For those of you who aren’t familiar with the site, here’s a little bit more about Mashable:

Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture. With more than 40 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new Web sites and services, and offering social media resources and guides.

As you can imagine with over 40 million monthly pageviews this was big news for Little Bird. The articles we contributed too focused around the coworking space, Indycube which our director, Beth Charlesworth, is involved with. We were over the moon when we found out recently that the articles have been shared more than 2,860 times across the social networks Twitter and Facebook alone.

You can read both articles below and Little Bird would like to give a special thank you to Mashable staff writer Amy Mae Elliot for including us in the pieces.

6 Top Tips For Managing a Coworking Space

HOW TO: Be a Better Coworker

This picture of the happy turtle sums up how we felt when we found out we were being featured in Mashable.

Some of the results above we found rather surprising, especially the figures that show females watching more viral videos than men. and that whilst Southerners watch more videos than any region, Midwesterners share more. It isn’t surprising, however, to see Facebook as the leading way to share video. Here at A Little Bird we have, on average, 30+ video’s shared with us via Facebook every day. How do you prefer to share the video’s you love? Do you use one channel or share all your videos on all your networks?

As social media becomes more and more popular it’s not just businesses who are jumping on this new way of promoting, commenting and capturing public opinions, the mainstream media are also hot on social media’s heels. Whether it be your favourite soap, reality show or news programme, Twitter’s hashtags make it easy for you to read real time comments and updates of the programme as you watch it.

We’ve recently been really impressed by the way Channel 4 has embraced the Twitter hashtag for it’s new programme ‘The Promise’, Peter Kosminsky’s new four-part drama about the British peacekeeping force in 1940s Palestine. Knowing the programme was going to stimulate much discussion both on and offline, Channel 4 created a tracker tool, designed to illustrate the scale and variety of discussion The Promise sparked on Twitter.

The clever little tracker pulls in all the public tweets that use the hashtag #c4thepromise and meet C4′s community guidelines. It then breaks each tweet down into its constituent parts (nouns, verbs, adjectives as well as hashtags, @-replies and URLs etc) using a natural language algorithm. Then the complicated science part happens, which if you’d like to learn more about you can read Channel4′s handy about section.

After all the clever sciency technology bit has happened and the tweets have been broken down they produce a series of clusters of common themes. This Twitter Constellation of clusters give a real sense of the variety of the online conversation around the series. The volume of tweets around each theme determines how close it is to the centre of the visualisation, with the most discussed theme being closest. In the end resulting in what you see below, a sexy little Twitter constellation. Pretty cool eh?

Channel 4 will be displaying a Twitter Constellation for each episode of the four-part drama which you can view here. It’ll be interesting to see if Channel 4 do anything with these results once the series has finished, whether this will be a common tool used for future C4 series’ or if it’s simply just a clever promotional tool. Needless to say, if you’re a viewer, it’s a great way to spark conversation, interact with other viewers and share your thoughts in real-time, and we for one think this interesting and effective use of the Twitter hashtag is picked up by more mainstream media in the future.

Well it’s come to that time of year again, that’s right people, Twestival is back… and this time it’s local. And it was a rather easy decision for A Little Bird Told Me to make, again. We’re happy to announce that we will once more be offering our services and sponsorship to the charity festival for the second year running.

But what is this mystical Twestival of which you speak? Well here’s the back story courtesy of the Twestival organisers themselves:

Twestival® (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good by connecting communities offline on a single day to highlight a great cause and have a fun event. Twestival is the largest global grassroots social media fundraising initiative to date. Since 2009, volunteers have raised close to $1.2 million for 137 nonprofits. All local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

Twestival was born out of the idea that if cities were able to collaborate on an international scale, but work from a local level, it could have a spectacular impact. Over 200 international cities from Buenos Aires to Bangalore, Seattle to Seoul and Hong Kong to Honolulu to Cardiff have participated in Twestival.

And if you didn’t understand that here’s a handy little video to help you on your way.

We’re only in the beginning stages of pulling the Twestival team together and deciding upon a local charity to benefit from the funds raised this time around, so there’s plenty of time to get involved still. If you’d like to become part of the team or think you’ve got something to offer, whether it be a talent, raffle prizes or simply just ideas, email us at CFTwestival@gmail.com

To find out more information about Cardiff’s Twestival or other events happening around the world please visit the main Twestival homepage. You can also follow the Cardiff Twestival team on their Twitter or blog.

If you’re looking for a book that details the rise of the new social media initiatives, their successes, failures and what the future looks like you couldn’t go far wrong with the new book by Teressa Lezzi called “The Idea Writers,”
Lezzi examines marketers’ efforts to use digital media in a clever way—often with storytelling that incorporates the brand—to create interactive experiences that their audiences want to see and to share.

Touching on such cases as the phenomenally successfully interactive campaigns of Old Spice and Burger King’s SubservientChicken.com as well as high end mini films, community campaigns and flash-mobs to name but a few.

Overall Lezzi offers the view that social media, more than just “being there”. Whilst it’s good to have a constant stream of content it’s important for companies to place someone creative at the helm too. And we couldn’t agree more.

For a more comprenhensive review of ‘The Idea Writers’ we suggest you check out The Wall Street Journals book review by Melanie Wells, which is a great read.

Whether you’re a fervent social media user or not by now the whole world and has dog have heard of the current two major heavyweights in the field, Facebook and Twitter. There’s plenty arguments for and against both networks but what we were rather interested in was their user bases. Who uses the networks, demographics and numbers.

It just so happens that author Polly Becker from social media marketing blog The Wallhas produced a rather nifty infographic giving a breakdown of how Facebook and Twitter did, user wise, in 2010.

Looking at the graph it appears Twitter tends to have a little older, a little richer and better educated. Although it’s really interesting to see that 70% of Facebook’s users are outside of the US. That’s an incredible transformation and points to its continued further growth.

Well hello there 2011! You’re looking devilishly good already if we do say so ourselves.

It’s been a little while since A Little Bird blogged but lucky that’s because we’ve been super busy with all our lovely new clients, and not because we had nothing interesting to say!

Since we last wrote we’ve had lots of exciting things happen it’s hard to know where to start. We’ve started working with one of our favourite restaurants in South Wales, a non-digital arts organistation and a delicious little cupcake company to name but a few.

We’re also proud to announce that our director, Beth Charlesworth, has also become a Young Ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, whose grant money actually helped kick-start A Little Bird when the company was just starting out. She’s also been featured in Glamour magazine again blogging about Cardiff’s cheap alternative eats this time. Fancy eh?

And that’s just a round up of 2010!

So what about 2011… This year we’ve already run our most successful marketing campaign to date which saw our clients not only trending on Twitter for the Cardiff region but also feature in the top ten most talked about subjects in the UK! We’ll be talking more about this in some depth in a future blog but this little video might help give you a clue as to what the campaign was all about.

There’s all this and more to come on the blog very soon, as well as more client testimonials and maybe even a new team member… We’re so excited we just squealed like a school girl. But for now, you’ll just have to wait.

Friends are able to ’like’ pages and articles on sites that use Facebook’s Open Graph – a social plug-in that was launched earlier this year. These links will also be fine-tuned, with those that a mutual friend on Facebook appearing highest in the search results.

Speaking on the Facebook blog, spokesman Bret Taylor said:

Your friends have ’liked’ lots of things all over the web, and now, instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place… When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you’ll be able to see your friends’ faces next to web pages they’ve liked. So you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search.

This service is currently only available in the United States, but both companies said these changes will not be instantaneous and that users of both Bing and Facebook will be made aware of the changes as they are slowly rolled out.

Facebook, like with so many of it’s other new applications, will be automatically activating this feature on all accounts, making the user, yet again, have to work their way around the confusing account settings to turn the damn thing off.

All in all it appears everyone is trying to make search results more social and part of the communities and networks that are already in existence. It was only a month ago that Bing launched a Twitter feature which recommends people to follow based on search results.

Is this a function you are looking forward to using?
Or are you fed of Facebook appearing on every web page you look at?

Generous Skoda Facebook Campaign

Skoda Belgium are currently in the middle of a very interesting Facebook promotion indeed. They’re giving their ‘fans’ on Facebook the chance to choose how much they pay for a brand new car! Well, it’s not quite as straight forward as that of course as Skoda has added a clever little twist to the competition. The more people ‘like’ the Generous Skoda Facebook page, the lower the price of the car drops. So for each time the ‘like’ button is pressed Skoda are lowering the price by approximately two euros (£1.75) each time. The price of the car has already gone down by over 2,000 euros already.

More interesting though is whilst brands in the past, like Burger King and Apple have offered vouchers and gig tickets for tweets, Skoda is in fact the first company to put a monetary value on a ‘like’ or fan. That’s right people, ‘likes’ aren’t just some throw away click any more, they now hold value, an online currency if you will.

Very clever indeed, as not only is Skoda growing it’s fan-base on Facebook massively it’s also increase fan gratification and loyalty by offering them a prize at the end of it all.

For Sony Europe their recent social media campaign for their new low-light photo cameras was something very different indeed. Whilst many international companies like Old Spice, Tipex and Cisco are used to product launches that are social network heavy or sometimes even solely online launches, with the offline stuff coming much later on, Sony is definitely not. In fact as Ruth Speakman, head of consumer PR and social media at Sony Europe commented on their latest choice to push towards social media ‘For Sony, it was revolutionary’

Historically Sony’s past campaigns have depended on the traditional model of marketing, utilizing press, TV and cinema advertising in their peak sales months from October to December. “We wanted to get away from that peak and trough mentality,” says Speakman. “We knew that consumers were willing to purchase cameras all year round. We just had to work out a way to reach them.”

And that’s just what they did. Taking the cameras supreme ability to capture images and video in low light situations Sony used social media to advertise for footballers all over Europe to apply to take part in seven very special football matches. The games would all take places at twilight and in seven spectacular locations around the world including the Australian outback and a floating football pitch in Venice.

Not only that but to help capture the events, photographers were also recruited using online competitions and were each given a new Sony camera featuring the brand new low light capturing Exmor R CMOS technology. International bloggers too were given the chance to take part. Known as ‘Twilight Hunters’ these online writers were enlisted to help create an online buzz prior and during each of the football matches.

But how did a company with very little experience in social media networking and online promotion manage to go from zeros to heroes in an area they knew nothing about?

Well they had a little help of course. London based agency, Immediate Future, worked tirelessly creating online profiles, conversations, competitions, and not only managing but also measuring the results. They also oversaw the recruitment of footballers, photographers and bloggers. As an experienced social media agency they were able to get Sony heard, and more importantly talked about, at the right times, by the right people.

“With social media it’s about setting measurable goals from the outset,” explains Katy Howell, MD at Immediate Future. “It’s not just about ’raising brand awareness’. That’s too simplified. At the start of the Twilight Football campaign, we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve and how we were going to achieve it.”

Immediate Future were given three months to recruit online via Sony’s Twitter account @sonyeurope and then posted their entries on branded Twilight Football pages on YouTube and Flickr. The bloggers recruited to help spread the word about the events have proved ‘invaluable’ to Sony who now have established long lasting relationships with this online community. Not only did these ‘Twilight Hunters’ become ambassadors for Sony as a brand they also helped Sony collect data on their business operation and performance which they might not have otherwise found.

So what were the aims of this online promotion? The main one was to showcase the capability of the technology in a consumer friendly manner and to spark interest from mainstream audiences around the products. Not only that, Sony wanted to stop their peak and trough sales around the October-December markets and create a buzz around a product that would last all year long.

And did it work? Videos for the campaign were viewed over two million times and online talk lasted an astounding 9 months. Whilst sales of Sony’s Cyber-shot TX1 exceeded forecasts by 27% while sales of the Cyber-shot WX1 exceeded forecasts by 45%. “The ROI was an outstanding €12.5m,” says Speakman. So we’d jolly well say it worked, and it worked a treat.

When asked what the most important of the campaign was Speakman replied;

“We had to ensure we had time for conversations. In a traditional campaign we would buy creative time and air time. With social media we had to buy ’people time’. Because when bloggers or journalists are asking for back-stories, graphics, buttons, video clips or images you have to respond quickly. That was a real shift in how things are done.

Source material: Marketing weekly