I am a student at Nottingham Trent University, studying Product design. I have just started a 9-month placement as part of a 4-year sandwich course. During my year out I have carried out a months work experience at the studio 4, 5 months part time work in retail and I am just starting a 9 month placement back here with the studio 4.

Many university courses offer 4-year sandwich courses, which include a placement year. Placement years do help to prepare you for the world of work as long as you find a placement!

Finding a placement

This is a lot harder than what I originally thought. Universities advertise placements but you’re most likely not the only university who will be applying for the positions available. The amount of people applying for the placement on your course x how many other universities … [Read More]

He said identifying the next big thing was as much down to probability and predictability than a sixth sense. You look at current trends and how they are evolving for an insight into what might happen next.

I likened his role to BBC’s Tomorrow’s World programme, which served up a tantalising glimpse into the future that in hindsight was not always very accurate. But he shook his head and claimed to be far more conservative in his predictions than the BBC show ever was.

I was reminded of that encounter during the last few weeks as I took a look around Pinterest.

It is relatively new on my social media radar, but the site is actually two years old. Not exactly the new kid on the social media … [Read More]

On Saturday, The Studio 4 became the main focus for a photo shoot, showing off our fantastic new Faber EOS roller blinds that were installed earlier in January.

Having moved into our new third floor offices in September last year, we were in desperate need for our new blinds due to the sun coming in and glaring all our screens from lunchtime every day.

Faber’s EOS system solved our problem, as it’s flexible enough to be adapted to a wide range of styles and sizes and in our case was fitted to twenty large and four small windows. This included in our boardroom, which had to have the blackout option installed to make our presentations come alive.

Preparation started on our offices about two weeks before the shoot with the organisation of professional cleaning of the metal columns around the windows and the actual windows being cleaned inside and out … [Read More]

And it is certainly true when it comes to doing business online. Standing still online is never an option.

Change is good. Change is what we should all embrace.

Yes, I know, that’s all well and good in theory but when it comes to practice we all have a certain amount of fear and loathing when it comes to change.

If we encounter something new when we ae expecting the familiar, our first impressions are not always positive. In fact, they can be downright hostile.

That is just as true online, witness the fall-out from any new developments and announcements from our favourite search engines or social networking sites. Twitter’s recent announcement on the “open exchange of … [Read More]

Social networking has changed the way many firms handle customer service. And those same social networking sites have given other firms the type of PR headaches they have spent years studiously trying to avoid.

Learning how to make best use of social networking sites is vitally important these days. A growing number of companies are taken a carefully considered and measured approach to using social media channels to interact with their customers…and even to like them.

These companies are actively engaging in a very public conversation with people who buy their products and services, causing a mini revolution in terms of traditional customer service.

Social networking is revolutionising customer service. There are more and more examples of companies using Twitter to deal with individual customer complaints and get important product messages out to the public as quickly … [Read More]

Here’s what we think you should have on your radar.

1. Invest in content

We find that a lack of good quality content is the single biggest marketing barrier that our clients face on a day to day basis. Content more often than not ends up in a rush job with that empty feeling of “things could have been so much better”, or it is written by your marketing agency with very little client input provided. It is important that you realise it is you that live and breathe your products or services so you … [Read More]

So you’ve got your great looking website with fantastic content that’s optimised accordingly now what? Well the next step in SEO is link building to your site. In Google’s eyes what other people say about you is extremely important and this is where links from other sites come into play.

If your using a SEO company like us for your optimisation you will hopefully have started to rank however to get above your competitors we will need to build the reputation of your site. One of the major areas of reputation building is creating lovely links from great sites that Google will see as valuable sources.

So.. How do we create these back links?

There are various types of links that you can get and they all require different attentions:

Editorial Accumulation

These are links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to reference your … [Read More]

The subject matter of the blogs was not the issue. The poor spelling, grammar and overall style of many of the individual posts was, however, proving a major source of distraction and irritation.

It wasn’t just me complaining, regular readers were not impressed either. When such mistakes were pointed out, apologies were forthcoming…initially.

But there came a point when the newspaper, the bloggers and their editor went on the offensive and stopped apologising for the regular mistakes. “The rules have changed,” I was reliably informed. “This is blogging, it isn’t journalism. So that stuff about spelling and grammar doesn’t always matter these days.”

My argument did not change. It came down to … [Read More]

For example, if you spend an hour searching on Google (while you are signed in to a Google account) for the latest iPhone, the next time you log into YouTube, you might get recommendations for videos featuring the iPhone, along with ads for the iPhone and the nearest place to buy them.

These changes will  take effect on March 1, and Google will be notifying users today via email and a notice on their homepage.

How is this different from what Google was doing before?

Google has always collected this sort of information, for example, you may have noticed … [Read More]

If SOPA passes in its current state it would mean new web based companies that focus on user content and social media would have an incredibly hard time getting off the ground.  This is mostly due to them starting with a small work force and minimal resources … [Read More]