Category: social networking

Is there any point live-tweeting an event any more?

thisisnotaninsight_tumblr_comAs Social Media Week kicked off on Monday in London, amid all the online noise the This Is Not An Insight tumblr stood out like a shining beacon of common sense.

While keen tweeters dispensed ‘aphorisms’ left, right and centre, This Is Not An Insight cut them down to size mercilessly, neatly highlighting why live-tweeting from an event is nowhere near as useful and necessary as we all thought.

Utterly moronic

Over the past few years, providing a steady stream of tweets from an event you’re attending has become de rigueur. We’ve all done it – you rock up to a venue, cue up the provided Wifi password and hashtag, and then listen carefully for words of wisdom to broadcast to your Twitter stream.

Unfortunately, unless you’re actually good and practised at this, what you tweet can very easily sound utterly moronic.

Now amplify the nonsensical noise by about 3000 – as has happened at Social Media Week – and all you get is a steady stream of ‘blah-blah-blah’, making it nigh impossible to pick out anything of any note or consequence.

You can, of course, mute an event as Adam Tinworth has done, but that doesn’t really get to the nub of the problem.

To my post’s original question, I would say ‘yes’, there’s always merit in live-tweeting an event, if you can guarantee you can actually do it well and it’s not so huge that what you say (whether as an individual or a brand) doesn’t get drowned out.

There are, of course, certain rules to ensure that what you tweet isn’t dismissed as needless crap – rules I shall try to list now (additional suggestions welcome).

Rule 1: Stop before you tweet

Many people are in such a hurry to broadcast something a speaker has just said that they don’t even think about what it means, and if it’s actually even insightful.

Write your tweet and then look at it carefully before you hit post to see if it makes any sense to your colleague in the office 2 miles away. Keep the phrase ‘no shit, Sherlock’ at the forefront of your mind.

Rule 2: Attribution

If a speaker says something you think is worthy of broadcast, quote them and use their name. In isolation a random sentence makes no sense if you don’t know what the event is or who’s speaking.

Better still – use their Twitter handle, so if they really are talking in gold nuggets, others can follow them.

Rule 3: Provide context

This is a follow-up to rule 2 – adding short commentary to a quote makes it far more valuable and more likely to be RTd, than just tweeting what has already been said.

Rule 4: Remember that Twitter is a conversation

Most people have forgotten what Twitter’s tagline is (Join the conversation), but never is it more apt than when it comes to live-tweeting.

To put that into context, the tagline is not ‘Talk to yourself’. Try to tweet things that might encourage people to interact with you or want to share.

Rule 5: Statistics work better than quotes

What sounds good in the moment – as has been pointed out earlier – doesn’t usually make for a good tweet. However, numbers/facts are normally more concrete and much more shareable.

Use your common sense, though: Someone tweeted this on Monday: ‘33% of brands have created a content publishing hub, to deliver consumers rich content’. To which the rejoinder has to be – ‘Is that any good or not?’

Rule 6: If in doubt, don’t bother

What this entire post is trying to say is that, usually, you’re better off using your tablet/smartphone to take valuable notes that you can share with your team in the office later, rather than tweeting banalities.

What have I missed? Let me know, please. This might even become a dispensable guide…

Why I decided to quit Foursquare

For the past couple of years, location-based content and apps have been trumpeted as the NBT (Next Big Thing).

The initial excitement and success of start-ups, such as 4square and Gowalla, seemed to herald a new era for forward-thinking digital creatives and tech superstars.

I admit I was late to the party. I got an HTC Desire in Feb 2011 and almost immediately started using 4square.

It was fun checking into places, adding friends, racking up points, earning badges and, eventually, gaining mayorships.

It was one of the cool things about a smartphone – being able to show or use your location.

On the occasions, I went to events, it was also useful to see who else was there.

But it didn’t take long to find frustrations. The supposed benefits that came with mayorships were few and far between and were often linked to big chain enterprises, rather than local businesses.

In other words, 4square hadn’t done a good enough marketing job to show off why they should engage with customers.

Another frustration came with the explore category. I went on an errand one lunchtime and needed to find somewhere for lunch. A perfect use for Foursquare, I thought.

I work in Central London, so it shouldn’t have been difficult to get recommendations. But it was.

I didn’t need or want a Pret a Manger, or a Starbucks. I wanted a good old-fashioned sandwich shop, but there were no recommendations. In other words, the big brands dominated, which didn’t feel like the right use of the tool.

Then there was the ease you could become mayor of somewhere. I went to a Travelodge last weekend and picked up the crown within 2 days. Pointless and rather sad.

Also, if you’re a Twitter user, the 4sq updates are mildly annoying.

Finally, there’s the whole points thing. I admit, I did go through a spate of number chasing, but it increasingly felt hollower and hollower.

Foursquare stopped being a useful app and turned into a soulless, endless game.

There will be friends reading this telling me I was one of the worst culprits, and I freely admit that’s the case, but the scales have now dropped from my eyes.

So I’ve stopped using. My account is still alive, but I’ve deleted it from my phone and ipod touch to break my habit.

Why haven’t I deleted the account? Because I firmly believe there’s still a way of integrating location into a wider, mass-appeal application. At the moment, though, Foursquare isn’t it.

It may need to partner up and allow its technology to be used in conjunction with someone else with a better idea.

If I knew, I’d be on my way to being a millionaire.

In the meantime, I’ll continue using Twitter 🙂

Why Nikon’s Facebook ‘epic fail’ wasn’t really that bad

Major fuss today over on the Facebook page of Nikon, after it posted a status update that enraged many of its followers.

The Japanese camera company’s fans took offence at the suggestion that equipment was more important than the photographer.

Nikon received almost 1500 comments, many of which blasted the company for being too concerned about their own equipment and not caring about the craft of the actual photographer. The word ‘fail’ appeared a large number of times.

But was it really the awful ‘integrity suicide’ that many commenters suggested? I’d say no for the following reasons:

1) Nikon is a brand that sells camera equipment – why else would you follow them? Surely, they’re going to use their Facebook page to try and encourage people to lean towards more Nikon kit. OK, so their words were a bit hamfisted, but they were essentially trying to get people to talk about Nikon products. That may not have been the greatest use of social media, but fans complaining about Nikon trying to ‘promote’ Nikon are very misguided.

2) The number of complainants were very small. At time of writing, Nikon has around 841k followers on Facebook. Of that number, only 0.17% left a comment and not all of the roughly 1500 comments were negative.

Admittedly, you never want to get bad press as an organisation, but it wasn’t exactly widespread condemnation.

3) A slightly more semantic point on the original post. Agreed, Nikon shouldn’t have dissed the art of the photographer, but if it’s all about the person, why doesn’t everyone use a disposable camera to take photos? Why do snappers need to shell out on the equipment and lenses that Nikon were trying to promote?

Interestingly, what this does highlight – yet again – is how fraught with difficulty social media can be for commercial organisations. People want to follow their favourite brands, but it seems as if they don’t like them being too important and opinionated.

Nikon did post an apology, but it took them 15 hours to do so – pretty poor. It really shouldn’t have taken them that long to react to a crisis situation. To be honest, that was probably their biggest faux pas.

Ultimately, though, they’re unlikely to lose that many of their followers and in a couple of months, most people will have probably forgotten all about it.