As a driven entrepreneur who is passionate about her business, Jennie is always striving to ensure that Kids Allowed deliver the best possible childcare to children and parents. In this first video blog, Jennie challenges the priority that her industry places on Ofsted ratings and outlines Kids Allowed strategy for the future, one clearly focused on putting children at the core of everything her business does.

Jennie shared her first CEO video blog on the Kids Allowed website home page, news page,  Facebook page and Twitter account.

Find out more about Jennie Johnson and Kids Allowed.

A great way of celebrating and engaging employees was demonstrated earlier in March this year when South Norfolk Council held their annual GEM staff awards – (GEM – Go the Extra Mile) – we captured the essence of the event for them producing a video of the evening’s highlights, that the council was then able to share with a wider audience on their website and social media channels – check it out below.

Find out more about South Norfolk Council.

The East Sussex village of Winchelsea was the slowest, with an average speed of 1.1Mbps, according to uSwitch. Hereford was the slowest city, with average speeds of 3.1Mbps.

The government wants to see super-fast broadband as the gold standard in most UK homes, and has pledged to make the UK the fastest broadband nation in Europe by 2015. By that time, it also promises to make sure that all homes have speeds of at least 2Mbps.

The uSwitch data – based on 1.68 million speed tests carried out over the last six months – suggests that there could still be some way to go.

Other towns and cities to offer average broadband speeds of below 5Mbps include Kilmarnock (3.2Mbps), Dumfries (3.6Mbps), Canterbury (4Mbps) and Shrewsbury (4Mbps).

Fast pipes

The government has provided £530m to help local councils fill in the UK’s blackspots. Cumbria, which has several areas in the top 10 slowest postcodes, received the biggest amount, with more than £17m to cope with its 96% of homes eligible for subsidies. Councils will have to put some of their own money towards the costs, and some have been slow to get the projects off the ground.

For those in well-connected postcodes, the news is much better. Both Virgin Media and BT have recently turned up the speed dial on their broadband services. Virgin announced that broadband with speeds of up to 100Mbps was now available to 10 million homes, while BT pledged to offer some homes speeds of up to 300Mbps by 2013.

Source: BBC News

Activity was buoyed by the facts that many users received new devices for Christmas and firms offered discounted apps over the holiday period. The US was responsible for nearly half of the downloads, followed by China and the UK.

With 81 million downloads, the UK easily surpassed Canada (41 million), Germany (40 million) and France (40 million). It was beaten to second spot by China with 99 million downloads. The US was out ahead with 509 million.

Flurry thinks this level of download activity will become more standard. “Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one billion download barrier per week will become more commonplace,” the firm said in its blog… “While [Apple] iOS and [Google] Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent.”

Unsurprisingly, Christmas proved a boom time for device makers. Flurry estimated that nearly seven million Android devices and iPhones were activated on Christmas Day. Apple does not disclose such figures but Google confirmed that more than 3.7 million Android devices were activated over the Christmas weekend.

Source: BBC News

Highlights include:

To support the web video case study, LGE also asked us to produce an audio podcast that features in-depth interviews with key members of the Croydon team, who outline in detail their process and recommendations for others about to embark on a similar programme – you can listen to the 25 minute podcast here.

I’m a big fan of brands promoting their social media profiles offline and spotted an excellent example this week when unpacking the family ‘big shop’ (thank you Peter Kay)!

The brand I’m applauding is Yorkshire Tea – who produce my favourite decaf tea bags. As you can see in the photo below, once I opened  the box and lifted the lid, my eyes were met by a clear call to action to link up with Yorkshire Tea on Facebook – which I subsequently did!

I think Yorkshire Tea did a number of things right here:

• They picked a smart place on the packaging to promote their Facebook page – there was no way I was going to miss this message when I opened the box – and to me it almost has more impact because I wasn’t expecting it – which wouldn’t have been the case if they had just printed it on the outside of the packaging
• They also used the magic combination of 1. A clear call to action (Come and see what’s brewing on) 2. The correct Facebook logo (according to Facebook’s brand usage guidelines) and 3. An easy to find brand page name www.facebook.com/yorkshiretea

Nicely done Yorkshire Tea team – I’m off for a cuppa!

So the last couple of weeks have been pretty manic from a Facebook perspective – numerous updates across the platform including the big news about the all new Facebook ‘Timeline’ replacing the current profile layout.

The new timeline is due to be rolled out across accounts from 04th October 2011 – but if you’re super keen and want to upgrade to the new timeline now, you can – it’s pretty straightforward and this great video walks you through how to do it.

I did it a couple of days ago, my initial reaction to the new timeline is really positive, I’m a big fan of chronology as a way of organising things anyway, so this layout really feels comfortable for me – it’ll be interesting to see how it goes down with other Facebook users, maybe it’ll even encourage some people to switch to Google+ which is now open to all.

What do you think about the new Facebook timeline?

We published our latest web video last week for long term client The PPMA (Public Sector People Managers’ Association).

The online video (see below – running time 4 minutes 30 seconds) features a ‘talking heads’ style interview with current PPMA President Anne Gibson, who outlines her thoughts on the key issues facing the Association and its members over next 18 months and she also comments on how public sector cuts are affecting capability within organisations and what the future impact will be.

We managed the entire production process of the web video including planning, filming, editing, encoding and uploading of the final film to the PPMA’s new website, YouTube channel, Facebook page and Twitter account.

The aim of the video is threefold, firstly to bring the current president’s agenda to life and introduce her to the wider HR community, secondly to engage PPMA’s online community across both it’s main website and social channels and thirdly to improve their new website’s SEO – video is a great tool for achieving this according to leading global research company Forrester, who in 2010 identified that a website with a video is 53 times more likely to come up on a first page result on Google than the exact same page without video - sobering stuff!

I saw this great video earlier this week – not only is the message powerful, but it’s really cleverly done. Hope you like it too!