Weekly Round-Up: Hello Lamp-Post, Re-Imagining Content and a Skateboard Pizza

by
GWS Team

19th July 2013 0 comments

Astro Dog Gromit in Millennium Square, Bristol

We adore Bristol all year round but it flourishes with activity during the summer when the sun bounces around the harbourside with the anticipation of a new event or festival pretty much every week.

The Gromits around the city have been basking in the sun and attracting many visitors as well as artists; here is some great Gromit photography, images of a lone Gromit at London Paddington Station and a get well card for a missing Gromit in Bristol.

Giant Gromit sculptures are not the only objects animating the city this summer; Bristol's Playable City Award for the Hello Lamp Post project by PAN studio involves speaking to lampposts and text conversations with bus stops and post boxes. This weekend you can join the Bristol Cycle Festival which is part of the second Make Sunday Special event and includes the cycling carnival - Carnivelo. More festivals to see include the Bristol Shakespeare Festival and next weekend the Bristol Harbour Festival, which returns with a fireworks display for its finale.

This week at GWS we've been testing new sites for clients including ONA, Oasis and Kents Direct. We also met with Mensa International, the High IQ society, the Manufacturing Advisory Service and ONA - the Network Cabling Experts.

Social Media and Online Marketing for Businesses:

Jeff Bullas provides some fascinating global statistics and usage facts, figures and graphs for the top 5 social media networks, revealing Facebook to be the most globally used with high engagement. The use of Twitter, however, is still increasing and here you can find some tips on how to improve your re-tweet rate by adding things like links and hashtags.

Hashtags can also be used on Google+, and along with the use of images, circles, communities and hangouts; Google+ can generate great engagement for businesses and brands - as suggested by Social Media Examiner. For bloggers, these ideas to make guest blogging more powerful include focusing on contextual links and linking to other guest blogs you have submitted. Another way to get the most out of time spent on content marketing is reusing or re-purposing material, as explained by Heidi Cohen, with ideas on transferring or re-imagining content into various formats.

Art, Design and Technology:

Some interesting designs we came across this week include this bendable smartphone watch for the future, this versatile modular shelving design and a spell checking pen which vibrates when a written mistake is made.

These unusual and wacky summer accessories also caught our attention, including an air conditioned shirt, a solar powered bikini and a mermaid tail swimsuit.

More creative designs we found this week include this pizza slice skateboard which looks like a triangular piece of pizza, and these miniature paper sculptures of every day scenes housed within representations of modern technology.

To end, here's a fun Friday animation, written by Conor Finnegan and featuring a bird who is afraid of flying: