With Orange’s Phone Fund you get money towards a new phone every time you top up to chat.

London agency Poke decided that clearly the only sensible way to promote that online was create gigantic animatronic teeth chattering their way round a track, giving out prizes, powered by people’s tweets and status updates. Of course! What else would you do?

Different agencies and specialists worked together to create the resultant wonder; Smesh delivered high-performance social plumbing to capture game-plays via Twitter and Facebook in real-time and pass them through to the Poke web backend and game engine.

BAFTA season is long over, but something exciting remains: our recently launched stand-alone version of the Orange Film Pulse tool.

Our system scans social networks and websites measuring the level of love for a film in real time. Our algorithms process reviews and Twitter sentiment, calculating a ‘pulse score’ on a scale of 1 to 100. The more online love there is for a film, the higher the score.

The Film Pulse opens up a world of honest user reviews in a single click, making your decision about what the see on the silver screen a lot easier. What’s more, you can get involved, cast your opinion and directly influence a film’s pulse score. All that’s left for you to do is choose your seat in the cinema. Don’t sit at the back, people will think less of you.

Today, everyone has a voice. You can hide behind faceless blogs, tweet under the guise of a pseudonym, air opinions, heckle and praise all from the comfort of your beige IKEA sofa. You no longer need to hide your feelings in the chambers of your mind. You can now whine, moan, smile and share your feelings instantly with millions of people, all with one push of the enter button.

Inevitably this means that true reviews can be cast about anything from products to TV shows, the arts to Film, and that’s something that excites us. Enter the ‘Orange Film Pulse’, building on Orange’s long standing affinity with film through likes of ‘Orange Wednesdays’ and their sponsorship of the BAFTAs. Working with Orange and digital creative agency POKE, we built a system that brings film closer to the people that matter… the film lovers.

The idea is simple. Instead of relying on a review from one person, from one movie blog, magazine or newspaper, Orange Film Pulse groups together all noise that a film causes online – across Twitter, Facebook and review sites. It analyses sentiment too, assessing opinions about films from across the web. Clever eh? Every time there’s a tweet, a review or a Like, Oranges’ finger is firmly on the pulse. All of these ‘real time reviews’ are beautifully calculated in to one easy, digestible score out of 100. The buzz and hype, good and bad, all contribute to the score.

So, now when we are choosing what to go and see at the cinema or vote for during awards season we can see someone in Manchester opine that ‘The Artist was beautiful but would of preferred it with some words’ and see film buff from Hackney candidly admit that 50/50 made him ‘weep like a baby’. These true insights may even be more likely to influence our decision than an overly pontificated blog post.

Orange’s Film Pulse ultimately changes the way we assess a film’s success, never mind the mammoth Box Office sales. We now know the truth from the people who matter most, the audience.

As an added bonus, if you can’t tear yourself away from Facebook, there’s a version of the Film Pulse there too.

Here’s a rather exciting one — on November the 9th, as part of Internet Week Europe (IWE), we’ll be running a large-scale Twitter wall that integrates into a comedy performance by The Boy with Tape on his Face, produced by BBC Comedy. Here’s a clip of The Boy in action.

We’re not sure if this is the first comedy with gig with Twitter featuring as a core part of the performance (rather than a parallel ‘bolt-0n’); it’s almost certainly the first silent comedy featuring this kind of deep Twitter integration. Regardless of the technology, The Boy represents brilliant (award winning!) live physical comedy performance, and as this is an experimental night, tickets are free.

Details and tickets for the event are available via IWE.

Once more we are ably assisted in design and frontend build by our friends at Sennep.

Addendum: the gig was fantastic fun; I was going to do a write-up, but @loooooren has done an amazing job already. We’ll post images and video clips when they’re available.

Update: some set-up photos; more of the performance to follow.

Smesh and The Guardian have partnered to develop the GuardianTagbot, aka ‘tagbot’, a Twitter-based gateway into the Guardian’s content API.

For Twitter users, the tagbot is a handy shortcut into the Guardian’s rich content ecosystem — just tweet some keywords or a phrase @GuardianTagbot, and you’ll receive a mobile-friendly link into relevant Guardian content. It also helps the Guardian  investigate new content services for users, as well as a new way to show potential commercial clients just what its API can do.

The initial launch was a wee bit too successful — some high-profile tweets (hi @charlesarthur!) mentioning the service saw a sudden surge of queries mere minutes after launch. Twitter, vigilant against spam-related automated services, saw the sudden flurry of automated replies and responded in a manner temporarily harmful to our well-intentioned and helpful ‘bot. Tagbot will be up and running again soon!

We’ll also tell you a bit more about how the tagbot service works in another post.

Please also look at the Guardian’s FAQs on the beta, by visiting www.guardian.co.uk/tagbot.

Update at 18.20: tagbot is awake once more!

Update: Nieman lab have nice write-up on the tagbot, including some details from us on how it works.

Smesh was thrilled to bits to win a Marketing Week Data Strategy Award for the Flickometer, which we developed for Orange’s 2011 BAFTA campaign, supported by production and design work from Poke and Flash build by Sennep.

It is a universally acknowledged fact that nothing says ‘glamour’ like Data Strategy; something that Ruby remarked upon in various creative ways throughout the evening. Ruby looked a bit troubled when Liza from Orange, actually looking glamorous, turned up with me to collect the award. “Are you with him??,” asked a disbelieving Ruby.

My sense of outrage was soothed when the otherwise generously-proportioned Ruby had to stand on a plastic crate for the photo above.

Smesh looks forward to doing more interesting work with creative partners for forward-thinking clients; awards always a nice bonus.

Following on from the epic cinema-scale Twitter wall system developed by Smesh for the Huffington Post’s UK launch event, Smesh is proud to power The Gauge.

The Gauge (aka The Guage if not typing carefully), prompts the general public as well as Huffington Post contributors to tweet their opinion on key issues arising from the HuffPost UK site.

These tweets are tightly integrated into the site’s content, which tracks and visualises levels of agreement with each day’s Gauge content, based on a variety of user groups — the public, Huffington Post contributors, and general site visitors.

Smesh’s social data handling infrastructure and expertise allowed Poke to focus on creating a fantastic user experience and application specific content management tools for their client at the HuffPost, knowing that relevant Twitter content would be safely captured, filtered and archived.

Whether your August was a wash-out or a wonderful heat wave (really?), you can’t go wrong with an ice cream. Particularly a free one. Well, unless you’re lactose intolerant. But still.

Orange’s August feature for their ‘adventures on the internet’ site The Feed, ‘keep me cool‘, uses Smesh’s technology to take in real-time tweets and Facebook votes from punters fancying free ice cream, who can vote for their area to receive a visit from Orange’s special ice cream van.

This campaign combines cool and creamy pleasure with campaign exposure across both Twitter and Facebook.

Credits: Flash build work by lingoBee; creative direction, design and management by Poke.

Smesh was both chuffed AND thrilled to provide its Twitter commentary software running on a cinema-screen scale for the Huffington Post’s UK launch event on the 6th of July, 2011.

Held at the Curzon cinema in Millbank Tower, the invite-only event featured a panel debate including Richard Bacon, Arianna Huffington, Alistair Campbell, Celia Walden, Kelly Osbourne, Shami Chakrabarti and Jon Gaunt.

Smesh’s software filled the cinema screen behind the panelists, showing a flow of tweets submitted by the very enthusiastic audience, many of whom competed to get their tweets promoted to the ‘hero’ spot in the centre of the screen.

Highlights of the Twitter wall in action.

Blogger A Modern Mother observed “It was very Question Time confrontational, and sort of entertaining, but the highlight was the cool Twitter stream that was projected on the big screen behind the panel.”

Smesh provided a fully-featured moderation system. With the help of some expert human operators, this shaped the flow of online commentary and thankfully bested some very creative attempts to circumvent profanity requirements[2].

Credits: Flash design and build work by Sennep; creative direction and management by Poke.

[1] http://themediablog.typepad.com/the-media-blog/2011/07/twitterwall-huffington-post.html

[2] Tip o’ the hat to Mr Michael Hunt

[This is a extended write up of a Guardian press release on Smesh's work with them for their 'Enjoy England' campaign work for VisitEngland]

Smesh have been using their in-house monitoring and analysis tools plus their human expertise and experience to help The Guardian (GNM) run the social media aspects of their ‘Enjoy England’ campaign for VisitEngland.

At Smesh, we believe that it’s really important to deliver a blend of focused consultancy and tool-based analytics. Just providing raw access to tools can leave clients swamped in data; relating this data back to campaign goals and quickly feeding back into campaign activity is essential for making the most of the interactive and real-time nature of social media. Read the rest of this entry »