If you listen closely, you can hear the whisperings of a million brand managers the world over asking themselves, “How on earth do I create positive buzz around my brand in social media.”

Well, you can do this.
(Experiential marketing brilliance + seeding on YouTube)

Or this.
(Appling social media sentiment insight to product innovation + PR savvy)

Or this.
(Courting social media via traditional channels to encourage a shared viewing experience.)

The last one is our favourite. We love a Shared Media Experience here at Blonde.

Which is why we were so excited about the opportunity to take part in a Tweet Tasting event. A Tweet Tasting provides a structured forum in which a group of select individuals sample whisky (in this instance) and share tasting notes on a hashtag. It makes a virtue of that collective Twitter conversation.

Steve from The Whisky Wire, who had organized and run many similar events in the past, presented the opportunity to us for our client, Cutty Sark. You can see his other Tweet Tastings here and here.

Steve and Blonde worked together to send out samples to 15 whisky Tweeters before the event. If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to receive a sample, you were still able to follow along with all the tasting action on the #CuttyTT hashtag.

Creating a hive of positive activity is a desirable outcome for any brand. Add in influencers and it gets even better. And within the whisky community, wit and creativity reign, especially when comparing tasting notes. So, if you create this lovely buzz on a platform that thrives off of this type of communication, you’ve got a great result.

As much as we like whisky at Blonde, we are by no means experts. Which is why we had Master Blender Kirsteen Campbell on hand while we were Tweeting from @cuttysarkblend to answer questions and provide a level of expertise that we wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise.

Leveraging this knowledge proved valuable to the rest of the Tweeters.

At the end of the night, we counted 474 Tweets using the #CuttyTT hashtag.

Creative notes:

Unsurprisingly, the product stood up to the interrogation. Here were some more Tweets from the event:

We look forward to doing more of the same in the future.

The TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE.

I’m in two minds about the concept of tone of voice as applied to marketing in social channels.

Succinctly describing a brand’s tone of voice is a distinctly advertising discipline.

And advertising disciplines are not always fit for social purpose.

“What is our message?” isn’t the most helpful question when it comes to social media strategy for instance.

In fact make that three minds.

Tone of voice is also the advertising discipline that is most prone to bullshit.

Worse than that it’s often vacuous, first-base bullshit born out of wishful thinking rather than reality.

Nonetheless it is worth interrogating a brand (and/or a culture) for personality and tone of voice traits that can be usefully applied or interpreted by the human beings at the sharp end of your social media strategy.

And, to this end, we came up with THE TOTALLY TOUGH TONE OF VOICE CHALLENGE (TTTTOVC).

It’s a workshop technique that’s designed to get internal stakeholders really thinking about their brand.

And it really is tough.

The toughness is the antidote to bullshit and safe, first-base thinking.

Here’s a word cloud populated by the safe, vacuous, first-base tone of voice words that I’ve most frequently encountered during my two decades plus of doing “this stuff”.

These words are all useless.

They’re useless because they accurately describe the tone of voice of every brand on the planet.

Name a brand that deliberately positions itself as UNconfident. Or UNfriendly. Or UNapproachable. Or UNtrustworthy. Or UNprofessional. Or negative.

Clients and complicit agencies gravitate to the tone of voice words in the word cloud precisely because you can’t argue with them.

And then the creative teams in the complicit agencies simply ignore the tone of voice section of the creative brief and do their own thing, safe in the knowledge that whatever they come back with will be seen as confident, professional etc……. because it can’t not be.

The tough bit of this totally tough challenge is that you’re not allowed to use these words. In fact you’re not allowed to use any word or phrase for which the complete opposite wouldn’t be a viable option for a competitor brand..

For example…

“Broadsheet” would be fine because “tabloid” is also a viable tone of voice option.

“Polished” works because “warts and all” would be a viable alternative.

Believe me this is really tough for most client stakeholders.

But it is also very rewarding once you’ve collectively broken through the pain barrier in a workshop environment.

Once one person in the group “gets it” and comes up with some rich, relevant, differentiated language there is a domino effect as the penny drops for everyone.

In our last workshop we got a few phrases that the group was palpably proud of. They were phrases that I couldn’t wait to share with the agency because they were accurate, pointed, dare I say “ownable”, and – unlike the usual tone of voice suspects – impossible to ignore.

Try it. It works.

And, if you liked this, check out the other techniques in this series.

Social media workshop technique #1 – Glass half full, glass half empty.

Social media workshop technique #2 – What have social media ever done for us?

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.

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.

It’s back for a third year!

EdTwinge is a service that monitors tweets about all the acts at the Fringe, analyses them for sentiment and creates a “karma” score for each one. These karma scores are used to create league tables for each genre of show at the Fringe.

So the audience becomes the critic in 140 characters or less.

It means that you can use the wisdom of the crowd, people like you, to decide what shows to see rather than the more dubious and subjective wisdom of a few “professional” critics.

EdTwinge is a collaborative labour of love between Blonde and this band of reprobate brothers, who’ve managed to hold it together since the Fringe Festival of 2009.

Talking of collaborations…

For 2011 EdTwinge is having its back scratched by, and is scratching the back of, the Live At The Gilded Balloon Podcast.

In its previous guises the podcast has enjoyed between 400,000 and 2,000,000 iTunes downloads, and we’ll be working together to add value to each other’s offering and build each other’s profile. For instance the acts that are booked for the live podcast recordings will be influenced by the EdTwinge league tables.

Hopefully the relationship will help EdTwinge grow again in 2011. The site had 192,029 visits from 131,887 unique visitors during the 2010 Fringe.

Follow EdTwinge on Twitter…

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.