Hello Soho! My name’s Kitty Hennessy. Nice to see you again.

Starting at Launch this week has felt like coming home – in more ways than one. I started my professional and PR life in the mighty Soho Square, just around the corner from Launch Towers in Archer Street W1. It got me thinking as to why so many creative industries choose to set up shop on King Henry VIII’s former hunting field.

It’s certainly not glamorous or picturesque to the naked eye – but perhaps that’s the point: all life is here. And always has been. The colourful locals on our corner come from a long tradition in Soho, when loitering wasn’t loitering but each corner was in fact an unofficial labour exchange. Archer Street was the musician’s quarter with nearby Compton and Frith Street for waiters, literally waiting for work.

Perhaps Soho’s creative notoriety stems from the entrepreneurship that was left behind when the employers had been and gone; survival of the fittest (or most imaginative). Artists, musicians, actors, poets  and everybody else besides gathered in the many great watering holes to devise ways of making their fame and fortune and more than a few succeeded – past residents of the area include: Karl Marx, Casanova, William Blake and Mozart.

I think that is the key to the lure of Soho – inspiration is everywhere you look, and that, combined with vision and creativity, do a successful mixture make. No wonder the Launch lot are so invigorated – you live by your wits round here!

One of the most common questions we get asked as digital consultants at Launch is, as We Are Social noted this week, ‘Where should we start with social media?’

There’s no quick and easy answer, as every company’s challenges and opportunities. However, for complete newbies (newcomers), a social media audit is a great place to start.

A good social media audit should help you analyse your current position online and in social media, identify potential influencers to engage and fertile ground for active to be targeted at.

We’ve put together a short simple template to help guide your thinking. Of course, if you want us to actually carry out the audit for you, you’ll have to get in touch.

When people ask you on a Monday what you got up to over the weekend, one answer you maybe don’t expect is “I helped to break a world record”. But that is exactly what the Meteor meet and greet team said and did a couple of weeks ago.

Early on a Saturday morning armed with coffee, the Meteor meet and greet team – or the Meteorites as we like to call ourselves, arrived at a car park in Gatwick Airport with our fighting spirit intact. The record we were trying to set was for one person to park 50 cars in a car park in under an hour.

The team got to work straight away, making sure the photographer, videographer, official time keepers, and of course the 50 cars were all in place. As the clock struck 1030, we all got into position and held our breath as the starting horn blew.

The Meteor meet and greet driver was on fire, expertly screeching cars ranging from BMW 5 Series to Fiat 500s into the spaces and sprinting back and forth to the start line. When the 50th car was parked and the horn sounded, all eyes rushed to the clock. We had successfully set a Guinness World Record, parking 50 cars in a car park in only 22 minutes and 16 seconds.

Once the XP side of the event was complete, Launch Group set the all-channel wheels in motion and achieved some fantastic on and offline coverage.

Check out the video here:

Online communities form whenever people with common interests are able to interact. This could mean the ‘community’ is a forum, profile page, blog, group or any other similar space, and these interactions can take the form of buying, selling, collaborating or simply the coming together of likeminded individuals around a specific topic.

When they come together, these groups can have a huge impact on businesses – both positively and negatively. For example, a negative review left by disgruntled customer could dissuade others from engaging with the same company, but a group that have independently assembled in support of a company, product or service represent a golden opportunity to utilise their passion. By managing online communities themselves, brands are in a position to influence public perception and build long-lasting relationships with influencers – the results of which can be incredibly fruitful.

Despite the obvious power of online communities, many brands still struggle with the concept of interacting with customers and would-be customers in this way. Here are our top community management tips:

Engage: Managing, or simply contributing to online communities gives you the opportunity to engage in multi-way conversations. However, it should never be considered merely as a channel to promote your latest product or service. Communities give you the chance to grow relationships long-term and provide your members with something genuinely useful and interesting (think news, images, video or a unique point of view). Before creating or engaging with a community you should consider just what exactly you will be offering your audience in return for their interest

Dedicate Resource: Communities take time and patience to grow, and this means that you need a committed resource manage it. The absolute biggest inhibitor for any community member is the feeling that their contributions are going unheard or unnoticed, so it’s vital that community managers ‘show’ their faces on a regular basis. This means finding a way to engage with your audience on their level

Show Personality: You may be in a position of authority, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a personality. In fact, we’d say it’s mandatory. Consumers are far more comfortable engaging with a familiar face as opposed to a nondescript company ‘entity’ that shows no warmth or passion. All of your interactions should match the personalities of the audience you are engaging 

Monitor, but don’t over-censor: Of course there needs to be clear rules for the community you are managing, but there is a fine line between maintaining a calm space and debilitating freedom of speech. Outline at the very beginning what is acceptable and what is not

Be Adaptable: Communities are living, breathing entities, and you should expect them to grow and change. Keep members in the loop whenever this happens, such as when new features or tools are being added or removed. Think hard about your audience – how can your community better serve them?

Measure Performance: This is essential in growing your community and adapting content when necessary. Everything from sentiment analysis to Google Analytics will highlight opportunities for improvement and areas that aren’t working as hard as they should

An Introduction to PPC

As marketing strategies continue to evolve and adapt to the online shift, understanding and utilising the new tools at your disposal in the correct way is critical to effective All-Channel campaigns. So with that in mind, just what is PPC advertising? How does it work? And why should I care? Sit back, grab a tea, and I’ll tell you…

So, PPC, heard of it? Any guesses? A quick office poll produced ‘Please Prepare Canapes’, ‘Post Party Crying’ or, my particular favourite, ‘People Prefer Cats’.  Amusing though these suggestions may be, the answer is, of course, a little more conventional. For the uninitiated PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising.

What is it?

First off the basics, when you search for something on Google it will give you two different types of results: natural listings and sponsored links. Natural listings are free, generated by Google’s algorithms and are dependent on SEO (an acronym for another time and another cup of tea). What we are interested in today are the sponsored links. These are paid for results which appear at the top in the orange box.

Google’s PPC advertising is in essence a real-time auction in which you bid on keywords that you would like your ad to appear beside when searched. You only pay when somebody clicks on your link and thus you pay per click, ergo PPC! Simple!

The order that these results appear (the ranking) will be dependent on the popularity of your search term. The more popular a search term is the more companies there will be competing over it. Those with the highest bid and those with adverts whose copy is most relevant to the search term will appear at the top of the list.

What does it achieve?

What are the benefits to your brand? Simply put – visibility. The ads will generate traffic to your website, targeted leads and instant sales. The beauty of PPC though is its flexibility. You can adjust your budget as you see fit in a system which really does give back relative to what you put in. You can test keywords and track your conversions to keep an iron grip on exactly where your advertising budgets are going, one of the notable differences between online and traditional advertising.

As with all elements of digital marketing, using PPC on its own would leave you with a limited online strategy , however if implemented wisely as part of an All-Channel campaign PPC advertising can be invaluable, lucrative and in most cases absolutely essential.

Next week we will be covering the yin to PPC’s yang, SEO. If you have any questions or would like to find out how PPC could work for you, send us a tweet @LaunchGroup or an email to hello@launchgroup.co.uk.

The answer to the question – ‘which platforms should I be using in social media?’ – is pretty simple really. Most digital practitioners would agree (in broad terms) that it’s merely a case of identifying where conversations relevant to you are happening online, and then coming up with a way to join those conversations without intruding and causing a backlash.

Social media, at its core, is no different to other comms channels. As our CEO Johnny Pitt pointed out in his recent all-channel PR post, the key to creating a successful all-channel campaign or presence is to select the right channel to reach your target audience. This is equally true whether you are integrating social media into existing marcomms activity, or putting together a standalone digital campaign.

Additionally, having an idea of what the endgame is going to be – what success looks like – is key to using these digital channels effectively. Consider your use of social media and digital channels in marketing in a similar way to the process of writing a good story. You should know what the ending of the tale is going to be before you start.

It might be that you want to generate product sales through digital advertising, or protect your reputation through the effective monitoring of conversations online. Whatever you do, be rigorous with your measurement and evaluation, and be realistic about what you can achieve. Success doesn’t happen overnight, even if in some cases it seems that way.

That’s exactly what we believe in at Launch. Identifying the key channels-to-market and communicating a message to a specific audience. This means working with our clients collaboratively to put campaigns in place, not pushing them down a particular route to fulfil our own agendas. Setting ambitious – but realistic – targets that are going to make a tangible difference to our client’s bottom line. And above all, doing great work that is backed by brilliant thinking.

Rushing into setting up a Facebook page or building a microsite may seem like a good idea initially, but if you truly want to build a long term, successful presence in the digital world, putting time and effort into identifying the best channel and tying down your key message ise of paramount importance.

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss our all-channel approach in more detail

Social media channels

Launch started life as a consumer brands project PR agency in 2001.  We were one of PR Week’s best new agencies of the year, attracting great people and great clients alike.

In 2005, our offer began to integrate media relations, digital and events.  We launched our corporate team around this time too.

And now, towards the end of 2011, we’re talking to people about our all-channel PR offer.

Innovation is good in business.  In fact, if you don’t innovate, your business quickly loses its shine and appeal.

All-channel PR?

It’s logical – whatever you have to communicate, to whichever audiences, we consult around the key PR channels-to-market to do it.  And we have all the capability in-house.

Clients should be guided, clients should be advised, and they shouldn’t feel hampered by one dimensional offers.  There’s too much at stake in the real / virtual / consumer / corporate inter-connected world and the relationship between experience / content / digital and media needs to be well explained – and bought in part (if that’s the need against the audience), or in whole.

Some clients come to us and say – ‘we’d love a bit of that.’  And that’s great.  Others come saying ‘we’re not sure, you tell us’.  And that’s equally, if not more exciting.

One size doesn’t fit all.  Having all the channels open and available has to be in a client’s best interest.

Add amazing people, brilliant thinking, collective culture and nice coffee and you’re probably on to something.