What a fantastic concept! Travel Experience is a locally owned travel agent, based in Mareeba and Atherton, specialising in group tours and holiday packages all over the world. Travel is their passion, and they are keen to share their experiences with you to help you find your way around the world.

Travel Experience required a new user-friendly website that would be eye-catching, inspire a feeling of trust and enable users to view the many unique and exciting holidays that the the team have on offer. Initially most people only want to see what you have on offer that is going to meet their needs. If the product interests them, then they will look at your branding, logo and who you are. With this in mind, we designed the the Home page, or “shop front”, with a clean and un-cluttered look and feel, easy navigation, a great hero-shot and a good clear message. This creates a positive emotion and connection, which is essential for successful business today.

We also designed and developed an online banner advertising campaign for analytics. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn – Visual Obsession integrated social media with the website to further engage the community and drive traffic to it. Travel Experience is all about great customer service, so good two-way communications using Social Media, which is measurable, is a fantastic way to build confidence and trust in potential clients.

What are you waiting for? Check out the new Travel Experience website to see the fantastic travel specials they have on offer!
http://www.travelexperience.com.au/

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The use of the mobile web has exploded over the last couple of years, with 2011 being the first year that Smartphones have outsold PC’s and Smart phone Internet use tipped to surpass that of PC’s in the immediate future. With the iPhone being the dominant Smart phone platform since its release in 2007: the release of platforms such as Google’s Android has launched the mobile web into unprecedented levels of use.

Australia has the highest use of Smart phones per capita, with 40% (and rising rapidly) of the population connected to the Internet via their mobile phone.The use of mobile Internet services has also been accelerated by social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. For example: Facebook has around 800 Million monthly active users and about 350 Million of those are accessing the site through their Smart phones.

So after extended legal battles, Facebook’s Timeline is now here. So what do we need to know?

Business Branding 
First of all, what does this mean for business branding? So far Facebook has neither confirmed nor denied whether brand pages will get a layout similar to Timeline. We can observe however that Facebook is trying hard to tap into the “personal branding” scene, using subscriptions. Time will tell whether this takes off as Facebook has long been seen as a very personal network. So is it time to start personal-branding on Facebook the way we do with LinkedIn? One very important point to consider in that discussion is privacy.

Privacy 
Because Timeline makes past events very visible, it may display things you wish certain people didn’t see. In my opinion however, this is a major plus. All of this information was already out there, available to snooping people and indexable by search engines. People are now being forced to confront what they had preferred to ignore. If you choose to market your own personal profile as representative of your business or brand, you will probably wish to hide most of your past from the public and your subscribers. Luckily Facebook has provided an option to do just that. If you want to restrict everything you have ever shared to be viewable only to your friends, go to the Privacy Settings page (http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy) and click “Manage Past Post Visibility”. You can then go back through all of your posts and choose individually which of them you want to share with the public. For each item you can also hide it from your timeline or share it with only a certain person or list of people. To check what it is looking like, use the “View As…” tool. You can find in-depth information about these privacy options here: http://www.facebook.com/about/control

Cover Photo 
One of the most noticeable differences in the new layout is the massive cover photo that you can now add above your profile picture. We are predicting a mini-industry will spring up around this, similar to the myriad of “MySpace Layouts” providers that were around several years ago. So far, people have begun using their cover photos in some very creative ways. Here are a few of our favourites.

• A Filmstrip
• Some Fake 3D
• Some Real 3D! (Apparently it works if you have the glasses)
• Recursion
• The Simpsons
• The Brady Bunch
• Mobile Apps
• Personal Branding

If you have been inspired, download our Photoshop Template and get to work! Post a link to your creative cover photo in the comments below.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

On Thursday YouTube released the biggest design overhaul in its entire 6 year history, in a bid to change the whole way in which people interact and use the website.

Google’s vision for YouTube is that it’ll become a complete media destination, one which will rival Cable Television. The newly designed homepage has become a hub for the viewer’s content, with a feed running down the centre of the page featuring channels and videos based on site viewing trends and even what their friends on Facebook and Google+ are watching.

This comes after YouTube has announced various changes to the site including a new Analytics system, and announcing that it will be bringing 100 new channels of original premium content to its site. And with its recent announcement of Disney coming on board with putting original content on the site, YouTube is looking to become an ideal spot for advertisers.

With YouTube’s emphasis on promoting itself as an Online Television Platform, this could potentially change how we currently do online video marketing, changing the way we think about promoting content and businesses on YouTube.

In the meantime, we’ve updated our YouTube page to the new design and we’re excited to see what new strategies we can form to take advantage of this new design. Check out our new channel here: Visual Obsession YouTube Page

Great News! Our client EcoSplash has done it again! Still pumped about our awards at the annual Queensland Multimedia Awards, one of which was for the EcoSplash logo design, we are happy to announce that an EcoSplash Pool Design has just been awarded it’s first international Gold Award of Excellence at the recent APSP Presentation at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas/ USA!

We are thrilled for our design and concept to achieve international recognition. Placid Pools as the builder has been awarded a staggering total of 5 Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards in the international arena. We are delighted to share the good news with you.  ~ Amanda Spelta, Co-Creator of EcoSplash

And this award was just the tip of the iceberg… earlier this year, EcoSplash not only won the “Innovation of the year” award at the Tropical Innovation awards, but Treasurer and Minister for State Development and Trade, the Honourable Andrew Fraser, announced that EcoSplash had won funding from the “What’s Your Big Idea Queensland?” grants scheme on behalf of the Anna Bligh government!

Well done to the the fantastic team at EcoSplash, what a fantastic year it has been for you!

Click Here to view other work we have done for EcoSplash.

• Queensland Media Awards 2011

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• Queensland Media Awards 2011

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• Bob Hale Award – Best Advertising Campaign Across All Media for Ergon Energy – Power Savvy
  
• Best Multi Media Presentation – Training/Educational DVD for Condoman
• Best Environmental Story for GhostNets Australia
• Best Logo – Not For Profit for GhostNets Australia
• Best Logo – Corporate for Placid Pools – Eco Splash

Our other nominations were:

• Best Logo – Retail for Quaint Wondecla Quilting
• Best Logo – Service for Speedweld
• Best Environmental Story for Ergon Energy – Power Savvy
• Best Corporate Identity / Stationery Package for Placid Pools – Eco Splash

This fantastic outcome was made possible by our many amazing clients. We are so lucky to have really great clients that give us the opportunity to create and design award-winning products that they are happy with.

Saturday night was a win for each and every member of our professional team and really demonstrated that collectively we can produce work at a very high level. Together we can achieve more than any one of us could achieve on our own. This level of achievement is only possible when everyone works together to an end goal. Our aim is to see each one of our clients getting a good return on investment from their marketing strategies.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Here is a video of some of our behind the scenes work:

Visual Obsession was contracted by Mango Productions to carry out a still and video shoot for Tourism Australia for the New7Wonders of Nature campaign.  The New7Wonders of Nature is a global search to recognise the 7 most wondrous natural sights in the world, as voted by the world community. Visual Obsession contracted WIN News to join them and capture news footage to be aired that night nationally across Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10, and ABC.

The Scene:  Deep in the heart of the coral sea, patriotic Australians and enthusiastic travellers snorkled and splashed their way to the world’s most scenic and remote polling booth which was placed on a Great Barrier Reef sand cay 30 Kilometres North-East of Cairns.

Because we needed to capture the scene from the air and on the ground we broke the production team up into two main groups

- Visual Obsession production manager, Corey Austin.

The ground crew: Corey Austin: Cameraman/Production Manager, and Ewan Cutler: Production Assistant.

The sand cay was located two and a half hours by charter vessel from the coast of Cairns. This meant a bright and early start (2.30 am) for Corey and Ewan.  All equipment was methodically checked off, including all audio and camera gear. The crew and talent were then ready to depart the wharf by 4 am.  Once the boat came to shore the props team set up a temporary voting booth equipped with an iPad. The team then commenced their section of the shoot of the polling scene and interview.

The air crew: Kevin Austin: Cameraman, and CJ McNamee: Still Photographer.

The air crew started their day at 6 am. After loading their HD video and still cameras they set off to Great Barrier Reef Helicopters at Cairns Airport. Kevin and CJ set up the HD video camera onto a Gyro Stabilizer. Both doors were removed from the Turbo Jetranger with a clear line of sight to shoot the talent voting. The ground crew had finished their shoot and were safely back on board the boat. Once they received the “Okay” call, the helicopter commenced the flight to the sand cay. Both the Aerial and ground crew captured some stunning footage and photography.

Andy Ridley, Executive Director from Earthhour Global and Ben Southall the winner of the Best Job in the World were there to promote the reef.

It was a pleasure to work with the great people from Mango Productions & Tourism Australia

Editing the photos and video for Social Media uploads onto Tourism Australia Facebook took us through to 6pm. A very long day for some of us but we don’t mind when we are able to get great shots of one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Within the hour there were 3,000 Facebook “likes”, and then within 48 hours there were over 10,800 likes! Just goes to show how many people are interested in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I recently gave a presentation on Trust Based Marketing at the Austropex Seminar. As a social media marketing agency in Cairns, we have seen social media efforts fail so many times when they are not grounded in a solid marketing strategy or focused on a clear goal. At Visual Obsession we are committed to offering strategies and solutions, not just individual products and services.

I was speaking specifically as a part of the Tourism Session presented by Marcus Brady from Tourism Tropical North Queensland, and Leslie Ring from Enterprise Connect. Also delivering fantastic presentations were Max Shepherd from Skyrail, and Ben Woodward from The CAPTA Group.

The presentation went well, with many attendants expressing interest in learning more. This video is a quick snapshot. If you would like to find out more about social media marketing, or would like us to come and present at your event, feel free to get in contact with me.

The campaign was an instant success, with the blog attracting over 5,244 page views and the website receiving 2610+ visits in the first 15 days.

The challenge was set: Visual Obsession had to develop an easy to operate blog that was visually engaging, appealing to its target audience and easily accessible using social media to spread her message.

In addition to her blog’s success, The Imperfect Mum’s Facebook page has attracted 3,168 fans and counting, her twitter has over 400 followers and her first 4 blog posts have over 232 comments.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

In addition to designing and developing all platforms for Kristy’s online presence, Visual Obsession has provided assistance through their customised visitor data reporting suite. Visitor statistics are gathered in realtime, so Kristy can see exactly when and where visitors are clicking from to get through to her Blog, Facebook page or Twitter stream. This has been instrumental in helping Kristy know exactly when and where to post her updates to most suit her audience.

Developing an online social media presence is just one facet of Visual Obsession’s overall online marketing package. We can design and develop an identity of any size, personal or corporate. If you think we can help you out, just head over to our contact page and drop us an email.

We have had quite a few people ask about the little orange RSS icon on this blog, so here is a quick overview of RSS feeds and what to do with them.

First of all, RSS stands for RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary, which may sound very technical, but is much simpler than it sounds. Basically, RSS just grabs the latest content from a website without any of the design stuff and presents it in a very simple reading format. Just the content.

But why is that useful? Well, RSS becomes useful when you use a feedreader. A feedreader, or a newsreader, is a program that lets you subscribe to the RSS feeds of all your favourite websites. Then when you want to spend time reading, you visit your reader and see everyone’s updates in one place, instead of having to visit all those websites and blogs individually. For those who use Facebook, you might be familiar with the news feed. Instead of visiting everyone’s wall to see if they are doing anything new, you can see everyone’s latest updates, all in one place.

So if you’ve never used a feedreader before, let’s get started now.

There are lots and lots of newsreader programs, some are programs that you install on your computer, and some are web apps that you access with your web browser. The one we will look at today is Google Reader. I’m going to assume you have a Google account of some sort (you already have one if you are using Google+), if you don’t you can sign up for one here: http://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount.

Now visit Google Reader. If you haven’t logged in yet, it will ask you to do that.

In the top left click the little button that says “Add a Subscription”. It will bring up a field for you to type in a website you want to subscribe to. Type in www.visualobsession.com.au/news and click “add”. Voilà! All of our latest posts will show up in your reader. On the left hand side you can see a list of all of your subscriptions, and can add or remove them as you like. You can also group them into folders so you can manage your different interests.

Any website where you see that little orange RSS icon, you know you can add it to your reader. You can either subscribe to them like we did above, or you can just click on the icon. Let’s give that a go now.

Why don’t you visit my friend Kristy’s Blog, and click on the orange RSS icon at the top. You’ll see a page that has her latest posts, and a “Subscribe Now!” box with lots of different methods for subscribing. Click the little Google button in the subscribe now box, and then click the blue “Add to Google Reader” button. “The Imperfect Mum” blog will now be in your subscriptions and you will see those updates mixed in with the Visual Obsession updates.

Keep going and add all your favourite websites and blogs, so you can keep track of all your favourites in one place.

Here is a great video that explains more.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.