why it's time to stop counting your retweets

How easy would it be to write a post ridiculing the practice of assessing the success and relevance of your social media activity by counting the number of retweets, likes, followers or fans you have?

I think we all know it would be quite easy. 

How much value would there be in my doing that?  Well, about as much value as there is in assessing the success and relevance of your social media activity by counting the number of retweets, likes, followers or fans you have.

Did you see what I did there?

I read a blog post today in which someone said they’d tweeted something about the Uberdaddy of record-breaking sky-diving, Felix Baumgartner. That tweet was then retweeted more than 5,000 times, reaching more than 140,000 people’s streams by dint of just two of those RTs.

Woah..! Big numbers.

Big so what, too.

In an exchange on Twitter with a social marketer at one of the world’s premier sports brands, I recently said something that went a little bit like this:

Measuring your online relevance simply by counting how many retweets you get is a bit like driving all the way to the supermarket at the weekend, not actually going in to buy anything, but still considering it to have been a trip to the supermarket.

Technically, that’s a trip to the supermarket.

You don’t have anything to eat though.

One point I (try) to make to the brands I speak to about how they measure social success – and more importantly how they should measure social success – is that surely it has to be better for their business to find 50 people they know are spending money with them than to have 50,000 Facebook likes from people who probably aren’t.

That’s me all over though… I state the obvious.

Social media. Digital communications. Where did it all go wrong? We let it fall under the spell of people with no real experience of what it takes to create genuine interest and actionable desire.

Affecting a sustainable change in people’s perceptions and behaviour is not as hard as it might seem. As for measuring those changes, well OK that is a little bit hard. But it’s not impossible and it gets a good deal easier when you know what it is you’re trying to measure and why.

A former business contact of mine got a job last year as a “social media coordinator.”  I posited that one day, maybe in three-to-five years, there wouldn’t be anyone with the word social in their job title.  It’s all just media.

We need to stop dressing it all up as something it isn’t and get back to the business of crafting great narrative, building compelling brand stories, and measuring the things that really matter.

o2 and the social media handbrake turn

Did O2 get it right on twitter in the wake of their network outage problems?

No.

And yes.

This may be one of the biggest clichés in PR and comms, but it gets to the heart of a very important consideration – what are you trying to achieve, and what does success look like?

When I and thousands of other O2 users found we couldn’t make calls or send texts, we turned to twitter to see what else we could learn about the problem… was it happening to anyone else, was there an explanation, and so on.  The O2 support page seemed to go offline around the same time, possibly due to being swamped by enquiries.

Twitter was soon a-buzz with tweets from disgruntled O2 customers.

There wasn’t a great deal of information coming out of O2 and the grumbles began to grow in volume and intensity. The O2 twitter account seemed to go a bit quiet at that point too.

By Thursday, O2 seemed to be more in control of itself, if not of the glitch that had caused the outage, and the company’s twitter stream was soon alive with responses to customers.

O2 is one of the few brands I follow and interact with on twitter. Not just because I’m a customer, although that is ultimately the explanation, but also because I’ve always thought they got the balance of interaction and broadcast right. There was a human touch to the O2 account but it never overpowered the O2 brand.

But in my opinion the wheels came off on Thursday.

If you check out Karen Webber’s excellent piece about the outage on NewsReach you’ll see what is probably the most famous tweet from O2 in response to an abusive customer’s tweet. It was inspired. Genuinely funny.

That whoever was staffing the twitter account was given the freedom to do that is a masterstoke.

However, I also got the impression that the huge positive sentiment that tweet elicited from the wider audience prompted someone at O2 to declare “do more tweets like that, I think we’ve found our way out.”

For a while it seemed that O2’s motivation on twitter was no longer to inform or engage with customers, but to demonstrate how achingly funny the brand could be – how irreverent and not-at-all-how-you-expected it was capable of being.

For me, that joke wore thin pretty quickly.

It was clever though.

Social media is a fickle environment. The speed with which people get enthused and subsequently bored is staggering at times. So, why not take advantage of that..?  Which is what O2 did.

By engaging in a spot of banter, attempting to shock us all a little by responding to remarks about anal sex with people’s mothers for example, the brand was executing the perfect social media handbrake turn.

O2 outage..? What O2 outage..?? Look over here - they’re being funny about tweeting first and fellating in hell later, and joining in with jokes about pigeons.

Did O2 get it right? I think that depends entirely on what we think they were trying to achieve. If it was reassuring customers (and don’t forget some of them rely on O2 for their business) that the problem had been identified and was being put right, I don’t think so. If it was turning the tide of negative tweets, then yes.

They could have posted some animated cat gifs, that would probably have had the same effect in terms of getting the angry mob to put down the pitchforks and torches.

Personally, I think there was too much emphasis on trying to be clever and funny, and not enough on acknowledging the problem.

Footnote: can you see sour grapes here? If you feel like trawling through my twitter stream you’ll find a tweet from me to O2 stating that despite being inconvenienced by the outage, I wasn’t feeling at all aggrieved. There are no sour grapes.

Background reading: BBC: "O2 says mobile network fully restored after fault."

breaking news: sorry twitter, journalism still wins out

Two things happened in London in the space of 24 hours that, once again, had me – and plenty of others – musing on the role of Twitter as a channel for breaking news.

On Thursday 26 April, there was an incident on the Bakerloo line of the London Underground (that’s the brown one).

I learned about it first thanks to twitter. But here’s what I learned. I learned that something had happened – it might have been a tube train crash, or a collapsed tunnel, or a train might have hit a bulge in the wall of a tunnel, or the tunnel might be flooded, or some plasterwork might have fallen off the tunnel walls onto the track, or there might have been a terrorist attack.

My, what a lot of things I learned from Twitter that morning.

I looked online at some reputable news providers’ websites to see what I might learn from them.  It took a while for the news to appear on the likes of the BBC or the Evening Standard websites. As is right and proper.

On Friday 27 April, news broke on Twitter that there had been a bomb scare on Tottenham Court Road (a very busy shopping street, complete with a major theatre, lots of offices, pubs, restaurants etc, and a tube station that was featured in An American Werewolf in London). There were pics too.

Someone observed that the bomb scare (which during the time I was writing this piece morphed into a hostage situation) had been trending on Twitter for half an hour, but still no mention on the mainstream news sites…. prompting one person to ask  “do we need 24hr news channels anymore?” (@mattaudley)

But I like this tweet best: “What the hell is going on at #tcr?!? The bazillion varied reports are bloody confusing!” (@/betti_ttt)

The story was still developing while I was writing, but this is the BBC's take on it. And as of the time I published this piece, there were no reports of injuries - I can only hope that stays the case.

  

Responsible journalism demands that stories are confirmed ("stood up" in the vernacular). That you have more than one source to corroborate the lead or rumour, and that you explore the facts. At its heart the job of the journalist is to find out what is actually going on and present people with reliable facts*. Otherwise news is nothing more than a lot of rumour and speculation.

There is (and will always be) a role for traditional journalism and regular news outlets – it’s in cutting through the confusion and presenting people with the facts.

That’s something Twitter will never be able to do, because even if one tweet gets immediately to the heart of the matter, the next 50 might offer nothing but fear, uncertainty and doubt. And how on earth is one to tell the difference.

* footnote: anyone who tells you journalism is all about getting to "the truth" is either a self-aggrandising liar, or a fool.

fake gary glitter – the best & worst of twitter

There was a little bit of a commotion last week when an account on twitter called @OfficialGlitter started getting a lot of attention.

I think the sum total of my involvement initially was to tweet that I thought the disgraced pop star was dead. But lots of people were talking about this account, which to all intents and purposes appeared to belong to Gary Glitter, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as a singer, and then again in the late 1990s for offences connected to child pornography.

He was then imprisoned in Vietnam in 2006. If you need more background on this stuff, JFGI.

More than 17,000 people started following the account, including a number of high profile celebrities and public figures. There were plenty of negative opinions voiced but a lot of people tweeted some very positive comments to, and about, the account – which they believed to be the real thing.

It was not.

According to the person, or people, behind the fake account the whole thing had been a “social experiment.” A Tumblr page laid out an attempt at explanation, citing the main reason to be to demonstrate just how gullible some people are online. It also made the point that there is nothing to actually prevent a convicted peodophile from setting themselves up on twitter, and no way of being able to tell real from fake.

I think the first time I wrote about the internet and child pornography was in 1997. So this issue is nothing new to me, and I sometimes think I’ve got a more highly-tuned sense of caution than most people when it comes to internet fakery and staying safe.

One extract from the blog says: "Apart from the thousands of negative and abusive comments I got whilst impersonating Glitter, it amazed me and deeply disturbed me to see a shocking amount of positive, encouraging and supportive comments that people were giving to a convicted child rapist."

And this is where the really good stuff started to happen… in the wake of the big reveal.

The too-cool-for-school brigade appeared en masse to vilify whoever was behind the fake account. The majority of them were the usual empty vessels that can generally be relied upon to be seen struggling to elevate themselves by dint of pushing others down.

But there were some more influential figures joining in, including journalists from leading UK newspapers. Their weighty contributions to this debate tended to be of the “my cat is also a social experiment” type.

For me this kind of backlash is an example of one of the worst aspects of the British psyche. Someone tried to be clever. They weren’t, perhaps, as clever as they thought they were. It matters not if the point they were making was a good point. They were trying to be clever and here, in the UK, that kind of thing will always get you shot down.

Usually by people who wouldn’t recognise an original idea if it dribbled out of their coke-damaged nostril and landed in their breakfast one morning. Or, worse, by those who are actually more than capable of solid, rounded, interesting arguments and opinions but who don’t want to be seen being intelligent, and would rather than stick to being arch, reductive and on the unpleasant side of cynical.

It’s easy to sneer and mock. I find it a hugely unappealing character trait.

I care far less whether there are holes in the explanation offered by the originators of the fake Glitter account (such as how old the account was, whether events overtook them, etc) and more that as a result of their actions someone somewhere may have started to think about the importance of not being so gullible, asking questions, being sceptical.

The issue of keeping children safe online is important.

If you disagree, you are an idiot – or you have a vested interest in children not being kept safe.

Either way, I don't wanna be in your gang.

why four years for the facebook rioters is not a good thing

Two young men in north west England have been sentenced to four years in prison, each, for content posted on Facebook that was deemed to be inciting people to riot.

Some of you may be thinking this is a good thing.

But it's not good.  It's far from good.

The average sentence handed down to rapists in the UK is five years.

That's the average. You don’t need to be a statistician to appreciate that means some get sentences that are far more lenient.

It has to be possible that at the same time one of those men was using Facebook to attempt to encourage people to engage in acts of criminal destruction (in one case the proposed target was a McDonald's restaurant) somewhere in the UK a woman was being raped.

Should her attacker be arrested, convicted and sent to prison in accordance with the existing typical sentencing loads, that rapist will be released back into society before someone who invited people to a riot that never took place.

This cannot, to any reasonable person, be a good thing.

I do not advocate leniency in the sentencing of people who have sought to perpetrate civil disorder, theft and destruction. Far from it.

The events that took place around 8/9 August 2011, when the rioting and looting reached its apex, were shocking and appalling. Those that broke the law must be brought to book and suffer the consequences.

However, the government has been on the back-foot from the outset and even now is seeking to position itself as in control of things by virtue of a succession of reactionary statements driven by fear. Now, it would appear, the judiciary is caught up in that fear too.

So much for the separation of powers.

Crack down on rioters and looters by all means. That can only be a good thing. Furthermore, investigating options for coping with the way in which people will choose to use social media, mobile phones and other messaging technologies is a good thing too.

Sending someone down for a failed attempt at inciting a riot – whether they do it on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, a phone call, a fax, or even a carrier pigeon – is also a good thing.

But a situation where rapists face lighter prison sentences than a couple of idiots in Cheshire whose clumsy attempts to look big on Facebook would be more at home on a site called egg-on-your-face-book is not a good thing.

It is a bad thing.

crackdowns, kneejerks, and forest fires

Last week's wave of social unrest and wide-scale criminality in the UK has opened up the issue of how social media is used to a more mainstream audience than it has previously. Was it part of the problem? Was it part of the solution?

I expressed my opinion on this on twitter:

My point being that a forest fire spreads quickly via the trees. The trees aren't wooden arsonists, merely fuel being somewhat opportunistically used by the fire.

I read on Friday that the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail company had "temporarily interrupted" the service from the following mobile phone companies - Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. This was done to disrupt a protest which had been planned in the wake of a fatal shooting on 3 July of a man called Charles Hill by the BART police.

According to a report I read on Al Jazeera:

"On Thursday, BART police Lieutenant Andy Alkire told the local Bay City News agency that while it was unusual to block mobile services, it was 'a great tool to utilise for this specific purpose.'

"Linton Johnson, BART's spokesman, told the local KTVU television channel that BART 'didn't try to shut down the protest. They simply turned off the cell service so it couldn't become viral. It really is just a cost-benefit analysis of where your freedom of speech begins to threaten the public safety.'"

Fair enough. Up to a point. But I can't be the only person who thinks that a train company shouldn't be deciding on where the line is drawn. Can I?

In the early 1990s, when I was a freelance writer and editor, I interviewed a lawyer for a piece I was writing. We talked about how the legal profession was adapting to meet the needs of its clients. The lawyer told me that the fax machine had changed people's perceptions of how quickly decisions were made – a client sends you a fax that requires a detailed and careful response. But because they know it only took seconds for you to receive it, they expect that response in a similar timeframe.

Jeez. Just think what havoc email and IM must have wrought.

The law (in it's broadest sense) has always lagged behind innovation.

Cliché alert…. technology is moving so quickly that legislation cannot possibly keep pace.

But surely that's ok. To an extent.

Wherever you are reading this (I have readers on every continent bar Antarctica you know! <smiles, waves>) don't we all want to live in a society where the laws are carefully considered and brought into being following the proper consultation and evaluation of their efficacy and how they might be enforced?

Kneejerk reactions can be the downfall of many a well-intentioned action – whether in the personal or professional sphere. Some have greater consequences than others. It could be a damaged personal relationship, a badly-managed crisis, or even a calamitous piece of legislation.

While it would be foolish to completely dismiss the role of social media in bringing people together around a cause, a one-size-fits-all reaction will do more harm than good.

facebooking the music

As some of you reading this will know, I am currently the lead vocalist in a band called The Subtitles.

Most people agree it’s a cool name.

And when we launched it late last year, most people agreed we have a cool website.

We have a page on Facebook. And a Twitter account.  You might want to open those links in a new tab - for some reason that seems to work better.

But the website is easily our most impressive online estate. Lots of pics, some of which were sent in by people who attended our gig in February. There are also two recordings so you can get an idea of what we sound like.

Some people like how we sound, others… well not so much. But that’s ok, there’s no point trying to be all things to all people.  But I have high hopes of some of the news songs we're writing.

Anyway back to Facebook. I have a confession. I’ve always felt somewhat conflicted about using it where the band is concerned.

I was an early adopter of LinkedIn. I was on MySpace before it peaked, and then well, less-than-peaked.

And I took to Twitter with a zeal that would put many a religious fundamentalist to shame.

But when it comes to using Facebook to promote The Subtitles I keep hitting a wall. If you’ll pardon the pun.

So if you’ve read this far I would like crave your indulgence.

I'd like you to visit The Subtitle’s Facebook page and well… do something. Like it, share it, critique it, leave a comment here and tell me what you think about it.  Anything really - advice that I can use to improve things, that's what I'm looking for.

Thanks in advance – I hope to hear from you.