So just like our beloved ‘Where’s Wally,’ we’re challenging you to spot the R&B logo in some unusual places. To get you started, the guys in the office have been busy on their travels around Australia.

So from somewhere on a road in WA, Sandra took this photo

From deep in the Pacific somewhere on the Isle of Pines this little gem was spotted by Brendan.

Keep your eyes peeled…

Over the next few weeks I’m going to introduce you to them, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with some playful packaging & branding for Byron Bay Captured.

Having just moved over to Australia from London, I was unsure how I’d find the transition to working life ‘down under’.

My daily commute no longer involves being squashed in an overcrowded tube train. I now have a view of the Pacific Ocean from my office window. And with several of our clients based in the UK, it already feels like home… just without the English weather.

Working at the UK’s largest broadcast PR agency, I spent the last couple of years managing TV, radio and online campaigns for national and international brands before my move out here.

Here are some of my top tips for improving your website:

• Websites: Applying some simple ‘conversion optimisation’ techniques can help improve the effectiveness of your website without needing a full redesign. Well worth it if your site is not user friendly.

• Content Management: Investing in an good content management system (like Symphony) will help you manage your site efficiently. Google also gives a higher search ranking to sites that are regularly updated.

Just for fun, here are the top things I’ve learnt when it comes to Australia:

1. A ‘Bogan’ is someone who takes little pride in their appearance
2. You should only order a ‘Schooner’ in Queensland.
3. There’s no such thing as ‘drop bears’ (last time I fall for that one).

We also have two new additions to R&B’s rapidly expanding digital team … and, as it happens, they’re both from New Zealand. Nick – who has just moved back to the Gold Coast after working in the UK for seven years, and Phil, who worked as a joiner apprentice and majored in geology before finding his calling as a web developer.

So to all the clients I have met so far: lovely to meet you. To the ones I’m still yet to get to know: looking forward to talking to you soon!

1. Don’t cram your campaign with heaps of copy.

Aim for writing a few enticing yet succinct sentences about your subject, then push your reader back to your website to learn more.

This way you tick two boxes: not overwhelming your reader with too much copy and also driving traffic back to your site.

2. Put your most important/interesting piece of content at the top of your campaign.

Your recipients probably won’t read all of your newsletter, so don’t bury your best content mid way or towards the end of your campaign.

3. Study reports from your past campaigns.

What was the content most clicked on? How many people opened one campaign compared to another? Use this invaluable knowledge to continue to improve and refine your eNewsletters.

4. Experiment with your subject lines and delivery times using A/B Split Testing.

Research has shown that open rates tend to be higher on a Wednesday morning and campaigns sent on a Friday or over the weekend are more likely to be marked as spam. While this is worth taking into consideration, each market is different.

Mix it up by sending your campaign to one group on a Monday morning if you normally send on a Wednesday. Get creative with your subject lines. Try keeping it focused on the main content as opposed to something generic. Include your company name or omit it. Send the same campaign, but with two different subject lines to your subscribers. Study your reports and find out what has worked best for you.

5. Use Segments to Target Your Campaigns

If you’ve got the information available, tailor your campaigns to a special segment of your subscriber list. Know you have a group of people interested in a particular topic or product? You’re guaranteed to get a better open rate when you talk directly to a consumer’s interests.

Already I hear many clients and colleagues cutting their advertising dollar from the once useful yet still expensive door stop, the Yellow Pages. They realise this is no longer the way customers are finding them. The old word of mouth is still the winner for many businesses however that ‘word’ can now travel on the ‘super highway’ via a myriad of digital channels with or without the supercharge of social media. Even my mum uses the internet to find stuff! So the big driver behind all this is convenience in our modern, time poor lives.

As the world becomes more convenient peoples expectations change. If they have a positive ecommerce, service, information or brand experience online that will become their benchmark to what they will expect from the next business they deal with, your business. If your digital assets don’t communicate your brand, products, services and deliver on your business promise whether it be ‘great prices’ or ‘excellent service’ then it’s time to act or be left behind.

As our lives become more digital and our capabilities and digital tools converge there will be very little that can’t be facilitated by digital technology. This revolution doesn’t stop at your website. It does and will to a greater extent effect how you market your business, how you talk to your customers, how you deliver your goods and services, how you collect and interpret business information, your internal culture, your brand culture, your brand experience. It may expand your business offering or it may send you broke if your no longer relevant or useful.

In any business, strategy is important. However at this point in time I believe that business strategy with a skew toward how you will operate in the digital age is more important than ever. This is about staying relevant, innovating, finding new ways to talk to your customers, finding new customers and working smarter not harder.

This doesn’t just apply to technology based businesses either, this applies to every business. Every business needs customers, needs to communicate, sell, provide service and be found. So start to think about your business, it’s customer touch points, it’s objectives, what it offers now and what it could offer in the future. With the current rate of change a new digital paradigm will upon all businesses well within a decade, depending what you business your in it is already upon us.

If you’re a business manager that’s not technologically inclined and all of this is makes you uncomfortable then you need to talk to someone who can align your business objectives with your digital assets and opportunities. It doesn’t need to be a massive change that happens overnight but rather a staged approach that is prioritised strategically to ensure you are well positioned for tomorrow.

You can read a bit more about what a digital strategy is here.

Apparently a South African company conducted a little experiment – it used a carrier pigeon and Telkom ADSL (South Africa’s largest internet service provider) to send 4GB of data at the same time. Guess which one arrived first? Young Winston, the 11 month old carrier pigeon took home the gold.

Unfortunately for Telkom, only 4% of the 4GB had been transferred in the same amount of time it took Winston to arrive at his destination (just over 2 hours), with data card safely strapped to his leg.

Of course there are the obvious security implications of having pigeons flying around with data, but it raises an interesting point. Memory card storage keeps getting bigger – and there are still Australians out there forced to use archaic dial up internet. The lesson? Maybe pigeons aren’t just ‘rats with wings’ after all.

Check out the full story on the Mashable website.

While we’d love to drop support for IE6 altogether (it would certainly be like Christmas for the developers) – there are two arguments to this contentious issue.

A Bit of Background

In the digital world, 10 years is practically a lifetime – and that’s coming up to how long it’s been since IE6 was first released in 2001. At this time, IE had an incredible dominance of the market – at one stage, up to 95% of users browsed the web with IE6. Since then, technology has progressed at the speed of light – with IE6 the continual splinter in its side, which retains power, even today, purely because of its number of users.

The For Argument: Innovation is Being Stifled

Designers and developers’ number one argument against IE6 is that it restricts innovation. In almost every way. There are a bunch of features (some technical, some design) which IE6 doesn’t support – so designers and developers need to spend a lot of extra time writing ‘exceptions’ to their system or tone down their creativity to allow for the roadblocks IE6 presents.

The digital industry has put up with IE6 until now. But it has reached a crisis point with the advent of HTML 5 – a lot of which IE6 will not recognise. HTML is part of the core code which shapes the internet – and version 5 includes some pretty exciting new features.

The ‘IE No More’ movement argues that users are really the ones getting the raw end of the deal with IE6 still around. User experiences could be richer, more exciting and more powerful – if not held back by a need for IE6 compliance.

On a more practical note, there are also some fairly serious security issues with using IE6 – your data is simply not as safe as if you were using a more technologically advanced browser.

Furthermore, they propose the only way to force IE6 users to upgrade their browser is to stop supporting it – when a user’s favourite sites cease to look and work the same, they’ll have no choice. It will be to the benefit of the entire web community – industry, designers, developers and users alike.

The Against Argument: Corporate Users Don’t Have a Choice

People don’t use gaming consoles that are nearly 10 years old – I think it would even be difficult to find an appliance in any kitchen which has reached double digits. IE6 users can’t seem to give it up. But for some IE6 users – who ‘The Against’ argument is founded on – don’t have much of a choice.

Fast forward from 2001, when IE6 was released, to today – and even though there have been two subsequent releases of IE, many users out there still haven’t upgraded from IE6. While a significant portion of this statistic are undoubtedly at-home-users, who received IE6 in their Windows XP Operating System and have never realised the need to upgrade – the troublesome portion is corporations. These are the organisations who still use IE6 because of the time and financial costs of updating the browser of every computer in their network. This is why it would be unfortunate to drop IE6 support – because of the employees who have the browser forced upon them.

A new website has even been started to ‘name and shame’ organisations who still use IE6, in an attempt to force them to upgrade. As you’ll see – there are some major players on that list – and some serious numbers of employees who will be affected if IE6 support is dropped.

Finally, Microsoft also refuse to drop support for IE6. While they support users updating their browser, they retain choice of browser remains with the user. And as Microsoft remain committed to supporting Windows XP – they will do the same for IE6.

Where To Now?

It’s unlikely IE6 will be going anywhere anytime soon. This is primarily because Microsoft still support it, and corporations (especially in the current climate) will refuse to fork out the man power and money required to upgrade all their systems.

But for digital agencies and individuals who have already made the decision to stop supporting IE6, this doesn’t mean their IE6 users will not be able to access their websites altogether – they just wouldn’t quite look or behave exactly as they should. Not ideal, but not unusable either.

And our stance on whether we’ll be continuing support for IE6 in our projects? Let’s just say it’s still a hotly contested one in the development studio. Stay tuned…