Graphene: Made in Manchester

A great video highlighting Graphene's connection to Manchester and some future uses.

Eventzilla - free event ticketing and attendee management

I've just discovered Eventzilla and its amazing! Its a great tool for managing events, ticketing, attendee lists and on-the-day registration. What's more it is free (if your event is free).

Setting up your event and ticketing is easy. My favourite feature is eTicketing where customers can request an electronic version of the ticket that they can print or display on their phone. This is combined with Android and iPhone apps for event organisers who can then scan the eTicket and check the attendee in at the event.

Recipes for a child with allergies

As someone with a child with a milk allergy I found this blog of recipes really useful:
Allergic baby led weaning

What I've learned from the Manchester Visitor Information Centre.

In June 2010 Marketing Manchester, in conjunction with Manchester City Council, launched the new Manchester Visitor Information Centre (MVIC). Read this press release about the centre opening for some background. As the person at Marketing Manchester who manages the development of technology it was up to me to make the MVIC technology work.

After this great article from Tnooz and the resulting comments, I thought I'd jot down a few things I've learned from the project...

• Staff are key - technology can never replace the staff, they know more about their destination than a computer ever could. Get them involved from the start and keep them involved at all stages of ongoing development, in fact, a lot of development should be triggered by their experience and knowledge.
• Print - at the moment visitors still want print, either because they don't trust the technology or the digital version of the leaflet doesn't contain the right information. Even thought digital is vastly different to print, for visitors you still need to provide that basic information in a format they want.
• Everything breaks down, eventually - no matter how advanced the technology, it will always break at some point in its life-cycle. Make sure everything is guaranteed and supported (24/7 if possible, as that is something we have struggled with) or you have the in-house knowledge to fix things. When budgeting at the start of the process, always set aside a large chunk for ongoing support (and development).
• Content - the technology in the centre would be nothing without the content on it. If you don't have automated content publishing via your website/DMS/thing, then set aside a large chunk of time and resources to keep it up to date.
• The future - things change, technology improves and no matter how good your project planning you'll never be able to predict all possibilities. When choosing platforms/technologies do as much research as possible and if possible speak directly to the suppliers of the underlying technology. For example Microsoft are launching version 2 of the Surface which, although we couldn't wait for them, would have been nice to know at the planning stage.

We've got lots of plans for the future of which mobile is key. So far we haven't linked any mobile technology with the centre as the ideas we have aren't achievable with the resources available. However, as the technology become more common place and cheaper we shall introduce it.

If you've got any questions then feel free to email me at stuart.aiken at marketingmanchester.com.

Assigning large numbers of postcodes to UK regions

Following on from my last post about plotting large numbers of postcodes onto a map, here's a more scientific approach to assigning postcodes to UK regions (again stemming from work to provide intelligence to sales people).

It uses Excel, for example:

A1 Full postcode	B1 Trimmed postcode	C1 Result	D1 Part of array
A2 SE15 4JU	B2 SE	C2 SE	D2 AL
A3 BL1 7TB	B3 BL	C3 #N/A	D3 BN

Where

The function in column B (=LEFT(A2,2)) trims the full postcodes in A down to two characters.
The function in C (=VLOOKUP(B2,$D$2:$D$100,1,0)) then compares this trimmed value against an array of postcodes from a defined UK region e.g. South East (derived from http://www.thirzah.co.uk/misc/post-codes-and-area-lookup/). This formula returns the postcode if it appears within the array or #N/A if it isn't present.

Plotting a large number of postcodes on a map using ZeeMaps

One of the many things I have to do at work is provide demographic data to the sales team to enable them to sell marketing opportunities to other businesses.

One of the main problems I've come across is being able to provide a sales-person-friendly geographic breakdown of our consumers stored in our CRM system. The main issue of this problem is the often incomplete address data we hold (arising from us using short and sweet sign-up forms online) and the lack of budget to get the data enriched with full addresses (using products such as AFD's Refiner).

I've tried using Google Maps and the KML file format, however, with both my out of date scripting knowledge and a large number of records this method has proven unworkable.

After searching high and low I found http://www.zeemaps.com/, a free and easy to use interface for carrying out many map based activities, one of them being plotting data on maps by submitting CSV files.

It's really simple to produce an image or PDF to show people a visual breakdown of where your comsumers live. Just create a map, go to 'Additions > multiple markers' and follow the instructions.

Here's a quick map I made:


Here's a short demo video from ZeeMaps:



Please note that there are some limitations such as a 2Mb file size limit.

I Love MCR - the logo, the controversy

In the wake of the Manchester riots Marketing Manchester (who I work for, although this post is purely me voicing my own views), Manchester Arndale and Manchester City Council initiated a campaign to combat both the negative financial effects and negative perception caused by the violence on the city.

The riots were a huge crisis in terms of PR and like most PR crises had to be responded to very quickly to a) aggregate the positive views of the city that most people were voicing in direct response and b) get people back into the city spending their money (yes yes, the ugly capitalistic side of modern life).

The campaign used Facebook and Twitter to promote the constructive messages being broadcast by individuals and businesses. It used the Manchester version of Milton Glaser's famous I 'heart' NY logo to create an identity for the campaign:

The campaign has been successful with over 20,000 people liking the Facebook page, over 37,900 people tweeting the hash-tag #ilovemcr, two well-attended events and lots of support from Mancunians (and non-Mancunians).

However, people are now starting to blog/tweet on how the campaign didn't work. The main issue being raised that if Manchester is such a unique city and does "things differently" why did we use the logo above?

My main response to this is a question to you:

Can  you create a logo with that much emotional resonance (and in itself a call to action) in two days and in those two days, can you get that logo branded onto thousands of posters, hundreds of t-shirts and thousands of other promotional items? If you can then I would seriously like to work with you.

My second response is also a question to you:

You were asked at the time to get involved and help out the city that you are part of and has supported you. Why didn't you get involved or at least make suggestions then if you have such a strong opinion now?

Another top 100 science fiction book list

NPR have released their top 100 sci-fi and fantasy book list and it looks very similar to my sci-fi meta-list, bar the fantasy novels. The methods of collecting the data for the two lists are very different (NPR used a poll, I aggregated all the top 100 lists I could find) but it's not that surprising to see little variance.

From all the lists I've collected and read it seems that people favour the classics (3 of my top 5 were written in the 40's and 50's) and it's very difficult for new sci-fi novels to make any headway to the top of the list.

I've not yet added these new results into my list but will do so at the latest opportunity.

Walking, camping and hiking equipment reviews

Walking, camping and hiking equipment reviews:
http://campingwalkinghikingreviews.blogspot.com/

Internet meme anyone?

Surely an intentional reference to a famous meme?