Tag : Metrotwin

We were milling about at @LenKendall‘s @the3six5 meetup at The Ginger Man here at SXSW last night when Greg Christman, aka @reelspit, came over to say hello. Greg had recently taken part in a creative workshop we held at BBH NY to generate ideas and test thinking for the next phase of Metrotwin, a site we created and run for British Airways. What a dude.

The place was packed with South By’s itinerant freak scene of start-up makers, innovators, journos, digital and new model advertising folk. I was hanging out with Utku from Mint Digital and, in jest, we discussed how awesome it would be if this group could be a country or city-state. This prompted Greg to whoop loudly that we should call it the Kingdom of Awesome and design our own awesomeness flag, and run the whole place using Foursquare. As an aside, I’ve heard a few people recently suggest that the word “awesome” is over. My friends, you misunderstand the meaning of awesome if that’s what you think – but that’s another blog post.

This morning I took part in a transatlantic blogger meet-up in the Martini Lounge (alas, not a one in sight, though it was 9am) at the new Arch Hotel.

The event was organised by our friend Jeremy at Transatlanticism, a New York-based organisation we’ve gotten to know through our work on Metrotwin.

Metrotwin is about creating connections, through people and places, between New York and London. This morning’s chat delivered hugely on that premise, so much so that I thought I would introduce some new additions to my transatlantic universe.

I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.

Assessing necessity

Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.

British Airways wanted to follow up on what Metrotwin started by extending the concept of twinning to their second most popular route after London-New York, namely London-Mumbai. Except we decided to go with a blog this time, for various reasons, the most significant of which is that India’s blogosphere is an extremely active, growing place and a blog would be a great way to document the best of both cities while attracting the right audience at the same time.

My avatar has changed.

Uh oh. Big deal, you might think – some people change their avatars as often as they change shoes. And so do I – but not here at my work blog.

For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face – a “spare” avatar bestowed upon me by Isaac until yesterday.

Stuart noticed a blog called Digital Strategy where Rob Innes aims to review new sites in digital “intended to inspire thinking by showing how brands are communicating with their customers”.

In this week’s New Media Age this week (6 November issue), Steve Richards the MD of Yomega has written a letter titled ‘BA shows brands the way to use social media’. It’s a very nice letter in which Steve says:

A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.

With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?

We’ve been using our new Acts As Recommendable plugin on metrotwin.com and it’s been interesting to see how it’s performing in a real-world situation.

Bookmarks (places) are integral to Metrotwin, and a user can associate themselves with a bookmark by ‘Loving it’, saving it to their profile, or by stating they’ve been there.