I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

This is a short post for the forthcoming Cow Digital digest, which Louise Doherty and myself put together every week.  Sign up for it here!

According to Google, the fastest growing search terms for 2009 so far have been Michael Jackson, Facebook and Tuenti, the latter being a leading Spanish social network.   Meanwhile the top three searches for Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, are likewise Michael Jackson and Facebook, with Swine Flu in third place.

Perhaps of more interest is Google’s list of fast falling searches.  Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger all figure.  

So, perhaps worryingly for the brands in question do video sharing site Daily Motion, social network Bebo and Nintendo’s game console, the wii.

A study by Royal Pingdom, which looked through three weeks worth of tweets from 21 Oct – 11 Nov, confirms that Twitter is still very much a US dominated network.

The average number of tweets per hour showed a dip between 8am – 1pm Central European Time (or between 7am – Noon GMT), when Europeans get into work but still the middle of the night for the US.   But at the same time, things clearly picked up around 4pm central Europe, or 10am East Coast US, so near the start of the American working day.

Royal Pingdom also found that people tweet a lot at work with activity going down at weekends.   This shows that Twitter’s ‘power users’ - the 5% who account for 75% of tweets according to a separate study by Sysomos – are biased towards professionals who have Twitter open in the office even though they might be broadcasting personal messages.

That previous study by Sysomos confirms Twitter’s US and also anglophone bias.   Sysomos found that 62% of users were in the US with the UK trailing far behind in second place with 8%.   Canada had 5% of users and Australia 3%.

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• Americans enjoy middle-of-the-night web surfing more than Europeans do (thenextweb.com)
• The surfing day (bbc.co.uk)

Chances are you’ve been diverted here by the old News from the Herd feed.

This blog has been in existence for a good six months.   The original idea was that as I’m a bit of a statistics geek, and most of my posts really involve me churning out commentary on social media and marketing stats, I could do with a new site.

Hence the name, which comes from a Mark Twain (or Disraeli, whichever you prefer) quote.

The idea was this would become my main window to the outside world, and an additional one for Cow.

However, as I found out, maintaining one blog is difficult enough let alone two, so this one was put on the back burner.   But with the domain name thisisherd.com having run out, it was as good a time as any to make the switch.

It more accurately reflects what I write about (Herd was a division of Cow, long since defunct and more recently replaced by Cow Digital) and it will give me the chance to start again, including the long climb back up the AdAge150 list (assuming they accept me straight away) – a good exercise, as it’s obviously an advantage to know 1st hand what works in pushing a site up the rankings before you advise clients about the same.

I’ve imported all my old posts from blogger to wordpress and all seems to be working fine, except – for now – it doesn’t seem to save every comment.  Apologies, bear with me on that one.   I’ll have it sorted by Monday.   Any questions or comments in the meantime, Twitter DM me (dirkthecow), or email me dirk at cowdigital.co.uk

(Update – It seems the comment problem is due to an over eager Akismet plug-in, which identifies too many things as spam.   I’ll check it every day to move any non-spam comments across and I am hoping Akismet rapidly gets better as it claims it does!)

Image – Jamie Thompson