It’s a year of celebrations this year at C9 with an engagement and a few big birthdays – I won’t mention who! A great excuse for cakes and bubbly…………

You could argue third party applications such as TwitPic and YFrog allowed us to add images to our profiles but it was never really as simple as uploading directly from your Twitter account and the images never appeared as saved galleries on your profile.

How?

Twitter has now added a new image gallery feature which loads a strip of thumbnails of your recently uploaded pictures into the sidebar. When you view a person’s homepage directly, you get a larger image. When you view a profile by clicking on a person in your stream, you get a smaller set. Both allow you to click and enlarge the photos in a very similar way to Facebook!

A typical Twitter slider view

Why?

So why have Twitter added this feature?

Adding new features like this keeps people on the site longer and adds interest to the general text based tweets. It also means people won’t miss images that are uploaded by people they follow as they would usually be buried under a stream of updates as they are a constant feature on a profile.

So?

More interestingly for us at Cloud 9 it allows us to market ourselves and our clients in a better way on Twitter that we could only before do using Facebook. We can brand ourselves in a better fashion and ‘tweet’ with images rather than text and images. As well as text, tweets can ‘retweeted’ to allow them maximum interest. It may seem like double the work but we look at it being double the exposure to a normally out of reach audience.

We’re excited about this new feature and will be sure to be using it! Keep an eye on what we’re doing on https://twitter.com/c9dd or https://www.facebook.com/cloud9digitaldesign

QR codes (or Quick Response codes) have been around for a while and arrived here via Japan, where they are very common place. It’s not been until the massive uptake of smartphones in recent years however that we have now started to see them used in the UK.

Will your customers use them?

Usage numbers are growing rapidly and people are becoming more inquisitive. Those that already use QR codes will undoubtedly be receptive to your presence on the web, your Twitter Facebook, YouTube presence etc.

If you’re still not sure about QR codes, here is a video that may encourage you to try for yourself.

http://youtu.be/B3lrcOhmp9g

Or contact Cloud 9 and let us help you to develop a strategy to build QR codes into your marketing campaign.

Some examples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT16DcHcjRA

Titled Legacy – Now Is Our Time, the ad features a reading of Charles Bukowski’s poem The Laughing Heart, which opens with the lines ‘Your life is your life, don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission, be on the watch, there are ways out, there is a light somewhere.’ The visuals are a mixture of kids having fun (jumping into swimming pools etc) and the more pertinent imagery of protests and riots.

Realising that the timing is off, Levi’s has apparently postponed the ad’s UK release, but has uploaded the spot onto YouTube and similar sharing sites, and it is available to view on the Levi’s Go Forth site, goforth.levi.com, so is easy to find. Plus with the unrest that has occurred elsewhere recently, the ad’s imagery will no doubt feel topical to people all over the world, not just in the UK.

Levi’s is far from the first brand to want to co-opt the romanticism and danger of protest imagery for commercial gain. And looking more deeply into the mission statement that accompanies the ad on the website, Levi’s is clearly trying to instigate positive action with the campaign (in particular support for the charity water.org). But should brands really be dabbling with the language and imagery of political protest to sell products? Especially when the issues behind such action, as has been proven lately, are often far more complex than brands are ultimately comfortable with engaging in?

This post courtesy of Creative Review

Not only are they great videos, but they also make me want to see more of the world, and all the great things in it.

Their words…

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage…
all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films….. = a trip of a lifetime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvgYAwDORo4

{Please note: this isn’t suitable for under 18′s}

Although there’s a big disclaimer saying it has nothing to do with Wrigley or Skittles themselves, there’s some nice production in it that cost ‘someone’ some cash. Clearly, watching the video it’s obvious why they can’t be seen to have commissioned it themselves.

We love the way big brands are cottoning on to the idea that a low-cost viral can spread like wildfire, if the concept is really and truly rude, shocking or proper funny.

This doesn’t apply to marketing managers that don’t have bottle to be rude (You’d be surprised how reluctant people are to be rude). Someone using your product wearing a funny hat is not going to make a great viral, and we’ve all seen enough cute cat/baby videos.

If you would like to investigate promoting your brand or product through viral advertising, we can come up with an idea, shoot and distribute it for you. The question is, do you have the bottle?

Give us a call

 Facebook launched in 2004 and was originally restricted to Harvard College attendees only. Since then it has rapidly grown into a way of life for people. It now has more than 750 million active users, there are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events etc) and people spend over spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

If you are not yet convinced of why your brand should be on Facebook, check out these stats from Experian Hitwise.

1. Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google, accounting for 6.89% of all visits from UK Internet users in September.
2. Facebook is by far the biggest website in the UK for page views. In total, 16.40% of all page views during September went to a Facebook page.
3. Facebook now accounts for 1 in 6 page views in the UK, that’s twice the number of page views received by Google.
4. Facebook is the most popular social network in the UK, accounting for 55% of all visits to social networks.
5. Facebook is the number one search term in the UK. 3.69% of all searches typed into Google, Yahoo! and Bing are for ‘facebook’.
6. Taking into account variations of Facebook with misspellings and abbreviations such as ‘facbook’, ‘fb’ or ‘facebok’ – Facebook accounts for approximately 6% of all searches in search engines.
7. Facebook accounts for 9.58% of all upstream traffic to other websites in the UK.
8. Nearly 10% of Internet visits come immediately after a visit to Facebook, second only to Google in traffic generation.
9. Visits to Facebook have quadrupled in the last three years. In the last year Facebook has grown by 17% in terms of UK Internet visits.
10. In the last year, Facebook has increased its downstream traffic to online retail sites by 12%.

We love Social Media at Cloud 9 and see the huge potential for any Brand to be part of this ever growing social religion. Why not give us a call to see how we can help you grow and give you the opportunity to open new doors.

On the final leg of our trip to the Yorkshire Dales, my friends and I decided to embark on a walk through How Stean Gorge near Grassington. Armed with hard hats and torches we explored the limestone caves and although we didn’t encounter any highway men (who reputedly used it as a hideout) and neither did we find silver and bronze Roman coins (as were discovered in the Gorge in 1868), we still enjoyed this natural attraction nevertheless!

This gastro labyrinth, with the odd celebrity chef thrown in, attracts thousands of visitors every year who (like me) lap up every free sample going and get seduced into buying things that you fear you may never see in the shops.

However, I was pleased to see my favourite vodka brand exhibiting there, Żubrówka. Distilled in Białystok in Poland, it’s a brand and a town that’s close to my heart as its where my mother and her family are from, so when I go to Białystok the brand is promoted nearly everywhere you go and there’s always a bottle in my auntie’s cupboard. Żubrówka in association with Appletiser, have created a wonderfully refreshing long drink which was being trialled at the Show and I have to say, a few bottles of this new combo came back home with me!

Whilst wandering around Leamington Spa on Friday night (pre cinema) trying to find some where to eat we came across Kayal – a fairly recently opened Indian Restaurant.

The food is mainly authentic Keralan and South Indian, and therefore very different to standard Indian fare in the UK.

The service is friendly and the staff are happy to recommend dishes. I opted for mixed starters with a yummy lamb curry (Cheera Erachi) to follow – the meat was very tender and the taste was a lot softer than your regular Indian curry.

Mike had an amazing mixed seafood curry – he said it was the best he had.

The decor is a little naff with a TV playing showing the region which after a time could get a bit dull! (but nowhere near as bad as their website!!)

However the food and service ensures I will definitely go back.

Marks out of 10? – 8.5!

Links:

http://www.royal-leamington-spa.co.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Leamington_Spa

http://leamingtonspatowncouncil.gov.uk/