I’ve seen a cavalcade of changes in what is still a relatively short life in the communications industry. I joined as phototypesetting was taking over from repro-setting – compositors said it would never catch on. Then came DTP: artwork studios said designers could not do their own artwork (‘what is artwork?’, I hear my young colleague say).  Digital photography – the quality will never be good enough, said photographers… and so on, and now we have the web.

I hear developers mumbling into their lattes now about CMS systems, but some very exciting stuff is being built on Joomla and WordPress for instance. I’m afraid the genie is out of the bottle but it does not indicate the end of some golden era, just the constant changing communications landscape.

As new year is always a time for predictions, I will stick my neck out and say that 2010 will see a rapid growth in sites built on proprietary CMS – but this will mean that developers will not be stuck doing the basic, boring coding. There will be a burgeoning of clever apps and plugins – especially extending into social internet and mobile media.

The only constant is change… embrace it, it’s what makes working with new media such a roller coaster of fun.

Following up a question on Linked in, I found these great answers to the question of examples of businesses making maney through social media. Take a look.

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

I am old enough to remember when the advertising industry spawned first, creative hotshops (remember Cramer and Saatchi?), then media independents and it wasn’t long before the discussions began to rage between the comparative value of buying full-service vs ad hoc. Later, when digital media first reared its interactive head it was seen as a separate service. Now, digital has been embraced as part of the marketing and communications scene and the old argument (in a slightly different guise) appears again.

We could spend a lot of time discussing whether ad agencies have sufficient digital expertise or fully recognise the possibilities, or if specialist digital agencies have a sufficiently broad marketing base – but in what is still an immature sector the discussion is rather pointless as the offering is so varied and patchy as to provide no obvious answers.

To compound matters, specialisms within the digital arena are growing and replicating faster than a swine-flu virus. We now have SEO, PPC, mobile, content, ecommerce, content production, international, email, research specialists and many, many more.

Nobody but the biggest digital agencies (big bucks) can keep the depth of expertise on their books to bring together the right mix of specialisms required for even moderately complex solutions. But few clients, particularly SMEs, have either the physical resource or the knowledge to assemble the right team of suppliers for an à la carte solution. The instinct of a big agency is do as much internally as they can; it maintains control and maximises revenue. But to provide a client with the most effective, and cost-effective programme, they need to take a more project management role.

The alternative is for clients to employ a digital project manager to manage the best possible team of disciplines to achieve their strategy.

I’m quite concerned about the stir cause by the knowledge that some etailers are delivering higher prices to returning ‘loyal’ customers than to new customers. What does this say to me as a loyal customer? It says; “We are complacent; we take your custom for granted so we will treat you like a mug!”

Of course we expect introductory bonuses and such for new customers, but loyalty is hard-earned and loyal customers should be nurtured.

It is often said that high street retailers can learn a lot from their electronic counterparts, but this is a case where etailers should take a leaf from the book of bricks and mortar retailers – why do you think they have loyalty schemes, give points and exclusive gifts etc? Because it costs a lot to secure one new customer, and far less to hang on to, and make money from those you have got.  Get greedy and those repeat customers will soon tell you where to stuff your cookies.

I was just reading an interesting post on Zdnet.. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-334651.html. Apparently Twitter is not serious enough for business. I know it is always a contentious issue when I raise the subject at training workshops I deliver – Twitter is kind of the Marmite of social media – you either love it or hate it. It is sure to raise the strongest of emotions.

I am still unsure why this is the case. Some very serious people and organisations are obviously using microblogging very successfully. True, it is a bit of an unruly child at the moment… an adolescent struggling for its own identity trying to find its place in the world.  But then, so was the internet back in the early nineties.

As I said at the start, opinions are strongly polarised and for everyone who hates Twitter I find support and adoption coming from the most unlikely quarters.

I would tend to be cautious when people state such strident views: maybe it is not the image of Twitter which is the issue, but their own self-image.

It seems like a long time since we first started hearing about the wonders or threats of convergence, but there is a strong indication that mobile in its various manifestations may be taking over the driving seat.

I’ve always been a bit of a purist so far as my mobile phone was concerned: it was just for making phone calls. Then I subscribed to mobile broadband, mainly to use a dongle on my laptop as I travel a lot (don’t get me started on the price hotels charge for broadband). Anyway, that permitted me broadband on my phone. My first use was Google maps when I was was lost. There followed a number of distress driven uses and soon I was hooked. My phone upgrade then led me to a bigger colour screen (my eyesight is no longer what it was… if it ever was).

So, where I always made sure I carried my laptop everywhere in its rucksack, I scaled down to a netbook for foreign trips. At one time I felt naked without some form of computer… now I am relaxed with just my phone, comfortably using it for most of my quick applications.

My tasks for the coming weeks?  Adapt and make sure my websites work well on mobiles.

Content management systems have been around a long time. Once they were custom-built and strictly for big organisations with the money to pay for them. Today they are commonplace for even the smallest enterprise. Building on frameworks such as Joomla they have shifted the project emphasis away from the management of development to the management of content.

This has some interesting consequences: the development of structure is far more in the hands of the managers. Does this make ’strategy creep’ more or less likely? In the previous model, if clients did not get their strategy exactly right, they would change or modify the brief, making amendments throughout the development stage. However, there was usually a substantial cost to these changes, perhaps mitigating against too many changes and (theoretically) an onus on the client to get the strategy right at the start. With a CMS, the client can more easily make changes… even serious structural changes, without such penalties.

So, what is more important, getting the project exactly right… even if you got your initial strategy wrong, or accepting something being 95% right but allowing the other 5% to go through to save costs?

With my project manager’s hat on I hate sloppy planning and I applaud anything that encourages people to get the strategy right at the outset. But in the real world I must accept that clients often DO get the brief wrong or unclear, or situations simply change and it is our job to help them get back on course as painlessly as possible.

The other aspect of the increasing use of the CMS is that it puts the emphasis firmly back on content. That means that it engages the client far more than the developer. There was a time when the the client passed a job over to the developer, with content as an afterthought, expecting the finished project to spring fully formed onto their server. Now the steps are far more synergic: get the design and structure approved, then develop the content… which after all is what the project is all about.

What do you consider your most useful tool in project management… digital or otherwise? Is it your favourite software… critical paths or pertographs, networks on time perhaps… Microsoft project?

My candidate for the most useful tool is the humble post-it note. After the pencil (with an eraser attached) the post-it has been one of my fundamentals for getting to grips with a new project. It is clear, flexible and allows me to be creative and explain processes to clients.  Give me coloured post it notes and a blank wall and I’m in hog-heaven. So… what is your candidate?

Google’s new ‘Google Squared’ has been launched, but just in its test phase at the moment (www.google.com/squared). Basically it seems to deliver search results in a matrix with rows and columns… so what? Well I was sceptical – is this just another jolly wheeze from Google or will it have any practical use?

In terms of searching that we are all familiar with, the tried and trusted layout is probably ideal, and a casual searcher might find ’squared’ confusing. I certainly did when I first looked at it.  But when I started using it as a research tool for one of my other blogs, it all started to fall into place… I could put topics down the vertical axis and categories allong the horizontal axis. Once I ditched Google’s suggested categories (Star sign?) and put in my own… things started to fall into place.

It does get addictive as you can be interactive in a way that traditional search does not allow. I think I will be getting square eyes soon.