David Cameron (photo: flickr - Screaming Bertha)

David Cameron has been caught out by live radio. In a live interview on Absolute Radio with Christian O’Connell, Cameron used two words that he really shouldn’t have. He used the phrase “pissed off” and then when asked why he didn’t use Twitter he stated (swear word coming up!):

“The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits might make a twat.”

Why that’s a good and bad thing

David Cameron gets one thing about Twitter. It’s instant. It’s impossible to stop what you tweet getting out and what you tweet stays out there – there’s no delete (well, there is, but it actually doesn’t delete it from twitter search).  For that reason, and given his choice of words on live radio, it’s probably good he isn’t on Twitter.

However, it’s a bad thing. In a world where UK politicians are not seen as trustworthy or having integrity after the expenses scandal, we do actually want to get to know a little more of the reality and humanity of the people behind the names.  There is a lot of “spin” and “managing the story” that goes on with PR, and that is something that people are reacting against.

Cameron at least is being real and honest

While he was, perhaps, using inappropriate words on live radio, it at least shows that he is a real person who uses some real words. His comments about Twitter are valid and it shows some sense about the service. However, this should be an opportunity to recognise it’s power. I found out about the story via Twitter, and it spread via Twitter.  If Twitter isn’t an absolutely vital tool in his arsenal for an assault on becoming UK Prime Minister in the next few months then I would be hugely surprised, especially as Barack Obama utilised it so successfully.

An eye opener – Twitter is the story

Perhaps the biggest thing about this story is that the focus was put firmly on David’s thoughts on Twitter or actually his thoughts on those that use Twitter. Not his swearing (although that came into it) and not that it was done on a radio show that is in a demographic he needs to target, but that it was reported all over Twitter as “David Cameron thinks you are all t**ts” which is not true (if it was, he’d lose all our votes in the UK straight away).

It’s David’s twitter comments that have sparked the social media backlash. Twitter is a big deal.

Horizon Realty is a company we all know very well. Well, ok, it most definitely isn’t, but they are fast becoming known for all the wrong reasons.

Horizon Realty (a US company) are suing one of their tenants, Amanda Bonnen (twitter: abonnen – account deleted now), for $50,000, for a single tweet on May 12th. That tweet was apparently so inflamatory, it was deemed worthy of a massive lawsuit. That tweet was:

So, let’s get this stragiht. Amanda Bonnen had around 20 followers and sent around 1 to 5 tweets a day. Not a big deal you might think. However, Horizon Realty have sued her, without contacting and/or asking her to remove the tweet. To add to that, Horizon’s Jeffrey Michael was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying of Horizon Realty about twitter: “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization”.

Whoever in Horizon Realty thought that this was a good idea was very wrong. There is now a storm brewing online and a very large number of people now know about Horizon Realty. To cap it all, they know about Horizon Realty as being:

• A company that sues it’s tenants without talking to them first
• A company that provides allegedly moldy (or mouldy) apartments

Managing Your Social Media Engagement

This is a perfect example of when expertise and understanding is required. To be honest, this was a tiny issue and could (probably should) have been ignored, and dealt with in a friendly and direct manner. This most definitely wasn’t $50,000 of defamation or libel.

Being involved in Social Media means that you may well end up getting negative criticism somewhere. However, not being involved in Social Media, doesn’t mean it cannot bite you. Horizon Realty don’t appear to have a Social Media presence, and therefore didn’t fully understand the significance of what they were doing.

Rule of Thumb: Don’t React – Engage

This is a simple rule you can easily live by. It’s the same idea as “take a deep breath” before you do something. There’s often a better way.

The best way to engage is often to ask an expert. Unless you are used to Social Media and engaged already in it, then it’s often a very steep learning curve to manage positive and negative criticism. All that most people want through Social Media channels is realism, engagement and connection, and not lawsuits.

I recently did a talk to the Twitter Developer Nest (a group of people in the UK developing applications on Twitter and utilising Twitter for business) on the different types of data that exist on Twitter.

The talk came out of a previous blog post of mine from which I created http://twimages.org – http://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/twitter-applications-persistence-and-twimages/. It also comes from many years of tweeting as @PaulDJohnston on Twitter.

The Big Thing – 5 Minutes Attention

Tweets last about 5 minutes. I’ve done a little research on this myself since the presentation, and 5 minutes is about the long and the short of it. There is very little interaction with a tweet after that time.

Why does this matter though? Well, it means that Twitter is a Now tool. It’s also a conversation tool. Getting people to read and then forward your content is important.  It makes your data more persistent.

Why Persistent and Transient?

Transient means “staying only a short time” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transient) and Persistent means “constantly repeated” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/persistent).

I think that “staying only a short time” is a great definition of a tweet. If it’s only there and has attention for 5 minutes, then it’s really of little value.  Unless you can get it to be constantly repeated.

Twitter is microblogging. But with the microblog comes micro-attention.  We have to understand that attention is precious and small packets of attention can produce big results only if put together with many other packets of attention.

What this means for an Organisation or Brand

Twitter is one of the major tools in the social media arsenal now. A social media strategy will not be complete without fully working out where Twitter fits. Understanding Twitter and how to utilise is is key to any social media strategy. While not everyone is on twitter (yet), the idea of short messages that grab attention is becoming much more important as Facebook have changed their interface recently to adapt to the idea of short messages.

If you only have 5 minutes, then each tweet has to count. Nobody likes messages every few seconds or minutes that are auto-generated and as such you have to be careful about how often you tweet. But if you can utilise some of the ideas to generate more persistence, you can gain great interest and action.

The rise of Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has generated new possibilities for marketers and organisations in general. It opens up whole new communities of people to whatever the organisation is offering. It also opens up avenues of communication to a lot of people.

Community is now the focus

When you look at the rise and rise of Social Networks, there are many that would point to the technology as being the key. This is why there are serious numbers of competitor social networks out there that in essence copy the technology. However, Technology is and was never the key.  The key is Community.

Community in it’s loosest sense is just a group of people. What they are grouped around joins up members of that community. Not every person will be joined to each other and a person may be more involved or less involved in a community and often it is their choice how involved they are.  Communities will also overlap. One or more members of a community will be part of another community and so there loose joining between both people within a community and other communities that is very important.

Building a Community

It’s very difficult to build a community from scratch. Unless you have a highly charismatic leader who is able to inspire large numbers of people into a community by sheer force of personality, you will likely need to build upon an existing community. Building on an existing community or getting involved in another community gives you a starting point. Which community to build on and why to build on that community is very important.

It’s not simple (if it was, this company probably wouldn’t exist)

There are many companies and organisations out there that think that “If we build it, they will come”. It’s just not true. Matt Mullenweg created a highly successful business based on online communities called Wordpress (this blog is a Wordpress blog). He has talked about how to build communities, as that is essentially what a blog can do for a person or organisation, and he says in a presentation he does on getting your first 100,000 users:

• The first [users] are the most passionate and unique users, and the hardest to get. After that, you’ve got enough momentum – chances are, you’ll coast.
• It’s easy to call something an overnight success – it’s never true – there’s always time, blood, sweat and tears poured into any major success – you just never hear about it until it’s big.
• Your first users should be your friends, your family, and those people who don’t like you – they’ll give you the honest goods on how to improve the experience you’re creating for your (hopefully) [next group of] users!

Community isn’t simple but it is Everything

Not every community needs 100,000 users to work. Some only require 5 or 10. But, once you have a community, you have an opportunity. Let’s rephrase that quote from earlier:

“If we build the community, they will come“

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk on twitter was the first user on twitter to break the 1 million twitter followers today. Some would call him a twillionaire. I just call him good at understanding the technology.

There were 2 major things that went right for him:

Cause

He had a cause. He said that if he was first to 1 million followers, he would donate money to Malaria No More:

http://www.malarianomore.org/

Competitor

He had a competitor! CNN Breaking News – @cnnbrk – had managed to get a large following, and Ashton Kutcher made it a race between the two of them. The race was very close too:

Kutcher v CNN

Why Is This Important?

It shows the power of celebrity to endorse a charity. The interesting thing is that some people followed him because it was a race with CNN, and others followed him because it was for charity. There were in fact 3 winners though, CNN, Ashton himself and the charity who received the money.

Celebrity endorsements are great, but the real key is the size and speed with which the following was formed. Twitter has the ability to bring in real traffic for a real cause with real speed.

The Perfect Storm

However, it was a perfect storm. The conditions were right and the opportunity presented itself. I’m not sure if anyone could have strategised this because it was not engineered, but however it came about, this was a brilliantly executed social media campaign.

However, ongoing, this is not a particularly great conversation. It’s very much about getting 1 million followers, and that’s it. The thing about twitter is you don’t have to care about your followers particularly, they just follow you. TechCrunch took a similar view in that they see twitter being overtaken by celebrity.

So, now this is all over, will it actually matter?

Well, for the people who will receive a malaria net it will. And actually, for me, that’s all that matters.

Followership on Twitter

For a sarcastic take on this episode see 10 tips to increase your follower count which highlights some of the more amusing aspects of followership on twitter.

Twitter has been riding the crest of a wave for the best part of 2 years and the most interesting question on most people’s lips about twitter has been “what is it for?” and the second most interesting question is “what’s the business model?”

We at Aristos Social are very excited by Twitter as we believe it has huge potential to build communities around it, and as such, can help clients to generate some very interesting propositions.

Well, now we’ve had a sneak preview of the answer:

This apparently was a release that “slipped through the net” (thanks to ReadWriteWeb for publicising the page) and shouldn’t have been displayed, because it’s no longer up there as of now. However, it’s enough to make us all realise what they are going to do.

Business Model

Twitter has gone down the route of sponsoring/advertising on the front pages of the site, and this is to be expected, but has taken an inordinately long time to come together.

However, have they missed something here? They have an API and have built a very strong community around the product. This community has utilised the service through clients, much like email, and as such, has taken a lot of the traffic away from the site. It could be argued that without the clients, twitter would be nowhere as popular as it is today. Are they starting to advertise on the website where most people don’t use twitter?

How this can help organisations

Sponsorship and advertising will definitely produce a revenue stream, and it will generate some traffic.The difficulty will be in which adverts get placed on which profiles. This will require some interesting technology, as what do you display for? Do you display:

• according to the tweets a user is following
• according to the tweets a user is creating
• a mixture of the two
• trending topics on twitter at the moment
• randomly
• some other combination of the above

The most valuable opportunities are not in advertising, but in getting a community’s users to be advocates of an organisation/campaign/product. We wonder if the best solution is to generate a social advocacy campaign, which would partially remove the need for advertising anyway.  We’ve done that kind of thing before here, so we could do it again.

Interesting to watch Twitter’s Strategy

We’re going to be watching with interest as this unfolds. Twitter has some interesting challenges to face over the next few months as it tries to justify it’s valuations and will this year be the subject of a lot of interested parties wishing to buy the service.