The Twichhikers guide

Everyday we hear of new and interesting ways that people are using Twitter, today I heard about the "Twitchhiker". Basically, it is what it sounds like, it's a guy using Twitter to hitchhike his way around the world.

Said man is a freelance journalist called Paul Smith who is trying to get from Newcastle to New Zealand in just 30 days. Now, there are a few rules that he has put in place for his journey and they are as follows:

• He'll only accept help (lifts, a place to stay and food) from other people on Twitter
• He can’t make any plans further than three days in advance
• He can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in his suitcase
• If there’s more than one offer on the table, he gets to choose which he takes. If there’s only one, he has to take it within 48 hours
• If he's unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and he goes home

At the moment, he's currently at the InterContinental Hotel in Chicago and is possibly off to Dallas next, if nothing else comes up. Check him out here and you can also read his blog here, but for now, check out his latest twitchcast:



MyTake - This is some pretty damn interesting journalism and I for one will be following his progress. It clearly demonstrates the global power of Twitter and the sense of community that it has created. It almost gives a renewed faith in humanity, don't it.

Is there a pot of gold at the end of the skittles rainbow?

There is, and has been, an awful lot of chatter about the skittles digital campaign that's currently underway which is predominantly focused on the use of Twitter. There's more to come from this campaign, so this post might be a bit premature but I wanted to get my thoughts on a post at this point because I think that unless we have "the big reveal" soon, it's going to die off.

If you haven't heard of it, Skittles has essentially changed it's entire website to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook (which features the game pictured to the right) and Flickr. So, the landing page actually features all the twitter chatter about the campaign, which is quite substantial given that the campaign is in full swing and there's a lot of buzz around it. The website also includes some fairly standard product info, a few videos and some pics - which really aren't that special. According to some of the tweets on the feed, the website is actually a copy of Modernista's site and after taking a look, it could be.....then again modernista could be working for Skittles.

There are a couple of posts floating around about the campaign that aren't that complimentary about it, pointing out the exposure of the brand to negative comments (and there have been a few) and the fact that they aren't actually interacting with their audience, breaking the first rule of the social web. But.... I think there's more to come and they have hinted at it on their Facebook page:

Skittles wroteYesterday, at 16:39
Thanks for all your thoughts on the new site. I know there are some lingering questions out there: will they twitter back? Is this site real? Am I causing that smell? Stay tuned for answers to those questions and more. We promise.

MyTake - This campaign hinges on what happens next and I for one am quite excited about what that might be. There's so much chatter around this already, so there's a lot of buzz around the brand which you'd think would spill over to mainstream media, making it a success from a PR/marketing perspective on two fronts. But they need to start interacting pretty soon in order to capitalise on the buzz, or risk losing the audience that they worked so hard to build.

Twitter Turnbull

Kevin 07 isn’t exactly up there with the current Obama campaign, but for people in Australia it was pretty exciting to see politics embrace the online space…even if we did have the then Prime Minister John Howard starting all his YouTube broadcasts with “Good morning”. Malcolm Turnbull is probably the most savvy when it comes to the online space and special credit goes to him for leaving a negative comment on his site when every other politician removed any trace of negatively from theirs.  

But, what’s the news? Well, Malcolm Turnbull is the first Australian politician to start using Twitter. He hasn’t been on it long and has only posted eight times, examples include “is in parliament”, “is learning about twitter”, “is in question time” and “is addressing the nation”. It wasn’t until his seventh post that he (his staff) realised that Twitter is in fact not your Facebook status update and decided to drop the word “is” from the start of every post, by post eight he/they finally twigged that Twitter is about sharing things and posted a link to his address on the financial crisis.   

Yet, a couple of things still bother me about this. The first is the fact that all the updates are done from the web, which must mean he either has a laptop connected to the net with him at all times, or he’s not actually posting himself. The second thing, he has 413 followers and isn’t following a single person – kinda missed the point there, didn’t you guys.    

MyTake – I applaud good examples of brands, companies and politicians getting involved with social media as it’s a really good way to talk to an online audience. However, the Turnbull team need to realise that social media is about a two-way conversation, not just pumping out message after message. Take a look at the Barack Obama Twitter feed, he/they are following 103,116 people. Now, while I’m sure Barack isn’t tweeting himself (of maybe his is) this is more in keeping with the Twitterverse as it’s positioned as the campaign tweeting. 

The Twitter song

Ahh, Twitter, we love you. You have already spawned the Fail Whale and now you have your own song.  Written by a UK musician called Ben Walker, the song proudly proclaims that "you're nobody if you're not on Twitter, and if you aren't there already, you've missed it".

I have to say, it's very catchy and has a healthy dose of good old fashioned British humour. It reminds me of the London Underground song that came out a few years ago, only without the swearing and stuff.....

MyTake - Don't worry, you've not really missed it, go and join Twitter today and you can even follow Ben or yours truly.  This is yet another example of social media inspiring popular culture (you may have read my post on Facebook: The movie) and I think we are just going to see more and more examples of this. So, next time someone tells you that social media is a waste of time, sing them the Twitter song.  

Man Interrupted

You’d be forgiven for thinking that email had been around forever, but it wasn’t long ago that the fax machine and the common letter were still the main forms of communication. I read on a colleague’s blog that she remembers when she started work she had to share an email account with another employee. When I started working in PR in the ancient days of 1999 I spent most of my first internship standing by the fax machine sending information to journalists and clients.  

Hard to believe in a world dominated by online communications with email now the mainstay for us all. Why am I talking about email? Well, some research has been released by a guy called Dr Thomas Jackson and he works at Loughborough University in the UK, according to him email is a huge distraction that beaks our train of thought. He has some interesting findings and reckons that it takes us over a minute to get our concentration back after we’ve received an email which equates to eight and a half hours a week of “what was I doing again..” type thoughts for those of us that check our email every five minutes. 

MyTake – I’m not sure what concentration is any more! I get “interrupted” by emails, phone calls, Instant messages, tweets, questions….the lot. I think that they average person has a more fluid sense of concentration that is more outcome based, i.e. what are the tasks at hand and when do I need to achieve them by. But, I am not a doctor and Thomas Jackson is, so check out his website for tips on managing email. Just a thought though Doc, what about a study looking at instant messaging and micro-blogging?

Intergalactic planetary….tweets

Well, not quite intergalactic, but from Mars….and that’s pretty damn cool. It’s been a while any of the space missions have captured my imagination, only this morning I was reading about the “Jules Vern” spacecraft that’s essentially a posh rubbish bin that the astronauts on the International Space Station pile their rubbish into before aiming it at the atmosphere where it’s obliterated by the heat. Alright, I think I’ve mad it sound cooler that it is….cos it’s just a big bin, sorry Esa. 

On the other hand, The Mars Phoenix Lander is a far more interesting tale and one that we can follow practically minute by minute because the thing (or some engineer) is tweeting its journey so that us mere Earthlings can follow.  One of the latest tweets reads “News of my demise is premature but I appreciate the warm thoughts :-) I plan to last many more weeks before ice & darkness win”, The Mars Phoenix Lander also informed us “Solar panels generate about 2000 watt-hours of energy per sol (down from 3500 in June). So plan is to dig many samples now & then analyze”.   

MyTake – What an awesome use of twitter and totally cost-effective – hardly used any taxpayer money. Space missions just don’t get the coverage they used to and this is a very innovative way of allowing people to follow it using a medium that could have been made for it – hey NASA, you didn’t invent Twitter did you? I wonder if CERN are on twitter….. you could just imagine the tweets: ”smashed another proton…..I rock”. 

Please Tweet on arrival

Following on from my post about James Buck, I received a newsletter from the Twitter team talking about his story and also another trend that they had seen - Moms and dads tweeting the exact time that their babies are born.

Now I'm a Dad and I remember when my daughter was born and it was very early in the morning here in Australia, but me and Malin (the beautiful other half.. hope she's reading) are from Europe with family all over. Her parents live in the north of Sweden, her sister in Holland, my parents live in the south of France, my sister in the north of France, my bother in London and other extended family throughout the UK.....I get exhausted just writing it.

So, you'd probably guess that the idea of Tweeting when your child enters the world would be an awesome idea to people like us. The extended network can then help pass on the message to other family members and with Tweet Pic, they can even have an instant picture to pass round - all with just one tweet.

MyTake - We're not far away from Twitter going mainstream and when it does, we are going to see a whole host of cool apps developed and a whole host of new and wacky ideas to use it. We talk about information being bit sized already - I think we need a new term when this crashes through the tipping point.

Tweet your way out of the slammer

I heard recently that anyone joining Twitter now is officially no longer an early adopter, yet when I ask people if they Twitter the response is usually no, followed by “what’s that then?” When I explain what it is people often question the point of it and simply fob it off as a gimmicky “waste of time”. Well, I wonder if they’ll think the same way after they’ve heard the story of a journo named James Cark Buck.

James was in Egypt covering an anti-government protest when he was arrested along with his translator and shipped off to the local police station. En route he took out his cell phone and sent a tweet stating one word only - “arrested”. Back I cyberspace his followers on Twitter were immediately alerted to his predicament and started to rally the troops to come to his rescue. Throughout his incarceration, James continued to Tweet to keep his network updated. Eventually his was released and sent another one word tweet “free”.

CNN.com reported that: ”Although the Twitter message helped him find contacts to get out of prison, he says it was more the power of the network he had as an American that enabled him to be released so quickly.” And James himself stated "The most important thing on my mind was to let someone know where we were so that there would be some record of it ... so we couldn't [disappear]…. as long as someone knew where we were, I felt like they couldn't do their worst [to us] because someone, at some point, would be checking in on them."

MyTake: Wow……Now I admit that I was a doubter when I first came across Twitter, but once I started using it I soon released its potential. In my own twitter group I see some amazing insights shared on a daily basis and often think that the journalists of the world should all be on Twitter to watch-out for early leads and commentary. In this instance a virtual network did more that just share insights and ideas, it helped keep this guy safe. So in conclusion, you might not be an early adopter anymore, but this could just be your “get out of jail free card” – some come and join the Twitter revolution http://twitter.com/digiwedo