I was recently approached by a small company who wanted to bring their old web site up to date. A lot of the content was still relevant so they were keen to incorporate it into the new site structure.

However when their old web company realised that a client was about to be lost, they insisted that all the texts written by them remained their copyright and would not be released. The directors decided that writing new content would probably be less costly and time-consuming than a legal battle, so took the hit and moved on.

Was this the right decision? Probably.
Can we learn from this experience? Definitely!

Caveat: I am not a lawyer. Check the following with your legal advisor before acting on this information!

As I understand it, copyright remains with the content creator (that is, designer, copywriter, web builder,…) by default. So unless there is a contract in place which transfers it over, you have only limited rights to use it.

So before you start a project, you need to reach an agreement about copyright – specifically who is allowed to do what and when.

But be warned: this may not be as simple as transferring all rights to you on receipt of payment. Some professionals – photographers in particular – hold tight on to their copyright. Selling additional rights helps them keep their costs competitive. Others – like web designers – may want to reuse code in future projects; indeed your own web site is likely to include code that has been used many times before.

So as with all things legal, before you speak to a professional or draw up a contract yourself, think about what you really want. What are likely to need from your content in future? Are there any restrictions you want to put on the marketing or web agency to prevent them reusing the content they created for you. Set it all down in plain English and discuss it with them.

If you do this at the outset, while you are negotiating the deal, then chances are they will be more than happy to reach an agreement.

Last week I spent some time evaluating solutions for a client who wants to make their first, tentative foray into e-commerce. Because they are uncertain what return they will get on their investment, we thought that hosted solutions – which charge a relatively high monthly fee but have very low setup costs – would be worth investigating.

I looked at many providers, but the contrast between my experiences at Volusion and BigCommerce can be taken as a lesson for all of us who are considering selling beyond our domestic market or going all the way with export…

Problems with internationalisation?

Both companies have strong solutions, they come over well in numerous independent reviews and provide plenty of information on their web sites. But when I dug a little deeper into BigCommerce I started to find discussions on UK business forums which bemoaned their inflexible approach to how we include VAT in prices and on invoices over here.

With ecommerce, sales tax is one of the basics that you just have to get right. So, given that these blog posts weren’t all that recent, I figured it was best to ask the BigCommerce people themselves – giving them all the details that the blogger had highlighted.

Slipping up on the basics

After about 48 hours I received a response. It was one of their presales guys, asking me if I could explain “What is VAT?”.

This wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for, but you can’t expect everyone within an organisation to get it right first time every time, so I sent a brief explanation and a link to a Wikipedia article which covers the subject really well.

Now, two weeks later I’m still waiting for a response – do they have the technical ability to work with UK clients or not?

Meanwhile, Volusion – who appear to be split equally between the UK and USA – have been in touch on the phone, confirmed these and other requirements and put in place the foundations of a good working relationship.

Local company wins the business

So once again, it looks like a more local company has won the business.

I’m sure BigCommerce can live without my client’s business. And the USA is a big enough market to not worry about the ins and outs of every other country in the World. But it shows how you really do need to get things in order – from market research to product functionality, staff training and social media monitoring – if you are going to maintain your professional brand integrity when you start exporting.

Even if you have identified a problem that the competition isn’t addressing and even if you have proven that the technology can address it, there is another level at which any new proposition needs to be tested. It’s not rocket science, and it may not give you the answer you want, but an honest appraisal of the ‘NDA’ could save a great deal of wasted time and money:

Need

How pressing is the need that your product addresses? For the individuals who you are targeting, is the problem you solve big enough to command their time and attention? Will it even appear on their radar? If not then you are going have trouble getting more than polite interest, no matter what percentage return on investment you can offer.

Desire

Some problems were never destined to be solved. Some business decision makers are motivated by political agendas such as avoiding personal risk or selfish empire-building. Many individuals – both consumers and in business – are afraid to make the changes they know are needed. Do your target buyers really, really want what you are proposing?

Ability

Can the people who would benefit from your product afford it? If not then who else are you going to have to persuade? The public sector is notoriously fickle when it comes to obtaining funding, no matter how much benefit society would derive. And in business, the people who need your product may not have the purchasing authority – because of the price, because of the cost centre(s) into which it falls, or because other people have control over that area of the business (a frequent problem with complex IT systems).

As government is proposing stronger measures against consumers who illegally downloaded MP3s and other intellectual property, is it right that big supermarkets are at the same time distributing own-brand ‘copies’ of successful branded products?

Developing new consumer products is arguably every bit as time-consuming, costly and risky as taking a new artist from demo tape to stardom. So is a big supermarket’s own-brand version of the Mars bar radically different from a file sharing/ indexing site? Practically speaking, the big supermarkets have such a hold on the distribution channel that brand owners cannot afford to fall out of favour with them. But just because it’s pragmatic doesn’t mean it’s right.

Perhaps we have no compunction buying own-brand chocolate bars because they are  not exact copies; the overall taste and brand experience is different. But would that then mean that we should have a completely clear conscience when we download MP3s, so long as the sound is slightly degraded and without album artwork?

Cultural persuasion

More to the point, those of use whose livelihood depends in some way on intellectual property (IP) need to recognise that each culture has fairly arbitrary ideas about what can be owned and what belongs by rights to everybody. In the short term, we have to accept that this can vary tremendously by region and is largely immune to logic. However these values do change over time and can certainly be influenced.

If you are looking for an example of how not to do it, take a look at the music and movie industry. Given the wealth of creative talent at their disposal, their attempts to persuade us away from copyright infringement have been embarassingly crude. Now, by rolling out the heavyweight lawyers and lobbyists they seem to have given up on influence and be gambling everything on a centralist, top-down legislative approach.

Voluntary commoditisation?

Pricing pays a huge part in the perception of value and building brands, so it is a big mistake to make pricing as linear as the cost of distribution.

Some software companies are getting this right, while next to nobody in music and media seems to have got past the basics. Most music, DVDs and cinema tickets are very similarly priced and the products are barely differentiated. There has been apparently very little effort to create solutions to meet the needs of different people – different demographics, different life stages, different social and income groups.

Those who are getting it right are creating innovative bundles, editions and licensing options. They are making sure that people who want and can afford the best are given something that fits their perceptions, while those on tighter budgets still pay but at a lower level.

In conclusion

Perhaps the makers of Mars bars haven’t got so much to worry about after-all. So long as their marketing results in people who aspire (in some small way) to a real Mars bar and where a significant proportion of the market is willing to pay premium prices for them, then a certain proportion of rip-off copies need not be a real concern.

Sometimes really serious-looking technical errors have the simplest of solutions.

This afternoon I moved a client’s WordPress installation to a new server and subsequently upgraded it to the latest version.

So when the upgrade failed with the message “Unable to locate wordpress root directory” I had visions of mis-configured servers, permissions gone wrong or IP addresses lurking in places they shouldn’t be.

However after a little researching online I found that the answer is as simple as it is random: This error can be caused by the wrong FTP username being given (not an incorrect password – that would be trapped nicely by wordpress – but the username).

I guess this isn’t something that is going to happen often – moving a server and so changing the FTP username – but I’m glad I thought to read around before spending hours diagnosing the server.

Over the holidays I’ve been catching up on reading and not surprisingly, search engine marketing and social media featured prominently. As I’ve been reading papers, presentations and blogs from experts and devotees, one of the messages I’m hearing is that interruption marketing is history.

What is ‘interruption marketing’

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘interruption marketing’, it refers to things like advertising and direct mail. Essentially, this is the kind of marketing that interrupts what you are doing to deliver sales messages that you didn’t request. This includes all those irrelevant TV ads and the stuff that comes through the letterbox and finds its way quickly into the recycling.

But to suggest that mailshots, cold calls  and advertising are outdated tools for people who just don’t understand the web? Experience shows that simply isn’t true!

Championing the old ways

So in the interests of balance, I’d like to put the case for including old-school promotions in your marketing mix:

• Social media can provide some great ways of engaging with your target audience, so long as enough of them use social media when they are thinking about your kinds of products and services. So although millions of people connect with friends on Facebook, you have to ask yourself whether they would really want to build online relationships with a supplier of industrial chemicals (or security software or whatever). What’s more, there are many, many more people – including a large proportion of business decision makers and older more affluent consumers – who just don’t use social media; they prefer to keep their social activities offline.
• Search engine marketing is great when your target audience is actively searching for information about a particular issue. For a start, people who know they have a problem and want a solution are the best kind of sales prospect. But what about people who don’t yet know they have a problem? Or those who never look for a solution because they believe none exists? Or those who are ignoring an issue because they have more pressing day-to-day priorities? If you don’t interrupt these people with your sales messages, they will most likely never get to hear them.
• If your business is focused on a narrow geographical area, you can tell search engines about that, so most of your search results will come from the right people. But if your market niche is more specialised – and one which people are unlikely to refer to in a Google, Bing or Yahoo search – you may find it easier to narrow-in on your audience through specialist/trade publications and mailing lists that are built up from company or lifestyle data.

As I’m writing this I feel I’m barely scratching the surface. But if it adds a little perspective to an important but over-hyped discussion, then I guess that will do!

I just heard on the Wired.co.uk podcast that Adobe will no longer be developing Flash for mobile devices. Given Apple’s stance on Flash (“It’s bad for the web, so we won’t let Flash presentations, games and sites run on iPhones and iPads”) this is perhaps inevitable. And given how much you can now do with open technologies like jquery and HTML5, I think we’re all ready to move on to the next chapter anyway.

For me personally, the timing of this announcement was a little ironic. You see, I’ve just finished developing a ‘virtual showroom’ for a client, which is updating an almost indentical bit of functionality off their old web site.

The disadvantage of creating it in HTML and CSS rather than Flash is that we had to do a lot more testing – on different computers and in different browsers. But that aside, it’s great to see the finished product on my PC and Android phone, Mark’s Mac and his iPhone, all the same, all working perfectly.

You can check it out on the client’s new web site - click the ‘view the range’ button.