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.
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