Underscore are delighted to announce we have been shortlisted for this year’s PMA’s for our work with the regeneration of Alexandra Palace.

In 2012, underscore was integral to the public consultation for the regeneration of Alexandra Palace. The Trustees of Alexandra Palace have been developing a ‘spatialmasterplan’ for the future use of the building, looking at the whole site and how people might use it and move around it in years to come. Our role was to visualise and deliver a public friendly communications campaign across their website, social media and within an on-site exhibition to share these ideas with the public.

Alexandra Palace is the people’s palace, and their views were seen as critical to shaping the future of their palace. Our ‘public opinion wall design’ created a model of the building from comment bubbles which allowed the palace to note and prioritise the people’s ideas as they move to the next station of the regeneration process. This concept was then translated across all exhibition material for the public consultation on site as well as our digital updates and surveys.

A key part of our role was analysis of user behaviour and responses to the survey, to give the Palace a better picture of the behaviour and requirements of their audiences. Longer term, this will help the palace shape it’s strategy and offering.

We are therefore delighted that the success of our public consultation and regeneration plans has been recognised by others, and the resultant funding bids will ensure that Alexandra Palace will have a glittering future.

Apple are set to release a new, flat user interface design with the roll out of  iOS7

In keeping with a recent resurgence in flat design trends, which are largely credited to Microsoft’s Metro design,  Apple are set to move away from their more skeuomorphic design patterns towards a flat user interface.

Skeuomorphism describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. This is because skeuomorphic features, such a shutter sound on a digital camera or paper textures that remind us a digital calendar used to be made of paper, are designed to make a user interface more instinctively familiar to us, as users.

However, the new flat UI trend embraces minimalism through the exclusion of textures, shadows and highlights. This might make the interface more visually appealing but will usability suffer as a result?

For example, Sacha Greif states that:

“Users have come to rely on a lot of subtle clues to make their way through an interface: buttons have slight gradients and rounded corners, form fields have a soft inner shadow, and navigation bars “float” over the rest of the content.”

Moving away form these subtle clues, do Apple run the risk of frustrating their extremely well established existing customer base? I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

The Broadgate Circle is undertaking a comprehensive re-development to improve its retail, restaurant and leisure offering, a newly revitalised public realm, and an improved amenity for local occupiers.

In creating a destination that will offer the finest in al fresco City based food and fine dining, it is not too much of a boast to say that no other situation in London can offer such an ever-changing landscape that changes with every new event and also with the seasons.

A strong, stand-alone Broadgate Circle brand needed to be established to support and enhance all of their communications, and underscore are delighted to have been appointed as the brand delivery agency after a pitch.

Until the launch in 2015 our role will be to articulate the leasing opportunities for potential retail and restaurant occupiers, raising consumer awareness of what is to come, and above all creating a sense of excitement about this major new  destination for the workers, visitors and residents of the City and central London.

The first point of dialogue for our brand and its supporting messages will be their hoardings, which will be up in early 2014, so why not pay a visit and tell us what you think?!

Leading recruitment consultancy Deverell Smith Recruitment have appointed underscore to develop their brand and digital offering.

Already a hugely successful and well-respected business at the top of their game within the field of property recruitment, they have outgrown the branding that they launched with in 2006.

After winning a multi agency pitch we are now getting beneath the ideals of the company in order to set them apart from their competitors and improve their communications with their staff, clients and applicants.

The day after our concepts and reveal meeting in the underscore thinking garden we received an email from Andrew Deverell Smith, chief executive to say “Morning…woke up feeling excited!!!”

Now you can’t ask for much more than that really can you?!

Credit Action, the UK’s financial capability charity, has appointed underscore after a multi agency pitch to deliver their rebrand to become ‘The Money Charity’.

To compliment a vision to provide financial education so that everyone can get on top of their money and live a happier and more positive life, our strategic response will need to consider audiences which will include young people, adults and ‘industry’ as we seek to develop productive and well structured relationships across the board.

The introduction of a new name will better reflect these aspirations whilst providing an exciting ‘fresh’ platform for the organisation and staff to embrace and project into the future, and early progress has been really well received.

After only our second meeting in the underscore thinking garden Michelle Highman, chief executive of  Credit Action fed this comment back to our team “We all came away bubbling over with ideas and enthusiasm.  It is so exciting to see it all take shape. Thank you once again. A great morning!”

At underscore we create brand stories that form an emotional connection between brands and their audiences, and here’s a few reasons why we take that particular approach.

Whether chronicling life’s events, communicating with others, or creating an inspirational image, stories have formed a vital part of human development.

Storytelling and narrative tap into a fundamental form of human communication and connection, engaging with the imagination and through that, our empathy and creativity.

When the story has creativity, relevance and integrity, it provides a common language that unleashes inspiration and invites maximum engagement through audience participation.

Stories provide emotional transportation, inspiring action because the audience can easily identify psychologically with the characters, the experience or the values courtesy of the images evoked in the telling.

Equally important, stories have the power to turn the audience into viral advocates of the proposition or brand by paying the story—and not just the information—forward.

They provoke our memory and provide a structure and frame of reference for our understanding, and they also reflect the way the brain works. Whilst we often think of stories as vehicles for the information, they are in fact the foundation of our understanding and retention.

“We perceive and remember something based on how it fits with other things. One way the brain sorts things is by metaphors,” says psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Los Angeles-based Media Psychology Research Centre. “When you’re describing things in a story, you are creating visual imagery that engages you in multiple ways. You’re bringing your own stuff to the story, which is reinforced through the emotions associated with the experience,”

Given their importance, it is worth investing time in preparing your story thoroughly and understanding your audience better before you start to tell it.

What you know about your audience is key, as it influences what you say and how you say it. So a good brand will always ensure it has a really strong understanding of its audience, because without that, even the best stories will fall on deaf ears.

88% of marketing professionals feel they cannot measure social ROI accurately.

Fast Company cites an Adobe white paper  that says 88% of 750 surveyed marketing professionals didn’t feel they could accurately measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns.

A recent survey by iContact discovered that for companies using social media, the most common challenges were lack of time or knowledge and uncertainty about how to measure ROI.

Difficulties in attributing direct returns from investment is social media can be difficult, due to the fact that last-click attribution models are not necessarily a good reflection of social media marketing success as social campaigns are often developed to increase overall engagement and brand awareness.

As a result, many social media marketers  have tried to develop the return on investment paradigm into one more applicable for the social space.  This has spawned such terms as return on influence, return on engagement and return on conversation.  The theory behind these terms is sound, however, whether ROI is an appropriate term for social media or not, it is the measure of success for a business.

The following are a few of the many methods of measuring social media marketing success, which may be applicable for your business:

Metric Tools

Todd Wasserman, for Mashable., states that:

“If a customer clicks [on a Facebook post] and then goes on your site to register, then you have proof that the ad was at least effective for that. Of course, the ideal scenario is when a customer clicks through an ad and then buys something on your site.”

Wasserman goes on to suggest that using multiple tools simultaneously is the best route as it allows you to monitor click-throughs from social media profiles to your website. From here (assuming this is in-line with your business model), one can calculate conversion rates from social click-throughs thus giving an indication of social ROI.

However,  it’s not always easy to tell what actions on these social media cites have driven that traffic, or how much that traffic truly cost. Using a tool such as Pagelever can at least give an indication of the most popular Facebook book posts and give an estimate of the half-life of a post, thus enabling a marketer to determine optimum timing for posts.

Interactions & Engagement

If your social strategy is to increase reach and awareness then perhaps interactions and engagement are an appropriate judge of return on investment.

Michael Cohn, for Social Media Today, explains that engagement measures such as likes or re-tweets are relavent, when you are able to understand what each one means for your business.

“Every single comment, photo, video or post takes a few seconds for a user to digest,” writes Cohn. “It is estimated that the average ‘like’ on Facebook takes seven seconds per person while close friends of this person will take an average of five seconds to digest that ‘like.’”

Analysing post likes or total reach for tweets or posts gives on indication of the number of people which your brand message reached. From here, a social media marketer is able to determined how many people were reached for the total investment in that social media post.

If you have difficulty in measuring ROI or would like strategic advice on how to maximise social ROI, say hello!