What a difference a year makes. And when that year’s 2020, the difference is even greater… How has this affected B2B technology topics? Privacy, security – what’s grown, and what’s faded? We have been tracking key B2B tech topics for 3 years now, and have identified key shifts, based on social data, in our latest research report. You can read it here , but here are the headlines: No surprise – digital workplaces have been a hot topic, accelerating from previous years Cities may have been quiet this year, but not when they’re smart – this continues to grow as a discussion topic Robotics picked up pace Fintech (finally) got consumer-orientated, shifting focus from tech providers to end-consumer applications Why does all this matter? Sure, it’s a lens on life, but it’s also actionable for organisations. What should you be discussing, where should you spend time connecting with buyers? What’s discussed, shared and clicked (in different ways) reflect priorities amongst decision-makers. It’s also about recognising that B2B tech shifts faster than some recognise – yes, there are multi-year trends (cloud, SaaS etc didn’t happen overnight) but things can also shift faster. Data privacy is a good example, which has declined markedly as a focus since GDPR implementation put it top of mind. Can you spot these things sooner? Rather than wait for a year, can you spot things before others? We believe so. Whilst this research looks at year-to-year shifts, if you want to incrementally win, digitally, we believe there is a competitive advantage in spotting things which are ‘pre-viral’ in their space. Chat to us to learn more: there is roughly a two-week ‘half-life for most B2B tech content, based on our analysis. So you have time to ‘win’, but not much, even if it could be the key to ABM (Account-Based Marketing) or social selling programmes… Download the research #b2b #research #tech

What are algorithms? Algorithms. If it weren’t for COVID, they’d be claiming “most disliked” awards in the end of year round-ups. Surprising levels of dislike, considering they are around us daily, our entire lives. In recent times they’ve had particular focus around social media algorithms, and in academic rankings. If it’s got to that stage where it’s got awkward to admit you aren’t exactly sure what they are, here’s our handy introduction… What is an algorithm? Definition: “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer”. Basically it’s how you decide how to sort information into an actionable series. Whether that’s what social media posts to show a user first, or who receives the highest grades, or perhaps most currently, which people are given a vaccine first… An algorithm is functionally uncontentious (life can’t exist without them) but morally contentious, as every algorithm is the product of decisions by its creators… and therefore their intentions, background and biases. When did they first appear? Well, they’ve always been present, ever since mankind recorded information. Arguably before that, if one includes the series of considerations our ancestors took over who ate the kill from the hunt first (weakest? Strongest? Highest stats?). A Persian dude in the 9th century gets credit. In the twentieth century, the concept had a fresh resurgence, beginning with a German gent. As ever, Wikipedia has a banging timeline of algorithms. Don’t tell us we don’t know to party. We know how to hook you up. When did algorithms start to matter so much? Well, without getting into social-cultural political theory, we’re going to point fingers at Ada Lovelace. Quite a badass herself, she broadly gave us computing machines (or the thing you’re reading this on). Machines getting involved in algorithms has really changed the game. Why? Some of it is just fear: why should a machine be more alarming than a person when it makes decisions? Arguably they’re more reliable. Other factors are more valid. We have vastly more information, and can sort it vastly faster. A newspaper editor used to decide between hundreds of potential stories for your edification – your social networks / Google now do the same but across billions of potential ‘stories’, and not even just daily – every time you refresh. So, there are more opportunities to influence, to share, to distort. Globalisation means algorithms are often determined by those outside your legal jurisdictions. Whether that’s for better or worse depends on both where you reside, but also your perspective. None the less, it is less predictable and controlled than in yore. Possibly most long-term significant is that machines (computers, for the layperson) are now able to self-train, meaning that whilst we set them off with the parameters of an algorithm to solve a particular problem, they then evolve based on what they find, using self-referencing instructions. After a while, no single person knows the algorithm. Facebook has hit this point. i.e. the algorithm is bigger than any single set of instructions. So, what? The fact you’re reading this at all is the consequence of multiple algorithms. Some, distantly, involve the basic fact the author has received certain educational and life opportunities, determined by the existence of algorithms, allowing them to write this content. More directly, they include the basic filtering ot the inbox/social feed/Google search which led you here, based on a complex series of algorithmic assessments of the most relevant content to meet your needs. Algorithms are themselves neutral. It’s our framing of them, management of them, and judgement of them which is subjective. There are as many algorithms as there are opinions. None of them are right – they just sit in a spectrum of ‘rightness’, based upon your personal framework. Give them a break. We need them.

Habits. Tough to break, even harder to form. Yet they underpin much of our behaviours. Last year we analysed which habits were being made, lost, or just frozen due to enforced change from the pandemic. It’s a rare mass experiment in behaviour change. We’ve recently refreshed this research ( read it here ), so you can read more on what’s happened, and happening.  The longer the pandemic alters behaviours, the greater the ‘stickiness’ of the new habits formed. In many cases what’s happened has been an acceleration of multi-year mega-trends – such as that towards wellness, or around digital collaboration technologies. Of particular note are the contradictions inherent in our choices. We’ve long known human beings aren’t rational, but our markedly increased exercise habits seem somewhat incongruous alongside our increased imbibing of alcohol… Equally, we can see plenty of evidence that people’s desire to travel is undimmed, as soon as they’re able, and comfortable. We will travel again, we will socialise again, but it might be interspersed with more online shopping, a quick 5km run, and a facetime with Gran, accompanied by another G&T… Overall UK lockdown 3 hasn’t seen major differences in habits from lockdown 1’s impacts. Largely we are just over the novelty of Zoom, even though we are using it, we aren’t discussing it as much. Thankfully quizzes were left long behind… So much changes, yet so much remains the same. We know what we like, and we like what we know.

Almost a year ago, Olivia joined us after graduating from Edinburgh Uni. As 2019 comes to a close, this is what she’s learned. OneFifty offers one of the most competitive internship programmes in the digital marketing sector, actually in the country (trust us, we have the Linkedin stats…). Many of the things I have learnt during the period of my 6 month internship, albeit only 2 months of this was as an intern with the following 4 months being within the role of a Junior Consultant, are lessons that will play a significant role in shaping my career and something I wanted to share. Whether you are years into your career, about to start or even thinking of applying for a role at OneFifty, entertain my musings and get involved – I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about these points as much as I am interested in sharing them… If you want to be the best, you need to surround yourself with the best. I have been lucky enough to be relatively good at the things I have tried. However, arriving at OneFifty made me feel as I have only felt once before when joining the Edinburgh University Performance Swimming Team: so incredibly out of my depth. I was suddenly surrounded by an incredibly talented and intelligent group of individuals and to be frank, it was insanely intimidating. As time has gone on, I have been nurtured by and learnt from these same individuals and when you’re learning from the best, you can’t be learning from any better… Be like a sponge. Honestly, soak it all up! I don’t think -in fact, I am relatively certain- that I have never learnt more in a similar time frame as I have during my first 6 months at OneFifty. I have a notebook from my first month at OneFifty in which I wrote down everything that was new. This notebook only lasted my first month because after this it was full and I realised from an environmental point of view, I needed to turn these notes digital. My sponge mindset has enabled me to learn and progress with OneFifty and be given increasingly high levels of responsibility as an acknowledgement of all that I have keenly absorbed. Work is hard. But, that’s what makes it so rewarding. I love working at OneFifty, but it is by no means easy. We produce excellent work for several clients every single day. How? Because we care, so we work hard for our clients to ensure we deliver the best. I am not work shy, I studied for an Ancient History degree at the University of Edinburgh whilst completing around 30 hours of swim training a week, but I would say my current working week is just as hard. Why? Responsibility. It’s not just about me anymore. I have a responsibility to my colleagues to deliver high calibre work every day so that we as a team can fulfil our responsibilities to our clients. But, when work is hard, the reward is greater. Speak up. When working in an office, it is important to speak up whether that be for a personal reason or just within general office chatter. Being a part of what you’re working within will provide a greater sense of purpose because you feel as if you’re part of it, a piece of the bigger jigsaw. But, speaking up also has a far more pragmatic purpose to it: if you’re not speaking up about something, people might not know about it. If they don’t know, they can’t help! Whether that be that you are going through something personally, you can’t meet deadlines due to workload or even something trivial such as having different snack preferences to that currently on offer in the office (a frequent point of discussion within our office…). If you’re not voicing it, people can’t hear it and if they’re not hearing it, they can’t do anything about it. I could keep writing, but the lessons learnt within the first six months of my career have been countless, and invaluable. I have been set up for my career in ways that have outstripped those that I could have ever imagined. I hope you’ve found this read interesting, perhaps even thought-provoking and for those that are interested in how I am getting on with the whole working girl part of my life, I hope it has been satisfyingly informative. Now, over to you, what are the most important lessons you have learnt in your career so far? #interns #internships

Was the biggest shock last week that Corbyn was sent packing by such a margin, OR that some people made TikToks about the election? Don’t worry, I’m not going to stretch credulity and claim it was the latter. BUT, there were the signs of something meaningful for the years to come. TikTok is experiencing the heady combination of both serious user growth AND also the sort of cult-usage which marked out Twitter and Vine back in their early days. Instagram, despite being a juggernaut, never quite had the explosive meme content which allows you to spot platforms going hyper. Snapchat never quite made it happen (maybe it yet will: spoiler – it won’t). So what was happening? Well, a summary of key things we picked up: Boris beat Corbyn for interest. Note interest and support are not neccessarily the same, but as measured by views on hashtags, the blonde bombshell edged it The finest traditions of politicial satire were alive and well in content formats Policy featured surprisingly highly There were some kids who back the Tories. Seriously The best performing were funny, not angry. Angry, ranty TikToks (this time round firmly belonging to Corbyn-backers) routinely delivered fewer relative engagements than those using satire to make their point Personalities worked – i.e. people transferring typical celeb-fandom tropes to politicians Scale-wise, TikTok was hardly blowing up with election fever. That being said, for a relatively nascent platform, it had some scale, delivering impressions in the millions. Certainly showing more political tone than Instagram, I’d pick it to be a feature of issues-based campaigning over the next few years #election #politics #tiktok #trends

Our co-founder, Alex, recently wrote a blog for the brilliant people over at comms consultancy, Fourteen Forty, about the impact of digital campaigning on the UK election. Head over to their blog to read the full piece. “Covfefe”. Even typos can structure a news cycle, when you’re a tweeting president. Such is the impact of digital tools on our political discourse, strategy and tactics, that the 2019 general election looks set to be the first principally digitally driven UK campaign. This is against a backdrop of allegations of foreign interference, illegality and general mania about anything involving the word ‘data’. But how did we get here, and what can it point to about how we shape a better political future? Read on…

Sarah here! It’s been six months since I wrote my last article on ‘Podcasts to get you through the day’, and since then I’ve had numerous friends, colleagues and clients tell me they loved the recommendations (you’re welcome!), plus quite a few who shared their own podcast faves. So in the lead up to the Christmas holidays, also known as a week of prime listening time, it feels like a good opportunity to update you with a few new listens below – and don’t forget to read the original list here. Ologies- It’s fun to learn and science is cool. Fact. A ‘comedic science’ podcast from Alie Ward, and the perfect listen if you’ve got an hour to waste and want to learn something new. Pro tip: listen to ‘Osteology’ aka the science of skeletons – fascinating. Startup – in a startup or want to know the inner workings of what goes on when you’re setting up a business? Go for a pint/wine with Alex or Katie. Not got the time or appetite for that? Listen to startup and follow Alex Blumberg as he sets up his podcast empire, Gimlet media (those who read my last blog post will know I listen to almost all of their podcasts). DTR – the show all about dating. Great for smug couples who want to date vicariously through single people, DTR is not only full of great stories, but is a prime example of how brands can do branded podcasts in a way that doesn’t feel like marketing overload. This one’s a hookup (see what I did there) between Gimlet media and Tinder – alas it’s a couple of years old and they don’t seem to have another series en route, but it’s good for a laugh (and the marketing research, obviously). Read what the Guardian has to say about it here. Tailenders – a recommendation from Alex and Olivia in the office. A load of indie lads chat cricket. V English. The High Low – if you’re a woman on the internet between 20 and 40, you probably listen to this one already, so I apologise if I’m preaching to the converted – The High Low is full of news, drama and general chit chattering from authors Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes. I actually don’t listen to this one any more, but everyone I ever meet seems to, so give it a go. The Horror of Dolores Roach – listen, I never said this list was going to be all smart stuff. This one blurs the boundaries between audiobook and podcast, a gruesome fictional tale told over 30 minute minisodes. It’s got empanadas, cannibalism and gritty New York horror. What more could you want!? On that note… I think a new list of audiobook recommendations is up next… Sarah #podcast #podcasts

Being digitally inclined can lead you to a plethora of opportunities in today’s digitalised era. Hike up your employability—in any field—by hiking up your know-how with the best digital skills to learn today. Learn which of the 5 types of digital skills can help you get a leg-up in your career, as well as how you can start your digital skills training in this quick and easy read. Coding With an increasing amount of businesses (in or out of the tech sector) who rely on computer coding, it’s safe to say that code is the language of the future. According to a report from a job market analytics firm, Burning Glass, there are about 7 million job openings in 2015 which require coding skills. Candidates vetting for a position as data analysts, artists, designers, and engineering need to learn how to code—even just the basics. That said, coding has become a valuable digital skill that can open more job opportunities for you. To get started,  you can opt for free digital skills training courses in coding from online platforms like Coursera and Github. Digital Advertising Social media is one of the most powerful platforms businesses use to interact with and attract their target audience. Although just about anyone can have a social media account, it’s not as easy as it looks. According to Left Bank, marketing hiring trends in 2018 state that 69 per cent of companies plan to hire more digital marketers. Among the most in-demand digital marketing skills include digital advertising (45 per cent), followed by content creation (42 per cent), and content strategy (39 per cent). To effectively utilise social media as a marketing platform, learning skills in digital advertising is a must. Having one of the top digital skills under your arsenal gives you an edge in the workforce. If you want to start your digital skills training, Udemy teaches digital skills online, including digital advertising. Analytics The future belongs to people that can adapt quickly. In this case, at least possessing the basic digital skills to have an edge above the rest. Data analytics is one of the examples of digital skills that give anyone an immediate edge. Having the right and timely information (and acting on them) can spell the difference between survival or extinction in today’s dog-eat-dog world of fast-changing markets. In recent years, data analytics has risen as one of the top digital skills as the demand spiked in proportion to companies make the move from solely selling products to crafting personalised customer experiences. According to a recent McKinsey report, the United States alone already face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 analytical professionals. That said, it has become a minimum requirement for decision-heavy and managerial-level positions. Give yourself a career edge, and learn this top digital skills through Coursera. Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as paid search, is one of the digital skills examples that help sway a customer’s buying decision—meaning increased sales if applied correctly and effectively. SEM is simply one of the most influential and highly competitive disciplines today. Its role for digital retailers is so important. To put things in perspective, most of a business’ eCommerce traffic starts with the search engine with 67% of the traffic goes immediately to the first five of the search engine results page (SERP). Over the years, the landscape for SEM became increasingly more cutthroat and complex that both learning and teaching digital skills in Search Engine Marketing have a high demand. Stay above the competition and start now, learn SEM courses that Udemy offers. Cloud Computing Over the years, the cloud computing market has risen into popularity around the globe, becoming a top business solution. This fast-growing industry has attracted many global investments. Particularly,  the UK plans to spend $10B on cloud computing this year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) predictions. With so much promise for cloud computing, it is a great industry to get into for IT professionals. In fact, a report from a Forbes article states, the worldwide public IT cloud service revenue will rise from $127 billion back in 2018 to $167 billion by next year (2020). Start now, google digital skills training to get started. Learn digital skills from the aforementioned sites like Udemy, Coursera, and Github.Ready for your next tech project? Assemble your team from a pool of the best tech talents at cost-effective rates with Cloud Employee.

If you follow us regularly, you know that we at OneFifty do thing differently. We don’t do dress-down Fridays (every day is a day where we dress like the people we are) and we don’t need the pub at 4 (because WeWork is providing free beer every day – yes you read correctly). Instead, we are big Friday Hooray-ers! Friday Hooray a 15-20 minutes session that Sarah introduced back in October last year. The purpose is to share our highlights and learnings with each other, each week. A lot of projects we do are advanced data analysis and brand sensitive, so we can’t always shout about them in public, but every Friday afternoon we take the time to learn and celebrate what we have achieved together. It does a lot for us as a team, some things are obvious and some are surprising. Let’s have a look at what the data says about our Friday Hoorays: Below’s a word cloud with all our weekly highlights. You’re looking at 219 anonymised data lines – or all the things that the team mentioned as being their winner each week. The three obvious ones are standing out: We’re a positive bunch of people – half of our top 10 most mentioned words are positive: happy, good, enjoyed, and great. I know this word cloud is biased and only showing the weekly highlights, but nonetheless is it showing very strong emotive words We’re passionate about our client work – clients are frequently mentioned as a highlight each week. But what we equally love is our team lunch on Thursdays;) We enjoy doing what we’re best at: social, content, campaigns, influencers, data and reports (wait, who said that??) And this wouldn’t be a OneFifty blog post if we weren’t looking at what the data actually tells us about human behaviour (or what it doesn’t)… Feedback – a thing that we strongly believe in at OneFifty is instant feedback. Looks like people are actually valuing this, to make their work the best they can Best/ satisfying – our work is excellent because that’s the standard we set for ourselves. Seems like this isn’t something we are just preaching, but what makes people actually feel proud Different/ feeling – as I said earlier, there’s a OneFifty way to do things. Being different isn’t something you can learn, it is something that we live and feel So, try putting the yay into Friday yourself, and see what it tells you… Anne-Catherine

We’re feeling hot, hot hot. And it’s not the fact it’s currently 27 degrees outside (although that is contributing). You might remember that last year we featured on the Startups 100 list – an annual ranking of the UK’s newest and most exciting businesses. Well, we’ve made it for a second year running! It’s the one award that we said would mean the most to us when we set up OneFifty because it’s not just confined to the marketing and comms industry but all startups. So the fact we’ve been named on it twice is a huge achievement. We’re now in our third year of using data understanding and human behaviours to have more effective brand and commercial interactions with the people who actually matter. We’ve stayed true to our word from the very beginning: Opinions don’t matter, facts do. Being genuinely effective means looking at the evidence of how people live today – and challenge ourselves and others to prove it. We want to say a very big and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has worked with and for us – the Architect’s of Next who have joined us on our journey. Now, we are all about the data, so here’s our journey so far in numbers: 46 brands worked with 21 members of the OneFifty team (and 1 dog for a little while) 5 offices because we keep growing out of them 460,200 messages sent on Slack 11 WeWork cards misplaced We’ve got so much more we want to achieve, and more people to bring on our journey, so if you have 2 minutes and you know someone who we should be chatting to, we’re right here! Or just give us a shout out on social, we always love that. #winning #startups100 #award #growing #awards #Business #startups

There we said it. It’s a dirty concept. Verboten, ‘other’, naive. But, for all the challenges it presents, social media is about progress. About emancipation from control of information, about empowerment of individuals, about the irrecoverable movement toward meritocracies. Call me (us) idealistic? Fair. Call us negative, quitters, cynical? NEVER. Social media, for all the challenges, retains the transformative power to empower individuals, concepts and economic efficiency. That’s worth standing up for. Headlines about “social media fatigue” are just that – usage has never been higher. People aren’t quitting in droves, they’re refocusing on their usage. We are a population in control and cognisant. That’s to be celebrated not critiqued. Vested interests aren’t going to tell you that. This is the opening act. And we’re clapping loudly.

Advance Together was set up in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, with the aim of creating a political party for people, not politicians. It wanted to address the issues facing the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea by having local people represented by local people, with a new form of politics. This is how we worked with them in the run-up to the May local elections. THE BACKGROUND Kensington and Chelsea has some of the biggest disparities between rich and poor in the country; It has the highest gap between the median and mean salaries in the country, with a £90,000 difference between the two In Notting Dale, 34% of children live in poverty, compared to <10% in most other wards This, combined with Grenfell, proved that something had to be done. People were fed up with the status-quo; Recent events at the 2016 General Elections saw Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour on the march, with a 10% swing in votes from Tory to Labour and the first Labour MP sitting in the seat since its creation Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea became a battleground at Local Elections; Labour and opposition parties looked to exploit Tory weaknesses, whilst the Tories desperately sought to maintain influence OUR OBJECTIVES Starting from scratch, Advance had three clear objectives to measure success by: Change the discussion around local politics: Instead of being driven purely by national issues, it wanted to bring the conversation back to local issues Get local people engaged in the discussion and issues in the borough: Grenfell had highlighted just how out of touch the Council had become from many of the ordinary voters. Advance wanted to increase engagement with the political system especially in the poorest boroughs where turnout was under 30% in 2014 Get candidates elected into office: the initial aim was to win between 1-3 seats across the borough WHAT WE DID IN SOCIAL The diverse nature of Kensington and Chelsea’s different wards, combined with a limited social budget, meant that a blanket paid-for social approach wasn’t going to be possible. To make sure the right creatives were being delivered to the right wards, we: Tested the response rate across every ward in the borough, narrowing down the wards we then tested variables with from fifteen, down to three Tested party messages vs. topic-led posts with the three wards, to understand what resonated best, discovering that topic-led content performed 40% better on a CPM basis Having discovered that topic-led content performed best, we set out to find which of the campaign topics, out of Schooling, Housing, Governance, Accountability and Air Quality, would resonate best. We found that there was little variance between topics Tested which formats (video vs. image) performed best. As we wanted to get the party message ‘out there’, we prioritised CPM over CPE for these tests, discovering that video-based content was more effective than image-based posts RESULTS & LEARNINGS Campaign Results Across the campaign, we reached 184,900 individuals, within the targeted area. Given that the 2011 census put the populations the borough at 160,000, we are confident that nearly everyone in the borough would have seen an Advance Together post in the run-up to the elections People watched our content for a cumulative time of 117 hours 1,000 click-throughs to the Advance Together website Voter turnout increased by an average of 9% across the ward On election day, Advance took 9% of the vote across the wards that they ran in. An impressive result but unfortunately not enough to break the two-party dominance of the current council Provable effect on votes cast In the aftermath of the election, we wanted to know if we could see any relationships between vote share and seeing one of our adverts online. Because the vote tallies for each ward were published we had a great data set to look into the effectiveness of our campaign on driving vote share We ran a linear regression model to see if views, engagements, or reach helped drive votes We found that there was a significant relationship between vote share and reach (significant at the 0.01 level) – essentially a statistically provable relationship between social media outcome and electoral outcome Shaping the debate: what did we learn about who took part in the conversation? We explored whether Advance was a significant part of election debate by tracking the conversation throughout April and May and found that: The official Advance account was second-most influential within this conversation Three of the top 12 accounts were Advance candidates The appearance of several personal accounts within the top 12 reiterated the need for candidates to push the party message, demonstrating that they are the most likely to get cut through within this conversation We were also mentioned by some prominent celebrity Labour supporters, the most notable being Lily Allen, who had a significant network effect. This Tweet was one of the most discussed and most influential and shows how well Advance did in gaining cut through Below is a graph of the most influential accounts within this conversation, measured by a variety of factors such as: how many times an account mentions a key term, follower interaction with tweets, and the number of followers of that account. What are the learnings which other progressive political organisations could deploy? We found that there were a variety of learnings that could be applied to other progressive political campaigns wishing to use social to help mobilise support: Campaign messages need to resonate: Our most successful messages were edgy, with this type of content outperforming on a CPM and CPE basis by some margin (+70%) Online buzz does not necessarily result in votes: 477 people talking about the election had Labour in their bio, compared to six for Tory or Conservative. This means people were 53x more likely to identify as a Labour supporter than a Tory. This was not reflected in final results, where the Tories made gains People respond to people: content needs to be authentic, with the candidates and issues concerned being key, not production values CONCLUSION What was so fascinating about this project was that it demonstrated statistically, there was a clear relationship between being seen online and the amount of votes cast for particular candidates. However, in order to be seen, brands must understand not only who their audience is, but also how and why they consume, share and act on online content, in order to maximise effectiveness. We have been able to prove a clear model for alternative political movements to drive political change.