We are delighted to be working with Passenger Focus - the independent passenger watchdog.

The brief was to produce 12 versions of their regional bulletin, Passenger Voice. This publication is produced quarterly and is mailed out to MP’s and many other decision makers connected with the transport industry. It covers a wide range of topics including the results of the National Passenger Survey - the largest survey of Britain’s rail passengers. This revealed that value for money satisfaction scores had increased a record eight points to 48% and also that five out of six passengers (83%) reported they were satisfied overall with their last rail journey. Other topics included customer’s views on ticketing machines and how the rail companies cope when faced with disruption.

In addition to the traditional printed bulletin’s we also produced an ‘accessible’ version for the visually impaired and all the versions were added to the website in an interactive eBrochure format. This is the first time Passenger Focus has used this, and it has been well received.

Our website has really connected in some way with our peers this year, we’ve had nothing but praise and recognition since its launch back in November 2009. When it launched we were confident that we’d created something very different from the norm, something that would get people talking. We’ll hopefully be adding to the silverware we’ve already picked up for it by winning yet another award at this years Dadi Awards. We’ve been nominated for the “In-house Website or Campaign” and “Use of Visual Design” categories. Fingers crossed!

Now in their fourth year the Dadi Awards, in association with Leeds Live it Love it, has become synonymous with digital effectiveness, where agencies, clients and individuals from across the UK show the depth of their online thinking and the breadth of their digital design.

Not so long ago mobile phones were used primarily for making phone calls. One brand, over 200,000 apps and five billion downloads later, the App Store has transformed the mobile phone into a device that can do virtually anything you need it to. But since its release in 2007, the iPhone’s five senses (multi-touch interface, accelerometer/gyroscope, GPS, camera and mic) have lost their novelty benefit, and today’s developers need to do more than just create “an app for that”, they need to use the senses creatively.

Once the preserve of sat nav, GPS has opened up a new class of apps. If you want some examples look at the new range of geo-location based social networks - Foursquare, GoWalla, Rummble or Everytrail. The degree to which they are geographical or social differs from platform to platform, but the features they display generally fall into one of these two categories. Typical features within these two types are as follows…

1. Location data - outlets (shops, bars, etc), reviews, information, photos, people.

2. Social features - friends, updates, integration with other social networks (Facebook/Twitter etc), games.

The use of games in these apps have helped transform what was once niche into a very fast growing technology. Pioneered by Foursquare, users of the network can collect and unlock virtual badges for actions around the site. Members can also claim outlets as their own by checking in there more than anyone else. By doing this, they become ‘Mayors’ of the outlet. However these bragging rights are under threat - because if anyone else manages to check in more than them they lose their title to the incumbent.

This may seem trivial but it makes the service entertaining (one of three metrics used by the App Store for determining an app’s success alongside its utility and social value) - even when users don’t know many people, which is always a challenge for new social networks. They also give users a connection to the site and a reason to keep coming back - to gain new badges and above all to retain their mayorships. These also provide two ways for brands to interact on site, promote themselves and add value to users.

Even without the social side, the use of geo-located data provides some interesting opportunities. For example Everytrail allows users to track their routes on hikes, bike rides or walks, and add notes and photos to these trips. These can then be recorded and shared. Everytrail users therefore have access to thousands of these trips in hundreds of locations, focused around a wide variety of interests - from horse-riding to photography.

The story is just beginning. Despite the privacy concerns, the numbers joining these networks is growing incredibly rapidly. Foursquare, for example, is currently gaining 100,000 new users every week. For marketing managers we see the use of them fitting into these eight categories:

1. Geo-located offers
2. Treasure hunts
3. Rewards for the Mayor
4. Data aggregation
5. Special badges
6. Discovery
7. Loyalty schemes
8. Announcements

If you’d like to find out how geo-location based social networks can work for your brand, business or organisation please give us a call on 01226 292921 and ask for Behrooz Saeed.

Advertising revenue at Facebook is expected to pass the £1bn mark next year for the first time, as rival MySpace is expected to see ad revenues shrink 14%, according to a new report.

Facebook, which has more than 500 million global users, leaving one-time social networking darling MySpace in the shade, is expected to bring in $1.285bn (£824m) in ad revenue this year.

About 65% of ad revenue is derived from the US market, according to a report from research firm eMarketer. This compares with MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which is estimated to be on target to make $347m this year.

Next year Facebook is forecast to hit $1.76bn (£1.13bn), with a slightly lower 60% coming from the US market, which means Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild will have seen ad revenues grow by 165% between 2009 and 2011.

MySpace on the other hand is expected to see ad revenues fall 14% between 2010 and 2011 to $297m.

“Brand advertisers are making Facebook a core buy,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Ad spending is building quickly and the mass audience is one that marketers cannot ignore any longer.”

Zuckerberg told the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June that “it is almost a guarantee” that Facebook will eventually top 1 billion users, with significant room for further growth in countries including Russia, Japan and China.

Thanks to The Guardian for this wonderful news item.

The Roses Design Awards is heading back to Manchester for 2010, taking place on Thursday 14th October in the Ramada in Manchester and we’ll be there to see if we’ve won yet another award for our website.

At this gala black-tie event the results of the 2010 awards will be revealed and the trophies handed out. Those who have entered will be waiting in anticipation to see if they have won an award, been commended or remained nominated.

Attended by around 400 key individuals from the architecture and design industry, suppliers to the industry and our fantastic judging panel, this event provides the platform for those who have demonstrated excellence in design to be rewarded as well as allowing attendees to use the ceremony as a networking tool.

For a long time now, autoresponders have been one of the most requested new features for email™ - our fantastic email marketing application.

So what took us so long? Well, autoresponders can be tricky beasts; they can be prone to abuse, become complex to manage, and quickly overwhelm subscribers (hello, spam complaints). They can also be incredibly valuable.

We were prepared to hold off until we knew we could solve these problems in a simple way. After a stack of design iterations, usability testing and a huge effort from our developers, we are finally ready to put it in your hands.

Before we get too carried away, how about a quick introduction. Autoresponders go by a few different names like triggered emails and drip campaigns, but essentially they are an automated email, or sequence of emails sent when a subscriber meets a condition you set. For example, when someone joins your list, your subscriber’s birthday, or a month since someone purchased from your store.

Basically, you set the rules around when an autoresponder should be triggered and tell us what emails to send. We’ll do the rest.

You never want to email a subscriber when it’s not what they asked for or isn’t something they’d be interested in. The “set and forget” mentality that comes with autoresponders can be a dangerous thing, so we’ve made it easy for you to choose exactly what should cause an autoresponder to be triggered.

You can trigger an autoresponder when a new subscriber joins your list (via a subscribe form or the API), or when a subscriber’s date-based custom field matches a rule you set. Date-based autoresponders can be based on either the anniversary of that date (like a birthday), or an exact match (like a membership expiry).

Of course, there are other scenarios outside these like a link clicked in a campaign, or more sophisticated conditions being met, but as always we’re going for the simplest implementation to meet the needs of the majority of customers. If the demand is there, we’ll look at adding more ways to trigger them in the future.

We put a lot of thought into building autoresponder reports that you can actually learn from. At a glance we give you an overview of the basics like how many emails have been sent, the average open rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate. But, it’s the “over time” stats that are really interesting.

Autoresponders are often something you put a lot of work into setting up initially, but then only tend to check on them occasionally. With that in mind, we focused on making it easy to spot how each email in the sequence is performing over time.

Our email marketing application is packed full of useful features like this. If you’d like to arrange a demo then please get in touch with a member of our team on 01226 292921.

It’s not been long since we launched a new website for the Rivergate Shopping Centre but we’ve continued our efforts to address more day-to-day issues by designing and creating a fully bespoke Tenants Extranet for the Centre.

Over the years we’ve worked with many Shopping Centres and experience has taught us that communication between the tenants and centre management is never as efficient as it can/should be. The same problem exists with contractors too.

We’ve helped the Rivergate Shopping Centre address this problem by creating a Tenants Extranet. It’s a secure web-based portal that provides both tenants and contractors access to; General Documents, Meeting Minutes, Presentations, Feedback and Centre Announcements.

The Extranet not only acts as a centralised document sharing facility but it allows the Centre to easily and efficiently send out email based announcements to all tenants and contractors at the click of a button.

Centre Director Patrick Robbertze said: “This is going to revolutionise the way we communicate with our tenants and contractors, it really is a ‘must have’ for any Centre, no matter how big or small”.

Many people have criticised the iPad as an in-between product that lacks both the portability benefits of smartphones and the power and multi-tasking of netbooks. I believe the iPad will be something of a game changer in the way we consume media and in providing new opportunities for marketing.

Let’s start with the audience. I believe the profile of iPad users will be somewhat different from the typical Apple fan. I bought our iPad for family sofa browsing (and testing of course!), and it’s a great shared device. As well as families, I think it will be a hit with older users and I’ll certainly be recommending it to my parents. If you take a look Google’s Ad Planner data for Apple’s sites, you’ll see that more than a fifth of Apple’s users are already over 45.

The iPad is going to accelerate the use of apps and ebooks. You’re probably aware that when the iPad went on sale in the US, it sold over a million units in its first month. But did you know that it prompted the download of 12 million apps from the App Store and 1.5 million ebooks? So there are opportunities to develop engaging branded utilities and free ebooks or PDFs that will be browsed at home. Of course, it’s hard to get cut-through in the App Store with the sheer number of apps so expect to see more promotion of branded utilities via a company’s social presence.

So if your colleagues have discussed creating an app for your organisation or they’re worried whether your website works on the iPad then it’s worth checking current iPad usage via your analytics. Many companies use Google Analytics and this already offers the option to view iPad visits in the Visitors > Mobile Devices menu option.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this subject simply call one of our digital experts on 01226 292921.

When Google announced Chrome, critics suggested there wasn’t room for another entry in the browser race. Firefox was taking chunks out of Internet Explorer’s market share. Safari had the Mac market sewn up and Opera had only really gained momentum in the mobile space. However, a combination of marketing clout and the fact that, as it turns out, Google knows how to put together a pretty good browser, is starting to make critics eat their words. In December 2009, Chrome zoomed past Safari, and today NetMarketShare and GetClicky say it’s significantly past Apple’s browser.

It appears Firefox hasn’t taken a hit (although it’s share remains flat), and nor has Safari - most of Chrome’s growth has been at the expense of Internet Explorer, which remains in a state of slow decline, and currently has an estimated share of between 50 and 60 per cent. And in a piece of good news for us (web designers), Internet Explorer 6 fell below 5 per cent share for the first time in May, according to StatCounter - a drop of 7 per cent since May 2009. A quick thanks to .Net Magazine for this great article.

When London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Town Council asked us to create a fun and funky twist to promoting the famous Dagenham Town Show, we stepped straight into the arena!

Dagenham Town Show has been running for over 60 years and this year headlines with X factors very own Stacey Solomon. Over the weekend there will be plenty of other entertainment, from the exciting motorbike display team Moto Stunts International to the wacky clowning activities of Tom and Tilly, perfect for children, and Bruce Airhead.

There will also be a dazzling display of acrobatics from the Kangaroos Gymnastic team and breathtaking daredevil feats from the Stannage Stunt team.

As well as all this fun and entertainment, there will be exhibition stalls from a variety of council services, charities and local organisations.

Take a look at - www.lbbd.gov.uk/dagenhamtownshow