Simplicity

Category : Blogging, Internet

It works.

It can excel.

Can it be creative? Absolutely.

Freshness, honesty and authenticity — three things it can still do.

Grabbing attention. Success in pitches. Winning awards.

A focus on what matters, getting back to the story.

Acting on insight, rather than impulse.

Creating digital reality.

It can still have layers and depth.

Useful and integrated.

And it can be just as memorable as anything else.

Goes down well and can bring real success.

Plenty of scope to get noticed and be memorable, even become a classic.

It can be just as clever and brilliant.

It can be great, truly great.

Simplicity.

Posted via web from Don’t Go Mad

10 for 2010

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Category : Internet

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Telporting to 2010 -- Reproduced Under Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilderic/4222496679/

10 sentences about 10 of the digital trends I think will be hot in 2010. By no means definitive or exhaustive but here’s a starter for 10…

1)       Getting INLINE. It’s all about the message, not the medium, as an integrated communications strategy becomes the only way to make sense of the digital world; new research from WS shows influences on purchasing decisions and why brands need to tell their stories in the right place at the right time.

2)       Preposterously simple. Blogging and other social media will achieve genuine mainstream adoption by becoming despearately simple to use — check out new service Posterous which removes any remaining geekery from blogging, making it as easy to write a blog post as it is to email your friends.

3)       Social search. Google now incorporates results from social networks (including Twitter) which means brands need to create content that people will put on their profiles as way to raise the visibility of their stories in search.

4)       User generated revenue. Ford’s Fiesta Movement has created an online community to test-drive cars, with members reporting back on sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook in a move that’s apparently generated tens of thousands of sales leads.

5)       Business Twits. If you don’t already have a Twitter strategy then now’s the time to develop one as the internet darling is poised to introduce official B2B tools.

6)       Video news releases. Engage traditional media in an untraditional way using online video to turn complex news into globally popular coverage.

7)       Spending (even) more time online. Big players like Google want people to use the internet more – from watching video to writing spreadsheets, all within a browser-based operating system – and they’re likely to invest heavily to convince us because they make more money if we’re all living online.

8)       Where 2.0. We barely bat an eyelid at GPS these days and now so many of us have it in our phones the landscape is ripe for full exploitation of location-based services along with the mobile apps that mean you can do just about anything on the move.

9)       Get a life. Make content work harder by pushing it out to as many (relevant) communities as possible using a lifestream like Friendfeed or Facebook and become more visible in more places more of the time – this works offline, as well as online.

10)   Return on Involvement. Shifting to a model where ROI is based on delivering an engagement strategy which delivers against a business objective measurable in more ways than just website traffic.

Don’t Go Mad on Posterous

Category : Blogging, Internet

“Preposterously simple” is one of the themes in my 10 for 2010 lookahead. I’m putting my money where my mouth is by experimenting with a Posterous version of this blog– you can find it at http://posterous.dontgomad.com if you fancy a look.

Preposterously Easy Blogging

Category : Blogging

Blogging has certainly become easier in the last year or so — not necessarily the content creation part, *that* involves engaging brain which no amount of technology can replace, it’s more the physical act of posting the content. Having said that, it’s become “easier” rather than easy full stop. That means there’s still a barrier to entry and so blogging has retained some level of technical knowledge. Until now.

New service Posterous removes any remaining geekery by making it as easy to write a blog post as it is to email your friends – one of the ways digital communication is now achieving genuine mainstream adoption by becoming desperately simple. And once digital communication becomes seamlessly integrated (or INLINE, as we call it), then that’s when things get really exciting.

Postscript
Time now to put my money where my mouth is. I’m going to give Posterous a roadtest by creating one at http://posterous.dontgomad.com I’ve set it to autopost content across my main blog www.dontgomad.com and my Twitter account www.twitter.com/dontgomad to form the basis of a simple lifestream.

Posted via email from Don’t Go Mad

We’re hiring!

Category : Internet

We’re looking for someone to join the digital communications team here at Weber Shandwick in London. Please get in touch if you’d like to know more and we’ll talk. Looking forward to hearing from you — my contact details are on my blog homepage.

Open Mic

Category : Internet, thought leadership

Rather than write something myself today, here are a selection of essays from esteemed WS colleagues in the latest edition of our ‘33 and a Third’ newsletter. Enjoy.

How to engage a blogger — mummy knows best

Category : Blogging

I re-read this blog post today written by one of the leading mum bloggers — a reminder that the best way to engage people online is to start by listening to them and meeting their needs, rather than pushing your own agenda.

Key points are:

  • Be useful
  • Get to know the blogger before getting involved
  • Be creative
  • Include the blogger in the planning
  • Provide product samples if you are inviting them to review something

This all sounds straightforward but it’s a reminder that bloggers aren’t traditional journalists. It’s essential to recognise that a different approach is needed and hearing it directly from a blogger is the best way to bring it home.

Social Search

Category : Internet, Mashups, Reputation

A little bit of geekery today — but don’t go mad! It’s all rather clever stuff from Google in that when you search they’re not only scouring the general internet but potentially also sifting through your friends’ social profiles to find relevant content for you.

Given that the vast majority of people start their internet journeys from a search engine, this  development shows just how important it for brands both to sort out their own websites and crucially create content which people will take away and place on their social profiles.

I’ll leave it to Google to explain how the search bit works:

It’s Time to Get INLINE

Category : Internet

Today at WS Towers we launched our vision of the future, which is also our approach to now.

It’s about understanding that the fragmented media landscape means people nowadays get their information from all kinds of sources — from TV and print to website reviews and traditional advertising. We’ve created a methodology which draws on insight rather than impluse to tell us what influences decision-making. This is a key tool to reach modern audiences with our messages, and helps us tell a consistent story across all relevant platforms. It’s not about online or offline, it’s about INLINE.

The insights are very revealing and some even counter-intuitive. My esteemed colleague Mr Warren picks up the story:

Inline Communications Europe Report

They Think It’s All Over…

Category : Internet, TV, Video

Ever since the coronation, the default view of the world for normal people up and down the country has been television. Quite literally life through a lens.

I spent the best part of a decade making programmes to appear on that screen in the corner of the living room. Early mornings, late finishes, overnights, weekends, bank holidays, cancelled holidays, home, away — I’ll let you into a secret that it’s not terribly glamorous. So news that this weekend’s England game will only be shown on the internet really caught my attention.

I understand why people are rather upset:

*you can’t watch it in a pub

*the quality is not as good

*smaller screen means harder to watch with friends

*talk of limiting audience to 1m to stop it crashing

*cost for people who already subscribe to a pay-TV service

*it should be on TV and free because it’s England, after all

I agree with a lot of these points.

Thing is, this seems to be the first time TV has failed to deliver. There’s now a chink in TV’s armour; it no longer has the monopoly. Services like the iPlayer have gone a long way toward making TV-style content accessible away from the telly. Football (and indeed sport more generally) has fuelled the takeup of satellite TV and services like interactive and HD, as well as a plethora of web innovations — will it now force mainstream consumers to take the next step in embracing and adopting this new way to consume video?

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