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.

True return on investment is a hard financial measure.

This really, really good presentation by Olivier Blanchard makes the point more eloquently than I’ve seen it made before.

The tone of voice is lovely.

And the content feels like stuff that you should know.

Which it is.

But lots of people still act like it isn’t.

(Isn’t stuff that they know).

Live tweeting of Philippa Gregory’s new novel ended on 17th August. To coincide with the book’s international publication date, the following day we put live a bespoke Flash application on Philippa’s website that allows fans to read the tweets uninterrupted and at their leisure.

The White Queen on Twitter.

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been helping Philippa Gregory and her team with the launch of her latest novel on Twitter.

The first phase of the project has been the release of the c.250 tweets over the seven days leading up to the global publication date for the novel on August 18. At the time of writing this post, the final installment of tweets is due to be released from 5pm GMT this evening. The tweets have been published via the Twitter api using a specially written php/MYSQL broadcast system.

The project has attracted the best part of 600 followers who, based on their spontaneous reactions, have largely enjoyed the experience. Here, in the form of a status update picture essay, is a representative, warts-and-all sample of the @messages that have been sent to Elizabeth Woodville – the main protagonist in the book and the source of the White Queen tweets.

Elizabeth’s opening tweet…

Almost immediately fans comment on, and engage with, what is seen to be the “racy” nature of the tweets…

With roughly 33 tweets going out each day, the frequency of posting was not to everyone’s taste. Such a reaction was probably inevitable and, to be honest, we saw less of this kind of reaction than we had expected…

Some people clearly became actively engaged with the Twitter persona of Ms. Woodville…

Some started to question the point of the exercise – isn’t this giving away the plot?

But such responses were in the minority…

The dust has yet to settle on this project, and Phase 2 kicks off tomorrow (18th) with the addition of a bespoke Flash application to the Philippa Gregory site. This application will allow fans to read the tweets uninterrupted and at their leisure in a more user-friendly environment than that provided by Twitter itself. We’ve learned a lot already from this project that will hopefully be applied to further experiments in the future.

Nice piece in The Sun highlighting celebrity involvement in the IRN-BRU Can Clan. As detailed in the earlier post on this subject, Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s inimitable, fun take on this year’s Homecoming celebrations – a free music event on Glasgow Green on 13th September, including a cancan world record attempt, and the world’s largest online cancan.

We have recently launched the IRN-BRU Can Clan site.

Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s take on the 2009 Homecoming celebrations. The Can Clan will gather at Glasgow Green on September 13th to make an attempt on the Guinness World Record for the highest numer of people simultaneously performing the cancan – Can Clan / cancan geddit? There will also be a free mini music festival with a couple of exciting acts that will be announced later this month.

The role of the microsite is to support and promote the Can Clan event, and it features the world’s largest virtual cancan. Anyone can join this virtual cancan by creating their own “BRUZER” – as nearly 400 people have done at the time of writing.

The site is fully wired for social media showing and telling via all the usual channels and mechanics, and you can create your own group or mini-clan. The BRUZERS are fully portable as avatars and widgets.

It’s good to see the brand creating something original and of value to its drinkers as part of Homecoming rather than just jumping on the bandwagon like certain other soft drinks brands we could mention…

We’ve been working with Philippa Gregory (author of The Other Boleyn Girl) and her publisher, Simon and Schuster, on a pioneering project to launch her new novel in Twitter format. This is a first for an international bestselling author of Philippa’s stature. She has reinterpreted the novel as a series of roughly 250 tweets from the book’s main character.

Elizabeth Woodville is The White Queen. Born originally into the House of Lancaster, she seduces and marries the Yorkist King Edward IV. Having risen to royal status by virtue of her beauty she has to use her guile, and the odd bit of witchcraft, to rise to the challenges presented by her precarious position.

Or, in Philippa’s words…

As the examples below demonstrate, what she has to say goes some way beyond the what-I-had-for-breakfast banality that characterises some Twitter exchanges.

If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did.

It has to be secret. His friends have a wedding planned for him and I am a nobody. We marry in secret and we bed in a hurry. I adore him.

At dawn Edward’s army rises from mist, like an army of ghosts, and charges up the slopes to Warwick’s army of Lancaster to vicious fighting.

George, the fool, chooses a fool’s death. He wants to be drowned in a barrel of wine: in his chamber at the Tower.

The project has presented creative challenges to the author and some practical challenges to us in executing the idea. This is Philippa Gregory talking about adapting tens of thousands of carefully crafted words of prose into the 140 character format of Twitter…

“Tweets are a discipline, rather like a haiku, and the shortness of the sentence gives each one a rhythm which is really interesting for prose.

“It was more like writing poetry than prose. And some of the tweets seem to me to be more arresting than the prose of the book. I especially like the first one…
If my mother were not a witch, and the descendant of the goddess Melusina, I think none of this could ever have happened to me. But it did.

“I like this so much, I have re-used it when describing the novel, it doesn’t appear in the novel but only in the Twitter version, but it encapsulates for me the mood of the novel, its dreamlike quality, the character of the heroine and invites you to read more. I am certainly going to write creative tweets again.”

So much for the creative challenges and opportunities. Blonde has been charged with making the project happen in practical terms. And this is by no means a trivial exercise.

Clearly Twitter afficionados will want to follow the project on Twitter, or their Twitter client of choice. But Twitter is an inherently noisy channel and maintaining the narrative thread in amongst tweets from everyone else that the reader is following isn’t easy. Also anyone coming to Elizabeth’s profile mid-way through, or after, the event will be presented with the tweets in reverse order – i.e. the latest tweet first – and back to front isn’t the best way to read a novel, whatever its format. So, whilst launching the novel on Twitter is incredibly of-the-moment, Twitter itself isn’t necessarily the ideal channel from a user perspective in which to follow 250 consecutive 140 character episodes.

This is why the project is being implemented in two stages.

Fans will be able to follow @ElizWoodville on Twitter between 11th & 17th August. The tweets will be posted between 17.00 and 20.00 GMT each day, a window that is designed to make the content accessible to both UK and US audiences.

Then, on August 18th, the global publication date for the book, a bespoke Flash application will be launched on the Philippa Gregory website. The application will provide a rich, immersive experience which will allow users to read the tweets uninterrupted and at their leisure. The above visual is a snapshot from the application.

At the time of writing we’re working with the publisher to seed the project to various communities – fans of Philippa Gregory, the publishing industry and the digital/social media scene. The hope is that the Twitter experiment will introduce new readers to Philippa, but already there is evidence of Philippa introducing new people to Twitter.

Watch this space for further learning once the project goes live.

The reflex reaction to being presented with good content is to share it. Generosity, mutuality and sharing are the engines of social media.

But yesterday an un-named Blonde colleague brought to our attention a good idea.

Our collective initial reaction was to spread the word. Tweet and retweet.

Then it dawned on us that this was actually a very, very good idea. An idea that we can adapt and apply to our own wicked ends. An idea whose potential would probably be spotted by others. And we’d hate to be beaten to it.

Too good to tweet in fact.

(Until later when we’ll obviously give credit where credit’s due).

Meanwhile we feel a bit like this.

Image borrowed from DutchImage.

Ever come across anything that was too good to tweet?

The whole Facebook username landgrab, goldrush thing in pictures…

Like a good proportion of the Scottish social media community we tried to help the 300 miles guys raise money for the CLIC Sargent childrens’ cancer charity.

Like the rest of the community we had high hopes and expectations of being able to harness the power of social media – specifically Twitter – to generate some noise and donations.

And, like many of those who did their bit, we’ve learned some things in the process about both the benefits and limitations of Twitter. We share some of these observations in this post.

But first our congratulations to Lee and Garry on their achievement. On Friday last they completed their epic 300 mile Outer Hebridean challenge in 57 hours & 10 minutes. They cycled the equivalent of 10 London Marathons, kayaked a half marathon and ran another marathon while ascending the height of Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Mount Snowdon combined. In the process they raised the best part of £10,000 for CLIC Sargent. Well done guys, a fantastic, inspirational achievement!

During their training and preparation for the event, Lee and Garry shared their experiences on their blog and through Twitter. They fully embraced both the virtual and real world aspects of networking as they captured the imagination of the Scottish social media scene.

Many of these people, perhaps most notably Mike Coulter, rallied round to help boost the profile of the challenge. Indeed, it was prompted by Mike’s frustration at slow conversion of Twitter buzz into money that we launched our own initiative.

We set out to make it as easy as possible to “monetise” Twitter on behalf of 300 Miles.

All people had to do was retweet (RT) our simple message and we’d donate 50p to the cause – up to a maximum of £300 for unique retweets.

We assumed that removing the need to actually donate yourself would turbo-charge the message and deliver an easy £300 for the charity. Indeed there was some internal debate as to the right level to set the donation per retweet. It was argued that at 50p we’d burn through the £300 in double-quick time and that 20p would be more appropriate.

How wrong we were.

The first Tweet went out from our Blondehaslearnt profile at 9.44 AM.

And, within 20 minutes we were being picked up as one of the most retweeted items on the planet…

But things quickly slowed down. We had been retweeted 40 times in the first 45 minutes. The first 31 retweets had the potential to reach 38,641 people (ignoring any overlap in followings of the people who retweeted us). But in the next 3 hours we added only 36 further retweets and things had slowed to a trickle.

By way of a boost we shared this information with a secondary tweet.

For a while this had the desired effect, but closer attention to the content of the retweets revealed that the further we went beyond the “inner circle” of people who knew the 300 miles guys, or at least knew about the challenge, the less likely we were to be retweeted.

In appears, quite rightly, that people don’t retweet lightly. And repeated scamming and spamming has hardened people against taking a charitable tweet at face value.

Some people, like @RicRoberts, took the time to check it out. Many others clearly didn’t and our message fell on the Twitter equivalent of stony ground.

The 140 character format of Twitter makes messages easy to digest and pass on, but it doesn’t allow for the richness and depth of communication that might perhaps have convinced people of the authenticity of the call to action.

In the end (by that I mean the fact that, at the time of writing, there hasn’t been a retweet for over 24 hours) we achieved 127 retweets with a maximum theoretical reach of 63,325 people. In other words a very loosely defined “response rate” of 0.2%. Would your average, sophisticated direct marketing charity outfit be happy with that? All comments welcome.

In conclusion, our main reflections on this quick and dirty, spontaneous piece of fund-raising activity are as follows:-

1) Things spread like wildfire on Twitter. Which is great if you have a piece of news that needs to travel fast. But wildfires have a habit of flaring up and burning out really quickly. Which is not so great if you’re looking for people to take any kind of action on the back of that news.

Twitter has a short attention span. It is a firework rather than a flare – blink, several other tweets roll in and you’ve missed it.

2) There are communities within communities on Twitter. Social media are at their most powerful when the ambient awareness for other people that you generate online is reinforced by face to face contact. This initiative worked well with the 300 miles inner circle but stuttered and quickly stalled once it moved a couple of “generations” beyond that.

3) Was our copywriting optimised for direct response? Could we have explained the offer, been more motivating, and allayed people’s authenticity concerns all in 140 characters? Indeed make that 120 characters or so given that we needed to leave room for the extra characters taken up by the process of retweeting.