Like many of the digital folk reading this, I read a lot of blogs, books and pretty much anything that piques my interest. Hell, I’ve even been known to drop into the occasional Google+ Hangout. Doing the rounds, there is a common theme on approaches to content marketing.

Though the wording changes from article to article they generally all follow the same rule: use Google and some advanced queries to pull up websites that return [“KEYWORD” “submit guest post”]  or [“KEYWORD” “Write for us”] or something else along those lines. Read More »

Good news for those working in  the digital and technology sectors.

Recruitment firm Propel have found that over the last four years salaries in the sector have grown more than twice as fast as the UK national average. Read More »

China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity. As each social media platform looks to monetise faster and further than its competitors, brands are dealing with a constantly moving environment, and nailing a strategy across this can be extremely complicated.

Within this nebulous environment, brands have to learn to navigate and make use of the market size in the most efficient manner – setting quality over quantity. To help cut through the noise and complex social media structure in China, we have selected some key channels that are an essential starting place. Read More »

Facebook Home mobile app

Facebook is expected to report a 40% year-on-year sales lift tomorrow for the first three months of 2013, fuelled by its fast developing mobile advertising revenues.

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It’s something of a contentious point these days, but digital creative agencies are still, primarily, purveyors of truth.

It may often be dressed up in words like ‘engagement’, ‘shareable’ and ‘social’, but the strongest of their creative ideas still have a solid truism at the core.

So it’s interesting to consider the quote of Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest original thinkers, that ‘Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation‘.

Hmm.

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Content, data, digital, marketing, mobile, PR and social media… The industry changes so fast and to stay on your game you need to be tuning into great resources like The Wall (yay for you, you’re already ticking that box), the ever decreasing number of trade magazines and of course events.

There are a handful of big, agenda-setting conferences in the UK that everyone knows about and many will attempt to go along to one or more during the year.  But, there are a number of other events that may fly under the radar, and many niche (social media for the military, pharmaceutical or utility industries for example)  or focused conferences (if you’re looking for an event solely about content or data – 2013 is your year) that are worth considering. Read More »

For those of us who have preached the virtues of simplicity down the years, e-consultancy’s recent ‘Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends for 2013’ made for an interesting read.

The collapse of complex business models – one of Clay Shirky’s signature pieces – long ago caught the eye; when applied to the world of online advertising, it makes for an ever more compelling read.

Particularly when you start to poke around the latest findings, which gives you a decent ‘snap-shot’ of the mood of marketeers in 2013, what are they thinking and above all the challenges are they facing right now. Read More »

The belief of WPP’s chief executive Martin Sorrell that Twitter is more a PR medium for brands, rather than an advertising opportunity, has been widely shot down by rival agencies and social media practitioners.

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You can’t help but come away from SXSW without a feeling of positivity, of excitement about the future and where technology is going to lead us.

As I’ve mentioned before, just being there gives you an idea of what the future is going to be like – checking into Foursquare becomes useful again, people pay at tills with the Level Up device 3D-printed by the Makerbot, while treats can be downloaded from Samsung just by tapping your NFC-enabled phone.

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With nearly 30,000 people descending on a few blocks in Austin, Texas, SXSW may have some major problems – mainly the challenge to get into oversubscribed talks and the variable quality of the talks themselves – but with a fair few launches and innovations, being here is like stepping into the future and you can’t help but be inspired.

The new product launches are diverse and the ones that caught the zeitgeist for me yesterday include Makerbot’s digitiser, a very cool device which allows you to scan an object and print it off in 3D; the first ever 3D mobile phone printer; LevelUp’s mobile phone scanner; and Cheil’s beta of our very own Mubbl app (http://mubbl.com) , which lets event attendees capture the event together to create a richer, collective  digital memory. Read More »