July 9, 2008 by Mike Barrett
Well, how surprised were we last night when at the APA Creative Awards, the new Your family site beat the likes of Tesco and BA to the “Best landing page” award?
Very! that;s how…
Only a few weeks after launching the site, we’ve already won our first award which is great news and bodes well for the future.
The Redwood team were all very excited and much champagne was consumed with the added bonus that the NSPCC team were in attendance too to see the victory. The party went on until late and it’s fair to say that the office is quite subdued today although everyone is admiring the nice shiny trophy.
Posted in Charity, Compound Media | No Comments »
July 3, 2008 by Mike Barrett
Today we signed off the final bugs on our biggest project to date, launching a new parenting advice site for the NSPCC to supplement their “Your Family” magazine. It’s been a labour of love for sure (see my silicon.com column) and over a year in gestation but it’s live and working and looking great.
It’s a really clever mix of “Heat” styling but full of very high quality parenting advice all backed up by a team of experts at NSPCC. It’s a crowded market but the high level of trust endowed by the NSPCC brand should see us carve out a niche in the sector. We’ve got articles, videos, product reviews and loads of suggestions for family days out now that the summer is here.
Needless to say there are a large number of people to say thanks to for making my fist major site build a success. All the editorial and account management team at Redwood who write the content, NSPCC for the opportunity to do the project and the guys at Squiz who built the site on their open source MySource Matrix CMS.
In building the site we’ve invested heavily in the platform and hosting so that now we’re able to provide a fully hosted, enterprise level CMS. This is ideal for smaller publishers who want to get on-line without the expense of software licensing and hardware purchase. Look out for a further announcement about the launch of the “Compound Enterprise Platform” soon.
In the meantime, if your kids won’t eat their tea tonight or go to bed on time without a tantrum, take a look at www.yourfamily.org.uk and see where you’re going wrong…
Posted in Charity, Compound Media, Content management | No Comments »
January 30, 2008 by Mike Barrett
This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on some of the key learnings from a recent project to take an established print publication on-line. I had originally started penning a long article about what we’d learned but quickly realised that it lends itself nicely to shorter, more focussed pieces so here is the first: -
Taking your print publication on-line is a scary business. I know, I’ve just been through the process, hence the lack of recent activity on the blogging front.
For the average print publisher, moving on-line is daunting. The digital community has created a brave new world, where the natives speak a different language. To the uninitiated, this makes almost impossible to determine who knows what they are talking about, and who are the equivalent of dodgy second hand car salesmen.
Should you embrace video? what about user generated content, social networking, widgets, Web 2.0 and all the other buzzwords that get bandied around in the press and amongst the knowledgeable bloggers?
One safe route for print publishers venturing on-line would be to look to one of the digital agencies to guide them through the maze. After all, the agencies are at the forefront of the on-line world and should be best placed to advise on design, architecture and strategy.
However, having worked on a number of projects now with the agency community, I think that far from them being able to provide all the answers, the publishers actually know a lot more than they realise. The best projects are those where the two sides listen to each other and respect their specialist knowledge.
Lesson 1 - It’s a combination of the digital marketers knowledge of the landscape combined with the publishers understanding of their content and audience that creates the “magic soup”
Posted in Marketing, Publishing | No Comments »
December 4, 2007 by Mike Barrett
Now all the beans have been counted and totals added up, the great news is that we broke the £400,000 barrier for monies raised by the participants of this year’s Byte Night event.
The most amazing thing of all is that with the dedication of the board, sponsors and NCH, the costs of staging the event worked out at less than 10% of the total.
Byte Night Local contributed around £40,000 with satellite events in Reading and Essex and we’ll be pushing hard to expand on this next year.
A big thanks to all the teams involved and we’re already looking forward to next year’s event so be sure to put the 3rd October in your diary now
Posted in Byte Night, Charity | No Comments »
October 15, 2007 by Mike Barrett
This year’s Byte Night was the most successful yet with over £340,000 pounds raised by around 270 people from the IT industry sleeping out for the charity NCH.
We were in good company with Martin Linton, MP for Battersea, Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes, actresses Lindsey Coulson and Jenny Agutter, Trinny Woodall critiqued our pyjamas and Sian Lloyd provided a weather report on the evening.
As predicted by Sian, the weather was kind to us with no rain and a pretty mild night for October and the Compound Media team managed to raise more than £4,000 with a last minute surge in donations meaning we beat our target.
I want to say a big thank you to the team and to all our sponsors who gave so generously, we’re already planning how to raise even more next year…
Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media | No Comments »
October 4, 2007 by Mike Barrett
Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?
Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?
I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.
I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″
The judges said: -
“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”
Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.
Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.
Posted in AOP, Social Media, Web 2.0, ZDNet | 1 Comment »
September 26, 2007 by Mike Barrett
On monday night I was at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards at the Hilton in Park Lane to present the award for the IT Services Technology Project of the Year. It was a close run thing between the top names in the banking sector with the eventual winners being ABN Amro for their London message hub project.
It was a very enjoyable evening hosted by John Simpson, the BBC foreign affairs correspondent who shared several “interesting” anecdotes from his times with such differing personalities as George Bush and Colonel Gadaffi who apparently always conducted interviews from a distance in fear of being assassinated (surely not by the BBC?).
It was the first time Compound Media has sponsored anything like this and it was great to see such a big turnout with over 600 guests at the event. We also raised over £4000 for Byte Night during the evening.
Posted in Byte Night, Charity, Compound Media, Events | No Comments »
September 18, 2007 by Mike Barrett
Last Friday I spent an enjoyable few hours locked in a small room with actress Jenny Agutter. Women of a certain age will remember her as the eldest daughter in “The Railway Children” but men of a similar age will remember her for the seminal film “Walkabout”. I clearly remember being taken to the local cinema on a school bus to see it when aged about 12. It was the first “Serious” film I ever saw and as such will always be clearly imprinted on my mind. Jenny is a long time supporter of NCH, the charity that that works to combat youth homelessness.
So imagine my excitement at being asked to represent the Byte Night Board at the recent “Radio Day” where Jenny and I were interviewed by 16 radio stations. We had a great time and had plenty of opportunity to plug not just the upcoming event in London but also a new initiative this year that lets people join in wherever they are based.
Byte Night Local means anybody can now participate in a great event. We’ve got a mini-Byte Night happening out in the UK Silicon Valley (OK, Reading!) and people sleeping in their gardens up and down the country.
If you want to join us, it’s not too late to sign up and spend a night under the stars on the 5th October. If that sounds like it might be too cold and wet for you then you could sponsor me, or, if you’re a man of a certain age then you might even like to sponsor Jenny.
Updated - Listen to an excerpt from the interviews here (3Mb)
Posted in Audio, Byte Night, Charity | 2 Comments »
August 23, 2007 by Mike Barrett
Way back in March, I wrote this post about the problems in monetising user generated content. Last week, my namesake at MySpace announced that they have been trialling contextual display advertising based on user behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, there were no technical details as to how they would segment the users as if they can crack the magic algorithm and make a success of it then they will be well ahead of the pack.
It’s a bold step with many unanswered questions, I believe the issues are twofold:
- Firstly, can they make it work?
- If they can, then can social networkers be enticed to click on ads?
As to the first point, if it works then they will be able to charge a healthy premium for access to target groups. Barrett is claiming that a premium of between 30-50% is “within the ballpark”.
However, if they don’t get it right then the potential to alienate clients is huge. FaceBook found this out recently when the government suspended advertising on the site after their ads were run against BNP groups.
The second question is harder to anticipate, this recent article bemoaned the poor CTR on FaceBook. Of course, this could be down to many factors, poor creative, lack of targeting, uninteresting products will all have an effect on lowering the CTR.
However, there is also the possibility that social networkers just don’t respond to ads in the same way that users do when browsing traditional content sites. If this is true then no amount of targeting will command a premium without a measurable ROI for the clients. Only time will tell…
Posted in Ad serving, Social Media | 1 Comment »
June 14, 2007 by Mike Barrett
My old friends at CNET have invited me to be a judge on the awards panel for the 2007 Business Technology Awards which is a great honour.
I’m looking forward to sifting through the entries to see how the cream of British technology companies and personalities have made their mark in the past 12 months.
It’s an illustrious judging panel which I’m sure will debate long and hard over who deserves the prestigious cog-shaped gongs.
Posted in Entrepreneur, Events | No Comments »
