The Future of Social Web: Facebook’s Vision for Brands being Social Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TFMA) Earls Court, London, Wednesday 2nd of March 2011 Where to start? Facebook, the sexiest of digital brands and the social-networking trailblazer, give a keynote at TFMA 2011. This blur Group blogger managed to acquire a seat without too [...]

Would you read Oliver Twist or Animal Farm over and over? If you’re a fan of Dickens or Orwell, perhaps you would. Would you read blur Group blog posts over and over? Well, we think the more appropriate question would be why wouldn’t you peruse our prose again and again and again…just in case you [...]

One of a marketer’s rites of passage is writing their first agency brief. It might be to kick off a campaign or to test out a new agency as part of a beauty parade. Briefs take a lot of thought. The right brief leads to the right campaign leads to the right results. But have [...]

blur Marketing took the FT Digital Media conference social. blur’s Crowds and clouds jazzed things up at the eventful conference and ricocheted speakers perspectives across the Twittersphere and social networks. Read all about it here.

The marketing services industry is changing. Big agencies are getting it from all sides. Google has eroded their media buying divisions. Social media is challenging their PR departments, while YouTube is confusing the hell out of TV advertising production. And mobile marketing – well that’s a whole new game of tennis.

blur Marketing has just launched the all new, dancing and singing blur-Marketing.com. Check in. ‘Need a (marketing) campaign?’

We redisigned blur Marketing’s Facebook fan page. Here’s how you can improve yours. Use this great article on creating the perfect Facebook Fan page. We followed the step by step guide so check how it looks on our beloved blur Marketing fan page. Using ‘image real estate optimization’ we developed a custom badge for the [...]

“I don’t have enough time for twitter, Facebook or blogging.” What if it paid back 200% of your time invested? Photo by Marchin Chady via Flickr ‘Not having enough time for social media’ sounds like the title of a summer song. You listen to it again and again, without asking yourself why. Maybe we should [...]

The crowd is flexing its muscles. Take a look at these terrific projects. We’re constantly amazed by what collectives of talented individuals can now achieve so we banged together this video assemblage for a visual share on how crowds are changing the rules forever. 10. I’ve Got Nothing – a crowdsourced song. Just hit the [...]

Have you looked into Facebook Advertising to promote your business? Photo by ugo90 via Flickr There is an untold story about Facebook Ads. While most businesses are focusing on Google Adwords for PPC, truth is that those experiencing Facebook are getting positive results. Seomoz.org recently looked at the benefits of ‘in-depth’ targeting and re-published Nielsen’s [...]

We take a fairtrade approach to managing our crowds. We also understand what its like for people going out on their own and devised bulletproof processes to make sure that your rights as an independent contractor are taken care of. Mainly to avoid the following:

Photo by Deemonita via Flickr We were avidly re-reading this article from March about the future of PR by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research. We felt a bit of an issue with the use of the word ‘agency’. We feel that the future (or the present of blur Marketing) is actually communities representing communities. The [...]

blur Designs traveled over to the trendy Shoreditch House last night to see their latest Human Brand project, Rabia. Here she is singing ‘Fronting’. It was a great gig and the crowd loved her. blur Designs is onto the next stage of Rabia’s Human Brand, watch this space!

Mashable’s Brandon Mendelson posted an interesting collection of tips on how to grow your crowd. At blur Marketing growing crowds is not only critical to what we do, but also central to how we engage with our clients. Photo by ppdigital via Flickr We enjoy reading this and participated in the discussion. How are you [...]

At blur Group we talk about our passion for focused crowds. When we look at other crowdsourcing initiatives such as Threadless or Wikipedia we are all impressed by the number of people participating and joining every day. But these are large, one off projects and supporting crowds. Photo by Ma1974 via Flickr Does Size matter [...]

Photo by boskizzi via Flickr Building our crowd is a fundamental daily activity of blur Marketing. Identifying a focused crowd of talented people is no easy task. Talent is sometimes present in the so called amateur, which is increasingly beating the professional. We are currently building an army of talented marketing people, regardless of their [...]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pRQYAZUahSA" width="440" height="270" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /] Entrepreneurs chat at the latest blur’d event about why they became Entrepreneurs and what their biggest issue is right now. Check out – http://innovatrs.com

The definition of Fairtrade is clear: “Fairtrade is a strategy for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Its purpose is to create opportunities for producers and workers who have been economically disadvantaged or marginalized by the conventional trading system. If fair access to markets under better trade conditions would help them to overcome barriers to development, [...]

It’s the buzz word of the moment. Some see it as an opportunity, others as a threat. Some think they are experts, others actually are. Truth is that little is known about Social Media. We are all learning about how masses use media, but mostly we are gaining knowledge about ourselves. Because Social Media is [...]

Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly accepted term with examples bandied about such as Google using the analysis of Web links to crowdsource their search engine, Wikipedia crowdsourcing the planet to build the largest encyclopedia and Threadless crowdsourcing approaching a million people to design t-shirts. But what is the future of crowdsourcing? Well, we think it’s [...]

We have powerful ideas in mind for September. We are aiming to expose pressing business issues and get fellow entrepreneurs to help. We feel it would be disconnected from our way of doing things if you were not involved in the process. We want your opinion and our next event is about that, brainstorming on [...]

As blur Group gets more of a following we increasingly get asked why what we are doing is important. It is both a fundamental and complex question to answer. I have spent the last ten years building large communities and marketplaces on the Web – consumer facing, business facing and some that mash both up. [...]

At blur we are committed in providing spaces for people to gather and start compelling projects. Our online communities revolve around this concept. We considered to push the idea forward. We started blur’d, a London Meetup for Entrepreneurs, Digital Directors and Innovation Officers. We thought it was a great idea to offer an offline space [...]

At blur Group we really believe in doing things differently. It’s not only a nice statement, it’s a fact. Our company website runs on WordPress Our Intranet is a Ning website, where you can join and mingle with the team. Our initiatives are crowdsourced, but we are more than just a marketplace. We think that [...]

blur Group is hosting the first in a series of entrepreneur meetups in London tomorrow night, June 30th. blur’d Meetups are designed for interesting entrepreneurs launching or running somewhat disruptive and innovative ventures. blur’d also lets in select digital directors and innovation officers from large companies. They plan to do monthly, invitation only get togethers in [...]