When it comes to classical music artist management HarrisonParrott are at the forefront. In 2010 we had the privilege of redesigning and developing their website – a site that was loved by the client and their peers and competitors.

Two years on, although the site still stood up against its competition, it was felt it was time to give the website a new lease of life, with a fresh design and some additional functionality.

The site was already full of engaging content and stunning photography, which made it a real pleasure finding a simple, stylish design to frame it all.

But we didn’t stop there. We created a carousel, which gave the client ultimate freedom to change images as well as feature site content such as relevant news and new artist signings.

The news section was revamped so that there is a hierarchy of content, and again here the client has the ability to change the order so that the focus is not always on just the latest item.

As well as added control and flexibility, we also integrated a series of players (including an HTML5 verison), so that all audio and video content played on iPads (extremely important as the artist managers like to use these to showcase their roster for potential bookings), mobile and desktop browsers.

All of which made for a great showcase at the IAMA industry conference in Budapest last month!

Original site post

If you listen closely, you can hear the whisperings of a million brand managers the world over asking themselves, “How on earth do I create positive buzz around my brand in social media.”

Well, you can do this.
(Experiential marketing brilliance + seeding on YouTube)

Or this.
(Appling social media sentiment insight to product innovation + PR savvy)

Or this.
(Courting social media via traditional channels to encourage a shared viewing experience.)

The last one is our favourite. We love a Shared Media Experience here at Blonde.

Which is why we were so excited about the opportunity to take part in a Tweet Tasting event. A Tweet Tasting provides a structured forum in which a group of select individuals sample whisky (in this instance) and share tasting notes on a hashtag. It makes a virtue of that collective Twitter conversation.

Steve from The Whisky Wire, who had organized and run many similar events in the past, presented the opportunity to us for our client, Cutty Sark. You can see his other Tweet Tastings here and here.

Steve and Blonde worked together to send out samples to 15 whisky Tweeters before the event. If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to receive a sample, you were still able to follow along with all the tasting action on the #CuttyTT hashtag.

Creating a hive of positive activity is a desirable outcome for any brand. Add in influencers and it gets even better. And within the whisky community, wit and creativity reign, especially when comparing tasting notes. So, if you create this lovely buzz on a platform that thrives off of this type of communication, you’ve got a great result.

As much as we like whisky at Blonde, we are by no means experts. Which is why we had Master Blender Kirsteen Campbell on hand while we were Tweeting from @cuttysarkblend to answer questions and provide a level of expertise that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise.

Leveraging this knowledge proved valuable to the rest of the Tweeters.

At the end of the night, we counted 474 Tweets using the #CuttyTT hashtag.

Creative notes:

Unsurprisingly, the product stood up to the interrogation. Here were some more Tweets from the event:

We look forward to doing more of the same in the future.

We, Blonde, first met Anshuman when he was Head Of New Media at the CBI. We worked together on an interactive version of the CBI’s Climate Change Tracker.

Our first, and lasting, impression was of a smart, switched on, sophisticated, interested, interesting, calm and incredibly nice man.

We stayed in touch.

And now we are delighted to announce that Anshuman has joined Blonde as Consultant in our London office.

Most recently Anshuman was Global Digital Channels Manager within Group Communications at HSBC.

He is an ideal addition to our London team. The projects that we’re working on out of the Midford Place office can be summarised as providing elegant digital solutions to complex, multi-stakeholder commercial problems. The work is upstream, strategic and requires a people-first approach to technology.

Like all the best planners, Anshuman is curious and interested in all manner of things beyond the scope of his day job – cooking, literature, history, culture, travel, photography, community radio and milking cows (check his Twitter avatar). He draws inspiration from an eclectic range of sources.

We look forward to drawing inspiration from him. Welcome to the family Anshuman.

The TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE.

I’m in two minds about the concept of tone of voice as applied to marketing in social channels.

Succinctly describing a brand’s tone of voice is a distinctly advertising discipline.

And advertising disciplines are not always fit for social purpose.

“What is our message?” isn’t the most helpful question when it comes to social media strategy for instance.

In fact make that three minds.

Tone of voice is also the advertising discipline that is most prone to bullshit.

Worse than that it’s often vacuous, first-base bullshit born out of wishful thinking rather than reality.

Nonetheless it is worth interrogating a brand (and/or a culture) for personality and tone of voice traits that can be usefully applied or interpreted by the human beings at the sharp end of your social media strategy.

And, to this end, we came up with THE TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE (TTTTOVC).

It’s a workshop technique that’s designed to get internal stakeholders really thinking about their brand.

And it really is tough.

The toughness is the antidote to bullshit and safe, first-base thinking.

Here’s a word cloud populated by the safe, vacuous, first-base tone of voice words that I’ve most frequently encountered during my two decades plus of doing “this stuff”.

These words are all useless.

They’re useless because they accurately describe the tone of voice of every brand on the planet.

Name a brand that deliberately positions itself as UNconfident. Or UNfriendly. Or UNapproachable. Or UNtrustworthy. Or UNprofessional. Or negative.

Clients and complicit agencies gravitate to the tone of voice words in the word cloud precisely because you can’t argue with them.

And then the creative teams in the complicit agencies simply ignore the tone of voice section of the creative brief and do their own thing, safe in the knowledge that whatever they come back with will be seen as confident, professional etc……. because it can’t not be.

The tough bit of this totally tough challenge is that you’re not allowed to use these words. In fact you’re not allowed to use any word or phrase for which the complete opposite wouldn’t be a viable option for a competitor brand..

For example…

“Broadsheet” would be fine because “tabloid” is also a viable tone of voice option.

“Polished” works because “warts and all” would be a viable alternative.

Believe me this is really tough for most client stakeholders.

But it is also very rewarding once you’ve collectively broken through the pain barrier in a workshop environment.

Once one person in the group “gets it” and comes up with some rich, relevant, differentiated language there is a domino effect as the penny drops for everyone.

In our last workshop we got a few phrases that the group was palpably proud of. They were phrases that I couldn’t wait to share with the agency because they were accurate, pointed, dare I say “ownable”, and – unlike the usual tone of voice suspects – impossible to ignore.

Try it. It works.

And, if you liked this, check out the other techniques in this series.

Social media workshop technique #1 – Glass half full, glass half empty.

Social media workshop technique #2 – What have social media ever done for us?

Two geeks nerding out for 46 minutes.

Two geeks who have both founded incredibly successful social start-ups talking about funding, coding, user experience, killer functionality, luck, social networking, scalability, how to define your competition, the difference between building a product and building a company.

Kevin Rose of Digg et al talks to Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram.

They obviously enjoy each other’s company and the content is clearly better and more revealing for it.

The interview ends with a deceptively simple piece of advice. Namely to focus on solving problems rather than focus on technology.

“Far too many start-ups are technologies in search of a problem.”

This is 46 minutes well spent.

Social media workshop technique #1 works well as an ice breaker.

This second technique in our occasional series is much more about getting down to brass tacks.

If you’ve read our Universal Social Media Strategy you’ll know that, in the commercial arena, any strategy worthy of the name should match social means to commercial ends. Social media are not ends in their own right.

This exercise is all about identifying commercial ends that might be achieved by social means.

It’s called “What have social media ever done for us?”

It is an homage to the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, in which the leader of resistance group the People’s Front of Judea (played by John Cleese) asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

It is clearly meant to be a rhetorical question but, much to his chagrin, his audience proceeds to rap off a long list of valuable contributions to society made by the allegedly oppressive Romans – roads, aqueducts, education, public order, irrigation, sanitation, wine etc.

This exercise is about projecting forward and collectively, collaboratively defining what success might look like.

With the image above on a projector screen as a prompt, you hand out A4 sheets with empty speech bubbles on them. Then ask the assembled stakeholders to project forward a year or two and imagine themselves faced by a sceptical CEO asking the question “What have social media ever done for us?”

The task is to generate a list of social media successes that would make the People’s Front Of Judea proud.

This exercise has been used a couple of times in anger and has generated some rich, varied, ambitious and sometimes surprising visions for the commercial value of social media activity.

By and large though the responses cluster around Revenue Generation, Cost Reduction, Efficiency Gains, Employee Engagement and Brand Positioning / Reappraisal.

A highly useful by-product of this exercise is that it serves to cement the idea that social = commercial in the minds of influential stakeholders. The project owner (your client) doesn’t need to sell the idea to his or her stakeholders. They sell it to themselves through this exercise.

As with Technique #1, feel free to borrow this and let us know via a comment whether it works for you.

I road tested this projective technique with client x the other week.

It was a typical (if there is such a thing as typical) stakeholder workshop, bringing together people from across a business to understand objectives, objections, agendas, hopes, fears, loathings and such like as they related to said business embracing a more social approach to internal and external communications.

As an ice-breaker I handed out a bunch of A4 sheets, each with a picture of a half full/empty glass. I gave the group five minutes to write down their fears, concerns, threats etc in the half empty section of the glass at the top, and their hopes, opportunities, ambitions in the half full section at the bottom.

The result was some incredibly rich and revealing insights, expressed via interesting and pointed language.

Indeed there was a double-whammy effect whereby there was great content on the completed sheets, and this content then acted as stimulus material for a further useful conversation.

Ice broken.

Cards on the table.

It worked.

(Feel free to borrow).

As part of our ongoing work with Maxxium UK, we have been working with their wonderful Mixxit team to redesign and develop a new website. 

Mixxit is the brainchild of celebrity mixologist Wayne Collins. Along with his colleagues Andy Gemmell and Patsy Christie they set-up Mixxit initially as a training and education programme, with the aim of inspiring bartenders to make quality mixed drinks and cocktails. But they are so passionate that every drink can be perfectly made whether you are in the bar and or at home with friends, they wanted to spread their knowledge. 

Mixxit is unique in that every drink can be perfectly made in 5 easy steps. So how could we give people access to over 300 delicious cocktail recipes as well as offering guidance from three of the most prominent drinks experts in industry?  

Welcome to the Interactive Cocktail Mixer; you can search by spirit, occasion, glass, mixer or even colour in your quest to find the perfect drink. The cocktail mixer is built in Flash but utilises the site’s search functionality to find the right cocktail. Happy mixxing!

It’s that time of year again when men all over the country are sprouting mo’s. Most are in aid of Movember and the rest are just asked if it’s in aid of Movember. Either way, this can only mean one crucial fact; Tache of the Titans is back.

Movember is a great cause focussed on raising awareness of men’s health issues. Tache of the Titans aims to add even more benefit to the cause by allowing anyone who is taking part in the month long campaign to go head to head against other mo bro’s. One Tache to rule them all!

Tache of the Titans has had an upgrade for this years bouts. We have added ‘groups’, which basically means that you can once and for all prove who out of your family, friend or work colleagues has the ultimate mo on the go. The actual process is the same as before. All you need to do is simply upload a photo of your tache (Face tache only…!) and you will be entered into a head to head bout against another Titan. All of the votes cast go into a clever league table based on the percentage of bouts won.

The competition won’t actually take place until the last week of November, which allows an essential mo maturity time so that everyone can look like Tom Selleck by the time the ’bouting’ begins…in theory.

In the meantime we hope you can all push past the homeless looking stage as quickly as possible and upgrade to the prestigious “I need a tache comb” status.

Good luck gentlemen, we salute you.

The Marketing Society kindly invited me to speak about “social media”.

It’s a big subject to cover in 40 minutes. So I came up with what is hopefully a useful framework for thinking about strategy. Something that begs the right questions. Something that helps people to avoid the common pitfalls arising form the woefully sloppy use of language in this area.

The slides are embedded below.

To take advantage of the speaker notes that I’ve added you’ll need to view the presentation in situ on Slideshare.