The one about solving an industry problem and then reducing the factors contributing to the very existence of that problem, rather than purely capitalising on it remaining.

The one about not being a one-trick pony, but of creating a widely admired legacy of constant innovation and high standards in business, and of earning the trust of the marketplace.

And it’s the one with the good news that we need more amazing people to join us in doing all this, making our Ve exciting dent in the data-driven services universe.

If you care about how you want to feel when you come into work, when you pick up the phone, when you make that sale, design that interface, build that app, collect that award. If you want to feel energised on your Sunday nights, you should probably come meet Ve at Chinwag’s Career Day at Digital Shoreditch, London next week.

We’re waiting for you!

This blog will be all about DKNY’s mystery PR girl, an amazing woman named Aliza Licht, and our newfound love for her.

Lindsey was totally inspired by Aliza’s captivating insights and stories as the community manager and two-year mystery girl behind @DKNY on Twitter. As an early-adopter and ultimate pioneer of B2C social media, Aliza encountered every challenge imaginable on her own – and was generous enough to share her personal experiences.

Her first hurdle was understanding the value of social media, why it mattered, how it was worth her time, and what she would get out of it. As an innovative thought leader with a passion for public relations, she was determined to crack the code and appreciate the need for this new service on her own.

Her inclination to take the initiative in establishing a successful social media campaign for DKNY was not only an inspiring story, but it hit home for us at Ve in a very special way. Aliza’s experience with engaging otherwise uncommon users by a shared interest of her own was a true testament to the power of social media togetherness and using social media as a platform for broadcasting both positive news and messages.

Aliza’s unique ability to identify her own thoughts and concepts that would render with random users enabled her to bring people together over a common interest, all the while subconsciously increasing the visibility and awareness of her own brand.

Although Aliza succeeded in implementing an impressive, effective social media strategy for DKNY, she had still failed to reveal herself as the PR girl behind the handle for two whole years! Needless to say, she faced an even greater challenge in deciding how and when to unveil herself to the world.

With tons of anticipation and no lack of uncertainty, Aliza finally came out on YouTube to nearly 380,000 faithful followers. After her long anticipated and popular debut, she still manages to maintain DKNY PR girl, direct the public relations efforts of Donna Karan and balance her own family and children.

As a social media services provider, Ve Interactive was not only moved by her inventive nature, but encouraged to make a similar impact for our company and all of our clients.

Can you spot Ve people?

1. Last-click attribution, the most common measurement model used by marketers, undervalues social media’s role in engaging customers earlier in the buying process.
2. First-click attribution more accurately captures the impact of social media, increasing its value by up to 94%.
3. This increased value may be significant enough to change how marketers prioritise investment in social media sites and allocate spend across digital channels.

That got us thinking. We’re often confronted with anecdotal evidence, for example, that consumers are far more likely to purchase from a traditional e-commerce website than from a company’s F-Commerce platform. So what? That’s probably true, but how many of us have seen a product on Facebook, before going on to make a purchase?

The answer, we’d suggest is ‘most of us’ (if you’re on Facebook!). That’s why a site like Pinterest has, in the space of a year, become the second-biggest driver of traffic to retailers. Pinterest is just a simple (and beautiful) shop window in which we can discover products that we’d otherwise never come across.

The concept is no different to that of a bricks-and-mortar retailer’s window. Do you dress it to entice people through your shop doors, or do you save money on the window display and only cater for those shoppers that decide to come in anyway? We’d argue that the answer’s pretty obvious.

Tools like Google Analytics are now showing the value of a customer’s first click, and those metrics are only going to improve. So, shelve your scepticism and get your stock onto social. It’s worth it.

For more information about how to optimise your social strategy, please get in touch with Ve Interactive.

The UK has 400,000 premises with fibre-optic connections with no targets set to increase that figure. France has 6 million connections already, and is planning to reach 70% of premises nationally by 2020, while Russia has 12 million homes with a fibre-optic service.

Just to put it into context, fibre-optic wires can offer download speeds of up to 1,000Mbps. The copper wires that complete the last leg of the journey into British homes and businesses can reach up to 80Mbps. According to Akamai, Britain’s average download speed is ranked 16^th in Europe. Online growth could stutter and stumble, as a result.

The Government have committed to provide 90% of UK premises with “super-fast” broadband by 2017, but they define that as 24Mbps and over. BT says it’s “not of the school that universal fibre to the premises is the solution.” That’s as may be, but many experts argue that, by 2017, 24Mbps will be super-slow, and that these targets are fulfilling demands of the past.

With the speed that the internet and its accompanying online behavior has changed over the last half a decade, it’s hard not to agree.

Adviser to the last government on broadband infrastructure, Francesco Caio, draws a nice analogy: “If the country is happy to travel at the speed determined by the driver that is fine, if we want to force the driver to accelerate then we have to change the model.”

The technology is there. As digital companies and as a critical factor in the UK economy, we need to put our foot down.

Isso exige investimento. Segundo Reuters, não há dados oficiais para o financiamento do capital no Brasil, mas as evidências sugerem que houve 6 aplicações em 2009, 17 em 2011 e 45 investimentos de capital em 2011. A partir de 2012, mais de doze empresas, incluindo algumas das maiores do mundo, estão querendo depositar seus fundos no empreendedorismo brasileiro.

Ainda há obstáculos para crescer, que sufocam o ecossistema empresarial. SurveyMonkey, reconhece que há uma escassez de serviços jurídicos de baixo custo e uma cultura empresarial que não facilita a promoção fácil. Mas esses são obstáculos que podem e vão ser superados.

O centro tecnológico do Brasil, São Paulo, continua crescendo, Recife, Campinas e a velha cidade mineira Belo Horizonte, onde os edifícios foram degradados para o preenchimento com empreendedorismo digital.

Nós somos o país do futuro!

Hometown Heroes

Mike Krieger is a very wealthy man. The co-founder of photo-sharing site Instagram, recently bought by Facebook for the headline figure of $1billion, has, in an incredibly short space of time, become Brazil’s most successful tech export. Krieger left his homeland to go to Stanford University, before taking up residence, predictably, in San Francisco. Brazil’s challenge now is to grow more tech entrepreneurs and keep them at home.

That requires investment. According to Reuters, there’s no official data for venture capital funding in Brazil, but anecdotal evidence suggests that there were 6 injections in 2009, 17 in 2011 and 45 capital investments in 2011. As of 2012, more than a dozen firms, including some of the world’s biggest, are looking to entrust their funds to Brazilian start-ups.

There are still obstacles to growth, which stifle the entrepreneurial ecosystem. SurveyMonkey reckons that there’s a shortage of inexpensive legal services and a business culture that doesn’t facilitate easy promotion. But these are obstacles that can and will be overcome.

Brazil’s tech centre, Sao Paulo, is continuing to grow, along with satellite hubs like Recife, Campinas and the old mining town Belo Horizonte, where dilapidated downtown buildings have been filled with digital start-ups.

The future’s looking bright!

I detta ögonblick står vi i vår monter på Nordic eCommerce Summit här i Stockholm. Eventet är ett av de största inom e-handel i Europa och vi har träffat många nya potentiella kunder. Vi har även pratat med många av våra existerande kunder och fått väldigt bra feedback och respons på vår produkt. Nordic eCommerce Summit är en av de bästa sammankomsterna för e-handlare och leverantörer i Sverige och i Norden där vi är mycket stolta och glada för att få representera Ve Interactive Nordic.

Idag har vi har lyssnat på många intressanta talare, som pratat om vikten av att mäta och analysera sin data när man driver e-handel! (katchiiing). Vi blir naturligtvis mycket inspirerade av att höra detta eftersom det är precis vad Ve Interactive handlar om!

Här är lite foto från i morse!

Nordic eCommerce Summit 2012 (NES)

At the moment Ve Interactive Nordic is in the middle of exhibiting at the Nordic eCommerce Summit 2012 here in Stockholm. The summit is one of the biggest e-commerce events in Europe and we have met a lot of new potential customers. But not just that, we have also met a lot of our existing customers where we got really good response and feedback of our product. Nordic eCommerce Summit is really “the” gathering for e-retailers and e-marketing suppliers in Sweden and other Nordic countries and we are very happy and proud to present Ve Interactive Nordic.

Today we have been listening to many interesting speeches about the importance for an e-commerce company to measure and analyzing their data to be successful! (katchiiiing) Of course we are very happy to hear that because that is exactly what Ve Interactive is all about!

Here’s a pic from this morning!

So, the stadium wasn’t packed and some of the key players looked like they’d let themselves go a bit, but it was still a great night and a fantastic result for us. The fact that our unique brand of data-driven, online efficiency services was recognised is a real boost. It gives us confidence that we’re approaching online optimisation in the right way – keeping data at the centre of everything we do, from email remarketing to website design and development.

So it’s been a great week, what with the opening of our DACH office in Berlin, our exhibition at the Nordic Ecommerce Summit in Stockholm and the New Media Age Award nomination – the fifth nomination this year – that came through yesterday.

But enough about us, The Drum Marketing Awards were a wonderful celebration and demonstration of all that’s good about marketing. There were some fantastic examples of the industry at its innovative and creative best, but, more importantly, the emphasis was on campaigns, products and services that had delivered. Awards went to companies that had provided real ROI for their clients and customers.

After all, that’s why we’re in marketing, right?

Whether you’re using social media personally or for a company, there are some unwritten rules that all users should be aware of – and, unfortunately tons of terrible antics that disrupt them.

That’s why Ve decided to put together a short list of three bad ways to engage on social media. Regardless of your eager attitude or friendly personality, this type of behavior is never wanted or appreciated to anyone in the world (at least not that we know of). Enjoy!

Automated direct messages are the devil. We’ve all seen them. We’ve never liked them. Our inboxes are full of them. These are from those clueless brands that fail to put themselves in your shoes, and instead act out of theory. Their thinking is that if they thank you for the follow, you would be happy to return their favor(s). The truth? No one wants to do that. And if they did, they would have by now.

Hashtags are bittersweet in many ways. When used correctly, they can be a great source of relevant information for users around the world, and a fun, cool way to start discussions. When used wrong, they can cancel out the entire purpose of an otherwise informative tweet. It’s one thing to use them to start, contribute, or classify information, but it’s something else when they’re super spammy, such as #TeamFollowBack.

The only thing worse than annoying overuse or someone syncing their Facebook account to Twitter is someone purposely using a hashtag on Facebook while knowing it serves no purpose. You wouldn’t bother asking someone to “Like” a tweet, right? There are social media features unique to Facebook and Twitter for a reason, so it makes sense to use them right.

Annoying notifications are the worst. There’s no arguing that the official launch and promotion of an event is something that should be exciting to share and embrace with everyone you know. That said, there’s nothing much more annoying than seeing a red number on the top left of your Facebook, only to click it and find out it’s a mass invite about the opening of an awful new bar or the celebration of a forgotten old acquaintance. As if the only reason you logged in was to be informed of that event. If you truly want to invite someone somewhere: inbox them, text them, or actually pick up the phone and call.

Lucky for Ve, we don’t encounter these annoyances on a regular basis – our Facebook friends and Twitter followers are too awesome! However, we still understand that most social media users will come across these once or twice, so we just wanted to share some sympathy and reassure you that, whether from our London HQ, Boston, Sydney, Stockholm, Sao Paulo or brand new Berlin office, Ve will always treat you how Ve wants to be treated!

What other annoying social media antics have you experienced?

Yesterday we opened our DACH office in Berlin. Today we’re exhibiting at the Nordic Ecommerce Summit in Stockholm. We also had the fantastic news that we’ve been shortlisted for a prestigious New Media Age award for Best Use of Affiliate Marketing and tonight we’re at The Emirates Stadium in London, home to Arsenal FC for The Drum Marketing Awards ceremony, where we’re (rather overwhelmingly!) up for Marketing Services Company of the Year!

{We’re taking our COO along, but please don’t let on that he was previously the Managing Director of Manchester United Interactive or he might get frog-marched out of the Gunners’ hallowed grounds!}

So there’s definitely a spring in our steps at Ve this week, even if spring has well and truly abandoned the northern hemisphere.

As for tonight. Well we’re thrilled to be nominated. But we’re also well aware that the competition is beyond stiff. It’s a roll call of some of the most extraordinary brands and agencies. The truth is, Ve only came out of the gate in late 2009 and so technically, some might say we’re still a start-up! Therefore on that fact alone, tonight marks a HUGE and mind-blowing benchmark in our young career. A very excited Ve will be allowed to stay up late for a chance to meet amazing industry people, cheer inspirational others on and to have fun chinking a few glasses, dancing and celebrating this extraordinary week we’re having. Thank you to The Drum for this amazing opportunity, we’re looking forward to it.