48 hours to save your reputation? If you are lucky, you'll get four

Take a look at this chart, it shows the Twitter life span of the tube story that ran on Friday and is a lesson for any customer facing organisation.  When something breaks online you literally have 3-4 hours to get a handle on things.

As has now been widely reported, on Thursday blogger Jonathan MacDonald filmed a London Underground staff member verbally abusing an elderly passenger after he got caught in the doors of a train.   By Friday morning it was on Twitter, we were indeed tweeting about it ourselves in our office around 10-ish.   By the time I left work in the afternoon the story was staring at me from the front page of the Evening Standard, complete with calls by London Mayor Boris Johnson for an investigation.

This and two other UK stories that appeared last week showed how ordinary consumers online can once again make all the running and change the news agenda within a number of hours.

First of all there was the Trafigura case where the Guardian was prevented from reporting on an environmental scandal involving the energy concern, despite the fact that it was the subject of a Parliamentary question.   Never mind, people on Twitter uncovered the story themselves and by the end of the day the gagging order was lifted.   The Guardian itself admitted that Twitter had on this occasion saved free speech.

Then there was the Jan Moir column in the Mail hinting that Stephen Gately may have died for ‘lifestyle’ reasons (despite the fact that the coroner said he died of natural causes) and using it to make a comment on gay marriage.

A number of bloggers like Malcolm Coles weighed in and urged people on Twittter to focus their tweets on advertisers like BT and M&S, so that they pulled their ads from the (online) page.   And within a number of hours, they did.

All these show why Twitter matters.   The overall numbers on Twitter are actually quite low when you consider that there is a core of 5% of users who account for most tweets.   But though your mum or the bloke down the pub is unlikely to be in that 5%, a lot of journalists and bloggers are.   

In fact, a key misconception about Twitter is that it’s a place for people to babble all day about what they are having for tea.   Sure there is some of that, but as David Bowen says in an article on online crisis management in the FT, Twitter is ultimately a connector – a bridge to other media.   News breaks on there, it breaks fast, and people take it elsewhere. Ignore it at your peril.

Media strategist Ben Kunz has run a similar analysis on his blog of the story of the balloon boy in the States, something else that went crazy on Twitter within a number of hours.   Ben makes the point that people who play it by the book and get legal, HR etc together will have missed the boat.   Indeed, he asks would a lot of organisations have even noticed what's going on?

The FT piece says that you have 48 hours to restore your credibility as after that people won’t visit your website to get your point of view.   

Maybe so, but in terms of getting a  handle on the story I’d say you have four – if that.   If something goes viral in the morning and if you aren’t proactive by lunch, you’ve pretty much lost control of what’s going on and you’re just left to firefight.

Who knows, the next time someone captures an incident similar to the one Jonathan MacDonald did, they’ll use the live mobile broadcasting platform qik (which works with a lot of smartphones), and people will be able to see what’s going on in your organisation in real time.

A mixture of celebrity coverage and hard news leads to UK papers upping their US site traffic

The other day the always informative journalism blogger Malcolm Coles showed how UK newspapers were doing a bit of SEO by stuffing their web-pages full of Patrick Swayze results and tags.  This follows Malcom's earlier analysis that the Daily Mail had become the UK's most popular online newspaper....thanks to its coverage of Michael Jackson's death (on another note, check out how the Mail is copying right wing blogs in the US with its Obama coverage).

20% of tweets about products

Or so says the result of a Penn State study in the States.

Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people 'asking and providing' product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

I initially found that % on the high side, though 'providing product information' is a definition that's wide enough to include any tweets about a product or service - I went to this restaurant today, I bought this mobile phone and so on. I guess it is true that as a personal broadcasting system we do use Twitter to talk about stuff we buy or like / dislike a great deal.

Case in point I've - almost unconsciously - made some kind of comment about four different companies since the weekend.

According to the study authors, the large amount of brand data on Twitter can pretty much provide you with a sentiment map if you monitor and analyse tweets over time: What do your customers and non customers think about your product, what features are going down well / not so well, and how are your competitors faring.

One to add to our list for internal clients of 'what is Twitter good for?'

Image - marc.benton

Digital media and the idiocy of the big number

Delivering the keynote lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Newscorp Europe and Asia boss James Murdoch came out with a good soundbite, namely that we have "analogue attitudes in a digital age."   Murdoch was obviously talking about TV and his speech involved taking aim at the publicly funded BBC in particular, but it's a nice line to describe a lot of what goes on in this space. Take our continued obsession with the big number for example.

Exhibit A, the other day Comscore released its latest Twitter stats. 'Twitter more popular than the BBC!' said Netimperative and TechRadar. But, as I said on my home blog, saying you have 50 million monthly visitors is not the same as saying you have 50 million users.

First you have to take away the duplicate accounts (for example I have registered four IDs, only two of which are active). And on that note, you then have to subtract the number that register but never participate - according to Hubspot 54.9% of tweeple have never tweeted, and I don't buy the line that 'they are all listening.'

Then you have to look at the % of power tweeple, the people who really do use it, and (according to Sysmos) you are left with 5% of the total. So just over 2.5 million.

'Oh well, waste of time, very few people do use it then' will say the nay-sayers (of which there are plenty), but the whole point is that looking at the raw number is completely pointless. What's important is who they are and what they do.

Exhibit B - I've fallen into this particular trap of proclaiming that newspapers are more popular than ever thanks to the Internet.

Again - sure the basic stats show that the Guardian online gets a huge audience compared to the web edition....yet (assuming I care about UK consumers only), a high proportion of that audience comes from abroad.   And stats from Columbia Journalism Review show that 88% of newspaper reading time is in print, while Malcom Coles in the Online Journalism blog figured out that most online newspaper readers only look at one page.

The comparison is therefore completely artificial due to the fact that the way we read online and print is completely different.

Exhibit C - The other day there was chatter that 'RSS' might be 'dead.' Why? Asks Patricio Robles of eConsultancy. "RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook but who says it has to be?...not every technology has to achieve 90%+ adoption to be useful."

The fact is we're taking an offline metrics way of thinking and hauling it online. It doesn't work that way.   And the problem with using the big number is that it's very easy to puncture it.

Exhibit D, Twitter has in the past been unfavourably compared to the virtual world Second Life in terms of hype, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly.   The point is though that Second Life also in its heyday suffered from large user numbers being banded about.

In mid 2007 there was talk of 10-15 million Second Life residents...completely untrue when you took out duplicate accounts, people who registered but never came back...sound familiar?   That number was so over inflated that it was easy to puncture, sparking a debate about the 'real' number of users (I gather it's currently about 750k human beings).

Analogue thinking is that we like to see a big number so that we (in marketing) can tick a box and say 'job done, I reached X many people.' Digital thinking is we put the big number to one side and instead look at two things that are more important: Engagement (does anyone care enough to pass it on) and influence (who exactly are we reaching?)

Or as Norwegian brand strategist Helge Tenno says his latest blog post "traditional media is a battle between stories...in social media, we are not engaging in stories, we are engaging in the exchange of ideas."  Two completely different things.  As Kevin Slavin (quoted in Helge's post) puts it:

"The relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share a couple of the same letters, but they are not in the same taxonomy."

It is as if the whole of Birmingham suddenly stopped reading newspapers

For the mobile Internet, it really does seem to be a case of 'build it and they will come'

An interesting report by Transpera (via Marketing Charts) conducted in the US shows: Once someone starts graduating onto mobile video with their phone, they are hooked and use it as the main way to go online.

According to the results, 62% of mobile video users use their mobile/cellphones to browse the Internet more than they use their computers. Meanwhile, 58% of mobile video watchers get more of their news from their phones than from any other source.

To me those are fairly significant stats. It shows that the line 'build it and they will come', does hold true here.   After years of the mobile Internet being hyped to high heaven, people really will start using their tiny iPhone / Palm Pre screen et al more than their computer, provided (as is the case with the iPhone and its ilk), the user experience is rich enough.

Of course, the overall mobile video audience is still relatively small but it's growing as smartphone use becomes more prevalent. According to an Allot Communications study published at the end of June, "http streaming" (ie watching You Tube, Hulu etc on your phone) now accounts for 21% of mobile data traffic worldwide - see chart below.

Overall, Allot Communications (download the full report here), found that global mobile data bandwidth use increased by 30% worldwide in Q2 2009.

The Empire strikes back or the old order's attempt to bring an end to the age of free

 They've had enough. Enough of all you freeloaders stopping by their sites and not paying. Enough of you ignoring the ads they've served up for you. And enough of you reading and sharing their stuff elsewhere.

Is online video maturing?

This is interesting - Will Sullivan at Poynter Online has a report on online audiences getting used to longer web videos.

It's a theme that I've posted on before on my home blog, that despite the huge numbers touted around about the online video explosion, those same numbers have pointed to something completely different once you scratch beneath the surface.

Namely that while it's reach mass adoption levels, online video viewing is done in short several minute bursts - indeed Tube Mogul found out last year that most people stop watching after the first sixty seconds.   Then there's the statistic that most web-only TV style mini series don't fare well at all, losing most viewers after episode one. The overall conclusion until now has been that online video is fine for a bit of light entertainment here and there, but for TV style viewing, the TV itself still rules supreme.

Will Sullivan points to a New York Times piece by Brian Selter who talks about the cat on keyboard style stuff being "supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video." Quality is up, so is the technology and so is the content. The long term trend is that online video is growing up as a medium.

Is this a threat to TV companies in the same way that online media is to print? Absolutely not. For starters, average video durations were still only 3.4 minutes in March according to Comscore. More to the point, the TV industry has been at the forefront of seeing the Web as an extension of its media property and not a threat, with whole programmes being available for free online via devices such as the BBC's iPlayer.

Interestingly the New York Times points out there is another parallel to films at first being extremely short. Due to the technology not being up to scratch, the first kinetoscopes in the 1890s were only about 30 seconds long: "It probably felt like a giant dangerous leap to short films of three minutes."

Image - GR Shado

US survey casts doubt on whether online ads really do aid awareness

Recently Comscore was commissioned to do a report on behalf of online publishers to show that online display really does work. "Forget about the click through" was the angle, "what matters is that these ads drive awareness."

A piece of research out by Harris Interactive casts some doubt on that. A survey of American consumers found that when it came to ad formats found to be the most 'helpful' in influencing purchasing decisions, TV came top on 37%.

TV was followed by newspaper advertising on 17% while search engine advertising scored a respectable 14%. However at the bottom of the table, only 3% considered radio ads the most helpful, dropping down to 1% for Internet banner ads.

When it came to ad formats they claimed to 'ignore', only 6% of consumers ignored newspaper advertising (there is life in the old dog yet), 9% ignored radio ads, 13% TV and 17% search engine advertising. Internet ads? 46% claimed to have banner blindness.

For a more detailed response that I posted around the Comscore study, see a post I wrote on my home blog.

'The slow death of blogs' (again)

Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you'd expect much discussed, Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging 'dying.' His rationale was that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.

This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004."

The numbers don't show a decline

Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are basically dead - abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that's still seven million+ that are alive and well.

And on his data mining blog, MSN's Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs to prove that blogs aren't declining. He took a series of common (not news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you'd imagine to be fairly consistent year round.

Looking at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term 'birthday' and found the trend to be fairly straight.

Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?

I'd also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.

That's because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to have conversations (the stereotype being it's where people blast off 140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it's somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.

So I predict that in a year's time we'll still be having 'decline of blogs' type pieces...and plenty of posts like this in return.

Blogging is dead - long live blogging

As an aside, A List blogger Steve Rubel recently announced that he's done with blogging...actually not really as he admits himself.

What he's done is move his blog over onto Posterous. While he calls Posterous a lifestream, we're really talking semantics as Posterous is a blogging platform that's a few steps on from blogger in terms of functionality, in that it integrates better with Twitter, Facebook and video sharing sites.

It's something I'd been considering (and no doubt a lot of other bloggers) myself - moving this site onto a system that gives me a few more options - and no doubt with Steve's lead others will now follow. The point is, it shows that the blogging industry isn't permanently stuck back in 2004, but continues to evolve.

Image - Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse

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'

‘Professional bloggers’ - the the PR people of tomorrow?

Fellow Cow Ella forwarded me on this piece by Fuat Kircaali from Web 2.0 all about how PR people and consultancies are marketing dinosaurs due for extinction.

Sure, the guy was trying to push his Utilizer news publishing platform with a fairly up-front plug in the article. However, it’s this quote that caught my attention:

“Companies with the Largest Number of Professional Bloggers will win. Tomorrow's (and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be played on professional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will win the marketing and propaganda games.”

Will the PR people of tomorrow simply be glorified bloggers with brands employing an army of scribes to send pearls of wisdom into the online ether?

I can see some logic in this argument. News is increasingly online first and in print a distant second, everyone is connected, and blogs directly help your search engine rankings.  Nevertheless, I would have thought that the need to disseminate more news online and engage with people means professional (and trained) communicators are more and not less necessary.

So - “The new job description of "professional corporate blogger" will be a very popular one”? Well that depends. Companies like Kodak do have people present in this sphere, but what they do works as they actually add value to customers (in Kodak’s case via a photo blog).

Assembly line blogging where announcements are blasted out however is just online noise, something we have plenty of already.

Image - Barely Fitz