Come on, let’s play

When you are creating, you are vulnerable. To others comments, to failure, to having the right idea at the wrong time or the wrong place or the other way round. And sometimes the audience is just not ready for an idea, or the idea is plain shit. Anyhow. You will do foolish things. Important is only that you do them, and that you do them with enthusiasm and pride. There has never been created anything new out of hesitation. That’s why I respect people who have been failing. Because next time it will go right. 

Come on, let’s play!

Twestival Helsinki – A Review and a Manifesto

As you can see, my last blog post is already a month old – in blogging time this means a century. It is not that I have been giving up on blogging, I was just extremely busy with an endless flow of incoming projects. And as this would have not been enough, the last four weeks were also the time we got to organize twestival Helsinki.

So, this blog post will be about twestival Helsinki. Was it a success? Yes, definitely, and I will explain why. It is a story about social media in the true sense of its meaning, about good people and about a totally new way of raising awareness and funds for a good cause. It is a story of earned media and the ’plant’ twestival which will grow in time.

Let’s have the hard facts first. Twestival Helsinki and the cause chosen by the public got great awareness and PR. In first place on social media platforms and blogs, but also in traditional media like newspapers, magazines and radio. Further we had some great ad spaces like this 57 outdoor screens promoting the idea of twestival Helsinki and a cleaner Baltic Sea. In addition to that there were lots of flyers and posters. All this is particular remarkable as the overall twestival Helsinki budget was 0 euros. All what we got and achieved was due to great people with passion and a good heart.

We also raised some good money, although we do not know the precise amount yet. We had four different income sources: The donations made in the evening of twestival Helsinki itself, the money people donated straight to the account of our cause, 10 % of the turnover of the venue Nude and last but not least the contribution the Nokia N86 tour will make to our cause. Once again, 100% of the money goes to the Clean Baltic Sea – John Nurminen Foundation.

Coming to a more personal level, I had so many great discussions with people that I got seriously enriched and inspired. One hour of good discussion with Reino Nordin, who played a fantastic acoustic gig in the evening, ensured me to be even more active on an environmental and societal level. As we could read in today’s Hesari, young people are interested in the world, but don’t want to change it anymore. Where does that come from? Young people have always been a guarantee for challenging the status quo. Social media and networks give back power to people, and we are just in the beginning. How about demonstrations in social media channels? If people don’t want to go to demonstrate on streets anymore, they could make an impact via social media. Will work further on the thought. I have seen many people having great discussions during twestival Helsinki, and it was also a pleasure to see how the local twitter scene met IRL = In Real Life. Apart from that folks enjoyed themselves and had fun. People were dancing to the beats of DJ Jacques.

Other discussions were circling mainly around social media, what it has brought to us and what happens next. Rupert Howe, a video blogger from London touring the twestival world for Nokia put it in a great and enthusiastic discussion I had with him and Phil Campbell this way: ’We are living in the future’. This is true for many reasons. I find this piece of video promoting Charles Leadbeaters’ book ’We think’ a good indication for development in the future. We are talking about social wealth vs personal wealth or the concept of owning vs sharing. A true revolution.

Finally, I have one wish for the further development of twestival Helsinki: Take over the project and organize twestival next time. It will be a twestival global again, the date is set for 4th February 2010. Take over the twitter account, the website, the facebook group, the visual identity and the good spirit and make it bigger. There will be more active twitter users in Finland next time, and I would love to see this project grow over all boundaries, hierarchies and companies. Twestival is crowd-sourcing, twestival is social good.

Thanks for everything.

p.s./ 

Special thanks to Henna, Susanna, Mia, Erol, Teemu, Jukka, Delfin, Reino, Tuija, Jakob & Janine. You were building the bird’s nest and left your remarkable piece.