DON’T

This plea for sanity is born out of the vast amount of Tweet spam that infects the microblogging tool.  If you haven’t encountered this, create an account and wait for the flood of “followers” who offer you tips on alleged marketing or – on a less sophisticated level – links to NSFW images.

Adding to the background noise by setting up a corporate Twitter feed won’t help. The way to use Twitter – and any social media – to spread a message is to target your audience, identify exisitng networks of interest make sure that your message is relevant to them.

Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday, dear agency with the slightly peculiar name.

Yes indeed. w00tonomy is one year old. (Though, strictly speaking, as it was formed on 29 February its next birthday is not until 2012.)

It has been a very successful 12 months for us. We have won clients from the Scottish public sector and from the personal finance, IT and media sectors in the UK and abroad. And we have made it onto the Scottish Government’s digital roster.

Our clients have been attracted by our ability to make the web work for them – whether it be through social networking, improved content, strategic consultancy, analysis or web redesigns.

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This is a major achievement for a young agency and we are delighted. Along with our consortium partners, we look forward to providing the Scottish Government and other bodies using the roster with our services:

Turbocharge content to optimise appeal to online customers.

Creating messages that interest customers rather than messages they ignore.

We make online spend work harder. We deliver higher returns on online investment through the use of targeted, quality content to build a lasting relationship with your target audience.

If you’d like to know more, please contact us.

The utility is seeking to create online services that clearly demonstrate its ongoing commitment to providing excellent customer service. w00tonomy is working with Scottish Water to identify an online strategy, through its understanding of people-focused websites, particularly given the changes that have happened to the internet over the past three years.

Chris Wallace, Director of Communications at Scottish Water said “Customers are at the heart of our business and increasingly they look to connect with us in an online capacity. Therefore, it is important for us to continually review what we offer in this area, and we are excited to be working with w00tonomy on preliminary strategy.”

Stewart Kirkpatrick , Content Marketing Director of w00tonomy and award-winning editor of scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007) said: “Our experience has taught us that to reach target audiences clients need to build a relationship with them based on interesting and relevant content – and websites that deliver these effectively. We are thrilled to be working with Scottish Water and are impressed by their vision of the future.

We don’t know if people have truly realised the full implications of the latest development from Google Labs, SearchWiki.

Away the from the techincal detail the bottom line is that this new feature provides customers with an additional way to switch off the messages they don’t want to receive and to rate your content.

It adds to our case that your SEO strategy should not focus on just achieving a high ranking for your key search terms. With Searchwiki if the content isn’t relevant your page could be removed or worse negative user generated comments could adversely affect your brand. Where does that leave you. You have to drive your online marketing strategy from the principle of providing content that delivers value to your customer, which is Content Marketing.

In more detail, the new search feature allows you to customise your search results when you are logged into your Google account. You can promote a search result so that the next time you do the same search it appears where you can find it easier. It also lets you add notes and see the notes other people have added for your search results. You can find out more by watching the video below.

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Our expertise in online content will help them move into the field of newspaper websites while their knowledge of how design can maximise the appeal of words and pictures adds to our offering to our clients.

Here’s some highlights from the press release about this:

Having been at the forefront of newspaper design throughout Europe and beyond for the past 10 years, Palmer Watson has for some time been exploring options to widen its operations as the newspaper industry moves towards an increasingly digital future.

The new partnership will allow Palmer Watson to combine its renowned design, content and branding experience with the digital expertise of w00tonomy.

Like Palmer Watson, w00tonomy is small but vastly experienced team, with crucial expertise in the field of optimising the appeal of online content.

w00tnomy’s content marketing director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, who succeeded Palmer Watson director Terry Watson as head of content at scotsman.com in the late 1990s, helped make the site a multi award-winning publication which was one of the top 30 Google news search sites in the world. (He left when the newspaper was sold and scotsman.com reverted to a standard newspaper website.) Kirkpatrick was named by the UK Press Gazette as one of the 50 people shaping online journalism worldwide and is a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Along with fellow directors Tony Purcell (a web development pioneer) and Dr Graham Jones (an online communications expert), w00tonomy, in conjunction withPalmer Watson’s multi award-winning newspaper track record, aim to offer newspapers a wider consulting service that will help publishers to maximise the opportunities of the digital crossover, and enhance their online and mobile offering.

Several of Palmer Watson’s projects have resulted in the newspapers being named “World’s Best Designed” in the prestigious Society for News Design competition, the most recent being the Danish broadsheet, Politiken, in 2007. 

Founding directors Ally Palmer and Terry Watson began working together in the 1990s in Scottish newspapers and were instrumental in The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday being recognised worldwide as among the industry’s best. Since forming Palmer Watson, the agency has worked with around 40 publishers – including such iconic newspaper titles as Le Monde and El Pais – across Europe and Scandinavia, and in South America, Russia and Africa. It is currently involved in projects in India, South Africa and the UK.

The combined team will be able to provide to publishers and editors practical, relevant and hands-on expertise encompassing all aspects of how newspapers should be approaching the digital era:  technical, content, revenue, traffic, strategy and design.

The focus of the Palmer Watson and w00tonomy partnership will be on:

• enhancing the newspaper website user experience
• creating dynamic content that will boost online traffic
• maximising traffic
• optimising online revenue opportunities
• growing online communities
• building the ideal combined online/offline user/reader package
• assisting with newsroom integration and content management

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An essential element to optimising you site content is having the right measurement tools. Google Analytics seems to get better and better and the rational of using its free service instead of a licence product is becoming more compelling, especially in these hard times. Recently Google has announced 7 new improvements to Google Analytics that will see it become more like an enterprise solution. If you are current Google Analytics user then you should see these enhancements rolled out over the next few weeks. The new enterpise features are

• Improvements to the user interface
• Improvements to the management interface
• Integration with adsense
• Custom reporting
• Advanced segmentation
• Motion charts
• New API

Google has created a few videos in its YouTube channel to help explain these changes in more detail. We particluarly like the video on the new motion charts.