Social media workshop technique #1 works well as an ice breaker.

This second technique in our occasional series is much more about getting down to brass tacks.

If you’ve read our Universal Social Media Strategy you’ll know that, in the commercial arena, any strategy worthy of the name should match social means to commercial ends. Social media are not ends in their own right.

This exercise is all about identifying commercial ends that might be achieved by social means.

It’s called “What have social media ever done for us?”

It is an homage to the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, in which the leader of resistance group the People’s Front of Judea (played by John Cleese) asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

It is clearly meant to be a rhetorical question but, much to his chagrin, his audience proceeds to rap off a long list of valuable contributions to society made by the allegedly oppressive Romans – roads, aqueducts, education, public order, irrigation, sanitation, wine etc.

This exercise is about projecting forward and collectively, collaboratively defining what success might look like.

With the image above on a projector screen as a prompt, you hand out A4 sheets with empty speech bubbles on them. Then ask the assembled stakeholders to project forward a year or two and imagine themselves faced by a sceptical CEO asking the question “What have social media ever done for us?”

The task is to generate a list of social media successes that would make the People’s Front Of Judea proud.

This exercise has been used a couple of times in anger and has generated some rich, varied, ambitious and sometimes surprising visions for the commercial value of social media activity.

By and large though the responses cluster around Revenue Generation, Cost Reduction, Efficiency Gains, Employee Engagement and Brand Positioning / Reappraisal.

A highly useful by-product of this exercise is that it serves to cement the idea that social = commercial in the minds of influential stakeholders. The project owner (your client) doesn’t need to sell the idea to his or her stakeholders. They sell it to themselves through this exercise.

As with Technique #1, feel free to borrow this and let us know via a comment whether it works for you.

I road tested this projective technique with client x the other week.

It was a typical (if there is such a thing as typical) stakeholder workshop, bringing together people from across a business to understand objectives, objections, agendas, hopes, fears, loathings and such like as they related to said business embracing a more social approach to internal and external communications.

As an ice-breaker I handed out a bunch of A4 sheets, each with a picture of a half full/empty glass. I gave the group five minutes to write down their fears, concerns, threats etc in the half empty section of the glass at the top, and their hopes, opportunities, ambitions in the half full section at the bottom.

The result was some incredibly rich and revealing insights, expressed via interesting and pointed language.

Indeed there was a double-whammy effect whereby there was great content on the completed sheets, and this content then acted as stimulus material for a further useful conversation.

Ice broken.

Cards on the table.

It worked.

(Feel free to borrow).

As part of our ongoing work with Maxxium UK, we have been working with their wonderful Mixxit team to redesign and develop a new website. 

Mixxit is the brainchild of celebrity mixologist Wayne Collins. Along with his colleagues Andy Gemmell and Patsy Christie they set-up Mixxit initially as a training and education programme, with the aim of inspiring bartenders to make quality mixed drinks and cocktails. But they are so passionate that every drink can be perfectly made whether you are in the bar and or at home with friends, they wanted to spread their knowledge. 

Mixxit is unique in that every drink can be perfectly made in 5 easy steps. So how could we give people access to over 300 delicious cocktail recipes as well as offering guidance from three of the most prominent drinks experts in industry?  

Welcome to the Interactive Cocktail Mixer; you can search by spirit, occasion, glass, mixer or even colour in your quest to find the perfect drink. The cocktail mixer is built in Flash but utilises the site’s search functionality to find the right cocktail. Happy mixxing!

It’s that time of year again when men all over the country are sprouting mo’s. Most are in aid of Movember and the rest are just asked if it’s in aid of Movember. Either way, this can only mean one crucial fact; Tache of the Titans is back.

Movember is a great cause focussed on raising awareness of men’s health issues. Tache of the Titans aims to add even more benefit to the cause by allowing anyone who is taking part in the month long campaign to go head to head against other mo bro’s. One Tache to rule them all!

Tache of the Titans has had an upgrade for this years bouts. We have added ‘groups’, which basically means that you can once and for all prove who out of your family, friend or work colleagues has the ultimate mo on the go. The actual process is the same as before. All you need to do is simply upload a photo of your tache (Face tache only…!) and you will be entered into a head to head bout against another Titan. All of the votes cast go into a clever league table based on the percentage of bouts won.

The competition won’t actually take place until the last week of November, which allows an essential mo maturity time so that everyone can look like Tom Selleck by the time the ’bouting’ begins…in theory.

In the meantime we hope you can all push past the homeless looking stage as quickly as possible and upgrade to the prestigious “I need a tache comb” status.

Good luck gentlemen, we salute you.

The Marketing Society kindly invited me to speak about “social media”.

It’s a big subject to cover in 40 minutes. So I came up with what is hopefully a useful framework for thinking about strategy. Something that begs the right questions. Something that helps people to avoid the common pitfalls arising form the woefully sloppy use of language in this area.

The slides are embedded below.

To take advantage of the speaker notes that I’ve added you’ll need to view the presentation in situ on Slideshare.

Cop a load of these Tiny books from printstagr.am. They are funky, dinky, and magnetic. Yes, they stick to fridges.

Printstagr.am exists to turn Instagram photos into a variety of hard copy formats.

It “usually” works by connecting to Printstagr.am using your Instagram account, selecting the photos you want to print, selecting the format you want to print them in and paying.

That’s fine if you want photos from one Instagram account.

But we wanted to collate photos from multiple Instagram accounts using a single #blondedigital hashtag.

This was a special request.

But a special request that, to prinstagr.am’s credit, they agreed to fulfil.

In fact their approach to customer service was the most human experience this correspondent has had in quite a while.

Witness this verbatim reply to an email in which I thanked them for their flexibility and responsiveness.

“Responsiveness is due to the fact that I am a real human being. But don’t let that fool you… I also get really lazy sometimes and totally ignore customers and then have backlogs of emails to catch up on, which is seriously stressful and kind of makes me want to cry sometimes. Thanks in advance for understanding if sometime I don’t answer an email.”

Out of context that might seem like a public relations nightmare. In the context of the email exchange in which they had gone out of their way to make something unusual happen for me it was incredibly endearing.

An endearing experience and an endearingly cute end product.

A lovely project for a great client.

We’ve been working with The Open University to develop some accessible, interactive content about the periodic table of elements for its Open Learn site.

Open Learn exists to provide free access to Open University learning materials. It is effectively an interesting, useful and “gentle” introduction to the world of Open University.

This periodic table content was developed to coincide with the International Year Of Chemistry. As with all Open Learn content the brief was to be interesting and informative and not to assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the target user.

Rather than develop a single interactive environment our approach was to break the learning objectives down into a series of single topic applications. These include an introductory video piece about the history and importance of the periodic table, “elements that changed the course of history”, “elements of the world”, and “body chemistry”.

To the extent that it was possible we wanted to recreate the immersive experience of the best science shows, where learning is achieved through interaction with single-topic experiments and displays.

We used rich imagery and illustrations to bring the periodic table to life and capture the imagination of the user. The navigation and hierarchy were both kept very simple and intuitive to allow easy access to the different applications. This simple approach allows the user to lightly browse topics or, if they prefer, delve deeper into the hard facts and data of the periodic table.

The following technologies were used to develop the apps…

HTML5 Video – By using the HTML5 <video> tag we made sure that the multimedia content in the application would be 100% compatible with the iPad and other mobile devices.

CSS3 – CSS3 was used to create interactive elements on the pages like the buttons – allowing us to reduce the number of assets (images) on the page. It was also used to create new animations and transitions supported on modern browsers

jQuery – jQuery was used through the site to allow users to interact with the data on the pages, and provide support for older browsers that don’t support CSS3 animations. Plugins such as jQueryUI and jQuery Reflections were used to add these effects. jQuery Scrollpane was used to support iPad style page scrolling.

It was a joy to work with the OU team on this project. The teaching staff should definitely write a book on this stuff if they haven’t already. Most of the really interesting content and periodic table facts that “make” these apps came from them.

Have a play. And learn.

It was a privilege and an education to be part of the judging panel for the 2011 Social Buzz Awards.

Reading, discussing and interrogating the papers with a very high calibre panel of fellow judges was a real eye-opener.

The results will be announced at a dinner at Wembley Stadium on 1st December. (Book now!).

Meanwhile here are some general, non-confidential observations arising from the judging process. If the award entries are a reliable indicator, what do they suggest for the near future of social media? And what suggestions can I make for writers of future Social Buzz papers?

These are personal views, not necessarily those of the panel as a whole.

Blonde is five years old today.

We shall be partying tonight (#nopartyforoldmen).

Meanwhile, there is barely contained anticipation for the pre-party speech that Blonde MD, Pete, will be giving to celebrate this important anniversary and to fire us all up for the evening.

Pete is best known as a caring husband, a loving father, a talented musician, and a digital heavyweight. But he is also a great orator.

We share herewith the contents of this morning’s internal all-staff email thread. (Which was NOT an attempt to wind Pete up).

Phil : Don’t know about you but I can hardly concentrate because I’m looking forward to Pete’s pre-party speech so much.

Rob : Been looking forward to it for weeks.

Andy : Heard it was amazing. Really can’t wait.

Phil : 96 Karma on EdTwinge (Tearjerker league table). Good job he’s not childish enough to pick on people who try to wind him up eh?

Emma : How is he going to top last christmas?

Ricky : Rumour has it, it’s much better than this:

Nick : I reckon it will be as powerful and inspiring as this:

Rob : Might be a little more shouty, I’d say.

Matt : More like this I reckon….

[Embedding of *that* Gwyneth Paltrow speech "disabled by request" unfortunately.]

Ricky : I’d rather it was like this:

Nick : We’ll be so psyched up afterwards the the bar tab will be destroyed in under an hour!!

Nick (again) : I think we’ll have a change of tack from Pete today actually. Usually funny and caring, I reckon we’ll see a new approach to motivation:

[Embedding of *that* Full Metal Jacket sequence also disabled by request.]

Jen : My maiden name is Pyle. This scene has always had a particular resonance with me, particularly as I used to get bullied for having such a silly surname. I really hope Pete doesn’t ask me to choke myself on his hand on front of everyone tonight.

So no pressure then Pete.

And, no, we won’t be sharing Pete’s speech in public. It will barely be safe for our work. Which means it certainly won’t be safe for yours.

When our pals at The Leith Agency decided to create their own Leith beer brand we jumped at the chance to wade in and lend our support. The result of months of late nights and extra hours is the Maid of Leith – a beer brand based around the soon-to-be famous daughter of Leith. She’s a feisty little minx that stands for everything known and loved about Leith – she’s tough, she’s irresistible and she’s got mare charm than you can shake a Water of Leith fish at.

Designed by Charlie and built by Paul, we created a website that concentrates on the beautiful label design – a large bottle that you scroll down to view, caressing every inch of the Maid in all her glory. Using some nice CSS styling touches along the way to bring her to life. We also set up a Twitter and Facebook pages for the Maid’s fans.

So, next time you’re out and about in the Leith locals grab yourself a bottle of our delicious ‘Maid in Leith’ brew and get yourself acquainted to the Maid’s treasure chest for yourself. You’ll be seeing it popping up in numerous reputable drinking establishments including The King’s Wark, The Shore, Fishers, Sofi’s, Beets and Valvona & Crolla.