Sunday, May 5th, 2013
I was given the opportunity to run the Twitter account for the event Youth Marketing Strategy 2013 I was invited by my friend James Eder (find him on Twitter here) because well he knew he could trust me to do a good job – as I am a seasoned and consistent Twitter user, and I have quite a few tricks up my sleeve!
Thursday, April 18th, 2013
I was asked to run the @youthstrategy Twitter account on April 16th 2013. So I was there, all day, tweeting away, and listening to awesome speakers talk about how brands can more effectively market to young people – kids, teens, students, young adults. I also wrote this post about live tweeting which will help anyone else who plans to be doing live tweeting at an event. You can read that here.
But for this post I wanted to share some interesting stats which I hope you will find fascinating!
Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
I am not bragging but I have found myself in demand a little bit lately. It’s a nice feeling. Maybe because I know lots of people, maybe because people like me, and maybe because I love what I do. I am getting more and more booked up with one to one social media training and this sends my efficiency bells ringing.
I decided to take a risk and schedule out a bit of time in my diary for small group workshops. If you want to know why I think it’s a risk, comment below and I will explain. But for now let’s get to the point about these workshops.
Glad you asked. There are 3 dates – 25th March, 26th March and 11th April, and you can book here: http://smallbutperfectlyformed.eventbrite.com/
The idea is that people can bring their laptops and try things then and there. We have free wifi in our office (pretty handy, I know) so people can just get onto that and start talking to people online straight away.
Not everything about those things but quite a bit really – all the main things so you know where to get started to make the most of these – even if you have limited time. They include:
Don’t forget to book, soon! Spaces are totally limited to 4 per workshop!
Book by clicking this link
Friday, March 8th, 2013
Ever heard of “FOMO”? Fear of missing out? Well I have had to deal with that a lot this week, as I am on holiday, and today there are all these events happening this week which I cannot be at! It’s International Women’s Day, and sometimes I like to throw myself a challenge (to prove what women can do). I have prepared this blog in just 20mins, so scuse any typos – and had to use my Iphone and an app called “TypeIt” for the image above – since I don’t have Photoshop on my laptop.
Here is what I am missing out on today:
My friend Darshana is opening this event, and it’s run by Entrevo, a partnership lead by Daniel Priestley and Marcus Ubl. It’s an event with 12 speakrs over 2 days for SMEs to learn what the formula is for creating a super successful business with high quality services and products and impressive recurring profits – through marketing, innovation, strategic partnerships, the right mindset and all sorts of other “secret sauce”
http://www.entrevo.com/expandbrand/
A full day of speakers, learning and networking held by Women Unlimited Worldwide, founded by my friend Julie Hall. This is the first year I can’t be at this annual event, and this is actually the official launch of “Women Unlimited Worldwide” (my sources tell me) and what I will be missing is a day full of inspirational female businesswomen speaking – who have incredible stories of failure and success and practical effective tips and advice which will teach and inspire the audience.
http://www.womenunlimitedworldwide.com/thrive-2013/
An annual conference of film music and technology, which I have never attended would really love to. How could I be there next year and at Women Unlimited Worldwide conference? If they could invent that being in two places at once potion. For me the most interesting part is the “interactive” bit, which starts today and runs till the 12th with alks from leaders in emerging technology (a lot of new stuff gets introduced at SXSW so it’s worth watching the tweets!).
My friend Dan McKernan is there with his company UMeTime and also my friend-from-Twitter and now Facebook and Instagram, Craig Bower from Design that Rocks, has a stand there!
Skiing in Wagrain, Austria: I am on a family holiday which was booked ages ago. The weather is perfect for skiing and I have to pay attention to skiing when I am skiing so cannot do too much work thinking but I do on the lifts sit, contemplate life, and come up with ideas for my business in my head. I also do blogging in my head sometimes too!
There in spirit: I am thinking about my friends around the world at their big events, and wishing them luck and sending them good energy!
On Twitter: Luckily for me, I know how to click on a hashtag, so I cant be missing much as attendees to these events are going to be tweeting away like crazy.
The hashtags are:
So, hope you are also feeling a bit of FOMO, and we feel we are together in not being together! See you at some other inspirational event, some other time, hopefully soon. In the meantime, let’s talk on Twitter!
Sunday, February 3rd, 2013
I think it’s my responsibility to let you know that I am not hiding away but getting out there, helping more people learn about the world of online marketing and social media! (more…)
Monday, October 1st, 2012
On the 28th of September, 2012, JP and I (pictured below) went to spend a day learning new skills and trends at The Designer’s Fiesta – a “celebration of design and digital”, brought to London by the UK’s leading Adobe Authorised Training Centre – Academy Class. We went check out the latest trends in design and development and to hone our skills. Keren asked us to blog about it, and thought interview style would be the way to go. Read her Qs and our As below!
What was the event you went to?
JP: We went to Designer’s Fiesta 3
Who was it aimed at?
JP: It was aimed at web designers and developers looking to learn something new and expand their skillset.
Chris: The Designer’s Fiesta was aimed at designers and developers to share tips and tricks from some of London’s top creatives.
Who ran the event?
JP: The event was run by Academy Class, a training centre for web developers and designers.
Was it well attended?
JP: Yes very well attended, all the rooms were full. At some of the talks people were sitting on the floors because they ran out of space.
Chris: The event was well attended with maybe around 150 people – a lot of bum’s on seats and even a few on the floor.
Did you meet any new people? Who?
Chris: Tony Harmer- Expert in Print, Academy Class. Tony spoke about Illustrator’s Colour Tools and enlightened the crowd about Adobe Bridge.
Were there speakers?
JP: There were loads of speakers there, from designers, typographers, mobile developers and industry experts.
Chris: The speakers were well prepared for hour long talks reviewing new tools and actions in Adobe Creative Suite and answering questions from the crowd.
What were they like as speakers?
JP: The speakers were really well prepared, well most of them. They gave good presentations and kept their talks interesting. My favourite speakers of the day had to be Leon Baird and Andrew Dobson. Leon’s talk on mobile development sparked an all new interest on mobile app development, and even got me think what it would be like to develop and use a Mac.
Who was the best speaker?
JP: While I really enjoyed Leon’s talk on mobile development I have to say my favourite talker was Andrew Dobson. He gave a really good talk about the industry and how it’s been developing over the years. He spoke with over 15 years experience and has been in the industry when there wasn’t standards and the job description was just figuring stuff out. He also spoke about how designers and developers should work more closely together and not as separate work stations.
Chris: The speaker who stood out for me would have to be Tony Harmer, his extensive knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite was incredible. From his knowledge of Adobe CS6 he utilises and manipulates elements over all Adobe programs to create exciting and interesting design.
What did they talk about?
JP: Most of the talks that I attended were about mobile development and responsive design. While a lot of the focus was introducing you to the basics and the concept behind the technology and what we should do to move forward in this exciting merging market.
Chris: The majority of the Designers Fiesta talks were based around the Adobe Creative Suite CS6 introducing new tools that have been added. Each presentation was funnelled into specific areas for hour long talks about : Sexy Texty – Typography, Illustrator colour tools, CSS for Photoshop fans and loads more interesting talks.
What did you learn?
JP: My answer below hopefully answers this question.
Chris: As a fan of Illustrator I found the colour tools talk by Tony Harmer very informing he spoke about colour pallets how to manipulate colour harmonies and apply them to designs. Also his talk on Adobe Bridge was very good.
What will you do now differently?
JP: I will try to break stuff more. What??? Yes I said I will break stuff more, here I will explain.
In Leon’s talk he spoke about when he worked at huge corporate company’s developers and designers were told to sit in the corner when they broke something. But when at agency’s or app/development company’s you got a pat on the shoulder. You see when you do something you know how to do the chances are you will succeed and everything will work perfectly. But when you do something you don’t know, or experiment with a new method of coding you’re bound to break something and by doing so you have to fix it and learn. In short if you’re not breaking anything you’re not learning.
What are you itching to try now that you learned about it?
JP: Oooo I am itching to try and make an app, it’s completely different to what I am used to developing but I am sure I can learn.
Chris: I really want to have a go at using bridge to utilise its tools to speed up the ‘in-between’ time between changing through programs, designing and searching for files.
Bridge provides a platform where you can organize files and create categories for speeding up design time and making the most of your time.
Would you recommend this event to others?
Chris: Yes I think the event was well worth going to, they had some very knowledgeable speakers and some good information to share.
Monday, September 24th, 2012
Can you feel it? It’s a big week – a week where London celebrates social media, with all sorts of events going on. I am fortunate enough to be speaking at three of them. Ok, only one of them is an “official” event but still. You can follow along on Twitter if you don’t feel like actually travelling all over London to the events. The hashtag is #SMWLDN
I am going to be a teacher! Yes, on Tuesday 25th September I will be starting to teach at INSEEC University. The course is called “Digital Planning” and I have 2 groups of 35-40 students and for 10 weeks I will be teaching 3 hours a week. I am preparing my own syllabus – just the way I like it – and each class will be a mixture of information sharing and practical activities. The students will be on laptops and will be encouraged to tweet and use Facebook in class. And of course, there will be lots of homework! I plan to get the students to work on real briefs for our clients. Any brilliant ideas the students come up with can be used for our clients to help them with blog headlines, campaign ideas and content planning. Genius!
On Wednesday 26th, somewhere in Notting Hill, I will be talking to the Association of Women Art Dealers and sharing tips for using online marketing to market themselves, drive more traffic to their websites and raise awareness for their galleries and art.
I have spoken for AWAD several times (TLD is an official partner for AWAD) and their founder Susan Johnson Mumford is fantastic – an inspiration in both the art and business world. You can follow Susan on Twitter here and follow AWAD on Twitter here.
On Wednesday evening, I will be attending my first ever Digital Sizzle event. So exciting! They will be showcasing the businesses who participated in their last event, a “Hackathon” fusion of art and technology. Digital Sizzle is run by Michael Hobson – who you may remember until recently was working at TLD – and now is part of an entity known as “3 Beards”. Yes, he grew a beard. Read more about Digital Sizzle and follow them on Twitter here.
On Thursday 27th September I will be speaking on a panel at an event hosted by Constant Contact, where my good friend Tamsin Fox Davies works. You can follow Tamsin on Twitter here. Tamsin and I have spoken together many times before, and those of us who have seen us will have noticed that we have natural on-stage chemistry – it’s uncanny! The topic will be “Multi Channel Social Media – Friend or Foe?” and I will be the Twitter expert. Read more about it here
Well that’s it – stalk me if you like, and of course I will be tweeting all things social media this week – so be sure to come say hi on Twitter too! If you use the hashtag #stalkingyounow I will know you read this post!
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
On the 18th of May, Alicia Cowan and I went to Brighton to run our now famous “Social Media – can you afford to ignore it?” workshop – which we have now run over 6 times (with the Twitter hashtag #dontignoreit). The reason we went to Brighton is because we had 2 girls from our December seminar -Emma and Esme from My Special PA – come up to us as and ask us if we would like to consider taking the course to Brighton. They had found our workshop so enlightening they could see it being of huge value to the Brighton business community.
In the weeks running up to our big event, Emma and Esme worked tirelessly spreading the word. In the end we had 40 attendees – and on the workshop day we found the audience to be energetic and interesting – asking lots of questions! The best thing is reading all the wonderful tweets and feedback from the day.
We have since got together to plan our next Brighton based seminar for November – we will of course be keeping all you lovely readers posted! In the meantime, enjoy some pictures below from the day!
You can read a blog post about Why My Special PA’s take on bringing us to Brighton here.
There is also an interview about Emma and Esme here on our blog – check it out!
Monday, April 30th, 2012
I have just come back from a week in Singapore. This was on invitation by one of our favourite clients, Gina Romero. For those of you who haven’t heard of Gina, she runs a business strategy consultancy called “Unconventional Busness Thinking” and we did the website for that. She also co-founded Athena Singapore with Claire Kidd, (and we did the website) and she is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to networking and teaching businesses how to make the most of it.
Gina also consulted on and project managed another project we worked on for a Blue Ocean Systems Singapore.
So, back to my week in Singapore. I mainly wanted to go as we have already had 3 great projects with Gina and I wanted to meet more of the businesses out there.
I found the people I met to be friendly, respectful, fun and interesting, and I am definitely going to go back for more trips. Singapore is now in my list of top 5 best cities in the world!
There are lots of other things I loved (the food, how easy it is to get around, and how clean and civilized everything is) but I want to publish this blog TODAY so I will end here. If any of you have been to Singapore and want to add your thoughts, comments and experiences, that’s what the comments box below is for!
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
On the 23-26 of March, 2012, Alicia Cowan and I were lucky enough to go to Lake Como to work on social media strategy and content planning for an amazing business – The Lake Como Wedding Planner.
This fantastic wedding planning business is run by Rachel Birthistle Cooke, who provides amazing experiences for wedding couples and their guests in the gorgeous Lake Como area as well as Tuscany.
In addition to experiencing the amazing scenery and eating amazing food, going for walks and runs around the lake, and spending time with Rachel and her family, we worked with the team to create a blog and Facebook strategy mapped out for the next 6 months. We also setup and implemented and systems that will enable them to continue sharing their expertise, passion and experiences of organising exceptional weddings in Italy through social media for much longer.
In order to understand the business first hand, it made sense for Alicia and I to go over to them – and we spent 4 days immersed in their lives! We met the whole team and stayed with Rachel and her family.
It all started when Rachel and Taimar (who helps with the business marketing and is also Rachel’s daughter) came to our December “Social Media – can you afford to ignore it?” seminar, and wanted to learn more and for us to implement a real online marketing strategy.
It was a great experience and we came away feeling not only that we had helped their business but also made new friends.
Since we were there, we have been so pleased that they have been blogging regularly and sharing great things on The Lake Como Wedding Planner Facebook page
It was so rewarding that the team – Leonora, Laura, Rachel and Taimar showed a real passion for the business, and were excited at these new ways of sharing their stories. The response so far on their blog and Facebook activity has been amazing.
Rachel said the following after the weekend: “Thank you so much for an amazing weekend, I loved it, both on a work and personal level. I hope it is not just the beginning of a whole new way to work but also of new friendships. I feel so positive since the weekend, I also feel more technically able, something I didn’t think I would ever say! Also the response to some of the posts is great. “
