We require a junior web/content editor to start at our busy London office as soon as possible.

Ideal candidates will have some experience using web input forms or CMS systems and have a keen interest in the web and related systems. Excellent language skills and an interest in copy and layout are preferred.

Duties:
Update existing web sites with copy changes and configuration options.
Update and build HTML and CSS templates for web pages and emails
Administration and setup of social platforms such as Facebook tabs, applications, widgets and buttons.
Placing tracking tags and events onto existing web pages.

Skills required:
Working knowledge of HTML and CSS, with a focus of best practise and standards
Excellent language and editing skills to approve copy and layout

Desirable:
Any knowledge of JavaScript or the Facebook JavaScript API would be beneficial to the candidate.

This role would be ideal for a recent university graduate, or student on a placement year.

If you’re interested, simply email careers@analogfolk.com with your CV.

This iOS app lets you tamper with (or completely mutilate) some of the most incredible and inspiring artworks of all time whilst learning about their history. Below you can see my adaption of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I now like to call Houses in the Sky.

I get the feeling that Sound Selecta are targeting this more toward kids, but in all honesty I don’t care because it’s genuinely fun, interesting and simple and I think people of all ages will enjoy it. With the free app you get Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Georges Seurat’s ‘A Sunday Afternoon’. The facts are really those that adults will enjoy more than kids, for example, did you know that Starry Night was the view from Van Gogh’s sanitarium room and painted completely from memory in the daytime? I didn’t. And I enjoyed learning that fact.

I downloaded the free trial, which was released 20th January, but the premium version (which costs £4.99) comes with six different options (plus, it removes the Art Jam watermark from screenshots you save).
These are the six pieces you’ll receive with the premium version:

The Last Supper – da Vinci

A Bar at the Folies – Manet

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I – Klimt

Seated Woman with Wristwatch – Picasso

Starry Night – van Gogh

A Sunday Afternoon – Seurat

Nike’s FuelBand locks together three of the biggest gamechangers in product development today –  gamification, socialisation and personal data – but adds one killer refinement that will make it stand out from the market.

FuelBand heralds the advent of the Quantified Self into the mainstream. For years athletes and the keener ones amongst us have used personal data to improve their regimes. From pedometers to Polar chestbands and watches that allow you to monitor and maintain your optimal heart rate, accessing personal data has played a key role in fitness. But pedometers and heartrate monitors deliver only one dataset each. Recent fitness accessories have started to deliver a lot more wellbeing information that doesn’t just focus on exercise. Jawbone’s UP will measure your sleep activity and let you track what you eat. (Though product flaws from its inability to wirelessly communicate with the app, through to bricking have stifled sales.) Meanwhile Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, which started in 2005, signposted an interest in personal data stretching beyond exercise oriented data (subsequently inspiring Facebook to employ Felton leading to the development of Timeline). People love to discover their personal data.

Add gamification to personal data, and exercise becomes more compelling. FuelBand users can set targets to beat and earn awards for activities a la Foursquare. (Cyclists should take note of the Strava Cycling app to earn similar rewards.) But setting targets for yourself is not nearly as compelling as competing with friends. This third tier of socialisation is really where FuelBand will succeed. As Opower’s comparative utility bills have shown, and behavioural scientists/economists have argued for some time, social competition is a big incentive to changing habits. Nike has integrated this social element heavily into FuelBand.

But Nike’s real victory comes not in folding together data, social and gaming, but the addition of one killer refinement…

FuelBand will let you count steps and calories, but more importantly, it simplifies and refines your data into an overarching score. This means that, unlike the original Nike+ which limits users to running, converting movement into one score to rule them all means users can compete against friends despite taking part in different activities. It’s not about number of steps or calories burned; you don’t need to run quicker or further than your friends; you just need to beat their score via any activity that gets you moving. By refining data to a simple cross-sport score Nike’s message “Life is a sport” truly comes to life. This refinement is where Nike will win.

—

Whereas this message was best delivered via an award-winning advert ten years ago, Nike has evolved to deliver the same message via hardware and software. Kudos.

The same message today.

Zeebox has been around since the end of October 2011, but BSkyb took a 10% stake in the company this week and announced that it will integrate the Zeebox app into its TV platforms later this year, which is why it’s our very first App of the Week.

Zeebox integrates tweets and status updates with the TV schedule, which makes it easier to follow the conversation around your favourite TV programmes. Zeebox bills itself as ‘a new way to watch television’ which is probably a bit of a stretch as people have been simultaneously interacting across media platforms for years, however, Zeebox has a slick user experience and does help sort the signal from the noise.

Convergence of web, TV and mobile will be one of the biggest media stories of the next 18 months. Expect a Zeebox type experience to become part of the standard connected television across all platforms in the next couple of years, and expect to have to deal with the implications of two screen behaviour patterns coming to the mainstream.

Zeebox is currently only available on iPhone and iPad and is free.

Aussie media and marketing site Mumbrella named AnalogFolk’s Australian office opening as one of the ‘seven biggest launches in 2011′.

The site reads: “The hottest digital agency launch of 2011 hit the market in November. Tribal DDB’s Matt Grogan and BWM’s Matt Robinson opened the doors of AnalogFolk with founding client Yellowtail wines.”

Read the article to find out which other launches they named as some of 2011′s highlights.

Happy New Year

all.

You will be responsible for managing and developing the Community Management offer within the agency. Specific responsibilities include managing, growing, and developing a small team of community managers, developing industry leading best practice and thought-leadership around community management as well as directing and implementing clients’ online community strategy.

A great opportunity for strategic content creators as the role coordinates with the internal editorial, copy and strategy teams to support their respective missions.

If you’re interested, simply email careers@analogfolk.com with your CV.

A low-down on the responsibilities:

Managing, growing and developing a small team of community managers

Working with clients to help them understand the value of community management

Implementing online community strategy, coordinating with the strategy team to ensure effectiveness and providing superior quality of customer service and support to all our managed communities.

Generating compelling editorial content and competitions for the site communities to engage with, and lead them into contributing their own high quality submissions.

Written and presenting thought-leadership on community management best practices

Working with the production team to ensure the community platforms are kept up to date and functional, as well as influence the roadmap by collating user feedback.

Regularly feedback insights gained from community monitoring into the client partner, to help evolve strategies in a timely fashion.

What we’re looking for from you:

3 years’ community management experience in a commercial environment is essential
In-depth knowledge and understanding of the differing dynamics of online community platforms and behaviours is essential

Experience with moderation, crisis management and customer service is essential

A background developing content and content strategies in a range of different media is essential, with excellent written English a must and simple video-editing, image-editing and photography skills desirable

Creative, diplomatic, cool under pressure and fantastic interpersonal skills

Strong project management and organisational skills

Team player, with the confidence to take the lead and guide other departments when necessary

Good technical understanding and can pick up new tools quickly

Path released an update yesterday that allows you to post your ‘thoughts’, what you’re listening to and whether you are awake or asleep on top of previous functionality – location and who you are with as part of a photo. There is also a complete design overhaul. It’s a big update for Path who have been suspiciously quiet for quite some time. But does widening its product offering and positioning itself as a “Private Personal Journal” help the niche social network?

Disclaimer: I’m a big fan and advocate of Path. I’ve converted a number of friends to the niche social network, one of whom refuses to join Facebook, so I’m keen to see Path succeed. My online world is no different to anyone else’s – it is split into two spheres:

- friends and family I know and love

- friends and family and work colleagues and twitter followers I don’t know very well or love. (We have Facebook to blame for allowing us to categorise some people we don’t know or love as friends.)

For me the latter class sit across a number of social networks but most importantly, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Foursquare. Meanwhile the former class, sit across all of these but also Path. In short, Path is just for my close family and friends. You can have up to 150 connections on Path (formerly 50). I only have 14. I curate my Path viciously. I don’t connect with anyone whose updates I don’t want to see. This, combined with the fact that Path only lets you post photos – real life occurrences – means whenever I get a Path notification I get excited. I look forward to seeing a photo someone I love has posted – seeing what they’re up to. I cannot say the same for any other social network. This is the power of Path. Excitement through relevance.

Path 2 introduces a fistful of new features. And I’m concerned that the diversity of these features are exactly the sort of thing that turns off many Facebook users and will have the same impact on Pathers.

Instagram’s success has been simplicity and single-mindedness. Its phenomenal recent growth (10m users in the last year) is testament to its proposition – photographs and only photographs. When users enter a niche social network they know they’ll only be exposed to one genre of content. Whether it is Instagram, Pinterest, turntable.fm, Miso, Foodspotting they are choosing to see one thing they know and love.

Path 2 has moved into territory that emulates other major social networks (your new timeline even looks like Facebook’s Timeline). The introduction of text status updates, location checkins (combined with Foursquare checkins), music checkins (with the ability to play the track in-app), companionship updates (previously launched as niche network With), and what I can only describe as state-of-consciousness updates, all show that Path is following its original remit of being the intimate social network by getting more diverse updates from your closest friends.

But even your closest friends can be boring when you give them the ability to tell you they are now asleep. “It’s about staying in someone’s life every single day,” says [Path founder] Morin. “That’s love.” That may be true for my wife. But for everyone else, that’s annoying.

If my connections on Path start telling me where they are, or that they are awake, will I remain excited whenever I get a notification from Path? I doubt it. And if Path holds no allure, then it’s just a Facebook group or G+ circle made up of my closest friends. And that could make it redundant.

Interning is a great way to gain agency experience, and with AnalogFolk you’ll get a chance to take on real work for real clients. We’ve got placement opportunities within design, creative technology, copywriting, strategy, production, user experience and community management. If you’re interested in finding out what life’s like in the industry then drop us an email and let us know the area you’re interested in and the kind of experience you’re looking for. Send your CV over with a link to your online portfolio (if you have one) and a short description of yourself to our lovely Operations Manager Sian James (sian.james [at] analogfolk [dot] com).

Our recent recruit, Nick McWilliams officially joined the strategy team in September. Before that, he was with us on an internship for five weeks.

Nick studied English Language and Literature at King’s College London and impressed us all during his internship. He came on board to help us out with production, strategy, community management and everything else in between. I’ll pass it over to him to tell you about his time here…

“Having spent my three years at university doing everything but work internships, I left with very little practical experience of the working world (beyond countless bar jobs). For me a busy day meant two hours of lectures and a particularly taxing bus ride home, and the office was a mythical realm ruled over exclusively by variations of David Brent. But a month at AnalogFolk soon changed that.

Arriving on my first day, I was made to feel instantly welcome and involved.  Over the sound of the office playlist, I was introduced to everyone and assigned a desk, and within minutes I was sitting in on a client meeting. And the pace rarely relented. For the next five weeks, I was kept busy working on a myriad of accounts – from researching to concepting – and getting to know how each department operates.

The relaxed atmosphere is exemplified by the Friday afternoon “meeting”, for which fetching the booze was one of my most vital weekly tasks. Yet despite (or, more accurately, because of) the pub lunches, Jay-Z blasting from the stereo and chats on the sofa, this was a place where things got done. Although easy-going, everyone was truly passionate about what they did and worked hard to excel in everything they put their hand to. For me, that involved immersing myself in a whole host of tasks: researching brand positioning on everything from beers to photography apps, developing ideas for boosting the online presence of low-fat yoghurt, and contacting bloggers to drum up support for a campaign, to name but a few.

A month at AnalogFolk has been invaluable in giving me a behind-the-scenes look at the world of digital media and the skills needed to succeed in it. And it was pretty fun too.”