Short and sweet: http://twitter.com/andyfacts
We’re hiring: Delib direct sales
Ben Witnall - February 3rd, 2010The elevator pitch
You’re an enthusiastic individual who loves selling. Delib, the part of Team Rubber for which you’ll be working, is an interesting company that’s all about connecting people with decision-making. We’ve got a great set of offerings and a long list of targets. Together, we’ll make our clients and our team happy.
The work
For 2-3 days a week, you’ll join our friendly team in our Bristol studio. You’ll hit the ‘phones and spend your day talking to organisations involved in big decisions – like the NHS, planning agencies or local authorities – drumming up interest, generating leads and building up a healthy sales pipeline. Do well (turn up leads) and the job could expand.
The responsibilities
It’s pretty simple: we have a large addressable market and we want to have productive conversations with people within it about how we can help them. Your responsibility will be to generate leads, covering lots of ground amongst our target audiences whilst maintaining our reputation for providing great, useful service. It’s not a difficult sell, this is a good offering that’s been proven to work and has a long list of happy clients; we just need help to spread the word.
What you’re like
Intelligent selling. If you don’t love talking to people, responding to enquiries and closing deals, this isn’t the job for you. Beyond that, you’ll need to be self-motivated and well-organised, able to put your head down and press on with a big pile of work under your own steam. We’d also like it if you were the sort of person who could enjoy having lunch with us. You should have a degree and preferably some background in marketing/sales.
The rewards
£8,400 for a 3 day week (equivalent to £14k p/a full time salary) + a healthy bonus based on the profit of each job.
The people you’d work closest with
Chris, our new business director; Ben, our marketing man; Adam, our existing sales guy; Gez and Michaela, our consultants; Laura and Alex, our project directors.
The view from the coal face
‘Fun, flexible, foning’ – Adam
How to apply
Please send your CV and a covering letter to Ben Whitnall: ben@delib.co.uk
iFeatures Kick Off
Matt Golding - February 3rd, 2010The last few weeks have been a little busy! I entered the iFeatures competition months back but wasn’t aware I was on the scheme until last week when I got a call asking me to meet a writer and producer who had got through to the final 12 without a director. I had had a project in the final 25, which didn’t get through, but the panel wanted me to meet these two (Nick Pitt and Carol Noble) to discuss whether I would be suitable for their project. After a hasty meeting and a weekend of phone discussion I was on board.
I’ve just returned from the kickoff of the iFeatures development process. Two days of intensive workshops in Bristol with much more experienced industry writers, directors, producers and distributors coming in to give feedback on our projects and advice on how to get them to the next stage. These workshops can be a bit gruelling. The teams in the final 12 all have hefty experience in the film world (albeit in very varied guises) and I think there was a general sense of apprehension at the start of the two days as everyone must have experience of similar “development” workshops that can either be tiringly spirit crushing or annoyingly useless.
We shouldn’t have worried. It was great. In fact a number commented that if this two days was all they got out of the project, having had some great advice and tips, that would probably make the effort worthwhile.
But there’s lots more work to do. So it was to the organisers and speakers (including Laurence Coriat, Asif Kapadia, Lawrence Gough, Peter Ettedgui, and David Shear from Revolver) credit that everyone was left feeling charged and energised, as we’ve all got a lot of work to do getting our projects in shape for another round of pitching in mid March.
Tips on how to blog to optimise the SEO of your website
Chris Quigley - February 1st, 2010We all blog in Team Rubber, and one thing we need to understand is the value of our blogging from a commercial perspective. Blogging isn’t just for fun, or for team knowledge-sharing, it should also be for “world sharing” – i.e. optimising the blogs / sites we post to so that the rest of the world can find them more easily – and we sell more stuff to the right people ; – )
So this blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website, making sure it has the best chance to go viral (and be found).
Some SEO basics
- – Google loves content
- – Google loves relevant content
- – Google loves well-structured content
- – Google loves very focused content
- – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)
- – Google loves content that is loved by popular people
- – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people
What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO
- 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.
- 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?” For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!
- 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.
- 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.
- 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site. For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“. Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.
- 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking. Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.
- 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image. This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.
-
To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites. e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.
- 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites. N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better. So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog. To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings. You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.
- 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well. After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content. If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!
- 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Viral Ad Network, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites. Check it out our Viral Ad Network here!“
N.B. these tips were first posted on the Viral Ad Network blog, giving tips on how to optimise the SEO of your blog.
E3 relaunch National Curriculum website
Robin Greene - February 1st, 2010Next year sees the launch of an entirely new Primary School National Curriculum. Our friends at E3 have been working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) and the COI to relaunch the National Curriculum site. Phase one of the site was launched last week with a second phase due in March. The site is designed to be a resource for teachers in planning lessons and interact with other teachers using collaboration tools.
It’s always good to see our friends in Bristol involved in national projects and producing engaging, collaborative online content.
We’re making Opinion Suite join up with Linked Data (through RDFa)
Andy Parkhouse - January 29th, 2010With so much chat and buzz at the moment (and rightly so) about Tim Berners-Lee et al’s data.gov.uk, I thought it’d be timely to say a bit about how we’ll be doing our bit towards publishing online consultation information as Linked Data (Steph Gray has recently blogged on a similar subject).
We’ve built (and are continuing to iteratively improve) Opinion Suite, an open-source online consultation management and creation system designed primarily for local authorities and other governing bodies. It’s currently being used by Bristol City Council, Sutton Borough Council and a large partnership led by Cumbria County Council, with more rollouts hopefully coming soon.
Through Opinion Suite, organisations can store, organise and publish details of all their consultations – hopefully, exactly the kind of information that it’d be really useful to be able to access from a variety of sources, to include in apps and to run analyses/queries on.
As you probably know, that’s what Linked Data is designed to facilitate; it’s a way of marking up web pages semantically so that software (like browsers, search spiders etc) can understand more about the content and so that it’s easier for citizens to ‘cut and combine’ the information in ways that are relevant to them. The Government’s into it in a big way: all central government consultations need to include this markup as of the start of 2010 and DirectGov already uses it to pull consultation details into its listings.
We’re currently making a few changes to the code of Opinion Suite so that all consultation details entered using the system are marked up as Linked Data – using RDFa, to be precise. This means that all consultations inputted into Opinion Suite will include this additional metadata, making the information therein more readily and widely available. So, for example, DirectGov could pick up all of a local authority’s consultation details and pull them directly into the ‘local consultations’ part of their site, or someone could make an app to compare consultation activity with other data, such as population or earnings surveys. That’s a lot of potential added value for something that’s really not that hard to do – and it won’t affect the appearance or user experience of Opinion Suite for end users or administrators as the data will be taken from existing fields.
It might also be worth mentioning that this is in addition to the existing RSS functionality built into Opinion Suite – for example, you can create an RSS feed from any search query in Consultation Finder, meaning you can take the content and embed it into a blog or community website.
Basically, we like sharing and we like making the most of data – so we reckon RDFa’s a good thing all round and an easy win in many ways.
Team Rubber “virtual election hustings”
Chris Quigley - January 28th, 2010So this afternoon Paul Smith – the Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate for Bristol West – popped in to say hi, following our debate last week on “the internet and elections”.
Chatting to him got me thinking about how we should maybe run a Team Rubber election hustings in the run up to the forthcoming election. A simple suggested format could be us running a 3-way virtual husting where we get each of the candidates to film a 90 second speech, put it on YouTube, and then maybe link it into Twitter with hashtags, and get the local community to ask questions. We might even include a vote – though maybe the voting might overtake from the more important aspects of the discussion.
Anyway – there’s a thought. We could even roll the idea out as a wider-platform, and run hustings around the country???
Paul Smith @ Team Rubber HQ
Why do people completely ignore Security?
Tim Wintle - January 27th, 2010When it comes to security, I’m often shocked by how much people are won over by a little social engineering – but I was even more shocked this morning.
Here are some regular examples of things we routinely see people do – all of which are potentially highly dangerous, and could easily lead to an attacker stealing your bank details, work information, or your entire computer:
- Open files attached to emails (.swf, .pdf, .doc, .wmv, .sh to name a few) We all know never to open a file we’ve been sent unless the email has been digitally signed right? But how many people actually sign their emails?
- Embedding content from another domain into your website (pulling a .swf, .js, .class, or even .gif file from another domain can give the other website owner control over what happens on your site)
- Emailing log-in details. (emails are sent as plain text – if either of you are on wireless, then anyone within 100 meters or so of you can see exactly what’s been sent with some very basic tools)
But what I saw today was even more shocking (to me) – I was invited to join a facebook group, ostensibly to help find a couple who lost thier camera (there’s no reason to suppose that’s not actually what the group is doing, so feel free to go ahead and join).
When I looked at the page, it has this message:
TO MASS INVITE
1)Click "Invite people to join"
2)Delete all the text in your address bar and replace it with the following
javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');
for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}
Then hit enter
In fact, looking at the code, that does look like it does what it says on the tin, so nothing dangerous – “what’s the big deal” you might ask?
Well that message is asking you to paste executable source code into your browser, which will run the code as if it was code trusted by facebook
i.e. whatever code you paste into your browser window, can do whatever it wants to do with your facebook account – and I suspect very very few of the people who followed the instructions actually understood exactly what the code was going to do – although I know for a fact that a lot of people did follow the instructions.
So that’s another one to add to the list – Never copy and paste anything into your browser that doesn’t begin with http: or https:
Following over 150 people? Then you’re not listening
Tim Wintle - January 25th, 2010Interesting news today as a Oxford university researcher who’s pointed out that the human brain is only capable of dealing with 150 social relationships.
Robin Dunbar, the researcher involved, is the namesake of “Dunbar’s number” – suggesting our neocortex is only capable of managing a maximum of 150 social connections.
According to several news reports, he’s currently studying social networking sites such as facebook, and preliminary results suggest that they show exactly the same pattern.
So what about people who follow thousands of people on twitter? Well his work seems to suggest that those people simply can’t be listening to the majority of them – although there may be up to 150 people (including contacts not on twitter) who they have a real social connection with.
Google have creative branding…. really?
Dave Ashby - January 21st, 2010
The Google Chrome logo is not bad in my opinion, but they kind of shot themselves in the foot using those colours…. and don’t make your logo square or follow the colour pattern of windows! are you mad?
