In Conversation with… Little Orchard
Posted in Tom's ramblings) on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 by admin
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.
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The March of Progress
Posted in Tom's ramblings) on Monday, July 26th, 2010 by admin
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…
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CANDDi revealed to prospective investors
Posted in blog ( company news) on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 by tom
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.
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First Spinoff Spins Up
Posted in company news) on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 by tom
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.
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UKFast SEO Roundtable: Content is King (as long as it is delivered quickly)
Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 by admin
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.
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Social Media: Digital PR vs Digital Marketing
Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 by admin
Incredibly, 40 years since the inception of the internet, the digital marketing goldrush continues. Today (still) everyone wants a slice of the social media pie, which is leading to some interesting conflicts and collaborations between marketing agencies.
PR agencies are laying claim to social media as being naturally their space. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense: social media is an ideal way of conducting ‘public relations’ since it provides a powerful medium for conducting conversations between a brand and its audience.
But most PR agencies are not in the business of public relations. They are in the business of media relations.
This is an entirely different – though no less valuable – skill set, focused on building up influence with a small group of professional advocates/advisers within a given sector – usually journalists and analysts. Creating stories for this small group of people with the aim of having them share those stories with their audiences is very different to managing a large audience directly.
The skills required for a more direct approach to the audience/prospect have much more in common with the skills of advertising or direct marketing. Sure the message has to be made appropriate to the medium, but it is hard to argue that PR agencies are better placed to handle this challenge than their marketing agency counterparts.
More important is the skill to manage the reaction and interaction with the audience, and shape that interaction to drive specific outcomes. This is where a sales-focused marketing agency really has the edge.
An effective social media strategy requires a combination of talents, creative, practical and operational, and with the space still evolving, no-one yet has the definitive answer. But as a general rule I would propose this:
If you are looking for help to manage your brand’s interaction with key influencers in social media channels , you probably want to talk to a PR agency. If you want to leverage social media channels to talk to your audience directly with clear outcomes in mind, talk to a digital marketing agency (ideally, us).
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If You’ve Got It – Launch It!
Posted in blog ( company news) on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 by admin
Going Out In Style: And Digital at the Launch of go-style.co.uk
Here at And Digital we’re celebrating the successful launch of go-style.co.uk. This stylish online fashion magazine was commissioned to promote the retailers of Golden Square Shopping Mall, Warrington.
The main feature of the site is the Style Builder, allowing users to create outfits online from the collections of all the different fashion stores at Golden Square. With the ability to mix and match from different lines, we expect the site to fast become a one stop shop for fashion lovers – especially once they get hooked on the editorial content: fresh articles on current fashion trends, photos of Warrington’s most stylish and constant promotions.
The aim is to build a real community of fashion lovers that grows organically through social media. Social media remains a hot topic but there are many disaster stories. With go-style.co.uk we placed an emphasis on interaction at the earliest design stage. The social media aspects are not merely add-ons but an integrated part of the strategy. Through these campaigns, we are able to begin conversations with users directly and develop campaigns that are responsive to their requirements. While this may not be a quick-fix route to success, it lays the foundations for a lengthy and mutually fulfilling relationship.
The launch party for the site is a great example of the benefits to this level of interaction. We ran an extensive on and offline campaign for the event and invited stylish ladies of Warrington to get dolled up and celebrate with us. The result was a great success – lots of users signed up, the retailers bought-in and there was a real spike in site traffic.
Most of all though, a good time was had by all.
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I measure my value in Google rankings
Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, October 12th, 2009 by admin
People like the digital world for many reasons. One of them is its measurability. You can put a fairly definite number on the impact of most digital campaigns: how many clickthroughs, how many emails opened, how many Facebook fans etc.
But how meaningful are these metrics?
Check out this guy: http://www.baronseries.com. He calls himself the “#1 Wealth Coach”. His justification? In brackets alongside this statement: “Google and AOL.”
That’s right. His justification for this bold statement is that he ranks highly for a given keyword on Google and AOL. Their search algorithms are so powerful and authoritative that they can bestow market leadership on a person.
Back in the real world, this is of course nonsense. But it’s a lesson: it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers of the online world and begin to measure yourself on increasingly abstract metrics. But there’s only one metric that really counts: success, usually measured in pounds and pence.
Measure the direct impact that digital marketing campaigns have on your business and you’ll never go far wrong.
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Social Media: Not ‘How’ but ‘Why’?
Posted in Tom's ramblings ( blog) on Monday, September 21st, 2009 by admin
Lots of organisations are coming to believe that they ought to be engaging with social media in some way. The clamour around Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has led bosses and staff alike to believe they need a presence on these popular channels, and others.
I’m all for this new-found enthusiasm, but it is raising some problems. Because social media channels are fairly straightforward to set up (by design), many groups are leaping in with both feet, starting up pages here and feeds there before they’ve asked the crucial question. Because the answer to ‘how do we do this’ is so simple, many groups are failing to first ask ‘why should we do it?’
Without answering this question, it is impossible to set objectives. Without objectives it is impossible to decide on an approach, or to measure the success of that approach.
We believe there are three fundamental reasons why you might consider social media from a campaign perspective.
- Reach: Create content that is ripe for sharing and you will increase your reach beyond the prospects you know about to their friends and family that you don’t. Incentivise prospects to share content by ensuring that it adds value to their day through entertainment or education.
- Reinforcement: As any good PR will tell you, your message has a lot more impact when it comes from an independent source. There’s all sorts of stats out there about this, but suffice to say I trust recommendations more than I trust adverts. If you can achieve ‘Reach’ the chances are that your message will also be reinforced.
- Reaction: Social media tools are by definition about two-way communication. Anything you share can usually be responded to or commented on. If you want to know what your audience thinks of you, or of your partners and competitors, you should at least be listening to social media channels.
Before you set out on a social media journey, decide which of these outcomes you are seeking to achieve. Put some metrics against them, and then design your strategy and your content appropriately.
If you’re stuck, you can always give us a call.
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And Digital in The Drum…the coverage continues
Posted in blog ( company news) on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 by admin
Check out our article in the latest issue of The Drum. If you’re a member of the Marketing Industry Network, you can download it for free.
We paid to put it there, but we think it’s worth a read. And hey, free comment opportunities like 5Live don’t come along every day… 
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