Being Blonde

Dundee has long been known as the ‘City of Discovery’ – an identity that has been very beneficial to the city in terms of raising its profile locally, within Scotland and further afield. However this old branding for the city is now more than 20 years old and in need of a new look. Blonde has been working with our sister agencies, Leith and Stripe, on a new website www.dundee.com to support the relaunch of Dundee and its new branding, ‘One City, Many Discoveries’. The new vision, while still reflecting the city’s heritage, has been created to better represent modern, multi faceted Dundee: a diverse, creative and innovative city which is home to world leading research, a thriving digital sector and which offers a fantastic quality of life.

At the heart of our refreshed vision for Dundee are people who are linked to the city and their stories about it. A host of inspirational individuals including figures such as the actor Brian Cox and presenter Lorraine Kelly as well as scientist Sir Philip Cohen and local musician Ged Grimes have shared their personal discoveries about Dundee with us.

Through the website we’re inviting people to ‘discover more‘ about the city but we also want to unearth locals’ stories so we can share with these with everyone else. So through ‘Dundee & Me‘, we want to hear from the people who live or work or study in Dundee and find out what it is about the city that sparks their imagination. A selection of these stories will be published online and also in a new guide book to the city, and one story will be chosen as the subject of a new short film about Dundee.

Another week, another new Blonde website! The Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC) launched its new site on Monday. The new site is aimed at event buyers looking for a suitable venue for their conference, exhibition or concert; and event goers looking to purchase tickets and was created due to a need to change the corporate website to better compete in an increasingly competitive market place nationally and internationally within the business to business market.

We worked alongside the SECC’s in-house IT team to supply designs and HTML templates for their implementation. We also commissioned the some striking new photography from Lesley Jones to showcase the SECC at its best.

Sean Murray, overseeing the project from the SECC, commented: “Just now is an exciting time for the SECC on many levels, from the major business we have won to the projects me and my team are working on from a marketing and PR perspective.  The new corporate website and pending ticketing brand have been challenging but equally exciting projects to deliver.”

1) We were executing someone else’s idea.

We’re more than happy to do this. Some of our best work is the result of executing someone else’s idea. Bad experiences arise when the idea has been sold in to the client before we’ve been consulted. Sometimes the idea is under-ambitious, sometimes over-ambitious, sometimes technically impossible, sometimes completely inappropriate to the target audience, quite often a print or broadcast mindset has been applied to web design or content generation, and we’d be rich if we had £5 for every time an idea has been promised to a client for a wildly unrealistic budget.

All of these scenarios are avoided by a collaborative mindset and early consultation.

2)  We were brought in too late.

This is hinted at above. We are most definitely more effective if we’re consulted before an idea goes to the client. Even better (much better) if we can work with you collaboratively from the briefing stage.

3)  Our advice wasn’t asked for or listened to.

This is rarely malicious. It is usually the result of junior project managers being extremely busy. “Digital” is not their primary discipline and it is a long way from being their primary concern. We’re contacted to do our thing at the very last minute, when listening to us is just going to add unwanted items to their to-do list.

Sometimes creative people get wedded to ideas that are just plain wrong. Sometimes creative people want to protect every minute detail of an idea that is basically sound but that has room for improvement.

4) We had no direct access to the client.

What the client is asking for may not be the most appropriate way to achieve their objectives. Are you qualified to challenge a brief and recommend relevant alternative approaches?

The digital aspect of their brief may be little more than an afterthought (”oh yes and we’ll need a campaign landing page or microsite”). Are you qualified to recognise that a huge opportunity might be about to be missed?

5)  We screwed up

Sometimes (very rarely) we let ourselves down and there’s no-one else to blame.

Our people are very good, our processes are robust, we learn from our mistakes, but nobody’s perfect.

I presented to the West Lothian eBusiness Group yesterday. The subject was Blogging for Business, based mainly on our own experiences here on the Blonde blog. A nicer, more appreciative audience you’d struggle to find.

It was also an opportunity to road test Prezi - a potential antidote to death by Powerpoint.

Prezi describes itself as the “zooming presentation editor”. It aims to avoid the linear narrative (stuck on rails) progression of Powerpoint by using a zooming approach to navigation. It really is a case of zooming pictures painting a thousand words because I won’t be able to do it justice by describing it here. The site is well worth a visit because the simple visual tutorials will quickly give you a good idea of what it’s all about. Basically, though, it avoids the use of slides by arranging the content of your presentation on an “infinite landscape”. You then progress through by zooming in and out

My Blogging for Business presentation can be viewed here. You can follow the path I created by clicking the next arrow, or zoom out using the magnifying glass and click on any element that interests you.

Based on the interactive tutorials I was able to get up to speed and put a presentation together in less than a morning. The main drawback, as far as I can tell, being that some elements of presentation structure are hard to change retrospectively. There’s an Undo button, but undoing everything after the component you want to change to get back to it can be frustrating to say the least. The secret, as with all presentations, is good planning before you start creating.

I have upgraded to a Pro account which gives access to a desktop version (the first presentation was put together on the Prezi site) and a huge amount of extra memory space on their site.

Well worth a look and a play.

We’ve been members of CreativeBrief* for a while now, but yesterday we finally got round to publishing our agency showcase on the CreativeBrief site. Apparently this should significantly increase the number of potential clients that have a gander at us. Here’s hoping.

The main navigation for these showcases is fixed for all agencies, and they act as a sort of hybrid between a website and a credentials presentation.

We’re collating initial feedback at the moment so treat this as a public beta test at the moment.

*CreativeBrief may not describe themselves like this, but to us they’re a new business referral agency. Clients use them to condense and keep confidential the process of drawing up shortlists of suppliers for the provision of a range of marketing services.

Our “IMMORTALising Grolsch” paper has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Online Excellence category of the Marketing Society Star Awards. Woot!

It’s a tale of dynamic content, brand development and rigorous return on investment analysis.

Fingers crossed for May 29th.

UPDATE 1st APRIL

Just heard that the paper has now been shortlisted in the Digitally Led Marketing category at the national Marketing Society Golden Jubilee Awards. Double woot!

Fingers now crossed for June 8th too.

Here are the results of a quick experiment conducted in our Edinburgh office whilst everyone was having tea and enjoying cakes made by our pals at Stripe for Comic Relief.

We’d been in a meeting talking about the design for an in-house portfolio project we’re working on. This involved one of the team attempting to sketch an outline of Scotland on a notepad. The scribble was so laughably bad that we decided to extend the task to the whole office. Everyone had 30 seconds and no Google-peeking.

What this says about our observation and spacial awareness skills we’re not sure. It probably won’t form part of our design credentials.

We’re chuffed to bits to have won the pitch for The Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC).

It was a four way pitch, primarily for the redesign of the secc.co.uk business to business site. We’ll now be working closely with the SECC’s marketing, commercial and technical teams to review the site’s information architecture and navigation, to reinterpret the SECC brand and to introduce a range of new event planning features.

We’ve been doing a fair bit of interesting work in B2B sectors recently, and this is no exception - a range of internal stakeholders and a series of target audience segments all of whose goals and objectives need to be reconciled via a single site.

Sean Murray and the team at SECC have an ambitious vision for the venue and the brand, and there are some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Its helps a lot to be working on behalf of a “product” that is world class. For the 2nd year in a row, the SECC has just won BEST UK CONFERENCE VENUE 2009 at the industry leading M&IT Awards in London (23 Feb 2009).

As well as the main B2B site, the SECC also operates the ticket sales websites secctickets.com and secxtra.com.

Watch this space for details of the new site when it launches.

It’s been a while. The You Are What You Shirt category has gathered dust and cobwebs. But this morning’s fire drill presented this opportunity, courtesy of Roy.

The devil is in the detail. Read the small print.

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success - well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

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Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival -  http://bit.ly/yblG3