Habitat's moment of Twitter madness

Over the weekend, Tiphereth Gloria's blog (the excellent 'Digital Tip') over in Australia alerted me to an incidence of Twitter madness from UK furniture retailer Habitat.  The story has now extended to mainstream news outlets picking it up, for example see this piece by Sky's Twitter correspondent Ruth Bartlett.

In a nutshell, Habitat didn't just blast out price lists and special offers via its Twitter feed.   That would have been fairly harmless, if pointless, as with Twitter you can of course decide to unfollow anyone who doesn't take your fancy.   Instead, they forced themselves into popular conversations by the use of hash tags - the way in which popular trends and subjects on Twitter are grouped.   This included things like #iPhone, which meant that if you were searching Twitter for info about Apple's smartphone you would have come across Habitat's posts.

Spammers and get rich quick merchants use this method of getting attention through hash tags all the time.   But it's not what you'd expect from a premium brand.

However the worst thing was that whoever Habitat outsourced its feed to also used hash tags to do with the Iranian elections, a crisis which has of course cost lives.   Above there is an example where they used #Mousavi (after the Iranian opposition leader) to call for people to join their database.  The reaction from the Twitter community was pretty much as you'd expect, below is a small selection.

Habitat has now admitted its mistake, though in fairly mild terms and in brand speak.  It's also scrubbed its twitter feed clean, though the results live on thanks to the joys of search.

My guess, for what it's worth, is that the Habitat press office had nothing to do with this directly.   Communications professionals would (hopefully!) not think it a good idea to spam Iran election feeds with info about flat packed furniture.   I could be wrong of course but instead I assume that they outsourced this job to someone - and someone who knew something about Twitter, as a complete novice wouldn't be clued up on hash tags. And that the brief read 'get us X,000 followers fast!' (or words to that effect.)

If so, perhaps it's a case for checking out the credentials and online footprint of whatever social media "expert" you bring on a little more closely?

Update (25 June) - Habitat has published an apology and put it down to the fact that they turned their feed over to an over enthusiastic Intern.

When it comes to social networking, we stick close to home

It's received wisdom that social networks make it possible to connect to people half way around the world based purely on your similar interests and so communities are no longer defined by where you live.

But what if that isn't so, and we are in fact connecting with many of the same friends, but just in different ways? A study that I recently picked up on makes this case. It suggests that very often, we're using these networks not to talk to people in New Zealand, but to someone half way down the road.

Noshir Contractor and William J. White of Northwestern University studied virtual worlds like Everquest and Second Life. These computer generated environments are places where you can remain totally anonymous if you so choose. So you’d imagine that these are the very places where people aren’t bound by geography.

Not so. The researchers found that geographic distance did play a part in choosing your friends. But in the sense of the closer they are the better. To a certain extent that does of course make sense. If you are from Australia and someone else is from Mexico not only do completely separate time zones come into play, there’s also the language barrier to contend with.

However, Drs Contractor and White actually found that people based 10km away from each other were 5x more likely to be playing together than people 100km away from each other.

That’s something I was told when launching the kids world Club Penguin in the UK last year – that often participants play on there with their existing friends after school. And similarly, looking at the teen version of Second Life, the researchers found that players did make new friends, but just as in real life these were friends of friends. In other words, by and large they stayed within an extended social circle, something that as an aside should reassure parents.

I know 1st hand that often applies to blogs and bloggers as well. In the UK (and I imagine it’s not so different elsewhere) if you organise a bloggers lunch, not only will you find that the people there largely already know each other, they already link to each other too. So most UK tech PR blogs, link to other tech PR people in other agencies – the type of people they already encounter in their daily lives - and so on. 

It would be an interesting side study to do the same to Twitter accounts. As (unlike on Facebook) it’s generally acceptable to follow strangers on there, does it break down barriers?

From what I see from my own colleagues the answer is initially no, eventually yes. You sign up and follow people who might be sitting at the other end of the room from you. But eventually after seeing who they follow, and checking out their followers’ followers, the boundaries do start to dissolve.

So, in conclusion, even though there’s been a lot of research about the existence of virtual friends, what this study tells us is that our virtual and real networks are sometimes not so different after all.

Instead, “people end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know. It's not creating new networks. It's reinforcing existing networks.” It’s sometimes less about creating new friendships than about deepening the ones we already have.

Time to let your staff use social media at work?

It’s a license for staff to waste time.   There’s no control about what they say.   What happens if a customer makes contact with them direct?   Today’s arguments against allowing your staff to use social media at work?  Actually they were pretty much the arguments used by companies to restrict email use in the mid 1990s.

That’s worth bearing in mind as the social media in the office debate rages.  

Today it’s received wisdom that email is an essential business tool, and so it will be with social media before too long.   

Especially with metrics firm Nielsen showing that in February, communication via social networks overtook communication via email.   And from personal experience, I can now think of several instances of clients messaging me direct on Twitter as opposed to pinging me an email.

However just like with 90s email, the first stage of workplace social media acceptability is to publish dos and don’ts guidelines about what’s allowed.   Even though a recent survey by Monster showed that 90% of workers are afraid of using Twitter for fear of getting in trouble, a number of firms have done just that.

As with all internal guidelines this ranges from the simple to the ones filled with corporate speak.   

For example, Opera, the makers of the Internet browser of the same name, published a series of eight easy to understand rules: Share your thoughts, be active, “we’re not your mama”, don’t give away the farm, check your sources, our friends are your friends, for the squeamish post a disclaimer and use your common sense.

Australian telecoms giant Telstra publicly released guidelines revolving around the ‘three Rs’ – responsibility, respect and representation.   And at the far end of the scale, Canadian broadcaster CBC published criteria that they backtracked on after it caused a fuss, saying that personal blogs couldn’t be used to espouse a partisan political opinion.   

The bottom line is though social media isn’t going to go away, it’s part and parcel of today’s Internet environment and it’s what graduates in particular who join your organisations see as second nature.     

As with so much of social media, you can either set out the parameters of your involvement now.   Or stick your head in the sand and wait until it comes to you, when you are forced to react to it.   

Image credit

Online video: Over-hyped, over-sold, or just misunderstood?

Back in 1996 when I was involved in the UK launch of MSN there was an all-singing, all dancing event at the Royal Commonwealth Institute here in London. Programme makers trouped along to hear MSN tout the Web as the next best thing for watching TV-like content. Bear in mind this was in the days of 28.8 dial-up...

Obviously it never happened that way, and arguably there have been a series of online video false dawns. Just the other month a piece of research by Tube Mogul showed that most web TV series lose the majority of their viewers after episode one.

I mention this as a Media Post article under the heading ‘Online Video Usage Dramatically Overstated’, talks about a recent piece of research – the (US) Video Consumer Mapping Study, produced by Sequent Partners and Ball State University.   The project found that while a lot of people watch online video, as a proportion of viewing figures it’s very low. Online video makes up less than 1% of US viewing time, while the good old TV still has a 2/3 viewing share.

This is supported by a raft of other research that shows, plainly, the Internet is somewhere where people dip in and out of to watch short clips. By and large its not somewhere where you can serve them lengthy content. Case in point, Comscore measures average US online video watching at ten minutes a day, and around fifteen minutes for the UK.

Indeed, one of the authors of the Video Consumer Mapping Study reckoned that people actually over estimated their online video usage and talked down the amount of time spent in front of the box because online video is seen as "cool."

TV RIP? Hardly

The fact is that advertising-led recession woes aside, unlike the print industry, TV has actually held its own pretty well. As Nielsen showed last year, heavy Internet users are actually the most likely to also watch TV as they multi-task.

And the past decade has seen a range of innovations introduced from the (now) humble PVR onwards. Just this week Italian / Israeli start-up Bee TV received a cool $8 million in funding for what TechCrunch described as its ‘stunning’ personal TV recommendation system

According to the online demo, the founders fully intend to white label it to multi-channel TV content providers (like Sky and Virgin Media here in the UK) as a value added they can pass onto customers.

The conclusion? Online video, definitely here to stay and a powerful medium. But it supplements and doesn’t replace the main video viewing platform. That’s still the telly.

Image Credit - 'The Sofa'