When you think of of a diary you may hark back to the days of sumptuous, leather-bound monsters sitting on your desk. Or maybe you’re old enough to remember to 1980’s craze of bulging filofaxes. Both were, in their own way, things of tactile beauty. Today we don’t use desks in the same way and […]
A question frequently asked and one of the most difficult to answer to the satisfaction of the asker. But is it actually the right question? In reality, most folks want to know how much they should be spending on their digital service so framing the question in such a way to isolate just the web-site, […]
We’ve covered the hybrid model and gameplan and also the strategy. This article is about operational delivery, and specifically how and who it’s apportioned to. Much of the work carried out by digital agencies is fairly low-tech, frequently hidden in a black box and wrapped up in a £££ invoice. Often, the operational marketing tasks […]
Read More… from Building a collaborative digital strategy (Pt 3)
In the previous article I covered the pros and cons of in-house/3rd party and the role of the gameplan. The upshot was that we needed a hybrid solution that brought together the benefits of using both in-house and 3rd-party solutions. Collectively we need to aim for a strategic and operations model that offers: We do […]
Read More… from Building a collaborative digital strategy (Pt 2)
Most people either elect to outsource their digital services to a third-party, or keep them entirely in-house. Both approaches have their pros and cons: The challenge is to create a hybrid solution that meets the needs of your organisation, fits well with the digital agency and continue to motivate both to strive for improvement. Motivation […]
Read More… from Building a collaborative digital strategy (Pt 1)
Lots of folks talk about agile, and it’s most definitely one of the buzz-words of 2013 as it moves out from the dark corners of code-development into the limelight reality of sales, marketing and operational environments. But, it’s glaringly obvious that the agile movement itself is not really delivering the sort of productivity improvements that […]
Read More… from Re-visiting our agile journey, a retrospective
The explosion in consumer use of mobile is somewhat over-documented but recently we’ve started to see mobile playing a greater part in B2B customer journeys. Two recent B2B digital builds (Elgood Flooring and TV Studio Floors) were both created using VNX 4, our digital services framework that works brilliantly on all devices and they’ve seen […]
As we reported back in June, Google’s recent algorithm change has shifted the focus away from SEO “techniques” (I call them deluded, but that’s a whole other story) and moved towards quality, original content. The great news, for writers that is, should see the focus on quality writing and getting rid of those ‘orrible, spam-soaked, […]
By Andy Holland July was hot and sweaty, a heatwave of proportions not seen for a decade but that didn’t seem to bother Client Services. True, it’s a quieter month with around 50 support tickets (2 per day) and support delivery went a smoothly as some of the ice cream we’ve been eating to stay […]
Apple’s new mobile operating system, IOS7 is due for shipment in week 37. We’ve been working with the early development versions since May so our upcoming release of VNX4.1 is first for us – it supports a mobile operating system that’s not even shipping yet! As a committed Apple Development Partner since 2010, we’ve kind […]
With the conclusion of WordCamp 2013 San Francisco it’s an exciting time to be part of the digital community. Despite the over-whelming number of developers and techies that turned up this year (boy, can some of them drink craft beers!) its’ refreshing to see the platform moving out of the shadows and into the mainstream. […]
It’s true! The working practice that’s been heavily copied across the digital industry for nearly 10 years is now officially dead. Deeply embedded in Google’s 8 pillars of innovation is slowly being eradicated from it’s version of history. Some of Google’s best products came from 20% time, including GMail and one of their core revenue […]
Introduced over a year ago to little interest and no acclaim, the Google Authorship Programme has a bold vision to make content personal, unique and (as ever) to stamp out content farms and machine-written content. Working hand-in-hand with recent updates to kill off-page spamming, the Authorship programme is looming large on radar, if not square […]
Read More… from Google’s Authorship Programme – why and how?
Powering over a quarter of new websites and digital services across the globe, the rise of WordPress has been nothing short of meteoric. It’s now the dominant digital framework and for good reason; it’s open source (love it), very powerful, incredibly extensible and lightweight. WordPress initially grew out of an old blogging platform, b2/cafelog, forking […]
Bill Gates famously said “If you don’t like geeks, you’re in trouble” and he wasn’t half wrong. Geekery, in the form of big data, marketing automation and scientific management of decision cycles and user journeys. Its not a home for old-school, pat on the back, “lets get some leaflets printed” sorts. They’re, mostly, extinct alongside […]
In beta since May 1st, Connected are proud to formally launch VNX 4.1 (Re-Boot), an open-source framework for delivering digital services. It offers: Open source licensing available with support contracts Responsive design framework designed to work in a NoCode environment Extensible and expandable with off-the-shelf plugins The usual suspects baked-in including; back-end integration, database management, […]
Despite rumours to the contrary, email marketing is alive and kicking. What is changing, however, is both the range of email clients now being used and the number of opens on mobile devices (up to 75% for some markets). Ignore, for the moment, the mobile email space there’s a big elephant in the room that […]
Read More… from Outlook 2013 and email marketing. The challenges.
From a US survey, admittedly, but the UK is actually worse. Pure Oxygen Labs carried out a thorough survey of the top US organisations and found that: 2/3 risk ranking downgrades in Google for not serving mobile versions of indexed pages 1/2 serve any mobile formatted content to smartphone searchers 1/3 serve some mobile content, […]
Read More… from Two-thirds of major companies are not “Google compliant”
The first candidate for release of WordPress 3.6 is now available and you can download it here. Just be careful as it’s still in beta and we expect there to be some compatibility issues with some plugins, we’re testing ours now and those of our curated VNX 4.x Framework, but we don’t expect any horrors […]
When, in 2007, Twitter brought hashtags to the masses it was as an aside; it wasn’t core to the Twitter experience. Besides, it wasn’t an original idea – hashtags go back to the 1990s and was used in chat rooms, bulletin boards and forums. How the world has changed: Hashtags now drive key media events, […]
