After a half hour brainstorming meeting between me and Simon Wilson over a cup of coffee, and 2 weeks hard slog from the team at fuse8, I can proudly confirm that our fun World Cup website ‘World Cup Stick Up’ has now gone live!

The basic concept is this, you can upload your own picture, pick from one of the set sticker templates (currently Charlton, Keegan, Waddle, Beckham, Beardsley, Seaman and Graham ‘Turnip’ Taylor) and turn yourself into a football sticker. You can then upload your pic to facebook, where it creates your own World Cup Stick Up album. Twitter integration is coming soon.

Despite working on several pitches which have facebook connect at the core of the concept, and some experimentation with our developers, this is our first proper attempt at using it on a site. It’s been a hectic week in which we’ve experimented which the flash and javascript APIs, but we got there in the end, and it really has made a massive difference to the campaign. The vast majority of early visiting traffic has come from facebook, showing that a fun tool, and a snappy bit of copy on each upload can make a huge difference.

The last time we created a self-promo site at fuse8 was at Christmas, with our Powered by Sprouts website. The launch of that site was under similar circumstances, in that there is a crowded marketplace. Replace Christmas, for the World Cup, and as you can imagine there are a lot of agencies and brands doing their own thing. It was imperative this time that we created something that could be updated and tweaked periodically to maximise word of mouth. So, the idea this time was to create different ‘packs’ of stickers, so we can continually update and offer more choice on the site! The great news for non-England fans, is that the next pack is our first ‘Rest of the World’ pack, hopefully containing Maradona, Valderamma, Voller and Gullit! Keep an eye out on the site, and follow World Cup Stick Up on twitter to keep up to date with all updates.

Have fun using the site, and let me know what you think! Always great to get some feedback!

Since being given the responsibility of managing a team in my current role at fuse8 I’ve been thinking of ways we can interact, share ideas, and generally keep each other updated about what we’re working on, other than face to face meetings (you can’t beat those! – although they’re not always practical). As a test I decided to start using what has been labelled ‘Twitter for Business’, Yammer.

At work we’ve always relied on email and MSN, so basically you get a lot of emails containing links, location updates, invitations to nights out etc etc, all amongst the stuff that matters….work. MSN just adds to the interruption with people expecting instant responses, meaning concentration can soon become a pretty much impossible task. So I was worried that Yammer would just add to the noise, and end up distracting people and harming these concentration levels.

The initial testing group consists of me and 5 of my team. These include an Information Architect, Concept Director, User interface developer, HTML coder and an SEO consultant. Some were avid Twitter users, a couple of them don’t use it at all. So…a mixed bag. It’ll give me an idea whether using Yammer would work across the whole company…the suits, the hardcore developers and even the creatives. I started by introducing it to the team as an experiment in the hope that the actual usage of the tool would give us a good insight into how it could work. The results so far have been very positive.

It’s proved a good way of team members updating other’s what we’re working on. We all work in for a digital full service agency, so everything is relevant to everyone, meaning everyone can have input. There have been several occasions so far where we’ve collaborated on a project which we wouldn’t have done in the past, and ended up improving the output. It’s also helped keep track of where people are. In the past I might have popped into a meeting, and if someone was away making a cuppa they wouldn’t know where I was. Now they do.

To share articles, inspirational websites, and videos we all use Delicious, but people still send links around via group email. It’s just a quicker way to get everyone looking at something you think is interesting. On Yammer I can share links with an individual (via private messages), group, or all of the team. You can also integrate it with Google Reader. Also, just like Twitter, Yammer has it’s own iphone app, and also works via SMS. So if someone’s gonna be late in, they just Yammer it. Easy as.

All in all, it’s still early days. It’s a test to see if it really could change the way the whole company communicates. I’m fairly optimistic that it will.

Ed – Since writing this I’ve found this great article on The Economist – worth a read.

I’ve been busy over the last week taking some pics of the fuse8 Leeds office. This particular shot is of my current monitor setup! Loving the vertical widescreen for blog/twitter reading!

For a sneak peek inside the office of a digital agency, check out the rest of the pics on the fuse8 flickr page

Check it out:  http://cargocollective.com/kevcharlton