And Digital

Contour Community Blog Awards

tom — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:28:09 +0000

AND Digital is sponsoring the Community Blog Awards in partnership with Contour Housing, one of the UK’s largest housing associations. Contour is providing skills training to its residents on blogging and social media, and running an awards ceremony to celebrate the community’s best bloggers. AND Digital has provided the website and prizes, and strategy director Tom Cheesewright will be judging the best entrants.

touchfashion.co.uk

tom — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:58:30 +0000

Touchwood in Solihull is a high class shopping centre catering to the moneyed many of the Midlands. The centre needed a fashion-focused site to act as a hub for outbound campaigns attracting and retaining shoppers. Touchfashion.co.uk features AND’s own Style Builder application and a gallery of Birmingham’s beauties snapped at the store in the Gallery.

newfaceoficeland.co.uk

tom — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:57:20 +0000

How do you find a new face for your store? Iceland was looking for ‘real’ people to front future campaigns and turned to AND Digital to deliver the means to make it happen. NewFaceofIceland.co.uk became the hub for a media campaign that saw five lucky entrants travel to London for screentests and then get voted on by the public to find the New Face of Iceland. The campaign was a huge success with high-profile coverage in all the major tabloids.

carlylefinance.com

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:56:12 +0000

Carlyle Finance is one of the UK’s largest providers of car finance with a massive network of dealers throughout the country offering its financial services. In order to increase its engagement with the end customer Carlyle Finance chose AND Digital to deliver a community website providing users with a wide range of additional services and benefits.

In Conversation with… Little Orchard

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:38:54 +0000

I headed down to see our friends at Little Orchard yesterday, to appear in the latest episode of In Conversation With…, their series of live video interviews with members of Manchester’s creative industries. It was great fun and I would highly recommend it to other agency bosses and bigwigs (there are many bigger wigs than me appearing in the coming weeks). I’d also suggest you talk to Little Orchard first if you have any questions about video, be it for the web or any other use. We’ve recommended them to our clients and had nothing but glowing feedback.

Check out my episode below – it starts about two minutes in.

The March of Progress

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:33:27 +0000

It’s a trite truism that the digital world moves fast. Everyone here at the ANDDi mill is working in a job that didn’t really exist twenty years ago. Every day we’re learning about new technologies that can enhance our output, allowing us to create ever more intelligent, engaging work for our clients. But unfortunately, not everyone moves at the same pace.

Some of our clients sell into markets where internet use is, shall we say, patchy. We’re not talking about the third world here. We’re talking about large corporations. Unfortunately many large companies still keep a strangehold on users access to the web, through maintaining old versions of web browsers and imposing draconian restrictions on internet access.

The result? A poor experience for our clients’ customers. We take accessibility requirements into account, and (under duress) we can design sites that degrade reasonably right back to Internet Explorer 6 (still used by 6% of web users I think – all in large corporates I’m willing to bet), but when companies lock down images, scripts, videos, Flash, plugins, etc etc, it becomes pretty tricky to create an engaging experience.

My point? We need a change of attitude from large corporations. Shutting their staff off from the finest aspects of the digital world does nobody any favours. It leaves them blind to big developments and social shifts, and it limits their access to powerful tools and information. The potential benefits of more open access need to be more carefully weighed against the security threats this incurs. And for the sake of their own safety and sanity, they really need to get people off IE 6…

CANDDi revealed to prospective investors

tom — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:17:47 +0000

CANDDi, the digital marketing software start-up that we spun out last year has just completed the 13 week Difference Engine programme. The programme ended with a day spent pitching our product alongside our fellow start-ups to some of the UK’s most prominent investment firms.

I’m pleased to say that the reception for CANDDi was very positive and we will be starting conversations with potential investors in the coming weeks with the aim of raising capital towards the end of the year.

In the meantime we will be proving CANDDi’s value through a programme of beta testing. More than fifty companies have signed up to trial CANDDi so far, including many of AND Digital’s clients. If you would like to join the beta programme, drop us a mail at hello@canddi.com or leave us your email address at http://www.canddi.com.

If you want to know more about what CANDDi does first, then drop me a mail at tom@and-digital.com and I’ll be happy to talk you through it.

First Spinoff Spins Up

tom — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:17:00 +0000

CANDDi (a working title) is the first spin off from the AND Digital stable.

Designed to streamline the digital marketing process and enable better conversations between brands and prospects, it is currently being developed by a team in Middlesbrough, following initial seed funding from The Difference Engine, a North East-based venture capital fund/incubator.

Watch this space for more CANDDi updates in the coming months, as we enter a beta phase and then launch the product to the market.

sayoneforme.org

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:45:48 +0000

This simple site was created to provide an opportunity for people to share their prayers with bishops around the country, and have those bishops pray for them. It has been a huge success in the short time since its launch, conveying the prayers of hundreds of people from around the country.

UKFast SEO Roundtable: Content is King (as long as it is delivered quickly)

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:25:21 +0000

Yesterday I took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by UKFast and soon to be disseminated via eConsultancy. Around the table were Matt Rycroft of Creative Suit, Craig Stone of CSI Media, Terry Heffernan of High Position, Lawrence Jones of UKFast, and finally me. The debate was chaired by UKFast’s communications chief Jonathan Bowers, to whom my thanks goes out for the invite.

Prior to the debate, all the participants were asked to come up with five top tips for successful SEO in 2010. Mine were as follows:

Know your product: is search the right marketing medium for product promotion, or should it be brand/thought leadership?
Know your audience: understand their language and perception of the market
Separate SEO (the work you do on your site), from Search Engine Marketing (the work you do to drive traffic to your site)
Don’t underestimate the workload SEO/SEM campaigns can place on you the client, however much you outsource
Content is king: links are nothing without context

As a man with a strong content proposition, I placed the emphasis on number five, fully expecting to hear dissenting voices around the table. Amazingly, just about everyone concurred: the biggest challenge and greatest focus for companies undertaking SEO campaigns in 2010 is the creation and placement of a sufficient quantity and quality of relevant content.

The only alternative view came from Lawrence from UKFast, who suggested a much greater emphasis on performance. Given his company’s investment in a high performance broadband network and fast servers, you might not be surprised at this message. But the case he makes is compelling: his clients have seen measurable leaps in search ranking when they have moved their sites to his network, or subsequently upgraded their server platforms.

It seems entirely reasonable that Google would take performance into account in their rankings – after all, it has a dramatic effect on the user experience of the web, something that is close to Google’s heart. A site that delivers the answer to the user’s query quickly provides a better experience than one that delivers it slowly.

I am convinced, and will be taking site performance very much into account in future conversations with clients about SEO.