‘@billgates’? Sounds like a PR stunt to me

The Twittersphere has been awash with users trying desperately to follow former Microsoft supremo Bill Gates, who joined the microblogging platform this week. So far he has about a quarter of a million followers – not bad for a few days.

He hasn’t really said anything particular interesting, though did manage a few words to Ashton Kutcher!

Part of me wonders how you can be who he is in technology without having tried Twitter before now. The other, more sceptical side of my being remembers that this is the week he launches his new blog for his foundation…

Far be it for me to utter the words “publicity stunt” or “ghost-tweeting”!

If this is all just PR, then it has to be commended as it is doing the job…

Forrester Social Technographics adds Twitter users

Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have today released a revised version of their Social Technographics research – an analysis of the different profiles of social technology users.

If you haven’t come across them before, Social Technographics allow you to identify how certain users or segments of users participate in social technologies. As Bernoff explains:

“Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

The main update that we see today, compared to three years ago, is the addition of the conversationalists ‘rung’. Bernoff explains that this is in direct response to the growth of micro-blogging and, specifically, Twitter.

“Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.”

The Forrester analysis shows that conversationalists are 56% female (this is more than any other profile) and 70% are aged 30 and up.

Social Technographics are a great way to really understand audiences and Forrester has a great free tool on its website that allows visitors to construct Technograhics for specific demographics and audiences (e.g. by country, age etc.). At the moment it seems as though the tool hasn’t been updated with the new data, but I’d expect this to come shortly.

#eurostarfail Social media is for good times AND bad

Social media is a great tool for marketers, no question about it. But what about when things go wrong and the tables are turned?

I’ve argued before that in many ways, PRs are best placed to run social media operations and there are number of reasons why I think this is the case. One of the key reasons is that experienced public relations pros are adept at responding to situations – good and bad – and communicating messages quickly and effectively to a particular audience to inform, whilst taking strides to protect the reputation of the brand or business involved.

Last night, five Eurostar trains stopped working as they entered the Channel Tunnel, leaving the trains and passengers on board trapped. Many were trapped for hours in what must have been a scary and terrifying ordeal for them as well as their families and friends.

This is a nightmare situation for a company like Eurostar. And this is not the place to look at attributing blame. But, I do want to look at how the company approached one of those mainstays of traditional public relations: crisis communications.

Across the board, Eurostar seems to have fallen down on it’s duty to its customers, by failing to adequately transmit information.

And nowhere has this been more evident that on social media and, in particular, on Twitter. Mike Butcher at Techcrunch has covered the unfolding of this story in detail. But, essentially, there were no updates on either the @Little_Break or @Eurostar_Uk Twitter accounts as the crisis unfolded. In a twist to the story, it transpires the latter account wasn’t even an official Eurostar channel – it has now been suspended – and @eurostar is used by someone in Shanghai!

The @Little_Break account wasn’t updated until 11.30 today (Saturday) – a full 16 hours after the first incident happened! WTF!? If we have learned anything about social media, it is that it works best in real-time.

What does this situation teach us about the handling of social media when things go wrong:

  • It doesn’t matter what you want the account to be used for – it looks as though the @Little_Break account was being used for some sort of social media marketing campaign. Which is fine. But the public don’t put brands into boxes like this. If you have a social media channel then the public will see this as your brand on Twitter. So expect them to get in touch with you as they see fit, and not necessarily in the way you would like
  • Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring – it doesn’t matter if it is a Friday night before Christmas, the public will still use social media and will expect companies – if they are using the channel, and increasingly even if they are not – to be listening
  • Social media is real-time – we all know this, so why did it take Eurostar 16 hours to update their Twitter account? There is no excuse, especially as real-time take centre stage with Google transmitting the whole story as it unfolds
  • Social media shouldn’t be an afterthought in crisis comms – as all good PRs know, in an emergency, you need to get clear, transparent and helpful information out to people as quickly as possible. And that means social media too
  • Advanced planning is crucial – when something like this happens, there isn’t time to start putting plans together, it needs to have been thought about in advance. It looks as though this didn’t happen. Having social media as part of your crisis communications action plan is vital
  • When things go wrong, who’s in charge – with this confusion over ‘who is best placed to use social media’ within organisations, it is no surprise that when things go wrong, social media could fall through the cracks. Is it the PR, ‘social media’, SEO, marketing or customer service team that should be in control, pushing the agenda to the fore?

Obviously this is a horrid situation for Eurostar and it is easy to sit and criticise from a distance. But the fact is that this has not been handled at all well and their reputation, their PR, has taken a serious knock.

UPDATE: It seems this is a topic that isn’t going to go away any time soon. Already there are some great posts from Dirk, Rachel, Mark and Neville on the subject. As Dirk says, expect this to be coming to a social media case study near you soon…

UPDATE: Eurostar CEO Richard Brown has released a video apology on the Little Breaks blog site – it’s a good effort and sounds pretty sincere.

UPDATE: I was very careful not to mention any agencies associated with Eurostar in the above post. At a time like this, decisions will be made at a senior level within the business. An agency will only be able to sit and advise to their best ability. If this is ignored, there isn’t much to be done. And it seems this is pretty much what happened. In a very honest post, Robin Grant from Wearesocial, a social media agency, has given a very open overview of things from their perspective. It’s worth a read as it perfectly highlights some of the organisational challenges I referred to above.

Facebook wants users to help it take on Twitter

Facebook’s new privacy policy has been met with a fair degree of hostility, and rightly so. The changes are clearly designed to encourage users to open up more of their updates to the wider world.

So why the change?

Simple. Facebook is worried. It’s worried about the rise of Twitter and, in particular, it is worried about the impact that the recent addition of real-time results to Google searches.

As I’ve said already, the Google changes have the potential to have a big impact on the popularity of Twitter as Twitter updates are put front of mind for the general internet public in millions of searches.

This is a problem for Facebook, because by default, activity by their users is private and shielded from the search engines.

The dangers for Facebook

But the one thing that is worrying for Facebook is the thing that it’s users like and enjoy about the service. It’s the reason why so many of them prefer Facebook to Twitter, or at least use it in very different ways.

I use both services, but I wouldn’t share or reveal the sorts of things I reveal on Facebook on Twitter. I like that and it allows me to use the services in specific ways for certain audiences.

Facebook’s move potentially changes this and I wonder if it is in danger of diluting the key foundations of what it stands for and what it’s users want.

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Mr Fox – the latest Twitter superstar

Sometimes I’m still amazed by the power of social media. I spotted the tweet above picture posted by RadioKate on Sunday evening.

The next day I was at a conference and already, it was cited as an example of how social media can be a very powerful. It’s a great picture and so far has been viewed 57,169 times in only four days.

What does this tell us? Great content will be shared.

7 features to expect from Twitter Premium

Reports are suggesting that Twitter Premium (read: paid for) accounts, might be appearing before the end of the year.

So, in handing over our hard-earned cash, what features might we expect in return?

Here are my thoughts on what I would and would not like to see in a two tiered Twitter world…

GOOD

1. Analytics – This one seems like a dead-cert. Whilst there are numerous analytical tools that have cropped up using the Twitter API, they still all depend on the data that Twitter does or doesn’t not allow them to access. Giving premium accounts access to more data (especially historical data) would have obvious benefits to brands and super-users and would certainly persuade a vast number of these to invest. The ability to track follower behaviour and ROI, for example, would be worth paying for.

2. Verification – It is pretty much guaranteed that there will be some sort of ‘verification’ of premium accounts, so that you know the person/company you are dealing with is who they say they are. This will obviously inspire trust in the account holder(s) and will give brand peace of mind. I can see the benefit of verified accounts and it would certainly persuade some to sign up I’d imagine.

3. Commercial APIs – The data access that clients like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and CoTweet rely on to give users access is limited by Twitter. If advanced analytics are available to premium accounts, then expect this to be fed into these clients also, giving us a new breed of super-charged business-focused tools.

4. Enhanced profiles – This makes a lot of sense. Providing premium users with additional profile real estate, perhaps with more links or even the ability to display images or adverts. This wouldn’t really affect the experience of normal users, but would certainly add further value for businesses.

5. Support – It is highly likely that premium users will get a hotline to the big T, allowing them to get support, help and possibly even advice on how they could improve their use of the service.

BAD

6. More than 140 characters - anything that messes with the fundamental principles of Twitter is bad in my eyes. The idea that premium accounts would have more than 140 characters to play with, strikes me as changing the very fabric of what Twitter is and why we love it.

7. Multiple users – I’m torn on this one. It is possible that premium accounts would permit access by more than one person – a bit like the way companies like Ford tags company tweets written by certain individuals. I fear though that this again plays too much with the fabric of Twitter. This is a tool designed for individual communication (whether brand or person etc.).

What about you? What would you like to see in a Twitter Premium offering?

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Is the retweet dead? Using the ‘favourite tag’

Last week I wrote about Twitter’s controversial changes to native retweet functionality. And, today, I’m wondering if there is a better way…

In my blog post on retweets, I suggested that the RT can be used to flag up interesting comments, posts or links. It does this in a very simple way: by putting the tweet in question into the stream of your followers (this happens in both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of the RT).

I think this might be a broken feature however. There are problems with the old RT function – for example, a popular link can crop up time and time again in your feed and some tweeters who RT too often can become irksome.

The new method has its flaws too, with random tweets assigned to people you don’t follow cropping up out of the blue.

What about the favourite feature?

With these questions in mind, I was interested to read a post by Keith from Knowthenetwork.com, flagged to me by Courtney Engle examining the ‘favourite’ feature in Twitter.

I hardly ever favourite tweets. That’s not to say that I don’t have favouite tweets, I just don’t really see the need to ‘favourite’ them – where’s the gain or the value?

If I want to share a tweet, I’ll RT it. If I want to praise a fellow tweeter, rather than favouriting their tweet, I’ll probably just send them a reply or a DM. The only time I really use this feature is to flag something that I want to remember or possibly explore or catch up on at a later date – not how it was intended to be used.

Tagging tweets

Keith’s post looks at the inability to ‘tag’ content in Twitter. He points out that the ‘favourite’ feature is really the only way to do this and mentions how Robert Scoble is now using this feature, which is giving it more prominence.

But for me, the problem with the favourite feature is that it doesn’t allow me to see the favourites from those I follow very easily. If I want to check out Robert’s favourite tweets, I need to visit his page on a regular basis, or subscribe to an RSS feed – but with so many tweets being flagged, this could quickly become overwhelming.

Is following favourites the answer?

Wouldn’t it be useful to have the ability to subscribe or ‘follow’ favourites? Then, when Robert or anyone else you respected favourited a tweet, it would then show up in your feed.

With so much content out there, the problem we all face is keeping on top of it all in a manageable way. Tagging is certainly one way to do this, but the tags themselves have to be accessible in order to be useful.

So what about it Twitter…?

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Is Twitter opening a can of worms with the RT change?

Phil Sheard has written a post examining the impact to brands of the changes to retweets that Twitter is gradually introducing (there is no need for me to repeat what he says here as he puts it very eloquently).

I’m a big retweeter. And I use the ‘traditional’ RT for a variety of different reasons:

  • To show my ‘support’ or agreement with a tweet/idea/post or cause
  • To flag up interesting ideas/links to my followers
  • To credit the original author (or RTer) of the tweet

As I’ve suggested in the comments on Phil’s post, I think Twitter may be about to experience some backlash with this change. And to my mind, much of this comes down to the ‘if it’s not broken…’ argument. Personally, I don’t see a problem with the system as it exists at the moment.

Perhaps I am just afflicted by that very human condition, whereby we automatically shy away from ‘change’ – the ‘Facebook effect’. When something (like a social network) that we have a close attachment to undergoes a change, our automatic inclination is to resist it.

There is precedent here. In May 2009, Twitter made a subtle change to the way replies show up in your Twitter stream. There was a huge backlash initially to the move, but this soon abated and today, we still quite happily use Twitter.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter will experience the same backlash with the RT change, as it will fly under the radar for many users.

But, I do think Twitter has to be careful.

I love the fact that Twitter is a very simple, open platform that allows users to communicate and interact in whatever way they please. Yes, there are certain ‘conventions’ that crop up, but these aren’t really imposed from on high, rather, they are moderated by the community as a whole.

This is in stark contrast to other networks like Facebook, where the way you use the service is dictated by the network itself.

Is Twitter potentially in danger of pushing its agenda too much on its users? Or is a bit of organisation and order important and useful as popularity in the network continues to grow and user numbers increase?

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5 ways Twitter Lists could be used in the future

Twitter Lists are the latest Twitterati obsession. [If you don't know what they are, then this might help.]

Lists have obvious benefits. They give users another metric by which to measure their relative popularity and are (in all seriousness) a good way to discover new recommendations by trusted peers (or celebrities…).

But, I don’t think we are yet to see the full power of lists. In a widely unreported move a few days after the official roll-out, Twitter announced the introduction of a Twitter Lists widget (see above), allowing you to embed (on a website or blog) tweets from people on a particular Twitter List – this strikes me as nice additional functionality.

So what else could Twitter Lists bring? Here are my top five crystal-ball-gazing predictions:

  1. Yammer-like closed loop messaging – Lists are a great way to create subsections of followers. This has been possible for a while on Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, but lists could take this mainstream.
  2. Better conference backchannels – Using Twitter at conferences is a lot of fun. With lists, it would be possible to have a separate group of all conference delegates, making the feedback more focused. Maybe you would also be able to create lists based on GPS location to narrow it to particular conference rooms or even football stadiums for example.
  3. Segmenting of personal v. business tweeters – For the two years or so I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve used it 99% of the time for business. This has been mainly because my non-business friends weren’t using the service. That is starting to change dramatically and it would actually be quite useful to segment the two – both in terms of who I follow, but also in terms of what I say to different segments.
  4. Personalised news channels – Media organisations have been flocking to Twitter since it launched. But finding and following different outlets can be tedious and is not always perfectly suited to your interests or needs. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use Twitter Lists to create a tailored feed for particular subject areas – e.g. PR or the environment – taking sources from around the Twittersphere.
  5. Advanced eCRM – This would, like most of these ideas, clearly require extra functionality, but it would be great for companies to use lists (or allow their customers to use lists) to segment different user bases and send certain messages to different segments of people rather than using different Twitter accounts. Obviously to do this, you would need to be able to send to a list, rather than just using it to view tweets from certain people.

So there you go, some more likely than others. How do you think lists could be used in the future?

You can follow me on Twitter here!

Good iPhone data capture move from Orange

Twitter has been simmering this morning with news that Orange is going to be selling the iPhone 3GS in the UK by the end of the year.

Now, despite numerous complaints about the service that iPhone users have received under O2, their use of Twitter to quickly respond to and work with users has been pretty impressive: http://twitter.com/o2.

But Orange doesn’t seem to be too far behind. Only hours after the announcement, @conorfromorange has been tweeting and keeping excited iPhone fans abreast of latest developments.

And the iPhone microsite he mentions is a smart move from the carrier, building on the social media buzz that has accompanied the announcement and capturing data about potential customers, even though the phone isn’t available yet.

Personally, as someone that moved from Orange (the only carrier I had ever had a phone with) to O2 when the iPhone launched, I don’t really have any complaints with O2.

But the competition can only be a good thing and will hopefully push prices down.

About

This is my story. I've always been fascinated by the internet. My first passion was music and I studied a music degree at Birmingham University. But once graduated I quickly went back to the web working as a digital marketer. I also ran a web startup for a few years. In the need of a new challenge, I turned to the world of PR and now work as an Account Director at EML Wildfire. My interest is primarily looking at how PR professionals can make the most of the web and digital marketing. This blog contains my thoughts and things I find inspirational.

© 2012 Danny Whatmough - Made by me