I read with interest an article in ReadWriteWeb about the launch of a new cookie cutter design for mobile web services. The thing that was interesting was the how the author, Dan Rowinski, positioned the idea that it might be a negative thing for services that make it easy to create sites and apps. His question to mobile web developers was "Are we going back to a mass of websites that all look the same, back to the era of Netscape and boring design? Or are services like FiddleFly a good thing for the development community?" The readers comments that came back were predictable: 

• - if you make it easy you cannot produce sophisticated services
• - you can only do simple stuff with WYSIWYG
• - to really create an engaging presence you need to create a unique service

The presumption that efficiently produced products and services should be any less engaging, powerful or sophisticated is an interesting position for the industry to adopt. Clearly, almost every other major industry in the world has worked out how you can combine "cookie cutter" production with customer delight. To move forward, the digital industry has to break this mentality of hand-crafted is the only way to produce great services.

Our challenge for 2012 is to help the PR industry undertake digital intelligently. By repeating the basic functionality and avoiding reinventing the wheel every time, PRs are going to focus more energy on the parts that matter to a client - their message and whether their call to action is converting to sales.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on whether "cutting the dough" is the same as selling a delicious cookie?

We had a great discussion at our Repeat This! webinar yesterday, with industry practitioners posting some great questions for Ulla Jones (@UllaJones) from Hill+Knowlton and myself to mull over. This webinar is the first in a series where we will look at how repeatable solutions can boost the revenues, margins, quality levels and collaboration within PR agencies and over the coming weeks we will be taking the show to meet some amazing people in the world of PR.

The big themes that came through were certainly around the fact that the PR industry can really surprise the established "digital agencies" by creating digital services efficiently and being the champions of the digital conversation on behalf of their clients.

We spent time discussing how repeatable solutions are already helping Hill+Knowlton in Helsinki to produce high quality digital projects at light speed, and Ulla was really pushing the point that clients need help to define what they need when it comes to web solutions.

Ulla's prediction for 2012 was centred on social media moving even faster, but with PR agencies helping clients to learn to "swim for themselves", and the rise of the mobile site as the key deliverable for many PR related activities. If Ulla's predictions are true, we will be producing a lot of repeatable solutions for mobile and I have sneeking suspicision it will be.

Big news! I repeat, big news! Not only will I be hosting a webinar with Hill+Knowlton tomorrow at 4PM CET, we are planning to follow the webinar with a whole series of webinars and clinics that are designed to educate the PR industry about repeatable solutions and the benefits they bring. The schedule for the rest of the Repeat This! series will be solidified in January, so stay tuned for updates. 

We hope you join us tomorrow when we kick the series off, but if you can't make it, fear not! True to fashion, we will repeat the webinar again in January.

Register here

With the growing shift of client marcomms spending from traditional to digital channels, what does it mean for PR? I think it means that unless your agency starts to gain the capability to produce digital well - not just post and manage social media conversations, but actually move into the world of helping move internal and external comms on to the web.

For example, more and more businesses are creating digital annual reports for shareholders, or producing digital newsletters for clients and staff. They are creating Facebook landing pages that capture "Likes" and engagement and microsites to drive SEO rankings. These used to be complex productions, but today there are many ways to produce them effectively.

We talked to a number of clients and many of them have set the goal of 100% of the marcomms being spent on digital productions. This literally means no more print publishing of any type. What does this mean for PR agencies and what opportunity does it create?

Personally, I believe that content has always been king, so if PR agencies can do digital intelligently, then coupling this with the ability to write well and the trust of the client to put their message out, I think PR has a great future. What do you think?

I will be hosting a webinar together with Hill+Knowlton at 4PM CET on December 15th 2011 to discuss how the PR industry can borrow a few good ideas from other industries to improve the way digital services are created for clients.

If the most recent predictions will come true, next year is going to be a difficult one for the industry. I believe that to cope, the PR sector should focus on three things to ensure business can boost profitability: repeat, repeat, repeat!

"Repeat what?", you may ask. We are going to look at how PR agencies can do digital intelligently by focusing on turning one-off web projects into global best selling products.

Please join to learn more about what will change in 2012.

The PR industry now finds itself in a rather amazing position. In this era of economic uncertainty, reduced spending on advertising and increasing digital conversation, PR has the potential to become the “new advertising” modeled for and by the times. So, why then is the PR industry going backwards when it should be moving forwards? Something doesn’t add up.

What is going wrong lies somewhere between revenue and profitability. Revenues for the industry are up dramatically (by 9.24% in 2010) but profitability is down, burdened by increasing employment costs and a lack of productivity. The profitability of the Top 40 agencies in the UK fell by a staggering 23.8% in 2010 according to the Kingston Smith W1 report, heralding the lowest profit margins for seven years. So what needs to be done to increase productivity such that the increased revenues are no longer squandered?

According to Avril Lee, UK CEO at Ketchum Pleon, as quoted in response to a PRWeek report, "everyone in PR is having to be flexible about how we use resources and our most precious asset – our people. The need to cultivate and find great talent, and having it available ‘just in time’ when campaigns do get the green light, is often our most pressing day-to-day challenge."

Flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes new challenges. What can be done to help this most precious resource with consistency? Strategies, especially in the digital marketplace, must be equally nimble but must not sacrifice productivity. What is needed are high quality repeatable solutions that can be rolled out at the drop of a hat.

Think about the kind of digital projects you are asked to do for clients. Many of them are similar. Corporate websites, product microsites, newsletters, Facebook campaigns, LinkedIn applications, social media aggregators, etc. are all great examples of repeatable solutions that are different in content but similar in form. We recently interviewed a director at one of the world’s largest PR agencies, who said that about two-thirds of the solutions they produce for clients could be repeatable, meaning that in most cases repeatable solutions could reduce production costs, shorten turnaround time and, most importantly, guarantee consistently high quality.

At Hammerkit, we have been working with repeatable solutions for many years and believe that there has never been a better time for the PR industry to use them to their full advantage. Beyond that, we believe that to ignore repeatable solutions is to be left behind, facing statistics like nearly 25% drop in profitability mentioned above. Repeatable solutions accelerate profitable growth, improve productivity and create happy clients.

Here is how Hammerkit can help. We recently launched our Cloudstore for PR, which makes it easy for agencies to turn one-off web projects into best selling products. Every project has the potential to become a repeat sale, another solution added to your bag of tricks. It is like having your own PR AppStore. Our Cloudstore allows your agency to share all of the best selling items, shortening the sales cycle, and recycling what works. Valuable creative resources are stored rather than lost, and thus, also revenue is stored rather than lost.

If the PR industry doesn’t answer the call in 2012, it risks squandering its advantageous position. Smart agencies will focus on three things: repeat, repeat, repeat.

Facebook has taken a step towards safer browsing by making an SSL certificate mandatory for all external provider’s apps. With an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) data is encrypted online making it less fragile for potential misuse. App sources that do not hold the certificate will not be accessible on HTTPS mode.

So far we are used to secured browsing in data sensitive applications such as banking and e-commerce. However, since many Facebook apps also store user information (like it or not) this seems like a reasonable step in positioning Facebook as a more data secure platform. You can read more about this on Facebook’s Developer Blog.

The HTTPS support for all Facebook apps (page tab and canvas) has been mandatory from October on. HammerKit has taken the necessary steps to comply with this requirement to make sure that our customers’ apps keep providing the best possible user experience.

Being (in)famous of their dynamic nature, the next rather big change is mapped for early January 2012. Facebook will then drop the support of FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for new apps. Existing FBML apps will only work until June 1st. HTML/CSS/Javascript are to be used instead, which is good news for external developers (such as us) who use iframe embedding for FB pages.

I took a little look at how companies are utilizing Facebook applications. Most of them engage the public by different competitions, polls and all kinds of ad hoc information. Everyone seems to be out there crying for likes, but it is baffling to notice that in most cases a real call for action remains forgotten.

A large portion of all web browsing already takes place in the social networks with Facebook dominating that scene. So my question is why are companies not bringing their money making process to where people spend time, talk, share and compare?

For example, a charity organisation can for sure raise a lot of discussion over its cause. But why not include a simple app that asks people to go donate right there and then?

I did find some cases where the opportunities seem to have been grasped.

Check out the examples below:

1) Integrating an online store interface on Facebook

Shnajder Shop was set up in Facebook for promoting the work of Macedonian designers. The best T-shirt designs could be purchased directly from an embedded e-commerce application with an integrated payment system on Facebook. And in this case this was the only point of purchase. The result was an increase both in fan base as well as T-shirt sales.

2) Creating awareness and collecting supporters

Following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 a group of women came together to start a viral campaign for drawing attention to the region’s coastal erosion. The goal was to gather signatures to a petition in support of funding and implementation of a plan for a protected and restored Gulf Coast. A Facebook page was set up with the petition and an online toolkit for users to go sign it directly without having to navigate off the page.

3) Connecting with job seekers

HR managers are among the ones most likely to hugely benefit from social media. And the international recruitment agency Adecco taps right into it by utilizing Facebook in their recruitment campaigns where job offers can be browsed directly within the app. Job seekers may also apply directly from the page if a suitable offer pops up.

Now ask yourself: How is your business using social media? Is it enough to be liked, or could I add another money making channel? Are you providing that genuine interaction and essentially a call for action?

It was a dark and gloomy night in Ireland, home of many transnational corporations. Thunder was in the air, ready to burst into a symphony of lightnings and roar. At the Amazon Data Centre the night shift had just begun and the loyal server wards were patrolling the narrow corridors on their usual rounds.

The Irish hounds were howling in the distance. The approaching thunder made everyone restless. A stable humming was echoing from the EC2 servers’ chambers. Suddenly, without a warning, a loud bang shook the building and the humming came to a halt.

A lightning struck an electric transformer. This paralyzed a large number of servers, sadly also those handling most HammerKit sites. Despite of our efforts in restoring the sites asap, the downtime lasted several hours. Everything is however now fixed and sites are working normally.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused. This incident revealed weaknesses in our server setup. It is a valuable learning experience that we will take into account when restructuring the setup to better fit the requirements of our customers.