'Off the wall creative thinking' - quite literally! We've moved to our new offices just off London Wall. Fast outgrowing our previous space at Albion Mills, we recently went on the hunt for more room for us all, and have finally completed our move to Finsbury Circus. A few pictures still remain to be put up on the walls as we get more settled in, but the coffee machines are plugged in and ready to go, so we'd love for you to come and visit!
We look forward to seeing you in our new home!
In my current digital communications training session there is a slide which talks about how fast the digital world changes and how businesses, if they want to remain successful across social channels, have no option but to adapt quickly. A prime example of the relative speed businesses are now required to move at is illustrated through LinkedIn’s recent announcement of the switching off of the Products and Services pages on April 14th. The Products and Services tab on a company's LinkedIn page has for some time been a key point of focus for marketers, providing an effective platform to profile what the business offers, who the most relevant contacts are for that offering, alongside recommendations left by clients for those products and services. With the often complex nature of financial service websites this was a nice, simple and clean overview that aided cross selling, lead generation, and in some cases, SEO benefits.
LinkedIn introduced showcase pages at the end of last year as part of their move to become more of a publishing platform, encouraging more in the way of rich, regular content. Products and Services were often fairly static and gave a user no reason to return multiple times. A showcase page is structured in almost exactly the same way as the main company page and can be accessed via its own URL or on the right hand column of your company page.
Initially, they allow you to add a large attention grabbing banner across the top of the page, a short introduction and a URL to lead visitors to the most relevant section of your website.
From there it is all about content, content, content as you are provided with the ability to add an endless scrolling feed of posts.
Firstly, there is no way of profiling key contacts or running promotions like you could before. There is also no way of migrating the recommendations that you have earned on the current Products and Services pages. This has caused a fair amount of discontent and uproar among the LinkedIn community who feel largely that this is change for change sake and that they are losing valuable digital real estate - not to mention the time and money they have invested in getting those pages set up.
As of the 14th April, unless you embrace the change and start to implement showcase pages, your LinkedIn company page will lose any reference to your current products and services.
What I would say initially though, is that this should not be rushed. Showcase pages should only be set up for areas where you have enough commitment to producing enough engaging content to post on a regular basis. They are not a direct replacement for your Products and Services pages. They require a different approach and some strategic thinking to get it right.
I have seen Products and Services overview pages with 30 or more individual items within them. Setting up and maintaining 30+ showcase pages isn’t practical, and I don’t believe it would add any value. You need to focus on the dynamic areas of your business where the teams produce a lot of content, attend a lot of events and where you can find a lot of relevant material across news sites that you can aggregate and introduce as useful reading.
In my opinion LinkedIn does not want your company profile page to be a static summary of your website, they want it to be a go-to source of information in its own right, a place where people converse, share and post collaboratively. Whether this is because they want to sell more advertising, or because they want brands to provide better content to the existing audience, that’s up for debate. Ultimately they want you to stay on the website for as long as they can keep you there.
What I am sure of however, is that this is not a change you can afford to ignore. If you want to talk about how we can help you, or if you just want to connect, feel free to add me on LinkedIn.
In line with the continued growth of this specialist insurance and financial services marketing agency, the brandformula & Lamb team has seen a number of key new recruits join the company. Julie Jarvis has joined as events director, where she will support the large industry-wide gatherings such as the BIBA & Airmic Conferences that are a key part of their service as well as the client specific work they undertake. On the creative front Mark Leman has joined along with Dalia Merecinskaite as senior designer and designer respectively.
Completing the current round of joiners, Bradford Jordan has joined on a fixed term contract to widen the available resource within their digital communications services. He will be primarily assisting the in-house team with the delivery of their social media services.
Speaking of the creative additions, Nick Patchitt, the group's creative director commented: "I am excited at the outlook for Creative, Mark brings a wealth of brand identity experience from his time at some top creative agencies and Dalia has a wealth of skills to help drive our creative offering into digital, animation and other multi-media channels. The team is looking ahead with confidence at continuing to build on our track record of creating engaging brand identities and award winning campaign work, and the new additions to the team will help us move forward with real purpose."
Mark Huxley, executive director of brandformula & Lamb added: "This is a really exciting time for us. It will soon be 18 months since we merged the two businesses and the intervening time has seen a consistent period of growth, with increasing levels of support from existing clients and many new friends made. Being able to build our team in such a positive way is a wonderful testament to this and we are really looking forward to the great work they will deliver."
Do you know your Baby Boomers from Generation X, Generation Y and for that matter the newly appointed Generation Z? Generations X and Y already dominate the UK workforce by more than 65 per cent and culturally, they pose significant challenges for businesses and their relationships with customers.
I’m a child of the Baby Boomer generation (only just I might add!), having been born between 1945 and 1960. I find myself regularly noticing the differing subtleties between the Baby Boomer group, Generation X (1961-1980, or early 50’s-30’s) and Generation Y (1981-1995, or early 30’s to 19). What’s interesting is the rate at which those differences are becoming more apparent.
Within the next 5-10 years, Generation Y will come to dominate the purchasing market. From that point on, a whole new raft of deciders will prevail. Generation Y is driven by a high exposure to the media, the convenience of immediate access, on-demand services and an utter dependence on technology. Time magazine called them 'the most threatening & exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution'.
As customers, they expect far greater levels of engagement, accessible to them anywhere and at any time. For brands or organisations, it’s important to understand how your future target market wants to be communicated with, and through which channels, especially online.
In the workplace, employers would do well to understand the new and dynamic motivations of Generation Y. They require their roles to be more challenging and interesting, all whilst demanding clearer definitions of their career pathways than previous generations were ever afforded. This equally translates to their purchasing motivators.
Understanding the differences between these ever changing demographics will enable you to harness the right channels now to build relationships with new and existing customers, clients and partners. Failing to do so will hinder those future relationships, and stifle business growth.
I’ve not really spoken about the scariest and most compelling generation of them all.
Anyone with younger families will no doubt notice the monumental differences in how their worlds are completely and utterly reliant upon constant connectivity to everything via technology. This new generation is being shaped by the legacy of the economic downturn, global warming, wiki-leaks, cloud computing, mobile devices, living their lives online & in public, self media production, unlimited internet speeds, instant access to all forms of music, video and the complete globalisation of everything. These technoholics, entirely dependent on their mastered IT skills and likely to launch nothing short of a full-scale panic alert during a power cut, have been branded Generation Z.
Generation Z will reshape the corporate world. Career multitaskers, they are far more likely to be found moving seamlessly between organisations, assuming short term roles whilst remaining plugged into digital media, eating 3D printed food and being permanently chauffeured by driverless cars.
And the most interesting part of it all? Generation Z started in 1995, which means they’re already moving into the workplace.
One of our very own designers, Owen Moralee will be putting himself to the sword this weekend from 1pm on 8th March, undertaking a rowing challenge in the name of Sport Relief.
He is part of a seven person team that will quite literally be rowing a marathon on an indoor rowing machine at the David Lloyd Club in Beckenham. Even Olympic rowers only ever race over 1km, these worthy, but in our opinion slightly bonkers people will be doing that distance 42.195 times (to be exact).
You will be pleased to hear we have ordered an extra cushion for Owen to sit on come Monday. Just cannot yet work out how extra long his arms will be.
If you would like to support Owen and the rest of the team you can find them at www.withoutapaddle.co.uk where you can donate online to the worthy Sport Relief cause and if you fancy going to watch grown men in proper pain, there are details of where this epic event will take place on the site too.
Good Luck from us all at Lamb!
Here's a digital remastering of an old classic puzzler. How quickly can you match the social media icon pairs? Craig, our Director of Digital Services, managed it in 58 seconds. Can you beat him?
Courtesy of James Blute
Let us know how you got on via Twitter: @Lambinthecity