Blog posts in the news category

This visual representation of social media by Kyle Studstill sums it up pretty well

Social Media Explained

So Rage against the Machine have done it. A track originally released by the band in 1992 (original chart position No.25) pips poor old Joe to the much coveted number spot for Xmas 2009.

But let’s be honest, how many of us had heard the Rage Against the Machine track before? How many of us know what the band look like? Where they’re from and what their favourite colours are? Not many (Not that we care).

Now Joe McEldrey…..

The song -  “The Climb”.

What’s he look like? A cheeky Geordie chappy with a Hollywood smile.

Where’s he from? South Shields.

Favourite colour? Anything that Cheryl likes.

So how do a band that relatively few people have heard of make it to Xmas number 1 toppling the behemoth that is X Factor with it’s massive television audience, huge publicity machine and endless marketing efforts?

Simple – Facebook.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t the great song or the love of the band that got RATM to number 1, it was Facebook. To be more specific, it was a brilliantly orchestrated social media campaign by Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple fed up with the domination of the Xmas number 1 spot by X-Factor winners.

Their campaign highlights the phenomenal reach and influence social media channels can have. Zach le Rocha (RATM lead singer of course – c’mon guys) summed it up perfectly, “It was incredible organic grassroots campaign”. Indeed it was. A campaign started by a couple wanting a change, rapidly joined by 486,781 fans and quickly becoming the hottest topic on Facebook culminates in delivering the UK an alternative Xmas number 1 and delivring a crushiong blow to the slick marketing and publicity machine that is X-Factor.

So the platform that brought the Whispa back to our shelves, returned Monster Munch to the cupboards of children of the 80’s now has an ever greater feat to its name. A new Xmas number one.

At the risk of repeating a previous post. Social Media – Powerful stuff.

Q: What happens when someone on Twitter with more than a million followers recommends your website?

A: Your website traffic goes through the roof

But you only know this to be true if you track your social media mentions properly…

Burger King recently launched Singing in the Shower, the digital extension to their breakfast re-launch campaign (which just so happens to have been built by Pancentric Digital).  If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re missing a treat take a peek.

The site, featuring a bikini clad shower girl “shaking her bits to the hits” was recently spotted by celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who decided to “tweet” about the site.

@perezhilton

What happened next? Perez’s loyal followers duly flocked to the site, increasing traffic by 3000%, voucher downloads by even more and it helped create a great online buzz about the site with hundreds of re-tweets and blog posts.  All this within 24 hours of dear Perez’s post.

So the question is, are you tracking your websites & brand across social media platforms the way you could be?

Perhaps somebody is talking about your brand right now, sending waves of traffic to your website or creating a powerful online buzz about your latest initiative but you just don’t know it.

There are a number of great tracking tools for Twitter & other social media platforms, Viralheat, Twitterfall, and your trusty Tweetdeck to name but a few. Setting these up and tracking your brands mentions across social platforms is as important as your web analytics and your email tracking.

Don’t miss out on your brands social media exposure, as Perez has proved, social media can be powerful stuff.

It’s welcome to sequin-city complete with countdown glitter balls and heaps of Strictly fun as we launch ‘Strictly Social’- the BBC’s big online event for the show this year.

After all of the creative madness, there were weeks of user experience development, architecting, wireframing, designing and technical consultation to make this social TV extravaganza a reality.

The application is designed to let viewers interact with the live broadcast of the show.  Fans can also have fun predicting the judges score or can get behind their favourite contestants using the ‘I support’ feature. They can wow as the couples waltz or tut as they tango then share these emotional reactions real-time with other users. User reactions are also aggregated so they can watch the biggest ‘boo’ moment or biggest ‘wow’ moment again after the show and even share it with their friends.

Each week ‘Strictly Social’ will be hosted by a different celebrity guest who will take part in the live chat via dynamic comment streams and messaging.

It’s early days but the app has already been well received; click to find out what Revolution magazine, the Guardian, Design Week and Creative Boom had to say about it.

And why not have a play yourself? Click here to find out more, and let us know what you think.

The results are in and we’re pleased to count ourselves amongst the UK’s most successful digital agencies having ranked in this year’s NMA Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2009 guide.

We were invited along to last night’s Top 100 launch party to share a drink or two amongst our peers, in London’s trendy Soho, where the results of this year’s agency league were announced.

The NMA Top 100, which is now in its tenth year, ranks agencies purely on the income they earn from digital media activities in the UK- a better indicator than overall turnover of what an agency’s digital expertise is worth. Click here for more info and to see where we ranked.

The ranking follows our success earlier in the year when we also made it onto the Design Week Top 100 list. As well as ranking 69^th in the overall listing we also found ourselves considered the 3^rd most bullish agency.

It’s been a bumper year for us here at Pancentric- we’ve grown rapidly, welcoming 12 new bright and talented faces to our ranks and we continue to work with some of biggest global brands including the BBC, Cadbury, Burger King, RSA, AXA, Petplan and Whitbread. Given the challenges of the current economic climate, we can only feel proud of this.

So as they say, the only way now is up, and we’re focused on moving forward…so watch this space!

Having been given a couple of IDs for the Google Wave sandbox, we decided to have a play.

Many of you will have seen the (rather long it must be said) official video from Google I/O 2009 (see it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ) and, if you managed to stay the course you will have seen a great technology demonstration.

So what’s it like for real?

To begin with, in common with all products at this stage of their development it is buggy. Not majorly so, but subject to various browser crashes and unexplained behaviour, ho-hum. Since we first had access the stability has improved greatly, so there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Other than that, it is fairly polished and works as expected.

The best way that I can describe Wave is that it is a realtime email with bells on. The basic atom is a “wave”, which has participants, i.e. you and the recipient(s). You can both type and interact in the wave, seeing in real time what each other is typing, sharing (drag and drop photos and embed videos) and are able to invite more participants as you go along. New participants can add to and modify the existing wave, it’s completely open. Private messages can also be sent between any number of the participants of the wave allowing for more private discussion.

Along with human participants, you can also add software participants called robots. There are some neat robots already there for example:

Tweety the twitbot that brings a Twitter feed into the wave
Rosy Etta – the translation bot that does realtime translation across about 40 languages (and is pretty smart at it too)

Then there are gadgets that you can interact with, for example there is a Chess playing gadget, and one that brings Google Maps into the wave.

The wave continues forever so you can leave and come back where you left off whenever you wish. And because everything is stored, you can replay waves to see how the conversation progressed, so much better than trying to follow email trails.

At the moment it is only possible to run waves in Google’s sandbox, so there isn’t a lot of stuff we can show, but we have started doing some Google Wave consultancy, speccing out business applications looking at the implications and feasibility of new applications. In the future you will be able to run your own wave servers, and there will be, I am sure, a market for wave hosting.

It is fair to say that we are coming up with new ideas for this all the time, everywhere you look on the web you start seeing things that could be done better with waves.

The big question is whether it is sufficiently disruptive technology to change they way things are done now? From what I’ve seen I’d have to say yes.

How successful are those demonstrations you get when you go to marketing conferences?

If you don’t know the ones I’m talking about, it’s where the presenter tells you how great this new approach to marketing is, or how wonderful this new piece of technology is. The presenter then proceeds to fire of a twitter, a blog or a forum post only to be inundated with responses by the time they finishes their talk. Success!

So here’s my attempt. Right now myself and two colleagues are giving a talk on the benefit of search marketing to businesses. We’ve just set ourselves the challenge of getting this blog post to the top of Google before the end of the talk. Nothing like pressure then.

Yes, this is something we’ve done before on the Pancentric blog, but we want to prove to our guests this morning that it works, and works quickly.

Simply type the title of this blog post into Google, and (fingers crossed) we’re top.

The title of today’s blog post was provided by our esteemed guests, nothing to do with me. Honest.

Welcome to another James who joins our ranks (that’s three now!). James Bruce joined first thing in 09 and is heading up our Creative operation. He was formerly with the BBC working as Creative Director (User Experience & Design) and before that Deputy Creative Director at Cimex. In the few weeks he’s been with us he’s overhauled the structure of our creative operation and recruited additional senior creative talent. James brings over 10 years digital creative experience and a host of award winning work that includes a BIMA, IVCA Clarion award and a Webby. We’re hoping his award-winning track record will continue at Pancentric.

This year, Pancentric decided to share it’s Christmas Tree with the world. Rather than have a traditional tree in our office, we made a virtual one.

First we commissioned a metalworker Adam Laurence from the wonderfully named “One Little Girl & A Can Of Gasoline” to produce a tree shaped structure. Then we grabbed a bunch of LCD screens from around the office to hang on it. Alex here opened up an old PC and put as many graphics cards as we could in it (who would have thought that it would be so hard to find working PCI graphics cards?) After some swearing and a lot of grief he managed to get x-windows running across all of the screens, (this involved re-compiling the windowing system without xinerama, thank goodness for Open Source and the Freedom to modify). So now we had the basic hardware up and running.

Next, Laco and his gang started work on designing and programming the tree. Working with the geometry of the screens they created a pixel perfect flash animation to run across the 6 screens on the tree!

Of course we weren’t content with just that, so a camera was sourced to put this onto the web. The 1st effort used a standard webcam effort, not good enough I’m afraid, the limitations of custom plugins, and the low refresh rates made it look rubbish.

So, we started again this time with a domestic camcorder, this is connected to a PC and the raw video feed is transcoded into h264 and pumped up to a server on the internet. The server then puts the h264 video into a Flash wrapper and streams it out to the end viewer. If nothing else this was a great proof of principle/concept for us as it means we now have the capability of doing mass video streaming – which is nice.

So all that remained was to record some “fun” clips for out 3pm broadcasts, put the flash in a good looking page, design an email etc. and away we went.

We’ve taken it down now and hope you all liked it.

A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2009 from us all at Pancentric.