You are what you eat.

Papergirl Leeds submission.

Exhibtion:
Paper Girl Leeds :Test Space

Twitter and it’s role in your SME’s online strategy

Twitter is a website which offers businesses a gateway to customers online, a social networking service which enables people to send and read messages - those 'tweets' you may have heard people chirping about. Twitter now has up to 175 million users, that's a growth rate of roughly 15 million users per month or about half a million users per day.

Time to invest. Increase your ROI by tweeting.

Using Twitter to implement your social media strategy is easy - business scope is borderless. Combine your online strategy with honest conversation and relevant chatter. Get social.

Twitter: Essential to your social media strategy

* Allows you to build and continue conversation with customers and stakeholders
* Provides a platform - direct customers towards your product/service (gain feedback too)
* Creates a hyperlocal sense to your business and online strategy
* Consumers and competitors both use Twitter
* Monitor behaviours and trends through easy accessible analytic tools.

Time to engage.

What’s happening while you are not tweeting?

Not on Twitter? Your business is being talked about. Online conversation of consumers occurs whether you are listening or not.

Twitter is a real time exchange of dialogue within a networked community. It’s all happening without you. Know what’s out there: make sure you know what’s currently being said about you.

Time spent reviewing or following brands that are using Twitter well is time well spent.

Tweets, trends and @mentions are something which on and offline businesses can no longer afford to ignore. Ignorance is bad for business.

Get started with Twitter

1)Tweet – 140 characters. Keep it social, short and sharp.
2)Retweet – regurgitate tweets that engage your followers and are relevant to your business. Echo your brand, purpose and interests. Share it with your network.
3)@mentions – tag your followers in a tweet. Direct tweets towards someone already listening. Ask questions. Manage conversation. Create Chatter.
4)#tags - create and follow trends on Twitter. #tags are meta data that connect tweets and birth trends across the Twitter platform.
5)#FF – Follow Friday. It’s nice to be liked. Build a network of like minded businesses and individuals with a digital salute.

Let’s talk shop

Twitter is a tool which is savvy and an enabler of community, embrace this and your community will embrace you. So...

* Follow - check out those that follow you, provide timely responses, participate in conversations keeping your business objectives in mind.
* Keep it social – got new stock this morning? Talk about it. Let customers know what is going on in real time.
* Keep it sweet – beware of language. Create a persona, be warm, be human.
* Build interest – promote with retweets of your followers. Invest time and effort to build a conversation.
* Plan - a content strategy will help focus your efforts on publishing content of value in a timely and relevant way.
* Location – add location data to tweets, push local business. Mobile usage of twitter means you can reach those listening for locations in real time.
* Analytics– third party tools for your twitter strategy. Keep an eye on your metrics.
* Trends - Twitter is always on, make sure you have someone to monitor conversations, competitors and trends.

Entice your followers with incentives and general conversation, get to know your market, execute searches. Dig in. Join in.


Want more?
Follow me @jessica_barlow


Useful links:
The @twitter blog
Twitter: On Track for 200 Million Users by Year End
Third party tools for you and your twitter strategy:
Hootsuite
Tweetdeck

What's for Tea? at The Common Place, Leeds

We are putting on an event with Ctrl.Alt.Shift in Leeds on December 5th...you should come.


Access Ctrl.Alt.Shift
Access more information about What's for Tea? at the Common Place
Register for Common Place membership

Latitude| Tropic @ PSL

Botany Bay 2007, Installed on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, Armley, Leeds and part of the current exhibition Latitude|Tropic featuring work by Roger Palmer and Jeremy Wafer. This collabrative exhibtion lives and breathes in the high open space of the PSL gallery. The walls seeming much like home to both artists.

Roger Palmer's collection Latitude, a group of seven photo-triptychs, dominated the gallery with an effortless bekon of black and white tones. The subject matter varies, but a mystery or a forgotten message, a moment perhaps a direction surrounds all of his work.




Spring Water (2009) by Palmer, part of the Latitude|Tropic exhibtion, is a thought provoking piece and relevant to recent concerns within society. Although based around the geographical connections between Botany Bay in Australia and an area of Leeds/Liverpool Canal in the Armley district of Leeds, the piece seems to provokes the sense of and a need for change, something else.

The flow of water, even in its most simplistic static state, mimics a trance like motion of kinetic energy which an empty plastic bottle dances with. Small eddies offer the plastic vessel a different path, or to take afloat in its current surroundings; the movement of this mundane plastic bottle also provokes the idea of a short journey.




After a cold walk along the picturesque canal I was even lucky enough to be invited to help myself to homemade Carrot and Corriander soup. I enoyed a fair few sponfulls whilst watching a collection of short films around the theme of Borders and Crossings as part of Soup and Cinema, a regular night held at PSL.



More information about Latitude|Tropic
More information about PSL's Soup and Cinema night

Leeds Light Night 2010.

A collection of images from a night where you are welcomed to play with your City. I visited PSL on the side of the Leeds Liverpool Canal, not too far from Leeds City Station off Whitehall Road.


The current exhibition Latitude/Tropic features work from two Artists, Roger Palmer and Jeremy Wafer. The collabrative exhibtion lives and breathes in the high open space of the PSL gallery. The walls seeming much like home to both artists.



I made my way through town via Leeds Liverpool Canal, calling in at Milo's to catch a lil' glimpse of the EP launch party for Soul Circus - Artisit & Artisans is available for download now. Continuing up Briggate to catch a glimpse of a nostalgic cardboard gramaphone installation in Thornton's Arcade.





Making my way up to Broadcasting Place, several moving image and light installations welcomed me, along with a bitmap style typography installation, syncronished and executed from a trolley, onto the side of the rustic architecture that is Leeds Metropolitan University.






Films were projected on a continuous loop all night on The Parkinson Tower of Leeds University, I caught a short glimpse of a dark lined, playful shape and scribble animation.



Then onwards for a pint at Santiago's in Grand Arcade to catch Black Moth. Who by the way are effortlessly on heat at the moment and so much more raw live.

Find out more about Leeds Light Night 2010
Check out Soul Circus and find out more about their new EP Artists & Artisans
Check Black Moth out on MySpace

What's for Tea in Hunslet?

A collection of images: The exploration of demolition and decay.










What was left of the high rise flats no longer exists, all that stands at Gaitskell is the rubble of what once was.

These high rise flats were once full of people, some happy some not. Full of people with belongings they treasured, some they did not. They now lay dead, barren in the memory of what once was. As cement, rubble and metal fall to the ground with a great sense of loss, a family of pigeons find shelter, hope and a place to call home...at least for a while.





The crumbling lost and left becomes a loft.

The XX.

The XX's UK tour comes to an end up North, in March 2010. The coy quintet are heading to the Cockpit in Leeds on 8 March 2010. Having recently toured America with Friendly Fires.

The XX are back on the road in the New Year with a headline tour of their own, playing Shepherds Bush Empire in London on 3 March.

The XX at the Cockpit means eclectic tone treats for those of you in and around Leeds. If you miss that, or Britain's Got Talent is on, then they are back over in Liverpool on 10 March.

Making a crack ridden pavement into a subtle stage in Amsterdam, The XX are melodically crafted plucking at classic acoustic guitars. Occasional traffic drones by unnoticed, adding to the raw feel of the music.

I reckon I better buy m'sen a ticket:


Oliver and Romy playing Crystalised in Amsterdam.

More info on The XX and tour dates

Considered Vinyl.

Leeds Fine Art Student Fundraiser 08

Brudenell Social Club....
Flowe, Ellen and the Escapades, Süp and Ben Graves

Leeds University 3rd Year Fine Art Students hosted a Fundraiser for their Degree Show, at the Brudenell Social Club, Hyde Park back in December. The oh-so-cheap beers were flowing from behind the working man's bar, and quaint little cakes were selling, well like hot cakes. The night began with a certain subtlety to it, with the student crowd dribbling in through the doors, acoustic chords echoed through the old aesthetics of the Social.

Charming singer songwriter Ben Graves, originally from Wolverhampton but resident in Leeds, kicked off the night’s shenanigans with a nice hat, and even nicer guitars chords, picks and melodies. Graves voice effortlessly rang through the club, obvious bluegrass influences and inspirations from acoustic folk lord Damien Rice plucked at my lobes. Graves continued to busk, singing confidently, peeling back music to a classic acoustic guitar, him and a stage. Melodic chords, deep passionate vocals and an evident narrative to his songs made Graves a hit with a less than apparent crowd.


Süp slipped on the stage with pencil skirts, guitars and violins. A personal favourite of the night Süp oozed character and originality, consisting of two charming female characters, Emma Greenfield and Emma Kraemer. Greenfield lightly strummed her guitar; “drip, drop, drip, drop” cooing at the microphone, Kraemer stood barefooted, snaking with the rhythm and flow of her violin. Quirky lyrics matched their presence, “take me away from this melancholy place, where everything is not quite what it seems, take me away to a land where they don’t say the polar opposite of what they mean”, simple, enjoyable and true to life. As they warmed the stage, the growing crowd showed their appreciation for the near perfect harmonizing and original take on naive folk.


In between a few more cupcakes and trips to the bar the night progressed and larger bands donned the miniscule stage. Ellen and the Escapades were up next, surprisingly all managing to fit on there. Crammed on to the stage they seemed to please the crowd, with their bluesy, country twangs but being technically gifted, possessing the ability to read sheet music since the age of nine and obtaining a music diploma doesn’t make Ellen and the Escapades an unstoppable midst of fresh local talent. Yes, I would be cruel and wrong to say that Ellen and the Escapades were not well equipped with the ability to play music and thread technical melodies together, but there is just too much going on all at once (and not in a good way). They seemed nervous, stringing together good arrangements and keeping it together on stage, but leaving an air of dissatisfaction, on my part at least. Ellen and the Escapades cross the folk, melodic-indie barrier, at times unpleasantly tapping at a mature Radio 2 audience. Ellen’s voice has a warming quality and ‘Yours to Keep’ stripped to the bare essentials, was their best of the night. Lyrics were true and soulful with large hints of a Katie Melua influence along the line. The band have just recently released their first EP and have a string of local, live gigs lined up, including a headline at the Cockpit in March.



Flowe then hit the stage with more than enough confidence and pizzazz, showing The Brudenell that they are very much a unit, possessing their own identity and sound. Boasting a banner of Her Royal Highness stating ‘make electro history’ at the front of their set, they grabbed the crowds’ attention with their cocky take on a performance. As I listen along with the rest of the rabble, hints of very early Kings of Leon spring to mind, with Celtic influences thrown in hear and there for good measure. Flowe are a cheeky alternative/indie-folk English talent. I couldn’t help but watch the drummer; work out combinations with ease and the rest of my time was spent watching the front man swagger and swoon, his voice brimming with an eclectic 80’s cult band sound and feel. Pint after pint was consumed as the night went on, plenty more cupcakes were nibbled and songs after song Flowe persistently impressed, this quintet from a little further south of Leeds are definitely ones to watch.