Although the DigitalLabs team have been busy working on projects and teaching students, we haven’t been publicly sharing what we’ve been up to. My role is to tell the story of DigitalLabs, where we are and where we’re going. We’re proud of our work and we’d like to share it. There are a number of things that make us different from other digital agencies. There are also a number of things that make us different from other university teams. We’re unique and its time we explained how.
Through our website and social platforms we’re going to tell you about DigitalLabs. We love to talk and we’d like to start conversations with our students, our customers, our peers and our local community. Over the last few weeks, we have been deciding what we wanted to say, which platforms to say it on and drafting the content to help us say it.
Unlike a new business we already had a variety of online presences, but all of them were out of date. Our website hadn’t been updated and our social media accounts hadn’t had any new posts for a number of years. Digital Marketing Tip: Any organisation where the most recent updates to their website, Twitter account and Facebook page were made over two years ago, is doing it wrong! If you want to be part of the conversation on interesting topics and seen as relevant in your field, then leaving your social media accounts to fester for years at a time, is definitely not a viable option. Bearing this in mind, one of our first steps was to identify our existing social media accounts, including the ones we didn’t know we had.
At some point in history DigitalLabs had been all over the internet, but changes in personnel, a less than stellar handover process and countless attempts to guess which email address had been used to set up the various accounts, left us weeks later with digital real estate that we still had absolutely no control over. At this point we had to make a decision on whether to start from scratch on some platforms and risk the confusion of multiple similar accounts or continue our detective work with no timescale.
Claiming your space on every social media platform may seem like a good idea, but realistically there are only two ways to have any level of success. The first way is to dedicate enough resource to generate the necessary amount of high quality, platform specific content, monitor the results and actively drive engagement. All of which assumes that your audience is actually using those platforms.
The second and more manageable way, is to claim the space, brand it and use those accounts to refer visitors around the internet, to the platforms you have the resource to effectively maintain. With a team of four people and no formal marketing budget, the first option wasn’t going to work. The recommended plan would have been to identify the platforms your audience uses and only utilise those, but as we already had accounts on multiple networks and no analytics or historical data, we decided to aim for the second option, review the results and adjust accordingly.
We’re still in the process of finding and rebranding our various online accounts, but we’ve updated our website, changed our logo and now here we are ready to make a fresh start.
Welcome to DigitalLabs