‘Is social media making us over confident?’

In the 2012 elections, Twitter, the Internet’s micro-blogging site has become a major platform for reaching voters, with messages tailored to individuals, shifting politics away from a 24-hour news cycle to a 140-character one.  And it’s a cool thing when people can be engaged in a one-on-one basis like that. But there is also an argument for whether Twitter is leading to shallower politics.

We’ve all seen those attempts to score points through sarcasm for example, the lobbing of one-liners over the Twitter wall in an attempt to move the needle on undecided voters. But why do something that can only undermine your credibility?

It’s a fact that sarcasm is a means of the perpetrator indirectly expressing aggression towards others and insecurity about themselves.  Sarcasm transforms the polarity of a negative utterance into its opposite, to imply positivity. But who’s actually fooled? We all recognise that wrapping thoughts in a joke shields the perpetrator from the vulnerability that comes with directly putting their opinions out there.

And whether you are a President or a business person, doing it in 140 characters can just make you look like a bad stalker, seeking cynical publicity.

Cue a follower hemorrhage.

And it’s time to call people out who do this. So tweet carefully. There’s a fine line between firing a quick and smart riposte, and the act of Twitter trolling. And whether you like it or not, how you behave on Twitter directly affects the impression you are giving of yourself professionally.

It’s a double-edged broadcast tool.

Ve Interactive's CEO, David Brown on Performance Marketing panels at A4UExpo

This week saw Ve Interactive’s UK CEO, David J Brown invited to participate in 2 panel discussions and one closed round table at the A4U Expo in London. The first panel debate covered Tech congestion in Performance Marketing and the second, was on Value and Perception in Performance Marketing. These talks were ultimately No.2 and No 6 in the Top 10 talks of the event.

We also exhibited at the event and brought along execs from our other international offices, who enjoyed fruitful discussions on cross border strategies with the networks present.

BIMA’s (British Interactive Media Association) main aim is to support and promote Britain’s digital industry and to encourage the next generation to become a part of it. Their Digital Day challenge was to give 17-18 year olds an idea of what it’s like to work with professionals in the digital industry.

We were partnered with the lovely – and digital savvy – ladies from St Saviour’s and St Olaves School who Ve went to meet last week. Our Content & Social Media Editor Eileen went along with our Marketing Assistant, Emily, to talk about what Ve do. But more importantly, help the girls win the challenge!

We put on some very brave faces and went back to school (with our shirts tucked in!) and after a few nervous faces from the girls (and us) we got to work. We were blown away by the girl’s knowledge of social media and the digital industry as a whole. They worked extremely hard thinking of ideas, over-coming problems and asking us for help when they needed it. Which wasn’t very often!

Ve had a brilliant day working with the girls who showed a huge interest in the digital industry. BIMA should certainly think about doing this again next year, as it gives both teenagers and professionals a great way to share information.

Fingers crossed St Saviours and St Olaves win first prize for their brilliant social media campaigns they created!

The Last Few Touches Being Made to The Conference Room

In less than 48 hours, for the first time since Ve’s inception, The Ve Interactive Global Conference will kick off at Ve Interactive HQ in London!

We will be welcoming members of Ve from the offices in Berlin, Boston, Stockholm and Sao Paulo, to check out our London offices and take part in a weeklong brainstorm, discussion and all round celebration of everything Ve Interactive.

It’s all go in the UK office…

Thrilled to hold our first ever Global Conference, everyone in London is really looking forward to meeting other Ve’s from around the world (finally putting faces to some email addresses and phone voices!) And as well as the conference and discussions, we will also be spending some eves showing our international Ve’s around London; holding a number of events to give them plenty of wonderful memories to take back home with them.

And for the Ve team in London, there is definitely an air of nervous excitement floating around the UK office. We’ve been doing some last minute decorating and adding overall beautifying touch-ups to the place – we’re still making the place our own following our recent move here in March. Akin to a housewarming, we want to show the place off and make sure all 15,000 sq ft of it is perfect!

Speakers and Speeches

Our CEO David will also be speaking on two panels at A4U Expo next Tuesday and Wednesday, where Ve Interactive will also be exhibiting, and on Friday we’re hosting a welcoming party for the international members, and UK investors and have a very special guest speaking!

Emma Jones , received an MBE earlier this year for her services to enterprise. Emma is the Founder of Enterprise Nation and the CEO and co-founder of campaign group StartUpBritain, and played a key role in setting up the government’s startup loans scheme. A prolific business author, Emma also presented the Enterprise Nation Small Business Report from the Main Stage at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011 and has been a very vocal supporter of Ve Interactive from our first encounter, even tweeting that our Co Founder CEO, David Brown is “one of her favourite UK entrepreneurs.” We previously wrote a blog post about Enterprise Nation here on the Ve Interactive blog.

So tick tick tock, the final countdown is on until the Ve Interactive Global Conference kicks off; check back here on the Ve Interactive blog to find out what exactly we’ve been up to, we promise there will be some interesting news to report….

BIMA

Although it’s been a while since we’ve been at school, Ve are delighted to be a part of BIMA’s Digital Day taking place in over 100 schools in Britain which is happening on the 10^th of October. The aim is to inspire young talent to venture into the ever changing and exciting world of digital.

BIMA’s (British Interactive Media Association) main aim is to support and promote Britain’s digital industry and encourage the next generation to get involved. So what better way to encourage young minds then having Ve show them the ropes!

Ve Interactive are one of many other digital organisations that are members of BIMA; benefiting from what they do and being rewarded for great work. Ve were extremely proud (and a little bit giddy) after winning the BIMA Retail Award last year. To be recognised as an award-winning company by such a respected brand was a huge achievement for us.

Caroline, Markus and Kathy Nervous About Going Back To School!

Next week BIMA are sending us to St Saviour’s and St Olaves School to help some very digital savvy sixth formers win the BIMA Digital Day challenge! Earlier this week Caroline, Markus and Kathy went to visit the girls taking part and prepare for the challenge.

For the event we made a video about Ve Interactive For BIMA Digital Day. Wish us luck for next week and check back to see whether St Saviour’s and St Olaves clinched first prize!

Ve Interactive

And we are very excited to announce that also attending will be executives from our American, Nordic, German and Brazilian offices, who will be delighted to talk to any global brands needing cross border e-commerce technology and cart recovery partners. Among those flying in, will be Greg Shlopak, CEO of Ve Boston who brings an impressive wealth of industry knowledge and experience with him.

Seasoned marketer, Greg founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Cyrk Inc., a promotional marketing and design company. Cyrk grew to be the largest global promotional marketing company during Greg’s twenty-three year tenure, achieving yearly revenues of $980 million worldwide and listed on NASDAQ.

So don’t forget to say hi, meet the wider team and come learn about our multi award-winning cart recovery and remarketing software and why we are the No.1 trusted global partner for almost 2000 e-commerce clients.

At Ve Interactive, we embrace change. In fact most of the time we initiate it; creating new opportunities, continually innovating. We’re a river, not a canal.  But as the season shifts into full blown Autumn, if 24 hours a day already wasn’t efficient enough, this month we’ve got THE MOST packed roster of exciting events to participate in, things to be announced and developments to be unveiled.

And there’s an extra special buzz around the offices as a result.

So stay tuned to our blog and all will be revealed…

Elliott Green, Ve UK's 100th employee!

What an honour to be Ve Interactive UK’s 100^th employee!

Hi, I’m Elliott Green and if you had told me two years ago that I would go from the trading floor of one of the world’s biggest investment banks to one of the most exciting employment opportunities that exists today, I would never have believed I would be so fortunate!

I am delighted to have just joined one of the most vibrant, dynamic and successful technology companies around today, in Tech City, in London, and perhaps the world.

My working life began at JPMorgan, fresh from their graduate training programme and onto the trading floor to learn about Emerging Markets, a dizzying task I reveled in. Being keen for new challenges, and the occasional deli sandwich, I found myself soon on a plane to New York, to help grow the business out there, due to the new focus that came to Emerging Markets after the turn of the century.

Three years flying round North America and having grown something from almost nothing, I began to get a taste for being involved in fast growth, high growth businesses ventures that have such tremendous potential. A great city and a great experience helped open my eyes to all of the possibilities that the world contains – it would be a building block towards my future aspirations.

Back in London, I began to realise that my focus was expanding from the world of international financial markets to the dynamic world of digital technology. In a fortuitous twist of fate, I met Martin King – an Executive Director of Ve Interactive, who offered me a lift back to London, (the lure of a ride in his 458 Italia Ferrari was way too powerful!)

We began a conversation all about Ve Interactive and its stratospheric, entrepreneurial growth to date and the plans for the future. I was so convinced by the concept, I had virtually begged him to let me get involved by the time our journey had ended.

On entering the Ve HQ a few weeks later and being further inspired by the extraordinary, dynamic team there, I realised that Ve Interactive was a definitely on a journey that I wanted to be a part of and, very fortuitously for me, both Martin and CEO David J Brown agreed! And here I am, the newest executive in Ve UK’s Corporate Finance team and employee No. 100!

Keep reading the blog to learn about some of the exciting news we have in the Ve Interactive pipeline!

Optimistic in that we would get to meet some talented people, we arrived early on Friday at The Vinyl Factory to set up our stand. Armed with cupcakes (standard), Galaxy Minstrels (handy for sharing) and Dime bars (who bought these?!) – we were well prepared to keep our energy levels up in order to match those of the visiting job seekers.

From designers to developers, SEO strategists to all round web fanatics – it became clear very quickly that there was an exciting flock of new industry enthusiasts in our midst. By the end of the day we had run out of application forms for our many advertised positions, (take a peek, we might have something to suit you), but we were certain that somewhere in the stack of CVs we lugged back to the office there would be that of a promising new Ve team member.

Going through all those CVs again this morning we’ve decided we will definitely be getting in touch with quite a few of the people we spoke to on Friday. So thanks for all of you who took the time to come speak to us about cart recovery and online efficiency opportunities at Ve Interactive. And for those of you who missed out on the day you can still get in touch with us at careers@veinteractive.com.

A huge thank you too to Caroline, Charlie, Eileen and Emily who ‘manned’ (and ‘womanned’) the stand in shifts on Friday – answering questions and sharing our ‘Life at Ve’ video with the attendees.

And of course, thanks to Chinwag for hosting the event. We hope to soon claim we found our 100^th Ve Interactive UK employee at another one of your great events.

As September draws to a close and Q4 rapidly approaches, its a busy time of year for anyone involved in the e-commerce industry, and an exciting time too.

We are having an incredible end of month at Ve Interactive. On the client acquisition front we have surpassed all previous months; we’ve had astonishingly exciting news on the celebrity investor front {GASP}; two ‘Special Award’ nominations at the Software Satisfaction Awards; the seeking of our 100^th employee (we know!) in the UK office alone; an extraordinary agreement signed that we are just bursting to tell you about. But can’t. Yet! And we are looking down the barrel of a jam-packed October that heralds many exciting activities, (more on those coming soon).

The Ve Interactive online efficiency team have been working hard with our e-commerce clients on strategic planning and best practice in design and messaging, (maintaining sensitivity to client branding); execution and analysis; and continual optimisation of their campaigns and carts. We are busy preparing seasonal campaigns, making sure they are very focused and targeted, by using our advanced data segmentation tools, since our enterprise architecture can track over 400 fields and set criteria to each one of those fields.

Our consultants and analysts work in conjunction with our in-house Compliance Manager (supported by specialist media lawyers Lee & Thompson), to make sure that all our clients’ remarketing campaigns and processes, whilst being relevant, also adhere to the correct and best practice guidelines for both the legal and compliance standards. So a big drive is on to spruce up the legal positioning in time for the pending spike in traffic!

All this activity ensures that our client communications achieve the highest deliverability rates, (up to 96 percent!) as well as best conversion rates  – we have a 25 percent average across all sectors and boast consistently increased order values.

The most popular feature of our products this month has been our ability to repopulate abandoned carts on the fly, by dynamically rebuilding them without the use of cookies. A huge testament to our Tech Team (now over 30 staff in that division!) and their capabilities. We are so happy to have them in house. For our non-affiliate merchants, the Tech Team have also built a private network. VeMerchant and the accompanying new iPhone App that launched last month has been a huge success and quadrupled sign-up this month. Not surprising since it is the world’s first real time dashboard reporting on abandonment, cart recovery and conversion statistics.

VeCommerce, the world’s first e-commerce platform with integrated cart recovery and remarketing software, has been getting lots of development attention recently and is not far away from a whole host of new features being announced; some will revolutionise the e-commerce business as we know it.

So, we finish September comfortably as the No. 1 trusted cart recovery solutions provider. With over 1,800 e-commerce clients and tracking £Bns of attempted transactions daily and hundreds of £Ms of successful transactions weekly,  our statistics continue to stack up and provide us with the world’s largest and unique industry insight, it’s therefore no wonder we have had some great endorsements in this month. Thank you Julia for this one!

“ Ve Interactive is a trusted and highly effective partner, supporting our online conversions from start to finish.” – Julia Dayment, Confused.com

Happy days and now, time for a well-earned weekend. Oh and a Ve wedding to attend!