Band on the Wall
3,577 people like Band on the Wall which is a not-for-profit venue run by registered charity Inner City Music that brings some of the best music from around the world to Manchester. Their Facebook page gives fans up-to-date information about up and coming line-ups. The guys that run the Facebook page are great at replying to comments left on their wall and they get involved in the conversation. To their credit Band on the Wall give a great stream of relevant information to fans.   It’s also exciting to see what’s coming to Manchester and by including videos and pictures of said artists the posts contain some great content. Band of the Wall also post videos of events held there and link through to their vimeo site connecting other social media sites.  Band of the Wall have all the information you need about the venue, opening times, location etc.  Finally they are making the most of the tabs above showing some great reviews, events listings and include some awesome pictures and albums from acts, venues and creative fliers.

Cricket Liverpool
Cricket is an exclusive fashion boutique based in Liverpool famed for the local celebrities who shop there. With 2,005 fans they are very popular and posting the products is enough to hold the interest their fans who are all about fashion. They are available to answer any questions about stock, new lines and new orders. They include loads of pictures that are a huge selling point and the notes tab being used as a blog keeps everyone up to date on events and news.

American Soda
American Soda have one of the best Facebook fan pages for a small business. With 7,482 fans they use it mainly as a customer service front which works really well. They really interact with the their customers, have conversations, answer any questions and keep it very up to date. They allow their customers to add their own photos and write on their wall which encourages a mutual trust. Their customers are always adding comments about how great their products and services are and if anyone has a problem it is clear that someone has picked it up responded and dealt with it efficiently, resolving any issues in a timely and personable way. American Soda have added content from their Twitter and YouTube sites in the tabs above, this allows the customers to connect with them on other social platforms. This Facebook page really does revolve around the fans.

Bespoke Blinds & Poles Ltd
I really like this example as it’s such a different product to the others I have discussed. Bespoke Blinds and Poles have 1,094 fans. The wall is very personable and has a friendly touch, they are not overwhelming you with their products and focus on giving sound advice. The enquiry tab they have installed is a great idea for fans to request a call back from Facebook.  It shows that they go that little bit further in terms of their customer service and makes it so much easier for their fans to contact them. The info tab is thorough and gives all the details a potential customer needs. The boxes tab has some great images, links and videos and they are using the notes page like a blog which add a really nice touch. The time invested in the Blinds and Poles Facebook is paying off. Their photos not only show their products but also their involvement in the local community. This is great Facebook site for a small company selling very niche products.

Chester Zoo
Chester Zoo has a whopping 10,052 people who “like this” and who can blame them? For animal lovers it’s a great way to keep up to date with the local zoo. Again like American Soda, Chester Zoo lets people write on their wall which is great.  People start conversations around visits and recommendations. They post lovely pictures of the animals and announce new arrivals to the park including recently a very cute baby elephant, these give people reasons for a new visit. Their YouTube tab allows people to link with them on other social platforms and their notes tab give users more detailed information about what’s happening at the Zoo.  It’s a very friendly, local Facebook page.

The five companies above can do a lot more with their Facebook pages but as far as building up a good following and putting in solid foundations they have made a great start. By adding additional tabs to blogs, branded games, vouchers and discount codes, links to other social sites, review tabs, etc will help the fans and users interact with the brands. It’s really important no matter the size of the brand to make your site personable and friendly, people aren’t going to want to be a fan of a company that spams them with their products.

If you can think of any more that you think deserve a shout out we’d love to hear about them.

Meeting Room with TV and Wii. We were streaming the match in here last week while munching on muffins and cookies.

Stairs and Lee’s chair where he chills looking cool with his Ipad.

Chill out area upstairs, we also use this area for more informal meetings too.

Fluid wall hanging that Creative Director Wayne Silcock designed to brighten up the studio.

The Fluid team hard at work, it’s a great open plan office with loads of space.

Here are some of the awards we have won over the last few years.

And finally this is where the Fluid staff* like to keep fit. Our sexy personal trainer Richard Marsh supplies the equipment and training sessions, check him out at Absolute Fitness Online.

*by Fluid staff there is only a handful that actually use the gym.

Matt Davies rocks Pitch and Putt at Heaton Park

“Even if you’ve never played golf in your life, this is a fantastic time of year to get over to Heaton Park to try out their 18 hole Pitch and Putt course. You don’t have to be a demon with the driver to play here as all holes are under 100 yards, making the game more about accuracy than power. It’s only a fiver to play all 18 holes (plus a refundable deposit of another £5 for clubs), making it a cheap, fun way to enjoy the sunshine while getting a bit of exercise!”

Here’s Matt enjoying a round on a sunny evening after work (don’t worry, the clubs are not actually made out of rubber – the bending you can see is down to dodgy camera phone photography!);

There’s loads of other great activities at Heaton Park to get stuck into; for more information check out their website.

Sarah Ozdemir loves chilling in the sun before hitting the shops!

“Grab yourself a mango or raspberry frappuccino from Starbucks, a good book and make use of the grass at the Urbis centre. Theres a great atmosphere and a real mix of people coming and going, it’s a great place for people watching. After your done eating/drinking/slurping pop and the sun is slipping behind the buildings you can’t beat hitting the shops for some reatil theropy.”

Scott Green:  part time fisherman

“For me there’s nothing better than getting up at 4am on a weekend just as the sun’s about to come up, packing a bit of a picnic and a few tinnys, driving to a quiet pond with a mate or two and dangling a piece of Spam in the water for a good few hours!”

Scott caught this beast at Church Gardens in Bolton.

Matthew Simpson: escapes to Town (if only for a few hours)

“I must tell you I experienced an amazing sense of freedom for a few precious hours: mainly down to the two predominant factors: 1. Without the kids 2. Without the missus! God bless ‘er cotton’s, I lav ‘err really mate (that terrible attempt at cockney dialect was to let you know that I am from London originally).  I can tell you was a new man at the end of my extremely limited time spent on my own in a city, which is rare for me anyway, as I live in Wigan which is just a tad too far from Manchester to make it a regular shopping destination with the family (we’re more inclined to go that beautiful shopping emporium The Concourse in Skelmersdale at the weekend (Wigans very own Trafford centre for the local chav’s and chav nots).
Anyway that’s my suggestion as we all know it’s quite rare to get the sun in Manchester at the best of times. So if you can’t make it to dear old London try the best city outside of it: Manchester. Enjoy the sun whilst it lasts folks!”

Nicola Thomas: rock chick

“I’d recommend going to see a local gig, support your local bands and enjoy the beer garden that might be attached to the venue. Keep up todate with local gig and festivals on Ticketline. One good venue to watch this summer is The Witchwood who are showing the England games on a big screen, free food and free entertainment after!!”

Jay Lau:  Beer and a bit of History

On a hot day me and the boys head down to Dukes 92 and BarCa in Castlefield. You can’t beat a few pints in the sun and soak up the atmosphere with all the people chilling by the canal. If you want to impress someone you can show them the reconstruction of the original Roman Fort, plus the oldest railway station in the world, the first industrial canal and great waterside walks and loads of places to eat and drink. If you time it perfectly you may even catch one of Manchester’s only booze cruises down the canals.

Lee Turner Cycling Enthusiast

“Come rain or shine I will be riding in the Derwent Valley. You could be anywhere in the world the sceneries amazing, you would never suspect your just outside of Manchester. Its not for the faint hearted but the cycling is amongst the best in the world with incredible views as your reward – if you want a challenge this is the one for you.”

Julie Abbott: Tactical Mum

“My favourite thing on a hot sunny day with kids used to be inside, in the cool, air-conditioned kids’ palace of Head Over Heels, Chorlton.  While everybody else was at the park, I’d be staying cool with a nice long iced drink and letting the kids burn off all their energy! Cost is up to a fiver per child, depending on age, and whether it’s term-time (cheaper) or not. Allow for some spends in the yummy cafe, though. And top tip don’t go when it’s raining – the place is packed!”

Sarah Slamon: outdoor movies and Pimms

“When the weathers lovely one of my favourite summer evenings is to head down to Spinningfields to watch a film on the big screen and grab a few Pimms and lemonade, it’s a great atmosphere. When the film ends you’re spoilt for choice on where to eat. I will be heading down for Pretty Woman and going to take the kids to see Up later in the summer.”

James Chapman living on the Edge

“I’m quite a fan of walking round Alderley Edge at the moment.  Not only is it a good Sunday leg-stretcher, but there’s also a tea shop that does some proper nice cakes.  Take your own flask of tea though as they’ll sting you for a brew.  It’s also easy to forget that there are views like these just minutes outside Manchester”

Graham Nimbly:  likes to keep busy

“I always recommend people to walk around the Mersey valley - two water parks (Chorlton and Sale), the river banks, various woods and nature reserves and plenty of places to walk/run/cycle. Everyone seems to head down there when it’s sunny! For food/drink (or to recover) you can go to the restaurant at Sale Water Sports Centre, the small café at the Mersey Valley welcome centre or Jackson boat (a great country pub).”

Michelle ‘pass me a cocktail’ O’Brien

“On a sunny day you can’t beat heading down to the Northern Quarter in Manchester’s City Centre nipping in and out of all the vintage shops and cute boutiques. One of Manchester hidden gems is the Manchester Craft Centre that’s full of artists and crafts people making and selling contemporary goods; some of the jewellery is to die for. A quick trip home then its sundresses on and time to meet the girls, can’t go wrong with a Northern Quarter bar crawl. Socio Rehab and Cord for cocktails, Matt and Phred’s for some live music then Black Dog Ballroom for a dance. Summer nights are the best!”

Whatever your plans are we hope we’ve given you some good ideas for days or nights out and we hope you make the most of the sunshine. The team at Fluid would also love to hear about any events you recommend in the comments below.

The missing Tweets from all pages are what’s concerning the gang at Fluid the most, but fear not Twitter have re-assured us on their status blog that they are not lost forever and will return soon:

“We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. We’ll update you soon with an ETA.
10:17 PM PDT: Users may temporarily experience missing tweets from their timelines. They will be restored shortly.

11:51 PM PDT: We’re recovering from the site outage. Remember, users may temporarily experience missing or duplicate tweets from their timelines. Normal timelines will be restored shortly.”

We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

The problems over the last few days have caused a bit of concern. With a growing number of people not only using Twitter daily but relying on Twitter to be kept up to date with the latest news, industry developments or simply friends. The question on everyones lips today is ’should we depend on it’.

I am a huge Twitter fan, I not only encourage friends but businesses to use Twitter to engage with customers or clients, keep up to date with industry news and share their thoughts on hot topics. In some cases not having access to this information or to cusomers can be business critical.

The technical problems with Twitter can be more than a minor inconvenience for websites that have a Twitter feed installed. With Twitter being down this will disrupt these feeds and can potentially damage a website. Some businesses this morning will have to consider if having a live Twitter feed on their site is worth the potential disruption it can cause.

Here at Fluid we are hoping these issues get resolved as soon as possible but we would also like to know what procedures will be put in place to stop this happening again.

Matthew says “I am delighted to join Fluid Creativity as they are very ‘real’ and not full of jargon. Fluid Creativity wants the best for their clients and I am proud to be a part of a team so committed to helping their clients stand out in this highly competitive marketplace.  As well as that they are a nice bunch and good to work with.”

Lee Turner Managing Director explains “Matthew brings with him a wealth of experience and will be an integral part of our Business Development Team which has had a fantastic start to the year with some great client wins. Fluid are extremely focused on building the best Digital Solution business and are looking forward to building our Search and Development teams over the coming months”

Matthew follows the arrival of Martin Proffitt, PHP Developer and Michelle O’Brien, Digital Strategy Consultant who both joined Fluid Creativity in February.

Fluid are always searching for new talent, and are currently looking to recruit a PHP Developer.

Lee Turner 49:46
Scott Green 54:26
Michelle O’Brien 1:00:18
Julie Abbott 1:07:56

Michelle got snapped going strong at 1.5km. We will be adding more pictures as and when they come in so keep your eyes on the blog.

A huge thank you to all those who supported us on the way. It was a great day and we all had loads of fun.

Due to drop outs we are a bit behind on our target of £1100 so any additional support and donations will be very welcome and I am sure you’ll agree that it’s much deserved by the team. http://www.justgiving.com/fluid-creativity

A huge personal bug bear of mine with Facebook is that the pages can sometimes look really dull and drab despite there being some awesome content on it. I put the challenge to the Fluid Creativity team to see what we could do to jazz up our company ‘Like’ page and this is what we came up with.

We have opened a can of worms with this one, we now have loads of great ideas for more exciting tabs for Fluid and for our clients. Holla if you like it…. we would love to hear what you think below.

The team consists of Lee Turner, Managing Director, who despite being a fitness freak hates running, we are all convinced he is still going to whip everyone by finishing in under 50mins. The dark horse in the race may come from Scott Green our top designer and motion graphicsist who has been training like a big kid in the skate park. While the super fit yet crazy Julie Abbott, Business Development Manager, is doing a triathlon next weekend to prepare. Jeff Lloyd, top coder, who is representing the development team has not let much slip about what he’s doing to train, will he beat us all? But the real race this year is between the 2 foodies on the search team James ‘Gabbotts’ Chapman and myself, it’s our first ever run and it’s going to be a close one.

For those wanting to place bets we will keep you updated over the next 2 weeks with the progress of the teams training. We’d also love it if you could donate whatever you can to our just giving page.

A number of online publications are considering putting up paywalls on their websites; these paywalls will block access to a webpage with a window requiring payment.

When does written content online become a product?

With Rupert Murdoch leading the way with paying for content online the question on everyone’s lips is ‘does it work as a viable business model?’. Manchester Confidential bravely took on the challenge before performing a complete U-turn in less than 3 months. Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential recently alluded to Murdoch’s proposals, declaring at a digital content event in Manchester “your free trial is over”.  Within a week of this bold statement How-Do announced the collapse of his paywall for Manchester confidential, with Garner finally admitting “We lost money throughout the entire year,”

I understand that a paywall will work for industry specific content like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. They produce very detailed financial news and information for which a small group of people are willing to pay.

Where Murdoch’s plans may fail is when he will introduce charges for websites such as The Sun and the News of the World. Paying for online content is not what most people want or accept. There are too many alternative places to get that same news on the web for free, why would people pay for it?

It’s unwise to assume the paywall model will work on all content. It won’t. People use different sites for different things.

So what makes paid content online successful? Subscription models are working all over the internet for example E-consultancy, where you have to pay for reports, independent advice and insight on digital marketing and ecommerce. It works because the information provided is useful and very specific to the industry.

Reader loyalty is key too, if your readers visit you as a passing fancy every now and then it is doubtful they will pay for the content. If someone visits everyday and can’t live without the information the publication is providing then you have a case for a paywall. It is about differentiating between your readers and looking at what is going to work best for your site.

My housemate works, lives and breathes fashion. Her library of Vogue magazines are her bibles and a monument to her passion for the industry. She visits the Vogue website daily but also subscribes to the magazine, should such a loyal reader have to pay for her online content too?

I have a few questions to ask those putting up paywalls: if a reader doesn’t think the article was worth the cost will they get their money back?  What happens to consumer rights? If people are enticed to purchase an article by a catchy clever title but the content and bulk of the article was fluff, how is that fair. Can you be refunded if you have already consumed the product?

If a customer subscribes to a website paying a monthly fee does this mean they won’t have to put up with targeted advertisements? I don’t think so. The people putting up paywalls will still be gaining from advertising and affiliate revenue every chance they get. The paywall isn’t about paying for better content – in my opinion it serves no other benefit than to line the pockets of businessmen who declare, without evidence, that their content is worth paying for.

Adapting the entire print industry to the new digital platform is not going to be easy and there will be a place for both free and paid for content online. I understand the money has to come from somewhere to pay for journalists, photographers, copywriters and editors. But the one thing that needs to be factored in is the costs of producing content for the internet is no where near as high as the materials, printing costs and logistics needed to produce print based publications.

The content or services companies are providing online have to be different from any other free websites. Consumers that can get the same information anywhere else for free will do. Quality of the writing is irrelevant to most people if the information is the same.

To all those fat cats considering putting up a paywall on their websites consider one thing if you put up a paywall you need to have something that is worth paying for.

The RAR Awards are all about recognising excellent customer service – the awards are based on what clients really think of you and their recommendations.

Recognising how hard it can be to find the right agency for your brand, RAR developed an online research process to gather up-to-date market insight right across the spectrum of marketing services.

“As well as top-line supplier information, this process also captures ratings from clients that give a unique picture of the level of customer satisfaction that each supplier achieves.”

This makes it easier for companies to gather reliable and independent information on agencies and suppliers to help them make the right choice

The winners will be announced at the RAR Awards at the Russell Hotel, Russell Square, London on 21 April 2010 and we can’t wait to join the party.