Simonsays

Paddick's a Qwitter

I blogged back during the London Mayoral elections about Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick using Twitter as a tool for a virtual Q&A session with the electorate.

Well it seems that his dalliance with the tool has ended pretty soon after the election happened.

Personally I think it is slightly worse that he is signing off with a "I'm winding down now" message which kind of implies that he has been a regular user of Twitter rather than what was essentially a engagement-initiative-as-PR-stunt.

Maybe that is a bit of an extreme take on it, but wouldn;t it be more authentic to just say: "I tried this during the election to engage with voters and now the election is over I'm signing out."?

Hat tip: Dominic Campbell

Technorati tags: Twitter, Brian Paddick, Politics, Mayoral Elections

*UPDATED* Brian Paddick reaches out to Londerners via Twitter

Hot on the heels of Lynne Feathestone MP and No 10 Downing Street twittering I received an email last night from the Lib dem's Head of Innovation, Mark Pack, telling me that the Lib Dem mayoral candidate, Brian Paddick, is holding the world's first interview using Twitter.

Mark's email told me:

"Liberal Democrat Mayoral Candidate Brian Paddick is taking part in an exclusive interview on Twitter, the popular text messaging service, the first time this has been done by a UK politician.

Brian Paddick will be offering an exclusive interview to all of his ‘followers’ on Twitter.  Users who have signed up to follow Brian Paddick on Twitter will be able to text a question and answers will then be sent to the questioners and posted on his official website."

I was struck by two things:

1. the emphasis of Twitter as a text messaging service
2. the offer of an exclusive interview with brian via Twitter

I wondered why Twitter was being sold as a text messaging service when it is soooo much more. I suspected it was due to sell the idea of Twitter to a wide audience. Alan Johnson's deputy leadership campaign manager, Stuart Bruce, confirmed as much to me via Twitter this morning.

The second point is more subtle and seems to indicate the Paddick team's lack of understanding that Twitter, like other social web tools, are shifting the balance between organisations and their stakeholders.

The simple fact that Paddick is on Twitter means he is open to conversation with his 'followers' - so why set up a specific 'exclusive interview'? Or perhaps they are using the story as a neat media hook!

Either way, Ken Livingstone isn't on Twitter and despite the Tories new media savvy Boris and his team consider online debates as not involving "real people". At least Paddick is opening up a new front for direct engagement with his followers/supporters.

*UPDATE* Stephen Waddington reports back via Twitter that he posed a question 20 hours ago and is still awaiting a response.

Technorati tags: Brian Paddick,  London mayoral elections,  Lib Dems, Twitter

Twixtr: Twitter for images?

Haven't had a play around with Twixtr yet but it looks like an image-enabled Twitter. Sounds good, but Dave Winer has some other thoughts:

"Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter.

To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API.

To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures."

Technorati tags: Twixtr, Twitter, Dave Winer

Edelman Trust Barometer 2008: live twitter

Tomorrow sees the UK launch of the Edelman Trust Barometer, the de facto indicator of 'trustworthiness' across business, politics, media and civil society.

Edelman's Global President and CEO, Mr Richard Edelman, will be in town to discuss the findings and what they mean for the PR landscape. He'll be joined by UK CEO Robert Phillips, former Sunday Telegraph editor, Patience Wheatcroft and Daily Mail columnist and political commentator, Quentin Letts.

As previous years have shown - expect a significant (and rising) level of influence from 'people like me' and social media.

I'll be live twittering the event, as will Edelman's European President and CEO, David Brain.

For updates try following http://twitter.com/simoncollister and http://twitter.com/davidbrain from 8am GMT.

Technorati tags: Edelman Trust Barometer, Richard Edelman, Trust, Twitter,
 

First MP to liveblog during parliamentary debate

The Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome, Sam Coates, sent me a fascinatng email this week telling me about possily the first example of liveblogging from the backbenches of Parliament!

Sam told me that the Tory MP for Harwich, Douglas Carswell, posted live to the ConservativeHome CentreRight blog while waiting to be called during a debate on the need to review the parliamentary calling procedures. He posted via his Blackberry.

Douglas reports:

"I write this sitting in the chamber of the House of Commons listening to a "debate" on education and skills.  It is now so utterly plodding and pedestrian that the gaggle of Italian tourists up in the visitors gallery got up and left after five minutes."

I bet liveblogging wasn't proposed in the review on making Parliament more accessible to the public.Maybe that's because live reports would be as damning as this one!

Douglas then offers us some constructive thoughts on reform:

"Rather than the current 15 minute time limit on backbench speeches, why not have 3 minute limits, but allow speakers to make several contributions?  That might force Honourable Members to say what they mean, and allow points to be developed."

Well, he may have hit on something there. His proposed changes would certainly make the debates more conversational, rather than a series of broadcast speeches from Members.

Another change that would be great for parlimentary democracy (maybe) would be to screen a live Twitter backchannel during debates.

How much fun would that be? During grand ministerial speeches you could see tweets scrolling across the Chamber reading:

• "Ask him where the money for his second house came from!"
• "Those statistics are used out of context."
• "Your flies are undone!"

I think it would be great.

Technotrati tags: ConservativeHome, Douglas Carswell, Parliament, democracy, Twitter

Blogs: that was then, this is now

Happy New Year one and all. As we enter 2008 I thought I’d flag a great post from Richard Bailey reflecting on blogs as mature communications tools and their place in the online mediasphere.

Richard considers how blogs were viewed when they first hit the mainstream somewhere around 2003:

“Compared to newspaper or magazine journalism, blogs seemed ill-considered, ill-informed and unaccountable.”

But that was then and this now. The growth of social networks has become exponential and Richard suggests if we compare blogs to social networks it’s fair to say “blogs seem considered, valuable and highly literate. The froth has gone, but there's something substantial left.”

I agree and this situation has been hinted at last year with analysis of Dave Sifry’s State of the Live Web report which showed a distinct slow down in blog growth leading some to speculate that blog networks were consolidating with the strong ones surviving and becoming even more important as online influencers.

Even more interestingly, Richard plots a chart of the publishing ecosystem ranked according to speed, reflectiveness, interactivity and immedicacy. As publishing tools blogs sit firmly between traditional media and newer tools such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook etc.

According to these criteria, Richard suggests blogs now occupy a relatively important lace in the media/publishing ecosystem. A position whereby they offer the PR professional a tool with “speed [and] a high degree of reflection.”

Put like that it seems pretty clear that the dust has settled around blogs and we can see where the strengths/weaknesses of social media tools lie. In turn this can give us a steer as to which ones are right for different PR programes or campaigns.

I don’t know where Richard got his charts from, but I think it’d be a good idea to continually revise them as new products/tools evolve so that we can build a kind of Gartner Hype Cycle for the online publishing/media tools. If anything it’ll help guide PR practitioners towards the right tool for their campaigns and communication/marketing programmes.

Technorati tags: Richard Bailey, blogs, publishing, media, communications

7 Twitter Archetypes

My decision to start twittering again has tied together nicely with a post by Will McInnes all about Twitter types. Which one are you.....

7 observed Twitter archetypes

These are the archetypes I've noticed using Twitter.

1. Mickey ME-ME-ME!
2. Tina Trivia
3. Freddy Fragmentation
4. Polly Phoney
5. Cedric Spam-again
6. Lucy Local
7. Ozzie Occasional

I'm convinced a wine-loving Mickey Me-Me-Me broke my previous phone which couldn't handle the unrelenting  text updates ;-)

Technorati tags: Twitter, Will McInnes

Twitter and the 'intention economy'

I came across the concept of the 'intention economy' early this week - although surprisingly it seems to be a concept that's been around since 1996.

It's a very interesting idea, with some major repurcussions for micro and macro-economics if taken to its logical conculsion. Doc Searls invented the term in an essay he wrote for Linux Journal:

"The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them."

But as fascinating as it is I can't help but think that the intention economy is a long way off.

So that was Monday morning in my RSS feeds, and then Monday evening lying in bed (steady!) I read an article by Jemima Kiss in Media Guardian about the micro-blogging, life-streaming, etc tool, Twitter.

There, hidden in the final couple of paras, is a telling insight of two very important things. The first is the possibility of a revenue model for Twitter - a long held Holy Grail. The other could be a sniff of the makings of the intention economy:

"Twitter has ambitious plans for growth, [Ev] Williams explained. A group feature is being developed, a better way of browsing a user's history, and there are also some long-awaited plans to monetise the service. The strategy will involve branded channels, so companies like Woot would pay to reach those very valuable, loyal users."

It could have been the glass of red-wine, but companies paying a premium to reach out to customers as they tweet about products they want or need sounds could be the start of the intention economy.

Technorati tags: intention economy, Doc Searls, Media Guardian, Jemima Kiss, Twitter

*UPDATED* Twitter is about people, not technology... how many times?

*UPDATED*Further to my previous thoughts on online identity, Doc SearlsDave Winer has a nifty little post about how we engage with social networks (including Twitter) differently.

"When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences ...

On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product."

Very astute point (obviously)... and something PR and marketing people should take into account when thinking about measurement.

We are dealing with social tools being put to social uses. It's not simply a case of measuring Twitter as Twitter. It's about measuring Twitter as totally diverse group of Twitterers each using the tool for different purposes

That's the difficulty (impossiblility?). And the usual metrics suspects probably aren't the right people to be doing the measuring.

Technorati tags: social networks, Twitter, Dave Winer, measurement, metrics