We’re all a bunch of miserable sods apparently!

Especially those of us that live in London if you’re to believe everything to read. No time for casual chit chat, rush, rush, rush, not even time for a cordial hello and a smile anymore.

Well VW have decided to inject a little bit of harmless playful fun into our lives, nice.

Even though it’s been around for a while The Fun Theory this is still my favourite campaign at the moment. A deserved winner at the Cannes Cyber Lions by DDB Stockholm, Sweden.

It’s one of those pieces of work that just brings out an inner smile, a whisper to a colleague of “oh very nice” and an envious thought of “oh I wish I’d thought of that”

A great example of a campaign that utilizes the digital platform perfectly. It’s not a digital solution, or a digital execution, just a campaign that integrates digital platforms and technologies perfectly.

It looks like they’ve continued the fun here to with their Fast Lane!

This post has got me thinking about other campaigns that use digital in innovative ways and I will post up my favourites. One of those is the now famous Nike Chalkbot that sprayed tweets onto stages of the Tour de France.

Is your client concerned about what’s above the page fold?, do users scroll?, Is Flash really evil?, if it works for Amazon it must be the right solution?

If your constantly hit with challenging questions by clients, you need to up your knowledge on user experience or just love to show off your knowledge of the internet with friends and family then UX Myths is a fountain of knowledge.

If your a professional you will still find some little gems of information in here. Make yourself a nice coffee leave your preconceptions behind for once and read with an open mind. Backed up by lots of research and articles from the likes of Jakob Nielsen and Seth Godin.

I thought I’d share a couple of cool infographics that have caught my eye recently. The top image is the ‘Cosmic 140‘ a visual representation of the top 140 twitter influences compiled by the Information Architects team. The size of the blobs indicate indicate how many followers each account has.

New City Landscapes – Interactive Tweetography Maps is the second image of a 30km radius around London compiled by Twitter data. There is some great renaming of london districts and I love the thought of ‘Soho Mountain’ in the centre of town.

A very brave piece of guerrilla marketing from Heineken. On the night of the biggest football game in Europe, Real Madrid v AC Milan Heineken decided to stage a fake concert event and recruited 200 people to try and get 1000 people away from their televisions to watch the concert.

The reactions of the boyfriends, husbands and friends is superb.

Continuing with the advertising influence I grabbed these favourites from the bookshelves this weekend. They’re a continual source of inspiration and are small enough to have a good flick through.

Words of wisdom on every page, from advertising legend Paul Arden.

Lots and lots and lots of staples! Baptiste Debombourg has created these incredibly detailed artworks by using up to 35,000 staples. They are a series of two artworks entitled, ” Air Force One” and ” Air Force Two “.

Described on his site as “The protagonist Icarus, the Mannerism of the Renaissance and the symbol of sublime power Air Force One -the plane of the American President- are the main points in this work”. More really nice work on his site too.

If you are confused by social media or are the sort of person that likes to name drop brands with buzz words into meetings and conversations then this diagram is the one for you.

The Conversation Prism collates a colossal amount of technologies and companies into quite an easy to understand diagram. There are loads of brands I have never heard of before so it will be good to investigate and discover, you can never know everything!

That’s the beauty of this industry, always learning.

If you’re going to buy one book this week/month then Creative Mischief by Dave Trott is the one I would pick up. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It works for every creative discipline.

I won’t tell you why. You’ll understand once you’ve read it. Genius.

Dave Trott’s Blog

Super cool inflatable bag monsters by Joshua Allen Harris’ on the street of New York City.

The giant animals are taped to grates on the sidewalk and come to life when warm air is pushed up from the subway. The giraffe is cool and the one that looks like it could be the US equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster is excellent.

Another great find whilst doing client research is The Web Strategy blog by Jeremiah Owyang.

An incredible source of knowledge and insight into web strategies. Written by Jeremiah Owyang who was a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, and is now Partner of Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group.

Good reading:
Companies Should Factor ‘Social Influence’ Into Total Customer Value
Four Social Media Trends for Business in 2010

I hope he won’t mind but I’ve pinched his “To Be Successful, Companies Should Focus On Four Key Trends in 2010″ to share with you.

Don’t fondle the hammer.
Understand customers, focus on objectives, not develop strategies based on ever-changing tools. Companies really need to understand their customers first, see our recorded webinar to learn more.

Live the 80% rule.
This is a movement: get your company ready. 80% of success is getting the right organizational model, roles, processes, stakeholders, and teams assembled –only 20% should be focused on technology.

Customers don’t care what department you’re in.
Customers just want their problem fixed, they don’t care what department you’re in. Yet, now, nearly every department can have a direct relationship with your customers using social tools. As a result, provide customers with a holistic experience Start to investigate how brand monitoring, community tools and CRM systems are merging.

Real time is *not* fast enough.
Companies cannot scale when it comes to social media, for most companies, you cannot hire enough people to monitor and respond to the conversation, As a result, lean on advocates, by building unpaid armies, and anticipate customer needs through advanced listening techniques.

The image above is from “The Future of the Social Web” Forrester Apr 2009.
The Five Eras of the Social Web.