So tell me about Macmillan Cancer…
Macmillan Cancer Support is all about improving the lives of people affected by cancer. We provide practical, medical, emotional and financial support.  So as well as providing nurses and occupational therapists, we can come to your house and help with the gardening or carry your shopping and we even offer support if you’re struggling with the financial impact of cancer.

How did you get involved with Twitter – how do you use it for Macmillan?
I got involved because a couple of friends were using it and it seemed an easy way top keep in touch with them.  Both use social media as part of their work, so I saw first hand just how useful it can be for an organisation.  It took a while to get our heads round how to use it for Macmillan, but I think we’re getting there – it’s just part and parcel of being an organisation on the web these days.  We send out updates on campaigns and fundraising events, we encourage people to join in and we try our best to respond to everyone who @’s us, especially those who are fundraising. 

What was the idea behind the Shoreditch Twitnic?
I’ve been to a couple of the Shoreditch Twits and really enjoyed them, so when they were trying to come up with a June concept, I suggested making it part of our Big Picnic event.  We encourage people around the country to raise money for Macmillan by hosting picnics and getting their guests to donate money in exchange for some food or drink.  We also have loads of sales promotions in Somerfield, so if you go into your local one, you’ll find loads of products where a percentage of the profits are donated to Macmillan.  We were lucky in that Somerfield are great supporters of ours and they provided all the food and drink for the Twitnic.  Big Picnic goes on till the 14th July, so if anyone else wants to get involved, they can log on, register their details and get lots of tips, ideas and themes.

And you’ve got something else planned for Shoreditch as well?
We do, it’s called The Brick Lane Festival and it’s happening on the 13th August 2009.  We are basically taking over some venues on Brick Lane and the surrounding area and putting a bunch of bands on.  We’ve already announced that Frank Turner, The Chapman Family, Spycatcher and Jersey Budd are playing and we’re going to be announcing loads more in the next two weeks.  I’m even tempted to get up and play myself!

We’re really excited about the event as it’s the first time we’ve done anything like this.  Tickets are only £20 and all the bands and venues are doing it for free, so all that money goes to people affected by cancer. You can buy tickets and check for more bands being added here.

Do you see more charities turning online in today’s climate?
I do, but I think it’s just something that every brand/organisation is doing, not just charities.  For us, it’s obvious you have to have some presence on the web, not just in terms of PR, reputation management but also fundraising and raising awareness of the services we provide. It’s a great way to connect with your supporters and get real time feedback on what you are doing right and what people aren’t responding to. Because of the climate, we’re all told by experts that it is a cheap and easy way to work, but I think with charities (particularly smaller ones) our greatest resource is people and their time, so while there are all these new things to try and experiment, we can’t replace all the things that already work.

I’ve found that I could spend all day on Twitter/Facebook/Justgiving sites talking to supporters, but all the offline/print/broadcast work we also do would suffer and they are equally important to reaching people. I think it’s vital that we remember that there are many people who need us that aren’t on the net.

But you’re relatively ahead of the pack, what advice would you give to the third sector  to get involved to this?
Firstly I’d state the obvious; that listening to what people are saying about you before diving into the conversation is important. Whether it is Twitter or forums or Facebook, you need to be patient and really look at what people are saying (and not saying) before you start to approach them. You’ll have a greater understanding of what the mood/culture is and that in turn will help you approach people online in a more friendly, less corporate way.

Every organisation has a personality that comes from a mix of their public face and internal culture. Try and find your voice and personality in everything you do. 

Try everything that’s free! If you don’t like Twitter, or don’t see the value in it, there is probably another tool out there that will suit your needs.  The worry for me is that charities will see Twitter (because of the media spotlight) and if they don’t like it, will write of Social Media altogether.

Anything else we should know?
We have lots of different ways you can get involved with supporting Macmillan, from trekking in South America, to picnics, to marathons, to coffee mornings or just shaking your tin outside a supermarket.

While we’ll be praying for good weather for the next two weeks, you can start planning buy….

1. Buying a rug
2. Selecting appropriate picnic garments
3. Practice making Pimms
4. Telling all your twitter friends to sign up here

Finally, we’re also really grateful to Big Picnic supporter Somerfield who are providing us with a selection of goodies for the picnic itself. We’ll have a bucket or something on the day to collect donations for Macmillan. Follow them on twitter at @macmillancancer.

If anyone has suggestions for entertainment that go beyond frisbee and hackey-sack, I’m all ears.

Visitors to Skittles.comare invited to “Interweb the rainbow”, which basically means “see what’s going on in the world of Skittles all over the web”. You can see chatter on Twitter, photos and videos on Flickr and YouTube, and product information from Wikipedia. “Isn’t this cool?” say social media people everywhere… well yes, it is. But why?

1. They don’t ask you to visit the factory
In Feb 2008, at  a Chinwag discussion on measuring social media, it became clear that deciding just what to measure was one of the biggest issues, and safe to say, that’s not changed. Danielle West, then at analytics firm Nedstat, highlighted the ability to track user engagement on a company’s homepage, whereas Will McInnes, one half of Nixon McInnes spoke much more about engagement, conversation and content.

Of course Nedstat is going to say that the aim of social media marketing is to drive traffic to your own website which you can analyse later, and it seems that every online campaign must have its own microsite these days. For brands selling to consumers, I find this a very strange mindset to have. From a sales point of view, a confectionery company shouldn’t care if you buy one of their products in a supermarket, a petrol station or in a vending machine, what matters is the purchase. It would be insane to suggest that you have to go to factory to buy the sweets. In a similar vein, Skittles is suggesting that they don’t care where you interact with the brand, they don’t care if you don’t visit Skittles.com – in fact, if you do, you won’t find much that you can’t find anywhere else on the web. What matters to them is that you engage with the brand somewhere.

The marketing goal of “driving traffic to our microsite” is equivalent to “getting people to the factory”. Which reminds me of the story of an elderly couple driving nearly 100 miles from Portsmouth to BBC Thames Valley Radio following an advert asking them to visit the BBC website. They thought it was an actual building. That’s a little off the point, but talks to a principle that Skittles is following: Don’t use social media to interrupt and usher people around the web. Brands engaging with internet users should bear in mind the fact that 99.9% of the time, we’re online to do something which isn’t look at your website. I think Skittles gets it and it’s this that makes its website a huge game changer for marketers who have seen website traffic as one of their key goals.

2. The decision has buy in from the top
This is more of a supposition than going off actual evidence, however, I think it’s safe to say that there’s no way that this would have got signed off without some serious muscle at Wrigley getting involved. There are a growing number of marketers who understand and embrace the fact that social media makes organisations pourous – with information being communicated to and from the entirety of the business, not just from a single, centrally controlled outlet. However, move closer to the centre of the business and that enthusiasm is generally not as prevalent.

The social web doesn’t just impact how organisations should communicate, it impacts how they do everything. HR – should know about and engage with employee Facebook groups, product development teams should be listening to demands and complaints from current users in all kinds of online forums, tech support should be monitoring twitter for any issues arising. Of course, some of these boxes are being ticked, but I can’t help but think that for the most part, this is a bottom up movement – driven by communications and customer service departments. While “Interweb the Rainbow” may have come from marketing, but there’s no doubt that sign-off came from the real business decision makers. It’s always been a marketers job to educate CEOs on why this is a good idea, and with Skittles being an example that would take most board members way outside of their comfort zones, this is a hard sell, but one that must be made.

3. They want you to listen to your peers
Sending visitors to other parts of the web is acknowleding the concept that “Your brand is what Google says about you.” It’s giving creedence to the fact that web users don’t just take your word as gospel. With millions of viewpoints and opinions just a simple search away, Skittles is bypassing that step by leading people straight to the opinion. Plenty of conversations and meetings this year have paid lip service to transparency, but surely this is the genuine article. There’s even a disclaimer on the front page which notes that there is external content available, over which, Skittles has no control. Gutsy, very gutsy, but a move that signifies a huge shift in direction and understanding for marketers everywhere.

…So after the hype and knee-jerk reactions have died down, Interweb the Rainbow is still running relatively smoothly. The site looks good and you get can navigate the pages in the same way that you’d navigate social media platforms normally. But it’s the principles behind the site that really make a difference and should have marketers sitting up in their seats, thinking about how it affects their brands.

They’ve been putting together some great events this year, including the fabulous “Fashion and the Web” which was sponsored by MAC cosmetics. So, when it came to the idea of organising a Shoreditch Twit with the Pout team, we jumped at the chance.

So I can now announce that Shoreditch Twit #8 will be renamed The Shoreditch Pout and will take place on Wednesday 27th May at DreamBagsJaguarShoes. The growing presence of the fashion industry in social media is not hard to spot, plenty of brands are getting involved in Twitter for customer service and to engage in a conversation about fashion and products with their audience. I’m personally really excitied about this one and would love to get some other companies involved in the event, so if you’d like to work with us, contact @miggyfromPOUT or @shoreditchtwit

Will be great to see usual faces and new ones coming along. Sign up here or click on the flyer to put your name down.

First off is the advert that’s being aired in cinemas: A whistlestop trip around the globe showing how lovely the world would be if only we could hug and kiss each other instead of paying for things – a sort of kindness economy if you will. Trouble is, that in a time of global recession, suggesting that everything would be better if only money didn’t exist is twee, naive and unreasonable as a central concept of a marketing campaign. What’s more, it’s not a concept that Absolut (owned by Pernod Ricard, a company making annual sales of €6.6bn) subscribes to. Absolut sold around 100m litres of Vodka in 2008, I’m sure that they’d prefer £16 for a bottle rather than a kiss on the cheek (not to mention their shareholders).

Secondly, the week long series of events and giveaways, where people could exchange acts of kindness for goods (fruit, coffee, cocktails – although I’ve seen many a girl get free drinks in exchange for their number or a discreet snog). The website proudly reported that “Early morning coffee seekers who were extra kind to the barista staff were rewarded with lattes, cappuccinos and a few healthy teas. Smiles, winks, loud ‘good mornings’, lots of compliments and laughs demonstrate just how kind Londoners can be.” Yes we can be kind, if we’re getting something for free.

What Absolut don’t tell us is how the vendors were coaxed into taking part. For example, the Berwick St market traders aren’t operating on Pernod Ricard finances. My hunch is that they were sponsored by Absolut to get involved – meaning that the pashminas and grapefruits were paid for in the first place – in essence making the “acts of  kindness” superfluous to the entire economy of it all – or, by Absolut’s logic meaning they’ve been paid for twice… odd.

Finally, visitors to the website are asked the question: In an Absolut World you could acquire whatever you desire as long as you’re prepared to pay in kindness. That puts a slight spin on value. So, how would you measure value? What would you buy and how would you pay for it? 

Unfortunately, most visitors didn’t really get the question and came up with gems such as:

• I wish I can live in a world of kindness. No money, no worries , no robbery just kindness. What a wonderful life…..  (Obviously not read Hobbes’ Leviathan)
  
• I would rebuild New Orleans and retire on a farm. (You’ll have to be REALLY kind to rebuild a city)
  
• If kindness were currency I’d pay for everyone around the world to have expensive cancer drugs that they can’t currently get. I’d do anything for that. I’d even be kind to spiders by giving them flies to eat, and not screaming loudly when I see them and not dusting away their webs. (Sure, let’s ask drugs companies to give away years of R&D in exchange for Polly being nice to spiders, “Hold please….” )
  
• I would buy enough chocolate for everyone and distribute it when it was needed (You’d buy chocolate? with money? isn’t that against the rules?)

Well thanks Absolut for providing us with some amusement, but please stick to marketing campaigns that don’t patronise us or try to turn us into hippies – it doesn’t suit you.

Anyway, I also do appreciate the emails I get letting me know about cool new stuff to write about – even if I’ve not posted anything yet, I’m sure I’ll get around to it when the time comes (Chris, Yuri, Alex are first in my showing love queue!)

Accedo: This is more of an update from what they showed me at IBC, essentially, they’ve taken on the ‘app’ model for Facebook and Twitter so that you can view a cutdown version of these applications as a sidebar during your normal TV watching. In the same way that online applications such as thwirl and digsby recognise that some things need to be kept in the background while you’re focusing on your main task, Accedo will sit completely unassumingly until you want to share what you’re doing with your network. It also integrates with your EPG, so that just using the coloured remote buttons, you can update what you’re watching. Neat, look:

SeaChange: as a previous client of mine, I was curious to know what this middleware provider was up to in the world of web content.  They’re pimping Affinity, a social networking engine for video-on-demand, essentially a tool that allows you to make and take recommendations for stuff in a VOD library, the idea being that people will discover pay-per-view content that they might not normally find (= extra revenue for operator). The problem I have with this is that it seems that the recommendations are done via collaborative filtering (i.e. you share what you like with your friends and vice versa), which means that the solution is only good when your friends like the same stuff as you AND they happen to have an Affinity enabled TV service. If it was linked to a social network’s API, there would be a lot more value from this and it wouldn’t necessitate the latter point.

Ericcson: Yes they do TV, although apparently they don’t do web design so well. They were showing last.fm on TV – not the actual videos, but essentially, it’s an ‘app’ built for playing music through your TV when you get very bored of adverts for ringtones on VH1. I’m not entirely sure where it sits in the network because they don’t seem to be talking about it in any of their literature or website, which is a shame. I liked the demo though, it looks pretty slick and my TV has better sound quality than my PC, so I’m all for taking this particular service to the living room in another way (I currently use the last.fm app on my iPod quite frequently for that type of thing. Pic below:

CompleteTV: Now I have to say I’m more than a little disappointed with these guys. Despite having a fairly nice booth at IPTVWF, and splashing the YouTube Logo across it a couple of times, looking at their site, I fail to see how that was any more than lip service to online media making its way to the TV in any genuine form. Fear of content producers… perhaps. Now, that might sound harsh, but here’s the thing… CompleteTV makes boxes – not a great start… boxes for the consumer (even worse, since most of this stuff will migrate to the network in 3-4 years), which, with the whole wealth of social media goodness out there can do all this: “browse the internet and act as an email/instant messaging client”. Wow. I’m hugely underwhelmed, mind you, they’re way above Ericsson on the web design front.

Finally I wanted to quote a great article from the March/April issue of Future Media, in which Jonathan Webdale has interviewed Anthony Rose, one of the big cheeses behind the iPlayer, who said that “2007 was the year the BBC chose what you watched, 2008 was the year viewers chose what they watched and 2009 would be the year your friends choose what you watch.” As long as it’s not my Mistresses-watching colleagues choosing, I’m keen to see how it goes. It’s a great article (print only so far) which talks a lot more about TV going into social media (rather than what I’ve written here) so go read it now.