By Beth Carroll

This morning I was lucky enough to be invited to the launch of a new partnership between Foursquare and History Channel – the first of its kind in the UK.

How does it work?

The premise is simple, when foursquare fans check-in to one of over 600 sites they will now find quirky and interesting historical tips about their location. Badge collectors will be pleased to know that checking-in four times to any of the 600 sites will unlock a limited edition badge.

The campaign currently involves 20 partner sites including The Tower of London, HMS Belfast, Shakespeare’s Globe and The Clink museum. These partner attractions will reward users for checking-in through a number of exclusive special offers that are only available through foursquare.

You can view a full list of the tips and the places you will find them on History Channel’s Foursquare profile.

What are they trying to achieve?

The team at History Channel explained the focus of the campaign is to help Londoners to uncover more and more of their city. For example, when I checked in at the event this morning at Tower of London, I received the tip ‘From 1235 until 1835, the monarch’s personal zoo was kept at the Tower and it included many exotic animals given as presents by other monarchs, including polar bears, leopards and elephants.’ Interesting stuff!

This certainly marks the beginning of new partnership opportunities with Foursquare – it will be interesting to see which brands follow suit.

A handy video

Not sure how Foursquare works? Here’s a handy video they showed at the event this morning:

Some examples

Some more fun tips you might now find on Foursquare:

• Savoy Street – This is the only street in the UK where you drive on the right. The rule dates back to the days of hansom cabs, dropping off their privileged guests at the Savoy Hotel.
• The London Stone – this simple rock on 111 Cannon Street, now lying in the wall of a Chinese bank, was once the most famous landmark in the city. Its origins are lost in legend and myth, but it was considered the city’s symbolic heart.
• The Dove – Situated at 19 Upper Mall in Hammersmith, this cosy riverside pub dates back to the 16th century, and boasts the smallest bar in England – 4 foot 2 inches by 7 foot 10 inches.
• The Thames Whale – In 2006, Britain was captivated by the fate of a 19 foot bottlenose whale that swam up the Thames and became stranded here. Sadly, the whale died and its skeleton is now in the Natural History Museum.

The future?

What’s the future for Foursquare? Will this be a turning point that sets Foursquare apart from Facebook Places? Share your view in the comments box below.

If you’ve been hiding under in bed this month to avoid the snow, it’s the only way you will have missed the UK’s biggest social secret Santa!

After having to clamp my hands over my mouth for a whole month, I can now reveal the #SoCol Secret Santa givers.

From a mini Christmas tree to Facebook ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ stamps, the gifts have certainly been creative. To see a selection of the best, visit our Facebook page or scroll to the bottom of this post. Got one to add? Just send us a pic on Twitter and we’ll upload it to the Facebook album.

Get scanning for your name and don’t forget to thank your giver. To find them on Twitter, just click on their name.

Drum roll please…

The Social Collective Secret Santa givers

Lewis Shields gave to Emily Leary
Katie Colbourne gave to Lewis Shields
Emily Leary gave to Katie Colbourne
Michelle Rodger gave to Adam Vincenzini
Joy McCarthy gave to Michelle Rodger
Dirk Singer gave to Joy McCarthy
Adam Vincenzini gave to Dirk Singer
Mark Jennings gave to Fred Caballero
Fred Caballero gave to Sophy Norris
Sophy Norris gave to Mark Jennings
Julien Fourgeaud gave to Joanna Halton
Charlotte Clark gave to Julien Fourgeaud
Joanna Halton gave to Charlotte Clark
Michelle Plett gave to Nicky Fraser
Nicky Fraser gave to Steve Ward
Steve Ward gave to Michelle Plett
Anne Smart gave to Stuart Witts
Stuart Witts gave to Charlotte Benditt
Charlotte Benditt gave to Anne Smart
Anne Carr gave to Irene Poon
Irene Poon gave to Gillian Dick
Gillian Dick gave to Anne Carr
Emma Mykytyn gave to Kate Spiers
Kate Spiers gave to Sharron Clews
Sharron Clews gave to Emma Mykytyn
Rhianon Stevens gave to Vicki Maggs
Vicki Maggs gave to Colin Wren
Colin Wren gave to Rhianon Stevens
Liz McNaulty gave to Laura Murphy
Laura Murphy gave to Liz McNaulty

A huge thanks to all those who took part.

We hope you also enjoyed the little extra gift we sent to each giver. If you didn’t take part and want to get your paws on a limited edition #SoCol badge, we have a few left so will give them out on a first come first served basis.

Happy Christmas!

The Social Collective Secret Santa
By Social Collective  |  View on Facebook

Beth, of the #SoCol awesome foursome

PS If your gift has not yet arrived, let us know and we will check with your giver. A number of gift have been delayed in transit by the snow.

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There’s been some fantastic, measured yet insightful 2010 round up posts going around this week. And more importantly it’s great to see the intelligent thinking that’s been going in to 2011 planning and predictions this month.

But folks, it’s also December, the month of Santa, mulled wine and frivolity. So, for our end of year round up post, we’ve selected our favourite fixes of festive fun from across the social web.

Our Top Five Fixes of Festive Fun

1. The digital nativity – This has probably already graced your screens but it’s worth another view. Watch the tale of the nativity be mapped out in a fast paced overlay of social screen shots.

2. Santa, the brand – Does what it says on the tin. Remember, Santa is fond of children. Santa is not a bit creepy. Nice work Quietroom.

3. 12 days of social Christmas – A fresh take on the traditional theme tune of Christmas. Stay alert and watch out for the five angry birds!

4. Fresh Networks social Santas – What better way to celebrate Christmas, while amusing others, than renting Borris bikes and Santa suits then attempting some synchronised cycling?

5. 1000 Heads Custom Cracker – You’ve got to admire the festive spirit of the guys over at 1000 Heads. A small team locked themselves in a room for a day to create custom jokes for their loyal followers. This was the gem I received:
“Santa hires elves b/c orcs stink, there aren’t enough dwarves & pixies haven’t done anything decent since 1991.”

Bonus: Essential Christmas – It would be slightly biased to include this in the official list but a Christmas fist bump should also be delivered to Felix and the guys at Essential, well, just for the tights really.

Got any Christmas corkers that shine brighter than these? Has your agency come up with a quirky alternative to the Christmas card this year? Share yours in the comments box below.

Beth, of the #SoCol awesome foursome

The mulled wine is a brewing and Rudolph has been polishing his nose but what will you be getting in your stocking this year?

For a special Christmas treat, your Social Collective team has joined forces with Santa to bring you The Official SoCol Secret Santa.

The premise is simple:

• Register your interest by leaving your Twitter handle in the comments box below or simply tweet ‘I’m taking part in the #SoCol #SecretSanta http://ow.ly/3cnZa‘
• We will make sure we’re following you from the @SoCollective Twitter account and invite you to DM us your postal address and telephone number – don’t forget to follow us back or we can’t send you details
• Once you’ve signed up we will send you your Secret Santa contact details
• Head to the shops and pick your present. Try to keep the cost between £5 and £10.
• Post your gift and wait patiently for yours to arrive
• Once the elves have dropped off your bounty, share a picture of your pressie on Twitter using #SoCol and see if you can guess who it’s from
• We will reveal the Secret Santas on Christmas eve along with a selection of the best pictures (but of course, not your contact details)

So let’s get giving and make a fellow Twitter friend’s Christmas sparkle.

Who knows what Santa will send through your chimney!

Seasons greetings from the #SoCol awesome foursome, Beth, Barry, felix and Simon.

A note from your organisers: This is for fun not profit. Your contact details will only be passed on to your Secret Santa and not used for any marketing purposes.

The latest in our guest blog series is bought to you by Tom Mason, aka @totmac.

Is your business scared of its employees?
By Tom Mason

The majority of businesses are scared of their staff. More specifically, the majority of businesses are scared of what their staff have to say online. And they’re not having any of it.

A global study from Perdue University found that 81% of businesses restricted the use of at least one social network. Meanwhile, 13% of organisations had an umbrella ban on a host of sites, including Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Mail. You can understand why: in 2009, employees spent 40 minutes every week browsing updates and photos from their friends while sitting at their desks.

But companies are missing an opportunity here. By blocking employee access to social networking sites they are losing out.
An engaged employee can be a powerful company advocate; an informed member of the team keen to share news about their projects to friends and followers. Indeed, an army of passionate bloggers and tweeters can work alongside a traditional marketing strategy, spreading brand awareness and encouraging lead generation. It isn’t as if the majority of employees don’t already have a social media presence.

And by giving staff the ability to tweet at their desks, you’re actively encouraging them to talk about their day job. An engaged online workforce, co-operating with a digital marketing strategy, can lend a passionate and personal voice to the corporate megaphone. And often, that individual presence can be a lot more effective as a brand advocate that an official account, if only for the fact that people tend to be more trusting of a Twitter account with a face and a forename.

But this isn’t to say that companies aren’t aware of their staff on social networks. Far from it. According to a survey by CareerBuilder.co.uk, 48% of UK companies monitor their employees’ use of social media, both in and outside the office. More worryingly, 28% of firms have fired staff because of something they’ve posted on Twitter or Facebook. Reasons given for these dismissals include negative comments about the company or its employees, unprofessional behaviour and sharing confidential information.

The crux of the issue here is that staff are going to use social media regardless of whether access is available during office hours or not. And it is the company’s responsibility to educate staff on what they can, and cannot, say online. I’m not referring to bad grammar or pictures of a Friday night drink here, but rather confidential information which breaches contracts. The BBC, Kodak and Intel have all adopted sensible policies for the usage of Twitter et al. at work, advising employees on how to avoid any potential pitfalls and more organisations need to follow suit. It’s time for companies to stop being scared of their staff.

This was a guest post by Tom Mason. Tom is the social media manager for Manchester marketing agency Delineo. You can follow Delineo on Twitter here.

View other recent posts in our guest blog series:

Reaping the social harvest by Kate Spiers

The web might be dead, so what does this mean for our clients… by Andrew Davison

“The Talk” by Max Tatton-Brown

Sshhhh; Social Media is a Feminine Model by Michelle Rodger

Social Media is Dead; Long Live Social CRM by Eric Swain

There are two things I love more than anything else about Twitter; the debates and the banter.

Throw out an issue and you’ll find an instant audience ready to share their pearls of wisdom. One of the only frustrations is the lack of structure to these debates. I’m sure you have all spotted a great conversation that you missed because you were in a meeting or just came to the table a little too late.

With this in mind, Paul Sutton and I have set up The Big Tweet Off.

We will be bringing you weekly sessions where you can debate the current hot topics, lead by two weekly guests with contrary view points. You’ll all be invited to join in and at the end of each session we’ll vote to see who’s convinced the masses and who’s going home with their tail in between their legs.

What’s the point?

a) To provide an informal discussion forum for the hot industry topics

b) To drive the social media agenda forward

c) To have fun

If you want to join in, head to The Big Tweet Off Posterous account for more details and follow @TheBigTweetOff on Twitter. Make sure you keep an eye on #bigtweetoff.

Paul and I will be announcing the first Tweet Off topic and contenders in advance of the first weekly Tweet Off, which will be held on Thursday, 4 November 2010.

Dust off your fighting gloves and start training. The Big Tweet Off is on!

Beth of the #SoCol awesome foursome

We thought it would be fun to run the #SoCol Conf’s tweet transcript through Wordle… This is what it came up with (click to make full screen)

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Our first Social Collective conference took place on 30 September 2010. Since the big day, we’ve been keeping an eye on the great posts the speakers inspired and are trying to pull together a selection of the reviews from across the blogosphere.

Paul Sutton of Bottle PR has also been kind enough to pen his own review, covering his personal highlights:

Why Social Collective Blew My Mind
By Paul Sutton

There are lots of social media conferences around. Judging from the number of invitations I get, I could probably go to at least one every single week. But despite the topic area being so cutting edge, many of the line ups looked tired and uninspiring. So when I first heard about Social Collective I was excited by the concept; a social communications conference that was focused on the big strategic questions, not the tactical outputs. I could very easily have been disappointed come 30th September.

I’m delighted to say that I wasn’t and that, if anything, Social Collective exceeded my expectations. Every speaker offered something new and insightful on a wide range of topics, from the evolution of online communications to the advancement of social technologies to predictions for what’s to come in 2011. From experience, I’d expect to learn or take something away from maybe three out of a typical day’s eight sessions. But with Social Collective there was something in every single presentation and it’s not overstating the case to say that I’d gladly sit through half of the sessions all over again. They were thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring in equal measure.

Indeed, such was the day’s impact on me that the first thing I did the following day was to blog the key things that I took away from the day. The conference gave me fresh thoughts and new directions, and it gave me back some of the confidence and belief in the social web that I had, admittedly, been lacking over the previous few weeks. It was a great opportunity to (finally) meet some of the people with whom I have daily contact on Twitter, and it introduced me to others. And, perhaps beyond anything else, it prompted ideas and insights that I was able to report back to BOTTLE PR that will have a direct impact on the way we do things. In fact, I’ve already held a company training session to impart some of my new knowledge.

So hats off to the Social Collective crew for putting together such a fantastic group of speakers and topics. I for one will be keeping a close eye on dates for 2011!

Read Paul’s extended review on his own blog, The Social Web, here.

Find out more about Paul here.

Some other view points

We would love to pull together all your Social Collective inspired posts. Here are just a handful of highlights from across the web. If you would like us to add yours to the list pop it as a comment below or send it to @SoCollective via Twitter.

A view from one of our organisers Felix Hemsley

Danny Whitehouse gives his view from the audience

Paul Armstrong follows up on the #SoTech panel

Brendan Cooper delves in to Brad Little’s talk

Laura McBeth takes inspiration from the day

We were privilaged enough to have the first look at the results from CNN’s global social media research at Social Collective conference on 30 September 2010. Our guest blogger Gemma Went put together a great overview on the day which can be viewed here.

For those who were unable to attend, CNN has put together it’s own summary of the results, which can be viewed here. This includes the video shown at Social Collective.

The key findings:

1. The study aimed to measure emotional engagement associated with online news sharing. The results showed a “halo effect” of substantially higher engagement with “recommended” news content and embedded advertising, as opposed to “randomly” consumed content and advertising.

2. The overall uplift for brands who advertise around stories recommended in social media is significant. The global online survey showed that people who received news content from a friend or associate via social media, were 19% more likely to recommend the brand that advertised around that story to others and 27% more likely to favour that brand themselves.

3. More specifically, POWNAR examined case studies including one where a major European tourism board reported notably stronger campaign cut-through with aided ad re-call up 50% and brand favourability up 32% after advertising around news that was shared in social media.

4. The results from POWNAR also showed that video pre-roll advertising had overall a superior branding effect when appearing around news content shared in social media, in comparison to display banner advertising.

Our Social Collective speaker, Didier Mormesse, Senior Vice President at CNN International, commented: “The commerciality of the social media space is fast becoming apparent and this study means that for the first time, we are able to substantiate the value of shared news from an advertising perspective.”

Some juicy stats:

What makes news “shareable”?

POWNAR identified a three tiered semiotic wheel that guides sharing patterns; comprising the three types of codes of narrative, theme and underlying message. For narrative, 65% of shared content comprises ongoing stories, 19% comprises breaking news and 16% of content falls into the “quirky or funny” category. In terms of theme, news recommendation is driven by content that is visually spectacular, stories about science and technology, human interest stories and money-related stories. The majority of stories being shared carry an underlying message of the “sharer” imparting knowledge.

Who is doing the sharing?

The 80/20 rule applies to the findings. 27% of all frequent sharers* account for 87% of all news stories shared. The average global user shares 13 stories per week and receives 26 stories through shared social media links or emails.

Which platforms dominate?

In peer-to-peer communication, 43% of news sharing comes from social media networks and tools e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, followed by email (30%), SMS (15%) and IM (12%).

How does news travel?

Beth, of the #SoCol awesome foursome