This gallery is a bit of a variety pack, to give you a taster of my work. Go back to the homepage and explore further to see the full selection from every shoot.

Some shots from the prejudging session at Leeds Town Hall.

Dan’s shoot was my first with a model and he was fantastic to work with. We worked in and around Holbeck in Leeds, taking advantage of wasteland, the canalside and the brilliant Temple Works as locations.

Bit of a niche post this one, but thought i’d share in case it saves someone else some time. I’ve been noodling around with Google Maps over the past few days on a job which started simple and then rapidly got more complex (don’t they all!)

It also pointed up some of the limitations within the My Maps version of the product. I was building a map of the UK, showing around 300 of my clients locations. I started out with a bit of a ropey spreadsheet, which after some cleanup I fed through the very useful batchgeocode.com which happily takes delimited text and chews through it geocoding the info (even if all you have is a postcode) and creating lat/long co-ordinates.

Once that’s done you can save it as a KML file and import it into Google MyMaps. That’s where the !=fun begins. For some reason MyMaps pages the results when you hit 200 markers, so from then on the map will only show one page worth of markers at a time. Not so bad on the site, but a bit sucky if you intend to embed the map (where the paging isn’t shown).

At this point I realised we’d need to wheel out the Maps API to save the day and here my technical knowledge falters a little. Particularly as not only did we need to show the 300 pins from the KML file…but each location was also allocated to one of 36 areas and each area was in one of 5 divisions.

I knew i’d be wanting something like numbered pins showing the areas and perhaps of different colours to denote the divisions. This way you get clusters of colour showing the divisions and the numbers are also clustered (more or less) into areas.

But doing all that with the API was a bit beyond my limited knowledge so I handed it over to my talented team of techies who had it worked out in very short order.

Which just left me needing to locate a set of graphics for the markers, I know there are fancy pants ways of generating them programmatically but for reasons we won’t go into I needed a folder full of PNG files.

Actually finding something to fit the bill was tricky, eventually after some hunting I hit on this post at benjaminkeen.com which had a set of markers (and a PSD file, hurrah!) from A-Z in 10 different colours.

So, for those of you searching for numbered markers instead, I present below, my version. A PSD with the numbers 1-36 (I only needed that many and I don’t love you enough to go up to 99) and the 10 colours.

Google Map Markers 1-36 (markers.psd) 616Kb 

May it save you a little time and effort if it can.

I recently gave my first Pecha Kucha style presentation. I’ve been wanting to for a while, ever since first seeing them at Geekup in Leeds, where the format generally involves much heckling and a trip to the bar if the subject really doesn’t grab you. For the uninitiated Pechakucha is a “lightning” presentation format of 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each giving a total presentation time of 6m40s. There’s also a variant called Ignite, mainly used by O’Reilly at their events of the same name, which is 15 seconds a slide.

The kicker is that the slides are set to automatically advance, meaning you either practice what you’re going to say meticulously, or else move the hell on before stuff starts getting thrown at you. It had been at the back of my mind to give it a go for a while and then I attended one of the first Ignite events in the UK, held at OBH in Leeds. It was a revelation, around 20 speakers  in 2 hours with a couple of breaks for refreshments and networking. What made it special was the range of topics, we flitted from one idea or concept to the next and even if one didn’t appeal, you knew you were never more than 5 minutes from the next.

One speaker showed some fantastic ways in which people in Africa are using ingenuity and the materials they have to hand to build technological solutions, another spoke about the pitfalls of developing apps for the iPhone and one spoke in depth about coding something so technical that I now can’t remember even the tiniest detail. Special mention however goes to Tom Scott, who’s “My Life in 20 graphs”, had the audience roaring with laughter with a mix of Graphjam style lulz.

What they all had in common was that they were concise, punchy and in at least some measure intriguing, even when they were subjects I wouldn’t normal even consider.

So, finally I bit the bullet and pulled together a presentation of my own. I’d been asked to present my strategic plan for the year to my counterparts from our other offices and was aware it could easily turn into a bit of a stats filled yawnfest (something which I hasten to add my counterparts avoided!) and so tried to use an image led format, although eventually some more traditional bullet points did creep in.

What did I learn:

- Avoid the temptation to have more than one thought per slide, I flip flopped between thinking I wouldn’t have enough slides and having too many and crammed too much in.

- Practice several times out loud, I tried it in my head on the train to London and it’s just not the same. 

- When you practice, keep yourself at a measured pace, I have a habit of speaking quickly anyway and it’s easy to almost hyperventilate as you try and get stuff out quickly.

- If you have the prep time, then write a script, learn it, then throw it away (you don’t want to be reading by rote on the night)

On the day itself, the presentation went pretty well, people seemed to like the format and the idea and I almost got a round of applause for making to the end (although I did have to cheat a little halfway through), the main problem was I had too many thoughts per slide. Even three short bullets can easily take more than 20 seconds once you’ve introduced them and added some context. Ideally slides with one picture, or one word on make life much easier. Fortunately I had a written document that accompanied the presentation, so anything I missed will still get picked up later. But at something like an Ignite event there’d be a real danger of missing out vital info.

Would I do it again, absolutely!

My top tip, should you be tempted to cram too much in though, is to sacrifice one slide half way through for a picture of a kitten. After all, you can never have too many kittens…and while people are going awwwwww, you have a chance for a breather and a drink!

Thursday last saw me down in London for the day at a conference hosted by Enhance Media. Online Recruitment, The Year Ahead.I was accompanying a couple of my clients and it was an interesting day with some great presentations, in the pleasant surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.

A few highlights of the day:

Lisa Mauro from Youtube gave a good presentation on using the site for recruitment, with some nice examples of a more guerilla approach to shooting videos with line managers talking about the role directly to the candidate. Not so polished, but the shaky camerawork actually lends to the trust factor, also nice to see some of them filmed in the office where you’d be working too. How many job interviews have we all been in where all we saw of the company was an anonymous grey conference room! But ultimately, there was nothing amazingly new to me, just that more people should do more video!

Workcircle gave what was, for me, quite an interesting presentation about setting up an aggregator from scratch and scaling up an adwords campaign, it was nice to see a concrete case study of the long tail in action. I think some of the audience however found it a bit detail heavy in places. It was great though to hear a really down to earth presentation where they made it plain that their business model is essentially about buying candidates at one price and selling them on at another. Many companies would dress that up in a lot more fluff.

Jeremy Mason from Revenue Science gave a good overview of behavourial targeting, which I knew about, but it was good to see some of the more advanced stuff they’re now doing and to learn that the big minimum spends that used to act as a barrier to entry for a lot of clients have now been relaxed a little.

Facebook, never fail to be interesting and gave a stats packed presentation with one or two useful nuggets which give the lie to some of the more commonly held assumptions about their audience. One that stuck in my head was that 25% of their users are over 35. Great to see some examples of their new video and event engagement ads and avanced targeting too. Also interesting to see that the low cost PPC model of Facebook Flyers has led to an increasing number of  candidates running their own ad campaigns targeted at employers they want to work for!

There were some interesting nuggets in some of the other presentations, but alas by that part of the day my memory is becoming hazy, you can catch up on some of the action too by reviewing the people who were tweeting the event live with the hashtag #c9

Overall it was a good day, I bumped into a few people I knew too and it was great to catch up. But, if anyone from Enhance reads this I was left with a bit of a feeling that the event couldn’t quite decide who it was aimed at. Some presentations clearly had clients in their sites, others were more agency focussed, some were very heavily techie, others a much lighter overview.

..and over lunch I even managed to slip out for 10 mins of fresh air to make some calls and snap some pictures in nearby Hyde Park.

A few days ago I took a look at the soon to be launched search.co.uk, a job board from the people behind the Search recruitment consultancy.

Andrew makes some very valid points about the “revolutionary” nature of their offer, or lack thereof. But my first glance concerns were slightly different.

What the hell is going on with the job board market?

Social media is in many ways still finding it’s feet as a recruiting platform, but gaining speed rapidly so right now should be, if not the heyday for job boards then at least a chance to make some hay.

But what are the major job boards doing? Either plodding on as per usual or occasionally dressing their site up in a pretty new frock and passing it off as something incendiary and revolutionary. This is going to sound like I’m very down on job boards. I’m not, I think they have a definite place in the marketing mix. But, it’s increasingly frustrating to see them cast themselves as cutting edge, without really doing much to earn it.

So, what about search.co.uk? As a site it feels like a bit of a greatest hits approach to a job board. The personalisation of Monster, meets an Adwords style pay per application model and finally, hey lets throw in ads for houses, cars and classifieds to boot. Those Fish4 fellas do it and it seems to work for them.

Well, yes, but Fish4 has it roots in the local press and as such has a ready source of content to draw from and a national network of publications to market the service in.

Search however, are a recruitment consultancy, i’m intrigued to know where they’re planning to source the content from for the other sections and how well they’ll function.

So what does search.co.uk have going for it? Well, it’s a fantastic domain name, you almost wonder what the hell they’ve been sitting on such a valuable property for so long for!

Also, the design is pretty good, clean and bright; certainly as good if not better than the recently relaunched (and still rather leaky) monster.co.uk which continues to be fussy and overcomplicated.

So, is anyone doing anything other than smear the same pig in a different lipstick?

There are a few sites trying out new models, last year theladders.co.uk launched with a proposition built around only listing roles with salaries over 50k and, get this, charging candidates to sign up to the site.  You’ve got to admire the chutzpah, and it seems to have paid off with double the number of new members in the first year than predicted. But I suspect that maybe all is not quite as rosy as it seems given that they’ve recently quietly relaxed the rules and included viewing roles in the free basic membership. Paying 10 quid a month now gets you a critique of your CV, a personalised salary report and some unspecified tools to “manage your career search”…so what do I get in month two?!

Jiibe.com for example lets users answer “psychometric” questions which compare their current and their ideal workplaces and then use that crowdsourced data to recommend workplaces that might suit. Ultimately though, it’s a sucky user experience. You answer an interminable number of questions, some of which are repeated more than once and a list of workplaces is dynamically updated at the left hand side.

You very quickly realise though that the company reviews are actually just a selection of badly cobbled together statements with some vague relation to the traits you indicated a preference for. The recruitment equivalent of a psychic doing a cold reading.

At least you don’t have to cross their palm with silver…yet.

7.02am – Bradford, West Yorkshire, one hour until the O2 store opens and as I pull into the car park I notice quite a few cars. It’ll be the staff I tell myself as I round the corner and find a queue of 21 people (some with folding chairs) waiting for the store to open.

 So, at least 21 people are sadder than me, which is a start!

 Over the next hour, I got chatting with some of the other people in the queue, including a couple of magicians who were practicing their sleight of hand coin tricks. The O2 staff were really good, keeping everyone jollied along, handing out free water and keeping everyone up to date with progress. A nice camaraderie began to develop.

The store only had around 10 16GB iPhones which disappeared almost instantly so a few people peeled off as they didn’t want to settle for an 8GB. By about 8.20 I was in the store and sat down while the very friendly assistant took my details, filled out paperwork and took copies of my ID….at which point the O2 credit checking system fell on it’s arse.

 A little disappointing given their experience earlier in the week with the online store, given the decision to open almost all the stores at 8.02am, it was hardly going to be a surprise that the online credit checking service was going to get a sudden hammering.

So, i’ve “bought” an iPhone, pending the credit check. But I can’t actually get my mitts on it until they’ve run the check and given me a call. Which realistically means this evening. I can’t really fault the on the ground staff. Just a shame the infrastructure didn’t live up to it!

Found this rather amusing french Hyundai ad this morning, a great example of turning your perception on its head and also presenting a (reasonably) positive message in the process…oh and it’s funny too.

via outintheuk

Well it’s Tuesday and i’m still knackered from a weekend in London to celebrate Michelle’s birthday. It was a packed couple of days. On Saturday alone we visited two museums, had afternoon tea (cucumber sandwiches, crumpets, cake and a pot of Orange Pekoe.), saw Cirque du Soleil perform Alegria at the Royal Albert Hall, dinner at a Thai restaurant and then went to see The Producers at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Busy? We didn’t stop.

So Sunday in Ealing was a nice change of gear, we wandered into Ealing for a rummage round a second book shop and an organic supermarket before having an enormous roast dinner to set us up for the drive home…

Was also pleasantly surprised to see Ealing Studios as we walked to the tube station.