Futurity Media

Case studies

Blogs & podcasts

While there is a great deal of hype surrounding social media, blogs have a demonstrable role to play in B2B enterprises. Blogs are a great way to raise your profile among people who would not typically be your target audience, but nonetheless carry important influence. It’s also a great way to engage with your employees, and using modern platforms like WordPress and MovableType/TypePad, the publishing process is relatively straightforward. However, many companies benefit from additional market insight – and this is where we can help. Futurity Media is a regular contributor to the Orange Business Services blogs Orange Business Live and MEA Briefing. We also write for the Alcatel-Lucent’s femto cell blog Wilson Street.

Customer newsletters

Orange Business Services has a well-established customer base and an expanding range of services to offer them. It makes sense to have a regular dialogue with their customers, to offer advice on the latest technologies and also to demonstrate service upgrades and new launches. Futurity Media created the Enterprise Briefing email newsletter to bring Orange closer to its customers. Comprising genuine advice, industry analysis and solutions to business challenges, Enterprise Briefing has a circulation of over 15,000 readers per month and is one of the leading customer email newsletters within its sector. Futurity Media created the Enterprise Briefing newsletter in 2003 and have been managing it since, coordinating articles and ideas among multiple internal stakeholders. For Orange Business Services, we also write and edit Highlights, a bi-annual product newsletter, and Real Times a quarterly printed newspaper.

Web sites

TelecityGroup are a leading pan-European data centre provider. As part of the complete relaunch of their web site, Futurity worked with top design agency Structure to produce the content for the site. The brief was to bring clarity and standardisation for all of their content – particularly their services information. For example, the managed firewalls page has a strong standfirst to describe the service in a nutshell, identifies the business issues, presents the TelecityGroup’s approach, outlines the key benefits and links to the brochure, case studies and any other relevant information. The copy is written to optimise for search engines, so that it appears on the first page of a Google search, for example. To write the content, we interviewed experts in TelecityGroup right across the organisation, from the technical product specialists, through marketing to human resources. This resulted in content ranging from employee profiles to data centre infrastructure. In addition we worked with Structure to write the script for an animated film that appears on TelecityGroup’s home page.

Brochures & solutions guides

Despite the inexorable growth in the web, many companies still have a need for printed brochures, solution guides or service summaries to use in marketing packs for sales staff or collateral at conferences. We have worked on a wide range of projects to help our customers produce this material. Recently we worked with Airwave Solutions to produce a service summary, and subject brochures to support its presence at a key public sector communications expo in Germany. This involved speaking with subject specialists in the company in areas as diverse as OSS/BSS, transmission, security and systems integration. The project was a key part of positioning Airwave as a solutions-focused company for the international market. We have also worked with TelecityGroup to do a full range of brochures for its services, drawing information from interviews with product managers, including: IPMH, Ethernet and backup.

White papers

Technology developers and service providers are in the business of developing interesting new solutions to existing business challenges. But they are not always well equipped to demonstrate what those challenges are or how to go about solving them. This is the role of the white paper, and that typically requires the help of writers like Futurity Media. White papers are typically a lengthy process whereby Futurity interviews a number of internal experts and creates a 2000 – 5000 words document to an agreed outline. Examples of projects include a paper on embedded security for Orange Business Services written with the input of four subject specialists based in three different countries; a more technical paper on WAN optimisation for the same company written in collaboration with experts in the US and France. Other recent white papers include a description of Lone Worker solutions for Airwave solutions, areview of consumer attitudes to femtocells for Alcatel-Lucent, telco Cloud Computing strategies for Juniper Networks and M2M application guides for Vodafone.

Customer case studies

We regularly write case studies for many of our clients, including Orange and Airwave. The GSM Association had something very serious in mind when they created their HSPA mobile broadband campaign. The goal was to encourage operators to charge their experiences of building and launching HSPA mobile broadband services. Futurity Media has supported the GSMA by creating case studies and articles that demonstrate new business models, applications, technical challenges and compelling services. Check out this example: Stelera Wireless.

Annual reviews

The GSMA Public Policy team is active all over the world: lobbying governments over spectrum, regulations or licensing; organising industry coalitions against age-sensitive content and mobile spam; and supporting mobile communications projects in some of the poorest regions of the world. For the last four years, Futurity Media has brought these stories to life in the GSMA Public Policy Annual Review.

Managing PR agencies

The Middle East is a strategic market for Orange Business Services. As well as the full range of enterprise solutions, Orange offers the unique Solutions for Operators (SFO) mentoring and consulting programme to help incumbent and new entrants fast-track into next generation telecoms services like IPTV. Futurity Media designed the messaging,microsite and collaterals for the SFO programme, and also manages the activities of various on-the-ground PR agencies in the Middle East. Futurity Media’s role is develop pitches, brief spokespeople, respond to journalist enquiries, and manage the reporting process to corporate PR. The result is a trebling in PR opportunities over the previous year.

Journalism & analysis

It’s important to keep in touch with the latest technologies and trends, and you can’t do that if you are only ever exposed to one or two clients. That’s why we continue to work as journalists, analysts and bloggers for clients like Silicon.com, Current Analysis and our own Futurity blog. We have a strict rule though: we will never promote a client in an independent article or market report, unless we very clearly disclose any potential conflict of interest. And to protect our clients, we never ever break confidentiality agreements.