It’s an exciting day for the 33 Digital team. After launching on 7th May 2009 and spending our first nine months in 33 Dallington Street with Hotwire, we’ve reached the point where we need more space to grow. We’ve found a home to call our own and today… we’re moving.

[our new digs]

Our new headquarters are on Clerkenwell Green in London. We are looking forward to having oodles of open space to expand (our first nine months as an agency have been kind on us - we’ve grown in every way a company can). All of us will miss the Hotwire team that we have been part of (sob!). And most of us will be looking forward to frequenting the new luxury of having our own coffee bar on-site.

Thank you everyone for your support so far. Look out for our 1 year birthday celebrations which will be coming up in May.

You can follow our move on our Flickr stream and on Twitter.

[pic courtesy of dylans]

[Updated - email added for private comments - details below]

After my stint presenting the 33 Digital bit of Social Media Week last week, I got into two separate conversations about social media monitoring tools for teams.

Specifically, people in large organisations are looking for a killer product with good workflow management. They’re big enough to need whole teams of people to share the duty of responding to customers via social media. An essential feature is the ability to assign ownership when there’s follow-up required.

One person shared their current shortlist: SM2, CoTweet and truPulse were all being considered.

Reasons for growing demand?

• As soon as different work patterns and physical sites are involved you’ll need a system that can deliver good results for your customers.
• Good companies appreciate how important social media is for ongoing relationships, rather than looking to simply milk the platforms for marketing promotions. With my ‘consumer’ hat on, I’m happy because we use social media to share and solve problems, not listen to a sales pitch.

To read the full blog post click here

This morning we played our part in Social Media Week, having been asked to host one of the breakfast briefings. We took the opportunity to talk about the way we have seen PR evolve in the social media ecosystem and share some experiences along the way.

We just wanted to take an opportunity to say thanks to everyone who came and took part. And dig into some of the discussions that took place around the future of PR and social media.

Some of the points brought up by the group:

• How online communities will respond to increasing brand activity. Opt in, opt out, or desert the whole network?
• How B2B was an early adopter of social media for internal and external communications
• How do brands track the value of social media engagement? Dashboards versus ‘management accounts’ style information
• How often does a digital PR agency that does social media campaigns get to influence day to day comms? (as much as most PR agencies! So a lot)

What now remains to be seen is whether some of the predictions put forward around the room will become a reality sooner rather than later. Anybody with views on some of our pet areas of social TV or the internet (or social network) of things should tell us below in the comments box.

Details went up this week online about the events coming up in the London arm of  Social Media Week.

33 Digital is hosting a  breakfast in our digs in Clerkenwell, London. It’s going to be on the morning of 4th February and the agenda’s up on the Social Media Week site. It’s free to attend, all you need to do is head over to the booking page here.

We so wish we had a concorde or teleporter or something, because the events going on around the world look truly awesome. Highlights so far in our humble opinion are Seth Godin’s talk on Thursday morning in New York, Speed’s welcome, which is on at the same time as ours in London, and Pepsi’s talk on social media and branding in New York on the Monday.

If you’re in the UK, check out the barcamps, tweetups and other goings-on for Social Media Week at their site.

International brands are always looking for local user numbers for online communities. And so up to date numbers are useful to remember.

ReadWriteWeb has just linked to a new review by Sysomos of Twitter users that breaks down the biggest countries on Twitter based by user numbers and tweet volume.

Interesting to note that countries you wouldn’t expect to see in the top 10 such as Indonesia and India have replaced historically larger ones on social media such as France and Spain.

The full Symosos Twitter report is available here if you’d like to see it.

It appears the usefulness of Twitter for reporters knows no bounds. News has reached us this evening that one news organisation is loading the Twitter terminal Tweetdeck on to all staff machines.

Tweetdeck is a great tool and a number of people I work with use it. I have used it a lot too. It’s reported to be the most popular Twitter app. But I personally dislike it and think it would be a bad idea to make an entire company, large or small, use it as an interface to Twitter. Here’s why.

First, why it’s a bad idea to blanket install Tweetdeck (this isn’t a criticism of Tweetdeck, it’s just the reality that the Tweetdeck experience is not for everyone):

Twitter, is a personal thing. To get someone to use it, it has to fit in with their ways of using technology. When we are training businesses on how to get the most out of social media you see this become apparent very quickly. Everyone likes to use and get the most out of the social web in different ways. Some prefer the raw web experience, some prefer mobile. Then some like apps, others like terminals (Seesmic is another popular version). Some use SMS. To lean entirely on one interface will alienate many users who would see appeal in others. Yes it will be quicker to go one size fits all, rather than training a workforce on various different ways of using Twitter, but it could miss the real value that can be created when you manage to create a completely engaged team.

Secondly, the reasons I personally don’t like it:

To read the full blog post click here

We had the pleasure of listening to a talk by George Magnus the other day on the impact on society, the economy and community of our aging civilisation. George is the chap who is widely acknowledged for predicting that the sub-prime crash would lead to a global recession, and is senior economic adviser to UBS. His book is called The Age of Aging.

Amongst the chat were these fascinating factiods: there are more over-65s than under 16s in the UK for the first time, over the next 10-15 years one quarter of the UK population will be over 65, half of all babies in the UK born since 2000 may live to be 100. This all means the economy and society will warp like never before. Housing crashes, pressure to employ a broader workforce, more saving, less spending, and less baby-making.

And of particular interest to us - how future generations will literally evolve from the web. “If there are no other kids around the home, who will children learn from in the future? Facebook?” said Magnus…

To read the full blog post click here

Twitter is in the process of adding an official ‘retweet’ option to its service.

It’s very early days yet - most people haven’t received the option, including some in the 33 office - but it’s already created a lot of debate (TechCrunch and PC Mag for example) because it’s fundamentally different from the organic way that the community has popularised retweets

How-to retweet (before and after)

Originally, a manual retweet or one by a Twitter client, will copy the whole tweet and add the phrase “RT @name” at the beginning of the tweet*. They also let you add commentary to the tweet if you’d like to add your own perspective.

The new approach won’t let you edit a Tweet. Instead, the whole message will be pushed verbatim into your follower’s stream.

The original approach won’t be outlawed but is likely to shrink or disappear as more clients adopt the new feature.

Why is retweet being changed?

There are many reasons that Ev Williams explains on his blog but here are a couple:

1. To reduce noise, you’ll only ever see a retweeted message once. This will keep your stream a little quieter, but sounds like it will have a negative impact on the way we currently gauge the importance of a message that is popular and being retweeted. Noise can be distracting but in case of breaking events, it can also be an important sign to take notice.

2. You’ll be able to hide retweets from people. For example, if I only wanted to see Dom’s personally authored tweets then I could hide his retweets.

Our initial reaction…

To read the full blog post click here

In London today the second Media140 event took place. We were kind enough to have been asked to speak at it and needless to say stuck around for most of the day to learn some lessons from social media veterans in attendance too. (here we are quoted in The Guardian’s write-up)

Amongst the presenters were people from Red Bull, Innocent, Virgin Trains, and the agencies of Doritos and Compare the Meerkat. It was a good crowd, and some entertaining content to boot.

Our panel has already been written up by Adam Tinworth, and some commenters had a few things to say as well. It was about how the people charged with social media engagement can get tone of voice, personality and culture right, for the medium and the brand.

What we thought were the most entertaining sessions came from Mindshare and Innocent… To read the full blog post click here

At 33 Digital Towers, we’re always playing with the next big things on the web, looking for the latest tools and services that might add value for our clients and eventually become an integral part of the Digital PR we do every day.

One of the services that has caught our eye recently is foursquare. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, foursquare is all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. As 33 Digital’s Drew Benvie describes it, “foursquare is a new social networking application that has been getting the early adopters spending a little time away from Twitter of late. It mixes microblogging (like Twitter), location-based check-ins (like Dopplr) and adds a layer of game theory, like unlocking prizes an badges for certain achievements.” Responses to his post from early adopters make foursquare out to be the next new app to give Twitter a run for its money.

To play, you need to tell foursquare where you are, so they can tell you which of your friends are nearby. It’s called “checking-in” and you can check-in from a park, bar, museum, restaurant, whatever. Every check-in earns you points and interesting check-ins earn you badges. The more you explore, the more you unlock – making it a compelling reason to keep checking in and unlocking new badges.

To read the full blog post click here