It’s not to give to the poor (although that would be nice) nor to forsake trousers for green hose, I’m not thinking about Hood’s actions but the history of the legend itself and how it evolved.

I’ve long been obsessed with the origins of the Robin Hood legend, as well as the continuing theories on who was “the real Robin Hood” and the evolution of the story from the original ballads. I particularly love how it’s permeated through the culture, to the extent that there are pubs and roads named for him throughout the country (there’s a Robin Hood Island near me, a good 100 or so miles from Nottingham).

So, what does this have to do with social media

Of course the stories were altered, changed and augmented though conversation, that’s what we learn from any folk tale. Creating characters likeable enough that they attract other people to continue the story is another one, if people do that it’s free advertising. You have to not to be precious, allow your story to evolve.

But did you know it might have been an advert for the medieval version of C&A?

The original “Gest of Robyn Hode” ballad contains far far more references to clothing and cloth types than any comparable literature (almost all literature, except for the minutiae obsessed American Psycho). As well as Robin being named for his hood there are “coats, breeches, shirts and six different colours of cloth” [The QI Book would you believe]. Robin also poses as a draper, selling the King 123 feet of cloth.

This leads to the suspicion that it was a form of viral marketing for clothmakers guilds (members of the Guilds also wore hoods — an attempt to make them heroes by association?).

It seems a good lesson to learn, that if the story you create is interesting enough — and it can be, there are things to tell about almost any process — you can slip the most unusual stuff through. But that’s only half the point, the original Robin Hood ballad would have been told in person, adapting to their surroundings and taking on clues from those listening. Engagement and using the right methods for the right place (groups or Fan Pages on Facebook rather than profiles, listening and responding personably on twitter, trying to be funny or wow on youtube) are part of the solution.

I’m off to get some green tights.

I was invited along with a group of other local bloggers to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham this week. It’s part of the party’s plan to do more in the social media space — including the launch of a blogging platform ‘Blue Blogs‘ on their site. Head of New Media, the very affable, Rishi Saha sorted out passes and security clearance and I met him on Monday for a brief chat about what they were doing.

Apart from wandering around the Conference itself — think The Ideal Home Exhibition with less, but odder, stands and more press — I attended a number of fringe events about the Internet. The most interesting was run by The Freedom Association and was intended to be about “Freedom and The Internet”, it was really a good chance to see and hear the most famous right-wing bloggers talk amongst themselves. The panel was chaired by Iain Dale, and featured Guido Fawkes, Dizzy, Devils Kitchen and MP Nadine Dorries.

While all of the other bloggers on stage blog in what I would consider a conventional way — it’s their opinion, on their own chosen subjects, they handle comments, link to others and form part of a community — Nadine doesn’t.

Part of this comes from what I perceived as her lack of interest, she admitted not to reading other blogs “don’t have the time”  and also doesn’t have comments on her blog — again in part due to lack of time. The other issue is what I would think a lot of other politicians suffer from, a lack of understanding.

Nadine’s blog is useful to her because of the speed and unmediated way it can get her opinion to those that matter — in her case journalists. That is a blog’s great strength on a “narrowcasting” level, although (in this instance at least) the same could be achieved by emailing the text to the people that are interested.

It was intimated that Nadine’s blog got her “in trouble with the Chief Whip” — something that she interpreted as her “honesty” being incompatible with high office. Her blog was even cited (in another panel session) as a reason more MPs don’t blog.

She’s “thinking of giving it up” — it isn’t proving worth the effort she’s spending on it (which considering she emails her “blogs” to someone to put them up for her isn’t too much).

So. Why don’t MPs blog?

Further proof, if proof be needed, that pushing blog posts to twitter (and vice versa) creates nothing but echo. In this instance the only tweet archived from “yesterday” is the tweet announcing the previous day’s tweets (and so on and so forth):

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A nothing perpetuating itself, filling up the internet and making interesting stuff harder to find.

At WordCampUK over the weekend I found myself increasingly thinking about the moral questions that relate to how we behave on the internet. Not the same questions about whether we’re nice to each other, or lie or steal, that’s just a virtual version of the real world — more just how far you’re willing to push your idea/content/site on other people.

I’ve already decided that, to me, crossposting is a moral dilemma, it’s up to you to decide how much you’re willing to “shout” — if you’re willing to send links your blog posts out via twitter, jakiu, Facebook status update etc. then they’d better be really good, or people will start to get annoyed. I like to give the choice about which stuff I produce that they see, so as well as keeping different subject areas separate, I don’t push anything automatically at people. There are RSS feeds avaliable, they’re clearly labled, you can chose to subscribe (or come to the sites) or not — it’s up to you.

During an interesting talk on WordPress and SEO, I found my mind wandering from the subject of how to optimise your WordPress installation so people can find your content by searching for it (a good thing of course) to whether the “deliberate” search engine optimisation being explained is something I’m comfortable with at all.

While I’m all for tagging, indexing correctly, logical naming, and easily navigable structure, (I’ll call that Semantic SEO, making your meaning clear with formats and data) anything else seems to be gaming the system — cheating.

The talk covered subjects such as paying for content to be written and put on the web that used links to you with your selected ‘keywords’ as anchor text — “journalists are cheap” we were told — playing ‘link-builders’ to get links to your site around the web.

If “journalists are cheap” then they’ll write cheap words, useless words, words that will drive the quality of the web down. If links are bought then they aren’t the “peer review” links that Google based their original algorithm on (the concept that people would link to stuff that was good, the best stuff gets the most links).

If you prize traffic that is coerced into arriving at your site, that has to be your decision. I’d much rather an honest web where the best content, the best services rose to the top. This is why I am being driven from conventional search to more social search options. I’ll often only Google now for a company or product name after checking out the advice of people I trust on twitter. Search engines are being conned, and until they stamp out the link-buying, the splogging, they’re going to lose traffic — and utimately if your sites are doing the conning you will too.

I know that the practices are tempting, I know the argument goes that “our competitiors are doing it, we have to to keep up”. I don’t buy it. Do the best you can, create the best content, host the best discussions, link the best links, provide the best service people will recommend you, with links and by social-web-word of mouth.

Don’t put anything on the net that you don’t think increases its value.

Prompted by Mark Steadman’s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.

Mark said:

“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins - like the ones on your own site - that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”

With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.

That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.

The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too.  It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.

As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.

In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.

This post is prompted by the Birmingham twitter “community”’s reaction to what some saw as unethical and “anti-social” behaviour on joining twitter [edit: as the guys from Artsfest say in the comments below, it wasn't an official account. It's now gone.] by the local council’s yearly arts festival, um, artsfest. In short, upon (laudably) starting a twitter account, they (either by bot or someone with a sore mouse finger now) started aggressively following people starting with locals, and it seems radiating out through their contacts lists.

They ended up with around three thousand followees (many very unlikely to be interested in a UK-based arts event) — the sort of thing that gets you a high ranking on twerpscan (this a screengrab of Pete Ashton’s):

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• Following thousands of people (people unrelated to your niche especially) is not only pointless (you’ll get blocked by people that otherwise might have followed you, your message is useless to many of those people) , but will get people’s backs up. Not a great first impression.
• Even if the twitter account is for an organisation (anonymous, or multi-authored) people need to see that it has personality. Bot-like behaviour isn’t useful — if those thousands of people followed you back, could you hold meaningful conversation with them?
• Twitter is made up of mainly tech-savvy people, pushing your PR message (that they could get from your blog or other channels if they wished) at them is SPAM-y behaviour, it’s shouting, duplicating and attention grabbing. Although there are many people that autopublish their blog links to twitter, the sort of people that will follow your tweets will normally be able to follow your blog on its own — what twitter is great for is additional more ‘personal’ information, nuggets that are exciting or interesting, but not worth a blog post.
• Re-tweeting your main message after each @reply (or aside) is wrong — those following you will get that message repeatedly, SPAM. Very few twitter users will find themselves at your page on twitter, and the tweet at the top is not your “most important message” it’s just the most recent.
• You need to interact, if people send you an @message or a direct message you should respond. Can you listen to thousands of people’s tweets? No, of course not, so don’t follow people unless you need to interact with them. (Using a bot to auto-follow people who follow you could be a time-saver tho’).
• Use tools like summize hashtags.org or tweetscan to keep an eye on conversation about your product, organisation or subject area (you can get RSS feeds of all of your search terms). This isn’t eavesdropping, it’s all publicly shared information, and if you see conversation (negative or positive) then you have a conversation opener with those people talking about you. You may learn some really useful things about how you are perceived — and be able to genuinely help people (always popular!).

Ariel Waldman on crossposting with social media:

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

Like me, she sees it a spammy, rude and a little needy. More people are making this moral choice to talk only when they’ve got something to say — which can only be a good thing.

Hat duly tipped to Stowe Boyd, who’s in agreement.

I’m on the panel for this debate on Wednesday, organised by Birmingham Future, with Ian Taylor, commercial director of Marketing Birmingham and David Clarke. I doubt there’ll but much internet talk, although PR really is very much about the social web these days.

Is Birmingham A Second City? The Big Brand Debate Wednesday 25 June 2008

“Birmingham was the original hotbed of entrepreneurialism, innovation and cutting-edge technology, our ‘City of 100 Trades’ was a proud forerunner in the Industrial Revolution. Since then, we have suffered an image crisis – maligned in the media and the butt of many jokes despite huge strides in improving the built environment, infrastructure, amenities and leisure offer for the city’s inhabitants and visitors.

So what can we, the next generation of city leaders, do to change these outdated perceptions of our city? Is the Second City banner, coveted by a number of other English cities, a positive or negative for Birmingham? If not the Second City, then what are we? The First City for Innovation? The Youthful City? Diverse City? International City?”

I’m not sure if there are places available, or if hearing me is worth £15 + VAT and the chance of missing the first bit of a Euro 2008 semi-final (although the other guys should be good), but you should be able to find out at the link above.

I’ve had a lot of comments recently, mosty from this girl (using various names). While Flickr respond quickly to spam reports (much more quickly than any other customer service requests) that’s not really the point. There must be something they can do to stop registration of these spam accounts - maybe not allow people to comment until they’ve uploaded some photos?

I’ve been quietly impressed with Get Satisfaction, which is sort of best described as a “social customer service” site. Twitter and some other big-name players on the internet use it for their official support channels - the idea of the site being that employees of the companies join in with discussion of “problems” that people are having. Some employees just join to help, others are granted “official” status and can speak on behalf of the organisation.

Of course lots of problems that we have with products or services aren’t really problems (or are well know and documented) - in these instances other users are happy to help (very much like unofficial forums for software). ‘Users’ are also welcome to point out possible solutions to anything - and of course they do.

So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.

Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council - one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that - as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” - anyone can set a company page up. So I have.

I don’t have anything to ask at the moment, but I’m hoping that it might get used.

“Sometimes representatives from the company or organization may take part in the conversation too.” says the blurb — wouldn’t that be great?