New Government or not, it looks likely that Community Cohesion will remain a key priority within the public sector in the months and years ahead.

With often such diverse communities however, how do you achieve Community Cohesion through your choice of communications?

Advances in Mobile Marketing have opened up new communication opportunities that can harness cultures, provide opportunities and create a sense of belonging.

Here are 5 ways mobile media can support your Community Cohesion strategy:

1. Instant Communication and Feedback

During recent campaigns we have combined the proximity power of Bluetooth with the interactive exchange of iPhone or Android apps. The latter allows the recipient to instantly share their views or concerns on a range of issues and for you to instantly capture those comments and details, offering greater peace of mind and assurance that voices are being heard.

2. Ability to share content

In the same way that residential communities are built, mobile communities also exist. If you send a person something fun and educational, they can pass it on to virally to friends. Remember it’s about a value exchange so if it is a serious message about Anti-Social behaviour, try collaborating with local leisure services to provide voucher offers and discounts.

3. Overcoming Language and Culture Barriers

Many of our campaigns are in up to 6 languages. Imagine the print costs of a campaign like that? With mobile marketing, one push of a button on receiving the content will change the language and make it a far more inclusive communication.

4. Detailed Response Reporting

With Bluetooth we can tell how many people have requested content. With mobile apps, the reporting is far more interesting and two-way communication is possible.

For sensitive campaigns such as Domestic Violence and Bullying for example, consider SMS short codes for discreet and instant cries for help.

5. Supporting Media

Using Mobile Marketing exclusively only goes part way towards achieving a solid Community Cohesion Strategy. It’s fair to say that many older people are not altogether comfortable with the media and therefore it’s important to maintain a healthy balance of communications.

Websites, Advertising, PR, Radio, Leafleting, Local Events and messages passed on via children at schools are all still very important factors when achieving a successful Community Cohesion strategy.

In Summary…

Mobile Marketing at its best can strengthen the Community Cohesion drive, probably save you some money and give you more detailed levels of reporting than many of the non-tangible traditional media.

Want to know how it could work for your authority? Contact Gary on 0161 2145214 or gary@gencia.co.uk for a free 1-hour consultation.

A Mobile Marketing campaign developed by Gencia has resulted in almost 2500 people taking part in a survey focussed on sexual violence, rape and consent within just a few days of launch.

Commissioned by Wrexham Community Safety Partnership, the main focus of the campaign was to raise awareness of boundaries around consenting sex and offer victims more ways to access support.

Using i-Phones and specifically targeted male (www.he-says.net) and female (www.she-says.net) websites, young people were invited to test their knowledge of the law and attitudes towards 3 gender based scenarios.

Local newspapers, social media, radio and the BBC also reported the campaign, offering added awareness. A staggering one in five women and around 7% of men in the UK are affected by sexual violence at some point in their lives.

Community safety groups say research also shows a "lack of understanding by young people about consent for sex" and dispelling certain myths became one of the key objectives for the campaign.

Focussed mainly throughout Wrexham's Yale College, the campaign also offered 6 friends the opportunity to win a VIP night out if they answered all 3 questions.

Speaking about the early campaign statistics and general response, Domestic Abuse Co-ordinator within the Community Safety Team Christine Elmitt said:

"This is our second campaign with Gencia following a very successful alcohol awareness campaign before Christmas.

This campaign has raised the bar even further by not only delivering a critical sexual violence message and local support links to a large portion of young people within Wrexham, but in also offering us crucial information on attitudes and knowledge of young people in our area.

"We are absolutely delighted with the campaign results." Even more impressive was the timescale of the campaign - just 3 weeks from concept the completion.

Gencia MD Tony Braide commented:

"Educating young people on Sexual Violence is an extremely sensitive yet vital issue and mobile media has enabled us to reach more people in a private, engaging and measurable way.

"It was a challenge delivering such a serious campaign in the 3 week timescale we had and we're absolutely thrilled with the outcome."

It was a challenge that the Gencia team relished. The launch site includes a large amount of streaming video content and Gencia employed the services of a professional actor to get the best out of a difficult script.

The end result has received a great deal of praise from within the industry and prompted Verbatim's Managing Director to make the following comments to the Gencia Team:-

"Looking over the website, brochure and videos I am absolutely stunned and excited by what you have produced. You have given us the very identity we aspired to and the production is of such high quality. I believe this will really set us apart from the competition as I have yet to find another site which comes close to what you have produced. Thank you to everyone who has put so much time, creativity and effort into producing applications and material of the highest quality. You really are such a talented bunch of people who I know work really hard to hit our almost impossible, at times, deadlines.

Take a bow everyone and thank you sincerely for all your support."

Matthew Timmins
Managing Director
Verbatim Asset Management

Back before the New Year Google announced a possible change in the way it 'may' display the URL snippet within each search results. Google has always advocated 'Accessibility' and 'Usability'. Breadcrumbs (a means to keep track of a user location and/or hierarchy within a website), promotes both of these philosophies. Google has been experimenting with an improvement that replaces the standard website URL's in 'some' search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website.

My guess is not only will this reward sites using best practices, but aids usability and gets rid of the long and often unreadable URL's found deep within a sites hierarchy.

There is no way to say for sure if Google will prefer sites with breadcrumbs or even decided to use the 'location breadcrumbs', but it's good news for advocators of web standards like myself. It shows Google is indeed looking at websites with properly built navigation.

All SEO aside, good navigation and the use of breadcrumbs is much better for the user/customer experience anyway and it's going to be interesting to see how much Google uses this improvement over the next few months and how sites perform.

Just when we were starting to get our heads around websites and emails, the naughties came along and challenged marketers to reach customers on previously unimaginable levels.

Who would have thought that terms search engine optimisation, blogging and social networking would take priority in marketing planning sessions that previously debated the combined merits of advertising, direct mail, PR and telesales?

Time to run with the beast…

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that marketing is an ever changing beast that should be embraced and not tamed.

Yes there will always be a time and a place for advertising and print, but the clever kids are staying ahead of the game by looking at the trends and getting there before their competitors.

So with this in mind, here are 5 things to embrace in 2010…

Social Media

Social Media got an old song to Christmas number one this year and maybe (just maybe…) marketers will finally now begin to build Social Networking into their communications plans.

In 2010 Social Networking will continue to dominate as the Facebooks, Twitters and Bebos up their games in a bid to fend off increasing competition from the emerging sites and the profile raising opportunities resulting from such exposure.

So how can you have a strategy for something so spontaneous you may ask? The answer lies in the ability to create time, budgets and topics that will resonate with the customer and drive positive outcomes – in fact the very reasons we have enjoyed so much success this year!

To discuss a social media strategy for your business, contact Tony on (0)161 214 5214


Microsites

If the question of the early naughties was “Does you company have a website?” the question of next decade will surely be “How many?”

The recession has challenged businesses to demonstrate their value, relevance and relative competitive advantage to the customer and a ‘catch all’ website simply doesn’t do it.

Let’s take a catch all IFA website offering services around Ethical Investments, General Investments, Retirement Planning, and Property Management against a company who appears to be focussed on Ethical Investments.

If I (the customer) am searching for Ethical Investments, who am I going to find first/contact first/choose to do business with first?

In summary if you have 3 or 4 key products for 3 or 4 key markets, then why not give yourself 3 or 4 bites at the cherry by exploring one or more microsites in 2010?


Mobile Marketing

The mobile phone has become our media companion of choice.

Mass, unsolicited and untargeted text messaging is likely to annoy and offend so marketers must be clever about how they interact and engage with their audience.

For the past 24 months, Gencia has harnessed the very best Bluetooth technology and married it with clever, engaging marketing campaigns designed to grip and tease recipients into wanting to request content.

Forget the hard sell with this media…It’s very much a value exchange… turn your Bluetooth on and receive 25% off or ‘who’s your perfect match?’ Download your free game now.

At Gencia we’re pushing the boundaries with Bluetooth and other types of mobile marketing campaigns and our clients are reaping the rewards!

To find out how mobile marketing could work for you, contact Gary on (0)161 214 5214

Mobile Apps

Apple’s line “there’s an App' for that” is now up there with the very best of them.

The rise of the app' and importantly, the sophistication of android technology and its ability to receive apps, presents a real marketing opportunity that should not be overlooked.

Gencia has itself become a specialist App' builder and experienced first hand the power of this media in the marketplace.

So if you looking to do something different in 2010 Gencia may well have an app' for that.


Social Norms

Social Norms is increasingly becoming the chosen way to educate, inform and challenge perceptions around young people and key subject matters, with the primary aim to positively and verifiably affect behaviours by revealing key facts from survey findings.

In simple terms, marketing messages will increasingly demonstrate relevant statistics to positively (or negatively) shatter misconceptions or alter perceptions, depending on the situation or intended purpose.

An alcohol awareness campaign that previously said:-

“Drinking under 16 can seriously damage your health” may now read

“77% of under 16’s don’t drink…stay in the majority. 

At Gencia we’re passionate about Social Norms to the extent that we’re even developing our own website to help our clients to collate, analyse and promote their findings on higher reaching levels in 2010.

For more information about how we can help you with your campaigns, please contact gary@gencia.co.uk  
 

After a recent post I've had a few emails asking questions about PageRank, most making over exaggerate claims and misleading assumptions on its impact in relation to their search engine rankings.

The truth is many Webmasters often obsess over the importance of PageRank in relation to their Page Rank. Note two words, "Page Rank" not PageRank (PR), two different things. PR is just one of the many factors that Google uses to determine a page's actual Page Rank on their search result page (SERP) for a given search query.

So why does everyone bang on about PageRank? More than likely because it's the most visual algorithm of Google complex Page Ranking system. It's free to download the PR Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer but its open to misleading interpretations. It's also even easier to get pulled into an obsessive world of link building and SEO pitfalls. I once heard an SEO guru state PR is a way of making people look at one hand whilst the other hand does something else. I still think this is very true today.

This unhealthy obsession with PR is possibly being felt at Google HQ, as Google Chrome   currently does not offer this visual PR tool and Matt Cutts as gone on record stating that he would like to remove the PageRank indicator altogether from the current Toolbar. So then does this mean PR is dying? Of course not, PR has just been given far too much focus in SEO community. My opinion is that Google shot themselves in the foot with PR helping to create an industry of link farms and PR advertising merchants they didn't want. Most of Google efforts and patents now seem to focus on eradicating this manufactured phenomenon.

It's important to remember that PR is just one of many algorithms Google uses to determine the relevancy of pages. There are many more publicly known algorithms known to us mere mortals such as Hilltop, TrustRank (used in PR) and Hypertext-Matching Analysis with it's many more algorithms.

To quote: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. A paper if you have read this far you should read in full

"Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence."

Now I have that out of my system, to recap, PR is not the same as Page Rank, and PR is NOT the single most factor in Page Rank (two words). If I write the words PR I always mean PageRank I will explicitly say Page Rank when referring to how a page is ranked in the search engines. Think of it as ColdFusion, I actually mean the markup language CFML and not ColdFusion Server, does that make sense?

If you have not already heard of the two other algorithms I mentioned above Trust Rank and Hilltop, chances are you just Googled them, right? If not then you should. They are just as important as PR and one of them was actually invented because of a flaw found in PR and works along side it, but by no means the only factors in Page Rank (two words). If you cannot be bothered to Google them then here is summery

PageRank: The basic definition of PR is that PR determines the authority of a page in general.

Hilltop (patent in February 2003): determines the authority of page related to the search term used.

TrustRank: harder to explain in one sentence for me anyway, it's to do with links from a seeding page. It's not to be confused with Yahoo's Trust Rank so we are told Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts
Conclusion SEO is full of people that remind me of the Principles of Adaptive Behavior. Just because something changed for the better its attributive to just one factor or something you did different at one point in time. It's the blind leading the blind when it comes to SEO. I will never write or tell my clients I can get them top ranking results, if you do then you're lying to your customers. I can tell you what Google is looking for and its hard work not black magic, good content, updates and a site people want to visit. That's not what most clients wants to hear, and yes there are tricks you can use. I have done many of them myself. For example some years back .NET magazine asked me to get a site to the top of Google in six weeks and write about it. I did, not ethically and it did not say at the top for long. Something all webmasters should remember when saying links and PR is the most important factor in SEO, is not it's just one!
 

Manchester agency Gencia is supporting the ‘Calling Time on Violent Crime’ in Wrexham this weekend, a campaign commissioned by The Wrexham Community Safety team in Partnership with the Home Office and Wrexham Council.

Gencia’s Bloowire proximity marketing tool is set to engage hundreds of young revellers with key alcohol health and safety messages during the festive period.

TV monitors attached to promotional staff will encourage revellers to download a free Beer Goggles game, which demonstrates the effects of judgement following drinking.



An alcohol units calculator quiz can also be downloaded to remind young people to drink responsibly and personal safety messages encouraging young women to travel home safely will also feature in the wider campaign.

Clubs such as Liquid and Envy are also supporting the ‘think before you drink’ message by wearing t-shirts behind the bar and on the door.

Leading the Crime reduction element of the campaign is North Wales Police Sergeant Dave Marsden who says:

“Knowing your limits is about being safe, looking after friends and getting home safely.

“Bluetooth offers us a modern and measurable way to engage young people with key messages around alcohol and Gencia were chosen because of their experience of delivering full campaign strategies rather than just the technology itself”.

Home Office Adviser for North Wales Tim Nunn added that they were proactively supporting the partnership to ensure ‘people could enjoy the festive period safely.’

Apart from addressing the issue of alcohol related crime, key aims include communicating the health problems and consequential behaviours that can result from excessive drinking.

Partnering the project is Health, Social Care and Wellbeing Strategy Manager for Wrexham Council Gillian Cowan who commented:

“Health Challenge Wrexham is about encouraging individuals, organisations and local businesses to take ownership around health and wellbeing.

“It’s proven that alcohol can induce risky behaviour such as unprotected sex which itself can lead to further health consequences. 

Alcohol is one of six key areas where we need to engage young people and this is the media of acceptance within this target age group.”

The latest campaign completes a range of successful 2009 bluetooth projects for Gencia across within the area of health, crime and education.

Teen Life Check – the NHS Choices lifestyle web quiz for 12-15 years – is now available on the mobile phone.

Gencia has been commissioned to pilot a Bluetooth version of the game in schools in January with the aim of rolling out wider campaigns towards Spring.

Key advantages downloading the game to handsets include greater privacy, measurable participation, repeat visits and an ability to automatically save local services numbers into the directory.

If you are a TLC co-ordinator and would like more information about our work in this area, please call us on: 0161 214 5214.

Gencia supported Rotherham's Hollywood S-Word campaign by providing life sized paparazzi, bouncers, pop up displays and a Hollywood Hottie quiz game via bluetooth, which enabled students and the general public to receive advice and links to local services.

The 'S-Word: We Need To Talk About Sex' uses themed imagery and word-plays from films such as PS I Love You, Mission Impossible, and The Bourne Trilogy to convey sexual health messages. For more information visit www.s-wordrotherham.co.uk

Free condoms were distributed and several hundred young people took part in discreet Chylamdia Screening tests throughout the week.

He may be the ghost of Christmas Past - but Birmingham’s IMAX launch of Christmas Carol on Saturday is turning to techniques of the future to bring in the crowds.
 

For the first time, promoters are using Bluetooth or proximity marketing to engage with local shoppers – with savings of 25% for anyone choosing to receive the free message voucher to their phone.

Saturday’s Millennium Point promotion forms part of an integrated worldwide marketing campaign for the movie and coincides with Birmingham’s Christmas lights switch-on and the estimated 40,000 expected to attend.

Bluetooth works from a nearby ‘Bloowire’ transmitter, offering shoppers within a 100 metre range the opportunity to receive a free voucher to their phone which they can then take to the desk to receive their discount.

PR Manager Caroline Durbin explains:

“The Christmas lights switch on represents a unique opportunity for us to engage with large concentrations of people which is where Bluetooth works really well.

“The content is completely free to receive to phones and we’re offering those taking part a special 25% discount on the door if they show their digital voucher.”

Unlike SMS or text messaging alerts, the actual names and numbers of those participating remain unknown and therefore privacy is retained.

The chosen partners for the campaign are Gencia, who have now been running Bluetooth campaigns throughout the UK for over 2 years.

Gencia Managing Director Tony Braide says that techniques are becoming more widespread due to increased mobile usage rates and the introduction of more sophisticated phones.

“Bluetooth is increasingly more popular as a promotional tool due to the amount of mobile users, sophistication of phones and range of uses this now brings to both the sender and recipient.

“The organisers have already done a sterling job in promoting the film in other ways and the 25% offer by Bluetooth will give them a measurable way of attracting even more people through the doors.”