Two geeks nerding out for 46 minutes.

Two geeks who have both founded incredibly successful social start-ups talking about funding, coding, user experience, killer functionality, luck, social networking, scalability, how to define your competition, the difference between building a product and building a company.

Kevin Rose of Digg et al talks to Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram.

They obviously enjoy each other’s company and the content is clearly better and more revealing for it.

The interview ends with a deceptively simple piece of advice. Namely to focus on solving problems rather than focus on technology.

“Far too many start-ups are technologies in search of a problem.”

This is 46 minutes well spent.

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).

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.

TED Global has set up shop here in Edinburgh.

And if that’s not cause for celebration in geeky circles then we’d like to know what is.

So celebrate is what we decided to do.

We’re celebrating TED with TED Yourself.

TED Yourself does what it says on the tin.

It augments the reality of your LinkedIn profile to create a spoof, spurious and pseudo-intellectual TED speaker version of you. With a couple of clicks you’re the charismatic and riveting guru you always wanted to be.

The real speaker profiles for TED Global 2011 include a “privacy artist”, an “undercover economist” and a “digital preservationist”.

And for TED Yourself we just dialled things up a bit. This correspondent is a “philanthropical fetishist” for instance.

The site was designed by Elaina Jumper.

Copy was written by Lauren Sudworth.

Coding and LinkedIn api jiggery pokery by Tane Piper.

Further details on this “hobby” project and the open source code behind it can be found here.

On Friday we said au revoir to Nikki Godley who had spent several weeks with us as “animator in residence”.

Nikki approached us with the idea of a mutually beneficial residency, whereby Blonde could benefit from having in-house animation and illustration skills and Nikki could add some digital design and development strings to her bow in a busy studio environment. We found both the idea and Nikki’s infectious enthusiasm and can-do attitude irresistible.

Nikki brightened up everyone’s days whilst she was here and she is a very talented creative lady. We look forward to welcoming her (and her awesome banana bread) back to Blonde in the not too distant future. In the meantime we wish her well with some very exciting animation projects.

Meanwhile our headcount continues to be boosted by 20-25% on a semi-permanent basis by an eclectic collection of freelancers and interns. To cut a long story short we’re busy. And we’re lucky to have found some very talented external resource to add value to our core team, and to contribute to the real sense of buzz around the place.

As a result we often find ourselves testing the theory that meetings are quicker and more productive without chairs. We’ve had to raid meeting rooms for tables and chairs to accommodate the extra bodies in the office.

And we’re delighted to announce that last week one of our interns became a full time Blonde. We had been so impressed by the attitude and intellect of Megan Lambie that we offered her a job in our planning department. Megan will be working closely with our Head of User Experience, Andy Irvine. UX lives at the intersection of design, technology and human insight and so it’s a brilliant place to learn your trade as a digital planner.

Thanks to everyone who has done good work and made the office more interesting in the last few weeks.

As an agency that passionately concerns itself with the human aspects of technology (Human Ends. Digital Means and all that), we couldn’t let this piece of SXSW 2011 pass us and you by. The live tweeting of Gary Vaynerchuck‘s talk on caring as a business model and the humanisation of brands. Themes from his book The Thank You Economy.

It’s also another example of how useful social storytelling application Storify is. The story below took ten minutes tops to pull together and publish.

No further commentary needed. It’s all contained in the story.

We love robots at Blonde.

They’re the useful, friendly, (almost) human face of technology.

And we have a small and growing collection of them in our reception area.

If we were an American digital agency we might go as far as to say that robots are “sick”.

Instagram, the photo sharing app that makes iPhone images look cool, is pretty sick too.

Robots versus Instagram…

We’ve just finished a game of 52 card pick-up with our internal systems.

Out have gone the over-specced electronic trafficking applications that gave people fewer reasons to talk to each other.

In have come a couple of distinctly analogue whiteboards that are the focal points for a weekly meeting involving the entire agency, and which give 100% transparency on who’s doing what for when.

The first board shows what each individual in creative, development, planning and new business is up to for the week ahead, with deadlines and, where appropriate, the number of hours/days due to be spent on a given task. Each individual is responsible for populating their section of the board.

Who's doing what for when.

The second board (aka The Shipping Forecast) focuses on deadlines. What is being “shipped” when. This can be things going live, creative work being delivered for presentations, strategy ready for a client meeting.

The Shipping Forecast

On Monday mornings we all talk through the work that’s going through the agency, plus work which we anticipate coming in over the next couple of weeks. Potential log-jams are identified, discussed, and worked around.

Then we get on with it.

And we talk about it on an ongoing basis. Everyone can see with 100% transparency where the pressure points are and this makes for a constructive, collaborative environment in which to do the day to day tweaking and negotiation around resource allocation.

It’s early days but hopefully we’ll achieve the appropriate balance between robustness and rigour on the one hand, and that start-up feeling on the other.

HP went back to the garage. We’ve gone back to our boards.

Back to the garage.