Three today! Happy third birthday to us. Have some cake
Sookio Ltd is three years old today. Before tucking into a slice of cake and a glass of cheap cava I thought I'd take stock of what we've achieved in the last year - and where we're headed.
Last June I took part in the London Social Media Marketing conference, giving a presentation called Tweets That Travel: A Guide to Writing Viral Copy. Offering a heap of practical tips on blogging, Facebook and Twitter which anyone could apply, no matter how big or small their budget, it was really well received, with many people commenting that it was the most useful talk of the day.
This led to an major new contract with cScape, working on the We Love Stories competition which sees students from four film schools across Europe compete to produce a viral video for Toshiba. As well as producing content for the website, Facebook and Twitter, I'm a judge on the competition. Can't wait to see what the teams have come up with when we reach the final next month.
The conference also led to the development of a series of workshops on writing for social media, on which I'm working with fellow editor Christine Cawthorne from Crocstar Media. Called Sweet Retweets, we delivered the first one at AOL's London headquarters during London Social Media Week. We're now offering the workshops to large groups and as highly tailored sessions for individual companies; this week for example I was at Chelsea FC working with the folks at their new music venue Under The Bridge.
I've been blogging about digital, social and marketing matters for Media Week's Wall Blog, working on graphic novel The Entrepreneurs and helping run events such as CamCreative and TEDxGranta. Joining forces with Laura Keogh at Handstand Creative we entered the London Long Copy Challenge to design a massive 48-sheet poster for the Underground, and were really pleased to be shortlisted in the top 24 out of over 500 entries. OK, so we didn't beat the Saatchi team - maybe next year...
I've also been working with Spice on the campaign for Coronation Street: The Album. As a former message board host for BBC Soaps and project manager at ITV.com where I looked after all the Corrie content, this is all familiar territory and it feels good to be back in Weatherfield again! There's also a lot of exciting stuff going on behind the scenes at the moment about phase two of the project...which I'd love to announce but am going to have to keep quiet for just a little bit longer. Non-disclosure agreements and all that.
Writer Rhia Chohan has been doing sterling work for The Cambridge Web Marketing Company (formerly DB Practice) and will be taking on work for more and more of our clients. As the company has expanded we've been able to give work to star copywriters Harriet Powney and Steve Moore, such as the contracts that we've just begun working on with iPER Media. I've also been mentoring a couple of students from Anglia Ruskin University and spoke at an employability seminar about working in the arts and media.
We're also proud to have been asked to become an associate of Onespacemedia, a new company set up by James Cotton of CottonRendle specialising in web design, development and strategy. Kicking off with the campaign to promote the Cambridge Phenomenon book we've got several projects coming up that we're keen to get our teeth into!
So what lies ahead? We want to expand the Sweet Retweets offering, bringing the workshops to a wider audience. We love copywriting and producing web content for such a diverse set of clients and want to do more. In short, we just want to carry on doing great work for great people. Now, where's that cake slice?
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