Graphic Alliance Blog

Meet the team – Name: Stuart Bowler. Job Title: Overlord.

You may have noticed that we don’t have a “Meet the Team!” section on our website. This is a deliberate omission; we didn’t want to go down the traditional route of staff bios. But, we do want you to get to know us better, so, over the coming weeks, each member of the Graphic Alliance team will write a short ditty about another member of the team. I know what you are thinking, and yes, this could potentially be a dangerous exercise! The first one up is Stuart Bowler, with Linford Haggie writing about him, and they have no one else to blame apart from themselves…

Stuart Bowler, by Linford Haggie

Some say he appears on high-value stamps in Surrey, and he thought Star Wars was a documentary…

Some say he’s afraid of dogs, and he thinks the credit crunch is a breakfast cereal…

Some say he has code instead of blood, and if you tune into 88.4, you can actually hear his thoughts…

All we know is, he’s called Stuart Bowler. And he’s the brains behind Graphic Alliance!

Stu is undoubtedly the cleverest guy I’ve ever worked with. He routinely overcomes complex technical issues as if they were insulting him. He’s created online banking systems from scratch, made a website for Qatar’s state-owned gas company RasGas, and developed the Temperley online shop which Vogue described “as good as it gets from your desktop”. Unusually for one so gifted mathematically, he also has a fabulous eye for design which is pretty amazing considering he is… wait for it… colourblind!

Stu likes rock music, poker, family, geometric shapes, Howies, drinking and Tesco ready meals.

Stu dislikes religion, public school, bad paying clients, boy bands, and being called Fu Man Stu.

Fu Man Stu’s dress sense has improved over the years. In the early days, he once came to a meeting with a City law firm wearing a t-shirt with a woman blowing her brains out. This prompted our late Chairman, Mike Nicholson, who was also Chairman of Gieves & Hawkes, to make it his mission to ‘get Stu in a suit’. When he finally managed it a couple of years ago, Mike said it was one of his finest achievements in business.

If Stu was a car, he’d be a 1960s Dodge Charger with flames down the side.

If Stu was a drink, he’d be a Jack Daniels straight up, the tipple of rock stars.

If Stu was a recipe, he’d be a full English without mushrooms and extra bacon.

Sitting next to him at work is a constant amusement. When asked “how are you” and he replies “medium”, you know not to bother running a new idea past him. Then for every 10 ideas I come up with, Stu dismisses 9 of them almost immediately with a straight “no”. But that one idea is nearly always put into practice for the benefit of the company. After all, getting board approval is easier than getting his approval! He marks my client proposal documents with great interest and last week gave me a B++ for The Conran Shop pitch document (once he gave me an A- but that was so long ago, I can’t remember what was special about it).

Can you believe it’s been nearly ten years of working together? Surely cause for a party!

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on February 2, 2010
Categories: Homepage, Meet the team
Comments (0)

Frame of Honour!

Here at Graphic Alliance HQ, we are always trying out new things. Through our blog, we’ve brought you our Monday Morning Munchies, because we know Monday mornings are hard, and our Friday Famous Five, so that we can deliver you the latest celebrity news. All interspersed with a spattering of online marketing know-how. Well, drum roll please – the next addition to our blog is here, and we have named it “Frame of Honour”. In a nutshell, we will be awarding someone, or something, our “Frame of Honour” every week. This prestigious accolade can be bestowed on anyone or anything, for reasons that are subject to change. Here is this week’s Frame of Honour…

This week’s frame of honour goes to the as yet unopened Snog Shop in Covent Garden. Snog, a chain which sells frozen yogurt, are opening up a shop just round the corner from our office in early spring. I was walking past the site the other day and noticed that they were using their unopened site location to advertise a social media campaign which promotes their new store. The campaign is “Tell us about your first snog…” In the run up to the opening, snog are giving away one hundred free ‘snogs’ (yogurts not kisses, sorry) to the people with the best stories about their first snog. To do this you either Tweet them or use their Facebook page. It’s great way of engaging with their prospective customers and creating noise about their latest shop opening. It’s also eye catching and bold and has certainly got us talking in the office! Now we just need it to open so we can get our hands on some yummy frozen yogurt!

Posted by: Alison Young on January 25, 2010
Categories: Frame of Honour, Homepage, Social media
Comments (3)

Google Wave – flash in the pan?

A while ago, I wrote a post about Google Wave, and said that I would trial it for a while and then report back on how it was working for me. The time has now come to write that update, and to cut a long story short, Google Wave has entirely underwhelmed me. Whilst I’ve actively tried to use it, I go for days without even remembering to check my Wave inbox. Although on paper I understand that Google Wave offers greater communication prospects than email or existing social networks, I find it far easier to contact friends and colleagues through email, Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, a lot of my communication is done via mobile (Blackberry), and as far as I know, there is no Google Wave Blackberry app, or simple way to sync the two (correct me if I am wrong). And, whilst Google Wave is still fledgling, I think that users should receive email notifications when their wave inbox is updated (my colleagues never remember to check their Wave inboxes either).

It seems that I’m not the only one losing interest in Google Wave. As the graph below shows, Google did a great job of building up hype around Google Wave towards the end of last year, however it seems that interest in the product is now plummeting.

The graph above shows Google search volume for the term “Google Wave” over the past 12 months.

The Hitwise graph below further confirms that usage of the service is falling; traffic to the Google Wave has fallen considerably over the past two months.

The above statistics don’t surprise me in the slightest; Google Wave is currently not sticky enough to hold attention, and the functionality isn’t great at the moment. No doubt Google have some tricks up their sleeves, and the product is still in beta, so I am by no means writing this service off, but for now, I’m going to stop waving.

What are your thoughts?

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on January 22, 2010
Categories: GA Guide, Homepage, Search, Social media
Tags: google, google wave, hitwise
Comments (8)

The wonders of WordPress

Just in case you didn’t know, WordPress is an open source project (which, put simply, means it’s free and has hundreds of people working on it from all corners of the globe) that can be used for anything – from your own personal blog to a fully functional, professional looking website.

Back in 2003, WordPress started as a blogging system, but has now evolved into a content management system (a.k.a. CMS) where almost anything can be made possible thanks to a wealth of different plugins, widgets and themes. In fact, just one look at some of our previous work will demonstrate to you how much WordPress can be manipulated and how versatile it can be.

Take, for instance, Because Magazine – the digital fashion magazine from the people behind Tank. It’s a high end, click to buy fashion magazine that simply oozes cool in a suitably unobtrusive manner. Since its launch back in September 2009, Because Magazine has been hailed in the press and most memorably described as “high-end fashion pornography… that makes me want to rob a bank while simultaneously winning the lottery” (NMA site of the week, 8^th October 2009). We also got the chance to tell .net magazine all about the bespoke functions such as the wishlist, login and personal profiles which were made possible through extensively modified plugins to match the design and requirements of the website.

Or, for something a little different, why not take a look WOW Toys, who wanted a fully immersive brand experience built using an open source CMS. This site also received some brilliant coverage and featured on makebetterwebsites.com, bestcssgallery.com, welovewp.com and designshack.co.uk – to name but a few!

Nevertheless, flexible it may be, WordPress is not a full featured CMS (like the Graphic Alliance CMS). As a simple CMS it works brilliantly – search engines love it, it’s easy to use, and it looks great. However, if you’re after a database of information or a site which can hold all sorts of different content, then you will need to look further than WordPress which is, after all, just a blogging platform.

Even so, we can’t fault WordPress and love the power, flexibility and amazing community behind it!

Posted by: Susan Lim Clowes on January 20, 2010
Categories: Homepage, Work
Tags: because magazine, WordPress, WOW Toys
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5 tools to help you monitor your online reputation

With last year’s high profile case of United Airlines experiencing a 10% decrease in share price due to a single YouTube video (“Revenge is best served cold – on YouTube”), and Google rolling out “real time search”, companies are finally coming around to the realisation that social media must be acknowledged. Social media has provided consumers with a power never seen before, the power to talk openly about their experiences of a brand, and to share that content freely, and more importantly, quickly, around the social web.

Any negative bit of searchable content on the web could have a hugely negative impact on your brand, from a mainstream news article on the Guardian, right through to a forum comment or an isolated tweet. In this new social media world, control lies in the hands of the consumer, and companies need to adapt accordingly. Whilst this lack of control can be disconcerting, timely and appropriate responses to consumer conversation online can be hugely rewarding.

However, before you try to talk to converse with your consumers online (how best to do that will be another blog post!), you need to know what is being said about you, and preferably, in real time. Social media/online PR agencies (including us!) will be able to perform ongoing quantitative and qualitative online audits for you as part of their services, to provide you with an in-depth understanding of your online presence and reputation. However, there are some tools available online, which can give you a topline snapshot of this.

With this in mind, we have collated a list of five free tools to help you monitor conversations about your brand. If you try any of these out, let us know what you think!

1. Google Alerts

We’re not going to dwell on this one, but suffice to say that anyone who hasn’t got Google alerts set up for their company/products is missing a serious trick. Simple to do, simple to manage.

2. TweetBeep

TweetBeep is a great way to get up to the hour alerts on hot topics of your choice direct from the twittersphere. Self-dubbed Google alerts for Twitter, it works very much in the same way; picking up on key words or phrases as and when they are tweeted about. TweetBeep allows you to create up to ten ‘beeps’ per account before there is a charge for the service, however once you have used your ten alerts on one account, there is nothing stopping you setting up another!

TweetBeep is a Twitter application set up by Michael Jensen (twitter.com/mdjensen), who has also developed a number of other twitter tools, including LiveTwitting.com and TweetAnswers. It is not affiliated with Twitter.com.

3. Collecta

Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, in real time. You can either search the entire social web through Collecta, including blogs, Twitter, flickr, YouTube etc, or you can filter the search, so that it only delivers comments, updates (twitter etc),or photos. We have to say, this tool isn’t particularly useful for brands/companies which don’t generate a lot of chatter, but it is quite useful for searching hot topics, emerging news stories, or well known personalities or brands.

4. BoardReader

Boardreader scans online forums and communities for chatter about your brand. As well as providing search results for your chosen key words, Boardreader will also plot this chatter over time to illustrate the ebbs and flows in conversations.

The best feature about Boardreader, we think, is that you can compare up to three key words at a time, which is a great way to compare the level of conversation about your company with that of competitors. However, Boardreader is by no means definitive; it doesn’t scan every forum out there! So if you know of forums important to your business, it worth looking at those forums and doing additional searches.

5. Social mention

Social mention is a new tool, similar to Connecta, and we must admit, we are just trying this one out too!. It is a “social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc”.

Similar to Tweet Beep and Google Alerts, you can also set up social mention alerts to find out what people are saying about you as soon as it happens. Not sure what we think about this tool yet; we will let you know in a couple of weeks.

So, what do you think of all these tools? Or do you have your own favourites? Let us know!

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on January 19, 2010
Categories: Homepage, Most Popular, Online marketing, Social media
Tags: online pr, online reputation, Social media, united airlines
Comments (13)

Monday Morning Munchies!

MMM211209

It’s the final MMM of the year and the Monday before Christmas, so what could be more fitting than the festive and very yummy traditional mince pie! Fun and very Christmassy- a perfect way to start the week! Now all we need is a glass of something to go with it, it is Christmas after all… Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!!

Posted by: Alison Young on December 21, 2009
Categories: Homepage, Monday Morning Munchies
Comments (0)

Breaking world records – just an average day at the office

It’s great working in Covent Garden. The atmosphere is fervent, bustling, and there’s always something random going on. You literally never know what’s going to happen. Typical example of this – when I walked into work this morning, I could never have guessed that less than three hours later, I would be breaking a world record.

Yes, you heard right. Today, I broke a world record.

Don’t believe me, well here’s the proof:

So, as you can hopefully see from my great Nokia phone film footage, I broke a record for “the most amount of people in one place simultaneously flipping a coin”.

Nice.

And the point of this? Well, this PR stunt world record attempt was the brainchild of agency Taylor Herring to promote a new Channel Five series called Heads or Tails.

I think it was quite a nice idea, although I would have perhaps done more online to build buzz prior to the event. But anyway, I’m sure the ‘world record’ will provide a soft news story, and so this might make a few papers tomorrow, just in time for the show’s premiere on the weekend. On that note, I’m slightly regretting my proximity to Justin (watch vid of the photoshoot below!)

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on December 17, 2009
Categories: Events, Graphic Alliance, Homepage, Work
Tags: covent garden, justin lee collins, Social media, the big flip
Comments (0)

The implications of Google Real Time Search for brands

This is my second post in less than a week about Google.

I’m not obsessed I promise, but Google does seem to be rolling out a lot of new features recently (as well as spending a hell of a lot on advertising, no doubt taking advantage of cheap outdoor ad rates which it has helped to drive down).

Anyway, last week, following much anticipation, Google finally began rolling out ‘Google Real Time Search’. Real Time Search refers to the incorporation of ‘real time’ social media updates (from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed) in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Of course, not all social media updates will be automatically incorporated in SERPs, but Facebook users will need to check/update their privacy settings to make sure their conversations are not being indexed by search engines.

So the question on everyone’s lips is – what will this mean for brands? If ever a brand was looking for a time to take social media seriously, surely this is it?

In a nutshell, yes. Whether you are a brand that commands one tweet a month, or one tweet a second, these real time updates will affect you. If you are part of a company which only gets tweeted about on rare occasions, each social media mention will act as a permanent fixture on the first page of Google until someone else decides to talk about you. And, if that mention has come from an irate customer, then I’m pretty sure that the ’someone else’ will be you!

Conversely, if you are a company which generates a lot of chatter online, then it will become important to ensure that overall sentiment is consistently positive. For example, for a global FMCG brand, one tweet will probably have a SERP-life of under a minute, giving individual tweets less impact. However, we all know how quickly things can escalate within social media, and 10 or 15 ‘retweets’ later, you may have a problem.

For trending news stories, I think that Real Time Search adds a new “emotional” element to online coverage. When searching for news about the BA strike, I was immediately confronted with tweets from real people who are being affected by the action.

And then, there is the issue of spam. Take a look at the image at the top of this blog post. I got Graphic Alliance to feature on the first page of google results for the term “google real time search”, which is a very popular search term at the moment. Will people use trending topics to promote things entirely unrelated to that topic? Probably. I mean, it’s already happening on a massive scale within Twitter (Twitter displays trending topics, and a number of ‘twitterers’ incorporate these words in their tweets to gain visibility for something else).

As well as acknowledging the impact that Google Real Time Search has on your own online reputation, you should also think about ways to use Google Real Time Search to your advantage. Ensure that you are having regular conversations with your audiences online, and responding to valid customer queries quickly, even if it is just to say “we’ll get back to you shortly”. Constantly monitor what people are saying about you, your products, and your competitors. Don’t rely on Google alerts to tell you when people are talking about you – tweets will appear on Google search engine listings before you get your update, trust me, I just tried it! Use a faster monitoring system, like Tweetdeck, to see conversations as they happen.

I’m not saying that real time updates are the only important aspect of search engine results pages; in reality, they are ephemeral and I would rather have to deal with a negative tweet about me than a negative news article with a permalink. Also, a live feed is not available for every search term yet, just popular ones, although, Google have stated that Real Time Search will become ubiquitous very soon.

To conclude, what I think real time updates have done is ensure that social media cannot be ignored. But exactly how people take notice remains to be seen.

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on December 14, 2009
Categories: GA Guide, Homepage, Online marketing, Search, Social media
Tags: GA Guide, google real time search, Social media
Comments (1)

The WOW Toys website is now live!

Graphic Alliance has designed and developed a new interactive website for WOW Toys, the toy company renowned for good quality and attention to detail. The new website aims to increase understanding and knowledge about what makes a WOW toy special. It also builds brand identity, increases awareness and will grow with the brand to enable future development.

Built entirely in WordPress, the website appeals to a variety of visitors and combines an intuitive, interactive navigation, as well as a more traditional, linear navigation for those who do not wish to interact.

Although the website is not a transactional eCommerce site, it aims to showcase and provide as much information as possible for each product so that the visitor is able to click though to a retailer and make an informed purchase. Each product is categorized into its own ‘WOW World’ and sits against an on-brand backdrop brimming with fun WOW features. The immersive brand experience continues through to each product page, where icons, sliding tabs, plenty of imagery and information brings every toy to life while explaining the individual functions, features and benefits.

We loved working on WOW and hope you enjoy it just as much!

www.wowtoys.com

Posted by: Susan Lim Clowes on December 11, 2009
Categories: Homepage, Work
Tags: WOW Toys
Comments (0)

Err Google, I’m not waving, I’m drowning…

You may have heard (I say slightly in jest), but Google has recently rolled out a new tool, Google Wave, which is supposed to revolutionise the way we communicate and collaborate online. Google’s master stroke, which has got everyone talking, is the fact that they have made this service invite only for now, and up until yesterday, (when Google released another bout of invites), invites were pretty hard to come by.

I was (supposedly) one of the lucky ones, who managed to nab a Google Wave invite fairly early on, and I have been signed up to the service for quite a while now.

So, has it revolutionised my life?

As tempted as I am to answer that question (you can probably take a guess from my tone what my answer would be), I am going to wait a couple of weeks before I tell you.

According to Google, “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

Whilst I have been on Google Wave for a while, I haven’t really had anyone to wave to, and from Google’s description it sounds like it will be a lot more useful and fun when there are more people involved. So what I have done recently is invite the rest of Graphic Alliance to join me on the service, and we will be making waves next week. Therefore, I will report back at the end of next week, and give you my verdict.

And, if you want to get on to Google Wave and haven’t found an invite yet, just let us know. We have a few going spare!

Posted by: Natasha Ighodaro on December 10, 2009
Categories: Graphic Alliance, Homepage, Social media
Tags: google wave, Social media
Comments (2)

Meet the team – Name: Stuart Bowler. Job Title: Overlord.

The wonders of WordPress

Monday Morning Munchies!

The WOW Toys website is now live!

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