PR spam on Twitter – it could be smart (but it’s probably not)

Look at this mess.

There’s been a rash of this stuff lately. It irritates me in a way that’s hard to explain but usually I ignore it – we were all new to this stuff once upon a time. Thing is, not only is this cack-handed and lazy but, because LDR London claim to be a decent agency, some poor sod must be paying for this.

It’s not as if I don’t try to help. There’s a contact page on Created in Birmingham - it has an email address, a contact form, a postal address and, in case that’s not enough, there are some step-by-step instructions explaining how to get onto CiB.

For that matter, because I don’t use the account in a particularly conversational manner, the @createdinbrum Twitter bio says “@ChrisUnitt is the person to chat to”. And anyway, why would I want to follow a Twitter account that spams people like that and just wants to send me a press release? That doesn’t sound fun.

It wasn’t just me who felt the need to point out the obvious:

But wait…

Is my minor hissy-fit missing a bigger point?

Perhaps the accepted wisdom – that a more personal, conversational approach is the way to go – is wrong, and the way to extract maximum value from Twitter is to use it ruthlessly efficiently.

Maybe, in a commercial context, it’s enough to use Twitter to follow your industry peers/contacts/sources of info and occasionally fire out messages to people who might be useful. You’d miss out on some of the deeper benefits that Twitter offers but they’re not guaranteed anyway and you’d be minimising your level of investment in the platform.

It’s not necessarily what I’d recommend, but I’m not blinkered enough to think there’s only one way of using a tool.

It strikes me as a risky tactic though. Beyond a bit of antagonism from people who feel like they’re being cynically targeted, there’s a chance Twitter will think you’re a spammer and shut you down – after all, it’s the way spam bots behave. I’ve tested this out and, on a new account, you can usually tweet the same message to about ten or so people before Twitter catches on and closes your account. Quite right too – imagine if every brand used Twitter like that.

The other week the British Museum tried this tactic to promote a debate with Grayson Perry. In a short period of time they put out 100 identical tweets to a range of people before Twitter applied the brakes – not because they were seen as spamming (presumably having an established account with around 65k followers gives you some leeway) but because they reached their daily limit (see info about limits here). This caused some issues.

Still, I didn’t see any complaints from anyone and presumably it had the effect of increasing the number of people who were aware of the debate and the museum’s Twitter account more generally. So that’s good.

In conclusion

Like I say, I think it’s a good thing to find new ways of using these tools. Accepted wisdom is fine and useful as long as it doesn’t limit invention and lead to needless homogeneity.

On the other hand, if you want me to promote your client for you, a little effort on your part wouldn’t go amiss.

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What’s the point of CiB?

I’ve been looking after Created in Birmingham for a while now. ‘Looking after’ being an odd but instinctive way of describing it. I didn’t set the site up, it wasn’t my idea in the first place and after my first stint I handed it on to someone else. Nevertheless, I’ve now been running CiB for over half its lifetime.

I’ve been having a bit of a think recently about what the site is, what is does and what I might do with it. The following is an unfinished chunk of that thinking.

Where CiB is at

Since it started almost five years ago, things have changed. It was set up to do a job and prove a point - that there’s plenty of interesting stuff going on in Birmingham and that a good way to show that off would be to spend pennies on the website and invest in the editorial. It worked although I don’t think enough people have taken the lessons on board yet.

Job done, then. From here on, anything else is a bonus.

In its first days there was funding available so time could be set aside for it. I think that was pretty much vital for getting it established but it’s had a life beyond that. Depending on your point of view, CiB is now either a hobby that I do in my spare time or it’s subsidised by my employer, Made Media. It’s probably most accurate to say that it’s a bit of both.

Thing is, quite a lot of people don’t treat it like it’s my hobby. That’s fine and I certainly don’t mind being asked to attend shows, launches, press calls, backstage tours, to give advice, do pro bono work and have chats over cups of coffee.

I’d love to do all of that but I can’t, interested as I am and no matter how much it might benefit me/them/others. I can only do what I can within the limits of my own spare time and interest/energy levels. At the moment I’m trying to manage peoples expectations of what I can do. (Side note to marketing/PR types – your time for that kind of thing tends to be paid for, mine’s not).

That all sounds a bit woe-is-me. It’s not meant to, but I think it points towards an appetite for something that CiB can’t currently fulfil.

This also ties in with something else I’m quite mindful of. Jon quite rightly pointed out that CiB is more preview than review. He’s right but I don’t think that’s a bad thing if a balance is kept.  I want to give context, tie things together, host discussions around important points and occasionally just point at things and say ‘look at that’. CiB has to be more than just an inefficient listings website.

A related pointed is that CiB is less exploratory than when I ran the site the first time round – in that I don’t discover things that are totally new to me so much – and that’s just because I know the landscape a lot better now.

CiB used to be an outsider’s view of the arts and culture scenes in Birmingham and that’s an interesting position to take. I’m not quite such an outsider to it these days. It means I’m able to give more context and background but I don’t tend to explain things so well to those who are less familiar with things.

Where our audience is at

CiB’s audience is more scattered than it used to be. Our web traffic dropped by two thirds between my two stints and has stayed roughly around that level. However, we’ve got 1500ish RSS subscribers (on a good day) and a currently dormant mailing list with 1200 people on it.

The main difference, which may well account for that dip in website traffic, is that we have 3900 followers on Twitter and 3400 on Facebook. A large chunk of people are getting their info via those social networks, not that we use those channels as well as we could or that each update/tweet reaches anything like the full extent of those audiences.

Point being that there’s plenty of ways for people to get their arts/culture news online and although the CiB blog underpins our activity it’s not the preferred/usual point of consumption for many.

Side note: I know this sounds very ‘push/broadcast’ and that social media is meant to be “all about the conversation, man”. Spout that rubbish at me and I’ll come at you with a brick.

My Twitter/Storify experiment

This is the thing that got me writing this post. On 2 June I wanted to write a post but was struggling for something to write about. It occurred to me that there was plenty on Twitter I could dip into.

So, what I did was I embedded Storify in a post and occasionally pulled notable tweets into it. I billed it as ‘A day in the life of a creative city’.

We got what I expected we’d get: news, announcements, whimsy, pictures, self-promotion, requests for help, peeks behind the scenes and people talking about shows they’d seen the night before. There was more there than I could ever cover in a month of blogging and I thought it was great.

What my Twitter/Storify experiment showed is that ‘everyone’ is publishing their own information now – with varying degrees of dedication and to varying audiences.

And when I say ‘everyone’ I mean the the full-time artists and the aspiring part-timers, the marketing teams and the audiences. That last one’s perhaps most interesting. In many cases they won’t be tweeting exclusively about art and culture in Birmingham but it was possible for me to draw a line around all of those things.

I acted as an aggregator (not, for goodness sake, a curator), applying a bit of an editorial steer by picking the stuff I wanted to make its way onto my website.

I should also add that I was looking at Twitter but it’s equally true that people are publishing information via (RSS enabled) websites, Facebook Pages, YouTube account and all sorts of other things.

Given all of this, what’s the point of CiB?

Pete always said that if CiB ‘worked’ then many more people would copy it. He said something along the lines of:

when there are 100 CiB’s, CiB will have done its job and won’t be needed any more

So everyone’s publishing arts and culture information online in Birmingham now. Everyone’s in a position to subscribe to the stuff that they find interesting. What’s the point of CiB? Have we reached the point that Pete was talking about?

I don’t think so and I don’t think we’re likely to.

Twitter’s great in many ways but it’s limited in its format, demographics and transcience. Finding all that information amidst the general noise of Twitter’s not that easy either. Widening things to all the other blogs and social networks, how many people will want to roll their own arts and culture news service?

People gravitate to established, trusted sources of information. CiB provides that. It’s been around long enough to collect people. It has a history. Having asked around, it seems it’s different things to different people:

• news headlines (to the folks who like the links round-ups especially)
• their homepage
• somewhere to get their events and activities promoted (or at least noted)
• a ‘daily ray of sunshine’

And all sorts of other things. So again, what should CiB do? Should it look to record and amplify the information published by others around the city? Should it be another (albeit probably slightly louder) voice amongst many? Should we try to cover things that nobody else will have access to? Should we scale up to better serve the organisations around town that are looking for an outlet for all their stuff?

Or should I really not stress it and treat it as a little blog that I use to talk about interesting arts/culture things in Birmingham and leave it at that?

What’s next?

Two things really. It’s CiB’s 5th birthday towards the end of this year and I know Pete’s been thinking about the effect the site has had in that time. He’ll approach and digest that thinking in his own way and I’m sure that’ll be really interesting to read.

For my part, I’m looking at how CiB can evolve into something a bit different. Maybe a bit bigger. I think it’s moved past the role it played in its early years and it needs to do something different – not better, just different.

Like I say, these are just some fairly unformed thoughts that point the way to the kind of things I’ve been thinking about. Any input from anyone would be gratefully received.

Some other stuff

Consider this the DVD extras. Here’s some other stuff about CiB which has figured into my thinking:

• We don’t chase hits. I could do that but at the moment I don’t want to go down the linkbait/SEO/content strategy/traffic building route. Why not?
• I could do better on the analytics side of things too
• If we shut tomorrow, what would the effect would be?
• I really enjoy running CiB but I’m going to leave Birmingham at some point (maybe soon, maybe not). What then?

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Talking about Created in Birmingham with Carl Chinn

On Sunday I was back on BBC WM again, this time with Kate Spragg to talk about Created in Birmingham, its success in the Weblog Awards and the creative scene in Birmingham generally.

Carl was an engaging host and quickly grasped that the most important thing the site tries to do, beyond publishing bits of news and info, is link together the various communities around the creative sector.

I managed to get in plugs for 7 Inch Cinema, the Flatpack Festival and Capsule as well as the Social Media Surgeries organised by Nick Booth. Possibly others too, I forget.

I quite enjoyed the experience and, unlike my last appearance, I didn’t feel the slightest bit nervous and managed to keep my umms and ahhs to a minimum. I think. I haven’t listened back to it yet. For anyone who missed it and fancies a listen it’s available on the iPlayer until Sunday 22 Feb.

Here’s the obligatory photo of myself, Carl and Kate:

Big thanks to Carl Chinn for having us and for Lyle Bignon for arranging it.

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Plugging CiB on BBC WM

This morning I was interviewed by the very nice Phil Upton on BBC WM’s breakfast show. I was there to talk about Created in Birmingham’s feat in winning the award of Best UK Blog 2008.

You can listen again here (I’m on at around 2 hours 20 mins) and, as soon as my audio player plugin starts behaving, I’ll insert the 5 minute snippet with me below. Actually, in the meantime you can download it here.

I’d just like to say thanks to Phil and his team for making me feel comfortable (I’ve not done much radio at all) and to Lyle Bignon for sorting it in the first place.

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How to write a ‘thank you’ post (or a collective memory)

As you may have heard the blog I run, Created in Birmingham, won the award of Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards.

As well as being pretty pleased with the outcome I also found the whole thing fascinating. I’ve got a list of blog posts I’d like to spin off but I thought I’d start with something that only ocurred to me because of this tweet from @anne_brand:

Anne (who I’ve never met) is linking to this thank you post on Created in Birmingham in which I thanked the usual people, mentioned one of the other blogs that I thought was particularly worthy of attention and listed everyone who had given their support online.

I’m guessing her tweet referred to the list of supporters, which ended up being rather long. Over 200 individual Twitter users mentioned CiB, as did 80-ish blogs/forum posts/organisations/etc. Keeping track of them all and compiling a post with links cost me a few hours sleep and a little piece of my sanity. It was important to do it though.

Why do it?

Here’s the thing – it didn’t occur to me to not do it. CiB won the award thanks to the efforts of the community around the site. It’s only right to thank everyone and the way to do that in internet-land is to link to them. So that’s what I did.  It took ages keeping track of everything and writing it up but it’s such a small price to pay really.

I have previous in this regard though – I did a similar job after the 2008 Supersonic Festival and Birmingham Opera Company’s ‘King Idomeo’. These ‘collective memories’ end up being an interesting document of who said what and I’ve always meant to write up how I go about collecting all the links.

How to do it

Twitter

I discovered the tweets using Twitter searches of the following keywords – ‘Created in Birmingham’ CiB’ ‘#votecib’ and ‘http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl’. By way of explanation:

• #votecib is a ‘hashtag’ – a unique identifier to attach to a message on Twitter. Messages on a similar subject can then be more easily found with a search (as long as people use the tag).
• http://tinyurl.com/9m6mwl is a shortened URL which stands in place of a longer one – when you’ve only got 140 characters to use in a message, characters are at a premium
  

To track these in real time, and respond with a thanks if/when necessary, I used Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a desktop-based Twitter client (that is to say it’s a little programme that you can use for reading your Tweets) which has a large panel display and allows separate panes for searches. It’s a bit industrial-strength as Twitter clients go but it doesn’t half get the job done. Heres what it looks like (click to enlarge):

It’s not quite as scary as it looks but it was a bit of a distraction. Whenever someone tweeted using one of those search terms I recorded their name in a text document I kept handy. That’s all there was to it.

The other links

I did a Google blog search and sorted results by date to see if anything relevant had been posted. I did that fairly regularly to keep up with any ongoing conversations and to see who was talking about us. I bolstered this with the odd search on Twingly and Icerocket too.

It can be quite hard to search for a post or comment left in a forum but I tried Boardreader, Boardtracker, and Omgili. The results were better than nothing, but only just.

At the end of the voting process I did a couple of regular Google searches (mainly combinations of the keywords ‘CiB’, ‘Created in Birmingham’, ‘ Best UK Blog’, ‘Weblog Awards’ and ‘vote’). Working up to page 20 of the results I came across a few new items.

Again, I recorded the URLs of any blogs I found in a text doc to be written up later.

Simplifying the process

A couple of things I could’ve (should’ve) used to lighten the load:

• Google Alerts (searches of blogs, news, the web, video and groups) delivered by email or RSS – there was really no need to keep searching when I could’ve just taken a sec to set this up and waited for the updates to roll in
• Social Media Firehose – a Yahoo Pipe that searches a swathe of sites and presents the results saving you the legwork

If I was monitoring these terms for longer than a week I’d have set these up straight away.

Any help?

This sort of thing can be applied to whatever you’re interested in. It would make sense (and is not at all egotistic) to have some sort of automated search set up for your name, although bad luck if your name is John Smith. Ditto for your company name and any topics of particular interest.

However, I’m sure there are easier and more comprehensive tools/techniques that I’m not yet aware of. Any suggestions would be welcome.

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Handing on Created in Birmingham

As I said in this interview with Localmouth, I put my involvement in CiB down to being in the right place at the right time and count my lucky stars for that.

When Pete introduced me to the CiB readers he said that he’d lost interest in running the site to some extent and that the ideas for taking CiB forward were “kinda complex and needed some serious planning”.  Someone else (that’d be me) would run the site for six months while that took place.

I took over in May this year.  At the end of October six months will have whizzed by.  Now, I’ve still got plenty of enthusiasm for the site, although I’m starting to feel the demands it makes on my time now that I have a run of other (possibly kinda related) projects stacking up.

So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to (for now at least, conclusion correct at time of writing) – I’ll probably pass on the baton in the new year, using January 2009 as a transitional month as it should be pretty quiet then.

Who will take over though?  Hmm, that’s the question.

I’ve got more time to think about it than Pete did, so some criteria is slowly forming in my noggin.  This isn’t set in stone by any means but I reckon the person taking over should be:

• comfortable with blogging and (if you’ll excuse the buzzword) social media generally.
• on the fringes of Birmingham’s art scene (if a part of it at all).  A narky commenter once described CiB as ‘the blind leading the blind’.  Erm… well yes, that’s kinda the point.  It’s meant to be someone feeling their way into the nooks and crannies of Birmingham’s creative scene.
• not putting lots of time into a good blog already.  CiB is meant to help foster blogging around Birmingham, not nick the people writing the good ones
• time rich.  There’s so much more that could be done with CiB (heck knows the ideas and opportunities are out there) but it takes time to keep on top of 400 or so RSS feeds and however many emails arrive daily.  It’s not really compatible with a regular day job (I work evenings and weekends a lot).
• friendly.  Of course.
• new to CiB, who hasn’t done anything on the site before.

Should I add anything to that list?  Or should I stop thinking about it so hard?

The problem is that list strikes off every good person who comes to mind.  Still, someone will pop up and be perfect for it, I’m sure.  There’s plenty of time between now and January to find them.

Anyway, the idea of this post was to get my thoughts in order more than anything – it’s NOT an invitation for applicants to put themselves forward so please don’t treat it as one (and certainly don’t email me about it unless you want the email copy/pasted into the comments below).  If you’re interested then the best thing would be for you to be blogging regularly and ‘well’, not that I’m a judge of that or anything.

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Surface Unsigned Festival’s PR Idiocy

Back in March of this year, Danny Smith wrote about Surface Unsigned, a battle of the bands kinda thing, on Created In Birmingham. His fairly innocent post has provoked a bit of fuss over the past couple of days. Here’s the story in a nutshell:

1. On 18 March, Danny posts about Surface Unsigned.
2. CiB regulars diss Surface Unsigned in the comments. Danny defends Surface Unsigned.
3. Danny comes back from the gig and, having done a bit of digging into the Surface Unsigned business model, reports that some aspects of the Surface Unsigned business model aren’t to his liking. On 20 March he quotes a single paragraph from the info pack Surface Unsigned give to bands.
4. Danny reiterates that he had a good time and that, from a punter’s point of view, it was good value for money.
5. Two months later, on 15 May, Surface Unsigned Festival Limited send Danny a letter threatening prosecution if the post is not taken down by 22 May.

You can see the email on Pete Ashton’s blog along with a bit more detail on the events. To my mind his analysis is spot on but I’d like to add a few extra thoughts of my own.

• There’s no copyright infringement. Danny didn’t quote a whole or substantial part of the information pack and if you tell me that the market value of that document was diminished by Danny’s post I will laugh at you, and you won’t like that. If anything it could almost be a confidentiality matter, but frankly that’s just grasping at straws.
• Surface Unsigned don’t just want the ‘offending’ paragraph removed, they want the whole post deleted. Their ‘copyright infringement solicitors’ would do well to find a court willing to order that. Makes me think it’s Danny’s digging in the rest of the post they’re worried about, not just their T&Cs.
• If Surface Unsigned had asked nicely then there’s a much better chance that a paragraph on a long-forgotten post would have been removed/paraphrased as a courtesy. Oh, but I forget – it’s the rest of the post they’re concerned about.
• As Danny said in the inital post ‘Surface don’t seem to do any promotion’. With PR pratfalls like this you can see why.

So what have we at Created In Birmingham done? Well, we’ve left the post up, obviously – we’re not going to stand for being bullied. As a compromise Pete’s gone and rewritten the post in LOLspeak (yes, I know translation of copywritten works is unauthorised, you’re missing the funny).

As Pete points out, the real problem for Surface Unsigned is to do with Google search results. In particular people linking to the original CiB post and using Surface Unsigned as the anchor text like I have here – Surface Unsigned.

It’d be interesting to hear what you, your friends and maybe even your forum buddies think about this whole thing.  Link back to the ‘offending’ blog post and chances are I’ll notice and give you a mention on CiB on Thursday.

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