Set up in 1988, we now have a membership base of over 400 organisations comprising more than 4,000 professionals, who collectively have an unrivalled level of expertise in SAP software and its deployment.

As a member of SUGEN (SAP User Group Executive Network), a body made up of 13 international user groups, we also share the concerns of our members and influence SAP at a global level.

Website: http://www.sapusers.org

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Digital Consultancy, Web Design and Development, Social Media Integration and Support.

Their systematic, customer centric approach gives their clients the absolute assurance that their non-core activities are in a safe pair of hands. Results focused, they measure everything they do from client KPI performance to internal procedures.

Website: http://www.anabas.co.uk

Project Details.

Brand Development, Brand Guidelines, Brochure Design, Direct Mail, Marketing Support, Ongoing Creative, Digital Consultancy, Web Design and Development, Social Media Integration and Support.

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Website: http://www.chaptershotels.co.uk

You can also find Chapters Hotel & Restaurant on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook.

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Website: http://www.quay2media.com

Some comments from Christian Cerisola, Director.

We put the search out there for our new website on twitter and they were among the first to respond. It was important for us that our web developers had a strong understanding on the importance of social media channels for our own site plans. From there though, they were straight on the phone and keen to come and meet face to face with us.

Their ideas, creativity and ease to converse with immediately made them the immediate front runners among the developers we saw. Importantly for us, they gave us the impression they actually really wanted our business.

From the moment we then agreed terms with them, we never doubted for one second we had made the right choice. They stayed patient while pushing our comfort zone and maintained creativity and new ideas while offering a fantastic client reporting structure to us at Quay2. They’re a young, hungry team and its no surprise they are rapidly becoming a great North East success story.

We’re thrilled with the end result and genuinely hope it’s the start of a long term relationship we can develop with Better and their team.

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Website: http:;//ww.keithmossphotography.co.uk/

Some comments from Keith Moss.

Thanks to all from team Moss. Had a look at our web site now it has gone live and it looks fantastic, just wanted to say a big thank you to you and all the team that has worked on it. We are all so happy that we chose Better Brand to design and build our website, as right from the start of the process you made us all feel comfortable, understood our requirements, explained the process,  kept us informed at every stage and went up and beyond the call to deliver. A big thank you to all.

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Website: http://www.fudgefancies.co.uk

Michael, the founder of Fudge Fancies, is the eldest son of three children. As the eldest Michael enjoyed a lot of quality time and attention from his grandparents and had a particularly close relationship with his maternal grandmother, Jean, whom he spent a lot of time in his early years. Michael’s first spark of interest in cooking came from watching his grandmother bake her legendary fudge.

Michael loves the care and precision that is needed in creating the perfect piece of fudge as opposed to his usual style of cooking which requires no measurements! This need for precision only encouraged Michael to strive for perfection and after trial and error he has achieved his goal with Fudge Fancies.

Michael now regularly sells his gourmet fudge at various farmer’s markets across the North East of England including Saltburn and Stokesley. Michael believes the markets are a brilliant way of testing new flavours, such as his upcoming Cherry Trifle, as people are always more than willing to try a sample of his scrumptious fudge. With his recipe book getting fuller by the day, Michael believes he has more to surprise and delight his customers!

Project Details.

Brand Design, Brand Development, Marketing Support, Website design, WordPress CMS Development, Social Media Strategy and Support.

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The Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) is a new accreditation federation aiming to stamp out cowboy web developers in the north east. According to the FMDC, “most businesses look at web developers as being cowboys and rip off merchants” and claim the good news is that “they are here to put that right with the help of quality caring development companies”.

Two Teesside business partners, who head up their own website development companies, launched the national Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) in an event held at Middlesbrough Football Club last night in response to alleged growing criticism that too many web developers were taking advantage of businesses.

The two men behind the The Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC), Stuart Davies and Saheed Rashid, said that the Federation is aiming to prevent businesses from being lured into unfair contracts that leave them vulnerable to overpricing, poor service and withdrawal of services without notice. Mr Rashid founded the Middlesbrough based Com IT in 2005, and he is also a director with Mr Davies of Stockton firm LocalRus.

According to NEbusiness, local firms that have suffered at the hands of industry rogues have welcomed the Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC), but many in the web industry have questioned the move.

Rashid spoke last night of how he wanted to position the non-profit organisation as the preferred quality standard for providers. On the organisation’s website it claims that ‘being a part of the Federation will allow you to increase credibility and reputation and will provide peace of mind for your current and potential clients. Displaying the FMDC Logo will increase sales, as like the Corgi badge of old this will be a trusted sign within the industry that will ensure your business is highly considered when companies choose their provider in an ever increasing competitive market’.

After inspection, the concept seems to have several flaws.

Although it’s free to register with the Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC), developers will be required to add at least FIVE domain names at a cost of £60 EACH per month. At last night’s event, the Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) argued that these conditions would discourage rogue operators from joining the network and give website owners confidence, but it could in fact, have the opposite effect. The domain requirement could lead to many web developers in the region being labeled as ‘cowboys’ as they will struggle to meet the five domain name quota.

The Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) has also come up with the concept of web developers adding login details of created websites onto its database in an attempt to protect the clients. This idea would provide significant risk in terms of intellectual property rights, data protection and security from hackers.

At last night’s event, it was suggested to the Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) organisers that if they are to preach about online brand management and accrediting an industry that is full of ‘cowboys’, then they should get their own house in order first. North east digital agencies such as ourselves, that are already establishing themselves as leading digital specialists in web and digital media, could argue that the standard they work to is already over and above the quality expectation set by founders of the Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) and the organisation itself.

Also many agencies, including leading developers and freelancers, are finding it hard to understand how the founders think they can just invent an accreditation organisation and expect it to be taken seriously without engaging or consulting with others in the same industry. At the launch event we were told that the organsation has been 2 years in the planning however when we asked our social media network and the digital community around our business there had been no engagement or awareness of the organisation. It is also particularly startling that there has been no engagement with existing agencies and digital support organisations in the region, especially Codeworks who are driving digital innovation in the North East and heavily promotes innovation through research and development for North East digital companies. Questions we’re asked regarding this last night.

Questions were also asked about their tendering system, the accrediation system, their charter and the guarantee that Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) would give to its members. Unfortunately, for us, the answers were not convincing.

When asked about who is their watchdog to ensure that the FMDC remains independent, quality driven and gives them the accreditation to take this position in the digital sector it was suggested that a board has been established of ‘accountants, solicitors and other people from the business community’ put together from the founders business networks.

The Federation of Media Development Companies (FMDC) are reportedly holding another event similar to last night’s in Newcastle over the coming months, it will be interesting to see how many members will have signed up to the federation by then. More interesting, we’re sure, will be the level of attendance from digital companies in the north of the region questioning the organisations agenda.

The most important question must be, should a private group of companies or individuals be able to establish themselves as regulatory organisation for a sector such as ours when there are existing organisations that could be much better positioned to become the independent watchdog.

Ian brings to Better a decade of digital experience, the majority with e-commerce specialists Visualsoft.

Ian will work closely with Better’s customers on their web projects taking overall responsibility for digital project management, managing resource, project specification, customer support, liaison and training.

Ian says: “This is a brilliant opportunity to join a growing agency and help guide its digital output and strategy to help it compete on a national level. As Head of Digital, I’ll be heavily involved in the planning and delivery of digital strategies for both existing and new clients, bringing to the table my understanding of a complex digital landscape that is constantly evolving.”

Mark Easby, Managing Director of Better, said: “Ian joining our team is indicative of our growth over the last 18 months. He joins Senior Web Developer, Simon Scarfe, who joined us twelve months ago, in creating a skilled digital team team capable of delivering fantastic results for our clients and positioning Better for further growth.”

Within the first 18 months Better have expanded to 7 staff and is proud to have established a client base which includes NDI, Freshfayre, Philippa Gregory, SASDA, Codeworks, Onyx Group, Teesside University, The Enterprise Team, MPI Offshore, and Northumbria University. The company recently won the Internet/ICT category at the 2009 nebusiness awards and have also won Best Social Media Marketing Campaign at the 2008 North East Digital Awards.

Website: http://www.freshfayre.co.uk

Established over 20 years ago, Freshfayre is a rapidly growing delivered foodservice distributor offering a nationwide service from its central depot in Leeds and seven satellite depots across the country.

The company specialises mainly in chilled foods and offers both van sales and a standard telesales with a delivery service to a wide range of catering establishments including schools, universities, retailers & independent café and sandwich bars.

Project Details.

Website Design, Web Development, Bespoke CMS Development, SEO.

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The edges of our media space are expanding faster than our ability to make sense of them, of new technologies, of how people use them and of the shake out, that will mean some old media will fall by the wayside.

But this is an unravelling story seen from two very different perspectives. The user, swept along by the rush of the crowd to try new media, to make that media fit their lifestyle and the marketer, trying to position a brand where its’ target customer is.

We are at this juncture, living through exciting and yet worrying times because history repeatedly reminds us that the intervening years between the birth of something new and it being fully realised, is a path marked with successes and failures in equal measure.

It is our fear of failure that plays into the hands of those who make their living trying to predict the future we marketers so desperately want to know about.

A recent TimesOnline article has marketers raving about the simple insights of a young man, who whist on work experience wrote a short paper on how teenagers use media. According to him, teenagers (boys mainly) use their games console for conversations, not their mobiles, which incidentally is primarily used for text and music. They don’t read newspapers, preferring instead to get their news online and they don’t buy movies or music, seeing nothing wrong in pirate DVD’s and peer-to-peer downloads.

And what about teenage girls? I speak from experience here as I have a teenage daughter, who has Facebook, MSN and YouTube open simultaneously on her laptop and only uses her mobile or ipod for music / texting whenever she is on the move, and disconnected from her laptop.

What surprised me about this article wasn’t necessarily the insights it revealed, it was the reaction of people to these insights. It was like the volume had been turned up by this young man and for the first time these marketers could hear the authentic voice of a generation.

Who can really know where we’re going; the futurists, the edge dwellers and technology hipsters?

Egos and reputations are at stake, which makes people, who in their time gave us clarity and made sense of where we were, look further and further ahead, not for us this time but to cement their own reputations, their own place in history. They fixate on new worlds, where they can coin new phrases, name new movements and re-claim their place in media folklore. They change the language (For no other reason it seems than that’s what they feel the world expects of them) from social to collaborate to individual and so on.

I don’t have much time for them to be honest. As a user I’m loving living through the revolution and as a Marketer I’m busy trying to make sense of the changing world for our clients and helping them understand how their brand engages their customer across social media spaces.

And what will win through in the end. Which media will still be around when this revolution reaches it zenith? Well history also has a lesson to teach us about this too. New technology is only revealed in retrospect to be turning points in a revolution.

So we need to accept we’re as bound to get it wrong as we are to get it right, so move forward or be prepared to get left behind. Enjoy being part of history in the making, leave the future to the generations to come after us.