In a “bid to find tweets that are ahead”, The Golden Twits awards have been launched by The Drum magazine to try and find the best tweeters in the Galaxy, and they’ve very kindly asked me to be one of the judges on the panel.
As with anything you’re asked to judge, it’s a strangely humbling experience, full of “hmmm, am I really qualified to judge this?” and “wow, they got that guy to be a judge too”. Anyway, it’s all very exciting, and obviously you should all enter. The official press release is below:
A new award scheme is to be launched for users of Twitter – the micro-blogging site many decry as a useless, waste of time.
Despite such sentiment the site has become a social media phenomenon – from a standing start in 2007, it is expected to top 18m users by the end of this year.
And the fact that it can now support an award scheme is testimony to the fact that it is entering the media mainstream.
Within seconds of the awards being announced on Twitter, the event attracted dozens of entries into categories that includes Best Celebrity, Corporate and Bizarre Tweets.Mindful of problems acceptance speeches at events such as the Oscars, organisers will insist that any winners must keep their acceptance speeches to 140 characters – a rule which applies to Tweeting itself.Judges for the event include leading new media figures such as:
Ashley Stockwell - Virgin Media
Syd Nadim – Clock
Peter Abraham – Econsultancy
Trevor Chambers - Start Creative
Rowan Heasley - Naked Penguin Boy
Mat Morrison - Porter Novelli
Adam Sefton - Reading Room
The entry deadline for The Golden Twits is October 22 and the ceremony will be held at Fabric, London in November.
The organisation behind the Golden Twits is media and marketing magazine The Drum. In a 140 character statement its publisher Gordon Young said, “The awards will recognise the fact that, despite the character limit, Twitter is being used by people in increasingly sophisticated ways.”
… that in my last post I refered to myself as a planner. Well, it’s in my job title I guess. I’m not sure how important it is to have a job title though. I guess it must make some people more comfortable to know which box I’m in.
Either or, I hope you still let me play with the crayons from time to time.
First up, the fact that comments on a YouTube video are often funnier than the video itself. Take this piece of succinct genius from the comments on the latest Diet Coke ad (which truly is awful)
Revengeonseattle (48 minutes ago)
The people who made this ad made the world worse.
Now, I’m not sure what problem this person has with Seattle, or indeed how their revenge has been taken on the place, but what is for sure is that s/he has one excellent point.Terrible ad, and the world is now actually worse because of it. The sheer grandioseness of the statement made me laugh anyway. And then I found myself in a bit of a black mood because, well, no-one likes watching stuff that is actually making the world worse.
Until I read that the next England game is available live online, and you can pay to stream it direct to your desktop. Which sorta made me smile in a ooo-I-wonder-if-this-is-the-future sort of a way. And then I read Rio Ferdinand’s comments on it:
“I read that online advertising has taken over from TV, so that tells you something about where it’s going in terms of the digital world,” he told BBC Sport.
“So I’m sure it’ll be the way forward and in the future it’ll probably be the reality. I think it’s a good way to gauge how many people are interested.”
And the fact that Rio has been researching the world of online advertising really made me smile. His next UK Gangsta flick will hopefully be launched exclusively through his MySpace page.
Which took me, in a strange and roundabout-via-twitter way, to The Ideas Brothers and their “A novel written by a planner” post, which made me laugh so much I want to say “That was funny Ideas Brothers. Here, have a LOL”.
‘The Wedding Murder Code’ is so titled because according to research, books with ‘Wedding’, ‘Murder’ or ‘Code’ in the title are more likely to be bestsellers.
Anyway, it nicely sums up a certain view of the function planning plays, and probably explains why it’s copywriters who write novels, and planners who write the quasi-science I-wish-I-was-Malcolm-Gladwell books with neon covers.
And, ending in a nice circular way, one of the comments to the post reads
Anonymous | May 21st 2009 at 9.57pm
why is it that all planners are fucking morons?
Anonymous, I really don’t know, but it’s certainly funnier to create a whole fake book about it than just call us names, however moronic we may be. Still, your comment made me laugh as well. So well done. Here, you can have a LOL too.
See, when I was 12, our school discos consisted of standing awkwardly against the far wall, listening to some scratched 12″ of Bananarama and drinking a cup of warm, flat cider that Craig had stolen from his parents.
Not so these guys, who get to watch the genius of The Scribbles and their 12-year-old Ukelele-playing lead singer
Just seems a shame he’s too young to enjoy the groupies …
I’m sorry. It’s not you, it’s me. I used to love you. I used to love the way you could take me through central London in about 4 stops. Naming no names (Picadilly!), there are other lines that need 11 stops to get as far. I used to love the fact you could get me to work in 20 minutes. Your simplicity was your beauty. Not for you was the desire for different branches; not like the sheer awfulness of the does-this-branch-go-to-Kings-Cross-oh-no-wait-it-goes-to-high-barnet-but-hang-on-does-that-mean-it-goes-to-Kings-Cross-fuck-I-hate-you Northern Line. Even when you were suspended the other day for signal failure, I laughed with my mates about how I’d rather walk along your tracks than use the Northern line. You remember that whole YEAR when you shut at 10pm? I left the pub early every night so I could use you. I was faithful to you through it all.
And yet, what do I get in return? I have to start thinking about me, Victoria line. I need to be selfish for a bit. I’m just at a point in my life where IF YOU SHUT FOR THE WHOLE OF THE FUCKING BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND I’m going to have to look elsewhere. I mean, surely it’s not unreasonable? I mean, to expect SOME LEVEL OF FUCKING SERVICE FROM YOU AFTER YOU SPENT A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR SHUTTING AT TEN O’FUCKING CLOCK. I MEAN FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHAT WERE YOU DOING FOR THAT YEAR? DID YOU ACTUALLY FIX ANYTHING? WERE YOU JUST FUCKING AROUND WITH THE DISTRICT LINE THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME OR WHAT?
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to rant at you. I’m sure some of this is my fault too. I guess I expect too much. But I’ve come to realise that it’s ok to have high expectations. I’ve been too hard on myself over the years. I need to move on, so I can grow, find my own way around London. There’s so much I haven’t done; pink lines, brown lines, red lines to try. Maybe even use the buses.
I hope we can still be friends. I hope in the future if I meet you, we can chat and laugh about old times; racing me to Victoria to get my last train; holding me tight in your chairs when my dizzy, drunken head wanted to collapse to the floor. I can hope, can’t I? But I’ll need time to get over you. I hope you understand that. I hope you can give me the space I need. For now, Victoria Line, I’m sorry, but it’s over.
Everybody is talking about Twitter. Stephen Fry talks about it. In fact, journalists ask him about Twitter before they ask him about his latest film. The Guardian put Twitter on it’s front page. Twitter is Here.
In fact, over the last few days, people have started saying to me, “oh, Facebook is over. No-one’s on Facebook anymore, everyone’s on Twitter. If you want your clients to have a social networking presence it should be on Twitter.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love Twitter. I find it a more useful tool than Facebook, for both keeping in touch with friends, and finding interesting articles and research. I love the character limit, and I love the search. It’s a useful tool both personally and professionally. But this doesn’t mean that we should assume that Facebook is dead in the water, with Twitter busy marching over it’s grave. Look at the following graph from Alexa on web traffic to the two sites.
The really small line at the bottom that you can barely see? That’s web traffic going to Twitter. The top line that is still steadily rising? That would be traffic going to Facebook.
There is a very clear difference between the buzz a new technology or application can create, and the real truth about its popularity. [Read more →]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, talks of large, unpredictable events, and how these events are ones that have the most consequence on the world around us. Events of consequence are almost impossible to identify in advance, seemingly obvious only in retrospect. If events that have the most impact are almost impossible to identify in advance, they become impossible to plan for. Check Wikipedia for a better introduction to the subject.
It’s interesting in terms of communication, because so often the success or otherwise of a campaign is due to means beyond our control, particularly in pure digital, where unexpected coverage from other media can boost success. Our most-visited site a few years ago was one for Crime Stoppers, which benefitted rather heavily from a front page story in The Sun. It was a great site, but the event that made its success was its unexpected, unpredictable appearance on the front cover of a paper with a circulation of 3m+. That site was one of the ones reviewed and voted for when Reading Room was voted Digital Marketing Agency of the Year for 2007 (Impact Awards). It’s not that I think we don’t deserve it, but it’s interesting how success in this case (and I’m sure many others) was, to an extent, outside of our control.
The book goes on to talk about how to profit best from these Black Swans, and, if you’ll excuse the gross over-generalisation, for the most part this is down to preparation. Be ready for when you are witness to a Black Swan, and you can better take advantage of it. And I think social media provides us with a toolkit to do just this.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s think of something remarkably unlikely to happen. Say, a plane landing on the Hudson river, New York. Fairly outlandish idea. At least it was until the 15th January this year, when a US Airways Airbus A380 did exactly that (apparently due to another large aquatic bird, the Canadian Goose).
Janice Krums, on holiday from Florida, happened to be on a ferry in the area that went out to rescue the survivors of the crash. He was there well ahead of the mainstream media, and he happened to have an iPhone and a Twitter account, with TwitPic, which allowed him to share photos via Twitter. This was his photo
It was almost certainly the first picture of the scene. I think it’s a fantastic photo. 30 minutes after posting this picture, Mr Krums was being interviewed by MSNBC. The photo of TwitPic has almost 360,000 views. He’s now followed by 3,940 people on Twitter (I have read that pre-photo, he was followed by 200). People are, at least for now, interested in what he has to say. The Black Swan event has led to his popularity increasing, and his influence growing.
But of course, this is only possible because he had the right toolkit to get his photograph and thoughts to the rest of the world. There was more than one person on that ferry. Janice Krums was just the only one with access to the right tools.
So if we want to try and take advantage of our proximity to Black Swans, what do we need? When Alex Iskold wrote about the Attention Economy, a key part of this was the relevancy of the information you were broadcasting. People are interested in you and your thoughts/pictures/ideas whilst they are relevant, and when they no longer are, don’t expect them to stick around.
In this example, relevancy is about speed. You as an individual with your camera phone are relevant only until the mainstream media gets to the event, so to stay relevant, you need to be able to act quickly. And of course, this is what digital lets us do - write, photograph, publish and broadcast quickly.
My initial ideas are below, but I welcome thoughts for things I’ve no doubt forgotten.
1) A device to capture the event. A camera phone is clearly best for this, as it’s something you’ll likely always have on your person. Most phones now have a camera of reasonable quality, and many also provide video capacity too. Small, easy-to-use video cameras (such as The Flip) would be suitable too, although that don’t also provide internet access, which brings us to …
2) A device to get the event online. No point having a great photo that no-one else will see until you get home. The great joy of modern mobile phones is of course they’re always connected to the internet. For iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphones, internet connectivity is part of the package. A small netbook with 3G card would suffice, but really the mobile phone gives you both the speed and ease of having a single device that can both capture and communicate the event.
3) Somewhere to broadcast to. There are so many sites out there that are possibilities here, from YouTube to Flickr to Facebook, but I actually think that Twitter is perfect. Twitter is built around short, regular communications, and it is the fact that they are regular that makes it perfect. If people regularly update Twitter, then people are more likely to regularly check Twitter. Twitter also has the largest sets of alarms and notifications to update you when someone you’re following sends a new tweet. In short, it’s great because people check it a lot. They’re more likely to find your event whilst it’s still relevant.
Of course, offering users a choice of where they can consume your content is only a good thing, and most mobile devices offer uploads to a variety of social media sites, and uploading to Facebook and Flickr is only going to increase the visibility of what you’re talking about.
Linking mobile devices with internet publishing creates an army of citizen journalists to report on these events. But it does more than that - the ability to react quickly around unexpected events is almost certainly one of benefit to the individual. And the digital world has given us a set of tools to help us do just this.
It’s interesting to think whether or not brands can benefit from this - either from being the “individual” with the tools, allowing them to communicate rare events to their consumers at greater speed, or from being the monitors of these events. Does monitoring social media for publication of Black Swan events aid the brand? Can they identify new trends or ideas quicker than competitors in this way?
An interesting piece from Dan Sabbagh at the Times on new technologies to allow you to run targeted advertising on television. Quite apart from the mild digs towards digital advertising, in particular Google paid search, I think there is a core problem with what he is saying, and that is soon people won’t need to watch advertising any more.
The main problem with his arguement is that technologies such as Sky+ will eventually render advertising obsolete. People watch advertising because the adverts are placed between the programmes that they want to watch. They watch because they have to, not because they want to; despite myths perpetuated to allow advertisers to feel culturally relevant, people do not watch ads for fun. They are not the end destination.
So as more people get Sky+, more people will realise that they don’t need to watch the advertising at all. Sky+ isn’t particularly cheap, so I imagine certain demographics will be the first to be untouchable by TV advertising. Those with money to pay for it, and with an early-adoptor attitude to make the initial leap that says “I don’t NEED to watch these ads”, will be the first to go. And then slowly it’ll spread, until eventually, I expect that they’ll be just a small core demographic left that can’t afford the technology or don’t want to understand it. Of course, even this will go eventually, but in the meantime I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of Daz’s Doorstep Challenge.
I’ve just ordered a shed load of stuff from Moo.com (this is what happens when I upgrade my Flickr account and have more space for photos!) and it just reminded me what an unbelievably great site it is.
They’ve actually created an application which is fun to use. Possibly the only thing in the world where the ordering process leaves you feeling better than when you started.
They’ve made ordering and getting the product fun.
They’ve made ordering and getting the product part of the product itself.
