Of course he could. And it’s been fun to play along – getting involved in the voting, retweeting his exploits and asking my network to see if anyone could help progress his journey.

From an observers pov, the only way I can describe the experience of re-living the travelling exploits of someone I’ve never met before is that it is like watching a reality TV show: mildly entertaining, brief enough to encourage me to keep an interested eye on proceedings, but distanced enough for me to step away if things got too tough (which fortunately they never did).

Did we learn anything new? Not really. For generations, the capacity of a community to draw together to support the needs of an individual or individuals has been well documented (although usually for more charitable causes). In my Lloyds TSB days, one of the ‘negotiating skills’ tests for Senior Management was whether you could travel from London to a meeting point in Europe (that was determined on the day of departure) with no cash. And the truth is, if the need and determination is there, most things are usually achievable.

I suppose for me the big thing about this experiment is that it is testament to the prevalence of real-time community decision making. In older times, the proof of the honesty of intent would have come from sealed letters from respected individuals – I’m thinking Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s A Time of Gifts here; over the past 30 days this validation has come from Twitter users.

The difference for me is that in older times, the journey would have taken much longer and therefore the impact that such an activity would have had on the people he would have met and the communities he stayed with would have been deeper and more longer lasting. I’ve no doubt that the Twitchiker had an impact, but I can’t see the ramifications of that impact lasting well beyond this year.

At least until the book comes out…

Obama and the power of Facebook (http://my.barackobama.com)

The Barack story is interesting, because there is a parallel with the Conservative rise to power of the early 70s. In both cases, the political parties/candidates recognized the power of new channels to activate and capture the attention of previously hard to reach candidates. In the 1970s the channel was TV; in the case of Obama it was the internet.

There is a lot of material about the Obama campaign (I’ve included two links below), but for me one of the most interesting and unique features was its use of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Chris Hughes, the founder of Facebook, was brought onto the Obama team and immediately set about activating a whole tranche of activities, run by engaged supporters. Some of the stats have been included below:

·         More than 1.5 million people visited the mybarackobama website and organized themselves into 35,000 separate groups

·         Over 150,000 meetings and events were organized during the 21 months of Obama’s presidential campaign

·         Supporters bombarded YouTube with videos of his speeches to boost his online presence

·         The campaign raised over $600m in donations from 3million people, many of whom contributed online

·         When the Republicans started the viral rumour mill, the Obama camp used the internet to counter the various rumours that were being aired.

Simon Rosenberg, who worked on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, said: “He’s run a campaign where he’s used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he’s reinvented the way campaigns are run. Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multinational corporation versus a non-profit organisation.”

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24610850-5018194,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7412045.stm

Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton

In the run up to Sunday’s Grand Prix, competitive fervor was at an all time high. For those of who were either dead or simply don’t care the premise was this. Felipe Mass, racing on home turf, needed to come 1^st or 2^nd and needed Hamilton to come 6^th or 7^th respectively to win the grand prix. If Hamilton came 5^th or higher he would automatically win. Added to this, Fernando Alonso, who had very public spats with Hamilton last year, had implied in press conferences that he might try to assist Massa (or at the very least hinder Hamilton). Man vs. boy; Spain vs. England; black vs. white. Take your pick – there were plenty of angles to choose from.

In the pique of nationalistic fervor, TBWA, an Omnicom agency created a site called Pincha La Rueda de Hamilton. The site, which translated means “Burst Hamilton’s Tyre”, invited visitors to place a virtual nail on the track at Interlagos, the setting for Sunday’s title showdown with Felipe Massa in the Brazil Grand Prix.

The site was closed down after hundreds of abusive messages were posted, some of which referred to Hamilton as a “half-breed” and others which used the n-word. It’s a classic campaign of an organisation creating something and then foolishly not monitoring how it gets used.

Now let’s be clear – this isn’t the first time that a voodoo style campaign has been created; in the most recent football world cup there were sites where you could stab effigies of key players with a pin in an attempt to curse them prior to a game. It isn’t even the first time that an agency has used the web to push the boundaries of acceptable marketing behaviour. The problem here was that the agency didn’t respond immediately when offensive comments started to get published and when Lewis won the championship, the story became incredibly newsworthy.

There is only one fitting epithet to this story…