SMEs "get" social media while large co's miss the boat

Two reports were released today that indicates a big discrepancy in how small business and large enterprise are embracing social media: with the small guys leading the charge. One study claims that social media has become indispensable to small businesses and another claims Superbrands aren't latching onto Twitter.

According to V3.co.uk, this year’s largest UK survey of small and medium businesses was released today in the 2009 Business Pulse Report, conducted by BT and the British Chambers of Commerce. The survey indicates two-thirds of 72,000 small business respondents rated high search engine rankings as being very important to their business. And 73 per cent felt online presence was important to the running of their business.

Meanwhile over at new media age, a self-conducted study was published saying that of the 500 brands in the 2009 Superbrands list, a whopping 74 per cent had no presence on Twitter. Of the 500 brands, just 29 brands were tweeting every hour; just 50 were tweeting every day.

Certainly the most compelling story here is that big businesses, with all their resources, personnel, and fancy budgets, aren't getting the value of social media. Is that because social media is comparatively free, and they can't see value in anything that's not burning marketing budgets? Small business is benefiting from Twitter, even if the benefit is hard to quantify. One of the more interesting quotes in nma's coverage was from the head of creative at Innocent Drinks, who have built a following of 20,000 fans on Twitter, and yet who believe that by not defining a Twitter strategy, they have gotten more value out of it.

Dan Germain is quoted as saying: “If we’d had a set strategy at the start and defined some sort of ROI, then it wouldn’t be successful because Twitter doesn’t deliver on that,” he said. “For us it’s just another channel for talking to people.”

That says it all, really.

Shocking headline of the day: Twitter users read The Guardian

Avid Twitter fans know the link between Twitter, and its bedfellow liberal paper The Guardian, so won't be surprised to learn a study has suggested the group of Twitter users, as a whole, are the 3rd most liberal group in the UK just behind liberal democrat voters but ahead of the traditional leftist group of 16-34 year olds.

Dicey stats from a study written by Captain Obvious. But what is interesting to ponder is that leading media site Brand Republic has lent publicity to such a direct link between Twitter and liberal papers. Are we at risk of alienating the 'other half' of the population entirely? Twitter's best attribute is its democratic nature. If we alienate rightists aren't we undermining the very point of Twitter? Discuss.

Social Media 09 - big budget noise, but where's the innovation?

New firm Run Marketing started up recently with an excellent website for digital marketing advice for small business. Hatch PR associate Chris Lee, director of Run Marketing, attended the Social Media 09 conference last week in London and posted a good summary of what was on offer.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to hear the agenda was dominated (apparently) by big budget examples of brands using social media for integrated campaigns. For a start, the London conference schedule is rammed with shows like this and I wish they'd taken a different stance with this new show. Where are our grass roots, innovation on a shoestring examples? Small business showing how clever marketing doesn't require huge dollars? Isn't that exactly what social media is all about?

After all, how much is a Twitter account? Free. Creating a Facebook group? Free. Conducting question and answer sessions over LinkedIN? Free.

But many a 'digital media' agency seems to be perversely charging clients big sums for creative and innovative social media campaigns. If ideas have been the bread and butter for PR for a longtime, the 'value add' that comes as standard with every programme but doesn't have its own price tag attached, shouldn't social media be the same? Traditional PR requires some use of tools and resources that cost overheads. But social media doesn't. So why should social media cost a lot to implement?

Like Run Marketing says, we want to see examples of grassroots social media campaigns. They are more interesting, less error-prone (thinking about the Habitat debacle with that comment) and far more 'viral'. That's more effective, in our book.

I'm worth $1m, how 'bout you? Valuing web's latest thang

On the eve of Forbes' declaration that Faceback founder Mark Zuckerberg is worth $2 billion, investigative industry rag Silicon Alley Insider ponders whether MySpace is "now worthless" and whether it was even worth buying on the part of Rupert Murdoch. (He paid $580 million for it, which at the time was considered a steal. But that was back when people used the site ....for actual social networking rather than just to look up bands).

How quickly the tide comes in, and goes back out, in the internet world.

Let's consider the valuation of some of web's social networking trends, shall we? It's a fun game which a lot of industry sources like to play at - with no accepted formula and no right answer.

*Facebook - the social networking giant has been popular for awhile now, yet advertising revenues are still abysmal - the last valuation was published in May 2009 at $10 billion

*Twitter - arguably the web's latest 'thing' - currently valued at $1 billion - but no one knows if that figure is anywhere even close to accurate, since the company doesn't make any money and has no business model

*MySpace - currently valued at $500 million to $1.2 billion

*Friendster - remember them? they lost all their business to Facebook yet claim to have a handful of fans left in Asia - currently valued at $210 million

Again there is no right answer in this game, and perhaps this is what makes it so fun to watch. The only accepted truth is that once the site becomes unpopular, the valuation dips. Oftentimes this has no relation to the actual revenue the company is making. If only businesses in other sectors were valued on these vague, cloudy formulas! Just imagine a world where your bank was valued based on 'hype' and 'promise'!

Suggested reading: Ray Valdes at Gartner has posted an interesting and more educated viewpoint on how valuations happen and what they imply.

Why don't teens tweet?

It has emerged this summer that teenagers aren't getting into Twitter with as much vigour as the 25+ age group. Mashable posted some statistics that seem to confirm it.

If Twitter can't woo the younger, tech-loving crowd, it not only has bad implications for its future but also for its monetisation model (presuming that Twitter, at some point, wants to try its hand at making money). Particularly since one of the monetisation models that other social networks have used successfully, virtual gift giving and buying, is something that teens seem to take a lot more seriously than adults. After all, on my wedding anniversary I won't be sending my husband a virtual pint over Facebook. But my teen neighbour might be more prone to sending one to her crush.

The interesting question is, why? Why don't teens like Twitter? Some people think it's too 'geeky' for teens, but teens are into all sorts of geekware.

I'd be interested to hear other people's views. For me the answer is obvious - that is, Twitter isn't obvious enough for teens. Teens today want immediate gratification. In my opinion Twitter takes at least a month of fairly heavy usage to build up a community and start seeing how to use it properly with followers and followees, and gain some benefit out of it. Just following celebrities isn't exciting enough to keep teens interested; they will need to build their own communities of friends and other teens with similar interests. And this is something that takes time to build up. Also Twitter's background customisation tool isn't exactly easy to use and teens want their own identity on everything they touch. Will average non-techie teens bother playing with it? It took me ages to get mine right and that was with the help of a professional designer.

Or, are teens actually using Twitter and they've just managed to fly under our radar in terms of how they are accessing it? The Mashable article briefly explores this question, which isn't easy to answer, especially since Twitter is allergic to giving out usage figures.

Do you agree or have other reasons in mind? Would be interested in hearing your comments.

Will Spinvox get its vox back?

It wasn't a good day for Spinvox, the voicemail speech-to-text company which was accused in a BBC article penned by Rory Cellan-Jones of some very serious data protection breaches.

Allegedly, rather than having ground-breaking technology that listens to spoken voicemails and converts them to text, the company has been paying countless call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines to listen to at least some of the messages and translate them manually. Obviously this raises some eyebrows in terms of privacy implications and whether it meets the data protection act.

At the time of writing, Spinvox was radio silent, though the story was also picked up by Sky and is all over the Twittersphere.

Spinvox has no choice in this situation but to go on the offensive and prove the credibility of its technology. And it needs to be specific about how its algorithms work. Ambiguity will get the company nowhere at this stage.

There isn't much else to say at this point until they respond, but a point worth making is the age-old 'any PR is good PR' thinking. Many people who didn't know what Spinvox did, now do - and some of them won't care about Rupert on the street in South Africa hearing what their spouse picked up at the supermarket for dinner that night. Most of us receive voicemails so dull they would probably put the call centre staff to sleep rather than incite drama, though staff apparently claimed in Facebook group posts to hear death threats, sexual messages and all sorts.

Waiting to see what transpires.

UPDATE: According to Sky news Twitter correspondent Ruth Barnett, someone from Spinvox will be be on Sky News channel 501 at 7pmish tonight to talk about the issue. This is one interview we won't miss.

Recipe for the next Twitter

As Twitter becomes less and less conversational and more and more "one-way broadcasting" we think the time is nigh for a next Twitter to barge into the scene.

If you don't agree with me that Twitter is becoming pretty one-way broadcasting in nature, rather than what it is at its best, a two-way conversational tool, consider the latest big Twitter stories that were covered in mainstream press:

-Iran conflict - citizen journalism to get the word out when 'real' journalism was stifled - one way broadcasting

-MJ death - yeah, sure, a lot of people Tweeted about it. A blog still broke the news, just like what would have happened with a big news event 8 years ago

-Habitat's horrendous attempt at a social media advertising campaign, highjacking stories of human suffering to push furniture - one way broadcasting on crack

-Ashton Kutcher's one million followers tirade - if he thinks it proves that he wants to converse with a million fans, rather than just broadcast to the world how 'special' he is, his ego has damaged his ability to reason

Finally, maybe it's just the people I follow, but I find that about half the Tweets coming up on my list are one-way thoughts rather than conversation starters or links to interesting stuff. And more importantly, when an interesting two-way conversation does come up between two of my followers, I have to click into one or both profiles to see what they said first, then click back for the next comment, then so on. I get lost and distracted while trying to trace a conversation.

A lot of early Twitterers were worried that as Twitter became more mainstream, it would somehow 'get worse.' I'm starting to believe it is getting worse. But I don't think the primary reason is that it's becoming mainstream.

The thing Twitter is doing wrong is not improving and evolving its UI to amplify the two-way conversational tools and steer it away from the one-way broadcasting direction. I still think Twitter is a breakthrough tool and I'm still a fan. And some of the one-way broadcasting, like the Iran conflict, is hugely important. But in some ways the UI is clunky and lacking basic functionality - especially for people who use it primarily as a two-way conversational tool. The stats are unclear about how many Twitterers use only the web UI and no other applications like Tweetdeck, but it seems to be at least half, if not the overwhelming majority. [Source for statistics: Hubspot, thanks to @handlewithcare, and Nick Burcher's blog, thanks to @crispyducks] Sorry to be harsh Twitter, but you are one of the most talked about technologies on the market today and your UI still needs a Tweetdeck for people who want more? Houston, we have a problem.

In my opinion, by not evolving the UI, Twitter has allowed a door to open for the next big thing to stir things up.

Here is our recipe for The Next Twitter - a groundbreaking conversation tool. If we had time to develop this ourselves, we would, but given how many proverbial pies we have our fingers in at the moment I'll give it to you as a freebie so someone brilliant can get it done:

1. Take the easiest web interface you can find, and make it interoperable with mobile (similar to what Twitter has done - we applaud them for their mastery of simplicity)

2. Shamelessly copy the follow / unfollow brilliance of Twitter. It's subtle and it works

3. Make search absolutely central to the tool. Don't confuse 'simple UI' with 'featureless' and don't kid yourself that any feature is more important than search. Twitter got this wrong in the beginning, and it still hasn't righted itself completely

4. Combine microblogging with elements of old-fashioned message boards, being the best of both, minus the annoying elements. Give people the ability to see entire conversations in a single glance on one screen, using plus/minus buttons so you can dig further into the conversations you want to see, and minus out of the ones you don't care about - all without having to navigate to a new screen. This seems technically hard to do, but I saw some truly innovative declarative UI programming technologies recently at our client Nokia Qt Software, and I have faith that techie geeks know how to do it and fit it all tidily on one screen

5. Initially, focus on convincing people how they can use it for their jobs and hobbies - Facebook's already got the masses' personal lives in the can

6. Excite and engage the media and PR scenes (much like what Twitter has done) to get the word out most quickly

7. Shamelessly market yourself as the thing that will unseat Twitter. The technology business world needs to take more lessons from athletes when it comes to bold, brash, super competitive statements

8. Be really strict with bots and spammers to keep them firmly out

9. Shake up the above ingredients, don't stir. Stick it in the oven and watch the world take notice

Do you agree with our recipe? Have other points to add? Let us know. We are dying to see this mystery tool be developed as we want to start using it now.

Letter to Facebook: have you lost your mind?

Dear Facebook,

I used to be a big fan, but my love affair is waning very fast. I sheepishly admit that in the early days, I may have even called you 'FaceHook' on occasion. But now, things have changed fast, and I worry you've lost your mind. And here's why:

1. You aren't Twitter. Some say you are trying to Tweet-ify your homepage and jump on the microblogging bandwagon. Note: that's what your newsfeed, which you've unceremoniously killed, used to achieve. This new mishmash of updates/wall conversations/posts is ugly and disorganised. I long for the old newsfeed.

2. There is already a Twitter, and it's doing just fine thanks, given its growth statistics.

3. You used to be an experience site where one could store little pieces of life and show them around to ones' friends. Now, I can't even find pictures, groups, others' profiles or the other little things that made my experience better. Now, you just seem to be a weird cross between an RSS reader, microblogging and mess.

4. "New Facebook" amplifies your worst feature - the one your biggest fans hate - applications that do nonsense things like vampire fighting that annoy and take up space on one's computer.

And here's why I fear losing your mind could result in your death:

1. I no longer recommend that people in my mom & dad's generation will 'get you' and benefit from joining. My mom would have been just about OK on the old Facebook, but the new one? She won't be able to make heads or tails of it. She shops online, so I believe her computer skills are average or above average for the 60-70 years segment. Wasn't that your biggest growth segment previously? You've screwed that one up royally.

2. I will no longer put my pictures on your site and chose Flikr from now on. Once people stop posting their photo albums, you're not even living up to your name "Facebook" anymore.

3. Your users revolted about the new T&C's to the point where you had to retract them. You planted the seed of doubt in users' minds that you are about to infringe on their rights and privacy (bringing me to my next point....)

4. You have apparently been emailing people's non-member friends that they recommend they join. (This happened to me, despite me a. not saying that was OK with me and b. not even wanting the recommendation passed on.) If you carry on infringing on people's online rights, your users will desert you faster than Friendster.

Please, Mark Zuckerberg, I implore you to rethink this strategy. It ain't working, and 94% of your userbase agrees, from the recent vote. If you wanted to create a new service, you should have kept the happy Facebook bubble, named the new thing something else and given users the choice to upgrade, have both, or stay happily where they were.

Sincerely,
Emily

Twitter pitches: erm, what about confidentiality?

Guardian tech editor Charles Arthur has made headlines in the past week by stating that he will no longer use email, and instead, only accept PR pitches via Twitter. This isn't the first PR stunt Charles has staged along these lines; I went to a Full Run talk he gave years ago where he claimed he never reads press releases, so Twitter is just another quicker way of getting news, in Charles' eyes.

I agree with Charles in that pitching via Twitter is a wonderful thing, when the information in question is already public and/or has already gone out over the wire. It keeps things concise, to the point, brief. It forces us to keep things simple. But it has a major flaw. What about pitching information that is not yet a part of the public record?

There are some inherent problems with only using Twitter to pitch PR stories:

1. Most good stories worth printing, and therefore worth journalists knowing about, are pitched in advance, when it's still confidential
2. In order to use Twitter for a private conversation you need to be able to DM someone
3. Twitter is absolutely dreadful when it comes to updating DM so even though I have 600 followers, I can only DM about 125 of them. I have chalked this up to a Twitter bug; if anyone knows it is caused by something else, let me know. In a nutshell, Twitter is a game changer but it's not without its (major) service faults
4. If the person doesn't follow you back, and I know Charles doesn't follow most PR people back, the DM process is hopeless, leaving your only option a public Tweet
5. No PR person in his or her right mind would ever pitch an exclusive over a public Tweet. Otherwise it would be called an 'inclusive'

Charles, as well as many other journalists, want to do things quicker, better, easier. But even they can't change the fact that a large part of the PR process is hinged upon client confidentiality and restricted by NDA agreements and this will never change. Most good stories are restricted in terms of timing due to good reason (for instance, because the new service you're pitching hasn't yet gone live). Exclusives are a critical part of the pitching process and if you really only accept Tweets, it pretty much means you don't want exclusives.

Lots of journalists want to change this balance of power, but frankly, companies will always control their own newsflow and 'timing is everything.' If journalists still want the holy grail of exclusives, I don't see how you can ignore email altogether, unless you want PRs to start showing up on your doorstep to tell you about a story in person and hand you a printout or go back to the 70s and start faxing you text. They can Tweet it first: "On my way to Guardian towers!" Giving you just enough time to alert your security staff.

I'm not a stick in the mud, and I'm usually fine with embracing new ways of doing things, but I respect NDAs and confidentiality like a priest respects the Pope, because otherwise, I'd be grossly infringing upon the trust of my clients, not to mention the legal implications of our contracts.

Comments very welcome on this post.

Spying on media spats

Just in this week.... Media People Often Don't Get Along. (The shock, the horror). There has been a lot of sand flinging around the media sandbox over the past few days and Twitter is your best window into the drama, if you follow the right people, that is.

Last week, a UK journalist called a US social media 'guru' and journalist a 'douchebag' for something he said at the SXSW conference. Do I know what he said? No, but I found it interesting that the journalist in question felt so offended by his presentation that he was obliged to bring it up on such a public forum as Twitter. And it was also interesting to see how the US journalist reacted, also on Twitter.

Less than a day later, a 'big' UK tech correspondent publicly complained about his team missing the Google Streetview story in his absence. Again, surprising to see Twitter naming and shaming going on.

And in the final media spat I've witnessed in the past couple of days, ZDnet publicly 'cleared up' some gross misrepresentations of a blog post committed by some (unnamed) US PR agencies. You've got to read this one for yourself.

I purposely haven't linked to these Tweets because my point isn't to call more attention to the spats, most of which were pretty minor anyway. But my point is to raise the issue that Twitter makes the sometimes love-to-hate relationship in the media sector front and centre for all to see. We've always had these spats, it's just that Twitter makes them more open.

Could eBayers kill the Twitter star?

Twitter seems bullet-proof. It rose to glory so quickly. So many people are living and working their daily lives out on Twitter. It brought a great concept, micro-blogging, to the masses - to those who don't have or would never want their own blog. In a nutshell, Twitter seems resilient, and it's hard to think about what could take it down, especially now when it's still on its way up.

But at the heart of Twitter is openness. 'Mainstream' (non-techie) users often seem to be attracted by the chance to follow celebrities, and the very attraction is that the celebrity's thoughts and feelings are there for all to see - no PR team has spun John Mayer's tweets about falling asleep with a guitar on his chest.

Openness is what makes Twitter so great but my assertion is that it's also its greatest weakness, because if perverse forces take that openness away, Twitter is done for.

And here's how that can happen - the Ebay crowd moving to Twitter and selling stuff like virtual vultures. Without regulation, Twitter could easily become the worst mix of a virtual souk and those horrific banking phishing scam emails that are actually trying to commit fraud against you. If the Twitter execs aren't savvy, this could easily happen.

Here's a specific example of how it starts. I usually tweet about work. On the odd occasion I will tweet something like 'Cadbury Mini Eggs are the fruits of the devil' or 'my hair dryer got so much use this winter, it's blown itself to bits.' Then, immediately after these Tweets, I get ten new followers of which two are: 'ChocoHolicDreamStore' and 'HairdryersAreUs.'

There goes openness - that's the last time I'll tweet about consumer goods. How quickly it happened.

Sure, you can then block these spammers, but what if you get 25 at once, it takes awhile and you might not have time to do it properly. People only have so much tolerance for this. Can Twitter block them for being blocked? What if a lawsuit was brought against Twitter for that? As Twitter becomes more and more mainstream, I fear they will really struggle to weed these types of users out and keep honest users free from this kind of perversion. If I am wrong and these measures are already in place, feel free to leave a comment.

The day Skittles made Twitter choke

Here's how everyday at Hatch PR starts:
1. Make coffee
2. Start computer, open work email
3. Turn on news (BBC, Sky and CNN in constant rotation)
4. Check Twitter
5. Check online news

Yes, that's right. Twitter has trumped online news in that order. That's mainly because Twitter has become a big source of my online news feeds. But in this regular ordering, rarely do sugary candies enter into the day until, perhaps, at slot 337, after lunch.

However, Skittles factored high on the list on Monday because when I got to number four, everyone on Twitter was talking about the new social media marketing strategy Skittles was using. In essence, Skittles turned its web page into a mini social media portal linking straight to a Twitter search on the brand. The rest of the website is a little dashboard sitting high on your screen linking to Skittles on Facebook and other sites.

Genius, I thought! I love it! No one would ever really have a reason to look at www.skittles.com, right? But now they've got the entire online media geekdom talking about them. And still talking. And still talking.

So much so, that Twitter then became borked later in the day and presumably it had choked on Skittles. When European Twitterers are still at work, and American Twitterers start waking up and logging on, it's high Twitter time - around 15:00 GMT everyday. Precisely when the choking incident happened.

But the other choking incident was when social media pundits started trashing Skittles. Lots of sarky, negative feedback was there to be heard. Apparently, it would appear that some social media people don't like taking a spoonful of their own medicine. I guess they don't like it when they talk all day long about how tech brands are most innovative and playful online, and then a candy company storms right into their party and outwits them all in the social media stakes.

I'd hereby like to distance myself from the naysayers and salute Skittles. It's sad that in the tech industry, very few brands would have the cahunas to disable their precious websites for one day and take a social media marketing strategy head-on like Skittles has. It worked absolute wonders for this candy brand and other companies should take note of the risks and rewards it entailed.

Is there a 2.0 creativity sap?

I was looking for comedic inspiration on YouTube last night and it struck me that it could be renamed CatShow.com. The 'most viewed' tab is always chock full of people doing stupid things with their cats at home. Or clips from the news. In other words, boring, uncreative videos.

I'm guilty, too. I put up a video last year of my cat playing fetch to show off his skeelz to my parents back in the US. Admission made.

But this brought me to ponder the question - now that 2.0 has been around for awhile, are we starting to experience a creativity sap? Do web-philes only have so many creative ideas in them, and have already used them up during the first few years of the 2.0 revolution? I feel as if I haven't seen many creative bits of content lately on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But I'm only talking about content, not about startup business ideas, where creativity has abounded in recent months, potentially as people have lost their 'real' jobs and gone off to start the company they've spent years imagining. One great source of this type of inspiration is KillerStartups.

I know that in PR, when things get really busy and I'm asked to churn out sometimes ridiculous amounts of content in the form of snappy, sharp writing, in short spaces of time, my 'snappiness' gets seriously sapped.

Or maybe it's just the winter doldrums.

If I'm wrong, please prove it to me by posting comments of the most creative content you've seen in awhile. Would love to see it. Would love to LMAO at something today.

How social media is like tracks in snow

There is something about snow that makes you reflective. Right now I'm reflecting on how snow is like social media. Walking to the corner store to get a diet coke today was an unusually voyeuristic experience. Seeing the tracks left in fresh snow, I could tell which of my neighbours went out today; who'd used their car. I could see who'd been walking a dog; even what size the dog was. The high heel shoe imprint next to tiny dog paw prints leaves a very different impression of its owner than the big chunky boot imprint next to a huge paw print.

And so, it leads to my (very reflective) thesis that snow is like social media. A tool like Twitter is the ultimate stalker solution, where one leaves tracks that tell a lot about our lives and our personalities. It wasn't until I started following an A-list Hollywood celeb that I realised the extent of it. I'm in wintry Birmingham (the uncoolest place in Britain, or so people believe), spending a large portion of my day talking to journalists, PRs and builders (an odd mix, I know). She spends her day sunning herself next to her pool in LA, hanging with other A-listers and working with Hollywood's most accomplished directors. And yet, here we meet, on Twitter, and I know what her daily personal response is to news stories, I know about how her husband wants to kill the neighbour (well, not really) and all sorts of personal stuff about their lives.

So what does it all mean? Is it good or bad? I think it remains to be seen. I'm not likely to attract real stalkers so I feel pretty safe using Twitter (mainly for business, when I'm not using it to track celebs). I keep my Facebook profile as secure from random viewers as possible and have turned off its wider web search capability. But for some, the stakes of using social media are presumably much higher. I don't know if I'd be so open about it if I was "famous." And yet the openness of Twitter is its real appeal, so without that willingness, the tool would be much less interesting. Still, I don't know if I'd want to be leaving that many tracks in snow (to neatly wrap up my analogy) if I needed to use a bodyguard to get to the nearest shop. Would you?

Advertising for the age we live in

I've seen two really creative new ads this week which do a great job of tapping into the times, in their own ways. I always look forward to January when the advertising industry turns over; always a fun time of year for the observant media consumer, but now, as we're facing our most challenging times, it's interesting to see how advertisers are reflecting our global fears, our struggles and our loss in confidence through ads.

And so the creativity abounds. Veet, whose tagline is 'World's number one depilatory products' nailed perhaps the best media placement imaginable with its 'Goodbye Bush' ad in the Daily Telegraph Australia on Inauguration Day. It captured the feeling of that day perfectly, through humour.

Another new ad which isn't humorous at all, but extremely powerful, was created for AARP - a huge American organisation dedicated to improving the lives of people aged 50+. The video ad must be watched in its entirety to get the message. It's been viewed more than a million times on YouTube and in the past day already has received 100k more views. It's about the "Lost Generation" and how young people feel about our role in changing these challenging times. It fits in perfectly with Obama's messages. I'll say no more as I can't capture it in words - this one's a must see.

One remarkable thing about these ads is that through digital sharing tools, Twitter, YouTube and email, the audience balloons, at exactly the moment it should be viewed rather than months or years later. How can advertisers capture this digital impact? Unfortunately the measurement tools of the advertising industry continue to be a real stumbling block - the technology has evolved much faster than the ways in which we measure impact.

Tweet me six ways to Sunday

I've been using Twitter for about 6mos, only for work, not personal life. Already got Facebook for that. I'm not shy to admit it took at least 5 weeks until I really 'got' how Twitter helped my job - and a certain client gets the bragging rights for converting me. Now I find it invaluable.

My quandary is this: as my Twitterverse grew, so did the number of people I follow. How many is too many? In general, if someone works in a related area, I like to follow them. I try to follow people back for good digital etiquette purposes. But with 350 people on my 'following' list, I miss a lot of Tweets I'd like to see.

I wish there was a 'filter out the nonsense about eating a ham sandwich for lunch, and just keep the business Tweets' application. It would be cracking. Developers - get a move on!