All that blarney yesterday was by way of introducing our latest social media app. There was too much background to the project (which we’ve called ReSporter) to just jump straight in.

Thinking about stuff is what we do.

Let’s try an analogy here.

Think of social media as a party. You are going alone. Don’t worry though, there will be around 100 million other people at the party. You’re bound to find someone interesting. Eventually. And if not, there’s always that Kardashian woman. Or Justin Bieber.

Now imagine if, as soon as you walk in, there were a bunch of people with a placard which read “We like what you like, talk to us.”

That would make life a whole lot easier, wouldn’t it?

This is where our thinking got us. We saw a need for a technology which really did let people focus on their interests first, regardless of where those interests were being played out. They could be on Twitter, Facebook, hell, they might even be on mySpace (cue canned laughter track).

It was about the interests.

We call the system, ReSporter. That’s because we’re going to focus on sports. For now.

And we’ve built the first App which plugs into this system. That’s called ReSporter: Football. For our UK viewers, let me clarify something: we’re talking NFL not Premiership here.

ReSporter: Football is out now and is at version one. It’s a pretty cool way of accessing what your favourite NFL players are saying. It’s a perfect, and focussed, way of getting ready for the Superbowl.

Pick your team and away you go. ReSporter: Football takes it from there. If you read something you respect or agree with, you can nominate that person to be a ReSporter. This will happen A LOT when you access the app during a game because there are A LOT of people wanting their say on things. The ReSporters with the most votes will appear more prominently.

Who knows, you might end up being a ReSporter too with people wanting to know what YOU think.

And as we’ve seen on Twitter, careers can be forged that way.

ReSporter: Football is available NOW on the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch for GBP £0.69/ USD $0.99 /€0.99. Additional theme packs are available through an in-app purchase priced GBP £0.69/ USD $0.99 /€0.99.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Steven Moffat may not like it, but when every show advertises a hashtag in order to encourage viewers to participate in Twitter discussions during shows then you know that he’s pining for days gone by.

Many shows are ripe for hearty, heat-of-the-moment discussions and it can be as much fun to follow the #masterchef tweets of (say) Mic Wright or Greg Stekelman as it is to watch the programme. Worrying about missing out on the nuanced narrative of such telly isn’t a major issue.

The reality is, whereas once we relished the chance to discuss our favourite shows around the water cooler now we don’t have to wait. Social media commentators are regularly being quoted by the mainstream media and reputations are being made. Book deals or commissions can follow from such popularity.

Even before social media made this process easily accessible, people flocked to online chat rooms to “follow their interests”. And before that there were the bulletin boards. Life was simple, if you could manage to navigate the sign-up process and deal with a 14.4k baud rate and your mum telling you to get off the damn phone.

Twitter and Facebook finally made the rest of us sit up, take notice and take part in the social conversation and we now share squintillions of messages on what we love and hate about every aspect of our daily lives. But I think that maybe we’ve lost a little of the focus which older systems afforded. I first noticed this after we released Super Twario (a mad, fun bit of self-promotion). The vast majority of users were drawn to the app not by the fact that it was a Twitter app, but because it seemed* like it was focussed on gaming. Over the year or so since its release, I have spoken with many of the users and discussed their Twitter stats. It’s quite a revealing story. Many people start using Super Twario following nobody and by having no followers. At first this behaviour puzzled me. Then it worried me. Such people would be visiting an app that was meant to make viewing their Twitter feed that little bit different. It wasn’t designed to be a serious reader but to get something from it, you did need a feed to create the little platforms for our tiny hero to jump upon. Take this away and I think you would be puzzled.

But what it did show, was the role interests (or hobbies) play in social behaviour. People were flocking to something not because of the technology involved or the fact that they knew there was a powerful online meeting room, but because they had an interest.

And they wanted to talk about that interest.

Understanding that made me look at all the people I’d introduced to Twitter and I went back and questioned them. Rigorously. I found I could split them into two camps: power users and casual users. Power users are well catered for in the social media world. Services exist by the bucket which enable them to view millions of feeds, measure interest, analyse influence and send abuse in multiple languages.

But the casual users all reported a period of bewilderment when faced with signing up.

Who did they add to their lists? How did they know who was genuine and who wasn’t? And then, with maybe a dozen or so people in their pocket, how did they focus on what brought them here in the first place: their interests?

Which brought me back to #masterchef and realising, when 1,351 people are all chattering about a dozen different things, that sometimes I wish I’d the time to set up filters for my social feed.

More importantly, it led to a bunch of us sitting down and having a what-if discussion about social media apps.

But more of that tomorrow.

*On a sort of related note: I wish we had the time to develop Super Twario more. We still get calls for it to have this feature or that and there are many ways it could go that would be of benefit to the right brand. Maybe one day we will get a week or two to have a really good look at it again.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

The beautiful thing about working with video games is the sheer range of subjects you get to cover. One minute you are working on a sci-fi game and the next you are producing visuals for a cookery app. “Normal” agencies don’t get to flit around the product gamut as we do. It means that even though some companies see as as “specialist” others see the experience that we bring.

So when MBN Events came knocking we were pleased to put on our Sport Billy hat and begin producing the kind of exciting visuals that have helped sell games for UEFA, WWE, Race Pro and many other titles that in a normal world would take all the energies of top agencies.

Head First approach work in the same way, regardless of client size. We take a look at the consumer market in which such products rest and create imagery and ideas that measure up to the standard of quality expected whilst also standing out in terms of recognisable identity. Again, coming from the video game industry where every (for example) war game can look the same we have found that being distinctive can make all the difference.

For MBN we have begun producing high quality visuals to continue their already high quality approach for both print and video.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.