Tomorrow I’m getting married, so I probably won’t be posting for a while. Not, of course, that I’ve been posting a lot recently.

Without wanting to get sentimental (it’s not that kind of a blog, and I’m not that kind of a man) I can say that not only did I never believe that I’d find someone like Krista, but that now I have found her, I still can’t really believe it.

I’m saving the rest of what I have to say for my speech tomorrow evening. There are all sorts of little surprises planned for the day, but one of the biggest surprises right now is “what Mat will be saying in his speech” because I’ve yet to write it. Tim has told me “be nice to everyone and try not to sound like Hugh Grant.”

Anyway, the hashtag for my wedding will be #wediaczar. Given that the audience is startlingly low on digital media bods, it’s not like I think it’s going to trend or anything, but it seemed like too good a hashtag to waste.

Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.

I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (“does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar

While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.

Quite often I want to find out whether MPs or congressmen or PR people follow each other on Twitter.

The way that I’ve been doing this until now is

1. make a list of the people who I’m interested in researching
2. for each person on that list, grab the list of all the Twitter people whom they follow
3. process the list so that only relationships between the people on the list show up

If all I’m doing is checking to see who follows whom, then this is a horribly wasteful way of doing things. The Twitter API limits the number of calls one can make on it — so this wastage leads to things taking much longer.

If only I could cycle all the names I want to check through something like DoesFollow!

Well – it turns out that I can. And in theory it’s not much harder than using DoesFollow. The Twitter API (which is what DoesFollow uses, after all) has a method called friendship/exists. All we have to do is send Twitter the following request:

http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a=barackobama&user_b=mediaczar

and it will come back with the answer:

<friends>true</friends>
or
<friends>false</friends>

Kludge-y perl code

(This fabulous picture courtesy of There, I Fixed It)

So I tried to do this using Yahoo! Pipes, but there are too many nested loops. You need to do something like this:


get list of names

}


There’s no easy way to get Pipes to do this, as far as I can see (I’ll keep trying, but if someone else can help, I’d be v. grateful.)

So I’ve pulled together a badly-written perl script to do the work for me.

The script

[code lang="perl"]
#!/usr/bin/perl
# checks the Twitter API to find the friendships between a list of usernames
# this should really use the NEW API call that would let us halve the number
# of API calls
# author: Mat Morrison
# date: Friday July 10, 2009
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;
# set up variables
# we're just using a whitespace delimited list for the moment
my @usernames = qw(kerrymg mediaczar timhoang titusbicknell);
# let's build the matrix with a hash of hashes...
# to begin with, we'll include diagonal values -
# that is -- we'll check to see whether @mediaczar follows @mediaczar
foreach $user_a(@usernames) {
foreach $user_b(@usernames) {
# we should put in a conditional clause that will check for the diagonal values
# and not bother checking whether someone is a friend of themselves...
$url = 'http://twitter.com/friendships/exists.xml?user_a='
.$user_a
.'&user_b='
.$user_b;
# get XML file from Twitter -- it's an astonishingly simple XML file that reads
# true
# or
# false
# so we don't need to do much with it...
$follows = get $url;
die 'Can\'t get $url' unless defined $follows;
# strip the tags - I'm using a generic "HTML stripping" regex
$follows =~ s/<(.|\n)+?>//g;
# we should probably convert "true" values to 1 and "false" values to zero or blank
# now let's push data into the matrix
$matrix{$user_a}{$user_b} = $follows
}
}
# spit out the data as a tab-delimited table
# print the top line first
for $user_b ( keys %matrix ) {
print "\t$user_b";
}
# now print the values
# they're all neatly arranged in the matrix so we
# can just print them out sequentially
for $user_a ( keys %matrix ) {
print "\n$source";
for $follows ( keys %{ $matrix{$user_a} } ) {
print "\t$matrix{$user_a}{$follows} ";
}
}
print "\n";
[/code]

Where next?

Most of my thinking is included above in the code comments. An obvious mistake I’m making is checking to see whether, say, @mediaczar follows @mediaczar. That wastes n API calls per search. But a more serious mistake is not to be using the new friendships/show method. Because it tells you whether user A follows user B and whether user B follows user A at the same time, it would save me lots of API calls. How many lots? Well take a look at this.

This is what I’m doing at the moment — checking each and every cell in the matrix:

This is what I’d be doing if I removed the diagonals:

And this is what I’d be doing if I used the newer API call:

I had to look up the formula for working this out without colouring in little boxes. With a little tweaking (to prevent the diagonals from creeping back in), here it is:

((n-1)^2)+n-1)/2

So — for a list of congress people (159 on twitter as at Tuesday July 14, 2009) that’d be ((156-1)^2-1+156)/2 = 12,090 API calls. Which is still a lot and will require some careful throttling, but (literally) not half as many as the 156^2 = 24,336 API calls that I’d need to run it as the script currently stands.

So – back to the drawing board for a while. I really can’t work out a programmatic way of doing this. Hmph.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.

Some red herrings

Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.

1. Some people are cagey about sharing their list of feeds: whether they consider it intellectual property, or whether they think that it may be too revealing, I don’t know.
2. Lots of people said things like “oh — my RSS reader? Haven’t looked at that in a while. I get all my news off Twitter these days.”

So what’s the experiment about?

You’ll probably know that I’m interested in networks of people and how information flows through those networks. I’m also interested in things like influence and whether and how we can identify and track its effects.

I’d heard about a word of mouth marketing campaign which was set up along the following lines: a sample set of pupils at a given school were asked “who’s the coolest kid in the school?” Clearly some names came up more often than others, whereupon the researchers went to those kids and asked them the same thing. By the end of the process, they had a good idea of who might be the key influencers.

This seemed like a good sort of thing to be doing. It was a simple idea, and apparently easy to execute. Everything else I was working on (the citation analysis and the network analysis in particular) seemed to be complementary.

A little history

So last year we did a version of this experiment for a client. We emailed and phoned a whole load of journalists and analysts whose beats covered our client’s interests and asked them:

Who do you read on a regular basis?

Who (other than you) should we be talking to?

If you were looking for information, where would you start?

Then we approached the people that they’d recommended and asked them the same questions. The purpose (as I’m sure you’ll have guessed) was to create a network map of who was whose go-to guys and girls. We’d take the data that we collected, push it through the usual processes and hey presto! we’d know who was really influential.

But what we actually found was that the journalists and analysts we asked seemed not to have any specialist sources. The people whom they cited were (in no particular order) their colleagues, the companies they covered (and their public relations representatives and agencies). Oh, and Google. Google was cited by everyone.

There were two obvious explanations for this:

1. It’s the truth: they really didn’t have any better sources. We’d all read about the collapse of journalistic standards; perhaps we were encountering it at first hand?
2. The privacy and intellectual property argument: maybe the journalists and analysts were constitutionally loathe to reveal their sources?

All my training and experience, however, points to the following reason:

3. Poor questionnaire design led to an inability to think (when put on the spot) of names and sources whom they believed were their influencers.

This is less unlikely than it may seem. If I were to ask you who your big influencers were, would you be able to answer?

All in all, it was a deeply unsatisfying exercise. We had envisioned what wild success would look like and this wasn’t even close.

Where we are today

I thought that it might be easier to ask people for their OPML files than it had been to ask them who were their influences. This is the equivalent of — say — asking to see a musician’s CD collection, instead of asking them about their musical influences. It’s not necessarily more accurate, but it might help expose a different picture.

Seven of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances sent me their OPML files, and that was enough to get started.

Early results

Between them, the first seven people subscribed to just over 1.5K RSS feeds, which gave me a lot of data to process. Here’s a picture of the network before I started processing the data.

You can see (I think) pretty clearly that there are several blogs (or RSS feeds — I’m using them interchangeably here) in the middle of the map that are linked to by several of the respondents. And there are some (around the edges) that are linked to by a couple of respondents. And there are lots that are linked to by only one respondent.

At this stage we’re interested in “indegree” — or “the number of OPML files in which we find RSS feed X.” Clearly the great majority (just over 1.3K) of the RSS feeds are single hits — that is, they appear in only one respondent’s OPML file. But that still leaves 180 RSS feeds with multiple hits:

Those 180 RSS feeds with multiple hits left us with a nice (and fairly predictable) distribution that looks like this:

Clearly the first-generation results aren’t very meaningful or accurate. Most often cited were author Seth Godin, ex-blogger-turned-lifestreamer Steve Rubel, and PR blogger Stephen Davies who were each read by five of the seven respondents. But more than half the respondents read my blog. Despite what I’d like to think, this is clearly an artefact thrown up by the sampling frame (my friends, colleagues and acquaintances).

Where next?

I’m hoping that we can extend this out a generation — and then keep iterating. I’m going to approach everyone with an indegree of 3 or above, and see how many of them will send me their OPML files.

I don’t hold out much hope of getting OPML files from people like Messrs Godin and Rubel, but if I don’t ask, I’ll never know, will I?

The current approach to WOM is to try to stimulate positive WOM while addressing or countering negative WOM. A sort of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between” strategy.

But what if we could do it a different way?

This idea stems from a conversation I had back in February with Martin Kelly and Andy Cocker of Infectious Media. Since that time I’ve chatted it through a couple of times with various interesting people. It’s not properly thought through yet, but following a chat a couple of weeks ago with Ketchum London’s new Head of Digital, the excellent Fernando Rizo, I’ve decided to put the idea out into the public domain to gauge what (if any) interest there is and whether I should continue to work on it.

“Word of Mouth” is hard to do well

I’ve read lots of word of mouth marketing case studies (there’s a great list over at WOMMA) and it strikes me that WOM is hard to do well for a few reasons. I don’t want to go into these in too much detail, but here are a couple of the structural issues:

1. Unless I’m a journalist, an A-list blogger or media personality or have some kind of platform, I probably have a very low reach.

   Despite everything pointing towards personal contact being the best impetus for positive word of mouth, most word of mouth campaigns compensate for my low reach by trying to get me to self-service my relationship with the brand and the campaign.

2. “Viral” distribution just doesn’t work the way most people seem to think it does; and this is particularly true when it comes to WOM.

   While I’m quite likely to tell stories about my personal experience of a brand and fairly likely to tell stories that involve a mutual friend, I’m much less likely to tell stories about other friends’ experience, and not likely at all to tell stories about friends-of-friends.

   Furthermore because of the ‘clumpiness’ of most people’s social graphs, geometric progression (the “I tell two people and they each tell two people and so on” effect) just doesn’t happen.

Homophily

One of the many reasons that WOM works is a thing called homophily — which roughly translates to “birds of a feather flock together”, or “you can tell a man by the company he keeps.”

I’ve written about examples of this before: for example, my analyses of twittering US Congresspersons and Westminster MPs which showed that one can predict with some reasonable degree of accuracy the political colouration of any given twitter account based on their mutual friends and follows (if you want to know more about the methodology, it’s worth reading Robert Hanneman’s chapter on cliques and subgroups.)

But there’s another side to the homophily coin; the social pressure to conform to the group’s norms.

Why I bought an iPhone

Let’s take a concrete example of this: it often seems to me that everyone I know has an iPhone. I made a conscious decision a few years ago not to buy an iPhone, but I’ve finally succumbed to the pressure.

While it’s true that several people have take time out of their busy schedules to tell me exactly how good the iPhone really is, I’m far more affected by what I perceive as the omnipresence of the iPhone. Everyone, it sometimes seems, has one except me.

Of course, on those occasions when I head down to visit my family in rural Hampshire, I’m reminded of the obvious truth: most people don’t have an iPhone. But that’s not the way the world appears to me.

How about turning it on its head?

What if we could identify people who are under social pressure to buy our products — who are being influenced by what their friends are doing and saying?

Let’s say for example that Apple and O2 (iPhone’s carrier partner in the UK) could work out that a significantly higher proportion than average of my Facebook friends access the service using the iPhone client, and could target me with special offers and rates to push me over the edge.

Instead of looking for WOM influencers, why don’t we look for areas of high potential — and target those people who are likely to be receiving lots of WOM stimuli?

Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?

Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?

Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.

But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?

Digging for victory

OK. Another hypothetical example. The social news site Digg is a huge source of traffic for most news websites. The Telegraph, for example, gets around 75K visits a day from the service. That’s an awful lot of traffic.

The thing is, with Digg, you really want to make the front page if you want the big traffic. Around 10K stories are submitted by users to Digg every day, and only 150 or so make it to the front page. So we’d need to be smart.

Digg is less open to being gamed than it used to be, but let’s say that a smart agency could still deconstruct Digg’s algorithm sufficiently that it can use its network of staff to improve the chances of a story (or review) making it to the front page that shows their client in a positive light.

All they’d need to do (say) is send an all-hands email that mobilised your staff to digg a particular story at the right time of day. Would this be legitimate? Digg clearly thinks not, but are they the best judge?

Ballot stuffing

Let’s say a client gets nominated for a Webby or one of the other user-voted awards out there. It’s common and acceptable practice for web services to use any means at their disposal to beg for votes.

So is it OK to send an all-hands email asking your staff to register and vote? Is it OK to ask them to use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to ask their friends and followers to vote?

Here’s what I think

I think that this is an ethical minefield, but I’ve got a couple of clear points of view that are up for discussion. First off, and from a purely business perspective:

If it’s valuable then clients should pay us to do it. If it’s not valuable we shouldn’t do it.

Ignore the ethics. When was the last time you sent an email that said, “Please share this with your friends and use billing code xxx.xx when you record it on your time sheet”? Of course, it only takes a few seconds to relay a message (fewer if you simply copy and paste the message from the all-hands email to your social media presences). What the hell – it’s all just part of the team spirit, isn’t it?

But if this service is of any value at all to the client, then we’ll see the demands on our time beginning to increase. Soon we’ll find ourselves doing several a day. Larger agencies with more staff will offer a more valuable service to clients than boutique agencies (“We have a thousand trained staff with Twitter and Facebook accounts primed to promote your campaign!”)

We could even work out some kind of ratcheted scale that said that people with more Twitter followers could bill at a higher rate; or we might start looking at unduplicated reach.

This might seem fanciful, but stories like the uSocial’s offer to game Digg’s front page for around $200 tell us that the thriving black hat market for this sort of thing is getting a little greyer.

If clients value this, then they should pay us. If we give it away as a “value added” service, then are we sure that we’ve communicated this properly so that the client understands the value we added?

How can we be certain we aren’t just undermining our digital value proposition?

Now, here’s the tricky bit where I bring ethics back into it. If we’re paying our staff to relay messages to their networks on behalf of our clients, what makes this different from spam?

Employees personal networks are their personal property

I’m one of those people who believes that the boundaries are blurring between our personal, public and professional lives. My colleague Chris Nee has posted about the presentation of self in social media, expressing a lot of how I feel rather better than I could myself, although that hasn’t stopped me from covering this elsewhere — notably in a discussion about our social media policy where I said:

I think that a good PR person is someone who manages their relationships well; who can tread the fine line between doing good work for their clients without abusing or exploiting their relationships. Who recognizes the value of their personal network, and their personal brand.

Do we have a right to ask our employees to use their personal networks on behalf of our business? I think the answer is – of course we do. We pay experienced staff more partly because of the social capital that they’ve managed to accrue in their address books. When you leave your job to go to a new agency, you’ll take your contacts with you along with all the shared experience, the favours you’ve done, and the favours you owe.

So if part of the reason we’re paying them more is because of that network, then we clearly value their network.

So why on earth would we encourage our staff to spam their personal networks?

I trust my peers. I don’t trust spam monkeys

Part of the reason for the success of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter is that I can choose who I follow and who I don’t. I can restrict conversations to a bunch of people I trust and respect. Sure, I’ve got lots of Twitter followers with names like “Sophie1982″ and “EdelmanHR” but that just means that they hear my inconsequential blatherings, not that I have to hear theirs!

And I follow a lot of my colleagues’ Twitter streams. I’m pleased to say that these are — on the whole — full of meaty chunky content and devoid of spam.

But if we increase the spam content, what will happen? Here’s what (in the absence of evidence) I believe: their follow rates, retweet rates and mention rates will all begin to drop off. From your experience, what do you think?

Where does this leave us?

I’ve put a somewhat one-sided argument here. I’m sure I’m open to all sorts of rebuttals like, “surely, if the content is interesting/useful/entertaining then our staff will only be adding value to their networks?” and “but surely it’s up to them whether they want to pass it on to their friends?” I’ll wait for these to roll in before I start trying to address them.

But here’s what I think. I think that we’re trying to teach our colleagues to learn from managing their personal communities in order better to manage our clients’ communities. Anything that teaches them to prostitute their networks is a retrograde move.

Am I wrong?

On Monday evening I was in Vienna. Thanks to our partner agency IKP Porter Novelli I had the opportunity to talk to some of the best and brightest businesses in Austria.

The presentation was given in a fabulous private salon (Austrians seem to be keen on the “private” thing — perhaps because it helps them get around the EU smoking ban) which promised “Guten Wein mit Wirtschaf, Politik & Kultur.” I don’t know where my presentation fit in.

As we were going up the stairs I saw signs that my presentation had been advertised under the title “Facebook, Twitter & Co”, so I carefully changed the title of the presentation accordingly. The bits behind the title page never really changed.

If you’ve read the Integration Triagle presentation post, then the last third of what follows will be familiar and I suggest that you stop reading when you see Arnold Schwarzenegger for the second time.

I really need to credit Paul Mead, MD of VCCP Search for the meat of the first third of the presentation: it’s pretty much a facsimile lift from an inspirational presentation I saw him give a few months ago that has changed the way I’m thinking about Social Media planning. Thanks, Paul!

After the presentation, the IKP Porter Novelli team took me out for drinks. The next day for breakfast, they made me ham and eggs. Then Franz Ramerstorfer took me to a “typical Viennese café” for coffee and Sacher Torte. This is Franz.

Franz is the Porter Novelli network’s “Digital Ambassador” in Austria, and leader of the Digital Taskforce out there, so this sets a new standard for Ambassador behaviour. I do hope the other ambassadors take notice. Thank you Franz and everyone at IKP for a great opportunity, and a great time!

These are the slides from a presentation I did this morning on the topic of the Integration Triangle. I’ve talked about this here before in the article “5 Straightforward Ways To Integrate Your Communication Activities” — this includes some quick case studies.

I created these slides to support the presentation I was giving: they aren’t the presentation itself. This means that while you’ll be able to have a good guess at what I was saying most of the time, there will be moments when my meaning is opaque.

There are 70 slides in the presentation, including the front and back cover. Nevertheless, I gave the presentation in under 25 minutes. To save you doing the maths, that averages out at around 3 slides every minute (actually, there was a 4 minute delay in the middle of the presentation — so it’s more like 3-and-a-half slides per minute.)

In fact, my slides fall into two categories — those on which I spend fewer than 5 seconds, and those on which I spend more than a minute. This is more an artistic decision than anything else — I think that lots of slides going past very quickly give an appearance of pace and energy (which I dearly need first thing in the morning), but can rapidly become exhausting to watch and hard to follow without the occasional pause for breath.

Even with 70 slides, there’s so much more that I can say about the “Integration Triangle” as a planning tool — but I was trying to keep this to a single simple message. I’m hoping that (whatever they thought about my presentation, and no matter whether they liked it or believed what I was saying) the audience will remember what it was that I was saying, and be able to tell a version of the story themselves.

There’s just so much that we can talk about when it comes to the whole Digital PR thing that it all becomes rather overwhelming. I’ve just got off the phone to a colleague in Vienna (where I’m speaking next week) who wants me to talk to his audience about “Facebook and Twitter and Blogs” (oh my!) And I’ve got 45 minutes to do this. Of course I can do it. But what on earth is the “one thing” I want them to remember?

I believe that — like Caesar’s wife — those who work in the public relations industry must be above suspicion when it comes to all online engagement (whether personal or professional.) Later on in this post, you’ll see how I’m hoping to use our social media policy to moderate our behaviour as a company, while freeing up our colleagues to experiment with social media. But I’m not expressing it well. What should I do?

Last summer I shared a draft of the Porter Novelli Social Media Policy that I’d been working on.

It’s one of those documents that some like and some don’t. A few people, for example, think that it’s too restrictive.

The sticking point for most people seems to be the bit that says (under 2.3.3):

Your profile must include an explicit statement that you work for Porter Novelli. Include the following minimum information: “I work for Porter Novelli, a global public relations company.”

For a couple of reasons, this item has popped up again. A few weeks ago, I tweeted that Porter Novelli people should disclose their full name and company affiliation in their Twitter bios, and referred to a post-and-comments on this blog that went some of the way to explaining why this should be. This tweet was picked up by a few people, some of whom commented. Willem (@hippowill, Ice cream for everyone!!) was probably the most eloquent, saying (among other things):

I’m not looking for work, but if I do I’m not interested in applying for Porter Novelli or any other agency that would feel the need to require my agreement to online guidelines, telling me how to talk, write and represent myself – and not the agency I work for – online.

So I’ve been meaning to get back to him, if nothing else. I feel that either I haven’t explained our policy properly, or he doesn’t get it — which amounts to the same thing. I don’t mind being wrong, but I do mind being misinterpreted. This stuff is important!

Yesterday, I had a brief conversation with some of our graduate prospects — young bright people who are looking to work for us. And it turned out that one of them, Anna Svensson (@svanna) had already written a post about it, asking Does your future employer have the right to control your online interaction?

In her response, Anna points out that (while she still feels that we’re “trying to control [our] employees a bit too much”) what we’re actually attempting to do is more “a form of issues management” (exactly!) It’s a good post, but it’s one of those that’s worth reading for the comment stream. I’d recommend you take a read.

But here, I think, is the big question:

Should a PR agency’s social media policy be different?

Different, I mean, from other companies’ policies? You see, I’d argue “Yes, they should.” I’m basing this on a lot of previous material. Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest guidelines, for example, explicitly state that public relations is a “special case”:

Editing in the interests of public relations is particularly frowned upon. This includes, but is not limited to, edits made by public relations departments of corporations or governmental entities; or of other public or private for-profit or not-for-profit organizations; or by professional editors paid to edit a Wikipedia article with the sole intent of improving that organization’s image.

The italics are my own. Public relations (and social media relations) people are – I think – likely to be more distrusted than usual. Our errors will be held up to ridicule by our customers, and by our peers, and will live forever in the popular schadenfreude, achieving the mythical status of the fake blogging fiascos of 2007, or poor bloody Kryptonite/Bic Biro events of 2004 that still turn up in presentations and training workshops.

We’re also under more pressure to make mistakes. Between us, PR professionals around the world represent hundreds of thousands of clients, and several million campaigns every year. As the pressure increases in every region to take these campaigns online, mistakes will be made.

While I was writing this policy, I came across lots of policies from other organizations. Most of these were old-school “blogging policies” (Forrester’s Charlene Li posted a list ofBlogging Policy Examples back in 2004) and there’s a list at the NewPR Wiki.

We wanted to do something a bit different. As I state in the policy preamble, we wanted it to cover “Anything you do online where you share information that might affect your colleagues or clients.”

I’d done a bit of quick-and-dirty internal research when I joined Porter Novelli. At the time (and even today) the great majority of our colleagues weren’t bloggers. As a result, any “blogging policy” would be irrelevant to them. And yet, at the same time, a majority of our colleagues were on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bebo, with some (mostly dormant) accounts on other social networking sites like Orkut, ASmallWorld, Hyves and the like depending on where they were coming from. A smaller number — while having no blog of their own — had commented on a blog or online news story, or posted in forums at least once in the past three months. Some of them were sharing photographs over services like Flickr, and (thankfully) a very few had — according to WikiScanner — anonymously edited Wikipedia (and, with one exception, always for non-client-related interests). Almost all had voted on something — even if it were only a poll — in the past quarter.

Some of these engagements were on behalf of clients, but the great majority were “personal business” — or as Willem might put it, representing themselves – and not the agency or clients for whom they worked.

The guiding principles for the policy

We were trying to keep things as simple as possible.

I rather like Comcast’s policy as quoted by Rohit Bhargava in his post Comcast’s Actual Social Media Policy No One Knew About:

Their official point of view is that their employees are allowed to participate authentically, as long as they disclose their affiliations, don’t divulge secret or proprietary information and don’t act as though they are an official spokesperson or allowed to speak on behalf of the brand.

That’s a lot better, I think than the often misquoted Microsoft “Be Smart” (taken out of context from a post from Robert Scoble” and a couple of often-quoted soundbites along the lines of “Our corporate policy is, be smart. We don’t talk about things we don’t know about.”)

Only the most arrogant would believe that “be smart” is suitable advice to include in a policy — instead it was a glimpse at the philosophy that underpinned the blogging policy that Microsoft were working on at the time. Scoble explicitly agreed with what Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny says:

The only advice I have … is this: please make sure it’s abundantly clear what the rules are. You’re getting to be a big company. Don’t rely on unwritten rules or company tradition/culture to do the job.

So I was trying to keep it simple and flexible. Hence the guiding principles:

1. The web is not anonymous. Assume that everything you write can be traced back to the company, if not you personally.
2. There is no longer a clear boundary between your personal life and your work life.
3. Do not lie or withhold the truth.
4. The web contains a permanent record of our mistakes. But do not try to change things retrospectively.

Furthermore, I borrowed a philosophy from someone much wiser and smarter than I (and who was more fitted to our corporate culture than — say — Microsoft’s), Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger who says:

All I can promise is that I will be honest with you and never write something I don’t believe in because someone is paying me as part of a relationship you don’t know about. Put differently: All I’ll hide are the irrelevancies.

So what’s the thinking behind Paragraph 2.3.3 then?

Well — there are several.

1. We’re proud of the people we hire, and we hope they’re proud to work for us

One of the most satisfying ways we recruit is through WOM recommendation from our colleagues, who have let their friends how much they enjoy working with us.

Because we think that our people are the best advertisement for who we are and what we do, we’d like to see them promoting their personal brands as much as possible. We actively encourage people to begin blogging, set up networks on LinkedIn, get on Flickr, Twitter, and the like. We don’t actively monitor these accounts, but do

2. It prevents us from forgetting that there’s no “private” anymore

I think that a good PR person is someone who manages their relationships well; who can tread the fine line between doing good work for their clients without abusing or exploiting their relationships. Who recognizes the value of their personal network, and their personal brand.

When I’m doing background research on someone I’m meeting, I’ll check Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Who are they? Where have they worked? Who do we know in common?

Have you heard the story about photos of Bono and “bikini-clad babes” turning up on Facebook? Have you every searched for Carpphone Warehouse on Flickr?

PR people (who work with them on a daily basis) are already aware that these tools are also a great tool for journalists. So only someone very naive should think that there’s a divide that people will respect (“Oh — I won’t look at their Twitter or Facebook accounts because that’s personal, and I’m only interested them in a business context”)

By encouraging our colleagues to label their accounts with their place of work, we are also encouraging them to be aware that (even in their private lives) they may be seen to represent us.

3. It prevents us from accidentally forgetting to disclose

OK — everyone should disclose where appropriate. We know that. But in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget. It’s particularly easy to forget when you have only 140 characters to express yourself “I work for Porter Novelli, a public relations company that represents brand x” will take up more than 50% of your available space.

4. It prevents us from “accidentally” “forgetting” to disclose

Imagine that sentence being read out with heavy-handed sarcastic finger quotes.

There are all sorts of schoolboy errors that we won’t be tempted to make if everyone who works for us is clearly labelled “Porter Novelli.”

Working in the nineties at media planning and buying agencies and creative agencies leaves me with an abiding memory of being asked to “click on any of our banners that you see while you’re surfing.” These days, thank God, technology and good auditing has put paid to this kind of abuse.

This kind of astroturfing (the term we use for faking grass-roots support) is the kind of behaviour we have to prevent. Leaving comments on forums and blogs, voting on polls, ‘seeding’ UGC campaigns with content or sending apparently spontaneous branded ‘consumer’ messages via Twitter or Facebook is exactly the kind of thing that junior staffers will be asked to do by people who don’t get it. The fact that all our staffers are marked with the equivalent of a digital watermark prevents people from us as a company asking them to misuse their personal accounts.

I talked above about “personal networks” and “personal brands” — it’s essential that we as a company don’t ask people to exploit those; we want to hire people who have good networks. We want to help our colleagues develop those networks and brands. But while they work with us, we want them to use them on behalf of our clients. You can see how easy it would be unthinkingly to ask them to abuse them. By asking our colleagues to put the name of our employer on their accounts, I think we take a step towards preventing that.

This is a complicated idea — but one I hope that I’ve now explained better.

5. It prevents us from accidentally astroturfing again

Remember, Porter Novelli is a global organization. Different territories are at different stages of their digital market development. This is both an advantage (we can better forecast and plan for what future developments will look like in those markets) and a disadvantage (we may be condemned to repeat mistakes we — or our competitors — have made in more developed markets.)

Does this make it clearer?

To those, like Willem, who think that we’re being too strict I’d ask — does this make more sense? Do you still believe that there is “public and private?” Do you think that we’re simply doing this to advertise ourselves and control our employees, or do you think that we are doing it (as I suggested) to moderate our behaviour as a company, and freeing up our colleagues to experiment with social media?

What can I do to improve this? Now you know what we’re trying to do, all suggestions will really be welcomed.

There’s a school of thought that says that what’s important in social media is to attempt to create debate, not consensus.

Peter Hay from PR Week and I appear to have been rather successful in this. This morning, PR Week published an article, Twitter has suddenly exploded. Almost immediately, Twitter (or at least our particular neighbourhood of Twitter) suddenly exploded.

One or two people were rather scathing: suggesting that the stats demonstrated that Peter and I didn’t understand the “essence of Twitter” or that they were “obviously flawed”, or that we had “redefined shallow”.

Indeed (horror of horrors) some people even went so far to suggest that Porter Novelli had ginned up the results to put us at the top. In fact, in PR week’s list, we came second. But no doubt this was a Machiavellian ploy — it’s details like those, Pooh Bah would say, that “give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

I joke, but I can completely understand people’s strong feelings about this; PR Week was torn between a desire to cover our approach (and give credit where appropriate) and a need to keep the article readable and relevant to the greater proportion of their readers.

I’d like to share our methodology with you all so that you can repeat our experiments, should you so wish. After that, I’ll talk about the methodology that we were originally going to follow,

Tomorrow (once it’s had a chance to blow over), I’ll post some quick thoughts on the whole storm-in-a-Tweetcup thing.

Methodology

We used Michael Litman’s (@litmanlive) list of UK Media Tweeple. This was based on original work by Stephen Davies (@stedavies) but has been wikified so that agencies can (should they so choose) keep their information up to date.

Lots of people on the list were pretty borderline — there are in-house teams and vendors there, as well as agencies with a significantly broader remit than simply “PR”. I am a relative newcomer to the world of PR, and was more than happy to let PR Week define who is PR and who isn’t, but we erred on the generous side. We are Social, for example, made the cut to be on the research list.

Had we had the time, I’d have sent a note out over Twitter asking everyone to update their entries. Time, however was not on our side, and I didn’t even get around to hinting at what I was doing until the evening of the 23rd.

By then though it was already clear that I had a large job on my hands; there were almost 350 people on the list. On the whole, the UK PR community should be proud of how quickly it has reacted to the whole “Twitter thing”.

I took the list, published it as a Google Spreadsheet and — using a Yahoo! Pipe that I adapted for the purpose, queried the Twitter API for the summary data on each account on that list.

Twitter gives you all sorts of interesting information, but what we were grabbed were the following:

• Date joined Twitter
• Number of Friends
• Number of Followers, and
• Number of Updates.

That allowed us to create this spreadsheet, from which the stats mentioned in the PR Week article were taken.

Again, Porter Novelli took no part in the editorial decisions (although they seem pretty straightforward.) You will recall that Peter and Gemma were writing for a general readership, not for the Twitterverse!

Methodology we’d like to have used

Those of you who’ve read my blog before will know that my real interest in Twitter is more complex than the previous methodology would suggest. When Peter and I first discussed the exercise on Monday we had been hoping to do something more along the lines of the network analysis that we’ve been fiddling with at Porter Novelli.

Here are some points to bear in mind.

First of all, not all followers are created equal. If I have only ten followers, but they each have a thousand followers, that may mean I have more opportunity-to-influence than if I had a hundred followers with only ten followers each.

More to the point, the fewer people those ten people follow themselves, the more influence I wield within their networks (if I am one of only ten people they follow between them, I will have greater share-of-voice than if I am merely one of ten thousand.)

Secondly, the followers whom I don’t share with the rest of the network count for more than those who follow several (or many) of my peers. The more “exclusive” my follower-base, the greater my control over on the flow of information within the overall network, and the greater my value to the network.

I’ve been doing some work looking at unduplicated reach among twitter networks. For example, looking at Porter Novelli’s own global Twitter footprint, it was interesting to see how many of our contacts were duplicated.

So what Peter and I really wanted to do was to use some of these techniques on the PR Week data set. For those of you with a mathematical (or social network analytical) bent, we were going to run some eigenvector shizzle on the whole bizzle. Oh — and look at unduplicated reach for the various companies on the list.

What went wrong?

It was always an ambitious project. The 344 people who were under analysis had a fairly daunting 95K followers between them. The Twitter API lets you make 100 requests an hour, and each request returns data on up to 100 followers. Even if we were to assume that everyone had followers in nice tidy multiples of 100 (they don’t) then it would have taken 9.5 hours to download the data using one Twitter login.

The trick of course, is to use more than one login. Tim Hoang (@timhoang) and I quickly registered 50 temporary accounts to power the API requests. Twitter’s terms have historically been quite relaxed about this sort of thing, and we’ve always been very careful to try and stay within the spirit of those terms.

But.

Twitter has been hit lately by a bunch of bad things (like spam bots and pyramid schemes), and they’re tightening up their defenses. This past weekend, they’ve tightened up a lot, and things that used to be fine just aren’t.

We managed to collect information on only around 60K followers out of the 95K. This was too large a margin of error to correct (although we made several attempts to do so).

So — we had to abandon our grand plans, and revert to the simple counts approach (as detailed above.) This won’t stop us trying to improve our processes, but we’ll need to talk to Twitter about that.

Some thoughts

Kate Hartley from Carrot Communications (who sits with me on the PRCA’s Digital Working Group) joked that it’s strange how PR people create research-for-news-stories for their own clients on a daily basis, but are miffed when their own techniques are used against them. At one level, I agree with her — I think that some people are probably disappointed that they aren’t the ones with their names on the research.

But there’s more to worry about than that. Here are my thoughts.

1. For God’s sake get over yourselves! We’re talking about Twitter here, not the economy. Worry about something important, why don’t you? I still can’t get over the fact that — when a pilot managed land an airplane on a river, the story we all tell each other is “how it broke on Twitter.” What — the story’s not about a man who magically landed a f*cking plane on a f*cking river? Are we really getting this right?
2. How influential you are on Twitter is not a real thing. It doesn’t really matter how many Twitter friends you have (although I’ve now got heaps, thank you very much!) Context is everything. My boss, who runs Porter Novelli’s EMEA network and sits on our Executive Committee is on Twitter. She is more influential than I, and will continue to be, no matter how many Twitter followers I accrue.

   Twitter is just one channel through which exercise your influence. Don’t give up on your blogs, your Facebook pages, your Amazon reviews, or your Last.fm playlists or your IM friend lists, for God’s sake. But remember, it’s who you are, and your relationships that matter; your “context”, and not your “counts.”

3. The really interesting question isn’t “who are the Twitterati” or twitter influencers. I’m interested in the Twitter thing mainly because I want to see how well it reflects real life. After today, I’d probably say that it doesn’t very well, wouldn’t you?

Be warned — I may just follow this research up with some research on “how many phone numbers PR people have on their mobile phones.”

Twixdagen does for Swedish politics what Tweetminster does for British. Hampus Brynolf (@hampusbrynolf) just sent me a link to this map he’s pulled together for their blog:

You’ll need to click through to his blog post to experience and interact with the map properly.

Hampus says that he used aiSee to generate an SVG file which could then be opened in Illustrator to “search and replace” on shapes, colors and lines (which explains the good-looking graph.)