Sore feet and social media

Today's event, in conjunction with the Marketing Industry Network, about using social media for business was a huge success, I've been watching the comments and feedback on Twitter (using the hashtag #usnfb). Take a look at what people thought, and I'll write a proper report tomorrow. Huge thanks to all the speakers (Guy Stephens from Carphone Warehouse, Kyle Macrae from Blether Media, Heather Gorringe from Wiggly Wigglers and Craig McGill) and the delegates - you made it an extremely enlightening and enjoyable event!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 1 July 2009
0 Comments

Caption Competition - June 09

It's that time again, remember it's not just for fun, there's a prize too!

It's simples...

1. Look at the image
2. Post your witty caption
3. Visit our site on Wednesday the 8th of July to see if you've won a spot on our homepage for the day!

small print: This competition is not open to tictoc staff unless the caption is particularly funny.

By Fiona Dorman
Published: 26 June 2009
4 Comments

Take That Circus comes to town!

My throat is still slightly husky from all the singing last night at the Take That gig in Scotlands national stadium, Hampden. I was absolutely blown away by the whole thing, the sets, the dancers and of course, Take That themselves! Thanks to my big sis for the ticket and sorry to her friend who couldn't make it at the last minute, the traffic jams were well worth it!!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 22 June 2009
1 Comment

and finally...

How did we share in the old days?

Before youtube the only way we could get a fix of skateboarding dogs or water-skiing squirrels was on the 'and finally...' segment on the news.
In these olden days how else did we share ideas?

It wasn't so long ago but I  can't remember how I made plans to meet with friends before Facebook and Twitter.
Can anyone else?

Interested to hear your thoughts.

By Fiona Dorman
Published: 5 June 2009
11 Comments

Caption Competition - May 09

It's not just for fun, there's a prize too

It's simples...

1. Look at the image
2. Post your witty caption
3. Visit our site next Wednesday the 27th to see if you've won a spot on our homepage for the day!

Don't panic, we'll run another caption competition next month.

small print: This competition is not open to tictoc staff unless the caption is particularly funny.

By Fiona Dorman
Published: 20 May 2009
16 Comments

Breakfast with Biggins and Muir Maxwell Trust

Just a quick thank you post to Ann Maxwell and all her team at the Muir Maxwell Trust for inviting us to host a table at the Glasgow leg of their Breakfast with Biggins event.

The event in Glasgow's Radisson Hotel, was one in a series of Breakfasts around Scotland and was an opportunity for Ann to tell the story of her son Muir, why the trust was formed and to demonstrate the incredibly inspirational work they're doing in the fight against epilepsy.

Kaye Adams hosted the Glasgow event (there were different local celebrities hosting each event) and Christopher Biggins spoke about how he came to be involved with MMT and his long term support for the trust.

For more information on the trust and the work they do (or even better, to support them) check out the MMT website but thanks again to Ann and all her team for a fantastic event (and the beans and sausages went down a treat!).

By Melanie Russell
Published: 19 May 2009
0 Comments

Report from OFFF 2009

Sitting in an airless, dark hangar with 3,000+ other people, in microwave-like heat, listening to some “show OFFFers”, I was trying to decide whether I should stay here and die or go out to the beach and have a swim...

After being at FITC in Amsterdam last year (a much smaller conference compared to OFFF), and at OFFF this year I have been keeping a record of all the weak/strong aspects of every presentation I have seen (mostly development/programming-related), which I have decided to turn into a short guideline about how to make a good presentation.

Rule One: Intro

The first 5-10 minutes is always the crucial part of the speech – I’d compare it to the very first 10 seconds of contact between two people – if your attitude is good and words interesting enough, people will stay and listen, otherwise they’ll leave shortly, interrupting everyone. How to engage the audience then?

Stand up

Some presenters were sitting, some were standing. Stand up – you’ll definitely make more impact on the audience and strengthen your body language, communicating much more.

Do not talk too much (crap) about yourself

Keep your intro bit as short as possible, do not go into unnecessary details. Some presenters talk a lot about their private stuff or get into their private issues. The audience is not a support group thus it’s better to introduce yourself briefly without getting into personal trips. People really don’t care how cool you’re telling them you are, they will see it themselves.

Speak clearly, slowly and loud enough

It's a good idea to ask the audience if they can hear you well, sometimes the room acoustics may be difficult and you may lose some listeners. It’s best to ask people that can’t hear you to raise their hands and then ask the soundman to adjust the volume.

Rule Two: Have a concept and be prepared

Some speakers started off beautifully but once they got deeper, they got into too many details and then somehow got stuck – and then nothing else happened till the end. People don't really want to see/hear about the same stuff for hours, so try to change the subject from time to time, make it diverse, interesting and engaging. The audience can clearly tell if the speaker has thought his stuff through.

Ask yourself what might be interesting to other people and if/how they can benefit from it

Try to show something more than people can see on your website, show some unedited footage/mock-ups, sketches, "the making of" films etc.

Try to make your entire presentation tell a story, have the beginning and a definite end (i.e. surprise with a sudden ending). If you see you’re running out of time, skip some less important parts in the middle but keep the end bit.

Also try not to repeat yourself too much, saying the same phrase 2-3 times is usually enough.

Deal calmly with technical issues

If it comes to the worst (i.e. you've lost all your data/your hard drive got eaten) – improvise, but never make a fundamental mistake by making excuses (unless you make a joke out of it).

Rule Three: Entertain

Stefan Sagmeister came up onto the stage dressed in a rather funny woman’s polka dot costume. I’ve been seeing Brandon Hall wearing some kind of a chef’s suit. Whatever the outfit was, it always piqued my curiosity. What’s that all about? Entertainment.

By putting on something special you are showing you’ve made an effort to wear something other than a t-shirt. That pays back in the extra attention you receive. Beware though, it’s easy to exaggerate and be too fancy, stylish hats and glasses will make a celebrity out of you. So uncool!

Ka-boom!

Try to surprise audience by showing some shocking/unexpected/impactful imagery (even ones that are in contrast with what you're talking about). Generate a wide spectrum of emotions, from laughter to concern.

It’s important to avoid over-excitement – if you get overwhelmed, you’re likely to lose your clarity.

Interact

Get responses from the audience, ask them to raise their hands etc. Form questions in a way that will give you an immediate estimate on something important, but avoid obvious questions – otherwise people won’t interact.

Reward

You can bring some prizes to give away at the end, throw t-shirts or something else, people will adore you and you'll keep them sitting till the end.

Rule Four: Impress, motivate and educate

You’re talking to hundreds, be responsible and make people amazed. Get them to strive to go further every day.

Gijs Gieskes was showing his amazing DIY instruments, unfortunately some of them didn’t work, so he went online to show the videos of them. That didn’t work either as the network lag was too long for the videos to buffer in a reasonable time. So don’t rely on the internet connection as it may be flaky and you won’t be able to play your Youtube videos, try to have all your files available locally.

Use full screen mode when possible, it’s nicer to view a video without unnecessary context. For the same reason try not to use fancy backgrounds for your slides, it's distracting and takes the focus away from what you're saying.

You can write your own software to handle your presentation, it’s very well received by the audience as it proves that you’re really prepared.

When things go wrong, let it go. If your code still doesn’t compile after the third attempt and neither you nor the audience can fix it, leave it. It’s better to say sorry (weakness is a strength) than desperately trying to attack the frozen beef with the plastic knife.

Make full use of your operating system or application by using keyboard shortcuts, auto completion (coders) and other techniques. There are two main benefits of this approach: firstly, you do things faster, so the audience doesn’t need to roll their eyes when you type SuchACoolFunctionNameWhichIsOnlySeventyFiveCharactersLong; and secondly, you teach people how to do repetitive things more efficiently.

If you show source code, always use monospaced font, dark background and white text usually works better than the opposite, especially in hard lighting conditions. Delete all commented code that you won't use in your demonstration.

Finally, have fun and love what you do.

By Tomek
Published: 11 May 2009
1 Comment

They don't make em like they used to...

Number 1 on the day I was born was...

The Wurzels - "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)"

This is maybe why I have such impeccable music tastes now hhmm
If your unfamiliar with this chart classic click here

What's your birth date tune?

By Fiona Dorman
Published: 30 April 2009
7 Comments

Frabulous fractals

tictoc's Technical Director Tom Beddard will be demonstrating how to create mathematical and generative art on a Mac. The pic above is one of Tom's creations. As an ex-physicist, fractals are one of Tom's specialist subjects. Actually, he has many specialist subjects, and I don't understand what fractals have to do with physics, but that's why I'm going to the talk - it's all about the edukashun, innit.

If you want to find out more, come along on Thursday 14th May 2009 at 6pm to Apple's Buchanan Street store in Glasgow. You'll find directions and details in the calendar of events on the store's webpage. Do come on down and find out about the wonderful world of fractals - I have a feeling that the pictures will not only be pretty, but clever!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 24 April 2009
3 Comments

Open Sesame!

tictoc has been using an online video publishing system called SesameVault for a while now - for example one of our clients' websites, Vetpulse.tv, uses it to allow vets around the world to upload video to the site in order to share expertise. We find it a great tool because it's totally web-based, doesn't require users to download any software in order to upload or view video content, doesn't take viewers off to a third party site (like YouTube) and it has an API that allows us to seamlessly integrate with our CMS. It's a great tool for SMEs because it's cost-effective, but allows them total control over how video is uploaded and published to their site.

Recently, our friends at Open Box Technologies, who developed SesameVault, have released SesameVault 2.0 which allows video to be published via mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones as well as via normal web browsers. You can see the full details of the enhancements they've made on their blog.

Plus our very own Alan Masterson is quoted in their press release, talking about how we've used SesameVault here at tictoc.

Good luck to the Open Box guys, we look forward to using SesameVault 2.0 in future projects!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 23 April 2009
0 Comments

tictoc Happy Easter art

Here's a wee message from tictoc's Tomek I thought I'd share with the tictoc blog! Goes to show magnetic boards are good for more than just writing coding notes!

Hope you all had a lovely break and the Easter Bunny was good to you!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 14 April 2009
0 Comments

tictocers to follow on twitter

The strength of our family is derived from it's fabric of exceptionally talented individuals. Most of which can be found on the micro-blogging service of the moment, twitter.

To save you the trouble of tracking them down yourself I've collated this handy list of tweeting staffers and roughly segmented it into 3 broad groups.

They're there right now sharing and discussing resources and topics related to their particular specialisms.

Development

@paratiger
@subblue
@nelstrom
@og2t
@cframe
and @riggbot who'll be joining our ranks next week.

Design

@monkeyville

Business / Digital Marketing

@melmcg
@gambollingsylph
@heartblankies
@feshine
@kate_wooding
@pocopina

And finally, @tictocfamily is our official twitter account. Say hello today and join in the conversation.

By Andy Bright
Published: 9 April 2009
0 Comments

Mirror, mirror on the wall

So, just who is the greatest web design agency on earth? We only ask because we noticed that one of our competitors, Alienation, were trying to get to the number one spot on Google for this very search term, and they employed a number of Search Engine Optimisation tactics to get there (perfectly reasonably, we're not suggesting that anything underhand went on at all!). We're pleased to report that if you search Google for the exact phrase "the greatest web design agency on earth" they come out number 1 - congrats guys!

That set us thinking... We knew they'd done a number of things to achieve the coveted #1 spot: they'd written a blog post with that exact phrase in the title, and they'd also Twittered about their quest (and probably some other stuff too). Alan, our SEO expert, thought it was a wee bit obvious, and wondered if we could get anywhere near their listing by just adding a comment to a blog with the phrase in. So, some time a couple of weeks ago, he posted a comment on one of our random blog posts that said "Thanks for the tips Kate you guys are the greatest web design agency on earth!". And then we sat back and waited...

Today we checked our results on Google, and just with that one little comment (we promise, we haven't done anything else at all to Search Engine Optimise our site for the search term "greatest web design agency on earth") we're now at the #4 spot! Wow!

This just goes to show the power of blogs, comments and Twitter in helping with Search Engine Optimisation - and of course, how important having relevant content on these is to SEO.

Of course, this is all in the name of fun (with just a little competitive edge!) and we doubt that many people search for "the greatest web design agency on earth" in Google. Or that if they do, they take much notice of the results.

So I was quite surprised to notice that a number of agencies were actually paying for Google Adwords on those search terms! Do you reckon their sponsorship of that search term wins them a lot of business?!

Photo credit: Kirk Teetzel on Flickr

By Kate Wooding
Published: 25 March 2009
6 Comments

Should agencies Tweet?

Interesting discussion on Econsultancy (see the comments on this article) about whether agencies should Tweet as an organisation (i.e. from a corporate account) or just rely on their staffers. Interesting because the tictocfamily Twitter account started to be used regularly this week, just before the discussion on Econsultancy broke out.

I'd imagine that although lots of our staff are on Twitter, and do tweet about stuff that happens here, they probably have different followers to the company Twitter account. Maybe when it's had time to get a sizable number of followers we'll do a comparison.

Do you think anybody is ever going to be interested in our company Twittering??

By Kate Wooding
Published: 25 March 2009
0 Comments

Digital marketing works, and here's the proof

Comic Relief's website saw a 100% increase in traffic to its Red Nose homepage which the organisation has attributed to digital marketing initiatives. The campaign used social media initiatives including networking websites, blogs and Twitter to publicise the site, and gain appeal from people who didn't watch the TV show when aired.

Red Nose fact :

Over 50 million Red Noses have been bought over the years – remember The Hands Nose, The Tomato Nose, The Colour Changing Nose, The Shaggy Nose and The Nose That Grows?!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 23 March 2009
0 Comments

Short URLs

This week we at tictoc have been thinking a lot about URL shortening services. There are loads of these around, you've probably already heard of tinyURL, but there's also tr.im, bit.ly, and many others too numerous to mention here. [Note to web geeks: .im is an Isle of Man domain, and .ly is a Libyan domain.]

They're great for when you don't have a lot of space and yet still want to provide a link to a URL that isn't exactly print-friendly - for example instead of the very long: http://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/shop/product.html?product_id=844&-session=shopper:57C2B9F207e352A3D8XiFEBC7C8E you can use a URL-shortening service and it becomes something manageable like this: http://tr.im/hHvS

URL shortening services have become much-used since *some* people are limited to only 140 characters (yes, I'm talking to all you Twitterers out there) and some Twitter-reading tools even have URL shortening services built in.

Anyway, I had been awake at night worrying that there weren't enough combinations of lower-case letters, upper-case letters and numbers to give any given page on the internet a short URL. I mean, how many pages on the internet are there anyway? And if I made a short URL, how long would it stay for? Would I find that in a few weeks it would have been given to another page? Or when I made a short URL did the URL shortening service check if somebody had already made a short URL for that page and give me the same one?

Anyway, I shared the cause of my insomnia with the techie boys, and they assure me that, if a URL shortening service uses both upper and lower case letters and the ten available digits (0-9) then that's 62 possible digits. And if the URL shortening service reduces URLs to a combination of 6 letters/digits, then that means that there's 62 to the power 6 possible short URLs in the world. That's 56,800,235,584. And the guys assure me that's enough for all the pages on the internet. So I can stop worrying now. Although I read recently we're living in the age of exponential growth, so I reckon at some point in the future short URLs will stop being so short.

In the course of this conversation, we also uncovered a few other interesting (?!) facts. First off, the short URLs that are generated aren't random - even if you use different URL shortening services, if you put the same long URL in, you'll often get the same short URL out (well, apart from the fact that the start of the URL will be different). Apparently that's cos these URL shortening services probably use the same algorithm to convert your long URL into a long string of numbers and then use fancy maths to convert this into a much shorter string of numbers. So that sorts out some of my other worries.

As an aside, Alan, our resident search expert, pointed out that short URLs do nothing for your site's optimisation (that's assuming that you're linking to your own site - well anyway, it won't help whichever site you're linking to). A site's ranking on a search engine results page is helped by having lots of links from other online sites to it. So, if you post on Twitter with a link to a page, that page's ranking will improve. However if you use a short URL it won't have any beneficial effect. The lesson? If at all possible, use the long version of the URL if you want to benefit the sites' opimisation.

Finally (phew! I thought I'd never get here) Tomek told me of a fabby URL shortening service called tr.im. It's helpful in a number of ways. Its URL is shorter than TinyURL.com, so you've got a headstart there in that your shortened URL will be even shorter. But also if you sign up for an account with them, you get to give a customised name to your short URL, which can help people know what you're giving them a link to. For example: if we go back to that very long URL I gave earlier, I could shorten it to something meaningful, like www.tr.im/basilplant. And the really clever bit is that tr.im lets you see stats about who has clicked on your short URL!!

I've probably bored you enough now, so I'll leave it there.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 20 March 2009
3 Comments

Don't get namejacked

Look, it's not as if Twitter has taken over the world or anything, and we promise that we can blog about other things. But this week we thought we'd broadcast a Public Service Announcement. Do yourself a favour. Go reserve your name, or your brand or organisation's name on Twitter. Do it now. Even if you think the whole thing is a complete waste of time and will disappear in two weeks. Because if you're wrong, or if you change your mind, and then you find out that someone else has taken your name already, you'll kick yourself. But more worryingly, they could be pretending to be you and sending out stuff on the web that has nothing to do with you or your brand/organisation. Don't say we didn't warn you...

There are lots of stories of people (famous ones usually) finding out that someone has got to their name first on Twitter - Shaq O'Neal, David Bowie, Richard Hammond, even the Dalai Lama has been caught out!

Here is some great advice just in case you do have to deal with a Twitter impersonator.

And here are some great lists of (real) celebs, charities and retailers already on Twitter. Feel free to add any you know of.

And if you are thinking of Twittering, here is a great top ten tips from eConsultancy. OK, end of Public Service Announcement.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 6 March 2009
1 Comment

Dogs are better than cats and here's the proof!

Oscar here, the tictoc office dog, thought it was about time I started getting involved in the chat here in the office now that we have a few clients relevant to myself! (Scottish SPCA if I need to talk to someone about my fears, PetsBenefit if I need some new toys or fancy a change of diet!).

I was chatting with Alan (our non canine SEO expert) who noticed some interesting stats on the rehoming section of the SSPCA website which showed dog rehoming, 768,000 views in January and February against cat rehoming of 167,000 (rabbits 58,000, small pets 84,000, others 32,000).

Just goes to show us Dogs are the master race!

By Oscar the Dog
Published: 2 March 2009
1 Comment