Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

A blog post from beyond the grave

Andrew Olmsteadwas a US soldier and blogger who fought in Iraq.

He died last year.

As part of his will he requested that his Last Post be added to his blog after his death.

Have a read of it, whatever you think about the war it is a profoundly moving piece of literature. It's also funny, in a bitter-sweet way.

"If you have it, throw 'Freedom Isn't Free' from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can't laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact"

"Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven't agreed with them. If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them...Blogging put me in touch with an inordinate number of smart people, an exhilarating if humbling experience. When I was young, I was smart, but the older I got, the more I realized just how dumb I was in comparison to truly smart people. But, to my credit, I think, I was at least smart enough to pay attention to the people with real brains and even occasionally learn something from them. It has been joy and a pleasure having the opportunity to do this"

Andrew said that as a blogger he wanted to make sure that he could "have the last word".

Made me think about death in a web 2.0 world.

I wonder if this kind of blogging goodbye from beyond the grave will become more usual as we all live our lives online through blogs and social networks?

Sorry if this sounds like a morose post.

5 simple rules of Blogger Engagement

I wanted to share my thoughts about the new Skype phone from 3 and their blogger outreach launch program.

Last month I talked about the fact that I was in the process of writing an Christmas article for the Spectator about "gadgets for girls" and asked the blogosphere for ideas about what new gadgets I should write about. Robin at 1000 Heads emailed and asked if I would like to trial the new Skype phone.  My husband Skypes a lot with his family back home in France, so I said yes.

Let me start with a big confession upfront: We never used the phone.

We didn't end up using it for a number of reasons: firstly, we realised pretty quickly that the thing that we loved so much about Skype is the web-cam functionality. For us it wasn't really the fact that you can talk via VOIP for free (which is obviously great), but it was more to do with the fact that we could see parents and young cousins on the screen in front of us while we chatted. The Skype phone does not have video functionality.  So  suddenly a big reason for  wanting to use the mobile phone went away. Then we realised that the times that we had always Skyped folks in France were Sunday evenings as that was the best time that we knew everyone would be home, and it felt silly using a mobile in the house when we could have talked together face to face with Skype and iSight.

So I can't give you a proper review of the phone, apart from the fact  that it didn't look very pretty but I was very grateful that someone had thought of letting me have one pre-launch to play with.

But I did want to talk about the blogger outreach program itself and how I found being on the other end of an  initiative like this.

The emails that I received felt a little dull.  Although it was interesting to know that a Flickr group that had been set up, when I clicked through the photos that had been uploaded were corporate photos of executive suits holding up Skype phones.

Sometimes I wonder whether brands are starting to set up Web 2.0 things like Flickr groups because that is what expected of them, rather than it being of any real interest to the consumer.

I would have been more interested in some of the background info, some insight into the technology used, their expectations for handset uptake and also I was interested in hearing 3's reasons for why they wanted to produce a phone like this.

Anyway, I still decided to talk about the Skype phone in my article.

Then I got this email from the blogger team saying: "If you were to link to the article from your blog, mentioning the skypehone (perhaps with a picture), I might wet myself..."

Now I have never met this person before, so to get an email like this actually made me quite uncomfortable.

The same day I got this email from another member of the blogger team asking me to contact them so they could get the handsets back: "now more than ever is the time for pulling together those final thoughts before we sweep in and take back our trusty devices. I say ‘sweep in’. In reality we’ll send a jolly fellow in a delivery van to pick the phones up and return them safely to us - all fairly conventional. As such, we’ll need a daytime phone number and suitable address, with someone to return the phones to our guys."

And if I am honest, I found it a bit annoying.

When the phones were sent out, they did not say that it was a time limited trial. It's not that I wanted to keep the phone, but I do think that companies have to be really transparent upfront about what they want and what the blogger obligations and expectations are. There were huge issues around this when Microsoft Vista did their blogger launch this year (Microsoft gave away a top of the range laptop pre-loaded with Vista for bloggers to use and blog about pre-launch)

Anyway, I did receive an apology for "weirding me out" (their words, not mine) but it got me thinking a lot about blogger outreach and how best to do it:

1. Have something of genuine value to the bloggers that you are contacting (a product, a site, an idea etc)

2. Stay in communication, but not too often

3. Please don't do a "one size fits all/copy and paste" approach, it just feels odd and like a bad PR way of doing it. Think about the blogger you are communicating too, you should have a good sense of what they are like and what they are interested in - if not, spend more time on their blog!

4. Ask for feedback (not just on the product) but also on the way that the program was carried out - stuff like this should be in a constant state of Test, Learn, Refine for any future initiatives.

5. Be totally upfront about expectations and obligations.

Simple really, but funny how often it seems that brands don't follow these 5 simple rules of Blogger Engagement.

Blogging Milestones

Milestones are good things giving you a chance to both look backwards and think about the future.

I'm excited about my one year blogging anniversary milestone.

Like a bad Oscar speech there are people I would like to thank: firstly Russell, without first reading his blog and then coming to the Breakfast Club coffee mornings back in November 2006 I would never have had the inspriation/courage to begin blogging myself. It was also the network of smart people from all over the world that Russell linked me into via his blog that took me so pleasantly by surprise.

Couple of other blog Thank You shout outs - Faris, you were the best thing about working at Naked and the first person to leave a comment on this blog; Beeker, you were my first proper blog friend (and it took us months and months to meet up in person!); Kaitlyn, the Catch Up Lady, an American blogging friend that I will probably never meet in person, but I was so pleased for you when you got your big new job at Ogilvy PR in Washington DC and when you started the Ogilvy Blogger Code of Conduct I was really proud that we were blog friends; Neil at Only Dead Fish; David at Sixty Second View, Richard at Adliterate  -  the list goes on...

Blogging has helped me sharpen my thinking, connect with a diverse set of people and views and provided me with a continual flow of creative ideas from all around the world. It has been a fantastic year in so many ways, here's to 2008.

Back from hols, back to blog

Liberating experience to turn off blackberry, mobile, Twitter, Facebook, blog for 10 days.

Easing myself back into the blogosphere.

This cartoon made me laugh as sometimes I feel like the kid in it and sometimes I feel like one of the parents!

Holidays and Prostitution

I am off on holiday for a week and going to let the blackberry die, turn off the mobile, stop Twittering, Facebooking and blogging and re-charge my batteries properly.

I'm ridiculously excited.

But I wanted to leave you with some food for thought couresty of Stephen Davies at PRblogger.

Last year Stephen and Edelman developed a ranking that scored blogger influence and posted about the 100 most influential UK bloggers. This list featured Tom Coates @ PlasticBag.org

And my god, is he pissed off about this!

Have a read of one of the biggest rants that I have read for a long long time that actually took place on his Flickr account. Have a read, but here is a flavour:
"One of the absolute worst things that has ever happened to my blog was an article last year that named plasticbag.org one of the UK's most influential blogs. I think it was on PRBlogger.com. The amount of crap I received from people who now viewed me as a useful and exploitable commodity put me off writing for months. Longer maybe. Being viewed like a piece of meat by people who wanted somehow to carve off a little of my feeble authenticity. Disgusting...I find it degrading, patronising, cynical. It makes me want to hurl...I'm furious"

It made me think.

The project that we are doing for Cocoon has been met with pretty much universal positivity from bloggers.

I am wondering if it was that the Cocoon program was more like a beta test than a seeding program. We found influential bloggers and started to build a proper relationship and conversation with them about the handset and their experiences of it so that we could begin a process of making the next generation phone even better.  I am not sure, but I wonder if the fact that we are part of a digital ad agency rather than a traditional PR agency made a difference in the way that we approached it?

Not sure.

Anyway, as I said, a bit of food for thought.

See you in just over a week!

- Amelia

(Thank you Insufficient Postage for the image)

O2 Cocoon Blogger Launch

O2 have produced what I think is a fantastic new handset, it's called Cocoon, you can play around with it here. We are working the launch and I'm really excited about it.

I like my Cocoon for some quite girlie reasons, firstly I just think that it looks great and very different from other phones out on the market at the moment. When I take it out in the pub or at a dinner it always draws comments.

I also like the fact that this is what I would term a piece of "insight-led design." By that I mean, strip away the hype about mobiles and the reality is that after talking and texting, the third most used functionality is the alarm feature (in fact in today's Ofcom Report they said just that) Cocoon has a nest which it sits in at night, charging, and it becomes an LED alarm clock.

It also has a cool functionality which allows you to see in-coming texts that scroll via the blue LED lights on the outside of the phone (that has led to many hours with friends texting me rude words just to see the phone light up and effectively swear at us while we giggle like 12 year olds)

That is very...

...and quite funny.

So I believe in in the product which from a Planner's perspective is a good place to start.

We decided to launch the phone in the Blogosphere before any advertising started.  The fact that you're reading this blog probably means that you understand the power of digital advocacy, but if you need any more evidence see the chart below.

We used a proprietary tool called Web Mapping to uncover who we think that key influential UK bloggers. It made me smile that in the category of Thought Leaders, some old London Beersphere mates turned out to rank really highly. So if you see Faris, John, Russell or Henry around ask them to have a look at their Cocoon. I've also found smart bloggers who I was not aware of before, like Techno Kitten, Tom Hume and Di Overton.

You can see some of their thoughts and postings over at the Cocoon Blog. Please drop by and feel free to leave any thoughts that you have there, or on this blog.

We have had some really positive feedback to the way in which O2 is reaching out to the new blogger world in a transparent dialogue  It's quite brave for large clients to do something like this as suddenly control moves out of their hands over to consumers, but the learnings that they are getting for the future are, I think, priceless.

 

“PSFK: The O2 project seems
like a smart one and provides
a potential blueprint for
brands to engage with
bloggers beyond the
sending of press releases.”

Pulverizing our own privacy

At the start of 2007 New York Magazine published a great article called Kids, The Internet and The Death of Privacy by Emily Nussbaum. It's a fascinating article, well worth reading.

Nussbaum says that the fact that teenaged online  behaviour could well be  "the greatest generation gap since rock and roll."

I'm not so sure.

Something has radically changed in our grown-up Web 2.0 world since the publication of the article.

While I totally agree that:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores...loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones...They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

The thing that strikes me is that this description is not simply about American teenagers, it can apply to all of us.

It's not  just the American Teen who is witnessing the Death of Privacy, it is all of us.

Thanks to Facebook, we're happily in the process of pulverizing our privacy.  Our photos are up online, we're being tagged all over the place, we know when people drop a movie from their Favourite list, we know when people join a new group, we know when they get a new friend. Through Twitter, we know their thoughts and whereabouts, through Flickr we see homes, families, trips to the beach and much much more.

We seem to be  sharing everything, with everyone, all the time. 

I wonder where it's all going?

Danah Boyd posted at the weekend about just this: She has been struggling about whether her Facebook world is a world filled with her real friends from High School and beyond, or whether it is a place to hang out and connect with bloggers, conference speakers, journalists. Given that Danah is the global authority on Social Networking, this is really interesting. Danah has tried, and failed, to keep personal life and professional life distinct and separate. In this Radically Transparent world it just doesn't seem to work. 

AdAge had an interesting piece this week :

"And unlike the very serious LinkedIn, the industry's previous network of choice, Facebook is spewing a strange blend of content, part high-minded engagement with marketing topics of the day -- such as consumer-generated media and, natch, social networks -- and part dillydallying with mundane exercises such as the microblog Twitter and games such as Food Fight that are almost Beckettian in their embrace of pointlessness. "

So where next?

As I have posted about before, I think that by the end of this year we will move away from this era of Radical Transparency to one of Refined Privacy. We can't keep sharing on the level that we are doing now. I for one don't think that I want to know the level of detail that Facebook is giving me every time that I log on about my friends.

I wonder whether something like Ning and other micro-Social Networks are the way forward.

Or at least for Facebook to allow many more complex layers of friendship just like real life. At the moment Facebook allows you to have A List friends and B List friends, but life as we know is much more complicated than that. The sooner Facebook technology recognises that, the better for all of us. But I'm still not sure what will happen to our sense of Privacy.

New Plannersphere Search Engine

MisEntropy has created a smart mash-up (is it a mash-up??)

A Google-powered customized search engine that only searches the Plannersphere

Gets you fast to the stuff you need

Brilliant

Brands, Blogs & Bloggers

There's a new survey just published by Shiny Media. In it they ask 606 people, recruited from their own blog network, how they felt about brands in the digital space:

51% said they now expect brands to have online conversations with them
64% highlight Flogs and Floggers (fake-blogs) for particular criticism
55% could name brands who "get it wrong" online

(via NetImperative, it has a link to the full research report)

Mike Butcher, of smart Mbites, chaired Brands & Blogs in London last week, the key points from the day are here complete with video. Sometimes it's hard when you are immersed in this world to realise a lot of what we all take for granted as active participants in the blogosphere is radical new news to a lot of people.

I know that when I write digital comms strategies, blogs and social networks often feature prominently. It's a new area for brands, but given the right brand, the right approach and genuinely interesting stuff to talk about, I think that it's a smart channel to for brands to communicate in. But it still takes a brave client to sign off on digital initiatives like this.

So key thoughts: People are starting to expect brands to enter into a dialogue with them online, but it can't be faked. And once you start talking with people online, you can't just stop and expect that people won't get annoyed and go and tell other people quite how pissed off they are with you and your brand.

Commonsense really. 

Passive Aggressive Notes etc

My new favourite blog, Passive Aggressive Notes (Ta Nikki) It's now on my blogroll and Google reader...

Any my new best YouTube clip: