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...

On Sky Sports News today there was an article about Leicester Tigers Rugby Player Jordan Crane - who had tweeted about the possible extended lay-off he would suffer following an ankle injury. Coach Richard Cockerill was quick to comdemn his player’s actions and issue a blanket ban on all Twitter and Facebook activities mentioning anything related to the Tigers Club or its team members’ activities.

In a discussion with my Rugby player colleague Chris, I voiced my opinion how this was surely all a bit of a storm in a teacup. He however quickly countered with the argument that the Tigers ’ opponents could use this information to gain advantage in team selection, training and strategy, knowing that the Tigers would be fielding a less tried and most likely less capable player in the number 8 position for an extended period.

This then got me thinking about the reality of Social Media and Twitter and Facebook , and how commonplace it is these days to tweet or post updates about anything and everything. It thus stands to reason that somewhere in amongst all these tweets, some people will be inadvertently giving away significant company and team secrects and strategies which competitors could and would use against them.

We all know that many employers check a prospective employee’s Facebook and Twitter accounts as part of the original interview and vetting process, but how many companies regularly check on their employees ongoing activities?

Now that the Tigers players have received an offical gagging order from the club, where they are specifically prohibited from tweeting anything club-related, how soon is it before companies en masse start introducing specific clauses into their employment contracts to ban employees from mentioning any of their employer’s activities.

Twitter really is a two-edged sword, as its great promotional ability has been proven again and again; yet, if every time you tweet about your company’s activities your competitors take note of your actions - how soon before they will have something seemingly innocuous that they can twist and spin to use against you.

Never forget how quickly the fortunes of companies can be reversed by one inadvertent statement - all you need to do is think ’Gerald Ratner’!

Up against the need fo...

NMAP.org has generated an interesting dynamic Web Infograph showing the relative size of the Web’s largest websites, rendered in relative Favicon terms. Of course the Favicons are simply 16 x 16 pixel - browser website identifiers, so there is some degree of distortion at larger sizes.

The dynamic favicon diagram is simply called ’Favicon ’ and is based on a large-scale scan of the top million websites, in accordance with Alexa traffic data .

A static JPG can be found [Here] with a legend of the 70 largest websites - which are really domains if you read the fineprint. All the usual suspects feature, the top 10 or so including:

Google

Facebook

Yahoo

Youtube

MSN

Wikipedia

Wordpress

Gravatar

eBay

Microsoft

I had no idea that Gravatar was so big, in the top 70 listing, there are also a number of sites I’m not familiar with. including:

LiveJasmin  (Porn - beware!)

Yandex  (Russian Search Engine)

Sohu.com  (Chinese)

Kaixinoo1  (Chinese)

Soso  (Chinese)

XVideos  (Porn - beware!)

Rakuten  (Japanese)

4shared  (File Sharing)

Travian  (MMO Game)

Renren  (Chinese)

You really need some kind of Augmented Reality 3D app to be able to navigate into the full dynamic infograph, which contains some 328,427 properties. The smallest icons, those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach, are scaled to 16 x 16 pixels. The largest icon (Google ) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440 pixels in total!

Social Marketing Platform FlowTown have created a JR Tolkien ’Middle Earth’-like topographic map / infographic of the main Social Networking / Social Media Players in 2010.

The top 8 places below come from the FlowTown data, while numbers 9 and 10 come from Wikipedia . It is interesting to see that even though the placings of the top 10 are pretty much the same, both sources disagree over the exact figures.

There are also some nebulous networks like Windows Live Spaces (120m) and country specific networks Vkontakte (Russia - 82m) and QZone (China - 200m) which I am excluding as they’re not properly global platforms; that leaves the following: Facebook - 500 million members Habbo - 178 million members MySpace - 125 million members Bebo - 117 million members Friendster - 115 million members Twitter - 114 million members Orkut - 100 million members LinkedIn - 75 million members Hi5 - 70 million members Badoo - 69 million members

As most staff members at Comrz have multiple accounts with many of these networks, the figures can probably be extrapolated and adjusted by as much as -10% if not more.

There is only one real surprise here - Habbo (formerly Habbo Hotel) is the number 2 ranked Social Network in the world. Most of you may not be aware of it, which is just as well really, as it is targeted at teens.

There are a number of other interesting statistics to be had in terms of changing patterns of access, particularly with something like Twitter , where often both the author and audience post and view their ’Tweets’ through some kind of app or 3rd party aggregator. Several Social Networks will simply evolve into some kind of data or feeder hub, with the actual ’live’ interaction taking place on a different platform and via a different medium.

There are huge changes afoot as we engage in more and more social networking activities through our Smart Phones. Google TV will further revolutionise these formats by channelling Social Media and Social Networking through the family lounge television.

Facebook may be way out in the lead at the moment, but the race is far from over, and an...

Are you familiar with ’txt spk’, ’rickrolling’, ’lols’ / ’lulz’; do you ’Google’ and ’Tweet’ text in abbreviated leet or chatspeak?

Do you indulge in this kind of malarky?:

’thx daz 2g2bt cya thr l8r 2mro’

(Thanks that’s too good to be true, see you there later tomorrow)

SMS and Instant Messenger chat were the last signficant leaps forward in stimulating language development, and currently Blogs, Micro Blogs and Tweets are the key means of etymological evolution.

In terms of cultural milestones and benchmarks, all are familiar with the stereoptycially over-tanned (tango’d), heavily made-up, over-preened and under-dressed role models in society. The UK has Peter Andre and Katie Price, who continue to influence even though split up; the US has Snooki and the Situation and the remaining cast of the GTL lifestyle show ’Jersey Shore’ (Gym, Tanning, Laundry). It’s taken the Icelanders to come up with a generic name for these stereotypes - ’Skinka’ for girls (Skinka = Cured Ham, possible associated derivation also from ’Skank’); overly tanned, muscled and preened boys are known as ’Hnakki’ (Hnakki = Nape of neck / Saddle; tanned leather derivation). One of these words - ’Skinka’ although Icelandic, has already found its way into the Urban Dictionary , which has become the de-facto reference for modern language use, alongside various snippets on Wikipedia and other specialised blogs.

Music journalism has long been responsible for coming up with the descriptive terms and genres to describe emerging musical movements, fairly recent derivations have included grunge, crunk and dubstep. But back then, terms first appeared in print, within musical journals and newspapers, now they almost always appear online first, in someone’s blog or tweet, or even in an associated comment or message.

Back in the day when we worked for Emojo, we introduced and popularised a number of industry phrases which have now found their way into common usage, among them were ’Social Content Management’ , ’Social Marketplace’, and indeed ’Social Commerce’. We needed to ’invent’ these terms to best...

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 Gui...

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.

In view of the declining consumption of ’solid media’ that is to say - Printed Media and CDs in particular, it is becoming ever more important to justify / qualify the cost of digital media. A whole generation has grown up with the ’Free Internet’. There are enormous numbers of digital media consumers who pay nothing for the privilege of viewing, reading, listening to or even downloading their daily fix of media.

Back in my childhood days the type and number of media outlets was very limited, we did not have 1,000 flavours of internet radio, or Digital TV, let alone eBooks or any of the Internet by-products. If you wanted something for free, it usually meant shifting your butt down to the local public lending library - where books and complementary media could be taken on loan for a week or so.

The evolution of technologies like iTunes and Kindle (and obviously the Internet in general) have had a dramatic effect on how media is consumed. Most music these days is acquired via MP3 download; globally - probably half of this is via illegal downloads - where the artists receive no remuneration for their efforts. Recent news coverage reported that for the first quarter of the year, Amazon had sold 150 eBooks for every 100 printed books that had been shifted, and more recent figures show a ratio of 180 to 100, almost at 2:1. There’s of course the current debate with Newspapers and Magazines vs Subscriptions and Paywalls. However, there are several things that the digital industry does quite poorly, and this needs to change to shift more ’consumers’ from the freebooter bandwagon over to the status of paid-up customer.

I know these issues as well as anyone, as I am an avid consumer of Music, Books and Movies. I still buy a lot of music on Vinyl and CD - in fact the majority of my music I prefer to buy in those formats, as I like to enjoy a fully tactile, tangible, sensory experience with my media. I like the solidity of a CD Case or Album Sleeve, I enjoy reading the liner notes and lyrics and smelling the scent of fresh print. I also like to be engaged by clever visuals, great album art and the exotic feel of quality parchment papers. The same goes for thumbing through a weighty book - there is a degree of heritage and worth, that just is not currently reflected in or conveyed by digital ...

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.

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 use...

For anyone even slightly connected with online media, it cannot have escaped your notice that News International fairly recently introduced subscription-only access to their Times and Sunday Times websites. Superficially, everything looks the same, but as soon as you click to access an article’s details, up pops the paywall to demand payment for further progress.

If you look at the figures: £1 for first 30 days (circa 4 weeks) £2 per week thereafter (remaining 48 weeks of year)

This adds up to circa £97 for the first year, and £104 for ongoing years at the same rate.

Not particularly expensive really - only the unfortune result of doing anything unilaterally is that your potential customers can still get equally high quality journalism on dozens of other free / open sites.

The circa £100 per year is less expensive than a paper-based subscription, but there are significant downsides to being the only one with a paywall.

The numbers of users on the Times sites have supposedly fallen by in excess of 90%. And although a number of prospects have initially taken up the £1 per 30 days offer, we have yet to see what proportion of this extends their subscription beyond the introductory period.

I am one of those people who believes in paying the going rate for any given product or service. Yet while free options are available, the Times needs to have a significantly better quality of articles and exclusives to make its offering sufficiently attractive. I don’t believe this is the case. While everyone else is publishing their news for free online, at a similar quality, I believe the Times paywall cannot succeed.

There are glimmers of hope for paywalls - as witnessed by the Financial Times , which runs a fairly successful model of subscription. It can only do this though, because its content is largely specialist and unique. The Financial Times also has a 2 step system - allowing limited access for casualy users, and subscription access for power users. 90% of the reasons people read a daily newspaper can be satisfied by any number of different sites. With the arrival of celebrity and gossip blogs, this has taken much of the power away from many of the leading newspaper columnists also.

It is as we have always said of the Internet - if you want to enforce subscriptio...

Iceland has another world-class athlete to be proud of. I happened to catch in the Icelandic News (Mbl ) on Sunday morning, that Anníe Mist Þórisdóttir was leading the fittest female standings at the midway point of the 2010 CrossFit Games .

A brief search on the Internet later, and I was on the CrossFit Live page, watching the event in High Definition - direct from the Home Depot Centre in Carson California - the home of the LA Galaxy for those in the know. This just goes to further qualify the amazing impact and reach of the Internet - that a little known 3 day programme of events can be broadcast seamlessly around the world - enabled by a moderate level of sponsorship, and easily accessible technology that is now available to all. The quality of the video broadcast exceeded that which I witnessed on the BBC and ITV for the World Cup.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with ’CrossFit ’ - this is a core strength and conditioning program which aims to utilise every single muscle in the body. It is the training methodology of choice for most law enforcement and fire departments in the US, as well as for many professional sports teams. I had previously thought that the Ironman Triathlon or Olympic Decathlon events were the pinnacle of extreme sports endurance training / testing, but having watched most of Sunday’s broadcast. I can attest to the fact that CrossFit certainly seems to be the most gruelling, intensive test of extreme athletic ability. As an example of an event, competitors were made to do 5 ’burpees’ in a row, scaling over a 6 foot barrier between each, and then climbing a 20 foot rope several times in succession, before repeating this circuit 3 times. This was a mix of running endurance, squatting, thrusting, pushing, pulling, climbing, leaping and straining the body to its absolute limit -and then doing further reps (repetitions) of the same, when you were quite beyond exhaustion. If you recall the obstacle courses from the gyms of your youth, imagine this with added weights, 10 times more difficult exercises, a time limit enforced, with several repetitions of each circuit. Watching this all go down live, was terrifically exciting, and after 3 days of competition, the winners totally deserved the accolade -’The Fittest Male / Female Alive’.

In every competition, the contestants are faced with brand new trials and tri...

Back in Victorian times you would promenade daily, year-round down Park Lane and along Pall Mall until the summer ’Season ’ hit, when you could take your showboating to a more extended range of venues.

Now in modern times, ’The Season ’ as such is a more extended range of sporting, cultural, and most significantly - musical events. Back in the early days, you would need a tent, sleeping bag and boots, and a digestive system capable of enduring dodgy festival foods and long queues to portaloos. Nowadays, thanks to the BBC , you can catch much of the music festivals online - some acts in full, some in highlights fashion.

Watching music festivals online, also means you don’t have to gamble with choices like choosing between watching Eminem or Prodigy at the recent ’T in the Park ’ festival.

If you have ever been to a festival, you will know that the audience experience of a live act can be very variable and depends on a huge degree on the vantage point you find yourself in. Many a times in my past I have found myself pushed to the fringes or having some obstacle in my path which affects the visual or auditory quality of the experience.

Again - no such problem online - the sound quality is very respectable, and the viewpoint of the performing artist is always going to be better than what you see from row 77 in Glastonbury. There has been a recent trend in cinemas to host live broadcasts from a variety of cultural events, particularly Opera. Considering the prices you pay at the Opera House, and the viewpoint / accoustics etc, the Cinema option is preferable or at least more practical - to many opera fans.

The added benefit of viewing online is all the related content and references, so you can quickly cross-reference the setlist with album tracklisting to pick out a favourite tune.

As with the BBC coverage of the World Cup , I am always impressed with how the BBC covers a live event. For all the festival sites out there, perhaps the BBC is missing the live interactive location map, but for pretty much everything else the festival experience is better on the BBC .

So far this year, I have followed:

Radio 1’s Big Weekend
Glastonbury
T in the Park

And we have several more up-and-coming, including:
BBC Proms
Reading & Leads

Thi...

Following on from my ’New Industrial Revolution’ article, which talks about everyone being able to design and manufacture their own industrial goods; i.e. the democratization of Manufacture; I now turn my focus to retail, where everyone can set up their own Boutique online.

Before I get into the definition of a Boutique, I would just like to reflect on a number of emerging trends, particularly in the area of fashion retail. In real-world shopping malls, some of you may have come across ’Pop-up Shops’; small, temporary boutiques which appear and then disapper within a matter of weeks. If you’ve been to Iceland recently, you cannot fail to have noticed the rapid growth and appearance of designer collectives and their retail outlets - whether these be in side streets, or residential basements and garages, or the unused area at the back of a large warehouse facility. In the bricks-and-mortar world, prime retail real estate is expensive, and fashion sales can be very seasonal, as for many other businesses, which makes for extended periods of inactivity and leads to a struggle to pay the rent. Having several designers club together and temporarily lease retail spaces - whether town hall, or school for a weekend market, or some other low-cost and slightly off the beaten track destination, is the cleverest and most common-sense option available.

The one thing that all these designers need year-round, is an outlet for brand-building and promotion. They need to be able to resonate with their potential consumers, by developing an environment which fosters the right brand associations and idealogies, and backs them up with re-inforcing content, media an consumer events. The Internet is the perfect place to serve these small fashion brands - why? Let’s get back to the definition of ’Boutique’.

For most people a Boutique is just a small shop, often associated with expensive goods. For our purposes, the value of the goods is irrelevant, although the economics of volume / quantity vs price / quality can play some part. My definition of Boutiques is ’Small shops with Personality’, this is usually because Boutiques are run by enthusiasts, and in terms of Fashion Boutiques, often the designers themselves. But this is just one facet of ’Personality’, the other, equally im...

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am a huge fan of the BBC family of websites generally, and in the past have often referenced parts of the BBC Site in terms of best practice implementation for certain functionality and interfaces.

However! In my opinion, the new design of the BBC News pages takes them back significantly in terms of best practice usability. The BBC has adopted a ’Blog’ style format, dispensing with the contextual left-hand Main Menu, and instead rendering a more simplified version of this at the top of the page.

Moreover, Related Content used to be located in the right-hand column, but is now placed at the very bottom of the article. The sole purpose of the right hand column now is for general Content Highlights, even this is a little backward, as the numbering of the Most Popular articles comes to the right of the titles.

I would sincerely love to see the Usability Testing Results on this new layout, as any idea of cross-contextual browsing is completely lost in the new format. In our many years of experience, the best format for informatic sites is 3 columns - with pertinent references aligning up alongside the main article - to the right and and left. In removing the contextual basis of the page location with the simplified Menu, it is more difficult to contextually navigate to related content. The Main Menu itself could be improved with the addition of additional drop-downs. As for the loss of the Related Items from the right hand panel, I cannot see why this has been done - humans always reference best in the same plane of view - this is why you have margin notes. Moving everything to the base of the page divorces the primary content from its contextual relativity, and reduces browsing to linear terms, rather than the tangential / parallel means we have grown accustomed to.

The new layout is definitely more elegant, and the BBC have updated the various Article Tools (share etc.) to a nicer format, but for me, the whole usability has gone back enormously.

What do you think?

I was required to do some reference visuals for the soon-to-be-released ’Affino Customer Ladder’ - particularly for the comprehensive Analytics screen. A very big part of this new experience is the ’Conversion Events’ and the various ’Badges’ that can be earnt / accrued. For the reference visuals, there were a couple of badge highlights elements that needed to be rendered, and as such I needed some Affino Button Badges. This is what I have been doing over the last day or so!

The difficulty is coming up with an appropriate aspirational / reward / award status Icon that transcends the occasional ordinariness of the task. The badges had to be visually appealing and symbolic, whilst conveying the right feeling of ’Status’. Here follows a brief explanation of the rationale for the creation and purpose of each; some are immediately obvious, others a little more abstract. The main point though is that this collection beautifully illustrates the workings of the Affino Customer Ladder. The buttons are arranged by spectrum colour sequence!:

  Collaborator - Badge awarded to ’Team-worker’ User, someone who contributes content to Groups, or posts replies to User Help Forum
Communicator - Badge awarded for Form Filling - User receives badge for filling in specified Form/s

Networker - Badge awarded to User for making defined number of ’Friends’ / ’Contacts’ on the site, compare with Connector, which is more about external connections

Follower - Badge awarded to User who subscribes to defined number of Content Subscriptions / Feeds / Newsletters, or follows defined number of Companies on Online Social Directory

Scholar - Badge awarded to User for scholarly activities - reading a lot of articles, and taking a certain amount of tests

Connector - Badge awarded to Super Networker - someone who invites a set number of Users onto the site (reference point for ’Connector’ is Macolm Gladwell’s ’The Tipping Point’)

Collector - Badge awarded to User who downloads a defined number of reference materials from your site

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.

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...

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 f...

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.