Facebook can be seen as a great way to promote your event or group and Twitter can simply harvest followers that can help drive traffic to your website or Facebook page.

Of course you do need a website that is engaging too and often people forget that amongst the mix of social media marketing is a website that sits in the middle like a hub that makes sense of it all.

So rather than simply filling your website with tons of content, people can use some of the Social Marketing tools as an add on to their website. Flickr for instance provides very useable gallery that can be added to your website with ease. And, as Flickr has followers and users who can add their photographs to the gallery then these pictures can find their way on your own website.

This Social Media map produced by Differentia offers a way through the maze:

The following article provides more flesh on the bones

Social Media Optimization is Here to Stay

There’s a recent surge in the business press about incorporating social media and search or basically a more holistic approach to natural search optimization. While many popular biz pubs are catching on, bloggers and consultants like the team at TopRank Marketing have been covering the topic for a while. To help marketers better understand the notion of holistic SEO outside of PageRank, meta tags and link building, here are several of our most popular posts and articles on making online marketing programs both search and social media friendly:

How Does Social Media Affect Search Marketing? – This post answers key questions about social media and search engine marketing: Are they two peas in a pod, complementary or two very distinct channels? The answer lies in understanding searcher behaviors and how expectations have changed as part of the search and social networking experience.

social media optimization

16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited – As social media has become a ubiquitous part of the online experience, it represents a new set of behaviors for consumers and marketers. The initial “rules” set forth in 2006 were revisited by Adam Singer to test their continued validity and you may be surprised at what he found.

Social SEO

4 Steps to Social Media SEO Success – “Simple and effective” sums up this post on incorporating SEO and Social Media: Listening, Content, Socialize and Measure. Too many companies make social media and certainly SEO more complex than it needs to be, bottlenecking progress. This 4 step approach makes social media SEO manageable, realistic and achievable.

social seo content marketing

B2B Online Marketing Trifecta: Content, Social Media & SEO – Long sales cycles and the influence of social recommendations reinforced by search visibility make a perfect integrated mix for B2B internet marketing. This post outlines how Optimized Content and Social Media participation work together to amplify online marketing results for B2B companies.

social media friendly

Is Your Website SEO and Social Media Friendly? – This guest post on Mashable brought to light the notion of social media features that can be added to websites to increase their attractiveness for engagement and sharing. Examples include: Fresh Content, Social Content, Interaction, Easy to Share and Syndication. Shareable websites make it easy to attract attention to great content, which results in traffic and links. More relevant links mean better visibility in search engines which means even more traffic.

reinvigorate

5 Social Media SEO & Analytics Tools Worth Checking Out – What good is undertaking a social media and SEO effort if you can’t measure results? Here’s a selection of tools that help visualize or package social media SEO data for insight. They include: reinvigorate which offers real-time web analytics with heat maps; TwentyFeet dashboard which aggregates social stats from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and bit.ly; SocialFlow which posts messages during your audience’s most receptive time periods, measures CTR, retweets and followers; Ontolo which is an advanced link building tool; InfluenceFinder which is another link building tool that coordinates with Majestic SEO.

11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization – Social media sharing and interaction creates content that can be crawled by search engines. That means it can be optimized for better visibility within search, attracting new members to your social networks and blog. Here are 11 free tools that come in pretty handy for testing the waters and measuring optimized social media content.

via Social Media Optimization – Tips, Tools & Best Practices.

Loch Indaal is a fantastic place and you can read about it on the Isle of Islay website. And the Ionad Chaluim Chille Ile – the Gaelic College is a great place to visit and learn about the Island’s Gaelic culture.

The panorama panel was produced in bronze and included detailed text and images in English and Gaelic. So it does look a bit wordy and the best advice for interpretation is keep the words to about 250. But why would you not want to spend time here and read the panel properly. You can even get it translated at the Gaelic college – Ionad Chaluim Chille Ile.

Here is the poem Norman Bissell of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics wrote for the panel.

Tha an t-uisage aodomhainn seo sàmhach an-ceartuair
    Ach a-nochd tilidh na cathain
These shallow waters are quiet now
But tonight the barnacles will return

The landscape is all for landscape architects. They look at the landform, the materials and design a scheme which is properly implemented and has a maintenance schedule built into it ensuring a certain degree of longevity. The resulting scheme might include a play area, a garden, a park, a nature reserve. But what they have done is to consider the landscape and design a sympathetic scheme that is in harmony with it’s settings. But is this interpretation? Well sometimes it is, but often it is something that carries a design which is given more importance and emphasis than the story of the landscape.

As an interpretation consultant I see my role as one of peeling back the layer of the land and exposing the natural and historic stories that are buried beneath the surface. Often this knowledge is within the people that live in an area, sometimes it is the story of the past. In many ways the actual design takes second place to the integrity of the story. There is no place for indulging in designs that don’t extract these stories. The design needs to speak to the visitor and factor is the biggest single factor that separates interpretation from landscape architecture.

So how can we can connect the two disciplines and allow for a more rounded approach to interpretation and landscape? Well there are of course many schemes out there that do this already:

Sheep Fenke at Appin. This is based on a traditional sheep shelter that was designed to allow a local stonemason to build using local stone and traditional skills. The shelter is adapted to include seating and creates a haven from the south westerly winds. There is also poetry discs on the walls that were created from work with the local school. The whole project came from my own experience of cycling that route from Fort William to Oban into a severe gale and finding no shelter on the way. Scottish Natural Heritage funded this and other schemes on the route in order to enhance public awareness of the natural heritage. So my design has used natural material, local knowledge and skills and uses a form that was traditionally part of the landscape. No GRP in sight!

Below shows some traditional structures from which the Appin Sheep Fenke was modeled.

The Caledonia Way. This is the name given to the long distance path between Cambelltown and Inverness. Our design is based on the traditional highland galley the Birhlinn and the shape of the boat has informed many of the features that have been designed. So the access controls and gates that punctuate the route use the curves and stern and prow features that define the Birhlinn. Is this interpretation or landscape design? Looking closer at the gates we see images of birds or flying boats or trains! These images came from both work with local schools and delving into past times and bringing this history out of the landscape to reveal stories of the past.

Here is an image of a Highland Galley taken from a carving in stone.

This project was funded by Scottish Natural Heritage and a number of smaller bodies. The requirement was to produce 12 panels and 2 bronze panoramas. This project was approached in a very flexible and open manner, in that once I visited the island and got a feel for the place, I was able to hold a public meeting and address the issues raised with an informed opinion.

The project brief has been expanded to allow for the provision of around 14 panels placed onto slate plinths – which have been constructed by the local community using local materials. Alongside these panels will be a set of 12 bronze engraved discs so that children visiting the island can collect a set of rubbings of images such as birds, dolphins, mermaids etc.

The materials I used were GRP produced by BSG Signs in Scotland – I was keen to keep as much of the work in Scotland as possible. The environment was quite a tricky one in that the light is intense on the West Coast as well as the storms being a potential for damage. The panels – 3 years later – are still as vibrant as they were when they were installed.

Why do we like WordPress – quite simply it is simple to use, simple to update and simple to implement. Simple.

Plus they can look really gorgeous and off a rich content if put together properly. We have also found them to work better in Google rankings than other systems. See our gallery section for more screenshots.

We have put together websites that sit well in a commercial setting such as Freelance Marketing’s new website. The client not only has a new website that they can manage and update themselves but also a super blog allowing them to take advantage of social marketing.

We have also found the WordPress system ideal for shops and with it’s shopping cart modules allow a shop to easily build an online shopping presence. Core Music have transformed their online presence and, therefore, how they respond to their customer base.

Social enterprises, charities and small organisations are well catered for as WordPress allows collaboration with it’s User Management. A small website can easily and quickly grow thanks to a small team of people contributing to the adding of content. Adapt North East have a rich website with great possibilities for growth without adding to their overhead.

Everyone thinks that you have been very innovative in your response to the original brief. You have made us think about what we could do rather than reproduce our original thoughts and sell them back to us – if that makes sense?! We really think that this is your unique selling point, you genuinely put a lot of thought into how to meet the aims of the client and you make the client stop and think as well.

In this case, the creative process has resulted in some unique pieces of interpretation which although great, were not necessarily what we had originally envisaged. Most importantly we feel as though the end product is unique to Wren’s Nest and really does the site justice. We received and still are receiving some very positive comments about the installations. You have also already shown that are willing to provide ‘aftercare’ in terms of artwork, replacement discs and paints to help with maintenance.

The tight timescale obviously dominated everything to do with this project and to your great credit, you adhered to it rigidly.

Overall, we would all have no hesitation in recommending you for other work and I would like to work with you again on future projects should the opportunity arise.

Wren’s Nest has many stories to tell – its geology, mining heritage and its biodiversity. As such, there are many different visitors to the site with many varied interests, in addition to the local community that use the NNR as a recreational resource.

A number of documents have been developed as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund project: Interpretation Strategy, Lifelong Learning Strategy and Audience Development Plan. These documents have identified a series of stories and themes for the NNR, which now need to be brought to life.

In developing how these stories should be conveyed, we have identified a number of locations across the site where new physical interpretation is required. These new features will support many other forms of interpretation which are currently being developed – including on-line, printed and audio guides, trained walk leaders and leaflets.

On visiting the site we developed a series of linked interpretation items. The site itself is a most impressive geological site and is rich in fossils. What struck us was the way the strata of the fossil mounds were upended.

Our solutions uses a range of Vitreous Enamel Interpretation Panels and Cast Iron Interpretation pieces. The Cast Iron Interpretation included a large 1500 mm Cast Iron Trilobite which forms the centre of an interpretation hub that allows visually impaired visitors to collect fossils from the base. The Time Periscope allows the visitor to view the strata through it and to tell the age of the rock by aligning the hill up through it.

We created a Welcome Interpretation Feature which included a map of the site with four walks to follow. The Pillar included a fossil cast in concrete as a base to give visitors a sense of what to expect on the site.

There was also a set of four interpretation panels on lecterns explaining the history, nature and geology of the site. These were produced using Vitreous Enamel for longevity.

The context
The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (FCFCG) has been asked if it might commission the design and production of Health & Safety signs (plus possibly others such as for recycling cans, drinking water, types of animals) that are more genuinely accessible than many of the commercial ones, look more ‘attractive’ so the site doesn’t look like a hospital environment (and yet have greater impact), and are durable such that one-off investment is just that. Also to explore the possibility of price reduction if a bulk order were to be placed. The artwork for the signs would also be made available to download.

The need
Farms have a variety of visitors including young children, people with learning difficulties and other special needs, people whose first language is not English etc. Many are either confused with some of the hand washing and other signs, or can’t read the English warnings e.g. advice for pregnant women to avoid contact with ewes and lambs.

The differing ability to understand the messages we try to convey for the cross-section of people who visit city farms is a daunting, and probably impossible task to get right for everyone, but it needs to improve and Environmental Health Officers are requiring better signage on many farms.
The Griffin Report, following an outbreak of Ecoli0157 in 2010, also recommended improved signage

The audience
This new signage programme is primarily of interest to community managed farms in the UK, but many of the outputs will be equally applicable to community gardens and rural farms that encourage visitors. The Access To Farms partnership has taken an increasing interest and has agreed to fund some of the developments and to trial drafts across the full range of farms that receive visitors. Funding was secured from the lottery (Awards for All) to pay for consultation and design expertise.

The target audience:

• Adults with learning disabilities and their carers
• Visual impaired
• BSL users
• Refugees and non English Speakers
• School groups and their teachers
• Children and their parents/guardians
• Local groups that visit farms
• Staff and volunteers.

Outcomes

• A framework of signage that can be used on farms, including designs with options for customising by farm managers, and recommendations for production materials and methods of printing
• The option – if adopted – of all city farms using the designs to give all visitors across the UK a degree of consistency
• A template for the production of the signs both by in-house means (low cost ink jet printing) as well as outsourcing production
• An increased standard of accessibility and awareness of non-English communication and disabilities both in mobility and understanding.

Download our Company Profile for more information.

Read it here.

Services: Graphic Design, Illustration, Watercolour illustration, Wildlife illustration (see www.wildlifeillustration.com), Copywriting, Website Design, Interpretation, Interpretation Management Plans, Interpretation Design and Production, Writing and Research, Print design and production, Logo and Brand Design.

Client Groups: Social Enterprises, Community Interest Companies, Community Associations, Parish Councils, Community Councils (Scotland), Local Authorities, Government Organisations, Private Companies and individuals (some).

Member of the Association of Heritage Interpretation – AHI.

Clients: Sustrans Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage, Newcastle City Council, Gateshead Council, Northumberland Council, Darlington Council, Newcastle Healthy City, Mesmac North East, Natural England, Defra (former), English Nature (former), Northumberland National Park, Argyll and Bute Council, Groundwork Leeds, Groundwork North East, others.

Testimonials: Read what our clients say.

I will be doing some other illustrations to support this such as watercolour illustrations of the bird life on the river and some scenes of the bridges over the River Tees.