Yesterday’s final day of the season saw plenty of fond farewells, tearful goodbyes and calls for a few old faces to return, and it would seem most emotion centered around the managers. After 26 years Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down as manager of Manchester United, just as another Scot prepared to take his place. Across town, defending League champion Roberto Mancini achieved second for Manchester City, but failed to collect over £14m in prize money after City bosses ‘let him go’ early.

Targets not met apparently, and nor were they for Harry Redknapp who failed to keep The Hoops in the Premiership. Roberto Martínez couldn’t avoid the slide either, as Wigan became the first team to be relegated and win the FA Cup in the same season. Of course, oddball is nothing new in football as next season sees the (likely) second coming of ‘celebrity’ manager José Mourinho. After a turbulent time in Madrid, can he still wield his charismatic magic? More importantly, who in the Dusted Conference League turned out to be the ‘Special One’ and top our own (albeit rather shallow) premiership table?

I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

Honorary Dustee James Winzar of Insite Graphics secured the top spot, but not without a strong fight from Wallop Athletic (who on more than one occasion, managed to top the table for several weeks). Friend of Dusted and Arsenal fan, Nic Achampong started late but strongly, and climbed to third while a season long mid-table battle saw Dan’s Distasters pip Matt’s Rangers to fourth spot in the very last game. Sadly, LA Golds and Lucy’s Lockets were relegated after trophy hunting in the bake-off proved far more fruitful.

The Dusted Conference League Table

Photo credit: katatonia82 / Shutterstock.com

The Geoffrey Harrison Foundation is directly funded by Harrison and was set up by Geoffrey Harrison (the founder of Harrison Catering) to encourage young people to consider a career in the hospitality industry, by giving them the opportunity to learn key skills in the kitchen.

Having worked with Harrison for nearly a decade, Dusted have been instrumental in establishing the Harrison brand as a industry leader. This branding and their fresh food provenance, has been successfully extended to form the basis of the web design for The Geoffrey Harrison Foundation.

I was for some time a senior catering manager at Ford Motor Company, with a team of 114, serving approximately 3,000 people daily.  It taught me the importance of delivering.

The course has gone on to give a lot of the applicants that vital ‘foot in the door’ when applying to catering college and apprenticeships. Spanning a 10 week period, the course is held on Saturday mornings over three hours and students are taught key skills in food preparation, cooking, presentation, hygiene and safety and food service techniques.

At the end of the course, students participate in and attend a graduation lunch and awards ceremony and are given the opportunity to meet a number of the trustees.

So, in familiar Dusted Bake Off fashion we were to bake and create own cupcakes to be tasted and judged by the whole team. These sponge-based specialities would be judged on the following criteria;

• Taste
• Creativity
• Appearance
• Usability
• Texture

Each of these categories were scored out of 10 giving a possible total of 50 points, however in a Bake Off first, we decided to give taste more weight in the scoring (40% of the score), much to my frustration as it fell to me to make the overly complicated calculations.

So without further ado, the results.

So in summary, Lucy came out on top (yet again!), with Caroline in second and Emma in third.

For those who don’t know, the storyline sees the main protagonist abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is really a bizarre prison. Throughout he is referred to as ‘Number 6’ and struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape.

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.

“I am not a number, I am a free man” was the mantra chanted in each episode and has been used since to represent the struggle some people face for distinction (and not just those residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure). Whether it is your credit rating or driver’s license, everyone will at some point have been filed, stamped and indexed, and nowhere is this more prevalent than online, especially within the social media sphere.

I’m specifically referring here to the emerging group of startups that aim to measure your online ‘influence’: a statistical take on how many people you reach through social media, how much they trust you, and on what topics. Klout has long been regarded as the biggest player in this field, and following a recent investment from Microsoft, is set to go mainstream when Klout scores start to appear in Bing search results. Internet pundits have likened this to Google’s Pagerank, but for people, as you can imagine it has come in for some heavy criticism.

Some have regarded this measure of ‘social worth’ (or Klout score) as irrelevant and preying on user’s ‘social anxiety’. Others have valued it highly, even using it as a barometer for job candidates (the story of Sam Fiorella is well documented) and for businesses, the possibilities are quite vast with perks offered to those achieving high scores. This isn’t simply a reward scheme used to justify Klout’s business model, but more importantly, major companies have realised the importance of high social influencers and the effect they can have on their brands.

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Matt Thomson (Klout’s VP of platform) predicted people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive big discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets. All in the hope that they tweet about it of course.

Measuring this social engagement is the next step for big brands and this week Klout launched a dedicated service giving businesses ‘analytics with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media’. In other words, are your brand advocates working hard enough for you? Which topics are they most influential on and will they drive consideration for your brand?

Given Justin Beiber’s Klout score (last year it was a perfect 100; a little less now), you can imagine how valuable such a social influencer would be to major brands. However, consider for a moment the Twitter account of Big Ben in London: It tweets a ‘bong’ for every hour of the day, on the hour but manages to achieve a Klout score of 78. Not bad for an automated account but I suspect it won’t be getting an upgrade to first class any time soon.

For some, this was their first time karting, for others it was a chance to test their bottle for the throttle. For Matt and I it was a rematch. Back in 2008 the same fixture saw us duel to the finish line – Matt setting fastest lap; me narrowly beating Matt to the chequered flag. This time, Matt was on a mission but as we lined up on the grid, little did we know history would repeat itself.

The results speak for themselves (see table) but during the post race interviews, everyone had their own take on the competition…

Nobody remembers the guy who finished second but the guy who finished second.

“To achieve anything in this game you must prepare to dabble on the boundary of disaster”
Matthew Schumacher

“The only way cheating can be done successfully is when only one person knows about it”
Dan Hamilton

“It’s like flying jet fighters in a gymnasium”
Ross Alonso

“The track is my canvas. My car is my pencil”
Paul Di Resta

“The crashes people remember, but drivers remember the near misses more”
Emma Kovalainen

“I ran outta tyres, track and talent on the entry to turn two”
Lucy Rosberg

Race results

Photo credit: Flickr user redeye^

The Fellowship of the Ring consisted of nine companions (pursued by nine ringwraiths) and according to IMDB, during the making of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Elijah Wood and his fellow Hobbit actors all got commemorative tattoos of the epic production. Wood’s is of the numeral 9.

While popular culture nowadays has given us the Nine Muses, a look back over Greek mythology ensures the original nine muses are remembered as goddesses of the arts and sciences rather than Korean pop ‘sensations’.

In Japanese culture, the number nine is considered unlucky because it sounds similar to the word for ‘pain’ or ‘distress’. In contrast, Chinese culture considers nine a good number thanks to its similarity to the word ‘long-lasting’ (and incidentally, its association with the Chinese dragon, a symbol of magic and power).

Needless to say, we prefer to align our thinking to the Chinese (along with the daughters of Zeus) and consider our anniversary today, a key milestone of longevity. Happy birthday. Dusted.

Undoubtedly one of Britain’s greatest actors, this is a man who needs little introduction, and since 2004 Dusted has worked closely with the Burton estate to preserve an online record of Burton’s life and work via The Official Richard Burton Website – a new version of which launched today.

The website is the definitive collation of the body of Burton’s work from his beloved career in theatre to Academy Award nominations (together with Peter O’Toole, Burton holds the record for the most Oscar nominations – seven – without a single win). The site charts his life from a mining village in South Wales to the jet-set lifestyle of Hollywood, Burton was rarely out the spotlight and lived life at full throttle. Once he realised his great ability to act he relentlessly exercised his talents through the mediums of stage, screen, television, radio and commercial recordings.

I rather like my reputation actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer: it’s rather an attractive image.

Burton was renowned for his role in such films as Cleopatra (1963), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Equus (1977) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) as well as stage roles in Hamlet and Camelot (each twice) and again Equus which were all greeted enthusiastically by critics. He was last seen on Broadway starring with Elizabeth Taylor in Private Lives a play that many critics found too close to their own stormy romance for comfort.

Burton was an avid fan of Shakespeare, poetry and reading, having once said “Home is where the books are” but above all, he remains a Welsh legend. Burton died in 1984 aged 58 and at his funeral in Céligny, he was buried with a copy of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas.

So, in a similar vein to last year, we were to bake and construct our own creations of gingerbread. These ginger delights would be judged on the following criteria;

• Concept
• Appearance
• Structural integrity
• Usability
• Taste
• Texture
• Xmas factor

Each of these categories were scored out of 10 giving a possible total of 70 points. We all tasted each others creations and we also employed the services of another impartial judge, Alistair Lever—a photographer and friend of Dusted.

So without further ado, the results.

So in summary, Lucy came out on top (again!), with Caroline and Emma in joint second and Paul in third. However we are all winners of the prize that just keeps giving—the scent of ginger which seems to permeate the whole of the studio now.

Developed by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), the UK charity focused on improving care and support services, Find Me Good Care is a comprehensive source of adult social care information and advice. Following a competitive tender last year, Dusted were appointed to develop the brand positioning, naming, identity and integrated communications for the new social care brand.

This of course included the website, a fully responsive design with extensive search options and case studies. One of them is Jude Irwin, who has had to arrange care for her parents. She said: “It has been an absolute minefield finding the right care for my parents. They both have dementia and I’ve never felt very clear about the options available for them. A website like Find Me Good Care would have been really helpful to me; I would have loved a place to go to say: ‘These are my circumstances – what are my options.’ You don’t always get that at social services or the GP.”

A quarter of adults who already use care provision say they struggled to find appropriate care and now feel they ended up with the wrong type of support.

The care system is a mystery to many, with SCIE’s research revealing that the majority of British people don’t know what options are available to them and two thirds have no idea how much care provision costs. Find Me Good Care has been created to help people take their first steps in seeking the right care – it includes information and guidance on how to choose and pay for care together with a directory of providers and the opportunity to provide feedback.

However, Dusted’s attention was quite rightly slightly off to the periphery at the time—the Dusted fantasy Euro 2012 league.

Much like we did two years ago for the World Cup, we decided to test our soccer chops with a little Euro 2012 Fantasy Football league. The prestigious prize (which is the adoration of his colleagues—nothing more) went to Peter, who openly admits to “knowing nothing about football”. Clearly he has great analytical skills though. Could he be the next Statto?

Second place goes to a honorary Dustee for this competition, friend and client James Winzar of Insite Graphics, who clearly did know what he was doing, leading the pack for the majority of the competition and missing out on top spot by only 4 points. Third place went to Dan Pavitt, who unfortunately left us part-way through the tournament. This obviously didn’t stop him from giving it his all. The top of the table was also helped no end by a lack of transfer action from a couple of the players who ended up propping up the league. David in particular is smarting from forgetting to make crucial changes to his team before the final’s kick-off. He will have you believe he would have won if it wasn’t for this oversight.

A special mention should go to newcomer Dan Hodkinson though, who entered the competition a week late and missed out on the first round of points. Despite this handicap, he finished a respectable fifth.

The Dusted Fantasy Football league results

Photo credit: Flickr user da_belkin