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Our latest recruit joined the Shiny Red team this week.
Adam Lewis has just graduated from the University of York where he studied advertising and communications, and caught our eye with his blog Flawless Buzz. After spending a couple of weeks with us around Easter and showing his flair for social media, we offered him a full-time role.
With perfect timing, Adam joins us a few days before our summer party!
You can follow Adam on Twitter here
Good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) practice is essential if a website is to attract readers. However contrary to popular myth SEO is much more than just checking your site is technically optimised for Google and other search engines.
SEO is an ongoing process and its rules have to be applied to all content that is produced.
Around 40% of a web site’s page ranking (which determines how much search engine traffic it attracts) is driven by inbound links from other online destinations like blogs and web communities. So link building is central to much of what we do.
Naturally we’d expect to foreground your SEO keywords in all our online communications, and to create SEO-enabled press releases to further bolster search recognition.
We are always happy to work with our clients’ SEO teams too.
We’re celebrating our third birthday this week and my goodness, what a lot’s changed since we launched…
Back in August 2006 Facebook was still a niche US college network, Twitter had just made its debut to an unsuspecting world, and Shiny Red emerged blinking into the light, a response from The Red Consultancy to the twin trends of declining offline media consumption, and people spending more time online.
Now there’s no way we can claim anything like the stellar growth of Facebook and Twitter, but in our own quiet way we’ve learned a few things from providing social media marketing to an incredible range of brands and public sector clients. So here are a trio of outtakes from the last three years.
1 – Goal first, channel second: We’ve always tried to steer clear of recommending our clients dive headlong into the Next Big Thing in social media (remember Second Life?) just because it’s fashionable. Instead we try to start with the same simple but essential question: what’s the business objective? Which also means drilling into the sorts of territory you’d find in a typical PR or marketing brief: what’s the timescale, what’s the story, what creative cues should we take, what’s right for the brand…
At the same time we rely on the collective Shiny Red hive mind to stay abreast of social web innovation so that we can consider new tools as part of our strategic response – but only if they offer the right route for the brand.
2 – Clients are upping the ante: In the last 9-12 months I’ve noticed a real sea change in the sorts of client conversations we’re having. Three years ago we worked mainly with tech brands like Nokia and Microsoft who saw their brands and products being debated online by tech bloggers and wanted to join in. Now the mix includes FMCG brands, global names in pharma, online retailers and the public sector. Each has a range of consumer and industry audiences to reach, and each needs a nuanced approach to social media.
Clients increasingly look to us to deliver greater levels of innovation for many intertwined reasons, not least that their own hands-on experience of social media has grown. And unlike three years ago there aren’t many meetings I sit in today where prospective clients need convincing that their audience is online. Like us they’re seeing an explosion of brilliant and effective digital campaigns that are constantly raising the bar for the whole social media marketing sector – which is good news for all of us working within it. As a result, creativity remains at a premium.
3 – Offline doesn’t have to mean anti-social: We’ve always worked on a mix of campaigns, some of which are online-specific, others that are fully integrated across on- and offline media. Clients want to maximise ROI, while offline media is increasingly influenced by the social web.
An example: we recently worked with our colleagues at Red on behalf of MySpace to pitch a story about voter intentions ahead of the European election to political bloggers. Minutes after we contacted Iain Dale, he popped up on Sky News as an interviewee, namechecking MySpace twice in a matter of seconds. Serendipity, yes, and also a reminder that content doesn’t just sit in a box called “digital” or “traditional media”.
There’s been a fair bit of online discussion in the last few days about the fate of Shiny Media, the UK blogging network which recently went into administration.
Just to clarify, Shiny Red is a majority-owned subsidiary of The Red Consultancy providing communications consultancy in the fast-growing arena of social media.
A minority stake in Shiny Red is held by Chris Price and Ashley Norris, and this stake is entirely separate from their other business interests which include Shiny Media.
It’s that time of year where the school holidays kick in and London starts to quieten down – but we’ve added two new people to the team so our office just got busier…
Alex Lefley joined us this week from Hill and Knowlton, he’s already getting stuck in on client and newbiz work and we’re delighted to have him on board.
We’ve also brought in Oxford grad Kate Brennan after a successful stint as one of our summer interns.
(Thanks to everyone who applied for an intern position by the way – we’ve filled all the slots now.)
We’re feeling more than a little excited this morning, having scooped the Highly Commended award in the Best Use of New Media Category at the Communique Awards 2009, for our work on Pfizer’s Get Real, Get a Prescription campaign.
Our work was a collaboration with Red Health and Pfizer to deliver massive online cut-through for a relatively neglected public health issue: the dangers of buying counterfeit medicines online.
Through a combination of blogger relations and popular social media tools we helped deliver a No.1 rank on YouTube for the video of Pfizer’s cinema ad campaign, 50,000 visits to Pfizer’s website from 99 countries and genuine audience impact ““ 97% of men confirmed the campaign will change their online buying behaviour.
It’s fantastic to have worked on such a high-profile, hard-hitting campaign that is genuinely changing people’s behaviour around such an important issue.
Needless to say it was buzzing at The Grosvenor last night with plenty of bubbly had by all!
Despite the doom and gloom in the job market, Shiny Red is looking for any bright sparks out there keen to get a foot on the career ladder.
As part of our summer internship programme, we’re offering graduates who are passionate about social media the chance to get their hands dirty on digital campaigns for some of the UK’s leading brands across FMCG, consumer tech, healthcare and public sector.
We’re looking for people who can commit to between four weeks and three months to work for expenses, with a start date from mid-June onwards.
If you or someone you know might be interested in work experience at one of the UK’s leading social media agencies, just drop us an email with your details and CV to HR@shinyred.co.uk.
Over the last few months we have found ourselves spending quite a lot of time at the Old Street offices of online video specialists Simply Media. We chose to start working with them because of their unrivalled knowledge of online video, and as time has gone by we have been blown away by their creativity and ability to deliver on even the tightest deadlines.
So much so that we are very proud to announce a new partnership between the two companies. From here on in Simply will be Shiny Red’s chosen supplier of shot-for-web videos, and will provide expertise and advice both to Shiny Red and its parent company The Red Consultancy.
Shiny Red MD Helen told PR Week this week “This is a partnership between two web innovators who understand that engaging video content is a high-impact, low-cost way to reach people online. Shiny Red has led the way in using web video in PR, and the audience for it is growing all the time.”
I personally believe that the way in which video can travel between websites, blogs and social networking sites makes it one of the most potent social media tools. I expect we will be spending even more time in Old Street in the coming months and years.
We’ve noticed a couple of major news sources this week engaging in the questionable activity of announcing a celebrity’s death while they’re still alive.
OK! has published its “˜Jade Goody Official Tribute Issue 1981-2009′ this week, following up on the success of their Jade Goody Official Wedding Issues. These three editions were some of the biggest selling issues to date, so in this respect, it is entirely understandable that they would publish another “Jade special”- what is confusing is that they decided to do so before the reality TV star’s death.
Even more surprising was Time Out New York’s decision to publish the article “˜RIP Natasha Richardson 1963-2009′ on March 17th. The actress is currently critically ill in hospital, surrounded by her family. Time Out commenters were not impressed by this insensitive inaccuracy, with one saying, “Scoring the scoop is not worth the pain and suffering of her family and loved ones!”
This comment, while a little dramatic, strikes to the heart of the issue; these publications are desperate to spread the news before it has hit Facebook, Twitter and other social media routes- and in these cases, before the news has even happened. We’ve become used to reading articles in traditional media that state Twitter or Facebook updates as their sources, and now it seems they’ve become a little over eager to break the story themselves.
My question is this: Since it is impossible for these publications to match Twitter in terms of speed of publishing, shouldn’t they focus on what they can provide that Twitter can’t? If they aim for accuracy and authority rather than speed, surely there’s room for both?
I have been thinking what my social media highlight has been over 2008 and I realised that this is a tough job. There so many highlights to choose from so I have put them into the following categories:
Creative Campaign: Nike’s Paul chasing. Great use of interesting online content that keeps you returning to the site, supplemented with offline activity such as advertising.
Social Media Tool: I don’t think that anyone could have missed the rise of Twitter throughout 2008
Social Media Story: Comments from Max Gogarty’s travel blog in the Guardian - Also topped as Shiny Red’s most red story of 2008, I can’t be alone
Event: Fresh in my mind is last night’s Twinterval. It was refreshing to see so many like-minded people and also meet people that I have been tweeting at for a while but have never met
Campaign that I have worked on: This has been a tough one, but for the amount of time the video made me giggle the winner has to be Yell’s Party Planner campaign
Video: I was impressed by EA’s reaction to a glitch in their Tiger Woods game
What is your social media highlight of 2008?
Shiny Red shortlisted for two Reputation Online Effectiveness awards
July 20th @ 15:07
Our pick of the Cannes Lions, and World Cup finale
July 9th @ 13:07
Digital Download
July 2nd @ 15:07
