So I wasn’t going to let the fact that it’s the Tuesday after a bank holiday and that Jordan’s safely tucked away at home in Toronto get in the way of the regular Monday Mashup, so without further ado, here’s a few things that have caught our eye over the last week…

Pepsi is ditching the Super Bowl for social media
This is big news kids:

For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not advertise in the Super Bowl ad breaks. No Cindy Crawford, Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake. Instead it is redirecting the millions it has spent annually to the Internet. Pepsi has chosen to give away over $20 million in a social media play it is calling The Pepsi Refresh Project, debuting in 2010.

Does the Long tail theory hold true?
Our friend Gareth Kay points to this Economist article examining the latest evidence around Chris Anderson’s long tail theory:

“Both the hits and the tail are doing well,” says Jeff Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, an American media giant. Audiences are at once fragmenting into niches and consolidating around blockbusters. Of course, media consumption has not risen much over the years, so something must be losing out. That something is the almost but not quite popular content that occupies the middle ground between blockbusters and niches. The stuff that people used to watch or listen to largely because there was little else on is increasingly being ignored.

Top Twitter Trends of 2009
Twitter has released a list of 2009’s top Trending Topics in different categories. Note that #uksnow makes it into the news list:

So it’s been a week since we woke up to the news of the Eurostar incident (for those coming to this fresh, read our original post here). Our role continues to be the subject of speculation, so I thought it worth updating you on what we’ve been doing.

Since last Saturday, we’ve continued to advise Eurostar customers on the situation using Facebook and Twitter, updating the list of frequently asked questions and answers many times as the situation changed and new questions emerged in social media. We also recorded this video Q&A with Nick Mercer, Eurostar’s Commercial Director, which went live on Monday afternoon:

It’s been a hectic week, and from Sky News feeding all of our Twitter updates live onto skynews.com, P&O Ferries use of #Eurostar on Twitter to Sky News also covering the social media story (watch from 1m:05s), we’ve all learnt a lot.

Most importantly, we seemed to make a difference to some of the travellers who were using Twitter and Facebook to get updates on the situation.

And we appreciate Emma Harris’ transparency with the press when talking about We Are Social’s role:

[Eurostar's Sales and Marketing Director] praised We Are Social, which went outside its brief to provide updates on Twitter and Facebook from late Saturday morning and film a video message from the chief executive, for “completely supporting” us.

She also acknowledged that the agency “said from day one this needs to be wider than just a commercial thing”.

Here’s a quick Monday Mashup for you, which is a bit later and a bit shorter than usual, as obviously we’ve had our focus on other things over the last few days.

Rage Against the Machine Tops UK Christmas Charts
So let’s begin with Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” becoming the best-selling single in Britain for the week leading up to Christmas.

A grassroots Facebook campaign started by Jon and Tracy Morter to make the band’s 1992 track this year’s Christmas #1 succeeded over the weekend, selling more that 500K copies online, compared to 450K copies sold (online and off) for Joe McElderry’s debut “The Climb”.

The campaign received a great deal of mainstream media attention, and the band even reunited for a special interview on the BBC Radio 5 Morning Show (which was cut short when the F-bombs began to fly).

But social media certainly played a part in the campaign’s success. The Facebook fan page now stands at 491,263 fans.  And the mash up below is simply superb:

Twitter tests contributors feature
Twitter has been working on some new features for business users, and are finally ready to start a limited beta test of one of the most developed features.

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal.

The Contributors functionality will be fully supported by the Twitter API, so expect to see it show up on many Twitter business apps soon, such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization
To close things off, a satirical video from The Onion who take a shot at the Friendster social network in their Today Now! programme. The show’s hosts are joined by Internet Archeologist Dr. Maxwell Fry who describes the perfectly preserved ruins of an online community called Friendster: “As soon as I entered the site, I knew I was the first human being to lay eyes on the those pages in many, many years”. Enjoy.

As you may already know, Eurostar, who are a client of ours, had a major disruption today. Five Eurostar trains suffered electrical breakdowns in the channel tunnel, leaving passengers stuck on trains in very unpleasant conditions, and even more were left stranded as all of today’s Eurostar services were cancelled. As you would expect with any event of this nature, this very quickly became big news on Twitter and elsewhere in social media.

Some have questioned both Eurostar’s and our own handling of the situation, with a particular emphasis on Twitter, so I thought it worth giving some insight from our perspective.

We’ve been working with Eurostar since the summer, creating online word of mouth around their ‘Little break, Big difference’ campaign. As part of our campaign, we designed, built and are managing the Little break, Big difference blog, along with the accompanying Facebook page and Twitter account. This has primarily been a social media marketing campaign, with conversations centered around things to do in Paris, Brussels and Lille and the difference a ‘little break’ can make.

When we first met with Eurostar, as we do with all of our clients, we talked to them about the need to put a real-time social media monitoring and responding programme and crisis plan in place, and proposed a conversation audit and consultancy project to help them implement such a programme. As is common with any business in the early stages of coming to terms with social media, they could see the long term benefits of such a strategy. However, as adapting their existing processes had wider implications across the business, they needed to investigate the options and their impacts. Meanwhile, they decided to move forward with the Little break, Big difference campaign and learn from the experience of engaging in conversations in social media.

When discussing 2010’s activity with the Eurostar team last week, we again discussed a listening and responding programme (and about taking action to claim the unoffical @Eurostar_UK twitter account), and after the positive experience from Little break, Big difference, we agreed to include this in our proposal for next year.

Fast forward to this morning, and I was awoken by a call from our Account Manager, Sarah with news of the crisis. Despite not having a formal arrangement in place, we’re pretty good at keeping an eye out for our clients, even at weekends. Since then, Sarah, Seb, Nathan and myself have been working flat out to help Eurostar deal with the situation.

This is an unprecedented situation for them so it’s been challenging, to say the least. Richard Brown, Eurostar’s Chief Executive and the rest of the team at Eurostar have been working through the night and today, with their priority to get those people that were stranded on trains overnight home and then to minimise the disruption for everyone else.

Since lunchtime, we’ve been sat in Eurostar’s St Pancras offices alongside Emma Harris, their Sales & Marketing Director. As things were changing so fast, we had be very careful not to communicate incorrect information, which restricted how much we could say, but we did pass on via Facebook and Twitter any news we could the minute we received it.

We also managed to grab a moment of Richard’s time, in between various operations meetings and television interviews, to write this blog post and record this embedded video message apologising to Eurostar’s affected customers:

Most importantly, we’d been feeding back into Eurostar’s team the questions that people had been asking in social media throughout the day, and once confirmation of the answers came through we were able to get this FAQ post live and spread the word about it via Facebook and Twitter.

Crises of this nature are not new to us here at We Are Social, and in fact we helped Skype successfully deal with a comparable crisis. We put in place a real-time social media listening and responding programme and crisis plan when we started working with them in June last year. When their crisis occurred in October ‘08, the listening and responding process was working like a well oiled machine and the crisis plan we had in place worked well. We tracked all of the online conversations relating to the crisis, helped Skype’s President write a series of blog posts in response and got the word out to everyone who had written about the crisis with Skype’s side of the story. Here’s the case study I presented about this at Monitoring Social Media ‘09.

We had our hands full today, but nonetheless I apologise to those who have been asking questions of We Are Social which we weren’t able to respond to at the time. Hopefully this post goes some way to answering those questions.

Update 26th Dec: I’ve covered what’s happened since I wrote this post in Eurostar and social media, one week on.

Contagious have released their annual Most Contagious report, a “review of the most talked-about trends and technologies to have influenced global marketing over the past 12 months”.

We’re proud to note that they’ve included our Marmarati campaign for Unilever as part of this year’s list. Thank you guys, we appreciate it.

[via]

This week Robin, Simon and I attended an event at Demos entitled “Is the Internet really changing politics?”. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a trivial question – the success of the Obama campaign, the rise of political blogging and the creation of new civic institutions such as MySociety all point to a simple “yes”, the open-ended nature of the question meant the panellists were free to take us down the roads they were on.

Coming out firmly fighting for the Internet was Tom Watson MP, one of Britain’s first blogging politicians and in his post-ministerial career, leading campaigner for digital rights and the gaming industry. Though the next election will still rely heavily on broadcast media, he sensed change in the air on how political institutions and parties use the web, but emphasised it will take strong leadership to use digital technologies wisely. This is particularly pertinent given the existing tension between the proponents for digital scarcity and digital plenty – restrictions such as DRM, disconnection of suspected filesharers and data record retention will only serve to restrict the Internet’s potential as well as encouraging repressive regimes abroad to follow suit.

In the other corner is Evgeny Morozov, who has this month’s cover feature in Prospect, arguing that the Internet has done little to topple dictatorships, and in some cases, has actually aided authoritarian regimes in oppressing their political opponents (to which Clay Shirky has written a reposte). Morozov is right in this respect – despite the wealth of grassroots movements and citizen journalists, no government has yet been toppled by a microblog platform or social network. However, you’d have to be hard pressed to find a digital activist who has spent any time working in the ‘real’ online world to claim that the web is going to topple old regimes; to claim that it’s just going to be online tools that revolutionise or even destroy politics is glib and harmful.

Although it’s easy to label such discussions as optimists versus pessimists, it’s rarely that case. Tom Watson as an MP is well used to the realities of working political life, while Evgeny Morozov is no Andrew Keen and in his piece proposes several constructive, optimistic ideas about how to make our use of the web better in helping spread democracy abroad. Although both would disagree on some things, no doubt they would agree that the Internet is largely a neutral technology – or if not that, then a highly flexible one – and that results depend not just on the tools you use but how you use them.

Using the Internet to effectively campaign politically needs not just a nice blog, or a Facebook group, or a Twitter hashtag (although they’re all good starts); you need to know what your goal is, who your likely followers are, and the people in power you need to target. You need to educate users in the tools they are use and the risks they bear using them, as well as dealing with the possibility of being subverted or misrepresented by your opponents and detractors. In short it needs to deal with precisely the things any ‘offline’ campaign would have to deal with – it’s about ignoring the difference between ‘offline’ and ‘online’ and approaching the Internet with maturity and an open mind.

So what’s the answer to the question? It’s very hard to see when you’re in the middle of it, but slowly politics is changing, but probably not as much as the optimists like to make out. It’s certainly not been as radically altered as the music and news industries, but it’s also not hard to see the mistakes some in these industries made treating the internet as a fringe phenomenon and refusing to see the changes it was bringing until it was too late. It would be very poor for democracy if political parties and institutions made similar mistakes…

Update: We’ve posted an updated case study

One of the projects we’ve been busy with recently is the launch of a new, stronger variant of Marmite for Unilever. We’re very proud to be working on such an iconic brand, and really pleased our work has been so well received by New Media Age and that it has been included in Contagious Magazine’s Most Contagious 2009.

Here’s an overview of the strategy we developed to launch “MXO” exclusively through social media by engaging with the brand’s most passionate fans. Bear in mind that the launch is still in progress – in fact you have until midnight on Wednesday 16th December to make your application to join The Marmarati.

One of the exciting parts of this project is the way we were able to use social media to help Unilever develop the recipe for the final product – hats off to the Marmite team for making this happen, and enthusiastically joining in the theatrical experience. It’s great to get brand advocates actively participating in the product development and packaging design, as well as creating content for the launch campaign. And of course getting involved in the conversation.

Google launches real-time, social web search
You might have noticed that Google looks a bit different, since announcing last week a couple of very important developments in the area of real-time search.

Google search results now include breaking news headlines, live updates from popular social networks, and blog posts published just seconds before. And the move is fully supported by the ‘who’s who’ of social networking: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter.

Forrester: Traditional agencies can’t do digital
A new study from Forrester last week highlighted the complexity of the interactive marketing landscape and the challenges this poses for marketers, and to traditional agencies:

Forrester interviewed about 100 global interactive marketers for the study. Only 23% thought their “traditional brand agency” could effectively plan and manage interactive marketing activities. About 46% thought they couldn’t do it, and the rest didn’t have an opinion either way.

Forrester expects the digital agency space to fragment even more with clients working with specialist agenices in areas such as mobile and social media.

Habbo Hotel launches conversation tracking tool
Habbo Hotel, the virtual world for teens with around 14 million monthly unique visitors, has launched a conversation measurement tool for the site called  ‘Habble’. This offers marketers a chance to understand what users are saying about their brands, slogans and key phrases over a defined period.

The tool has been developed to help brands advertising in the hotel and is used in conjunction with click-through rates, time spent and impressions. Brands not advertising within the virtual world can also use Habble to understand what type of conversations are taking place about them.

Germany’s StudiVZ adds support for 3rd party apps

Two and a half years after Facebook, its German clone StudiVZ follows the US social network’s most successful move by adding support for third-party applications.

Nine apps are available as of today and several hundreds are in development.

What sets this development apart is the emphasis that is being placed on privacy. Germany has some of the toughest online privacy laws in the world and CEO Markus Berger-de León has applied tight security policies to third-party apps “to avoid the type of scams that TechCrunch recently dug up on Facebook and MySpace.”