Having readied my trusty stead (after a brief delay) our group of 12 set off around 8:15am.

Our first stage lasted 3hrs without any breaks. By which time our aching bodies and tired muscles warmed to the sight of a pig on a spit. The break was short lived however and with many more miles to cover we regrouped and mounted up.

A final 2 hour push before we reached the daunting Ditchling Beacon Hill to which many a soul had previously succumbed. I later heard a man had passed away in hospital due to exhaustion as a result of this testing climb.

Without breaking any records we reached Brighton all safe and sound for a well earned beer or three.

If you think you are brave enough to attempt this mission next year visit

http://www.bhf.org.uk/events-and-volunteering/events/bike-rides/london-to-Brighton-2010.aspx

I am now in the middle of my 8^th full week as Social Media Strategist for Powwownow and this is the most common question I get asked. I am asked this by other staff members, by people I meet when I’m out and about, by my friends, and last night I was asked by my 82 year old grandmother! Considering she is yet to grasp the concept of the internet, explaining my job to her was no easy task.

One of my friends favourite answers to the; “What is it that you do for a living?” question is “My job does not define me!” And although I do agree with her on this, it is understandably a natural first question for people to ask. Although your job doesn’t necessarily define you it does give people a feel for you and something to talk about with you until they know you better.

The description of what my job depends on your knowledge of the internet in the first instance and Social Media in the second and because of this, before you know it, what I “DO” for a living can dominate the conversation!  So in order to keep it short and sweet I have tried and tested a number of explanations in order to find the one which best describes my job quickly.  My top two definitions include;

• I promote the company I work for on Facebook and Twitter (or on the internet depending on the individuals knowledge) and other sites like that – but I hate this explanation because it’s not really about promotion – yes that comes into it, but it’s not the main purpose, and it’s not just about Facebook and Twitter.
• I work in Online/Digital PR – but in the long run this description only generates the same questions as saying I’m a Social Media Strategist.

As you can see I’m not exactly making great headway in developing this explanation. I think the reason for this is because it’s not really that easy to pigeonhole my job. Yes it is about Communication and yes my background is PR – but for me being a Social Media Strategist is so much more than that. I use social media as a tool to try and achieve these things like this;

• Making sure we have a strong online presence
• Engaging with our online community
• Providing our current customers with fantastic customer service
• Listening to our customers to see what they think could improve
• Looking for opportunities with new customers
• Listening to our competitors’ customers to identify the mistakes our competitors are making – to make sure we don’t go down the same path.

At Powwownow we believe Social Media work involves every department. The Social Media Strategist is there to build the plan behind it (the what, why, who, where and how), to get people in the company excited about it, to get people outside of the company excited about it, and to manage it. This is what I “DO”– I make it happen!

Oh and just in case you were wondering – I LOVE IT!

As you can see from the picture, from the outside it looks just like any other curry house, but once you enter you feel you are transformed into a traditional Dhaba, the atmosphere inside is so different.

The food is great and portions are just the right size, we started of with a few starters a firm favourite for me would have to be the Onion bhajis.

This is a restaurant that I would recommend people try in order to truly experience the authentic Curry place. But ssshh dont tell everyone about it!

At least, that’s the conclusion we came to after hours of exhaustive research:

Flight of the Concords

Most of the time if you’re obsessed with your mate’s girlfriend, you keep quiet, pine, and write in your diary, right? But wouldn’t life be more fun if you spent all your energy actively trying to sabotage their relationship? You might run out of friends, but you could get sexy-lucky.

Falling Down

Falling Down should be required viewing for the under-10s. That way, we might be able to breed out that race of line-cutting, queue-jumping, last-sandwich taking sub-humans that make life that extra bit unbearable.

Anchorman

What would you do if a burly biker drop-kicked your bestest friend in the whole wide world off a bridge? That’s right – you’d place a collect call, start crying, and never stop.

Jerry Maguire

Thankfully I was too young in the 1990s when pop-culture chewed up and excreted this idiot phrase into the mouths of every American politician, car salesman and debt collector. My parents tell me it was a pretty rough year.

Swingers

Rule #47 of hooking up: never, ever leave a message for a potential love interest. Studies show you have a 98% chance of scaring them, and a 2% chance of causing them to call the Federales.

Seinfeld

Seinfeld’s George Costanza might not be a great role model, but does do a neat trade in schemes, plots and general weaselry. Here, George is dodging his girlfriend as he knows she’s about to break up with him, yet he wants to show her off at a work do before she does. Actually, I take it back – he’s a great role model.

Mean Girls

I must have watched Mean Girls about ten times. Not because I overly enjoy it, but because my girlfriend uses sex as a weapon and forces me to do things against my will. But like any kind of torture, after a while you start to enjoy it. Now I find this scene hilarious, rather than it making me want to grind my ears off with a lathe.

Boiler Room

I had a telesales job for a while, and I had a little photo of Vin Diesel from Boiler Room in my booth to encourage me. Then I got fired, and they kept my Vin Diesel photo.

Green Wing (NSFW)

You’ve been there: your partner breaks up with you and you call their work phone pretending to have accidently dialled them while making mad love to a new fictional conquest. Hey, we’ve all done it, right? Right?

Fonejacker

Less a prank call and more a testament to how long the British will quietly cope with mounting absurdity with their characteristic rigid Labium superius and their own ejaculations of dry wit. If this call had happened in the USA, somebody would have died.

And what about the conference call? No longer is it simply the domain of beet-faced businessmen on the verge of a massive suicide. No, with a bit of ingenuity, you can leverage the technology for all manner of amusing pastimes. These are they:

1) Roleplaying Games

Role-players are a solution-orientated flavour of nerd. So it was only a matter of time after the advent of video conferencing that dungeon masters worldwide would figure out they could use the tech to commune over vast distances and hold campaigns as if they were in the same room – the perfect solution if your party’s elven priest suddenly up and moves to New York.

2) Stress relief

The great thing about the telephone is that the individual on the other end can’t see what you’re doing, whether it’s lounging around in a leather diaper, or grooming your rats with a tiny little comb. Or, like American comedian Demetri Martin in the clip above, blowing off some steam and expressing your distaste for an idiotic client physically.

3) Read to your children

Are you a heartless travelling businessman, who through a tangled web of sexual dalliances has left young families dotted all over the country? Well, earn what little paternal kudos you can in the most efficient way possible by setting up bedtime story conference calls for your franchise of kids. Even better, you can put your sprogs on mute, so they never need even find out about each other!

4) Make music miles away

It’s not unusual these days for some bands, typically separated by distance (Postal Service) or bound together by contract but can’t stand to be in the same room as each other (Stone Temple Pilots), to use video conferencing to record music together. Or in the case of leathery punk legend Iggy Pop and the seven competition winners in the clip above, perform live together.

5) Hold a murder mystery

If you think that holding a murder mystery over conference call would take a great deal of finesse, you’d be right. But that doesn’t mean that intrepid murder mystery game companies haven’t been doing it for years, while alternate reality games (multimedia games that take place in the real world, usually involving conspiracy theories) have been growing increasingly sophisticated, even setting up conference calls between players, actors and actors pretending to be players.

6) Learn something

Without web conferencing, distance learning would be stuck in the Stone Age. Nowadays, students worldwide think nothing of IMing their friends during online lectures, or dialling into conference call seminars and promptly falling asleep. In 2006, it was even found that 3.2 million students were taking at least one online lecture a semester.

7) Gamble away your savings

Gamble over conference call? Why not? From playing poker over video conference to, as in the above clip, placing wagers on which of four taxi firms stays on the line when being patched though to a conference call, the possibilities for making a bit of illicit dough over the phone are endless.

8) Hold a secret political rally

Do you hold unacceptable political views that cannot possibly be aired in public, like thinking all buskers should be executed or believing in government-mandated nudity? Then the conference call is the perfect port for you and people who share your unpalatable politics to meet and plot your revolution.

9) Finally talk to your family

Did some traumatic experience in your childhood cause your family to splinter and scatter into the four winds, moving around the world to that perfect distance that’s far enough away to eliminate frequent visits? Well, the conference call gives the illusion of familial togetherness, with none of the awkward physical contact, long silences or boozy fistfights. And you can always hang up.

10) Haunt a conference call

People are idiots. If you happen to trawl the internet for conference calls, you’ll soon find many people advertising conference calls you call join – often providing both their telephone number and access number so you can call up and haunt them. Be it a meeting of masseuses from Michigan, or a prayer group from the Philippines – the potential for japery is endless. Or why not find a way to join one of your boss’s conference calls and see what he really thinks of you? Not that we could possibly endorse such behaviour, of course.

Europe’s leading free conference call provider, Powwownow, is taking London by storm with a new and very cheeky little campaign encouraging people to have a threesome for free at work!

The sexy campaign called ‘Up For a Threesome’ will kick off with guerilla activity today at the launch of Mayor of London, Boris Johnson’s London Bike Hire Scheme. There, specially chosen representatives of Powwownow will distribute free ‘key holders’ perfect for carrying both a cycle hire ‘key’ and a credit card which give the public access to the scheme.

The campaign dreamt up by consumer engagement agency, Hotcow will see ’threesomes’ taking place on a three-seater bike in and around Victoria.

The campaign will build from the guerilla activity running in July & August to a fully integrated cross-platform campaign including, radio, print,online advertising and PR.

Powwownow embraces social media as an engagement tool and this campaign is no exception. The Twitter handle @upforathreesome will be used for updates during the promotion and Powwownow’s Facebook page will keep their 600 followers  informed with delicious little tasters….like ‘you don’t have to be French to have a ménage à trois’

Andrew Pearce, CEO of Powwownow said, ‘We loved this cheeky concept and we wanted to have a bit of fun with it! We hope it will encourage people to cycle to meetings, and if they can’t then why not Powwownow instead?’

Join in the conversation on Twitter!

Have we got you thinking the three way? Why not follow us on Twitter and tell us who you’d most like to have a threesome with… Let’s make #pwnthreesome the latest trend!

With that in mind, these are some of our favourite tricks to beat the phone queue and claw that precious time back. Stick it to the man!

1) Don’t touch anything.
Automated call systems still have to account for the two people on the planet with an ancient rotary phone, so doing nothing will fool it into thinking you’ve got one and set you up with a real dude.

2) Swear.
Angry customers swear, and angry customers will leave companies. Some voice response systems will clock your naughty words and put you through to a human, typically a senior rep who’s more competent than most.

There’s nothing more that Obama loves than a good swear(ing-in)

3) The collections department.
Companies like money, and companies like their customers paying them money. Hence, if you connect to the collections department, you’ll likely bounce straight through to a human being.

4) Pretend to be a new customer.
Remember those days when you were a new customer and the company would pick up your calls straight away? Well, just fake that you’re a new customer, either by selection the right option, or with voice response systems screaming “new customer!”

5) Find some angry customers.
Can’t find a direct line to the person you need to speak to? There are likely armies of angry customers out there who’ve been through exactly what you’re going through, and typically have a solution. Do a Google search for the companies name plus “complaints” or “sucks” to find them.

Spot the clown

6) Get me the president!
One that’s worked for me – find a direct number or e-mail for the head of the company – typically they have a secretary monitoring their mailboxes/calls for complaints, which swiftly get patched through to the best call-centre monkeys and complaint handlers. Win!

7) The magic not-number zero.
With some systems, pressing zero will connect you to living, breathing human individual. Other combinations include 0#, #0, 0* or *0. Alternatively…

8) Pound the hash key.
Yup. Or…

9) Hit the star key.
Uh-huh.

10) The dreaded competitor
What scares voice response systems the most? When a customer utters the name of a competitor. So just say, like, “Megaconglomocorp Industries” and see what happens.

11) Go bilingual
Live in a country with a minority second language like Spanish or French or Na’vi? Try out a few words in that language – you might be patched through to a bilingual call rep, which usually means less waiting.

The Na’vi: get exceptional customer service.

12) Avoid peak times.
Like doing all your shopping on a Sunday evening – call centres have peak times. So don’t call during lunch, or on a Monday or Saturday. Thursday morning is pretty good, I reckon.

13) Don’t pay your bill.
That’s one way to get the company to call you.

So dear friends, any of these worked for you? Drop us a comment below.

So it’s with a huge dollop of delicious schadenfreude we enjoyed the story this week that 30-something Toronto harlot Gabriella Nagy is suing telecoms behemoth Rogers Communications for $600,000 after her husband discovered that she’d made a string of mega-long phone calls to an unknown number. The husband called the number, and the gentleman on the other end confirmed all manner of sexy shenanigans with the husband’s wife. The husband then walked out on the wife and their two kids.

Apparently Nagy is unhappy that Rogers combined her personal cellphone bill with the family broadband bill, which allowed her husband to discover the (booty) calls. She claims that her husband walking out caused her to underperform in her job as a rental agent, from which she was subsequently fired. Even better, the gentleman managed to obtain Nagy’s voicemail password from Rogers after she ended the affair, which he used to harangue her and her ex-husband.

Here’s something stupid she said: “I lost everything. I want others to know what a big corporation has done. I trusted Rogers with my personal information. We had a contract — and agreement that put my life right in their hands.”

And here’s something smart that Rogers said: “[We] cannot be held responsible for the condition of the marriage, for the plaintiff’s affair and consequential marriage break-up, nor the effects the break-up has had on her.”

Mmmm, delicious schadenfreude. Tastes like meringue.

Toronto woman sues Rogers after her affair is exposed [via The Toronto Star]

The company behind the phenomenon is Muzak, and they’ve got their tendrils in everything – the music you hear while you’re on hold, the music you hear in the changing room in Gap, even those interminable shopping centre Christmas playlists. Yup, thanks to the vagaries of copyright law stopping people from simply having a radio on, chances are you’re probably listening to a Muzak product.

Ever wonder where it comes from? Why it’s there? We’ve got 18 facts for you. Oh, and why not start up the below playlist to hear some of our favourite hold music songs as you read?

1 – Muzak was founded by Major General George Owen Squier in 1934. Squier’s other achievements include helping set up the US Air Force, and dying of pneumonia.

The very model of a Major General (or a massive dick, your choice)

2 – Taking inspiration (read: liberally thieving) from Kodak, Squier just merged the word ‘music’ with Kodak to form the company name. Funny, we would have called it Hellsongs.

3 – A survey by Gatwick airport in 1994 showed that 43% of its respondents hated muzak; the other 34% liked it and the rest were indifferent.

4 – Muzak claims that between it and its holdings, it commands the attention (or at least the subconscious) of a hundred million unfortunate people across a dozen countries.

5 – Alarmingly, sixty per cent of all the background music Americans hear is nefariously piped in from Muzak HQ.

6 – Muzak also provides the drive-through ordering systems used by many fast-food restaurants, therefore being partially responsible for thousands of cases of early-onset diabetes and heart attacks.

She won’t be smiling when she finds that swollen rat carcass in her beverage.

7 – Though they’re long associated with droning smooth jazz and instrumental cover versions of 80s pop songs, Muzak now provide a much broader service for its clients. Clients are assigned an ‘audio architect’ who painstakingly crafts a ‘programme’ of music specifically tailored to their business. Progress!

8 – In addition to a company’s standard programme, many receive an additional programme known as ‘The After-Hours’: uplifting songs for the poor schmucks working through the night restocking shelves.

9 – According to a Mori poll, 17% of people see muzak as “the thing they most detest about modern life”. And that’s over stuff like gout and Lady GaGa.

10 – After the war President Dwight D. Eisenhower pumped Muzak around the White House. Possibly to stop the interns from rutting in the Lincoln Bedroom. Possibly.

Lincoln: rolling in his grave

11 – Similarly, NASA incorporated Muzak into many of its lunar missions, to keep the astronauts calm and to stop them from contracting space madness.

12 – Muzak’s digital archive (dubbed ‘The Well’) is currently home to 2.5 million hand-picked songs, and grows at a rate of 20,000 songs per month.

13 – On average, it costs a 30,000 square foot store in UK £2,000 a year to pay for background music.

14 – In the UK, 31% of shop workers have to listen to the same album between six and 20 times a week, while a pitiful 16% will hear the same record more than 20 times during a week.

15 – In the 1940s, Muzak introduced the Stimulus Progression system, which they claimed would make workers more productive when exposed to muzak of increasing peppiness in recurring quarter of an hour cycles.

16 – During World War II, the stimulus progression system was claimed to boost worker production by 11%. Although it was met by a 9% increase in eye-clawing and a 4% rise in bleeding from the nose.

They might lose a finger, but at least they’ve got tunes

17 – Back in the days when elevators were a recent invention and prone to the occasional decapitating accident, music was piped in to soothe passengers’ nerves (or to usher them to their nightmarish deaths, depending on the elevator).

18 – Last year was Muzak’s 75th anniversary. Unfortunately, shortly after achieving that impressive milestone, they went bankrupt. Alas, the company managed to reform after reorganising its debt.

Stay tuned to the blog, where we may be running a competition to add your own choice of song to our hold music list.

So Apple have finally gone and done the big-boy thing and admitted there might be a problem with the iPhone 4’s reception. In the meanwhile, until they patch it, some plucky soul has come up with an ingenious and practically free DIY solution to help you learn how to hold the device correctly. What is it? Basically, find one of those rubber charity bracelets that Bob Geldof wanted everyone to wear a few years back (charity shops usually have a buttload), cut some holes in it, and wrap it round your darling iPhone. Voila: you’ve just increased your grip on the phone 56%, and no longer need to hold it in that “wrong” reception-buggering, dainty maid fashion.

DIY: Ghetto iPhone 4 case from a 99c bracelet? [via The iPhone Guru]