Should Advertising Regulate in Social Media?

1 09 2010

Today the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) announced that it extend its remit to cover “marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter”.  The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) has decided to extend the digital remit of the ASA and has today published a document detailing the new remit and sanctions.

I have some serious and personal concerns about the document.  In justifying the extension of its remit ASA refers to 3,500 complaints in 2008 and 2009 about the content of organisation’s websites.  How does this relate to social networks or social media?  Throughout the document there is constant reference to “other marketing communication” (sixteen times on 14 pages) with only a very loose definition of what constitutes “other marketing communication” suggesting that it is concerned principally with the primary intention “to sell something”.  Marketing communications is so much broader than that.

The plan is to carry out a review of guidelines in 2013, two years after the implementation of the extended remit.  This shows a fundamental misunderstanding and disregard for the speed of change on-line; for example in two years Twitter went from zero to 10 million tweets per day.  Spotify, which is fundamentally changing the music business, is less than two years old.

There is also a contradiction in terms of definition.  The guidelines exclude “press releases and other public relations material” and yet the definition of “other marketing communications” includes items that could be considered to be public relations material, for example the promotion of unsolicited (or solicited) consumer endorsement.

I would endorse all of the objectives of the CAP code with regard to the prohibition of misleading advertising, the protection of children and social responsibility.  The intentions here are good there is no doubt of that.  I just can’t help feeling that in regulating the social media space, bodies that concern themselves with advertising and have advertising in their title feel more than a little out-of-place.


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Categories : Brands, Facebook, Marketing, Media evolution, Social Networks, Social Web, Twitter

The World Cup, Hashtags and Monetizing Twitter

7 07 2010

Now that the World Cup is drawing to a close we can consider one of the most notable advances that the competition heralded and it’s not the Vuvuzela or the highly unpredictable Jubulani.

When it all kicked off in South Africa, twitter users discovered a subtle new feature alongside certain hashtags in their twitter streams.  World cup related tags generated tiny icons after the tag;  there were national flags for any tweet using a three letter tag for any of the participating countries and a tiny football for anyone typing the hashtag #worldcup .

This is far more than just a bit of fun. Twitter has unlocked an unobtrusive way of commercializing the twitter stream.  Each of these icons or annotations as they are described by Twitter has an embedded link.  For the world cup it takes you to a fairly anodyne aggregation of tweets albeit in a nicely designed page but these linked icons could take you anywhere and they could be ascribed to any hashtag or keyword on twitter.

At the moment the annotations just appear on twitter.com but they will start to be included in the API which means they will appear in our favourite twitter clients.  What we are about to see is a deluge of paid for links that might be used to sell music, promote TV shows and sports events, all without polluting the stream.  Back of the net.


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Categories : Twitter, Uncategorized

Twitter Hits 1000 Tweets per Second

1 07 2010

Twitter has been hovering close to milestone of the 1000 tweets a second for several days and in the last couple of days has broken through the barrier several times.  The number of tweets per second stayed above that figure between 2pm and 4pm UTC on Tuesday and passed it again at a similar time yesterday.

Twitter has also broken through another barrier, clocking up over 2 billion tweets in a month for the first time since its inception.  At midnight last night the figure was over 2.3 billion for June.

I verified the score for June using the unique twitter ID number that ever tweet carries.  These numbers are sequential so it makes the calculation straightforward. At midday on the 1st June Lance Armstrong tweeted “Hello June“.  Clearly this was not the first tweet of the day, but it was good enough for an accurate estimate.  The ID figure of 15162027303 for that tweet suggests that the first tweet in June was close to the 15130000000 mark.  Gigatweet had the last tweet in June at around test number at around 17440000000.   Although claims were made that the two billion barrier was passed in May the actual figure for that month was 1.99 billion.

There were suggestions late last year that Twitter had ‘jumped the shark’ but an apparent stalling in the numbers using twitter.com was simply caused by users switching to third-party applications.  Gigatweet also estimates that the 20 billionth tweet will be posted in just a month’s time on the 1st August.


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Categories : Twitter

ManageTwitter is Dead Long Live ManageFlitter

5 05 2010

Last week I posted about the threatened demise of the best application for managing twitter follow lists, the excellent ManageTwitter.  Well after a cease and desist order it has gone…sort of.  A search for Manage Twitter will bring up a remarkably similar site called ManageFlitter, brought to you by the makers of ManageTwitter.  Apparently one of the things that the masters of the microblog didn’t like was the infringement of their trade mark.

A few other things are different too.  There is no longer a tab that allows you to bulk unfollow users whose accounts may be dormant or who don’t follow you back.  This can still be done but you have to select individual check boxes or drag and select multiple icons.   The application isn’t quite as versatile as it used to be but hopefully the changes will have satisfied the head honchos in San Francisco as this is the most useful tool around for managing your account without spending hours checking the activity of individual followers.


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Categories : Twitter

Will Manage Twitter Get a Reprieve?

30 04 2010

For the last few weeks I have been using a great application called ‘ManageTwitter’ to do exactly that for my multiple accounts.  Described by TechCrunch as a ”must-use” it is one of the most practical twitter apps available.

ManageTwitter allows you to manage your Twitter followers in a variety of ways. It informs you os all the Twitter users you follow that aren’t following you back, those that have been inactive for over a month and those that are very talkative or very quiet.  You can then unfollow these groups of users individually or in bulk and that is the issue – twitter does not approve of bulk unfollow and as of last Friday a message appeared on the ManageTwitter home page indicating that it was to close in a week because it was breaking the microblogging site’s terms of service.  Today a different message appeared:

Save ManageTwitter Thank you for all your support! We are currently in negotiations with twitter regarding the future of ManageTwitter.  Updates will be posted to our blog.

This is a genuinely useful site that doesn’t encourage or facilitate spamming.  It just might get a reprieve but doubtless with modifications to its current functionality.


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Categories : Twitter

Social Web Traps Be Careful Out There

22 03 2010

The social web has started to feel like a bloody dangerous place.  In the last few days there have been not one but two major PR disasters befalling household names.  The first was Nestle’s appallingly handled response to the Greenpeace Palm Oil campaign, and today the CashGordon debacle has left both Labour and the Tories with pre-election bruising.

The Nestle debacle was covered in detail by my colleague Jon Clements on PR Media Blog but to summarise; a naive confrontation on the company’s Facebook Fan Page led to a full-scale debate on-line about deforestation in Indonesia and whether the brand’s use of palm oil was endangering the Orang Utan.  It was a text-book case of  ill preparedness and it seemed to outsiders as if the office junior in the marketing department had been entrusted with the global brand image.  Whoever was looking after the Facebook page was unable to deal appropriately with criticism of the company and rather than defuse the situation the flames were fanned.   For many people it was the first time they had linked KitKats with deforestation and it remains to be seen how many people will take a break from Nestle products.

Today’s pratfall was the collapse of the Tory attack site Cash Gordon.  The site allowed web users to post unmoderated tweets with the #cashgordon hashtag.   Having the words “Cameron is a paedophile” on a Conservative web site was just one of the unimagined consequences. Things got worse when a security flaw allowed the site to be hacked redirecting visitors in turn to the Labour website, a rickroll and a variety of shock sites.   Twitter users were circulating the code online required for the hack before Tory HQ regained control and directed users back to the main party site.

Solutions are to be found in a mixture of digital know how good old-fashioned PR practise; plan and test assiduously in advance, rehearse Q&As, monitor and respond, escalate responsibility during a crisis and just becasue they are digital natives don’t let inexperienced people manage the fall out.


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Categories : Brands, Politics, Social Web, Twitter

Breaking the Twitter 2000 Follow Limit

1 03 2010

New users may not be aware but established twitter users who follow large numbers of tweeters usually hit a wall when they attempt to add follow number 2001.

So, how do you get past the twitter follower limit of 2,000?  Well the only way to do it is to grow your own follower list. 

You don’t however have to have 2,000 followers; the magic number is in fact 1,819.  Twitter lets you follow the number of followers that you have plus 10%.  When you hit the figure of 1819 you are allowed to follow that number plus a further 182.  Your follower limit is now 2001 and you have broken through the barrier, just.

For every ten new followers you gain you can follow eleven new tweeters, and so on. Using that formula Ashton Kutcher would be allowed to follow over 5 million users, slightly more than the 320 currently on his radar.  So now you know.


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Categories : Twitter

Harriet Harman Twitter Spam Victim

25 02 2010

The twitter ‘phishing’ scam has claimed the Leader of the House of Commons as one of its latest victims.  Harriet Harman’s twitter account @HarrietHarman has been sending out spam direct messages to her network including Tory grandee and twitter newbie Alan Duncan MP.

Harman and her colleagues deemed the twitter scam scandal of sufficient importance to be raised in parliament.  On discovering that her account had been hacked Harman tweeted at lunchtime today;  “last tweet genuinely from me was about Commons reform. Now changed password. Janet Anderson MP protested twitter misuse in Commons today”. 

Alan Duncan who has only been using twitter for a couple of days on receiving the scam DM sent a text message to Ms Harman which alerted her to the hack.  He commented on-line that the Times and the BBC had both contacted him about the story.

Now that twitter is deemed sufficiently important to be discussed in the house will the election campaign begin to move on-line?


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Categories : Politics, Twitter

Twitter Spam Attacks Are Back

24 02 2010

The Spam attacks that began plaguing twitter users from the end of October last year are back.

Thousands of twitter users accounts are being hacked and in an almost identical scam to last year hackers are using the accounts to send direct messages using phases like “this you?” of with links to sites offering sexual enhancements.

Affected users are the victims of phishing where they have been tricked into giving out passwords to the hackers.  Social media guru Jeremiah Owyang has reported that he is seeing lots of these DMs today.

Effectively the DM function of twitter is being systematically killed off as inboxes are now polluted almost entirely with a combination of spam and auto-DMs thanking users for following.   Somehow twitter needs to get a grip.

Affected users should change the password on their account or go to the connections tab in your twitter settings page and ‘revoke access’ for applications that are listed, particularly any you don’t trust or recognise.


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Categories : Social Networks, Twitter

All the Buzz of a Google Press Launch

9 02 2010

The press conference has changing.  It has become a form of ‘event marketing’ and it is no longer restricted to selected journalists (and bloggers).  They have to be invited of course otherwise it wouldn’t be a press conference but they are no longer the exclusive channel for the launch message.  We can all attend the launch.

This change has already taken place in the technology sector with two major examples in the past week.  Apple, who have mastered the craft of the press conference event, launched the iPad, and today Google launched its new killer social networking application Google Buzz.

For me what was extraordinary about the launch of Buzz was that this morning I didn’t know it was about to happen.  I picked up the buzz around ‘Buzz’ on twitter.  I saw that the press conference was going to be channelled live on YouTube so I joined Jeremiah Owyang and the select few who were actually there and tuned in.  I realised immediately that Buzz would be big so I ‘live blogged’ over at PR Media Blog whilst the conference was still on, screen grabbed an image from the YouTube feed and posted my take a couple of minutes before the conference ended.

I subsequently discovered via @scobliezer that meant I had broken the embargo that the journalists attending had signed up to.  Surely, they broke their own embargo?


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Categories : Journalism, Media evolution, Social Networks, Social Web, Twitter

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