I have an odd habit – I collect snippets of celebrities’ musings about social media. For instance, this from Mike Skinner:
one of the things I’ve come to lately is that social media isn’t really for content providers, it’s for the people and if you place something on the internet, that’s all your social media done….
Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things. They just emulate. It’s scary man, simulation life that we’re living. It scares me.
Not that I always agree with what they have to say, but their perspective can sometimes be quite interesting. Probably because their view of interaction via social media is quite different to yer average. After all, whereas many people are concerned with getting someone (anyone!) to notice them online, celebrities have a surfeit of attention to deal with.
A few years back there was a Twitter search tool (I can’t find it now) that allowed you to swap your keyword for another in the results that were returned. Putting your name in place of @ladygaga and seeing the flood of messages (not all of them pleasant) was eye-opening.
With social media you can’t check into a hotel under a fake name for a bit of respite. The fans are always there, screaming outside the window.
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.
I got a new laptop when I joined Made Media and spent a happy evening going through all the applications I’d downloaded to my old laptop, only installing the ones that would actually be of use to me.
This is really another of those posts intended to serve as a checklist for my future self. So next time I get a new laptop and want to start from scratch rather than just transferring everything straight across, this might be handy. In the meantime, you never know, it might be useful to someone else.
Here are the applications that made the cut:
First of all, I have iWork and Office for Word/Pages, Excel and Keynote (good grief, I love Keynote).
Audacity (with LAME for mp3 export and Soundflower) – for recording audio and doing very light bits of editing (with extras for mp3 export and recording streamed audio, respectively).
Camouflage – sometimes my desktop gets a bit untidy, so if I’m doing any training or presenting then this is the virtual rug I sweep everything under.
Chrome – a nice, quick browser and my day-today preference.
Dropbox – for sharing files between our teams but also allowing me to work between computers when I need to.
Evernote – I’ll work out how I want to use this one day. At that point I’m pretty I’ll kick myself for not getting into it sooner.
JustNotes – a desktop wotsit for accessing Simplenote. This is the reason I don’t use Evernote (yet) and it was a revelation when I discovered it. Up until then I was cluttering the place up with a proliferation of TextEdit files.
Kod – I don’t often have to mess about with code but, for when I do, Kod will do the job.
Last.fm – for keeping track of what I’m listening to
MarsEdit – my offline blogging tool of choice. Good for writing on the go and a better place to work on drafts than WordPress. If only it synced between laptops.
Paparazzi – a nice little screenshot app with different enough functionality to Skitch to make it useful in certain scenarios.
Propane – a desktop client for Campfire, for internal office chatting.
Pukka – a lovely little social bookmarking client that replaces the functionality Delicious removed from their bookmarklet and adds some more handy little touches.
RadioAunty – a nice little player for listening to BBC radio.
Screenflow – a very good, simple piece of screencasting software.
Skitch – just a lovely tool for capturing screenshots, quickly cropping/resizing images and all sorts of other little things. I’m not sure what I’d do without it.
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.
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?
Social by Social – “A practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact”. Buy the book for a tenner and/or download the PDF for free
BBC – The Knowledge Exchange Blog: ugc@thebbc – “a year-long project which produced a huge amount of data, and proved to be the first significant study of UGC at a broadcast organisation”
2009 MTV VMA Tweet Tracker | MTV.com – VMA Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] is a real-time graph of Twitter activity that highlights the social news surrounding the Video Music awards by aggregating the most popular terms being tweeted around this event. Developed by Stamen Design and social media monitoring company Radian6,
I like Delicious a lot. It’s like the Internet’s version of a gated community, but one that’s open to any content as long as it meets some fairly simple criteria – it must be good enough for someone to want to bother bookmarking it with Delicious.
It’s nicely flexible too, with many uses. I ‘follow’ a bunch of interesting people to see what they reckon is worth bookmarking. The only problem is, for one reason or another, I don’t tend to visit the site very much.
Twitter‘s nicely flexible too, and also has many uses. Unlike Delicious I follow Twitter a lot (usually via Tweetie). So, what I’ve done, is plug an RSS feed from my Delicious network into a new Twitter account (using Hootsuite to do that). That way new links will plonk into the stream of updates I follow, or I can check the profile if I feel the need.
This isn’t yet another post banging on about how great socia media is, ok? It’s a glorified links round-up. Sure, I might want to prove a point, but it’s mainly a round-up of useful scraps of info.
Just wanted to make that clear.
For a bit of background, the Birmingham Post printed a piece by John Lamb, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce’s Press & PR Manager, today in which he castigated social media – seemingly Facebook updates in particular (although Twitter and MySpace got a mention too). Dave Harte and Jason Hall have pretty much covered my thoughts on the matter.
Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with giving social media a kicking if it’s done right, but John Lamb’s attempt was so clumsy and unbalanced that I’ve been moved to provide some redress.
So, as John cherry-picked the most banal things he heard via social networks (mainly Facebook, I think) over the past week, so I’ve picked out the most useful things I’ve discovered via Twitter in the past 24 hours.
Fusions is a space for organisations or individuals to explore new, potential projects, forge partnerships and share funding opportunities (via @wesharestuff)
The Birmingham Bead Shop is setting up at the Custard Factory (just down the road from my office) and blogging about it (via @getgood)
In other Custard Factory news, Rooty’s is being refitted and there’s been mention of ‘fine dining’ (via @stevegerrard)
I could, if I wanted, watch a live stream of today’s AmbITion event in Bristol (via @hadleypaul)
Karl Binder is developing a website for enabling collaborative writing projects. The working title is Screenbound (via @karlbinder)
The RSC have a photography-related event with Ellie Kurttz at their open day on Sunday 19 July (via @amyclarke_uk)
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s press officer now has a Twitter profile (via @tmstvns)
I saw a frankly hilarious video of Sepp Blatter falling over (via @lovelychaos)
There’s a bloggers/tweeters/whateverers meet-up in Birmingham on Monday. Birmingam Chamber folk welcome, I’m sure (via @peteashton)
Following a visit to Birmingham the other week, Citilab Barcelona are arranging their first social media clinic for Sept/Oct (via @cataspanglish)
The Art of With asks and answers the question – “what do the advent of the web, collaborative practice and open source ways of working mean for the arts and art organisations?” (via @clarered)
I got some nice responses to my message that I’m off teaching in Guyana this summer
Tonight’s episode of The Home Show features a guy who looks a bit like me. Only chunkier (via @editorialgirl)
Actually, I’ve only gone back five hours but I reckon that’s plenty.
Of course, I’m not saying everything in that list would be of interest to everyone, just me – but then I follow people who interest me. Seeing as how all social media does is help people to communicate, perhaps John Lamb’s real problem is his network.
Of all the Twitter visualisations I think this is my favourite so far.
It’s a Yahoo! Pipes/Google Charts mashup made by Xefer which plots the frequency of tweets and replies by day and hour. More importantly it looks kinda cool.
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.
As previously advertised, on Friday I made my way down to The O2 to have a nose about. I was there to check out the filming of a new advert highlighting all the goodly things available at the venue (priority ticket booking, access to private areas, etc) if you’re on the O2 network.
I gather that my involvement was part of a proof of concept – seeing what it was like to have bloggers involved in documenting what goes on behind the scenes. Essentially I’d been brought along to blog, tweet, photo and video lots and was given pretty much unfettered access to do so. There are worse ways to spend a Friday.
Anyway, I met up with @benrmatthews (who was doing remarkably well considering he’d been hosting 200 or so Twitterers at the inaugral Twestival the night before) and @drewb and we were ushered into a strange world of horses, wrestlers, bands, dancers and all sorts of other weird and wonderful things.
There’s no point me describing what went on because I was documenting things as I went along. So, for a flavour of the day here are my tweets (to be read from the bottom up):
Here are my photos (there are more from Ben and Drew – we tagged everything o2bloggers):
And here are a couple of videos I streamed (and recorded) live using Bambuser, a nice little service that I’d all but forgotten about. Please bear in mind that these couldn’t have been any more spur of the moment so there’s no incisive questioning or anything. The first is with Ed from O2 who explained what the ad is for:
The second is with JP, O2′s Digital Communications Manager – the guy who monitors the internet and responds to O2-related problems, queries, etc that people might have:
Some other stuff from the day, bulletpoint-style:
We got a tour of the building from the events manager which was pretty sweet – they don’t usually do tours.
Drew, Ben and I were initially the subject of 5 mins of curiosity. Sample question – “Blogging… why?” Actually that was as deep as the conversation went.
Actually, saying that, one of the stylists was talking about getting some sort of website together so I spent a couple of minutes setting up a blog here – Lucy Harvey. I showed her what some companies around Birmingham are using blogs for which impressed her so I’m hoping she makes some use of it.
The editor was Joe Guest. I wish I’d chatted with him more because he worked on the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad as well as music videos for U2, The Streets, Kasabian and Dirty Vegas. He looked kinda busy though.
I got the distinct impression that if this wrestler didn’t want me to exist it wouldn’t take him much to snuff me out. Dude was huge.
The O2′s (v swish) VIP bar is going to be the venue for a hack day sometime in October. More info on that to come.
Anyway, it was a good day. I got to poke around the venue and saw some things you certainly don’t see every day. It was fun to really put Bambuser, Flickr and Twitter to work for a few solid hours, even if the best lesson I learnt was about how quickly an iPhone’s battery can be used up.
I also enjoyed meeting the guys from Hotwire and am hoping to keep in touch, especially as some of Ben’s side-projects (the Twestival meet-up and Bright One, a PR company for charities and such) might maybe have some overlap with some of my own.
