Others have covered this more quickly than me, but I thought I’d say something beyond what I said on Seesmic last week – http://seesmic.com/v/6XRvg23fSW

Charlie said he didn’t want samples. I do. I’m much happier with my shower gel and play-doh than with a plastic monster a calendar and a badge in the shape of a vodka bottle. If something that comes in this isn’t useful, it had better be completely, mindblowingly, gobsmackingly beautiful – cereal box shaped like a book? Nah.

While the crayons made of soap are potentially also useful, the thing that made my brain scream more than anything was the lametrocious rubbish written about it:

“A set of crayons that are really soap tell a story about how Nissan’s not what you expect.” which in my very very humble opinion is the biggest load of self-justifying, bollockshite I’ll read in the context of advertising copy this year. God I hope so, I couldn’t bear anything more slimy and contrived.

Like Roo, I like the recyclability of the packaging, but I’m looking forward to much cooler and less wanky stuff next time please.

UPDATE: in the comments on the picture on flickr, mike heath says:

“That is really funny that you got Black and White playdoh in your Sony Bravia promo item. err… ‘Colour like no other’ LOL! That is probably a collectors piece, like a misprinted stamp Bit of a Homer Simpson moment at the packing factory!”

The main focus I think is on selling into larger organisations to be part of their development efforts but some are made publically available too. You can view the latest offering on Working with Americans online or download it to your phone by pointing your mobile browser at this page.

I don’t know. What do you think (of the content and the concept? I know I have American readers – how good is this?

Sorry guys.

My introduction to KoS was at Interesting2007 – a little pot was in the goodie bag, supplied by Steve Bowbrick who managed better than most would have to give a sponsor’s speech appropriate to that legendary gathering. I’d seen the product before, but was a bit suspicious, it looked (and sounded – shaving? oil?) a bit Top Gear for me. But I tried it out and fell immediately in love.

The lubricants I’ve used in shaving my face aren’t that wide and varied. I never really got on with the whipped cream that comes in an aerosol tin (perhaps I should have used shaving cream that comes in an aerosol tin) though that was my first obvious choice. It did have the great smell of Brut, but it’s just bloody messy, especially when it gets bloody. I had some nice Body Shop stuff once, that you worked up with a brush, but as with so many Body Shop products for men, it seemed to have been discontinued or just not in the shop I went to or something. I know that just using soap dries your face, but I do love the smell of Roger & Gallet Sandalwood or even Imperial Leather. Of course I once used this from G-Room which was nice and minty, but after showing my arse in the shower using one of their other products I was always scared to go back in.

My first thought was that I couldn’t believe how much you use – a “few drops?” but it really does go a long way. I started my little bottle from interesting about 7 months ago and although I don’t use it every day (damn you, Imperial Leather) and I bought another bottle when I went on holiday and forgot, the first one is still going strong.

I think the things I love about the experience boil down to:

lack of mess – although it can make the cut hair stick to the side of the basin.
smoothness of skin afterwards – though comparisons between my face and baby’s bottoms are not rare anyway
size of packaging – tiny, so great for travelling
it just works – it just does.

I shudders at the term “brand loyalty” but I think they’ve got me.

PS They have a bunch of blogs – I don’t read them, but the fact that they exist gives me comfort that applying this oil to my face every morning is OK and probably a good thing. Just confirming my weirdness.

When I came to present this to a client in the context of a social media strategy however, I was about to use Darren Barefoot’s excellent graphic version (with added logos!) when it suddenly occurred to me that actually it would be better to talk about it as a snowflake because we’re in the business of making snowballs to roll downhill.

Hey Scoble, don’t worry, the underlying idea’s the same and all credit to you for it

I remember being interested in their previous (and still going strong) product, mobizines (Scott describes mippin as mobizines on steroids) but was put off by the restricted content available and the java client. These Refresh guys have taken the good idea from it – we want to be able to read cool stuff as easily on the phone as you do on your desktop – but they’ve moved away from the horrors of transcoding a 15″ experience in its entirety down to a variety of small mobile screens and gone for the fact that most sites already produce content in a presentation-independent form – their RSS feed.

As a service, you can look at it two ways – as a “publisher” I get to include my RSS feed in their database, then if I want to I can opt to splice ads into the feed (in the same way that feedburner does) from which Mippin takes a small cut. Bigger publishers will want to customise the way that their feed is displayed and they can do this too.

As a “user” I can subscribe to the feeds I want and I can search for terms (or URLs) to find new stuff – so for example putting the URL for this blog into the search box returns a picture and title and a link for each post. A click on the link takes me to an uncluttered version of the post. Perhaps a little too uncluttered – the links have been stripped. But there is another link there to go to the original post (and you can pass it on by mail, sms or twitter – nice) There’s a kind of history page too so I can go to my regular reads. I see it primarily as an RSS reader for my phone. So of course my feature requests are to make it behave a bit more like an aggregator – I’d like a river of news view. I’d like to be able to define groups of subscriptions and get a river of news from each. I’d also like to be able to turn off ads, oh yes and I’d also like a zeitgeist tagcloud to be able to see what’s hot. Scott was boasting that moving from downloadable client to browser meant that their development times have been slashed, so I expect to see my requests implemented well before Christmas

As an aside, the experience is still dependent on the browser though – I want a really good free browser for my Windows Mobile Smartphone – IE just doesn’t cut the mustard, although I’m also tempted by a Nokia 800 or an iTouch.

Disclosure: I was given two cups of delicious coffee (and offered more). There was cake. Mike Butcher ate some cake, but I stuck to coffee.

I really hope that the ENO has the courage to keep that material up and to carry on with this experiment now and into future – it adds a layer of interestingness before you see the show as well as afterwards – it’s icing on the cake. As I say I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know if this is an occasion to peel the icing off and give the cake to the dog or whether this is professional critics talking out of their arses again. Now is the time for the Carmen folk to get the conversation really going – fight back or surrender, doesn’t matter which, but say something.

The thing is that critics are part of the problem with opening up performance to a wider audience. The good news is that their power is diminishing as we gain the opportunity to hear people we know and trust talk about what they like and don’t like. I much prefer getting recommendations from my friends and I look forward to seeing some ordinary people’s reaction to Carmen, people who don’t have any prejudice against ENO and don’t already have a fixed opinion about how this opera needs to be done in London today.

I went to a C4 Education screening last night entitled “TV is dead?” My answer – read my blog (two years ago! – funnily enough about the same time as I started thinking about blogging for theatre) The bit in the programme where, if I’d been at home, I’d have been shouting at the telly, was when someone from the Beeb trotted out the old line that in future, as media professionals, they would be the people that we could trust to sift out the crap. NO, BBC, STOP! I don’t want your opinion on what’s crap and what’s not, I want you to make excellent programmes that no one else can make. More “Dr Who”, “Comics Britannia”, “Windscale”, “The Mighty Boosh” (oh God! *More* Storyville, not less!!!!) and fewer animals stuck up trees and celebrities who can’t tap dance.

Phew!

I really liked that younger people were included in the debate in a fairly unpatronising way, though friends and other regular readers know what I think of panel sessions.

Missing from last night was any recognition that the internet is about social interaction not content delivery (just like TV has always been) and so you should be concentrating on making stuff that people want to interact around rather than worrying about how they get it and whether everyone’s paid exactly the right money (whole other rant on that one – tell us straight – how much money gets spent on protecting rights? – how much more or less is it than the amount of money you currently lose to “piracy” – how much more money might you actually make if you weren’t so tight arsed about it all – *hint* watch Radiohead very carefully)

Also missing was any glimmer of understanding that advertising might not work any more. The real question here is “TV Advertising is Dead?” And it comes in two parts – 1. People don’t want to be interrupted or fed commercial information any more, they want it self-service and 2. The current advertising sales model is based on pulling the wool over the eyes of advertisers with extrapolations from sample audiences – what happens when you (and they) start to get real audience numbers in real time based on actual attention data from your viewers/subscribers in a form that makes comparison with other online media forms more like-for-like?

I wish I had more time to respond, but in the few minutes before I get in the shower, I would add these points:

A great number of the theatre directors I’ve spoke to about in-house (marketing, if you like) blogging they have seen it’s *primary purpose* as circumventing what they see as piss-poor print-bound criticism which can kill a show’s sales just because the critic had a hangover.

Mr Billington should have a look here for an explanation of how to deal with that “relentless din”

I sat in front of Mr Billington at a press night last week. He was very well behaved, as you’d expect. The same can’t be said for one of his peers who threatened to disrupt the beginning of the show because the seat he’d been given didn’t suit his taste.

Is anyone doing (new)media literacy classes for these poor old hacks? How can we help them distinguish between the different types of blogging in theatre, spot the good stuff in among the rest and understand that you don’t have to read them all, any more than you have to read every column-inch of a newspaper.

It’s exactly what I was talking about here

Well done to the folk at interesource who got it going, but super well done to the ENO people who seem to have taken to it as naturally as I’d hoped. I was really grateful to get to talk to John Berry a few weeks ago and hear his take – I came away understanding that ENO was an obvious place to do this – democratisation of access to opera is one of their cornerstones. We also talked about ‘bootstrapping’ online and offline relationships and I thought I saw a small lightbulb go on.

There’s a ton of cool video on the site – perhaps too many talking heads (but who am I to talk!) but some fantastic music and behind the scenes action. Go look.

I think it’s a great example of post-geek bloggery – as I’ve been saying for a while, make your own fly-on-the-wall documentary of what you’re doing rather than getting a crew in to follow you around and then stitch you up after the event.

When I’ve pitched this idea to other people, the perceived barriers have been (lack of) editorial control and shining the light on the creative process too early. I don’t know what the process has been for creating content here, but I can’t imagine that Sally Potter has had to get her blog approved by a committee every time she writes.

One suggestion – a more obvious place to find CC-licenced images for bloggers to use to illustrate their posts about you

Let me first be clear about the basis on which I took part. I wasn’t paid anything for this, I just got a loan of a new laptop for a week. Toshiba covered the cost of couriering the machine to and from me.

I gave up being nerdy and spec-obsessed a long time ago (well the spec-obsessed part anyway) so I can’t reel off lots of geek-speak about it, and my current laptop is a Tosh Satellite, so that was my main point of comparison. A week really isn’t very long to try it out. I was working hard when it arrived so didn’t have time to play until a few days in. I wish though that I’d taken the time because actually it was so much faster than my Satellite that I could have got things done much more quickly….

The speed comes courtesy of a dual core processor, 1GB of RAM and a 95GB hard drive. Weight-wise, it was like all laptops – heavier than you want it to be. It was wide enough to fit in my social media empire bag but only just and made getting other kit in and out tricky. But the screen did feel pleasantly wide.

It worked fine with everything I do (though for a 1 week trial it was a bore to have to download and install my staples of Firefox, Audacity, SonicStage, The Gimp & Core FTP), and far faster than any of the other machines I have to hand – in fact I was gobsmacked by how quickly video got processed. But without experience of other similarly-specced machines, I can’t say for certain whether this is the *best* choice of dual core/1GB/95GB option.

This really isn’t about this machine, it’s about me. I hanker for something prettier and more out-of-the-box functional and useful for what I do, or else a big change from my usual environment. If I’d had longer, I’d have tried installing Ubuntu – that might have made for a more interesting review, but it might also have ruined my all of my personal and business relationships while I sat engrossed in tweaking device drivers.

Observations:

1. Looking at Jamie & Sophia in these pictures really shows you how much they were acting their socks off. Just at a physical level, for example, in the film, it is quite clear that she’s an older woman, but here they look about the same age.

2. I need a new camera, this one is fine for whipping out and taking shots of London’s rubbish, but it can’t cope with the conditions and so some of these were too crap to post. All round I’m getting a bit tired of using shit equipment. Please Father Midsummer, can I have a new MacBook, a 3-chip videocam with flash memory not tape & a Digital SLR?

3. Having said that, the grainy quality of some of them reminds me a) (nostalgically) of prints from a 110 instamatic and b) the rougher cut of the film we saw before.

Update: I see that the movie is to be shown on the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival – kewl!

The film is to be released at the end of August – definitely go see.

Hugh led a Q&A with David Mackenzie, Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles. The highlights were twittered Colin Kennedy was filming throughout (though the camera got variously hijacked by Jamie Bell at one point and Catherine Monahan of Orbital Wines at another) Looking forward to seeing what comes of that…

I would have stayed longer at the party afterwards, but my tummy was grumbling and the *nibbles* were just that – aaargh kill the microfood.

The day kicked off with presentations from David and Daryl Upsall who heads up the Fundraising Company in Spain. Here are my lightly edited notes from these presentations.

David Dixon – How do we enhance voice fundraising in the age of new media

Note this is “voice fundraising” not just about telephones or whatever device you might happen to be using to convey your voice such as: web, e-mail, mobile voice, mobile web & wap, sms, vismail, affiliate marketing, VOIP (and associated services), social networking, user generated content, MMORPGS such as Second Life.

There’s just been a conference about charities using Second Life – one of the main speakers is from Oxford University which has bought an island in the space. There’s also been a sponsored walk in aid of the American Cancer Society – it’s like temporary emigration – they are very real and people spend money on them, lots of big companies are setting themselves up there.

So we face a big threat – not so much in Spain, but further north. If you listen to calls you see that nearly everyone is very old – over 65 probably – the reason for this is that they were recruited by direct mail. Most of the donors in britain are acquired through direct mail. This is changing, but not that quickly. The effect of mass direct mail is under threat from both generational (older people dying, younger people not responding to direct mail) and technological change (the move to online) and the marginal rate of return is reducing all the time.

When direct mail started, you had to be very stupid not to get a good response, but as time goes by the quality of your communication has to go up in order to maintain profitability as the marginal rate will always move towards break even. So a small change in marginal response rates means that a whole bunch of mail becomes uneconomic, meaning that the volume of direct mail will have to reduce. At the moment it’s still increasing as the only way to increase profitability but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to continue like this forever.

We don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I believe it will be sometime in next 10 years. So we have a problem coming and I want to be on top of it beforehand. So now we’re investigating new media, we don’t have to but i’d like to be thinking about it now to get a strategic solution in place before it’s needed.

We’re focusing on learning how to integrate voice with new media. Our new kit allows us to work with sms email and web alongside voice, so we can position ourselves as an integrated contact centre. We don’t quite understand how to do it best yet, but we could get started right now.

The problems that charities face are: How to migrate from ‘here’ to ‘there’. How to restructure organisationally. How to monetise new media and how to grow expertise.

We are developing expertise so we can sell more voice fundraising, involving TPR directly with clients’ strategic planning. Historically, we haven’t been part of that planning, but we’d like to be in future.

An example of the experiments we’re doing is Donor Connect – it’s affiliate marketing – an awful lot of people want to give but don’t know who they want to give money to. Increasingly people go looking for ideas on the internet. In the commercial world for any search on a generic term you’ll see a mix of direct producers and affiliates who guide searchers towards the producers, with the affiliates getting a small cut.

If you were to type in ‘help darfur’ you’d get such a mix. Opinions vary on it – some people think that they are squatting and stealing traffic – others think its good because they are doing the suppliers job for them without getting paid until they get a result.

So we’re working with a network of affiliates – 1-2,000 from Affiliate Future – they do the dissemination for us. It captures people with a general interest – so if they know they want to help the people of darfur, they will get a way of finding it. and then we will get the calls.

We’re piloting it at the moment – pay per registration with a 10-day cooling off period – basic identity data – one phone number. We want to see if and how the model works so everything is being tested. In any sample we find a number of non-contacts, qualified prospects and sometimes single gifts with qualification information, but the main aim is new monthly donors which is what the charities pay for. Charities love this – they get to only pay for the people who actually pay them.

The thing that isn’t happening is the call back – assumption that people who’ve registered online will only respond to e-mail. So there’s a great opportunity – because voice is still the best way to talk to people.

So far we’re not getting huge numbers – given how much we’ve spent, we’re still pleased, but of itself it’s not great. We feel we’ve proved the basic concept but we want to show that we can do volume.

The ROI was 1.06:1 with a highest donation of a £100 Paperless Direct Debit. TPR income per contact was over 60% more than usual.

So good for us and good for the charity. The average donation levels are higher by web than we get by mail or face to face on the street. We think that attrition will be low as we’re creating a relationship. If we can prove it works we’ll do more – and go to all our clients and say give us your data and we’ll do the rest of the work.

Daryl Upsall – Integrating fundraising & communication- how to stand out

Daryl explained how there is so much going on as the web grows up and content (pictures, stories, videos) is going to be generated much more by individuals rather than charities. Here are the examples Daryl used.

Big shift from billboards to online. Google sells more advertising in the UK than Channel 4 in 2006

In UK 10% of young people get news from internet – even Murdoch is in on the act buying myspace – he knows that the traditional newspaper is dying. Where are the charities on myspace? In individual people’s pages. Lots of people setting up microcharities.

youtube is the perfect place to recycle content – very few charities have their own blog – does anyone do podcasting for charities? how about videoblogging?

First aid – St John’s Ambulance have put all of their courses on podcasts through iTunes.

SMS – Italians donated 18m euros in 24 hours for tsunami. but nobody’s capturing the phone number data by call back.

Vodaphone campaign in Spain – supporting various charities with shortcodes for each one. again no data capture even for feedback.

Unicef at Berlin New Years Eve party. 130,000 donated 350,000 euros
26m people sent a message for Live 8 – nobody got back to them.
e-mail campaigns work less but still effective getting 150,000 people to sign a petition – 95,000 new names – 225kUSD

Amnesty has probably the biggest database of e-mail addresses – amina libre – stoning women campaign 140 e-mails –> 9m people who can now be telephoned.

Keep your eyes open for anyone who’s doing something snowballing.

Amnesty’s base is getting older too. so they’re saying let’s build some lists of younger people – pencil in envelope not working. downloading music (john lennon)

Ticketing – fastest growing area is sms – latest is sending barcodes. How do you ticket your charity events – and what’s happening to the phone numbers generated…?

The mobile phone newsletter – via qr-code in Japan – building response mechanisms into advertising.

El Pais – unique numbers on paper is an entry to daily lottery – with immediate textback collecting permissions.

Online auctions – ebay for charity – you can sell anything and again generating leads.

Everyclick – every time you use the search engine, charities make money – some corporates force their people to use it.

Integrating f2f & mobile – Greenpeace India – bought a whole bunch of numbers in Bangalore – sent them a message (some would say spammed them) and if they replied positively they said “we’ll bring you a tree to plant in your garden”. They bought 39,000 numbers and got 2.3% conversion – the person bringing the tree was a fundraiser ready to sign them up to donate. Lead to supporter conversion 16% planning now to recruit 22k new supporters this way.

It’s about developing relationships – John Aspinall Foundation – get info via shortcodes about animals with click through to sponsor immediately. totallywild.net including ringtones of their sound or a related music download.

The first of these I’ve uploaded is unusual in that it features more of me than the peeps in the booth. You saw yesterday what I get up to in my leisure time. I thought you’d like to be reassured that it doesn’t get much better when I’m “working”. Hey, I don’t drink – I had to have some fun somehow

Actually no, I wish I hadn’t gone at all. The saving graces were unexpected meetups with Ged Carroll, Kevin Anderson and Ian Delaney and an expected meetup with Andy Hyde.

I wanted to interview the big fat blue mouse and the leopard girls (sorry rupert) but they’d gone on a break I think, so I started shooting this B roll stuff and then…

thank god it was free to get in (and out again)

Very nice Social Media Club meetup last night, not least because I met Rupert Howe, who rocks.

Prolly see you after the weekend.

According to the blurb the film was well received at the Berlin Film Festival recently and I just spoke to Paul the Director who tells me that it’ll be going to Seattle and Chicago later in the year. I have been given a DVD copy (and watched the first 20 minutes, which hooked me) so I’m going to blog about it when I’ve had a proper look.

If you’d like to go see it (and if you blog about it that would be lovely too) then give me a shout and I’ll put you in touch with the production team.

I also (thanks to my compulsive RSS reading) got in quickly on the sneak preview of Moo’s new product which should be here very soon, but I’m sworn to blog secrecy about them until their official launch on 18th April.

At the end I was really pleased to get to talk on camera to Sam Sethi of Vecosys and Paul Youlten of Yellowikis about what they’re finding exciting in this whole crazy web scene at the moment.

Good to see John Hornbaker again, not least because it gives me the opportunity to apologise for not linking to him before.

I also talked to:

Rupesh Chatwani of Lonsdale Capital about how the rest of the world is catching up with social media and that humanisation is the next big thing.

Brett Putter of Forsyth Group was he scouting for talent or clients or both? And how about Bright Young Things Clare Johnston and Agnes Greaves? I suspect I’m neither bright enough or young enough to qualify, but we talked a lot about using social media to engage with customers.

Ed Hodges of Voible (formerly blackfin.co.uk) – cool flash conferencing and some other smart applications for mobile, launching sometime in the next 6-8 weeks.

Alastair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin of the online document management/groupware 2.0 (“like basecamp only more around documents and including workflow” – and British) solution huddle

Briefly at the end Ryan Gallagher and Paul Maitland of ConnectMeAnywhere.com who Sam speaks highly of above and nice to bump into Paul Miller again who is now doing School of Everything as namechecked in the Paul Youlten video.

My most excitable moment was meeting Jamie Wallace of walkit.com – I just love it, love it, love it and it’s so nice when you meet the faces behind great applications, particularly when they’re so self-effacingly surprised to meet a raving fan like me

Blimey! I’m out of Moo Cards.

[update: gaaaah! also had a fantastic chat with Ian Forrester (such. a. nice. man.) from bbc backstage and he indulged my ranting and raving about theatre blogging - forgotten in the first draft because we didn't swap business cards - Oli Barrett, Paul Birch and Steve Moore also fall into this category - phew!]

They’re at it again. I thought I saw Jason saying nooooo-waaaaay Rosé to this but nevertheless Hugh’s just announced The Stormhoek/Threshers 40% off voucher for getting shitfaced by Easter (well April 1st anyway – uh-oh that date rings alarm bells).

Oh but read the small print: “cannot be exchanged at Main Line stations, Petrol Forecourts, Center Parcs or Student Unions.”

Download the coupon from here and take it to Threshers for 40% off – yes really. Now you know that I don’t drink, but that doesn’t make me a spoilsport – 40% off is, like, a lot.

You don’t need me to remind you what happened last time.

1. What does “only original vouchers accepted” mean in this context? Do I have to dial up my mail on my phone and show the waiter the pic? Or am I allowed to print it out. If I can print it out, what’s to stop me printing out 50 and giving them to my friends? And what, apart from their high ethical standards, is to stop anyone reading this downloading it and using it?

2. does “exclusivley” mean the same as “exclusively” (I’m just guessing here)

3. I didn’t realise I’d signed up to be a wagamamama covent garden member. I don’t know if I like wagamamama’s food as much as I like wagamama’s. AFAIK there are zero wagamamama covent garden members so this is a bit worthless really.