Redbee (formerly BBC Creative) are looking to recruit New Business Manager.
Salary up to £50k
If
you are interested, let Emmaclare Huntriss know and will send you the brief or
contact Suzy Fleetwood at Longhouse directly, suzy@longhouselondon.co.uk
I am giggling quietly to myself as I read 6 June Campaign….article by Gareth Jones
"Facebook, the online social network, created for students…."
Says it all. Gavin….. it’s not for students (alone).
Actually, seriously, I think UK Facebook has reached a tipping point….. When I first joined I was the first person to register my school and the first for "Cambridge University". Which kinda disproves the ‘created for students’ myth….. or maybe they just didn’t bother promoting it in the UK on campus?
Anyway, the membership is at that rapid multiplier stage in the UK (but isn’t yet there in Australia and NZ as far as I can see from my friends there…..!)
Those clever planning guys at Red Spider have a days training booked for 24th July in London.
information attached.
Charlie Robertson’s the man to contact if you want to go along….
I have had a couple of interesting exchanges with Matt Cronin of Web Liquid…. the last thing I asked him was about “Co-creation”. This is a term I came across recently. I asked him, "Is it another word for CGC or something different?". Here’s his reply
I see co-creation as a quasi CGC whereby brands encourage consumers to create content or ads for them within a well defined set of parameters. We’ve had a couple big brands here in the states do this sort of thing but to be honest I see it as a weak attempt to jump on the CGC bandwagon. As you know, many marketers are afraid of relinquishing their grip of control on the brand, so co-creation is one way they can ‘safely’ dabble in CGC.
The problem is that the output it neither interesting or compelling, which is anathema to true CGC, so the ROI of such an effort is virtually nil. Having said all that, I’d love to see an example of what one might consider a successful co-creation effort.
As for getting together, I’m actually based in NYC but do get to the London office quite regularly – in fact I’ll be there in mid July, perhaps we can meet then?
-Matt
And, to answer the next question, "yes" I will try and organise a venue for us to meet up with Matt when he’s over in July.
Figure it’s time to add a new category… te interesting folk I am meeting.
Later this week…. Kimikawa De-Castro. Cool lady I first met at the Girl Geek Dinner in London. Her firm, K4 Innovations, does project management for all types of situations.
Here’s what she thinks we should have for breakfast (Jamaican-style)
We eat various things:-)
Smoked red herring cooked down in Tomatoes with ‘Johnny Cakes’(a sort of fried bread).
Saltfish fried up with onions, and spices again served with Johnny Cakes.
Saltfish with Ackee (national Fruit) with toast.
Loads of stuff. Tell you what I’ll surprise you:-)
Followed by Caroline Lashley - she and I first met about three years ago and lost touch. But Isaw her profile on LInked In and got in touch again. Caroline is journalist trained and runs a PR / Press office business called The Editors Office.
And Andy West from Friction TV. The online channel that’s been blazing a stormy trail across newspaper front covers as it launches an alternative to ’speakers’ corner’ for your burning issues and to spark debate.
reading the Sunday Times’ 100 biggest private companies list this morning, it is not surprising that no agencies are on the roster. The smallest has sales of over £400m and most are companies that make and sell things not services.
One of the underlying issues with our industry is that fundamentally we are selling hours. Hours of creative expertise and experience. But we are trading our hours for dollars. There’s a limit to how much you can grow on that business model. WE know larger agencies are not necessarily more profitable or more creative and so the creative services industry risks remaining full of SMEs - unless the business model changes.
A while ago, Tina Fegent, sent me a copy of Beau Fraser’s article on "Compensation". He claims that Gate Worldwide is trying to work its timesheets better such that the areas where true value is added get paid at higher levels than lower value work like revisions.
He has five stages to a project: Discovery; Strategy; Development; Production and Revision. Pretty standard stuff. But if timesheets were aligned to stage not just overall project, agencies would have a better idea of where they were adding value, making highest margins / profits and be able to adjust their pricing for clients and for staff accordingly.
When you find one team moves more smoothly with a client through to the production stage but then spends too long on Revisions - you know you start losing money. And so agency staff compensation and client pricing could be adjusted to reflect this.
it is possible.
Maybe this is one change to the agency business model that can move someone into the large public companies list….
Download AdAge_BeauFraser.pdf
If you are a business that need sto quickly find out "the latest"…. try these for help
One
trend and rumour website
Google
trends
Nice comment from Leo who works on the Rowperfect weblog for Grant and Me.
I currently have a client that I am working closely with on their blog.
They will often send me little tip bits of information that they come
across when surfing the internet, and ask whether it is of any benefit
for their site or my other customers. There have been many times that
this has been invaluable. An extra pair of eyes on the internet never
goes astray.
Oh, did I mention that that is ME!?!
I met Will Rowe from Rufus Leonard the other day…. they are a design agency doing some interesting stuff reaching into digital and branding. Watch this space.
[ghastly pic!! ;-)]
Sent some time last week at NMK’s conference - titled Hymns or Heresy? Media, communities and commerce.
There was a lot on media and a bit on communities and rather less on commerce - well the sort I’m interested in which is B2B.
Keynote was Mahalo’s founder, Jason McCabe Calacanis (do you think his Mother thought seriously when naming him?) who has got an inexpressibly large amount of cash to build a human-powered search engine. Sorry, but the last time I looked this was called "The Daily Telegraph Answers Service". What will they invest in now?
Key points:
I caught up with Jason in a break and asked him my one burnign question.
"when are you going to do B2B searches?"
And the answer
B2B will be done next but we have a lot of B2C sites to index first.
So that’s the end of the interview….
how do they do the categorisation? Look at the Greenhouse where you can volunteer to do some indexing for Mahalo and get paid $10 if they like your work. Opportunity to get near free work from smart people worldwide…. Wikipedia spring to mind? it’s easy to do. Just look around the subject, check out some obvious searches, find the sites that seem to best fit the search criteria and submit.
The neat thing is how they are pre-selecting researchers based on their web-savvyness. a real set of ‘golden questions’. Brilliant. [if you don’t know about golden questions, I’ll blog it sometime but read Don Peppers and Martha Rogers 1to1 marketing books].
Oh, and don’t bother doing it unless you live in US as they won’t pay you (international tax reasons).
