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Hiring: Senior Web Designer, Salary £35K – £45K pa (London, SE1)

by Yannis |August 15th, 2011

Are you an unstoppable creative force living and breathing design, typography, information and technology? Are you devoted to detail and think of the pixel as the building block of the universe? Do you aspire to make a transition into art direction?

If you have just read a description of yourself, we have the clients and the briefs to keep you challenged and to help you grow as a creative professional.

You also need to be:

  • A keen thinker – you engage the left side of your brain first, before you put the right one to work
  • Experienced – you have spent at least 4 years working in digital communications, ideally in information design, corporate websites, ecommerce, intranets, or B2B marketing (experience in designing for mobiles and tablets is a bonus)
  • Educated – you have a college degree in a related field such as graphics, digital media, or information design
  • Knowledgeable – you have an excellent knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (knowledge of wireframe packages, HTML, or Adobe Edge is a bonus)
  • Resourceful – you are well connected with the online design community and know where to source tools, advice and best practice examples
  • A team player – you are used to collaborating with information architects, developers, illustrators, copywriters and usability pros
  • Articulate – you are comfortable talking about your ideas and presenting to internal teams or clients

We are an established agency based in central London. Our clients include some of the best known brands of the corporate world and have diverse digital communication needs: intranets, portals, mobile/tablet applications, video content, demos, campaigns, software UIs, and social media tools.

You will be an instrumental player in delivering exceptional creative thinking and doing across everything.

You can see our portfolio here www.flickr.com/photos/skyron/tags/portfolio/show/

and our thinking here www.skyron.co.uk/blog

You must have your own website (portfolio or blog) to apply. Please send your URL to yannis@skyron.co.uk

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Goodbye LinkedIn Answers

by Yannis |March 24th, 2011

For the past 30 days, I have been subscribing to the “Marketing and Sales” RSS feed from LinkedIn’s Answers section. Until the end of February I had been a casual visitor, occasionally dipping in and out to see what’s been discussed. Then I decided to add the RSS feed to Google Reader hoping to first, get a better understanding of the nature of the discussions and the contributors and second, to assess the relevance of this whole affair to Skyron and to our clients.

30 days and 1,140 RSS updates later I am unsubscribing for five reasons:

  • Too much repetition: I can’t take any more questions like “How do I use LinkedIn?”
  • Little insight: More often than not, Answers is used by lazy people who can’t be asked to make a simple Google search to find the information they need
  • Little relevance: There are plenty of new business opportunities but the majority would benefit consultants, freelancers and small suppliers of marketing services, none of which is directly relevant to Skyron or the majority of our clients
  • Tsunami of posts: The relentless posting suffocated my other feeds, resulting in me reading only a fraction of my daily intake
  • Groups are better: Group discussions are more focused and the participants behave more like a community, creating more valuable content

I actually did manage to introduce a London agency I know well to an American company looking for specialists of a certain kind, but this pretty much sums up all the excitement for the month.

If you are a marketing, or comms director at a large B2B organisation you are better off joining a relevant LinkedIn Group (or setting one up!) than shooting blind in LinkedIn Answers.

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Lost password nightmare: A new challenge for B2B marketers and what to do about it

by Yannis |January 20th, 2011

In film, there are many lost password scenes that have kept us on the edge of our seats; this one from Jurassic Park is a favourite…

More and more, the same nail-biting horror scenes are entering the workspace and especially marketing departments.

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RSS feed without content? Would you send an empty email with only a subject line?

by Yannis |September 15th, 2010

boxAs an avid user of RSS and Google Reader I find feeds without content really irritating. An example is Marketing Week’s feeds that arrive with only a subject line and with nothing else. Marketing Week must be pretty confident that their subjects are attractive enough to incite double action. I say double action, because the user has to first click on the feed subject to open it and then click again to visit the original article on the source site. Imagine sending out emails to your audience with no content at all, but only a subject line!

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5 steps to transforming your consumption of B2B news with mobile RSS

by Yannis |May 17th, 2010

Search for “B2B Marketing” on Google and this is what you get:

  • 390,000 results in the last 30 days
  • 124,000 in the past 7 days
  • 18,700 in the past 24 hours

This staggering flow of information consists of content such as  white papers, research, agency solutions, advertorials, case studies, blog posts, editorial stories, news and real-time content. You’d be forgiven for feeling intimidated, out of the loop, ill informed or left behind. I asked a number of industry professionals, clients and business friends how they keep up with B2B marketing and industry news each week; most can manage just a quick flick through a magazine and a skim  through a couple of email newsletters.

Enter mobile RSS. I switched from web-based to mobile RSS a year ago and it has transformed the way I consume business-related content. Mobile RSS has allowed me to browse and read more content, to easily archive and retrieve items of interest and to constantly optimise my list of feeds so that I read what’s relevant to me and weed out what’s not.

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