We recently returned from our first trip to South by Southwest Interactive. It lived up to expectations - overwhelming, exciting, eye opening, exhausting and full of amazing people and ideas would all be suitable descriptors of the event.   It's near impossible to summarise the key themes from SXSW as there were thousands of speakers covering topics as diverse as government, entrepreneurialism, startups, culture, entertainment, social media, mobile, retail, gaming, science, space, health and medicine to name a few. The wealth and diversity of content there was literally mind blowing.

Our Strategy Director Ben Howden and Managing Director of Growth Lab Tegan Addinsall spoke to CEO Magazine about the how companies can accurately measure their social media efforts and use the data to inform their business strategies. Here's how the discussion unfolded.

Content marketing seems to have found a way into most marketing managers 2013 plans. However, despite the recent buzz surrounding content marketing, it is not a new concept. Some brands have been telling stories and creating value through content for a very long time. It's only recently that more brands have started to take notice, in part thanks to the rapid rise of social media that requires brands to create and source engaging content for their communities.

2012 was another huge year in the social media world. Businesses that have ignored social media on the basis that it must be a passing fad now have a lot of catching up to do, whilst brands such as Coca Cola, American Express and Nike continue to innovate and find new ways to engage their fans.

Most of us know that website speed is important. You've most likely heard about the effect page loading time can have on page abandonment. Google, Amazon, Mozilla and Yahoo have all shown why website speed matters, with Amazon for instance increasing its revenue by 1% for every 100ms of improved page load time. In 2010, Google announced that site speed would be used as a search ranking factor. But we already know that website speed is important because we all have experienced slow websites and the frustration of feeling like we're back on 56k modems. Even though our own website wasn't in the slow website bracket, we wanted to show our users (and our clients) how making some small tweaks can actually make your website lightening fast. Here's how we did it.

We believe that social media is a critical part of most business strategies, and if used in the right way can be a key contributor to the overall success of your business. However, it seems that there is still some resistance out there when talking to CEO's and upper management about social media.

We believe that social media is a critical part of most business strategies, and if used in the right way can be a key contributor to the overall success of your business. However, it seems that there is still some resistance out there when talking to CEO's and upper management about social media.

If you work in the digital world you've no doubt figured out that mobile is the future. In Australia, smartphone penetration has increased from 37% to 53% in just two years and is transforming consumer behaviour. A common question we get as clients start developing their mobile strategy is what should we build? A mobile app or a mobile website? The answer to this really depends on a number of factors.

MelbJS (Melbourne JavaScript Meetup) has rapidly grown over the last year to become an important community meet-up for all web and mobile developers in Melbourne. As part of our team's involvement in this group, we are keen to present and share our knowledge on JavaScript - particularly our work with NodeJS in building web and mobile applications over the past two years.

For those of you who have never worked with MapKit before, or who don't know what MapKit is - think of it as Apple's proprietary library to Google Maps. It's pretty stable and versatile, although it can cause headaches for first time users. I guess the point of this post is to provide you a very brief insight into our experience with this library.

We have been asked a number of times recently to help setup company email accounts through Google Apps. Having used Google Apps ourselves for about 2 years now, we highly recommend it to anyone thinking of switching over. This post provides a quick guide on the advantages of using google apps, and how to get started.