Simple yet wonderfully effective - web widgets are a great tool to improve SEO, content distribution and viral campaign awareness. They add value for the user and help a site owner promote and distribute content easily and at minimal cost. Find out more by downloading “Essential Web Widgets” the 2nd chapter in our FREE e-book: “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.
Have you ever been invited to an incredibly famous fine dining restaurant to accompany a group of disgustingly attractive, frighteningly decent and friendly people for a divine meal sloshed down with lashings of Chateau Petrus?
No, me neither.
But I bet if you were, you’d go for it, wouldn’t you? Eh?
You could leave that 12 day old tub of caked over houmos for another day, don both your least-dirty Marks & Spencer suit and a well-practiced rigid smile and go for it.
Well read on because a similarly incredible opportunity (’ONCE IN A LIFETIME, LOSERS!’) has just come up…
Join us - the bold sailors on the good ship Nixon McInnes - in our latest voyage into territories reasonable well known but in need of a little extra investigation: ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING.
(Yes, yes. We agree that online social networks are more cliched and more frequently misunderstood than TomKat, but we also know that there exist unexplored islands of remarkable brilliance and wonder in amongst the oceans of vaporous hype.)
It’s just an experiment, so don’t panic. Because we specialise in the latest social media innovations kinda thing we know that experimentation is a big and important part of what we do. That way our clients get tried and tested, not ‘first thing we thought of’.
It’s incredibly easy to join (very very very fast and painless) thanks to the remarkable web application we’re using for our experiment - Ning, of which there will be much more commentary later.
We educate our clients and course ‘guests’ on GIVING IT AWAY!
We say: think of incredibly useful content and tools, create them and give them away.
We say: your boss will say ‘but we don’t want to give it away’. You need to tell him ‘boss, it’s OK to be male, elderly and often wrong’ and you need to educate him about the size of the opportunity, the reach of the Internet, the power of giving and the SEO benefits too.
We give away content too. We don’t just say it - shizzlers - we boom-tickling do it.
So please enjoy:
Plus, as an extra titbit - how cool is SlideShare? You just upload yer slides, and bada bing, it gives you a neat snippet of code to insert on your web page or blog, and boom tickey boom - WIDGET INSERTED :). Happy days, web campers, happy days…
The new age of online marketing success is often about sharing your knowledge and personalising your offering.
With this in mind we invited some of our lovely clients and friends along to Brighton Marina on Friday to share our words of wisdom on the topic and indeed learn about their own experiences and top tips.
Online marketing is transforming the balance and focus of marketing budgets all over the world and if yours doesn’t reflect that then “Come on - catch up!”
We got togeather at the Alias Hotel Brighton and talked through the commercial benefits, core principles and some great examples of business blogging, online social networking, podcasting, killer content, email marketing and online branding.
We got excited, shared some knowledge and helped some great people identify ways to kick new life into their own online strategy.
To see us all in action have a look at our photos on our Flickr account.
If you missed out and would like to come along to future events then drop me an email at jo@nixonmcinnes.co.uk - we’d love to see you.
Superb news is that I’ve been asked to join O2’s Marketing Academy Faculty to help O2’s marketers make the very most of opportunities in online marketing.
The Marketing Academy is run by an interesting and very professionally-run organisation called Imparta who first opened the conversation with us about this project.
It’s going to be fantastic fun working with Imparta and the O2 marketers.
My role is to design and develop the Online Marketing module for the Academy and to then deliver it at a series of training courses over the next year.
The marketing people at O2 are young, fun and very switched on, and to contribute our knowledge, skills and experiences to build the capability at O2 is a fantastic opportunity indeed. What a fantastic brand!
If we were blowing our own trumpet (and let’s face it, when are we not…?) we would trumpet about how this appointment further endorses just how much we know about our craft.
But let’s not do that..lots to work on with our client projects - time to crack on.
Does your brand follow the agreed brand guidelines? Does it even have a set of guidelines?
For many the answer to these questions is No.
What are brand guidelines?
Behind every good brand is a comprehensive set of Brand Guidelines.
Typically the guidelines developed by your designer will provide a set of rules and more general guides for how the brand will play out at each audience touch-point.
“Your identity or brand should express your character and your culture, and in turn play a leading role in establishing your reputation in the minds of our customers. Brand guidelines show you how to use the various brand elements to help achieve consistency in that message.”
Sounds great, but does anyone actually read these guidelines or in fact do the design agencies adhere to them?
Even the big guns don’t do their brand homework sometimes . . . .
I noticed a new TV advertising campaign for NatWest the other day and it looked nothing like NatWest. The design hack in me rushed to my computer and logged onto Natwest’s website expecting to see the new branding language I had just witnessed on my telly. To my amazement the two touchpoints did not add up. Sure they have the same logo, the same tagline but everything else was chalk and cheese. To my knowledge Natwest are not rebranding, which means this TV campaign has it own style which in effect is ‘off brand’ and does not follow the brand guidelines.
I have seen this countless times before. Sometimes it is total ignorance of the brand guidelines while sometimes it’s the case that the hand isn’t talking to the head and the notion of an ‘integrated’ campaign doesn’t feature in the overall marketing strategy.
But why are they so important?
Brand guidelines can be a bit anal but they do protect a brand. There are plenty of prizes for sticking to them:
Consistency of image in your audience’s mind
Stronger brand equity (value) over time
Accurate audience perception of your idenity/associations
Improved brand confidence
Increased brand profile
Improved competitive advantage
We have recently been working on a web presence for a client who wanted us to evolve their branding identity. Great, job done, it looks sweet.
However this brand identity does not marry up with the offline. So we now need to create some brand guidelines that are integral to the overall brand personality so that when a third party needs to create an offline product it integrates with the online presence we have lovingly created.
Careful not to go too far . . . .
Conversely though, there are also internal “brand Hitlers” who do not give the creative agency enough room in their interpretation of the guidelines. At the end of the day brand guidelines need to be specific enough to uphold the brand values, yet flexible enough not to compromise the creative opportunity.
If your brand has guidelines – use them. If not, then get some.
For more ideas on branding take a look at this white paper.
