We Love The Web - Blogorhea

It raises a smile every time I go to that café, but then I’m easily pleased. I can see the marketing meeting in my mind's eye: brainstorming around the core message that this tea helps create a small piece of the day that's just for you. 15 minutes where the outside world can go hang itself as you detox in herbal-tea-heaven.

The café in question is at the railway station here in Hebden Bridge, so people passing through are likely to be in a hurry. They must have been losing enough in sales to make it worth putting up a sticker to 'augment' the branding. It's a salutary reminder to consider where and how the messages you send might be delivered.

Seriously, however, it hightlights the importance of test-driven design processes. We know that test-driven design is great at picking up unintentional messages that you are sending and feeding those back into the creative process. There's nothing like showing a design to people not involved in the process for highlighting where your assumptions have led you astray.

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In April, Warp Films will launch DRM-free film download sales from its online store at www.warpfilmstore.com. Warp will start with a small selection of films that includes the Artic Monkeys - Live at the Apollo, the film of All Tomorrow's Parties and Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee directed by Shane Meadows and starring Paddy Considine. The list of films will grow over time to include future releases such as Chris Morris' Four Lions and most of Warp films' back catalogue.

We Love The Web ltd. worked with Warp Films to design and build the site.

It¹s a shame that this is in any way newsworthy. DRM is the copy protection stuff that¹s been so successful in keeping the Internet free of music and film piracy*, whilst giving customers who support artists and film-makers a worse experience than you get by pirating the film. Films bought by download are usually locked to a single computer and iPod**: so you if you want to watch that film at a mate's house, you'll have to take your computer with you. Using the files on your next computer may not work either.

There was real debate throughout the site¹s development about whether to go for copy protection or not. The decider was that we were able to find copies of Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee on Pirate Bay, Rapidshare and myriad bit torrent sites within 30 seconds of looking: this was weeks before the DVD was released. We¹ve been lucky in working with Warp. The 'Bleep' music store www.bleep.net run by Warp Records led the way in 2006 by in selling legal MP3s without copy restrictions. They've built a good business doing so.

We respect Warp Films for having the guts to trust its customers. Piracy is a major problem, but punishing the people who have chosen to support you seems contrary at best. Copy protection doesn't prevent piracy. Most major releases are on Rapidshare or Pirate Bay before they are even available to buy, so it's evidently not working. We understand how scary it is for film-makers to release this stuff, but it's the right thing to do. Surrendering the illusion of control is hard, but deliberately crippling your product only makes paying customers cross.

* the 'Sarcasm' warning flag is raised.
** iPod or other digital media player.

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If you are a DJ, having that hot new record in your bag for Friday is kinda important. The first shop to get it in stock will probably get the sale. Getting out the word about their hot new platters is worth hundreds of pounds a week to Fat City. It's useful to their customers too: DJs who want the latest and greatest. 

We built an easily managed website extension that pushes Fat City’s new stock direct from the website to Twitter through the twitter API (the allowed ‘under the hood’ connectors that allow you to talk to Twitter automagically. In the time it takes to tick a checkbox (about 2 seconds), it’s up there at www.twitter.com/fatcityshop

This is a good use of twitter: benefitting both the shop and its customers. Finding a happy confluence of wants and needs is what social media marketing is all about.

The Fat City site is actually hugely sophisticated. It’s one of the top five independent record stores in the country, serving tens of thousands of weekly visitors. There’s a weekly email-out measured in tens of thousands,  all the stock is automatically fed through to Google Shopping and www.gemm.co.uk (like eBay for music) and so on. It’s one of those sites that looks simple on the outside but spreads as far as the eye can see under the hood.

eCommerce is about a lot more than a shop-front these days...

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Just got my favourite email of the year so far from a recruitment agent.

It began:

Hi <<firstname>>,

And went on to extol the virtues of their personal, tailored recruitment service.

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