Tag: twitter (page 1 of 2)

12 August 2011 / 0 Comments

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

The hot topic of the week has been covered extensively on The Conversation and the mainstream media... the English riots. This Roundup aims to reconcile two polarised camps debating the role of social and mobile media.

First up, a statement from the Prime Minister in the House of Commons yesterday: "... we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality." Conversationalist Mark Pack asks whether it is simply a question of politicians and pundits always trying to ban technologies they don't use.

I think the question has been poorly phrased when it takes the form... Were these riots caused by Twitter / Blackberry messenger / Facebook? No of course they weren't. Riots long preceded the rise of such media. But what if the question was rephrased... How was the character of these riots altered by the availability of such media?

The primary message coming out of The Conversation this week (see below) is that you can't blame social media or society's enthusiastic adoption of it. Yet this belies or at least underplays its influence in my opinion. I would never resort to such tabloid misrepresentation as when the Daily Mail labels one photograph of a London bus ablaze "Twitter riot", but equally it appears that mobile and social media were prominent over other media and forms of communication in organising the riots. Read more

23 July 2010 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – Twitter, the Human Seismograph

Ever considered Twitter in terms of it being a "Human Seismograph"?

Brian Solis won't mind me pointing out that he likes to invent memorable turns of phrase. It's a common trait amongst communicators working on any cutting edge because sometimes existing phraseology doesn't quite do justice to the point being made. So here we are, discussing human seismography.

And two posts this week portray the seismograpic needle waggling wildly.

Firstly, Brian's post "Oil Spill Report: BP and White House Sentiment Spills onto Twitter" reviews the sentiment towards BP as expressed on Twitter. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed analysis is the deleterious knock-on impact the disaster has had on sentiment towards President Obama. Of course, correlations offer no evidence of cause-and-effect unless individual exclamations of feeling explicitly express such a connection, and this is something social web analytics can examine. Read more

9 May 2010 / 0 Comments

How social media might help put UK politics on the right track

Election 2010 was supposed to be the UK's first social media powered election, but with the advent of our first ever Leaders Debates, it became resolutely a TV-powered election.

But that doesn't mean same-interest groups aren't coalescing and making their point online; quite the opposite. It's just that the majority of the British public aren't that engaged with social media just yet. And don't start with that "but Obama did it in 2008" malarkey... sure, he ran a great campaign, but when you break it down you find that the majority "online" effort was plain old email marketing. Good on him, but this hardly makes anyone's definition of social media.

Let's take a brief look at two campaigns running right now, post-election. Read more

19 June 2009 / 1 Comment

We are one. We'd like to look like one, talk like one, act like one.

There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That's fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.

Which is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn't care.

I put "they" in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up "they", doesn't detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.

That's why we use "they" as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct "it".

Secondly, the "they" also indicates what's known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is. Read more

14 April 2009 / 0 Comments

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy – supporting perspective in Ad Age post

A few days after I posted the succinctly titled "There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile", B.L. Ochman posted "Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn't Tweet" on the Ad Age DigitalNext blog.

Right up there at number 1:

You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy. It's a tactic, a tool, not a strategy.

Now my post elicited some responses via Twitter (@sheldrake) questioning my definition of the word "strategy". So for clarity... your social Web strategy is the long-term "how" that follows the "what" of your social Web objectives.

I also agree with number 2 on the Ad Age post... if "every tweet has to be approved by legal" then your organisation is not ready for the social Web let alone little old Twitter. (I'd also argue that your business most likely isn't ready to do business in 2009!) Read more

3 April 2009 / 2 Comments

There is no such thing as a Twitter Strategy but you should have clear expectations for your corporate Twitter profile

I'm amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology... we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.

Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.

The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.

The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.

There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter's sake and not for business success. Read more

27 March 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

This slideshow made me laugh.

View more presentations from The Kaiser.

I've been a Twitter user now for two years, and I'm intrigued by its success.

You can attribute its success to its incredible simplicity, leaving the wider community to develop applications and 'clients' that anyone can chose to adopt or ignore.

You could attribute it to the character limit, meaning that no-one has to worry that they have to put much work into Tweeting (something that holds blogging back to this day), yet also short enough that clever-clogs can innovate and play games with the limitation.

You could attribute it to the ingenious (and incredibly obvious... with the advantage of hindsight) tweak to instant messaging. Take something that is already incredibly popular, but make it more public, more 'many-to-many'. Read more

26 February 2009 / 0 Comments

Dear PR Week, it's not about Twitter per se

In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today ("Twitter has suddenly exploded") we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.

I'd write here things like "AWESOME" and "WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING", but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I'll refrain.

What's with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.

...I don't know a Racepoint consultant who isn't on Twitter, and there's a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile. Read more

13 February 2009 / 0 Comments

Friday Roundup – Twitter humour

What's Twitter for? Interesting question, but we know we enjoyed the Tweetstream from @cluetrainee this week. Subtle. Satirical. And beautifully efficient in poking fun at the bankers who have wrought the current financial terror and are feeling like they want to apologise this week, over and over and over again.

I've appended an extract for your convenience :-) before this week's post highlights.

@cluetrainee gets it, but thanks to Rebecca Caroe for posting an entertaining video ridiculing those Twitterers that don't. Read more

2 December 2008 / 0 Comments

You're No One If You're Not On Twitter

Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of 'the balance' as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?

Here's one songster's take: