Today I had a read through some of the Blogs I’ve written over the last few weeks. They’ve really started to expose a lot about my character and personality, but I guess that is the whole reason Blogs were invented. They’re a tool to express our personal views and opinions, so naturally we’re going to let slip a few things about our private lives. But Blogs in a professional environment are now forming part of brand culture.

I’m always talking to clients about how they need to bring out more of their brand personality. So many of them seem to hide behind a sea of imagery that doesn’t reflect who they really are and use jargon on their website that they would never actually dream of saying.

Communicating a brand personality can be quite difficult. All to often we see companies that think a team photo on their website and personal biogs gets across the ‘culture’ of their brand. But we now have other platforms to do this, we just need to understand how to use them.

Blogs and Social Media are two very good examples of this. Tools such as these offer brands a really good opportunity to reveal their ‘inner selves’ and create some stand out over their competitors. But before you let everyone loose on your Twitter account you need to bear a few things in mind.

Blogs and Twitter give people freedom, which is often not a great idea when you’re wanting to keep some control of your brand. There needs to be a very clear distinction between what people say on their own personal accounts and what they say in a professional capacity. So, consider developing some Social Media and Blogging guidelines. This will not only help you retain some brand consistency but guidelines will also help encourage a better quality of contribution.

At Studio North we encourage people to draw on their own life experiences and apply them to our industry. The more people do this the more confident they become which means we’re never light on content and at times have to shut a few people up!

Blogging and Social Media guidelines are part of the Studio North offer so if you feel you need some direction in this area then please give us a shout.

So what do my Blogs say about me? Well so far I’m a mountain climbing, McDonalds eating, Asda shopper who has an eye for a bargain.

What could your Blog say about you?

Last week I had a very interesting experience with a recruitment agency. Usually I don’t bother too much with agencies. I have built up some good relationships with individual consultants over the years so my loyalty tends to be with them rather than the agency they actually work for.

But I took this call (more by accident) from an agency who had seen us advertising for a PHP web developer. I’m obviously not going to say who they were but they knew nothing about Studio North, in fact they thought we were and an IT company. They said they had worked with us before and in fact hadn’t. And told me that they’d last been in touch about 6 months ago. Great! So you only want to speak to me when I’m advertising a job??? It really did annoy me that someone had called wanting to work with me yet had done very little preparation or profiling of our agency. If I took that approach with my own clients I’d never get any business!

Now even though we clearly say ‘No agencies’, we still get them ringing up. This is incredibly annoying. And I wouldn’t mind but nobody says anything unique. If an agency came to me with a really compelling reason to use them then I’d give them a go.

But with the growing number of ways we can now recruit directly eg Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook etc, agencies really need to get their acts together and really start to add value to their offer.

I’m generalising of course. There are a few agencies who do get it right. But this Blog isn’t just about me having a rant, it does have a point.

I’d like to offer some thoughts:

- Promote your brand and build loyalty
Don’t just rely on the Consultants, lead with your brand. We work in a creative industry where we take notice of new, innovative ideas so get into our minds, act like a creative agency.

- Show that you understand my business
Do your homework before you call. All agencies are very different some are more strategic, some are more creative, some focus more on branding, others on digital. Get your pitch right, look at what clients we have and what PR we get.

- Show that you understand my industry
Attend events, even sponsor events, show your face at relevant networking do’s and better still contribute to them. When you call me give me a sense that you understand my industry and the challenges I face.

- Think about what makes you different.

I’ve spoken to a few of my peers about this and we all agree on the same thing…you are only as good as the candidate you represent. Identify what underpins your brand and shout about it.

And if you don’t know what this is then give me a call!

It’s an unusual week when the digital team at Studio North don’t hear me whining about how little time I have for anything to do with Adobe’s pesky little browser plugin, Flash. I sit firmly in the web standards crowd – I’d much rather experience the web with fast, platform agnostic, standards based technologies than have to sit through one more flash preload screen.

Sure, there’s many use cases where a Flash build is the only solution to a problem, but the truth is, many of the visual effects adopted by many sites on the web can be achieved by using CSS and a little javascript.

I thought I’d set about creating the ‘Meet the team’ page of the Studio North site using a mixture of HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. I’ve created a quick demo; you’ll need a copy of Google Chrome or Apple Safari 4+ to get the full experience.

HTML5

I threw in a few of the new semantic HTML5 tags – I used the new <nav> tag for the left and right controls.

CSS3

I used quite a few of the new CSS3 properties in the demo. The background is coloured using CSS3 background gradients; I had to use vendor prefixes for mozilla and webkit based browsers:
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#760340), to(#a80a63));
background: -moz-linear-gradient(19% 75% 90deg,#a80a63, #760340);
I smoothed the text in Chrome & Safari by adding the font smoothing property;
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased!important;
On the initial load screen, when someone’s name is hovered over, the text will slowly change colour. This effect can be achieved using a CSS3 transition. I set the transition property, the duration, and the timing function. Again, to achieve this effect, it involved using vendor prefixes, as some of this clever stuff is not yet a recognised part of the CSS3 spec.
-webkit-transition-property:color, text;
-webkit-transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s;
-webkit-transition-timing-function: linear, ease-in;-moz-transition-property:color, text;
-moz-transition-duration:0.3s;
-moz-transition-timing-function: linear, ease-in;
Hovering over a staff name will cause their job title to appear up above them. These boxes use the new box-shadow property to render the subtle shadow underneath;
-moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #7a003d;
-webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #7a003d;
box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #7a003d;
Hopefully in 2011 we’ll get more opportunities to use some of these awesome HTML5 & CSS3 techniques, whether it be in the browser or on mobile platforms and I’m certainly looking forward to using some of the more clever javascript functionality in HTML5, like offline storage, web workers and <canvas>.

Click to see the ‘Meet the team’ mockup