There seems to be an ever-growing number of IT, technology, internet and digital groups, forums and networks, setting up in the North East. The latest such group is ‘Digital Marketing – Debates’ hosted by Newcastle University Business School. Wednesday morning saw the first meeting of this new group, and despite the early start in seemed to be very well received, with a promising turnout, made up of both familiar faces and people I’d not come across at these things before. Being an early one, it got off to a slightly slow start, with many of us barely awake at 8.am. but a cup of coffee and some  interesting content soon changed that. The line up of speakers included Kay Jones and Dr Janet Ward of the University, Iain Gibson managing director of Mobious, Tom Fotheringham Online Marketing MANAGER at DFDS Seaways and Emma Cordiner Managing Director of Denalli Recruitment. While I found all of the presentations interesting, I found Iain’s and Tom’s most especially useful to me, as they were closed to what I’ve interested in, in terms of digital communication. Iain, obviously an old hand at giving this kind of talk, began his direct marketing career client side, before moving to agencies, and eventually setting up his business ‘Mobious’ in 2002, now one of the fastest growing agencies outside of London. Here are a few of the things on email marketing that Iain shared with the group: Relevance is king. The subject line in can be the difference between an email being opened and being binned, the subject line should contain a reason to open the email – mention the offer.  Concentrate on Click throughs, have one primary prominent call to action. Design both the html and plain text versions, make it easy for users to forward to a friend. Use sample cells, to constantly test and analyse. Tom has over ten years experience, and a substantial knowledge of online advertising, sales, site building, social media, search engine optimization, pay per click  and affiliate marketing. He came over as being a very hands on, kind of guy, having developed and build his own ecommerce sites as well as working with developers and agencies. Here are a few of Toms words of wisdom; Use a combination of search optimization and pay per click for the best results. Know your market. Use Behavioural targeting. Know when to use more aggressive short term black hat optimization and when to use slower white hat. Concentrate on relevant content, quality linking and strong structure. Poor linking can damage your Google rank. Register subdomains to manage your crisis PR – they come in above PR. If I were to criticise anything, it would be the time keeping. The talks overran by a good hour, leaving little time for chatting with speakers or networking afterwards, with many people having to rush out to rescue cars. The next meeting is planned for the 10th September, so if you have an interest in online marketing get that date into you diary and …. join the debate!

The presentations are now available for download.

There is a strange feeling of satisfaction in reading something that you have written in newsprint. I’m not quite sure what it is, but there is definitely something very special about the experience. When Lewis Harrison of  Codeworks, asked if I fancied having a go at writing the Technotes column for the journal, I wasn’t sure where it would go. That was about a year ago,  I written another four columns since.

Writing for Technotes, is a really interesting experience, the journal has a readership of around 110,000 with 32,859 copies sold a day, 65 % of its readers ar ABC1′s, with 26% aged 55-65,  so its nt an audience i’m used to talking to. You only get 450 words to introduce your subject and get your message across, which can be a bit of a juggling act between making an article accessible to the majority or readers and actually making the point you want to make, but I’ve never been one to back away from a challenge.

Working with Lewis is great, firstly to bounce ideas off about what readers may be interested in, but also from an editorial point of view, seeing what tweaks and changes he makes to my raw material is a great insight, and the man has the patience of a saint when it comes to correcting my grammatical errors.

For those of you that are interested, here are the links to the five columns so far.

Enter the Twittersphere
(no longer online but based on this original blog post)
Apple at risk of neglecting the faithful
Feb 5 2009
Twitter is fulfilling its potential
Mar 12 2009
‘Culture of Free’ has its opponents
May 14 2009
Search for meaningful results
Jun 4 2009
Are we ready for an email upgrade?
Sept 3 2009
Take time to reconnect with reality
Oct 8 2009
Smiles won’t be as wide this year
dec 17 2009
What does future hold for technos?
jan 13 2010
Being smart in the way we use our phones?
April 1 2010
Running free with hi-tech help
April 22 2010

The web widens to become ultimate experience
August 12 2010

It would be great to get some feedback and to hear any views on how we might develop this in the future,  so please leave a comment.