Ding - we're at the top of the charts with Littlewoods Funfair!

We're delighted to have tied at the top spot in Marketing Magazine's Top 10 ads of the week.

The chart of ads is based on those which are most highly recalled for that week, and our delightful Funfair advert and its respective 10" cutdowns have raced to the top of the chart with 44% recall, alongside the anti-smoking campaign Stoptober.

We've received great feedback in industry press and on social media for the campaign, which you can watch below featuring Myleene Klass, Mark Wright and a track from the up and coming singer Arlissa.

Roll up! Roll up, to the Littlewoods Funfair!

To sit alongside our current Autumn Winter TV campaign for Littlewoods, featuring Myleene Klass and Mark Wright, we have been busy creating and developing a social media campaign to encourage interaction and engagement with the Littlewoods Funfair this season.

The Autumn social media campaign kicked off on October 3rd and will feature a series of Funfair themed Facebook games that employ a mixture of platforms including Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat over the next month.

Littlewoods are offering participants a chance to win a range of prizes, from the latest tablets to fashion essentials. The games themselves are all based on classic funfair games, each given the Littlewoods touch – such as ' Snap-a-mole, Hook-a-Duck and Test your strength.'

The first game was Test Your Strength, which received over 1800 likes, making 3 winners. The 2nd game opens today, and you can keep up to date with all the games and have your chance to win on the Littlewoods Facebook page, and you can watch our Autumn Winter adverts here.

Community is...

Craig Newmark of Craigslist talking about the meaning of community at Digital Britain, via Wordia.

Traffic surge as news of Jacko's death spreads

As word began to spread around the world of Jacko's demise, traffic surged causing site shut downs and server crashes.

For the first half an hour after the news broke on www.tmz.com, traffic levels on google news were so high that Google presumed an attack on their systems. 36 out of the top 100 Google search terms were linked to Jackson's death and his music. The BBC reported a 48 per cent increase in traffic.

According to Twitter tracking software, Twist, at the height of the traffic surge nearly 30 percent of all Tweets were Jacko related as people turned to the site to try and confirm reports of the suspected death.

Interestingly enough, when I first heard the news in a restaurant last night, everyone's first reaction was to reach for the iPhone and get on twitter - not the BBC. I suspect this illustrates how people are beginning to trust people more than they trust the traditional news agencies. Or perhaps it's a matter of speed of WOM. Either way, it proves yet again the value of social technology to help people communicate.

Play my piano

Artist Luke Jerram has found 30 pianos and left them around the city for Londoners to indulge inimpromptu summer concerts. Originally in Birmingham, Play Me, I’m Yours was designed to act as a catalyst for strangers who regularly occupy the same space, to talk and connect with one another.

So it's a social media project really. In fact Luke says:"Like Facebook, ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ provides an interconnected resource, an empty blank canvas, for the public to express themselves and share their creativity."

Locations include the British Library (lunchtime singalong anyone?), Tate Britian, Soho Square (midnight singalong anyone?) and Liverpool Street Station.

I love the idea of bringing music to the capital, for the people, by the people, getting strangers to talk to each other, to have a shared experience, to make people smile. I hope they're allowed to stay.

USPS Priority Mail Simulator

Finally, a very useful way of making augmented reality mean something more than pretty.

#ukhols

To promote Vodaphone's summer of free roaming, they've set up this site which tracks where people are going on holiday, via twitter declarations. Nice, simple us of twitter, and a good way to assemble data and a few pr stories.

Arson, social media and the onion

Brilliant.

Us Now - and in the future

This is a the trailer to a really brilliant online doc about the way the world is now, how the web has changed that and where we're likely to go in the future.

You can find the full version here. . It's an hour long, but well worth it.

Thanks to John V Willshire for the heads up. If you want more brilliant thinking, bookmark his blog.

Twitter confessional

“I pulled her over just because she drove a Mercedes SUV. And I had it towed. I love being a police officer”

“Every once in a while I’ll tell someone I was on MTV. What I don’t tell them is that the show I was on was Fat Camp 2”

In the same vein as Post Secret, the SecretTweet feed encourages people to share their guilty secrets in 140 characters. Entertaining and at times moving, it’s a bizarre form of therapy!

They claim they have enough confessions to publish 2,400 tweets a day. Fortunately they’re editing it down to the most interesting ones. I’ve entered my confession and I’ve been told there’s a queue of 643 SecretTweets before they even get to moderating mine.

So come on people, ‘Fess up.

Car wars

I love it when Brands interact. This inter-brand banter illustrates quick thinking, brilliant understanding of buzz and great humour.

Audi put up a billboard showing their new sexy 2009 Audi A4, which reads “Your Move, BMW.”

And sure enough, BMW responded with a larger billboard right across the road.

“Checkmate.”

I don't know if this shows brilliance on Audi's behalf, betting that BMW would respond and build a news story for them, or complete idiocy merely illustrating how second rate they are...

Thoughts?

Facebook dominates online networking

Since we're all stat-orific today, I'll share some more. Comscore has just annnounced Facebook is now the sixth most trafficked website in the world commanding

275 million unique users in February alone. That's a 175 per cent increase since this time last year.

Europe saw faster growth - a 314 per cent increase to nearly 100 million uus a month. The UK accounts for 22.66 million of these users.

Not only are people coming think and fast, they're also hugely engaged. 4.1 minutes average time spent up from 1.1 minute last year. Facebook now commands a third of all our social networking time. That's 30 per cent of time spent on social network sites including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Bebo, Yahoo Answers, wordpress, blogger... I could go on. 30 per cent. On its own.

That is why it is so crucial for brands to engage in these spaces. The people are there. And they're engaged. And we have the opportunity to listen to them, to talk to them, to understand them better and to encourage them to spend time with us. And hopefully to encourage them to talk about us to their friends. Who will talk to their friends...

Tweetographics

For all you disbelievers out there, all you people who think Social Media is the land of the young, there are some pretty interesting stats out today about who exactly is using Twitter. Hold your breath, stats ahoy...

Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 14 million in the US alone per month in February. User numbers doubled in the past two months.

35-54 year olds are 36 per cent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group.

25-34 year olds are the second highest indexing demographic - 30 per cent more likely to visit.

18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter. Yes, that's LESS LIKELY.

Although it does make sense. Office-based, tech'ed up internet-mature people are using it to listen to their peers, do business and do the personal news broadcast. I have been watching the office and I've noticed an uptake in sign ups within these walls.

Roy - @roysy
Nimi - @NimiRaja
Dan - @daniellipman
Tim - @TimRogowski
Kathryn - @kathryn100
Emily - @emilydent

Consider yourself outed. Hope you're interesting!

Chatting about the weather

This nice little app from Chrome Experiments uses twitter to illustrate realtime weather in the states. Using real chat guarantees helpful, local weather reports. And I'm willing to bet it's more accurate than the Beeb.

Same tech could be applied to lots of other things - the mood of the nation?

Divine Intervention : Egg a Politician

We've just launched this on behalf of Divine Chocolate. The idea is to encourage people to send an email to politicians to keep fair trade on the agenda at next week's G20. You get to throw a chocolate egg at a politician and they get to enjoy the chocolate treat. Everyone's a winner.

The sound effects were created by our very talented Simon Allen and Daniel Lipman with pretty brilliant comic effect. Guess who did which politician.

Please throw some eggs and send it on to your lovely friends who might also want to egg good old Gordon. And then buy some divine chocolate for easter.

Mmmmm, tastes good!!!

UK's Top Female Social Media Guru & Speaker 2009

Drum roll for... UK's Top Female Social Media Guru & Speaker 2009 for which our very own Emily Dent, Head of Content & Community, has been nominated.

The awards are being championed by Jamie Burke over at Social Glue blog and this is the first year they've run. Voting starts on 12th March and the final round will see 5 women selected to each provide a 20min presentation. Jamie is also looking for brands to sponsor the event and prizes.

We will provide further information on how to vote once it's up and running, in the meantime we shall be persuading Emily to prepare a short skit, just in case.

Emily spoke at the IAB's Social Media Conference last week alongside speakers from Orange, Publicis and LG Mobile - view her presentation here.

Tweetminster

Tweetminster is a UK response to US digital open government describing itself as "a public service that makes it easier to connect the public with politics using Twitter. TweetMinster allows to track UK politics in real time, and to find and follow Members of Parliament (or invite them to use Twitter if they're not already doing so) and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates.".

There are around 30 MPs currently on twitter (including Prescott) as well as Downing Street, Boris and Westminster. Tweetminster is aggregating all the politics chatter and putting it in one place.

My Southwalk MP's not yet signed up, so I've sent a little tweetminster assisted reminder to him. We'll see how far that gets.

Word up!

Met one of the founders of this site last night. Wordia is the Oxford English Dictionary meets YouTube, and it's brilliant. It will continue to be brilliant as more and more people get involved. It's very young and still in beta, so there's user issues to sort out - e.g. where can I see an a-z in order to browse? But on the whole it's brilliant content and they've got some really quality entries. Quentin Blake on illustration, Gary Vaynerchuck on wine, James Walsh on Melody. It's this cross of professional and user-gen content thats really appealing. The London Dungeon has done this one about labrynths. There are still quite a few words available - can brands own some of this space?

Obama's web genius speaks UK politics

Thomas Gensemer, who acted as a consultant to the Obama campaign's internet strategy, gives Labour and the Conservatives some social media strategy. It's really really good thoughts if you broaden this out to how brands should behave - much better than the IPA's bash at it. My favourite quote from it is: "if the room was filled with 100 people, what would you ask them to do? If you can't answer that problem, technology is not your problem."The number one take out is - it's a journey not a destination. Yes we can.

Pen Paper (Pause)

I'm feeling particulary thoughtful this January. I'm not one for resolutions, but I am big on reflections. I like to think. And these made me think. Richard Watkins is a scribbler - quickly sketching his thoughts and broadcasting them one a week though his Facebook group. He's also scanned in a Pen Paper (Pause) book that you can create your own cover for and then give it to a friend to enjoy. There are currently copies as far away as America, Australia and Thailand. This is art meets word of mouth in a homespun, crafty, thought-provoking way - a humbler version of thedailyaphorism.com.