Why buy a lottery ticket if Twitter and Sixth Story can do it for you?

UK creative agency Sixth Story has come up with a different approach to social media by promising to share in their ‘Lotto win’ with anybody who engages with them on Twitter.

All ‘Tweeps’ have to do is RT @sixth_story including an image and using the hash tag #comingupsixes and they’ll be in it to win it. Naturally, the agency haven’t yet won the lottery… a fact that did take this writer an inordinate amount of time to work out.

Still, they did get my attention and if they do win the lottery I’ll be biggest twit in town. It will be interesting to see if such a campaign goes viral, but maybe I’ll leave the penultimate word to Sixth Story who sent this to me in an email:

“We want to come up with more fun campaign ideas like this that small businesses can “DIY” and drive the local economy. Maybe we’ll do a series over the next year, something to do with the Olympics… ideas come from anywhere!”

That’s true, ideas come from anywhere… more’s the pity.

DJs and musicians look beyond Facebook for Likes

* This is a guest blog by DJ, music producer and digital advertiser Tim Healey who tweets at @timhealey and whose official Facebook page is here

It came to a head on holiday about a year ago. I was confronted by my wife. I had been having an affair. A casual relationship and furtive interaction had become something sinister and all-consuming. She was right, time needed to be called. It was her and our girls… or Facebook.

She had busted me in beautiful Tegernsee, Germany, as I stood atop a sun-drenched snow-covered mountain. Instead of thinking “This is jaw-droppingly beautiful” or “Let’s make a snowman with the children”, my only thoughts were: “My Facebook fans will love this view of the valley and will generate loads of comments”. Continue reading

Is social capital the new currency or a pile of Somaliland shillings?

Last summer I had an adventure and flew to Addis Ababa from Mumbai and then travelled through Ethiopia on African buses to the Red Sea and spent a week in Somaliland on the way. Right up there with the best of life.

I had to hire a soldier for $15 per day, had a few problems with child-soldiers off their tits on qat (a masticated opiate), saw amazing cave drawings at Las Keel, nearly lost a finger when ‘my’ soldier macheted a fruit melon and had my first ‘dry-swim’ in the Gulf of Aden, in temperatures of 50°C. Continue reading