This evening ITV are conducting an experiment in the combination of social media and TV watching. At 7:20pm, they’re broadcasting the first episode of the new series of Primeval live on their website, with a live Twitter feed of the #primeval hashtag underneath.

The idea being it allows people to react to and discuss the episode in real time and, I’m guessing, therefore driving enthusiasm for the show amongst those taking part and awareness and consideration of the show amongst their Twitter followers.

Now clearly it’s not going to be as successful as CNN’s much more sophisticated use of Facebook connect during the recent presidential inauguration, but still, an interesting step from the ailing broadcaster.

Just don’t forget to turn your lights off after taking part…

Update: Ben Ayers, Social Media and Online Engagement Manager at ITV was kind enough to share his thoughts on how the experiment went:

There were really high levels of interaction on Saturday, with use of the #Primeval tag generating a buzz around the show throughout transmission. Fans seemed to enjoy the sense of watching something together and sharing their thoughts and it became apparent that most people were doing this using Twitter or a Twitter client in conjunction with their televisions.

Some viewers were watching the simulcast while they tweeted but I suspect that these weren’t in huge numbers, with most probably opting to tweet while watching the TV. As bandwidth increases this may become rapidly more popular, especially for those in large families with more computers than TVs.

With such a healthy buzz around the show, there appear to be real advantages to hosting such conversations on our site, not least because they make fans more likely to explore related content, like Primeval Evolved for example, as an extension of the experience. There’s also the sense that fans feel that their thoughts are being listened to by ITV which is really important.

We’ll continue to explore using social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook to engage with fans of our shows. Project Penguin, the overhaul of key parts of ITV.com, will make the site considerably more social and we’ll be looking at integrating social media functionality where it makes sense.

We realise now more than ever that we have to host, enable and join the conversation around our shows where appropriate (which is most of the time). After all, there’s only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not even being part of the conversation.

Update 2: So for episode 2 the experiment continued, with the writer of the epsisode live tweeting during the show and answering questions.

Update 3: Some related research and thinking from John Burbank of Nielsen Online.

Update 4: The BBC tries something similar with The Apprentice Predictor which not only allows you to view the show live along with a chat window (although it doesn’t use Twitter), but also allows you to have a go at predicting which contestant will be fired by the end of the show…

Update 5: Nick Burcher has a good post on Eurovision and Twitter – #Eurovision the ultimate in social TV?

Update 6: ITV are innovating again with a more refined live Twitter experiement during the FA Cup final.

Update 7: A nice post from FreshNetworks looking at how ITV with X Factor and the BBC with Strictly Come Dancing are handling realtime chat.

Update 8: ABC is introducing a new feature aimed at encouraging viewers who stream their favorite shows online to make the experience more social.

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

The quote above is from Clay Shirky’s recent essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, which takes an uncompromising look at the future of newspapers and journalism. With things getting to crisis point for newspapers in the US and in the UK, Dirk Singer has helpfully put together a timely report on the future of print and what it means for brands:

Dirk’s view is an accurate reflection of the current reality (even if obviously pitched from on offline PR perspective), especially on slide 21 where he says:

Online exposure is not second best
online outperforms print on reach and credibility

However, as Clay postulates, newspapers as we currently understand them may not exist on or offline in just a few years from now. And by then, social media will be even more pervasive.

The smart brands are preparing themselves for that future by learning about and experimenting in social media right here in the present.

Marketing carried a piece this week looking at whether brands should advertise in people’s Twitter streams, prompted by the appearance of ‘services’ like Magpie and adCause. Clearly, the short answer is no, but if you want the long answer:

Robin Grant, the managing director of social media agency We Are Social, warns against brands jumping in feet first. ‘Twitter is all about conversations and what these ad networks are trying to do is insert ads into that conversation stream which is inherently inappropriate,’ he says adding he won’t be advising any clients to advertise within Twitter streams.

Let me know if you think I’m being a little too simplistic…

Update: So perhaps I was being a little too simplistic – it’s worth reading Brian Morrissey’s thoughts on the subject.

Update 2: ReadWriteWeb looks into some use cases of Magpie (in a fairly negative light) and Graeme Wood follows up pointing out that, without disclosure, this sort of advertising may be illegal under UK and EU law…

You may have noticed the small German flag that popped up on the top right corner of the We Are Social site a couple of days ago?

We’re increasingly working on international campaigns, often including Germany, so it seems only natural that our website is also available in German. Obviously it would be nice to have some German clients, but mainly it’s really important that the people we’re talking to as part of our campaigns know who we are and what we’re about.

It comes thanks to Christian Röse, who spent a month with us in February as a We Are Social intern – learning about social media in general and working on the translation of our website – thank you Christian!

Obviously, we’re not German ourselves and we’re very much aware that adapting a text into another language is not just a straight translation exercise, so we’re really keen to get some feedback. If you speak a bit of Deutsch yourself please let us know what you think in the comments below or drop us an email!

Earth Hour is a global event taking place this Saturday, the 28th March 2009. At 8.30pm around the world, people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour, making a statement to the world’s governments for more urgent and effective action on global warming.

We’re working with the WWF to get the word out to bloggers – starting a conversation about Earth Hour and encouraging people to sign up to show their support.

If you have a blog, it would be really fantastic if you could blog about Earth Hour yourself – and even better if you could ask your readers to get involved telling their colleagues, friends and family too. You could embed the nifty light switch widget (you can see it on the top right of our site), or use one of the videos or banners that are available.

Every contribution, no matter how small you think it might be (even re-tweeting this post would help!), is important, so please help us and show your support.

N.B. If you’re not in the UK, you can still help the global campaign – they even have their own set of widgets.

SXSW Interactive: debate, discussion, frenetic networking, Twitter saturation, internet celebs, and happy chaos as technology and culture intersected in Austin, Texas.

At SXSW, as Mike Butcher noted in TechCrunch UK, “everybody knows your Twitter name”, and Twitter was essential to find anyone or anything.

On literally thousands of laptops and iPhones, everyone seemed to have their Twitter app of choice (mostly Tweetdeck from my observations) running constantly. In fact the vast swarms of geeks with iPhones overloaded the AT&T network until complaints prompted them to add network capacity.

The #sxsw hashtag became useless, so Digital Mission attendees kept track of each other using #digitalmission. At the unofficial “unpanel” we spontaneously convened, we “crowd sauced” the hashtag #kebab, with a live Twitter backchannel projected on screen.

Six to Start (who picked up a couple of awards for We Tell Stories – congrats guys!) ran an excellent panel on ARG’s and bringing TV to the web with the BBC, which also projected a Twitter backchannel, though this was overshadowed by Clay Shirky asking one of the first questions.

Twitter monetisation became an ongoing topic/joke amongst panel members from start to finish, with Guy Kawasaki opening the closing keynote interview by asking “free” advocate and Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson what he would do if he were Twitter. Anderson was long on philosophy, short on detail: “How do you create the version of the product that people will pay for without crippling the base product?… Charge companies somehow, and build from there.”

Some of the more interesting points came in the session afterwards, moderated by Doc Searls. Anderson observed that “catalysing and curating conversation is a big part of my job. My card says Editor-in-Chief but I’m really a Community Manager.”

The irrepressible Gary Vaynerchuk was equal parts entertaining and inspiring, and although it felt more like therapy than a keynote, I agree with everything he said.

Of the more practical sessions, Kathy Sierra and Cliff Atkinson impressed in Presenting Straight to the Brain. Learning how to “seduce the brain” involves recognising that our brains are wired from caveman days, and  are usually in epic battle with our minds. In Designing for the Wisdom of Crowds, Flickr and Threadless were looked at in depth, as great examples of successful crowdsourcing businesses.

The Mobile Social Networking panel was, bizarrely, missing anyone from Fire Eagle, and seemed to get distracted by definitions and privacy issues until Martin May from Brightkite announced that “Monetisation is kind of boring,” and finally started talking about mobile social networking!

Despite my plans the most interesting conversations have been serendipitous. It’s amazing who you bump into randomly in the hallways and parties – here are a few snaps of some of the people I hung out with, bumped into or tracked down via Twitter…

It good to see most marketers seem to have got the message about the value and effectiveness of social media activities. A new report out from Forrester this week shows that 53% of are planning to increase their spending in the next six months, despite the rescission:

Following on from Mark Cridge’s comments in New Media Age last week, Joseph Jaffe has an inspired rant in this week’s Adweek:

Exactly where and when did the digital space earn the stripes and credentials to tackle the high roads of authenticity, transparency or peer-to-peer collaboration (just to name a few of conversational marketing’s core tenets)?

The PR business is really no better and no worse than the digital one when it comes to social credentials. With its claim of being champions of “earned media,” it tacked the word “relations” onto blogger, lumped it together with “media relations” and “journalist relations,” and somehow went unchallenged.

Whereas the digital space has very little claim to the “physical” world and hasn’t proven itself in the virtual space, the PR industry resides more comfortably in the physical world, with a superficial grasp of the digital space and an anemic understanding of the virtual one.

I’ve seen client after client duped into charging a digital or PR agency with-arguably-the most transformational opportunity we’ve been given in our professional lifetimes and the result is almost always a shambolic disappointment. From Sony or Wal-Mart’s fake blogs to the recent Skittles.com mess, the culprits are almost always digital or PR agencies.

There’s an acute and fundamental flaw in equating “social” with “digital” or “social” with “earned media.”

So what’s the solution?

If you’re reading this, you already know the answer…

Update: In response to the comments below, the title of this post is taken straight from the title of Joseph’s article on Adweek, and it’s pretty clear he’s not questioning the ownership of social media as a whole, but rather what sort of agency is best placed to help brands deal with it.

Today I’m taking part in a live girly geek event organised by Eurostar. They’ve invited 80 French and Belgian girls over to London to shop till they drop, and then they’ll be meeting up with 40 girls from London (including me) for tea time refreshment at the Berkeley hotel. The idea, of course, is to get the message out to French and Belgian girls (and boys) in general about how quick and easy it is to pop over to London by Eurostar for a cheap shopping trip, now the pound/euro exchange rate is, shall we say, more in their favour.

All of the girls are tweeting, flickring and geolocating their experiences in real time, and you can follow the action live via a rather nice Google Maps/Twitter/Flickr mash-up they’ve created especially for the day:

Eurostar of course is no stranger to social media – in fact, Robin created the Voice of a City blog for them back in 2005, where you can follow the exploits of 10 Parisians as they live their lives (check out the Eating and Drinking or Shopping categories for a bit of inspiration) – the insight being that you have a better time in a foreign city when you’ve got friends to show you around.

Anyway – I’m looking forward to meeting everyone later and having a proper English afternoon tea!