Amongst the black mambas and pythons at the London Zoo-hosted Chameleon Net 10th anniversary bash I suddenly found that I was speaking in tongues.

Well, not tongues exactly, but certainly a strange version of English where all the nouns were replaced by technical acronyms. As a marketer rather than a technologist I try and speak, and write, in plain English whenever possible.  It came as a quite surprise to hear myself speaking fluent web-eze – all ‘CMS’, ‘SEO’, ‘ePR’ ‘PPC’ and ‘CSS’. 

This acronym-laden prose was peppered with strange and evocative concept words, product names and programming languages – ‘The Cloud’, ‘Python’, ‘Black Hat’. Now the recipient of my wisdom was a web developer, rather than a poor unsuspecting member of the public and my use of these acronyms allowed for smooth conversation flow and greater speed in getting our ideas across to one another.

Back in the office we debated our use of acronyms in our marketing and pr communications activity with clients.  Beyond the web, our work with specialists such as accountants and management consultants leads us into yet more acronym territory - MCR, TCR, COP, RSL and CTSA’s. We concluded our rule of thumb is to only use acronyms where we can guarantee that our communication will be received and understood by the target professional group. 

Fowler’s English Usage is, of course, the first port of call when deciding on the correct way to deal with acronyms.  Unfortunately I cannot seem to find an online version (you seem to have to buy it! It’s printed on paper!). However, the strangely named 'Garbl’s Style Manual' at http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual offers some rather poetic advice on the subject: “When in doubt, spell it out”.
And if you want to Indulge Yourself with Acronyms (IYA) then go to http://www.acronymfinder.com.

Last week I and Actual group Directors Stephen and Suzie had the pleasure of attending Chameleon Net’s 10^th Birthday bash at London Zoo. It was great to meet up with the team, and to make the acquaintance of a couple of recent recruits. Without wanting to be too gushy, it’s evenings like this that make us thankful for such lovely clients. In true Chameleon style it was an unorthodox evening, with a drinks reception – of course – in the Reptile House, with a party in the Pavilion later in the evening. It was nice to share the party with the wallabies and emus just outside, who were all wide awake and surprisingly sociable!

This month has shown that Chameleon’s work is becoming more widely recognised for its innovation and creativity, and that the company has climbed a long way in a decade. Chameleon Net’s fantastic campaign site for the latest Diabetes UK campaign made it into the news pages of New Media Age, the company won a silver W3 Award for the innovative Bucks New University website, and we were also proud that Vicky reached the finals of the competitive Women of the Future Awards.

So, what’s in store for the next ten years? As the internet grows and the industry matures (according to a recent survey , 30% of UK digital agencies were founded more than ten years ago),Chameleon are in a strong competitive position with a grown-up, experienced and confident offering. Happy birthday Chameleon Net – and here’s to many more!

In the process of planning for Chameleon Net's 10th bday celebration (today's the actual day, by the way), it occurred to me that I'm celebrating my own anniversary of sorts - October marks 5 years of my being here at Chameleon.

Time has flown by and a lot has happened, that's for sure. So in the spirit of the both Chameleon being 10, and me notching up 5 years service, here are my highlights of the past semi-decade working in web with Chameleon (in no particular order).

1. Watching the web move a breakneck speed. This never fails to outstound and entertain me. When I arrived at Chameleon in autumn 2003 we were working on founding our in-line CMS code library - seems quite a standard set of functionality now - but I hadn't seen it anywhere else at the time. Just over a year later we were pioneering ePR with early adopter bloggers, and establishing the building blocks for our modular hub & spoke e-commerce platform, something that still 'wows' clients. Last week one of our longstanding Devs - Steve - was working on some proof-of-concept with iPhone applications and our CTO Carl's just built an Adobe Flex website deployment tool. It's amazing. It just doesn't stop!

2. Having meetings in unusual places. Most organisations needs a web providers these days, which can take you to some odd locales to meet clients. We have something of a mini-competition at the office to judge who has been to the strangest. My favourite (i.e. the most oddball) was the a meeting I had some years ago inside Sunbury telephone exchange. This year I've been to two offices with 20 ft waterfalls in the foyer, but only one where there is a large two-level coy carp pond. Jeremy says his most impressive meeting, visually, was at the top floor of Barclays Global in Canary wharf, with floor to ceiling glass. I also reckon Jeremy and I tie on fun transatlantic meetings - mine at UNICEF HQ in New York City, and Jeremy with a memorable pitch at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachussets.

3. Relocating. Soho Square was great (we were there until 2006), but genuinely not a patch on Smithfield, our home for the past two-and-a-half years. The feel of the area is perfect to promote a relaxed yet vibrant team. Plus it allowed the business to break out of our confined serviced office space in Soho and set us up for the growth we've experienced since in our dedicated premises.

4. Setting up the Chameleon Net events programme. One of the things I felt strongly about when joining Chameleon was the role educating the market has to play in being a company at the cutting-edge of the sector. I still feel the same. We've been running our educational seminars since 2003, and we've had over 700 people attend and give us great feedback, which is a testament to our speakers' knowledge and great content. Our latest sector-specific ones in November (Plug: for the Education and Publishing sectors) are already proving really popular.

5. Working with clients (outside of the norm). There's definitely a feeling of going the extra mile here, which sounds a bit cheesy, but it's true nonetheless. Two of my highlights... 1) when we worked with our client The Foundry to not only develop a business-changing e-commerce website for them, but also jointly to put together a really compelling award entry for the 2005 London e-commerce awards, which won the 'Best Sales and Marketing Award'... and 2) when the Tsunami hit east Asia on Boxing Day in 2004 everyone was off on their christmas break, yet between ourelves and UNICEF we got the campaign and donation pages setup the same day, and the site took over £1M in essential donations in 5 days. Everyone here felt like that was a really impactful thing to do.

6. Creating and launching the first direct-to-consumer sales website for Random House, the UK’s largest general book publisher, in 2006. Of particular significance for me since I manage this account for Chameleon, but if also felt like working on an industry-shaping site when few publishers were going down that route at the time, and most were just happy to send their visitors to Amazon and get sales that way.

I could go on, and probably would if it hadn't already taken me 10 days to finish this blog because I keep coming up with different things to add in :-)

So... here's my 'and finally' point, and for tradition's sake it's a bit unusual and includes an animal...

7. Not content with the likes of iStock and Corbis, we took a new slant on our own branding in 2004 by hiring 'Mela' the Chameleon from ‘Animal Actors’ and holding a photo shoot in a kitchen in Walthamstow (thanks David!). He's the little fella you can still see if you look top left in our logo.