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.

Cop a load of these Tiny books from printstagr.am. They are funky, dinky, and magnetic. Yes, they stick to fridges.

Printstagr.am exists to turn Instagram photos into a variety of hard copy formats.

It “usually” works by connecting to Printstagr.am using your Instagram account, selecting the photos you want to print, selecting the format you want to print them in and paying.

That’s fine if you want photos from one Instagram account.

But we wanted to collate photos from multiple Instagram accounts using a single #blondedigital hashtag.

This was a special request.

But a special request that, to prinstagr.am’s credit, they agreed to fulfil.

In fact their approach to customer service was the most human experience this correspondent has had in quite a while.

Witness this verbatim reply to an email in which I thanked them for their flexibility and responsiveness.

“Responsiveness is due to the fact that I am a real human being. But don’t let that fool you… I also get really lazy sometimes and totally ignore customers and then have backlogs of emails to catch up on, which is seriously stressful and kind of makes me want to cry sometimes. Thanks in advance for understanding if sometime I don’t answer an email.”

Out of context that might seem like a public relations nightmare. In the context of the email exchange in which they had gone out of their way to make something unusual happen for me it was incredibly endearing.

An endearing experience and an endearingly cute end product.

TED Global has set up shop here in Edinburgh.

And if that’s not cause for celebration in geeky circles then we’d like to know what is.

So celebrate is what we decided to do.

We’re celebrating TED with TED Yourself.

TED Yourself does what it says on the tin.

It augments the reality of your LinkedIn profile to create a spoof, spurious and pseudo-intellectual TED speaker version of you. With a couple of clicks you’re the charismatic and riveting guru you always wanted to be.

The real speaker profiles for TED Global 2011 include a “privacy artist”, an “undercover economist” and a “digital preservationist”.

And for TED Yourself we just dialled things up a bit. This correspondent is a “philanthropical fetishist” for instance.

The site was designed by Elaina Jumper.

Copy was written by Lauren Sudworth.

Coding and LinkedIn api jiggery pokery by Tane Piper.

Further details on this “hobby” project and the open source code behind it can be found here.

We were surprised and delighted to recently receive a gigantic jar of miscellaneous sweeties from a happy and generous client as reward for our hard work on a recent project. ADMS are officially the loveliest bunch ever!

We thought we’d monitor and document how fast the sweetie jar was emptied as the swarm of Blonde locusts descended upon it. I knew we were greedy but the results were shocking! A 2.7kg jar lasted a mere 2 working days. Check out the photographic evidence!

We’re hoping that we may be sent another jar after completion of some other large projects we have in the studio at the moment so we can try and beat our own gluttonous record! That’s officially a challenge and gratuitous blag to other lovely Blonde clients!

We love robots at Blonde.

They’re the useful, friendly, (almost) human face of technology.

And we have a small and growing collection of them in our reception area.

If we were an American digital agency we might go as far as to say that robots are “sick”.

Instagram, the photo sharing app that makes iPhone images look cool, is pretty sick too.

Robots versus Instagram…

I wouldn’t normally blog about cake.

Unless it was really good cake.

And thanks to the brand new Cuckoo’s Bakery opening a few doors down the road from us, there’s now a really good reason to blog about really good cake.

Yes, but how does this make Blonde a better digital marketing agency? We hear you ask.

Good question.

Well…

Reason 1: as if our posh biscuits weren’t fabulous enough, we now have access to exquisite cupcakes for meetings.  Today we chose four:

Tropical
Black Bottom
Strawberry Cheesecake
Raspberry & White Chocolate

All freaking shadazzlicious. As agencies knuckle down to compete in these tough economic conditions, we shamelessly taunt our rivals with these flagrantly fragrant* sponge based temptations. We’re Blonde, we have more fun and now we have really nice cake too.

And we’ll share it with you-ooh-ooh-ooh.

Reason 2: it’s scientifically proven that we gain more happiness from small daily pleasures** like coffee and cake, than winning the lottery or getting high on heroin.  Plus you’re a winner every time and there’s no danger of death.

Reason 3: Cuckoo’s Bakery is founded by a member of the local SEO community.  See what greatness can arise when a little digital thinking migrates offline? It’s a beautiful joined-up world, people. The Cuckoo’s Bakery is like a whole new breed of cupcake.  By eating their cakes, we support cakeovation.  Hell, we may even gain superpowers.

Go on…

You know you want to.

We cupcake so you don't have to

You too can spend hours deliberating between Strawberry Cheesecake and Black Bottom AND it's cheaper than the cinema.

Today's freaking shadazzlicious cupcake selection

* Burns-based lexical inception
** “Les petits plaisirs” comme on dirait en France

Here’s some footage I recorded last Sunday at the Bank Of Scotland fireworks concert. The fireworks are held yearly at the end of the Festival and are set off from Edinburgh Castle. The concert is held in Princes Street Gardens. I don’t know if the fireworks are to mark the success of the Edinburgh Festival or to celebrate the departure of thousands of tourists. Check it out! Good with sound!

As digital marketers, it’s easy to hide behind our computer monitors. Campaigns come and go, and we remain relatively anonymous to the thousands (millions?) of people that they affect.

That’s why I was a bit intimidated to start on a project for a client (Sourz) which involved attending every date of a 7-city sampling tour. As the Sourz Community Manager, the idea was that I was there to, well, meet the community.

So off I went. My summer weekends were spent in shopping centres and pubs in Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, London, Bristol and Birmingham, respectively. While I was there I chatted to the locals about the Sourz online activity, took loads of photos and gave away some Sourz merch. And after each sampling event, I posted a recap on our Facebook page and blog.

There were friendly cities (Newcastle), aloof cities (Leeds), cool cities (Bristol) and crowded cities (London). But one thing remained the same across all cities – forming real-life relationships is hard work. Not to mention incredibly time-consuming.

But when the consumers logged on to Facebook to tag their photo or see what I wrote about them on the blog, I like to think they thought about the conversation that we had that afternoon. I like to think that the face time, laughs, and banter I had with these Sourz samplers meant that our online relationship was that much stronger.

Multiply this across 7 cities, and you’re really beginning to solidify your community.

It’s so easy to ‘like’ something online. With the click of the button we’ve declared our momentary awareness and affinity for a brand. But these ‘likes’ can be easily forgotten.

And the same can be said for the myriad of branded promotional whatever that we pass on our way to work/school/clubs/shops every day.

But when you combine the two in a meaningful and intelligent way, I think it can be pretty powerful. I’m looking forward to going offline with more clients.

-Deana

To date, this year I’ve been involved in four major research projects and our primary research process typically consists of two parts:

The quantitative phase (where we plan an online survey, spend weeks cutting the data in different ways, identify patterns and trends and develop “sketch personas”) and then…

The qualitative phase, a series of telephone interviews and occasional focus groups; the end-goal being a detailed digital strategy piece accommodating trends, complete personas and short, medium and long term digital recommendations, mapped back to a business ROI.

Quantitative data and designing online surveys

Following a recent mobile usability event, I got chatting to a mobile specialist who positively flinched when I mentioned quantitative data. I realise “market research” is a dirty phrase in some circles, but hear me out before you dismiss the science completely. For a start, some clients are better than others at collecting data, so these online surveys are an important starting point in even detailing the general profile of their customers/fans/enquirers. Secondly, it’s not just about the numbers. Depending on the warmth of the data set, we get some fantastic comments, which not only make for interesting presentations, but also provide the necessary framework to design the discussion documents for the telephone interviews. Finally, we actively look at response feedback (rate & quality of feedback) for each survey, so we’re always evaluating if there’s a better way to ask a question, what works as a pre-set answer and what needs to be open text. We nearly always leave an “other” field for each question, even if we think we’ve identified all the possible options. Essentially, when we design such audience insight mechanics, we know we don’t always know what we don’t know.

Still with me?

Qualitative data and telephone interviews

I compared this process of interviewing consumers (and sometimes other stakeholders) recently to a “box of delights” rather than “boxing up people”, because it’s about capturing stories and experiences, rather than trying to generalise behaviours, though of course there is an element of that. Personally as a planner and a particularly people-focussed one, this almost feels like method acting to me because I spend weeks at a time organising interviews, conversing with interviewees, playing back the recordings and for brief periods of time I become immersed in these personas, so much so that it isn’t always an easy or comfortable process shifting between projects.

The importance of gaps and shadows

Even with the telephone interviews, we’re still relying on a certain level of awareness from consumers about what they do, what they absorb and what they’d find useful. So much of what we do gets absorbed into our subconsciousness, safely locked away from the probing questions of market researchers. The challenge (for us) with consumer interviews is that they don’t always know what they don’t know, particularly with industries where the choice between the competition is either ambiguous or minimal. The challenge for clients when presented with “we don’t always know what we don’t know” and “they don’t always know what they don’t know” is that they’re then faced with a recommendation into the unmapped territory of continuous audience insight and integrating a dynamic feedback loop, rather than the quick-fix solution they were hoping for. That’s not to say that quick-fix solutions don’t come out of research, they do… lots of them, but in a difficult economic climate, increased online sophistication, increased competition and greater digital complexity, meaningful digital solutions go beyond an iPhone app and Facebook.

A serendipitous find this morning generated this video clip from “Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner”, which highlights some of the problems around consulting consumers (and internal stakeholders) on the direction of innovation.

We need a Senior (or aspiring Middleweight) Interactive Designer for a 9 month contract at one of the UK’s most progressive digital marketing agencies.

This is a rare opportunity to get one foot inside the door of Blonde. First and foremost the right candidate will be a passionate and inspired digital designer, able to take a digital brief from concept through to completion with an outstanding portfolio to back this up. A solid understanding of web technologies / trends is a must, with Photoshop & Illustrator skills a necessity along with good Flash skills. Any motion graphics and 3D experience is beneficial but not essential.

We’re looking for the best emerging talent to work in our Edinburgh office.

If you think you fit the bill please send your CV and examples of your top 5 pieces of work to info@blonde.net.

This contract starts at the beginning of March. No agencies please.