SquaredThought

So here I am, almost at the end of the journey. Six months of Squared Online has flown by! Still, one last assignment to get through, and it would prove the most challenging yet.

On the face it, an infographic doesn't seem that hard to put together, but when we were being charged with depicting how digital had impacted the medical industry, it's another thing altogether.

As with the digital marketing assignment, the real meat of the task was to take all of the excellent research the group undertook and combine it into one compelling whole. Fortunately my group developed a good narrative around the statistics we had extracted from our research: future gazing at how digital and digital technology can be used to help healthcare services as the population continues to age.

The narrative was very prescient - the issue of an ageing population is one that features regularly when looking at the sustainability of the NHS, given that it means more case of non-communicable diseases to treat and yet more financial burden on a system already suffering from real-term spending cuts.

By analysing developments in areas such as telemedicine, wearable tech, digital doctors and electronic medical records, we were able to offer a picture of the positive contribution that digital can make in streamlining the process for patients and physicians.

So here it was: module four and the arrival of the dreaded Google Analytics! As it turns out, the logic that we are the most afraid of the things we don't know or understand was just as applicable here, because as soon as you start to use Analytics in the practical assignment that Squared devised, it really is as straightforward a tool as you could imagine.

Even with the assembly of a new group, the task in hand - to review the Squared Online website with Analytics and make recommendations for future improvement - proved less than daunting thanks to the Squared Bytes that introduced Analytics and a class on how to identify insights from cold hard data.

Assigned the traffic sources data, I wanted to take a slightly more interesting angle and found that from all but one of the top ten sources, visitors were viewing less then two website pages per session. Given that the Squared Online website comprises seven pages, that's amounts to a significant amount of content that is going unseen!

My recommendation: to redesign the flow of the homepage to create a more compelling journey and encourage visitors to explore more of the website. The utilisation of A/B testing, another innovation the module introduced me to, would help in seeing which designs produced the most improved results. 

Whether or not Squared actually choose to implement this recommendation remains to be seen...

As March rolled into April, there was no letting up on the Squared learning curve - new month, new challenge! The challenge this time: to develop a multi-channel digital marketing strategy for a fictional female beauty product.

Despite the personal accomplishments of the last assignment, the fears of be a floundering fish in a shoal of sharks surfaced briefly, only to discover that from a digital marketing perspective, once again everybody in the group was starting from the exactly the same point of inexperience.

Fired up by early classes on the customer journey, the digital market mix and content marketing, we quickly began to research the female beauty market. To my surprise, I swiftly become an expert (well, sort of) on Chanel's digital marketing strategy and the channels it uses to reach its target audience.

Having established our own audience's average digital life, the ideas came flowing thick and fast, and we began to populate the presentation slides with them. However, structurally the whole thing still seemed a little loose and lacking in direction.

Having established that Facebook was the most used social media platform by our audience, I had already drawn up a slide on utilising Facebook's targeted advertising, but it still sat in amongst a collection of slides on other channels, without anything really binding them together in a way that could excite the client's imagination.

With the deadline fast approaching, I came up with the idea that would hopefully unify them all - a competition, launched through social media, that would showcase how our audience could use the product to achieve glamorous results, alongside the brand ambassador. It would not only drive a social media following and digital reach, but also produce a lot of collateral to help launch it in the market, such as video footage for YouTube channel videos, coverage from bloggers and vloggers, as well as coverage from traditional media outlets.

The rest of the group embraced it, helped develop it and the competition took pride of place in the presentation as our method of encouraging customer engagement. Once again I had surprised myself by reaching inside and finding the marketer within!

So after an invigorating but relatively gentle induction and first assignment, here I was at the deep end, about to jump into online business creation project with a bunch of guys who already work in digital marketing.

Would I sink, dragged under by my relative inexperience compared to the poor folks who got lumbered with me? Or could I swim, buoyed by enthusiasm for these new and exciting (and uncharted) waters?

As things transpired (after an initial period where we all wondered how exactly to stay afloat), happily it was the latter.

Far from being an intimidating bunch of brilliant but brutal digital marketeers I had feared, everyone in Group Blue 17 turned out to be friendly, welcoming and very open to new ideas. More importantly, we were all in the same boat and learning how to pilot it together.

Tasked with creating a presentation for an original online business idea, we swiftly generated our own one-page ideas, energised by a class on how digital is disrupting traditional business models and creating new ones. A vote elected the best idea, but then we hit a road block - how do we turn this idea into a presentation of no more than 12 slides?

For a few Hangouts we um-ed and ah-ed without getting anywhere. The breakthrough came with the business model canvas that Squared supplied us with. Methodically going through each point during a meeting really helped us flesh out and understand our business idea better, as well as providing us with the framework for the presentation. 

Combined with the value proposition canvas that I completed, we now had the wind in our sails and the route to port was clear. We may have had to grab the oars for extra propulsion to ensure we made it there on time, but now we were definitely all pulling in the same direction.

From a personal perspective, the experience was invaluable. I had proved to myself and to my peers that I could be a worthy member of the team. I had contributed to an original digital project and felt good doing it - all without the need for armbands!

Discover strategies and tactics on how to show up at the right place, at the right time and with the right content. Read the study.

See what the latest Twitter research says about using hashtags, photos, videos and more in your Tweets....

A street-talking Argos tweeter has won his firm thousands of fans after an amusing exchange with a customer in Manchester.

Before I launched Zaggora.com in July 2011, I had 2 classic growth hacking problems. 1) I had no budget and 2) I had no idea what I was doing. 10 weeks later I had 100,000 paying customers, without...

After an interesting talk from Zaggora founder Malcolm Bell tonight, I just had to check out his blog to get more insight into a man who grew a multi-million pound business by himself. How? By doing something I've never heard of before (and neither had he at the time): growth hacking.

As part of the assignment for Module 1 of Google's Squared Online digital marketing course, I had to make and upload an introductory video to YouTube.

"If you don't know where you've been, you sure as hell don't know where you're going."

Anon.

As this is the start of a new journey, let me begin by setting out where I've come from, before explaining where I'd like to go. My background is in journalism; primarily B2B, although in the last couple of years I've written for lifestyle publications like AskMen.com and ShortList, and gotten to interview everyone from BAFTA-winning actresses to Oscar-winning directors, Michelin-starred chefs and gold medal-winning Paralympians.

So with just five months of PR and marketing experience, what has brought me to Squared Online? Well, first is the realisation that my passion is for digital. More than that, my life is digital. No, not in the sense that I am a digital slave, sat endlessly on forums, trolling for attention on Facebook or Twitter or proselytizing about a technological utopia. Rather, it's the fact that over the past decade digital has enhanced my experiences to such an extent that I'm certain life would be infinitely duller without it.

In my personal life it has enabled me to book unique apartments in Rome through airbnb and find fantastic new restaurants on TripAdvisor, discover great new films, music and more through websites and social media and even track down obscure Japanese movie posters on eBay. 

Professionally, I'm in a place where I can't imagine working without digital, from writing content optimised for the web and tracking stories through Facebook and Twitter, to providing live Twitter feed updates from an international rugby match at Wembley and live-blogging street protests in Brighton and Hove.

Speaking of that city (my hometown), it has carved itself out quite a niche as the South Coast's burgeoning digital hub, with an ever increasing number of agencies basing themselves here. Which brings me on to the second reason for joining the good ship Squared Online - equipping myself with the requisite digital skills to become an attractive employee for one of them.