Shock new Telephone users poll from Prospect magazine

Here is a news release from Prospect magazine

PROSPECT PRESS RELEASE: NEW TELEPHONE-USERS POLL

Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped Telphone is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Telephone users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.

The poll tested Britain’s 5.5m Telephone users and compared them to the rest of the country — revealing that British Telephoners actually have a strongly liberal and civil libertarian bias. This is in contrast to the popular view that David Cameron’s Conservatives and their pamphleting supporters are the most adept online force in politics.

The poll shows that while 57 per cent of Britons think greater police powers to tackle terrorism are more important than protecting civil liberties, less than half of Telephone users agree. Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” compared to only 45 per cent of Telephone users.

Etc Etc…

OK – you may have spotted this is not quite the release Prospect issued.  It was, of course, about Twitter.  And it was recycled by The Guardian and others.

The point is – when are clunky old journos  going to realise:

Twitter is not a web site.

Twitter is not a form of media.

Twitter is not a form of content.

Twitter is just an infrastructure – like the Telephone.  The demographics of its initial adoption carry zero significance – in the same way as the fact that early adopting of the ‘phone took place within a limited segment of the population bore no significance to the role of the Telephone once it became established in every household and on every desk.

When the Telephone first came along people made the same mistake Prospect is now making.  Everyone, including the ‘phone companies, assumed its was a form of content.  Phone companies even tried to determine what type of content was appropriate.  Funnily enough, they actively discouraged people using it for conversation.

Lets learn a little bit from history.

Thoughts for Neville re #msm09 panel

Neville,

Not at the conference, but here are some thoughts for your panel.

1. I haven’t found a single paid-for black box monitoring solution that really helps devise and then run a social media strategy.  They are not real-time enough and they are focused on monitoring digital places rather than digital spaces. http://tinyurl.com/lg7cv4

2. You can only take monitoring so far until you reach the point where you have to stop spectating and start participating – start creating the environment you then need to monitor.

3. You don’t need to monitor everything (like we used to monitor media coverage) – its a case of identifying and keeping you eye on the 3 or 4 areas of social media space (i.e. conversations) that are relevant to your business.   Organisations which have lots of customers often think they need to have lots of conversations – they don’t.  Listen to your customers and you will find there are only 4 conversations they want to have with you. http://tinyurl.com/yfu9f24

Beware the web1.5 beast

There is a dangerous beast preying on unsuspecting organisations who want to get into social media.  This beast is the web1.5 agency or campaign.  This is a campaign that purports to be a social media campaign, because it uses the tools of social media, but in reality is an old-fashioned, conventional one-to-many mass message approach.

How do you spot these beasts?

First – if it comes from a traditional ad agency, it will almost certainly be a 1.5 approach.  Continue reading →

links for 2009-11-14

  • Is Social Search a threat to SEO?
    Look at the graphics in this post. It marks a trend that will accelerate – the shift out of web sites (places) into social media spaces – social media being all about the shift from place to space. This will spell the end (ultimately) for SEO but social search is not really the best name for what will replace it – since the act of search won't be the central activity. The key act within social media will that of asking the question, rather than searching for an answer (small but important difference)
    (tags: search seo socialsearch)

How to make your crisis plan ‘social media compliant’

Enough of the theory (for the time being).  There is a very practical impact of social media that affects every organisation right now.  This is the fact that every crisis management plan and process is now out of date – unless it has been made ‘social media compliant’.

If you now have a crisis, you have no time or space within which to hide.  You are essentially in the business of performing ‘live’ within a rolling 24/7 press conference.  This requires different skills and preparation – just as doing live TV is different from making a documentary.

However, this is not all bad news.  Social media allows you to communicate directly with the people you need to influence, without having to rely on the filter of the media.  This can make it easier to get information out much quicker, to dampen concerns and emotions and to limit the extent to which a crisis can develop or spread.

There are five things an organisation needs to do to make their crisis preparation social media compliant.

  1. Monitor social media in real-time
  2. Establish a management process that delivers a response that is quicker and more specific to the needs of social media, rather than adapted only to the needs of traditional media
  3. Create an information publication platform that is optimised to spread information effectively through social networks
  4. Re-purpose your existing information so that it can spread easily through social networks
  5. Incorporate social media into your crisis training.

Looking at these points in more detail. Continue reading →

Twitter listing – X Factor for social media types

I must confess I am sometimes a bit slow on the uptake and certain new social media thingies just slip by relatively un-noticed.  Thus it was with the announcement of Twitter lists a week or so ago.  I had a quick glance at it, reckoned that there was nothing a Twitter list could do that my User Lists in Seesmic don’t already do, and let it pass.

But today it has hit me.  Forget listing other people – the number of times people list me is (or will rapidly become) my highly visible social media popularity score.  Its basically the X Factor / Pop Idol for social media types.  Continue reading →

Ad agency + social media = car crash in slow motion

Here is an excellent article that highlights one of the classic mistakes of social media.  This is the assumption that social media is just another channel you can use to reach a consumer, rather than a channel that consumers use to reach you.  This results in the misplaced belief that an ad agency, or even traditional digital agency, can therefore “do” social media.  They can’t – because their expertise and business model is rooted in the world of the 0ne-to-many mass message.

I suspect the Toyota example referred to in this article will be a painfull thing to watch play out – for all the reasons the article highlights.

The big question is this:  how many organisations are going to engineer these sorts of car crashes before they wake up to what social media is all about?  Quite a lot I would suspect.

In the meatime – I would suggest the following precautionary principle – never, ever, let an ad agency, or media agency anywhere near a social media initiative.  And also take special care when asking a digital agency to get involved – simply because digital agencies make money selling web sites / platforms / digital places.  The whole point of social media is to get out of digital places and operate in digital spaces (conversations).  Note – this particular car crash I spotted a while back was created by a digital agency, also for an automotive client.