When you go home, tell them of us and say,
‘For your tomorrow we gave our today.’

The manager at Pret had to be summoned when I asked whether it was possible to use the new contactless payment system mounted into the shop counted. “It should work was the response”, and sure enough, it did.

PayPass is a Mastercard’s answer to cash and is designed for small transactions that otherwise generate queues when chip and pin is used. Systems have reportedly been installed in Books Etc, Coffee Republic, Eat, Krispy Kreme, McDonalds, the Science Museum, Threshers and Yo! Sushi.

The contactless system can be used for purchases under £10. It works in the same way as an Oyster card: the card’s embedded chip is read when it is scanned passed over a reader and the account debited. Occasionally you may be askedto enter your PIN to verify that you are the card owner.

Its simple, effective and quick. What we need next is for PayPass to be incorporated in a mobile phone. According to MasterCard its on its way. In the meantime if you’ve got a PayPass enabled MasterCard and you spot a reader ask the retailer if you can use it as the payment method and try it out.

Beg, borrow or steal a ticket for Eddie Izzard’s Stripped tour. He’s just announced extra dates. I was lucky enough to be in the audience at the Metro Arena, Newcastle last Friday.

Instead of a warm up act, tweets to @eddieizzard are displayed on two huge screens on either side of the stage, overlaid on top of images from a video camera that picked out members of the audience. As a means of engaging the audience it worked incredibly well.

During the gig Izzard stitched together his views of creationism, evolution and the development of human civilisation, to create a knockout two hour show with moments of absolute genius.

TweetReach calculates the reach of tweets as they ripple through a network. The online application calculates impressions and the people in your network that push your tweets out.

A full report that contains all mentions of any search term over the past seven days or up to 1500 results cost $20.

(via @jangles, @DavidBrain and @MarkPinsent).

Mike Ashley has tried to do both and true to form has spectacularly screwed-up. BBC Newcastle has just reported that the new name of the stadium is sportsdirect.com @ St James’ Park after the name of Ashley’s own shop.

Durrants has been on the acquistion trail. It acquired Metrica last week and the UK print monitoring business of Cision UK in July.

The media monitoring sector is oft regarded as the commodity end of the PR industry and is almost certainly under reported – if Durrants was listed in the annual PR Week League tables it would make a top ten slot.

Under Thompson’s leadership Durrants is a £40 million business that is defining the emerging market segment that is media intelligence.

What is the strategic rational for Durrants’ acquisition of Metrica?
The thinking was to bring together the two leading players in the media monitoring and analysis space and deliver the best of both worlds through one integrated platform. The market is beginning to see the upside of integrated services – there are clear benefits of having access to planning data, content and media analysis, all in on place and seamlessly interlinked. And the demand for measurement is stronger than ever as the media world explodes and the need to demonstrate value grows.

How is the deal structured?
Can’t talk about specifics here but we have bought the business and have incentivised management to come with us for the long haul. We plan to run the two side-by-side for a period and integrate when we’ve planned and are ready to go. We’ll move to one platform, one business.

The deal speaks to the opportunity for formal planning and evaluation of PR. Are PR agencies getting smarter?
I’m sure they’re becoming smarter because they are definitely becoming more accountable. End users are all more interested in whether they have achieved a return on their investment and agencies are looking at smarter ways of doing that. And it is not just about column inches any more, it’s about whether they achieved their objectives, be that increased sales or enhanced reputation.

What is Durrants’ competitive response to aggregators?
Aggregators provide a low cost, low value service. They sit somewhere between Google News and media monitors. They can’t match us on service when it comes to complex searching across multiple channels; nor can they deliver in every format from multiple hard copy press packs to viewable BlackBerry clips. And they don’t monitor all channels from print, through TV and radio, to online and social media. We believe what we do adds real value, but we’ll keep listening to our market and adapt if we need to.

Why is the standard of service in the press clipping industry generally so poor? Many press clipping agencies haven’t modernised. Why is this?
What we do is complex. The briefs we work to are extensive and we always aim to find exactly what the customer wants, no more, no less. And everything we do is bespoke to each individual customer. We have invested more than most but occasionally even we get it wrong. I’d like to think that our customer service is first class, and that we go the extra mile to sort problems when they arise.

Do you think there will be further consolidation in the media monitoring and evaluation market?
I’m not sure how much more scope for consolidation there is right now. And if there is, we won’t be doing it; we have enough on our plate with Cision’s UK print monitoring business and Metrica.

The Newspaper Licensing Association: friend or foe?
We recognise publisher rights and we totally understand that we should pay for the commercial re-use of publisher content. To that end, it is useful to be able to deal with a third party rather than to have to go to each publisher direct (we monitor 5,000 print titles in the UK alone). The NLA had a poor reputation historically, but they have worked hard under their current MD, David Pugh, to rectify that. And I think they have made progress, even if they are still not the PR industry’s favorite organisation. They haven’t handled the PR around their online initiative particularly well, and we’re still frustrated by their unwillingness to challenge Google under the same terms that they treat us. But overall, friend right now.

They weren’t disappointed. Sorrell reckons that we are set to experience an “LUV”-shaped world economic recovery:

• L-shaped for Western Europe
• U-shaped for North America
• V-shaped for the BRICs and Next 11

Delegates attending this year’s PRCA and CorpComms Conference had the benefit of hearing Sorrell’s wisdom three weeks earlier – which is no surprise given that its based on a blog post from July by Stella Dawson, Thomson Reuters’ Treasury Correspondent.

Newcastle United Football Club owner Mike Ashley is doing his damndest to secure his place as the pantomime villain in the city’s Theatre Royal production of Cinderella this year.

His on, off, on sale of the club is off again. And now his latest idea to raise cash is to flog off the naming rights to St James’ Park.

Newcastle fans are rightly pissed off. It’s a state of affairs that is rapidly becoming business as usual. Ashley’s mismanagement of the club and its relationship with supporters is well documented.

It’s not possible to live in or around Newcastle and not take an interest football. St James’ Park is at the very heart of city both physically and emotionally.

This is a Championship Club that regularly has a home gate of more than 40,000. That’s more people than attend most Premiership games. More importantly by my reckoning it’s close to £1 million revenue for the club.

The solution is simple. Fans need to hit Ashley where it hurts and start boycotting home games. It could be a superb campaigning issue for local media that would guarantee the attention of readers and provide an outlet for the fury of fans.

But so far both The Journal and The Evening Chronicle remain mute. I’ve even baited the Supporters Trust via Twitter but to no end.

And so the farce at St James’ Park – or whatever the stadium ends up being called – will almost certainly continue. As the father and son writing duo Mike and Tom Chaplin documented in their play at the end of last season – You Couldn’t Make It Up.

In addition there were 30 to 70 Twitter posts per minute during the show and immediately afterwards tagged #xfactor. These are conversations that are taking place outside the revenue generating phone-in and SMS polling mechanisms that are part of the current show format.

Mainstream media may be fragmenting but big media properties such as Britain’s Got Talent and X Factor can still pull in huge audiences (currently 13 million for X Factor) and generate thousands of conversations. ITV is missing an opportunity. It could be embracing these conversations within its programming.

Here’s are four ways that this could be done:

• IPTV or integrated itv.com applications: conversation platform such as Twitter could be incorporated in live programming as a feedback loop
• X Factor communities: fans of each singer or band could be organised by tribe on the ITV Factor site. These could be montised via ads or affiliate schemes
• Gaming: a tie-up with an organisation such as Paddy Power would enable Twitter users to put their money where their mouth is and place a bet on their favourite to win
• Downloads: the X Factor format is a career making opportunity for each of the finalists. Music downloads of their live performances would engage motivated buyers and provide and a revenue opportunity for both the finalists and ITV

My money? It’s on Stacey Soloman of course. She’s currently second favourite on Paddy Power after Joe McElderry.

The flawed formula is simple: build as big an audience as possible and use Twitter to push out marketing messages.

But it doesn’t work. It’s the TV model applied to a new medium.

But there are businesses that do appreciate the platform that Twitter provides to engage in a conversation with customers. Here’s an example.

On Thursday evening Mark Pinsent (@markpinsent) spotted that Henry Dimbleby (@henry_leon) was tweeting from the now infamous recording of BBC Question Time.

Dimbleby is a founder and CEO of Leon, the upmarket fast food chain.

Mark and I exchanged a couple of Tweets about Leon and at Mark’s suggestion I tweeted Dimbleby about the hefty price of Leon’s bacon sandwiches.

His response?

Such a frank response is refreshing. Leon’s cares about what its customers think and responds directly to their queries.