Fight, fight, fight...

I have no real value to add around this particular gem that has been proferred by one of my favouritest columnists, as it speaks for itself. Paul Carr - he of acid tongue and deadly quick wit -has got himself in to a bit of a bundle with Orlowski over at The Register, all in the name of charity event 'Twestival'.

Over to Mr Carr: "Orlowski, in the highly likely event that you haven't heard of him, is what I would call a professional troll. A "journalist" whose oeuvre is to spout views so calculatingly dumb – global warming? scientific evidence, schmientific evidence – and to rely on wordplay so pathetic – Wikipedia users? "wiki fiddlers" more like! – that the editors of the Register regularly disable comments on his diatribes, lest a child accidentally crawl across a keyboard and beat him in an argument. He hates Wikipedia, he hates peer-to-peer filesharing ("freetards!"), he hates basically anything popular or successful or fashionable. Which all serves to explain why, above all else, he really, really hates Twitter.

In fact, Orlowski hates Twitter, and its users, so much that he decided to summon up all of his trollish powers to write an article hacking Twestival, and its charitable intentions, to death. Faced with a forest of positive statistics and coverage of the event, he sniffed around – like a pig nudging aside truffles in search of a turd – until finally he dug up a single negative fact. Donations to Twestival's online radio station, Twestival.fm, had failed to reach their $20K target, with pledges coming in at a little over $4K. Compared to the huge totals pledged through other channels, it was an irrelevant disappointment. An irrelevant disappointment on which Orlowski based his entire coverage of the event".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-charity-trolls

You can read the actual email back and forth on Paul's blog here: http://www.paulcarr.com/can-you-guess-what-my-columns-going-to-be-about-this-week/

Google FAIL makes Twitter Headlines

Clearly this blog is not Twitter. I say that because aside from the obvious reasons (look around) its taken me more than three days to write about the little drama that follows, whereas it took Twitter less than 20 minutes. Over the weekend those of you glued to Twitter would have almost certainly seen Google was having an issue or two. The search engine was returning searches and listing every page as potential malware with the warning ‘this site may harm your computer. The malfunction which Google later apologised for lasted no more than half an hour and in an era past might not have even been a story unless a journalist happened to be using the search engine during this time. Yet with such discussion around the issue taking place so quickly on Twitter it seemed to emphasise or underline the event and make it mainstream news... http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/31/google-blacklist-internet

We’ve already seen Twitter become the source for first information about news stories which will later blanket the traditional media (the plane crash photos first emerged via twitter for example) but we are beginning to see with increasing frequency, twitter conversation impacting the news stories that actually make it in to the mainstream media.

What do you think? Without the Twitter conversation would Google have taken less of a hammering?

Quick post on Trust and Twitter

Well who’d have thunk it – trust in corporations is at an all time low according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer http://www.edelman.co.uk/trustbarometer (or at least the lowest in its ten year history). Is it surprising news? No, not really. As the report points out these figures follow hot on the heels of twelve months of bank bail outs, dodgy Illinois Senators and fraud scandals that we didn’t really think could happen again after Enron.

(Similarly low on the shock-o-meter is the accompanying fact that trust in Government has taken a beating too. Which begs the question, why then, were so many respondents (3:1) keen that Government intervene to regulate industry or nationalise companies in an effort to restore public trust?But that’s a bit of an aside.)

Well why is trust so important? 77 per cent of the report’s survey base say that they have refused to buy from a company they distrusted so oh dear, that means potential loss of sales and cash for distrusted business.

According to the report the majority of respondents trust the opinions of independent parties (or friends...?) more than corporate spokespeople. 34 per cent of respondents admit that they’ve shared negative company opinions and 42 per cent have shared positive opinions. Again, its not news to marketers that consumer word of mouth activity can impact sales but the old adage ‘ give a customer bad service and they’ll tell seven people (I’m probably hashing that right up aren’t I?) hadn’t taken in to account new technology and new communications practices.

Give me bad service and I’ll tell my 150 followers on Twitter – but I’m only a newbie - Russell Brand, by tomorrow afternoon I expect, will be able to tell the entire English speaking world. It’d be a bit of an oversight not to stay in touch with these folk wouldn’t it? Monitor who’s talking about you on Twitter, offer information to those that are interested, resolve problems for those who are having bad experiences with your company and make those negative experiences positive experiences with your brand.

If you’re looking for inspiration as to how to use Twitter and blogs and all that good stuff to better your company brand then you could do a lot worse than read this book by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens, ‘Tactical Transparency’, check it out at http://www.tacticaltransparency.com/ and let me know what you think...

So here goes...

I thought about starting a blog this time last year – filled with the kind of brash optimism that only a brand new year can inspire. Within two days (which to be fair is quite a long period of time for my new year’s resolutions to last) I began to feel like maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Really, what did I have to say that was important enough for people to take time out of their day to read about? Um. And that’s where the good intention ended – with a crisis of confidence and what I now know to be a misunderstanding about blogging – the notion that its about one way communication i.e me telling you a story. So a year on, what’s different, why am I back and actually making it one step further and writing my first blog post? Actually, you can thank (or blame) Twitter for that.

Over the past few months I’ve got involved in Twitter although initially suffering from the ‘oh my god, I’ve got nothing interesting to say’ paralysis, it quickly became clear how useful a communication tool it is. And one so easy to use that even I’m managing it, after all, who can’t manage a 140 character update on what they’re doing?

I’ve heard people dismiss Twitter – ‘who wants to know what someone’s eaten for breakfast’ but its so much more than that - it’s about building connections, finding people with mutual interests, sharing news and views in quicker time than any other format I’ve ever seen. And as a result I’ve built a whole new network of tweeple who keep me informed and entertained wherever I am in the world. It’s the new, shiny carrier pigeon, the lung friendly smoke signal (although I think I AM addicted).

And so if Twitter is ‘micro-blogging’ and I’m enjoying it then logic dictates that blogging can’t be that much harder, and perhaps offers twice the reward (new year optimism in evidence again).

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Twitter has made the concept of blogging so much easier for me to grasp and now I can’t wait to explore more, to learn more and to talk more with all of you. So here goes...