Made. By Iris

Posted: December 11 2009 in Work

Made Magazine is hot off the press and look­ing stun­ning (but what magazine wouldn’t with Cos­mo­pol­itan Magazine’s Sports­wo­man of the Year, Jes­sica Ennis on the cover?). And like all the best things, it was made in Shef­field right here at Iris.

The pro­ject for Iris cli­ents, Cre­at­ive Shef­field, began as a brief for an all-purpose com­mu­nic­a­tions piece to sell the city’s many social, eco­nomic and sport­ing attrac­tions to the out­side world. We came back with the idea of a magazine. But not just any old city magazine. We knew it had to be a damn good page turner. We also knew it needed to look the busi­ness. So we paid par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to writ­ing and com­mis­sion­ing inter­est­ing, well-written, ori­ginal edit­or­ial con­tent. Mean­while our design­ers got down to the task of giv­ing it the look and feel of a glossy, high qual­ity, per­fect bound peri­od­ical. Read the full post…

Charity starts at home…or should that be work?

Posted: November 27 2009 in News, People

We’re game for a laugh at Iris, as you may have gathered, and all the boys at Iris were (ini­tially) excited at the pro­spect of get­ting involved in this year’s Movem­ber. That is, until they real­ised that actu­ally meant grow­ing and hav­ing a mous­tache (on their face!) for an entire month!

Not ones to be unchar­it­able, they roped a more game, slightly more gull­ible fel­low to do the dirty work for them. Enter Michael Barker, top soft­ware tester at Applied Cyto­metry; our med­ical soft­ware spe­cial­ist cli­ent over in Din­ning­ton but also lov­ing (and rather spruce) fiancée of our very own Stephanie, Pro­ject Man­ager extraordinaire.

Read the full post…

Using our gifts to help UNICEF

Posted: November 5 2009 in Work

We have recently been lucky enough to work with UNICEF to assist them with their attempts at pro­mot­ing a num­ber of good causes through their Inspired Gifts web-site. UNICEF sell gifts that make a dif­fer­ence, with the aim of mak­ing your gift-giving go much fur­ther than ever before. Read the full post…

Iris plunges into Yorkshire Water

Posted: November 5 2009 in News, Wins

After a 6-way York­shire Water fight, sorry… pitch, involving some of York­shire and Manchester’s finest agen­cies, Iris has emerged drip­ping but triumphant.

The appoint­ment makes us the sole agency for York­shire Water and is a sig­ni­fic­ant win for the busi­ness. Going for­ward our role will encom­pass all of the util­ity company’s com­mu­nic­a­tions activ­it­ies and we’re look­ing for­ward to help­ing them meet the chal­lenges that all water and sew­er­age com­pan­ies are facing over the next few years. Read the full post…

How do you convey beautiful, upmarket fragrances in a printed brochure?

Posted: November 4 2009 in Work

Wax Lyr­ical, one of the UK’s largest home fra­gran­cing com­pan­ies, were look­ing for a new bro­chure design which would help them to pos­i­tion their lux­ury range of candles, interior fra­grances and dif­fusers to a more dis­cern­ing, upmar­ket audience.

We designed a bro­chure in the form of a scrap book of ‘fra­grance notes’ and other ‘cut­tings’, to give an insight into the things that had inspired the Wax Lyr­ical per­fumers in cre­at­ing the new range. Snip­pets of inspir­ing copy were inter­spersed with an eclectic mix of inspir­a­tional recipes, inter­est­ing facts and frag­ments of mater­ial, tex­tures and images of fra­grance ingredi­ents. Read the full post…

What is LinkedIn?

Posted: November 4 2009 in People

Well, as LinkedIn say on their web-site…

“LinkedIn is the world’s largest pro­fes­sional net­work with over 40 mil­lion mem­bers and grow­ing rap­idly. LinkedIn con­nects you to your trus­ted con­tacts and helps you exchange know­ledge, ideas, and oppor­tun­it­ies with a broader net­work of professionals.”

So that’s the mar­ket­ing spin, why is it use­ful for me as a business?

“LinkedIn gives you the keys to con­trolling your online iden­tity. Have you Googled your­self lately? You never know what may come up. LinkedIn pro­files rise to the top of search res­ults, let­ting you con­trol the first impres­sion people get when search­ing for you online.”

Think about this, it could have pro­found implic­a­tions for your organ­isa­tion, your repu­ta­tion, your brand and how people per­ceive you, just look­ing at my LinkedIn pro­file you can see the com­pany I work for, the size of my com­pany and all the con­nec­tions who have joined up (or who haven’t joined up).  You can see what we define our com­pany as and our mis­sion state­ment.  Also I have access to 11,600+ people who are 2 degrees away (Friends of friends; each con­nec­ted to one of your con­nec­tions). They can all see my pro­file, and my status updates.

If you have a com­pany and there are 20 employ­ees with 11,600 con­nec­tions each view­ing your com­pan­ies pro­file and your employ­ees pro­file this sud­denly becomes a massive audi­ence that pos­sibly inter­acts with you and your employ­ees mes­sages on a reg­u­lar basis — shouldn’t your brand be rep­res­en­ted in the cor­rect way, maybe you should think about hav­ing a com­pany policy for this; shouldn’t you all be put­ting a sim­ilar thing & work­ing to the same goals, ensur­ing that you have a pos­it­ive vibrant image?

More and more it’s the first port of call for new employ­ees to check out a poten­tial new work place and I know that I always check it out before I go to a new busi­ness meet­ing. Its use in the States is much more pre­val­ent, where its used as a con­tacts data­base as well as a social media plat­form. If you go to a meet­ing it’s likely that you will receive a request from someone to connect.

Actions

Any­way rather than dron­ing on about the vir­tues of Linked in and how to use it (as it’s been done a mil­lion times before and read­ily avail­able online) I thought I’d empower you to go find out yourself!

Heres your action list let me know if you have any questions:

• Sign up cre­ate a pro­file for you and your com­pany. Hone your pro­file — a pro­fes­sional look­ing pho­to­graph and include keywords in your sum­mary / spe­ci­al­it­ies (keep an eye on the Com­plete­ness bar)
• See what other employ­ees, friends and col­leagues you can con­nect to
• Try to get all your com­pany to join the cor­rect com­pany pro­file (trust me this isn’t easy)
• Join rel­ev­ant groups and join in rel­ev­ant conversations
• Post the occa­sional com­pany (or per­sonal) suc­cess story in your status – remem­ber be pos­it­ive, there is noth­ing worse than see­ing “had ter­rible day, wish I was at home” mes­sages and don’t overdo it!
• Seek recom­mend­a­tions — in the vir­tual world it is essen­tial to estab­lish cred­ib­il­ity and trust. Use the Ask to be Endorsed but­ton. And remem­ber, some­times you to have to give to receive …
• Cus­tom­ize your URL — like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/benmhall
• Com­mu­nic­ate with your con­nec­tions — you can send email via LinkedIn’s built-in sys­tem to 50 people at a time — but don’t spam; the more dis­tant your con­nec­tions, the more likely they will react badly to unso­li­cited messages
• Add the Slide­Share applic­a­tion to share present­a­tions, show­cas­ing your know­ledge and expert­ise (Google Present­a­tions accom­plishes the same thing)
• Cre­ate polls — ask one ques­tion and dis­play up to five mul­tiple choice answers for your audi­ence to vote on. Your audi­ence can be your 1st degree con­nec­tions (free) .

Help us give money to rural Yorkshire businesses

Posted: October 29 2009 in News

Iris have been asked by York­shire For­ward to come up with pro­mo­tional cam­paign to pro­mote three poten­tial fund­ing streams (worth £63 mil­lion over next 5 years) to rur­ally based busi­nesses in York­shire.

The Back­ground
Essen­tially there is a pot of money that’s being made avail­able to a wide range of rur­ally based busi­nesses in our region, and we want to make sure that every­one who is eli­gible for the fund­ing knows about it. If your busi­ness is in a rural area, or if you work closely with food pro­du­cers, you could be eli­gible for fund­ing from The Rural Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme for England.

There are three dif­fer­ent types of fund­ing depend­ing on the kind of busi­ness activ­ity you’re involved in and what stage your busi­ness is at — click the links below for fur­ther details. And just in case you were won­der­ing, you don’t need to be run­ning a farm to be eli­gible — any busi­ness that’s based in a rural post­code can apply.

The Solu­tion
Firstly we have made a rather nifty online data­base that lets you see if you are eli­gible — why not check it out to see if you can apply for a grant?

“How are you pro­mot­ing this?” I hear you shout. Well, without a huge advert­ising budget to splash out on a TV ad we decided to do some­thing a little bit dif­fer­ent and rely on your good nature and ambi­tion for the region (yes that’s right, YOUR good nature!).

We have pro­duced a raft of mar­ket­ing mater­i­als to pro­mote the fund­ing and ask that you include some of it in your next set of com­mu­nic­a­tions – whether it’s a ban­ner on your web­site, a prin­ted let­ter that you send out to mem­bers or cus­tom­ers or an email into which you include a snip­pet of text about the fund­ing. In short, if you’ve got the space we’ve got some­thing that’ll fit it!

Click here to down­load a num­ber of case stud­ies, let­ters, ban­ners, emails, text snip­pets, and links
Also, if you have some­thing spe­cific, for example a space that requires some­thing more bespoke please con­tact me: benhall@irisassociates.com

http://www.yorkshire-forward.com/helping-businesses/rural-businesses

Iris goes mobile

Posted: October 29 2009 in Work

We’ve been doing quite a bit of mobile web work here in the Iris web labs over the past few weeks, and with even more on the hori­zon, we thought it only right to shed a little light on the whole thing.

Not only have we given our blog a mobile makeover, we’re cur­rently under way with an excit­ing pro­ject for the DCSF, which involves cre­at­ing a shiny new mobile ver­sion of the news chan­nel we recently built for them.

This is test­a­ment to the increas­ing pop­ular­ity of the mobile web. Access to the Inter­net via mobile hand­sets is improv­ing quickly, thanks in part to fant­astic smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and the extens­ible Google Android plat­form to name but a few. Recently fore­cas­ted fig­ures make impress­ive reading:

• Mobile own­er­ship will rap­idly increase year on year up to 2013, when the num­ber of own­ers could be as many as 5.8 bil­lion. Cur­rent fig­ures put the num­ber around 4.3 bil­lion, up from 2.7 bil­lion in 2006.^[1]
• Sales of smart phones grew by 27 per­cent in Q2 2009, the fast­est grow­ing sec­tor of the mobile mar­ket.^[2]
• 6 out of 10 people around the world now have access to a HSPA net­work, which is faster than the cur­rent 3G net­works.^[3]

With many types of phone, come many dif­fer­ent screen sizes and cap­ab­il­it­ies. The biggest chal­lenge of design and devel­op­ment for the mobile plat­form is acheiv­ing a con­sist­ent exper­i­ence across a vast range of avail­able hand­sets, from entry-level through to high-end smart phones. The main restraints for mobile users are text input coupled with large amounts of data, and in turn, scrolling. Kept to a min­imum, a mobile site can be much more useable on hand­sets with restrict­ive input and slow connections.

On the flip side is the new breed of touch-equipped smart­phones. These are mak­ing the mobile web easier to view, use and access for increas­ing num­bers of people. Along­side greater cov­er­age of high-speed net­works, it’s no sur­prise the mobile web appears to be going from strength to strength.

Our pro­ject for the DCSF is cer­tainly prov­ing both excit­ing and inter­est­ing, we can’t wait to show you the res­ults, but until we’re fin­ished, you can check out Iris’s mobile-ready blog right here. Two ver­sions are avail­able, one for WAP users and one for you lucky smart phone own­ers. Pay a return visit to this blog through your handset’s browser to see it in action.

Ref­er­ences

1. 1. Por­tio Research Mobile Fact­book 2009
2. 2. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812
3. 3. http://www.3gamericas.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pressreleasedisplay&pressreleaseid=2451

Our big 18th birthday bash

Posted: October 15 2009 in News, People

Happy Birth­day to us!

It’s 18 years since a young, fresh faced David and Maria first joined forces to found Iris. To mark this aus­pi­cious event we did what all 18 year olds do… hit the town. Our com­ing of age capers kicked off in the unlikely sur­round­ings of a Little Chef on the A64 just out­side York. No ordin­ary Little Chef this, though. The York res­taur­ant is one of a new and excit­ing breed of Little Chefs to be revamped by Michelin-starred celebrity chef, Heston Blu­menthal. Iris were heav­ily involved in the rebrand­ing, so the even­ing was also a great oppor­tun­ity to see our work in all its glory and (for some of us) to sample the new menu for the first time.

After some excel­lent food (the steak was a pop­u­lar and superb choice) and the present­a­tion of the cake, we went on to York to a bar. Then another bar. Then another bar. And then a club (I think). Read the full post…