Pod1 Blog

What could be better than landing at Pod1 HQ over in Westbourne Park, than arriving to a breakfast of delicious Kryspy Kreme heart-shaped doughnuts, with a huge jug of Starbucks’ finest coffee?

Well, some more pastries, namely almond-topped croissants and fresh pains au chocolat. And about a year’s worth of supplies of napkins (which will all be used – we care about the environment!) to wipe those sticky fingers and all the sumptuous raspberry jam off our chins.

I’m proud to be part of the team that organised this morning’s surprise – the look of delight from Podders as they came in made it all worth it. The office email server held up as sugar- & caffeine-rushing staff shared their feelings with tantalising photos and accounts of how they tucked into their first (and sometimes second!) meal of the day. The unfortunate ones who have been working remotely may still even smell the glazing on Monday morning…

Thank you Pod1 – we love you too!!

I’m presenting at Figaro Digital’s ecommerce seminar next Wednesday 27th January at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are only 50 places available for brand marketers so if you’re keen, book your place asap:

Pod1 / Varien breakfast forum at Shoreditch House

Shoreditch House was the venue for a meeting on January 12th between senior staff from Varien (the developers of Magento), Pod1 and a group of people who influence the eCommerce decisions of many of the UK’s leading retailers. The meeting was organised to help in the exchange of knowledge and ideas about what UK retailers are looking for from an eCommerce platform, how Magento might meet their needs, and the potential obstacles to Magento’s uptake. After brief introductions to Pod1 and Varien, an open discussion led us into many of the more interesting areas of the eCommerce world.

Discussion ranged from the need for simplicity and easy operation for the very small retailer to the challenge of getting an open source application accepted by a big corporate IT department. For many retailers, it’s clear that the eCommerce team is small and busy, with has high targets and high expectations set for it. Any eCommerce platform needs to help the team do complex, powerful things with ease. Merchandising is a critical task for any eCommerce team, and platforms need easy to use, powerful merchandising capabilities.

For the larger retailer the robustness of the platform, how well supported it is (24 hours per day, 365 days per year) and easy integration with corporate systems like the CRM database are more important. Vendors developing for any client need to make sure the latest whizzy front-end feature isn’t going to break the back-end administration system, and isn’t going to be a nightmare to operate.

Many retailers want to buy a turnkey solution that they just use, without the aggravation of having servers and IT teams of their own, and they increasingly ask for hosting that will get bigger and faster when it needs to (on Boxing Day, for example) and then gets smaller and cheaper when the website’s quieter.

Varien shared a great deal of information about the current and planned capabilities of Magento. They have a team dedicated to high availability enhancements and performance improvements, and regular improvements are being released to the community and enterprise editions. They hope to release a version of Magento for another database (other than MySQL) very soon. The new version of Magento Connect will be ’super easy’ to use and support charging for extensions as part of the download process. The Magento development team certainly sounds very busy.

As hosts, we hope everyone learned something from the encounter. We certainly came away with lots of ideas, information and determination to make our flavour of Magento even better than it already is.

Thank you to our lovely clients and friends for attending our seminar (see post – http://blog.pod1.com/pod1/pod1-email-seminar)

You can download / view the presentations here:

Sarah from Brolly:

David from Email Academy

Liam from Pod1

We will post Toby’s presentation soon along with the video of the session – WATCH THIS SPACE

See you at the next event…. remember to propose the topics for the next session – amanda.squires@pod1.com

Thank you to all of you who have confirmed your attendance at our Email Seminar on Tues 20th October.

Some information about the day:
Sarah and David will present seven rules to harmonise your brand and commercial goals through email with IPT exploring how your data acquisition strategy can support these very principles.
Pod1’s Producer Liam Craig will provide tips on delivering successful email from the creative concept and copy writing through to testing and delivery.

The session is a great opportunity for you to bring questions and observations and we ask that you email; amanda.squires@pod1.com with any examples of GREAT or TERRIBLE emails you have received recently to share with the panel and guests.

A little about our speakers:

David Hughes, Founder, The Email Academy
David has been involved in email marketing since 1998 as a client, technology vendor, trainer and consultant. He runs email marketing training courses for organisations including the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Econsultancy and has recently launched Europe’s first email marketing professional qualification with the Institute of Direct Marketing. As a consultant he has worked on email marketing strategy with clients across the BtoC (Kangol, Pentland Brands, Thomson Holidays) BtoB (3M, Jones Lang LaSalle) and the Not for Profit sector (Welsh Assembly Government, British Council).

David is Founder of The Email Academy, an email marketing consultancy.

Sarah Montieth, Founder, Brolly
Sarah is Brand Director of Brolly. Clients include: Yahoo!, News International, Adidas, Sky, LOVEFiLM, Facebook.

After a career in brand marketing and four fantastic years as Brand Director of Sky’s media arm, Sarah (or Monty as she is often known) was finally ready to go it alone. Brolly was created to fill the brand gap between the client’s objectives and the raft of agencies who need to deliver what should be one brand vision.

As Brolly grew, it became clear that the most exciting and challenging gap was the digital gap, where the lure of fast moving technology often dilutes this brand vision. So Brolly became a Digital Brand Content agency, determined to fill up the digital space with clarity, imagination and substance and above all, the brand at its most captivating.

Toby Selves, Director, IPT Data
Toby started his career at the Today newspaper selling classified ad space and has included the Mirror Group, Daily Express and Daily Mail. Having been in radio for 6 years and with the internet boom in full swing he moved to head up the client sales team at Freeserve before moving to become media director for media republic, a small media independent.

Six years as a Director at IPT working closely with some of the best known brands in the UK Toby has recently helped secure the purchase the lead generation division from IPH (The AIM listed holding company).

Liam Craig, Producer, Pod1
Joining Pod1 in January 2009 to expand our online marketing credentials, Liam’s remit includes campaign banners, rich media, email campaigns, microsites, virals, blogs, widgets, social media and video across a broad client portfolio.

Liam is a firm advocate for online marketing and its potential to increase ROI and brand awareness. He has a keen eye for creative and technical detail and enjoys working with different people.

See you on the 20th!

We are holding a seminar on email best practice and strategy for our clients and potential clients;

Contact me if you are interested in the seminar – amanda.squires@pod1.com

How important is PCI compliance to retailers?

1. It’s something that can be safely ignored for another year or so
2. It’s an IT thing that’s all about the website
3. It affects the whole business and I need to address it soon

Attendees at yesterday’s PCI Seminar at Pod1 will know the answer is, in fact, 3. A panel of experts from PCI Auditor Evolution, PCI compliant infrastructure provider Rackspace, and PCI Level 1 Payment Service Provider Sage Pay explained the background and their perspectives on PCI in a very helpful and informative way. It became clear very quickly that there is no time to waste on getting PCI projects going. They affect an entire business, not just the website, and extend to other partners who take payment card data: for example, if you outsource your call centre.

My favourite example of something to consider was in the handling of taped calls to call centres. As soon as someone gives card details on a line that is recorded, the tapes come under the PCI microscope. How many of us thought of that before the seminar?

On the day that HSBC was fined £3.2m for breaches of data protection good practise, the focus on a vital part of retail operations seemed very timely.

I wrapped up by outlining Pod1’s position on PCI. By combining PCI compliant solutions for our clients, and by improving our processes internally, we’re planning to achieve Level 1 PCI compliance for our own operations in the Autumn. This will mean retailers won’t need to worry about their eCommerce from a PCI perspective when they give it to us.

The presentations will be online for all to see soon.

We are pleased to invite our clients and potential clients to a seminar on PCI Compliance.
This is an important issue for all businesses who take payments and hold payment details of their customers. We have assembled some reputable advisors to point our clients in the right direction.

If you would like to come along, please email: pciseminar@pod1.com to request a place.
Places are limited so first come, first served.

As a complete newbie to the SES events I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect but I was hoping this would be an informative day out. I guess I was looking for a combination of some ‘top tips’ and some ‘myth busting’.

Let just say I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve read a few other posts about the event, some more positive than others, and if you were expecting a trade show and exhibition you’d be disappointed but if you were looking for a top notch informative seminar then this would be right up your street.

I started the day with the keynote presentation “The Changing Search World”, which was as good a place to start a day of SEOism as any.

The first problem arose trying to decide which of the presentations to attend, so after much deliberation I chose the following sessions;

News Search & SEO - This was a very useful session for me and I picked up lots of tips as well as reinforcing what I already new with good presentations from Greg Jarboe, Lee Odden and Tim Gibbon.

Blog & Feed Search SEO – This wasn’t quite as relevant for my clients but triggered a couple of good ideas we can use like a Widget for e-shop clients that notifies users of the item of the day, new stock & sales items.

Podcasts & Video SEO – Some interesting stuff here like Google only indexes videos if they have been posted on sites like You Tube, Metacafe etc. letting user do the hard work for them by applying the tags & descriptions.

Balancing Organic & Paid Listings – Paid V’s Natural Search, the age old question PPC or SEO (well not that old as neither have been around for long). The answer DO BOTH;-)

Linking Strategies – This was tricky how do you turn down the opportunity to listen and hopefully learn from some of the industries big dogs but it did clash with the new kid on the block Social Search Overview. In the end the allure of the perfect linking strategy won me over, and on reflection it was the right choice as the nice people at SES have put all the presentations online (including all the ones I missed) http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/presentations.html.

So in summary a great day out informative and well worth a look, I’ll definitely be there again next year.