There’s an episode of the Simpsons (Season Two, Episode 22), stay with me, where Mr Burns would like to be nice to Homer—but he knows nothing about him (nor really cares) so falls on the most bland of engagement:

“Hey there Mr….d’uh….Brown Shoes! How ’bout that local sports team eh?”

(Oddly for a great Simpson’s quote the video doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anywhere, but there is an audio clip here.)

Does that remind you of anything? Here’s a collection of Tweets reminding me of it that I collected on Friday:

It’s not exclusive to Twitter, nor the Royal Wedding: check out any number of Facebook fan pages or any social platform on a Friday lunchtime to see loads of “Hey guys, what are you doing this weekend. Let us know!” type-posts. They’re a close cousin of the way blogs starting up will often end their debut post with a plaintive cry of “what would you like to see?”

It is no doubt amusing to watch them all come in (and to watch the meme or cliche spread), but there’s something deeper I think—and some lessons to learn.

I think it sometimes happens because people are following what the mainstream media started to do a few years ago (‘have your say’). “Let us know!” became their coda to all stories, because they were getting to grips with the idea that people could converse and create en masse without their involvement. They were trying to channel this new thing called UCG through them so they could continue to act as gatekeepers, or perhaps they were genuinely excited by all of those pictures of snow. The TV programmes and the newspapers (and to an extent their associated online spaces) were offering an audience, much like Tony Hart in his gallery, and still do—hence the potential motivation for sharing your content through them.

Most brand social web channels don’t have such a huge audience, or if they have a big one it’s often very tightly around a subject—big wide and generic questions aren’t going to engage that audience. Your dry cleaners, or a skincare brand, aren’t the first place you think of to tell your plans for a Bank Holiday.

Possibly it also comes from a desire to “get into the conversation”, to make a brand seem like it’s one of your mates. Might work, if you’re trying to create a very small community round your social web space—if you’re usually about answering questions and sending out news, isn’t it a little odd? What are your other followers going to do with the information if you get it and and then you spread it?

Most of all, people probably do it because they see others doing the same. That’s one way to learn, but you need to think more deeply about whether any techniques apply to your situation—what they might achieve and how they might look. In essence if you’re attempting to engage around your brand then things closely related, or of direct relevance are going to hold more weight.

As a bonus here’s Mr Burn’s classic funk track ‘Look at all those idiots‘, including wailing guitar from Waylon Smithers. What’s your favourite Simpsons as metaphor for social web engagement story? Let us know!

Take the administration in Austin, Texas (home, it must be said to large number of Internet culture savvy people) who probably thought that it was a nice piece of harmless PR through engagement to ask the people to come up with a new identity for the city’s waste dept. No-one sensible could care too much about the outcome, so it becomes open for hijack, open for people to have fun with, and easy fun is a great driver of activity. Activity you may have seen on the web this week:

And so the idea of the ‘Fred Durst Society of the Humanities and Arts‘ was born and attracted much attention, narrowly beating the ‘Ministry of Filth’ (although my personal favourite was ‘The Austin Dept. of Are You Going To Eat That?’).

It’s not going to happen, of course, so the outcome is that the consulters look stupid—drawing attention to both the time wasted of rebranding and their helplessness against the weak ties and satire of the web. What’s worse is it shows problems in engament in that  numbers of votes for this poll in total dwarf  those in other, more well thought through, consultations.

Even worse is when there’s a memetic idea that is simultaneously eligible, fun, and unacceptable to the consulters. That’s what’s has just taken hold in Fort Wayne (who like Austin are using the feedback tool Uservoice—blameless in these instances and a fairly nice solution to the tech aspects of this sort of questioning).  What bad luck for the town to have had a mayor and statesman with a vaguely rude sounding name (the man himself pronounced Baals “balls”):

As you can see the comments here are getting heated, there are legitimate reasons for honouring the man and there’s just no way to come out of this well now. Not every question is a good one.

It’s easy to sign up for a Twitter account, all you need is an email address. It used to be even easier, they weren’t even verified. I have, I estimate, about a hundred—lots used but others created for short-term projects or jokes. Some, in truth, in the same way as you register a domain name—idea half-formed but name assured.

That it was so, lead to a lot of great Twitter names claimed but unused and unloved. (@fry posted to about once very 6 months, @cat about the same)

Unless it violates a trademark, there’s no real mechanism for getting one freed up either.

Twitter has about the same sign-up to action ratio as most social web sites, but unlike Facebook for example your username, its uniqueness, its readability, matters. And those are getting used up too cheaply.

So, the first stage I think—the “where are you” email above, which I ‘ve just received. A shot that says ‘we did warn you’, when six months later—if you don’t log in— the account is closed and the name freed

How do I tell them that directing Twitpantos is a very, erm, seasonal activity?

If you’ve an account that you value, I’d take time to post every so often.

Is Twitter about to do a mass reclaim of unused accounts?

Just a little fun seasonal project I’ve made with the layout and design help of Gavin Wray.

It works very much like my other sentiment analysis tools, but with a sprinkling of Santa’s magic. Santa’s magic in this instance being that any tweets with the words ‘Christmas’ or ‘Xmas’ in them are weighted doubly—that is the scores are counted twice for the purpose of producing the mean score.

So, try the Christmas-o-meter and see how Christmassy you’re feeling.

(click through for big)

Last night I turned my sentiment analysis tool on two hashtags: #bcfc and #avfc, the most widely used tags to refer to Birmingham City and Aston Villa during their League Cup quarter final game. It was a chance to see if visualising to ‘competing’ tags around the same event would be a useful exercise.

Caveats that would apply to this:

• Some people use the tags instead of team names, meaning that they might be used by people supporting the other team (or no team at all)—most fans, though seem to tag with just the hashtag representing their team.
• Some tweeters use both—these tweets could be removed technically, but make no difference to the comparative scores.
• If there’s a subject that uses more slang or metaphor than football, it’s not often discussed on Twitter.

There was a generally a downward trend throughout the match, tension? Bad football? It could have been both. The first two goals seemed to have a much bigger impact than the third—this I don’t quite understand, but it seems to be more about the tweets themselves than the tool.

I could see how a special subject-set of emotion words could be created for football, which could cope with more nuanced or unusual words. It’s something to consider.

The sentiment scores in a Google spreadsheet, csv files: #avfc tweets (657 of which were during the game), #bcfc tweets (370 during).

The obligatory Wordle:

An extended version of the Internet culture part of the talk:

Interweb memes and contribution to community from bounder on Vimeo.

Bounded groups, and Clay Shirky.

Flowtown’s visualisations:

• Social network demographics.
• Facebook mobile take-up.

Facebook Statistics

The US Airforce comment response policy

Consumers trust recommendations from known people most

Rats at KFC

Sentiment Analysis

Twitter can predict the stock market.

Birmingham, B13, Digbeth.

Professor David Bailey blog for the Birmingham Post

And from the “inspiration” section:

Intermezzo vs Royal Opera House

Blogger living in the museum

Skittles, innovative campaign

Roger Smith Hotel

Facebook Add ROI from New York Theatre Network

It ran every minute and looked at the most recent 1,000 tweets tagged #xfactor.

The real reason for using the X-Factor is that I was aware just how violently the emotions can swing on Twitter when watching—and also it is a very defined timeline of events. The Valence (the happy-sad ratio, red line) had greater peaks and troughs in short times than any sentiment graphing project I’ve tried before.

The differences are far more prominent in the graph than any trends over the whole two and a half hours. Arousal (awake-ness, for want of a better word) was relatively constant, as was dominance (the feeling of control), although both jump up and down (within boundaries) along with Valence.

And who was ever-so unpopular around 8:50pm? This chap:

Next, I think I’ll try Question Time.

First was on the Personal Democracy Forum EU conference in Barcelona, for the length of the two-day conference I monitored the hashtag #pdfeu every five minutes:

(click image for larger view)

The highest rating was 64.4% (at 12:45pm on Tuesday), the lowest 49.6% (Monday at 12:14pm during a short power failure). What was interesting to me was that the “arousal” rating seemed to work well as it stayed pretty steady during the power failure  (or even leaped up a little) even as the happiness of the hashtag users  dived. Post-lunch conference lulls and periods of excitement (the big spikes in day two, at least, corresponded with much applause) were mapped quite accurately.

The overall average was 57.29%. If you would like to explore or graph the data yourself, you can see in all in a Google Spreadsheet here.

Secondly I tried a much shorter and more mainstream application, David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference:

The emotion tracking tool graphed here ran every 10 seconds during David Cameron’s speech to the CPC and analysed the last 100 tweets with the hashtag #cpc10 and the word “tories”. I chose two versions as I wasn’t sure that non-Conservative supporters would use the ‘official’ hashtag, I theorised that they would be likely to use the word ‘tories’. As it turned out I think that while there was a more even spread of pro and anti political types using the hashtag than I expected, but the ‘tories’ Tweeters were definitely more hostile. (See the data.) There was greater movement across the graph than on any other test I’ve run.

Conclusions? None so far, other than that I think this might be a very useful tool, and that more interesting data is created the more Tweets you have and the more you can afford (server-wise) to poll for results. I’m itching to try it on another big live event with conflicting opinions, that might mean training it on a reality TV event. Roll on the X-Factor.

If that sounds like something that would be of use to you email events@businesslinkwm.co.uk.