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The internet was kind to us last week. Here’s some of our favourite nuggets of goodness.

More Gymkhana madness

Part five of Ken Block’s (DC Shoes owner and rally driver) Gymkhana series. This time we’re taken on a visually stunning tour of San Francisco, where he shows off yet more of his utterly insane driving skills.

Lego Builders of Sound

To promote the new Lego Star Wars range of toys, a ‘barrel organ’ was created completely from Lego bricks and characters. When the barrel organ is turns, it plays the Star Wars theme.

How far will you go for a free snack?

Australian brand Fantastic Delite wanted to find out. So they built a vending machine dishing out various tasks for the public to perform in exchange for a tasty treat. From hitting a button on the machine 100 times (which eventually rose to 5,000!) to standing on one leg and dancing in the street, it seems people will do nearly anything for free swag.

The V Motion Project

Hook up a Kinect to some music production software and what do you get? Something like this…

More behind the scenes info here.

Perfect Curve’s Digital Strategy

“Digital is one of the most crucial things for a modern brand manager to get right, so the pressure is on for Siobhan to explain her strategy”. Who else has heard industry folk making just as much sense as this? ;-)

O2: Relaxed Community Management

O2 had all sorts of network problems last week. But it seems they loosened the reigns on their Community Manager, providing us with some entertaining tweet exchanges. Nice work shifting the focus onto O2 lols and away from having no phone signal!

Read some of the best tweets here.

Twitter is great. It allows us (among other things) to keep up to date with the latest news, watch events unfold in real time and pass comment on them for the whole world to see. For brands it’s an invaluable resource, providing them with the means to easily converse with fans, generate buzz around their products and potentially reach whole new markets simply by word of mouth.

So far, so good. Until, of course, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong…

Recently there have been a few high profile examples of Twitter backfiring on brands – moments where the angry teeth of the internet are bared in all their grizzly glory, leaving social media teams wishing the earth would swallow them whole. But as these brands found out, when something goes wrong on Twitter there’s no getting away from it, it’s there for everyone to see.

The majority of Twitter-related brand jams are the result of a poorly conceived hashtag. In the mind of the brand it’s easy to see why starting a personalized hashtag might seem like a good idea; if it begins trending then that’s some of the best publicity the internet has to offer – all for next to no money. However, when looking through those rose-tinted spectacles it’s easy to overlook one very key factor: as a brand, you don’t get to dictate how the Twittersphere uses your hashtag.

Take the recent debacle surrounding Qantas Airways, for example. The Australian airline recently fell foul of its own #QantasLuxury hashtag in spectacular form, after it was hijacked by irate Twitter users looking to vent anger about its poor customer service and spate of grounded planes. The same later happened to McDonald’s, whose #McDStories tag was overrun with unsavoury anecdotes from unhappy customers and brand-baiting animal rights activists alike. Finally, in the wake of their spectacular collapse of service at the end of last year, Blackberry recently found itself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse after it invited users to #bebold, and share their thoughts via Twitter.

The main problem in all three of these cases is that the brands allowed themselves to forget one of the golden rules of the internet: any skeletons in your closet can (and often will) come back to haunt you. In each instance it resulted in a profoundly embarrassing (and above all public) episode, and one that had to be openly acknowledged as a failure of marketing strategy.

Of course, that’s not to say brand hashtags always fail. Click here to see a rundown of some of the more successful ones nominated for an award at the SHORTY social media awards this year.

With this in mind, our advice to anyone considering the hashtag route of viral marketing would be to think long and hard before providing the internet with its own, unmoderated soapbox to voice opinion on your brand.

In the right circumstances it can work wonders, but get it wrong and you might just find yourself pushed off it…

Around the start of any new year it’s customary for agencies to dig out their marketing tarot cards and come up with a few predictions on what they think will be big news over the next 12 months.

Well, if you’ll allow us to return to the topic one last time you’ll see there’s one trend that’s already showing signs of being the true dominant force in digital this year – a trend that’s far bigger than any single platform or flashy new website.

In 2012, the dominant theme will be conflict.

Three’s A Crowd…

It’s an ironic turn for an industry based around sharing and being “social”. Up until this point, Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Google+ have all existed alongside each other in relative peace, occasionally poking their head up above the parapet to acknowledge the presence of another new arrival, but rarely anything more than that. However, recent posturing from all three major players would suggest that things are about to change.

The past five-to-ten years can be looked upon as a sort of ‘honeymoon period’, one in which social prospectors enjoyed unfettered growth without needing to really step on the toes of their competitors (the demise of MySpace notwithstanding). Now it seems as if the social landscape is approaching critical mass – a point at which the number of users willing to actively engage with social media reaches a plateau – and suddenly where there was once open-minded collectivism and mutual appreciation there is now increasing hostility, aggression and isolationism.

Take the recent (and unusually public) spat between Google and Twitter, for example. Google recently made headlines with the announcement of its ‘Search, Plus Your World’ initiative: a set of changes to its search algorithm that places added emphasis on Google+ pages within search results, effectively ‘favouritising’ them above content taken from the wider internet.

The revelation caused a tsunami of raised eyebrows among social media commentators and everyday internet users alike. Facebook engineers invented a tool to counteract some of the changes, but it was Twitter who came out as the most vocal critics, openly denouncing Search Plus in a letter to several major media outlets. This then prompted Google to issue a rather flippant rebuttal (via Google+, of course!), leaving professional relations between the two companies frosty at best.

Knives Out

In Google’s eyes, the shift to Search Plus is simply a move to keep them competitive, especially given Facebook’s increasingly cosy relationship with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. However, what Google appear to have failed to grasp is that this desire to compete is the very crux of their problem.

In the days before Google+, Google was largely an impartial observer in the great battle for social media supremacy – and rightly so. Now that they’ve waded into the ring brandishing their own platform, the delicate equilibrium has been unbalanced and defences are being raised on all fronts. Google might think this is game on, but in actual fact it will not end well for anyone, least of all them.

And here’s why: people place a huge amount of faith and trust in their search engine, relying on it to deliver the results they want without fuss. By taking the decision to actively reward their own pages above others, Google are undermining the very trust that is the lifeblood of their business – and once that trust is gone, it’s going to be very hard to win back.

Google hope that the move to Search Plus will force more brands to expand their presence on Google+, but it’s a dangerous gamble to make. While they dig their heels in and prepare for a long fight, there is absolutely no reason why a rival such as Bing couldn’t swoop in and take over the role of impartial search provider.

And it’s not like Google have much choice; after the unmitigated failure of both Buzz and Wave, there is a huge amount of professional credibility (not to mention money) riding on the success of Google+, and there is no way they are about to accept defeat lying down.

Ready To Rumble

So, it’s Google and Google+ in one corner, Facebook and Bing in the other, with Twitter flitting around the edges trying avoid catching a stray when the blows really start raining down. But where does that leave everyone else?

In the short term it looks like we’re all going to have to pay a bit of extra attention to Google+, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the uptake of new pages rise dramatically among brands and users alike. The real question is just how long that uneasy state of affairs can last.

Brands can easily replicate action across two platforms simultaneously, but asking users to maintain an active presence across both Facebook and Google+ seems like a step too far, and there will likely be only one clear winner when the dust settles.

Who that winner is, we shall have to wait and see.

Ding ding, round one…

Everyone has their own customer service horror story, but few of them have a happy ending. And even fewer of those are when you’re dealing with a huge conglomerate.

But even the big boys are realising that utilising social media can completely change how their company is perceived.

If you’d have recently asked me my thoughts on BT customer service, it would have been a expletive-laden reply you wouldn’t want your kids to hear. I was having a nightmare moving house, and after promising me a “no wait switch on” with my broadband, BT then informed me it would take 10 days to get it turned on. After all that, they still managed to disconnect me 4 weeks later, after the previous occupants didn’t pay their final bill.

Cue multiple 2 hour phone calls, being passed from department to department, speaking to innumerable women named “Judith”, none of whom cared about my problem due to the  fact that it didn’t perfectly match an entry in their scripts. One department blaming another, put through to someone new and having to explain everything again, or (my bugbear) having to call back on another number, as they can’t put your call through to the right person.

So I did what any enraged hyper-connected geek would do. I got on Twitter, and had a bitch about it.

I was expecting a few @replies from followers who had similar nightmare stories. But about 10 minutes later, someone called Stephanie from @btcare Tweeted back with a simple “any way we can help?” – opening the lines of communication between customer and consumer immediately. For the sake of shortening the story, all I need to say is that within 24 hours the problem was solved, and I was kept informed every step of the way.

There are hundreds of reasons why I think this approach works better than the current call centre cancer running through the customer service industry, here’s just a few:

Multiple concurrent tickets If you check the @btcare page now, you’ll see that they have one person dealing with many problems at once. As support can be provided in an asynchronous manner, there’s no need to wait on the line while a user checks their computer , or while BT look up something on their system. So time is used effeciently by both parties, meaning more work can be done with less people.

One problem, one person Anyone who has had a customer service nightmare can relate to this – there’s nothing worse than following a problem through, and having to reiterate your problem every time you make a phonecall. With @btcare, there are two people working in shifts, so if you maintain contact over one time period, they’re likely to be fully aware of all the details of your problem.

Traceable, by both parties I got into a shouting match with a TV manufacturer once, who charged me £75 for a maintenance callout, and when I called they said “we informed you about this during our last call”. They didn’t, but there was no way I could prove it. Now, I can track the conversation on Twitter, and when it went over into my email all was saved for future prosperity.

More communication channels available I think this is my favourite. The initial outreach was done via Twitter, and private details along with error messages were sent on an email follow-up. After 24 hours, Stephanie called to see if everything was working OK. Each time, the medium perfectly matches the message, and all options are available for @btcare at all times. If I ring a call centre, we’re going to be on the phone and that’s it – limited by the constraints of the telephone.

Naysayers might think that this Twitter approach can only work one person at a time, but BT, like many companies venturing into social media, are aware of the power of word of mouth, and that active internet users are vocal both in their ferocity and their praise. Could we see the day that companies without active customer support teams working across social media are seen as those in the 90s who stuck with the Yellow Pages instead of getting a website?

If you’ve read this far (fingers crossed) I’d like to think that your opinion of BT customer service is less a faceless name in a huge call centre in India, and more Cameron and Stephanie in a little Irish town called Enniskillen. And I can only hope that this post gets filled with Google Juice, and manages to make it up those rankings so that when people do search for “BT Customer Service” they know that BT trying to fix something that is so obviously broken.

If you’re a Twitter user, you can’t help but have noticed the term #moonfruit popping up in your stream of late. A bit of digging around will lead you their site (not linked on purpose), where they are offering a free MacBook Pro everyday to a random user who includes the #moonfruit hashtag in one of their Tweets.

This is following on from another company, who did a similar thing with #squarespace and iPhones last month.

Hmmm, over we head to check out Wikipedia’s definition of spam:

“Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems … to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately”

So the the #moonfruit promotion is spam, pure and simple, right? Well, unless you’re Adam Ostrow, Editor in Chief at Mashable. Apparently polluting your followers’ stream with bullshit is actually “Twitter promotion done right” and to hell with the fact that it will soon render Twitter’s trending topics functionality a spam blacklist. It’s disheartening to see that no matter what the medium, there will always be bad marketers around to apply scummy techniques.

Here’s an idea for “Twitter promotion done right” – make a great product, and release it with a clever launch. If it’s smart, everyone talk about it. Get to the top of the trending topics legitimately, not by dangling carrots in front of keyboard-equiped imbeciles who don’t know better.

As The Guardian’s @katebevan put it this afternoon “(I’m) fed up with moonfruit spam and considering unfollowing anyone who adds to it”.

Count me in on that one too Kate.

I find the RSS feed for The New York Times Technology section a daily source of joy. It’s always interesting, the writing is exemplary and the content is always relevent. And none more pertinent than in their recent piece on Tweeting Your Way to a Job, which details the ongoing trend for companies recruiting people into social media positions, and the tribulations that some people will go through to get them.

Outside Line were one of those companies. And when I came in for my first interview here almost 5 months ago I realised I was one of those people. So once a second interview was confirmed, and while waiting for a working brief to be sent through, I set up a secret Twitter stream where I could capture my work in progress for the presentation I was preparing. Thinking back to my Maths GCSE, and how “showing your working” was important as the answers themselves, my thinking was that Twitter was the perfect tool to capture a stream of consciousness.

I came, I saw, tweeted. And bagged a job.

And the learning? Twitter is a tool, not an idea. So if you’re using it to find the dream job, find some way of tailoring it towards to role itself – build a Flickr page of images you’ve found that might inspire the company, record a YouTube video of you using their products, set up a Tumblr of what you think will be relevent articles to your new position.

Be creative. Don’t just use technology for technology’s sake.

First, a recap: The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a famous thought experiment stating that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare”.

So why not put it into practice? Of course, we don’t have infinity, and typewriters have been replaced by keyboards, but we’ve still got monkeys! The Lucky Monkey is an insane site, which has a live feed of a room containing a monkey, a PC, and a connection to Twitter. You follow Jimmy (the monkey) on Twitter, and if the monkey types your username you win! ( don’t know what you win exactly, but it’s pretty neat nonetheless)

Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day thinking what thought expiriments we can make digital. Maybe we could stick a webcam in Schrödinger’s box?

We see it all the time, and now it heads to Twitter : “There’s Too Many People Here Syndrome”.

You know the place, that little bar that was once hip, and then everyone found out about it, it got busy, all the early people weren’t recognised as “being there first”, so they decided it wasn’t very good anymore. And it happens all the time on the net – Usenet groups, IRC channels, forums. And now Social Media Snobs are leaving Twitter in numbers as they believe popularity and credibility are mutually exclusive, and even if they can prove they were “here before you” it doesn’t change the fact that something that was once “their special thing” is now part of the mainstream.

But allow me to offer a counterpoint: what if it’s not snobbery? There have been significant studies in the area – the Dunbar Number, made popular by Gladwell’s Tipping Point, states than around 150 contacts is as many stable personal relationships our brains can manage. So it could be argued that as the number of people visiting somewhere increases, the chance for our brains to process all these people is reduced.

I’d love to know your thoughts – snobbery or science? And could this diagram be bettered in anyway?

(With credit to Diesel Sweeties for the original “Music snobs” idea, go buy his stuff!)

Here’s a decent tip that it seems very few people are taking heed of in the world of Twitter – if you’re obsessed with something, and it’s not an obsession that has caused people to start following you, please don’t go crazy on it.

Someone in my stream (it’d be rude to name names) recently decided to give a running commentary on the entire 90 minutes of a 2nd division football playoff game. A sure fire way to get yourself de-followed, especially by someone who has signed up to hear your thoughts on the future of media. Or how about the guy who managed to spoil Star Trek by liveblogging the whole thing using the #twitflix tag – this is annoying enough, but what about the people sat near him in the cinema! As Eric Vespe put it: “There’s no difference between what you’re doing now and what the loud teenagers constantly texting during movies do”.

Twitter is still in it’s infancy, so there are no hard and fast rules, but earlier in the week we had a little round table chat and came to the conclusion that flooding of any kind is a sure fire way to make yourself unpopular. One choice quote was “No one is interesting enough to have over 20 tweets a day” which is a nice round figure I’ll be sticking to, and advising people to do the same.

But as Clay Shirky said “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”. So rather than complaining, I’ll suggest a fix – equip Twitter with is a sleep button, so I can hide all updates from someone I follow for a short period of time. That way, when someone is at Cannes, or SXSW, or the FA Cup Final, I can just give them a little “time out” for a few days. The next Twitter client to do this might tempt me away from my Tweetie addicition.

The public domain is exactly that – once you say something, it’s out there, and you’d better believe people are ready to find it. Case in point? @omgamandaa updated her Twitter stream asking for help in tracking down a place to download Adventureland, a new Miramax comedy. Miramax dropped her a Tweet back gently asking her to take the moral high ground, and tagging the FBI into the conversation. And after she decided to call off the torrent-hunt, they proceeded to offer Amanda two free tickets to see the movie at her local cinema.

This is great example of a brand using social media properly, not being afraid to tackle a thorny subject and winning fans online. Good work.