Twestival by Jon Cartwright

After speaking at NMA Live’s Twitter for Brands, the IAB’s Travel Forum and Simon’s keynote on measuring online political behaviour, all in the last few weeks, it seems we have an even more relentless schedule of speaking engagements coming up over the next couple of months. On the off chance you might actually want to tag along, I thought it worth telling you about them in advance…

ad:tech, London, Tuesday 22nd September
I’m participating on an IAB hosted panel at ad:tech looking at “what to do when things go bad: the power of reactive social media” alongside Nick Jones, Director of Interactive Services at the COI and others. This is free to attend, so get yourself down to Olympia for 3pm tomorrow.

Drinks and Digital Marketing Summit, London, Tuesday 22nd September
The impact of social media on the drinks industry is up for discussion on a panel with wine bloggers and drinks marketers that I will be part of at the The Charlotte Street Hotel. It’s rumoured that Oz Clarke will be in the audience, so get yourself an invite and I’ll see you there at 6:30pm tomorrow.

IPA Social, London, Tuesday 6th October
Ok, so we’re not actually part of the line-up, but Nathan, Sandrine, Leila, Simon, Seb and myself will be there to contribute to the debate (as we were last time). The evening has the potential to go down in history as the moment adland woke up to social media. Whatever happens, you don’t want to miss it.

Silverpop EMEA Client Summit, London, Thursday 8th October
Silverpop’s Client Summit is invite only, if you are going along, I’ll be speaking in the afternoon

Social Media in Business, London, Friday 23rd October
I’ll be part of a panel debate on “The Future of Social Media” towards the end of the day, but the sessions they’ve got on beforehand look great – so grab a ticket now.

Media140, London, Monday 26th October
Gareth Jones, Revolution’s Editor and Mel Exon, Managing Partner of BBH Labs and I are on the opening panel, “Can you change a brand in 140 characters?” . If you can at all make it to this event, I’d advise you to – the previous Media140 conference was brilliant and this one looks even better.

Understanding Digital Creative, Dublin, Thursday 5th November
I’ll be heading to Dublin to speak at Understanding Digital Creative, an evening event that forms part of ICAD’s Design Week, alongside the chaps from Agenda 21 and Folk Creative.

Monitoring Social Media 09, London, Tuesday 17th November
At Monitoring Social Media 09 I’ll be talking about how we helped Skype set-up and run their real-time social media listening and responding programme. This is the first conference in Europe dedicated to this topic – it will be good to delve deep into the issues…

Account Planning Group Sweden, Stockholm, Wednesday 18th November
The Swedish account planning community invited me to Stockholm for the evening to sprinkle a bit of the We Are Social fairy dust as part of their series of events on planning in a digital world.

Interactive Advertising Festival, Madrid, Wednesday 25th November
I’ll be in Madrid for IAB Spain’s Interactive Advertising Festival, running a 100 person(!) workshop on Social Media (let’s hope their English is good, as my castellano is non-existent).

The Battle of Big Thinking, London, Thursday 26th November
Sandrine is a contestant in Campaign and the Account Planning Group’s Battle of Big Thinking, up against people like Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola’s VP of global advertising strategy and creative excellence, Guy Murphy, JWT’s worldwide planning director, Rick Vlemmiks, British Gas’ marketing director, Robin Wight, chairman of the Engine Group and Will Harris, Nokia UK’s marketing director. As you can see, she’ll be up against some formidable opposition – however it pans out, you’re guaranteed “a year’s thinking in a day”.

Bubblino by Roo Reynolds

This Saturday, I joined many of London’s smartest geeks and creators and took a break from the Internet to attend the third annual Interesting 2009, convened by the tireless Russell Davies. While there was plenty of backchat on Twitter and photos on Flickr, it was also refreshingly un-digital in many respects – seeing what happens when the digerati apply the same enthusiasm, creativity, curiosity and gregariousness in their day jobs as elsewhere. Topics abounded: live biohacking of yoghurt, the colour violet, how to conduct a symphony orchestra, nuclear weapons in Indian mythology, photographing bullets at the top of their trajectory, ponies, why we say “cheers” and how to win at Monopoly – the best of the action is summed up by Roo Reynolds.

That’s it. No real deeper message about social media or the power of the web in bringing people together, but just a testament to the variety of hobbies, interests and obsessions that drive some of the people behind what’s so great about the social web today. I’ll leave you with this video for the new astrotags site for sharing astronomical photos:

In typical style, I submitted two panel ideas to SXSW Interactive and have been too busy to write a blog post to ask you to vote for them. As the deadline is Monday, I figured I better pull my finger out…

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I submit for your appreciation and possible affirmation, the following:

The Death Of The Microsite And The Rise Of The Real-Time Web

Think about what you’ve spent your time doing online in the past week. How many microsites did you visit? How many branded flash animations did you watch? Calculate the mean answer for the entire world and you’ll probably arrive at a figure close to zero. But it’s a fair bet that you’ll have spent a significant proportion of time in social media. In the places that people choose to spend their online lives, constant interaction is the norm. But where does this leave the traditional model of brand websites?

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures. Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

Click through to see more details, including who I’m intending to have on each of the panels, and if you feel they are worthy, give them the thumbs up. If you’re interested in other British panel submissions, Sam Michel has put together a comprehensive list, and while you’re in a voting mood, We Are Social could also do with your help in the the people’s choice of “Most Admired Agency”…

Matt Webb on day 1 by Miriam Olsson

“You’ve had eleven reboots” – Bruce Sterling’s riff on the last Viridian note closed this year’s reboot conference. For over a decade it’s been a gathering of self-proclaimed practical visionaries; an un-conference if you like, but not without some of the trappings of a more traditional event.

The venue, the airy Kedelhallen (Kettle Hall) in leafy Frederiksberg, and the attendees, a breezy mix of mostly European web geeks, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers and communicators, make for an intellectually fulfilling experience. The presence of a crèche doesn’t preclude a decent afterparty (last year’s was disbanded by the police) and the haphazard nature of the programming doesn’t exclude sleb speakers like David Weinberger.

Winners – attendees, speakers included. There’s no differentiation between the two. Speakers speak at floor level, by and large. There’s no hands-up questioning, just an opportunity to move to a smaller space to carry on the conversation. And the bar opens at 9am.

Nevertheless, this year’s theme presented more of a challenge. Raising the bar for speakers meant fewer of them, and the quality wasn’t as consistent as last year. Matt Webb’s Scope and Lee Bryant’s session were, however, definite highlights, along with Bruce Sterling’s wake-up finale. Unlike last year, I didn’t speak this time around but I did manage to make an oven out of some cardboard, glue, polystyrene and aluminium foil. Will I go back next year? Yes.

The very final talk of Thinking Digital last Friday was by Tara Hunt, who was talking about social capital in networks as part of her new book ‘The Whuffie Factor’. ‘Whuffie’, a word originally from Cory Doctorow’s novel ‘Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom’, is used by Tara to mean what has been also been described as ‘social capital’ or ‘guanxi’ in discussions of intra-community relations.

Of course in many ways the word ‘capital’ is opposite to its normal usage – whereas financial capital is exhausted by being used, social capital is only exhausted if it’s not used. As Tara put it – “the more you give away, the more you gain”. Online communities tend to be gift economies – but gift economies are nothing new and it’s worth studying their history – an excellent and very readable anthropological and sociological view is Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’ and should be required reading for anyone who thinks social capital only came about with social media.

Of course there’s a natural tension between gift economies and market economies. Giving away everything for free is not the soundest of business models (although Matt Mason, author of ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’, had some thoughts on that earlier in the day). But gifting time, help and effort to communities and helping the conversations within them, to help everyone’s whuffie grow (not just your own) is the key to proper social media engagement.

There is one quibble I have with Tara’s philosophy on whuffie – and I suspect this may be stuffy Brit clashing with extroverted American – which is her emphasis on being light-hearted. While I’d agree that having a sense of humour is important, being human is more important. And there are many occasions when it’s not appropriate to be light-hearted, particularly dealing with experiences and conversations that are negative. It’s harder to convey emotion in text when online than in person, and you need to be sensitive and respectful as much as you need to be good-humoured in those situations.

Tara’s presentation is at the top of the post – do check it out – although her rapid-fire and engaging presentation style mean it was much better with her speaking over the top of it…

I spent a few days in Brighton last week attending the iMedia agency summit.

It was a great chance to mix with senior people from both media, above the line and digital agencies and discuss the challenges facing our industry (and, let’s be honest, get to know each other over a few beers).

Jeremy Hill did an outstanding job of chairing the event and my thanks go to Gavin Sutcliffe and the rest of the team at iMedia who made the event happen.

PHD’s Head of Innovation, John V Willshire, took time out from thinking about butterflies and bubbles long enough to write up his take on the conference, and leaves us with this question:

We are an industry built around reaching out to a million people in order to affect a small proportion of them for our clients. It’s embedded in the language we use, the business models we’ve created, even some of the ideas we suggest and persist with.

However the opportunity exists to build conversations and relationships with the thousand people we originally wanted to affect in the first place… and if we create a great relationship between our clients and them, they will be more likely to be loyal, enthusiastic advocates of that company and their products.

Which is better for the company and the people. So I guess the big question is what role will the agency play in that world?

Of course, this is the question we setup We Are Social to help answer…

Thinking Digital has been one of the most varied and stimulating events I’ve been to and it’s no surprise there’s been a lot of talk about social media and engaging your consumers.

Alex Hunter (@cubedweller on Twitter), who was also a panellist at the social media masterclass, had a talk of his own at the conference yesterday. Alex is head of web at Virgin Group, and a true social media evangelist. He talked about how he’s reshaping the Virgin Group website and transforming it into a social platform for Virgin’s customers. Much of his talk drew from the Cluetrain Manifesto but wasn’t just a rehash of that; he shared his own thoughts. He emphasised that people don’t want to talk to brands, they want to talk to people – and so Virgin has put people as part of its strategy, helped by the fact it’s one of the few brands already inextricably associated with a person, namely Richard Branson.

Interesting, of all the corporate blogs, Alex regards Digg’s as the best – not just because it’s written by the guys at the top like Kevin Rose, but because there is a multiplicity of voices and they respond to their fans. But then, as a social media site, Digg know the audience they’re blogging for, and as a new brand they’re more confident in experimenting. It’s harder for non-tech brands, so I’d use Digg as one example of good corporate blogging, but not the only one.

Alex was evangelistic about embracing social media in the business word, and made it clear it works for brands big and small (citing Qype and Zappos as examples). We also got some insights in the new Virgin philosophy – they have “labs”-style projects at Explore Virgin, which has produced Virgin Eye a beautiful visualisation of mentions of their brands on the web (from over 5,000 sources).

This isn’t just dabbling, however. Virgin plan to relaunch their website as a social platform, opening up to allow people to talk about their brand and products and upload their own content. They’ve been savvy to link up with Digg and Facebook Connect to utilise existing social media properties rather than reinvent the wheel. They have also put an impressive effort into research – a year and a half listening, researching and creating before launching their new social platform to make sure it fits the people who use it. It was an impressive example to others: not just in how to embrace social media, but how important it is to know the community you want to build around.

This week I am at Thinking Digital (#TDC) as a guest blogger. It’s a collection of some of the foremost thinkers in the UK and beyond on the future of digital and it’s a real privilege to be here. We kicked off yesterday afternoon with a social media masterclass, which turned out to be less a stuffy lecture and more a shared discussion from a variety of perspectives.

Stowe Boyd, the chair of the talk, kicked off with what he called the “strip-malling of the Web”. Controversially, he declared blogging as ‘dead’, claiming it as a transitionary stage between traditional web and ’social media’ – which he says doesn’t exist (at least not yet). There are valid points – blogging’s format is derived from traditional news outlets’ own, and they have found it very easy to adapt to blogging as a result.

Boyd likens the takeover of the blogging to “strip malling” – likening the blogosphere to an urban landscape, where some big players in the mainstream media end up crowding out the smaller independent blogs. He says those bloggers have since fled to streamed, more social and more egalitarian, media such as Twitter – within that there’s a comparison with the phenomenon of urban flight.

It’s a nice metaphor but I don’t agree with it – not least because blog platform traffic is steadily on the up. Some blog traffic will be disproportionately allocated to the big players, but we’ve known about the power law effect for over six years. And Twitter is no more egalitarian than blogs – some, such as celebrities and news organisations, have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, and with the exception of a few web gurus, ordinary users have followers several orders of magnitude fewer.

With Twitter is capable of was very nicely enunciated by Paul Smith, aka the Twitchhiker, who used Twitter to hitch-hike around the world for charity: water. Twitter to him was more than just a social network and to call it a social network was to do it injustice; it was a geographic network, a professional network, a news network. It’s all these things at once, and the beauty of projects like Twitchhiker is that they’re able to tap into all of these at once, rather than merely treating Twitter as another media outlet, or just to converse – it did both, but worked it into an exciting social project that did good. And this is only just the beginning – we’re only just starting to use these tools to their full potential.

OK, that’ll do for now. In the meantime I’m livetweeting the conference over at @conferencebore and you can follow everyone’s tweets on #TDC. And if you’re here then don’t be shy – come and say hello…

On Wednesday last week I attended the OpenGov conference:

A practical one-day conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities of social technologies to enable engagement, collaboration, and transparency in government

In a previous life I was a bit of an eDemocracy obsessive – so it was good to spend a day getting back into it. It seems things have moved on considerably in the last few years – the views that were previously held on the ‘outside’ seem to have seeped slowly into the ‘inside’, which is great news. However, there still seems to be a real lack of significant successes to point at (as well as a lack of consensus on what ‘Open Government’ actually means).

The conference was covered live by Andy Powell and has been written up by Carrie Bishop, so I won’t go into the day in detail, but Alex Butler’s contributions were a real highlight – both during her speech and in her refreshing interactions with the audience throughout the day, especially in response to Harry Metcalfe’s talk about Jobcentre ProPlus.

It was also great to meet some interesting people during the breaks, including Dave Briggs, Steph Gray, Paul Evans, May Race, Tim Davies and Paul Clarke. I’m looking forward to next time…