Thrudigital

So I have a thick head today. We were 45 minutes late to our Christmas party because Ollie was tackling a badly behaved cron job to work on our server. Emily, Ollie’s girlfriend, had been waiting all that time at Waterloo for us but she was kind enough to forgive him when we arrived. We eventually assembled at Namco Station on the South Bank and quickly started racking up the bar tab before having a few rounds of pool to get going. Piers had not told us in advance that he is practically a pro, so him and his girlfriend, Grace, cleaned up. Here is a picture of him about to take a shot – look how serious he is. I’d like to think this shot was a mis-cue, but I’m pretty sure he potted both balls in one go.

Bowling quickly degraded into a competition of creative methodology. We had backwards bowling, sliding on knees, see who can throw it the highest, the furthest before landing, the slowest, get it as close to the TV screen as possible without hitting it, bowl the most balls in one go, knock the next-door lane’s pins over, and run as far down the alley as possible without getting caught. We learned that bowling the ball really slowly helps greatly in improving accuracy (I’ll add that to the wiki).

Eventually once all other options had been exhausted and the diminishing marginal returns commonly associated with drinking were realised, we got ourselves on to the dodgem cars. Twelve months of stress manifested itself in complete carnage on the floor. However the trick became less about trying to thrash the hell out of our fellow work mates but more to try not to laugh any sick up or have it projected out by the seatbelt pulling on impact.

[These posts are written from a presentation I gave at Mediapro 2009. The first post explored the concept of social media, this one looks at methods of engagement, the next one will explore the major opportunities for brands, and the final one will give case studies of industry leaders who are seeing some success.]

We have already established that a conversation is occurring, without your consent or control. Nice. But what should you do?

Relinquish control. Or realise you have already lost it.

Within your company’s processes, or your day-to-day activity, change your perspective and approach to one that expects and values brand mentions, whether positive or negative. It’s what people were saying anyway… just now you can eavesdrop. This might sound tough, but its a decision to place the customer at the centre of your business which will pay off.

Listen. Without reacting.

It’s kinda like the playground. Some people are not going to be saying nice things. Even well-meaning and supportive customers are going to present you in a bad light sometimes. Get over it. Controlling the message is not what’s important. Trendstream research shows that customers perception of brands improves even when you just show you are listening. For a disappointed customer, shouting into the interwebs might bring them some consolation. But for you it represents a valuable customer signal, which you should be listening to. Because soon enough, your competitors will be. So set up a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and use a feedback form or an open customer support service to show customers you are listening.

Participate. Yes, like write something.

Whether it is just ‘friending’ vocal customers on Twitter, commenting on blog posts, or blogging yourself, start to take part in the conversation. In February, I will be participating in the second LikeMinds conference at which the topic will be “P2P.” Social media has enabled a world where classifications like B2C and B2B are less important. The important conversation is now P2P – “Person to Person.”

Add value. Create a meaningful contribution.

Your audience already has a set of behaviours online. There is already an ongoing conversation. Your target market searches for content, plays games, chats, researches, and watches funny videos. Instead of interrupting their activity to deliver an advert, why not try and add value: something eye-catching, funny, interesting, or informative. Why not aggregate the conversation? Why not deliver quality branded content? Why not provide tools for your audience? Why not provide a forum for customer service queries? Why not build a game or quiz to engage people? Why not create something that people will be interested in, discuss, and share. By engaging with your audience, and then exposing your brand by adding value, you embed your brand within the consciousness of your target market. At the end of the day, its about being present, and vocal.
In the next post will will outline the most valuable opportunities are for your brand within social media. One clue – its not all about marketing. Many business functions can benefit. Then we will start looking at successful examples of what others are doing.

To get the followup posts over the next few weeks, simply click the “add to RSS button”, follow thrudigital on Twitter, or subscribe to these posts by email by clicking below.

So today is the big day. We have said goodbye to our old brand thruSITES, and rebranded as thrudigital. It’s more than just a name change though.

thruSITES was set up in 2005, with our first clients being a couple of local primary schools (you definitely won’t find these sites on our portfolio!). From these humble beginnings, our team, services, clients, and ambitions, have changed significantly through time. We started out by delivering great customer service and great (albeit simple) brochure websites, hence the old name. By growing through word-of-mouth from satisfied clients, we slowly built a strong portfolio and client base, and a service offering that stretches beyond “websites” to include social media applications, online communities, email and search marketing, and heavy-lifting data analysis systems.

So the time has come for our name to better reflect what we do. As thrudigital, we will still build brochure sites, but our competency stretches much further. We believe in the future of the open web, distributed content, the power of data-driven marketing, the new world of social media, and in multi-platform distribution. We are also taking the opportunity to build on everything that we do for the longer term and develop our own products in-house to help address market needs and provide better value to our clients. And we will continue to deliver superb solutions, with a service built on delivering great customer service, whether they are blue-chip corporates or bedroom entrepreneurs.

Sorry I meant 4 months.

So the new site looks different, new, fresh! And, as the designer and developer of the site, I would like to write a few words on what we did.

Conceptualisation

The outline plan, vision and timeline for the new site was delivered to the team back in early August this year. It was to tie in with the rebranding of thruSITES, into something that better reflected what we do (and have been doing for quite some time). The new site and brand identity would have to be full-reaching and a considerable improvement on last time.

Wireframing process

As usual we started with wireframing. We brainstormed on many occasions as a team and put together a basic layout for the site with respect to the proposed content. My role was to put it on the screen in some form. I took one of my old friend’s 960 grid system and started position boxes in Photoshop. Later I replaced the boxes with some dummy copy so we could better focus on the layout with all its apsects. There were some parts which we managed to nail straight away and there were some others which took us a couple of (weeks!) iterations to get to the point where we were happy.

Setting up the visuals

Once we had all the content elements in the right place we gave more attention to the look and feel of the site and the brand identity. Charles came up with the idea of having typeface which looks like hand writing. After couple of tries and fails, and much persuasion, we had our header ready in place. We set the colour scheme quite neutral so the portfolio images could stand out the most.

We constructed a colour palette around what we had all agreed upon already, and on this basis finalised the background, text, links and accent colours. We had already tried a number of logo versions but none of them worked very well with the current style. We went back to the drawing board with the logo and after much experimentation and discussion around different shapes and typefaces I went with Helvetica Neue which is my favourite typeface anyway. The rough ages and drop-shadow fit nicely with the theme and set the design direction for the rest of the site. Drop-downs for the main navigation followed this pattern.

We also wanted to keep the hand-drawn atmosphere throughout so we used it for all page dividers, the footer, header, sidebar, comments headers and so on.

Development

Although slightly reluctantly, we have a lot of experience working with Wordpress, so we decided to go with this for the back-end (despite the many limitations, it’s nice and quick to build on, and easy for any team member or author to update regularly). Furthermore Wordpress, with all its plugin/widget possibilites, allows us to do almost everything that we had in mind functionally.

In terms of front end I went for one generic stylesheet and separate stylesheets for blog section and portfolio together with standard reset style sheet and IE specific styles (because as usual IE can be a pain in the arse). Javascript – in our case good old (not so old) jQuery – is used extensively across the site. Except for the standard validation, hide and show cases, I built automatic height adjustments for form text areas and ajax for sending the form data. We always care about accessibility (and inparticular mobile) so I built the layers (html, css, js) so that they fall back nicely if needed. The site can be used with javascript or css turned off without any problems.