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.

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…

You know the old saying. A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, and there’s a hurricane in Kansas. Or something like that.

In this case, someone sent comedian Alan Carr a gift of ‘Iron Brew’ humbugs (sweeties), and our client IRN-BRU became a Twitter trending topic worldwide- for nearly 18 hours.

It all kicked off at about 9pm on an otherwise normal, quiet Tuesday night with the following Tweets. (Read from the bottom up).

And the accompanying photo.

This triggered the Twitter equivalent of IRN-BRU pinball, complete with retweet bonus scores and celebrity mention multipliers.

Said celebrity multipliers included a nice mention from ex-pat Scottish comedian and CBS show host Craig Ferguson (658,000 followers)

IRN-BRU itself joined in to enjoy the banter and surf the wave of goodwill. This included a valuable retweet from Alan Carr himself.

Soon thereafter, the brand found itself in the #5 slot for worldwide trending topics- nestled above Dumbledore and below #pssst.

It stayed there for several hours, aided and abetted by a certain high profile comedian who was happy to enter into the spirit of this thing that he had accidentally started.

As a result of all this noise (which included a healthy dose of positive brand signal) the @NewFromIRNBRU follower count took a nice jump.

The account went from having roughly 1,700 followers to over 2,200. That’s a 30% increase in followers in 24 hours.

Same story for traffic to www.IRN-BRU.co.uk, which was already experiencing a considerable boost thanks to the freshly launched Star in the Ad campaign. During this crazy 24 hour period, Twitter accounted for over 10% of referral traffic, an unusually high proportion for the IRN-BRU site.

The number of mentions of “IRN-BRU” on the web clearly took a leap. We tracked over 2,000 mentions during those 24 hours, most coming from Twitter. This chimes with what we already know about Twitter’s Trending algorithm that favours emerging news over what is simply talked about the most.

Completely unplanned.

Completely serendipitous.

Completely organic and authentic.

(And therefore completely Twitter at its best).

A wonderful 18 hours for the brand, for which it owes Mr Carr a can or two.

(Especially as he kept the love going the next day).

Storify that compares and contrasts some of the radical and bonkers stuff that makes Twitter what it is.

Stories abound of server crashes caused by Stephen Fry tweeting links to good causes.

Well he hasn’t crashed YouTube, but he has tweeted a link to a new Young Scot film that Blonde (for which read David Hartmann) co-created with our sister PR agency Stripe.

The Storify below tells the story of the immediate aftermath of “the tweet”. You know when you’ve been “Fry’ed”.

I finally had a chance to play with my new Storify beta invitation.

Storify makes it easy to create stories from the social web. At least that’s what it says on the tin.

And, having briefly road-tested it with the somewhat frivolous story below, I’d say that it delivers.

You can easily pull in content from all the major social platforms, plus Google and RSS feeds. You can embed links, annotate the content to add colour and context, and select a master image to thumbnail the story when you publish.

To someone who has laboriously constructed picture essay blog posts about Facebook and Twitter in the past, taking multiple screengrabs and resizing to fit the blog column width, Storify looks like a godsend.

Once you’ve finished the story, the application gives you the option to notify the people whose (Twitter) content you have featured by tweeting the link to them. A nice courteous touch that also has built-in word of mouth potential.

The only minor quibble from this first trial is that when embedding the story in this blog, Slideshare-style, the formatting isn’t 100% perfect. But that’s what being in beta is all about.

I hope to give it a more thorough run-out in the near future.

Hi Phil,
Hope you’re well. I’ve now changed my mind completely and decided that Twitter is rubbish.
Yesterday we got 50k visits on the site. Facebook sent 6,000 people and Twitter 600, but we have more Twitter followers than Facebook ones. No one clicks on the links and there’s too much on it.
It’s OK for the punters but for driving traffic and building brands I think it’s a lame duck.
There.
Have a great weekend.
Paul

Paul Stokes
Publisher
The Daily Mash

I received the above email from Paul Stokes over the weekend and subsequently got his permission to quote him.

Twitter = rubbish for building brands in his view.

He makes an interesting point about there being too much on it and no-one clicking on links.

I suggested that this might have something to do with the fact that The Daily Mash uses Twitter as a one-way, broadcast channel (see below), and that a more “engaged”, dialogue approach might yield better long term dividends.

With such a broadcast approach it’s probably not surprising that Facebook performs better as a traffic driving channel. People tend to fan/follow fewer, more considered, more personally important people and organisations on Facebook than they do on Twitter. The signal to noise ratio is higher. And Facebook is hardwired for word of mouth.

Is Twitter rubbish for building brands?

Here’s a test for you.

Read this post.

Read it in its entirety.

In one go.

Without breaking to check email or Twitter.

If you’re anyway engaged with what Forrester would hate me calling “social media”, reading a post of that length, in the context of everything else that you could (and tell yourself should) be reading, in the context of everything that you should be doing, ain’t easy.

And that’s the whole point of the post.

And I quote.

“For the last couple of years I’ve jacked in to this increasing bit rate of downloadable intellectual breadth and I’ve traded away the slow conscious depth of my previous life. And you know what? Now I’m losing my self. I used to be a free standing independent cerebral cortex. My own self. But not any more. Now I’m a dumb node in some uber-net’s basal ganglia. Tweet, twitch, brief repose; repeat. My autonomic nervous system is plugged in, in charge, and interrupt ready while the gray wrinkly stuff is white knuckled from holding on.”

Breadth versus depth of information and knowledge.

The post argues that we are at the point where this is an either/or decision. If you wish to retain any vestige of “normal” life then staying in touch both broadly AND deeply is out of the question.

I made no resolutions for 2010.

But I took a complete break from blog reading, blog posting, and Twittering over the festive period.

And, as a result of so doing, gave some thought to this breadth versus depth issue.

And, as a result of so doing, decided to re-balance my approach to all things e-social.

In favour of more depth.

The fact that Jim Stogdill’s post seems to have touched a nerve (broadly and deeply as it happens) is indicative of the fact that many people are feeling the same way.

For the time being this information overload, this Information Surfeit Disorder, may only affect the geeky few. But, over time, it will also affect the (increasingly socially engaged) many.

And so we need to contend with this issue both personally and professionally.

We need to wrestle not only with how we manage our personal consumption of information.

But also how we manage our clients’ content and campaigns in the context of this overload.

We have soft launched You Are What You App. The premise of this simple site is that your choice of iPhone applications probably reveals something about you.

And so it would seem. It’s the iPhone equivalent of having LLoyd Grossman looking through your keyhole.

The site appeals both to the iPhone exhibitionist and to the iPhone voyeur.

At the time of writing it’s early stages in terms of the number of active participants, but the average time on site is 7 minutes 30 seconds, suggesting that people are enjoying having a good nosey at other people’s apps.

I’ve already downloaded a few new gems as a result of seeing and reading about the apps that other people can’t live without.

There’s Byline, a mobile Google Reader app, which is perfect for keeping up with RSS feeds on the train.

Instapaper is an interesting looking application that allows you to save and read web pages offline at your convenience.

Around Me elegantly answers the question “where is the nearest x, y or z?”

And people are clearly sufficiently impressed with productivity applications like Omnifocus and Things to part with decent amounts of cash for them.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account please do add your apps to the site.

You Are What You App is our latest “hobby” project, following in the footsteps of WeMet for EdTwestival and EdTwinge.

As mentioned in previous posts, we helped Philippa Gregory and her team to implement the Twitter version of her latest historical novel, The White Queen.

We developed a strategy for how best to publish the 250 tweets over seven days on Twitter itself.

And we developed a rich, immersive Flash application that lives on Philippa’s site that allows fans to view the tweets uninterrupted and at their leisure.

Twitter Flash App

The good news is that the book went to Number 1 on The Times bestseller list in the UK after only 5 days on sale, and achieved the equivalent number 2 position in the United States.

And here in November the number of views of the Flash application continues to grow month on month. The application is still delivering (increasing) value from tweets that were posted 3 months ago.

All good stuff.