Twitter has claimed its most high-profile sacking (no pun intended). Predictably, much of the coverage of the decision of American football franchise Kansas City Chiefs to waive running back Larry Johnson has focused upon the fact that the comments which earned him a less than amiable exit from the squad were published on Twitter.

As is so often the case in social media, Johnson was merely using a new channel to air opinions which would have resulted in disciplinary action had they been said in person, on the telephone or in print.

The Chiefs did not officially cite Johnson’s tweets (criticisms of his coach, mostly) in explaining the decision to let him go. They also did not mention a 32,000-strong petition calling for the front office to axe the player before he broke the team’s rushing record.

But while Twitter is inevitably getting all the credit, it’s more likely his inflammatory tweets were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Johnson has been arrested four times since 2003 on charges of assaulting women, including waving a gun at his girlfriend and spitting a drink in a woman’s face at a nightclub. Nice chap, then. Social media can be powerful, but it’s important to note that they are in human control. Twitter did not waive Larry Johnson.

How to make a video go viral

It’s not easy to get women’s college football onto ESPN Sportscenter in the States, but the viral qualities of video showing the exploits of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert caught the show’s imagination. In a game against BYU, Lambert kicked, fouled, punched and outright assaulted opponents, earning just a yellow card for her efforts.

Following her new-found fame, Lambert has been suspended by her team. The interesting thing about this incident is the speed at which it spread through the global football blog scene. I’ve been off-radar for a few days, checking in to Twitter and emails only very briefly. But I knew all about this player because of the sheer volume of sharing between my peers. The various videos have been viewed around a million times.

Still, they say all publicity is good publicity…

Twitter to introduce geo-specific trending topics?

That’s quite enough sport for this week. Back in the social media echo chamber, one of the unintended useful side-effects of Twitter has been trending topics, which can be identified by a whole range of tools and applications which take into account the volume of tweets containing the most-used words and phrases at any given time.

Trouble is, trending topics can be (a) gamed and (b) far too specific for a global audience. The classic confusions are between US and UK users when something occurs on either side of the Atlantic which has no resonance on the other.

The death of  Are You Being Served? actor Mollie Sugden in July led to the trending topic #mrsslocombespussy popping up all over Twitter during UK working hours. Upon waking, many users in the US spotted this topic and interpreted it as so much trend spam – one can hardly blame them, the stuff is everywhere.

Mashable has written of its desire to see geo-specific trends on Twitter, and the microblogging site looks as if it will soon answer the call. Good work, Twitter.

Google loves Sesame Street

Call me a miserable sod, but I hated Sesame Street (no, I’m not the Chris Nee who writes Blue’s Clues, by the way). As such, I care not a jot about the show’s birthday – unlike Google, which has dedicated a series of special logos to various characters while I was (thankfully) offline.

Of course, it got people talking and it most certainly raised the profile of Sesame Street’s birthday and got people talking. If it weren’t for chatter online I’d have been none the wiser about either the anniversary or Google’s logos. It’s definitely achieved its aim.

Kudos once again to whichever poor Google staffer has to keep an eye on the calendar of forthcoming anniversaries. This one was screaming out for a visual mark of respect, even if I preferred Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Top 10 Facebook apps

Ever since Facebook started to show developers a bit of leg, users have been inundated with emails and notifications from zombies, pirates, friends with gifts, quizzes and bumper stickers.

Building a Facebook application can be a great opportunity to engage with users, but only if you get it right. Mashable has carried out a poll of its readers and the results give an indication as to which apps get the thumbs-up from social-media savvy folk.

Predictably, the top ten is dotted with one or two functional apps but dominated by games. FarmVille tops the list, followed by Mafia Wars. Not far behind, Bejeweled Blitz edges out Scrabble. Extrapolating a little randomly, one could argue that apps are aided by a high level of engagement (a challenge-a-friend mechanic, if you will), simplicity and shareability.

SMS revenues pass $100bn

Jon Bernstein reported early last week that revenues from SMS (text messaging) have passed $100bn. Intended as an accessory on mobile phones, SMS has become a huge deal in its own right. Put simply, 160-character messaging caught on in a way few had expected.

And yet, well over a decade after its introduction, marketers haven’t quite figured out what to do with it.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. It was subversive once but now it’s as mainstream as Bono’s underpants, and as such it is under constant sociological scrutiny – from the press, naturally. Actor/writer/comedian/national treasure Stephen Fry was its biggest celebrity catalyst in the UK and his status and the apparent newsworthiness of the site means everything he does on Twitter is reported. A lot.

Fry was famously credited/criticised for a recent Twitter storm over an article by Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir which claimed that there was “nothing natural” about the death of popstar Stephen Gately despite the coroner’s report deeming it exactly that. Fry actually came to that party quite late, but said that the affair had made him realise he needs to be careful what he says, because people are listening.

Surprising then that Fry again became embroiled in an overblown Twitter row recently. A user, brumplum, stated that despite his admiration for Fry, he finds his tweets boring. Fry’s reaction was to announce his departure from the site, sparking some unfair abuse from his fans towards his non-celebrity critic. When he got wind of this, a mortified Fry apologised unreservedly to brumplum.

So what does this tell us? Well, Twitter is still catching the eye of the media. And it has its share of overzealous celeb-followers, as the reaction (Fry’s included) was completely disproportionate to what was essentially a pretty respectfully worded criticism. Oh, and Stephen Fry is a good egg.

iPhone app adds topping to Pizza Hut sales

Econsultancy commented this week on Pizza Hut’s iPhone application and its impressive return for the company. E-commerce has long been considered an ideal bedfellow for mobile applications and with $1 million generated by additional sales, Pizza Hut would no doubt subscribe to that opinion.

The app is currently only available to US pizza fans, and is approaching a million downloads thanks to featuring in Apple’s advertising. Econsultancy has previously reported on surveys whose results indicate that mobile users want to be able to use their handsets to order food, book movie tickets and reserve hotel rooms. Pizza Hut’s numbers certainly suggest this is born out in real-world action.

Celebrity Halloween

The Official Google Blog has revealed Google’s top Halloween searches following Saturday’s ghoulish holiday. The fastest rising search was “lady gaga costume”. That’s her/it above, and I’m none the wiser – give me Megadeth every time.

“michael jackson costume” also rose fast, augmenting a steady increase since a spike in June when the celebrity dancer passed away. And for those of you interested in what American dogs impersonated for Halloween, the answer is…TACOS! I personally would, if I had a dog, dress it up as a banana (sixth fastest-rising dog-based costume search). But each to their own.

Worryingly, “adult care bear” did a roaring trade on the search engine for Halloween, along with Balloon Boy and a bunch of “sexy [insert non-sexy outfit here] costume” searches. Not just a holiday for the kids, then.

Note to the music industry: these are your fans

Back when Napster went boom, I lost a lot of respect for Metallica. Shawn Fanning’s filesharing application had changed my musical world, opening up countless doors and giving me a chance to peep inside – for free – and listen to hundreds and hundreds of bands I might like. I have spent thousands of pounds on music and rather a lot of that can be traced back to discovery via illegal downloading.

So it’s no surprise at all that a poll of internet users by The Independent has found that illegal downloaders buy more music than those who claim never to have illegally downloaded music. It’s certainly true in my case, and just serves to highlight the music industry’s struggle to get to grips with the internet.

Its gung-ho attempts to clamp down on filesharing may sound beneficial to the artists but the industry bodies see the situation as black and white when it should, in fact, recognise that filesharers are often music aficionados with the kind of disposable income the industry would do well to attract.  Think on.

10 Things Social Media Can’t Do

London PNer Spencer Dalziel shared a great post from What’s Next Blog (he does that a lot) which concisely explains some of the most common pitfalls for people considering social media as a PR channel. It’s well worth checking out and I find myself largely in agreement.

It’s been a little while since we looked at the state of the print news industry, its evolution to online and the excellent Newspaper Death Watch blog. The site is currently running a poll in its sidebar which asks a very simple question (one we’ve addressed here before), but one which will come to define the future of the news industry. Will we pay for our news?

I must admit to being a little surprised that 45 percent of respondents said they would pay for news, albeit mostly dependent upon cost – I suspect this may reflect Paul’s readership. But the results so far do indicate that there is a cost line which would help readers decide whether or not to enter their card details.

We’d love to know what you think of the idea of paywalls/micropayments and whether you are willing to pay for news? Would they affect how you consume news items?

Of course it is possible for brands to reach their audience, and Mat explored how we identify potential influencers based on their popularity, betweeness and persuadability. You can read a more detailed report of the entire talk over at the WOMUK blog and Mat’s presentation is embedded below.

We always like seeing Twitter stats, because it’s the tool most commonly asked about in our work with colleagues and clients. Being a bit of a muso, Hypebot is one of my favourite blogs. At the end of last week it reported the results from the latest Pew Internet survey.

According to the research, 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter, a large increase on April’s figure of 11%. This growth is driven by under-44s, social network users and, importantly, mobile web users. After all, every year is the year of the mobile.

However, the 19% has been disputed by a comment on the Hypebot post which argues that the findings of the research actually suggest that it actually refers to “Twitter or another service”.

Google Wave: as much fun than it looks?

We have Google Wave, oh yes. And having watched various demo videos we’ve been very excited about giving it a try. As a collaborative tool and as a shiny new toy, it caught our collective digital eye. But while it’s undoubtedly very cool, it won’t come into its own until/unless it really takes off. Our enthusiasm has been reignited though, thanks to the video below, discovered on The Guardian’s Viral Video Chart.

It’s a great Wave rendering of an iconic scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Enjoy.

Facebook gambles again

Facebook is always a fascinating site and its constant progression is a sight to behold. Without any regard for its users, Facebook is aiming for the stars. Yet another facelift has attempted to pre-empt the noisy saturation of our news feeds by introducing a distinction between the highlights, a feature which has been upgraded to replace the standard news feed, and a live feed of all items.

It’s an ambitious move and one which makes a big assumption about the future of social media, namely that we will want noise filtered out on our behalf. Personally, it’s not my bag. Most of the “highlights” among my Facebook friends are, in fact, of no interest to me at all. I’m quite happy determining my own highlights, thanks. The update has received mixed reviews and an understandable feeling that Facebook keeps…on…changing!

Still, at least it hasn’t started doing something silly like recommending that people reconnect with the dead. Except it has – and not because Derek Acorah’s set up a profile for Sam. An improvement to Facebook’s profile suggestions has once again put the site into a bit of a PR swamp because it has started to suggest reconnecting with random people from your friends list. This includes the deceased, people who aren’t “connecting” for a reason, and my mate’s two-year-old whom I’ve never met.

Facebook, your users are not stupid. Once we’ve accepted friend requests from one another, can’t we just leave it at that?

One-nil to the Arsenal

Another blog on my daily reading list is the one written by Jon Bernstein, and he cunningly used a football club’s crest to draw my attention to his post about Arsenal Football Club’s impressive strides in digital and social media.

Jon draws a comparison between Arsenal’s work (that’s 11 website staff, online video, mobile video, a cable TV channel and an iPhone app) and argues that big-time publishers can learn a thing or two from the club.

He’s right, too. And the most important distinction is that Arsenal look to have successfully introduced monetisation into their digital and social media efforts, charging £2.99 for the iPhone app, £45 a year for online video on demand, £1.50 a week for mobile video and a subscription fee for the television channel. The problem for general publishers lies in something Jon touches on: Arsenal are targeting a very specific and very enthusiastic market.

I’ve written elsewhere about the unique opportunity staring football clubs in the face. It’s great to see Arsenal taking advantage.

Listening to:
Dead By April – Dead By April
(via Spotify)

Today the Oxford University Press (OUP) or for the purposes of this post, the department of stating the bleeding obvious, has finally confirmed what some of us have suspected for some time, in that Twitter is indeed all about you. This follows on from a Harvard Business Review report earlier in the year that claimed only that there’s a lot of dead space in the Twittersphere with roughly 80% of tweeple being followed by just one person and that 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of all tweets.

The OUP leading headline is that, in common with spoken English, ‘the’ is the most used word on Twitter, but the second most popular  is ‘I’, whereas it normally only just breaks into the top ten. Though to be a fair comparison, the OUP should have provided a list of the most popular words used in answer to the question, ‘What are you doing?’. Of course not every tweet is actually a direct answer to that question, but it does tend to guide what sort of content you tweet forth on. The Harvard report also doesn’t reveal anything too mind blowing, there’s a rough rule of thumb when it comes to the activity in online communities. For every one super-user who produces content, ten will interact with that content by replying commenting and 100 will lurk. So for ten percent to produce 90 percent of the content is pretty good, although the figure may well be skewed by including retweets and auto-tweeting of blog posts. It is also an excellent number in comparison to Wikipedia where over half of all edits are made by just two and half percent of all users.

The other twit-bits revealed by the OUP are really no less stunning, revealing such insights as:

• Average words per tweet = 14.98
  Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
  Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
  Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09

All without making any reference to the 140 character restriction once or pondering how it might, possibly, have a dramatic effect on the number of words and sentence length then used in this medium. Apparently verbs in their gerund form are also more common and terms such as “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, again revealing that people are using Twitter to broadcast what they are are doing.

Finally the research of almost 1.5 million tweets reveals that there is ‘evidence of greater informality than in general English’. OK is used more and there is  more swearing, which is the one finding that did interest us. As while, according to Cursebird, the PN digi team variously swears like a drunk sailor, a gansta rapper and an enthusiastic porn star on Twitter, our language tends to be a little fruiter in the real world.

So having roundly criticised this research, what would have we liked to have seen instead from the OUP? A greater comparison of how Twitter language compares to Facebook, which is admittedly tricky to do, or text content. How, or indeed, if, Twitter users are hastening the evolution of language, what new words have been conceived and are already passing into mainstream usage? From a non-language view point it would be great to gain a better understanding of what drives people to Twitter and why they stop, what they expect from it and if any business, other than Dell, has made money from the channel?

It’s hard to imagine any site these days looking like the majority of the old geocity pages, well perhaps for the majority of MySpace, but as one of the first places that enabled internet users to free hosting and an easy(ish) way to make their own home on the net, something that we now take for granted. Fortunately the fabulousness of these historic sites is being saved, or of it at least by the Archive Team and there is also an automatic transfer of websites to uCoz.

Before we’re too harsh on the lovingly handcrafted homepages, the professional sites of the time weren’t much better, go check out the BBC online’s original article about the Yahoo-Geocity acquisition.

Freedom of speech: “the freedom to speak freely without censorship or limitation” (Wikipedia). It’s high on the agenda this week with British National Party leader Nick Griffin due to appear on BBC’s Question Time this evening and Jan Moir’s disgusting Daily Mail column demonising the late Stephen Gately bringing into question exactly where (and whether) freedom of speech is challenged by the abhorrent nature of the views expressed.

As civilisation develops, some things just become accepted as wrong. Most people would now agree that racism is wrong, murder is wrong and stealing is wrong. So when does the freedom to express support for these ideas become problematic?

The concept of free speech is always a troublesome one and “you’re stifling my right to free speech” is too often the cry of the intolerant. Griffin’s supporters have argued free speech in supporting his right to appear on QT this evening, and I think that’s probably fair enough. The problem comes when one considers the removals of freedom advocated by the party.

Moir’s article was overtly homophobic and decried Gately’s death as unnatural, based entirely on Moir’s personal beliefs instead of fact. She had the freedom to write the article, and the Mail had the freedom to publish it. But does the gay community not have a right to not be victims of prejudice?

Griffin

Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has divided opinion among those who would generally consider themselves supporters of free speech. In a true democracy (not that we’re even close to one in the UK), even those who seek to restrict the freedom of others based on what they look like have a right to express their beliefs. More importantly, the BNP – like it or not – is an elected party. Nick Griffin is a Member of the European Parliament. Depressing, but true.

On the other hand, his hateful and racist views are downright wrong. The world would be a better place if he had no platform but if we’re truly democratic and we genuinely support free speech then we can’t legitimately deny him one.

In the long run, tonight’s appearance on QT will have little effect. Racist morons will follow him regardless of how he performs and, as someone else pointed out, are more likely to be fighting in pub car parks at that time on a Thursday night than tuning in for some meaty political debate. If he exposes his views as fringe fascism, then he’ll be perpetuating his reputation among normal folk. If not, he’ll lose face with the people who support the BNP. Preventing him from appearing would simply make him a martyr.

So let’s just watch him backtrack and dodge accusations, all the time resting safe in the knowledge that at the moment in recent history at which the fascist right would most likely be able to make an impact, it’s being hindered by this clown.

Moir, Fry and Twitter

This post from Brendan O’Neill got my back up yesterday. Following Moir’s disgraceful homophobic rant (now subject to a Press Complaints Commission investigation and an official complaint from Boyzone’s record company), Twitter whipped itself into a frenzy. Stephen Fry weighed in later (and later still he decided this was ill-advised) and the complaints to the PCC began rolling in.

O’Neill, somehow, concluded that Twitter “has become an authoritarian tool to police thought crimes”. Quite apart from over-egging Fry’s involvement (the storm was in full swing before he even got involved), O’Neill’s imagining of events suffers from his unfortunate confusion between “policing” something and expressing an opinion on it. Twitter users do not have the power to police anything, but they do now have the power to make a noise about it.

And that, in my book, is free speech – the very right O’Neill ambitiously claims Twitter is an enemy of.

Moir’s article – albeit with its original headline (”Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately’s death”, or some such) voluntarily removed – is still online and intact. So who, exactly, has had their free speech blocked by the supposed Twitter thought police?

Every once in a while emerges a story of #FAIL so epic that it’s difficult to comprehend how it ever saw the light of day. The latest is Toyota’s brain-meltingly weird marketing tactic for its Matrix model, an ill-advised and potentially costly “stalking” prank which – somehow – was supposed to raise awareness of the car. It’s certainly done that, but perhaps not in the manner intended.

The campaign is best summed up by The Consumerist, which explains that the prank game used by Toyota (YourOtherYou) allows people to “play extravagent pranks” on friends. In other words, with YourOtherYou one can scare the living crap out of a friend by allowing Toyota’s ad agency to assign them a realistic stalker. I’m sure the moral, legal and common sense concerns are beginning to formulate in your mind even now.

Sure enough, Toyota has fallen foul of its marketing. It is subject to legal action by Amber Duick, who is suing the company for $10 million after being subjected to a terrifying ordeal in which “she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police”.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Toyota’s lawyers say that Duick consented online to be part of the prank, which – unless she is a genuine deliberately-stepping-in-front-of-traffic type – seems unlikely. Duick’s lawyer is arguing that whatever she did “sign”, it certainly wasn’t to opt in to become the victim of stalking. It’s a complicated case legally, but the fact that Toyota put itself in such a sticky spot highlights a lot of issues which are worth addressing (in fact many of the bullets below reflect the comments on the post on The Consumerist).

• Is a stalking “game” connected in any way to a new car? Really?! I suppose if the two subjects were unmistakably linked a risky and ambitious marketing campaign would fit. But they’re not – and even so, stalking is a particularly unwise marketing tool
• The court case (assuming Toyota don’t opt to settle outside court) will examine the question of online signatures. But if I sign one thing, online or offline, how am I consenting to another? This will be a story of contractual small print and ethical minutiae. Where is the line of informed consent?
• Who exactly was the intended target of this campaign? It’s unlikely to be the victims, which raises further moral problems. And why would anyone be persuaded to buy from a company just because it provides them with a way to bully their friends? It certainly doesn’t appeal to me. And, unfortunately for Toyota, I’m a 24-year-old male. I suspect I fall within their target audience for this remarkably risky approach, and I’m wholly unimpressed
• Is there any place for prank marketing at all? By its very nature, it’s sketchy stuff. I certainly wouldn’t take kindly to becoming a victim, and I’d like to think my friends are clever enough to know that using a large global brand to play a prank on me would result in serious repercussions
• On the other hand, there are sections of the population who aren’t as susceptible to traditional marketing as others. Without trying new things, taking risks and being ambitious, how do we reach them?

Once again, the most important thing to note here is that the whole affair is characterised by stupidity. Toyota should have seen the holes in this campaign, as should its agency. But it’s not yet clear what exactly was “signed”, so the victim should not be absolved of responsibility just yet. What do you think?

The objective of the campaign is to raise awareness of HP in a younger demographic who tend to see the world’s largest  technology company as being rather staid and not the purveyor of some rather funky and stylish kit, which it now is. To that end, we created a multi-touch platform which encompasses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as a dedicated site on HP.com and a rather funky game that challenges you to prove that you’re a digital genius. We’re still only about two-thirds of the way into the campaign and we’ve already driven over 250,000 visitors to HP.com. You can read about the campaign in more detail over at Reputation Online.

As firm believers that digital is the natural remit of the PR industry, we’re actually a little saddened that we’re the only PR agency on the list,but we’re also glad that we’re the ones pushing into new areas which might previously have been deemed the domain of pure play digital or social media agencies.

All we need to do now is keep our fingers crossed for the awards ceremony on the 19th. For more details about the awards and the the full short-list, head over to the BIMA blog.