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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

In October 2009, Guardian News and Media launched its online Fashion Store, allowing users to browse from over 300 retailers and once again proving its ability and willingness to evolve. With this have they hit upon a business model which works for advertisers, publishers and users alike?

Cutting out the middle-man

With publishers increasingly looking to advertising and sponsorship deals to replace lost revenue from dwindling newspaper sales, the Guardian has effectively cut out the middle-man to provide a useful service for its readers. Given the choice I, personally, would much rather a dedicated area within which I can browse a number of brands and ’shop the look’ championed in this week’s style section, than sidebars full of promotion boxes for brands I may have no interest in.

Indeed, online retail analysis has suggested that people shop for fashion online in a different way to how they might shop for other products. Most clothes shoppers know what stores and labels stock what they’re looking for. So, rather than searching for a particular item, they would look for their favourite clothing brands and then search for the item within the brand’s site. As the Guardian Fashion Store offers the choice to search by brand, it fits with this shopping model much more snugly than side-bar advertising could.

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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).

At iCrossing we often talk to our clients (and prospective clients) about the possible benefits of getting their staff blogging and engaging with customers via a “corporate blog”. Of course, it’s not the right move for every organisation - but for those with an open culture with a high level of trust in their people, blogging can be a very effective way of showing your customers (and anyone who is curious about what your organisation is all about) just exactly who you are and why you’re better than your competitors.

I was struck this week by a sad example of this in an unexpected format when I happened to find the Borders Insider blog on The Bookseller website. This is an unofficial, anonymous blog written by a member of staff about what is happening inside the shops now that they’ve gone into liquidation. At first glance, you might think that the post entitled “Running on empty” is a very good example of why so many organisations are scared stiff of the idea of letting their people connect directly with the world via a corporate blog.  At first sight this might not be the best advert for corporate blogging - for starters it’s hosted by another site altogether, and the quotes like the one below are a PR’s nightmare aren’t they?

“We are running on empty, all we do is tidy. Everyday we feel less and less like booksellers and more and more like caretakers. The massive jolt that is administration, which was at first in a strange way energising, feels more and more like a dead weight. There’s only so many times you can explain the gift card redemption rule to angry people, without it getting extremely wearying.”

And yet, if you read a bit further, and then go on to read the comments below this post, what you’re left with is a very strong impression of the knowledge and passion of the Borders’ staff. And the very strong connection they had with their loyal customers.

“Please remember the peope who are treating you so poorly are not your customers. We are still here, devastated by what has happened, and what is happening, but you will see less of us now and more of the bargain hunters only dimly aware that this was once a book shop. My famiy and I have been going to Borders nearly every week since it opened. My wife and I found and decided on our childrens names, planned our wedding and rewarded our children at Borders. The failures have not been yours. If you were to think from scratch of how to compete with Supermarkets and the internet, you would come up with Borders. All the events, especially for children, and your enthusiasm contributed to an overall positive experience with books. You are not booksellers but ambassadors for literature. There are a lot of children who will never forget you and will benefit from your efforts.”

And this isn’t just limited to the store that this commentator frequented. I went into the Brighton branch of Borders this morning and was able to witness for myself the dedicated team of staff there still helping their customers find what they want amongst the jumble sale piles of books. That’s the kind of genuine customer advocacy that no PR stunt or press release can fake. And that’s why, I would argue, if you think your organisation has a special kind of chemistry with its customers and stakeholders, and a unique kind of engagement amongst its employees, a corporate blog is an excellent way of sharing it with the world.

IMAGE by Flickr user markhillary published under CC licence

It’s possible that the internet is going to keep me and many others in a permanent state of mental adolescence.

2009’s been a bad year for it – first there was Spotify, which instantly transformed my music listening and sharing habits. Then there was Twitter, which woke up after a year snoozing and ate my blog.

And now my world’s been realigned again: this time by Posterous.

I was alerted to it by Antony’s recent presentation, which gave it a special mention among things to watch out for in 2010. Since then I’ve gone slightly nuts for it.

Pre-Posterous printing press, 1930, from Seattle Municipal Archive

Others have done the hard work of describing what Posterous does: in short, it’s a tool that makes it absurdly easy to publish text/audio/images/video and push it to wherever else you’d like it go.
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I’m currently researching some data for a budgeting and savings planning calculator for one of our clients, and during the course of my research, I’ve been struck once again by the wealth of free data that is available to every citizen in the UK at the click of a few links.

As digital marketers I’m sure none of us need to be told about the power that intelligently analysed and appropriately presented data hold. After all, where would our businesses be without web analytics? But did you know that there are huge, shimmering pools of astoundingly robust and statistically accurate data sitting on government servers just waiting for intelligent minds to dive in? And all for free?

Here are my two top sources of free, public data - so why not hold your nose and take the plunge?
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I was introduced this week - for the first time - to the world of political blogging. A post on LabourList.org by Paul Richards (thanks to @stuartbruce) caught my attention; not because I’m interested [enough] in politics but because it contained a nugget of gleaming goodness that I have been able to churn out as my own at least twice since.

Richards’ tips for writing a great party conference speech (for the season is apparently upon us) contained this:

“5. Ask: what do I want to achieve? If you write a speech asking ‘what do I want to say?’ you’ll simply fill the time with words. Start by identifying what you want the speech to achieve. Is it to build the reputation of the minister, or take on a difficult argument, or explain a new policy, or attack the Tories, or garner a headline in tomorrow’s Mirror? If you don’t know what you want your speech to do, it won’t do it.”

Since I’d been only hours previously seeking to re-engineer the thinking around a web-site so that we began with not ‘what we do want it to look like?’ but ‘what content do we need to be on it’, it helped sum up (and take further) my main point - that is not to jump to any kind of ‘execution’ before you’ve decided on what the execution is supposed to be ‘doing’ - as opposed to ’saying’.

Often, particularly in my role, we ask ‘what do we want to say?’ We do this believing we already have a firm grasp on what our communications are supposed to be achieving. But, actually, I was reminded to apply some ‘what are we trying to achieve?’ vigour to every single piece of communication we undertake, from a new web site to any presentation to every Tweet.

Stating the bleeding obvious is a necessary evil, like making sure that somebody has, actually, called the ambulance. So, just in case anyone else - like me - had gotten a little lazy about where marketing execution, as well as planning, should begin, I thought I’d send out this little reminder.

That’s what I’m trying to achieve with this particular blog post…

Image Credit: WatscapePhoto

In distributed media, there’s good reason to default to the parenting rule: “Praise what you like, ignore what you don’t like”. It means the rubbish and spam gets less attention, and you save hours a day - after all, someone is always wrong on the internet. Meanwhile, theoretically, the good stuff is recognised and  rises to the top. It is, I think, a good rule of thumb, particularly if you conduct parts of your online activity on behalf of a third party.

But I’m going to break that rule now. For the hollow follow.

The hollow follow goes like this: you mention something in a tweet - a place perhaps, or a product - and within seconds you’re notified that someone previously unknown to you is following your profile.

Initially, there’s that thrill of a new contact - someone’s interested in what you have to say,  potentially from anywhere in the world, perhaps from somewhere you’ve never heard of, maybe a person or a project that could become important to you…. The possibilities are endless.  But all too often, the wonder quickly evaporates. Because the follow has been generated by a robot, and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone at the other end to talk to. Anti-social media.

In these cases, all is not necessarily lost. If the new follower looks useful and isn’t obviously a spammer, I’ll follow back. I might try the odd @ message to see if I can tease a human response from the other end, and sometimes I get one. These kinds of connection often don’t come to much, but they’re not offensive - and sometimes they’re surprisingly rewarding.

But I’ve just experienced one of the most shamelessly hollow follows I’ve come across.

@Kent_Messenger is following you!

On Tuesday, I happened to mention in a tweet between me and a colleague the word ‘Maidstone’, which happens to be my home town. Within seconds, I was being followed by @Kent_Messenger - apparently the official Twitter feed for the leading county paper (though hard to be sure - there’s no presence on their website as yet).

Now, although I don’t live in Kent anymore, an RSS feed of the local news is something that interests me. So I followed @Kent_Messenger back, and sent a couple of tweets to try and elicit a response. Nothing. Ok, so they’re not really interested in me. Maybe they’re busy.

But yesterday I checked their profile again and found that they’d stopped following almost everyone they had been following the previous day. Including me. They’d cut the number to 5, but retained a big ‘followship’ (more than 500), presumably made up largely of people @Kent_Messenger had initially followed and who had followed back.

This takes some nerve. I don’t expect people who follow me to be agenda-free. I realise that they may well be selling something, or in some other way promoting themselves. It’s like, um, life in general.

But to follow, refuse to engage, and then drop once you’ve got the follow back is the lowest, hollowest of follows.

Ironically, the @Kent_Messenger feed - officially sanctioned or not - is not spam. It’s a potentially handy service, albeit little more than an RSS feed in its current form. Perhaps this fact has persuaded whoever’s behind the follow-and-dump policy that they don’t need to behave properly - they are, quite possibly, providing a service that the people they’re targeting actually want.

But whether you’re a corporate marketer or maverick promoter of editorial content, fishing for attention like this is plain bad manners.

And in this case it does nothing to persuade me that traditional media can adapt fast enough to the demands of a readership that expects to be treated as individuals - and can talk back.

For real insight into what the digital revolution has meant - and will mean - for content, advertising and media owners I’d look no further than this article in the LA Times: Tough times in the porn industry

In short it tells us that the adult industry’s profits and revenues are down as consumers turn to the wealth of free content available on the web. As a result, actors, make-up artists, writers and the rest are working harder for less money.

And the reason I’d start here for an understanding of the future of content in an online world is because the porn industry has embraced digital like no other. Out of necessity and inclination it has innovated in search, affiliates, the use of short-form video content, freemium models, user-generated content and everything else that consultants like me tell content owners they should. And yet, they have suffered at the hands of the web even more than most.

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Flickr has finally upgraded its on-site search functionality, and it’s one giant leap for usability.

The advanced query form itself remains underwhelming - why such tiny radio buttons? why can’t the search criteria default to your usual preferences? But the results format is much improved (as Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable neatly explains) and should quicken any search.

For those who’ve always used third-party sites such as FlickrStorm to search for Creative Commons-licensed images, here’s how to search within the site:

Click on Advanced search and scroll down to the Creative Commons section at the end of the form, clicking aforementioned piddly button.

If you’re looking for images to use commercially, check the first indented box, and to ensure that you can modify the image (e.g. crop it) select the second indented box too.