I get about three different sales calls everyday. These are of varying quality with the majority offering products that claim to be revolutionary for social monitoring. However, where I struggle with this approach is that the solution is being offered before the problems have been identified. In the past I've used a number of different types of monitoring software but have found that they are only as good as the questions I want answered before logging in - or the people operating them!

One area where it has been a challenge to find a decent piece of monitoring software is one that reports on website speed. The importance of this is often overlooked, but in my experience (and especially at my old place of work), I have found it to be vital for a number of reasons:
  1. If you're spending a lot of money on paid advertising the first impression of a website matters - if it takes 6+secs to load it may as well not be live at all
  2. With more websites being accessed on a 3G/4G network it's good manners to not make the file sizes of images too big thus using up people's data allowance
  3. Google will penalise you for have a slow website by putting you lower in the search rankings and even increasing the cost per click
One excellent free too which I have used extensively in the past is Pingdom. Although Firefox also has some great add ons and Google offer PageSpeed tools. Too often have I had anecdotal complaints that a website is slow when in fact it's a number of other factors (network speed, location etc.) What Pingdom does is test a website from various locations around the globe and then offers a breakdown of what is causing speed issues. Some of the most common steps I have taken in the past to trim off those vital few seconds of loading time which have been identified are:
  1. Use GZIP compression – This can reduce file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site at all. There's a simple online tool for testing this
  2. Outsource javascript and stylesheets – Have your scripts and CSS load in external files instead of cramping up each and every page. This way, the browser only has to load the files once, rather than every time someone visits each page of the site
  3. Optimise images – In Photoshop, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. This allows a trade-off between graphic file size and crispness
  4. Don’t use HTML to resize images – HTML (and WordPress blogs), make it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic. The issue here is that the browser still has to load the ENTIRE image, THEN check the width and height you want and THEN resize it accordingly
  5. Cache when possible – Content management systems like WordPress have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to your users so that the browser isn’t forced to go dynamically generate that page every single time. Plugins like WP Super Cache can sewriously decrease page load times
  6. Go easy on redirects – A 301 Redirect is the preferred way to change your site structure without losing any of that valuable search engine juice, but lots of 301 redirects piled together just confuse the browser and slow it down as it wades through the old destinations to get to the new one
  7. Get up in the clouds – Over the last few years, this has become THE solution for websites which need to be globally accessible and serve pages depending on where the user is located. Faster access to a server near their geographical area means they get the site to load sooner
Remember that for every second you shave off of load time, you’ll tend to boost customer confidence and trust in your site, and sow the seeds that will make them way to tell others about you. In those cases, a few seconds can make all the difference - especially in this increasingly fast paced modern world!
Working at a FTSE250 company has definitely meant a I've needed to re-focus my priorities and learn the importance of the legal side of the job. Thankfully, legislation is not completely alien to me within digital marketing as in the past I've had to acquaint myself with the likes of cookie law, copyright and email/data security. However, in the past few weeks it's been a whole new board game as Kier publicly shared the news that we plan to acquire the highways business Mouchel:
Without going into too much detail, this has meant a vast amount of work for the team and I to ensure the likes of live webcasts, landing pages, and disclaimers (only accessible from certain IP addresses) were up and running in a timely manner. That we are a FTSE250 company means the importance of getting this right first time and to an agreed standard is absolutely essential. It's a good job I love a bit of pressure and problem solving (although not so much the early mornings!)

This is just the beginning too, as we look to integrate our businesses in a seamless way, with the respective teams already working well together to look at the best strategies for doing so online.

In a related story we also received some truly excellent news in that the global insight agency FTI Consulting independently voted us the top performing FTSE250 company on social media:
This is a staggering achievement given that our new strategy has only been in place a few months. Despite, us being very pleased with the much increased level of engagement internally it's always great to see this recognised externally and then benchmarked against our peers.

Key to this strategy has been the launch of our new company blog which has hit the ground running in a bigger way than we could have ever hoped. Our latest post on the highways academy has received a brilliant amount of coverage and comments and I even took to writing a guest post myself (I couldn't resist!) We have now increased our weekly traffic to the main company website by 12% with the majority of these being referrals from the blog. Here are some of the key reasons why we know it has worked:
  • Internal buy in - Initially we needed to do quite a hard sell internally to get this launched. However, it's clear that by having this tool we can give those people in the business a voice who previously had been sidelined. This demonstrates to them that their contribution is taken seriously
  • Being agile - By blogging regularly we can quickly publish content on a subject which is either getting traction nationally (thus increasing our exposure) or highlight something which it particularly pertinent. It's no coincidence that last week's post focused on highways!
  • Return visitors - Although admittedly not by much, we have noticed an uplift in people coming back regularly. I know the websites I visit most are the ones that are updated most regularly so this is a no-brainer
  • Industry authority - The comments we have received on our posts thus far have been 100% positive. Not bad going at all for our aim to be thought leaders in the sector
  • Social Media - our blog also provides an extra talking point on our social channels with our first post on 'Women in Construction' proving a particularly well shared one
  • SEO - I couldn't let this one slip by (as it's my boss's favourite!) but by providing regular, unique content we've also noticed Google raking us that little bit higher for certain topics (which makes all the difference against our competitors)
For all of the above objectives we've been very careful to ensure there are measurable outcomes. That way we now have the internal proof it's working as well as the external proof - we love you FTI Consulting!

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. My excuse though is that "I've just been too busy!" Seriously though, there are few topics regarding the working environment about which I feel so passionate as the work/life balance. This is because I think of myself as a family man first and a digital marketer second and if I let the work take priority then my children are not going to wait for me before they grow up - I'll just miss out on a time that can never be repeated...

When I first switched to a senior role in digital marketing I found that I was pretty much working every week night. I'd get home, have something to eat, get the children in bed and then get back on the laptop. This is because of the steep learning curve and the fact work never seemed to be finished. However, as I began studying for my diploma, and this took up my evenings, I realised my work wasn't suffering at all. In fact, I was even more productive as I was starting the day raring to go after a bit of 'digital downtime'. Needless to say I've revised my practices since!

This topic was been covered in detail in an excellent article in 'The Entrepeneur' this week focusing on the importance of sleep (my favourite way to spend an evening!) In summary it highlights that sleep is far from wasted time and is a vital part of a healthy and efficient working life. I also spotted a BBC article on the importance of sleep for professional footballers and how top clubs are putting as much emphasis on rest as the physical training regime. The one message both of these articles have in common is to stay off your phone at bedtime. With this in mind below is a little list for detoxing from technology which I've recently challenged myself to stick to:

1. Turn off all phone alerts between 10pm and 7am - this can be set in the phone's preferences
2. Put the phone in the glove compartment whilst driving - this avoids any type of distraction
3. No phone within 1 metre of the dinner table - meal times are for family NOT the internet
4. Spend an hour of the day being creative - with a constant barrage of emails it's easy to just spend the day feeling like I'm batting away paper planes but if I can't use my creativity at least once a day I definitely won't get the same job satisfaction
5. Don't buy an Apple watch - With what is essentially a Smart phone attached to your wrist there's no escaping mundane social media updates and emails!

The final part of this is how I actually manage my time when I am at work. With so many conflicting demands the first thought is to prioritise. However this is actually really easy to do and in reality achieves very little. Creating a list and acting like everything merits my time and that I can get it all done later is impossible, as time is a finite resource and work is never finished. A way I've chosen to look at it is that some tasks are just not important enough to warrant the time! It sounds a bit harsh but I'm sure we've all had experiences of working flat out only to find that some tasks are actually not necessary. An example of this I found is exhaustive minuting of weekly team meetings. Everything moves so fast that actually just a matrix of actions is much more efficient.

A much better system for managing workload is triage (as in the medical profession) and actively ignoring the items whose importance falls below a certain threshold. Flipping my thinking to the infinite amount of emails and queue of people vying for my attention to actually be a sign of success, and not failure, is the key to this working. All these people want my time so I must be doing something right and therefore an empty inbox is not the goal but an inbox empty of all of the important messages/tasks is.

To summarise, the 'I'm too busy' excuse is a hollow one that I've only ever heard used by the least productive of people. The key is to not get swept along with the modern world and the thousands of shiny distractions (which are in equal parts good and evil) and to leave time for the really important things in life.

After a week off enjoying the April sun it's straight back in the deep end for me with presentations to give, travelling to do and new services to launch. Working in digital means that I'm seldom away from my screen during the day and social media is something I do for income rather than fun. I vowed to have no screen time at all during my break which was particularly welcome. However, there was one platform I couldn't be without (even in my spare time) and that's Instagram.

I have previously mentioned that this is my most used app on my phone but as I have just setup an account for Kier I thought I'd take some time to write about why I like it so much and how it can be properly utilised for businesses.

Firstly, I find that I use my phone for taking photos more than anything and with three young children there's also plenty of high-jinx to photograph! By locking down my account to a select few followers I can then share the fun with family and friends and geotag it whilst saving the future embarrassment of my children and not recording their every move on a public Facebook account. The main reason I do this is for my parents who can chart where we are and never tire of photos of their grandchildren.

I have also found that the two Instagram sister apps (Hyperlapse and Layout) are great for adding variety to the account and being able to make a nice collage from your phone makes a nice change.

Our Instagram wall using DEKA
curtain
wire courtesy of Ikea!
The really fun part though is getting prints of the photos and then displaying them around the house. This is something we do on a yearly basis and have a nice display over our stairs of our adventures from the previous year. I use Polargram for this who offer an excellent service (and free sweets!)

One of the popular misconceptions abut Instagram is that its results for campaigns cannot be measured and because there is no built-in insights tool this has to be done manually. However some analytics platforms do exist.:

1. Iconosquare -This is the unrivaled leader among all free apps for Instagram which delivers extensive reports and various stats on your account.

With Iconosquare you can:
  • Discover the best time to post
  • Compare the tags you use with the most popular one
  • Get filter usage stats
  • Get an overview of your Instagram activity, plus the information for any activity within the last week
  • View monthly analysis on photos & view how popular your content is 
  • Check growth history, most liked and commented pics, most engaged follower
One more fantastic option offered by Iconosquare is the Promote section which gives you the following possibilities:
  • Get Public URL and link it to your Facebook page (people who do not have an Instagram account can now view your Instagram photos and comment on them using their Facebook account)
  • Create a Tab for your fans to discover your Instagram feed (and at the same time tightening the bonds with both of your networks) 
  • Integrate the Gallery Widget and the Follow Buttons to your blog or website



2. Union Metrics for Instagram - If you're ready to step up a gear then this is a promising tool that offers a set of useful features:


  • Discover your most popular pics and hashtags
  • Benchmark competitors by analysing their accounts
  • Analyse likes and comments
  • Monitor hashtag reach & discover the best time to post
  • Identify your brand’s biggest fans and advocates

    • It's clear that Instagram is a great place to promote your business if done correctly. We're hoping that with the right tools for Instagram analytics we can lead our Instagram strategy in a smarter way with better engagement to our content and more enjoyment for our followers. We're just starting out though so we still have lots of content to generate!
    Changing jobs from the public to the private sector has been a massive eye opener to me. I feel that I have not only learnt a lot, but now have a combination of transferable skills and the ability to work in almost any industry. You see your old work place very differently when you have something to compare it to. I can understand why the temptation to stay working in education could be very great and one of my concerns with moving to a FTSE 250 company was that work would be all about profit and lose it's humanity. After all, while marketing can at times be a strain on someone's morals at least selling courses you believed in and seeing the happy faces of graduates made it easier to sleep at night!

    Personally I cannot understand how anyone can work at a company where they don't believe in the product it offers/sells? This is something which was at the forefront of my mind when we started to discuss Kier's latest (and my first ever!) campaign and I felt that it would be great to take the great work that has recently been done on the brand one step further. Kier's tagline is 'Together, we make our world work better' which I really like as it sums up why we are a company about whose product and services it is actually easy to care.


    A mock up of a campaign visual
    for our website homepage
    Having now met a number of staff from the service divisions I was really struck by how what they all did made a real difference to the communities in which they work. I hadn't even given any thought to the fact that there are people up at 4am everyday to fix urgent problems with the waterways and bridleways. Naturally we decided it would be great to focus a campaign on these real people who work hard to just make our world work and to give them a forum to tell their story.

    With this we hit on the idea of '#KierHeroes'! A series of short videos with individuals from different areas all giving an overview of their job. It was then up to us to get out and about filming them and taking photos in order to gather as much feel good content as possible. I have put together a full campaign plan running up until May where we can slowly seed each video alongside a full online campaign. Part of this will be trying to leverage our social media channels to really see what sort of content works for our myriad audiences (we already know that our LinkedIn audience are very different to our Facebook one). I've also introduced the idea of building a landing page to try to get some meaningful statistics on website usage with built in conversions.



    I've decided to use the opportunity of having some great new content to also launch a few new channels, Instagram and a company blog. The latter is something I've been working on since I started and I already have a full schedule in place but this campaign seemed like a good opportunity to tie everything in together. Surely every good digital marketer likes the opportunity to re-use content when they can?!

    So there you have it - this week is the go live and we're all excited to do some online testing and learning as well as to shout about the great work the company does. Also, and importantly for me, the process of pulling this content together has now given me that real reason to care about what I do (as someone once said to me 'you can't teach people to care!') meaning whatever outcome we see from it the process has already been as rewarding as any potential success.
    This last week, I've been spending a lot of time with LinkedIn. I am due to present at a forthcoming leadership conference in Warwick on why having an updated profile is important for all employees and this has initially proved quite a challenge.

     Personally, I've long been a believer in the power of LinkedIn - after all that is how my current company found me for my most recent role! However, I haven't always thought like this and when I first started using it about 7 years ago my opinion was that it was an online representation of what the world would be like if no-one had a personality (just a succession of listings of personal achievements!) 

     This is where a number of people will be starting from so I thought the best way to approach this task would be looking at it from the point of view of a member of staff who has been with a company for 20+ years and had no intention of moving on to another job. Why would they benefit from updating their profile? Below are the key reasons which I came up with:

    1. It clearly establishes who you are

    Get authentically endorsed and recommended by clients and colleagues (STATISTIC: Profiles are 11x more likely to viewed if they include a photo)

    2. It is an effective way of managing your address book


    Cultivate your B2B relationships and follow up leads (STATISTIC: 4 Million businesses have a LinkedIn page)

    3. Groups are a great way of networking online


    Follow regional/sector specific groups to keep up to date with the latest trends and legislation (STATISTIC: Mashable is the LinkedIn group with the most engaged following)

    4. Attract new clients


    Research clients/stakeholders before you meet – they will be doing it to you! (STATISTIC: The average LinkedIn profile gets 11 views a day)

    5. Find the best staff for your business


    Save time and money by finding staff with authentic qualifications and experience (STATISTIC: 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet candidates)

     With this last point I feel that LinkedIn is definitely a great place to look for candidates. After all, if your current and past colleagues can view all of your employment history then you're a lot more inclined to make it truthful! LinkedIn have also put some major investment into both their connected and their job search apps of late to really try to position themselves as the place to go for new opportunities. I know that before undertaking any interviews or meeting new agency contacts it's the first place I turn.

     Therefore, I feel that in order to network and keep up to date with other industry professionals it is essential that you have an updated LinkedIn profile. As part of our social media strategy we are regularly posting updates to our 38,687 followers who are an important audience with a real interest in what we do. This is proven by the level of engagement and also allows us to learn the best time to post content for particular demographics to inform our strategy.

    My plan at the conference is that I follow up with a marketplace stall to do live health checks on delegates profiles. To save time I'm currently collating all of our staff images so I can add new profile pictures quickly and easily. This is because getting the initial buy-in is one thing but as soon as people return to their desks they'll get bogged down with their usual workload again. Doing the updates there and then will mean a quick and efficient fix. 
    I do have one final trick to get people engaged after the event though and that is branded teabags! These are printed with a few quick tips on how to bring profiles up to date with the idea being the next time they make a tea is also the time for them to update their profile. By me monitoring when this happens I may even get some useful data on at what time employees like to have a brew to give to our internal communications team!
    This is my first blog post since leaving the University of Bedfordshire and starting anew at Kier Group PLC. It certainly has been quite a week, with visits to three different offices and a very steep learning curve, but so far it's been a great experience for me. Therefore, I thought I'd list a few observations of what it's like to move from one sector to another and how I've tried to adapt my skills to a variety of new systems:

    1. Leave the past behind

    Thankfully, this week has been such a whirlwind for me that I can't even remember the projects I was working on in my last job! However, after working somewhere for a long time (nearly 8 years in my case) there was a real danger of just wanting to replicate everything that went before - such as the infrastructure and staffing setup. This way I'd be in my comfort zone and can just pick up where I left off. Obviously this would never work, especially in a whole new sector, meaning it's a brilliant time to reassess what did work well and look at the new options available. For me there are actually some old familiar friends such as HootSuite, Wordpress and Third Light but I've already found some real benefits of using Kier's existing CMS (SiteCore) and email system (Dotmailer). Next up is meeting the agency account managers and using my experience to build relationships there...

    2. Get learning and listen

    In order to be an effective digital marketer the first month with a new business should be primarily a learning exercise. Therefore I've been auditing everything in order to find out more about the company, their competitors, the staff, and most importantly, what success they are getting with their existing marketing strategy. By storming in with a 'I know best' attitude, I'd run the risk of alienating the very colleagues whom I need co-operation from. There's also the temptation to start changing everything before really learning the value of the current systems. Someone has obviously spent a lot of time developing them so I shouldn't just bin them until I have a good overview of what is working. Then it will be possible to use the things flagged up in the audit lists at the appropriate time meaning a potential slow and steady stream of great ideas from the 'new boy'!

    3. Don't be yourself - yet!

    The key word for your first day at work is restraint. If you're a naturally bubbly hyper-energetic type, tone it down a notch. This is me, and the last thing I want to do is to scare people. Likewise, if your default gear is low and slow, ease into your sense of humor. Even if everyone else is cracking jokes before the meeting starts, don't join the fray just yet - which is something I'm finding particularly hard! You're the newbie, which means you don't know which lines not to cross, particularly when your boss is involved. Also, whatever you do, never act like an assignment or task is beneath you. If they have you making copies all day or updating the Outlook calendar, don't whine. Once you pay your dues, people will see your potential and let you tackle the more interesting stuff.

    4. Request the tools

    Of course I don't mean turning up at work on the first day with a rider! But if you are to impress your new boss it's important that you have the tools at your disposal in order to do so. I immediately have set to work on my first month's objectives but there are certain hardware and software packages that would make achieving these much easier. Without them it'll be a case of going to work and feeling like my hands are tied which could lead to early frustration. Thankfully I've already forged some important relationships with IT in order to get my new computer completely tooled up and ready to go - 'Hello Adobe Creative Cloud...!'

    5. Stockpile sleep and find the kettle

    With three young children my chances of having an interrupted night's sleep are at a maximum anyway! But one thing I've noticed this week is how important scheduling in a good nights sleep really is. After day one (and even though I kept my usually energetic self somewhat in check) I was new levels of tired! This was due to my brain working overtime to absorb all of the new names, software and projects for which I am now responsible. It's a good job that the fancy boiling water taps mean it's even easier than ever to make a brew to keep me from becoming comatose.

    So there are a few thoughts on handling a change of role. It's all going great so far and I've been surprised how similar offices can be. I think this is especially true in digital marketing where very few companies are as ahead as they could be and it is still seen as very new. Now back to work...!
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