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Hello.

The nice people at Marketing magazine asked us to write one of their little ‘Brand in the News’ columns on Twitter.

They ran our ’sensible’ version, but here is the original version – written as a Twitter conversation, with 140 character sentences.

@glyndot Would you do Brand in the News on Twitter? It’s had lots of media coverage lately.

@MarketingUK Twitter *has* been in the news a lot, but for the wrong reasons…

@MarketingUK 2007 was 2nd Life. 2008 was Facebook. 2009 is Twitter. Any lame idea can get into the papers, as long as it involves Twitter.

@MarketingUK Or egomaniacal celebs sharing the minutiae of their lives.

@glyndot OK, but what are the right reasons?

@MarketingUK Customers are talking directly to real people inside brands and loving it. See #comcastcares

@MarketingUK See what people are saying about your brand in realtime. Try a Twitter Search for your brand: http://bit.ly/S1nM9

@MarketingUK Simple open system enables new communications opportunities e.g. Objects talking to people.

@glyndot Yes, but is Twitter a brand?

@MarketingUK It’s a great bit of brand*ing*. Great naming system, cute visual identity, clear what it stands for.

@MarketingUK But it doesn’t earn money, emotional attachment is low, and it’s not half as mainstream as people would have you believe.

@MarketingUK My verdict: Massively important, but for reasons that aren’t clear yet. Don’t experiment with it at your peril.

A friend of mine, @hullrobbie just asked me a question, via Twitter: ‘My latest CorpID project is on Twitter. Menu changes every day, and we’re pushing content all the time. How do we get followers?”

I sent him a series of 10 DM’s back, but in the interests of digestability and sharing, here they are. I’m not claiming these are comprehensive, or will even work. But it’s what I do (#glyndot) and what we do with #albionlondon.

1. Make sure your profile features interesting and relevant keywords so people can find you through Twitter Search.
2. Tweet often and regularly. Stay on topic. Don’t be a brand, be a person.
3. Don’t just broadcast, but join conversations, with lots of @replies.
4. Be open. Why did you use a DM rather than an @ for your question to me?
5. Share lots of links (with Bit.ly URLs), especially photos (using TwitPic of course).
6. Be nice and follow back people who follow you (apart from obvious bots / spammers).
7. Say interesting things that people want to Retweet. Special / limited offers?
8. Use relevant #hashtags in your posts.
9. Link to your Twitter profile from everywhere else: Your website, LinkedIn, Facebook…
10. Possibly register in directories like Twibes (although I haven’t tried this).

Does this mean we’re a social media agency now?

Marketing magazine today has a brand health check on our client Absolute Radio.

The editorial set-up is a bit shallow, stating “it has lost one-fifth of its listeners since rebranding from Virgin Radio last September”. But Kathleen and Cable’s comments are pretty fair – question over the RAJAR methodology, pointing out it’s early days, advising us to stick to our guns, focus around the brand proposition.

Is the recession somehow responsible for making all advertising on the Tube the same?

Red background? Check. Barely witty headline? Check. Too much body copy? Check. Logo bottom-right? Check.

We’re loving Twitter’s branding at Albion, for three reasons:

Firstly, it’s a great name. Less than 8 letters 8 letters or less (which @cdickens says is critical for any modern brand). It’s kind of onomatopoeic – it reflects the 140 character limit of the messages. It’s fun. It’s nice to say.

Secondly, they’ve been relaxed about letting their ecosystem use it, or variants of it. So it’s everywhere online.

Here’s a selection of the hundreds (thousands?) of apps that have sprung up using the Twitter API. It’s adapted from www.twitterapps.co.uk, but we’ve sorted them into categories according to how they’ve co-opted the ‘Twitter’ name:

It’s the third column that’s the really clever bit though.

Customers love to turn brand names into verbs. And you’d think that would be the ultimate accolade, when your service is so ubiquitous it enters common language. But that also means you lose control over your trademark as it is no longer ‘distinctive’. The list of words that started as brand names is long: Yo-Yo, Zipper and Heroin… That’s why Google issued instructions telling people not to use the verb ‘to google’. Of course people still will, but they have to be seen to play the game.

Through accident or design though, the verb that is most commonly used among Twitter users is ‘to tweet’. Not ‘to twitter’.

If they can encourage this action, persuading the ecosystem to use more ‘tweet’ derivatives and less ‘twitter’ derivatives, then perhaps they can have the best of both worlds: a strong protected brand name *and* an associated verb in common usage.

Unless a trademark lawyer can correct us…?

So the Competition Commission has gone and done it, and killed off Project Kangaroo.

Our first reaction when we heard the CC’s preliminary judgment was ‘how stupid’. Who wouldn’t want what Kangaroo was planning to offer – free catch-up, and archive of top shows across decades of BBC, ITV & C4 programmes? And who wants to have to visit many different websites (or worse download many different applications) to watch TV on the web? You don’t have to have different TVs for BBC, ITV, C4 etc.

So to us this seemed like while the CC were preventing a monopoly, and avoiding a theoretical and technical price fixing scenario, in the process they were actually denying consumers’ choice. Or worse handing a bye to the US-owned Hulu to steam in and charge for what previously would have been free (well, free at the point of use).

But over the last couple of months, other parts of the story have emerged, and have caused us to change our minds.

Project Canvas is another cross-broadcaster initiative to put web TV in Freeview set-top boxes, bringing the iPlayer and other services, to the living room in a way that normal people might use. And it sounds like it is open from the start, providing a platform anybody (?) will be able to access.

To us, this means one of two things will happen:

1. iPlayer will become the default platform for getting web video onto those set-top boxes. Someone (the BBC Trust, the CC) will make the BBC open up the iPlayer to other content providers. It’s easy to put Flash video on the web; the trick is making it scale. And why should the viewing public have to pay for that again?
2. The opportunity of Project Canvas distribution will incentivise content providers to unify around a common set of web video standards, and the content will be set free of any particular destination, so we can just watch what we want without having to learn how to use multiple sites / apps.

Which will be A Good Thing, and we’ll still get the service we so yearn for as consumers. Maybe even a better version.