In the online era of  Twitter, Facebook and social media in general – you can effectively say anything almost anywhere. The shift reminds me of the way the camera phone combined with 24 hour news has changed much of the landscape of news reporting today. Computers and smart phones have become the tools of getting personal feelings and stories out there instantly.

This is when things can get tricky for brands. Take this example…

Just imagine, you are waiting in a queue at a high street retail store and it’s too long and slow. People are barging into you and the air con is not working. Take out your phone and tweet: “Waiting forever at Store X. Service is poor”. The moment you hit send, that message is transferred to all your followers, who in turn tweet back with yet worse experiences at Store X. Apart from the obvious embarrassment, Store X could see this as an opportunity to learn from its mistakes rather than try to bury the bad news. However, the first reaction will probably be blind panic.

Here’s when online reputation management (ORM) comes in. It’s a service which helps manage the perception of a brand online. ORM is not about harassment or controlling the message. It’s not even about resorting to dubious off hand tactics to rid a website of a negative article or comment. What ORM puts in place are some legitimate strategies to present the view of a company or client that will blunt any negative messages and advise on how a client can speak to customers directly (mainly social media channels). A much publicised case in point would be the Marks and Spencer’s ‘Bra War’ campaign launched by Beckie Williams who started the ‘Bust 4 Justice’ campaign. It generated so much negativity for M&Ss’ policy of additional charging for larger sized underwear that the company had to resort to a public apology and price cuts. The author of the group went on to make news appearances  and attracted a lot of press coverage in the meantime. When times are a little lean, the perception was that M&S weren’t exactly value for money. Overall, this is a perfect example which demonstrates the influence of social media today but also the need to be vigilant and ready to defend your brand. M&S emerged relatively unscathed from this but had they been slower they would be looking at lost sales and lost customers.

The flip side is to find positive comments and be able to track how successful offline promotions can be by measuring the ‘buzz’ online. Personally I would say, if you don’t generate any buzz in the online community, be it positive or even negative publicity, you really haven’t got much of a brand.

How does one find comments? Essentially, find where your audience is! Look out for blogs, comments, message boards etc. Tracking online conversations and mentions can be tricky but some free tools are available already online namely Google itself, Technorati, Blogpulse, Twitter search and something like YackTrack . More professional programs are available such as Brandwatch. Next up is getting a full strategy together. This could involve getting press releases out counteracting negative statements. It may also mean getting a blog setup, throwing in SEO/PPC tactics or getting stuck in to a little tweeting yourself. Every strategy is tailored differently to the severity of the problem. It may even mean joining forces with your PR agency for a combined online/offline approach! If all is handled in the right way, your brand will come out smelling of roses for sure.

Picture: J Cole on Flickr

The Internet has become a mini battleground, where distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against government websites are the new Molotov cocktail. Lies deception and double bluffs are many. Numerous requests have come (apparently) from Iranians asking for government sites to be hacked and or brought down, other requests come through saying the attacks are doing more harm than good. Others ask for Proxy servers, VPN connections and SSH Tunnels to allow Iranians to break out of their government content filtered connections, yet more plead not to use proxies as they are all logged and the people using them will be imprisoned. Websites in Farsi have appeared, asking Iranians to sign up pledging support for Mousavi, with their names addresses and phone numbers, then tweets fly saying they are fake, set up by the government to entrap the unwary. Lies and the truth intermingle, both reinforced by re-tweets from people who have no idea who their source is.

Internet access in Iran is curtailed, with many sites blocked. The Iranian network controllers must be playing whack-a-mole – short of cutting off Internet access for the whole country, gaining access to Twitter is very easy and virtually impossible to block. An important reason for this is the openness of the Twitter API – simply blocking twitter.com does nothing to stop people posting updates and reading tweets. The Twitter API allows 3rd party sites and applications to both post and read tweets, spawning a plethora of ways in and out of the service. Twitter is a many headed hydra.

This was a smart architectural decision, and one could argue perhaps the single biggest reason for its success. The numerous startups associated with Twitter but not actually part of Twitter are testimony to this. As a side issue, this openness makes monetising the Twitter userbase an interesting proposition, made extremely difficult when a significant proportion of your users don’t ever visit the site.

Google too have made this architectural choice with Google Wave. Right now I imagine there are developers and start ups in the making looking at the Google Wave architecture, and thinking how to build the next ‘Twitter’ based on this fantastic preview of forthcoming communications technology. Picture if you will decentralised Google Wave servers mirroring data between themselves, mirroring images, video and text, with real time updates and multiple paths in and out of the system. A network of public Wave servers akin to the way USENET distributes content would be a truly powerful thing.

Simple architectural decisions in favour of openness and interoperability can have profound effects, though I don’t imagine the engineers at Twitter realised how their service would be used when they designed it.

Whatever the full impact of Twitter, Youtube and Flickr will be on the turmoil in Iran remains to be seen, but what is clear is this: the Internet is making things much more difficult to be a dictator.

Picture fhashemi on Flickr.

A few months later, and although the sun is shining on Great Portland Street we are happily working ‘under a cloud’.The concept of cloud computing has been around for a while and there’s plenty of definitions and not a little controversy about whether some of the larger cloud players are really providing a silver lining. I don’t think the team here at Altogether is that hung up on a formal definition of ‘the cloud’, we just like effective solutions that work for our clients. However,  as a broad definition: Cloud computing is a way of virtualising data in order to provide a specific performance benefit. The performance benefit may be the ability to provide a rapidly scalable hosting environment or fast access to rich content using edge served data.

Earlier this month Ciaran blogged about how Altogether were working with Kleenex to produce a Twitter based hayfever map of the UK. What he didn’t mention was that as the campaign progressed it was picked up by the press and traffic to the site started to increase pretty rapidly. In order to keep up with the demand for the service we simply moved some of the data storage out into the cloud, in this case Amazon’s S3 service. In Amazon’s words S3 provides “a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web”. Or in our words, the site stays up and performs well.

Whilst the hayfever sufferers have been keeping a sore eye on Twitter, we’ve also been working with Vertu on their new global website. The site has lots of content including rich video and some hefty photography, all delivered in 7 languages. There’s a lot of data flying around. To improve the performance of the site we’ve been working with Akamai who provide ‘edge serving’ technology, which is basically a way of putting the content nearer to the customer – in Akamai’s case on 48,000 servers in 70 countries.

In both cases there’s some pretty geeky stuff happening, which to some people is pretty exciting in itself, but what’s more important is that we have another tool in our digital armoury that ensures the solutions we deliver for clients stay online and perform well, whatever the weather.

Cloud image by turtlemom4bacon on Flickr.

Since then there has been a lot of talk about whether it would be enough to push Google off its perch. But whilst some people have rightly pointed out that there is actually very little keeping people from dropping Google, as there are no transfer costs for the user, it seems unlikely that Bing will topple Google any time soon. At least not whilst Google enjoys market share of more than 90% in many European countries. But what it could do of course is push Yahoo! from its position as first runner-up to Google.

It’s been argued by many that people are now so used to using their preferred search engine that they would choose it even if it didn’t give the best results. And so to test this, and see whether Bing really does have a chance, a Microsoft engineer has set-up a blind search ‘taste-test’. And being the curious fellow that I am, I thought I’d see whether this proposition holds true. It would seem that it does and it might not be something that Yahoo! will want to hear.

Of the 40 or so people within the Engine Group who answered my call to test out the blind search engine, 100% said that they currently use Google as their default engine. But when asked whose results they picked when they didn’t know which engine was providing which, the answers will be making Steve Ballmer feel all warm inside:

• Google – 60%
• Bing – 27%
• Yahoo! – 13%

Since its launch Bing has taken a lead over Yahoo! globally. But these results suggest that this may not be a blip and that Microsoft may finally have found something that may mean they can take 2nd spot on merit, rather than having to buy the engine in 2nd place.

Bing cherries by Wildcat Dunny on flickr

The End of the Line, the first major feature documentary film revealing the impact of overfishing on our oceans, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Sundance took place in Park City, Utah, January 15-25, 2009

Most successful environmental campaigns have had powerful icons to promote their struggle: poaching has the elephant and global warming has the polar bear, the original environmental icon were the whales, whilst the WWF has long been known for its panda. All of these species have been used to bring massive worldwide coverage to their respective campaigns; whilst the blue fin tuna is not quite a “cute”, in terms of fishing it’s no less important.

As a kid at school I convinced my class to sponsor an orphaned baby elephant at the David Sheldrick Orphanage and I have always tried to “do my bit” for the world whilst still living a “normal” life. Now that I’m a little bit older and have been corrupted by marketing for a few years I tend to see the world in a different light.

Traditionally films relied heavily on above the line advertising to promote the latest version of a post apocalyptic world riddled with CGI and bad acting. And whilst there’s still no escaping from ads for the latest blockbuster once the summer holidays roll around, movie companies have also started to create some of the most interesting & interactive digital campaigns of recent years.

To compete with the latest offering from the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, small independent films need to box clever to get more from tiny budgets, and what better way than to engage their audiences online, specifically by using social media.

The End of the Line has almost 2,000 Facebook fans and 1,500 Twitter followers. Whilst these numbers might not seem amazing it is not the numbers that interest me but the way in which they are interacting with their fans and the way in which they are using Social Media to promote the film and, ultimately, engaging people in the plight of the world’s fishing stocks and specifically the iconic blue fin tuna.

The functionality of many social media sites is perfectly suited to “grass roots” campaigns, allowing them to gain traction in an increasingly competitive environment. Businesses can also benefit from these social media campaigns by using the advertising models of social networks such as Facebook and directly targeting users with strong passions and attitudes towards issues such as over-fishing.

For example Waitrose is a supporter of The End of the Line: this is potentially a valuable investment in PR for them as it associates them with this highly emotive subject, Using the highly targeted ad placement available in both search and social media, brands such as Waitrose can use this to reinforce their stance on sustainable fishing practices, thereby building emotional connections with potential consumers (of their sustainably sourced fish products).

If people can’t get to the cinema to watch the documentary or aren’t quite as active in their desires to help change the world as those taking the time to promote it through Twitter and the like, The End of the Line have also produced a series of short clips, including interviews with of the films makers. These have been produced in conjunction with Babelgum to bring short 10 minute episodes to the masses and allowing them to consumer them where and when they want them.

The way we choose to consume our fish is something that will directly affect the human race over the next 50 years so hats of to those who are trying to do something about it. And from a digital marketing perspective well done for having the foresight to engage people in a conversation we didn’t really know we needed to have until you told us we did, just like we didn’t know we needed Twitter till it existed.

Fishing net image by djnordic on flickr

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ[/youtube]

Google Wave might revolutionize the way we communicate online – a single application combining email, instant messaging, commenting and realtime collaboration in a form which Google calls “part conversation, part document”. One interesting result might mean saying sayonara to hello and goodbye.

Wave allows online written communication to simulate verbal conversations, in which participants interact in real time rather than at the end of discreet “messages” sent and received at various intervals. In Wave, Alice might ask Bob a question, but Bob gets the gist of the question part way through Alice’s message, and begins to compose (mentally or actually) his answer before Alice has hit “send”. Just like a verbal conversation.

So no need for the usual email etiquette of “Thx, Alice”, “kind regards”, or “best, Bob” to end every message anymore. Of course this means some Wave conversations will mimic IM chat, not email – and even IM conversations usually end when one person signs off, goes to lunch or remembers that actually they’d really better get on with some work. We all have subtle techniques for drawing verbal conversations to a close, and a similar etiquette exists for IM. But in Wave, if there’s no concept of “hanging-up” we might find ourselves developing new ways of being polite (”no you jump off the Wave, no you jump off the Wave, …”). Is a Wave conversation ever really ended, or only paused?

Wave is designed around “conversations” rather than “messages”, but as with verbal conversations and endless corporate email trails Waves may well stray off topic, breaking the metaphor. Where will the boundary be between one conversation and another? Discipline will still be required, Wave or no Wave. We’ll surely need to find some kind of equivalent to “goodbye” – or some orderly way to close a Wave permanently.

Stop the Wave, I want to get off!

As well as being potentially unending, a realtime Wave conversation will also be faster and richer than an email or IM message (though nothing new to IRC veterans). But that means it might require all of my attention – no time for multi-tasking between messenger and YouTube when I can see every character my fellow participants are writing, as they’re writing it. So will I find myself torn between the always-open freedom of the Wave and the need to give attention to something else? Will I be able to cope with multiple concurrent Waves in various states? Will I find myself even more of a “Wave Slave” than I am an Email Slave right now?

Maybe we’ll find our online existence becomes just one huge group conversation. Maybe a new “generation W” will find working while Waving as natural as walking and talking at the same time. Maybe Google will give us oldies the option to use Wave in “slow and sedate” mode, and email will become the new snail mail. One thing’s for sure: Wave has the potential to change communication behaviour just as email, IM and SMS before it making it a truly disruptive technology.

Wave image by striatic on flickr

This is what we’ve tried to do with a new project for Kleenex. It’s a Hayfever Map and it’s powered by hayfever sufferers on Twitter.

The aim of the map is to provide real-time information on how badly hayfever is affecting the UK as most data up till now has been predicted. To populate the map all people have to do is send a Twitter update (or tweet) which provides details of where you are and how bad the hayfever is, alongside the hashtag atishoo so that Kleenex can track them all. For example:

#atishoo W1W 3

The original idea at the back-end of last year was just to track this data and trend it: but we were inspired by Ben Marsh’s wonderful #uksnow map to take it a step further. You can read all about the Kleenex Hayfever Map here, or you can get involved by sending a tweet now.

Gesundheit.

Pollen image by zenobia joy on flickr

To those in the digital world microformats are increasingly taking on the sort of significance that marbles, yoyo’s and micro-machines once had for kids in playgrounds across the country. And perhaps, in this hyper-connected digital age, they’re all the rage in playgrounds as well. Or perhaps not.
Whatever the case, they’re causing a bit of a stir and for those unsure what they are, the official microformats website defines them as:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)

It’s essentially a way of adding semantic meaning to an HTML tag; an attribute in the form of a small piece of code which you can attach to an existing tag.

The reason microformats are getting people so hot under the collar, is that Google have started using them in their search results. This means that if, for example, you search for a product, Google is able to aggregate reviews made using the hReview microformat from across the interweb and then display that information in the search results. Google are calling this additional information a ‘Rich Snippet’.

Although tagging is nothing new, and is an integral part of how sites such as Flickr and Delicious work (using the ‘Rel’ attribute), the ability to be able to semantically (and relatively easily) explain to search engines a broad range of information is a significant step towards what Sir Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the web… kind of) dreamt when he talked about the emergence of the ‘semantic web’:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

The ease with which people can now remove any ambiguity and explain to search engines in clear(ish) English exactly what the information on their website is about is likely to make the use of microformats much more widespread. People now have the opportunity to make information much more discoverable, as well as increase the click-through from search results as users are provided with much more relevant and useful information.

This means that when someone runs a search query such as a person’s name, or a particular location – search engines can quickly pull together a broad range of information that real people have decided is relevant to those search queries. The results returned could be photos, people’s acquaintances (through the XFN microformat), or perhaps news stories which are deemed relevant to the query. The benefit of microformats is that such standardisation makes data much easier to navigate and understand.

A consequence of being able to pull together relevant information from a range of disparate sources is that it leads to an overall decentralization of the web. This shift is reflected in Facebook’s recent move to support OpenID, a ‘free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the internet’. Facebook explain their reasoning behind adopting this as being rooted in the fact that:

The success of the web is rooted in the fundamental concept of decentralization. Even from a biological evolutionary standpoint, this is the principle which allows systems to become robust and thrive.

Whilst there is currently no evidence that using semantic markup has a direct influence on search engine rankings that’s not to say that it won’t have at some point in the not too distant future, as Google themselves have noted:

As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.

It is likely that in the future we will see the importance of self organizing systems and AI increase as more and more content is harvested from crowds of un-trusted sources. What this could lead to is SEO involving having to put as much weight on optimising content with semantic markup / class-names and microformats as was initially put on the correct use of <h1><title> markup when Altavista and other large search engines started taking these things into account.

What this all really means is that finding stuff on the internet is going to become much easier. However it also might mean that Google is going to be one step closer to turning into Skynet. Thank goodness we all have Christian Bale to shout us to safety.

Micro Machines image by liz-photography on flickr

Rich snippet image from Google Webmaster Central Blog

The reason for this was that I was standing opposite what I’ll call a digital poster (I’m sure that there’s a ridiculous trade term for these, but I’m guessing that this is what consumers would call them if asked): rather than the standard fare for these formats, where lazy advertisers just roll out sub-standard TV fodder, this ad was interactive & engaging. It started with an image and a question, like the one at the top of this post. I took a photo but was a bit slow on the draw, so missed the question that went with the image of a homeless person: Pity or Pitiful?

This screen was then followed by one which had two opposing quotes from, I assumed, members of the public – one showing pity for the subject of the photo, the other scorn. It then closed on a screen showing what proportion of Londoners agreed with each suggestion.

As my train pulled into view, I scribbled down the URL for the campaign and made a note to check it out once at my desk. What I found both pleased and intrigued me. The site, Time To Consider, poses a number of questions around fox hunting & homelessness, but also industrial farming techniques & the military. It then allows people to support one of two propositions for each, and encourages people to comment on the topics. Fox hunting seems to be the one that has stirred the most debate, with over 400 comments and counting.

All in all then an excellent example of using interactive media to challenge & engage with consumers. The only question left to me was who the bloody hell was the campaign for? Well, a quick whois check shows that the domain is owned by a certain CBS Outdoor, the company responsible for all the ad placements on the Tube. I can only assume therefore that they’re using it to show exactly what can be done with a bit of creativity and some clever media, which I can only applaud as so much of the ‘digital’ advertising on the Tube is utterly pointless: digital escalator panels which are no different from posters, except that they have pixels. Oh, and they’re less inventive than most posters, making no use of the opportunities that the technology opens up.

Hopefully CBS Outdoor’s campaign will encourage advertisers to be a bit more inventive and challenging in the way that they use these placements, especially as I’m guessing that prices for these spots are at an all-time low. And if they want any further inspiration, they could check out this excellent presentation on Digital Outdoor: it even includes a BBC World campaign in New York which is might similar to CBS Outdoor’s Tube on. Well, as they say, talent imitates, genius steals.

The most recent one of these was The Engine Cake Off, where staff were invited to bake a cake, with all cakes then being judged by a panel on everything from taste & texture to style & succulence. The cakes were all sold throughout the day to raise money for Help Our Heroes and the winners were announced in a highly anticipated ceremony at the end of the day. And, fantastically, the team at Altogether swept the board with account managers Heather Charnock & Dan Williams winning the awards for Best Kid’s Cake (below) & Best Chocolate Cake (above) respectively whilst Dan’s was also the fastest selling on the day.

In a decision that must rank with the ref dismissing Chelsea’s many calls for a penalty in the Champion’s League semi-final on Wednesday, the winner of the best overall cake went to a cheese cake, which barely qualifies as a cake at all. I guess that it should be taken as proof of the professional skills of our colleagues as the winning baker works for Mandate, specialists in corporate PR, public affairs &, tellingly, lobbying. Let them eat cake indeed.

For those wishing to improve their weekend by recreating Dan’s award winning cake, we reproduce the recipe below, whilst for those of you on a diet, you can feast your eyes on all the entrants here:

Chocolate, Fudge and Malteser Cake

Ingredients:

For the cake:

• 400g plain flour
• 250g golden caster sugar
• 100g light muscovado sugar
• 50g best quality cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 175g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• 125ml corn oil
• 300ml chilled water

For the fudge icing:

• 175g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids
• 250g unsalted butter, softened
• 1 Box of Lightly Crushed Maltesers
• 275g icing sugar, sifted
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract

Recipe

• Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4
• Butter and line the bottom of two 20cm sandwich tins
• In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugars, cocoa, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt.
• In another bowl whisk together the eggs, sour cream and vanilla until blended
• Using an electric mixer, beat together the melted butter and corn oil until just blended
• Beat in the water
• Add the dry ingredients all at once and mix together on a slow speed
• Add the egg mixture, and mix again until everything is blended
• Pour into the prepared tins
• Bake the cakes for 50-55 minutes, or until a cake-tester comes out clean
• Cool the cakes in their tins on a wire rack for 15 minutes
• Turn the cakes out onto the rack to cool completely
• To make the icing, melt the chocolate in the microwave – 2-3 minutes on medium / or in a bowl sitting over a pan of simmering water, and let cool slightly
• In another bowl, beat the butter until it’s soft and creamy
• Add the sieved icing sugar and beat again until everything’s light and fluffy
• Gently add the vanilla, chocolate and Maltesers and mix together until everything is glossy and smooth
• Sandwich the middle of the cake with about a quarter of the icing, and then ice the top and sides, too, spreading and smoothing with a rubber spatula

Enjoy!