The East Festival in London will feature Pete Fowler keeping festival fans updated via his freshly painted Tweeting Bike.

Pete Fowler's Tweeting Bike

Pete Fowler's Tweeting Bike

It’s a novel way to promote the festival and the @eastfestival twitter address as no doubt Pete will attract attention as he rides through the east london district.

You can check out Pete’s Flickr photo set here and follow the overall festival news via @eastfestival, or via the cleverly named #twike hashtag.

The agency behind this initiative is Chance Collective #twike

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State of the Internet

I never tire of watching videos which highlight the incredible statistics surrounding the penetration of the internet, and I’m still surprised by the growth in some of these statistics.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Social Media traffic catches Search

Alan Long, Research Director for Hitwise reports that Social Media Traffic in Australia has nearly caught Search as depicted by the following chart.

Hitwise - social media v search

Top 10 Social Networks in Australia are shown here, dominated by Facebook which boasts over 8 million Australians.

top10sml

The net affect is that companies need more than ever to develop a strategy for Listening and Engaging with these networks so that they have the ability to influence consumers.

Social Media Monitoring – categorisation

As organisations start to embrace social media monitoring, it’s important for them to categorise conversations to allow a suite of various engagement response tactics to be executed.

This beautiful slidedeck from Amber Naslund, highlights the key categories that should be considered.

Frontiering Shopping cart
Having used X-cart at the shopping cart solution at Gourmet Shopper, I was interested to see that the X-cart developers have released a new AJAX style shopping cart solution called Ecwid.
Here’s an example shopping cart that I have been testing, which as well as working inside Wordpress.

The Cart tool is reasonably simple to setup and configue, and whilst there are some limitations, it promises to be an excellent option for shops wanting to syndicate their content across their growing range of interaction points.
Here’s an image of how it looks in Facebook (see example)

GS facebook_

Relationships help sell Social Media

It’s surprising giving the hype surrounding Social Media, that it’s still quite a challenge to sell the adoption of social media to organisations.

There are many obstacles that stand in the way of running social media campaigns such as hurdle

  • Risks associated with open conversations
  • Non existant Internal policies covering social media engagement
  • Lack of internal communication of social media engagement policies
  • Perceived lack of metrics
  • Clarity of roles for managing the campaign
Google Wave explained

One of the hottest news for social communication this month was the beta launch of Google Wave.
Like a lot of people, I’m still waiting for my Beta invite – Google released 100K invites on Sept 30, 2009, and hopefully a 2nd wave of invites will come soon.  {Update : Thanks to Gus for sending me a twitter invite soon after this post was published)

Changing Media Landscape

The Economist has published this video which contains a series of interesting statistics about the changing media landscape.

economist-statsWhilst the stats are US focused, they are representative of the changes that are occuring across the globe.

Personalised Soccer Commentary

Be a Football Hero allows you to create a personalised audio commentary.

Select your name, country, and age, and then listen to the professional soccer (football) commentary of yourself performing the ultimate football heroics.

footballhero

If you like what you hear, you can order the soundtrack as a CD for 14.99 pounds.

The soundtrack is very realistic, and you get to hear your surname and age as you score the match winning goal in the dying minutes.

Socialnomics

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? socialnomics

Welcome to the World of Socialnomics

Qualman defines socialnomics as “The ability of social media to generate exponential returns for individuals and businesses”.
They have released a video which showcases some of the social media statistics that describe the social media revolution, and how it is changing the world.

 

 

And this revolution has only just begun !

Interesting Cross Promotion

Most of you would have heard of the “Will it Blend” videos, that do a fantastic job of promoting the Blendtec blender.

Today, I came across an interesting cross promotion featuring the founder and star of Will it Blend, Tom Dickson and one of the Ford Fiesta Movement agents, Ryan Dembroski.

fiestamovement

 The Ford Fiesta Movement has been one of the pioneering social media PR programs, which had over 4,000 people apply to become one of 100 agents.  The successful agents were all given a new Fiesta for six months, and are expected to record and share their experiences with the car.

Social media used for digital activism

Social Media has brought content creation tools to consumers, allowing an efficient means f­or organ­i­zi­n­g, f­aci­l­i­tati­n­g ou­treach, en­cou­ragi­n­g di­al­ogu­e an­d rai­si­n­g m­on­ey­.
This video describes how social media is being used in Lebanon for “di­gi­tal­ acti­v­i­sm­”.

Successful cause initiatives such as Kiva (Microfinance),  myC4 (Microfinance & Mentoring), Build An African School (Financing new schools in Africa) and MobileMovement (Microfinance using mobiles) all understand that the social media landscape provide consumers the means to more deeply engage with the cause, and in doing that these initiatives are reaping the benefits of communal support.

When the brief is too brief – 4 additions for your template

Not all campaigns will be successful, but not having a brief, or having one that is “too brief”  definitely increases the likelihood of failure.

The Brief is one of the most important stages of the marketing process, and yet many clients fail to see it’s importance, and either ignore it all together or pass this responsibility to the agency.  Agency created briefs or “reverse briefs”  can work well where the client / agency understand each other well, but there should still be some kind of approval step so that clarity of scope is understood.