Sandrine Plasseraud

The Battle of Big Thinking 2009

If you live in the UK and read Campaign you might have come accross a full page ad this week for "The Battle of Big Thinking" featuring a few names including mine... Organised by the Account Planning Group and Campaign Magazine, this 4th battle of Big Thinking will take place on the 26th of November at the British Library. 51 days to go before this very exciting yet scary event.

  

The format?

• 7 categories (Global Thinking, Innovation Thinking, Thinking in Social Media, Planning Thinking, Mobile Thinking, Thinking in the Free Space, Marketing Thinking)
• 3 speakers in each category fight for their "Big Thinking Idea" with a 15 minutes slot per speaker
• The audience vote at the end of each round with the winner going into an eliminator to find the supreme champion at the end of the day.

So as I said, a pretty exciting event yet a slightly scary one, so if you have attended one of the Battle of Big Thinking in the past, any advices would be welcomed!

 

Pepsi uses Twitter to launch Pepsi Raw

Well I guess if you read me quite regularly, you'd know I'm a total Diet Coke addict, so getting me to try another cola of some sort would be very difficult, and even more so if it wasn't a diet cola - so you'll be quite amazed to find out that Pepsi has succeeded in getting me to sample their new (non diet) "Pepsi Raw" today!

How come? When I came back to my desk at 1pm, there was a tiny can of this "natural born cola" on my desk - turns out that they were giving them away on Tottenham Court Road and Bertrand picked up one for me.

Why did I sample it? Because the can read "Tell us what you think @twitter.com/pepsiraw" and I was keen to engage in a conversation, to check out how many people where commenting and see the results.

Photo: @CamilleJ

The results? Right now they only have over 100 Twitter followers but it's too early to say - let's check out how blog posts will have been written about it in a few days and how many followers they'll have. It's a nice PR initiative I think - one that will get online marketers to write about the brand's attempt at using Twitter to launch a new product so kudos to them!

At least they'd have managed to turn a diet coke addict into a possible convert. I tried the drink just because of the Twitter thing, then realised it was a natural cola, which is quite nice for someone like me who drink 1 litre or so per day. Shame there is no diet version of it because I quite like the taste of it.

ps: if you haven't seen the cool Coca-Cola limited edition bottle that was made to celebrate Selfridges' 100th birthday, check out the one that @_vio_ bought for me here.

If kindness was currency...

My colleagues are working with Absolut to get the word out about their "Kindness for Currency" campaign so I thought I'd talk about the campaign here and develop my own thoughts on the subject...

In an Absolut Word, currency would be replaced by kindness and this week at venues around London, the idea is being brought to life: last Sunday evening in Islington and Clapham, cinema goers were pleasantly surprised to discover that all it took them to buy some cinema snacks wasn't money but simply a nice gesture towards the cinema staff, like a pleasant greeting or polite manners... On Tuesday, a simple smile was enough to get you a free coffee in Soho and Shoreditch. And for tonight, the AbsolutKindness Twitter account is announcing another session of Kindness in Shoreditch with a few bars offering drinks against kindness... Shame I can't make it but great idea!

Check out their commercial below - a really nice and warm ad that has the potential to make you feel all fuzzy...

So, if currency was replaced by kindness, what would I do personally ? In a world where money wouldn't matter so much I guess I would give out my time... I'll help out others, I would teach kids who are not so lucky...

#TTL - Twitter Taste Live, Friday 17 April

After almost a week offline, relaxing/detoxing in the Canaries, it was time for me to get back to reality and to the social media scene... So when Robert McIntosh (@thirstforwine) invited me to a Twitter Taste Live event, it came just at the right time!

This wasn't Robert's first #TTL event. In fact, Robert had organised the first UK Twitter Taste Live event, back in August 2008. 10 of us had been invited to an amazing evening of wine tasting and gourmet food at his place.

This latest event was organised by @thirstforwine and sponsored by @bibendumwine who brought along some wines from the French Côtes du Rhône region, which @jlcoassin and I very much enjoyed (especially the Châteauneuf du Pape!). The most intriguing thing for me was to discover that there was a white variety of wine in the Côtes du Rhône region! Really nice one as well..

Back to the Twitter Taste Live events. It's very interesting to see how such an old industry as the wine one was able to adapt itself to the social media scene and the new technologies available, with people from wineries using Twitter accounts to talk about their wines or with the setting up of innovative and exciting events such as #TTL. Check out Sprinwise report on Twitter Taste Live for more details. I also very much like Lea's comment: "This people, is wine 2.0. And it rocks."

T-Mobile "Life's for sharing" - Liverpool Street

Flashmobs have been pretty trendy over the last couple of years and in the UK, Liverpool Street station seems to be the perfect place for flashmobs! Remember the Rickmob that took place last April? Well, last week, it was a branded kind of flashmob that took place, for T-Mobile.

With the growing popularity, of gatherings like flashmobs, including pillow fights, marketers have clearly been thinking of how they could benefit from this trend... I actually remember discussing it with a client last year, and clearly, a branded flashmob is quite tricky: how do you get people to join in and how will they react when they find out it's for a brand?! Well, that is unless you have the financial mean to pay hundreds of dancers to do your own 'flashmob' and I think that T-Mobile have done a really good job of it! Check it out for yourself:

The 'live ad' is very entertaining but most of all it fits perfectly with their tagline "Life's for sharing" : this live dance is clearly the type of event you would video from your mobile phone and post on YouTube. Well done to them, great idea!

Day of the Dead Party at Chilango + Happy Halloween !

In case you hadn't noticed, Google was there to remind us that it's Halloween today, with a very cool logo apparently designed by Horror movie Director Wes Craven (thanks Eric for the info).

And in case you missed out completely on the Google logo, you may have spotted some Halloween emoticons appearing on Twitter ? The whole list of Halloween emoticons was available here. Is anyone aware of some other Twitter emoticons ?

So anyway, Halloween it was... So, Friday night I joined Niamh from Trusted Places and 40 other invitees, for the Day of the Dead Party at brand new Mexican restaurant Chilango. Check out the pictures from Tiki Chris and Mex on Flickr. What better place to celebrate Halloween than a Mexican restaurant ?! We even got a speech from the Mexican representative in London on how Mexican celebrates their dead over 2 days during Halloween. Tequila cocktails were flowing (courtesy of cocktail makers Wallid and Socrates lol), whilst we were nicely fed with some Burritos and Tacos in a very nice and colourful environment that is the restaurant...

I got to speak to Dan, one of the two founders of the restaurant and just loved the story of how him and his business partner Eric decided to create this restaurant. Both of them met whilst working at Skype a few years ago and realised they both loved Mexican food but couldn't find any good one in London. So they both gave up their job and embarked on a journey to finding out about Mexican food in Mexico city, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And here they are now, with a couple of restaurants, one in Islington and this brand new one Chilango, on Fleet Street. Check it out, it's well worth it !!!

Week #40

I can't believe I have only written a single post in week 40 ! If you've been reading this blog for quite a while, you know the rule was roughly one blog post per day... Obviously, I'm nowhere near this :-( But promise I'll get better !!! But before this is the case, here is a summary of week #40:

• Monday night, Revolution was having its relaunch party at Hoxton Pony, in Shoreditch, ie right in between my work place and my flat so no excuses for not going and mixing up with the digital people !!! And there, I finally managed to meet Vincent Thomé !


• Tuesday was Blogology night. BLogology ? What's the #$%#% is that again, you're wondering ? Blogology was the last of our London bloggers meetup, which was certainly by all account the best meetup ever... Smirnoff was sponsoring the event: 40 of us (bloggers) turned up at Diageo head office (Smirnoff parent company) for a cocktail/bloggers meetup. Very very impressive organisation : Smirnoff had designed a specific cocktail for each blogger, taking into account what his/her blog looked like and what he/she talked about on the blog ! My blog is called Buzz Attitude and because it's very pink I got a pink cocktail, with some spices for the "attitude". By all account, a very personalised marketing experience. Well done to Smirnoff and their agency (well done Rax !). And thanks again for sending us all the customised recipe by email !

• On Wednesday, Skype were launching their 4.0 Beta 2 for Windows so this was another excuse for a couple of drinks near Skype head offices ;-)

• Thursday ? I can't even remember what happened on Thursday - maybe it'll come back !!!

• Friday night was quiet on the social media scene so made the most of it to see some of my "non-social media" friends (yes, I still have friends who've never read a blog !!!). But Friday lunchtime was interesting: met with bloggers Cedric Chambaz and Andy Bargery for a cookery class over lunch, at l'Atelier des Chefs. Very nice lunch !!!

• Saturday was Social Media Camp in Euston. Had a fab day, attented lots of interesting sesssions about Social Media. Missed out on the socialising part as I had to leave at 5pm for a bloggers' event for Remington, one of our clients but altogether had a very interesting day. This was my first media camp and loved it. Thanks again Vero for the organisation, it was amazing - already looking forward to the next camp ! But I'll talk again about #smclondon 08 in a specific blog post.

• Sunday was... a bit of working, a bit of socialising with friends and a bit wishing it was not the winter already in London :-(

Week #39

The last few weeks have been so busy that I'm still not sure how I survived ;-) So here is a recap of week #39 :

• Monday turned out to be the day that Piers Fawkes, Founder and CEO of PSFK, was not only in town but was also organising for some drinks in Soho (Twitter is such a brilliant tool to find such info !). So yes, met Piers (I'm a huge fan of PSFK!), but also met Anjali, Amanda (@amandita) and a few other people...

• Tuesday night I finally managed to leave the office to meet Robert McIntosh (@thirstforwine) who had organised a bloggers wine tasting sessions with 2 nice guys from the Spanish wine industry (they use Twitter ! Check out @casavides). I'm glad I made it to Barcelona Tapas in Lime Street - discovered a few interesting stories about wine, drank some rosé for the first time in 10 years and like it, and found out about a Spanish drink called Sherry (loved it !). 

• Wednesday was supposed to be my "night off", ie the one I just crashed onto my sofa, away from the Social Media scene. Well, that was before we found out Loic Le Meur was in London... This last minute meetup at The Coach & Horses in Soho (why this place ?!) was pretty cool. Met quite a few people (including @solobasssteve @builtbydave @LloydDavis) and ended up doing a Seesmic video promoting the Twestival for @amandita ;-)

• Thursday ? Twestival of course ! 200 people from the Twitter community met up in a club off Trafalgar Square. A very very good night indeed (most of the social media industry was struggling on Friday am though lol). The event was even mentioned on the official Twitter blog and there are now talks about a Xmas Twestival, which would be fab ! If you couldn't make it on Thursday, pictures from the event are available on Flickr # Twestival. But if you missed out on the Twestival, you obviously also missed out on Ben Walker live performance of the "Twitter Song" ?! I save it for the end of my post - see below...

• Friday night, the Internet Minibar was taking place at Corbet Place. Stayed there for a few drinks with my colleague @peterparkes

Guess what I did on Saturday night ? I'll buy a beer to the first one who finds out!

ps: see the French translation of the Twitter Song here !

Just Do It !

I was really excited when I joined Nike+ "Team World" a couple of months ago: a team of 22 Londoners who originally come from one of the Nike+ Human Race participating countries. A real mix of culture and people from all over the world: Australia, Germany, China, UK, France, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and many more.

I was a little bit less excited when I sprained my ankle and struggled to simply walk...

I was really less excited when I found out I was being evicted because my landlord was no longer paying his mortgage, which meant finding another place to live didn't live me much time to train...

So needless to say, yesterday, at the Nike+ Human Race starting point, I was not as prepared as I wished...

But then the excitement of the race got me. 17,000 people wearing a red t-shirt in the Wembley arena, that's pretty awesome. Thousands of red t-shirt running together under the rain in North London, that's so much more overwhelming than some of the races I have done in the past where, yes there is a crowd, but you do not feel this "unity" that I felt yesterday, just because everyone was in red. A small detail but an important one ! Check it out for yourself with the videos I made on Qik

So this is it, it's over. I managed to achieve my goal which was to run the 10k under 58min (don't ask me why, my friend Marie-Anne set up the challenge for me !).

I have met a whole bunch of very nice people thanks to this Team World initiative from Nike. We'll have to catch up around some chineese dim sum as discussed or a BBQ. Also a big thank you to Simon W. from Nike for organising this and being patient with all of us.

And, a final thank you to my friend Victor who also ran the race, but in Paris and who was nice enough to send me a 10k music track without which I'm not sure I would have ran as fast. Thanks Victor !

Girl Geek Diner - 3 Year Anniversary

Last night Girl Geek Dinner was certainly exciting : not only they were celebrating their 3rd year anniversary but they were celebrating it a Google ! Well, in reality the only part of the Google Tower I saw was the Google Restaurant, but still, pretty exciting !!!

Unfortunately for me (I blame TFL), I arrived so late I missed out on all the networking part. Nevermind... I arrived just in time for a really good presentation on User Centric Design at Google and a panel on work-life balance, from a woman's perspective.

The presentation on User Centric Design was very interesting : the Google speaker explained how they used "persona" to design products (it reminded me of my "past" life in marketing). A "persona" is a character they create, they name and put a face on, to illustrate the potential user of a say product. The objective being in the end to deliver a product which does what the persona need. Interestingly enough, what that persona need is not for example to save a document, but rather to write a cv/a love letter. It's the end goal that matters, not the task to achieve it. Interesting.

The panel on work-life balance from a woman's perspective was equally interesting. Found out (scary) that the UK and Ireland have the longest hours worked each week in Europe... The example of work-life balance from a Google's perspective was amazing. We've all heard about the Google "way of life" but still... lots of company should use it as a benchmark to get the most productivity out of their staff. For them, work and their own life is mixed. They can turn up whenever in the office, and leave whenever, as long as the work is done, that's what matter. The Google employee mentioned she was planning a 10 days trip in NY, not as a holiday, but just so she could work from her parents' place and see them. Again, as long as the job is done, that's cool for Google. I'm pretty sure not all is perfect, as with any other companies there must be some drawbacks but still, a pretty inspiring way of managing its staff...

More reading about the Girl Geek Diner:

- Girl Geek Diner

- Anniemole

- Blogtillyoudrop

London Pillow Fight : a mix of feathers & snow !

It all started around 3pm in Leicester Square. Luckily for the few hundreds of pillow fighters there, it was nice and sunny... Well, at the beginning anyway... By 3:34pm, the pillow fight was still going on despite the snow storm which was starting ! A nice mix of feathers and snow to please all participants, adults, kids with their parents, but also passers-by. A lot of fun for this latest flash mob, which was not only taking place in London today but in most capitals in the world for the World Pillow Fight Day.

More pictures from the London Pillow Fight Day are available on my FLICKR.

2008 London Pillow Fight Leicester Square 1
envoyé par parcequemoiaussi

Global Pillow Fight Day : D-5

Ever heard of Pillow Fight ? The first one I went to, in Paris, back in May 2006, was great fun... Now it looks like things are turning global with a World Pillow Fight Day taking place next Saturday, the 22nd of March, in London, but also Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and many more including Beijing (!).

Fancy taking part in the event ? All you need to do is register on the mailing list here.

Backstage - Harvey Nichols, Foodmarket AW07

"Harvey Nichols brings you exclusive backstage footage from their Foodmarket AW07 catwalk show. Watch the industry's top models and creatives as you've never seen them before...". Watch the video, it's well worth it. British trash at its best !!!

Read the full story HERE.

Agency : DDB London

London Twitter / Blogger Film Preview : Juno

As I was attending the post-film-preview-meetup at the Union Square in Soho it suddently felt like a flashback of my first bloggers' parties in Paris in 2005. The UK is without any doubt well behind France in terms of online PR, however it is starting, slowly but surely. About 50 bloggers and "twitters" (twitterers" ?) were invited last night to attend the film preview of Juno at the Fox Building in Soho (nice for once to relax in a comfy cinema seat !!!!). Thanks Sizemore for the invite. All I can say is that the online PR is starting very nicely over here - a very good idea to invite people from Twitter actually (never saw that in France yet, have you ?). The movie ? Juno is the story of a "nonchalant cool teenage girl and her effortless attitude as she journeys through an emotional nine-month adventure into adulthood". A very very nice movie, the type of movie which makes you smile non-stop for 2 hours leaving you with a feel-good attitude. It's American but not in the way you expect American movies to be. It's rather like a French small budget movie actually. A couple of people compared the style of Juno to the brilliant movie Little Miss Sunshine. Altogether, a good night, a good movie, some nice people - can't wait for the next meetup ! Juno will be out in February 2008 in the UK but you can already watch the trailer here.

Meson don Felipe & Trusted Places

I have already talked about the website Trusted Places a while ago when they were mentioned by the Guardian as one of the top-30 startup to watch. So here I am again... Trusted Places have recently improved their website with some cool features:

* personal recommendations engine where Trusted Places proactively match their content to members' tastes from the "taste matcher".
* local experts program: key members are identified and nominated by the community based on the content they create

Have a look at the new look and find a place you really fancy ! I found a Spanish restaurant called Meson don Felipe on their website last night and had a really pleasant evening with some friends.

Pillow Fight - anyone interested ?

Recommandé par des Influenceurs

Pillow Fight ? Never heard of it ? It's a flashmob. People know at the last minute where is the meetup point, they all bring a feather pillow, wait for the whistle to launch the event and... fight with feathers... Lots of fun!

I filmed this video below at the first "Pillow Fight Paris" in may 2006 and now the Parisian team behind the event is getting ready for the 2007 edition of the Pillow Fight, I wonder whether some Londoners would be interested in doing the same over here ???

Pillow Fight Paris 3
envoyé par parcequemoiaussi

Let me know if you fancy organising a London Pillow Fight !

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Celebrate the new DatingDirect.com

If I say "Same Game, New Rules", that should remind you of something ? Meetic maybe ? Yes, it's the same strapline for both Meetic and DatingDirect.com and there is a simple reason for that. The French online dating company Meetic bought the UK DatingDirect at the beginning of 2007

Anyhow, you might remember the brilliant viral campaign that Meetic set up to launch its new redesigned website in Holland ? Well, the UK is set to have something similar apparently and Marc Simoncini, Meetic CEO is due to unveil them on the 26th of September, at London's trendy Amika.

Can't wait for the "VIP"party (to which I am invited through a work relation). In meantime, you can check out the new designed DatingDirect website HERE... Have fun !

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London Blog Drink - a month to go !

Recommandé par des Influenceurs

They're definitely coming:
Myself ;o)
Sanciaa
Raph
Semiot

They might be coming :
Vincent
Technokitten
DeirdreM
Cubic Garden
Rebonuk
AlexCraxton
Jim Callender
James Mitchell
jhohil
Mike Atherton
Darren Straight

And some more of you whose blog I cannot find or who haven't registered yet on Upcoming Events (Cedric, are you coming ?).
Altogether it looks like about 20 people seem interested. What about you ?

Nike+ Bloggers' Summer Run - London vs. Paris ?

This is the kind of User-Generated-Content that all brands dream about...

Victor has set up a Nike+ Bloggers' Summer Run challenge, starting on the 23rd of July and running for 45 days.

Two winners at the end: 1) the fastest one over those 45 days and 2) the one who will have run the most miles...



Shall we do a London bloggers vs. Parisian bloggers ? Who's in London and want to participate ?

Win a trip to London

Fancy visiting London for a weekend ? Well is here your chance to test out your level of English and maybe win a trip in London.

Damien is reporting that "Connecting English" is offering one lucky winner a trip in the British capital.

Good luck to you all !

The test Parlez Vous Anglais is HERE.

Le Cool London

Le Cool London is a free, weekly cultural agenda and alternative city guide.

Have a look at it if you're stuck -or not- for some ideas about what to do in the city - lots of good stuff !

It's also available for Barcelona, Madrid, Lisboa, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Milano and Roma (HERE).