Earlier in the week we spent two days at the Digital Festival, at the Millenium Centre in Cardiff – and what a great event! Digital has been running for 7 years now, and this year was the fourth time we attended as a company.
So what happens at Digital?
It’s a great event not only to network, but to find out about the latest innovations, evolutions and upcoming changes in the world of tech! We love going every year and playing on the new virtual reality systems, attending workshops and seminars and of course, catching up with our clients who also attend! This year was no different, with Emlyn getting a go on the new Immersity VR, learning plenty from the different sessions on about the venue (which was also amazing) and catching up with our Cardiff based clients.
What did we learn?
Data is considered the new oil. 70% of consumers expect companies to use their data to better their services and products.
Culture
There was A LOT of chatter about “culture” at this years event, perhaps in light of the GDPR coming into force tomorrow, or just a new buzz word, but what does it mean?! Essentially, business culture refers to your business ethos – how you want to and how you run your business. The main driving points for this was that business culture is at the heart of what you do, but it must be at the forefront of your mind too – don’t forget about why you started, what you hoped to acheive and provide at the beginning of your journey.
In terms of the GDPR (which people seem constantly panicked about), the ICO recommendation was “build privacy into your business culture”, and what a great way to encapsulate the new regulation.
Recruitment
This year we came away with some great information and insights. 2018 kicked off for us with a great boost in workload across our range of services, so we’re now looking into recruitment, which means plenty more sessions and workshops to attend at Digital. This included a great workshop by MangoHR, about how digital is changing the world of recruitment! Thankfully, for us as a digital company much of what was discussed really chimed with how we want to recruit, and also the opportunities we want to provide for potential employees. So this is an exciting development for us, watch this space!
So what did this session have to say? In the digital world of employment, 55% of UK based digital clusters stated “access to talent” as their main challenge, with 63% of employees in the digital tech environment looking to move job every 12 months. That’s fairly startling, but should it be expected in the fast paced digital world? We think so.
There are also changes to recruitment (potentially) because of digital – will recruitment agencies fall by the wayside as bots and social increase? Are the younger generations looking to social media and Google as a way of finding potential jobs? How about working remotely? Do we even need to be living close to a job, with digital helping remote access be so easy?
What predictions did MangoHR have?
- The paper CV will die (yay, finally!)
- Recruitment will become as transparent as online shopping (remember when Google added “shop” as an option in their search bringing together a load of search results across a range of shops?)
- Recruitment will move from agencies to in house
- Demand for jobs will drive a macro tipping point whereby data will drive decisions
- Recruitment will become cheaper over time (especially with recruitment moving in house, no commission!)
Social Media (for millenials)
This was an interesting talk to go to, especially as young business owners, we are both actually classed as millenials here at Cambrian Web. So the main take aways from this talk:-
- You must have thorough segmentation of your target market to create a successful social media strategy, if targetting millenials. Why? Becasue the age range of millenials is so broad. So get to know your target market inside out, and don’t generalise.
- Snapchat is a great resource to use (depending on your business of course), but it is resource heavy and demands new content every day! Native ads (by native, we mean not professional looking or traditional) were 70% more effective than the usual adverts churned out – so think basic, “student” and less polished. Everyone is churning out these swish, clean adverts, so stand out from the crowd and get yourself in the mindset of those you want to target.
- Key trends for 2019 – there will be a rise in brand advocates & endorsements, but not from the famous! From people your target audience know best – their friends.
That for us was Digital in brief! Our favourite quote from the event?
Evolution not revolution
This covers not only aspects like GDPR but digital changes to your business, social media, marketing, recruitment…!