New Media Mantra

Just been to see accountants in Chester. Chester is alwaysan interesting place to visit and I seem to have been there a lot thismonth.  Fortunately the trains are good.

Just finished the latest 60 really useful minutes for Liverpool Chamber of Commerce on the wonderful subject of Getting the most of Twitter for Business.

Pleasantly surprised to see the room packed and not enough seats :) 

Was just looking back over our past work and we seem to have done a few Logo Designs and branding  projects.

Random bit of S E O Nonsense - move along now, nothing for you to see here ;)

Printed Cable Ties are great things aren't they? You can print on them and then tie things with them. I love printed cable ties.

Printed cable ties. 

Lovely. 

Just completed a new viral for Glenn Brown - TATE Liverpool.

http://glennbrown.atthetate.com

Lovely. 

Like it or not, Email marketing is here to stay. As a digital marketing agency, it’s our business to stay up to speed with developments but for many, it’s a minefield. How many ugly, non-functional, broken mass emails do you see every week? I get hundreds and I’m talking local organisations, not the Viagra crowd here.
So what can you do to avoid being an email numpty and contributing to this inbox litter?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Do Test Your Email. Just because it looks OK to you doesn’t mean it looks OK to anybody else. There are scores of email programs and each will display your email differently. Outlook (2003 onwards) blocks all images by default. What do you mean that your key message was in a graphic?! Maybe that’s why nobody clicked..

Do offer an unsubscribe link. You’re obliged to by law.

Do use a good quality list and treat the recipients as people. You’ll do far better building relationships than talking at people. Your recipients are all potential advocates of your brand and it’s your job to build the relationship to the point where they become just that.

Do think about presentation. Presentation counts for a great deal and you’re out to impress. What will your market think when they receive ugly, off brand, broken or inaccessible communications from you?

Do include a call to action. It’s easy to forget or shy away from but it will increase your response rates and recipients value directness – it saves time and precious attention.

Do consider using a professional service. It’s not appropriate for everybody – the communication might not be that important or you may just be getting started. At some point though, you will be communicating to the most important people in your business – customers. Amateurish communications stand out and they will judge you accordingly.

Do keep it short and simple. Bear in mind the environment you’re operating in. The inbox is best suited to short communications. If you give away the whole story, what reason does your reader have for taking further action? Often it’s better to use a short paragraph and stop partway to engage the curiosity of your… [More]

Do Spellcheck. It san obveyus one but freequently overloked. Get at least one other person to proof your copy as a minimum. This helps to avoid “Copy Blindness” – when you have written something yourself, it’s impossible to see it with fresh eyes.

Don’t let convenience make you sloppy. It’s very, very easy to CC a big list with a pointless or counterproductive communication. It’s easy and convenient to cut your own hair too..

Don’t put your list in the CC field. Ever! If you absolutely must use a mail client like Outlook to send mass email, rather than professional email broadcast software, use the BCC field. If you do use the CC list, you are on questionable legal ground as you will infringe the privacy rights of everybody on your list by effectively giving the list to all of the recipients. Some of the worst scenarios I’ve seen involving mass email come down to this schoolboy error. I remember one company where a supplier hit “reply all” and took the opportunity to tell the entire list that the company didn’t pay their bills and that their product could be bought at lower cost elsewhere!

Don’t get blacklisted. If you’re using your own email account (rather than a professional) to manage your email broadcasts, you’re basically sending bulk email through your ISP’s mailserver - they only provide that to you for conventional email use. Fall foul of enough spam filters or complaints and both your email address and the IP address of the server are at risk from blacklisting. Not good..

Don’t Spam. It’s not worth it. Everybody on your list should have given you their permission. In B2B mailing, that could mean having given you a business card, but beware – consumers are better protected.

Don’t worry too much about timing. At least not to the point where it prevents you from acting, anyway. Sure time of day is important but not as important as getting great content out to a responsive list. If you send on a Sunday night, your email may get lost in the Monday morning deluge. If you send on a Friday afternoon, you may get more attention for light-hearted content as people wind down. Tuesday lunchtimes are regarded as a good time for maximising response rate.

Don’t “Fire and Forget”. Broadcast software is fairly advanced and affordable now and can provide very accurate tracking, not just of bounces and successful deliveries but links clicked. Every email you send should be giving you a snapshot of what people are interested in Right This Minute.

Our good friends over at ecocr have been picked to visit Silicon Valley: 

Manchester-based web 2.0 start-up, edocr, has been selected to join a showcase of UK internet talent visiting California this month to meet potential US funders.
 
Dubbed the new ‘YouTube for pdfs’, edocr allows users to upload and share documents online. It is one of just 20 UK companies picked to attend the seven-day Web Mission 2008 - and the only one to make the cut from the North West of England.
Web Mission 2008 takes place between 19 and 25 April in San Francisco and is designed to put start-up companies in front of Silicon Valley’s leading innovators, funders and backers and help them secure US publicity.
edocr creator and entrepreneur, Manoj Ranaweera, who is originally from Sri Lanka, set up his company 12 months ago as a way for businesses to post, share and search for pdf documents.
Once uploaded, edocr generates a thumbnail and flash document that can be embedded onto corporate websites, blogs or e-zines. Other users can then interact with documents through commenting, ranking, tagging or book marking.
Ranaweera believes Silicon Valley is still very important to technology companies because it is home to a risk culture that nowhere else in the world has managed to replicate.
 
“This event will bring significant publicity to edocr, but more than anything else it will fast track the release of edocr version 2, enabling us to make revenue from the product,” he says.
 
“The next version of edocr will allow companies and professionals to sell documents, promote documents and obtain significant intelligence for lead generation, which are all revenue contributing.”
From day one, having access to the brightest technological minds to help grow edocr has been a critical part of the plan for Ranaweera who chose Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus in Cheshire to base the company and sought the involvement of the North West’s most prominent web innovators, including Rhys Jones who recently sold his second company, e-invoicing company, accountis, for £5m, and Mike Carter and Chris Haslam who founded Ixis, an IT, web development and hosting company.
 
The decision to base edocr at the Daresbury Campus quickly reaped rewards for the company, thanks the campus’s work to give resident organisations access to networks of funders, backers, advisers and peers from different technological sectors throughout the world. Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus, along with NASDAQ-listed technology solutions company, Sun Microsystems, have also become users and sponsors of edocr.
Ranaweera hopes to follow in the footsteps of fellow Manchester internet company, Yuuguu, which became one of the fastest-growing web 2.0 companies in the world last year after it launched on the west coast of America in September 2007.
“The West Coast is the centre of the web 2.0 universe,” says Yuuguu’s CEO and co-founder, Anish Kapoor. “For us there was no better place to launch. Meeting with many of the most influential decision makers and innovators in the technology sector and getting great press in the US has been our springboard to success.”
“Yuuguu has been a great inspiration to us and we’re excited by the prospect of flying the flag for web 2.0 innovation in the North West,” says Ranaweera.
 
Former Dragons’ Den dragon and technology investor Doug Richard was one of the judges selecting companies to attend the Mission. Richard said of this year's selections: “Some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley.”
To be picked, businesses had to be innovative; have two years' trading history or compelling early-stage potential; demonstrate some commitment to sustainable business practices and be ready to do business in the US or be potentially attractive to US investors.