Over the course of the day, two clear themes emerged:

1. Know your customers and where they are online
2. Gear your digital decisions around first protecting and then boosting your brand

We’ll be covering the first of these in this post, and the second in a follow up post next week. Part 2 will also have our curated selection of Quick Top Tips from the event.

Locating your customers was a hot topic right out of the gate, with Hubspot’s Kieran Flanagan highlighting the importance of using personas to categorize your target market.

For the uninitiated, personas are a way of understanding your customers via archetypes – The Busy Mum could be one, while The Skint Student could be another, depending on the products that you offer of course. Finding shared behavioural patterns is the key to creating these, and as Kieran noted, serious dividends can be reaped. Creating accurate personas can inform a huge amount of your digital marketing – everything from your site design to what you send to your mailing list.

A core benefit of personas is in discovering whether your customers are more likely to be tweeting, Facebooking or Instagramming – its effectiveness is perhaps most immediately apparent in pay-per-click search marketing, where the impact of tools like Google AdWords and pre-roll YouTube ads is much improved by awareness of the channels where your customers are most active, and what they’re doing when they’re there.

But a key takeaway from the day was that it’s now just as important to discover what device they’re using to access these services. To help attendees harness this knowledge, Ringo Moss from Nerv was on hand to explain responsive web design (RWD) – this means that your web page identifies the size of screen that it’s being displayed on, and resizes and reformats itself accordingly.

This kind of consistency is becoming more and more important, with Ringo providing the example of a user journey starting on a smartphone – perhaps on the morning commute – continuing at lunch on a desktop, before ending during a bout of sofa surfing on a tablet that evening.

That same consistency should extend beyond your site and into the emails that your brand is sending out – once again, personas are your friend, with personalisation and relevancy key to successful email campaigns. Email Centre’s James Steiger was quick to make clear that personalisation isn’t simply inserting the recipient’s name into the subject line, but is based on careful and deliberate accumulation of data about your mailing list. The more information about your customers that you can acquire to enrich and refine your personas, the higher the engagement levels your mailings will receive. Surveys and interviews with clients are a great way to start this process.

Don’t miss Part 2 of our On The Edge recap, where we’ll delve into protecting your brand from internet frenemies, as well as how to make yourself a thought leader. We’ll also have our pick of Quick Top Tips from the event.

Subscribe to our RSS feed or simply follow us @bluepostdigital – we’ll tweet to let you know it’s up!

Fantasy option – play for England’s rugby team in a World Cup final.
Achievable option – ensure Bluepost is something that everyone involved has been proud to be part of. Then in the longer-term retire to an outdoors or lifestyle business to keep me ticking over!

2. What made you decide to set up Bluepost Digital?

I was parting ways amicably from my last business partner back in 2009 and considering my options (a nod to Thomas who kept the FSI name and has since sold up and is doing great). I asked Jamie for his advice and he suggested we set-up together . . . bingo! Jamie was someone I’d always have jumped at the chance to set-up a business with, so for the opportunity to arise was a great example of fortunate timing. Bluepost Digital was duly formed and officially named a month later, after the Soho pub we used to visit when we worked together back in the day.

3. Tell us the highlight of your career so far…

I’m going to defer that one and focus on making sure the highlights are coming over the next couple of years.

4. When you were younger what did you want to be? 

Palaeontologist (4-8)
Cannot remember (9-14)
Journalist (15-21)

5. What was life like as a teenager with no mobile phones?

It was great. Much easier to pretend to my parents I was somewhere else.

6. Do you think traditional advertising agencies will exist in the future?

Depends how you define ‘traditional’. Any agency that fails to leverage the opportunities of cross-channel marketing is going to be at risk of losing budget to more integrated competitors. However the big ‘traditional’ ad agencies have sustained their success for a reason – good ideas have value. Those that use their huge resources and talent-base in the right areas will be more than OK!

7. Who do you think will take over the world – Google, McDonalds, Tesco or Facebook?

Erm . . . going to have to say none of the above but I don’t have any insights on early-stage alternatives.

8. If you had to be an ostrich, an elephant, a mouse or a shark – which one would you be and why?

Are these chosen due to the human character traits they infer? Ostrich . . . having your head in the sand is hardly one to opt for as a business owner. Elephant . . . good memory – it’s fair to say I’m not renowned for that. Mouse . . . it is a rodent so just no. Shark . . . any bloke who says he is a shark is unaware of how much of a rodent that makes him look. I’m going to have to think about this one. Can I have Ewok?

Over the course of the past four decades we’ve seen the portable phone evolve from car-bound boxes the size of briefcases…

…to the comparatively svelte pencil case-sized Motorolas beloved of 1980s stockbrokers and Saved By The Bell heartthrob Zack Morris…

…to the explosively popular late 90s Nokia range, which gave rise to a whole a new way of irritating fellow commuters…

…to the ever-smaller phones of the early noughties, a time when the size of your phone was considered inversely proportional to the size of your wallet…

…and finally to the modern day smartphone, veritable Swiss army knives of functionality wrapped in identikit black glass.

We decided to do a quick straw poll to see what the team’s first mobiles were. At the top of the list it’s outreach manager Jo, with the Nokia 1611. Pre-dating even the archaic Nokia ‘soft keys’ (the ones with the blue line on underneath the screen), this relic from 1997 is a classic design. She adds:

I got it for Christmas and although there was the function to write texts, texts didn’t exist because it was 1997 and no one else really had mobiles, so there was no one to text anyway. Despite its ungainly looks and size, it still got nicked at a house party a few years later, but I got it back and everyone ruthlessly mocked the boy who stole it.

 It’s still in my wardrobe at home, ready and waiting for the apocalypse when only bricks will survive.

Around the same time PPC pro Ross was rocking the Nokia 2210, a not dissimilar device that in his words...

…had many similarities to a brick, mainly in its weight and size. I remember the SMS function on it but wasn’t quite sure what its purpose was, as nobody communicated by text much then. 

However, it did have an impressive 2 hour 40 minute talk time and 30 hours stand-by. This is considerably more than I get from my iPhone 4 and it certainly featured less ‘Call Failed’ messages.

Meanwhile account manager Lydia was sporting the Philips Savvy – we’re not sure what the ‘Savvy’ part was intended to indicate, but we fear it may have meant ‘budget conscious’…

It was beautiful and allowed me to text my boyfriend secretly without my parents knowing. I was 16 and one of the last of my friends to get one, and I was given it because I passed my GCSEs. I still have it. It’s vintage.

Content manager Emily was chattering away on the Motorola C520, a device apparently bought from somewhere called “Woolworths” (was this an early form of Phones4U? Answers in the comments). She adds…

I remember my parents not letting me have a phone for ages because of all the news reports about radiation. I think I was 15 when I finally got my phone and only one other friend also had one – pretty much the only person I could text! 

Copywriter Morven and graphic designer Rebecca were both gadding around with Nokia 5110s – clearly the choice of the discerning late 90s creative. Morven’s chief memory is of its ‘indestructibility’, while Rebecca commented that a stand out feature was its early device convergence:  ‘alarm clock and phone in one . . . genius!’

We’ve saved the best for last – social media exec Lauren’s Nokia 3210 was the most advanced of all, boasting a super slimline body with an internal aerial. It’s also one of the most popular mobile phones of all time. But her favourite feature?

I remember boasting about my monophonic ringtones, I’d spend all of my credit buying tunes off the telly! 

Ahh, the days before the App Store – forget Angry Birds, a singing ‘Crazy Frog’ was enough to keep the kids entertained.

That’s a wrap. Happy birthday to the mobile phone, we don’t know where we’d be without you (still waiting for our friends to turn up, probably). What was your first mobile? Comment or tweet us @bluepostdigital!

Morven McCulloch, Copywriter

I enjoyed Lexi Mills’s presentation on the ’7 Secret Weapons of Successful Content & Outreach’ as she mentioned some good tips on how to predict trends and highlighted the importance of effectively packaging content to maximise the impact on consumers. These are two key elements that we actively implement into our daily content output at Bluepost, and we’ve seen the benefits for ourselves.

Jenny Bailey, Senior Account Manager

It was great to see Sharon Flaherty (Confused.com’s Head of Content) talk about how creating engaging brand content onsite not only leads to increased site visits but improves conversions. An ex Financial Times journalist, Flaherty was asked to ignore SEO and follow a news-room model to encourage people to engage with the brand. Highlights of Flaherty’s presentation include a graph which showed site visits rocketing since they invested in content marketing, as well as examples of issue-based video content. Brand engagement, loyalty, driving traffic, SEO – a number of marketing priorities can be met by brand content that is fully multi-media. After dropping to page 2 for ‘car insurance’, Confused.com is back at position 1 – a perfect example of how an integrated content strategy which publishes quality content for the benefit of users will naturally attract links. Google can only reward this in search results.

Emily Sherlock, Content Manager

My favourite talk was from Hannah Smith whose presentation was entitled “Go Big or Go Home”. Hannah is an excellent public speaker and managed to put her point across in a funny and humorous way, which was great to watch. But importantly, Hannah’s point was that large content that takes over 40 hours to produce can sometimes be seen as a bit of a gamble. However, it’s something that brands should definitely be embracing, particularly in these ‘post-update’ days when content that simply chugs along is no longer going to cut it on its own.  With our team producing campaigns of all sizes for our clients, this is definitely something that we at Bluepost can attest to.

Lauren Davey, Social Media Executive

I had the job of live-tweeting from BrightonSEO and by doing that I managed to pick up some quotes, which stuck in my mind over the weekend.

• Bing speaker Dave Coplin mentioned that the ‘QWERTY’ keyboard was invented to slow people down. Apparently typists were able to type so fast on a type writer that it used to block and jam the strings, so Scholes’, the inventor of the first typewriter rearranged the letters which resulted in no jams! It’s funny how a keyboard originally intended to make us do our jobs less efficiently is still around today.
  
• “Think human, be human” – Dave Coplin – A great take on personalising internet searches.
• Dixon Jones predicted that sometime in the future Google will switch off access to a proper search unless you are signed in. This statement came back to London with me and I think I told everyone I saw that weekend, just to gauge their reaction and to figure out whether they knew what that would even mean…it’s a scary concept – let’s see if it happens!
• “Small content, small gamble, small reward” – Hannah from Distilled was making a very clear point that if you continue to create the same ‘small’ content which in turn gets the same ‘small’ results, then it’s never going to be enough to stand up to the big competitors.

Did you attend? Or maybe you spotted us by the free ice-cream van? Come and say hello on Twitter and let us know your thoughts!

This year for the first time, the event is taking place over three venues: The Dome Concert Hall, Corn Exchange and the Dome Studio Theatre. It’s been difficult picking the talks I want to attend, with big names such as Argos, Channel 4 and Autotrader all presenting across the venues. However, I’ll largely be in the Dome Studio Theatre where the talks on content and link-building take place. The Corn Exchange is hosting talks on data and scale, while a variety of different topics from How to Pitch Journalists to a look at whether the Bing search engine is the way forward, takes place in the Dome Concert Hall.

I’m particularly looking forward to Peter Jordan’s talk on using Analytics to Determine Content and the chance to ask ex-Google employees to share the search engine giant’s secrets in the Introductory Panel – it’ll certainly be interesting to hear the questions others put to them.

Sadly the free conference tickets have all gone, but if you attend one of the training workshops on Thursday you’ll receive a ticket to the conference on Friday.

We’ll be giving a recap of the highlights following the event, where you’ll be able to find out what our favourite talks were and if any Bluepostians stayed on for the karaoke…

Meet Steve, our SEO Copywriter. Described (by himself) as a Superman who manages to be a ‘writer by day’ but says that doesn’t stop him ‘saving the world by night.’ One of Blueposts’ most punctual employees, he managed to squeeze in five minutes to answer this all important questionnaire.

1.Summer or winter?

Definitely summer. I can put my shorts on and don’t have to resort to growing a beard to try and keep warm!

2.What’s your job title at BPD, and what does that mean you really do?

SEO Copywriter. I write both on-site and off-site copy for various clients, as well as blog posts and meta data (the bits that you see when you search for something on Google).

3.If you were a superhero, who would you be and why?

Superman. Writer by day and saving the world by night.

4.What’s your favourite thing about work?

The fascinating conversations we have in the office about cats. *cough* I also enjoy writing for different brands and seeing my work published on their websites.

5.How were you educated?

I did a Media degree in Leeds.

6.What’s your top tip for people who want your job?

First of all you need to enjoy writing, so setting up a blog is a good idea to develop your writing style. The industry can be tough to get into, so it’s great to have a variety of writing experience on your CV. Email companies you’re interested in, asking if you could write content for them and they may even start paying you!

7.What would your friends say is your worst attribute?

Sarcasm can probably get pretty annoying.

8.Would you rather spend a day working in McDonalds or driving a bus?

Although I’m partial to a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I think I’d rather drive a bus. I get annoyed by most people on public transport so at least if I were in charge of driving it, I could choose who to let on – probably not many!

Image via Technorati

Facebook has announced its latest round of changes for its users. Not satisfied with the last complete overhaul to the ‘timeline’, it has now decided to change your news feed view. Changes will include:

- more of a focus on visual and images becoming larger
- multiple feeds
- mobile consistency

Maybe due to their purchase of Instagram, photos will now appear more prominently in the news feed, be almost twice as large, and centralised. You will also be able to subscribe to different feeds and cut out what you don’t want to see, e.g. just updates from close friends, all your friends, music, photos, and (best of all in my opinion) finally a chronological option. So no more out-of-date updates appearing repeatedly from someone in your news feed? Hurrah. So, initially are you going to be a fan of these changes, set to roll out shortly? It could be a bit of a while before we see a mass roll out across all accounts…

So, how will this impact brands and their lovingly crafted pages? Well, this is yet to be seen.

But could we see a change in the way brands promote their products and services as a reaction to this? Does this spell the end of the ‘thumbs up’ updates, as brands will have to be cleverer, wittier, or offer more to attract our attention – as, with multiple streams, will filtering out brand messages be easier? Brands already work extremely hard to get ‘likes’ and are continually employing cleverer and more engaging tactics to attract fans, without resorting to paid advertising on Facebook. As this giant of a social network wasn’t built for brands, sometimes changes work against companies. But some brand pages are genuinely interesting and provide fans with information worthy of sharing. So will this change affect sponsored stories and targeted ads? There is little information about this too…

Zuckerberg has the final word:
“How we’re all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes. This is the evolving face of news feed.”

Well said, Mark.

As Senior Account Manager Jenny is responsible for many things, not least liaising with clients, brainstorming campaigns and making sure the wheels of Bluepost are running smoothly. Easily spotted in the office by her pink heels, she also takes charge of cake baking, birthdays and the office playlist – the warm and fuzzy bits!

1. What would you choose – Daddy or chips, and why?
Daddy. Every time. He’s irreplaceable.

2. Did you go to University? What did you study, and where?
I studied English at Reading University.

3. What’s your favourite thing about working at Bluepost Digital?
The opportunity to create magnificent things. The online world is limitless – it’s a great industry to be part of if you’re of a creative disposition.

3. What’s your official job title and what do you do here?
Senior Account Manager. I work closely with our clients and the Bluepost team to ensure we deliver successful integrated digital strategies that meet their requirements. All brands are online publishers of content – it’s our job to ensure a clear message is delivered to the right people in all the right places.

4. What would your friends say is your most prized possession and why?
My cat Mog. She’s quite unique… she plays fetch, follows me everywhere and has mastered the art of the roly poly (not even I’ve done that).

5. If the world was all one colour, which one would it be?
Flamingo pink.

6. What did you do before you worked at Bluepost?
I was a Senior Staff Writer for a contract publisher, which specialised in print and online magazines for the salon and spa industry.

7. What would be your dream job, if you could do anything in the world?
Freelance interiors writer. I’ve recently refurbished a property in Kent and absolutely loved choosing not just what paint to use, but where plugs and light switches went, the layout of our kitchen, what walls to take down, etc. I’d love to launch a blog that shared my experience – helping others design their homes. Either that or a cat trainer.

8. What piece of technology could you not live without?
I have to be predictable here and say my iPhone. I commute from Kent so it’s handy for emailing, texting, reading… Everything you need in one gadget. If you’d have asked me in ’92 it would most definitely have been my Sega Game Gear.

First up it’s the selection of social media head honcho Kate: Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign, a 2010 smash for the venerable toiletries manufacturer. This humorous clip wasn’t just for kicks, it was also the product of careful audience insight – Old Spice’s market research revealed that over 60% of buyers of men’s shower products were actually women. The clear challenge was to create a campaign that would manage to appeal to both sexes simultaneously, while stimulating conversation about the product (key to encouraging sharing of the video). The final product hits the bullseye brilliantly – addressing women directly, but with a gentle facetiousness that raises laughs from the men in their lives. Take a look below (here’s the video of that thing you like):

Copywriting machine Steve picked out this candid-style Nike Football clip, showing Ronaldhino using a new pair of boots to repeatedly smash a football from the middle of the 16-yard box to the crossbar – before having it bounce back to his feet in a perfect arc. He does it four times in a row before the video’s end, and the shaky, home-video style footage appears to lend credibility to the goings-on. Of course, this sparked debate online among watchers – in the videos comments, on Facebook and on Twitter in particular – about whether the feat was faked or for real. Zinedine Zidane even passed comment, stating that it was ‘impossible’ for it to be genuine. As it turns out, the video is fake, but it hardly matters – by keeping it on everyone’s lips and stoking the fires of the debate, Nike managed to generate a huge amount of buzz around their Football brand, and with relatively little budget spent.

The final clip this week is chosen by blogger outreacher Jo, getting all nostalgic over 90s web browsers with the help of Microsoft. This one wasn’t technically designed as a viral campaign – it was created for TV, but its techy topic and appeal to children of the 90s (a huge swathe of which dominate social clearinghouses like Reddit) meant it spread rapidly. Jo shares her thoughts:

“Internet Explorer has long been old hat in the browser stakes, so it was nice to see them going the nostalgic route and getting all the 90s kids to “reconnect” [good one - Ed] with the browser they probably grew up using in the days before Firefox and Chrome”

It’s an interesting attempt to make a very unsexy and much maligned product attractive again – playing on other 90s tropes like Hungry Hungry Hippos pulls at the heartstrings, and plays on the desires that many of us have to reacquaint ourselves with objects from childhood. It also ties in nicely with Microsoft’s current push for relevancy – an aging giant whose mindshare has been steadily marginalized in favour of Apple and Google for the last decade.

Ta ta for now – have a great weekend!