Turn Key Blog. Things we've done and the things we love.

Here at TK we’re totally blogsessed, this channel of communication has so many benefits for brands and businesses looking to ramp up their online activity. Our PR Executive, Gina , has blogged about blogging – giving businesses some tips on how to join the blogosphere…

Update regularly

Just as you would with Facebook or Twitter, a blog is a channel that needs to be updated regularly. For most brands, we advise about once a week or three times a month, however this depends completely on who your audience is. Blogs make excellent content for social media and updating regularly will help your website climb the Google rankings

Content is KING

It’s our favourite phrase here at Turn Key, but content really is invaluable. If you get bored writing your blog, the chances are, people will get bored reading it! Make sure you’re writing about relevant topics that are interesting to your readers. Try to keep things varied, put together a rough schedule of blog ideas for each month, although be prepared to post something quickly if you see a story in the news that you have an opinion on.

Integrate key words

SEO can be hard to get your head around, but one of the basics is to try and weave in key words to everything you publish on your website. Blogs are a great way to do this – for example – at Turn Key we may want to include the words; marketing, PR, design, social media, agency, Leeds (see what we did there?) By including keywords strategically and intelligently into your blog and website, you’ll have a better chance of climbing the search engine rankings.

Snap happy

As the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words and blog readers don’t want to spend hours scrolling through information. Make sure you keep your blogs brief but include plenty of photographs and visual aids such as infographics and diagrams, a paragraph or two and some well-chosen images will have just the right effect.

Sense the tone

The tone of a blog is different to that of a website page or magazine article. A blog is ‘web log’, an online diary, and this allows bloggers to employ a more personal tone which reflects the voice of the writer or the brand.

Our PR and Social Media Account Manager, Samara , shares her top five tips on how to use social media to benefit your business.

1) Be Selective

With over 900 social media channels whirling around the web, it’s important to select the right channels for your business. Don’t just follow the crowd, take time to understand your audience, identify where they ‘hang out’ online and develop a clear and concise plan of attack – a great campaign is wasted if it’s not targeted at the right people.

2) Patience is a virtue

Gaining thousands of followers, hits or likes doesn’t just happen overnight (unless you’re Justin Bieber!) Take time to understand your market, what they engage with, what gets them excited and then use these insights to create rich and engaging content.

3) Content is KING

Social media is a beast that needs feeding. And now, due to the rise in smartphones and the introduction of 4G, if you don’t push out the right content at the right time, your message will be lost in cyberspace.

A well-managed social media channel is one that is regularly updated with engaging and interesting information. Content will vary from one brand to another, but it’s the interesting stuff that makes people come back for more!

4 ) Nobody likes a social climber

Social media takes no prisoners. Don’t be THAT person who always talks about themselves, listen to your followers so that they continue to engage with you. If you’re seen to be self-promoting it is likely that your followers will start to disengage with you.

If you’re in a position to respond individually to each person, do. This will work wonders for you – the powers of word of mouth are as strong today as they were before the social evolution.

5) Invaluable insights

Unlike some forms of traditional media, social media can be monitored based on a number of factors. Look at your objectives and work out what success means to you. Historically (well, two years ago), success was measured by the amount of ‘followers’ or ‘likes’ a brand had, however this has changed quite significantly, today it’s more about the level of engagement and positive sentiment.

My tip would be to track your tweets and use Facebook’s free insight tool to understand what kind of messages your audience is engaging with. Use these insights to create even more engaging content based on what your audience wants, not what you want!

Last week saw the unveiling of Chaophraya Glasgow – Europe’s largest Thai restaurant.

Following a 14-week renovation project and set over four floors on Buchanan Street in the heart of Glasgow’s shopping district, the stunning multimillion pound eatery offers fine dining, a luxurious Palm Sugar bar and much more.

Having worked hard to ensure all marketing collateral such as menus, leaflets and karma cards were ready in time for the launch, team TK packed their bags and hopped on a train to bonnie Scotland to join in the launch celebrations. The TK PR team have also been building a buzz online via and to ensure no stone was left unturned on making it a night to remember.

Glammed-up and excited to see the venue in all its glory, a red carpet led the way to the entrance, complete with Paparazzi-style photographers and videographers and an authentically dressed Thai lady meditating above the doorway. From here on in ‘wow’ was the buzzword of the night!

As we entered the restaurant we were each offered a choice of champagne, wine, beer or Mango Martini to enjoy as we marvelled at the spectacular interior.

Downstairs to the right was Chaophraya’s famous Palm Sugar bar lounge , which lived up to our expectations. The granite bar and bottomless list of cocktails, accompanied by cool and funky music called for another ‘wow’ moment.

On to the first floor, the Ballroom. This breath-taking room is the main dining area, complete with a state of the art open kitchen and mini booths to enjoy a meal any night of the week. And, no event would be complete without an abundance of canapés so, Chaophraya did what Chaophraya does best and put on a feast fit for a king. There was everything from Thai fish cakes and spicy beef salad, to more quirky Scottish-Thai fusion dishes including scallops and black pudding and for dessert, chilli chocolate brownies!

And, if dining with the masses doesn’t do it for you, the next floor takes you to a private balcony for two that overlooks the Ballroom – yes, you’ve guessed it, another ‘wow’ moment.

We then moved onto the top and final floor – the private dining area and whiskey bar. Each private area is unique and caters for different tastes. There is a sunken seating area, where a Buddhist monk was blessing guests, an authentic Thai room, complete with wooden furnishings including large backed chairs imported from Thailand and a luxury dining room with hand-painted plates and gold plated furniture.

Once we had completed the tour we enjoyed the vast array of entertainment, which included belly dancers, air acrobatics, a snake called Bob and not forgetting the Pretty Boys of Bangkok who took quite a shining to our designer, Paul.

The whole night was amazing and we really enjoyed seeing all of our hard work come together in what was an incredibly successful opening night.

You can view the full gallery of images on the and more information about Chaophraya Glasgow is available on its stunning new website , designed by Turn Key who else?

You may remember a few weeks ago we commented on Pinterest – the shiny, new social media tool taking the World Wide Web by storm – and if you need any more reason to believe it’s the next big thing, take a look at the stats below from  FlowTown sniffed out by our Senior Web Developer Christian Shannon …

Obviously it’s important to practice what we preach so watch this space…Turn Key’s Pin Board is just a few clicks away!

Pinterest is possibly the most buzzed-about social media tool on the market and is set to take the online world by storm. For those of you who haven’t heard of the platform it gives users the chance to capture and organise images from the web onto their own “virtual pinboard”.

Considering that Pinterest is still an invite only platform, it’s has seen tremendous growth over the last two months. According to research company Shareaholic, Pinterest has over 4.9 million users and has driven more referral traffic in the last two months than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined!

Pinterest has seen many players making use of the website with more and more American brands and even a few UK companies starting to recognise the platform’s potential. In the last week it has gained a rather well-known social media user; the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself! He has posted very little content so far, but if he’s interested then surely more will follow. I know that we are desperate to get signed up and are looking forward to seeing Pinterest grow and grow in popularity!

We may be going a couple of years back, but as its social media week we couldn’t resist a shout out to the Old Spice campaign, which may very well go down in history as one of the most popular digital marketing campaigns amongst this generation of man.

Old Spice wasn’t particularly well known for its interesting social media campaigns, until they burst onto the scene with an incredibly funny viral video featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa as ‘Old Spice man’.

This impressive and well-worked rebranding campaign helped give Old Spice a younger image, and we think its a sterling example of digital marketing at its finest.

Our hats go off to Royal Dutch airline KLM, who executed a brilliant social media campaign targeting bored passengers waiting for their flight.

Passengers were encouraged to check-in via Twitter and Foursquare and were awarded with a personalised travel gifts from the tech savvy airline – nice!

If anyone has the fan base to guarantee social media success it is the global brand that is Manchester United. As one of the wealthiest and most widely supported football teams in the world it has an estimated 350 million fans ranging from Maasai warriors to Moss Side hoodies. There’s no doubt, therefore, that a club voted number one in the world’s most valuable sports teams (Forbes magazine’s annual ranking, 2011) is in a strong social media position. They have the all-important audience and they have the money to make it work. However with local rival Manchester City charging ahead with their social engagement and online personalisation for their fans could this attempt to roll out over the next two years end up being more old hat than Old Trafford…

Everyone’s heard of Manchester United. They’re to football what the Beatles are to music – a huge global export in an ever-increasing global village. It’s no great surprise to think some plucky member of the marketing team came up with the idea of launching a Man-U social platform where these fans could communicate, share, purchase, chat and generally wax lyrical about the devils in red. However, the age old question again comes in to play – just because you can do something, should you?

Fans of the club already communicate effectively across the popular platforms. With 20,265,988 fans currently on the Facebook fan group alone, the club has an already impressive following in the online arena. Any brand, product or celebrity who is popular enough to grow like this organically should surely be jumping in the air with glee that they don’t have to go to timely and often expensive lengths to find their followers. What, it seems to me, would make sense would be to invest instead in the strategy on how to communicate with this vast, worldwide audience, across the popular channels, rather than creating a space wholly owned and managed by the club. The reason social media has been so phenomenally successful is it allows an open and two way communication and as soon as someone owns this space and can, in essence, moderate and control its content, the point of the whole endeavour is somehow lost. In addition, in creating a new space you are asking an audience to move away from the channels they have already chosen and duplicate their profile in a new space. I am sure MUFC have the fan base that would do this but why ask them to when you already know where they are…

The other important factor is the ever-changing nature of social media. Just think of the constant development put into something like Facebook to keep it fresh and innovative. There has to be a concern that anything going into development now, as part of a two year roll out plan, is going to look slightly passé compared to its social brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, if anyone can do it, the Man United machine has a better chance than many.

Another privacy furore or candid admission of defeat?

Places was always going to be a risky move for Facebook, for two reasons;

1. An incredibly chequered record on user privacy.
2. Incredibly focused, powerful competition from Foursquare and Gowalla, two location based social networks.

Still, they danced along the rim of the spinning wheel of chance and unfortunately have fallen flat on their collective faces. So why didn’t Places work for a network that has been so universally successful in almost every other respect?

1. Privacy
We all secretly, in the deep crevices of our minds know that Facebook is just one gargantuan marketing database, but we do not appreciate that fact rubbed in our faces when Facebook stretch the word ‘liberal’ to its very limit with a new privacy update.

This infographic (courtesy of Mashable / ) summarises the most salient issues beautifully

So we can now see how users responded almost a year down the line “No Facebook, no.”

Don’t be fooled however, you have always been able to restrict who can tag you at a location, it was a feature when . I believe the real reason that Places is getting taken ‘out back’ is because of incredibly poor uptake, which leads me nicely on to…

2. Competition
Facebook massively underestimated the strength of the competition in this arena. Anecdotally I don’t think that the Facebook audience was ready for location based functionality, I don’t think they wanted it and personally I got little or no added value from it.

I’ve been a member and user of Foursquare for the last couple of years ( come see me if you are too ). If I want awesome location based fun, that’s where I go. I have had neither the desire nor interest in sharing my location on Facebook in any way other than in a status update.

Here is a little peek at the titanic growth that Foursquare drove through 2010

Check out the full amazing infographic here .

Where Facebook and Foursquare differ however is over our old friend privacy. Foursquare doesn’t leave every option as ‘Opt In’ or allow people to speak for me. It simply empowers me as a user to tell people where I am, what I’m doing and who else is nearby. It is the location based marketing tool, Facebook really, really wanted to have and just failed to launch.

While Foursquare has totally understood concerns about privacy and continue to flourish in location based social marketing, Facebook has sailed past the lighthouse and crashed on the jagged rocks of failure.

So why has it taken Facebook users so long to be concerned about the lack of control over location (as well as photo based) tagging?

The reason I believe it has taken so long for this basic privacy concern to come to light is that social networks simply didn’t feature in the public eye until recently. The increasing amount of interest social networking has received over the past two years has seen internet interaction grow from a furtive, socially unacceptable back room activity into a perfectly acceptable mode of communication, no more exciting than sending a text.

As social networking (and the Internet as a whole, let’s be honest) continues to spill into everyday life, it is becoming the subject of everyday concerns and particularly in the UK, privacy is a big one.

Inevitably during a paradigm shift in the way we interact, there will be some teething problems. This kind of openness takes some adjustment in the public conciousness and privacy always will be a concern. We have seen that for years with the Government , with Google Streetview , and recently with the phone hacking scandal .

As we become more data reliant, we must ensure that the people we give our information up to use it responsibly.

So Facebook; I applaud your diversification, I love your network, but please, please learn from the last six years of privacy misery – let me do the opting in.

Kthxby.