Twitter on Philip Sheldrake

The Twitter / Blackberry / Facebook Riots

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Friday Roundup - Twitter, the Human Seismograph

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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!)

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

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Friday fun with "The Garden of Tweetdom"

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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’.

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

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Friday Roundup - Twitter humour

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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:

The B2B Social Web - B2B video programming

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My last post described the first half of my interview with Ecommerce Times. The second half of our interview focused on B2B video programming, or what the publication described as TV Media Relations . B2B multimedia is one of my favourite topics, so I plunged straight in…

Forget “Pop Idol” and “The Apprentice”, B2B programming is the new hot programming. We’re within sight of bespoke TV shows dedicated to your industry, your profession. Coming to a screen near you, a whole raft of new productions with names like Logistics Insights Live, The Coronary Care Beat, Patent Law Update, IT Compliance Bulletin.

But where is this “screen near you”? What is TV?

Summize - Twitter sentiment analytics

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m currently into Social Web Analytics. Here’s my last post on the topic . So some interesting news from Summize’s labs, a new semantic analysis tool to give you a snapshot of the feeling in the Twittersphere.

Simply go here and enter the brand or object name in which you’re interested. Here’s one I did earlier…

Online, offline, up a tree, down a cellar - effective networking is all in the mix

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Being so fascinated by and engrossed in social networking, and digital media relations more widely, I’m asked on a regular basis “What’s the point of spending so much time online?”.

The very basis of the question betrays the fact that the questioner still, like the majority of people to be fair, feels it necessary to divide their life up into “offline” and “online” portions. Yet they don’t distinguish “time eating / not eating”, “time talking / listening”, “time with new people / with old acquaintances”, “time on the phone / not on the phone”.

Like eating, listening and telephones, digital media simply exists. It is part of life. Sure it may have its unique characteristics, but then what doesn’t? I am living, working, having fun, exploring, innovating, learning… some of which just happens to be online and some offline.