Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

With there being a myriad of Rubber related Twitters (6/7!), Rubber Republic now hitting 5000 followers (woooo) and @TeamRubber also finally inducting itself onto Twitter, I thought it a good time to skim through some of the intricacies that make a talk-able agency Twitter (the sort of stuff that’s difficult to convey without coming across as terrifically nerdy).

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.

In our strive to improve distributed working, I have taken it upon myself to find an office with wifi, sundries and airy continental atmosphere. Zurich sounded sensible (mainly because I had to be here for another work). So here I am in my new office:

Team Rubber's Zurich Office - behind me I have all the services I need. In front all the views and inspiration I need.

Yes it is a McDonald’s seemingly in the middle of nowhere:

The office's proximity to the McDrive services is undeniably superb.

The awesome Sustrans, who have built a network of cycle tracks across the whole of the UK, just launched their My National Cycle network campaign which challenges people to make a film about their use of the National Cycle Network. Entry is easy (you can make a film on your mobile if you don’t have a video camera) and prizes are great:
- Under 11’s: Behind the scenes tour of Aardman
- 11 – 17: 4 VIP tickets to the Relentless Extreme Sports festival
- Adults: Four night UK holiday for four in a log cabin.

Check out My NCN here >>

And check out the film we made to promote it here:

We’ve loved the work of Sustrans for years. The organisation started in our building, and as pretty much everyone working for Team Rubber cycles to work, and some for pleasure too, they’re always people we love to work with. So enter their competition!

I was trying to remember the last time I had a phone without multi-tasking – then I remembered it was when I had one of these:

(By coincidence it was also the last phone I had without video calling – fwiw It was a great phone when I got it in 2000)

Cornelius is off to Birmingham today ready to find out what the great and good think of cycle paths in that neck of the woods, and spread the Sustrans love! He’s already drummed up some interest – thanks for the props go to:

Birmingham Cyclist have posted on their blog here.
Follow them on twitter at @brumcyclist

Midlands Arts Centre. (@mac_birmingham). Drinkies here after cycle – around 5.30.

Hopefully will meet birminghamcyclist.

…and Chris Unitt at Created in Birmingham have posted here.

We will start at NIC at 1.30 and ride down the path – finishing at MAC for Pimms at 5.30pm. COME AND MEET CORNELIUS!

Here’s our brum route.

So Cornelius had an adventure today as planned. But unfortunately it was of the damp kind. Cornelius’ voyage of human discovery will now happen on revised dates, starting next Monday, in Bristol.

Bristol May 3rd << Click for map
Birmingham May 7th << Click for map
Cardiff May 8th << Click for map

Keep up with his adventures on his blog: www.crosscountrycornelius.com

Quick note: I’ve just released our flash bullet chart under a BSD license over on the Viral Ad Network blog , and this is what they look like:

For the next three days, we’re going to be out and about on the cycle tracks of Britain with our own time travelling tweed clad alien, Cornelius. He’s going to be being chauffeured around the country interviewing people in his cosy private cinema.

The lovely chap is working with us on a film project for cycle charity Sustrans , celebrating 15 years of the National Cycle Network. Cornelius has a high def camera built into his single cycloptic eye, and asks questions every time you hold his hand. We’re hoping the cosy environs of his interview booth will allow passers by to open up to him about their feelings about cycling and walking on the national network of car free tracks.

Cornelius’ itinery is as follows. COME AND MEET HIM!:

Thurs April 29th: Bristol << Click for a map!
Fri April 30th: Birmingham << Click for a map!
Sat May 1st: Cardiff << Click for a map!

...and he’ll be blogging about his exploits at www.crosscountrycornelius.com

We do a lot of work. A lot of great work. Sadly due to the nature of work that Delib does, in most cases we can’t tell anyone about it. Anyway, there’s one project that Delib launched earlier in the year that we can now tell everyone about – and that’s “Crisis Point” our majorly cool youth engagement project for the UK Office of the European Parliament which has just won a tasty EIA (European Information Association) Award for Excellence in EU Information Provision 2010. Whoop Whoop!

Check out the promo poster here:

The brief for Crisis Point was along the lines of “come up with a teaching aid to help citizenship teachers teach European Citizenship more easily and effectively”. So – as always – we wanted to give a bit of Delib’s patented *engagement zing* to the project and came up with the concept of the Crisis Point game – a kind of Hollywood Blockbuster disaster movie meets teacher resource ; – )

Pitched with the line “Europe has reached Crisis Point. A contagious pandemic is spreading fast. Can you make the right decisions to save lives?”, the idea of the game is for school children to play out the roles of a citizen, MEP and European Commissioner to experience how the EU works at first hand – albeit in the context of impending disaster.

Check out some photos of the school teacher packs here:

A big thanks to all the team involved in this, including Craig H, the nice people at Play Nicely and of course our lovely clients Daniel + Vera at the European Parliament.

So we’re in the final 6 of the fantastic iFeatures scheme in Bristol. Phew, and thanks to lots of hard work from writer Carol Noble and producer Nick Pitt. Our film “The Bristol Job” will tell the story of an 11 year old girl who frustrated at her family’s poverty (exacerbated by her father losing his job at the Keynsham Cadburies plant) faces the prospect of not being able to afford her final school trip, so decides to rob a bank with her two best mates. Its a heist movie with a difference.

You can keep up with “The Bristol Job” team blog here.

You can follow our heroine Billie Diamond on twitter here or click on the image below.

You can see the other finalists here. I didn’t intend to be quite so prominent in this photo. But it appears I am.