The prize was a rather awesome daytrip to London for our motley crew for their first ever meet up and a day spent…. well basically trying to beat the hell out of each other (in the gaming sense).   For me this was particularly great as one member of the #twitclan crew (Matt Jones) I had been chatting with online for years but never met.

Anyway.  The designated day arrived (July 31st) and 11 disparate / desperate souls trudged to the Hospital Club in London’s Covent Garden where Phil & Seamus greeted us with a private cinema, an Xbox, a table straining under the weight of geeks elixir (coffee) and muffins a plenty.

I’ll admit to not being the first in, so found a few of our clan busily shooting each other in a round of 4-up Modern Warfare 2 but rather quickly everyone arrived and got stuck in.

The rest of the morning was spent glued to the gorgeous screen trying to knock of plenty of multi-player co-op games that we could.  From memory we played Modern Warfare 2, FIFA 2010 and Split/Second pre lunch.

Talking of lunch it was an almost perfect (there was an optional salad) gamers meal of silly-fat burgers, fries and beer just in time for a movie.

Our choice was simple – Zombieland, and timed to throw up the first decent zombie chomp seen right when those burgers got bitten in to.  Nice.

Post lunch/movie it was more of the same.  James Whatley had brought along his long lost youth in the shape of Street Fighter 4 (I think) and proceeded to demonstrate just why he is known as being a demon texter – those fingers move too damn fast for someone of his age.  Not wanting to brag but I did kick his butt when it got to my turn, and the reason for not wanting to brag…. I had no idea what I was doing.  None.  Literally I was hitting any button, hanging on and hoping for the best, a tactic to which it appears there is little defense.  Good fun but it didn’t take long for the group to revert to our mainstay, MW2.

When 6 pm finally came around and the cinema had to be handed back for “proper things like movies” friendships had been renewed, strengthen and plenty of male back slapping performed.  Clan photos were taken (although suspiciously few have appeared online for me to post) and rather delightfully Phil presented me with a shiny new toy in the form of the top end Windows Mobile 6.5 phone – the HTC HD2 which as anyone so inclined knows is a tidy piece of kit sporting a massive 4.3 inch WVGA screen and all that goodness one expects from a serious smartphone.

Unfortunately we lost a couple of members straight after but needless to say pubs and bars were patronised and despite best efforts we failed dismaly to cause Matt & Paul to miss their train North options.  A blinding day of fun which will make all those online only evening sessions just that little more special.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us to win, Microsoft for stumping up a great prize day, Phil & Seamus for organising the whole thing and most of all to the #twitclan for rocking up and being good mates.

Roll Call – (the only photo I could find and not a smiley one):

Back row – Richard Hyndman, Terence Eden, Craig Franks, Nick Butler

Front row – James Whatley, Matt Jones, Abul Hussain, Kip Hakes, Paul Smyth, Barney Craggs (me) & Chris Westall

Well, today another photo has emerged that also looks decidedly odd (the original is here).

All looks fairly innocuous but there are a few bits out of place.

1. The control tower top left?  It would be over 200 feet tall to be up there surely?

2. The footwell light bottom right is a totally different colour to the surrounding sea.

3. A close look at the status screens shows doors and ramps as being open – at this height, really? (unfortunately I don’t know enough about the instruments to delve further).

4. That’s a very odd blur below ship in left hand windscreen – not at all like a smear on the screen.

BUT the best thing is the guy on the left has his fingers crossed.  Was it trepidation at the pending take-off (come on we all know this was pre-flight) or is he a BP exec just hoping people won’t notice?

Now of course there may well be plenty of image experts out there who will be able to prove this is an original and un-doctored image, BP may even come out fighting but honestly given their recent muppetry just how much do you trust the image above?

For those that follow me on Twitter I hereby formally apologise for bombarding your stream with assorted #mkop-twitclan messages all last week.  But I have a story to tell which hopefully may cut me some slack.

It’s June 4th and I received heads up that Microsoft was running a competition via their MyKindofPhone website that held a lot of promise.  Basically they were offering up a prize that any gamer would love;

If you can build the biggest and best gamer clan on Twitter, you and 15 friends could win a big screen gaming experience in London. You’ll get a private cinema with games consoles and the game of your choice ready to play, food, drinks, and we’ll screen one of the best gamer films of all time.

Essentially the competition was to utilise the power of word of mouth marketing by having the entrants get their contacts to tell other people about what Microsoft were doing.  Simple and potentially cost effective marketing.

For those that haven’t previously noticed I’ve been playing Xbox 360 games with a bunch of fellow Twitterers .    Founded earlier in the year by Kip Hakes partly as we had things in common workwise, partly because it gave us a great way to augment our 140 character existence with real voices and build up a set of more meaningful friendships.   For those who were around you may remember us as  #TwitMW2Frenzy,  but honestly that’s just too long for a hashtag.  Nowadays we are to be found under #twitclan or on Xbox Live as [twit].

I dutifully entered the #TwitClan, knocked out a couple of  starter tweets and sat back.

And that was my mistake.  I presumed that with 6 other people also helping and over 800 people following me that the re-tweets would flow and it would be job done.  Not so. At all.

Sure we took an early lead but then another clan entered the race, one with purpose.  The PGz clan were coming directly from a gaming website.  I have no idea how many members they have but it became apparent a couple of days before the competition closed on Friday 11th that it was more than our lowly 6 or 7 as they had come from nowhere to steal the lead.  Fair play to them, they posted calls to arms on their forums and their members responded.

PGz has just entered a competition where 15 of us could win the chance to spend the day gaming in our own private cinema on the big screen!

Prize – If you can build the biggest and best gamer clan on Twitter, you and 15 friends could win a big screen gaming experience in London. You’ll get a private cinema with games consoles and the game of your choice ready to play, food, drinks, and we’ll screen one of the best gamer films of all time.

All we have to do is Tweet the following on Twitter -

#mkop-PGz FTW! PGz demand to win the gaming experience of a lifetime! 

Just copy and paste it and Tweet it!

If we win and I believe we have a very good chance, then the lucky 15 PGz members who wish to go will have their names drawn out of a hat in a ‘live’ draw by our very own Axikal!

@gosu71 (http://prestigegamerz.com/forum.html?func=view&catid=1&id=92817)

Unfortunately in the process of jumping ahead a few of their number had talked about “spamming the hell out of this” and also offered up competition prizes of their own in return for help winning which were both at best unsportsmanlike but bordered on breaking the competition rules.   We had a wee moan amongst ourselves but decided to get serious about the whole thing.

In a very brief discussion it was clear that we actually had easy access to a very substantial user base by way of one of our member’s own website.  David Carrington is the owner and developer behind Dabr, a very popular web-based Twitter client used by tens of thousands of people from their mobile phones around the world.

David being a very sensible kind of chap made a call to stick a message on the Dabr website asking for help from his users.  More importantly he showed immense commonsense by;

• doing it in such a way as to only display the message in off-peak times so as not to bombard Twitter with thousands of promotional messages (which may have broken the ToS for Twitter and thus the rules of teh competition),
• making the link ONLY repopulate a re-tweet dialog so that users were fully aware and in control – no auto-bots or privacy issues here thanks, and
• having the whole thing stop asking prior to the competition end so that the overspill was better contained.

All in all a very shrewd set of measures to ensure not only the integrity of Dabr but also so as not to overstep the mark when it came to the rules of the competition.  I will stick my own hand up here to claim ownership of getting both David and another #twitclan member, Matt Jones, to take a number of screenshots of webpage’s and source code at this point knowing full well such a move was going to get us noticed.

Within hours of going live it was pretty obvious that it was likely to be a winning move as the sheer volume of support re-tweets was incredible.  Sure there was the occasional duplicate but when they were coming through on the last night at a couple a minute the number of unique messages was also bound to be high.

We rocketed from 71 odd tweets on the Thursday lunchtime to hundreds by the following morning.  This of course resulted in an outpouring of general name calling from our only real competitor at the time (#PGz).  I don’t think I’ve ever been called out for cheating so many times in my life.  Their annoyance was understandable, they were set for a fail.

The thing is/was that our call for help via Dabr was actually little more than #PGz’s intial call on their own forums, it was just that we chose a site with a bigger audience.  Given the intention of the competition was to drive attention to Microsoft and that it clearly wanted to see as much chatter on Twitter as possible accusations of cheating as only tweets from Clan members should be counted clearly didn’t hold water  (of course there is also the argument that why on Earth would anyone from a small Clan enter if only member tweets would be counted – it would be fait accompli for any large group).

At 12pm on Friday 11th June Dabr breathed it’s last cry for help and we sat back (again), only this time having monitored the opposition and feeling more than a little confident.

The competition closed at 2pm and for over two and a half hours everyone waited for the count.  #TwitClan polled 746 unique user re-tweets (from 71 the day before) based on over 1,400 total in our support.  We were declared the winners.

I won’t cover all the subsequent silliness from various people, it doesn’t help.  The rules were really simple, we stuck to them, pulled some very basic marketing and won through.

What we would have / could have done differently:

1) David is the first to admit he didn’t pay much attention to the close date for a few days, otherwise he’d have set Dabr running from day 1 resulting in an overwhelming win from the outset.  This might have meant a little less name calling.

2) We could have leveraged a number of other well visited sites and Twitter clients, a few Facebook pages – you know all that good social media stuff.  Given more time to prepare I’m confident we could have knocked out well in excess of 10k unique’s over the competition week.

3) Not even tried to communicate with the opposition.  In hindsight all our efforts to placate their concerns did little more than fuel their suspicions.  Hence this post and it’s setting out of our tactics.

Next Time: The Fun Begins

You’re opting IN for more junk by NOT ticking just to be clear.

Let me start of with I’m not coming out to defend the Estate Agency industry as a whole.  Much of their reputation is well deserved there are a great many sharks.  However there are also plenty of super well trained, nice, kind, informed and helpful agents too.  Just like any industry I guess.

Today Mike Butcher has a guest post up on the Telegraph’s website entitled “Does Sarah Beeny’s free property website herald the end for estate agents?”

Well simply the answer is no it won’t.

The whole FSBO (for sale by owner) model is well understood in America, Australia and NZ where a homeowner takes control of the whole marketing and negotiation process in selling their home.

The system works for a percentage but the last research I saw this was something like < 10% of all FSBO resulting in sale.

The reasons are simple.  Most people are not trained in marketing and in English based cultures haggling (negotiating) is a skill long forgotten.  For anyone in the UK the latest adverts by MoneySupermarket.com starring comedian Omid Djalili even mention the “cringe gland” being prevalent in the English where haggling is concerned.

The problem for many is that, quite rightly, their house is not a property it is a home. Somewhere they are emotionally tied to and when it comes to the business of selling a home removing that emotion is critical.

Why?  Well for a start the biggest killer in selling a property is price.  Too high and no one will even view the place, or at least if they do they will most likely be disappointed having expected it to have been better than it is – after all it is priced in a higher bracket with better properties.  Too low and most people will avoid it thinking there is something wrong.  Pricing is key.

Without training or at least access to decent quality comparable sales data it is really hard for a homeowner to get the pricing right.  Sure there are valuers or surveyors but they cost money and the whole point of FSBO is to avoid cost, right?

The second part to removing emotion from the process problem lays in mentally detaching oneself from the home and treating it as a commodity to be sold.  Trust me on this, it’s hard.  And without that detachment even the simplest of selling tools such as presenting the home for sale is a tricky task.  Home prep is not about clean and tidy, it’s so much more. Sure clean and tidy matters but it’s more about creating a space which prospective buyers can visualise as being their own not yours.   Try removing all personal effects, photo’s, pictures, that lovely family heirloom brass plate from the wall and living in the space for a while.  Your home stops being your home.  It’s hard.

And so back to Beeny’s new website, Tepilo.  I’ve seen a number of these “market your own home and save on fees” sites along with magazines, papers and even shops come and go over the last 10 years.  Sure this one has a “celebrity” name behind it.  Sure people are becoming ever better equipped with internet based resources for pricing, marketing and finding property.  But…

An estate agent does this for a job often 7 days a week. The good ones are formally trained (and where available qualified) and armed to the teeth with better information, better skills, more time.

There are amateur mechanics out there who will tinker with their cars.  I don’t.  Sure I could learn a few skills but when it comes down to the safety of my family I’m the first to throw the work to a local garage.  It’s no different in the internet space.  Anyone can get a copy of Dreamweaver or Frontpage (they still do that?) and knock up a website – will it be any good?  Maybe.  Could a professional have done a better job, probably.

Finally every agent understands fees are a sticking point when competing for business.  You can always try to haggle just don’t forget they haggle for a living.  More importantly find yourself an agent who can offer you more value in using their services than they cost, they should be able to prove their track record on this so just ask.

… well more accurately I’ve been asked to attend and speak on behalf of “Every Single One of Us” (and myself & consumers of course) at the two and a half hour workshop on Alternative Business Models.  Details are over on the BEUC forum site but here’s an teaser for this session:

The B2C equation could be seen as wider than just offer and demand. Trust, including high privacy standards, may be a company’s most valuable asset. Today, some companies have developed alternative business models that allow a business to flourish while at the same time being consumer-friendly and setting a high level of consumer rights and privacy. Some European projects and business initiatives are also researching alternatives to existing business models that would ensure a higher protection of consumers’ data when surfing the Web or shopping online.

The workshop will look at existing alternative business models and identify potential developments.

As speakers we are being asked to consider the starter topics below, my question to the crowd has to be “any input, thoughts or angles?”

• What do you consider to be an alternative business model?
• What kind of alternative model should be developed/encouraged?
• Do you know of any such alternative models today?
• What incentives are required for alternative business models to develop?
• Who should promote alternative business models? Businesses? European Commission? Civil society organisations?
• Should privacy- and security-by-design be a feature of new business models?

BT helped to develop Phorm and the system adheres to the UK DPA (if not the EU), consulted with the Home Office to ensure their position but screwed up by breaking the social norms in place by the community at large.

But BT did what any commercial entity would have done and ditched the system (irrespective of it’s worth or value) when it was apparent that their ability to retain Customers was severely hampered as trust had broken down.

In a world so acutely (albeit not always accurately) sensitised to security and privacy issues it never ceases to amaze me that companies believe that just because legally they can do something means they should.

Which ever camp one sits in one has to agree it is genius.