Checking for freshness

Using Topsy.com pre-tweet will allow you to track the existing tweets of a URL to see if it’s past its share-by date. This will also allow you to see how influential people have tweeted it and to adjust the copy of your tweet to show a different insight which is more interesting and spreadable to build on the previous tweets. It’s also likely that within your niche you’re not going to get retweeted if something has already been tweeted over 500 times – so what remix can you bring to that tweet? Sometimes it’s something that should instead be married to the insight of a lengthy blog post, which then makes it more shareable than just an old link. Think about how increasingly you can be a step ahead of your favourite sources that tweet – who are they retweeting? Follow them/their sources and who they retweet and so on.

Keeping it on brand

Acclimatising yourself with the past tweets is a good start to make sure you remain relevant to your followers that have kept on following, but firstly being interesting outside of tweets that just communicate company culture earn your right to then gradually do so.

More than anything the brand becomes the sum of all the agency’s…….

Personality

Your followers will want to see an agency that has a consistent personality if they are to choose to follow it over individuals or indeed over just a twitterfeed of its blog posts. Too many cooks can spoil the broth if they are not singing from the same hymn sheet (double cliche all the way). When reppin’ a company’s voice in the social internet being apprehensive about being ‘too’ cavalier can turn you towards news-line tweeting and this can be a big undoing (you could say tweeting is like any good creative work that needs that bit of boldness to spread on the web). Just don’t overstep the boundary in trying to be insightful or funny so that your CSR becomes an issue!

Sacrificing your own tweets

You know that really brilliant tweet you have that you could tweet from your personal account? Yeah, it sucks, but if you’re PR’ing your agency it’ll have to come through its twitter first 99% of the time. Exception being when you specifically want to curate the interestingness of your agency’s folk every now and then.

Adding to the retweet

Credit a source on Twitter for a great link but always add to their tweet unless they’ve put it so goddamn well it’s hard to beat. Mindless retweeting has become as common as the like. It’s the thought that you add which is spreadable and meaningful about your agency brand, not the clicking of a button.

Another in our occasional series ‘How to Kill Birds’

Did you clock how the first three cushions are positioned to spell “fit”? Sure you did. Oh such jestful geek pornery.

One is the Encounters Contentertainment talk (Soho Film Lab, 13:00) which is a private event invite only for ad industry creative directors chaired by Colin Marrs, editor of digital at Campaign (see above flyer).

The other is a public event on the future of short film at Apple Store Regent Street from 5pm – 7pm.

Details:

CONTENTERTAINMENT ’30 SEC LATER DEBATE’ (Vicky, Matt, Irfon & Adam)
12am – meet at the Soho Film Lab, 8-14 Meard Street, London W1F 0EQ
http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=529623&y=181041&z=0&sv=W1F+0EQ&st=2&pc=W1F+0EQ&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf
1pm – start
3pm – finish

APPLE iStore ‘The Future of Film’ (Matt speaking, Irfon chairing)
4.30 – meet up at the Apple iStore, 235 Regent Street, London W1B 2ET
http://www.apple.com/uk/retail/regentstreet/map/
5.00 – start
7.00 – finish
It’s outlined on the Apple website – http://www.apple.com/uk/retail/regentstreet/

GENERAL MAP
See the map on page 71 of the Soho Shorts brochure – http://quicktime.rushes.co.uk/2009_rssf_web.pdf

To top off this annual gloriousness, we even have a British person with a chance of winning! National morale is at an all-time high, sitting proudly and distinguished inbetween those familiar warnings of floods, droughts, heatwaves and mutated flu strains that visit us – unwanted – each year.

As Rory put it, it’s ‘Andymonium’.
Some people don’t like his face, but we’re proud of you lad, dead proud!

In celebration of all of this, I have selected a clip that harks back to a period of British cunningness and tennis domination. Please enjoy, have a great weekend and use the phrase “Hard cheese old boy” for the remainder of the summer!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Barely freshly shaven from his appearance on the BBC Today programme, Matt was kindly invited to talk a few things viral in front of Sky News cameras yesterday. It was through fortune in our safe office surroundings that he was spared the tomfoolery of background dancers (see video – poor Saatchi & Saatchi!).

This was all in aid of T-Mobile’s latest 7000 person “Hey Jude” singing flash mob in Trafalgar Square (with token popstar Pink plunked in the middle). Through press attention and popstar power alone it’s being talked about to buggery, yet you can’t beat the authenticity of the original which made us all smile and share somewhat.




- They are doing so because the brand expresses something about themselves or their community.

- They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.

- They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.

- They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

On this it’s also worth talking about emotional currency. We spread media in seconds via Twitter or email and we mustn’t forget that we often do so for the selfish reason of how something makes us immediately feel. Dosh Dosh wrote an interesting article back in July which in some depth discussed the emotional reasons behind spreading media, be it joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. The truth is the ‘key’ to spreadable media falls in murky depths, somewhere between combining emotional engagement, an individual’s perceptual/communal reasoning for spreading media and brand messaging. The further we move away from the idea that spreadable media is “dancing kittens on boobies” the better. It comes from a lot of people falsely believing spreadable media cannot operate in niches. It’s growing out of teenage bedrooms and the potential advertising has to be a positive force in the world in enabling worthwhile conversations is being realised.

Another problematic myth is a held perception that meme is integral to viral, so where does it fall into all of this? Debunking the idea that content should be internet memetic, Jenkins adds:

“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.”

A very useful addition to existing remix culture discussions.

Jenkins also talks about the “human agency” in cultures, inherently describing them as something we collectively create. Letting people mess with your content builds brand culture, giving people a stake in its spread and ensures its sustainable awesomeness. Ad-vacate to advocate.