Habitat’s Tehran branch – how not to use Twitter

I've been watching the way that the situation in Iran has been unfolding on Twitter with a mixture of surprise and confusion for some time now.

Yes I can see the huge importance of getting first hand reports out of the country and the vital role that new media has played in the debate - although I'm not sure I agree whole heartedly with Gordon Brown's comments that as a result, “you cannot have Rwanda again”.

What has most surprised me most though is the string of messages that started appearing over a week ago asking tweeters to turn their avatar green to show support for the people of Iran. Is this really helping? Why would I do this? What’s more, once I have turned my avatar green, do I keep it have to keep it green forever?

As a result of all this activity, #Iran and #iranelection have been top trending topics for the last week or so. Enter Habitat…

As the news broke that Habitat had started adding inappropriate hashtags to its sales offers, it started to become clear that we were now being presented with a great case study on how not to use Twitter.

The story of the intern who added inappropriate hashtags to Habitat offers (and has since been fired) will no doubt be told again and again over the coming months. But it also helps to highlight another Twitter issue that emerged earlier this week - namely that the micro-blogging site is proving to be very effective at sending traffic to media websites, but not online retailers.

This is clearly a challenge for all online retailers. As the new Woolworths online only store launches today it’ll be interesting to see whether they can make Twitter work for them. Just stick to picknmix hashtags – and steer clear of politics.

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‘Who cares about self-regulation’?

The recent release of the full Digital Britain report was incredibly important for the IAB in many ways – the fact it acknowledges the role of self-regulation, emerging advertising models and even welcomed our behavioural targeting Good Practice Principles.

However, there remain some in the industry who question this, (see in particular the comments here) and refuse to see a role for bodies that promote self-regulation such as the IAB and of course IASH. In my opinion, this is a hugely irresponsible view that when at its most extreme could actually thwart the growth of the industry at a time when the spotlight is well and truly on online, as a marketing medium.

As an industry of publishers, agencies and networks, we can sometimes forget where our main responsibility lies – with the brand advertisers.

In terms of IASH and network advertising , we want to protect these brands and prevent them from appearing against content that contains hate, indecency, obscenity, guns, illegal spyware and worse. IASH Members which comprises of Networks and Sales Houses, go through stringent audits to show that they comply with the IASH Code and do not deliver ads against such content. 

Without such processes in place, we run the risk of even stricter regulation, that begins to move out of our control, straight into the hands of policy makers

‘But it’s all about money, surely?’ some may argue… I doubt very much if any agency wishes to tell their clients that they had the opportunity to trade safely and securely but turned it down because of a few pence off the CPM.

The majority of Media Agencies understand the importance of self-regulation models such as IASH. They understand the lengths the Members go to in order to ensure they can trade safely. They also understand that what they are buying is transparent – they know that the ad they booked will appear against the type of content they have agreed to.  Perhaps this is why the model is being adopted in Germany, and the US.

It’s this transparency that needs to remain intact, and the industry needs to be united in this objective.

In my opinion this needs to be understood, and appreciated by ALL, as online advertising moves into this next, very critical stage.

Statsaholics Anonymous

For years I’ve known about my addiction to site stats. Watching that trend line fluctuate, hoping for an upward curve. Now I’m willing to step forward and come clean. I’m not alone with this affliction; the world is covered with web statsaholics. Alisa Bowman, Jason Jaeger and Geoffrey Golden being some of the brave souls to admit their problem.

It made me think, is search the new crack cocaine? Could search’s success be largely thanks to the human race’s inherent need to see a graph with growing trend lines that continuously look better than they did the week before. Take the below week from one of my sites:

Check out the peaks on that! They’re growing and getting bigger. But wait, a week later and an influx of traffic from a social network caused a mega spike:

Suddenly those peaky peaks seem crappy and the mega peak is what I’m after in future. It’s a continual battle to up your own game. Don't even get me started on Ebay auctions.

Has anyone been able to go cold turkey?

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Not Citizen Journalism... but what is Crowd Sourcing exactly? Who cares, it's great.

I am starting to get fed up with the MPs expenses scandal, I mean who hasn’t put in a dodgy expenses claim (though I suspect a moat and a duck house are two of the most unusual... even a bunch of creatives with a Cannes Lion in mind couldn’t come up with gems like that).  But one thing that has happened since the full (or at least partly full seeing as how the juiciest bits have been blacked out) list of expenses was released last week has been the Guardian launching a ‘crowd sourcing’ project asking members of the public to look over the volumes of expenses data released last week and report anything they think may be worthy of further investigation.

As the Guardian says on its website, there is nearly half a million thousand pages of data of which over 21,000 people have reviewed a third of these so far. The Guardian is asking people to review these and then report back anything that might be of interest which they can then look into further and start to build a big picture of what has been going on. 

I couldn’t help myself but have a sneak at my local MP. For my local member of parliament, a Tory peer no less, there are 292 pages of expenses that are available to view from 2005 onwards. Each page you look at asks you to classify the type of page it is by clicking the relevant button (a claim, a receipt, a cover page etc.) and you can mark it as whether it’s interesting and needs investigation, interesting but already known, or not worth investigating. It’s good fun, I highly recommend it, though I doubt I'll ever get any answers as to why he has to have a weekly railcard as well as a monthly one (especially as his constituency is a ten minute bus ride away from Westminster and you couldn’t travel there by rail even if you wanted to) and why on earth our taxes should be funding the wholly partisan Kensington & Chelsea Conservatives Foundation (primary aim to support and sustain Conservative values in the area, though probably not much of a stretch in that part of town) – shame on Sir Rifkind for his expenses.

This kind of thing is fantastic. There is no way that a Guardian journalist could sift through all of this quickly enough to pick out any headlines that the Telegraph hasn’t yet thought of.  I can imagine many ways in which it could be used. Environmental groups could go crazy for this kind of thing, as would shareholders of public companies. It’s a great way to get interested members of the public to wade through pages and pages of detail at no cost to the media owner. There may not yet be an obvious commercial application for this kind of involvement however as the issue would have to be wide enough to attract interest, and the subject matter would have to involve hundreds of thousands of documents to make it worthwhile asking for help on this scale.

No matter if a large amount of the 21,000 people who have so far done this may be members of opposing parties looking to do some dirt-slinging of their own, or even MPs wondering if they really have done something dodgy when seeing it in black and white from the public’s point of view (answer yes: all of this stuff looks dodgy to me!), this is a great exercise and well done to the Guardian for setting this up. I look forward to seeing what they do with the cases that have been reported. Hopefully  despite expenses claims fatigue, they will find some way to take these crowd sourcing results and produce something interesting and engaging for their readers to benefit from. Fantastic idea, and a great way of using the net and bringing people in to a big story. Another great use of online from the Guardian.

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A BBC licence fee for a digital age?

The Government – pioneered by the departing Communications Minister, Lord Carter – today unveiled its final Digital Britain report.

There is welcome acknowledgement of the contribution digital advertising – in particular targeted advertising - will make in helping to monetise online content.  The Government also attaches significant importance to self-regulation and education in promoting transparency and protecting internet users’ online privacy, supporting the IAB’s Good Practice Principles for behavioural advertising, as well as www.youronlinechoices.co.uk, the new portal to help educate users.  There is also encouraging news in the appointment of Martha Lane-Fox, one of the pioneers of digital commerce, as the Government’s digital inclusion champion.

But all eyes are on two specific proposals contained in the 238 page report which will alter the digital landscape in the years to come:

1. A 50 pence per month levy on all fixed copper and cable lines (but not mobile infrastructure) from 2010 to fund the rollout of next generation broadband.  According to Lord Carter that’s £6 per year per household, although low income households would be exempt.  The fund would raise between £150-175m a year, allowing next generation rollout to be complete by 2017, a timescale specifically criticised by the Conservative Culture Spokesperson, Jeremy Hunt.

2. Ring-fencing the BBC’s underspend for the so-called Digital Switchover Help Scheme (ie money the BBC receives to help vulnerable people switch to digital TV services - over and above its existing licence fee settlement) to help finance the delivery of regional news, other than that provided by the BBC.  This ‘Contained Contestable Element of the Licence Fee’ idea is not the so-called ‘top-slicing (to you and me that’s ‘sharing out’) of the BBC’s licence fee, as has been widely reported in the media.

Significantly, this second proposal fires the starting gun of the licence fee review (due in 2013) and the beginning of a wider discussion about how the BBC’s licence fee should apply (and in what form) in a digital age (eg we don’t pay the licence fee to access the BBC’s website or the iPlayer).  The report moots maintaining a ‘Contained Contestable Element’ of the licence fee after 2013 and, in his briefing to industry this afternoon, Carter did not rule out this money being used for (non-BBC) children’s content and programming. 

If there is to be a lasting legacy of this report then this is it.  The Government has effectively sounded the death knell on the BBC’s licence fee as we know it today and kicked-off the debate about how we fund public service content in a digital age.

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Have you implemented Facebook Connect yet?

Recently I wrote about the importance of Facebook Connect and how it will change the internet forever. Over the last month I’ve noticed more and more sites and online services implementing Facebook Connect and OpenID to their logins and site registrations. If you don’t know what these are, they basically allow users to login to your site using their Facebook, Google or Twitter accounts to name a few. By reducing the number of logins a user needs it solves one of the biggest usability issues the internet has had since it began: registration fatigue and forgetful memories.

A couple of recent big examples include Digg and Microsoft’s Xbox console using Facebook Connect to integrate user data into their services. It’s actually very simple to do, in my spare time I’ve been tinkering with it on my new blog, LoveClapham, and the API makes it all very straightforward for a developer to zip in and work their magic. Digg is one of the simplest yet best examples I’ve seen because it allows you to login to Digg in two steps using your Facebook account and then every time you Digg a webpage you can share it in your Facebook feed. This is a sensible and non-spammy method of promoting content within Facebook.

The benefits? Users hate registering every time they want to use a different site, this removes that hurdle increasing interaction and UGC. Users also tend to forget their logins if they don’t use a site very often, password reminders are ‘ok’ but they aren’t ‘good’ usability, this removes that problem too because people only have to remember one login. Then of course you have the benefits of promotion within the social networks. The negatives? You will be releasing certain amounts of data about your audience to organisations like Facebook and losing out on the ownership of those users, but you can still save additional demographic data and with the benefits it brings, Facebook Connect and OpenID are impossible to ignore.

It’s pretty obvious to me that by the end of the year the vast majority of websites will already have Facebook Connect integrated and the sites that haven’t yet added it will begin to suffer as the wave of users making use of it will be even less forgiving of additional logins. I’m sure most media owners will already be investigating this new technology so I won’t harp on any more about using it, but if you’ve seen some good examples, please share them in the below comments.

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