Last night, Michelle and Lee headed to the Barbican to see Us Now, a short film directed by Ivo Gormley examining how the internet is transforming society, with comments from the likes of George Osborne and Clay Shirky and a Q&A at the end (there's a short clip below). With an increasing loss of trust in our institutions, people are increasingly looking towards peer- or self- governance, and there was some real split opinion around how possible or indeed inevitable this will be. Stimulating stuff.

And this morning, that sociable trio Robbie, Dons and Col are out again hosting the first Oxford Tuttle, with live photos and Tweets flooding in. It looks like they're having an excellent time talking social media, creative tech and word of mouth.

Who needs a weekend when your week is this much fun? Wait, don't answer that.

Having experimented with platforms such as Wikis (not dynamic or visual enough, and unwieldy with a big team) we've seen great success with SocialCast, which allows us to share and debate internally in a way that feels absolutely intuitive to the Facebook generation. The series of microblogging-style update options, where you can throw up an idea, a question, a link, or indeed a worklog explaining what you're up to, are a refreshingly immediate way of keeping connected to members of all the different teams, and as a global company, we find it especially useful; our offices are spread across both London and Oxford, and at any one time a good few Heads are likely to be at an event or meeting abroad.

Of course, it comes up against the same issues we see in public social media; as your Socialcast presence draws in feeds from all your other sites (Twitter, Flickr, Digg etc) the work/personal lines can become blurred, and we're still working out how to keep things focused without stripping away the intimacy that keeps it human and creative. But it's already stimulated a lot of conversation about how we can make the way we work better - which is what we're all about, in the end.

What have your experiences been of branching into conversational comms? McKinsey have a neat summary on Web 2.0 tools for companies here...

Come and join us at 12pm EST (that's 5pm for UK types) - you can sign up at the WOMMA website or the Facebook group. It's free for WOMMA members and non-profits, $50 otherwise. All sorts of robust and challenging questions essential.

(They've chosen to illustrate it with a rather embarrassing and ancient photo. I am more intelligent than I look.)

"Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity [...] To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost. I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life."

Within the polemic, there's some truth. Many Tweeters have a strong identity, but in a crowded and competitive digital world, constant reinforcement and broadcasting of that identity has become default mode; it happened with texting long before microblogging. Many more than the 'young' and 'marginalised' feel that if they're not visibly sharing and speaking, they don't exist. In the same piece, Alain de Botton also notes that the mundanity of Tweets only reflects our age-old offline behaviour, by emulating the intimate, meandering small talk we indulge in with our closest family and friends. Basically, we want to feel that the big public world of social media is our living room (or even, as de Botton claims, our womb).

So underpinning most of social media's chatter and creation is a deep craving for security. People will continue to talk as if their identities depended on it, but those who learn to listen will be richest in the attention economy. For both brands and individuals, listening well, rather than constantly opining, will prove to be the real art of social media. This doesn't imply passivity; any actor tells you that active listening is an incredibly powerful tool, and that mirroring, acknowledging and asking for more will draw people closer to you. Making others feel heard, and reinforcing their identities - not imposing your own - garners the trust and, paradoxically, the attention that we all crave.

What was it that dude Shakespeare said? "Hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature", or some such guff...

It looks like Adidas.TV, soft-launched this week, has listened and learned, offering embeddable players and widgets. Their shorts will no doubt be well made, but one still wonders why they're sinking money into professionally produced clips instead of promoting and inspiring original creations from their customers.

If Bud.TV is the past, have a look at SEO Blog's 12 social media trends to watch for a glimpse of the future; it's a perceptive little list. We think that mobile technology and geo-location will be particularly important, along with consumers becoming ever more savvy about their rights, preferences and independence, as Antony Mayfield's canny examination of the Facebook Terms & Conditions debacle makes clear...

London has it, Birmingham has it, Cardiff, Manchester and Brighton have it, and now ladies and gentleman Oxford has it too! Yes, the famous Tuttle club, also known as Social Media Café, is coming to Oxford; and Col and Donna, two of 1000heads' finest, are at the helm.

Interested in coming along? We’d love to see you there. All the details are handily stored on this here Wiki page and if you’d like to meet Col, Dons and inevitably a few more 1000heads-ees then you can sign up here and be part of the inaugural Oxford Tuttle Club.

Things will be getting started at 10am on Thursday 26^th Feb at the Jam Factory in Oxford (obviously). It’s right by the train station for those who are coming in from slightly further afield. Look forward to seeing you there!]]> http://www.brandvocal.com/1000heads/2009/02/new_tuttle_on_the_block.html http://www.brandvocal.com/1000heads/2009/02/new_tuttle_on_the_block.html Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:54:18 +0000 Social media's latest ethical thorn bush comes courtesy of Australia's Hugh Thomas, a popular YouTube videomaker who posted up a video blog based on the (ironically titled) US drama Lie To Me - without disclosing that he was paid to do it by 20th Century Fox. And off the back of his vlog, scores of similar clips were uploaded - all by users who were also paid, but kept their mouths shut (full story at The Sunday Morning Herald here).

It isn't as clumsy as some other Australian and American YouTube 'whisper campaigns' - at least the videos were actually created by real users, who entered the deal knowingly - but that just makes it more risible, blurring the lines between independent content and sponsored spam. Fox will learn nothing from it - who knows if any of those users were really interested in the drama or not, and what they thought? - and the whole thing makes the show seem deeply unappealing; even with our own lizard-faced Tim Roth in the starring role, the only way they could get people inspired by it was, apparently, to pay them. Fail.

If you fancy a chat with our full-time ethicist Sylwia, get in touch.

The game we were really there for was Free London's Monsters, a project created by Andrew and the team from Blink Media using Thumbprint, their platform which allows people to read and write about their world by text message. To help FLM, you text the location, name and description of your monster to the platform, which allows you to 'own' that space in the city, where others can text in their thoughts, dreams, ideas, or indeed monsters... (mine is here).

Thumbprint has great potential: games are a brilliant leveller, and the combination of geo-location, playful offline meet-ups, social media integration and mobile technology has all the elements of the kind of immersive, sensory creativity we love. Flickr images from Andrew coming shortly.

As eMarketer announces that internet users have hit the 1 billion mark, it reminds us that China is in the lead (with only 20% of residents online); that Japan is still almost twice as active as the UK; and that the massive population of India will surely overtake the small fry of Europe soon. And a new OgilvyOne Asia Pacific study shows that 456 million Asian users have embraced social media -that's just under a third of the world's online population (for full story and a great regional breakdown of behaviours see AsiaOne Digital here).

So why, still, are so few brands building word of mouth strategies in a truly international way? Regional marketing budgets lead them to focus on single countries when the scope for connecting brand advocates across the globe is huge.We found our N96 Ninjas project for Nokia was incredibly enhanced by engaging voices from 10 countries across the world; it created a real sense of pushing boundaries and connecting diverse on and offline communities.

Each culture prefers different scapes, behaves in different ways, and needs a different approach; but in the increasingly sophisticated and inevitably international space of social media, why not capitalise on the one big thing the web brings to word of mouth: international comparison, collaboration and reach?

The paper notes that “while many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content […] employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet”.

It mirrors an earlier HP study, 'Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity', which looked at how public content sharing is more frequently motivated by a personal need for attention than a sense of the common good: “attention is the main driver of contribution to the digital commons [...] productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits an strong positive dependence on attention”.

If brands want to motivate both their consumers and employees to create high volume, sustained and enthused content, they must make them feel that they have attention and appreciation – both from the brand and each other. Creating online hubs to aggregate and highlight peer to peer brand conversation, and building a self-consciously supportive tribe of brand evangelists, are two big steps towards achieving this. It’s common people sense.

1000heads divvied ourselves up between as many UK based Twestival’s as we could and headed yonder last Thursday. Needless to say a grand time was had by all judging from what we saw at Edinburgh, Reading, Birmingham, Oxford, Bristol, London and Brighton Twestival was a grand success.

My own personal experience was one of delight and joy at PoppyRed in Birmingham where there was much celebration of Twitter and all it entails. It seems that this was matched across the board as escapades were shared between returning heads Friday morning.

One of our favourite and most social heads, Colin, was charged with organising the Oxford shindig and in doing so he was able to get the Twestival Team Gumball Style - @documentally, @philcampbell, @barnstormed and @magiprint - to drop in during their hectic tour. And in doing so, they decided our Col was worthy of an interview. Hurrah! See Colin chatting Twitter with @documentally here.

Lastly before signing off, I’d like to say a hearty hello to all those who chatted to a 1000heads-ee making the evening that little more communal and thank you to all those who made the events happen, especially @Amanda who put it all together!

Having spotted Shirky’s comment in yesterday’s Observer that ‘the internet brings to everywhere some of the conundrums of dense city living’, I went on to watch the first episode of Paxman’s series on the Victorians, which focused on the explosion of industry and the birth of the modern urban experience. Paxman’s narrative about the 19thC’s newly crowded and chaotic metropolises, which initially aroused fear and disdain, but went on to inspire a proud creative renaissance, has distinct parallels with society’s love-hate relationship with social media.

Our virtual scapes have their brimming sewers (RedTube), suburbs (Delia’s message boards) and public museums (Wikipedia, Flickr) too. Just as the Victorians invented the omnibus, opening up unprecedented levels of mobility for city dwellers where rich rubbed shoulders with poor, social media has opened up global, public platforms that connect us like never before. Our commentators similarly swing between criticising the anarchy and depravity of the space, and celebrating its democratic cultural richness.

And the psychology driving our new cyber-urban behaviour has uncanny resonances too. Paxman points out that, for the Victorian urban poor, emancipation did not mean the socialism of their revolting counterparts across the Channel, but the right to share the comforts of the middle class. And this kind of conservative aspiration is more of an online trigger – see this Sunday Times piece on PS3’s keep-up-with-the-Jones’ social network Home – than our crusading 2.0 iconoclasts would like to believe.

It isn’t just a cute conceit. The industrial revolution invented both our modern concept of the distant, mass-produced ‘brand’ and the mass marketing that was needed to make that brand desirable. It's no surprise that social media has inspired a similar explosion in brand interest and influence. By studying Victorian brands that flourished in their new environment – such as Duvelleroy, the London fan makers who created the highly successful and conversational ‘Language of the Fan’, which still generates content today, online and on TV – we might just find that our ancestors knew a thing or two about the urban psychology of word of mouth.