The new Harrison Parrott website went live at the end of last month.

Harrison Parrott (”HP” to their friends) are one of the world’s leading classical music artist and project management agencies. As we have discovered they are also a highly principled, ultra-professional, appreciative and engagingly eclectic group of people.

The new site is the product of a rigorous development process that included Scenario Planning, persona creation and brand definition.

Scenario Planning is a proprietary tool that uses a combination of stakeholder workshops and spreadsheet number crunching to directly relate user goals to business objectives. This allows us to objectively prioritise functionality and content via a process that is jointly owned by all of the key decision makers.

The planning for this project included primary research amongst various audiences including orchestra promoters, record labels, journalists and musicians. These audiences presented us with a sometimes contradictory set of insights around attitudes to all things social, technology usage, and the role of agency websites in their professional lives.

The process of reconciling these insights has resulted in a site that is finely tuned (no pun intended) to be fit for commercial purpose whilst offering a clean, efficient and intuitive user experience.

It has also resulted in simple but innovative features such as a notebook facility that allows users to create a personalised list of artists as they browse the site. These lists can be saved, printed or shared by email via a unique link. The notebook is already proving to be a popular feature both within and outwith the agency.

So there you have it. We clearly enjoyed the project and working with the HP team. This is what they had to say about us.

“Impressed by their work for Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh International Festival and Dilettante Music, we found Blonde to be an energetic and responsive agency. Their proposal for the redevelopment of our website was fresh and creative, but clearly focused on what we were trying to achieve. Asking the right questions to ensure they understood our business and our culture, they delivered – on schedule – a clean and striking site which is easy to use and features innovations that work for us and our users. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop our digital marketing strategy with this highly professional outfit.”

Antonio Orlando, Marketing and PR Manager

If ever you wanted an example of how great content underpins great search engine optimisation, this is it.

If ever you wanted proof that optimising your site for human beings is the best way to optimise it for search engines, this is it.

The Woodlands Junior School (Tonbridge, Kent) website isn’t the prettiest thing to look at…

… but boy does Google like it.

A post on the Hitwise Intelligence blog makes this point extremely well. It shows that the Woodlands site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term ‘mother’s day’ for the 12 weeks ending 13th March 2010.

I read the post with professional interest, but with a vague personal bell ringing in my head.

It was only when I looked at the site that I realised why. It is the self same Woodlands Junior School site that my daughter’s primary school teacher had recommended to me for its interactive times table games at a parents’ evening only last week.

In fact the site is a treasure trove of useful interactive educational tools. Wall to wall utility.

No wonder it has a reputation amongst the teaching profession as a valuable classroom and parental resource.

A reputation that translates into search engine authority.

I was the seven hundred and seventy second person to save the Woodlands site to Delicious, and the popular tags suggested by Delicious when I saved it tell their own story.

The content has been developed by teachers for teachers, and this is reflected in the recommended tags – resources, school, interactive, curriculum, junior, games etc.

Once the teaching profession grapevine kicked in, so did the inbound links to the site. Indeed, at the time of writing, Yahoo Site Explorer shows 86,541 inbound links to the site.

With that kind of Google-friendly authority, it’s not surprising that a short term Mother’s Day piece on its homepage outranks all other sites for that search term.

An excellent case-study showing that consistent development of useful content for humans is the best way to appeal to robots.

We have soft launched You Are What You App. The premise of this simple site is that your choice of iPhone applications probably reveals something about you.

And so it would seem. It’s the iPhone equivalent of having LLoyd Grossman looking through your keyhole.

The site appeals both to the iPhone exhibitionist and to the iPhone voyeur.

At the time of writing it’s early stages in terms of the number of active participants, but the average time on site is 7 minutes 30 seconds, suggesting that people are enjoying having a good nosey at other people’s apps.

I’ve already downloaded a few new gems as a result of seeing and reading about the apps that other people can’t live without.

There’s Byline, a mobile Google Reader app, which is perfect for keeping up with RSS feeds on the train.

Instapaper is an interesting looking application that allows you to save and read web pages offline at your convenience.

Around Me elegantly answers the question “where is the nearest x, y or z?”

And people are clearly sufficiently impressed with productivity applications like Omnifocus and Things to part with decent amounts of cash for them.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account please do add your apps to the site.

You Are What You App is our latest “hobby” project, following in the footsteps of WeMet for EdTwestival and EdTwinge.

What’s your poison?

We’ve been hired by Channel 4’s 4iP fund to promote a new iPhone application called You Booze You Looze.

4iP is an investment fund administered by Channel 4 that is designed to support non-broadcast public service initiatives.

You Booze You Looze (YBYL) is one such initiative . It is the brainchild of a game developer in Dundee called Digital Goldfish. DG is already responsible for “Bloons”, one of the biggest selling games on the iPhone ever.

YBYL is an app that keeps tabs on what you and your friends are drinking. In a fun way it also informs you of the short and long term financial and health impacts of your drinking. It has Facebook Connect technology built in to allow groups of friends to be acutely aware of what everyone else is drinking. It features various sobriety tests/games that measure the effect of alcohol on things like balance, co-ordination, reaction time and concentration.

What has this got to do with public service you may ask.

Well.

One of Channel 4’s core values is “Making trouble in the public interest”. (One of my favourite brand values of all time).

The aim for this app is that it will be fun. Being fun will lead to social use in bars etc. Social use will hopefully lead to discussion.

Anyone who has read Nudge will be aware of the Amerian campus survey that showed that students tend to overestimate what their peers are drinking, and increase their consumption accordingly. Once told that their friends are actually drinking considerably less than they thought, their alcohol consumption dropped markedly.

So this app approaches the issue of excessive drinking by accepting that social drinking is fun, in the hope that it will provoke discussion. It is very different in tone from your average public sector anti drinking campaign.

Blonde is working with Stripe, Opticomm and one of our EdTwinge friends, Andrew Burnett, to promote the app through various channels, with a heavy dose of social media activity in the mix.

Read more at http://www.youboozeyoulooze.com/.

And if you have an iPhone click the Buy Now button to get one. A bargain at only 59p.

Follow @BoozeLooze on Twitter too.

What do you do when attention is your currency and making trouble is one of your core values?

Answer : some very interesting things indeed, based on the presentations at Channel 4’s Meet The Commissioners session in London yesterday.

We heard from Louise Brown, Head of Cross Platform, Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP.

As well as some impressive examples of digital thinking in action, there were some interesting themes for the afternoon.

Routes to attention

Ideas judged against how they…

Get attention.
Keep attention.
Turn attention into value.

Digital Business Models

This was a major theme from Tom’s presentation. As well as investing in sustainable non-broadcast public service initiatives, 4iP is actively experimenting with alternative business models for online start-ups. As he said, if Channel 4 finds an advertising revenue model challenging with 10 million monthly uniques, 4iP will take some convincing that an ad-only model will work for a start-up.

Accountability

Matt talked about a 9 point (3×3 square) grid against which each project is measured.

The objectives of getting attention, keeping attention and turning attention into value run along one side. Along the other are three types of audience engagement : visitors, fans, contributors/distributors.

Using this grid, objectives and metrics can be entered in each of the nine squares. A simple but highly effective way not only to retrospectively report on a project, but also to run actionable ongoing diagnostics during a project.

All in all a useful and thought-provoking session.

(Thank you to davysims for the photograph.)

We had another website launch yesterday – Creative Scotland’s perspectives’ forum.

Creative Scotland (if you didn’t already know) will be a new organisation with creative practitioners at its heart: an organisation designed to listen to the needs of professional practitioners and use that intelligence in its role as advocate, champion, investor and broker.

It’s your chance to share your views on the opportunities as well as the obstacles for the creative community, for the individual, for the public and for Creative Scotland itself.

Over the next three months, they’ll be listening to your perspective on Creative Scotland’s four priorities: creative practitioners, accessibility, participation and international activity.

Creative Scotland has commissioned essays from the international creative community as a starting point to stimulate discussion. The first of these, the creative practitioner, was launched yesterday morning by visual artist Hans Abbing.

You can read his thoughts and submit your response on the site.

perspectives.creativescotland.org.uk

EdTwinge is a Twitter-based, crowdsourced, realtime Edinburgh Fringe rating application.

It monitors tweets that mention any of the acts at the 2009 Fringe Festival and/or the most commonly used Fringe hashtags. It then matches the content of these tweets against an extensive database of positive and negative words and phrases.

The site publishes two scores for each act at the Fringe. The first is “Noise”. This is simply the number of tweets that have mentioned the act in an Edinburgh/Fringe context. The second, and more important, measure is what we call “Karma”.

A full, geek-friendly explanation of how Karma is calculated can be found on the Edtwinge site. But basically it is a measure of the net positive sentiment about each act, which is based on a robust statistical analysis. This statistical analysis ensures that the Karma score is as reliable as possible. For instance an act mentioned in, say, five tweets, all of which are positive will have a significantly lower karma score than an act mentioned positively in 60 tweets out of 70. Phrases are prioritised over words, so “shit-hot” would be correctly identified as a positive statement for instance.

The top ten tables for the Fringe as a whole, and for each genre of show, are primarily derived from Karma. Noise only comes into play if two shows have the same Karma rating. In this instance the act with the higher noise score would rank above the other.

The site also allows the user to search and view karma and noise scores for any act, and to view in chronological order the verbatim tweets that underpin these.

EdTwinge is also the result of a garage-band style collaboration with some very talented, sparky and creative people.

Mike Coulter – social media exponent at Digital Agency (the original idea was his).

Andrew Burnett – another social media exponent and expert traffic driver.

Jim Wolff – digital misfit (his words not mine) who joined Leith part way through the project.

There is no paying client behind EdTwinge. It’s been a fun and fruitful diversion from the day job for those of us lucky enough to be involved. And what we’ve learned about tag-team style collaboration, baton-passing Twitter account shifts, and fleet-of-foot digital seeding and amplification has been as valuable as the technical, under the bonnet of Twitter stuff.

Early days yet (3 and a half days into the Fringe at the time of writing), but there has already been a significant amount of positive commentary and the site appears to be performing well. A big thank you to our friends at Stripe for securing some really excellent profile for the project.

I’ll post a more in-depth analysis of results and learning in a couple of weeks but average time on site is currently running at over 4 minutes on the back of an average of 5.22 pages viewed per visit according to Google Analytics.

Follow us (EdTwinge) on Twitter for regular updates. And/or embed your own EdTwinge Top 10 widget, like this one that we prepared earlier…

We’ve been working with Philippa Gregory (author of The Other Boleyn Girl) and her publisher, Simon and Schuster, on a pioneering project to launch her new novel in Twitter format. This is a first for an international bestselling author of Philippa’s stature. She has reinterpreted the novel as a series of roughly 250 tweets from the book’s main character.

Elizabeth Woodville is The White Queen. Born originally into the House of Lancaster, she seduces and marries the Yorkist King Edward IV. Having risen to royal status by virtue of her beauty she has to use her guile, and the odd bit of witchcraft, to rise to the challenges presented by her precarious position.

Or, in Philippa’s words…

As the examples below demonstrate, what she has to say goes some way beyond the what-I-had-for-breakfast banality that characterises some Twitter exchanges.

If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did.

It has to be secret. His friends have a wedding planned for him and I am a nobody. We marry in secret and we bed in a hurry. I adore him.

At dawn Edward’s army rises from mist, like an army of ghosts, and charges up the slopes to Warwick’s army of Lancaster to vicious fighting.

George, the fool, chooses a fool’s death. He wants to be drowned in a barrel of wine: in his chamber at the Tower.

The project has presented creative challenges to the author and some practical challenges to us in executing the idea. This is Philippa Gregory talking about adapting tens of thousands of carefully crafted words of prose into the 140 character format of Twitter…

“Tweets are a discipline, rather like a haiku, and the shortness of the sentence gives each one a rhythm which is really interesting for prose.

“It was more like writing poetry than prose. And some of the tweets seem to me to be more arresting than the prose of the book. I especially like the first one…
If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did.

“I like this so much, I have re-used it when describing the novel, it doesn’t appear in the novel but only in the Twitter version, but it encapsulates for me the mood of the novel, its dreamlike quality, the character of the heroine and invites you to read more. I am certainly going to write creative tweets again.”

So much for the creative challenges and opportunities. Blonde has been charged with making the project happen in practical terms. And this is by no means a trivial exercise.

Clearly Twitter afficionados will want to follow the project on Twitter, or their Twitter client of choice. But Twitter is an inherently noisy channel and maintaining the narrative thread in amongst tweets from everyone else that the reader is following isn’t easy. Also anyone coming to Elizabeth’s profile mid-way through, or after, the event will be presented with the tweets in reverse order – i.e. the latest tweet first – and back to front isn’t the best way to read a novel, whatever its format. So, whilst launching the novel on Twitter is incredibly of-the-moment, Twitter itself isn’t necessarily the ideal channel from a user perspective in which to follow 250 consecutive 140 character episodes.

This is why the project is being implemented in two stages.

Fans will be able to follow @ElizWoodville on Twitter between 11th & 17th August. The tweets will be posted between 17.00 and 20.00 GMT each day, a window that is designed to make the content accessible to both UK and US audiences.

Then, on August 18th, the global publication date for the book, a bespoke Flash application will be launched on the Philippa Gregory website. The application will provide a rich, immersive experience which will allow users to read the tweets uninterrupted and at their leisure. The above visual is a snapshot from the application.

At the time of writing we’re working with the publisher to seed the project to various communities – fans of Philippa Gregory, the publishing industry and the digital/social media scene. The hope is that the Twitter experiment will introduce new readers to Philippa, but already there is evidence of Philippa introducing new people to Twitter.

Watch this space for further learning once the project goes live.

I was invited by TRC media to speak about Branded Content to a group of independent production companies last week. I was the last on of several speakers but decided to spend the day to listen to what the others had to say. I’m glad I did.

The other speakers were Mike Dicks of Bleedinedge, Adam Gee, cross-platform Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, Lisa Sargood, BBC Multiplatform Commissioner, and Charles Wace, Chief Executive of Twofour Group. Each was speaking about their experiences in the realms of multiplatform content, 360º commissioning and/or platform convergence.

As usually happens when you attend an event whose scope lies outside your usual areas of interest, it was disproportionately interesting. That said there were some useful parallels between the world of TV company commissioning and that in which we talk digital marketing with advertisers.

There was a general feeling that the multiplatform bit of multiplatform commissioning was growing in stature and influence – no longer the poor relation of the “main”, broadcast programme idea, no longer the bit that comes “after”.

Parallel 1 – Digital is no longer the poor relation to broadcast.

This is being driven by a growing catalogue of award winning case-studies and some amazing numbers being delivered by multiplatform properties.

Parallel 2 – TV companies are suckers for awards, just like us and our clients.

Many examples of multiplatform excellence were cited, one of the most compelling of which was that of the partnership between CNN and Facebook for the live streaming of the Obama inauguration speech. The numbers (quoted here on Mashable) were tremendous.

What made this especially interesting to commissioning editors is the way in which a mass online event became a “shared” viewing experience. You and your Facebook friends could share feelings and observations in real time, creating the virtual equivalent of the mass, shared broadcast experiences whose demise as a result of media fragmentation is lamented by traditional advertisers.

Taking this comparison further, Mike Dicks described Facebook as having “gone ITV”. In other words its user base has expanded well beyond the geeky early adopter phase and is now a genuinely populist channel, potentially affording populist opportunities to advertisers.

Parallel 3 – Commissioning Editors, like advertising clients, are turned on when digital channels deliver “broadcast” numbers.

Based on his experience of multi-platform projects, Mike presented an ideal multi-platform production process and timeline. Contrary to the instincts of most TV producers this has the digital components of the multi-platform property commencing before the video/film aspects of the project. This was music to my ears. Mike’s full presentation can be viewed here and the timeline is slide 14.

Parallel 4 – the digital aspect of a multi-channel project should be aforethought, not an afterthought.

Building on the CNN/Facebook case-study, Adam Gee waxed lyrical about Sexperience. The online element of this property delivered 1 million page views in a single night, and continues to deliver 5,000 elements of user-generated content per week, long after the series has gone off air. At its peak Sexperience was ranking number 3 on a Google search for “sex”. It is still appearing at number 6 at the time of writing.

He also cited the example of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies. 99,000 teenagers took online STD risk assessment tests in just 4 days.

Building on the theme of user-generated content, Adam described himself as not so much a commissioner for content, but a commissioner for the infrastructure for content. For instance the back-end technical engine for Sexperience online is being re-used for an Adoption project on which he’s working – a direct lift of the technical IP and a direct lift of the infrastructure. Multiplatform commissioning editors are waking up to the fact that there is long term value not just in content, but also in the technical IP that turns that content into a compelling user experience.

Parallel 5 – content IP and technical IP can be equally valuable.

Adam finished his talk with a list of significant differences between what he called “networked media” (they are no longer “new” media) and television. These differences  are the foundation for the challenges and opportunities with which multi-platform commissioners are presented.

And there’s our sixth and final parallel.

Parallel 6 – a TV mindset doesn’t cut it in a multiplatform world. This applies equally to commissioning editors and advertisers.

Amen.