The people we work with also have to be confident enough to work with blue-chip clients as well as supporting start-ups and clients inexperienced at commissioning digital projects.

Believing in individual growth and prosperity, we frequently offer shareholding options to staff beyond twelve months and operate an informal bonus incentive.

We are hunting for four particular people right now to join our digital team:

• Junior Web Developer
• Junior Graphic Designer
• Web Developer
• Copywriter (part-time)

We are an equal-opportunities employer.

We are seeking a gifted and ambitious web developer to join our digital team, working with a challenging and exciting client list.

The successful applicant will be well versed in PHP/MySQL and HTML/CSS and be able to turn creative content into rich, engaging websites somewhat like a ninja. We would love an applicant who also shows familiarity with JavaScript, particularly JQuery.

Experience implementing Drupal sites will be a distinct advantage and, to a lesser extent, Magento and/or WordPress.

As with all applicants, if you really want to stand out at our company, you will have demonstrated substantial initiative in your career so far and have a thirst for greater responsibility.

The position will entail having a deep level of involvement in complete project lifecycles, often working directly with clients and being given the opportunity to inject your creative mark.

Please send your CV to careers@global-initiative.com

This is a full-time position.

No agencies, please.

Imaginative, fanatical graphic designer sought for compelling, idea-hungry client-base. The successful candidate will have a typographic flair, a panache for layout and an empathy for end user functionality. Although you might have several styles you feel confident with, we are particularly looking for bold and quirky. Generic design that fits in with the crowd is not needed here.

You should also be highly competent at Photoshop and Illustrator and be more than a passing acquaintance of InDesign. Experience with Flash is also highly desirable.

We have some amazing projects just waiting for you to get your digital teeth into.

Please send your CV and portfolio to careers@global-initiative.com

This is a full-time position.

No agencies, please.

Responsibilities will include managing projects (for which an earnest knowledge of Scrum-style project management will be key) across their lifecycle, often sourcing internal staff and external freelancers whilst working closely with clients to achieve their goals.

Most of our clients have long-term relationships with us so we are looking for someone who has the interpersonal skills and ambition to grow within their role and move to a more senior level.

Please send your CV to careers@global-initiative.com

This is a full-time position.

No agencies, please.

The winning candidate will be familiar with digital production and be sensitive to the requirements of Search Engine Optimization and Social Media channels.

Please send your CV to careers@global-initiative.com

No agencies, please.

So, on with some specifics. Here are the main benefits clients can reap from their website or digital media project:

1) Visibility, otherwise known as Brand Awareness. Unless the intention is to stick the project in a dark cupboard forever, this one cannot be avoided. The decision here is to understand how important the project is to raising visibility for the client. It could quite conceivably be its only purpose or it could feature low on the list. For example, when building an online conference manager for the Financial Times, the conferences themselves (commissioned by clients of the FT) existed to generate cash-flow rather than build the FT's brand.

2) Client Sales Drive. How important is it to drive new customer sales? Might it be an ancillary benefit of an internal training drive that should be capitalized upon or should every aspect of the project be studied to maximize client throughput?

3) Current Client Revenue Growth. How important will it be to focus on generating more profit from existing customers? Could loyalty be built and maintained using this project? Growth may not necessarily be in the form of revenues, of course. We built a management system for a local school whose chief purpose was to enfranchise parents, keeping them more involved with the goings-on of the school and their children. As a result, referrals to the school from parents increased.

4) Customer Management. How much should the project perform automatic customer management functions, such as providing account status and login functionality?

5) Business Management. A project need not be specifically a business management tool to offer up some administrative advantages. For example, we just completed a website for a project management company, whose owners were often on site with clients of their own. It allows for customer login and issue management as well as lead and sales tracking. Its primary purpose, however, is to raise the visibility and credibility of the business.

On a final note, it is exactly as important to understand the benefits experienced by the project's audience as well as the client's. The client cannot achieve any benefit whatsoever if they do cannot convey an advantage to their viewers. This is the core difference between building a project for a client and building relationships for a client.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple set of guidelines for clients and developers to follow? How useful would it be if you could strip all the jargon away and understand in simple, human terms what was required?

This is a seven part (ok, eight part if you include this introduction) broad-stroke explanation of everything you need to think about before anyone sets pixel to screen. We call each part a 'cornerstone' because without it, a project will almost certainly fail to fulfill its potential. In fact, we use these seven cornerstones when developing a blueprint for any project; it's a way of the client knowing what they are going to get and understanding what they have before they start.

And what are these seven cornerstones?, you ask… They are:

1) Purpose
2) Functionality
3) Content
4) Accessibility
5) Design
6) Promotion
7) Support

Throughout this series I will be using the analogy of building a house; it has a great deal of overlap and relevance to web design and new media development.

• 86% of users report using the internet to find a local business;
• 74% say they used a search engine to do so, and;
• 80% say they researched a product/service online before making an offline purchase.

The Long Tail of Search

This brings us on to a very important concept: the Long Tail of Search. The graph below illustrates this well: there are branded and short-length terms that are searched many times a month and bring visitors successfully to your site, and; there are low volume searches on more specific (and often longer) but highly relevant terms, which individually bring few visitors. Typically, the former terms (known as the Cream and Head terms) are said to make up 30% of the search volume for a given site and the Long Tail makes up the other 70% – now you can see the power of writing around the subject – and thus have a similar impact on visitor numbers. (Please note that the graph is for illustration only, click to see it full size).

 

 

Cream search terms are typically highly branded search queries, for example: “Nike Air Max”. Head search terms are often branded, but can also be more generic (but highly relevant) and successful terms. These would include “Nike running shoes” or “basketball trainers online”. The Long Tail of Search is populated by a great deal of expressions, including highly specific, very long phrases and niche phrases (ie those specific to an industry/service)*. The interesting thing about the length of terms is that they can reflect buying intent on the users’ side.

 

With that in mind, one could conclude that the likely conversion rate increases as the specificity of the search term increases. The moral of the tale is that one’s website should be easily and naturally indexed for the Cream and Head terms, and you should put effort into content for the Long Tail of Search.

* I will write another blog entry regarding the length of search terms and click through rates in the near future to help illustrate this point.

Brand Popularity and Cream Search Terms

At Initiative, we have researched and worked on SEO for some years now and the concept of the Long Tail of Search is not a new one. However, for those of you that know the subject matter well, you'll have noticed that we've created a new label: Cream Search Terms (a bit like we did for 'Search Engine Hygiene'!). This is in effect a subcategory of the Head search terms that includes only the Branded Search.

One of the reasons we have separated out this group of search phrases is that we believe they not only deserve their own grouping, but their position on the graph changes in relation to brand popularity.

In the example above, the original concept of the Long Tail of Search works very well and the Cream Search Terms' position is correct. But what if you're not Nike, or Coke, or Sony? How will people know to even search for "Bob's Plumbing Supplies"? Or, indeed, "Initiative New Media"? I've adjusted the graph to reflect this shift in Search Volume for the Cream Search Terms below. (Again, it's illustrative and you can click on it to see a bigger version).

There are two points to note very carefully. Firstly, the value of the Cream Search Terms with respect to potential conversion rate is still very high. The reason for this is that with smaller brands we typically find that if someone searches for you by name, they know of you and your services and are likely to follow up with some form of commitment. Secondly, the Long Tail of Search becomes even more valuable to the smaller brand.

The reason for this is quite simple: one can assume that the Head search terms have a lot of competition – "Web Design" for instance has around 331,000,000 results on Google. So it would be a very, very big challenge indeed for us to get to the prime real estate on the search engine results page. However, "Search Engine Hygiene" sees us competing with a paltry 694,000 pages and we are in second place.

Using the Long Tail of Search

So now that your interest is piqued and you've seen the potential what do you do? We always start in the same place: research, research, research. Look at how people are finding you and your competition. Find out what people are looking for that is relevant to your product or services. Then, write about it on your web site. Don't be over zealous though and release all your thoughts in one go; come up with a scheduled content release plan so that you entice Google to keep returning to your site. But, that is for another blog entry… alternatively, just give us a call!

 

And yet, aware of this self-evidence, clients will still often focus only upon themselves in a branding exercise, believing that nobody can object to a company whose entire personality could be reduced to these two, uninspiring words. They are right, of course: Nobody could be inspired by or find resentment for such an entity. Nor could they for the other 98% of companies whose mission statements also read "We will be the number one {insert product/service here} supplier in the marketplace and deliver the best customer service etc…."

If you want to blend into the crowd, be friendly and professional.

When I went for interview at Oxford University I became immediately aware that my dark grey suit and white shirt were pretty much exactly the same as every other candidates' dark grey suit and white shirt.  I made a decision at that moment that I would Stand Out. Like me or hate me, I was going to ensure my interviewer would have a distinct memory of me long after I was gone. I went out and bought myself a horrible ensemble of green suit, red shirt and, just to make sure, a blue waistcoat. I certainly got a reaction. My interviewer wrote to my school telling them of my "original, colourful personality". And I got the place.

The lesson I learned was that wacky beats common. But you don't have to be wacky to make a point.

If we condensed our company's brand down to two words they would be bold and quirky. A prospective client doesn't have to like such a personality but if that was the case, they probably shouldn't work with us. A client that does want these things in a new media supplier, however, need look no further – and they sure wouldn't have found it looking for 'friendly and professional'.

So be different. Be the things that your competitors are not. Take risks with how you are perceived. Push the personalities of your staff beyond the limits of their office. By all means, be friendly to everyone you meet and act in a professional manner but resist the urge to sink to the lowest common denominator of brand.