As a digital boy this made me smile – especially the line “Algorithms got me crossed eyed”!

I’m meeting up shortly with Paul Clarke (@paul_clarke) who is ferrying Londoners about the city for free rides on his motorcycle as they try to deal with the RMT union tube strike.

His #tweetbike has been taking requests for riders across the city, as they tweet him requests for rides. Follow along via Twitter to see tube strike updates, by watching the hashtag #tubestike, as this social media experiment unfolds.

 I plan to tweet and record an Audioboo interview with Paul Clarke about his experiences.

 I’m not sure how I’ll get back from today’s meeting in East London, but expect an adventure.

 I’ve also blogged here about the strike today.

Good luck wherever you are today in getting there and getting home,

-Lisa

In update to this experience of riding the #tweetbike offered by Paul Clarke during the tube strike, we got the attention of the BBC that day, and for a full report, please see this blog post:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/talking_point/8093595.stm

You can also hear about my experience of riding on the back of the motorcycle across London here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/8094149.stm

It’s a license for staff to waste time.   There’s no control about what they say.   What happens if a customer makes contact with them direct?   Today’s arguments against allowing your staff to use social media at work?  Actually they were pretty much the arguments used by companies to restrict email use in the mid 1990s.

That’s worth bearing in mind as the social media in the office debate rages.  

Today it’s received wisdom that email is an essential business tool, and so it will be with social media before too long.   

Especially with metrics firm Nielsen showing that in February, communication via social networks overtook communication via email.   And from personal experience, I can now think of several instances of clients messaging me direct on Twitter as opposed to pinging me an email.

However just like with 90s email, the first stage of workplace social media acceptability is to publish dos and don’ts guidelines about what’s allowed.   Even though a recent survey by Monster showed that 90% of workers are afraid of using Twitter for fear of getting in trouble, a number of firms have done just that.

As with all internal guidelines this ranges from the simple to the ones filled with corporate speak.   

For example, Opera, the makers of the Internet browser of the same name, published a series of eight easy to understand rules: Share your thoughts, be active, “we’re not your mama”, don’t give away the farm, check your sources, our friends are your friends, for the squeamish post a disclaimer and use your common sense.

Australian telecoms giant Telstra publicly released guidelines revolving around the ‘three Rs’ – responsibility, respect and representation.   And at the far end of the scale, Canadian broadcaster CBC published criteria that they backtracked on after it caused a fuss, saying that personal blogs couldn’t be used to espouse a partisan political opinion.   

The bottom line is though social media isn’t going to go away, it’s part and parcel of today’s Internet environment and it’s what graduates in particular who join your organisations see as second nature.     

As with so much of social media, you can either set out the parameters of your involvement now.   Or stick your head in the sand and wait until it comes to you, when you are forced to react to it.   

Image credit

I will be joining a top line up at Being-Digital ’09 on 9th June at Centre Point in London.  We will be bringing together some of the best digital minds and demos. The conference focus is on debate and discussion; both in person and via SMS or Twitter feedback. I plan to be about most of the day – I am speaking on a panel in the afternoon which looks at how tech companies can improve their bottom line in a recession.  I hope to see you there.

Links for the programme, registration and website are below:

Website
Programme

In a social media event that we hosted with Genius Rocket and Kickapps in New York recently, there was much discussion around how brand marketing can adapt to be more interactive with consumers, and create a sense of community within an advertising campaign.  It provoked some interesting debate. These days, consumers are completely visible to brands – they are often accessible to talk to individually over Twitter or through social media, for example. But at the same time, they have complete control over their own environment – creating and viewing content on demand and on their own terms. Injecting a sense of community – of belonging – that will engage consumers with a brand is the golden bullet of brand marketing. But it can be hard to achieve. Of course, if you are creating a long-term campaign, you can create complete projects that include physical events, virtual worlds, online communities and so on, that bring consumers together to interact with you and with each other. This takes significant time and money to do effectively. (Red Bull is a brand that does this well, with its associations with F1 and the Red Bull air race underpinning its ‘Red Bull gives you wings’ advertising slogan. Its music academy is also a good example of creating a branded community around a specific interest.) If you have a shorter campaign life – which might be led by a brand advertising campaign – then injecting a sense of community to that campaign is a bigger challenge. There are two ways that companies do it:

1. By creating a community that is itself the brand campaign (Cesar’s ‘I Promise’ campaign did this, creating a website where pet owners could make promises to their pets).


2. By creating a community around the campaign, such as the much-talked-about and utterly brilliant ‘Compare the Market / Compare the Meerkat’ campaign, developed by VCCP.

It’s been a big month for ‘decision engines’.

First we had the build-up and launch of Wolfram-Alpha as mentioned a few weeks ago and now we have the launch of Microsoft’s own decision engine called ‘Bing‘.
Bing went live last week, a couple of days early. The
earlier-than-planned-launch is a strong indication of the effort
Microsoft has put behind it. Let’s not forget how important Bing is to
Microsoft. The majority of Microsoft’s recent challenges to Google’s
search and online advertising dominance have failed to make an impact
on their market share. Bing is the successor to Microsoft’s Live
Search. But what’s different? And what exactly are ‘decision engines’,
a term so new that there isn’t a Wikipedia entry to define them yet?

Decision
Engines are being positioned as the evolution of search. Whereas search
engines ‘simply’ (and I use the word advisedly) return the closest
match to a given search term, decision engines move us closer towards
the ‘semantic web’ and artificial intelligence by using contextual
information, together with the results of previous user’s searches, to
provide more accurate and more helpful results. Well that’s the theory
anyway.

But do either Wolfram Alpha or Bing live up to this?

Wolfram
Alpha has hit the 100 million query mark, but getting an answer to your
question is still quite hit and miss. It’s actually quite difficult to
think of a useful query that Wolfram Alpha has an answer for. Many
questions still get a “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your
input”.

Bing on the other hand might well be trying to position
itself as a ‘decision engine’ but it’s not as revolutionary as its
pre-launch billing. It’s more of an evolution of search, attempting to
improve on Google’s offering.

And there are some nice features:
the image search allows you to filter images by size, style, layout
etc. A neat feature. The video shortcuts allows you to play the video
by just rolling over the image thumbnail in the search. But Bing has been
criticised for delivering poorer results than Google. For a neat way of comparing
Google and Bing, Blackdog have created a split screen site to search both sites at the same time.

Will
it be enough to make inroads into Google’s market share? Only time will
tell. But from first impressions it’s just not significantly different
or better than Google to shift consumer behaviour.

There is a danger that the term Decision Engine is being used by Microsoft in order to create some new news: as an attempt to be viewed as creating something new rather than just going head-to-head with Google.  But that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing.

The Wolfram Alpha product may not be quite there yet, but it takes us much more into the area of
decision engines and its evolution will be much more interesting and important to watch.

I must confess that until this week I’d never heard of a company called Twofour. They are a 280 person strong, £29m turnover TV and film business based in Plymouth.

This was just one of the new facts I learned from The Top 100 South West Creative Companies League Table – 2009″, put together by Bristol Media. This guide is the first ever round up of all the major TV, digital, publishing, PR, design and marketing companies from across the region in one list, ranked by turnover.

The South West boasts some nationally known names such as Future Publishing, McCann Erickson and Bray Leino. And with Bristol-based Aardman Animations the region is home to a creative company with a truly international reputation.

But what really stands out for me from the Top 100 list is its diversity and the quality of the work being produced by relatively small, but highly talented firms.

A small plug for my agency, 3Sixty. We were voted as the third most respected creative company in the South West of England among a poll of our peers. We were pipped to the post by Aardman and E3.

There’s a new digital model emerging in New York and I think it’s something we could learn from here in the UK. Our NY office recently designed and built a website for luxury fashion designer Catherine Malandrino. Nothing unusual about that I hear you say, but more than that, we’re taking hold of the stock, storing it, dispatching it directly to the consumer and answering customer service queries. We’re effectively running an online shop on behalf of the designer.

Now why would a designer hand over the reigns to a digital agency in this way? Well there’s a number of reasons, firstly, a lot of them don’t ‘get’ digital, secondly they don’t have the resources or the manpower, and thirdly, they don’t have the budget. Yes we know that they are ‘luxury’ brands, but unless it’s Louis Vuitton or Gucci these designers, of which there are many, haven’t got millions of pounds in their remit to do online stuff. This sort of solution is perfect for them, because it allows them to sell online, not worry about it, make the money, and someone is looking after it all for them. 

At the moment it seems to work in New York as opposed to the US generally because of its size and the amount of designers that are based there, but I think this is going to get bigger and bigger and could work well in London. There is no cash anywhere at the moment and certainly with these kinds of brands this route makes perfect sense. The future? I think so.

It seems that the UK is falling out of love with the kings of out-of-town box-shifters, PC world. This is a typical comment that I found on YouTube.

The sad truth is never purchase any computer, laptop, or
components from PC World. They are the cowboy’s of the computing
industry, who over charge, mislead, and sell awful products often to
those who know no better. Thankfully, I’ve heard they are in some deep
brown stuff financially. Source: YouTube

Agency websites suck.  It’s official.  And every agency would (should) agree.  I can’t think of a single quality agency that has a website that truly reflects them (and their work) as an agency.  That was until I came across this piece of genius from US agency Boone Oakley – a website as a YouTube vid.  Can’t think of anything more of the moment than that – other than maybe a company website made from Twitter, which wouldn’t constitute social media a*sery . . .