Those of us in the team who were left behind in London are now slowly recovering from last night’s Twestival in London. It was great night, as you can see from this morning’s tweets and the photos:

Here’s the organiser, Amanda Rose, appearing on Sky News yesterday evening via a Skype video call, explaining the event:

There’s also a great write-up in today’s Guardian (and, as befits my status as a Z List Twitter celeb, I made it into their photo coverage).

Thank you @amanda and the rest of the team!

I’m just back from Sydney Twestival, part of the global Twestival, and it was a great success. Although based in London, I’m originally from Sydney and it was great to see the Sydney Twitter community come out to support a good cause. Over 80 people raised over $1400 for Charity: Water, and in the process we had fun and met some great new people.

When I spoke to Time Out about Twestival, I mentioned that one of the great things about Twitter is the way that people help each other. Twitter users really give – and tonight showed how helping within a social media community can extend into giving for charity. 

We Are Social sponsored the Sydney event, and organised it with local volunteers @BernieT and @catchakiki. Big thanks to them and also to all the other volunteers who helped out on the night, as well as the sponsors that donated prizes, drinks and of course a great venue.

Check out the photos on Flickr above, and the Qik video captured by @betchaboy

Of course, We Are Social is also organising and sponsoring Twestival Paris, as well as helping out with Skype‘s sponsorship of Twestival London, Paris, Lille and Clermont-Ferrand, so stay tuned for more Twestival updates!

By the time I wake up they will be in full swing… Have fun over there, and at every other Twestival!

This morning, four of us went down to the Innovation and Networks of Influence event held at NESTA in central London for what turned out to be a refreshingly different experience from many of the usual discussions of what influence is.

The most common ways of describing influence in social networks is to draw diagrams with blobs on them – typically there are some very large blobs with lines radiating outward to smaller blobs, which in turn radiate to even smaller blobs. While this concept is useful for specific purposes – and can be mapped algorithmically – it should not be taken as a complete model of a social process. It doesn’t account for two-way conversation (or the lack of it), nor can it help explain where and when a message gets altered, or any other form of change that a lack of centralised control can bring about. There is also context to deal with – while one person may be influential on, say, technology, they may hold very little sway when recommending a florist.

Refreshingly this wasn’t the way influence was treated here – instead looking at it from above and instead of a mathematical modelling perspective, it focused on interactions and behaviours. A lot of games were played – the kind which you get on managerial courses and you make a bit of a fool of yourself. It’s easy to be sceptical of a game’s effectiveness – but as it turns out fun is a pretty good heuristic for getting a bunch of strangers to quickly bond and share ideas.

Out of it we got some pretty interesting observations out of these little mini-experiments. Activities where the rules were incomplete quickly lead to mutation, with people agreeing on extra ad hoc rules such as deciding tiebreakers, without falling out in open conflict. Even in moderately complex tasks, spontaneity can be more productive than organisation. Messages are prone to mutation and reinterpretation much more quickly than we think, and that it’s very hard to keep even the simplest ones the same. And verbal cues only form a small part of this continual process of cross-influencing when face-to-face.

That last part is perhaps the most interesting one, as social media is dominated by verbal, without the non-verbal cues nor the synchronicity of face-to-face conversation. This is gradually being broken down (think about how synchronous and seamless Twitter is becoming, as well as the growth of mobile and video & audio on the go), and there are the blurring of boundaries between and online and offline – just look at the amazing take-up of the Twestival worldwide (including Twestival Paris, which we are organising). But still, there are gaps, as evidenced by workarounds such as smileys and endless text acronyms and abbreviations, and people working in social media need to be mindful of the limitations they face.

On the same subject, there was very little talk of online, marketing or even ‘social media’ at the event. Not that I’m tiring of the term like Bobbie Johnson is – it’s just a word, after all – but it’s a mere means, and it’s far more interesting to look into the people behind the media and what interests them.

The play element of the day was just as important – reminding us that what we do in our profession should be fun, useful or preferably both, if we’re to do work that we can be proud of. Our thanks go to Mark Earls, James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore for a highly stimulating morning, and if you get a chance to see them lead a discussion any time soon, we strongly recommend it. How about that for influence?

This week, the IPA published a report snappily titled Social Media Futures – The future of advertising and agencies in a networked society. A 10-year perspective, the launch of which was covered both by the FT:

Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media

and Campaign:

For agencies used to what one senior executive calls a “broadcast mindset”, the social networking phenomenon and the way it empowers consumers can seem seriously scary. Which makes this week’s warning from the IPA that, when it comes to social media, the majority of agencies “aren’t getting it” all the more disturbing.

The Campaign piece includes some good analysis of the state of play, including this from Mark Collier, Managing Partner at Dare:

Social media should be viewed as a discipline in its own right and doing it properly will require genuine specialists who live and breathe it. But it will need to be closely allied to core marketing strategy and execution if it is to be relevant and effective.

And this from Steve Henry, the former TBWA\London Executive Creative Director:

The current agency model needs rethinking because it’s run out of steam. Remember that a lot of digital agencies are ten years old and you have to ask if they’re flexible enough to seize the opportunities on behalf of clients. Many clients are starting to feel that the agency they need doesn’t exist. That’s to say one that understands the mechanics of social networking as well as delivering the upstream strategy and thinking.

These are the very reasons we set-up We Are Social in June last year (combined with a similar malaise in the PR industry), and I’m confident that what we’re doing addresses Mark and Steve’s concerns head on.

As part of the launch of the report, the IPA also held an event on Monday evening, which Nathan, Sandrine and myself went along to – nicely summed up by PHD’s Dan Hosford:

Essentially, the IPA gathered a group of industry social media champions across agencies & media owners. Then bored them

There’s more detail, if you want it, in posts from Anjali Ramachandran, Graeme Harrison, Amelia Torode and John V Willshire.

Update: The IPA have put some of the slides from the event on SlideShare and responded with a blog post of their own.

One of the eternal questions you hear asked about Twitter, especially by those who don’t use it themselves, is ‘Why?’

Of course, there’s a myriad of different answers, but these two films come close to answering the question.

The first was put together by Christian Payne (@Documentally) and Matt Rawlinson (@Barnstormed) from vox pops they conducted at a gathering of Twitterers in London in September last year – the first ever Twestival:

The second was filmed by Hamish Campbell (@hamishcampbell) at Twinterval, another gathering of London’s Twitterati in December, and perhaps delves a little deeper than the first:

If you feel like doing some anthropological fieldwork of your own, you’ll be glad to know that Twestival has gone global – on the 12th February there will be local Twestivals all around the world, bringing together Twitterers for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

We’re going to be at three of them ourselves – we’re organising the Paris Twestival, which we’re confident is going to be one of the biggest and best, Nathan is helping out with Sydney’s and what’s left of the team will be partying hard here in London.

While I’ve got your attention, why not have a look at the last set of stats on Twitter usage in the UK, see Chris’ commentary on why the British tabloids are so hostile to Twitter or follow me on Twitter…

Update: Drew Benvie on the new generation of Twitter users, an interesting memo from The Pew Internet & American Life Project on Twitter and status updating and the answers the Guardian got to the question What do you use Twitter for?

The photos and the chatter from last night’s Twinterval tweetup. As you can see, a festive time was had by all. Until next time…

We’ve been working with Ford for the past few months now on the This is Now campaign to launch the Fiesta across Europe and we’ve recently started working on the campaign for the launch of their new Ford KA.

The campaign’s called “Find It” and it’s all about encouraging people to look beyond the obvious, to find and explore hidden discoveries. As part of the campaign, they created this video about the street art scene in Shoreditch:

We thought that a perfect way to get people both looking beyond the obvious and talking about the camapign, would be to take some bloggers on a street art tour of Shoreditch.

So that’s what we did on Saturday. We took along about 20 people, bloggers and their friends, to discover the best graffiti classics from the likes of Banksy, Eine, Obey, Invader, D*Face as well as work from street artists like Jim Cereal, L.E.T., Mike Marcus, TEK13, Sam3, Patr2ism and David Gouby. Here’s a little video of the day:

Also see write-ups from Michael, Lolly, Chris, Mehrdad, Gerel, Cédric and Martin or photos from Lolly, Mehrdad, Chris, Cédric, Violette and Robin.

Thanks again to all the bloggers who took part in this event: Cédric, Chris, Fubiz, Martin, Gerel, Lolly, Mario, Mehrdad, Chris and Vandalog. And a special thank you to Michael ‘RJ’ Rushmore from Vandalog for sharing with us his knowledge of street art and to Cédric for sharing his knowledge about Space Invaders with us.

And if you’re wondering what those 3D KAs are that appear in the video, head over to gofindit.net and download the app yourself.