Category: Best practice

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The Need for a Digital Strategy

Businesses of all shapes and sizes, from the big players right down to one-man bands seem to feel the ever-mounting pressure of having a digital strategy in place. How to crack the social code, how to market to the masses, or how to simply make friends and collect followers?

At the private view of Hotshoe’s Other last week I was discussing the possibilities of ‘Social’ with a group of commercial photographers. Aidan McCarthy confessed the pressure he was feeling having not yet joined the global conversation and master minded a ‘digital strategy’. What was it that people online wanted from him he asked, how would Tweeting lead to more work?

Photo by Aidan McCarthy

Image by Aidan McCarthy

A few weeks ago The Telegraph had their inaugural Festival of Business in Manchester. An agony aunt panel, made up of representatives from Twitter, Spotify, Facebook and Dell, were on hand to answer questions about digital strategy. The major gripe that many businesses had was how could they push their online presence past a website and a Facebook page. Many businesses had set up Twitter accounts but didn’t know how best to attract more followers. Jessica Verrilli, Twitter’s Head of Business Development, rather honestly pointed out that sometimes it is not always necessary for a business to have a Twitter account or a Facebook page. Creating a notable presence online for your business requires daily dedication for an uncertain gain. When time and resources are limited it is not always possible for a business to maintain consistency online. Verrilli suggested it would be wiser for some businesses to explore new digital advertising opportunities rather than ticking digital boxes for the sake of it or leaving Twitter accounts blank and inactive.

These feelings of social inadequacies that UK businesses confessed to at the Festival should be rather comforting to hear for people like McCarthy. Creatives should also remember that they have access to something many businesses don’t and that is content. Good content is what successful strategies are made of. There are very few established rules when it comes to social networking and this is what can be rather unnerving for many. However, if there is one solid foundation that Social rests upon it is sharing. It is not necessarily what you have to say that gets the conversation going but what you have to share with others.

Tilley Harris is a recent Photojournalism graduate of the LCC

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Bullet proof or overwhelming – getting guidelines just right

Writing clear but concise guidelines is always a challenge. Handing over a project or training a team to manage a new blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel or forum needs careful planning and enough hand-holding until the new team is confident that they’re able to manage on their own.

Guidelines need to tread a fine line between being bullet proof and overwhelming! Too much detail, and they’ll never be used. Not enough and users may miss out important steps in the process.

We approach guideline development in exactly the same way we would approach a website. We start with our audience. What skills and tools do they have to do the job? Do they prefer to keep everything online, or will they want a printed copy to keep on their desk? If they’re uploading a photo, do they know how to crop and save it in the right format? Do they have the right software to do that?

We always include screenshots and go through all the paces ourselves, putting us in the shoes of the user. It’s a useful exercise to go through the administration of a project in the shoes of a newcommer. What may seem obvious to us, may be confusing for someone unfamiliar with WordPress’s back end, for example.