B3Labs
St Ives Group
B3 Towers is abuzz with excitement today as it has been announced that Branded3 has been acquired by the St Ives Group; the UK’s leading publishing and marketing solutions group; in what will prove to be a momentous step for our agency.
Adding to what has already been a fantastic year for us with the launch of our first London office and appointment of a new MD, David Crawford; this strategic move further boosts our agency towards achieving our ambitious growth plans.
So what does this mean for Branded3? Well, not much on the face of it, we’ll still operate independently as a standalone business led by the existing senior management team of CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Director of Search Patrick Altoft and Managing Director David Crawford.
This means that our insight-focused and innovative culture built up over the last decade will still remain. There’ll be no changes to the team structure, day-to-day running of the company or the office locations.
Put simply, this exciting move gives us an extra push towards our vision; to be the ‘go-to’ agency for Fortune 500 companies.
Plus, we’re in great company; St Ives Group owns an impressive portfolio of marketing companies, and so the acquisition generates a lot of opportunities for Branded3 to collaborate with some truly forward-thinking businesses.
One man whose excitement resonates through the entire team is Branded3 CEO Vin Chinnaraja, who had this to say:
“I am really proud of my team and what they have helped Patrick and me to achieve. The success of Branded3 is really a credit to them.
“We are focused on being the best and doing the best for our clients and the support of St Ives will strengthen our mission here for both existing and new clients.”
Patrick Altoft shares Vin’s delight and commented:
“This exciting move means that we can continue to grow and expand both in the UK and internationally, whilst still retaining our known and well-respected reputation in the industry.
“Reaching this major milestone is testament to what our team has achieved, and we can’t wait to see what the future brings for our agency.”
So today is a significant day for Branded3 and all those working for it, as we move another step closer to world domination reaching our vision. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this day and continue to support Branded3 as we approach an exciting future.
Deloitte has released the results of its seventh annual Media Consumer survey and it certainly makes for some interesting reading, here we delve into the findings and what they mean for digital marketers.
Deloitte has also produced this interactive graphic highlighting some of the findings and demonstrating the year-on-year change.
We’re exhibiting at the Buy Yorkshire conference next Wednesday and Thursday, the biggest B2B exhibition in the north of England, and we’d like you to come and say hi!
Bringing together the best Yorkshire’s business community has to offer, the Buy Yorkshire conference features talks from Michelle Mone, the founder of Ultimo, and the Head of Business at Wonga, Russell Gould.
The event is a great opportunity to network with local businesses from all industries and sectors, with 170 businesses taking exhibition stands this year.
You can find me, our Head of SEO Strategy Matthew Jackson and Digital PR Specialist Laura Crimmons in the New Dock Hall on stand 64, but if you’d like to arrange a chat beforehand, feel free to drop us a tweet or an email.
Our Twitter handles are:
Matthew Jackson, @M4Jackson
Laura Crimmons, @LauraCrimmons
Felicity Crouch, @Felicity_Rose_
If you’re based in Yorkshire, make sure you take a couple of hours away from the office to come and chat to us, details of how to get to the event can be found here. See you there!
With WordPress 3.6 hitting RC1 today, I thought it was worth taking a look over some of the new features available in the latest version.
So, let’s dive straight in.
Twenty Thirteen theme
There is a new theme for the first release of the year – TwentyThirteen. This is a responsive design that should get users off to a good start!
Sign-up using the form below to receive the slides:
The Barbican Centre in London played host yesterday to Digital Futures, Branded3′s one-day Seminar which encompassed expert talks on SEO, Digital and Social Media.
The day got off to a great start with Patrick Altoft‘s opening talk on The Latest Advanced SEO & Link Strategies. Patrick highlighted the challenge digital marketers face in being able to evolve strategies in time to keep up with Google’s algorithm changes. The key, Patrick says, is to align offline marketing strategies with online strategies, encouraging SEO teams to work closer with PR departments.
Our Head of Search Tim Grice reiterated Patrick’s message, telling the delegates that SEO can no longer be about manipulation, it’s about tying in links with real-world marketing.
Newly-appointed MD David Crawford took to the floor after a delicious lunch to talk about five digital trends to be aware of this year. David hammered home some interesting stats about digital usage, such as “96% of smartphone users have searched for local information on their phone” – demonstrating the emphasis marketers should put on social, local and mobile.
“96% of smartphone users have searched for local information on their phone”
Next up was social media hour, in which Head of Creative & Social, Andrew Machin and Social Media Strategist, Georgia Halston discussed best practices for brand social media behaviour, and just exactly how to gauge social media success using various tools.
“A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a service. A brand is an emotional feeling.”
“A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a service. A brand is an emotional feeling.” stated Andrew, as he made the point that being ‘likeable’ on social media is central to naturally growing an audience.
Georgia referenced the popular Dumb Ways to Die YouTube video and why it worked so well, then went on to explain how exactly you can attribute monetary values to social media goals.
You can find out a bit more about how the day went on our live blog, written and updated throughout the day by our Head of Content, Mark Bowering.
If you’d like to receive the slides from yesterday’s Seminar, simply fill out the quick sign-up form above and we’ll send them over to you and you’ll also be the first to hear when tickets go on sale for our next Seminar.
Thanks again to everyone who came to Digital Futures, we hope to see you again soon!
We’re delighted to announce the appointment of a new Managing Director, David Crawford, a highly-respected Digital & Marketing specialist within the industry.
David has an enviable reputation in digital with a background which boasts leading the Digital Consultancy at McCann Erickson, heading up the Digital offering at BJL and working alongside brands such as Bentley, HSBC, UPS and American Airlines.
As such, we’re thrilled he’s come on-board at Branded3!
Aligning with our growth ambitions which have already seen us launch a London base this year, David’s appointment will strengthen the management team, with David primarily focusing on growing our Digital and Social Media offering.
With David’s strong marketing and digital strategy experience, he will also be spearheading our holistic digital approach for our clients, a methodology which sees the integration of our services to deliver results on all levels.
Branded3′s CEO Vin Chinnaraja had this to say about David:
“He’s a well-respected figure within the digital industry and I’ve no doubt that with his experience and skillset, he’ll help us deliver our ambitious growth plans.
“With this appointment and the opening of our London office last month, we’re certain that 2013 will be a fantastic year for the agency.”
Vin’s excitement is shared by David, who commented on his new role:
“I have known Branded3, Vin and Patrick for some time and have watched the business develop and expand on the back of a very compelling offering. We have a strong, shared belief regarding the future and potential of digital channels and I am, therefore, very excited about the role, the proposition and the opportunity.”
Our development team is always keen to hear about new ways to improve efficiency and reduce the time it takes to code without compromising on quality. For example, if there’s a way we can use fewer keystrokes when writing code or executing commands, we’re all for it!
Have a think about which tasks you find yourself repeating every day, and how you could streamline the process to knock off a few seconds or even a few minutes off. It could be simple tasks such as:
- Opening your vital applications and helpful utilities
- Accessing your projects directory
- Adding entries to your hosts file
- Opening your Shell Profile / PowerShell Profile
- Accessing remote servers
With Christmas and the New Year just around the corner, we’ve decided to take a look back on 2012 and what it brought for Digital.
Working within such a fast-paced industry, we often have to adapt quickly to technology updates and trends, and our Digital team have found that these five updates in particular have changed the way they work this year:
After another sacking of a Chelsea manager – this time Roberto Di Matteo – we got talking in the office about which was the best football team to support.
Working in SEO. naturally I decided to check out Google’s answer to this “which football team should I support?”. After all the usual Yahoo answers and forums suggesting who the best team is, the first official club site that returns is Liverpool FC.
So, that got us thinking; if we are one of the UK’s leading digital agencies then surely Branded3 should support the UK’s digitally-leading football team. Here we take a look at the Premier League teams to find out who is top of the only league table that matters, the Branded3 Digital Premier League!
October saw the biggest month in Microsoft history, with a number of high profile releases and the culmination of many years of product development which has reshaped Microsoft from the software giant of old, into a devices and services company looking to the future with their bold new design philosophy. They’re so serious about their new focus, that they’ve even updated the title tag of their website to reflect this.
Microformats (microdata, rich snippets, and RDFa) have been around for sometime. They are the basic building blocks of the “semantic web” – formats that make it possible to create meta-content which can be understood by machines. In this post, I’ll be going over the basics of what microformats are and what they’re used for.
With the ever-increasing popularity of smart phones and mobile devices, it’s essential to consider the use of them in your digital and online marketing strategies, because not doing so could cut out a massive proportion of your potential audience.
The use of mobile devices also has a big part to play on the SEO side of things, certainly factoring in local search intent. Recently, we’ve been asked a lot about the best approach for working with smart phones, so with regards to developing a mobile presence, here are the three key approaches we use to deliver the content:
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