Of course, we include all of the Social channels when developing digital strategies for our clients and we are big fans of Facebook as a means of finding and developing relationships with brand advocates.

All of the above are easy and straight forward to use, so straight forward that even my mother has managed to join the online Social crowd (and I used to have to reset the clock on her VHS every time we went from summer to winter!)

Google +1 isn’t. When they announced +1 I was interested. I followed the links and opted in to the trial for +1 on Googles experimental page. Then I discovered I had to have a Google profile so I created one and joined the experiment again. Nada.

I’ve just conducted a straw pole of the agency and most hadn’t heard about it (a bit worrying) and those that had have had the same experience as me. Explanations such as ‘maybe it’s not available in the UK yet’ are all well and good but nobody’s telling us that.

My point is this. If this is Googles big grab for a slice of the Social pie they’ve made it far too difficult. I don’t want to have to be logged in to Google as I search the web. I am more than happy to be on Facebook and login to this when I want to. If I find something I like on a site I am browsing and I think my friends might be interested I have no problem clicking the Like button to broadcast the fact to my friends on Facebook.

Facebook is an environment for me to share things with friends and family around the world. That’s why I am on it and that’s why I created a profile and added friends over the last 5 years.

Google is a search tool. I don’t log onto it to share things with my friends or colleagues nor will I considering how complicated they are making it to even join the experiment. Google are going to have to entice me with a lot better reason to join than the fact I might be able to see a recipe that my mother +1’d as she won’t have.

We also undertake this approach for a lot of the pitches we are working on and this provides us with data we are able to share without breaking any client confidentiality. Having recently conducted such an approach for the Charity sector we have a wealth of information regarding the type of experience users are looking for from a charity website, including the look & feel, the donation process and what makes users want to make a donation to a particular charity.

In the first of our planned series of reports we have put together the results of our research and are happy to share this with the sector as a whole. Always remembering that it’s one thing to collect the data and quite another to interpret it and turn it into the right end user experience.

Our new Bentley project has kicked off in earnest, Dunlop Health and Safety is just about to launch and you will soon be powerboating off Gibralter.

As well as existing clients we have several interesting pitches on at the moment and we are all thoroughly caught up in them. Triumph is a fantastic British brand with an amazing worldwide following which you can get a sense of by visiting some of the online forums. We are making use of Social Media to validate our ideas and opinions for the pitch and it is a very interesting and informative process.

We are also working on a pitch for a recruitment company who have a different model to any I have seen before which could be quite ground breaking.

Off to the Ace Cafe on Sunday with the team to meet Triumph bikers. Will have to hide my people carrier around the corner!

This got me thinking, what is it about working on a brand that makes you a natural advocate and how can I influence others around me to feel as passionately about this or any other brand I work on… which in turn will hopefully inspire them to influence others?

So in the run up to the pitch (and beyond) I plan on becoming that annoying friend who won’t shut up about this particular brand. In fact I would go as far as even trying to influence at least one of my friends to purchase a bike (if nothing else so that I could experience a ride on one).

However, on a more serious note and without wanting to give away too much we are approaching the usual suspects/influencers to gain their opinion and get a feel for their passion about the brand. It’s interesting just how strong people can feel about brands (for some reason it makes me feel normal). I’ll be interested to see just what comes out of this… watch this space.

It’s the same with websites – great looks and expensive design are all well and good but if the behind-the-scenes team didn’t lay the foundations first you might be in trouble. 

It never fails to amaze me – why are some websites just so frustrating and difficult to use? And why, then, is website usability not higher up the agenda? If you are seriously considering a site redesign or upgrade, put aside a small but friendly sized part of the budget for User Experience testing – right through the IA, design and build phases. 

There’s nothing worse than realising the foundations weren’t properly laid and expensive post-launch fixes could have been avoided.

Today I learnt that 5% of Mercedes drivers have 2 or more Tattoos. Well 5% of the 450 people in the UK they surveyed anyway.

How do I know this?

Lucky me, Mercedes have targeted me as a prospect. Which means I get a personalised piece of DM through the post aimed at getting me to visited http://site.iammercedes-benz.co.uk, a site that tells me facts about Mercedes drivers.

39% have blue eyes, so what…

Whilst there are some nice graphics and a few interesting ways of displaying survey data, I don’t get why this information is relevant to me as a prospect customer.

As well as displaying lifestyle data, the site does make an attempt to convey something about their cars, but unfortunately gets very dull by telling me about peoples average millage or preferred paint colour.

In my mind Mercedes have missed a trick. Firstly, this is still very much a one-way monologue from Mercedes. The site doesn’t encourage two-way dialogue, or try to establish anything about me the prospect.

Secondly, this would have been a great opportunity for Mercedes Drivers to express how they FEEL, not just what the ARE.

A great example of this is www.wefeelfine.org/

We Feel Fine automatically scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. It then presents the information back in really interesting and exciting ways, that make you want to explore the information and why people feel the way they do.

The other big advantage with this site is it updates automatically every ten minutes. It saves between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day rather than relying on static survey data that has a limited shelf life.

I guess the only problem with that approach is Mercedes being confident that their drivers FEEL good about driving a Mercedes.