Positive buzz was moving around yesterday about the
Skittles website taking on the social media genre quite nicely. Not even a day later they move the homepage to the static Facebook group page due to negative chatter about skittles on Twitter. So the big question I am asking is:

a) were they smart enough to predict some negativity & change it to Facebook with the aim of getting more press. Sorry, but negative press is good press if they handle it correctly OR;

b) were they simply not competent enough to predict that there will always be some bad with the good…

I honestly can’t believe it is the first, because all brands know that putting your brand out into the communities, will always erupt some bad chatter also. Its the strategy you have in place to counter act the bad – support it & grasp it! “we all know that not everyone out there loves our brands” – and that’s fine!

Interesting to see how they counter act & comment on this… Either way they got bucket loads of press out of it as they are the
3rd top word used in Twitter two days in a row! Yep, beating politics, world news and so on in Twitter…

Good job guys – at least for trying… Not necessarily award winning material but not bad either!

Kinetica Art Fair 2009 was a one-of-a-kind exhibition that introduced the UK to a collection of artists who have taken sculpture, electronic arts and robotics to new extremes in a three-day weekend event featuring 150 exhibiting and performing artists. On view and to touch and play with were gigantic, and desktop size, mobile artworks, moving pieces that made you laugh, or in some cases feel slightly disturbed, and light fantastic artworks splashed out across the P3 gallery space.

Favourite works on view included:

Tim Lewis’s “Pony”, a robot pet that moved about the floor giving curious glances to passersby.

Peter Sedgley’s luminescent light piece, presenting transformative, moving colour contained in a round disk.

Chris O’Shea and Cinimod Studio’s Beacon, a playful sensory floor display of emergency traffic lights that follow people as they walk about the room.

Giles Walker’s kinetically kinky pole dancing robots.

Alistair Burleigh and Alise Piebalga’s Labyrinths, showing projected image on cubes.

Michael Markert’s k2.1 Talking Machine that communicates as people mainipulate their hands around the piece.

Cybersonica Social Sunday night’s performances featuring Bathysphere, Ryan Jordan, Kristy VC, Oddscene, Steve Nosurname, Threep and Vent Media.

Still in motion,

-Lisa

The battle of big media is being waged at the community level, as both The New York Times and a Google executive launched rivalling “hyper-local” news websites this week, in the exact same New Jersey suburbs, with plans for expansion. Small town newspapers be warned, the big boys are gunning for your advertising dollars.

Maplewood, Millburn and Clinton Hill – the bland, upper middle class ‘burbs of big-city Newark seem like a strange place for two of the worlds largest, most powerful media companies to launch coinciding “hyper-local” news websites within a matter of weeks.

The New York Times’ The Local, and Google exec Tim Armstrong’s Patch have invaded these quaint communities with a soft focus lens and hard news angle.

Both publications will basically employ one journalist per community, who will report on local news in the area, which will be connected to one ubiquitous news portal website.

Patch, which launched in mid-February, was whispered to be Google’s “Trojan Horse” to Troy’s, in this case the idyllic communities of smalltown USA, advertising revenue, with Armstrong acting as a proxy.

The Local, which launched this week, picked the exact same towns as Patch, plus two more in Brooklyn, New York, seems to be NYTs volley.

Is it war? Both start-ups claim benevolence, and to an extent I see their point, hell, the industry isn’t exactly well-off enough to begin shuttering this kind of innovation, but certain questions must be raised.

For instance, do we really want Google dipping its pinkie finger in (assumingly) every community honey pot across the United States, controlling the news?

As a disclosure, Patch isn’t a Google initiative, rather a Tim Armstrong initiative, the same man who heads Google’s uber-lucrative advertising operations. Armstrong has put his own money down, Google supposedly gave the greenlight, but still, that’s barely a degree of separation.

And why would the NYT launch is the exact same communities at Patch, unless it’s a blatant attempt to thwart Armstrong’s advances in its own backyard.

And could the winner, if any emerges, be holding the golden calf? The saviour of the nation’s utterly (no-pun-intended) beleaguered newspaper industry?
We shall see, best bet is to grab a bucket of popcorn and watch the ensuing theatrics, it should be entertaining.

Well I might be in Finland but you only have to drive 5 hours to the border of Russia and its a different world.

 The growth in the Russian online sector is exponential at the moment and I don’t just mean finding a Russian Bride for yourself!

Odnoklassniki.ru is Russias 3 year old community with over 30 million registered users – according to Quintura! Odnoklassniki was launched in early 2006 so has some pretty nice numbers being the language is Russian!

Statistically it has about
8 million visitors each day. Their core competitor is
Vkontakte.ru with a trailing 28 million registered users
and 1.4 billion page views per day.

According to the Russian TNS Web
Index Vkontakte had 13.09 million visitors a month, which is slightly
higher than Odnoklassniki’s monthly audience. But these stats basically make the Russian social networking market  the fourth largest in Europe after UK, Germany and France.

Quite impressive & very interesting markets to watch as well as the Ukraine.

Watch this space!

The author, blogger and software developer Joel Spolsky recently likened software development to fine tuning a transistor radio. You spin the dial to roughly the right point, make a series of minor adjustments before the clear signal rings through and you can enjoy your favourite radio station.

It’s also a nice simile for managing online customer experience. Successful web properties have already arrived at a place where customers want to visit them but it takes a lot of fine tuning to reduce the static which might drive them away. Small adjustments to areas like sign posting, footpaths, email templates and other primary customer touch points add up to a big improvement in customer satisfaction.

Maintaining a static free signal is not easy, it requires constant attention, moulding the brand experience to customer preferences, tested in real time. It’s important not least because the competitor ‘pirate ships’ are circling, hoping to woo dissatisfied customers away.

You can read Joe’s original blog post here: http://alturl.com/7k3

First of all appologies for not being here for a while! Many things have been happening in my life both good and bad but now back on top of the ice-cream and ready to dip the cherry into the chocolate – bit too much detail eh?

Righteo, well I was previously blogging last June so I am not going to write everything that has happened since then but I am back & will be blogging weekly and daily if I find the time as lots to report. But during this time I have left the Isobar family, worked within a Finnish start-up and now going out on my own and looking for exciting projects to get involved with pretty much anywhere in the world.

But down to blogging – Twitter Twitter Twitter: right now I feel like its really launching itself. I have held back for a little while simply because not many people have been there & it still lacks viewers and users but it is for sure at the top of my wants list – its quick, easy, takes not time, informative… and removes the time restraints that many of us have when blogging – I can post a quick link or a one liner & for me that is great.

As for clients using it, well, I hope to get them on board in near future. At this stage it is essentially collegues or other digital savvy folk like us ! So add me if you will MichaelTrenerry as Im keen to hear everything we do in here when blogging in micro format. For clients the ability to track what people are saying in Twitter is vital – Its now so much easier to funnel your issues into Twitter so for powerful brands who are using all the tracking tools – thumbs up! I am hoping to work with clients in the Nordics though on their social media strategies and twitting will be just a small part of the overall package!

I also today downloaded TweetDeck: Really streamlined and easier to divide your inbox, messages, groups and so on: Twitter should keep things simple but perhaps make it easier to divide things into categories E.g. news, digital, personal etc… But check it out – TweetDeck is cool…

But what about you? What Twitter client are you using?