Hi to all interested in our agency.

As you may be aware we moved offices over the weekend from our old home in Roundhay back to town in the Holbeck Urban Village next to the Round Foundry Media Centre.. we”ll be uploading some time elapsed video plus something a little more creative in due course but workloads amongst the after effects guys are going to mean thats not forthcoming for a while.

In the meantime I thought I’d share these pics to give you an idea..all welcome to pop in for a look and to say hello!

View from accross the Midnight Bell Courtyard

On the whole I’m neither a great fan nor believer in the FMCG ‘brand experience’ website.

The first and only time I have visited the Persil website was just before writing this post and having visited it is safe to say it’s likely to be the last time. Similarly, If you’ll excuse the pun, it’s hard to give crap about your toilet paper brand isn’t it, so why would you go to look at the Andrex website? (oh alright it’s got cute puppies on it but you get what I mean right?!)

It would seem most UK consumers agree.. this unscientific look at traffic volumes to FMCG brand website  shows very low traffic volumes to these sites despite some of the largest above the line advertising spends in the UK.

You can clearly see that brands which struggle to enjoy an emotional attachment, such as washing powders, receive far less traffic than brands that have succeeded in bridging this void.

Up until now FMCGbrands haven’t had much choice but to try and provide, somewhat tackily in some instances, games and other “fun” things to attract & keep site visitors, after all, there really wasn’t any other reason to visit their sites.

Recently though we have seen more and more FMCG brands approach us to start exploring the role social media can play in their online activity, and what we’ve been seeing could be really exciting for the future of FMCG online. Social media finally gives digital a leading role to play in the promotion of, and emotional engagement with FMCG brands!

So how and why is social media changing the game? Here’s a quick introduction to how and why your FMCG brand should take a serious look at social media:

Why?

1. Establish an emotional connection with your brand!

Most FMCG brands are not related to things were are naturally emotionally connected to, social media enables brands to align themselves to causes that fill this void, have the potential for huge reach and enable a dialogue between the brand and consumers.

1. Enable word of mouth marketing

Successful alignment of your brand with issues and causes that people care about means your brand will be carried along with the cause. Social media tools such as Facebook enable people to quickly share events such as the charitable cause they are embarking upon, if you have thought carefully about this mechanic then your brand will get carried along too!

1. Drive sales

Successful use of social media marketing will drive an uplift in sales, if people care about your brand they will use you they will switch to you and you will make money, this is of course the only real reason to do this.

How?

1. Find a big idea!

You will know what your brand stands for, so look for causes, events, charities etc that make sense for you to get involved in (you may already support these through your CSR activity) and that have the broad or niche appeal required to achieve your ambition

1. Integrate

As an FMCG brand manager you are probably lucky enough to have a significant above the line marketing budget, you can use it to ensure that this is a success. Once you are clear about your ‘big idea’,  promote it! An integrated campaign will ensure that this builds to a critical mass.

1. Measure

There is a return on your investment to be had here, it may seem hard to correlate the uplift in sales to the social media campaign but there are plenty of ways in which to ensure that the campaign can be measured and its ROI calculated.

Image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/earlysound/2186172726/

We have a new vacancy within Bloom (see below) we are happy consider candidates that are on their way to becoming this rather than perhaps being there already.. what we do want is someone really bright, really motivated & excited by the social media revolution and its impact on digital/SEO & PR, really straight talking and personable.. this is a new discipline for us so we are looking for someone from a PR agency background who can add new strings to our bow!

Digital PR vacancy

Bloom Media is a leading digital agency in Leeds west Yorkshire, we are enjoying a buoyant start to 2010 and are expanding our team. Last year we won a prestigious Dadi award for an innovative social media campaign and are looking to strengthen our digital marketing offering with a specialist in online PR, content strategy and social media marketing.

You will be an online and digital PR specialist, you will love online PR and social media like it is your very own offspring! You will be an budding online PR and social media expert with at least two years experience in this field and an excellent understanding of the evolving digital landscape. You will be a digital evangelist, who are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of online PR to existing and potential new clients, as well as helping the agency as a whole stay at the forefront of digital innovation and trends.

You will have solid proven experience working on website content/copy, social media and digital campaigns and understanding of how to develop relationships with key online opinion formers and brand evangelists. A brilliant nose for news and experience working on crisis and issues would be useful as well as the ability to drive and direct campaigns to support traditional PR activity. Bringing blogger contacts would be advantageous and as would stakeholder and media relations and management experience/exposure.

The Role
You will join an existing team: setting the direction for all online PR activity within the agency, working closely with the SEO and development teams on new business pitches, and developing existing client relationships. The ideal candidate will have an excellent knowledge of relevant UK online media.

You will have:

- Great communication skills, both over the phone and face-to-face
- Excellent copy writing skills
- The ability to meet strict deadlines
- Proactive approach with the ability to use own initiative
- Ability to deal effortlessly with several tasks
- Excellent telephone manner and team working skills
- An obsession with digital media!

The Agency
We are vibrant digital agency with a great blue chip client base including some of the UK’s most innovative online brands. We’re passionate about digital and love our jobs, we’re looking for someone who shares this and wants to thrive in an environment full of likeminded individuals with a great team spirit.

Update: Sorry – this position has been filled!

Keep checking back for future opportunities.

We think we’ve excelled ourselves this year with our very own version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (eat your heart out Wogan & Jones).. I think its safe to say that Bloom isn’t a hot bed of vocal talent but those of you who know us, we hope this brings a smile to your face and i suspect a tear to your eye for those who don’t well this might be a little wierd..

Enjoy!

Video’s below.. sorry only got it to work once Nas was well on her way but she was without doubt a natural.. Norton… well.. not so much..

image credit Love in a cold climate… Valentine’s Day message in the snow. Photograph: Anil Dayal/AP www.guardian.co.uk/…/feb/14/sayitwithpoetry

Following our recent .. ahem ‘award win’ for best use of social media we’ve been on a whirlwind tour of top 100 UK brands in Britain talking to them about the use of social media for their organisations. During these visits a familiar feeling came over me which will give away my age a little here. So first a little diversion before I get back to the point of the title of this blog.

When I started out in digital we used to have to persuade companies that they should get a website, they’d read the news, heard the hype, everyone was telling them to get one so they were listening.. sort of. After websites it was (and still is to a degree) the importance of SEO, now its social media. Meeting clients we can see that they are responding to the ‘hype’ around social media, some of them can also remember the process I’ve just listed so are resigned to the ‘fact’ that they should probably engage with this, after all the ‘hype’ was right about the website and was right about SEO. It’s a bit more straight forward because most clients have a facebook account whereas they didn’t have a website.. but still I can see the ‘fear’ on their faces and in most cases what can be best described as a grudging acceptance that they are going to have to get their heads around another complex digital concept and technology shift.

.. anyway back to the title..

The other day I was asked a direct question by a UK based car manufacturer, where in their organisation we felt that ‘social media’ should fit “ is it PR or marketing?” it’s a simple enough question right? And the answer is simple enough too but the implications are actually pretty far reaching I think (btw the answer is both, it sits across both) and poses a significant challenge for agencies wishing to offer social media campaign management to their clients.

Social media campaigns are challenging because they touch on so many parts of the Marcomms Mix and influence or rely upon so many different technologies. It occurred to me that both digital and PR agencies are seeking to claim this space as our own.. but look at each other with cynicism about the others ability to offer the best solution.

In a nut shell, those of us in digital look at PR agencies and are dubious about their grasp of the technology, particularly the overlap with SEO, I think we are also cynical about whether PR agencies really get ‘it’. By this I mean that PR historically has been based around pushing messages whereas Social Media is about conversations, we’d argue that we understand the medium in which these conversations happen ‘properly’ and therefore are better placed to advise upon their use. Finally we’d tag on points about measurability etc and consider the argument won.

In retort I get the impression that PR agencies look at the importance of social media to PR and crisis management and are cynical about our ability to produce the ‘right’ messages and rightly I think they’d be highly dubious about our media relations skills when advising a client upon crisis management issues. There are probably other points to add to this so I’ll extend an open invitation to PR’s to get stuck here on the comments.

Over the last 10 years I’ve had many causes to work closely with my clients media & marketing agencies, I’ve received briefs instigated by PR agencies but so far have had little need for the type of regular communication or even partnerships that I have enjoyed and still enjoy with my clients Media/Marketing agencies. BUT I sense this is changing.. looking at my followers on twitter and those I follow there are a lot of PR agencies engaging and rightly so.. looking at the social media campaigns we are running and being completely honest I increasingly yearn for a stronger basis in traditional PR and see some real opportunities here for us with our clients. From here it isn’t a huge leap of logic to see why finally I am finding myself thinking about PR agencies and my lack of strong relationships with you.. could it be that social media has finally brought us together?

If you’re a PR/PR agency and you are reading this I’d like to hear your thoughts I can’t help feeling that we could work well together here and that through collaboration offer a really solid service to our clients.. what do you think?

Digital Account Executive – Leeds

A leading & successful digital agency currently require a Digital Account Executive to join our expanding team. Due to continued success, our fast paced & fun agency have won several projects & have many more lined up next year.

The Digital Account Executive should have 6-12 months experience of online marketing or working in a digital environment, however being truly passionate about digital is more important. You will be responsible for liaising between clients and in-house teams to ensure digital projects are delivered smoothly and to an excellent level. Joining a team of developers, designers, and online marketing specialists, you will have the opportunity to work on major UK brands!

Digital Account Executive should have:

* Customer/client facing experience
* Confidence to take, understand briefs, and relay those briefs to in-house teams
* Solid knowledge of online marketing (seo/social media)
* (Desirable) Knowledge or usability/web design/development processes and methodologies.

This is a fantastic and rare opportunity to get involved with a young, dynamic and successful company. Applicants from a non-agency background will be considered for this role, provided they match the above criteria.

I have interviews available immediately so apply now to avoid disappointment!

On the 1st December 2009 new changes to the FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising come into effect.   This is potentially big news for our industry as the new guides address the fact that advertisers are increasingly harnessing Web 2:0 technologies and social networks for word-of-mouth marketing.

A legal perspective on the FTC guides was posted by a leading city law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse last week and includes some interesting comments.

The new guides recognise the common practice of payment for reviews on Blog sites as a form of advertising and seek to regulate this practice in much the same way as other similar activities or advertising. The FTC have given specific examples quoted in the Field Fisher Waterhouse commentary but include;

“Paying a blogger to post a review clearly requires disclosure as does a word-of-mouth marketing program that periodically sends consumers products for review. Sending a free sample to a blogger with a request to post a review may qualify as a “material connection” depending on the value of the product and the frequency that this occurs.” (for more visit the Field Fisher Waterhouse site).

Also made clear from the guide is that the responsibility for disclosure is placed upon the Blogger not the advertiser.

As I see it this will impact the SEO/Social media communities in the following ways, but mainly this rasies a lot of questions:

1.    Bloggers that receive payment for posting reviews/other content are obliged to disclose this fact.. but will they? and how will this be enforced?
2.    If posts with the appropriate disclosure are identified by Google, will Google react negatively? Will these be seen as paid for link sources and penalised?
3.    Given the method of disclosure is not specified then actually wont it be pretty easy to disguise the disclosure from Google in any case? (i.e. the disclosure could be placed in an image)
4.    Following on from above will this unleash a spate of people reporting blogs they suspect of receiving payment without disclosing to the relevant authorities/Google?
5.    What are the FTC expecting bloggers to do about all of the historical content/reviews that were paid for before these guides came into play?
6.    Does anyone else think that potentially this bites off more than it can chew given the sheer volume of content?

I’d be interested to hear comments from others to see if this can be clarified any further…

I have been working with a lot of different usability agencies lately and it struck me that very small differences in how a user centred design project are run can have radically different outcomes, not all of which are positive. The main pitfall as far as I can see it occurs as a result of prominence given to either the usability or the development agency in the process and critically on how far the usability agency are asked to go with the process.

Scenario 1 – Usability agency engaged to define the brief to be handed to design/development agency for implementation

This scenario is defined by the size of the remit given to the usability agency, here (in brief) the process runs like so:

1. Engage users and test current website and competitor websites
2. Internal stakeholder engagement
3. Open & closed card sorts etc to define information architecture and functions
4. Produce wireframe prototype of proposed system
5. Design agency apply design to wireframes
6. Clickable jpeg prototypes are tested with users
7. A/B test
8. Launch

Outcome: a detailed and actionable brief effectively written by the target audience to meet their needs.
On the face of it this sounds great yet on more than one occasion the website produced as a result of this process has immediately and intuitively looked wrong to me and the conversion rates have in the end backed up my initial reactions. So what is going wrong? Time to consider a second scenario.

Scenario 2 – design agency led process
In this scenario the usability agency are used by the design agency for insight and verification of ideas prior to implementation, actually a lot of the tasks carried out are the same but this subtle change of focus and instruction has a radically different outcome.
Here the process works like so:

1. Engage users and test current website and competitor websites
2. Contribute to Internal stakeholder engagement with design agency
3. Open & closed card sorts etc to define information architecture and functions
4. Produce functional lists against proposed architecture
5. Brief client and design agency
6. Design agency brainstorm solutions ‘big ideas’ and produce clickable jpeg prototypes
7. Design agency finalise the brief
8. Usability agency test prototype variants and feedback
9. A/B test
10. Launch

In this scenario the design agency are using the usability company within their process taking user insight as just one strand of the briefing process. This has several critical differences from the initial scenario.

1. Before the invention of the car if you had asked a user how to improve their journey times they would have asked for a faster horse. The point here being that it is dangerously limiting to let users define the brief in its entirety, the only outcome will be a better version of what stood before.
2. User insight misses the bigger picture, if the voice of the user is too strong in the brief then the website will be too focussed on what users want (yes there is such a thing) at the cost of the commercial success of the site, sometimes less is more, but this rarely comes out of user feedback. This subtle shift in power is what sets the project free.
3. Wireframes are the death of creativity, there I’ve said it! Wireframes are of course useful in some contexts (lengthy form processes for instance where the design will actually reflect the boxes). In marketing led sites however, a wireframe design results in a web design that looks like the wireframes. At Bloom we prefer functional lists in their suggested positions as simple text on white space, ‘no frames’
4. Freedom! The most important change here is in the user engagement is used to ask questions, it is the creative and technical challenge to the agency to solve these problems and users are used to verify the potential success of ideas prior to the costly build not solve the problems themselves (for the reasons listed above).

For the purposes of this blog I have deliberately simplified the process here but I have tried to capture the essence of my concerns / recommendations. I would like to just take the opportunity to state that I am very pro usability agency and don’t want this to come across as a criticism, however this is still a relatively new and evolving market and we can and are always looking to improve the way we work and the success of our projects for our clients. I’m also aware that many usability agencies wouldnt adhere to the process in scenario 1 anyway so i’m not trying to tarnish everyone with the same brush.

So on that note I’d be particularly interested in comments from usability specialists, agencies, and individuals to help refine this for the greater good. Perhaps some of you think i’ve got it wrong?

As we do a lot of SEO work at Bloom we’re often asked to put together ROI forecasts against our SEO strategies. Inevitably this revolves around key phrase research and estimating traffic volumes that can be anticipated as rankings improve against those terms.

I thought it would be useful to share some factual observations around this based on real experience of our clients rankings on targeted key phrases and the corresponding click through rates and traffic volumes against these terms. Obviously my clients wouldn’t want this commercially sensitive information sharing with their competitors so I have had to remove the actual terms and any reference to a specific client but the data is real and hopefully of use to you next time you are trying a similar forecast.

Question 1: how does position affect click through rate? (organic position in the SERPS)

Taking a sample from a client where I have both the monthly impressions data from their PPC campaign against key phrases where they are ‘always on’ and comparing against their average organic SERPS position sampled twice weekly I was able to observe the following trends.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the position data for Jan here but we can assume that it was closer to the position regained in June. The Peak CTR achieved was around 4% against and average position of 3.8.

Here we can see a peak CTR of around 9% against an average position of 2, almost double the CTR for an average position 1.8 higher.

Here we how dropping from a top position (average of 1.75) to an average of 4.5 only a few positions lower has a dramatic affect on CTR with the peak CTR of 21.61% dropping to 5.94% with the result only 3 places lower.

Unsurprisingly the impact on traffic can be seen clearly of this drop in position.

Looking at the data I can see that where a position average of 2 was held for a month the CTR hovers around the 10% mark, where we see an average position of 1.75 held for the month meaning that for some of the month the client was at number one for the term we see the CTR double a huge difference for just one position gained for a just a proportion of the month.

Question 2: So what! this is obvious isn’t it?

Of course the fact that the higher placed you are the more traffic you get didn’t come as a revelation to me however prior to carrying out this research I hadn’t realised just how much of an impact position 1-2 makes, here we can see:

Position 1 -20% CTR
Position 2 -10% CTR
Position 3 – 6% CTR
Position 4 – 5% CTR

The drop-off is markedly slower once we pass position 3.

I do have to point out the limitations of this of course.. 3 key phrases is hardly a representative sample however without using impressions data I have verified the same degree of impact on traffic seen here from other clients gaining top organic positions. Other factors such as whether they are running PPC, how well known the brand is, what the copy under the SERP actually says etc will all have an impact.

The most important learning for me is that easing off working on key phrases once you see them hit top 5 spots to work on others is a false economy, we operate a lot of payment on results contracts with our clients and looking at this data there is a clear incentive to both the client and agency to restructure these around the very top positions, yes it’s tough to get there and perhaps even tougher to stay there, but with the right agreement this would be workable. Inevitably it would cost more but the ROI would justify the spend.