A few clicks on from another excellent Mashable update and we’re demonstrating and debating our own variance in social behaviour with chat show style banter on Google Buzz. Here’s the discussion thread…

Following an email around the office this morning, investigating what our individual thoughts were on Google Buzz, I received a few pretty cynical responses. To be fair, many people are still recovering from Google Wave: asking where and what now?

For me, it’s a bit different. Google is half my social equation. I have a Gmail account and am also a member of Tech Meet Up, Mobile Monday Edinburgh and Girl Geeks. TMU is a Google group, as is Mobile Monday and for Girl Geeks we organise information around Google Sites. I have a number of files in Google Docs, plus I’m in and out of Google Maps all the time. It’s fair to say I like Google.

Not everybody feels the same though. Here were a few thoughts from other Blondes about Google Buzz, starting with our tech team:

“It’s like twitter, but without any clients and unable to tie into any other of the microblogging/social media things…

It does follow the two people I have set up in googlemail already though.

Sadly, until they create some reason for it to exist my thoughts are:
“Just what the world needs, another twitter-clone.”

Oh it has “like” from facebook, which twitter haven’t managed to add yet.”

The bandwagon of Buzz bitchin’ rolls on…

“If everyone starts using it then it becomes really relevant. Haven’t seen a killer feature yet…

Google have been, shall we say, intermittent in their marketing of services so the jury is out about how big it will become.”

Having said that the current debate (going on around me while I’m typing this) is that if you are a heavy gmail user (I am) then it does appeal -as long as the take up is good.”

And then the rest of the planning team jump in….

“Google Buzz – initial reaction = “groan”.

Groan because as a digital marcomms professional I’ve got no option but to try it out, when my gut feel and the input (via Twitter) from people I trust are telling me that it’s going to be no great shakes.

Groan because I resolved this year to add more depth to my social graph (more emphasis on RSS, blog writing and commenting), and this feels like more breadth. That’s my personal take on the whole signal to noise issue.

Groan because there’s this stool called RSS, and there’s this other stool called Twitter, and I can’t see a valid role for anything between those two stools.

Groan because I only ever use Gmail for opening Twitter accounts. I really really can’t be arsed to have another following mouth to feed.

So I’ll watch with interest how it develops but at the moment it’s not even coming out of the box for me. “

And the tech team is still going….

“It just seems way to complex and unfocused.

Twitter
Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Facebook
helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

Simple. I get it.

Buzz
Go beyond status messages
Share updates, photos, videos, and more.
Start conversations about the things you find interesting.

Try Buzz in Gmail. (why do I have to do it in gmail by the way?)

You lost me at “Go beyond status messages”. Er.. not so sure I get it.

Really bad design as well. I find it really hard to scan. Twitter is so easy to just fly through and pick what’s interesting. Buzz is a mess and feels horrible to read.

Google seems to have forgotten their design roots. A million miles away from one input box to search shit.

Social network app fail.

A lot cleaner in t’iPhone though. Bordering on being useful.”

Before finally concluding…

“My friends are on Facebook (for the most part)
My friends aren’t on Gmail (for the most part) and if they are they’re not updating their status there.

So, for social/picture sharing stuff = Facebook.

I get interesting web/marketing/wotsit links by following people and searching on twitter.
I don’t get that from Buzz (yet, since there’s noone on it)

So for interesting links/finding out what random “famous” people are upto/whatever = twitter.

Buzz is only as good as the people using it – and currently noone is.

I expect it to go the way of Google Lively, to be honest. “

It appears I am the lone voice of Google Buzz support here.  I don’t think this product… this service… from Google is anywhere near complete and of course I’m aware of the privacy issues, which have been flagged up; but I need something that bridges the gap(s) between LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Social networking online isn’t this simple. I don’t want my engagement with professional communities to be confined to LinkedIn. I want meaningful, human-to-human knowledge sharing, which goes beyond the offering of Twitter and I certainly want a richer experience than Farmville updates on Facebook. I’m not arguing that Google Buzz is the solution, but given the incredible insight Google now has into our online behaviour, I’m holding out for some improvements first, before I search for a conclusion. Here’s to growing out of Facebook and Twitter…

We need a new planner.

We experienced a surge of inbound interest in the last quarter of 2009 and were fortunate enough to convert more than our fair share of the opportunities that presented themselves.

We’re also benefiting from year-on-year organic growth as existing clients place a greater emphasis on all things digital.

So we’re hiring.

We canvassed opinion here about the kind of person that we’re looking for, and the aggregated response is the recruitment equivalent of asking for the moon on a stick.

So here are the must-have qualities, minus the long tail of nice-to-haves.

1) HIGH-CONCEPT THINKING

A brief comes in from client x. It gives some details of their market, their brand, their audience and the issues they want some help with.

It doesn’t take you long to come up with some outline strategic thoughts, maybe a couple of headline themes that you could hang a pitch off, some clever ideas for channel strategy, and some interesting creative starters.

We want the intuitive leaps to go with the planning rigour.

We want a ‘Sherpa’ who can guide the creative process and occasionally deliver the ideas themselves.

A client once said that a really good planner is the only person he’d move his account to follow. Could you be that important to a piece of business?

2) LEADERSHIP

No, we’re not looking for a head of department, but we are looking for someone that can lead pitches and big presentations.

The way we’re growing we need to be on our A game in several places at once.

3) TECH-SAVVY

Our planning philosophy is rooted in the idea of people first. For a given audience what is technically desirable?

That said we need a planner who is also au fait with what is technically possible.

If a client asks, ‘Can that be done?’, you need to know the answer without having to phone a friend.

We’re doing interesting work for interesting clients, and we independently muck about with our own projects on a regular basis. We’re based out of London and Edinburgh. There are 25 of us, but we’re also part of a large marketing services group. So there’s a start-up vibe but we also have some very interesting friends in areas like co-creation, RoI analysis and media planning who can seamlessly slot into the team when required.

If you’re interested please get in touch via the email form on the contact section of our site. No agencies please.

(Image borrowed from hdurdle).

Fraser is back after paternity leave today.

He has called to say that he’s running 15 minutes late.

And he sounded sleepy.

So his development team colleagues have made him “breakfast”.

We’ve been members of CreativeBrief* for a while now, but yesterday we finally got round to publishing our agency showcase on the CreativeBrief site. Apparently this should significantly increase the number of potential clients that have a gander at us. Here’s hoping.

The main navigation for these showcases is fixed for all agencies, and they act as a sort of hybrid between a website and a credentials presentation.

We’re collating initial feedback at the moment so treat this as a public beta test at the moment.

*CreativeBrief may not describe themselves like this, but to us they’re a new business referral agency. Clients use them to condense and keep confidential the process of drawing up shortlists of suppliers for the provision of a range of marketing services.

Our “IMMORTALising Grolsch” paper has been shortlisted as a finalist in the Online Excellence category of the Marketing Society Star Awards. Woot!

It’s a tale of dynamic content, brand development and rigorous return on investment analysis.

Fingers crossed for May 29th.

UPDATE 1st APRIL

Just heard that the paper has now been shortlisted in the Digitally Led Marketing category at the national Marketing Society Golden Jubilee Awards. Double woot!

Fingers now crossed for June 8th too.

Here are the results of a quick experiment conducted in our Edinburgh office whilst everyone was having tea and enjoying cakes made by our pals at Stripe for Comic Relief.

We’d been in a meeting talking about the design for an in-house portfolio project we’re working on. This involved one of the team attempting to sketch an outline of Scotland on a notepad. The scribble was so laughably bad that we decided to extend the task to the whole office. Everyone had 30 seconds and no Google-peeking.

What this says about our observation and spacial awareness skills we’re not sure. It probably won’t form part of our design credentials.

We’re chuffed to bits to have won the pitch for The Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC).

It was a four way pitch, primarily for the redesign of the secc.co.uk business to business site. We’ll now be working closely with the SECC’s marketing, commercial and technical teams to review the site’s information architecture and navigation, to reinterpret the SECC brand and to introduce a range of new event planning features.

We’ve been doing a fair bit of interesting work in B2B sectors recently, and this is no exception – a range of internal stakeholders and a series of target audience segments all of whose goals and objectives need to be reconciled via a single site.

Sean Murray and the team at SECC have an ambitious vision for the venue and the brand, and there are some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Its helps a lot to be working on behalf of a “product” that is world class. For the 2nd year in a row, the SECC has just won BEST UK CONFERENCE VENUE 2009 at the industry leading M&IT Awards in London (23 Feb 2009).

As well as the main B2B site, the SECC also operates the ticket sales websites secctickets.com and secxtra.com.

Watch this space for details of the new site when it launches.

It’s been a while. The You Are What You Shirt category has gathered dust and cobwebs. But this morning’s fire drill presented this opportunity, courtesy of Roy.

The devil is in the detail. Read the small print.

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3

This post is primarily aimed at the 200 or so folk who have bought tickets for the EdTwestival on February 12th.

If you don’t know what this is about there’s a quick summary here (main Twestival site). An even quicker summary is “Tweet. Meet. Give.”

Blonde is the badge sponsor for the EdTwestival event, and we thought that we should do something interesting and Twittery as part of our involvement.

So, what follows is a brief summary of our idea, a plea to everyone who’s going to help make it work, and a mini instruction manual.

The idea

We aim to use Twitter to track in real time the socialising and networking that happens on the night.

No doubt lots of people are planning to live Tweet from the event anyway. We just want to give that live Tweeting an extra dimension.

To do this we’ve set up a Twitter account called WeMet – http://twitter.com/wemet.

Fairly shortly after the writing of this post @wemet will become a follower of everyone who’s attending the EdTwestival event. That will allow each of you (them) to send direct messages to WeMet. Please don’t block this new follower.

On the night everyone will be issued with a badge that carries their Twitter name – e.g. @Phil_Adams.

As you work the rooms we’d like you to send a direct message to WeMet each time you talk to somebody. An example message would be like this…

D wemet @tom @dick @harry

This will tell us that you talked to Tom, Dick and Harry and when you did so.

And we can then visualise this data in interesting ways. For instance everyone who takes part in the experiment will be sent their own personal social graph of the evening after the event. We’re also looking at some live visualisation options but we’re not at the making promises stage at the time of writing.

If you have the time and inclination you can add more context to the direct message (within the constraint of a 140 character limit). For instance…

D wemet @Tom @Dick @Harry – talking drunken shite about memes.

This will give us extra options when we play with the data, but it’s optional. The engine for this idea is the raw data about who you met.

The plea

Please bring your mobile Tweeting device with you and please take the time to send a short direct message to WeMet at the beginning of each conversation. Given that we’re tracking this in real time it would be good if you could send a message every time you talk to someone, even if you have already spoken to them earlier in the evening.

Hopefully this makes sense and is clear. There are a million and one things we could do with the data, but we hope that keeping it as simple as possible will maximise the participation levels.

If you need clarification or have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

If you’re following this blog via RSS the idea is that the EdTwestival folk will be sending an alert to attendees directing them to this post. Please feel free to distribute the link, but please give the Twestival guys first crack at the whip. Thank you.

If you want to retweet this post just copy and paste the text below into your Twitter client of choice.

Live Twitter-tracking of EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/131aU