Creative Agency Secrets

Brave Lloyd and his motley crew met this morning to ‘prototype’ the London Social Media Cafe idea that’s been discussed a bit.  The idea is Space to Meet : Socialise : Work.  that’s it.

we met in the unlikely attic of a Baptist Church in Bloomsbury - fantastic group…
and we discussed the key things needed to make the project fly:

• governance and organisational structure
• location and space
• money
• constituency
• Projects to do there

I joined the governance / money group….

we need….

1. legal / accountancy advice about how to structure the entity [any offers?]
2. We think we know some funders / sponsors who want to get (PR, Branding in the space, sponsor an event, meet the members, opportunity to understand social media, be within the buzz)
3. space - short let offices, lease-endings and possibly approved squatting rights
4. Business plan for our vision and values, statement of aims.   

that’s it for now… a Google Group has been set up.  Join if you want to contribute.

One of the keys to improving your publicity ‘reach’ online is enabling the search engines to index your site.

the key ones are MSN, Yahoo and Google. 

There are some quirks that come up from time to time and I hit one today…. I received an update notification that a blog post linking into my site from a contact I met for lunch in May 2007 had been checked by a search engine spider. 

Now that is S….L…..O…..W…. and obviously says a lot about your brand’s online presence and relevance.

And so here are 5  quick things you can do to speed up the linking process:
1 - Get an incoming link from a high-ranked blog
2 - Add Techorati Tags to your blog posts (see below….)  This ensures that Technorati is receiving tagging information from your source site and helps it to register your presence on the web
3 - Use feedburner as one of your site feeds (it comes free with most blogging software) And it automatically pings the relevant search engines for your
4 - Check how you are doing regularly - read your own site statistics and see where incoming visitors are arriving from.  Your site stats should list the search engines own spider programmes as well as real people
5 - Keep a check on yourself by setting a google alert for your blog name and running a regular Technorati check on your brand (everything in the known universe about….)

By contrast, a post on my rowing blog postd at 9.26 pm on Friday 28 September was indexed and the alert was back in my inbox by Sat 29/09/2007  at 01:04 am.  Four Hours.

These are things I enjoy and so do well.  I’ve done most of them many times and can give you references, if you need.

In no particular order….

1 - Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 - Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency - bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 - Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 - Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 - Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"