w00tonomy on the telly

w00tonomy’s Content Marketing Director has continued his relentless self-promotion with an appearance on BBC Scotland’s ‘Politics Show’.

He was talking about the future of Scotland’s indigenous newspapers. 

Unsurprisingly, the former editor of scotsman.com (when it was good) emphasised the importance of targeting quality content at key audiences who would find it of value.

As well as taking part in a live panel discussion, he was interviewed while attending the Scottish Government’s recent summit on newspapers.

In that vein, he was also quoted in the Sunday Herald on the recent change of editors at The Scotsman.

w00tonomy teams up with leading newspaper design agency

w00tonomy has formed an alliance with Palmer Watson, one of the world’s leading newspaper design agencies.

Our expertise in online content will help them move into the field of newspaper websites while their knowledge of how design can maximise the appeal of words and pictures adds to our offering to our clients.

Here’s some highlights from the press release about this:

Having been at the forefront of newspaper design throughout Europe and beyond for the past 10 years, Palmer Watson has for some time been exploring options to widen its operations as the newspaper industry moves towards an increasingly digital future.

The new partnership will allow Palmer Watson to combine its renowned design, content and branding experience with the digital expertise of w00tonomy.

Like Palmer Watson, w00tonomy is small but vastly experienced team, with crucial expertise in the field of optimising the appeal of online content.

w00tnomy’s content marketing director, Stewart Kirkpatrick, who succeeded Palmer Watson director Terry Watson as head of content at scotsman.com in the late 1990s, helped make the site a multi award-winning publication which was one of the top 30 Google news search sites in the world. (He left when the newspaper was sold and scotsman.com reverted to a standard newspaper website.) Kirkpatrick was named by the UK Press Gazette as one of the 50 people shaping online journalism worldwide and is a member of the international committee of the Online News Association.

Along with fellow directors Tony Purcell (a web development pioneer) and Dr Graham Jones (an online communications expert), w00tonomy, in conjunction withPalmer Watson’s multi award-winning newspaper track record, aim to offer newspapers a wider consulting service that will help publishers to maximise the opportunities of the digital crossover, and enhance their online and mobile offering.

Several of Palmer Watson’s projects have resulted in the newspapers being named “World’s Best Designed” in the prestigious Society for News Design competition, the most recent being the Danish broadsheet, Politiken, in 2007. 

Founding directors Ally Palmer and Terry Watson began working together in the 1990s in Scottish newspapers and were instrumental in The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday being recognised worldwide as among the industry’s best. Since forming Palmer Watson, the agency has worked with around 40 publishers – including such iconic newspaper titles as Le Monde and El Pais – across Europe and Scandinavia, and in South America, Russia and Africa. It is currently involved in projects in India, South Africa and the UK.

The combined team will be able to provide to publishers and editors practical, relevant and hands-on expertise encompassing all aspects of how newspapers should be approaching the digital era:  technical, content, revenue, traffic, strategy and design.

The focus of the Palmer Watson and w00tonomy partnership will be on:

• enhancing the newspaper website user experience
• creating dynamic content that will boost online traffic
• maximising traffic
• optimising online revenue opportunities
• growing online communities
• building the ideal combined online/offline user/reader package
• assisting with newsroom integration and content management

Content marketing: a visualisation exercise

Imagine you’re a marketeer who has gone through all the difficult work of getting your content online.

You will probably have done your audience segmentation and usability testing, designed your information architecture, created your taxonomies, produced creatives in line with corporate guidelines, selected your CMS, posted and reworked all those volumes of content and then gone through the agony of testing and change management.

Phew. Finally, it is accomplished. You have a site designed on sound principles compliant with all online standards. Surely such a well engineered solution must achieve the purpose it was set out to do. And to some extent it has – it has distributed your information in a structured format ready for your segmented audience to view.

Now how do you justify all that expenditure to senior management?

You supply monthly web statistics on page views, search terms and referring links – possibly, if you’re really sophisticated, broken down by audience segment.

And this is the evolutionary point where the best sites are today.

“So,” you may ask, “what is problem Mr Content Marketing?”

The answer is that after all this good work you need to start thinking about customer engagement and delivering value. In handling all those engineering and standard compliance problems, the actual marketing objective of engaging in a dialogue that delivers values got put to one side.

Why? Because it’s outside the expertise of many online agencies. And few agencies really want their performance tied to client business objectives. It’s far easier to deliver a website and job done.

Content marketing is the next step for anyone getting a message to an audience. It’s about putting the future of your site in the hands of marketers who think and act like publishers.

To illustrate this point: many health sector websites are the equivalent of a medical journal or text book. The information is well structured and all the information is there. But it’s static, sometimes hard to uncover and there is very little scope for change after publication. But if you marketed your organisation through online stories in a health, fitness and lifestyle magazine you would have something that was refreshed regularly and caught the attention and interest of your audience.

That’s content marketing.

Online: why the public sector wins

For eight years I plied my trade as an online journalist. My mission, should I have no choice but to accept it, was to attract readers to pages where adverts were served. For every 1,000 page impression a piece of content received we could expect something like £10 (plus any sponsorship for the relevant section).

That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.

Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.

This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.

But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but to demonstrate value for money and getting the right message out there. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.

Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.

w00tonomy and Scotland’s digital deficit

We have launched w00tonomy – our content marketing agency – today with this statement:

A radical new online agency has been launched with a view to helping Scotland overcome its “digital deficit”.

Stewart Kirkpatrick Editor, Content Marketing Director of w00tonomy and award-winning editor of scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007, said: “We believe that Scotland’s online ecosystem is five years behind London and ten years behind where it could be. There are many very talented web and marketing professionals in our private and public sectors but for one reason and another that pool of talent has not led to the digital landscape that Scotland deserves.”

Kirkpatrick and his colleagues, two of Scotland’s leading online thinkers, Graham Jones and Tony Purcell, believe that Scotland needs a national discussion on how to rectify this situation. They believe that their content marketing agency offers a unique service and is well placed to lead the debate. Kirkpatrick said: “Scotland’s invention gave the world television, tarmac and penicillin. We have traditionally punched above our weight – and still do in the games market – but as a nation we have yet to get to grips with the opportunities of digital.”

“Imagine a world where every citizen could access every piece of information they needed wherever they were, whoever it was from in a way that was relevant, engaging and – most of all – interesting to that individual. Imagine too that they were then able to enter into a dialogue with the organisation that provided the information so that they felt involved and engaged with the service provided. Every message would be tailored to them, every point of contact would make them feel part of a community and every transaction would involve something far more meaningful than the simple exchange of cash.

“Thanks to the improvements in mobile phones and the evolution of the internet into a two-way discussion based on the sharing of information, all this is possible now. All we need to do is make it happen.”

About: Formed by three of Scotland’s leading online experts, w00tonomy is the first “content marketing” agency in Scotland and it represents the next evolutionary step in online marketing.

w00t: (Internet slang) Used to express joy, particularly that felt during success or victory. (From Wikipedia.) W00t was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2007.

-onomy: system of rules, laws, or knowledge about a particular field. (Also from Wikipedia.)

Why did we do this? because of the way we saw the internet moving. The first phase of the internet was really about technology, the second was about the visual element. But for now and for the future it is all about content, particularly with the launch of new mobile devices like the iphone.

Our experience has taught us that to reach target audiences clients need to build a relationship with them based on interesting and relevant content – not ads. This content must be developed over time in response to intelligence about how the audience behaves. This is at the heart our business – content marketing.

What we stand for: We believe that every client has a story to tell to every one of its customers – w00tonomy will tell that in a way that builds a long-term relationship with the online audience.

How we work: We use the changing online landscape to deliver and develop our clients’ message through high-quality creative content on next-generation platforms, and then give them bite-size intelligence about how it performs so it can be evolved.

How we are different: Traditional online marketing has focused on building a web or mobile site, uploading the client’s content and then (maybe) monitoring the traffic. The process ends there. But this approach fails to take into account how people and content behave – especially after Web 2.0. All content competes for attention with all other content – regardless of who publishes it. Our business is built on the realisation that clients now want to demonstrate real value from their online spend. Our directors boast decades of experience in editorial, strategic, technical, analytic and operational fields. We bring all components together to make your online presence effective. We will guide our clients on every stage of building a successful online strategy.

Stewart Kirkpatrick – Content Marketing Director
Stewart is Scotland’s leading content consultant, working for the Scottish Government on major projects. He was editor of scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007. In that time traffic increased ten-fold to 4 million unique users a month. The site became one of Google News’s top 30 worldwide news sources and was identified by Media Week as the sixth biggest news site in the UK. scotsman.com won the Newspaper Society’s New Media Award for Best Daily Newspaper Site in 2002, 2003 and 2006 and was shortlisted for numerous national and international journalism awards. Last year, Stewart, a member of the international committee of the Online News Association, was named as one of “the top 50 people shaping online journalism” by UK Press Gazette.

Tony Purcell – Online Strategy and Research Director
Tony is a pioneer of the Internet industry in Scotland and a serial entrepreneur. He founded Communicata in 1995, a company specialising in web application development. Along with developing web applications, the company produced promotional websites for a number of large corporates including Sony, Scottish & Newcastle, The WM Company, Newcastle United Football Club, General Accident and the SQA. In 1999 the company was listed in Oracle’s top 50 list of e-business solutions providers worldwide. In 2001 Tony founded CIVIC with Graham Jones which went on to become the leading digital agency in Scotland. CIVIC provides a wide range of web services to the public sector in Scotland and is a supplier to the Scottish Government. Tony is also a business mentor and represents the interactive industry on the Scottish Skillset industry panel.

Dr Graham Jones – Client Services & Planning Director
Graham was Managing Director of CIVIC, Scotland’s fastest growing Online Communications Agency from its inception, in August 2001 to Nov 2007. In this time the business grew from an initial £0.5m and 7 staff to £2m with a staff of 28 people. His responsibilities throughout this period were to provide the strategic vision and direction to meet the needs of a dynamic and rapidly growing marketplace. His responsibilities also included Client & project Management, contractual negotiations, managing legal risk, business development and marketing of the agency. He was successful in establishing a reputation for credibility and industry expertise with clients to the extent that CIVIC became trusted suppliers to the Scottish Government. Graham has also worked for 7 years in the software industry, 5 years at Edinburgh University as Research Associate & 4 years as a Management Accountant.

w00tonomy and Scotland’s digital deficit

We have launched w00tonomy – our content marketing agency – today with this statement:

A radical new online agency has been launched with a view to helping Scotland overcome its “digital deficit”.

Stewart Kirkpatrick Editor, Content Marketing Director of w00tonomy and award-winning editor of scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007, said: “We believe that Scotland’s online ecosystem is five years behind London and ten years behind where it could be. There are many very talented web and marketing professionals in our private and public sectors but for one reason and another that pool of talent has not led to the digital landscape that Scotland deserves.”

Kirkpatrick and his colleagues, two of Scotland’s leading online thinkers, Graham Jones and Tony Purcell, believe that Scotland needs a national discussion on how to rectify this situation. They believe that their content marketing agency offers a unique service and is well placed to lead the debate. Kirkpatrick said: “Scotland’s invention gave the world television, tarmac and penicillin. We have traditionally punched above our weight – and still do in the games market – but as a nation we have yet to get to grips with the opportunities of digital.”

“Imagine a world where every citizen could access every piece of information they needed wherever they were, whoever it was from in a way that was relevant, engaging and – most of all – interesting to that individual. Imagine too that they were then able to enter into a dialogue with the organisation that provided the information so that they felt involved and engaged with the service provided. Every message would be tailored to them, every point of contact would make them feel part of a community and every transaction would involve something far more meaningful than the simple exchange of cash.

“Thanks to the improvements in mobile phones and the evolution of the internet into a two-way discussion based on the sharing of information, all this is possible now. All we need to do is make it happen.”

About: Formed by three of Scotland’s leading online experts, w00tonomy is the first “content marketing” agency in Scotland and it represents the next evolutionary step in online marketing.

w00t: (Internet slang) Used to express joy, particularly that felt during success or victory. (From Wikipedia.) W00t was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2007.

-onomy: system of rules, laws, or knowledge about a particular field. (Also from Wikipedia.)

Why did we do this? because of the way we saw the internet moving. The first phase of the internet was really about technology, the second was about the visual element. But for now and for the future it is all about content, particularly with the launch of new mobile devices like the iphone.

Our experience has taught us that to reach target audiences clients need to build a relationship with them based on interesting and relevant content – not ads. This content must be developed over time in response to intelligence about how the audience behaves. This is at the heart our business – content marketing.

What we stand for: We believe that every client has a story to tell to every one of its customers – w00tonomy will tell that in a way that builds a long-term relationship with the online audience.

How we work: We use the changing online landscape to deliver and develop our clients’ message through high-quality creative content on next-generation platforms, and then give them bite-size intelligence about how it performs so it can be evolved.

How we are different: Traditional online marketing has focused on building a web or mobile site, uploading the client’s content and then (maybe) monitoring the traffic. The process ends there. But this approach fails to take into account how people and content behave – especially after Web 2.0. All content competes for attention with all other content – regardless of who publishes it. Our business is built on the realisation that clients now want to demonstrate real value from their online spend. Our directors boast decades of experience in editorial, strategic, technical, analytic and operational fields. We bring all components together to make your online presence effective. We will guide our clients on every stage of building a successful online strategy.

Stewart Kirkpatrick – Content Marketing Director
Stewart is Scotland’s leading content consultant, working for the Scottish Government on major projects. He was editor of scotsman.com from 2000 to 2007. In that time traffic increased ten-fold to 4 million unique users a month. The site became one of Google News’s top 30 worldwide news sources and was identified by Media Week as the sixth biggest news site in the UK. scotsman.com won the Newspaper Society’s New Media Award for Best Daily Newspaper Site in 2002, 2003 and 2006 and was shortlisted for numerous national and international journalism awards. Last year, Stewart, a member of the international committee of the Online News Association, was named as one of “the top 50 people shaping online journalism” by UK Press Gazette.

Tony Purcell – Online Strategy and Research Director
Tony is a pioneer of the Internet industry in Scotland and a serial entrepreneur. He founded Communicata in 1995, a company specialising in web application development. Along with developing web applications, the company produced promotional websites for a number of large corporates including Sony, Scottish & Newcastle, The WM Company, Newcastle United Football Club, General Accident and the SQA. In 1999 the company was listed in Oracle’s top 50 list of e-business solutions providers worldwide. In 2001 Tony founded CIVIC with Graham Jones which went on to become the leading digital agency in Scotland. CIVIC provides a wide range of web services to the public sector in Scotland and is a supplier to the Scottish Government. Tony is also a business mentor and represents the interactive industry on the Scottish Skillset industry panel.

Dr Graham Jones – Client Services & Planning Director
Graham was Managing Director of CIVIC, Scotland’s fastest growing Online Communications Agency from its inception, in August 2001 to Nov 2007. In this time the business grew from an initial £0.5m and 7 staff to £2m with a staff of 28 people. His responsibilities throughout this period were to provide the strategic vision and direction to meet the needs of a dynamic and rapidly growing marketplace. His responsibilities also included Client & project Management, contractual negotiations, managing legal risk, business development and marketing of the agency. He was successful in establishing a reputation for credibility and industry expertise with clients to the extent that CIVIC became trusted suppliers to the Scottish Government. Graham has also worked for 7 years in the software industry, 5 years at Edinburgh University as Research Associate & 4 years as a Management Accountant.