters from being sent

Recommendations DE – fixed character issues and no longer recommend existing friends (or yourself)

Shopping Basket DE – price colour now taken from the Design Style

Social Connectors – now work for cross-zone users

Templates – Review Presentation Style bold title issue fixed

Affino 6 Release

markus@comrz.com — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:12:00 +0000

Affino 6 is the culmination of fifteen years effort to improve customer engagement online. It is the realisation of a key goal we have had since the outset to provide the tools to automate online sales and customer engagement. Affino 6 introduces the Automated Affino Customer Ladder and Social Gaming Engine, which not only provides great insight into your store and community but also automates online incentives in a highly effective manner.

eCommerce Hub

Affino Catalogues now integrate with two of the key eCommerce destinations namely eBay and Google Merchant Centre / Google Shopping. These provide great platforms for extending your online store and are a key milestone in Affino’s evolution as a Social Commerce Hub running at the centre of all your promotion, social and commercial initiative online. We’ve also rolled out deeper integration with PayPal to allow for onsite payments.

Over 300 Updates

In total Affino 6 follows the roll-out of over 300 enhancement projects. Some of these are minor usability fixes, but many are major projects with dozens of enhancements each. For more insight into all of these, see the headline features and detailed release notes below.

More Social Media

On the media side Affino now integrates with Ooyala and Wowza / Amazon EC2 for improved video delivery (it also now has a HTML 5 video player and supporting H.264, WebM and Ogg Theora and YouTube). For social music, the Affino media library now integrates directly with SoundCloud which allows users to freely upload MP3 tracks and remixes.

Facebook Open Graph

The key Social integration in this release is Affino’s full embrace of the Facebook Open Graph. We’ve completely re-written the Meta Data created for each page, updating it to the latest standards for W3C Dublin Core and crucially including all the key Open Graph and Facebook Meta Data so that all Affino pages can become Facebook Pages and be listed in the Facebook search results. We’re also extended the Facebook and Twitter integration to Comments and the ability to have Facebook and Twitter connect buttons throughout Affino.

Upgrade Guidance

You will need a new Affino Licence Key to be able to upgrade to this release. Please post through the forums when you want to update and requesting a new licence key.

We’re not expecting any major issues with this release, but the scale of this release means that issues may arise. We recommend that eCommerce sites wait one to two weeks before updating and check on Comrz.com for any guidance. We have already tested the release successfully on production community and commercial sites, but the range of configurations means that caution is recommended.

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 and Skin Update.

Key Enhancements

Customer Ladder and Gaming Engine

Affino is an engagement platform. It aims to service users in the most effective manner and to allow them to do what they want to achieve as easily as possible. To that end Affino allows site users to join, buy (and sell), publish, communicate, share, invite, extend and promote all their experiences.

Affino also provides extensive analysis of all this user behaviour with twenty different analysis tools, some which are highly specific such as Polls analysis, others which are more far reaching and include the eBusiness Dashboard. Affino further extends this by providing real-time integration with Google Analytics.

Affino is now being taken to a completely different level by introducing the Customer Ladder and Gaming Engine.

Customer Ladder

The Customer Ladder is the journey each and every site user takes from discovering you through to buying and becoming an advocate for you. It’s a process that traditionally websites are only able to cater to very loosely. Affino now enables you set up automated incentives and communication to help facilitate users in their engagement.

The Customer Ladder allows you to define all the key actions which your site users make and name them; associate them with Badges and points; define what part of the sales conversion process they are; and associate them with specific incentives and notifications. These are called Conversion Events.

Conversion Events

Conversion Events are the key which brings all the elements together. They can be both public and private. When they are public, members can see the badges they have been awarded. Equally some or all of the tracking can be kept private and used solely for automated incentives and analysis.

Conversion Events have key attributes which they monitor. Initially there are over twenty different activities which are captured, including: purchases, repeat purchases, purchases of specific items, content creation, uploading, sharing, communicating, promotions, form filling, and profile completion. Affino also monitors the frequency, e.g. the 10^th time an action is taken.

Significantly every Conversion Event can be assigned to a specific step in the Customer Ladder. It means that a buyer might be given a coupon to buy more, whereas a repeat customer might be given loyalty badge and additional unique incentives, and will be encouraged to become an advocate for the site / brand.

Automated Incentives

Automated Incentives happen in three key ways: users are issued Badges which give them status within the community; users can be given increased security privileges either temporarily or permanently. These allow for hundreds of potential incentives such as discounts, free memberships, and access to premium content and improved services.

Conversion Events can also trigger messages which can include specific incentives such as Coupon Codes, and calls to action.

Badges

Badges may seem simple devices, which they are, they are however a key element in the multi-billion dollar social gaming industry and are great motivators when used right. In Affino, Badges can be displayed on members’ profiles, and on the Badge Design Element. They are also accessed through My Information, which is also where all the available badges are highlighted.

Equally importantly the Who’s Online Design Element has a new filter so it is possible to filter members based on the badges they have achieved. This allows sites to showcase specific achievers and categories of users.

Analysis

Conversion Events are the major driver for the all new Customer Ladder Analysis Centre. This is a major new part of the Analysis Centre in Affino and provides immensely valuable insight into the growth and development of the community and customer base.

We will be rolling out incremental updates to the Customer Ladder over the coming weeks so check with the Affino Updater regularly to get the latest version and to get some great updates.

eCommerce v4

This release sees greatly improved backend order processing and checkouts in Affino. Affino now has Order Lists which can be created quickly and easily. They greatly improve the ability to batch process orders. The Order Lists can be views or printed off; used to generate invoices for despatch; print off packaging labels (Beta) and generate dispatch notifications which are sent to the customers to inform them that their order is on the way. We’ve also improved the management of product availability, e.g. available on pre-order etc.

Checkout

The Checkout has greatly improved error handling with full, detailed error descriptions and highlights on each field. It is now also possible to have a basic guide on the checkout screen. Users can now also sign up for a Newsletter directly within the checkout.

Company, Email and Telephone numbers are now automatically pre-filled in the address details. Continue Shopping now also works, even when the user clears out their shopping basket

Currency Geo-targeting

New Geo-targeting of currencies means that users are automatically presented with their local currency (as long as the pricing is available), i.e. Europeans presented with pricing in Euros, whilst US users presented with pricing in Dollars, based on their IP Address.

This release also sees the introduction of localised recommendations; initially these are based on placement areas, but will be evolved rapidly over the coming releases.

Google Base Integration v1

Your products can now be listed directly within the Google Shopping Search. Affino now integrates directly with the Google Merchant Centre and the real-time Google Base API for product listings. Most ecommerce solutions simply provide a product feed to Google, however, Affino products are listed as they are added to the catalogue and are removed when they are no longer available. Price changes are also updated immediately (although it can take a while for them to be reflected on all the Google servers).

The integration with Google Base is highly configurable using the new Google Base Profile. There are also new Product attributes which improve listings on Google Base, in particular new Brand and Barcode attributes. Currently Google Base only supports three language variations: English US, English UK and German.

eBay Integration (Beta)

EBay is one of the two leading centres of eCommerce in the Western world alongside Amazon. This Affino release sees the integration between Affino and eBay allowing catalogues to be seamlessly published and updated from Affino to eBay in real-time. This greatly reduces the maintenance costs involved with managing two discreet catalogues and greatly automates the sales process.

We’ve extended the Affino catalogues to handle eBay product categories and listing information. We’ve also added full barcode support for all the leading codes including EAN, UPC, ISBN and ASIN for future Amazon integrations. To facilitate the product listing Affino provides extensive reporting, highlighting exactly what needs to be done for each product to get the best listing on eBay and how much it costs. Affino also logs, notifies and reports all product listings and associated costs.

Limitations

EBay has literally thousands of options for selling products through their sites, they also target multiple languages and countries and indeed niches within countries. The initial release is purely aimed at eBay UK but can be extended easily as new country requirements come in. It is also focused purely on fixed-price sales with up-front payment and fixed shipping costs. Since up-front payments are required there is an additional requirement of having a PayPal account as eBay only allows PayPal when doing up-front payments.

We believe these are the best match for Affino users; however they will be extended as further requirements arise.

User Generated Ads v1

Members can now create their own ads as a premium service. The ads can be targeted based on members profiles, the interest topics and behaviour, e.g. female / 25 years / married (profile) interested in family (topic) joined a mums and tots group (behavioural).

The ads have much in common with Facebook user generated ads, but are geared more towards smaller communities. This means that the ads are provided as a premium service whereby users can create a number of ads as part of their membership.

The Live Editor has been extended to add in a new guide step so that the initial step takes users through a guide of how to create their ad. This is a universal extension to the Live Editor and means that guides can be added for all user generated content.

The ads can then be displayed throughout the site with the new Member Campaigns Placement Area DE. Users can manage their ads and have full access to campaign stats to see how well their adverts are doing.

Site owners can also monitor the success of the Member Campaigns using Member Campaign Analysis which showcases the top advertisers and Top Ads for given timeframes.

This is just one of a dozen new ways in which community owners can offer premium services to their community members.

New Media Processing

Affino now uses ImageMagick to generate images and thumbnails. This improves greatly the ability to handle JPGs and reduces greatly the issues users experience when uploading images. Affino now also has improved cache handling so that users can instantly see all their media items once they have been uploaded.

We’ve added a priority queue to media item generation. It means that user generated content is now prioritised above automated media imports such as incoming feeds and webservices. The end result is a better end-user experience.

My Messages v3

This release introduces attachments to My Messages (direct messaging), these allow users to share full documents directly with each other. Direct Messages can now also be made to be a premium offering so that users can now purchase message credits (in a similar way to LinkedIn). These can be at three different levels.

There is also greatly improved Message format, with a dozen new options for defining the message icons, making the experience much more usable.

HTML 5 Video Player (Beta)

Affino now supports video playback on the iDevices including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Not only does Affino support HTML 5 video for H.264 for Apple products, it also supports future Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers by supporting WebM and Ogg Theora. Affino goes further by also supporting the native YouTube and DailyMotion HTML 5 video players so that it seamlessly handles embedded video as well as native.

New Generation Comments & Ratings (Beta)

We have completely rewritten the Comments and Ratings for this release. They are now hierarchical, instantly updatable, social, Twitter and Facebook enabled and provide a far more engaging experience at every level. They’ve been written from the ground-up to provide the best commenting and rating possible and to maximize user engagement by allowing simple guest posts, logins and registration.

Note that this is still under development and will be refined over the next couple of weeks, however if you run the updater you will bet the latest version at any time.

Other Enhancements

Analytics – now track the number of daily views for Standard and Media items, store data for two months

Catalogue Export – improved usability

Coupons – new Automated / Forced Coupons feature allows coupons to be bundled together, e.g. a 20% off coupon can also include free shipping by including a second coupon

Dynamic Forms – conditional form fields, see Registration

Events – new Events Profile allows greater flexibility for listing events

Feature Scroller DE v1 – new iPhone friendly Feature Scroller Design Element for great banner highlights. Can be used instead of the Flash Feature scroller and works across all platforms

Forms – improved form styling for more compact forms

Forums – optimised Forum subscriptions so that when users subscribe to a forum all their thread subscriptions within the forum are removed; new forum thread limits can be applied to any forum, i.e. only 10 threads during the month; new thread type setting to enforce more information on threads; improved the Today view in the forums; improved forum styling by applying the updated Form Style to all the fields

Keyword Tagging – pop-up keyword tagger now available on Sections as well as Items

Live Editor – new optional Guide step for adding content, offers an additional level of assistance for beginners; it is now possible to simply type the Publish Start and End times; advanced Title formatting option allows new formatting for scientific publications (this is a Site Setting) e.g. sub-script / super-script and italics

Media Editor – streaming video handling; YouTube preview videos; filenames can now be edited; media file URLs can be easily identified and copied to the clipboard

Media Items – added page title so that a separate page title can be applied to each media item for SEO purposes

Media Library – greatly improved Artwork listing with numerous new styling options; greatly improved the Documents search and listing

Media Uploader – Affino now handles CMYK JPGs for the first time if Image Magick integration is set up.

Member Alerts v1 – full release of Member Alerts, these are alerts that members can set up to alert them of new members / groups which match their interests; this can be set as a premium option, whereby subscribers can set up the alerts. This is great functionality for group or other community leaders to help them identify useful contacts

Message Boards – improved listing format for sites with lots of Message Boards, introduced pagination on the Message Board listings

Modal Dialogue Style – introduced new styling element to the Design Centre. The Modal Dialogue Style allows you to style the pop-up boxes which appear throughout Affino for accomplishing specific actions. This is especially useful where sites have black or very dark backgrounds.

My Account – greatly improved Printable Receipt which includes full address and VAT details, and can be printed through the proper Print Preview channel for consistent formatting.

Newsletters – we’ve removed the Text Only version of Newsletter messages. This was in practice deprecated and not used by anyone, which given the era of webmail made it redundant.

Notifications – new account change notification emails for when members change their details

Online Form – Affino now auto-populates the name, email and telephone fields in online forms if the users has logged in

Optimisation – completely updated content view logging engine for greatly improved scalability and performance

Order Processing – added two new columns to all order line items for Coupon Discount and Item Discount, identifies exactly where discounts have been applied to specific items

Public Profile – it is now possible to multi-display any media to members’ pages; added Forum highlights to the Main Tab

Registration – new conditional fields option on the Demographic questions. Fields are displayed / hidden depending on the user’s Member Type or answers to previous questions, e.g. if a user selects CIO then she may be presented with questions on hardware expenditure.

Related Items – new Glossary menu, highlights glossary items distinctly from other forms of related content; improved embedded Glossary links

Scheduled Tasks – improved handling of scheduled tasks for load-balanced, encrypted site setups

SEO – new SEO Titles for all Standard and Media content; these items have a new optional SEO Title field which allows you to override the Article / Media title for improved SEO and bookmarking.

Smart Cache – new smart cache feature allows users to immediately see the articles / blogs / media they have uploaded. The cache pinpoint refreshes specific content and listing displays. This makes for a much improved end-user experience.

Spam Prevention – new Spam Prevention engine which allows you to restrict the number of posts by any member to a specific maximum for a given timeframe. This can then be applied to key content types.

Social Bookmarker – added the Facebook Like button (see Open Graph above) to the Social Bookmarkers

Standard Items – added page title so that a separate page title can be applied to each media item for SEO purposes

Users – the Security Centre User listing now has the User Profile assigned to the user and the Zone they registered in as two of the listing columns, helping to track users to specific sites

Video Player – it is now possible to create Topic-based Video Walls; new video task panel for better sharing of videos; new HTML 5 video playing mode with support for H.264 Ogg Theora and WebM as well as the YouTube and Vimeo. Also amended Affino video playback to use the Affino Video Player for .mov, m4v and mp4 videos

Who’s Online DE – introduced character limit option on user names

Workflow Profiles – new Premium Publishing options can allow limited ‘free’ publishing with two tiers for premium publishers; can be used for example to allow users to publish a limited number of user-generated Ads.

Fixes

Application Bar – fixed issue where Sections were occasionally being listed as Channels

Blog Highlights DE – fixed image formatting issue in IE8

Catalogue Items – resolved issues with displaying the correct price / VAT combinations

Channels – it is no longer possible to assign a channel as its own parent; editing channels no longer displays the ‘Micro Blog’ alert; deleting channels which are selected within the Online Directory Profile no longer errors out

Checkout – 1^st stage of Checkout process now works reliably across all Zone variations so that if a user already exists then they are identified consistently; consistently checks the payment method versus the appropriate address, whether it is the payment or invoice address; fixed issue with PayPal / Coupons which was causing it to error out; screen names are now only displayed if selected when checking out

Classifieds – fixed issue which caused new classifieds to error out

Coupons – now working reliably for shipping coupons

Design Menu – fixed and improved copy function so that when the copy is created the user is taken directly to it

Design Objects – can now be deleted reliably (when they’re not being used); fixed numerous Design Object previewing issues

Documents – fixed PDF download links, now work reliably

Dynamic Forms – resolved issue which caused some forms to error out; notifications now work reliably when using the Selector – Notification field

eCommerce – now displaying Top Shoppers accurately

eCommerce API – new option to set the number of days from which new products are pulled in from, e.g. could be set to 100 for initial import and 1 for on-going updates

Embedded Links – fixed issue which prevented some related content from generating embedded links

eTests – fixed issues with creating some questions; improved styling

Forums – improved listing where forum members have been deleted and their content is anonymously available in the forums

Groups – fixed issues causing groups to error out; groups no longer error out when being deleted; group members can now reliably see group media as per restrictions; group notification duplicates no longer being sent out

Incoming Feeds – fixed issue which was causing some incoming feeds to error out

Internationalisation – improved media look-up internationalisation

Inventory – resolved issues when searching for out-of-stock inventory; resolved issues when paging through inventory

Keyword Tagging – now shows a tick on the tagging status whether content has been tagged on the Control or Live side.

Live Editor – can now select images reliably, resolve image security issues; fixed issues with the URL shortener (Bit.ly) integration

Media Editor – master file dimensions can now be set reliably; items now listing reliably; images now showing reliably

Media Library – Media Scroller now works reliably, Media Library no longer errors out when members channel is secured; styling issues resolved, fixed issues with editing embedded media; media library sections no longer error out on the Control side; fixed errors with new Documents layout

Media Uploader – stability fixes; now handles Zip files in multiple ways, either extracting them or as a new document type

Member Search – member search no longer errors out

My Account – fixed issues where paid-up subscriptions were erroring out

My Messages – added new drop-down menu for browsing messages in My Messages. This feature had previously disappeared during the My Messages re-design.

Newsletter – resolved major styling bug whereby Design Styles were not being applied properly to content

Password Reminder – refined form so that it no longer errors out with missing profile attributes

Personal Tools – now completely hidden to guest users

Public Profile – fixed document listing on the main public profile tab; user’s content is now displayed in their content folder even when not live; public profiles now only display members own content; improved formatting when editing the profile; fixed issue causing public profiles to error out when viewed

Publishing Workflows – resolved deletion issues

Recommendations DE – now displaying reliably on Public Profiles

Registration – resolved issues with enabling / disabling the country selector on Registration / Demographic forms; fixed Double Confirm on registration

Related Prime Content DE – related channels now displaying with the right links

Screen Names – Section screen names are now unique per Zone

Site Search – resolved duplicate filter issues

Skins – fixed issues which caused Skin generation to error out

Smart Image DE – fixed Focus Image state for section trees, it means that images are now accurately presented in their active state for the target sections; fixed styling issue whereby Bold text was appearing in the ‘button’ link when defined on the Dynamic Menu

Templates – fixed formatting on a number of Standard Templates

Video Player – Video Wall now pulls in correct default video thumbnails; QuickTime files now play reliably; rating has been fixed; playlist no longer freezes video player; it is now possible to use the scroll-wheel again when browsing through videos; improved behaviour when removing videos from the shopping basket; fixed email interface; video mouse-over mode now displays product information and buy options

Affino 6 Heads Up

markus@comrz.com — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:15:00 +0000

We will be launching Affino 6.0 next week. It is a key milestone in Affino’s development with over 300 enhancements.

There are major breakthroughs for engaging with your communities; automating product distribution and promotion on Google and eBay; major improvements to order handling; new comments and ratings interfaces; localisation; and user generated ads.

All of these are eclipsed by the introduction of the Affino Customer Ladder / Social Gaming Engine which is a major breakthrough in automated incentives, user analysis and community building.

We are currently trialling most of these developments on Comrz with great success and are really looking forward to the launch next week. You can check out many of the updates simply by clicking around.

As it’s a major release, new licence keys will be required for updates. Existing Affino users will need to ensure that they’re on a subscription or will need to buy the upgrade. Just contact us through the forums or directly to your account manager when you want to upgrade for the new key.

As significant as this release is, we have a host of great developments lined up for the autumn / fall, which will transform the Affino experience further. Many build on top of the great new developments in this release.

Affino Site Showcase - Gill and Macmillan

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:27:00 +0000

The new Gill and Macmillan site has just launched. The site is very much a pure-play ecommmerce site. It’s a very clean book store which gets instantly to the point and makes the buying experience as easy as possible.

All the pages have a very clean design, with the books at front and centre. Customers can buy the books from any page, and the search makes it easy to find whatever book the user is looking for. The site is already off to a great start, with orders coming in within minutes of the launch, some of which have been very substantial.

Behind the scenes there is a lot of automation driving the site with the poduct (book catalogue), associated media and related content being seamlessly managed through the standard Affino eCommerce webservices. Transactions are tracked through to the EDI / ERP / AS400 via custom database integration we co-developed with the Gill and Macmillan team.

It means that the site fits perfectly into Gill and Macmillan’s existing workflow. Tony Hetherington and the web and technology team at Gill and Macmillan have done a great job of making everything work with the absolute minimum disruption.

There is a lot of great innovation coming to the site over the next few months, which we’ll post as it happens.

How To: Answer your Affino Questions Fast

markus@comrz.com — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 23:26:00 +0000

Over the past year there have been almost 100,000 posts on the various Affino forums, which makes them by far the most active part of Comrz’s support and of the Comrz website. There are lots of other ways users can find the answers to their questions faster and more effectively.

Below are the key ways you can answer your questions in the fastest way:

Application Bar

The Application Bar (which sits at the base of every one of your web pages when you’re logged in as an Editor) is the most useful tool you have in your arsenal. A good 10% of questions we get involve things that can be found right on the page. The Content, Design and Text tools allow you to go right to the appropriate settings and profile screens for most elements on your live page.

The Live Design mode does the same for aspects of your page design. It means that you’re rarely more than one click away from the settings or creating new content within the part of your website you’re in. Get familiar with the Application Bar, click on the various links, see how you can instantly copy your article to create a new one, or tweak and regenerate your Skin (page design).

Control Centre Super Navigator

The Control Centre Super Navigator (the navigation menu on the left-hand side) can immediately take you to whatever management interface (and answer 20% of your questions), content or media item, or your personal favourites at a click. If you’re not certain where to find how to export content, simply type ’export’ on the Control tab and you’ll see all the different types of export you can do from Affino.

Likewise, if you want to find a specific article, or media items, or section then simply go to the Content tab and type out the name, then hit the Search icon. You’ll get a list of all the items with matching titles. Between these two options you can quickly track down pretty much anything. The My tab is also incredibly useful as it will show you your content stream and allow you to instantly go back to any of your recent content.

In-line Help

You can always turn on the in-line help when editing in the Control Centre. This will provide (usually pretty useful) information on what a specific field is for. It can be especially useful for aspects such as import and export formats and for when filling out help information or when there are automated values involved. Using the in-linen help will answer another 5% to 10% of your questions.

Site Tree and Super Navigator Favourites

When starting out on Affino, one of the first things you should do is to go to the Site Tree, fully expand your Zone to show all the levels. This will show you your entire website and give you great insight into what’s there, and how your site is structured. Save this to your Favourites using the button on the upper-right menu. You should then go and refresh your favourites using the icon at the base of the Super Navigator and you will then always have this within easy reach. This will answer a lot of your questions when you’re starting out in terms of your site structure and how the navigation is working on your site.

Support Centre

Your starting point for Comrz support should invariably be the Support Centre. Many of the key support tools and materials are contained here, the most important of which are the Forums and Affino Manuals.

Affino Manuals

The Affino Policy Manual, Quick Start Guide, Affino Design Centre Guide and Affino eCommerce Guide are what you’re introduced to in your initial Affino training. You can always download the latest versions here and use the as excellent resource guides when you’re setting out with Affino or trying something new.

A great way to use them is to have the PDFs open on your desktop when you’re working on something and you can use the Adobe Acrobat document search to find the relevant parts of the guides for what you’re working on. It’s not necessary to learn every part of the guide, what is essential is that you have a good idea of which guide has what so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Affino Help Guides

For Specific tasks such as setting up the Affino to Facebook and Twitter integration the best place to go to is the Affino Help Guides. There are guides for many key tasks and having them handy means you get things done in a fraction of the time it would take if you were having to figure things out yourself. Especially for advanced aspects such as Webservices and integration.

Affino Release Notes

Always read the Affino release notes when you upgrade to a new release. They are very detailed (which can be off-putting for some, but believe me we’ve summarised things to the tune of 99.9% compared to all our project and working documentation). These guided provide key upgrade guidance and let you know what’s changed between releases. They also give you many ides for how you can improve your site based on the new features available.

Affino Help Forum

You can always check out the Affino Help Forum, we answer a lot of questions there and the answers are readily available to everyone. If you know the answers to some of the questions being asked by your fellow Affino users then help out. We really appreciate when users help each other and you get a lot of credit for it, with benefits.

Affino Feature Request Forum

If you have ideas you want to see in Affino or if you think something is sorely missing then post it to the Affino Feature Request Forum. Quickly search first to see if someone is already asking and add your voice to the thread. We do Two out of every Three feature requests asked for, so there’s a very high chance that what you ask for will be in a future Affino release.

Feature Requests are always prioritised based on demand, so even great ideas may be pushed back if only one customer is asking for it, whilst three are asking for something else. So get the community behind you. Network on Comrz.com and push for your ideas.

Comrz Site Search

At the top of every page is the great predictive site search which is very good at finding what you’re looking for. A quick search might highlight a new blog post which is relevant or a guide in the Support Centre. If you don’t immediately see what you want then click on the Advanced option and filter on what’s relevant for you.

Comrz Blogs

We’re constantly Blogging on new aspects of Affino and on the best strategies to take when building up your online business. Subscribe by email or RSS or both and you’ll always get the latest ideas coming your way (like this post).

Affino Videos

There is currently a very small selection of videos, but this will be growing over the coming months to become an incredibly useful resource. Take a look at what’s there already, and request video guides that you want to see, and as always we’ll prioritise based on how many people want to see a specific guide.

Affino Sites

Last but not least: Check out the other Affino sites, including Comrz.com to see what’s possible with Affino. We provide a number of key references directly from the Comrz.com homepage and we’re continually blogging on the latest site launches. We won’t necessarily blog on every new Affino site, but if you want us to showcase your site let us know.

Get Involved

If there are other approaches we should be taking, or more of something you want to be seeing then post in the comments below.

Affino Site Showcase - Ask My Community

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:18:00 +0000

Ask My Community have just gone live with a great site serving the community in the North of England. The journey to going live has been very involved and great kudos to the team for all the brave decisions they’ve made along the way to evolve the site to a point where it’s very approachable, has great content and a great team behind it.

A lot of the great Affino community enhancements of recent months have been driven by the Ask My Community project and all Affino communities will greatly benefit from them. The key ones are the enhanced groups, user generated ads, greatly improved usability for adding content, and many of the recommendation and personalisation enhancements. In practice they have been the driving force behind dozens of new ways to monetise communities with Affino.

It’s been great to work with the Ask My Community team, and over 1,500 forum threads on the AMC forum highlight just how much of a dialogue has been ongoing for the project.

The site itself showcases a lot of the key social elements in Affino including groups, member directory, social publishing, social learning, social media, personalisation, smart recommendations, forums, message boards, social events and a fair bit more.

We wish the AMC team all the best with the launch and look forward to your great success.

Automated Customer Ladders - The Ultimate Social Commerce Driver - Delivered by Affino

markus@comrz.com — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:41:00 +0000

The most significant development for Social Commerce will be for sites to lead and support customers up the customer ladder. Each rung takes a person through the higher engagement levels, starting with them getting to know you and your products right through to encouraging and supporting their evangelising on your behalf.

The next release of Affino will deliver on this golden standard in a way no platform has done.

The Background

Many years ago (1998) I was working with Carrera Technology, at the time the most awarded independent PC manufacturer in the UK. The main job I had was to give them an online computer sales platform which did everything that Dell and Compaq did, since these were the two market leaders. It became quickly apparent that the key to driving online sales was to surround each product with reviews, celebrity endorsements, nice images (media) and relevant content.

This realisation set me on the route to creating a single unified platform which handled all the content, commercial, media, promotion, community and analytics needs of an online business. This platform became Affino.

Years later (2004) I was invited to Norway by Semco and Innovatorium (which doesn’t exist any more, but Moon Walk does) as they were going to be using Affino to develop an innovation community. One of the principles driving the project was Kenneth Winther. Over a nice beer in Oslo I explained what I was trying to achieve with Affino in terms of building the ultimate online sales platform. He pointed out to me that what I was trying to achieve was to automate the Customer Ladder. The diagrams above and below highlight the very simple visual flow Kenneth sketched out for me on a napkin, and which very elegantly highlight the key stages a customer goes through.

Fast-forward to 2010 and we have a world where virtual goods have become a multi-billion dollar industry. Where people engage in virtual communities and online games (and gaming, i.e. gambling) and are very effectively encouraged to climb the ladder by making one small payment after another. The latest incarnation of this is the advent of the location-based check-in apps Foursquare and Gowalla, a big part of who’s success is their gaming engines.

It is also a time when Affino has evolved to become a leading Social Commerce platform which underpins numerous engaging stores, thriving communities and and online media spaces.

The Engagement Platform

Affino to-date can be best described as an engagement platform. It engages with people on the social, media, commercial, promotional and service levels. Every interaction point is logged and used to build up a user’s profile.

Conversion Events

Every single one of the engagement events is also a potential customer conversion event which takes them up (or down) the customer ladder, e.g. a user filling out a form asking for a trial; a user inviting a colleague to look at a price list or to join a community; a person sharing a YouTube video.

Currently virtually all online customer interactions are wasted opportunities because there is a complete inability to identify the type of user interaction and to motivate users appropriately to take them to the next level. What is done online is almost entirely manually or borders on being spam.

Affino will leverage the same capabilities that the gaming engines have for driving billions of dollars of virtual revenues in real-world scenarios.

The key to this will be the monitoring of conversion events, assigning them meaning, badges, points and identifying what type the conversion event is. The badges and points can be displayed publicly in the way that Gowalla and Foursquare do, and act as competitive and motivational rewards for achievement which in turn provide kudos within the community.

Equally it is possible to make only a sub-set or indeed none of the conversion events public, and use them entirely for analysing, rewarding and encouraging user behaviour which moves people up the customer ladder.

When users move up the ladder further conversion events automatically triggers rewards, encouragement and incentives to move up to the higher levels. These can be triggered immediately or spread over time to be more effective.

Affino will track twenty five different types of conversion event. These can be broad, e.g. filling any form or specific, e.g. filling form x. They range from tracking specific page views through to buy and wishlist evnets, networking and social media engagement, sharing on Twitter and Facebook and community participation.

Sample Customer Ladder

An example scenario for a site might include the following conversion events:

Engaging

Registering x 1
Reading a Newsletter, either Any / Specific one x 1
Commenting x 1
Posting a Status Update x 1
Logging in x 5

Trialing

Posting a Message Board Post to Any / Specific MB
Posting a Forum Post to any / Specific Forum
Taking a Test
Searching the Site
Points Total

Buying In

Buying
Filling out a specific form
Points Total

Preferring

Is a member of a specific security group
Buying 2nd Time
Blogging, i.e. creating content in the blog channel
Points Total

Evangelizing

Linking to Twitter / Facebook
Friend Invites
eCards
Points Total

Automated Rewards and Incentives

The recognition that users are at specific levels and have completed specific conversion events becomes a significant trigger for automated communications, discounts, coupons, memberships, premium content, premium services, as well as numerous additional member and customer benefits.

Since Affino provides all aspects of the user experience, everything is fully automated, instantaneous and seamless.

Customer Ladder Analytics

Affino will also provide extensive real-time tracking of the community evolution up and down the customer ladder. The Customer Ladder Analytics screen provides extensive charts, leader-boards, analytics by customer stage and much more.

Community and Customer Relations Management

The final piece of the puzzle is that everything is integrated into the Affino Community Manager. This allows you to drill down to each and every member to identify their exact position on the customer ladder and also to manually assign conversion events to them, e.g. if they have purchased products off-line or have attended a sales pitch or networking event.

Timeline

This is all going to be in the up-coming Affino 5.5.17 release, which will be out in the next two to three weeks. So you won’t have to wait long.

The Best Meta Data for your Pages (aka The Things we Do so You Don't Have To)

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:08:00 +0000

Sometimes R & D projects grow out of all proportion. A simple request from a number of Affino users has been to add the Facebook Like button to Affino. Seemed simple enough, but pretty quickly we hit the Open Graph requirement (for references see below) which is that the pages have to contain specific Meta Data to work well with Facebook.

This lead to a nice bit or R & D which we thought we would share with you to see if anyone has any further thoughts / suggestions, and to give you insight into the research that is ongoing for Affino.

The Meta Data R & D Process

This lead to research into the Open Open Graph and Facebook’s implementation, which are or course slightly different (although both originated by Facebook). Facebook highlights that actually the Open Graph API is based on RDFa. More research shows that actually the initial Facebook implementation is / was (depends on when you read this) somewhat buggy.

A quick scan of the Open Graph forums highlights specific syntax issues, and also highlighted that since both it, and Dublin Core (W3C approved standard for semantic web) have overlapping functionality it made sense to review all the Dublin Core Meta Data Affino generates for each page.

A quick scan showed that Affino’s implementation has been deprecated (i.e. no longer the latest standard). More research showed that many more pages still run on the old one rather than the new RDFa version. This brought on a lot of research into how sites are using Dublin Core and what elements (and how) we should be using it. We’re gone with a more refined version than the previous one and removed a couple of values which don’t make sense.

We’ve supported eGMS tagging for years, so I decided to do some research and see if it had any relevance any more by looking at a number of UK government sites, as well as leading government sponsored sites such as the BBC. The conclusion is that eGMS is a waste of time. Virtually no one uses it, and certainly I can’t think of any UK Govt search engine that any one uses, so it’s out.

We’ve kept the core Title and Meta tags, as well as key language, site indexing, content freshness and of course the Google Canonical link, so essential for SEO.

There is a vast amount of automation / logic which goes into actually presenting the appropriate content in each tag, and we’ll be refining that with the next release.

Additionally we spent considerable time looking into how the key standards bodies use their (and other Meta tags), it has to be said that they do a pretty terrible job on the whole. We also looked into what most other platforms so, and again it’s on the whole shockingly poor, no idea why. We were looking for great ideas that we could learn from, but there really weren’t many.

The biggest amount of time went into digesting all the information and working through the Mindmap, a small part of which you can see above. Without using Mindmapping, the whole process would probably have taken three times as long since it helped to move / focus / laterally approach the whole Meta Data topic in the most effective way.

What Comes Next

The next phase is going to be all about in-page Meta Data improvements, including Good Relations, and RDFa / Microformats(which Google Likes). We will also be marking up reviews and more of the media content.

Of course all of it will be as automated as possible, so that all you will need to do is add your content and make sure you tag it in the best way (or at least have a good keyword list).

We will of course also be adding the Facebook Like button to the Social Bookmarker Profile / Bar. You’ll just have to change a couple of settings once you upgrade to the next Affino release to have everything work nicely for you.

Useful References

Official Facebook Open Graph Developer Page

Official Open Graph Protocol Page

Useful Open Graph Group Thread

RDFa Wikipedia Page

RDFa Primer

Dublin Core / RDFa

W3C RDFa Primer

Good Relations

Open Calais

How To Turn Your Site Into A Facebook Fan Page

Creating a Facebook App

Facebook URL Linter

Join the Conversation

Let me know what your thoughts are on the Meta Data, do you like what where we’re taking it? Do you have great ideas of your own you would like to see included in Affino? Do you have great examples of existing sites / platforms? Please post in the comments below.

Comrz Support Forum Update

markus@comrz.com — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:20:00 +0000

You may well have noticed that the Forums on Comrz.com have had a bit of a makeover. The styling has been greatly improved and there are some key new options on most of the support forums.

If you look at the visual above the, key change is that for the first time you’ll be able to keep track of your remaining direct support threads during any given month. It means that you’ll have full visibility so that you can get the most out of the support forums.

We also provide you with key guidance on how to get the best out of your support forum. The three key elements handled within a dedicated support forum are: Support Requests, Project Posts and Affino Bug Reports. These are all handled by the support and project teams. It’s essential that you only post these posts to the forum, and only Support Requests are limited.

The two common types of thread which are not included and should be posted elsewhere are: Feature Requests (which should be posted to the Feature Request forum) and account management posts which should be posted to the account manager.

The hope is that by streamlining the support process we’ll have more resources available to develop support materials and video guides (and evolve Affino faster), which will reduce the need for support in the first place. It will also hopefully be an incentive for users to read the excellent guides and to experiment more to identify the solution themselves.

At the moment a great deal of conversation which should ideally be more public, i.e. taking place in the Feature Request and Help forums will start to do so; so that the entire Affino user community can have more visibility of many of the conversations which take place each day, and the 10,000s which take place each year on Comrz.com in the secured direct forums.

This will make many more answers publicly available to the whole community and hopefully create a virtuous circle of self and peer support. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Social Commerce Hub - July Update

markus@comrz.com — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:51:00 +0000

Every Affino release sees further and deeper integration between Affino sites and the wider web, the upcoming 5.5.17 release is no exception. What is exceptional is just how many new platforms we’re integrating with and the depth of the integration.

We’ll be integrating with:

Two of the key product promotion platforms - Google Base / Google Webmaster Tools
One of the leading etailers - eBay
One of the most advanced online video platforms - Ooyala
The leading social audio platform - SoundCloud
The most cost effective streaming video platform - Wowza on Amazon EC2

We’ll also be deepening the integration between Affino and:

The leading payment gateway platform
The most-used analytics suite - Google Analytics
And the single most important SEO resource - Google Webmaster Tools

The bottom line is that Affino users will be able to promote and sell their products more effectively, engage better with their audience, and develop innovative new business models.

New Integration Partners

eBay v1

The single biggest project (currently under way) is the integration with eBay. In the initial phase Affino will sync it’s product catalogue directly with eBay, both with the main eBay sites and with own stores running on eBay.

This is a real-time integration so that any products created / updated in Affino are instantly updated on eBay.

Google Base / Google Merchant Center v1

The ability to have your products listed right at the top of Google searches so that people can see the product, price and more link will be realised with the real-time integration between Affino and Google Base / Merchant Center.

Affino will real-time sync product catalogues with Google Base as products and their pricing and availability change.

Ooyala v1

Ooyala is a premium video platform with excellent video management, analytics, distribution, advertising and monetisation capabilities. Affino will work seamlessly with embedded Ooyala videos in what is the first phase of many.

The Ooyala integration will open up a number of new video monetisation options to Affino sites.

SoundCloud v1

SoundCloud is a great new Audio platform which allows users to upload and share their MP3s. What sets it apart from the competition is the fantastic API which means that SoudCloud can be brilliantly integrated into almost any site.

The initial integration is to allow SoundCloud Embedded Audio to ba handled seamlessly by the Affino Media Library. A key element will be the social sharing of embedded Audio files.

Wowza / Amazon EC2 v1

Wowza has always been a great option for streaming Flash video. Running the Wowza service on the Amazon EC2 platform really takes the price / performance of video delivery (including live streaming) to another level.

It is possible to set up and shut down broadcast streams and video libraries with ease on a pay for use basis, making this a great option for one-off or periodic events.

Deeper Integration

PayPal v3

The integration between Affino and PayPal has been greatly improved in this release with on-site payments, meaning that the entire checkout and payment process is now handled on the single-page checkout. This guarantees maximum conversions.

Google Webmaster Tools v3

Google Sitemaps have been extensively re-written to cope with much larger sites and for more Affino content. This should mean more rapid and comprehensive indexing of sites.

Google Analytics v2

We’ve included a number of refinements to the Google analytics integration, the most important of which is excluding team / QA transactions from the Google Analytics stats.

Next Steps

The big one we will be working on for Affino 5.5.18 is going to be Amazon store integration, but there will be a lot of deeper integration with Facebook, Twitter and eBay as well as the leading social media platforms.

The State of Affino - Summer 2010

markus@comrz.com — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Things are moving very fast with Affino, so to help everyone get up to speed, and to provide insight into where Affino is evolving. Here’s a quick recap of the key milestones we’ve hit this year (there have been quite a few), the current projects we’re working on and the plans for the next six months.

This is very much a Big Picture overview.

The Year So Far (skip this if you just want to know what’s coming up)

We started the year by rolling out the first phase of Affino as a Social Commerce Hub with the Twitter integration and the Social Campaigns. We then built on this when we rolled out the direct integration with Facebook. We also greatly improved incoming feed handling, with custom integration with Twitter and YouTube feeds.

The roll-out of the eCommerce APIs was a big step forward for standardising Affino’s integration with 3rd party accountancy, stock-control and accountancy solutions. The biggest strides have been made around the checkout and conversion process which has seen the single-page-checkout become far more streamlined and dynamic, with much tighter integration with the leading payment gateways.

We also greatly improved Affino’s SEO abilities, to get Affino sites top billing on Google and other search engines. The evolution of Topic Channels, and the phenomenal results they are able to get show just how far Affino has come. The roll out of canonical links and SEO page titles has further improved the ability of sites to rank highly. On-site search now has predictive search and refined results browsing, fully integrated with the shopping basket.

We also rolled out dozens of media enhancements with new Document and Artwork listings and streamlined the media uploader with great Zip file handling. The Media Editor has also been extensively reworked to be more effective.

To make the user experience more engaging, we’ve introduced or significantly enhanced a dozen Design Elements which make Affino pages much more dynamic and engaging, including: Photo Stack, Blog Highlights, Main Menu, Highlights Scroller, Stunt, Carousel, Related and Recommended Products, Detailed Standard Section, Tips, Video Carousel, Video Player, Newsletter Sign-up, Login and Welcome.

The social side has seen significant updates, especially Groups which have been evolved very significantly over the past couple of releases and will reach maturity in the coming release. The developments will put groups right at the heart of your communities. Newsletters have seen dramatic improvements with the introduction of event triggers and filters; it means they are now one of the most effective tools for targeting your community.

A lot of work has also gone into improving Analytics in Affino with the further roll out and evolution of Affino Dashboards. More significant has been the full integration with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser as well as improved integration with Google Webmaster Tools.

Big improvements have also come for users rolling out new sites with the introduction of Structure Copy for copying whole website trees and Affino’s greatly improved support for CSS for page styling.

Team productivity has been boosted with numerous Forum and workflow enhancements and the roll out of the Team Time Status Board and activity reports. The enhancements to My Messaging allows for a much more effective on-site messaging experience.

Finally, throughout we have rolled out dozens of usability and productivity enhancements such as the updated Live Editor, improved Blogs, nicer forms, upgraded Application Bar, better recommendations, and easier creation of content relationships.

For the full picture you can always go to the Affino Update History.

The Upcoming Affino Release

I’m not going to go too much into this as it’s going to be a separate post I’ll be doing next week, but it’s fair to say that the upcoming release is going to be very significant. Key highlights are: Google Base and eBay integration; eCommerce 3.3 (aka greatly improved order processing and ecommerce management); on-site PayPal payments; further checkout enhancements; user generated Ads; localised recommendations; a lot of new community monetisation capabilities; and a whole lot more.

The Next Six Months

There will be many projects Comrz will be working on to enhance Affino over the coming months. These are the key ones:

Learn-ability and Usability

We have a constant focus on making Affino more usable, and this past year has seen much of Affino transformed when it comes to key tasks, especially when rolling out new sites. The focus for the coming six months will be more on learn-ability rather than usability. Most of the interfaces are now pretty usable, there are still some less used ones which could use a makeover, but increasingly the issues our users are facing are not in terms of being able to do stuff, rather the issues are based around Affino’s amazing scope and flexibility, and how to make the most of it. This boils down to learn-ability. We have some key projects in mind that will help guide users through their tasks.

On a simple level this means many more To Do lists such as the one found in Commerce control panel. A much more significant project will be the re-working of many of the key control screens to create clustered panels focused on tasks, i.e. creating a Newsletter or setting up a new micro-site.

We do have dozens of smaller usability-based projects lined up and every release will see a number of improvements.

Social Commerce Hub Evolution

Every release of Affino will see wider and deeper integration with the leading social, commercial and media sites on the web. The reality of the ’splinternet’ is that many users experience the web in safe and familiar locations. The key social ones are without doubt Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Affino already integrates with both the former, and will integrate with the latter in the near future. On the commercial side people increasingly rely on Google Product Searches, eBay and Amazon as key commercial aggregators which they buy from.

We will be rapidly evolving Affino’s integration with these key portals so that they are much deeper and more dynamic. On the social side we will be integrating with Facebook and Twitter as closely as possible to share content, media and networks. We will be rolling out increasingly dynamic interfaces and using the full capabilities of the Facebook and Twitter APIs.

Commercially we will be rolling out a F-commerce integration, i.e. Facebook / Affino store integration. More significantly we’ll be extending the eBay and Google Base integration further into a much more dynamic full sales-cycle integration. We will also be rolling out full sales-cycle integration with Amazon. These projects won’t happen over-night, but will be continuously evolved over the coming six month period. We will also be integrating with more of the key commercial promotion sites as the requirement arises.

Mobile

What may well turn out to be the biggest undertaking (if not the Social Commerce Hub) is going to be the roll-out of the new Affino Mobile platform. We will be evolving Affino for Mobile in the same way as we are evolving Affino for Newsletters. It means that a sub-set of the Affino components will be optimised specifically for mobile publishing.

Right now mobile development is evolving in two ways: device specific apps and mobile web apps. For the coming months our focus will be on Mobile Web Apps. The key reason for this is that we will be looking to develop cross-mobile-platform apps which will work with the leading mobile platforms. Initially we will optimise for iPhones / iPads / iPods and Android, we next see us also optimising for MeeGo.

In practice there will be a new Mobile Zone which will partner with a Web Zone. These will share the same User-base / Community (User Profile) and Store (Store Profile), both of which will be extended with mobile components.

We’re expecting the development of the mobile platform to be very dynamic and there may be significant changes of direction during the roll-out as we take on board all the feedback from each roll-out. Expect public Alpha and Beta versions during the autumn / fall.

Targeting

Affino now has five active member targeting dimensions: interests (topics), network (friends / contacts), location, triggers (i.e. user behaviour), security (membership / partner), as well as all the passive targeting of related content, ’people who bought x bought y’, trending products / content / members etc.

We feel that this is fairly comprehensive in its breadth, but there is a great deal we will be doing on the depth, i.e. more trigger events, improved awards, and more localisation enhancements / database integration. We are very open-minded about this area and expect it to evolve consistently over the coming months.

More Engaging Communities

We will be doing significant upgrades on the public profiles. The first stage will be to completely revamp the Main tab on each member’s profile. Instead of being independent spaces where users post media, status updates and comments, we’ll be consolidating it into a single feed so that users can chose with a click to post a simple update or upload an image or an embedded YouTube video.

The feed will also include member’s recent blog posts and latest articles. It will also be possible to comment on each item. It means we should see many more conversations happening within the community.

Game Mechanics - we will be introducing game mechanics to Affino for the first time. These will be points and badge based and can be used both for fun and for more serious customer motivation / targeting purposes. Depending on projects, we may even take this one step further and tie it directly into payment / cash values / rewards.

Media Hub

Affino is already something of a media hub since it can handle many forms of image, video and audio content. The incoming media feeds, in particular YouTube feeds mean that it functions very well for aggregating media content and creating topical media pages.

The next stage will see the integration with a lot more 3rd parties, but more significantly we will be turning Affino into a video distribution hub. It means that if you upload a video clip with the associated meta data, Affino will automatically distribute it to the leading video portals including YouTube and Metacafe.

We will also be integrating directly into 3rd party video online production and encoding solutions. It means you can upload a video and have it transcoded / video thumbnails created. This will be essential for the shift to HTML 5 video which has now become a nightmare of codec support requirements: H.264, Ogg Theora and WebM.

We will be developing HTML5 based MP3 and video players, but this technology is still very rough around the edges. The clear priority will be to support WebKit, i.e. iPhone / iPad / iPod, but there are clear limits on what we will be able to do here in the near term.

Rounding out Affino’s eCommerce Capabilities

We have a lot of plans to further round out Affino’s ecommerce capabilities and to improve the back-end management interfaces. We’ve started on what is going to be a major ongoing effort over the coming months with the eCommerce 3.3 project, but that is just the start.

We’ll be developing many more of the traditional ecommerce management functions such as stock management; supplier chain management; and direct integration with couriers. There are a number of areas we can evolve Affino on the ecommerce side, and it will all depend on customer priorities.

Priorities

As always, priorities will evolve so the end result of the coming month will be somewhat different from that outlined above, but many of the projects mentioned will have been started and completed.

We will continue to roll out new Affino releases every two months or so, so be prepared to embrace all the new enhancements coming your way and to make the most of them.

Let me know if you feel strongly about particular projects, or if you feel there are other aspects we should be looking into. Hopefully you’ll be as excited about what’s coming as we are.

Affino Site Showcase - Portobello Rocks!

markus@comrz.com — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:18:00 +0000

We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the Portobello Rocks! site. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but time’s short. It’s for a fantastic cause, namely the preservation of the character of Portobello Road in an increasingly commercial world.

Portobello Road is pretty local to Comrz’s London base, only around 10 minutes away on the bike, and has such a unique character that it’s got to be worth keeping. It’s also a great tourist attraction, in a way that another ordinary High Street will never be (and which developers are looking to remake Portobello Road into).

The team behind Portobello Rocks! are doing a great job of promoting awareness and getting the community behind the cause. They came to us early on with the idea, and we leapt at the chance of becoming a prime sponsor and their online solution partner.

The Portobello Rocks event itself which will be on the 17th July at the Tabernacle will feature a host of great local artists and is being backed by some very impressive ambassadors including Richard Curtis, Emma Freud, Kevin Spacey, John Bird, Nick Mason and Christopher Scholey.

"We at Portobello Rocks! Are truly grateful to have received the sponsorship and support from the team at Comrz. Our goals would have been impossible to achieve in the timeframe we had without the help and guidance from the Comrz team. Working with Affino makes the route to market effortless, and instead of focusing on coding we are able to focus on content and integration, and reaching our target audience."

by Samuel Olsson, Val Jobara and Fraser Kee Scott of Portobello Rocks!

Initially the Portobello Rocks site is purely promotional, but that will change as Portobello Rocks! becomes a fixture of the Portobello / Notting Hill scene.

You can get tickets for the event here, go for it.

Affino Site Showcase - Like Minds

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:03:00 +0000

It’s been great to work with Like Minds. It’s fair to say that the Like Minds site has to be one of the fastest Affino implementations ever. Scott Gould came in for just a single training session and rolled out the vast majority of the site over the following couple of days.

The first phase is live, full of information and video pages on the Like Minds events and personalities. Essentially with just a few of days effort, Like Minds has matched what most events sites take weeks or months to achieve.

The next couple of phases will be much more engaging (and commercial) with some great elements planned to drive and deliver an engaging experience to the Like Minds community. We’re excited to be working with the Like Minds team, and look forward to seeing how the Like Minds site will evolve over the coming weeks and months.

Affino Site Showcase - Eric Prydz

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:28:00 +0000

We’re extremely pleased with the launch of the Eric Prydz TV site. It’s a project we wanted to be involved with for a very long time now, and although we were indirectly involved in a previous incarnation of the site, we never had any direct input until a month ago.

The entire design implementation, build, training and hand-over took just a couple of weeks, and the site is now being run by the Eric Prydz team. What’s up there is very much Phase One. There will be another three phases over the summer: community, SEO and commerce. In each phase we will be working with the Eric Prydz team to drive these aspects forward and to optimise the experience.

We’ve rolled out quite a lot of new tech in Affino to make the site happen, which will be available to everyone in the next release. Key elements are: New Feature Scroller (at the top of the page); highlight colours on the media players; improved slide show layout in the media library; new Video Scroller; new newsletter Signup DE; enhanced Welcome; lots of new styling options for Micro Blog and Media highlights; and a new blind effect on the drop-down menus.

We also created a couple of custom highlights elements on the site for Top 10 Downloads and the Gig Guide. If there’s much demand for them, then we’ll roll them out as standard Affino elements in a future release.

It’s been great to work with the team at Sershall Management, and there’s a much more in-depth news article here by Stefan covering everyone who was involved.

We’re excited by what’s going to be happening on the Eric Prydz site over the coming months and will keep you posted.

Proof that Affino gets sites Top Billing on Google

markus@comrz.com — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:25:00 +0000

I recently went to Biarritz to spend some time with the X-treme Video team. One of the places where the X-treme Video online presence has been very weak was the fact that they were not ranking highly on Google for any of their key terms.

The long-term answer is of course that success with SEO requires the proper execution of a solid SEO strategy. At the core this boils down to producing a continuous stream of relevant, unique, on-topic, well tagged, well promoted content. If you don’t do any of that, then of course it’s virtually impossible to get ranked.

Of course with Affino there is a pretty amazing short-cut: Topic Channels.

This is one of the most powerful, unique and under-used Affino features. It can instantly bring together all the on-topic highlights from your own site as well as the leading social media sites.

We targeted three key concepts:

Extreme Sports Videos

GoPro Camera News

Surf Video News

All we then did was change the meta data and Channel / Section Titles on a few key pages and set up Topic Channels around these topics.

You can see from the image below the GoPro Camera News page, how all the relevant X-treme Video content: Blog, Product Categories and Product Carousel is front-and centre and is framed by a video wall of the latest YouTube videos, the latest on-topic Tweets and the latest Google News.

Once we pulled the initial page design together, which took a couple of hours and meant using existing Design Objects (page designs) as far as possible, it meant that the second and third Channels only took approx 30 mins each to set up. Within two to three days X-treme Video was ranking for each of these terms, and has been ranking since.

The effort has had a dramatic impact on the rankings for X-treme Video, which previously only ranked for X-treme Video for any of it’s key terms.

A longer term scenario for Topic Channels is that we set up Social Commerce News on Comrz.com four months ago, and it hasn’t dropped below the top 10 on Google since.

30 minutes to pull together a great page for your customers and get top billing on Google for your key terms, with no maintenance required, it’s got to be worthwhile.

Creating a Winning SEO Strategy

markus@comrz.com — Sat, 22 May 2010 13:39:00 +0000

If you produce a product or service that you want to promote online, then you have to create content. From an SEO perspective you need to have very tight control over the release of this content so that it adds value to your online presence and becomes a key aspect of building your brand and driving sales online.

SEO is largely ’first come, first served’. Google Base, essential for promoting products with pricing online, actively filters out duplicate content and bars sites which consistently have duplicate (spam as far as Google is concerned) content. More importantly, being consistently the first with content ’Scoops’ means that you will build up an online following, with plenty of incoming links and consistent traffic growth.

The Winning Mentality

It is essential to build up a Publishing mentality and that everyone in the organisation who is involved on the sales and marketing side is following the same schedule. You need to generate regular content and you need to promote your Scoops with maximum effect. Your content should be jealously guarded and used to make the maximum impact.

When it comes to online publishing, content is king and timing is everything. If you have exclusive content you have to ’use it or lose it’. Most of the web is derivative, nine out of ten stories you see are derived from other sources up the line. Being the first means that you are quoted and referred to, and more importantly you get in at the head of the pack in the Google index. Which means that when everyone else is searching on the subject they see your page and it builds up a virtuous cycle.

You should always look to release exclusive content, both information and media through your site whenever you are launching a new product or service. You should develop two sets of promotional content: the first content set is intended purely for your own promotional purposes. This content should first be placed on your site first (with watermarks where necessary), and only when it has been indexed by the key search engines, should it be promoted through the leading social media channels.

These media spaces are tightly controlled, and wherever possible automation should be used to maximize productivity and ensure reliable distribution. This means you should use platforms which automatically synchronise with your social media spaces, real-time where required and on a time-delay cycle where necessary. To maximize your long-term search engine position you should stage-release ’extra’ content to ensure that your page is fresh and has content which people will come back to.

The second content set is the public distributed materials. These need to include information pages with a titles, teasers (synopsis), detailed descriptions and technical information. Additional collateral should include images and if possible videos.

It is essential that this content set is made as readily available as possible. To minimise copying of your core promotional content, this second set should be distributed directly wherever possible to the press, bloggers and resellers. The easier you make it for people to use it, the less your core content set will be copy / pasted.

Your specific strategy on timing the content release will vary. If you have direct sales channels which you want to promote, then releasing the information to the press and bloggers before you release it to your resellers forces the news sites / blogs to refer back to you and your site(s) as a source. If you are purely using distributors / resellers then you will want to provide the information to them prior to the public release and then do your promotions in a coordinated manner.

If you are a distributor for multiple product lines, everything becomes amplified. You should run the content and online parts of your business in the same way as leading online publications do.

Be Prepared for Grunt Work

There are many ways in which you can make your job easier when driving a successful SEO campaign (a lot of them are outlined here), but ultimately there is still a lot of work to be done: content doesn’t just create itself, and your brand doesn’t just go viral. Ultimately there’s a lot of planning, preparation, analysis and hard graft that goes into successful SEO campaigns. Once you’ve got the right channels and relationships in place your life gets a lot easier.

The Domain Factor

Every page on your site which builds up a decent page rank helps the overall site rank, and over the long-term drives up the rank on the site homepage, this is known as the Domain Effect. It is key to boosting the value of your brands online.

Running your online operation across multiple platforms and domains greatly reduces its SEO effectiveness. If you have all the key online business elements, e.g. a website, ecommerce site, blog, social space, and media space all on separate domains and they’re averaging a 2 or 3 Google Page Rank (PR), then these don’t add up to a PR of 15, they aggregate out at a maximum PR of 3.

If you have the same sites running off the same domain with seamless connections then you will easily achieve a PR of 5 or 6 and build from there. The Google Page Rank is a logarithmic scale, it means that you can easily build up the low numbers, but getting above a page rank of 6 or 7 is far more difficult.

High Page Ranks drive organic traffic to your site. Once established, highly ranked pages make promoting your messages online a great deal easier, and faster.

Blog Blog Blog

Nothing is more effective at engaging with audiences online than a great blog. It also happens to be the best and easiest way to generate great targeted content that the search engines love. You should relate this content in throughout your site to provide fresh, on-topic links and content to all your key pages.

Make sure your blog is the ’Go To Place’ for everything about your brands. Make it the centre point for all your promotions and social media.

Tagging, Taxonomies and Topic (landing) Pages

There are few things more important with SEO than identifying the key terms for driving your business online. These terms fall into a couple of categories: the ones you use to communicate about your products and services internally, which may also be industry terms; and terms which users use to find out about your products and services. Usually there is a big overlap in these terms, but not always.

Start by building your ’Taxonomy’, which is essentially a hierarchy of keywords, based on your internal keyword structure which could be brands, product lines, content categories, customer profiles etc. Each one of these can have their own tag tree. Next, identify the keywords that are used by people trying to find your products. An easy way to get started is by looking at the analytics and seeing how people found your website. There are lots of SEO tools that can help you with this, but for the fastest (and often the best) results get in an SEO agency / consultant to help you with this.

Where you have limited resources use incoming, on-topic feeds to help populate your landing pages. Great sites for feeds are Twitter, YouTube (videos) and Google News. You can also do deals with 3rd parties for exclusive content. If you are paying for content make sure that you either have exclusivity or an exclusivity period for using the content.

You need to make sure that you create relevant content and landing pages for the key tags, automate as much of this as possible.

’Own’ your Social Media Spaces

It is important that you take ownership of your social media spaces. These are the pages on the leading spaces such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which users will go to if they are looking to engage with your brand. They frequently rank right at the top of Google and other search engines. If competitors, staff, 3rd parties, resellers, distributors, fans or any other party is running a page which is core to your brand, then you need to be focused on getting them back under your control.

For resellers in specific markets it’s great that they’re promoting your brand, but make sure that they append the target market to the name, e.g. Brand UK or Brand Asia. These spaces can be key to your brand and revenue building and should be integral to your customer / prospect engagement strategies.

The term ’Own’ is somewhat an ironic reference since you must at all times be aware that very few of the social platforms actually let you own the space on their platforms. They are able to change service levels at any time and are able to remove services or charge for the use of their spaces. They’re also able to (and actively do) transfer or shut down spaces with no notice. It means you need to be very aware of the fact that there are no guarantees that these sites will always be there to drive your social engagement. Probability though says that most likely they will, and if not, then others will come to replace them.

You should also make sure that you take ownership of the social spaces for your target markets, e.g. twitter.com/widgets if you are a leading producer or distributor of widgets. These provide natural SEO for you and are will fit naturally into people’s search patterns.

Automate Promotion

At any time, there will be hundreds of different things you could be doing to improve the awareness of your brand, products and services online. It means that wherever possible you should automate the routine. At the most basic level this means having all your content assets readily available, so that any manual task you have to do is done as efficiently as possible.

The great thing about the web is that through traditional means such as RSS / Atom feeds and Podcasting you can distribute your content easily. Many sites let you set up incoming feeds to share your content, or to log it in search engines. Making these feeds public means that the online media can also track your latest updates with ease and incorporate the content automatically within their sites and services. Set up Social Bookmarker, e.g. for Digg and Facebook so that people can easily promote the site. Have automated newsletters and content alerts, which notify anyone who signs up of your latest content.

Use solutions which centrally manage and distribute your content to the leading social, media and commercial sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google Base, eBay and YouTube. Most of the major portals have APIs, these allow 3rd party solutions (and sites) to directly publish content to them. Better yet, use a solution which allows you to publish the content centrally and distribute it automatically (see Leverage Affino below).

Build Personal Relationships with Editors of the Leading Online Publications

With all the tech and potential for automation in place, people often forget that there are people driving every significant website. It is just as important to build direct relationships with the top bloggers, editors and enthusiasts as it has ever been. Make certain that you identify the leading news / opinion sites for your brands and products and build up close relationships with the key people running them.

Provide them with scoops, previews, and review samples. Run joint promotions and competitions. Many of these sites are marginal businesses and small incentives can go a long way.

Use the Best SEO and Analytics Tools

There are a lot of great free, incredibly useful tools out there to help companies get going. The essential starting point is to register your sitemaps with the leading search engines (Google Webmaster Tools, Bing / Yahoo and Ask). Next you should get analytics up and running, e.g. Google Analytics. Don’t be shy about using two or three tools since there is no perfect solution and all have their strengths.

Use SEO analysis tools and join professional SEO sites such as SEOmoz, try out all the leading SEO plugins on Firefox and see which best suit you. Use these tools to identify problems with your pages and sites to ensure you have the right mix. Use them to identify your page ranks and monitor these regularly by running weekly reports.

Help Others Do It for You

This is a general principle that will make you much more productive. Help others to promote you as effectively as possible. Motivate them in the various ways outlined, and any other way which works. Build up good relationships with opinion leaders and you can ramp up your effectiveness very quickly.

Integrate Promotions with your Sales Channels

To get the most out of your promotions make sure that they are 100% integrated with you sales channels. If you have a landing page for a product, make sure users can buy the product right off the page (i.e. add to basket). Use this principle throughout your promotional activities.

Continually Check the User Experience

You must continuously check the user experience. Do this as part of the core routine, but also get others in the company, customers, friends and 3rd parties to provide feedback regularly. You should be continuously improving the user experience, tweaking and fine tuning.

Leverage Affino

SEO is at the heart of what Affino does. Every strategy outlined above can be executed by using Affino to drive your business online.

May 2010 Affino Updater - Stylin'

markus@comrz.com — Sat, 15 May 2010 18:06:00 +0000

Affino 5.5.16 has been a great success. Virtually all sites have already been updated to the latest release and the feedback has been very positive all round. The release has been incredibly solid for such a major update but a small number of bugs were introduced late in the release process. We have been very quick to respond to any issue which has arisen and have released Affino 5.5.16.8 which resolves all the reported issues to-date. If you are not on the latest version of the new release then we strongly recommend you run the Affino Updater to bring your sites up-to-date. There may be one final 5.5.16 release next week.

A record number of Affino sites is being rolled out at the moment (we’ve been training new companies every day for weeks), and the the past couple of weeks’ Affino development has been primarily focused on us on styling and usability enhancements to make all the new sites look good. It means that Affino sites will be even better looking (check out the new form buttons) following the next release.

Next week sees the development team move on to the more significant projects. These will be a combination of premium community features, such as user generated ads, and core ecommerce updates. The integration team will be working on direct integration with Google Base / Products, followed by Amazon. We will also be developing localised recommendations which will be one of a host of recommendations updates.

The most complex project will be the enhanced internationalisation of Affino, with multi-lingual articles, media and catalogue items. There’s still a fair amount of research, specifications and development to be done here.

Following the great work done on Structure Copy in the last release, which allows the very simple cloning of site structures when rolling out new sites, we’re looking to make significant improvements in how content is re-used across multiple sites. This will come in two forms: improved publishing automation and making it easy to have multiple language variations of the same item. When combined, the best-fit content will be displayed across all sites.

Of course there will be another one to two hundred other improvements as well (we’re already at 72).

Affino 5.5.16 Release

markus@comrz.com — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:25:00 +0000

This is another milestone release of Affino which sees improvements across the board. Most users managing Affino sites will find thing are greatly improved including: SEO professionals, site designers, site builders, site editors, store managers, general managers and community managers. End users will also enjoy the improved experience offered by the greatly enhanced video experience, smoother checkouts, improved registration and updated WYSIWYG editor.

It’s fair to say that this release is heavily focused on making the job of designing, building, running and analysing Affino sites that much more effective. SEO and PPC professionals will see the biggest improvements through the Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer integration, as well as improved search tracking, Canonical Links for improved Google Rankings and optimisations in Sitemap generation.

Designers will have greatly improved styling capabilities with the roll out of Custom Style Sheets and a number of new Design Elements; whilst Site Builders will be able to reduce the Microsite rollout times dramatically by being able to copy entire site structures over to new sites. Site Editors and Commercial Managers will find Smart Messaging to be a great way of engaging with users, whilst Commercial Managers will like the improved checkout process, renewable payments.

General Managers and all team members will find Team Time to be a great tool for seeing what everyone is up to, and for tracking performance. Community Managers will benefit from the registration and subscription purchase improvements.

And if there is just one or two of you running the sites then you’ll find your experience is dramatically improved all round.

Upgrade Guidance

We’re not expecting any major issues with this release, but the scale of this release means that issues may arise. We have greatly improved our Quality Assurance process for this release, especially on the eCommerce side so anticipate a significant improvement in the number of eCommerce related issues in this and future releases.

The most significant under-the-hood change in this release is the support for Custom Cascading Style Sheets and the tight integration with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. These changes should not have any impact with custom code or existing designs.

It is recommended that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update.

Key Enhancements

Google Analytics Integration

Affino is now fully integrated with Google Analytics. Previously it was possible to include the Google Analytics code on each Skin so that all page views could be tracked, in this release it is now possible to integrate directly into Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API. It means you can start full ecommerce analytics via Google Analytics as well as through the Affino Dashboard.

Key indicators you can track are conversion rates, average order values, visits to purchases, product performance revenue tracking.

It is also possible to do a funnel analysis on purchases, e.g. V visitors W added products to baskets X went to the checkout Y went to pay Z completed the transaction.

The single most important aspect of the integration is that you can track keyword conversion rates, i.e. how much you spend on specific keywords, and how much revenue they drive for which products. It allows highly targeted Pay Per Click campaigns where you can immediately see which keywords are working for your business model and tune your campaigns accordingly.

We’ve also rolled out the Q URL variable for all key internal searches so these can be tracked within Google Analytics as well.

Google Website Optimizer Integration

Affino now lets Google Website Optimizer live up to its potential by allowing anyone to easily create very powerful experiments without any code. Google Website Optimizer (GWO) lets you see which layouts and content provide the best conversion rates. You can try out multiple titles, images, videos, buttons, layouts simultaneously, define the Goal and Google Website Optimizer will tell you which the most successful combination is.

The problem is that it is virtually impossible to set up Experiments on GWO by the average end-user. Fortunately Google has made available the GWO API which allows Affino to create Experiments for you.

A simple form allows users to set up the Experiment within Affino. Most significantly you can define any of number of actions as the end goal including: filling out a form, a purchase, registration, search, newsletter sign-up or specific content viewed.

Affino lets you create variations using Design Objects. This is far more powerful than the traditional way Experiments are created, e.g. simply with text and images or whole pages. Affino will let you try out different elements of your page layout, and can include everything from text through to videos and navigation elements.

Once the Experiment is running GWO will let you know the best combination of page elements for the most effective targeting based on your goals.

Structure Copy

Structure Copy lets you copy whole / parts of site structures from one site to another (running on the same Affino instance). This is extremely useful for setting up new sites and microsites. It is also very useful for copying successful elements between your sites. Structure Copy lets you do in seconds what would otherwise take minutes / hours of complex effort. It can be used at any stage, so that sites can easily be extended as required.

When copying over the structure it is possible to change key elements such as the Skins and Security, and to universally define default profiles to be used by the new channels. It will also ensure that no duplicate structural channels will be created, i.e. it will not copy over a Login channel where there already exists one in the destination Zone (site).

When used in conjunction with Smart Copy on the Designs, it can reduce the effort to roll out new microsites by 90% and opens up new business opportunities.

Custom Cascading Style Sheets

Affino’s support for Custom CSS has been transformed in this release with the introduction of a number of key CSS styling enhancements:

New Custom Cascading Style Sheets in the Design Centre which can be re-used across multiple Skins. Design Styles can now also have Custom CSS applied; these are generated into a CSS file for each Skin.

It means that there is a 3 level hierarchy for CSS applied to Skins: At the base is the CSS automatically generated by Affino for all the Affino Design Elements, on top of this is the CSS applied to the Design Styles and then at the top level is the Custom CSS applied to the Skin. This provides the maximum granularity of design possible.

Each Design Cell now has a unique ID, e.g. id="dc_15877", which can be styled to, and which works across Skins, this allows for more targeted CSS. A number of key Affino elements have been updated to improve the ability to style them.

Most significantly the Application Bar has been updated so designers and editors can turn on or off the Custom CSS when viewing a page. This will allow both the users running a site, and those who support them to immediately identify if something is a custom styling issue or a core Affino issue. It also provides the ability to try designs with or without the custom styling.

Smart Messaging

Smart Messaging takes Affino Newsletters and email communication to an entirely new level. In what is a significant milestone for Affino, this release sees the introduction of Event Triggers and Group Filters for targeted messaging.

Smart Messaging is an extension of Affino Newsletters, which means you get all the great personalisation, design and automation capabilities which already exist and can now extend them to send out much more targeted and timely messages.

The new Filters mean that Newsletters are no longer used for simply sending to subscriber lists. Instead they can be used as a smart messaging platform for targeting specific subscriber groups, all users, active / inactive members and customers.

Event Triggers are used to provide timely messages which improve customer service, sales conversion and engagement. Key event triggers include registration, login, aborted shopping basket, purchase and birthdays. It means targeted messages can be sent out automatically based on user behaviour, e.g. birthday greetings; vouchers to encourage shoppers or subscription renewals; introduction messages for new users; re-engagement emails for inactive users.

Team Time v3

The Comrz Team has been using ’Team Time’ for a while now as our In / Out Team Status Board. This release sees the first public release of Team Time as a key component of the eCommunity Solution. Team Time lets members of a team check In and Out so that other members can always see what their status is. It also provides extensive time tracking and reporting capabilities for managers. Although Team Time was initially intended as a purely internal solution, there has been a great deal of demand for Comrz to make this core Affino, so now it is.

The main screen is the Status Board, here users can see the status of their team members and can log In (meetings, lunch or travel) and Out (holiday or sick leave). Logging in or changing the In status is simply a one-click action. When logging Out users must enter in an activity report which covers their actions since logging in. The simplicity of this approach is what makes it so effective. Below the logging area users can see who is in or out and view their latest report.

There are a number of report screens which provide great insight into the team performance. It is possible to review the whole team’s performance in terms of their latest reports and their time tracking. It is possible to filter that by days, months and years. Very useful for tracking working hours, time spent, and days worked in a month.

It is also possible to do much more detailed drill-downs on each team member, both within the Team Time reports, but also directly through to the Community Manger which provides insight into the team member’s activity throughout the site.

Video Player v2

Greatly improved video player. We’ve implemented dozens of new concepts to make the experience smoother, faster and more intuitive. The biggest change is the native YouTube and DailyMotion support. This means that you can create YouTube video walls, carousels, video walls and much more. It also means that you can use YouTube / DailyMotion videos seamlessly within your site without losing your customers to 3rd party sites.

Other Enhancements

Addresses – address handling has been made consistent across all community, registration and ecommerce elements

Blogs – now display videos intelligently: if there is a main image and a video then the main image is displayed on top and in the listings; if there is no main image then the video is displayed

Blog Archive DE – now displays the blogger’s details and RSS link

Canonical Links – Affino now supports Canonical Links for all Channels, Sections, Standard and Media items; These are essential for improved SEO and Google Search rankings; fully automated

Carousel DE – new refinements and options for improving layouts

Comments and Ratings – can now be hidden on a page design (in the Prime Content settings) allowing for them to be designed into templates; no longer deleted when deleting users, instead set to ’Created by Former Member’

Content Subscriptions – Affino no longer sends out content subscriptions to members who have not logged in for six months, reduces the possibility of Spam blocking

Documents – Improved the flow of the Tender Documents process so that it is clear to users which items are available for download; improved overall usability

Dynamic Forms – new Dynamic Routing Field allows forms to be directed to specific email addresses based on the options selected

eCommerce – there is a new option to not sell Zero Value products, this is essential where content is being imported via webservices and something potentially goes wrong. The products are presented but there is no price and it is not possible to purchase them. Payment Gateways can now be made country specific; new Order Statuses: On Hold, Released for Delivery, Back Ordered, Pending Return, Returned; new Shipping information box which can be managed on each order and is available through the My Account screen; new PayPal renewable payment support for PayPal Pro; billing email address now auto-populated on the checkout; users who enter an existing email address are prompted to log in at the start of the checkout process; delivery address can now be hidden on the checkout if only digital goods are being purchased; improved the flow of subscription purchases; fixed buy button on Media Library; introduced unique URLs for each checkout step

Form Handler (Control-side Forms) – reworked the forms so that they are faster and work well with the newest generation of browsers

Forum – simplified search presentation with easy access to the advanced search options; improved Today screen allows users to peek at the last post made to each forum plus improved layout and information

Groups – personal media items can now be easily displayed in groups

Login DE – new Horizontal layout option with ’forgotten your password’ link

Media Library – it is now possible list secured media items, users can see the item information but when they click on the link they’re taken to the login / sales page; new Documents listing option for presenting detailed information on media items; new option to user the Affino Video Player instead of the native YouTube and DailyMotion video players; Affino Media Library now supports Zip Files

Media Uploader – new simpler method for adding streaming video and audio items to the media library; improved compatibility with embedded videos and SlideShare

Media Workflows – a number of new Lock Down options make it possible to streamline media uploads considerably; new button options mean that it is now possible to make more obvious control interfaces for new communities

Member Search and Listing – improved layout, numerous new options for refining what information is displayed; new default message for member invites

My Account – numerous new issues for hiding inactive elements of the personal account screens

New Member Alerts Beta – new ’premium member’ option, alerts members of new members or groups they might be interested in, i.e. those which match their interest topics

Newsletter Sign-up DE v1 – new Newsletter Sign-up design element makes it easy to include straight forward newsletter sign-ups on Gateway pages

Optimisation – optimised many of the most frequently run queries so that they are either cached or more efficient, improved scalability and performance

Pending Users – Member Type column added to listing to simplify the approval process

Profile – new Documents tab added to the public profile to showcase members documents; incompatible image alert when users are trying to upload CMYK based JPGs

Recommendations – Events added to recommendations

Registration – the Member Type can now be made into a drop-down; when purchasing a subscription new users are taken directly through to the checkout; if only one membership option is available then it should simply just be presented; Topics can now be assigned to Member Types and in turn to members, improves targeting; new Description of Responsibilities option in Registration; it is now possible to Fix the country that users register from, i.e. only UK or France for country specific sites; it is now possible to have a shorter registration page; it is now possible to make newsletters opt-out on registration, i.e. users will default register to some newsletters

Related Content – new filters on the Related Article selector allow you to find articles much better by being able to filter by the Section and Presentation Styles

Search – site and member searches can now be easily tracked using 3rd party analytics tools as a Q variable is always appended to the URL when a search has been done; It is now possible to have drop-down Channel filters on the site search, this will let you filter searches by their product categories

Standard Sections – new Quote listing template allows Quotes to be listed effectively

Tips DE – improved layout; introduced new option to hide the image, useful for Quotes

URLs – rolled out ’No Follow’ on a number of links which should not be indexed through to, including: Page Tools, Article Tools, Social Bookmarkers, Email This, Subscribe by Email, Login

Users – changed way in which security is assigned to users, now done directly on the User Edit screen.

Video Carousel DE v1 – new Video Carousel Design Element allows you to present videos in a carousel; handles MP4, YouTube and DailyMotion videos, allows purchasing from the carousel

What’s New – improved the What’s New listing by adding More links so users can browse to the sections

WYSIWYG Editor (TinyMCE) – updated to latest version: 3.3.2 to resolve numerous issues

Fixes

API – the webservice API has been refined extensively and multiple critical fixes have been applied making this an essential update for anyone using it

Articles – now display reliably when using Multi-display

Blog DE – improved layout when no image is selected

Competitions – Fixed UDF List error; Title no longer squeezed in IE

Contacts – fixed layout for Google Chrome

eCommerce – numerous Wishlist issues fixed; layout fixed on single-page-checkout; fixed issues with using SecPay payment gateway, products now reliably add to basket when containing special characters

Dashboard – extensive query optimisation to speed up the dashboard; fixed iZoneCode error

Embedded Links – fixed issue where embedded links were clashing with hard-code links in content

ETests – answers no longer pre-selected wrongly

Events – resolved layout issue

Feature Scroller DE – Sort Order now works consistently

Forum – the Forum Monitor now takes the Design Menu style assigned to the Prime Content

Groups – numerous key issues resolved making this an essential update for Groups

Highlights Scroller DE – multiple fixes making this an essential upgrade if you want to use the Highlights Scroller

Incoming Feeds – updated to handle the updated Twitter and YouTube feeds

Live Design – the Live Design panel now appears above Carousel content

Live Editor – no longer taken to the homepage when editing articles

Login – Auto-login function now working reliably when using cross-domain logins, i.e. one user account across multiple sites

Main Menu – no longer displays hidden sections; no longer displays Sub-sections when Integrated Navigation is not selected on the Channel; fixed numerous JavaScript / AJAX issues; CSS Main Menu copy function fixed to copy over the bullets

Media Editor – numerous fixes for generating assets, grabbing video frames and preventing caching on CDNs make this an essential update for the Media Editor; now opens reliably from media library sections

Media Library – DailyMotion videos no longer blow up; fixed issues with editing media items; no longer append a 1 to media file names when uploading new unique media

Members – add to Contacts from member listing issues resolved

Mobile – mobile channel fixed, no longer erroring out

My Information – fixed preview in Design Centre

Newsletter – fixed links on the Buy button for catalogue items; newsletter subscriber import issues fixed; fixed newsletter test messages

Password Reminder – now users the Sub-site name rather than the Zone name when sending out the reminders

Pending Users – group membership no longer removed from non-registration related groups when approving users

Personal Dashboard – no longer errors out

Photo Stack DE – now shows guidance if no dimensions have been entered, rather than blowing up

Public Profile – fixed issue with missing email and password fields when editing User Profile; role and title field content no longer doubles up every time you re-submit the form

Publishing Workflows – improved the lock-down; fixed channel selector issue

Registration – fixed refresh on the country / county drop-down selectors

Screen Names – Section Screen Names can now be reliably set to be unique to the Zone; refined uniqueness of screen names so they consistently point at the same content; Affino now reliably removes deleted screen names

Search – fixed issue which was causing the site search to break under certain conditions; fixed special character indexing for the site search

Sections – embedded links now working reliably for Sections

Seminars – layout improvements

Shopping Basket DE – fixed browser compatibility issues with adding products to the basket

Slideshow DE – preview image now shows again reliably; multi-displayed images now showing correctly

Smart Image DE – no longer ’sticks’ when mousing over; fixed text padding issue; fixed character issues; now shows the correct focus state when on an active channel

Standalone Video Player DE – no longer blows up on Design Object Preview; numerous fixes on the preview images

Text DE – fixed text size issues; improved special character handling

Wishlist DE – any product can be added to a Wishlist, not just ones which are for sale; no longer errors out on new products without pricing

Wishlist Profile – Profile Settings now generated reliably

YouTube Compatibility – updated most elements integrating with YouTube to match changing YouTube requirements

Plus numerous other minor fixes and enhancements. In total there are around 200 enhancements and fixes in this release.

Affino Site Showcase - Filmutea Site Transformation

markus@comrz.com — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:22:00 +0000

This is the first in an ongoing series of blog posts we’ll be doing on Affino sites. There are some great new sites coming up and also great site transformations taking place continuously and since the Affino user community learns so much from each other we believe this will be a useful series all round.

Filmutea have just re-launched their film community site with a new look and broader focus. The site transformation had been done completely in-house and will be an ongoing project over the coming weeks as the team set about transforming the site to encompass all the numerous current cross media projects and related projects they’re involved in.

The look is more underground than the last couple of versions and sees a return to the guerilla roots that Filmutea comes from. It’s going to be well worth keeping an eye on this site as Filmutea rolls out the new Affino community features to the 35,000 strong member community, and starts to leverage the up-coming YouTube video walls and other great video related features we’ll be rolling out.

If you have an Affino site launch or transformation you want us to showcase, get in touch with me with the details.

Affino Beta Labs - Smart Messaging

markus@comrz.com — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:48:00 +0000

We’re going to sneak in a final stealth project into the Affino 5.5.16 release, and it is a major leap in Affino Newsletters / Messaging. We will be introducing two new key capabilities to Newsletters: event triggers and group filters, which will open up a whole new dimension in active customer engagement within Affino.

The last time we seriously looked into rolling out smart messaging was back in 2006, and it led to a six page requirements plan with weeks of work required to deliver the functionality. Since then we’ve had numerous conversations with companies on their requirements and the requirements have magnified.

We have been doing some optimisation on the messaging side in Affino this week and it led us to explore the feasibility of rolling a v1 of Smart Messaging, and the great news is that it is going to be very achievable for this release.

So we’re going for it!

Every single Affino site owner will greatly benefit from smarter messaging and it will have a material impact on customer service and sales conversion rates.

It’s worth recapping the evolution of Affino Newsletters since it will give great insight into just why Smart Messaging is going to be such a key driver.

Manual Newsletters, Flexible Design

The first release of Affino newsletters allowed users to select any Skin design and send it out to a group of newsletter subscribers. From the outset this was integrated into the core site and the site registration. It gave great design flexibility and full automation on content and subscriber management.

Newsletter Analytics

We also rolled out Newsletter Analytics which provide solid tracking of key indicators such as user reads, which content is clicked through on, what competitions are entered and if the message leads to site registrations or a loss of subscribers.

Personalise Messages

Next we introduced basic personalisation through the Text Design Element (DE) which allows for personalised text within messages, e.g. Hello Fred of Bedrock. This increased the click-through rates whilst reducing the spam filtering.

Message Optimised Code

We worked closely with numerous organisations to tune the code generated for Affino messages to minimise the risk of spam filtering and to improve the message presentation.

Automated Newsletters

Last year we introduced automated newsletters. These are sent off on a regular schedule and consist of fully dynamic personalised content, with all the subscriber management, content and analytics being fully automated. This allows the setting up of regular hands-off, active communication.

eBusiness Dashboard

With the roll out of eBusiness Dashboards we greatly increased the level of analytics available on Newsletters including subscriber trends.

Personalised Highlights

We extended the personalisation recently to allow the highlights elements to be fully personalised within the messages. This allows for users to be sent messages highlighting what their friends are up to, and with personalised recommendations. It means that as an example, rather than sending the 10 latest videos, you can send 5 latest which match their interests and 5 which were created / uploaded by their friends.

Optimised Designs

At the same time we introduced the higher level of personalisation it became clear that the message code is now completely different from that required for generating web pages. To that end we have selected the top fifteen Affino Design Elements required for newsletter messages and optimised them so they work well across all the leading email clients.

Smart Messaging

Smart Messaging builds on top of all of this great design flexibility, personalisation and analytics to allow far more effective targeting of customer and community members.

Group filtering works in two ways: firstly it allows you to target members of specific groups (security groups) you have created; secondly it allows you to target behavioural groups such as active and inactive members, customers and inactive subscribers.

Event Triggering allows you to target members based on specific events such as birthday, registration, last login (inactivity), abandoned shopping carts and purchases.

What Smart Messaging Makes Possible

With the Smart Messaging in place you can provide greatly improved customer service, timely reminders and user engagement. By being more relevant and useful you also reduce the likelihood that your messages will be un-subscribed or end up in the junk folder.