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Marketing Communication

Better Brand Agency industry comment relating to marketing, marketing communication, social media marketing, online marketing, and traditional marketing.

Home Group embrace social media with Better Communities
Date:: 20/01/2012

Home Group has recently announced the launch of it’s online community powered by Better Communities.

The ‘Online Community’ has been developed and launched to support ongoing customer and client engagement and develop insight into the needs of customers. Home customers will now have 24/7 online access to discussions with other customers, focus groups, polls, and surveys as well as direct access to feedback through the community. (more…)

Social media, mobile marketing, SEO, CRO, web analytics…get up to date on it all and more at ‘Marketing: the art of’ 2011.
Date:: 21/09/2011

Date: 10 November 2011
Venue: The Sage Gateshead
Time: 9.00am – 4.15pm

This year’s ‘Marketing: the art of‘ conference will give give you expert insights into how to dramatically improve your digital marketing strategy.

A number of keynote speakers will be there to inspire you throughout the day, and local marketing experts (including our MD, Mark Easby) will help you to explore how you can develop your own digital marketing strategies effectively to win new customers, build brand recognition and grow your business, in a series of interactive workshops. (more…)

Winning New Business: Developing your Digital Footprint through Social Media
Date:: 02/08/2011

Date: Thursday 13th October 2011
Time: 8:30am – 11:30am
Location: Gateshead College , NE8 3BE

Tweeting, hash tags, mashable, SEO, tiny URLs – these are all terms that a few years ago didn’t even exist, yet today they play a fundamental part in organisations’ marketing strategies. Due to the popularity of this workshop in 2010, Service Network is repeating (and enhancing!) this event which will take you through the step by step process of developing a digital footprint for your business. A digital footprint is a collection of activities and behaviours recorded when an organisation interacts in a digital environment. It includes the recording of activities such as clicks on e-newsletters, visits to a web-page, tweets and Facebook updates. (more…)

Embracing openness and transparency
Date:: 17/06/2011

How transparent should companies be? There’s an argument that many brands aren’t getting it right.

Sometimes the amount of information released to it’s customers is more than they need or want whilst others hold too much to themselves. A glut, feast or famine, getting the balance and tone right is vitally important as Martin Thomas, author of Loose suggests, social media needs only three actions to work well: be human, be responsive and be open.A great post written by Amy Duff in Director Magazine explores the challenges faced by businesses and governments in this age of enlightened, connected consumers. (more…)

Thinking about Thinking Digital Conference 2011
Date:: 27/05/2011

It’s like when the fair leaves town or your favorite show finishes on TV, the come down is always hard in the days immediately after something momentous finishes. And so it was with Thinking Digital 2011. (more…)

Does Google use data from social sites in ranking?
Date:: 24/03/2011

GoogleWebMasterHelp responds to a question from WebSEOAnalytics about social media and it’s impact on search rankings…”Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?” (more…)

Social media and co-creation partnership set for rapid rise to power
Date:: 11/01/2011

A NEW joint venture between two North East firms is on target to see sales hit £1m in its first year after attracting interest from several national corporate giants.

Newcastle-based market research business Explain has joined forces with Teesside brand agency Better, to launch Better Communities. The Better Communities product is a bespoke private digital community backed up by specialist research software which allows companies with large customer bases to gain feedback and insight from their consumers.

The co-creation and engagement tool has already attracted interest from a number of blue chips from across Europe in several sectors including retail, manufacturing and utilities, and negotiations with a handful of multinational companies continue to progress. (more…)

Be A Storyteller Brand
Date:: 02/06/2010

I recently enjoyed a two day storytelling seminar given by Robert Mckee, the legendary story doctor who has worked with luminaries of the movie industry for more than 3 decades.

Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

(more…)

Avoiding social media burnout
Date:: 17/03/2010

I’m an average kinda guy. I have social network profiles on Twitter x two, Facebook, LinkedIn (Including four groups), Flickr, Slideshare and Friends Reunited. I have my own blog and contribute to a company blog. I Subscribe to, and read regularly, eighteen blogs through my reader. Thats a total of 31 connections with different social networks and contacts.

We have on average (Dunbar Number) 150 social connections, so for me that represents 4650 potential social connections. There isn’t time to manage all these social connections effectively, we’d be mad to try but some people do and I’m seeing more people dump their profiles all together as they’ve hit social media burnout.

Social connections are important and valuable both to the individual and the communities they are part of. This has been well documented over the last two years and I won’t go over well trodden ground but I am concerned that people have begun to question the benefit of their social connections. This is on the back of feeling their commitment to keeping their social connections open has begun to affect their work and home life. There are lessons we can all learn to ensure we don’t find ourselves in a similar situation.

Chose to lose some social network platforms.

Dumping the social networks that you joined in a rush of enthusiasm but aren’t actually value social networks will free up your time to focus on the connections that really benefit each other. By value social networks I mean those social network that don’t feed you personally in terms of knowledge, learning and connections or you don’t feel contribute to the growth of the community.

Remove overlapping contacts.

If we stick to the principle of one person equals one connection, how many duplicate connections do you have with a person across your social networks? It’s easy to accept a friend and a follower, without giving it a second thought when we connect with them on other networks already. Consider how many people use Twitter to feed their Facebook profile or vice versa? If you follow people on both networks you’ll expose yourself to the same content twice.

Recognise what is social media noise and and then ignore it.

Remember when you were a kid traveling on holiday with your parents. You’d sit in the back of the car watching the cars coming in the other direction. Then you simply started to not see them. They were there, but you didn’t register them any more as they’d become part of the background noise. (more…)

A mandate for 2010
Date:: 14/01/2010

A recent post by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd in Harvard Business discussed how few socially connected organisations there are, indicating this will need to be redressed if companies are to be attractive to a future workforce that judges a potential employer by the social media freedom they allow their employees.

The social networking juice that powers a generation across sprawling vibrant communities has its feed forcibly cut off when the majority of company staff walk into work. All the potential of networked company communities, the opportunity for people to collaborate and and share knowledge is left at home and lost to the company. (more…)

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