DigitalAgency

Live! At the BBC:

I had a very pleasurable day yesterday working with, (and it has to be said, learning from), half a dozen key players from some of Scotland, Northern England and Northern Ireland's top creative businesses.

So take a bow, a curtsy and plaudits:

Kenny Shaw from Screenmedia Design, Joel Simon from Flickerpix Animations, Nicola Black from Blackwatch Productions, Damien Smith from ISO, Dom Raban from Corporation Pop & Andrew Crawshaw from Tuna Technologies.

(Incidentally; Why 2 links per delegate above? First to Twitter, second to website. I am delighted to report that to a man, and woman, everyone in the room had a Twitter account. Do yourself a favour, follow them now.)

Entrepreneurs all, I met the aforementioned luminaries at a day long social media workshop I facilitated in the BBC's impressive Pacific Quay building.

A terribly nice, but scarily smart bunch, the the day was a blend of me pontificating (as usual), about social media, flurries of tough questions, (with occasional soft answers), a large chunk of hands on keyboard engagement with essential social media tools, all wrapped up my the usual over-the-top evangelism and exhortation to get socially stuck in.

The day was part of the year long Cross Creative project, formulated and hosted by TRCMedia, a Glasgow based, and beautifully proportioned, provider of industry-wide training and development for business leaders. 

Their mission is to help delegates make sense of the latest business and technology trends, and how they might respond to new challenges in this era of revolution and reinvention.

(Oh, and, before I go any further, I must also give a huge and significant thank you to Cross Creative Project Manager; Carole Dunlop, for some terrific organisation, for keeping me on track and on brief, and for being totally unflappable.)

During the groups Q&A sessions, we covered such topics as:  How can busy execs find time to engage with appropriate social media channels, how does one separate of person and professional involvement, the distinctions between social media as a productivity tool, and it has to be said, productivity inhibitor, what's the big deal about Twitter, the importance of aggregation with 'search+share', and we even found time to explore the use social tools to find the best haggis in Glasgow. (Joel was on a mission here, with Burns Night looming.)

The team also grilled Damien about ISO's ambitious and fascinating 4ip funded Central Station project. (He was as forthcoming as possible, but understandably wasn't able to give us the full skinny.)

And we discussed the groups upcoming March visit to Silicon Valley to meet with many of the web's great and the good. Including, I must report with not a little envy, appointments at Facebook and Google.

We rounded the day off with a Social Media quiz, shamelessly repackaged fro the previous weeks Edinburgh Coffee Morn birthday celebrations.

All in all a sometimes grueling, sometimes challenging, but always stimulating day.

Would I do it again? Like a shot.

Would I do it again some time soon?

I think I need a bit of a lie-down first.

Till about August.

Flickr set from workshop here:

Whopper FreakOut:

This is very, very, very good.

(And, very good.)

From the home of the subservient chicken.

It's 7 minutes long, but in my book worth it.

So stop tweeting and start watching.

(Thanks to Adrian at mightysmall who originally saw it here on adsareboring.)

It wasn't like that in my day:

I was lucky enough to get myself on the D&AD Copy jury a few years ago.

It was all very gentlemanly, (and gentlewomanly of course, Barbara Noakes was on it.) And all Smoked Salmon Sandwiches, with Chablis as chilled as the judges.

Larry Barker was there too, and the unflappable Malcolm Duffy. (I forget who else. I'm getting on a bit, and can't be arsed going over to my bookshelf and finding the Annual in question. Late 90's sometime.)

Anyhow, I just saw this great shot (Flotograph?), of a judging session from Flo's blog, (he was doing website jury service this week.)

How times have changed. (Good to see the preponderance of Steve Jobsean black turtle necks too. But there aren't half as many 'ironic' Threadless T's as I'd been led to imagine those young digital folk wear.)

(You can click the shot to enlarge it. Oh, you know the drill.)

"No community is best served when the elite have control."

My title comes from a quote near the end of this presentation by J.J. Abrams from TED 2007.

It's about love, creativity, curiosity and why you don't always need technology.

Every creative department should watch this.

Then get on with it.

Thanks to Rob for the heads up.

Whitespace Done Good:

Film Friday:

I just wanted to thank Alex and Henki from Airside and Al from Mother for coming into my Missus' place Whitespace on Friday and previewing their Live Earth films; 'A Beginners Guide to giving a damn...' and 'Penguin in a pickle' prior to their afternoon show at the EIFF.

Loved it, as I think everybody at whitespace did.

If you haven't seen the films, I wrote a piece here a while back which hopefully should fill in the blanks.

Frasr, also put up a photoset on flickr here.

(Oh and a special thanks to Rig, for scouring Edinburgh for some appropriate, ethically sourced, organic pop-corn for the filums.)

Watching cheese mature:

Well it sure beats watching paint dry.

I was listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, when they did a feature on a Somerset Cheese maker who'd put a web cam up for a few months looking at a cheese maturing.

What I thought was brilliant was that this centuries old tradition was using present day marketing to great effect. (A 5 minute slot on the Today programme all about the brand? That'll do nicely.)

If they hadn't put a web cam up, if they didn't have a myspace page, (which I hasten to add they do, with hundreds of cheesy friends,) then this would have been a non-story.

The presenters of Today even gave out the url and invited listeners to go and look at the webcam.

As your humble reporter, I diligently did so, it was wonderfully low-fi and ever so slightly Monty Pythonish, but I noticed that 500,000 other visits to the site had already been racked up.

Yep. HALF A MILLION. To a Shepton Mallett cheese producer's web site.

My guess is that the figures will go even more stratospheric after the Today airing. (Not to mention the long tail benefits and indeed Google ranking effect, thanks to the BBC's links.)

But they might want to revisit their allocation of server capacity, in order to meet demand. After giving out the url on air today, the servers crashed.

Marvellous, name making stuff, and only possible methinks via Web 2.0 enthusiasms.

ps. On visiting the cheese site, I couldn't help but notice a striking resemblance to the TV set graphic the company my Missus works for, whitespace. I wonder if they could be related?

(Cheesecam)

(Whitespace home page.)

UPDATE: I'm told by the Whitespacers that the image was sourced from iStockPhoto, which explains the co-incidental useage.

pps. The cheesecam reminded me affectionately of the Cambridge Coffee Cam many years ago.(But you're probably to young to remember that.)

Cool Coolhunting film:

Jonathan Harris is the guy behind the wonderful 'We Feel Fine' site.

This short, makes you think, film, is packed with great thoughts and images and well worth a look.

(Thanks to my young nephew Mark at Mother for bringing this to his dotty old Uncle's attention.)

BarCamp Scotland:

Yesterday's BarCamp Scotland at Edinburgh University School of Informatics.

It rocked.

Though the attendees where mainly technology guys, I found the presentations, products and thinking were in the main, pretty brilliant.

I was disappointed that there weren't more people there from the advertising, design and marketing communities. (From agencies, web developers or client side marketing departments.)

Either they were unaware that it was on, which perhaps reflects on how close they really are to what's happening online. Or they had better things to do.

Whatever reason, I think they missed out. They could have learned a lot and seen what's available/going on in their own backyard.

The passion, enthusiasm and solutions presented were as infectious as they were insightful.

Good to see Russ and Alex from Whitespace there. (The Flock presentation even used Alex's GoogleSightSeeing to illustrate part of their talk.)

As you'd expect everyone was blogging the event, and there's a sizable pool up on flickr.

And I was delighted and surprised to see the ratio of Mac's to PC's slurping up the free WiFi, was about 10:1

My favourite presentations where from GroopIt, Revish and Flock.

But I missed stacks, there was so much stuff going on. (Though I wasn't too fussed about missing the SecondLife presentations)

Hope there are more of these things in our neck of the woods, and if one pops up in yours, do yourself a favour and get yourself there.

Thanks to Alice too for hastily rearranging her weekend, and coming along to fly the DigitalAgency flag.

Adding a bit of much needed academic rigour to my crude, working class, mercenary marketing agenda ;-)

(Below: DigitalAgency's very own Dr Alice Bartholomew chats with Jon-Paul of Dunedin-arts.com)

The ultimate example of User Generated Content?:

It's also an example of a new category I've just invented called; 'User Generated Media Buying.'

The bloke in the ad above, created it himself, booked space in a large circulation Swiss magazine, then asked their accounts department to bill Gucci direct.

By the time it was discovered that he had bugger all to do with Gucci, and it was a con, the ad had appeared.

The little tinker.

Perhaps with all that girly-man after shave wafting about, the publishers found it difficult to smell something fishy.

The Police are understood to be looking for the culprit, looking at the photograph, although they might want to start by knocking on Thierry Henry's door.

Tip O' the hat to my young nephew at Mother, Mark Waites for the heads up.

And his source AdFreak.