Right folks- it’s competition time!

Premise: we want to do something to mark the launch of our brand spanking new suite of PPC tools. We also want to do our bit to help out with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal, and thought the best way we could do this would be to play to one of our strengths. We’re referring, of course, to the exciting world of PPC advertising.

The genius solution? Read on…

First up: the competition.

You guys compete to write the best PPC ad for charity. That’s the short version…

You (yes, you) write a blog post about the competition and include your ad in the copy- you should link to it in our comments so we know you want to enter. The purpose of your post is to spread the word about the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal- there’s no need to link to our blog (unless you really really want to!). To reiterate: over and above the actual ad campaign, your blog will help raise awareness.

We’ll put all the ad entries into a campaign with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone donation page on World Vision as the landing page- deadline is Friday 13th June.

We’re putting up the budget to run the PPC campaign for a limited time. Obviously the longer we can run the campaign the better as it will lead to more donations (and more statistical significance for the adverts!). So if anyone is interested in contributing to the PPC budget please get in touch.

The ad that performs the best and drives the most amount of traffic wins.

Secondly: the prize.

Not to blow our own trumpet or anything, but this is a pretty cool prize. If your ad performs the best, you will win this rather wonderful collection of goodies:

• A year signed up to our Reputation Monitor tool, pro level.
• 3 months premium membership with the one and only SEOmoz. This prize was kindly donated by SEOmoz (which means we can spend more on the ad campaign!)
• A copy of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day By Avinash Kaushik
• A Distilled hoody (limited edition)
• 3 months free access to Acquisio Search and an Acquisio t-shirt from the nice guys at Acquisio
• 3 months license to Ranksense from Hamlet Batista
• A signed copy of Radically Transparent from Andy Beal
• 2 year subscription to GoStat Pro from Richard at GoStats.com
• We’ll do a follow up post on you and your ad, explaining why we think it got to the top.

Of course, you’ll also be winning in the sense that any efforts you make should be helping to increase the amount of aid going to the cyclone victims in Myanmar (Burma).

Next up: details.

We’re going to foot the bill for the PPC campaign for a short while.

World Vision are a client of ours and we have arranged this one-off PPC campaign with them as a product of our team building day. All ads submitted will have to be run past them first. Using your common sense should be enough to make sure your ad passes muster. Once approved, your ad will be run from either Distilled or World Vision’s Google Ads account.

Ads need to follow the Google Ads format: 25 characters headline (1st line), 35 characters 2nd line, 35 characters 3rd line.

You can submit up to three ads. However, we may have to limit the number depending on the take-up, so make sure you rank your submissions.

The landing page you’ll be sending traffic to is http://www.worldvision.org.uk/.

We’ve decided to just bid on one keyphrase: ‘Myanmar cyclone appeal’

The deadline for submissions is two weeks this Friday- that’s the 13th June.

That’s it folks. Don’t forget to leave a comment with a link to your post and the adverts you want to compete with.

Update

Great feedback from everyone already for this competition, the following people contributed to the ad budget:

• $100 added to the ad budget from David Mihm
• $200 added to the ad budget from Hamlet Batista
• $100 added to the ad budget from Dylan at Brilliant Prints

And the following people have chipped in extra prizes (which I’m inserted into the list above as well):

• 3 months free access to Acquisio Search, as well as a t-shirt form the nice guys at Acquisio
• 3 month license of RankSense Professional from Hamlet Batista.
• Andy Beal has thrown in a signed copy of his book Radically Transparent. Signed! Cool.
• Richard from GoStats.com has given a 2 year Pro subscription.

Awesome!! Thanks very much to everyone who’s donated so far and thanks to all the guys who’ve blogged about it

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Here’s a short video of exactly what we got up to in our team-build-2.0 lunch break last Thursday. Will was the cameraman and Leonie put it all together.

Feat. Duncan (aka The Lunger), Emily (’so, um, what are our aims for this afternoon?’) and Will (’PPC tools!!’). Keep your eyes peeled for the guest appearance (the man next door who quite obviously wishes he worked for Distilled).

For a refresher on what happened last Thursday, check out our Team Building Mission Accomplished post.

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As I twittered earlier today:

If you read one bit of news today, read this: SEOMoz + Distilled

The announcement has just gone out about our really exciting plans for working more closely with our great friends at SEOmoz. We are the first (and only planned) ‘Global Associate’ of SEOmoz and will be working with them on both their public facing site, some PRO services and client work.

Scott has written it all up better than I could hope to, so I suggest the best plan is to head over and read his post. The bit that sums up all of our thinking as much as I think possible is:

We also think they’re a great bunch of guys and we share very similar business philosophies.

Suffice it to say, the feeling’s mutual.

Tom and I are going to be in Seattle for SMX Advanced and will no doubt be around the SEOmoz booth a fair bit (or find me on twitter) if anyone wants to grab me to discuss anything more.

PS Tom wanted the title of this post to be “Distilled acquires SEOmoz”, but I thought I would stick with the truth given current controversy.

Update from Tom: Sean left a comment over on the moz which is just too good not to share:

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This is the final post of what has been a very long day, it started at 7.30am and it’s now 8pm as I’m writing this so over 12 hours today! (Admittedly with a long lunch for BBQ and cricket in the middle). Check out photos from the day over on flickr.

To recap what we’ve done today:

• Published a crap load of blog posts
• Coded the back end of 2 and a bit tools
• Designed and wrote copy for a new section for the Distilled site
• Wrote at least one other blog post which is waiting to go live
• Organised a kick ass competition

So we’re not putting everything live however we’ve pulled out the stops (just 20 mins ago it didn’t look like this was going to happen) we are proud to announce the launch of…

404 Checker

Woop! Check it out at the new PPC Tools Page or directly on the 404 checker page. Sure there’s a few bugs that need ironing out but you can sign up through the form on the right hand side of the page.

Note that because of Google’s API fun and games, we have to request API access and you have to grant it before the tool can actually run. Since we’re now going to the pub, this isn’t going to happen till tomorrow, so you can have a look and gawp and gaze, but can’t actually play until later… Sorry about that. You can sign up though!

The rest of the tools and the competition (which we’re pretty excited about) will be following shortly (probably early next week) so stay tuned!

All in all we’re really happy with what we’ve done today and have achieved a lot so congratulations to the team, Duncan and Andy in particular who have worked their socks off!

Thanks to everyone who followed along on twitter, on flickr and on the blog. You’ve been very helpful and stay tuned for the rest of today’s work going live over the next few days.

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About time for another update then! The day is nearing its close and Andy is pleading not to have to code any more…

We’ve taken it in turn throughout the day to be in control of the office tunes, entertainment hour we called it. This is Rob in uniform:

This is Will in uniform:

Quality tunes from Rob! Not so much from Will who just put Johnny Cash on shuffle… More effort next time Will!

We had a brief interlude around lunchtime for a BBQ which was awesome. Big thanks to Emily for that one. Then we took a quick breather to play some tennis/cricket. Well done to Duncan for hitting the ball over the wall on his first hit! Thankfully we had more than one tennis ball. This is Emily playing tennis/cricket:

We’ve made some great posts throughout the day:

9.45 update

1pm update

Background for the team building day. Mel from Carsonified then wrote about us. Cool!

Rob put out a great piece about how PPC ads would look if run by politicians!. Please digg/stumble this article if you get a chance - I think it’s hilarious!

The eagle eyed among you (and even the ones who were just following along on twitter) will be expecting a competition but unfortunately we’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to launch this as it’s awaiting final sign off from one of the parties involved. We’re very excited about it though - and you’ll get a chance to win lots of cool stuff so stay tuned tomorrow!

So where are we with the PPC tools? Well that’s a good question. It’s been hard work setting everything up but it looks like we’re almost there. Duncan informs me it’s ’sooooo close’. I don’t know if that means it’ll be done today or next week! The designs are coming along well though so things are starting to pull together.

Where will we finish? How many tools will we get live? Will we all just scarper to the pub? Stay tuned to find out! Expect one more update post to round out the day with final results.

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AdWords has become an increasingly useful tool for politicians from all parties to help spread their message. We’d like to share Distilled’s unique insights with you, on how some of the major political parties have run their own AdWords campaigns.

USA:

• Democrats: After spend millions of dollars deciding which of their two best adverts to run; they’ve go no cash left to actually spend on the ‘winning’ ad.
• Republicans: God told them to place ads. Chuck Norris made sure they did.

UK:

• Labour: Their budget is spent on bidding for populist keywords to please unions. Most web-users stopped clicking on their ads in early 2008.
• Tory: Most of their cash was spent on marginal keywords, to ensure Position 1
• Liberal Democrats: Perpetually disappointed that they can’t bid on alcoholic keywords. Drafted an ad about weed during University, but never set it active. Honest.
• Monster Raving Looney Party: Spent the ’80s writing ridiculous creatives, only for Labour to use some of them 10 years later.
• BNP: Didn’t put any text in the ad, to make sure it stayed as white as possible.
• Sinn Fein: British laws demands that their adverts are read by an actor.

Elsewhere:

• EU Commission for Common Agricultural Policy: If you own enough land, they’ll fund your campaign for you.
• Communist Party: Think that all the ad spots belong to them anyway. Party members may place an ad by bribing their seniors with chocolate.
• ZANU-PF: AdWords Campaign Manager says that they’re in position 2; they demand that the international community recognise their advert as position 1.
• Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP Party: Launch with an incredibly successful AdWords campaign, but got distracted by bidding on attractive looking Italian keywords.

Further suggestions welcomed in the comments….

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So we’re nearly 6 hours into our team-building day. Not a lot to show for it yet if you’re watching from the outside beyond a load of twitters (oh, and tom’s if you can persuade him to let you follow him). But beneath the surface, it’s a hive of activity and things are coming along well.

I thought this would be a good time to tell you about where the inspiration for this day came from.

The answer is that I originally had the idea that became team-building 2.0 when I remembered a week-long creativity exercise the cool cats at Carsonified did where they built Hug My Mac in a week.

My original idea got taken and improved a load by the team here and original thoughts have morphed beyond recognition.

In the spirit of giving credit where it’s due, I gave Mel at Carsonified a call to have a chat about what they did. Here is the result of our conversation:

Mel from Carsonified on Team Building

Note that the conversation below is my hurried transcribing of a telephone conversation. It might not be word for word, but I hope I haven’t misrepresented anyone! Any stilted phrasing is entirely my fault in the transcribing as Mel was really articulate and clear…

Hi Mel, could you give us a little bit of background about Carsonified for anyone who hasn’t come across you guys before?

So Carsonified started out from a couple of apps - building up to workshops aimed at specific skills training. Future of Web Apps (FOWA) grew out of that as the first conference in San Francisco with about 500 people in attendance.

The next conference was FOWA London followed by the first Future of Web Design (FOWD) (also in London+)

+ You can read about the fun our guys had at FOWD this year

From there, each event now happens twice a year - once in the UK and once in the states. Events now include FOWA, FOWD, Future of Mobile and one Future of Online Advertising. Coming up next month is Fuel which is aimed at more traditional companies to teach them how to use online tools and harness the power of the web better.

And what apps are you running with these days?

The apps now include Amigo, Dropsend and Eventstream, which is internal only at the moment - it’s an online event booking system which might be white-labeled in the future.

So, what about the team-building day you guys had?

With workloads increasing, it was becoming easy for the whole team to stay with their eyes focussed on their screens - so we thought it would be a great idea to take some time out for team building.

At the beginning of the week, we had no idea what we were doing - it could have been anything. We cleared the week out of our diaries. At the beginning of the week, we had a number of ideas from mini-apps to cards to all kinds of things.

Since we all have shiny macs and iphones, we wanted something to show off that was related to that - which is how we came up with hug my mac. Everyone had a budget of £20 to buy materials and we all had to work individually and build our characters.

Did you promote it externally much?

We used twitter and facebook and obviously wrote about it on the blog. At the end of the week, we told a few people about it and response was hard to believe given it was just to get the team together and building something fun.

There is a website as well isn’t there?

Yes - the website was pulled together in a day - the designer had to build his own hug as well as the website so that was a little crazy. The last hour in particular was crazy - even though everything went really well.

And what has happened to the hugs since?

Each hug was sent out with a little message book. The idea was that it was to be kept for a month and then passed on along with the book. At the end of a year, we’re hoping to get the books back with a record of who’s had them.

Where have you seen them turn up?

At SXSW someone came up to me and showed one of the iphone covers.

Sounds like it has been really cool. Thank you to Mel for giving up a bit of her morning to speak to a crazy guy calling her in a hurry! I’m hoping that we will get to meet the Carsonified team in person sometime soon - consider this an open invitation to give us a shout whenever you are in London guys!

The Carsonified week was a little different to our day, but it sounds like they had a lot of fun, and we are too… I’d recommend getting your boss to go along with something similar. If you can’t do that, maybe you’d rather work at Distilled or Carsonified

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Right. Everything’s going swimmingly. Top of the list of updates: the BBQ’s just kicking off… and it’s looking fiiiine! Team Distilled has a very clear MO when it comes to this sort of thing: good food equals good work.

A quick run-round:

PPC Tools: I’m reliably informed that the PPC tools are coming along nicely. Andy and Duncan are doing some sterling work, and barely whinging at all. Here’s a beta version of kind of graph our PPC Pricing Guide will be able to offer:

Design: Leonie is busy creating masterpieces in the corner. Here’s an idea of what the PPC Pricing Guide’s going to look like:

Blogging: obviously, I’m writing this post…. and we’re progressing fast on some exciting linkbait that will test your skills as writers while simultaneously getting your charity fix for the day. Intrigued? You should be- watch this space…

Music: Some of you may have picked up on the ‘entertainment hat’, modelled here by Tom. To encourage heterogeneity, everyone has their ‘hour’ of entertainment when they can play the music of their dreams. At the moment, we’re on Tom’s ‘Kinda Kinky’ mix. I recommend it. If Anna Karenina was real, alive and could mix- this is the sort of thing she’d be doing.

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Distilled team building day (also known as “needs to be PPCeen to be believed” - blame Lucy) is officially underway. We’ve all been in since silly-o-clock (7.30am) and breakfast has been had. If you’re following along at home check out our photos on flickr

Back to the task in hand, however, we have decided on which tools we’re building. They are as follows. Drum roll please:

404 Checker

This tool is first on the list because it’s the easiest to build. The premise is very simple, the tool simply runs over your account, finds a record of all the landing pages you’re using and checks the status code of those pages, checking for 404 error pages. Why is this important? Well if you’re sending traffic to a 404 page you’re throwing money down the drain! One client account we took over management of recently had spent £5,000 driving traffic to a 404 page……. It’s not big, it’s not clever and it costs you money. Our tool will mean you never do it again! Ciaran, no more worrying about those stubby fingers when writing URLs

Ad Strength Tool

This is the tool I’m most excited about and I think will provide the most value initially. It’s certainly the one I think we’ll use the most internally. This tool compares the performance of all the adverts in an ad group and tells you which are performing better. But not just regular ‘better’, statistically significant better. Oooooh - fancy

Did I mention this tool will run in the background and notify you automatically as soon as statistical significance is reached? Kick-ass!

PPC Pricing Guide

What does this tool do? It makes shiny pretty graphs. Everyone loves pretty graphs! Graphs of what you ask? Well Google will already tell you estimated clicks compared with your bid but it’s a pain to query their tool for all bids so our tool will do that hard work for you and drop the results into a pretty graph. Doesn’t make sense? Don’t worry - it does pretty graphs.

We’ve split up into various teams and we’re hard at work on the different aspects of the tools, designing pages, writing copy, taking photos, wearing silly hats etc etc. Of course the real work is being done by Andy and Duncan who are coding the tools. Mush, mush!

more cat pictures

Yep - that’s Duncan in the pic.

Stay tuned on twitter/blog/interwebs for more updates and if anyone has any feeback please drop it in the comments below.

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Phew - things have been hectic here in the Distilled offices. The team has now grown to 9 (check out the new team pics) and we’ve got a great team. The office is lively and we’ve already had a few fun evenings in the pub as a company.

Not content with that though the powers that be (read: Will and Duncan) have decided it’s about time for us to have a team building day. My idea to go and watch Indiana Jones as a company got overruled and instead we’re going to use this Thursday to build a project from scratch.

We’re Building PPC Tools

So after some brainstorming and a few discarded ideas we settled on building a set of PPC tools into the Distilled site. Why? Well:

1. There’s a gap in the market for small business PPC tools
2. We run a fair amount of PPC campaigns here and they’ll make our job easier
3. We’d like to be able to give something back to the community

Why do you care?

Because you’ll get some free* PPC tools out of it which will be live on the Distilled site and available to use on your own PPC accounts and because we’ll be making it a fun day with live updates via twitter, blogging and there might even be a BBQ (ok, that’s not a reason for you to care but I’m pretty excited about it!)

*- the tools will be free for a little while at least. Perhaps not forever!

So get ready, we’ll be kicking off early on Thursday and making a fair amount of noise about it.

Lastly if you’re currently managing PPC accounts and have a burning need for a tool to make your life better drop us a line or leave a comment below with your idea and you never know you might see it built on Thursday!

If you want to keep in touch on the day we’ll be blogging and livetwitting the event so you can all follow along at home

Since this will most likely be a regular event, if anyone has any ideas for a better name than “team building 2.0 style” then let me know and we’ll send you a cookie in the post.

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