As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been a bit quiet. The last couple of months have been anything but – here are the highlights.
Hello beautiful world
Last June, I made the difficult decision to leave my amazing team at PayPoint.net and move five minutes up the road to a fantastic agency called beautiful world. The talented people at beautiful world aren’t total strangers to me – you’ll know them from my blog from NFP Tweetup fame. We’ve collaborated before on different projects so, when the opportunity arose, there was something quite inevitable about accepting the invitation to join.
Although my business card says ‘Account Director’ - and I do indeed head up the accounts team - in keeping with their hiring philosophy of having to be ‘good at more than one thing’, I also get to work on all the other things that excite me – campaign and digital planning, design and user optimisation – in a totally complementary environment. Every day brings left field challenges, creative solutions, and at least one opportunity for a belly laugh.
Other projects
To mitigate any conflicts of interest, I’ve stopped freelancing for any new UK based charities but the good news is that I’ll be able to work with you in my new capacity at beautiful world.
Aside from that, I’m currently collaborating on a project for Microsoft, and a selected schedule of design and ecommerce-focused consultancy projects means that I don’t have windows for any new briefs until October.
Filming takes place towards the end of the summer, with new episodes hitting the interwebs later in the autumn. Uber excited!
A little housekeeping
The site is going through a re-design to better accommodate my blog and generally reflect where I’m at at the moment. That’ll be up in the autumn sometime, schedule permitting.
I'm blessed to continue to work on some amazing projects with some very talented people. The last couple of months have been hugely transitional for me on many levels so thanks to everyone that has been a part of it. I look forward to sharing some new things soon :)
Quite simply, a screencast is a video recording of stuff happening on your computer screen.
Very recently, creating a screencast was the easiest solution to an increasingly common scenario in my workflow. I’d set up a blog on a new platform and I had to train the 70+ people that would be posting to it how to use it. No one had time to attend a training session (and I definitely didn’t have time to prep for one), no one ever reads training manuals and I didn’t want to have to repeat myself for any new people that joined the team. So I jumped online, recorded a screencast, sent the link around and let everyone have at it.
There are a plethora of other screencasting tools out there, both free and paid services; you can find lists and reviews on Mashable, 1st Web Designer and across the web. Standout alternatives include QuickTime X for Snow Leopard (thanks for the tip, Ash!) and Screenr for quick capturing.
Consider editing
There are a couple of things to consider when it comes to editing your screencast –
How much more you have to pay for being able to edit your screencast: most tools allow you to record for free, but charge for their own editing tools or the ability to export as a usuable video file that you can import into the editing tool of your choice;
The time and resource you have for learning how to edit your screencast.
Although I have Final Cut Pro, it’s a bit hardcore for a basic screencast so I was looking for something with editing functionality already built in to the tool. Part of the reason that I upgraded to Screencast-O-Matic Pro (at a princely sum of $9/year) is because their editing interface is very user friendly and they had a comprehensive YouTube channel of how-to screencasts showing me how each feature worked, so I could edit and learn all at the same time.
I found this demo of how to edit audio in free audio editing tool, Audacity, especially useful.
Screencast-O-Matic Pro also allows you to export videos as MP4, AVI and FLV files to upload into other editing tools of your choice, including the iMovie and Windows Movie Maker programmes that come with your computers.
Audio – remember your audience
One of my clients once asked me why you don’t usually hear me speak on my training screencasts and I replied, “Would you be able to hear me if I did?” Like a lot of office based workers, my client’s computer is devoid of its sound card. Knowing that they would be accessing my screencast at work meant that I had to make more use of the subtitle and text features, although I usually put a generic soundtrack in the background for anyone that does have sound.
Training is the most obvious use for a screencast, but I’ve also created screencasts to
take clients over new designs
show customer services people exactly what happens when I get their error pages
I discovered Picnik last year when I left my Macbook – and Photoshop - at home and took to the road with my netbook. I was on blogging duty and needed to find a solution primarily to resize and crop images ready for posting.
If you’re a Flickr user, you might have used Picnik from within Flickr itself. However, Picnik is freely available to use online; you don’t even need to sign up for an account.
Here’s a video walk-through I made on how to resize an image in Picnik for use in a website banner.
Picnik doesn’t just resize and crop images; you can also sharpen and adjust exposure, remove redeye, rotate and re-colour your image. Check it out at Picnik.com.
'Designers are the last people you should use in a re-brand. The first thing that should be engaged is collective brain-power. No-one enjoys this to begin with as thinking usually hurts. However by the end of the exercise you have a sense of collective ownership and a roomful of brand zealots. You’re going to need them to make the changes stick.’
Having worked as a designer in-house, agency side and freelance, one of the most frustrating things is often the lack of access that I get to anyone else in the organisation outside of the marketing team handling a re-brand. Frequently, the sense of collective ownership that Simon has mentioned is top level and hasn’t been consulted, communicated or translated into the DNA of the rest of the organisation, let alone owned.
Whilst designers shouldn’t be the first people that you call on during a re-branding exercise, we usually are. And therein lies the great responsibility of the designer to do what a colleague of mine calls ‘the sh*t sieve’. This is because, despite collectively looking within your organisation to determine the goals of your re-brand, the designer is usually the first opportunity an organisation gets to test whether they can clearly communicate them.
At heart, great designers are problem solvers. And solving problems involves asking a lot of questions, some of which might not seem obvious to the design process; I can’t tell you the number of jobs I’ve turned down because a client couldn’t answer a question as basic as ‘what are your core values?’ It’s a red flag and is indicative of the problems we’re likely to face should we work with you. Despite trying to explain why these questions are important, clients often get defensive; I once had a very exasperated marketing director on the phone asking why it was important for me to know why they were trying to re-target a specific group of donors.
It’s not just about pushing pixels. As someone who enjoys working with start-ups, one of the most common issues I point out is the ‘I’ v ‘We’ positioning quandary. For example, when a freelance web developer goes from ‘Joe Bloggs – I design wicked awesome websites’ to ‘Firefly – we breathe life into your online presence’, the new positioning and perception will have a knock-on effect to the business model, pitch lists and clientele that this one-man band will have to deal with if he hasn’t thought about that first. Experience has taught me to casually ask how they’ve altered their business model to accommodate this before I start work, as there’s nothing sadder than having to do work on a re-brand twice over.
Designers shouldn’t be the first people you call when you want to re-brand, but if they are, keep an open mind; you’ll either find that your re-branding plans are bulletproof and watertight, or that there are some areas that need re-thinking, re-conceptualising, and maybe putting on ice. Whatever you do, just thank your lucky stars that their first question wasn’t about your favourite colour.
I’ve been doing a little training with some new clients in the last couple of weeks and I’ve had to answer the question “How do I get a picture to show up next to my [blog] comment?” more than once, so I thought I’d do a post...
What is Gravatar?
That little picture next to your name is called an avatar. An avatar is an image that identifies you and your content across a number of websites and social media services, such as your profile on Twitter, your channel on YouTube, or whenever you post a comment in a blog or forum.
Gravatar (short for globally recognised avatar) is a service that allows you to upload various images for you to use as your avatar. You can link different images to different email addresses, all within the same user account.
My Gravatar account. I have linked different images to different email addresses.
How does Gravatar work?
Have you ever commented on a blog and wondered why some people have pictures next to their names and others just have the blog’s default image?
Whenever you type in your name and email address to leave a comment on a Gravatar-enabled website, the image associated with that email address appears alongside your comment. If you change the image linked to your email address, then your image automatically updates everywhere on the web where you have used that email address. The comment form on the beautiful world blog. After I type in the email address associated with the image I want to use...
... it appears as the avatar beside my name when the comment is published.
Gravatar integrates with Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging platform (and increasingly popular CMS) according to Technorati's 2010 State of the Blogosphere report, as well as a number of other services such as IntenseDebate, Disqus and Polldaddy. Frustratingly, it doesn’t yet integrate natively with Blogger, which is why if you leave a comment at the end of this post, you won’t see your avatar whether or not you’ve signed up, alas.
Why you should get a Gravatar
Brand recognition
People are more likely to remember your picture than your name. If you use the same avatar alongside your well thought out comments on a number of blogs, people start to recognise and remember you, enabling you to build your reputation within your field. And to go along with this…
Be more visible where people in your field can read what you think
The most influential people in your field tend to engage on the same blogs and in the same forums. Your avatar enables you to be easily seen as part of this group.
Builds credibility
People are instinctively more likely to lend weight to a comment from someone that can be identified, as opposed to the generic no-face default icon. This is even more important if you are commenting on behalf of your company or organisation.
A comments stream on the Six Revisions blog. Some people have them, others do not.
Traffic driver to your site
People clicking through from sites where I comment is the second biggest driver of traffic to my website. The great thing about your avatar only being linked to your email address is that I can enter a different URL in the website field on the comment form that might be more relevant than my homepage to anyone clicking through.
As a bonus, Gravatar allows you to create a Gravatar profile complete with all the services / presences that you have online, so you can display your Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr and other accounts together.
Anything that helps others take notice and engage with you and your brand is a plus, and getting your own Gravatar is an easy win – sign up once and you don’t have to do anything except put in your email address to identify yourself on other sites. You can get your own Gravatar at Gravatar.com.
Although hectic, as always, it has been a pretty great couple of work months. Besides all the strategic online marketing stuff that I've been working on, I've had a nice balance of in-house design and stuff for my friends. Here's a little snapshot of some of the things I've been working on recently.
Some creative for a print campaign that will feature in iGaming Business Magazine.
We recently launched our own blog internally. I figured there ought to be a place where everyone can post all the stuff that makes us laugh, debate, react and meet around totally non-payments related stuff, so after a few weeks of putting together a screencast and some how-to slides on the side, the .net team was let loose on it last week and I shared the highly addictive Go Barbra site with the team :)
This is some creative for a therapy brand. I also did the website and logo for this client too. There were lots of learning points working with this client which, if permitted, I'll share in some blog posts at a later date.
It's getting to be that time of the year again, and I recently took some time out when I was on leave last week to working on a wedding website for my good friends, Lucy and Iain. They asked for a nod to the 50s art deco style 'in a duck egg blue' so I had fun playing with shapes and motifs on this site.
This is the logomark for the branding and design of the portfolio site of a very talented developer with whom I have the pleasure (and challenge!) of working with regularly. It's a fun project because - outside of my usual doodle or minimalist styles - I finally get to put a grunge aesthetic into practice, so this should make a nice little addition to both of our portfolios.
Work has started in earnest on 2GK, a new web series project with my Fletcher colleague and collaborator, Regan Latimer. Planning for this project has taken an interesting turn, and I'm looking forward to exploring it creatively as well as strategically.
And not to forget our other show - if you're still awake, tune into Femslash4Fans Radio on Blog Talk Radio this evening at 11pm GMT / 7pm EST where Regan and I will chat all things Fletcher.
The highlight of my week last week was attending NFPtweetup 10. I heart NFPtweetup a lot, and given that I don’t work in a charity, I feel enormously privileged every time I’m allowed to attend. So it was my absolute pleasure to be given the opportunity to co-sponsor this particular event for my production company, Pixel Philosophy.
I’m writing this post because a few people clocked my name sticker that evening and asked how they could get me to sponsor their events. I thought about writing a ‘how-to’ but to be honest, I couldn’t really come up with a generic pragmatic list of tips on how to secure non-corporate sponsors to sponsor your event without thinking of the events and the people that run them. And therein was my starting point…
Be generous
Longstanding attendees of NFPtweetup are ridiculously generous with their ideas, from comments in the days leading up to the event, to conversations during the event itself, to reflection pieces after the event. If NFPtweetup as a collective loaned out incubator or consultancy services, I dread to think what the bill would be, so if you’re a charity at any stage of the online game, you’re going to get a helluva deal. Resources that come out of the event – presentations, summaries of tweets with the hashtag, commentary – are generously shared on Slideshare, Flickr, a multitude of blogs, and sometimes by livestream.
Be nice
There’s no way you can attend NFPtweetup without being moved by the organising team from beautiful world. I remember attending my first event (NFPtweetup 5) only a little over a year ago, by myself, and being generously welcomed by NFPtweetup’s founder, Rachel Beer. Since then, I continue to be impressed by the endless enthusiasm of organiser extraordinaire, Teri Doubtfire, from the announcement for tickets, to follow-up emails, to making sure everyone’s having a good time at the event, to the thank you tweets and emails, and the request that everyone fills out the feedback survey.
With all the talent in the room, it’s easy to feel daunted, but when you’re in the queue for the beer or the muffins, or you’re hanging out waiting for your breakout group to start, people are pretty open to you saying hi; more often than not, don’t be surprised if they hunt you out (in a good way) to talk to you about something you tweeted on the Twitterfall wall.
As online, content is king
NFPtweetup is not a fancy event. I don’t mean this in a bad way – all the events that I’ve been to have been staged in comfortable surroundings, the (free) beer is always flowing, and don’t even get me started on the cake! But ultimately, when NFPtweetup’s strength is ideas in a proliferation of forms – great presentations, engaged conversations, tweeted ponderings, intelligent and enthusiastic blog posts and reviews – the event could be in a pub or someone’s back yard and it would still be pretty great.
Don’t do a thinly veiled sales pitch
Many tweetups that I’ve been to have been thinly veiled sales pitches for some kind of product, service or subscription. The great thing about NFPtweetup is that you couldn’t really get away with that; for example, one other non-profit consultancy rocked up to a recent tweetup and used the mic to try and promote their agency having previously contributed nothing to the community (I use the term ‘try’ loosely – it was a terrible elevator pitch). Tacky. I’ve previously worked with people that I’ve met at NFPtweetup, and although cards obviously get passed around, it’s a pretty secondary consideration to the learning that gets done.
In conclusion
The most effective cheerleaders of any event, brand, campaign or organisation are people that are not associated with the event, brand, campaign or organisation, and you only have to search the hashtag to see that NFPtweetup has such cheerleaders in abundance. Great events attract great people and beget even more great ideas. And I’m into great ideas, or even ideas that haven’t formulated themselves yet.
I’m not going to support an event which, at the root of it all, is a massive marketing exercise or a sales drive, even if it does help my personal or business brand (there are more viable channels and opportunities to which I can attach words like ‘strategy’ and ‘ROI’ if that’s what I’m after).
I hope Rachel doesn’t mind me mentioning this, but I volunteered to co-sponsor an NFPtweetup – there was no pitch, as each of the events I’ve attended have provided more than enough reasons as to why I should support them. It’s an enormous privilege to contribute to this community – both online and off – and I’m very much looking forward to the next one.
Last week, I sat on a Marketing and PR careers panel at my undergraduate alma mater, Queen Mary, University of London. I had mixed feelings about the event as I recalled how I felt about nine years ago when I was exactly in their shoes. I was very anxious about not having had enough work experience, I had no clue what I wanted to do, and I didn't feel like I had learnt anything of benefit to a potential employer.
You know you're old when you can reflect and use phrases like 'things were different back then'. And it truly was. This lot have ‘social meeja’ at their disposal, making it all at once both easier and more difficult to stand out and connect with department heads, recruiters, agency bosses and our ilk.
I've previously written a post with tips on how to get a job in marketing, so this post is not about that. Here are some of the things I hope I made clear (as they were things that I wish I'd been told back then).
You will never know everything
After an exhausting round of questioning that included explanations of SEO, onsite heat maps and pitching, someone asked if they expected you to know this when you applied for your first job. Our answer was unanimously a very clear no.
When I first started at PayPoint.net I had no clue what golden keywords were. So our Marketing Director sat down and spent a good chunk of time explaining what they were, how to intelligently determine them and how to optimise our website for them. A couple of years later, there are still things I'm learning every day and I'm pestering my team to explain to me. You will never get done learning – embrace it – and remember, it's always ok to ask questions.
No one person will give you the same advice
And going along with this, what works for one person won't necessarily work for another. Everyone's context and experience is different so there are few universal truths. Try stuff – if it works for you and your context, great; if not, bounce back and try something else.
It's ok to not know what you want to do
I'm sure someone had told me this but I didn't quite believe it at the time, so I wanted to reiterate it. I spent two years temping before I fell into a role that was vaguely associated with what I happily do now. In most careers talks the experience that is often portrayed is that the speaker went into a graduate role, then an entry-level executive role, then manager, then whatever it is they're doing now. Well, not me; I was an events manager, travelled, temped and various things in between for a couple of years before I ended up as the information co-ordinator at a charity. And it all worked out great. So it's ok if you end up temping for a little bit (just make sure you keep in touch with your clients – all those directors and managers whose diary you're taking care of end up being great connections in future!).
It's up to you to carve out your role in a team
There's a reason my job title is the very non-descript Online Marketing Specialist – what else do you call someone that does a little web and collateral design, works on SEO, does a little strategy and manages everything to do with social media presences? I carved out my role in the team and it’s not as unusual as one may think. Each marketing team is different and it’s up to you to speak up and find where you fit.
The road ahead is not clear
Unlike our contemporaries in the law school, the stops along the road to where we want to go are not clearly defined. It’s scary, but it’s also very liberating. Embrace the journey and you might find a destination you never knew existed.
I've been blessed with a pretty packed year. I've worked with some pretty amazing people, travelled heaps and gotten to work on some pretty interesting projects. Of the ones that aren't covered by NDA (!), here are some of my highlights from 2010.
Loving my team...
I continue to be surrounded by a pretty great team at PayPoint.net, which is just as well as we’ve had a pretty relentless schedule. My favourite campaign this year was the Trade in 24 campaign that launched a pretty significant product for the business – at only 24 hours from application to trading, we have the fastest merchant account in the industry.
I have always struggled with our colour pallete (indigo and yellow) but it was surprisingly seamless to design the assets for this campaign, which included campaign emails, dedicated landing pages and a guide to trading in 24 hours. I was very pleased with the outcome – fresh, and more in line with a forward facing online company – and I look forward to developing this aesthetic in the coming year.
This was also the year in which social media really came into its own within the business in terms of how we connect with people on Twitter, LinkedIn and within various business forums and I'm looking forward to developing our strategy and partnerships with our online friends next year.
This year we've been working really hard on a couple of projects that will come to fruition in 2011 so it looks like that's going to be an exciting year.
A new agency collaboration
When a new project presents itself, I like to work with the best talent in the field to get the very best out of it for everyone. This year, I had the pleasure of collaborating with digital superstars, Beautiful World (of nfptweetup fame), on developing the social media presence of UK forces charity, St. Dunstan's. We had fun designing their new Facebook Welcome page, as well as talking analytics, demographics and strategy.
I had an amazing experience working with Beautiful World on this project; it was a nice learning curve for me and fingers crossed that we get to work together again soon.
When Fletcher went German
In August, I went to Cologne where we had been invited to screenB.J. Fletcher: Private Eye at One More Lesbian's Theatre Nights. Part of the festivities of the Gay Games 2010, this showcase of web series from around the world put Fletcher in pretty great company alongside five other web series. It was great meeting up with various European editors from eurOut, the production team behind German web series, Emma Stahl and Bridget McManus, who hosted the red carpet for AfterEllen.com.
Coming up in 2011...
Next year, I am looking forward to be working with my web series partner in crime, Bee Charmer Productions' Regan Latimer, on a new web series project. Hopefully that means a trip or two to Toronto :)
January will see the launch of a new performance optimising brand that I have been working on for a private client who has had more than a little influence on my learning curve and career for the last couple of years. As I said, we're looking forward to showing you the new stuff that we've been working on behind the scenes at PayPoint.net, and I have a new blog coming out on part-time working to answer the many questions I get asked from people looking to re-shape their work weeks to look a little more like mine.
Exciting times ahead – thank you all for your continuing support and I look forward to working with you next year :)
Recently, one of my PayPoint.net colleagues, Etienne Clergue, posted an article on his blog lamenting the rise of external link building techniques and the decline of onsite optimisation in the SEO game.
So here's what I think.
External link building in and of itself isn't evil. After all, in the spirit in which link building was given importance, the more relevant and useful a website's content was to visitors, the more links it attracted as other websites wanted to share its content with its own visitors.
Of course, agencies with link farms - and clients that can afford to pay to utilise them - can exploit the numbers game in order to get a website to rank higher in organic search. However, in order for this to be successful and sustainable for the website owner, they need to remember one important factor: the end user.
The point of all SEO activities is to have your website rank highly in a search engine so that the end user will see it, click on it, arrive on your site and convert; to convert is to get someone to buy something, view something, download something, sign up to something, or whatever it is that you want visitors to do. If the visitor does not convert, all SEO activities are pretty much a moot point. It pains me when I see a website that ranks really well but has sacrificed onsite user experience by stuffing as many keywords as possible into the content to the point of rendering it incomprehensible, replacing navigational anchor text with keywords, or linking every conceivable content keyword to deeper pages without a second thought to user path.
Users are also getting more sophisticated at searching for what they want. Social media, recommendation sites, and links from associated websites also contribute to how we find new sites and services. For example, many of the services that I use to run my freelance office, including online storage service Dropbox and BackBoard, I discovered through reviews in articles on design blogs and recommendations on Twitter.
It is entirely possible to build a successful startup business or website without giving a second thought to SEO, but instead focussing on fundamentals - great products, good customer service and old school marketing. Take for example the case study of Woo Themes, who built up an annual revenue of over $2 million in two years by ignoring SEO altogether and instead focusing on these principles.
The importance given to external link building strategies is necessary because no website exists in a vacuum. However, the part that isn't dictated by search engines – taking care of your users, both onsite and off – is extremely important, if not more so, because a negative experience provides a natural antidote to artificially inflating one's rankings - users vote with their proverbial feet (and real world wallets).
Also, if they have a good experience, they'll create a link back to your site... Don't hate the players, Etienne.
This is the projects blog of Rochelle Dancel, web series producer, designer, online marketer and brand developer.
Rochelle also has an unhealthy obsession with Converse trainers, the work of Stephen Sondheim, Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons and new social media platforms.
I’m super pleased to be in pre-production with Regan Latimer for a third round of B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye. We launched a fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo, supported by our home on AfterEllen.com.
This is the logomark for the branding and design of the portfolio site of a very talented developer with whom I have the pleasure (and challenge!) of working with regularly. It's a fun project because - outside of my usual doodle or minimalist styles - I finally get to put a grunge aesthetic into practice, so this should make a nice little addition to both of our portfolios.
In August, I went to Cologne where we had been invited to screen 