Sometimes it feels like the media is obsessed with new technologies, platforms and thinking about the future.

We need to do this, there’s no doubting its importance, but I wonder if we’re becoming guilty of overlooking the content side of things.

After all, it doesn’t matter if you’re in print, broadcasting, sharing links or Audioboos on social media or making something available as a podcast..if the content is rubbish, no-one’s going to want it.

The other side of the coin is that if the content is strong, it can be spread across all those different platforms, have a bigger impact and ultimately make more money.

One man who fully understands this is Ryan Seacrest.

He’s known around the world as the unflappable host of “American Idol” but to me, he’s the best example of how to make great content work in this new digital world.

Seacrest studied journalism and got his start in radio and I’m a big admirer.

He’s worked his way up over the last 15 years and now hosts a daily breakfast show at KIIS FM in Los Angeles.

That programme gives him access to some of the biggest names in showbiz. So when tabloids run a story about Britney Spears’ love life its Seacrest’s programme she calls to clear up the rumours.

His great skill lies in knowing what his audience wants and not getting in the way of it. You’ll see it on “Idol” where he describes his own role as that of a “traffic cop” gently guiding the audience and the contestants through the show. Keeping everyone moving, but never overshadowing what’s going on.

It’s the same with his radio programme. Listen to it and you might ask “What did Ryan Seacrest actually do in that programme?” But take him away and there’d be a gaping void.

 I know this seems like a strange compliment but the place he occupies when he’s on air is similar to the role Kermit The Frog plays on The Muppet Show.

 He’s not particularly funny, doesn’t reveal much about himself, doesn’t have “an act” of his own but represents the “everyman” keeping the viewer engaged and guiding them through all the sleaze, scandal and turmoil of another day in showbiz central.

 And like the best journalists, when he gets a nugget of great content, Seacrest absolutely maximises its worth.

 He recognised years ago that the 4 hours of content he generates on air every day had a value beyond Kiss FM Los Angeles.

A producer sits listening to his programme and takes clips of the best material. References to time, place and the music and adverts are cut out and the content is re-packaged into a syndicated programme available to radio stations all over the world.

This week, Real Radio in Scotland (and its sister stations throughout the UK)  joined in and now broadcast Seacrest’s programme from 11pm-1am weeknights.

It’s a great listen and the programme team at Real Radio are able to insert their own choice of music, Seacrest provides a few specific mentions for “our listeners inScotland” and the Scottish audience gets access to a presenter they know from television and the unique content he’s able to provide.

Seacrest gets millions from the worldwide syndication and his content continues making money long after he’s left the radio studio.

He then takes that same content and sprinkles it across social media and his own website while simultaneously promoting the Bing search engine AND the following day’s radio programme.

And he’s smart. While almost every other radio presenter in the world wears giant “ear defender” headphones during their programme, Seacrest prefers tiny in-ear iPhone style models so his team can film segments for his You Tube channel without him looking ridiculous.

Seacrest works hard, but his content works harder. And without understanding how to harness it he’d never have enjoyed so much success.

What can we learn from this? It’s about figuring out what we’re best at and giving it 100%, giving it a life cycle beyond the initial broadcast, publication or sale.

The lessons apply to every business but require discipline, creative thinking and a firm focus on what you do that actually generates value, rather than what you’d like to do or what you think you should.

Consider how you can make the most of what you’ve got and go for it. As Seacrest says himself on his Twitter page – “The day will happen whether or not you get up”.

Citibank has revealed that hackers have stolen data from thousands of its US customers.

Although the attack happened in May, the banking giant has only just revealed the news – something which has drawn criticism from the banking industry and consumers alike.

Customers’ names, account numbers and contact details were exposed during the attack, although the bank says that other data such as dates of birth and card security codes were not revealed.

A Citibank spokesman told the Reuters news agency: “We are contacting customers whose information was impacted. City has implemented enhanced procedures to prevent a recurrence of this type of event.”

Around 1% of the bank’s 21m customers were affected by the theft.

This is the latest in a string of internet hacking attacks on major corporations, with both Sony and Google falling prey in the last few weeks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which regulates the USA’s banks, is now pushing them to introduce enhanced account security measures.

The events should act as a warning to UK banks – and indeed all organisations that store customer data – to step up their internet security measures.

Hey everyone it’s Thea here again. Did you know the name Silicon Valley was first used exactly forty years ago by Don C Hoefler** who was writing a series of articles Silicon Valley USA? Rather surprisingly I didn’t until I heard it at the recent, rather inspirational Innovation Journalism (InJo) conference at Stanford.

Here in “the Valley”, like anywhere really, people love to talk about what excites them – music, movies, television shows and especially technology. So I thought I’d pass on to you what’s excited me this past week – just on the off-chance you’ve not heard about them already. (You may have heard of some of these already, but hopefully one or two will be new to you too!)

CitizenTube.com

This one gets mentioned because of an enjoyable panel talk by the main man Steve Grove at CitizenTube – which is YouTube’s News and Politics channel. “How many of you knew we had a news and politics channel?” he asked and few of us raised our hands.

The idea is that citizens of the world are becoming the news curators by being in the right place at the right time (depending on how you look at it) with their camera phones or video recorders. Incidentally, this was a common theme at the Stanford InJo conference, as on a later talk from CNN’s Marisa Gallagher explained their use of iReporters on Open Story.

None of this is dissimilar to what Sky News and the BBC are doing – what’s interesting to me is the trend of this “citizen journalism”.

TuneIn Radio

TuneIn Radio is a website and has a variety of apps for different platforms. It was recommended to me by a fellow music-loving friend Teri. (NOTE: Teri has around 150 apps on her iPhone and sees more concerts than anyone I’ve ever met, so she was the perfect person to recommend this app to me.)

As we sat outside a little coffee shop in downtown Campbell, I download TuneIn radio onto my iPad and, just for kicks, loaded up BBC Radio Scotland’s Morning Briefing with my NSDesign colleague Colin Kelly and we sat and, well, tuned in.

A rather surreal moment that.

Once Magazine

Now this one is a little different, as it’s not yet launched, but am excited to check it out once it goes live. From the website of the young SF-based firm, Once Magazine is a simple concept based around how great photographs look on the iPad. Not only that, it’s apparently a “viable publishing platform in the digital age calls for a new business model”. While it’s subscription based, they’ll be sharing revenue with the photographers. That’s only part of their business model. So Once is one to watch, I think, especially if you’re keen on “long-form narrative photography”. (Don’t you just love all these new buzz terms for everything?)

Awedeitorium – Aural Happiness

At Stanford, after an interesting panel I got chatting to one the panelists @ Justin Ferrel from the Washington Post’s Director of Digital when the gentleman to my right chimed in about an app he loves called Aweditorium. This little app is engaging for music lovers.

FlipBoard

This particular app is getting more raves than anything I’ve heard in ages! As it was released last summer, you may have heard of of this personalised social magazine already, but it was “news” to me. It’s perfect for all you social media lovers who like reading newspapers and magazines. A truly visual app, it looks amazing on the iPad.

Well that’s just a few of what caught my ear and eye this past week.

Next time, on my Silicon Valley Diary Part 3 – I’ll fill you in on a fun, recent trip to Google’s HQ for a “free lunch” with a friend.

*****************

** The term Silicon Valley is credited to Ralph Vaerst a Central California entrepreneur, but was first used by his friend, a journalist, Don C Hoefler in his column for Electronic News.

In the 90s, a Toyota subsidiary in Japan, created two dimensional barcodes called QR codes (Quick Response). What may have started out  as a car parts tracking mechanism, is now being used in a much broader context by a variety of cities, individuals, and businesses alike.

We’re starting to see them in books (see right), magazines, on buses, posters or even on the sides of buildings.

With a bit of software and a camera, your smartphone turns into a QR reader/scanner that can decipher the codes in the real world.

While this is rather fun, if a little geeky, what can it do for you? Well, for starters, you can promote your website, a product, gig or art exhibit in a unique and engaging way.

A few of us in NSDesign are reading the NOW REVOLUTION – Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social (Jay Baer, Amber Nusland). Throughout the book there are many QR codes that take the reader online for more information. Think about the ramifications of that.

As soon as someone prints a book, the  content can become “out of date”, but with QR links to a web address   – you can keep the content fresh and current. Mistakes can be fixed…

You can create a code which links to text (information), a website URL, to call a phone number, to send an SMS, to an event, to someone’s contact details, a PayPal “buy it now” link, a link to iTunes, a place on a map and a whole lot more!

Not just a techie online destination, you can put the codes on shirts, hats, mugs and so much more!

One QR code contains space for up to 4,000 alphanumeric characters!

For several years now, bands like The Pet Shop Boys have been using QR codes in their videos, on posters and online to promote exclusive material for fans.

The possibilities are endless on how you can creatively use the technology to enhance an experience.

You can create your own, for free, on a variety of sites such as QRStuff or Qurify, Create QR Code, to name a few.

In summary, here is a great piece from one of my favourite magazines – Fast Company – on 13 Creative Ways to Use QR Codes for Marketing. There is also an interesting BBC News piece on how Bordeaux is using QR codes to get it’s citizens online.

It was a Tuesday evening and I was with a friend in the computer unit at Napier University’s Merchiston campus.

I’d heard about “The Internet”, “The World Wide Web” and “Email” but really didn’t know what they were. Strange new symbols like “@” and the letters “http” were starting to appear at the bottom of adverts and I was intrigued. Something was happening and I wanted in on it.

Just the previous day I’d been eating a hamburger at Burger King and noticed “visit our website” at the bottom of that flyer they put on your tray. If this bizarre new phenomenon had infiltrated the world of fast food then clearly I needed to be involved.

We were sitting side by side in silence, locked in our own computer worlds but I knew Gordon was about to do the same thing I was. In that slightly awkward and anti social fashion favoured by computer types the world over, we were both about to take a step – or a click – into the unknown.

We were venturing into cyberspace – or “surfing the internet” for the first time.

I sat staring at my screen wondering how I “got on” the internet.

Then I noticed Gordon had clicked on the “Netscape” icon, which had a symbol of a ship’s steering wheel. That seemed to make sense.

Seconds later, I was on.

A minute and a half later, the page had finished loading and I was staring at http://www.napier.ac.uk – the university home page.

I’d love to say the first webpage I ever looked at blew me away with its innovation and possibilities.

Instead, I thought it was incredibly dull. It bore more a suspicious resemblance to the university prospectus which had been lying under my bed at home for the last few months, but with all the pictures and colour removed.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961224092240/http://napier.ac.uk

(these pages will appear in colour now but at the time, on the system I was using, they were black and white)

All rather pointless I thought but not wishing to dismiss something new so quickly and unable to believe that something I’d been excited about for so long could turn out to be so dull, I decided to press on and try another website.

Remembering the advert during my Burger King trip, I typed in their address.

Gordon and I had a heated debate about journalistic ethics while I waited for the page to load.

He seemed to be having more success than me and had ventured into a “Newsgroup” which was full of discussion about Formula 1 which he was heavily into. It looked a but grey and full of badly laid out, difficult to read text but at least he had something on his screen.

I had a few teasing lines of text and huge empty spaces.

The first computer I ever owned was a Sinclair Spectrum when I was 5 so I had developed patience when it came to these things. But this was ridiculous.

Eventually, the pictures finished loading and I was looking at this…

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19961226181251/http://www.burgerking.com

I was raging. 10 minutes of my life gone and all I had was something even less interesting than the flyer in my tray telling me to go on the website. And no chips to eat either.

“That’s it” I decided, “One more and I’m done.”

But where should I go?

I had absolutely no idea.

Google might have been big on the Stamford University Campus at the time but I’d never heard of it.

And Yahoo? More like “ya-WHO?”

I sat for a new moments then did what I’d always done whenever I got stuck with a computer – try to get back where I started.

This Netscape Navigator thing had some pictures along the top, one of which looked like a house and had “Home” written underneath it.

Sure enough, pressing it took me back to the Napier University page. My home page.

I also noticed a “Search” button but quickly dismissed it because I didn’t want to search the computer. I knew what was on the computer, I wanted someone to tell me what was on the internet.

By the time the Napier page had finished loading I’d had a brainwave.

Maybe these “websites” had something in common. They all had addresses that started “http://www.thensomewordsusualyacompanynamefollowedby.com or .co.uk

So if I kept the first and last bits of the address and changed the words in the middle, maybe it would take me somewhere interesting.

At least I had some things to try. So for the next hour I sat trying out different words and phrases and seeing where they took me.

It wasn’t earth shatteringly exciting and I went home that night not entirely sure I’d ever go back on the internet. I couldn’t really see what the point was but figured maybe it would one day be a useful way of replacing the Yellow Pages.

Instead of looking through a huge thick book for someone’s number you could just type the company name into the browser and their details would come up, and if you could hang around long enough, you’d get a nice black and white picture of their logo too.

And maybe, if you were really advanced, instead of even having to pick up the phone, you could just click the “E-mail” button and get in touch with them that way.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned e-mail up till now.

And there’s a reason why.

The university’s entire IT system was managed by the “Computer Unit.”

So everyone’s e-mail address consisted of their lengthy matriculation number – mine was “96056541” followed by “@” and then “csunt2.napier.ac.uk”

Due to my e-mail address being so dangerously close to a highly offensive word, and most of my socialising at the time being done in noisy bars, with a high risk of me being misheard as I yelled ”CSUNT2!” repeatedly over loud music, I’m sure you’ll understand why I decided it would be safer not to give it out to many people.

Now it’s over to you. Think back and share your memories of your first experience of the internet. What did you look at? Where did you go? What did you think? Have your say in “comments”, and have a great weekend when it comes!

Well we are down to the final twenty four hours of our annual Twenty Four Days of Twitmas promotion. We have to say that we’ve been delighted by the levels of participation across the board – as well as the prizes that were donated for the cause. There really was something for everyone.

Last weekend on Saturday – Abica Telecoms offered up a Bottle of  Ten Year Old Glengoyne Single Malt Whisky – which went to  a rather delighted @steve5424.

Sunday, a personal favourite of mine, was a proper Scottish Tea Break goodies from the newly-launched KILTR.com – a networking site for Scots home and abroad. The goodies included some caramel wafers, tea, shortbread and a limited edition @kiltr mug too!

On Monday, the kind folks at the Renfewshire Chamber of Commerce, offered the choice between bottle of Johnnie Walker or a Chivas – but halfway through the day, they decided to offer them both! The Chivas went to @BraeScotland & the Johnnie Walker: @globalaudit.

We followed up the festive Spirits with one for the golf lovers out there! Up for grabs, thanks to our friends at Pro Shop Direct, a pair of FootJoy Golf Shoes worth more than a hundred pounds!  These went to a very happy @dsparks83, followed by the mid-week Twitmas giveaway of a £25.00 voucher to spend at Gifted People. The winner was @deepfox who may put it towards a “microlight experience”!

The penultimate day of our promotion was one especially for the ladies  - an Arbonne Seasource Detox Spa Express Set worth  a hundred pounds. Heavenly luxury.  This was won earlier tonight go by @janicepattie.  A special thanks to @thejaxxstar for donating a very popular prize!

The Final Day – Day 24!

As it’s our last day, we have two prizes – one little and one  rather massive one.

As a result of our last day of work in the office,  in a bid to tidy all our desks, we uncovered  a selection of sundry items to be given away a “booby prize”…(pictured below).

As you can see – it’s probably the best booby prize of all time, including – a big Cadbury Roses Tin (granted there are only three chocolates left), a SpidaTrap.com baseball hat, the only book of numbers you’ll ever need (well, if you live in Glasgow South), an NSDesign mug, a 2011 calendar, a copy of Essential 80s Pop Music (a random trivia book written in 1998 by yours truly!) and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc wine (and amazingly we’ve not opened it!) Just to name but a few!  So a few real goodies, and a few things thrown in just for fun!

And finally….

We have arguably saved the biggest prize for last – a week’s accommodation at Les Grands Arbres in France.  Exclusive use of the beautiful “Le Pommier” studio cottage (self catering) for any week between January 1st and the end of May 2011 (to be mutually agreed between the winner and Les Grands Arbres)!  It’s a superb prize, and we’d like to thank Irene and Jim, the owners of Les Grands Arbres for donating it to our Twitmas initiative.

The final twenty four hours of the Twenty Four Days of Twitmas 2010 begins at 8pm tonight (Thursday 23rd December), and we’ll be closing the entire event at 8pm on the 24th.

The first randomly-selected winner will be announced at half eight and will pick up the “runner up” prize.  Following that - the overall winner of the accommodation in France will be announced!!

Remember to follow us on Twitter for all the instructions about how to enter, and best of luck to everyone.  Thanks again to the 1000′s of people who have taken part over the past 24 days – we hope you had as much fun participating, as we (and our generous clients) had running it! Merry Christmas to everyone, and here’s to #24Twitmas!

Thea
x

We meet people all the time who wonder what the benefits are to utilising social media tools like Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook to promote their business. It’s understandable really. I mean many people specifically wonder - “How much info can one convey in 140 characters?“

A lot more than you think, as it happens, but like anything out there, you’ll find there’s an knack for doing it and doing it well. For those who are a bit skeptical still, today’s blog post is just for you.

When asking why you should use social media to promote a business, just know that it will vary from company to company, but here are ten reasons you may wish to consider:

With Social Media you can:

1. raise your profile/brand (or your company profile).

2. connect with customers directly to problem solve or receive feedback on your products or services.

3. funnel sales-driven traffic to your website.

4. have competitions – e.g. to give away samples of products or services.

5. humanise your site, company or organisation.

6. build trust (let’s face it, people do business with people they like and trust).

7. gain industry insights.

8. increase SEO.

9. increase your word of mouth / viral marketing.

10. Position you/your company as the expert in your field.

There are, no doubt, more than the above ten, but those are a few reasons worth considering working social media  into your marketing mix to promote your business.

If you’re not sure how to go about that, but are interested in doing so, then please get in touch. We’d be happy to help you formulate a bespoke strategy.

What started out as a normal Wednesday morning resulted in being anything but.

Over our usual morning cup of tea and banter, the subject inevitably came around to the pending papal visit the following day.

Being web evangelists (aka geeks) here at NSDesign, we jokingly imagined creating an “alternative” version utilising the PayPal branding but without the distinguishing “Y”.

To be honest, that part wasn’t a terribly unique idea, people were already referencing it on Twitter, but on a whim, we took it that bit further. We decided it might be fun to do a little social media experiment where the objective would be to start with nothing and see how we could build awareness and generate interest in a site which was literally minutes old.

If it did work, then perhaps some of the lessons learned could be applied any online marketing strategy.

By eleven we’d registered the domain. After noon, we’d thrown a quick site together and started to promote the site via a few pointed “tweets” just after 1pm.

Below is how the site looked not long after launching: very basic but still funny enough to get people talking…

(Screengrab: www.paypalvisit.com)

Within minutes the traffic started to arrive and the re-tweets began…

(Screengrab: Real Time Google)

As the day went on, we added more content and images and posted the link on Facebook walls.

SOME 48-HOUR STATS:

The unique visitors were just short of 2000.

Page views came in around the 3500 mark.

Our whole point wasn’t just to drive traffic in a call-to-action format, it was to reach a s wide of an audience as possible thus building brand/site awareness.

Through tools such as TweetReach* – we were able to ascertain how far our “reach” was.

Tweet Reach: Nearly 75k

On Twitter, according to our full TweetReach report*, shows we had a potential reach around 75,000 people – which rather ironically is more than actually showed up to see Pope.

On the day of the Pope’s visit, “day two” of our  humourous project, we posted various topical updates throughout the day.

The page grew and grew more graphics and with tongue-in-cheek reports.

(Screengrab: Susan Boyle Double Booked!)

Those, too, were tweeted and re-tweeted throughout the day. (We caught a few people out with that one…)

It was all done in good fun but yet there were things we could take away from this humourous experiment.

A FEW THINGS WE LEARNED:

1) Anything topical you can tie in with your own expertise, and be a part of the buzz creation by contributing something valuable to the buzz,  you’re on to a winner.

2) Anything that is unique with humor (bearing in mind everyone’s humor is different) is also an added bonus in experiments like this.

3) We added the Facebook “Like” button and the “Tweet This” button – quite late in the game on day two – which indicates had we’d started off the project with that we might have pull back our marketing push and let the visitors of the website spread the message directly. Nearly a hundred people indicated “liked it” in just a few hours and thus spreading the message directly to their own wider networks.

4) Understanding who your champions are is very beneficial. For instance, you can see who’s mentioning it – using Google Real Time – you quite quickly see who the main influencers are.

In theory, you could almost be clever and target the people who you want to be spreading your message – and tweet them specifically in the first instance.

5) On the down side…while this experiment actually resulted in gaining followers, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t admit we’d have lost a few in the process.

After all, we broke the cardinal rule of overusing one subject in tweets – which, at times, may have been viewed coming across in an overly saturated and spammy sort of way.

Anyway it was a really fun and interesting project. We hope you who viewed the page enjoyed it as much as we did creating it.

****
SEE: www.paypalvisit.com

(*Note that link only shows 50 of the total Tweets – you have to buy the full report to see all of it – which we did…)

We were lucky enough to have an exchange colleague in the office today.   Riu Yokota is a Japanese PhD graphic/web designer – and the team enjoyed him showing us examples of Western-influenced Japanese designs. 

Riu was also kind enough to write a little summary of his day which he has given me permission to post here:

I’m Riu and from Japan.

I come here Scotland by the vocational exchange program of Rotary International.

NSDesign kindly accepted me and gave me an opportunity to experience the web design in Scotland. So, today I got involved in NSDesign and spent a day here.

As a part of today’s program, I looked for the difference of web design between Japan and Western countries. I feel the framework of website layout in Japan is almost the same to western companies’. The logos would be placed at top-left corner. There may be horizontal navigation bar below the logos. In-site search box will be top right corner of the website, and etc… However, the difference of language, that is, difference of characters or letters, makes the look of the websites different.

Another difference would be the atmosphere of the workplace. I think it is more friendly and enjoyable here. Of course I didn’t mean my workplace is uncomfortable. It may be the NSDesign will be the nicer place to work comparing to others. Anyway, I appreciate for Gary, Paul, Kenny, and Thea for taking care of me.

 Thank you very much, NSDesign.

Really hope to see you again!

On behalf of the team – my thanks to Riu for his short (but influential) time with us, and I hope this is the beginning of strong Scottish/Japanese relations!   – Sayonara

View the Photos here!

Running a social media campaign is a time consuming business and the urge to set up a series of auto-updates can be overwhelming. It can also be quite effective if done correctly, but does have a series of drawbacks which prevent it achieving the same response as a personally run campaign; however, the time saved may justify this. So should you keep it personal or auto-update?

Obviously the biggest drawback with automated updates is the removal of personal response to your followers and fans. In automating the campaign you are unable to react as quickly or personally to any comments, questions or answers you may receive from those following you. It can also look as though you are ignoring a potential client if you don’t respond to their request but keep updating with other information – not a great selling tactic.

Similarly, it means you can only update pre-determined material, rather than reacting to industry news and events as they happen.
On the plus side, auto-updates enable you to update your site 24 hours a day, potentially interacting with followers around the globe in a way that would not be possible if you were only able to update in working hours. As any conversations that begin this way will be subject to delays because of the time difference, the downsides of auto-updating are largely offset.

In reality, a mixture of auto and personal updates will probably not harm your businesses social media profile, the damage really only occurs when a campaign becomes reliant on it.