Where on earth is The Rake and why doesn’t it have any reception and why are we being dragged to Borough market?

Its all Louis’ fault – he lives round the corner and is on first name terms with all the ales in the enormous fridge. We’re in the game of bringing together the most exciting digital types and possibly some work. In a snuggly environment. Yes it’s the punmaster Cadbury at the keys and this month’s sponsor is Worksnug!

WorkSnug has just released an iPhone app that uses state of the art technology to guide you to your nearest place for some mobile working, and gives you ratings on how good that place is for wireless provision, power provision and if its friendly. It even tells you how noisy a place it may be to work. Why not take a reading of the place and send it back to the worksnug website using the inbuilt decibel meter?

Why are we shamelessly plugging Worksnug? Because they have agreed to add the Rake to their system for one night only so if you download the app to your iPhone 3GS (or 3G with limited functionality) you will be able to use the app to guide you to The Rake, which is pretty cool. You should download their brilliant iPhone application Worksnug pro [iTunes link] right now.

On arrival you’ll be greeted with a complimentary beer, (2 if you show the application) courtesy of WorkSnug and a hug from us – we always give hugs, it adds to the snug feeling.

WorkSnug, we salute you!

See you all on the 29th!

How does a brand with one of the most challenging product offering changes of all time approach PR?

Traditionally a brand in this position would create a slew of souless adverts hoping for a trillion unqualified eyeballs not to glaze over while they are subjected to a hollow and vacuous “brand impression.”

So what did Kodak do? Microsponsorhip. Kodak are not after your eyeballs – they are after your heart.

With this in mind Ketchum Pleon – Kodak’s PR agency approached Ale 2.0 to sponsor London’s most chilled meetup. Kodak wanted to target the key influencers in the tech blogging community to introduce them to their client’s newest toy, the Kodak Zi8, a HD video camera.

Over the ensuing weeks we got to know @francesca25, Ketchum’s Digital Specialist for the UK and introduced her to our favourite pubs, she even made it to @charlescadbury’s birthday party, an act for which she was well rewarded. The only downside to this sponsored event was that we had to limit the numbers so we split the invite list between our closest and loyal supporters and bloggers we had the most admiration for.

The good news for those invited is that everyone was given a zi8 to keep for ever and ever on the understanding that they recorded the event and blogged about it in whichever manner they felt best. Kodak even gave up some budget to pay for a tasting session at the rake that was greatly appreciated by all – free HD cameras, free beer! Good times indeed.

You can see some coverage here:

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Flickr from @Bitchbuzz

What Is Ale 2.0?

“Ale 2.0 is a community of people who work in digital marketing who like real ale – we meet once a month to discuss the finer points of the business and to enjoy the best ale on the planet.

How Did Ale 2.0 Come About?

We were big fans of a regular meetup called Likemind which had an easy going vibe and ideas were shared freely, cards are swapped and it is a generally and fun positive experience. We met @al_robertson at one of the events, hit it off and decided to meet up for an ale or two in the coming week.

Once holed up in the Old Fountain we discussed the variety of tools and trends that we had been getting involved in. It was refreshing to talk about the technologies outside of a direct work context as we had become sick of talking about them in terms of clients. The agency environment has the capacity to be silo’d and it’s easy to become sucked in to the just reading about tech etc online. We are the kind of people that see the value in talking to real people and learning from each other in person all with a good ale naturally.

Louis casually tweeted about having an “ale up” and the response was good enough for us to take it seriously and put a date in a diary, set up a blog.

To our surprise about 25 people showed up at the Harp on a sunny day in June. Some people had travelled over an hour to be there and it was genuinely exciting to meet people whose faces you were used to seeing as a tiny crushed up little avatar. We all talked, drank ale (and recorded it on our phones – Ipadio) flicker.

Afterwards we all felt realy positive – we’d made something happen! Up to that point Web 2 had seemed like funny youtube videos/dell and facebook baby photos – but through realitme technology we’d put together a mini community – ale and digital combined.

We couldn’t leave it alone after that, Ale 2.0 blurrred the lines between work and non work. We now have a community of freinds who are equally a part of our work life as part of our personal lives – Ale 2.0 is neither one or the other – it benefits both equally.

We’ve run one everymonth (just about) since then and we’ve had people from the BBC, Thomson Reuters, Metro, Sun Microsystems, BitchBuzz, GDR, Gumtree, The Times, Agency.com, Which, Ogilvy, Dare, techcrunch, mashable, The Observer as well as bloggers and of course real ale fans.

A few months into it we thought about how we could be more productive with talent of the people who came to the meetup. Having been inspired by Tuttle and their consultancy model -Tom, Fleur and Kate came up with the idea that if everyone at the next Ale 2.0 out their cards in a pint glass wrote an amount of time and their specialism on those cards – we would then amass that time and donate it to a charity that had a low/no marketing budget. We asked the same crowd to vote for a charity and the APP was selected. Over 2010 – we will be working with the APP and the Ale 2.0 members to help them out this year.

We’ve had two members of Ale 2.0 get new jobs through the events and one couple (albeit briefly) – so there is some love in the air. So much so that the core team has increased to five. Charlie and AJ of www.whiteapp.com join Tom from Skive and Louis from We Are VI and Kate Arkless Grey (from just about everything).

It is the nature of the business that marketing can often involve flogging bad products to bad people and that the interest often can only be found in the process. Ale 2.0 looks to provide much needed soulfulness in the advertising industry or at least a respite from selling products that can often be less than inspiring.

Our aim is to make Ale 2.0 the most loved event for people in marketing who want to talk shop, learn from others, make new connections without name badges or agendas. If it’s not fun, then we don’t want to do it anymore. We’ve loved meeting 99% of the people who have come to the events and personally we’ve learned loads and made our digital experience fuller.

We’ve also learned a f**kload about ale – we had a passing fondness for the stuff when we started but there’s a whole world of ale/beer out there. Maybe for this reason Kodak has come onboard to sponsor the next event, it’ll be an invite only affair for some of our most ardent supporters and some bloggers to help spread the word. This format will continue throughout the year.

The next event is at to be found at The Cross Keys on the 25th of Feb.

Ale 2.0 is @howmanygills, @mrtomollerton, @CharlesCadbury, @kidcapricious and @radiokate