Social Media Masterclass: audience building tools fit for purpose?
The Chillifish crew were truly honoured by BBC Innovation - Paul Sheehy and Tim Kalic had just one hour to share all of Chillifish’s knowledge and experience on engaging and building audiences using third party social media and networking sites including . The showcase for this event was the very recent and hugely successful launch of Pretty Green (www.prettygreen.com) through the exclusive use of community utilising 3rd party social platforms….
The BBC has for sometime been trying to find ways to reach new audiences for their programs and are particularly interested in utilising, as yet, unused assets from films and programmes that can be placed on the web to build and develop communities and extended audiences around programmes.
Oliver Thomson and his team at BBC Innovation promoted our session like this:
Chillifish - an online marketing and branding masterclass
What space should your programme occupy on the web?
What type of films work online? How can we use third party social media to promote and engage audiences around our work?
How can we safeguard our brands and values and monitor, optimise and utilise social media platforms without compromising BBC values and standards etc.
Gone are the days when audiences sat quietly and listened. In today’s digital space, brands need to engage, interact, inspire and stand-out. It’s not all about smart ideas.
In addition to being something to wow customers, a successful Web site needs to be easy to use, reliable and most of all commercial. And, it needs to live and breath the brand it represents. Learn more from our visiting experts…
Chillifish works with brands to create beautiful, simple and highly functional online experiences. The company’s background is one part retail, one part creative and one part technical and the team delivers a huge range of projects for web and mobile.
Tim Kalic and Paul Sheehy talked through how developing a huge community through social media was achieved as well as running through a case study on Pretty Green which had been created from harnessing the social platforms to reach it’s audience. Pretty Green community was born by providing exclusive content to members only and through the production of 2 iconic films. The first film was to announce the project, build the brand and create hype. From here the community was born and we needed to keep it alive and fresh. Users could ask Liam a question which he would respond to by video. Liam started tweeting and the exclusive photos from behind the scenes added to the exclusive content that was provided to the community. Then came the time for the second iconic film to launch the brand for pre sale :
The results have been phenomenal with over 500,000 views of the films and a massive audience Pretty Green is alive and only just beginning.
Exciting stuff to say the least! And now its time to aggregate all of the noise and use it to continue building the brand communication and sales!
Thanks to the BBC for hosting this event and we look forward to speaking to you all again some time soon.
We have started the process of adapting a new way of working here at Chillifish. Through our experience working on a variety of web projects, we totally understand and appreciate the fact that the final delivered project is, in most cases, a far cry from the initial specification. Trying to force large scale web projects into traditional project management methodologies just doesn’t work, as due to the nature of the business, things change.
We’ve chosen to loosely base our project management on SCRUM, which is commonly used in Agile software development.
“Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. The term was coined in the year 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was formulated.”
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_Manifesto
The SCRUM approach involves the client as part of the development team, with frequent intermediate deliveries with working functionality. This allows the client to test working software much earlier in the development cycle, and enables the project to change according to changing needs.
This approach also allows for transparency throughout the project, something which many web projects suffer greatly from, with in some cases the client only seeing the finished website days before launch. This is obviously not the best way to work, as at this stage it is far too late to make any changes, and as I said before, things DO change.
Hands on involvement from the client at early stages also allows them to ‘feel out’ functionality they may have only previously seen in a flat design or a written functional specification. And as some things sound better on paper, we want to be adaptable and position ourselves in the best possible way to deliver a project the client is over the moon about!
Two weeks into our first ’sprint’ (find out what a sprint is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development) ) and we are welcoming the change!
Check back soon, I will blog about how we find the first month..
Off topic slightly, but we have been a bit suprised here in the offices with the rather large amounts of snow that keep blowing past the window and hindering our efforts to get to and from anywhere… Haven’t seen snow like this in Bournemouth for years!
Welcome to the new chillifish.net blog. We thought it about time we starting blogging about what we were up to because there are some very exciting projects on the horizon, and always crazyness going on in the office! This blog will be a mix of updates on current projects, sneak peeks at new projects, general perceptions of the world, and professional tricks and tips from some of the clever people that work here!
So stay tuned, subscribe to that RSS, and check back often because we are also launching a brand new website very soon!