Community

iCrossing’s fashion & retail editor Jo-ann Fortune takes a light-hearted look at how digital has helped transform the fashion landscape.

1. Blogosphere – Susie Bubble, Mademoiselle Robot, The Clothes Whisperer – not children’s TV characters but our new fashion heroes. Real-girl style inspiration, insider insight and one-on-one engagement have us hooked to the point that the big brands have had to sit up and take note. The best part is; anyone can give it a go.

2. Live in your living room – Burberry helped to democratise high-fashion when it became the first label to stream its fashion week shows live online, sell directly from the runway via iPad and release its new season looks through Twitter before they hit the catwalk. All we’re missing now is the front row goodie bags.

3. Street style – Ten years ago, if someone asked to take your photo outside Tesco, you’d be forgiven for making a quick retreat whilst avoiding eye contact – now, thanks to street style photographers such as The Satorialist, it’s the ultimate in fashion flattery.

4. 24/7 shopping – Picking up this season’s Topshop must-haves while in your PJs? Unheard of a decade ago – now common practice. We can now shop 24/7 – in our lunchbreaks, on the tube or in the evening after a few glasses of wine – the latter not to be advised… Read more…

This weekend I was able to see with my own eyes just how influential Stephen Fry’s Twitter feed is. I thought it would be interesting to share the experience with our clients and other readers of Connect.

My mother is in the process of setting up a charity to raise funds to support the devastated community in the Japanese fishing village of Onagawa. She lived in Japan for many years and spent happy holidays in Onagawa. She has friends there who lost family (in fact an estimated 75% of the population perished), and when she read this blog post by football writer and non-league fan Mike Innes she decided to contact him and see if he fancied setting up a charitable fund with her.

An Onagawa Supporters blog, a Twitter feed @OnagawaSapo and a Onagawa Supporters Facebook page later, the Onagawa Supporters campaign has got off to a flying start.

On Saturday Stephen Fry tweeted about the Onagawa Supporters website and I was able to monitor the impact this had on the site traffic and on donations.

Here’s how the numbers went:

• Number of followers for @StephenFry: 2.5million
• Number of site visits generate by his Tweet in the first 24 hours after he tweeted: 5,000
• Number of financial donations to the site: 20 (to the tune of around £450). Read more…

On Monday night Facebook revealed the new Messages, amid fierce protests that it’s not e-mail. Even they have to admit that it does seem a bit like e-mail, especially as you get an @Facebook.com e-mail address. But on closer inspection it feels like e-mail evolved. It’s a bigger beast that’s gobbled e-mail and other communication channels up, and spat them out as a digested whole.

The premise is combining four methods of contact – Facebook messaging, text message, Facebook Chat and e-mail – into one system to give you a Social Inbox. Whereas previously you’d need to use a variety of channels to communicate with all the different people in your life, and one conversation could be dispersed across all four with no consistent record, now the conversation can be contained in Facebook.

If someone writes to you in Chat, the same message appears in your inbox so you can read and reply in either place, and it’s not lost once the chat window is closed.

Anyone on Facebook, friend or not, can send you a message. But not everyone is on Facebook. Enter the Facebook e-mail address. Now anyone can send you a message.

And if you provide your phone number you can get text messages in the messaging system. This is the cloudiest element for me – does it apply when sending a text from and to a mobile if both people’s mobiles are registered with Facebook? Can I read my text messages in messaging or only read my messages in text? Or does it simply notify me by text when I receive a new message. Remains to be seen when it’s rolled out.

Your Social Inbox prioritises your friends – by default messages from Facebook friends and friends of friends are automatically sent to the Inbox. Everything else goes to the ‘Other’ folder, even if it is sent directly to your Facebook e-mail address. If you bring a message from your ‘Other’ folder into your inbox all future messages from that person will go straight to the inbox so you can prioritise who you want to hear form. Read more…

Facebook Places was speculated to be the end of other location-based social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla due to the massive user base of more than 500 million that Facebook has access to. But, unlike their competitors, Facebook Places gave users little incentive to check-in to a local business, until yesterday when Facebook formally announced an extension to their Places feature: location-based deals.

So what does this look like for businesses?

Much like on Foursquare, businesses can now entice customers to check-in to their physical store locations by offering some form of deal or discount.

With the huge potential audience reach that Facebook provides and the creation of deals being completely free, both small and large businesses are sure to be drawn to experiment with the power of Facebook Places. Although The Zuck (Mark Zuckerberg) declined to comment on the amount of check-ins Places has seen since its August launch, he did say “We know that it’s multiples larger than any other location service.” This gives potential partners an indicator of the reach Places has to offer despite only being active for three months.

Deals can be created by any business with a Places page, using a self-service tool, and fall into four distinct categories:

• Individual Deal: An individual deal rewards, as you might have guessed, individual customers. These types of deals will often be in the form of a discount, free merchandise or, to quote Facebook, ‘some other cool reward’. An example of this would be the deal that Gap is running where the first 10,000 check-ins at any Gap store receive a free pair of jeans and subsequent check-ins will be offered a 40% discount on one item of clothing.
• Friends Deal: A friend deal is the equivalent of the ‘Super Swarm’ badge on Foursquare, whereby a group of customers that check-in together are offered a group reward. For example, a group of friends at a gig could be offered a free t-shirt each if they all check-in together.  
• Loyalty Deal: The loyalty deal will work much like a mayorship on Foursquare, whereby the most loyal customer is given special deals that others are not entitled to. Though Facebook’s implementation of this slightly differs from Foursquare as the reward is offered to those that check-in a certain amount of times, rather than to one person who check-ins the most times overall. For example, a bar could offer the user a free drink for checking in five times. 
• Charity Deal: A charity deal is where a business can incentivise check-ins by pledging to donate money to a charity every time users check-in to their business.

Read more…

I spent the weekend before last searching the internet for news about the well-being of members of my extended family who live just outside Concepcion – the epicentre of the huge earthquake that rocked Chile on 26 February. I was surprised to find that Google quickly became completely irrelevant to my search for information. It just wasn’t fast, micro or specific enough for my needs. At some point, they’ll get their social search fine tuned and consistent, and they’ll kick the spam merchants out of Google News, but until then Google fails big time when it comes to meeting an immediate, urgent need for micro-level information about something that has just happened. Read on to find out how social media networks succeeded where Google failed.

The urgent need for news

In January I wrote about the way that social media was helping with the aid efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. I had no way of knowing at the time that just a few short weeks later I’d be using my personal social networks to try and track members of my own extended family caught up in an earthquake elsewhere in the world. But on Saturday morning I opened my eyes at about 8am and had a conversation with my husband (who was checking his crackberry – an early morning habit) that went something like this:

Him: “There’s just been a big earthquake in Chile – 8.8 on the Richter scale.”

Me: “Oh no.”

Him: “Epicentre in somewhere called . . . Concepcion?”

Me: “Oh god no. That’s where the family are!”

To cut a long story short, part of my extended family is Chilean: four generations – grandparents, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who all live in Chiguayante, just outside Concepcion. Fourteen family members in total.

I spent the rest of the weekend glued to my computer as I took on the task of “social media monitoring” and quite a lot of “outreach” on Facebook and Twitter on behalf of the family, whilst others desperately tried the “direct marketing” approach of phoning and emailing.
Read more…

Like most people, I’ve spent the last week watching the depth of the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti reveal itself with an increasing sense of horror and disbelief. And probably like most people, I’ve donated as much as I could afford to the relief effort via the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) website, because, as one colleague put it: “There’s pretty much nothing else that I can practically do to help the people of Haiti.”

The story that has been playing out on our TV screens and newspapers is truly shocking, and there seems to be a battle going on over which story the media wants to tell. What’s going to sell more papers or get more views or viewers? The story of “hope” (the one word headline on the Sun’s front page on Monday) – that people are still being pulled out of the rubble alive nearly a week on from the earthquake? Or the story of “human evil” – that “thugs” (as the Metro’s front page so eloquently described the Haitian earthquake survivors) are “looting, shooting and lynching” (the Telegraph) as a response to humanitarian efforts to provide them with food and water. (The fact that we’ve all donated £25million so far tends to suggest the Sun got it right again!)

Of course, the need of the media to create simplified, exaggerated, panic-driven narratives in order to grab attention from their competitors is nothing new. But as my sister (who works in the digital communications team at the Department for International Development  – DfID) explained to me as she worked a Sunday shift whilst visiting me this weekend – the way that the media tells these kinds of story has had a direct impact on the amount of money raised by DEC in the past.

I was fascinated, then, to see that her emergency shift supporting the DfID press office with their communications relating to relief efforts in Haiti wasn’t so she could help with press enquiries. Rather she was working to publish updates on DfID’s own website, and pictures and relief plan details directly to social media places such as Flickr and Twitter and on their blog pages. I watched her upload this Creative Commons map (which she sourced from Wikimedia) showing the exact location of the Leogain to Flickr, a region of Haiti that no one had yet managed to get to, and where DfID co-ordinated rescue teams were planning to travel to next. In a situation like this, providing pictures, updates and information directly to people like you and me – rather than relying on the press to tell the story – means that we are able to make up our own minds whether we think that this is a cause that’s worth our money without the filter of headlines, editors and ad sales targets.

Personally, I find this a very easy decision to make! But for those who might be worried that their money might somehow end up being “looted” by “thugs”, these images and updates tell a pretty clear story.

I’d really recommend adding DfID and other relief co-ordinating agencies to your social media feeds and streams if you are interested in getting a clearer understanding of what is happening in Haiti. With news breaking today that a second earthquake  measuring 6.1 shook the island this morning, the success of social media to help raise awareness about the need for donations could make a big difference to Haitian survivors.

IMAGE CREDIT: Michael Haig / Department for International Development via Creative Commons licence

HEADER IMAGE CREDIT: The U.S. Army

Spotify – sounds like a rubbish Harry Potter spell, but is nevertheless among the most wondrous developments of a busy 2009. It gives us the ability to share and extend our love of music in ways that would have been unthinkable before. And the ability, on a moment’s whim, to subject colleagues to the most horrendous and all-but-forgotten 80s hair rock.

So, in the Spotify spirit of enabling both good and evil to flourish, we offer you, without prejudice, the iCrossing UK Christmas Playlist – a collaborative effort of festive proportions.

It features some of the loveliest Christmas (and Christmassy) music ever made, including several tunes I first came across on this gem of a compilation from 2000, Jeepster/XFM’s It’s a cool cool Christmas. These include Low’s ‘Just Like Christmas’, Eels’ ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas’ and El Vez’s ‘Feliz Navidad’ – classics one and all.

There are leftfield corkers (gawd bless you Flaming Lips), perfect wintry pop songs (El Perro del Mar), some frequent fliers (Sufjan Stevens, Vince Guaraldi Trio, Soulsavers), folky tearjerkers (Handsome Family) and a smattering of smooth crooning classics, whose glories refuse to fade despite limitless exposure.

It also includes some tracks that ought, in my opinion, never to be played, anywhere. I initially took out the Paul McCartney track thinking that someone had dropped it in there for a joke; but having heard its heart-felt defence by our head of search innovation Addam Hassan it’s back in. I’m sorry.

Such is the closely intertwined beauty and horror of Spotify. But unlike an inextricable taped compilation of ye olden days, this one’s ready for swift reinterpretation. So, please: stick it on, pluck the bounteous wheat for your own Christmas playlist, and let us know what treasures we’ve missed.

Merry Christmas!

There are also a few tracks that Spotify could not muster which would otherwise have been in there. King among them, Half Man Half Biscuit’s ‘It’s cliched to be cynical at Christmas’ (but at least you can go to YouTube for that, thanks Ben).

Google, still on the case to collect as much personal information possible and have now expanded on the features provided through ones Google Account. Users can now create a personalised Google Profile which will enable you to rank for your name in Google.com (has not been rolled out to the UK yet)

Google are aware that millions of users are searching the web every day for name related searches. An Australian scientist concluded that most web users were not satisfied with the search results when users Googled their name, also known as Egosurfing.

“One problem is they don’t have any control over the search results. Either they don’t like the search results, or what happens most of the time is, they’re not listed on the first page” Says Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management

A Google Profile enables users create their own “online brand” and enable Google Account holders to publish an online representation of themselves in their own words. You can enter as much or as little information as you want, however Google have stated that the more information you enter the better you will rank for your name. Here is some of the information you can enter:

Read more…

We’ve made the move to our lovely new office in Brighton. It’s amazing!

We have a massive roof terrace, sea views, giant games, a ‘library’ (also potentially a gaming room if I have my way as it’s fitted with some nice screens!), Jamie Oliver’s restaurant and a lucky voice below.

Read more…