Team Fublo

How we ran an iPad competition for Vitamin Water

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:10:00 +0100

We were approached by We Are Social to run a competition for one of their clients, Vitamin Water. With the release of a new flavour of their water called “i-focus” the competition was to win an iPad.

Team Fublo decided to run this competition on Friedmylittlebrain as it has the bigger of the three audiences and we felt our readers would be after an iPad. To enter the competition they had to complete the sentence “I find it hard to focus when….”

We made it a stipulation that as well as answering the question, they were required to become a fan of Friedmylittlebrain on Facebook too.

Running for two weeks, here’s some stats for you:

294 competition entries were made
893 page views/697 unique views
51 Tweets
19 Shares on Facebook
199 stumbles on Stumble Upon
Gained over 300 fans on Facebook

The competition was picked up by Money Saving Expert and a user posted to their forums with that post generating 1,130 views.

We also decided to create a leaderboard creative to put on Friedmylittlebrain. This meant we could move the competition post from being a ‘sticky’ so as to keep the homepage fresh and generate some click throughs to other content. Using OpenX we targeted the ad at UK readers only, which resulted in a total of 5000 impressions with a CTR of 1.3%

All in all, a successful competition for us and a thing to note:

What will be the drop off of fans on Facebook now the competition has closed presuming that a lot of them aren’t interested in electronic music?

Willetts warns graduates: if you can't get a job start a business

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:41:41 +0100

Universities minister says students leaving higher education should rethink what they consider to be a graduate career

“The other point I’d make is that we have some odd definitions of what constitutes a graduate job. The most vivid example of that is that setting up your own business does not constitute a graduate job.”

Read the full article on The Guardian

Our love for WP (3)

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:24:00 +0100

Wordpress, the love of many a designer and developer?

Here at Team Fublo we’ve got a slight obsession with the platform and with the release of 3.0 a few weeks back, we’re continuing to use it (with theme frameworks) on a lot of our current and forthcoming projects.

Recently we’ve been:

Utilising the custom menus system
Creating custom widgets and templates
Figuring out how to use Custom Post types to fit the needs of clients
Generally playing around with the platform to make life simpler

Wordpress + 960.gs + Solr = Optimized workflow

What are you doing with Wordpress (3) ?

"By implying that it thinks content should be free for moral reasons, the Guardian website is playing..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:30:40 +0100

“By implying that it thinks content should be free for moral reasons, the Guardian website is playing an extremely dangerous game. It’s an approach which not only makes it hypocritical to charge for the printed newspaper and the iPhone app, but also gives hostages to fortune: what if the Murdoch paywall, or some other “micro-payment” system, starts to work? Are we to believe that the Guardian wouldn’t institute something similar? Or would it be happy to be reduced to the online equivalent of a freesheet?”

-
David Mitchell for the Observer (note also our shared disgust at that abhorrent Guardian article which welcomed Times readers to their supposed electronic utopia).

via Sarah Chapman: Mitchell on Murdoch

Interview with Mark published on Vitamin Water’s...

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:53:01 +0100

Interview with Mark published on Vitamin Water’s blog.

highlight:: if you could work with anyone who would it be and why? futura2000. i’ve always admired his work and involvement with brands but he’s pretty much retained his trademark style and still continues to push on to this day.

jamescooke: Hanging at Protein Forum number 6 with Mark and...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:50:13 +0100

jamescooke:

Hanging at Protein Forum number 6 with Mark and Paul. We’ve been working with Paul on the NIKE78 site.

jamescooke: The Times’ and Sunday Times’ share of UK newspaper...

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:07:40 +0100

jamescooke:

The Times’ and Sunday Times’ share of UK newspaper web visits nearly halved in the month since bringing up the paywall. Full analysis on Paid Content and Hitwise.

shminking: Doug McCune maps San Francisco crime in 2009 as if...

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:01:57 +0100

shminking:

Doug McCune maps San Francisco crime in 2009 as if it were elevation. Peaks and valleys emerge with the rolling terrains of crime. The above is the map for prostitution:

http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/07/san-francisco-crime-mapped-as-elevation/

We love this infographic 2.0!

"open rate 7.3% higher than the industry average"

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:01:32 +0100

“open rate 7.3% higher than the industry average”

- An hour after sending and our latest newsletter is already above industry average - mailchimp says so, so it must be true! Sign up now - July’s newsletter isn’t far away.

You’ll get the latest:

Updates on what we’ve been up to at Team Fublo.

Reading - links on what’s going down in internet land.

Forthcoming - what’s happening when with our newest projects.

And a slice of random - pirates / cats / etc.

Plus we like to feature our partners’ content so submit stuff for July through tumblr.

jamescooke: Last week we put the new search functions of the...

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:36:00 +0100

EnviroSecurity Action Guide search

Text search with filters

Refinements shown with result counts

Special lists of results available

jamescooke:

Last week we put the new search functions of the EnviroSecurity Action Guide live. The system is build on Solr running on Tomcat on Windows and has some great features - screengrabs above.

The EnviroSecurity Action Guide is a user friendly online resource that brings together information on organisations, publications, initiatives and websites in the fields of environment, security and sustainable development.

The search engine provides the functions for new ways of navigating the records, searching within facets like subject area or category and finding specific records with text search. We hope that the new functionality will help the Action Guide to grow into a larger and more widely used and reference online resource.

An interview with James while he was teaching on the Tech 2...

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:56:47 +0100

An interview with James while he was teaching on the Tech 2 course at Hyper Island.

The full interview is nearly an hour long - but you can read a breakdown with highlights and quotes on Hyper Report (beta). Our favourite quote:

a developer needs to be superman and turn water into wine

Friedmylittlebrain.com named No.1 UK Dance/DJ Blog by Cision.com

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:56:00 +0100

Friedmylittlebrain.com was also announced as the No.1 spot in the “Top 10 Dance/DJ blogs in the UK” today. More love from Cision.com.

We’re off to celebrate at lunch time and if you’re down at East Village later, come say hello and have a drink with us!

UK Street Art named No.1 UK Urban Lifestyle Blog and No.1 UK Art Blog by Cision.com

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:49:00 +0100

Cision.com has named UK Street Art as the No. 1 in the “Top 10 UK Urban Lifestyle Blogs” list which was announced today. We’ve also been announced as the No. 1 spot in the “Top 10 UK Art Blogs”

These accolades come from Cision’s ‘blog ranking methodology’ which you can read all about here

We’re very happy to have been named as No. 1 in both of these spots, alongside some of our favourites including Better Never Than Late, Urban Nerds, Art of The State and Too Much Posse! Congratulations to everyone who made the list!

Keep your eyes on Fublo.net for some more news this year as we bring you a couple more of our projects…

Do you really like it?

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:49:06 +0100

So, Facebook have decided to ditch “Connect” and go with “Open Graph”

Facebook Connect, the company’s tool for bringing your social graph to third-party websites, will soon be no more.

During a press conference today at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Facebook Connect brand would be eliminated as part of the launch of Open Graph. Instead, the company is standardizing the interactions between Facebook and third parties via Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol and the OAuth 2.0 standard.

We’ve just installed a WP plugin on UK Street Art, Fat Seagull and Friedmylittlebrain as a test to see if people “liking” things will increase the traffic coming through to the sites.

Having seen one click on a post to share it back into Facebook, we’ve got high hopes that this will increase traffic, not massively, but will be interesting to see how many more page views this generates. What do you think?

Also, here’s an interesting piece on “How Facebook won the web”

Twitter mining of the first UK election leaders debate from 15th...

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:34:17 +0100

Twitter mining of the first UK election leaders debate from 15th April. Just like our Arsenal / Barcelona graph, we put this together with data from the Twitter API compiled in the morning after the debates. We chose to focus the response to each of the leaders and so searched for tweets including their names in full.

Full PDF is available (direct Dropbox link)

There is clearly little or no correlation between the questions in the debate and the volume of tweets for each leader. Twitterers seem less engaged by the politics and more interested with responding to jokes, banter and discussion about the leaders. As a result spikes have been generated by the responses and retweets caused by these humerous and sometimes critcal observations.

James Garner on Computer Week suggested that twitter is “dominated by the largely liberal left”. This appears to be supported by Nick Clegg being mentioned 39% of the time and that’s without many twitter jokes made at his expense.

Let us know what you think?

How twitter responded to the Arsenal / Barcelona Champions...

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:37:00 +0100

How twitter responded to the Arsenal / Barcelona Champions League quarter final first round match. We’ve put this together with data from the twitter API compiled on the night after the game and BBC Sport text commentary.

Full PDF is available (dropbox direct link).

We’ll be looking at more projects in the future so if you want to know more about how we did this or have some twitter ideas you’d like us to look at, drop us a line… email / tumble / tweet (Mark or James).

Things we thought were interesting about this graph:

The lag between the big game events and twitterers’ responses seems to be around 90 seconds to two minutes. The time is takes to shout at the TV and then shout on twitter?
The quietest times for tweets come right before goals.
The 8pm spike is interesting - we haven’t dug into why this was here… was it just supporters tweeting about how on the back foot the Gunners were? Or maybe tuning in late thinking it was an 8pm kick off?

What can you see in there? Let us know?

UK Street Art gets some blog love from Vitamin Water's "Daily Vitamins"

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:26:00 +0100

UK Street Art was featured in some blog love last week on the Daily Vitamin site.

“x x x this week our love goes out to @ukstreetart top top blog <3 http://gvwurl.com/street x x x”

was the original tweet and of course we returned the favour by the RT.

…and from the post:

another friday, another fantastic blog!

this week it’s the popular uk street art blog, ukstreetart.co.uk. featuring all the latest news, galleries, events and happenings in uk street art culture.

featuring work by artists such as banksy and sick boy, it’s a good read if you are looking for news on your fave street artists. they also have feature exclusiveinterviews with some of the biggest names right now, including blek le rat.

they also feature other assorted bits from street art culture from around the globe, so go have a look! some of our favourite posts include:

the art of asbestos

ronzo’s pity of london mini documentaries

Thanks guys!

whoisbanksy: Thanks to all of you for the follows and reblogs...

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:37:00 +0100

whoisbanksy:

Thanks to all of you for the follows and reblogs and loves… we’re now rolling with fifty followers - big love to all! :D

Photo is an old painted over work by matski_98.

“Who is Banksy?” also:

has just over 500 chunks of content in six weeks
generated a couple of thousand page views in its first month
shows a solid top ten search result for “who is banksy?” in google web search.
got us thinking about the next Team Fublo street art project… bigger and better!

Here’s our recap of how we built WIB on tumblr and the Banksy content on UK Street Art that started it all.

This Heineken campaign from the end of last year is interesting...

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0100

This Heineken campaign from the end of last year is interesting for two reasons:

It puts an alcohol company in a position of appearing like the saviour… Heineken “rescues” the people that have been tricked into missing the match.
If you watch the results (from 4:00) it shows what happened to the content that was created… Shown on Sky Sports, 10 million saw the campaign on the news, 5 million internet visitors saw it, it was blogged and reblogged and embedded in sites around the world.

Is the goal now for all campaigns to attempt to be newsworthy to gain maximum exposure?

Previously we wrote that we were looking for a location for a...

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:53:00 +0100

Previously we wrote that we were looking for a location for a Team Fublo office out East London way… The search is over - we signed last week and moved in this week. A shared space in the office of renowned designers Fredrikson Stallard - the most uber creative space we’ve seen in a long time!

We’re looking forward to a fantastic, creative and productive summer here!