What will 2010 bring?

December 30, 2009 by Paul Imre 

First things first, goodbye 2009, we are not going to miss you. What a year it has been. 2009 was difficult, challenging, testing and requiring one to run faster and faster just to stand still. Good, decent, upstanding and respectable clients went bust and some of the methods used by receivers are truly shocking, even the Times commented on this. All good for experience I suppose.

Last year as I looked forward to 2009 my Google searches did not reveal much to tickle my fancy. This year however there is plenty to digest. As a first observation more people seem to be looking forward, which I fully understand, more are taking guesses and are making interesting predictions.

The Scotsman even compares the previous year’s predictions. Nice. http://bit.ly/8GQ9zo

These are my favourites:

At Imre we probably need to pay more attention to these predictions.
Marketing Vox:  http://bit.ly/4N7TEo

Then there are all of these:

So where does that leave us with the thinking for 2010?

Value, radical thinking, relentless change, social media maturity where we can expect the likes of toobla.com to tie up the lose ends to make things more workable. Local seems to come up again and again.

And for our clients?

Most are using smart phones, those that are not, really need to make the jump. Devices such as iPhones will bring home how local services can work, and also where there are a few spare minutes, dipping into social media is entirely possible. Most clients say that they do not have time for social media activities. I think 2010 will be the year that those  who are not taking part in the conversations will find themselves exposed.

Cmon 2010, help us forget 2009! And it is time for an African team to show that 2010 belongs to Africa.

Happy new year from the IMRE Team!!

Late update:
From the Beeb for UK Manufacturing. Good for 2010.

Filed Under Blog, Social, Strategy, Web / Tech · Leave a Comment  

Twitter and productivity?

January 3, 2009 by Paul Imre 

There is an old joke that talks about the creation of Europe. It goes something like this.

1. The French wanted a Europe to stop the Germans from constantly invading.
2. The Germans needed a Europe due to Panzers being out of fashion.
3. The Brits wanted to join Europe after being kicked out of all the colonies.
4. The Irish wanted to join because the  Brits must have known something!

As far as Social Media goes I am a bit like the Irish.  I have been watching the dudes from the Social Media Mafia as I think they must know something. If the Irish can join Europe, well then I can join Twitter.

BUT - my biggest worry about all of this stuff has been around productivity. So I asked that question on Twitter and this is what I got back:

 
loudmouthman @audio yes education and insight, when applied to process and motivation is excellent tool to do things well, rather than more. 28 minutes ago from web in reply to audio

So I held these beliefs that Social Media must have a huge cost. Loudmouthman put a spanner in this line of thought only after a few seconds of me having raised the issue.

If you have read Clive Woodward’s book on winning, you will know that rather than trying to raise performance by 100%, using one method, you are much better off improving 100 things by 1%. In terms of Social Media the maths may actually look more like this:

audio RT @i_paul @audio One person loses say 10% but a hundred people gain by one or two percent? The bar moves up for everyone. Thats cool 39 minutes ago from web

So time to be more like the Social Media Mafia peeps. Time to engage and take action.

Filed Under Blog, Marketing, Social, Strategy · 1 Comment  

Education, Education, Education ( MCL2 )

December 6, 2008 by admin 

Who said education, education and education?
Well he has moved on, having not sorted out the Uk Education system he decided to meddle in the Israeli-Arab situation and buy a few houses along the way….. thanks Tony

So, forget the Gov and the people with the letters “PM”or “MP” after their names as they are barking up the wrong tree.

If you are into Web, SEO, Social Media, blogs, gaming and all that that other stuff in the soup or if you want to learn more or if you want to network, well  then there is only one thing you need to do.

Get down to the latest Social Media Mafia event on December 13th - it is FREE. ( MCL2)
http://mediacamplondon.pbwiki.com/register

We will be there. If you are not convinced trawl through facebook, flickr and search on Chris Hambly and read our previous posts.

Now this will be Education, Education and Education. (and Fun! Make sure you meet Jo!)

Filed Under Blog, Marketing, News, Social, Strategy, Web / Tech · 1 Comment  

Urban Tickets Click Cart Pro customer starts taking bookings even before the project is complete!

November 20, 2008 by admin 

When Biyi Desalu paid us a visit for his Urban Tickets project, we thought what a great idea. We did not really make any judgements, but we could see how the project might work having seen the momentum with another similar client, UrbanStrides.

However, there should have been a little warning for us after Biyi had told us that the Princes Trust had actually mentored him some time ago…….

We agreed to build the site and Biyi set of to work on the business side. Before we could get the site fully finished the bookings started to pour in. Amazing!

If you want a shop project to work, get your web guys to do their bit but don’t be fooled into thinking that you can put your feet up. You need to be out there, on the phones, meeting people, setting up relationships and working damn hard, really hard.

Learn from Biyi, get people to come to your shop and they will buy! Perhaps Biyi could help mentor other businesses?

Pssst! Want to know the secret? Try social media……

Filed Under Client Sites, Marketing, Social, Strategy · Leave a Comment  

Saturday night business

September 19, 2008 by Przemek 

Late one evening, a couple of friends came to visit my house mate.
We sat in the living room and started to talk. The first topic was work:
I couldn’t miss this opportunity to tell them that I’m a part of Imre Ltd, a web design company.

As it happens the company of one of my new friends was looking for a new website. So I started to talking about our business, existing projects, the technology that we are using and showed a few examples of our work.

In this way I met Jan, the contracts manager of CSC Screeding who are specialists in floor screeding systems. To cut a long story short, after our Saturday meeting they became our new customer.

I still meet with friends and new people regulary for informal chats. Who knows perhaps there will be another business opportunity around the corner?

Filed Under Social · 1 Comment  

Follow up to “How hard can thinking be?”

August 9, 2008 by Paul Imre 

Iain Chalmers of The Holst Group commented on our post and stated:

If you think that we are losing the economic battle to these countries now, just wait until they start to think better¦

This dialogue happened before I ran into an old teacher friend who pointed out a youtube video along similar lines.

Alternatively see the video clip here: Shift Happens

The news is great that at grass roots level teachers have woken up to this and are motivating our kids to wake up. BUT what about Gordon? Cameron? Education Education and Education? What is going on? We as small businesses are now dependant on the future capital of our youth. What are the schools churning out? and what are our leaders upto? Quoting the video clip: “China has more gifted and talented students than we have students.”

Someone needs to put creativity back into Education, Education Education!

Filed Under Social · 1 Comment  

Mediacamp London on 5th July at the SAE institute, a great idea from the Social Media Mafia.

July 6, 2008 by Paul Imre 

Yet again an amazing event for learning and getting up to speed on all aspects of Social Media. Here are my notes of the day.

1. Google cloud computing.

We have heard a lot about this recently in the press due to the acute shortages of power in London holding back  data-centre expansion. Similarly new data-centres  are being built in the colder climes of the planet just to cope with the shift towards the cloud.

Anyway, Jo Jordan presented her Zimple project. Essentially the idea is simple, you need to learn a bit of python, develop on your laptop and stick it on Google for free. If your project explodes then Google will take care of the scaling for you. Seems like a great idea as I am sure many applications will be delivered in this way.  Once you are on the cloud it becomes very easy for you to acquire customers as they will have nothing to install. Your potential clients will only need their browsers. The implications of the cloud model are huge:

a) Google has everything. (scary?)
b) Costs of entering the market are almost Zero
c) Traditional developers beware. (About time someone killed of Sage?)

2. Adi Ben-Nesher & Steve Lamb talked about Social Media and the enterprise

The important point made was simple. Enterprises have historically resisted all new forms of communication. Examples given showed that staff were not allowed outbound calls or emails or even mobiles seems ridiculous right? Telephone, emails and mobiles are now universally used in all businesses. But what about social media? Who has MSN blocked? Who is not allowed to use facebook?  The argument given for not allowing social media runs along the lines of work time must be full of work related activities. How can twittering be productive?

Well the opposing argument says that history will sweep aside these blockages and that any company not allowing social media in the course of normal business interaction will appear to be as stupid as denying an employee a phone on their desk. Why? You might ask. Well, take an example that runs something like this:

What if in the course of a day employees are facebooking, blogging and posting ideas on what they are up to… are they not testing the market? Are they not avoiding costly mistakes? Are they not asking their peers for advice? Combine this with the idea of 85% of learning happening informally….. What would you do? Ban social media? Or embrace it.

I remember Caudwell famously banned emails and turned his business around Was this a case of back not forward?

On another note, Swarm groups are all the talk at the moment within the Social Media Mafia group. http://home.swarmteams.com/swarmpro Great idea, and would seem to be ideal for action teams. Pssssst! No one mention this to the parking enforcement teams!

3. Whatleydude aka Whatleydude.vox.com

This 3rd session was around social object theory. The money is in the object and not the network. Facebook is a social tool, the Mediacamp unconference would be the example for a social object. Social objects bring people together. Then the tools such as Facebook can help groups form, stay in touch and help gather feedback. At this point things were getting a bit over my head…. http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004390.html

4. Reputation management by DeCabbit (Judith Lewis)

After the social object gubbins I was ready for stuff that I could handle! Reputation management by an ex-black hat SEO specialist had to be worth listening to. And it was, and it was well presented, well done Judith.

Type the following into Google Landrover discovery and you will find a horror story. With more and more people researching the products they are about to purchase you simply cannot afford to have bad press at the top of the Google search results. (Read more here: http://www.haveyoursay.com/)

Judith basically told us to wake up and to start taking our reputations seriously. There are tools out there to track reputations and you can actively do something to build up good PR. If anything bad does happen you should spot it quickly and take action. Deal with the issues immediately and not bury your head in the sand.
Some actions you can take:

a) Set up RSS feeds and monitor keywords via Google and Yahoo alerts
b) Set up search results short cuts
c) Monitor once per week
d) Engage, talk with bloggers, deal with complaints and get your side of the story out there!
e) If your website is important to you, well then the 1st page of results in Google are even more important to you. If you find bad stuff, start taking action to drive the negatives down in the rankings.

5. Neshio and SEO stuff

By the fifth session I am not taking in all the stuff! It was good to see that we at Imre are not that far off the mark in terms of what we have been telling clients. The fundamental principles of SEO are not rocket science. (U, A and R)

a) Usability
b) Accessibility
c) Relevance

Do the above and you are well down the road to having a search engine friendly website. As part of the U, A and R the site should have a good architecture, be CSS and XHTML complaint, and not use images for navigation.

In terms of the optimizing bits, one should pay special attention to

a) Title
b) Descriptions
c) Keywords in headings
d) Limit number of keywords per page
e) URL structure  (get the keywords into the URLs)
f) Good incoming links from _relevant_ sources
g) Check your competitors
h) Use blogs for the long tail
i) Use forums for the long tail
j) Get and start using Social Media tools such as Facebook
k) Use the Google webmaster tools
l) Check out ning   (a new one for me: http://www.ning.com/)
m) Check out http://www.seomoz.org/
n) Check out http://www.e-consultancy.com/
o) Use analytics and find out which keywords actually work for you. This is a long term iterative process.
p) Keyword research is a big part of SEO, use the Google tools, adwords, Google trends and use traffic estimators.

Is that all? How hard can SEO be? Very funny. But I was glad no black hat stuff was mentioned. We strongly believe in the ethical approach.

All in all the London MediaCamp was a great success. In one day it is possible to learn stuff that might take six months of trial and error. What great PR for the SAE institute for having opened their doors to an unconference. Keep it up Don!

Filed Under Blog, Marketing, Social, Strategy · 3 Comments  

What is Web 2.0?

June 13, 2008 by Adam Owen 

The term Web 2.0 has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue for a few years now, but there is still a lot of confusion about what it actually means.

The O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 was the first notable use of the term, where Tim O’Reilly described it as:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

While I truly believe in the Internet as a platform (just look at how Google are dominating the online applications market), the rules for success are rather blurred.

[Read more]

Filed Under Social, Strategy, Web / Tech, Web 2.0 · 2 Comments  

More MediaCamp BUCKS 08

May 23, 2008 by Paul Imre 

A week later and still stuff is coming out of the MediaCamp BUCKS 08 sessions……

We had been asked to by a couple of clients to keep them at the “leading edge”. Having seen how the Bucks New Uni are using a wiki instead of an intranet has given us the idea of setting up an IMRE Lab using a wiki. Great idea - more will be said on that later.

Back to various emails that have been generated from the unconference.

From Jo Jordan:
http://flowingmotion.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-social-media-as-a-mirror/http://flowingmotion.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/dam-it-the-potential-of-social-media/

From Eran Ben Sabat:
????????http://www.universalmccann.com/Assets/wave_3_20080403093750.pdf

From Chris Hambly:
http://www.chrishambly.com/content/social-influence-measurement

Filed Under Social, Strategy, Web / Tech · 1 Comment