Why are we so ready to criticise? (or "No Social Media Guru is an Island")
March 19th, 2010
As has often been observed, there’s something irresistable about schadenfreude. That’s one reason for the obsessive finger-pointing by the digerati every time a new brand experiences a social media crisis .
Another may be our unholy desire for traffic. After all, I’m writing this blog post in response to today’s Nestlé-Greenpeace-Facebook storm (if you’re coming to this story late, Sam Ismail’s post offers background). More to the point, at least four bloggers cleverly promoted their coverage of the events in the Facebook comment stream.
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Posted in opinion | 41 Comments »
A perl script to make granting Mechanical Turk bonuses a little easier
March 9th, 2010
One of the problems I quickly encountered when noodling around with Mechanical Turk is the limited and clunky web interface. Amazon has a handy comparison table which shows you what I mean by “limited”. Below is a look at the web interface for managing submitted HITs which will show you what I mean by “clunky” (which you can click for bigger.) None of it is JavaScript enabled — so every button-click requires a page reload. And there’s no logging for who’s been paid, and who hasn’t. Aargh!
After my first foray into using bonuses to engineer better results, I found that I needed to pay over a hundred bonuses. It rapidly became clear that paying these using the web interface would be nearly impossible, forcing me to look at the command line interface tools a little faster than I’d been planning.
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Tags: mechanical turk, perl
Posted in Harnessing the Crowd | No Comments »
Experiment 1: a method to get the dates of first posts using Amazon Mechanical Turk
March 4th, 2010
When London PR blogger Melanie Seasons started her blog two and a half years ago, the subject of her first post was her first post from her MySpace blog. In fact, she took most of her content from there as well. She calls her first post “a cop-out first post of another first post”, but I think that she might have spun it as a “metapost”.
In some ways, the post you’re reading now could be another metapost — a post about first posts. But it’s really about new ways of working.
I know about Melanie’s first post because I’ve been carrying out some quantitative research using first posts. I took a user-generated list of UK PR blogs that I helped curate last October, and attempted to identify the date of the first ever post for each blog.
This is a task that’s almost impossible to automate. Getting the newest post is a cinch for a computer – the oldest post not so much. And yet it’s relatively simple for a human to perform the task – generally it’s just boring and repetitive (although I challenge you to find the first post on Jed Hallam’s blog, Rock Star PR). I’m not one of those people who enjoys repetitive tasks, so I decided to take this opportunity to set up the Magic Bean Lab’s first experiment; to test the efficiency of various alternative labour sources.
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Tags: freelancer.com, mechanical turk
Posted in Harnessing the Crowd | 10 Comments »
#wediaczar (or “I’m getting married in the afternoon”)
July 29th, 2009
Tomorrow I’m getting married, so I probably won’t be posting for a while. Not, of course, that I’ve been posting a lot recently.
Without wanting to get sentimental (it’s not that kind of a blog, and I’m not that kind of a man) I can say that not only did I never believe that I’d find someone like Krista, but that now I have found her, I still can’t really believe it.
I’m saving the rest of what I have to say for my speech tomorrow evening. There are all sorts of little surprises planned for the day, but one of the biggest surprises right now is “what Mat will be saying in his speech” because I’ve yet to write it. Tim has told me “be nice to everyone and try not to sound like Hugh Grant.”
Anyway, the hashtag for my wedding will be #wediaczar. Given that the audience is startlingly low on digital media bods, it’s not like I think it’s going to trend or anything, but it seemed like too good a hashtag to waste.
Tags: #wediaczar
Posted in life | 13 Comments »
A first stab at a perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices
July 14th, 2009
Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.
I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar
While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
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Tags: kludge, network analysis, networks, perl, twitter
Posted in hack, twitter | 6 Comments »
The #interestingOPMLexperiment (stage 1)
July 1st, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.
Some red herrings
Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.
- Some people are cagey about sharing their list of feeds: whether they consider it intellectual property, or whether they think that it may be too revealing, I don’t know.
- Lots of people said things like “oh — my RSS reader? Haven’t looked at that in a while. I get all my news off Twitter these days.”
Tags: #interestingOPMLexperiment, bloggers, citation analysis, influence, influence mapping, network analysis, opml, research, social media, visualization
Posted in influence, networks, research | 4 Comments »
Thinking differently about word-of-mouth
June 30th, 2009
The current approach to WOM is to try to stimulate positive WOM while addressing or countering negative WOM. A sort of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between” strategy.
But what if we could do it a different way?
This idea stems from a conversation I had back in February with Martin Kelly and Andy Cocker of Infectious Media. Since that time I’ve chatted it through a couple of times with various interesting people. It’s not properly thought through yet, but following a chat a couple of weeks ago with Ketchum London’s new Head of Digital, the excellent Fernando Rizo, I’ve decided to put the idea out into the public domain to gauge what (if any) interest there is and whether I should continue to work on it.
“Word of Mouth” is hard to do well
I’ve read lots of word of mouth marketing case studies (there’s a great list over at WOMMA) and it strikes me that WOM is hard to do well for a few reasons. I don’t want to go into these in too much detail, but here are a couple of the structural issues:
- Unless I’m a journalist, an A-list blogger or media personality or have some kind of platform, I probably have a very low reach.
Despite everything pointing towards personal contact being the best impetus for positive word of mouth, most word of mouth campaigns compensate for my low reach by trying to get me to self-service my relationship with the brand and the campaign.
- “Viral” distribution just doesn’t work the way most people seem to think it does; and this is particularly true when it comes to WOM.
While I’m quite likely to tell stories about my personal experience of a brand and fairly likely to tell stories that involve a mutual friend, I’m much less likely to tell stories about other friends’ experience, and not likely at all to tell stories about friends-of-friends.
Furthermore because of the ‘clumpiness’ of most people’s social graphs, geometric progression (the “I tell two people and they each tell two people and so on” effect) just doesn’t happen.
Homophily
One of the many reasons that WOM works is a thing called homophily — which roughly translates to “birds of a feather flock together”, or “you can tell a man by the company he keeps.”
I’ve written about examples of this before: for example, my analyses of twittering US Congresspersons and Westminster MPs which showed that one can predict with some reasonable degree of accuracy the political colouration of any given twitter account based on their mutual friends and follows (if you want to know more about the methodology, it’s worth reading Robert Hanneman’s chapter on cliques and subgroups.)
But there’s another side to the homophily coin; the social pressure to conform to the group’s norms.
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Tags: influence, influence mapping, marketing, network analysis, public relations
Posted in influence, networks | 8 Comments »
Should we ask employees to tweet client stories?
May 15th, 2009
Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?
Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?
Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.
But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?
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Tags: digg, facebook, networks, social media, social media policy, twitter
Posted in opinion, twitter | 10 Comments »
Oh, Vienna.
April 22nd, 2009
On Monday evening I was in Vienna. Thanks to our partner agency IKP Porter Novelli I had the opportunity to talk to some of the best and brightest businesses in Austria.
The presentation was given in a fabulous private salon (Austrians seem to be keen on the “private” thing — perhaps because it helps them get around the EU smoking ban) which promised “Guten Wein mit Wirtschaf, Politik & Kultur.” I don’t know where my presentation fit in.
As we were going up the stairs I saw signs that my presentation had been advertised under the title “Facebook, Twitter & Co”, so I carefully changed the title of the presentation accordingly. The bits behind the title page never really changed.
If you’ve read the Integration Triagle presentation post, then the last third of what follows will be familiar and I suggest that you stop reading when you see Arnold Schwarzenegger for the second time.
I really need to credit Paul Mead, MD of VCCP Search for the meat of the first third of the presentation: it’s pretty much a facsimile lift from an inspirational presentation I saw him give a few months ago that has changed the way I’m thinking about Social Media planning. Thanks, Paul!
After the presentation, the IKP Porter Novelli team took me out for drinks. The next day for breakfast, they made me ham and eggs. Then Franz Ramerstorfer took me to a “typical Viennese café” for coffee and Sacher Torte. This is Franz.
Franz is the Porter Novelli network’s “Digital Ambassador” in Austria, and leader of the Digital Taskforce out there, so this sets a new standard for Ambassador behaviour. I do hope the other ambassadors take notice. Thank you Franz and everyone at IKP for a great opportunity, and a great time!
Tags: austria, franz ramerstorfer, presentation, social media
Posted in porter novelli | 2 Comments »
Today’s “Integration Triangle” presentation
April 15th, 2009
These are the slides from a presentation I did this morning on the topic of the Integration Triangle. I’ve talked about this here before in the article “5 Straightforward Ways To Integrate Your Communication Activities” — this includes some quick case studies.
I created these slides to support the presentation I was giving: they aren’t the presentation itself. This means that while you’ll be able to have a good guess at what I was saying most of the time, there will be moments when my meaning is opaque.
There are 70 slides in the presentation, including the front and back cover. Nevertheless, I gave the presentation in under 25 minutes. To save you doing the maths, that averages out at around 3 slides every minute (actually, there was a 4 minute delay in the middle of the presentation — so it’s more like 3-and-a-half slides per minute.)
In fact, my slides fall into two categories — those on which I spend fewer than 5 seconds, and those on which I spend more than a minute. This is more an artistic decision than anything else — I think that lots of slides going past very quickly give an appearance of pace and energy (which I dearly need first thing in the morning), but can rapidly become exhausting to watch and hard to follow without the occasional pause for breath.
Even with 70 slides, there’s so much more that I can say about the “Integration Triangle” as a planning tool — but I was trying to keep this to a single simple message. I’m hoping that (whatever they thought about my presentation, and no matter whether they liked it or believed what I was saying) the audience will remember what it was that I was saying, and be able to tell a version of the story themselves.
There’s just so much that we can talk about when it comes to the whole Digital PR thing that it all becomes rather overwhelming. I’ve just got off the phone to a colleague in Vienna (where I’m speaking next week) who wants me to talk to his audience about “Facebook and Twitter and Blogs” (oh my!) And I’ve got 45 minutes to do this. Of course I can do it. But what on earth is the “one thing” I want them to remember?
Tags: get on board, life's for sharing, orange, presentation, rockcorps, t-mobile, wwf
Posted in opinion, porter novelli | 2 Comments »
