The Rise and Rise of Social Media in the UK

Over at the We Are Social blog, Robin Grant points towards research from Hitwise showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits over the Christmas period were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’:

"The successes of Facebook and YouTube, along with similar sites, meant that social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week. For the week ending 27/12/08, our Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 10.09% of all UK Internet visits, the first ever time it has passed the 10% threshold."

Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK

Here's the graph showing the rise in internet traffic to social networking sites over the past 12 months:

UK Social Media traffic Dec '07 - Dec '08

The trend also applies to Twitter:

UK Internet visits to Twitter Jul '07 - Jul '08

The post on We Are Social pulls out another quote from Robin Goad that highlights the key facts about the rise in visits to Twitter:

"UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there."

It all makes for positive reading for those operating in the space and I'm sure it won't be long before Twitter becomes one a 'mainstream' social network, as many are predicting.

The full set of in-depth data is available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update. Thanks goes to Robin Grant for flagging the research to me.

Magpie: How to lose followers and alienate tweeple

There's a lot of chatter on Twitter this morning about Be-A-Magpie,  a service that will pay you to insert advertisements into your Twitter stream.

According to TechCrunch, advertisers pay on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis, and the ads are promised to be delivered to relevant audiences based on keywords. That means Be-A-Magpie will analyze the content of your Twitter messages to see if there is a match to particular advertisers. The service auto-determines the number of ads to insert per legitimate Twitter message - the default is one ad for every five tweets. The service inserts the ads automatically by storing your Twitter credentials.

The TechCrunch Twitter account, with 31,000 followers, can earn a whopping €14,410.51 per month. By comparison, my Twitter account can earn a paltry €149.11  per month.

However, there has been a lot backlash against the service. One of the main reasons seems to be that Be-A-Magpie is aginast the ethos that the twitter community has created, namely to share what's interesting to you at that moment, not what someone has paid you to share with others.

As for disclosure, a #magpie hashtag is added to each Tweet. You can also see who has signed up for the service already as Be-A-Magpie are seeding messages through Twitter to get more people signed up, as this photo from TechCrunch shows:

Scobleiser has started an interesting disucssion over on FriendFeed which discusses whether Be-A-Magpie should be banned from Twitter. A lot of people are saying that they will unfollow anyone who starts using the service as it is considered spam.

My favourite comment comes from Enrique Gutierrez:

"Social Media is about sharing interesting things with people who find those things interesting, not about soapboxing crap and spamming others with random junk. Magpie is a service that doesn't understand that, and though it attempts (poorly) at doing some level of justice to spamming, it's still spam/ads and unwelcomed in my book"

Jeremiah Owyang gives his take on the service here. Neville Hobson also gives his take on what Twitter with ads might look like, which explores some of the issues around advertising on Twitter, although the post doesn't look specifically at Be-A-Magpie.

No doubt @Ev and the others from Twitter will be taking a close look at the service and whether it should be allowed on Twitter. Their terms and conditons don't prohibit this kind of service, but if the backlash continues, it may well be worth their time to amend its terms.

I won't be using the service, but it will be interesting to see who does from those I follow. Although, if they do subscribe to Be-A-Magpie, I for one won't be following them for much longer.

Hotwire heads up 'preeple' table

Following on from yesterday's post on Stephen Davies' list of preeple on Twitter, Michael Litman has produced a table listing agencies' presence on Twitter, which is aimed as a compliment to Stephen’s alphabetically ordered list.

I'm sure the list will get updated as more people add themselves to the list through comments so the table may change, but at the time of writing Hotwire heads up the table with a total of 16 preeple without including any twitterers from it's sister agency, Skywrite Communications. Axicom comes next and it's good to see the Rainier team with 11 Twitter users.

Although the table might not mean that much as the agencies listed vary in size and as such will have differing levels of people on Twitter, it is nice to see that Hotwire has a lot of active people on Twitter and how we recognise it as a useful tool throughout the agency, not just in our digital media practise.

Here's the list as it appears on Michael's blog:

1. Hotwire (16)
2. Axicom (12)
3. Rainier (11)
4. Edelman (9)
5. Lewis (9)
6. Ruder Finn (9)
7. Cow (8)
8. Berkeley (6)
9. Freelance (6)
10. Wolfstar (6)
11. Hill & Knowlton (5)
12. Porter Novelli (5)
13. Six Degrees (5)
14. Text 100 (5)
15. ITV (4)
16. Liberate Media (4)
17. Mantra (4)
18. Microsoft (4)
19. Waggener Edstrom (4)
20. Weber Shandwick (4)
21. Diffusion (3)
22. Kaizo (3)
23. O2 (3)
24. Shiny Red (3)
25. Wildfire PR (3)
26. Fishburn Hedges (2)
27. Nelson Bostock (2)
28. Punch Communications (2)
29. Racepoint Group (2)
30. Splendid Communications (2)
31. Staniforth (2)
32. University of Warwick (2)

Jeeple and Preeple

Stephen Davies of 3W PR has produced two blog posts of note recently (not that is other posts are rubbish, just these ones have garnered more attention than normal...).

The first post lists journalists in the UK who are on Twitter. The second does much the same, listing PR people in the UK who have a profile on Twitter.

So far, there are 85 journalists on the list compared to 137 PR people by the last count. That's almost twice as many 'preeple' on Twitter as there are 'jeeple' (using Stephen's terms), and the list of PR professionals is growing as people leave comments below the post to be added on to the list.

What does this actually mean anything though (apart from the fact that journalists are now going to get contacted more often by PROs on Twitter, PROs will get contacted by recruiters through Twitter, and Stephen will get a lot more hits to his blog)?

It has been documented that there are currently around three times more PR professionals than there are journalists in the UK, so it might come as no surprise that the list of hacks is longer. 

It might also be an indication of the varying levels of usefulness of Twitter as a tool for both professions:

Journalists can source stories and potential snippits of information on Twitter much quicker than most other tools, tweet stories they've recently published, and use it for sourcing information for articles. There's a much longer list of uses and some good discussion on the subject here.

PRs can use Twitter to have a conversation with their cleint's market and make and mange connections with customers, bloggers and other stakeholders, keep in touch and build relationships with the  media and influential bloggers, monitor mentions of their company or client brands, announce special deals,  post live updates on events or conferences and promote blog posts, webinars, interesting client news and more.

I'm sure that journalists will argue with me on this one, but it may just be that PR professionals have a wider range of users for Twitter than journalists and these uses are more valuable to their work (BTW, this isn't me trying to get journalists to leave comments on this post so we can find out more clearly how they use Twitter...).

Then again, it might also be an indication that PR professionals have more time to waste scouring t'internet and posting up to Twitter ;)

What do you think? Do you feel that there is an imbalance in the number of journalists on Twitter compared to PR people? Is this a bad thing? What does it mean for both journalists and PR professionals?

Fry off to a flying start on Twitter

Mass excitement around the Twittersphere yesterday as national treasure Stephen Fry joined Twitter. Within 2 hours, Stephen had over 2,500 followers - with more being added constantly - in what must have been a record number of followers in such a short space of time.

To see the full scale of commotion, take a look at the Twitter Search on Mr Fry.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of this was the fact that he was following a lot of people back, meaning that there were numerous squeals of delight when people received the "Stephen Fry is now following you on Twitter" email. When I received mine, I did actually let out a girly squeak and have since printed off said email, framed it, and it now hangs over my desk...

The thing that most interested me about Stephen joining Twitter is that he instantly has a mass of people talking to him (or about him) meaning that he won't have time to 'dip his toes in the water' as it were and find his feet with the service. Unless he has help behind the scenes - as some have commented - then he's been thrown in feet first, will be overwhelmed by the noise and may not see the value in Twitter.

In fact, Stephen has already sensed this himself as a few tweets have shown:

Most people I've spoken to on this subject feel that they gain the most out of Twitter when used to follow a select group of contacts and see how their conversations develop - "a manageable group of people to follow" as Kate Bevan put it.

If Stephen doesn't continue using Twitter then it will be a massive shame as we're all no doubt looking forward to such 140 character gems as "Golly, crumbs, heckamighty and all the powerful legal swears and cusses Twitter will allow."

Then again, Stephen has said that he will tweeting his travels around the world, all of which will be on his soon-to-be-overhauled website, www.stephenfry.com. So even if all of his 2,926 followers (at the last count) won't be able to strike up a conversation on Twitter with him, we'll at least have our days brightened by his occassional tweets.

Anyone who thinks they're too cool to use Twitter can leave

(Tip 'o the hat to Tim Masih!)

Scheduling Twitter messages with Twittertise

Twittertise could prove to be an extremely useful tool for all sorts of companies and organisations on Twitter, as it lets you schedule Twitter messages in advance to send automatically.

Whatever is written on Twitter is posted immediately into the main timeline, which is great for individual users who want to let people know what they're up to, but if a company wants to send out pre-written tweets - like news, announcements, or other promotional messages - they'd need someone to remember to manually send out the messages or setup an RSS feed, through a service such as Twitterfeed, to automatically do the job for you.

The problem of tweeting announcements this way is that  it normally results in 10 messages being sent at once - very annoying for those whose timeline is suddenly taken up by a torrent of news announcements:

That's where Twittertise comes in, allowing you to spread out the timing of tweets to appear less spamtastic. Twittertise is also simple to use: you log in with your Twitter username and password, type in tweets your tweets as normal and schedule them to send at a specific time.

Simple, but effective.

If you want to direct people to your homepage or a news item of interest,  Twittertise has an excellent feature that routes links through a URL shortening tool called Bit.ly, which lets you track how many people have clicked through your link - an indespensible feature for Public Relations practitioners (amongst others) who want to prove the audience reach of their Twitter activity.

I'm sure there's lots more uses for Twittertise - what do you see as potential uses of this service? What are the other advantages if using this service? Any disadvantages that users should be aware of?

Research on Twitter demographics from Hitwise

Sherrilynne Starkie posted a link on Twitter this morning to an article on Twitter demographics. Written by Bill Tancer from Hitwise and featured in Time magazine this week, the article gives the results of research into Twitter user profile data.

The research is interesting because (as Nick Burcher of Zed Media notes):

"There are a number of systems that allow analysis of what Twitter users are posting, but it is much harder to analyse who they are."

These are the key points about Twitter demographics from the Hitwise data:

• Males make up 63% of Twitterers
• California residents account for more than 57% of Twitter's visitors
• Twitter's largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds who make up 25.9% of its users.
• 14.7% of Twitter visitors are type H03 a.k.a the "Stable Career," comprising a "collection of young and ethnically diverse singles living in big-city metros like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami." The Stable Career tends to work in the arts and entertainment industry, drive small cars and espouse very liberal political views.
• 12.3% of Twitter's visitors are H01 a.k.a. the "Young Cosmopolitan," 40-somethings likely to drive a Prius, earn household incomes over $250,000 per year and also identify with very liberal politics.

It turns out that Twitter is not just 18-24 year olds using the service as a substitute for SMS texting (especially now Twitter has disabled certain SMS features). Older, professional audiences are key Twitter user demographics too, meaning that the service is more mainstream and more valuable (given the average spending power of users) than previously thought.

I also presume that the remaining 43% of Twitter users that don't reside in California must live in London or Brighton. Well, according to my Twitter stream anyway...

To Blip or not to Blip?

There's been quite a bit of buzz about Blip.fm recently. For those of you who don't know, Blip.fm is "a music sharing site where you post short messages (blips) with a track attached. The timeline builds up a story accompanied by music documenting your friends’ day. You play the timeline and have music on all day selected by your friends." (Hat tip: Becky McMichael)

You can even upload your own music and give people "props" if you enjoy a particular song they've blipped. You can also share your music on other sites, such as Last.fm and Twitter (check their FAQ to find out more). It's a great site which I'm sure - as more people join - will become an alternative, if not a direct competitor, to Last.fm.

But the ability to share what you're listening to on other sites - normally a definite plus point for emerging services - may actually threaten the success of Blip.fm. Some people have taken to cross-posting every single one of their blips to Twitter, meaning that some people's Twitter streams end up covered with muscial notes and Tinyurls to someone's Blip.fm stream.

This has annoyed a lot of people on Twitter, most notably Bobbie Johnson:

Sorry people - the bliprage has hit me. Please, no more ♫♪ LISTEN TO MY STATION ON COCK.FM!!!!! ♪♪

(Good luck with the move to San Francisco by the way Bobbie - hope it all goes well!)

The reason it annoys people? Tweeting every single one of your blips is spam. Twitter is a platform for conversations, for useful links and for interesting thoughts. Unfortunately, the majority of blips don't fall into any of these categories.

Blip.fm operates just like Twitter, meaning that you can follow other "DJs" and they can follow you back. You can also do @ replies, so you can get a conversation going with any contacts you make on there. The only reason that some people aren't using Blip.fm like Twitter is that the audience isn't there yet. No one is listening to what you have to say on Blip.fm, but by cross-posting to Twitter you instantly gain a much bigger audience.

But, unfortunately, the people who tweet every blip will find that their audience on Twitter will decrease - I've stopped following at least 3 people because of their blip spam.

It's an interesting example of where cross posting can go wrong and I'm sure (and hope) that Blip.fm won't fail because of this.

What are your thoughts on Blip.fm? A good service or do you still favour Last.fm? Do you tweet your blips?

If you fancy finding out about the music I listen to, you can add me as a favourite DJ at blip.fm/benrmatthews. I promise I won't spam you with 80s glam rock!

Announcing the Harvest Twestival!

In the pub the other night, over a few beers (where all the best ideas happen), a group of Twitterers / footballing-wannabees came up with an idea for a tweetup, bringing together the disparate worlds of Karaoke, Twitter and the Harvest Festival.

The result? The Harvest Twestival!

The event will happen on 25 September in a mystery location in deepest darkest London (which means that we're still sorting out a venue...).

As well as meeting the faces behind the Twitter avatars (and checking out whether they really are as good looking as their online appearances), there'll be plenty of songs to be sung with karaoke classics and, while you're at it, do some good for the world (kind of like Band Aid but without Bob Geldof)

In the spirit of our schooling days, we'll be holding a food drive, where everyone's invited to bring a few cans of food, dug out from the back of dusty food cupboards, which we will be donating to a central London soup kitchen. It is hoped that this nostalgia trip will also be a way for the Twittersphere to help those in need.

The idea for the Harvest Twestival came about Tom Malcolm's (Diffusion PR) love for karaoke, Tim Hoang's (Porter Novelli) love for getting people together and Ben Matthews' (Hotwire PR) love for helping those in need.

There'll also be an announcement of a new project that will use the PR community to help charities non-profits and social enterprises, of which more details will be released closer to the time.

It all promises to be a fun evening, a chance to meet up with old friends and meet some new ones, all while doing a little bit to help those who are less fortunate.

Once we've sorted a venue and sponsors for a bit of beer money, we'll also set up an event invite on the Facebook group.

For more information, contact one of the organisers via twitter - Ben Matthews (@benrmatthews), Tim Hoang (@timhoang) or Tom Malcolm (@tommalcolm).

In the meantime, get practicing on your singing voice, dig out a few cans of food, and we'll see you on the 25th!

Should PR people blog/tweet about their client work?

Not wanting to start of this post sounding like an episode of Sex and the City, but what are the rules surrounding PR practitioners talking about their client work in the online space? Does it annoy the people not in PR have to put up with our occasional promotional tweets in between personal messages? Should we be posting/tweeting about or client work at all?

Etiquette would have it that most people would be perfectly happy to put up with a few plugs from a PR person, as long as there was a disclaimer stating that it was client work. I've done it a few times on Twitter (with a disclaimer), but I've seen a few people being pulled up for tweeting about client work but not disclaiming the fact.

There's also the issue of people who put up a link on their blog or a Tiny URL on their Twitter feed, but not informing people where the link leads to. Often it is to personal blog post or a clients site. Is this practice frowned upon?

What about people who blog/tweet on behalf of a client? And what if they then retweet a client's messages sans disclaimer? This confuses the issue even more.

I believe that in PR, transparency and authenticity counts for a lot. I'm perfectly happy for people to write about their client work and even plug it, as long as the wool isn't being pulled over our eyes and there's a clear disclaimer that lets everyone know that what has been written should be read from a certain perspective. Sometimes it can be really useful for people to write about their client work as it may be of genuine interest to people who read about it.

Our personal and business lives are so intertwined in the online community that it is often impossible to separate the two in some cases. Even then, it is only good practice to let people know what's going on behind the scenes.

What do you think? Do you let people know when you write about client work? Do you get annoyed when people write about their clients without telling you that they're being paid by them?

(P.S. Apologies, but upon rereading this post, it really does seem like something out of Sex and the City, especially if you read it in Sarah Jessica Parker's whiney New York accent)

The Question of Privacy on Twitter

My colleague Drew tagged me in a post on his blog, asking what's best - to be public or private on Twitter?

Drew choose public because he feels that it's better at connecting you with other people. And that's the main reason he uses Twitter. Good things tend to happen when you connect.

As for me, my Twitter feed is set to public. I agree with Drew that when it comes to connecting with people (which is arguably what Twitter is best used for) public is the way to go. I am now in contact with a lot more people due to being on Twitter, and the service has improved both my business and social lives.

I have tried my account on private, but got tired of filtering through the requests to follow me. I find it much better to let whoever wants to follow me and let Twitter send me an email to let me know when someone does. I can then check their profile at my convenience and if I feel like following them back I will. And that's an important point - even if people follow me I don't have to follow them back, which is especially useful given the rise of spam bots on Twitter recently.

It is important to remember though that whatever I put out on my Twitter stream of consciousness are things that I'm happy for all of my followers to see. If I did have highly personal or sensitive conversations, then I would set my account to private. But then again, people can direct message each other if things are more appropriate that way, then there's even the options (as crazy as they may seem) of email and phone conversations.

It will be interesting to hear what the others tagged on Drew's post think. But what about you? Is your Twitter acoount set to public or private? Why did you choose one or the other?

Update:

I put the question out on Twitter and received the following replies:

	bigtimbond @benrmatthews Public, baby, it's the only way to be!
	Ronna @benrmatthews My Twitter account is public. If its online its public anyway, so I never say anything online that would embarass me in public

Tapio also asked me to tag a few blogger friends to get canvas their opinion, so I'd like to see what Dominic, Patrick, Andy and Stacy-Marie think.

Twitterers at 2gether08

There is just so much chatter on the Twittersphere this morning that I thought I'd list those twitterers that are here (with the help of our friend Summize.) Hopefully people will start following each other, join in the conversation,and ultimately add to the event.It is also really useful to follow the event on Summize (here)If I've missed anyone out, let me know and I'll add them on!

• benrmatthews (Me!)
• waugaman
• dominiccampbell
• jobsworth
• darraghdoyle
• Nico_Macdonald
• joannejacobs
• martman
• kevglobal
• EverythingHQ
• timaldiss
• lisadevaney
• Dothegreenthing
• kevinmarks
• pjlaurie
• psd
• ClareWhite
• anniemole
• philhawksworth
• russelldavies
• lloyddavis
• jemimakiss
• Stevebridger
• davidwilcox
• paulhenderson
• tom_watson
• tomtaylor
• umairh
• alfie 
• jemstone 
• giz 
• jemimah_knight
• amayfield
• danmcquillan
• Mickfealty
• matlock
• agentgav
• codepo8  
• edmittance

Blogging for the real world

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend the weekend in Dorset doing some charity work. Much as I love London, it was great to get out of the City into the countryside for a bit of a break from the fast-paced city life.

As an added bonus, we were in the middle of nowhere and could barely get any phone reception, let alone an internet connection. This meant that there was no way of keeping up with the blogosphere, Twitter, or emails.

It was great to get away from it all - even if for just a weekend.

This sentiment rang even truer given the book I took away with me to read: We Think by Charles Leadbeater. It seemed to me, reading in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere under a lazy blue sky, that Leadbeater could have done with stepping outside his office more often.

Don't get me wrong - We Think is a great book. It explores plenty of the issues surrounding the new ways of working that the internet has brought about and the challenges we will all face in the future in light of this. Leadbeater also avoids using overly complicated language for the sake of it and uses simple terms and descriptions to get across his ideas (a big tick in my box).

But - and I think this is a problem with academia in general - it seems to be less rooted in the real world with concrete examples of how to apply the theories put forward to the real world, and more as a piece of academia written for academia's sake.

You could argue that the same happens to the blogosphere - blog comments just come from bloggers commenting on each others blogs. Twitter is an extension of this; bloggers commenting on issues - not on each others blogs, but on Twitter (could it be argued that Twitter is a post and every Tweet a comment underneath it?)

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a much better book - for me anyway. It is written ion the same simple language as We Think, but the ideas it puts forward are much more rooted in the real world, concrete examples and case studies are explored in depth, and - most importantly - it is discussed how these examples can help us in our everyday business and personal lives and what we can take from these examples. Shirky has stepped outside his office into the real world, but then brought it back to write the book, and finally tailored it to be put back out into the real world.

This is a lesson that I'm hoping to take to my blog. I'm going to try and root every blog post in the real world, giving examples of how readers can apply the ideas given to their work and personal lives. It may be a tall order - not every blog post will appropriate or useful - but it's a good ideal to work towards.

As for stepping outside the online bubble? I think I'm pretty good at that anyway, but will try to keep on keeping on and getting out into the real world. This may seem hypocritical coming from someone who's paid to do online PR, but to keep things even more in perspective, read this unbelievably true blog post from Jeremy Pepper.

The kids I was helping this weekend have gone through so much more than you or I probably ever will, so just bear in the back of your mind the next time you're still reading blogs at 2am that it just doesn't matter.

Twitter Launches Twitter Status Blog

Sitting on the first page of Twitter this morning was a short message that has (thankfully) replaced the doom and gloom messages about the pagination and IM features being unavailable:

"Check out the Twitter Status blog for ongoing updates about the service."

It's good to see that Twitter is trying to communicate it's problems more. For example, the first post explains that the API request limit has been lowered to 30 requests an hour and that pagination has been partially restored:

Pagination partially restored

Most users will be able to paginate through older updates, but you may run into some situations where the Older links are not available. We’re continuing to work on restoring pagination for everyone.

IM is still offline but we are currently testing some fixes that enable the restoration of that service.

IM and Pagination are disabled, API limited

Due to excessive database load, we have disabled pagination on the web and IM updates. Also, we’ve lowered the API request limit to 30 requests per hour. We are working to restore.

While I'm sure everyone would rather Twitter not have to have a status blog and keep Twitter running 24/7, when it does go down we at least now know the problem.

This is one blog that I hope doesn't update very much as Twitter runs better in the future.

Twitter Hiring and Firing

Recently, there's been a few hires made over Twitter.

For example, Rainier PR recently hired the services of Matt Watson, and RedMonk offered a position to Tom Raferty - both hires made through Twitter (By the way, congrats to both Matt and Tom, and good luck in your new roles).

It looks like companies using Web 2.0 for their recruitment will be a trend we'll start to see more of, especially with the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn encroaching on recruitment agencies' turf.

But there is a darker side to this that is yet to rear it's ugly head: employees being fired for their activity on Twitter.

There have already been a few cases of employees getting fired over their Facebook activity. For example, Goldman Sachs trader Charlie Barrow became addicted and was fired for spending too much of his time on Facebook (or FaceCrack, as Charlie probably now calls it). He went as far as adding a warning letter from his employer on his profile.

Other examples are Penn State’s Daily Collegian columnist Zach Good, who was fired over comments made regarding a cancer fundraiser, and Canadian grocery chain employees Devon Bourgeois and James Woodwere, who were fired for making wisecracks admitting theft.

While there haven't been any cases of anyone being sacked for their Twitter usage (as far as I know anyway), there have been the signs that it's only a matter of time before someone does.

An aide to John McCain was suspended, not fired, for Twittering a link to a video linking Barack Obama to his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The rule of thumb must be that it is always dangerous ground to be talking about your employer in public. Even before the age of the internet this was true. In fact, it is even more dangerous in today's hyper-visible society, where employers can use Tweetscan or Summize to track what people are saying about them.

At the end of the day, if you are twittering at work, then you aren't working (unless of course that's what you're being paid to do).

Another question that has to be asked is that whenever someone is fired for their social netowrk usage - Facebook, Twitter, blogging or otherwise - was that the real reason they were fired, or was it just an excuse to fire them for some other problem?

Companies and organisations might start to produce rules or guidelines for their employees use of Twitter, along the lines of Facebook usage or blogging. Employees might even consider seperating their Twitter activity into two accounts - one for work and one for personal use.

While this example might be a bit extreme, it surely is a matter of time before companies start to address these issues as Twitter becomes more mainstream.

- Have you heard of any people getting fired because of their Twitter activity?
- Do you or your company have any guidelines when using Twitter at work?
- What guidelines for Twitter usage would you recommend at a place of work?

Update: Edelman are also hiring for their Tech division. Get in touch with @johnnybentwood for more info.

PR Event: Chinwag Live's Micro Media Maze

I piled in late to the Chinwag Live event last night, which took place at The Slug and Lettuce on Wardour Street, Soho. I managed to get a fairly good seat at the back though (complete with clear route to the bar), so got to catch plenty of the action.

The event was billed as follows:

"First the music track was decoupled from the physical product and the "long player" album, then the newspaper article was severed from the website. The same wave rolled over the blog post, the TV show, the photo, the vlog, and now the tweet...

It seems like everything's gone micro. As content is disaggregated into ever smaller pieces and syndicated and widgetised at accelerating speed, how is the media landscape being re-shaped, and who are the winners in this scenario?

Are media owners caught between a rock and a hard place? They've got to get their content out there, but context and branding work differently in the world of mashups and aggregators. In turn, the revenues they make from micro media pale in comparison to their staple money-making ventures (print, CDs, TV, DVD, film).

P2P culture is also firmly embedded, with iTunes and other digital retailers numbers' still dwarfed by ripping and filesharing. Now media giants like Microsoft and the BBC are using P2P technnology, but has their deeper modus operandi shifted? Are they fated to be outpaced and outgunned by innovative companies who play by different rules?

In turn, is the profusion of micro-content a recipe for meltdown, with information overload and competing "me-too" platforms delivering little but dumb aggregation which ultimately becomes a headache?

In this, the sequel to our groundbreaking Media Widgetised / Widget Week event in May 2007, our panel of experts will look at the issues and opportunities surrounding the explosion of micro media for publishers, brands, business, and culture more broadly..."

And the panel of exeprts were:

Umair Haque - Director, Havas Media Lab / Bubblegeneration
Umair heads up the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business models, and strategic innovation. Prior to Havas, Umair founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that helped shape the strategies of investors, entrepreneurs, and blue chip companies across media and consumer industries. Bubblegeneration’s work has been recognised by publications like Wired, Red Herring, Business 2.0, and BusinessWeek, and in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, to which Umair was a contributor. He also blogs as a discussion leader at Harvard Business Online.

Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist, Author, Entrepreneur
The Wall Street Journal calls Gerd one of the leading media futurists in the world. Co-author of the influential book The Future of Music (2005, Berklee Press), Music2.0 (Jan 2008, self-published paywhatyouwant pdf available), and of Open is King (Fall 2008), Gerd's background is in music (he won the Quincy Jones Award in 1986) as well as technology and the internet (former CEO of LicenseMusic Inc; currently CEO of Sonific.com). His work focuses on the convergent sectors of music and content, technology, communications and culture. His clients include SonyBMG, RTL, ITV, BBC, France Telekom, German Telekom, Orange, LebWeb3, Financial Times, TribalDDB, the European Commission, and Nokia-Siemens.

Miles Lewis - SVP, European Advertising Sales, LastFM
Miles launched his career in media at Haymarket publishing in 1988, moving to a consumer magazine role with IPC Media for their Leisure Network. Shifting to Good Housekeeping, a 5 year stint at the National Magazine Company included various roles across Corporate Business Development and finally Director, Advertising Sales at Esquire. Miles then became the UK’s first Head of Agency Sales at AOL (UK) Ltd in 2001. Five years on, Blake Chandlee (now at Facebook UK) brought Miles into Yahoo!’s UK and Ireland operations as Head of Agency Sales. Then CBS’s Last.fm came knocking and now Miles is charged with the strategy, direction and monetisation of Last.fm across Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia.

Mitch McAlister - Product Director (Europe), MySpace
In his current role Mitch defines and lead European product strategy and architecture to address market demands, revenue oppertunities, and user growth, identifying and building relationships with potential technology partners to enhance current product offering. Prior to Myspace, he was Project Lead at Universal Music Enterprises. With over 8 years experience in the internet industry Mitch's focus has been product and marketing, specifically on the social media side of things. He has built eBay stores, runs a weekly podcast, and has been working with MySpace for three years.

Neil McIntosh - Head of Editorial Development, Guardian Unlimited
Neil McIntosh is head of editorial development for Guardian.co.uk, where he has led the launch and development of innovative blog, audio and video services since 2004. He lives in London, supports Swindon Town FC, and blogs about it all at completetosh.com



CHAIR: Steve Bowbrick
Steve is one of Britain's most experienced Internet managers and entrepreneurs. A fifteen year veteran of dot.com boom and bust, of web site design, online marketing, technology strategy, capital raising and people management. Steve advises media owners (Channel 4 and the BBC), startups (Rememble.com) and consumer brands (King of Shaves) about social media and digital strategy.


Here's the skinny on what I managed to jot down whilst balancing a notepad on one knee and a hard-earned pint on the other:

Micro-media and social issues:

• We still see widgets as games, largely due to Facebook
• Last.fm and Myspace revolutionised the music industry, solving a problem along the way
• But there are more serious global problems, such as world poverty, health, education, rising food prices
• We are under an illusion, especially in London, that media is entertainment, but the media also educates and can be used to solve social problems
• Widgest and micro-media can offer a way to help solve these problems
• But you have to create value before you can capitalise on it, you have to have a purpose before you can profit from it
• Umair Haque's challenge for micro-media developers: how do we solve social problems and add value at the same time?

The media's control of micro-media:

• The media is starting to move to a model where they are collaborating with their audience
• The key is where they choose to loose control and where they choose to keep it
• The stakes and the risks are high for media organisations, but if they don't take these risks then it's game over for them
• If these "old dinosaurs" don't change their business moidel to address social problems then they will become extinct

How will revenue be generated?

• Media comapnies control billions of punds of spend
• But this money is being spent on where the audience is migrating to
• They are putting it into TV and search, which works for some companies but will not reach the right audience for most
• Old media won't die, people will just use it in different ways
• People still watch Eastenders, but they'll watch it on BBC's iPlayer rather than on their TV
• People used to pay for music, but now they get it for free by clicking somewhere
• The same has happened for software and phone calls
• No one knows where the next success is, the next "Google", but this is where we should be investing, not in traditional media

Brand Messaging:

• There is an assumption that brands will have to piggy back a message onto their widgets
• The CEO of Kellogs can't go to traditional media and say "Well, we've turned Crunchy Nut Cornflakes into a listening brand - what more do you want?"
• Micro-media is a slower process of engagement with a brand's audience

What does this mean for our culture?

• The BBC can't commission big budget dramas that people like to watch, e.g. 24, The Sopranos
• We must think carefully which content and functionality we push out into micro-media
• The BBC like to think that their content is good enough to push out to YouTube and iTunes, through which they can create a global voice

Last.fm have already created value - what percentage of your reve=nue comes through affiliates, e.g. ticket sales?

• Can't give percentage split of revenue streams
• But Last.fm is the world's largest on-demand jukebox
• The future will be taking data to agencies: how can data on listener's music tastes fit into a brand's efforts?
• For example, if dishwasher powder buyers like Madonna, and the advert plays a Madonna song, at what point does this affect sales?
• Listeners have been giving Last.fm their music tastes, but the challenge for Last.fm was to build a platform to keep this data safe
• But now micro-media will take this data away from the Last.fm site, which raises the problem of data security
  
• Some data is too personal to Last.fm - they are purely a music silo that benefits users when they give more data to the site
  

What financial incentives could there be for users creating content?

• The overhead for running user generated content is tremendous
• Myspace has 100s of people checking photos that are uploaded to the site
• Running this outweighs whatever revenue could be giving to content creators
  

The end of the night was the best bit, with plenty of good chat/banter, ideas developed and new introductions made, all lubricated by a healthy amount of alcomahol.

Among the crowd were Jonathan Hopkins (@jopkins), Claire W (@claire_w), Amanda Rose (@amandita), Dom Whitehurst (@domw), Katy Howell (@katyhowell), Robin Grant (@robingrant), and Will Mcinnes (@willmcinnes) - so a big hello to them!

I'm already looking forward to the next Chinwag Live event, but in the meantime I need to start building that micro-media application for this blog that will solve world hunger...

Update 1: Jemima Kiss blogged the Chinwag event at The Guardian's PDA blog.
Update 2: Jonathan Hopkins also adds some great insight into the event.

Becoming a part of Twistori

According to the site, Twistori is the "first step in an ongoing social experiment."

Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter containing specific keywords: 'I Love', 'I Hate', 'I Think', I Believe', 'I Feel, and I Wish. It then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.

The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, it's not clear from the site what the second step in the experiment is. But for now, watching the feelings of anonymous Twitter users scroll by is strangely addictive and exciting when you see one of your own tweets appear.

I'll leave you with this (slightly altered) thought to bear in mind when you're watching the flow of thoughts and feelings on Twistori:

"Sin writes Twistories, goodness is silent."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

According to Goethe, all us Twitterers are sinners - and watching the 'I Hate' stream backs this up. But it's also perfectly counterbalanced by the 'I Love', 'I Wish' and 'I Believe' streams, showing that there's still a lot of love in the Twittersphere!

PR Event: Social Media - The Death of Print?

"Social media won't kill traditional media, but it's definitely strangling it" - Drew Benvie.

Taylor Bennett and Unicorn Jobs invited a group of us along to an event which discussed social media and how it relates to the mainstream media, called 'Social Media - The Death of Print?'.

The erratic and rather weather conditions obviously took a few casualties as the event wasn't as busy as the Facebook event page suggested, but it was a good event with a panel and audience that spoke with enthusiasm around the issues of social media and PR.

On the panel were:

• Drew Benvie - Director of Hotwire PR, blogger at Drew B's take on tech PR
  
• Mick Fealty - Blogger at Slugger O’Toole and the Brassneck blog at the Daily Telegraph.
• Simon Nixon - Journalist at BreakingViews.com

It was good to meet some of my online contacts in the real world, including Steve Waddington, Ged Carroll, Drew Benvie, Jaz Cummins, Sarah Stimson, and Alex Pearmain and Alain Desmier of the PR and Comms Network. I missed Justin Hayward, but I'm sure that there'll be more opportunities to meet.

Ged Carroll, who obviously kept much better notes than me, has a run down of the event which you can read on his blog, and Sarah Stimson also mentions the event over at her blog. Below are some of the key points that I took away from the event:

• When pitching to bloggers, know who they are and talk to them as though they were someone you knew. If you read their blog for long enough, you’ll know what they want.

• Since he started blogging, Mick has never read so many newspapers in hard print.

• Disaggregation is the key term. It involves the displacement of the editorial process: social media is turning disruption, the editorial process where traditional media filters news into one channel, into engagement.

• In the next 10 years, newspapers will find a way to grab value (revenue) from the niche markets in social media.

• “Lies get half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on” – Tony Benn. Blogging is a chance for the truth to get its boots on and knock lies on the head before they get anywhere.

• The real value in public relations is in audience insight: social networks are an ideal tool to gain this insight.

• Bloggers are their own brand. Corporate brands are slowing, personal brands are growing.

• Find the yellow canary – the blogger who’ll warn you when something big is going to happen.

• Markets are conversations.

Looking back, these points perhaps aren't as poignant when placed out of context, so I recommend also reading Ged's post. But the debate was very useful to those who attended and I look forward to attending similar events.

Such a SocialThing(!)

Thanks to Neville Hobson (@jangles) I've managed to get an invite to join Socialthing!, which officially went into private beta today

Socialthing! is different from the other social network aggregators out there (FriendFeed is popular due to some ex-Googlers starting it and a list of other aggregators can be found here) due to the way it determines which of your friends to track.

While FriendFeed requires users to create their own list of friends for FriendFeed, Socialthing! automatically detects who your friends are on the social services to which you belong, saving you a both time and hassle.

The distinction might not sound obvious, but as TechCrunch reported today, "Socialthing!’s method actually makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for longer term maintenance. When you sign up for Socialthing!, you only have to provide it with your credentials to sites like Facebook and Pownce. And as time goes by, you don’t have to worry about setting up new friends on the service because it will automatically know that you’ve become friends with people elsewhere. In contrast, FriendFeed requires you to both explicitly designate friends during the initial configuration and manually add new friends over time."

Another benefit Socialthing! has over FriendFeed is its focus on allowing users to send data back to applications such as Twitter. For example, I can respond to tweets directly from Socialthing!.

It's also very simple to use and looks very clean. Unfortunately though, it just doesn't keep me updated with tweets as well as other services I've tried, such as Thwirl or Twitbin. Socialthing! groups tweets from people together, often in threes, meaning that I often miss the drift of conversations - vital to be able to use Twitter properly.

Ultimately, there is little to choose between the two at this stage. FriendFeed currently supports a wider range of applications than Socialthing! (28 vs. 11), but FriendFeed doesn't let you see Facebook updates.

Time, as always, will tell.