LOVE Digital – celebrating Womens Day with digital inspiration

On Friday 6^th March Cosmic played a big role in a major regional event aimed at encouraging and inspiring women in business to use digital technologies. Our CEO, Julie Hawker opened the event with her direct experiences of developing her own digital skills as part of private sector, public sector and since joining Cosmic. Her work in recent years as part of the Cosmic team has focussed heavily on supporting skills development and leadership from across the whole team to ensure that our work to support other businesses continue to grow and excel in quality. She encouraged everyone in the audience to consider their digital skills development as a journey and something which should be enjoyable and exciting as well as challenging.

Julie went on to introduce two of the LOVE Digital case studies which have been developed recently – Carol Waterman-Smith of Specialist Textiles, and Drew Llewellyn of QBallyoo. After watching two of the short videos produced (the full versions can be found on our website here – http://www.cosmic.org.uk/blog/cosmic-produce-videos-about-women-who-love-digital) Julie interviewed Carol and Drew to find out more about their own personal journeys with digital technology and how they’d adapted and improved over recent years. The audience was very keen to hear ‘from the horse’s mouth’ how challenges had been dealt with and how both Carol and Drew had learned to work with support and advice from the people around them.

As part of the programme we were able to demonstrate some really keen developments in apps and trends for the year ahead courtesy of Kate Doodson who excelled with a real passion on how technology can bring major advantages, including in her piece on ‘Our Mobile Day’ – a very insightful look at just how much of our lives can benefit from mobile.

The apps featured in this presentation were;

Kate delivered a further workshop later in the day looking at how business impact through digital technologies can be achieved in the months ahead, with some very practical tips for everyone to consider and real examples of how much difference some of these can make in business.

Nicole Yershon from Ogilvy Labs was keynote speaker for the event www.ogilvy.co.uk/agencies/ogilvylabs

She spoke of some superb examples which have been developed from the use of cutting-edge technologies to innovate in digital marketing. Including the fabulous Beyond Dark campaign which looked to “measure the pleasure” which their chocolate delivers compared to other pleasurable experiences (cuddling kittens, blowing bubbles, listening to beautiful music) www.measurepleasure.co.uk And the Power of Cute – using graffiti images of cute babies to reduce the occurrence of anti-social behaviour in Greenwich – http://ogilvy.co.uk/projects/royal-borough-of-greenwich/babies-borough

Nicole’s insights and experiences of working in high-end digital development provided the audience with inspiration and ideas as to how much innovation and change can be supported in the years ahead. She also spoke of Ogilvy’s work to develop talent in young people who haven’t had the best achievement levels in their schooling – the Ogilvy Rough Diamond programme which links with several other large employers and art colleges to provide an extensive and significant learning and development programme for those aiming to enter the digital marketing employment market.

Jan Spencer of Womens Development Unlimited and Lizzie Whitchurch from Cosmic presented to the event on the support opportunities which already exist for women-led businesses in particular and ways in which that support can be accessed.

And in between all of this brilliant concept, there was still plenty of time for networking and a bit of fun with the Digital Animals game. And the feedback at the end of the day certainly reinforced initial feeling that the event was a major success and highly valuable to those attending.

#lovedigital

LOVE Digital – celebrating Womens Day with digital inspiration

Smart Alarm Clock HD

Calendars 5

Flipboard

Klout

Instant Heartrate

TripLog

Evernote

Google Now

Skitch

Cloud On

Forms

Xero

Wikitude

WordSwag

Audiobooks

Dulux

Blippar

Make up Genius