Innocent Drinks’ Supergran initiative is back again - except this year it’s been renamed The Big Knit. The idea is that people knit small bobble hats to sit atop bottles of Innocent smoothies. The behatted bottles go on sale - they’ll be in Sainsbury’s in November - and for every one sold innocent and Sainsbury’s donate 50p to Age Concern.

The Innocent website has very simple instructions on how to make the hats, and there are groups on Facebook and Flickr that you can join to show your support and get some knitting inspiration!

At the time of writing 2,012 hats have been knitted and sent to Innocent. I’ll be keeping an eye on this hatometer to find out how they’re doing with reaching their target of 400,000 hats…and will be knitting a few of my own to help them reach their goal.

The Editors, part of the BBC blog network, recently featured an interesting post about redesigning the Newsnight website. It’s a call to action from Newsnight editor Peter Barron, who asks readers to let him know what they like and don”t like about the current website via the comments. He says:

“Let us know what you love and hate, what you visit all the time, what you never visit but are glad is there…Do you want to read long articles, view video, download podcasts or talk to each other?…And are there features we should quietly put out of their misery?…The pruning shears are in your hands”.

The post has generated some good comments and suggestions, about navigation and structure on the homepage, improving accessibility and suggestions for new content and features. By asking these questions through The Editors blog, Newsnight has managed to reach a highly-engaged audience and therefore achieved a level of feedback and insight that can be difficult to solicit through a standard online survey.

I like this approach to gathering feedback from users and assessing website performance, and can see a role for it alongside other mechanisms like website analytics, surveys, focus groups and user testing. The informality of the ”comments” approach lends itself particularly well to gathering frequent, ongoing feedback, as well as testing out new ideas.

Update: The revamped Newsnight website launched at the end of August. A post on the Newsnight blog says: “Many raised similar themes and we’ve tried to incorporate or reflect most of them. The result is, we hope, less cluttered, clearer and much easier to navigate. And, as many of you requested, we’ve killed the GorDaq”.

Last week cybersoc.com featured a story about how ”news sites should make better use of the material provided by YouTube and other Internet resources”, quoting from an article published in American Journalism Review.
The article argues that rather than build new, proprietary social media tools, news organisations should find ways to use existing social media tools, like YouTube and Flickr, which already have a highly-engaged audience and are easy to use. I think this can also be applied to other types of organisations that are looking to embrace social media or find new ways to interact with their audiences online.

A good example of a company that is already doing this is Innocent Drinks, which has set up a Fruitstock 2006 pool on Flickr. The photopool was promoted in Innocent’s weekly email newsletter and at the time of writing, 76 Flickr members had contributed a total of 404 photos from the Fruitstock festival which took place earlier in August.

This very simple, easy to implement idea is a great way of extending the momentum of the festival and helping to build a community around the Innocent brand. Prize money of £250 for Innocent’s three favourite Fruitstock photos is a nice extra touch to encourage people to participate.