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Haitians are not alone, thanks to Twitter and Facebook

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 Discussion: 1 Comment

images courtesy United Nations Development Programme

Media140 blogger Peter Bouvier is Social Media Editor for a UK Government body and has worked in project management, planning and education. Peter is also a keen consumer of current affairs, whose impressive writing skills shine whenever he is armed with a burning issue and a keyboard.

Peter was on hand to take a look at how useful social media have been in mobilising aid to Haiti this past week, as the already fragile communications infrastructure on the quake-devastated island nation broke down completely.

International relief efforts may be hampered and many lines of communication remain down, however, social media is proving its worth in Haiti.

Only 10 per cent of the country’s nine million people have internet access, yet Twitter feeds gave an immediate picture of the earthquake and photos emerged on Twitpic and Flickr almost instantaneously.

First-hand videos of quake-ravaged Port-au-Prince also appeared on YouTube within hours of the quake, alongside Haitians’ personal appeals to the world for aid and support.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Friday, January 8, 2010 Discussion: 1 Comment

Social media might be a relatively new addition to our personal and business lives but it already has an etiquette. Fall foul of a few unwritten rules and you could end up with egg on your face, or – in the case of a corporate body – a severely damaged bottom line.

Fortunately, along with this etiquette there have also arisen some switched-on individuals who know not only the rules of engagement, but also how to maximise impact in this arena of change.

One such person is Gareth Harmer (@gazimoff), who has written this piece giving businesses an idea of what makes the difference between ‘follow’ and ‘unfollow’ in the Twitterverse.

I was recently in a supermarket doing my weekly shop when the dreaded tannoy clicked into action. The traditional nasal voice droned out that there was a special offer on in their electrical department. I had the urge to shout back at the disembodied monotone that the offer was mediocre at best, but had no desire to get thrown out and return home without my shopping.

The point is that there was an understood protocol in action – the supermarket could drone on at me about anything it liked, and I had to keep my comments to myself.

Each communications medium develops its own unwritten rules. Those who don’t follow them are ignored or even blocked – much like the person who thinks it’s a great idea to start phoning at 2am every other day to tell you about the great time they had out on the town, or the emailer who is too liberal with the ‘reply all’ button.

It takes time, but eventually most people learn the strange little rules of each new tool and work within them, as individuals and as businesses.

When a new tool arrives on the scene, it takes time to figure out its associated rules and faux pas.

In Twitter’s case that may have taken longer because nothing else really lined up to the experience it offers. Users grappled to understand: is it like instant messaging or Facebook status updates? Is it like email? What about forums or RSS feeds?

Twitter doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories, but it has elements of all of them, and arguably it embodies the way the whole web has changed, taking the rules of engagement along with it.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 Discussion: 3 Comments

Cast even a perfunctory eye at the Twitterverse throughout the day and you will clock 100s of Tweets which refer to businesses or brands – from a simple coffee shop through on-line retailers to the biggest global technology giants. A single tweeted opinion can generate a rash of responses all involving the same brand or service. Whether these respondents agree or disagree with the original tweet, the conversation provides a real time, often heartfelt, source of consumer opinion – one which cannier companies are now realising they would be blinkered to dismiss.

For MKTG140, Media140′s Man with the Mic, Glenn LeSanto talks to some of these braver businesses about their experiences of leaping – even tentatively – onto the Social Media bandwagon. His conclusions may surprise you.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging website, has rapidly grown to become one of the world’s busiest websites in a relatively short period of time over the last 24 months.

While Twitter has plenty of detractors, who claim, among other things, that it is full of banality and inconsequential drivel, it is already proving to be an essential tool in business. Clever companies worldwide have woken up to Twitter’s potential for connecting them to customers, both old and new. The truth is that, while people do occasionally tweet what they had for breakfast, they also engage in a lively exchange of information, contacts, knowledge and opinion on all levels, from the banal to the highly intellectual and even analytic.

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 Discussion: 1 Comment

Are there some questions to which the appropriate response is so important or life-changing, that crowd-sourcing for opinion on Twitter is simply unacceptable? Most of us have done it at one time or another. Pizza or Curry tonight? Smart or Casual? Does my bum look big in this?

But is there a time when asking your followers for their opinion becomes one tweet too far? For #IMHO140, Stuart Witts muses on the value of the real-time response.

During a recent train journey, I was scrolling through my stream when I came across a tweet asking for views on whether or not an individual’s child should be getting the Tami Flu jab. Now I certainly don’t see this particular question as controversial, I’m sure anyone who was undecided about this particular issue would be asking the advice of all of their friends (both real and virtual). But it did get me thinking about how far this type of crowdsourcing could go.

Could there be a time when a fellow Twitterer asks a question of us with such far-reaching impact on their lives, that in the split-second of our ‘real-time’ response, we don’t fully consider our thoughts and suddenly someone’s life has been forever changed?

Twitter’s biggest strength, ‘real-time’, inevitably leads to us tweeting at any juncture of our day. We may be feeling happy, after meeting a friend for coffee, or annoyed at having missed yet another train due to over-crowding? But it is exactly at these times that we may be called upon to give our opinion and, again because of Twitter’s ‘real-time’ nature, we feel compelled to answer immediately, before the moment has passed and the conversation has moved on to another topic.

I may be overemphasising the importance of the responses we give; after all, we are supposed to be free-thinking individuals, fully capable of making our own decisions. But we all know that’s hogwash and if that were really true there would be no marketers, ad-men or thought leaders.

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) spoke of his influence, and his ability to bring down websites, at the recent 140conference in London and luckily he’s a nice guy. But what if, as Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) said, those who have the most influence are not nice? What if they have their own agenda, and the answers they give only serve to further it?

It’s not all bad though. Where else could you canvas the opinion of such a varied audience? Forums are great, but due to their specialised nature are likely to be filled with individuals of a similar mindset and with all of the specific baggage that comes with any particular subset. On Twitter, your followers can be anyone or indeed anything.
There are also times when the ‘real-time’ reaction can be a much truer one than the carefully considered response.

In the end though, I want to believe that the people I talk to are genuine and that I myself, am strong enough, amongst the barrage of subtle persuasions, to make my own decisions and, in the immortal words of Monty Python’s Brian: “You’ve got it all wrong! You don’t NEED to follow @ME, You don’t NEED to follow @ANYBODY! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You are ALL individuals!”

Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009 Discussion: 2 Comments

It is #followfriday again. Love it or hate it – it is a Twitter convention which is hard to ignore. A previous post on this forum by Caitlin Fitzsimmons (@niltiac), on how best to manage the #FF deluge and simultaneously send traffic to your blog, has proved to be one the most popular on this site.

Below, Media140’s Man with the Mic, Glenn Le Santo, takes a look at the etiquette of the follow and the unfollow, both for individuals and for the increasing number of corporate accounts dipping their toes into Social Media via Twitter. Glenn, btw, now features regularly in the top 10 of UK Popular Tweeps on Twirus.com, beating @schofe, @CHRISDJMOYLES and even @MrPeterAndre. @stephenfry had better watch out.

Twitter works on following. Without followers, your tweets simply don’t get read. If you don’t do any following, you don’t get to read other’s tweets. That’s set in stone, you must follow and be followed back to have a meaningful Twitter experience.

Problems do arise when we consider who we should and shouldn’t follow, and which processes we adopt when deciding. I posed various questions about following on Twitter this week to tease out opinion on the rules, if there are any, of following and to see if any patterns emerge.

Although my response was very varied, I do think following habits are already clearly identifiable on Twitter. One blogger who picked up on the #2follow conversation was @Gazimoff. He has already gone away and blogged his thoughts on #2follow. His blog entry sums up the popular line of opinion among tweeters when he says:

“..most seemed to be selective about who they follow back. It seems that for most of us we tend to read up on who our followers are, scanning through their previous tweets and deciding if it’s someone we’re interested in following.”

@Gazimoff also notes that the process is often a long one, instant decisions are not necessary and mistakes can of course be rectified at any time with a click of the follow/unfollow tab. Time gives you a chance to see what they are tweeting and so decide if to stick by them or not.

Another respondent, @amnotfunny confirmed this line of thought with the tweet:

“I unfollow someone if they just constantly send a stream of drivelly tweets to everyone or send endless rt’s replying to things”

There are also many varied reasons why a tweeter won’t draw or maintain a follow.

As a tweet from @crispinheath says: “I don’t follow everyone back if they’re bots or sales focussed. I unfollow people that don’t tweet often or don’t share links”

I wondered about reciprocation of follows; do we get offended when people fail to follow us back? It seems that while some of us might well do, the general opinion is that it doesn’t matter too much in personal tweet relationships. I particularly liked @ogerrard’s take on
this:

“interestingly, not having to create a reciprocal bond with someone is why I prefer Twitter over Facebook.”

“on facebook if you want to read what I’m saying, I have to put up with your drivel too”

That’s the personal tweeter talking however. If you are running a business twitter account, it seems that an entire set of different ‘rules’
might apply. During our twitter conversation, @Gazimoff suggested that:

“if you are in the service business, you should engage with customers in the form that suits them, not you”

His subsequent blog returned to this point with some useful advice for business trying to chart their way through these choppy #2follow waters.

“Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.”

One area which prompted plenty of debate was the cost to businesses of engaging via Twitter. A recent tweet exchange with @DuncanBannatyne had the entrepreneur contesting that businesses cannot follow every follower back – because of cost. Here, etiquette looks like it may have to be subordinate to bottom line. I agree to a point with Mr Bannatyne’s view that cost prohibits this level of engagement but I suggested that not following could have a negative impact on the value of his company’s social media campaign?

Engagement is such a key factor in the process it seems that not engaging carries significant risks. Although the tweet exchange with the man from the Dragon’s Den had seemed to me to go without any ill-feeling, Mr Bannatyne promptly made his feelings crystal clear on engagement by blocking me.

Fortunately, I found I wasn’t alone, despite the Scotsman’s rebuff, @Gazimoff differs with Bannatyne’s views too:

“The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store.”
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Editor: media140 Editor Posted: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Discussion: 4 Comments

So, where DO you stand on Twitter? Are you perhaps with David Cameron, whose now infamous “too many Twits” radio interview quip seemed to backfire somewhat? Or did you perhaps succumb to the zeitgeisty wave which swept across the Web earlier this year and sign up to the micro-blogging service? Yet now somehow, you’re not entirely sure what to do with your shiny new @Twitterhandle? A recent HubSpot report showed that 55 per cent of Twitter account holders have never ever tweeted and another 53 per cent don’t have any followers at all….

In the following short introduction to a projected series of posts on the myriad aspects of Twitter, Media140′s resident sage Glenn Le Santo recommends his own rules of engagement, with a view to helping newbies and veteran Tweeters alike get the very most from Twitter:

Are you a Twitter user? Then read on, as this post is definitely for you. Not yet using Twitter? Then why not read on anyway? This post will definitely help you make the decision to subscribe to the popular micro-blogging tool. It is a decision that I guarantee you will not regret.

It can be a more than a bit bewildering when you first sign up to Twitter. You have an empty following list and nobody in your follower list (unless of course, you made the mistake of letting Twitter’s sign-up process add some ‘recommendations’ for you). Your personal timeline (the place where you write your own and read others’ updates) is blank, much like a brand new canvas just awaiting your brush strokes.