And the band played on and on and on.....

100 years on from the sinking of the unsinkable, this weekend marked the actual anniversary of the last night of Titanic's fateful maiden voyage.  

One particular activity which caught my attention has been on Twitter. Since mid-March @titanicrealtime have been tweeting in the guise of officers, crew, passengers (all classes), engineers etc.  I've been unsure about this all along - is it insightful or unnecessarily voyeuristic?  So many of the tweets seemed so obviously written with the benefit of hindsight - references to numbers of lifeboats, safety measures etc - that it seemed hackneyed to say the least.


Then last night - the tweets increased in volume with a moment by moment, sometimes second by second narrative of the collision, sinking and final rescue of the 700 survivors by the Carpathia.  I don't deny I was gripped but it made me wonder why?  I can claim it was out of professional interest to see how a publishing company with product to sell treated the topic, but that would be disingenuous. What is it that draws us towards this subject time and time again?


There's been the commemorative Balmoral cruise with everyone dressed up in period costume to sail the exact course and dates - judging by the look of most passengers this was a great jolly, like some glorified murder mystery event rather than a more genuine commemoration of 1500 lost lives.


It made me think about other anniversaries and how we respond to them and how we might respond to them in the future.  What about a hundred years on from 9/11?  Will future generations dress up in turn of the century business garb and re-enact the last hours of the twin towers or take commemorative flights?  I think most would agree the idea is abhorrent so what makes the Titanic different? What turns something from being a sombre cause for reflection into an excuse for a big party?  And what is it about the story that has such staying power?


Oh and if you're interested the same publishing company behind @titanicrealtime are planning a blow by blow Twitter account of the Ripper murders from the perspective of the police involved.

Twitter – Washing your cyber laundry in public

Like a kind of chatty fungus, twitter’s totally grown on me. I love it. It satisfies those less than lovely character traits in me – my incessant need to know stuff first, my slight nosiness (which my husband will testify to having witnessed me peeking round the blinds in our flat in Stoke Newington when we lived in London at 4am on a Saturday morning looking at the gang fight happening right below our window – “will you come away from the window you crazy staring lady you’re going to get us killed”).

Twitter’s a strange bird. It’s allowed us to get close to the innermost feelings and opinions of people whose comment and copy are otherwise generally edited and misquoted, retouched and twisted. It manages to be crazily intimate (Holly Willoughby’s contraction-by-contraction birth report from her mate Fern - eugh enough already) and massively broadcast at the same time. The difference and distance between being a celebrity and an unknown was already becoming blurred and shortened with the explosion of reality shows, celeb magazines and the Internet. Twitter has made the distance seem minute. Stalkers must be having a field day.

What I think I love best though is how it puts us all on a level playing field,– i.e. those on t’telly and those not. Demystifying them once and for all, proving that really they are just like us, just a bit more famous. My favourite recent example of this was a theatre writer taking umbrage at having been, in his opinion, unfairly interviewed by one of Radio 4’s presenters. The theatre writer tweets his annoyance and the presenter then fired back his response and voila – supposedly reserved and professional blokes on the radio having a row in our full glare. Oh the joy – and so much safer than watching rival Stoke Newington gang fight each other!

By the way if you’re not following us, do so right now @TunWellsWoodies

White with two sugars and a revolution please

So according to Gaddafi "protesters… fueled by milk and Nescafe spiked with hallucinogenic drugs" are responsible for trying to drive him from power.

The Twitteratti went into overdrive and Nescafe began, unusually for it, trending.

So how did Nescafe respond? How should they have responded?

What is social media for? Is it just a vehicle for brands, as so many do, to post something about a new product, an ad campaign or sponsorship every few weeks?

Or is it a chance to give a wider audience a better sense of the brand’s personality. If we go back to the brand architecture, a brand's tonal values are a key component. Tonal values are the brand's personality - a much broader definition than just what words and pictures the corporate identity guidelines allow us to use.

So doesn't social media give a unique opportunity for a brand to give its audience a better sense of its personality - its sense of humour, its agenda, its politics?

A great opportunity yes, but equally a great risk. To do it right, it needs treating with the same care, and messages crafted with the same skill as any other media - with brand at their heart.

Let's see what Nescafe do about it. It's interesting to note that they've been the first brand to take advantage of the new UK product placement rules with their £100k investment placing their Dolce Gusto coffee machine on the set of This Morning today.

Perhaps we can expect to see a big 'P' on future coverage from Libya.