The Brighton QR Code Treasure Hunts

In September 2011, I set up the Brighton QR Treasure Hunt website along with Marie from the The Brighton Treasure Hunt Company. We ran our first event for the Digital Festival 2011 in Brighton which was a great success. Visit Brighton were a fantastic support and the Brighton Dome kindly gave us the use of the Founders Room. The feedback on this quirky QR Code event from our participants was excellent and we raised over £600 for the Rockinghorse charity.

Spurred on, we ran another event for White Night 2011 with the winning prize of a swanky hotel room, donated from myhotel. Funding to run the treasure trail as a free event, was granted from Brighton Council and over 500 participants signed up to join the treasure trail on the night. “Exceeding our expectations” is an understatement  – we were thrilled at the response!

“Jed & Tilley V King Oo-Bank & Queen Jar-Dan”  

So we’re planning on returning with something even more special and quirky for the Brighton Fringe Festival in May 2012. Jed & Tilley, the heros of our story are on a mission to save Brighton from the evil King Oo-Bank & Queen Jar-Dan, who want to take over Brighton and change it forever: and believe me, this will be a living hell to the good people of Brighton if it happens.

This truly interactive 3 hour event will have participants searching, singing, dancing, dressing up, acting, cracking clues in QR codes, live tweeting and putting their ‘make and do’ skills to the test.

To make the event a reality, we are seeking crowding funding from the arts funding website “We Did This”. They are a little like KickStarter and say in their manifesto:

We will build a popular movement to support and transform the UK arts sector; a new alliance between artists and their audiences to take control of arts funding.

Marie and I are hoping to raise £1000 to pay for the hire of a venue over 4 consecutive Saturdays during the Brighton Fringe Festival to hold a Dragon’s Den style product presentation that will save our fabulous city from the evil King Oo-Bank & Queen Jar-Dan.

Find out more about our project and the event over at the Brighton QR Treasure Hunt website and Facebook page. To become an arts support and donate to our project, visit our project funding page on the We Did This website.

[custom_frame_left][/custom_frame_left]Sodaworks is finally getting a well deserved makeover and update. I took some time out to complete my MA in Digital Media Arts (yes that’s me looking pretty chuffed) and now it’s over I can get on with blogging, designing websites, talking about digital media and a few of my new found interests.

I am still developing Sodaworks so this is clearly a skeleton site but it’s really good to be back here again. With refreshed enthusiasm and some awesome projects in the pipeline, I’ll be blogging to my hearts content over the coming weeks.

Sodaworks are moving offices, working on new projects and updating the website. We hope to be back in full swing soon. Existing clients can contact us a usual and new enquiries should be made via email to

hello@sodaworks.co.uk

This is an excellent round-up of digital trend predictions for 2011 from Steve Rubel and David Armano. Moving on from the social media explosion and the need for good relevant content, it seems we need to be creating a narrative between our content, audience and relevant multiple platforms. Basically, storytelling. What does this mean for the average marketeer, business owner or website editor? Tell your story, engage your audience.

“Marketers begin to realize the value of attention” so driving traffic to a site is important but keeping your visitor interested in your content is what is important here. It’s refreshing to think that content will become relevant, that social media will become truly social and not just the done thing.

“Identify under-served niches and meet them”, “frame up issues and discussions; editorialize”, “make curation collaborative and social”. I think the digital creatives out there should be inspired by these predictions. Creatives are the innovators in digital content creation. The Marketeers are the promotors of digital content. Social media, mobile devices, the humble desktop, all become important platforms for sharing a story and creating a discussion around that story.

Alongside Sodaworks, I’m studying for an MA in Digital Media Arts. This highlights to me to the potential of the digital medium and the issues that arise; how we can embrace digital media as an important part of our social interaction. Our message has to reach beyond our website homepage, shop window and Facebook profile.

Ubiquitous computing means that we’re digitally connected without even realising it. A large majority of us will regularly, throughout the day, check our emails, send and receive texts, connect on Facebook etc without thinking about it. Therefore technology has presented us with a tremendous opportunity for communication. These actionable predictions simply highlight how best we can utilise this technology now that we’re getting over the novelty and embracing it as part of our everyday lives.

Last week I wrote about how a business breakfast in Brighton re-ignited my belief that social media strategy is about great content and engagement with customers. I am at the stage of continually monitoring what works and what doesn’t for my own online marketing strategy and that of my clients. I’m finding that WordPress websites are proving to be extremely popular right now, as a cost effective manageable CMS system and I adore building them. However once I hand the websites over to the client how well they perform is out of my hands.

Websites need to be found and the search engines are the holy grail for any website owner. Grasping the basics of SEO: back–linking, defining niche keywords, monitoring competitors’ online strategies, reading the latest industry news and writing an occasional blog post are excellent ways of helping your organic search engine results.

You charm the search engines, but what about your visitor? Your potential collaborators and customers?  Once your visitors find your website you want them to fall in love with your service or product, or sign-up for your newsletter or follow you on Twitter. It’s your website content that will encourage this kind of activity and this is known as Content Marketing to some.

Content Marketing: another hyped up phrase surrounding online marketing? Actually no. It’s common sense and most website owners do it anyway. (Or at least they should be). Generating regular content in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics.  It isn’t rocket science but it is time consuming. A content marketing strategy, a calendar of blog posts, a series of videos on YouTube, recording and distributing a set of podcasts. They are all powerful forms of content when done regularly and consistently. THEN you have something to day. Something to share.

Once you get your content marketing strategy in place you will reap the benefits especially via social media channels. Social media networks are platforms to promote your amazing content.

As a designer I want to make things user friendly and look good. As a marketeer I want to communicate my message. Good design + great content = the chance of a successful website. Once you have this combination you can then share it on Facebook or gain feedback on your new content via Twitter. Having social media profiles won’t do anything unless you have something to say. Then Listen: listen to your visitors and your customers. Utilise free tools such as Socialmention, or Google alerts. Then respond and enter into a dialogue.

Here is the Sodaworks’s outline journey of website content…it’s really only the beginning:

1. Build a user friendly website (read Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ for a little insight. Also sign up to Econsultancy, Mashable and Smashing Mag‘s RSS or Twitter feeds for excellent resources.
2. Search engine optimise your website. Research your target market, competitors and keywords. Write some lovely copy and use some stunning images.
3. Research basic SEO. Meta tags, descriptions, anchor text. It will pay dividends in the long term if you know what to do and all website owners should at least know the basics.
4. So you’ve got a website outlining your product and services. Now start producing extra content: e-books, videos, podcasts or simply expand on your service or product information. (Read the Junta42 blog for ideas and content inspiration.)
5. NOW sign up to social media and use these channels to distribute your lovely new content.
6. Listen to what people are saying about you, your products, your competitors, your industry. Engage with them. Comment on others who are involved in similar areas.
7. Persevere! It’s time consuming, but you will soon start building up a network of loyal customers and followers.

I attended my first Brighton Chambers of Commerce business breakfast this morning. I’ve been taking my time with Sodaworks and felt it was time to start networking, not only to promote my business but also to learn from other business owners.

I’ve heard good things over the months about the Brighton Chambers meetings and I wasn’t disappointed this morning. A friendly welcome, half an hours networking with coffee readily available and a yummy breakfast at Carluccios. You can’t go wrong really and it’s pretty obvious why I chose today to be my first effort into the chambers events. Metro Deco, a 1930′s style, dog friendly teashop in Kemp Town Brighton, were speaking about their business and about their engagement with social media.

Speaking to Maggie Morgon after the talk I found out that Maggie and her business partner Helen Wilkinson were pretty nervous before speaking. Their practically untouched breakfasts sitting on the table, were a testament to that fact. However it didn’t come across like that to me. As I listened to their story I was inspired by how their passion for tea and dogs has helped them succeed and create a successful niche business. What’s even better is they have found that using social media methods is an affordable and effective method of communicating with their customers, potential customers and keeping up that sense of community, that’s also been key to their retail presence.

Metro Deco don’t just ‘do’ social media. They actively engage with their audience. In addition they are passionate about their products and their core aims and objectives. They have found a niche that’s clearly proven popular and their story is a great case study as to how social media can work for a business. They use it to communicate their content: a great service and product. A business can have the greatest social media gurus on board and expensive monitoring tools in place. However if that business doesn’t have good content, something worthwhile to share and say or an excellent product, marketing efforts will be a waste of time in the long run. Passion & Product = Content and social media marketing, online marketing or any sort of marketing for that matter won’t work without this combination.

As a small business owner myself, sometimes this can all seem a bit of a slog. Just finding the time to find prospective clients, manage the accounts, admin, networking: it’s time consuming. Listening to Metro Deco’s story was inspiring and the slog seems worth it again, especially when I’m so passionate about digital media content and social media marketing. And yes two women succeeding in business will always grab my attention. For this reason alone, today’s event was a success for me.

Brighton’s networking scene is clearly a vibrant one and I’m looking forward to the next event.

Project Brief: Hypnotherapy Lounge was founded by Sarah Turner, an inspiring business woman and hypnotherapy therapist with a passion for the benefits of hypnotherapy. Sarah wanted to create a new brand and website to sell MP3 hypnotherapy downloads, tickets to hypnotherapy workshops and have a place to blog about these products and share her expertise.

Project Details: Hypnotherapy Lounge was a project requiring Sodaworks’full range of services including logo design, setting up an ecommerce website for downloadable products and a ticketing system for hypnotherapy workshops. Furthermore Sodaworks was responsible for designing and configuring the Hypnotherapy Lounge social media profiles and integrating them with an RSS feed from the Hypnotherapy Lounge website. WordPress training was then delivered.

Services Provided:
Wordpress Ecommerce Website
Logo Design
Social Media Profiles
RSS Integration
Wordpress Training

Project Brief: The event director came to Sodaworks to help the European Future Energy Forum initialise and integrate a social media campaign into their existing marketing strategy. The European Future Energy Forum website is an informative website packed full of interesting articles perfect for sharing across various social media channels.

Project Details: Consulting and delivering a social media strategy for the European Future Energy 2010 event this year. This included setting up a Facebook Page, Twitter and Digg accounts and integrating them with the event website’s RSS feed. A training seminar in social media best practice and how to use social media for marketing purposes was then delivered to the Event Director and staff.

Services Provided:
Social Media Strategy and Profiile Set Up
RSS Integration

Project Brief: Brighton graphic design agency Harrington McDermott needed an SEO review, after moving offices and expanding their services and so commissioned Sodaworks to carry out a full SEO website audit.

Project Details:  This exciting project began with a complete website redesign using the WordPress CMS. As part of their wider online marketing strategy, Sodaworks undertook a website audit, then devised and implemented a social media strategy using Twitter, Facebook, Behance and Posterous. In addition tasks included rewriting the HM website copy and optimising it, according to the keywords set as a result of the SEO website audit. Currently Sodaworks provide a ‘ghost’ copywriting service for the Harrington McDermott blog, researching and creating original content.

Services Provided:
Wordpress website development
SEO research and website audit
Social media profiles set-up and strategy
Copywriting