Junior designer wanted at Raw Creative

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Our sister agency Raw Creative is looking for a fresh faced and talented designer to join their team and help their small agency grow even further.

They are looking for enthusiasm, so they want somebody who jumps out of bed on a morning and makes a good cup of tea - only kidding.

This person will work alongside the senior designer and on their own, so the ability to see a project through from concept to artwork would be ideal.

The candidate will need a degree or equivalent in graphic design, and experience using Quark Xpress, Illustrator and Photoshop is essential.

Raw has a broad range of clients and projects so no one day is the same.

If this opportunity sounds appealing just send an email with your CV to craig@rawcreativeleeds.com and he will be in touch shortly.

Cross posted: Norton’s Notes

Claire joins Wolfstar for work experience

Hi. My name is Claire Field, and today is my first day of work experience at Wolfstar. I graduated last year with a MA (Hons) from the University of St Andrews, where I read International Relations – Social Anthropology, but also took additional modules in Economics, English and Italian in my pre-Hons years because of how the Scottish system works – and no, I can’t speak Italian – non mi piace l’italiano (I don’t like the Italian language) is the extent of my recollections. I’m also highly skilled in butchering other languages – they’re not my strong point!

Despite attending university in Scotland, I’m actually a Yorkshire girl hailing from the liquorice-famous town of Pontefract, about 10 miles from Leeds; pre-uni I made the most of the Leeds nightlife and shops, but also its creative offerings. I was lucky enough to snag the last place on the Galaxy Radio Academy from thousands of applicants, and spent four months learning all about commercial radio broadcasting, even gaining a NCFE diploma from it.

This sparked off my interest in radio; I was delighted in my second year at St Andrews when student radio station STAR was set up. I immediately signed up, and began presenting my own twice-weekly show – ‘The Schnitzel with Noodles Show’ – which was fabulous because I got to pollute the airwaves with my ramblings and eclectic music taste! I was also on the committee, holding the position of Head of Community Relations, where I set up work experience for local pupils and promoted the station as a community, not a university, project.

I’m happier when I get to be creative and I’m pleased to be given the opportunity to work with Wolfstar to learn more about the PR world – social media especially – as my dissertation explored the issues arising from the use of social media within modern society, using Facebook as my ethnographic site. I find the rise of the Network Society absolutely fascinating, and have always had an interest in the fast-pace and sheer magnitude of the Internet. I’ve even dabbled in website creation myself – my first site was the now defunct Claire’s Cabin, which had episode guides of popular TV shows of the late ‘90’s – this spun-off a second site dedicated to the Harry Potter books.

Wherever I end up in my career, I know my forthcoming time at Wolfstar is going to be both a fabulous, and beneficial, experience!

Nat joins Wolfstar for work experience

Hiya! My name is Natalie Smith and today’s my first day of work experience here at Wolfstar. I’ve recently completed my first year on the BA(Hons) Public Relations course at Leeds Metropolitan University and am nervously anticipating exam results! (five days and counting, fingers crossed please guys!)

I’m originally from a nice little village in East Yorkshire called Swanland (No, I do NOT live in Hull, thank you!) which, contrary to the name, unfortunately no longer has any swans living in it!

I moved to Leeds in 2006 to begin a film production course at the Met, but after the first semester it became clear how badly run the course was, and how unmotivated I was to continue the course as a result. However, as my parents were kindly obliging to pay for my education, I agreed to finish the year to gain a certificate of higher education, so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of a year!

I realised that although I am a creative person, I’m not cut out for the monotony of life behind a camera, or sat in an editing suite 18 hours a day. So why choose PR? Well the idea actually came from my mum, who’d secretly been researching other courses for me, apparently “just for fun”. My answer to this suggestion was quite honestly “But what exactly is PR?”

After researching companies and the course, I spent two days with the in house PR team at Arla Foods which convinced me that this was the route I wanted to take and showed me what PR was all about. I loved it and immediately sent off my application to start the transfer process!

After completing the first year of the course I really believe that I’ve made the right decision and that PR is perfectly suited to my personality. I’ve almost shocked myself by the amount of motivation I’ve had- my house mates still look confused to see me getting up in the morning for lectures! I’m really looking forward to starting my second year, although it’ll be weird not being a fresher for the third year!

Being a poor student (edging nearer to my overdraft limit by the second..) I’ve decided to stay put in Leeds for the summer as jobs are a bit scarce at home! So it’s a life of job hunting for me at the moment!

Working with the Wolfstar team is a great opportunity to help introduce me to the growing world of social media and WOM marketing, I can’t wait to get involved and see what it’s all about!

Twitter Tool - Updating Twitter from Microsoft Outlook

If you are a regular Twitter user, you may well be interested to hear that there is a new tool available which means you can check and update your Twitter status directly from Microsoft Outlook - so no more switching from one site to another.

I have just tested it and it appears to work just fine and it’s actually really useful. Interestingly, it singles out messages to just you too, which is a really useful function - I had spotted most of my personal messages but there were a few in there that I didn’t know about.

Thanks, to Tom Murphy for flagging this one up to me - very useful. To download this tool click here - it takes about 30 secs.

Below is a screen grab of my outlook page and how it now looks.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

UK blog visitors reach an all time high

The latest research from Hitwise Intelligence reveals that UK Internet visits to blogs reached an all time high last week.

In fact if you look at the monthly data you can see that the market share of blogs has increased steadily over the last three years and has increased by 208% compared to ‘traditional’ news and media sites which have also increased significantly by 70%.

Another interesting statistic  is that the market share of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73% respectively.

Hitwise’s Robin Goad cites yesterday’s launch of Apple’s 3G iPhone as an example of the influence of blogs. Gadget and Apple-related blogs sent more traffic to the iPhone site than the traditional IT media.

Another fascinating fact about blog traffic is the diversity of search terms that people use to find them. The highest ranked term was ‘club penguin cheats’ yet it accounted for just 0.39% of the 518,000 search terms.

The final interesting piece of data for me was the importance of Google image search, which was the second largest individual source of traffic after Google UK and even more tellingly 7.85% of all traffic from Google UK Image Search went to blogs, second only to social networks and forums.

The significance of image search for public relations people is that it highlights just one of the many business benefits of a social media news room and social media news releases. Content is no longer being created just for the privileged ranks of journalists, but for thousands of ‘citizen journalists’ who simply want to talk about what they like on whatever user-generated content site they happen to use. But this means we must be much more focused on customer engagement and what the people want rather than what the client or business wants to tell them.