We teamed up with Jont, a charismatic, brutally optimistic unsigned singer songwriter to take Unlit, his and Dave’s heartwarming, life-affirming initiative of intimate house gigs on the road in the UK this summer. Orange will provide them with everything they need (from winnebago to GPS phone and everything in between) to go on the road for 2 weeks of unpredictable journey of love and goodness. We’re really hoping to bring to life the Unlit philosophy that it’s the people we meet and the experiences we share that make us who we are.

This is going to be very special. And you can get involved on so many different levels - anything from following the tour on different platforms, to offer your house for a gig or, if you are a musician and want to participate in unlit, you can leave your details on the microsite

While on the same subject, Mike sent around this gem. Turn out the whole campaign is not really original - I am Orange been running for quite q while now. Oh boy.

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Sounds perfect, you say, why are you spoiling the party?

Well, let me take you couple of years back to Iain’s unpleasant experience with Virgin Media. He described in details his ordeal and, surprise surprise, someone from virgin contacted him and solved his problems. That was just one story of that increasing trend of companies staying tuned to the blogosphere and replying to people rants - and we all blogged about these cases and how wonderful and advance these companies are and how the ‘get it’.

And now the story repeats itself on the twitter platform. Excuse my cynicism but I’d be a bit more critical and less hasty in heaping praises all over the place. Since Iain’s case I’ve only heard more horror stories on Virgin Media CS, most recently Dave’s ordeal. And I say, don’t hurry to make an invaluable PR service for companies with bad CS reputation.

They are smart and cynical. They learned that satisfying a couple of angry Tweets is the easiest and cheapest PR trick as the public rant turns into a public praise and gives the false impression that this company has a great customer services.

Do you honestly believe that Comcast really changes their ways?

Mind you, for every one satisfying tweet there are probably hundreds of angry customers that don’t blog or tweet. They do it the old fashion way by talking to their friends down at the pub - and their problems don’t get solved that way. Their problem meet layers of poorly designed pre-recorded menus and canned responses that don’t actually help them.

Only time will tell if the sea change we crave for will come and businesses will (truly and deeply) change their ways and invest in their most valuable brand building scheme - customer service - or will they simply employ 2-3 people to make sure that they satisfy social media rants and that would be the end of it.

Rejoice with cautious.

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Yes, yes I’m on Twitter (If I wore a hoodie I’d be covering my face with it in shame). Damn that social pressure. But I guess that after my hasty, bossy sneer back in Feb 2007, I ought to explain why I finally broke and got on board…

The shortest answer is that I was simply wrong. I completely underestimated the flexibility of the platform and the resourcefulness of the users/community to make Twitter what it is today. And indeed usage of Twitter has changed quite dramatically since it started as simply status updates of ‘what are you doing now’.

The way I see it, (and the main reason I decided to join) Twitter expanded texting (SMS) behaviour to a far greater circles than each of us have. The immediacy of throwing something to the twittersphere and getting replies in minutes is for me, the key forte of the platform. Put differently, it’s the only way or me to get hold of David - emails and facebook are non existent ;-). So it’s less about the short personal stories and more about the multiple micro-conversations, exchange of ideas, links and blurbs - this was the main reason of my feeling that I’m left out of the party and not staying on top of what is happening.

As a self-aware junkie and a sucker for good conversations I need to be really careful not to be drowned in tweets. And I’m determined NOT to let Twitter take over blogging - reading AND writing.

I’d love to hear any good tips on maintaining a normal, fairly productive life with Twitter - Mack? Andy? Dino? Neil? anyone?

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We’ve been together for almost 7 years which means you are now 140 years old (It is a common belief that 1 human year is equal to 20 handset years). And in all these years we spent together, you never once disappointed me. You were always there - basic, solid, bold, rough, resilient and, extremely reliable.

Up until our very last days together you still insisted on being charged just once a week - you never needed more than that. No matter what happened to you - drowned in water, splashed in snow, free falling from 10 fit on hard concrete - nothing broke you. You just kept going on and on and on, doing what you’re doing best - making calls, sending texts and reminding me about stuff.

In the past year or so we’ve been both an object of ridicule as well as admiration. Some people looked at with a pity smile while others gave us the approving in-the-know nod. But I didn’t care - for me you were a reliable companion as well as a personal (environmental) statement. As your fellow handsets became more and more sophisticated, loaded with unnecessary features I loved you more and more for what you are (admittedly, twice over these years I had a short fling with younger, newer handsets. But in both cases I came straight back, begging for forgiveness. And you never made a fuss or bear a grudge.)

You are the best handset ever made.

Hello iPhone.

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I recently noticed that I don’t leave as many comments on blog posts I read as I used to and I think I’m not the only one as i can see the decline from the receiving end as well. There is just too much stuff going on hey? We scan and skim, we twit and plurk, we TED and Mint and we just don’t leave comments anymore.

Have you noticed that as well?

That’s not good. Blogging doesn’t worth a penny without the dialog, without the conversation.

I pledge to leave at least 1 comment a day on blog posts I read

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This lovely typo-video is part of a new campaign to empower adolescent girls in the developing world, “Because when adolescent girls in the developing world have a chance, they can be the most powerful force of change for themselves, their families, communities and nations.”

Cheers Neil

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You can watch it here

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A bit of a background:

Live music scene is in the middle of a boom period with a higher than ever number of sold-out gigs taking place across the UK and gigs tickets have become the most sought-after commodity in the music market. Getting tickets to gigs today sometimes involves lots of hassle, effort and with all the dodgy touting business online and outside venues there is a growing issues of trust. All this contributes to an occasionally unpleasant and disapointing experience for live music lovers.

Orange has teamed up with seetickets to create Gigs and Tours from Orange - a free service that allows Orange customers to get alerts for gigs of their favourite artists and reserve tickets to these gigs in advance up to 48 hours before they go on sale to the public. In short, Gigs and Tours makes it easy for people to enjoy live music.

It’s been around for a while but never got the attention it deserves. We thought it’s too good a service to be hidden and we wanted to take it to the heart of communities where people connect, share and discover music and there’s no better platform than Last.FM.

From the very beginning we weren’t looking to simply advertise or promote the service but to create a complementary experience for Last.FM users in the UK. Last.FM helps you discover new music, generates social recommendations, gives you artists and events information and a platform to discuss your passions - Gigs and Tours from Orange takes you to the gigs of the artists you like.

So to generate awareness and encourage people to subscribe we just launched a long term activity on Last.FM with 2 key elements:

1. Functionality integration: This is still in beta but we aim to allow people to seamlessly add artists to their gigs and tours alert list straight from Last.FM - on every artist page on Last there will be a branded button that will enable you to add it to your alert list.

2. giggers united: we’ve created a sponsored group that is all about celebrating live music and gigs goers. It’s a space that was created for and will be maintained by the community. The mechanism is very simple - Orange will give you x 2 tickets to a gig ( you can choose from a long list - we hope to have at least 15 gigs every month) in return for a review and a couple of pics. [We've hired Gareth, a serious music buff to be the community manager of giggers united to help with the day-to-day stuff.]

In the future we have some more loveliness like monthly competitions of the best gig picture, ‘gigger of the month’ prizes for the person who went to the most gigs and more.

Please go and visit the page and if you like it, please join the group. Oh, and because we just launched there are some tickets up for grabs for some amazing gigs next week…

I’d really appreciate any feedback on this one.

Live music lovers, unite!

*(Even if you’re not an Orange customer you can still get a free sim so you can subscribe and enjoy this)

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Do you remember life without Youtube? Thats what I think we will feel in couple of years time of QIK and Fixwagon. We are already used to see every piece of news, gossip, celebrity slips, authority abuse and what not on youtube but the wold is about to get smaller and quicker. Now potentially, every event that happen in the world can be captured and streamed live to our screens.

This is a big shift and it will take time to fully realise the potential but the citizen journalism trend has just had a big leap forward. Anyone, anywhere (currently with nokia, iphone or windows phones) can now stream live and my prediction is that just as we saw the rise of youtube stars we are about to see a new wave of QIK stars, documenting events in the world and reporting in real time. The whole idea of being there “in the moment” is about to change.

Ha! as I fix this post and populate the links I see live on QIK homepage the legendary Lloyd Davis whom I met at interesting (2007/8). How random is that?

Hello Lloyd!

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This one is the best ever (click to enlarge).

WTF???

Now that’s what I call organic SEO

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