Social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
February 25th, 2010

Hashtags, A new challenge to idiots

Apparently the Olympics suffer from ‘Ambush Marketing’, meaning that if they don’t stop other people doing adverts that are a bit like they have something to do with the event then the official sponsorships aren’t worth as much dosh. It’s all about scarcity, just like how TV rights are only worth so much if you can stop other people showing the games (something that the sports world is also struggling with), or how news coverage (or at least the adverts that sit alongside it) only makes money of there are a limited number of people doing it.

The Olympic movement (and sport in general) is not know for it’s forward thinking policy on this sort of thing, we’ve seen people with cameras not being allowed in,  Dutch football fans’ trousers being confiscated, and fixture list copyrights being policed with the ferocity of, well, only the music industry are equally as dickheaded. Not only that, but they’ve been accused of bizarre censorship around the current games:

Anti-Olympic mural censored in Vancouver Boing Boing

(Boing Boing)

So when the Wall Street Journal decided to stir up a bit of Twitter trouble, it was easy to find brands supposedly breaking the Olympic marketing rules (in which “nonsponsors are barred from referring to the Games and their athletes in name, likeness or imagery that evokes the Games in any media without a waiver from the committee” — this would now one would assume cover the “official hashtag”):

Twitter / Verizon Newsroom: GGuess what? Team USA is rockin' out the #Olympic medal count in 1st place with (drumroll, please) 18!

Verizon and Red Bull were the two accused here, by joining in with the conversations around events rather than sticking to broadcasting marketing tweets (“barketing”? if it’s not been called that before, I’m coining it) they’d broken rules drawn up in another information age.

You can’t control the use of words when you can no longer control the scarcity of information. Something even the World’s oldest organisations are going to have to learn.

February 15th, 2010

Football and cats

I always think that you can explain almost anything in terms of football or cats, and those of you who have seen me talk with probably of heard about one or the other — what I’m really doing is using smaller examples to explain big concepts. Football has given me another great example over the last few weeks, this time of really innovative, interesting and fun (hyper)local media.

It’s the Billesley United FC twitter feed. Billesly are in the third division of the Birmingham AFA League (I think, it really doesn’t matter), and have had an un-named fan covering their matches this season:

Billesley United (billesleyunited) on Twitter

It’s fun, partisan, a bit rude, cliquey and at times incomprehensible (cold fingers and the mobile web aren’t the best combinations for reports) but it’s great.

With only nine followers (including me who doesn’t know any of the team, or anyone connected with the club) it’s not reaching a big audience — but I suspect that they aren’t bothered. It’s everything that’s great about social media: they’ve just gone and done it, and not been drawn into any conventions that mainstream media have used before.

A real point that’s missed by some people in the hyperlocal land-rush is that since no-one’s paying you can do pretty much whatever you want. Sometimes that will find a wide audience, sometimes it won’t — there may not be an audience there — but if you do what you enjoy then that’s enough of a point.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in microblogging, social media, twitter | View Comments | Tags: ,
February 1st, 2010

Hashtags and the desire to own and organise

One of my favourite books on social technology is ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous‘  by David Weinberger — a book about the power of disorder, that’s disorder in information organisation rather than the more visceral milk bottles, petrol and rags sense. It’s a book that will leave your head bursting with the potential of information, its sharing and searching. The essential point is that computing power and overarching networks allow us to dispose of restrictive methods of information organisation and sort only at the point in which we need. The concept of tagging (assigning keywords to objects) is a big part of this — it allows patterns to emerge through folksomony.

Tagging objects that aren’t easily searched, such as photos, especially benefit from the social indexing that tagging can provide — to me it’s all about how common descriptions (or picking out the ‘important bits’) emerge.

On Twitter tagging has a slightly different, or an additional, reason for being. The hashtag (a word, or collection of characters identified as metadata by use of a # symbol in front of it — based on an IRC convention) is used more to facilitate collection of tweets about a single issue.

When they were first used, Twitter was a much smaller (and more difficult to search) place — users had to follow an account especially to get updates of hashtags they were interested in — it was part of registering those words as important enough to be worth searching; as not every word could be. Twitter is now much easier to search (although the persistence of the database is not great) so tags aren’t needed in quite the same way.

A random list of things that I find interesting about the use of hashtags on ‘modern’ Twitter:

  • They’re part of a folksonomy, requiring no registration or official status — yet organisations feel the need to have “official hashtags” and some people feel the need to ask “what’s the hashtag?” when they could look and try things out themselves. Both of these seem to come from a fear of disorder.
  • Twitter search (and other search tools) don’t do anything special with the # — so if the word is unique (eg firefox – at least in the computer sense) then the hash symbol does nothing except indicate that the user thinks the word is important.
  • The pressure of creating that “official hashtag” is between readability (eg #hellodigital), conciseness (eg #hd) and uniqueness (eg #hd09).  It’s very hard to get that right.

The idea of an “official” meaning for a tag within a folksonomy is an odd one, for tags to be usable in ‘collection’ they need to be unique — but as they lose meaning and become tags for machines (that is for aggregation) rather than for people (readable, searchable without prior knowledge) overlap is inevitable.

A year or so ago, I decided to try to define a format for people to explain what a hashtag was representing — I wanted something that could be done in a tweet and searched for with whatever search method that people were using. We ended up with an account @tagref that you could tweet with a definition (meaning that a search for a hashtag and “@tagref”)  would bring up the definition. This didn’t really take off — Twitter’s lack of holding tweets in the search for more that a few days was a bit of a problem (a long-running tag would need to be re-defined), as was the ‘death’ of search (for most people it’s acceptable to ask questions of the network rather than use tools.

But some people have used @tagref or a number of similar services — and that led me yesterday to the battle being had over the #esm hashtag. I saw this definition:
Twitter / Mary Bradley: @tagref #esm is definition ...

“#esm is definition Official Experts of Social Media hashtag”

This piqued my interest, mainly because an “expert of social media” is really a bit of an insult round these parts (rightly or wrongly) — so I had a look to see who was using it. Therein I came across this bit of protectionism:


Twitter / David Gerzof: Thank you for pushing #ESM ...

a sort of “I was here first” message.

Deliberately hijacking a hashtag is spam, of course, but to accidentally use the same (short, non-obvious, non-descriptive) tag — hardly a crime. Both sides were getting a little heated, so some people decided to lighten the mood — and maybe prove a point about how conversation can’t be kept within boundaries on an open system.

What are hashtags for, why do you use them — and do you expect to ‘own’ them?

by Jon Bounds | Posted in social media, twitter | View Comments | Tags: , ,
January 6th, 2010

Twitpanto – worth your vote

I’m not usually one to hold much stock in awards, but I like the mixture of democracy and professional opinion that The Shorty Awards has (public vote sorts out a shortlist for such luminaries as David Pogue and MC Hammer to preside over). They are pitched as the Twitter Oscars — so as what I guess is the best dramatic use of Twitter, I think Twitpanto deserves a vote. It’s (currently) doing quite well in the ‘art’ category.

Vote here, or just click on this bit and tweet for Twitpanto (please?).

Twitpanto Narrator (twitpanto on Twitter) was nominated for a Shorty Award
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
January 4th, 2010

Twitpanto 2009 — The Sequel

After proving that online pantomime could work last year, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to repeat the trick — but eventually the lure of doing it again with the experience of how it went before proved too much. It does take a long time to organise, and I wanted to do something more complex with the viewing platform which required more tech skills than I had, so I was very grateful to the Birmingham Hippodrome for their support in making it happen.

The structure of the pantomime was very similar to Cinderella last year — there was a cast, who had ‘motivations’ (character bios) and a script to follow (or improvise around), and a private “director” account for prompts and the like during the performance. Most of the differences were to do with how the medium (Twitter) has evolved over 2009:

The main difference is it’s reach — here’s an Alexa (usual caveats apply, Alexa is a skewed sample to both the US and to ‘techies’) graph of PageViews for the Twitter website (remember also that a huge number of Twitter users very rarely have cause to visit the site):


twitter.com - Site Info from Alexa

With more users comes both the problems of noise and an altered demographic — it wasn’t possible to rely on as much shared knowledge of either how Twitter works or shared culture if we wanted to reach any more than the same people.

Many people found following Cinderella (last years #twitpanto) hard and were happy to use Matthew Somerville’s Roomatic hack which highlighted cast members within the stream — but I felt that this would still be too hard to read this year. So, while it was still possible to follow the hashtag any way people liked, I planned a version that separated those ‘on stage’ more completely using two different windows. Here’s my mock up:

TwitpantoHippodrome.pages

The changing nature of Twitter also presented issues for casting, I found difficulty balancing keeping the cast open to as many people as possible, while making sure that they were people who would ‘get’ how to do it difficult. Due to this, and also the possibility of a collision with the Hippodrome’s offline panto (which due to real-world rehearsal commitments didn’t happen) I wrote a scene that would contain characters from other pantomimes, so people could be in it without having much impact on the story.

With increased interest in being in the cast (people were clamouring from May) , I wanted a panto with a good number of characters, but it was also imperative that the plot was very well known. Twitter isn’t a great medium for establishing scene or location, nor one where curtains can be drawn between scenes — there’s also the conceptual problem that there can be no secrets from one character to the other (we ask for suspension of disbelief, unless it’s a good plot point). For that, and the obvious men in tights gags, I chose Robin Hood.

The script this year was written to be less in-jokey than last years (where I not only knew the audience better, but wasn’t attempting to get a wide audience), which was more of a struggle but — with a good chuck of help from Danny Smith — it turned out I think to be a good deal funnier. In fact it’s readable and enjoyable out of context, if I do say so myself.

What I was more sure of this year is that Twitpanto is a collaborative and open piece of art — played out online — and as such the live, free and interactive nature of it is the main thrust. There were over the Christmas period attempts to do “real time” twittering of both Home Alone and It’s A Wonderful Life  — interesting, but too tightly scripted to be anything than transposing to a new medium.

The ’set’ worked, after a few Twitter hiccups, brilliantly — and even more impressively Matthew modified it after the event to  allow a replay — it’s the iPlayer for Twitter and very clever. You can watch Twitpanto ‘as live’ here.

It proved a little difficult for the cast to use, I’d advised them to use the Twitter website and keep refreshing, as it wasn’t quite fast enough for them to wait for their cues on anything using the Twitter API. There were also some early web issues for a few of the cast, which contributed to the rocky start.

I also had to stop myself from being overly directorial, I felt at times that some of the improvisation was making it difficult for people to find their cues — disappointingly for me also muddying some of the jokes. But all in all the cast were brilliant in staying in character and interacting with the whole messy experience. It was especially difficult for some with only one or two lines to stay quiet for the duration, in retrospect fewer, bigger, parts work better.

Nudging, which is really all you want to attempt on the social web, is a difficult theatrical directing style to achieve, here’s what Joanna Geary (whose involvement got us a bit of press from The Times) tweeted:

Twitter / Joanna Geary: @alexhughes has just perfe ...

It was  better attended than 2008 — the #twitpanto hashtag  was one of Twitter’s top ten trending phrases during the “performance” — very unusual for a UK based topic to trend these days. There were over 1,500 tweets containing it between 3:30pm and 4:30pm (1,500 is the limit that Twitter’s search facility can recall on any one search).

Whether the model can work outside the structured chaos of the pantomime I’m not sure, but happy to try (maybe  a Shakespeare comedy…), but it’s certainly the most innovative drama experience on the web.

Thanks again to all the cast (find ‘em here) all at the Hippodrome (follow them here), Libby (who contributed last minute lute) and all that participated.

December 14th, 2009

Twitpanto 2009

Last year I wrote and “directed” (what I believe to have been) the first proper piece of drama on Twitter — Twitpanto. I still think it’s the only time that attempts to integrate theatre with the social web have gone further than people copying and pasting their lines — or awful “chose what happens next” video series. It worked really well, and this year — on Friday 18th at 3:30pm — it’s happening again.

Thanks to support from the Birmingham Hippodrome we’ve got an improved version of Matthew Somerville’s “set” for people to watch on.  This time it goes a step further that colouring to identify cast from audience — with a stage and stalls. There’s even iCal reminders built in, if you head over too early (go on, head over there now).

The involvement of the Hipp has allowed me to spend more time on the development work than last year, but has made thinking around it a little more challenging — did we need to build in moderation to the stream? Did we need celebrity guests? How much more explanation do “new” Twitterers need?

So far we’ve gone with moderation of a sort, the ability to remove tweets from the audience section (although there wasn’t a single tweet that I’d have removed last year) and not worried about star power — although Joe Pasquale and fellow real-life panto star Ray Quinn have helped with the promotion.

Birmingham Hippodrome :: News

A lot of last year’s cast are returning, including Tom Watson who’s going to play the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. How will it go? Tune in to the #twitpanto hashtag on Friday.

November 17th, 2009

The new Whuffocracy

The idea of rule by those with the most social capital is explored by Cory Doctrow in his novela ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom‘. It doesn’t end well, and also considers a future in which the amount of social capital — or ‘whuffie’ — each person has is easily polled as everyone is wired into the ‘net.

It’s not a meritocracy, we understand that those with the most social capital aren’t always the best to lead (nor do they wish to — as Stephen Fry often makes clear). It’s not democracy (although it has certain democratising features), as there isn’t a system — nor an equal voting footing (those with more social capital can push others into positions of power).

In societies (those online are the only in which we have seen movements toward this) where there is “rule” by those with the most social capital it can be seen from the outside almost a ‘mob rule’ (with those with social capital directing the mob).  The Jan Moir protests are seen as ‘democracy’ or ‘mob rule’ — and as Paul Bradshaw says (in his first comment) “nothing inbetween”.

Influence by social capital can be seen as ‘mafia’s, cliques, etc — which baffles those ‘inside’ them as they aren’t necessarily knowingly exerting influence.

There’s real need for the study of this ’system’ of rule — and it needs a term so we can distinguish it from others, so we can agree what’s happening and look at the effects. I’m going for whuffocracy — unless someone already has come up with a better one.

November 5th, 2009

Why might you need social media help?

I’ve always struggled to explain what I do for a living, I help people with social media — in varying ways. Why would they need help? Without going into every example for individual cases — which can take a huge amount of time to be anything more than the most general — I think an analogy might help. So here one is (please contribute in the comments if you can improve, extend or tear down):

Social media is for most people something you work with, rather than in. Think of it like a pencil — almost everyone can use it in their job, but few work “in pencils”, or even exclusively with them.

It’s an easy thing to use, to make a mark with, and there are huge differences in scale of use; from a shopping list to one of Da Vinci’s etchings. All are completely valid and require different amounts of skill and knowledge in how the pencil works.

When you use a pencil to communicate you’re not really thinking about the pencil, but the message you are communicating. If you’re using it to mark a point to saw on a piece of wood, then it’s internal communication — if it’s a note for the milkman you have to think about how he will react to what you write. That is if you want your gold top in the morning.

If that’s all you need then, great, get to the stationers and get a box of HB — you’re set. If you’re just pencilling for pleasure and have time to practise, have fun (and show us when you’ve finished what you’ve done).

Now stop and think that everyone can get a pencil if they like. And make a mark pretty much anywhere.

How do your marks interact with other marks? And what does that mean to your communication? You need to think about the people you’re communicating with rather than the pencils, or even the marks they make. You may need help thinking about that or deciding what marks to make with your pencils, or where. You might just want tuition to raise you to your own level of pencilling.

That’s where the people that have been thinking about the pencils, the marks and the communication as a whole come in — they do work “in pencils”, in a kind of way.

They may even know the people who put the lead into the pencils if you need to build your own.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in social media | View Comments | Tags: ,
November 4th, 2009

Make things

I’ve recently worked on the social media coverage, on the day but also a few “wrap up” pieces, of the Hello Digital Festival in Birmingham. There were interesting talks, I found those outside my areas of expertise and interest (the Innovation in Gaming panel especially). Sion Simon’s address, which I didn’t have time to concentrate on live, but have just listened to again) mentioned that it was my “destiny” (using me as a name to represent talent in the local social media scene, I think) to have a statue much like the ‘carpet salesmen‘ (Brum’s industrial fathers) have in the city centre.

The Carpet Salesmen by M R Fletcher

The Carpet Salesmen by M R Fletcher

I’m not sure what it means, The Lunar Society is an oft used reference whenever it comes to thinking coming out of Birmingham — but those thinkers thought of science and industry and “made things”. I’m wondering if I need to “make things” too, or is “helping others make things” (a way to think about consultancy work) enough?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

– Sion Simon MP at Hello Digital

October 7th, 2009

Why I Share Stuff

You may or may not know that I’m a director of We Share Stuff — a social enterprise that uses social media to address the idea of Digital Inclusion. We firmly believe that technology (and social media in particular)  is not something separate from everyday life, we look to give opportunity, motivation by explaining the possibilities, and ability by real understanding.

I’m rather proud that we’ve developed — what we believe to be — the first accredited course in understanding and using social media. It’s completely platform agnostic — and designed to work with the appropriate tools for the interests and motivation of whoever’s learning, teaching the concepts of the social web rather than the tools.

Why not the tools? Well, here’s a lovingly extended metaphor I wrote for a talk Stu Parker gave at the WMRO Conference today:

Learning to use technology is like learning to drive — the rules, the highway code, being safe and not hurting yourself or others, are more the focus than what each control does. Not that learning to drive isn’t learning to use the controls, it is, but it’s only a start. Your teacher, your mum, your dad or a paid-for-instructor will focus on what’s happening around you rather than learning by rote what pedal to press when. Once you’ve mastered the gear change, it’s all about observation and reaction.

Think about what happens when you get into a different car to drive it, you might spend a little bit of time getting comfortable in the seat, working out on which stalk the lights are, reading the manual to make sure the radio doesn’t keep flicking to Saga FM — but in a few seconds, because the controls are basically the same (and the rules of the road are exactly the same – unless you’re one of those people that think porsches are allowed to park on double yellows) you’re off.

And this is what real technological inclusion is. It’s the confidence to move from one technology to another, to be confident that you know enough to make sure you’re safe — that there isn’t going to be a crash. We don’t spend time and effort teaching people to drive a Renault Clio, only for them to be foxed by a Fiat Punto. And we shouldn’t teach people Word or Excel only for another word processor or spreadsheet to stump them — or in the case of Microsoft Office a simple upgrade.

And so digital inclusion is platform agnostic, we need to define it as a confidence. You may well need help to get you to the basic level — to pass your test to continue the driving analogy — but it’s then that you can really start using the ‘net or any other technology you want to. And it’s then that you can do it without thinking about the buttons, wheels, pedals, but concentrating on your destination, reacting to others. It’s then that you can rush down the motorway to work, or take a casual meandering drive around pleasant country lanes, Linked In or Cute Overload — you can go where you like.

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