2006 – I need a blog

2007 – I need a viral

2008 – I need a twitter

2009 – I need a fan page

2010 – I need a badge

The purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate to a wider audience exactly what the Police do on a day to day basis. As GMP Chief Constable Peter Fahy explained:

“A lot of what we do is dealing with social and health problems such as missing children, people with mental health problems and domestic abuse. Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resource and expertise.

“I am not saying that we shouldn’t deal with these types of incidents, far from it, but what I am saying is that this work is not recognised in league tables and measurements – yet is a huge part of what we do.

“I think that it’s time to start measuring performance in a different way. There needs to be more focus on how the public sector as a whole is working together to tackle society’s issues and problems.

“We see time and again the same families, the same areas and the same individuals causing the same problems and these people are causing a considerable drain to the public purse.

GMP Opens doors for 24 hours

The experiment caused not a little controversy, people questioned if it was a good use of resource, if the account was automated and what the actual point was. I had my own reservations, through friends in different forces around the country I know that fear of crime can be almost a big an issue as crime itself and so a 24 hour stream of crime consciousness, even one highlighting the non-criminal work the police get called in for, was perhaps not the best idea.

I was also particularly both impressed and unimpressed by the use of three distinct accounts. Impressed as this shows planning as the team behind it obviously knew the volume of tweets would run foul of Twitter’s update limits. Unimpressed as Im not sure the example set by switching accounts every time one got  suspended, or ‘Twit Jailed’ as the @GMP24_x team called it,  was a good one. As someone pointed out to them, the account suspension is meant to a punitive measure, not a reminder to switch your base of activity.

Thos reservations aside, today the point is clear, it has raised huge amounts of press coverage from around the world, highlighting that the much like the ambulance service, people will call the Police for the most trivial of matters. Whether it will actually change anything remains to be seen I’m not sure the people who call the police because there is a rat in their house are self-aware enough to take notice. I’m equally not sure that it wil have any impact on the impending cuts.

All in all, while flawed, it pushed the boundaries of how Twitter can be used and provided some good blog and MSM fodder.

I toyed, a while ago, with the thought of creating a wiki of social media crisis, the objective of which would be to provide a place that told the definitive tale of each of our favourite case studies. For example, it would have pointed out that while Dell Hell is a good example of how a lone voice in the blogosphere can make huge waves. It probably helped that the blogger in question was journalist Jeff Jarvis, and therefore probably more influential than most bloggers at that time. A detail that occasionally slips a speakers mind as he tries to persuade his audience of the importance of social media.

I didn’t get round to creating that wiki, but it looks like someone has created a very good starting place with this presentation of Social Media Crisis, or Social Media Screw Ups – A history, which I recommend you flick through. As you do, you might notice that most of the screw-ups weren’t actually social media related. For example, twitter had nothing to do with United’s physical mis-handling of Dave Carroll’s guitar. Facebook was equally blameless in the terrible customer service that he received. What social media did was help Carroll get his message out and then for others to amplify it. An offline crisis made worse by social media, which is what most of the examples contained within the deck are.

However, it’s a useful reminder of how once something goes wrong, on or offline, if you ignore it. It’s not going to go away, it will only get worse and then you’ll end up as an inappropriate case study.

On a final note, wouldn’t it be nice to have an opposing deck of examples where social media helped save a companies reputation after a snafu?

MOFILM helps aspiring filmmakers create video for big brands and social causes, MOFILM Social is going to help the big brands work out the best way to use that, and other, content. It’s incredibly exciting and there are some very tasty little projects under way that I’m already writing the award submissions for in my head.

What it does mean is that I’m even more fascinated by video content and what its possibilities than ever before, though I’ve got slightly less twitchy about the use of word viral.

So Bruce Daisley‘s talk at the London Business School, in conjunction with BIMA on Tuesday 28 September was of great interest to me. Not just because I now have a reference point for the stat that by ‘by 2013, 90 % of web traffic will be video’ but also because he had some interesting things to say about what makes a video go viral. It also made me question what we actually mean by viral.

Do we go by views? I’ve seen some people claim that they’ve made a ‘viral’ and it’s had less than 200 views. I’ve also seen people say that they are making a ‘viral’, which should surely be I’ve made some content that I’m hoping will spread really quickly from person to person in an infectious stylee.

An Ad Age article from a couple of days ago tries to explore the possibility of a formula for creating a viral, it even suggests that PnG may have cracked it, focusing on the succes of brands such as Old Spice and Gillette. As with many articles, it’s the comments that are the most interesting parts. This one in particular caught my eye.

What’s interesting with most branded viral videos thus far is that they aren’t harnessing the power of what truly makes viral video popular; the spontaneity of real user posted content and extensions beyond the medium itself.

Is that the new definition or benchmark of success? Do people need to love a peace of content so much that they copy it, or make derivatives? One of the markers Bruce gave for something that might go viral naturally was that it was laugh out loud funny. This piece from Sussex Safer Roads campaign can definitely be described as something that went viral, yet I’d be amazed if anyone made a copy of it.

Embrace – Sussex Safer Roads

This is a topic I’d already been thinking about after another summer of online snafu’s, I’m starting to think that it is impossible to avoid a social media crisis, yes you can prepare for it, but you can’t actually stop it. I’ve got a half drafted post floating around the ethernet on this very topic, titled ‘fucking up on social media is inevitable’, which I might try and complete this evening.

In the meantime, I’d like to know if you agree. Is fucking up on social media inevitable, or is it possible to seven P your way out of it?

Do let me know.

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With now over three years fairly constant usage under my belt, I’ve become a bit reflective and seeing someone else welcome a new follower the other day jogged my memory of how the way we use Twitter has changed over its very short existence, though I guess internet years are somewhat similar to dog years, if not more so.

Anyhoo, below is an rough evolution of how I think Twitter following has evolved from the early days which has been knocking around my head for a while, enjoy and feel free to add your own suggestions, if they are any good I’ll do a revised version. Mebbe.

1. After waiting for ages and checking several times a day notice someone has followed you, check them out immediately, follow them back immediately
2. Still checking several times a day, you now send tweet a hand-crafted welcome twee to each new follower and then never speak to them again
3. Follower numbers are steadily climbing, i.e. you’re almost to triple figures, so you auto-follow those who follow you
4. You still use auto-@replies but now you bung as many handles as your standard witty welcome will allow in 140 characters
5. You realise you’re now following 50 horny Brittany’s, 200 social media guru’s and handful of web marketing experts who haven’t upgraded themselves to guru status as yet
6. Half the social media gurus and all of the web marketing experts have auto-DM’d you a spammy welcome message
7. Stop the auto-follow
8. Numbers are still climbing and you realise you may be spamming your followers, so you stop the auto-welcome
9. Briefly consider the auto-dm option
10. Feel dirty and pretend you didn’t consider the auto-dm option
11. Add request to your bio for new followers to @ to say ‘Hello’ and perhaps get a follow back
12. Eventually take request off bio as no-one ever seems to do as requested
13. Fall into a steady pattern of watching numbers climb, occasionally checking to see if anyone interesting now thinks you’re interesting
14. Occasionally user tools like Twit Cleaner to root out dead accounts
15. Get frustrated by lack of bulk unfollow.
16. Unfollow anyone who hasn’t tweeted in over a year. Feel oddly guilty.
17. Get oddly over excited when sharp rise in numbers is due to real people following you, not spammers – do not greet or acknowledge in anyway
18. Try to remember to flag interesting peeps on fridays, remember every Saturday. Feel guilty, briefly
19. Create various segmented lists of you those you follow
20. Never check lists
21. Get excited when the ‘lists you are on’ number goes up, get disappointed that it’s another Twibes based one
22. Resolve to remove yourself from Twibes. Forget.
23. Get annoyed that Twitter’s new who to follow tool seems to suggest following people you’re already following
24. Find out that you are mysteriously not following them anymore
25. Re-follow them
26. Ignore rest of list who are people you have previously definitely unfollowed
27. Wait for Twitter to come up next evolution in follow management that will no doubt frustrate and infuriate in equal measures

I can mainly be found blogging From Cannes, for PR Week, Porter Novelli in the UK and on the PN Conersation @Cannes site.

Normal sporadic service will resume upon my return

More importantly, should brands be monitoring conversations about them and then respond without explicit permission from the online complainer?

One of the written rules of the Internet is Do Not Feed the Troll, a troll being a user that is deliberately provocative. Personally I think that the Mail is the largest troll* that exists and it has been suggested that it, along with other papers, is starting to deliberately provoke Twitter storms. The reason why is pretty obvious I think, it increases their traffic and provides them with a reason to up advertising rates while having a very limited impact on how their core readership views them. The people who get up in arms about the Daily Mail on Twitter are highly unlikely to ever buy the paper, and those that buy the paper are highly unlikely to get up in arms about what it says.

Bearing all this in mind, I probably shouldn’t be writing a post about it’s latest trollish article about how brands are using the internet to ‘spy’ on their customers. The only reason I do is because it hits on several pet topics of mine, mainly privacy and the general hypocrisy of people; it’s also a subject I touched on way back in 2008. The impetus then was a question from the 2008 intake of Porter Novelli graduates who asked if anyone had got upset at a company responding to a general online whinge. At the time I could only think of an example from the States, in the form of a New York Times article about ComCast. Today’s Mail article has a few more examples, mainly about BT (disclosure Porter Novelli client).

The article starts by saying that ‘Some of Britain’s biggest firms were last night accused of ‘spying’ on their customers after they admitted ‘listening in’ on disgruntled conversations on the internet’. Although at no point in the article does it say who or what has been doing the accusing and on what basis. It does cite the specific example of someone from BT contacting a customer after they had commented on their FaceBook page about poor service. The customer in question described being contacted as ‘Big Brotherish’ and ‘Sinister’. He’s also changing his privacy settings. The article does make clear, via a quote from BT, that it is only monitoring public conversations. So is it the fault of the person who doesn’t realise that they are complaining publicly in what they felt was a private space, or should the onus be on the brand the question make a note of the complaint, not react directly but concentrate on improving its service generally based on it? Or should they take note of the complaint, and ensure that the complainer receives special attention but without ever publicly disclosing why? Personally I feel that approach smacks far more of 1984.

Do consumers have the right to feel disgruntled if the company they are publicly complaining about contacts them to address their issues? Should companies taking this approach start any contact by establishing the person knows what they said was public, and offering the option to tell the brand to poke off? Should companies put a bit more thought in how they should respond to complaints in the wild? Should people be more aware of the difference between public and private online spaces? Should they accept responsibility for the consequences of not knowing the difference?

The answer to all these questions, as ever, is probably, except for the last two, where it is a most definite yes.

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*I also suspect that the Mail is actually what the lump of concentred evil left in the world at the end of Time Bandits turned into