So, there I was one morning watching TV coverage of protests in Egypt.
Across the cornflakes I’m seeing a bulletin with overnight pitched battles in Tahrir Square on the news.
This square in Cairo has been the symbolic battleground. Pro-democracy protestors hold it. The President’s men want them out.
Stones, bottles get thrown to dislodge them. Snipers too but the protestors hold on by their finger tips.
Checking Twitter the hashtag #egypt is filled with news reports, pictures and messages.
One catches my eye. A man proud that he knows one of the protestors who is there on the ground.
I retweet it thinking there may be people who follow me interested.
Minutes later one of those whose name I retweeted thanks me and several others for this act.
Let’s get this straight.
One of the protestors in Tahrir Square who has been fighting for what he believes in sends me a tweet to say ‘thank you.’.
The historian in me can’t handle that.
The geek in me is amazed.
What would a tweet from the French Revolution look like? Would @marieantoinette RT Let them eat #cake…?
But this is the 21st century, baby.
Now, those protestors are not figures on a screen. I know one of their names and contact – fleetingly – has been made. It’s Manal Hassan. His Twitter name is @manal. He is from Cairo.
I know in years to come what I’m saying now will seem as naïve as the school teacher who marvels at the photograph from the Crimean War.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitpics are the first draft of history.
I see that.
I’m now just hoping for a peaceful outcome. And I’m hoping Manal is alright.
It’s always good to show people Twitter when they don’t use it themselves.
Isn’t Twitter Stephen Fry talking about his tea? Isn’t it a load of noise? Isn’t it a waste of time?
I was sat with two people who don’t get Twitter.
Instead of explaining, I asked Twitter a question. It’s sometimes amazing the response you get.
I posted the following question:
Then several people started to chip in with what they thought.
@Mike_Rawlins posted something daft about #brewcamp. This is an event I’m looking to do with Mike and a few others.
Then @adrielhampton posted. It can amplify what matters to you. When I showed them his Twitter profile they started to get interested.
“He’s from America,” one said. “How do you know him?”
Through Twitter I told them.
“So who is Will Perrin?” they ask.
“Oh, he created the e-petition platform at 10 Downing Street. He does Talk About Local. They support hyperlocal blogs.”
I show them some hyperlocal sites they’ve not seen before.
I talk about Pits n Pots in Stoke-on-Trent and a few others.
We talked about how we could use the platform for the council.
Minutes passed.
I log back onto Twitter and there were a stack more replies waiting.
“Are they interested in anything?” one posted. “Find experts in that. Fast. Find their friends. Find themselves.”
It’s all good stuff.
Their faces change from confusion to awe.
“I’m starting to see the point now,” one said.
I show them hashtags. I show them how I can find out what’s happening at Stoke City, in local government and I show them the UK Govcamp hashtag #ukgc11.
I show them #xfactor because that’s a TV show that one likes.
I tell them that you can watch TV and get a real time running commentary on the programme you are watching via Twitter.
That gypsy wessing fly-on-the-wall programme they were talking about. I heard all that on Twitter and I hadn’t even got the telly on.
I navigate back to Twitter.
US people who specialise in emergency planning had started to contribute.
“Situational awareness, direct connectivity to public, better engagement,” one tweeted.
“Wow,” my colleague said.
One tweeter reminded me of the @savebenno campaign on Twitter.
What was that?
That was a campaign to highlight the unfair dismissal of a 2nd XI village cricket skipper.
It ended up with the team I was playing for playing a Save Benno XI.
We’re fortunate our head of communications Darren Caveney and head of press and PR Kim Neville were quick to spot the potential.
More than 6,000 tweets on and there are a series of lessons we’ve learned.
In one of the first blogs I ever wrote I talked of the 27 things that work on a local government Twitter stream.
For a presentation at LG Comms in Nottingham I boiled that down to 12 key lessons.
The slides are available on slideshare (click the link above).
#12 LESSONS FOR USING TWITTER IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT
#1: Realise that the landscape has changed (and your skills need to too.) You know that a few years ago that writing a press release and booking a photo call was enough? That’s still a great skill. But you need other things too.
#2: The channels of communication have changed. In the old days there was the newspapers. Maybe the radio. Every now and then TV would show up and it would be a really big thing. They’re still there. In some cases just or not at all. It’s just that people get their news in different ways now. Remember, Facebook is the fourth biggest news site on the internet.
#3: Learn the language of the platform first (by messing about with it yourself.) When you start to use Twitter – or any other platform – you’ll notice that there is a different way of talking to people. It’s a lot more relaxed and conversational. Get to know how things work under your own name. Once you build some confidence up you’ll be up to speed on how to use it for your organisation.
#4: You can’t control the message. It’s a big one for press officers this. In the old days there may have been key messages. There’s still things you want to say. Just realise that this stuff works as a conversation. So be conversational.
#5: It’s okay to be a human voice. What works best on Twitter is a relaxed tone. It’s not about linking to an RSS feed and tweeting the first 140 characters of a press release. That’s just shouting. A police officer once told me that as a beat officer he would start conversations with people. Then he’d slip in some information he thought may be of help. That’s what Twitter does. It’s probably why many police officers are very good at it.
#6: Link. Share. Retweet. Be web 2.0. It’s okay to retweet. So long as it’s third sector or public sector. Spotted a police witness appeal on Twitter? Link to it. Charity car wash in your borough? Link. Share. Earn social capital. Be a responsible council. Share interesting content.
#7: Take the argument offline. It’s never a good idea to have a row in public. Point people to the place where they can get information that can help. Most non-trolls are fine with this.
#8: Take the re-buttal online. Is your local paper circulating via Twitter a link you have a major issue with? Have they failed to include your statement adequately? Post the statement online. Link to it. Tweet it to them – and your followers.
#9: Service areas work well on Twitter (so be prepared to share). It’s fine for comms to use it. Others can too. There’s no-one better at knowing what’s popular with libraries than librarians. So if your library want to use it, let them. Give them some pointers first.
#10: Have a simple to understand social media policy. A hundred pages won’t work. Something that fits into a screen does. Make it simple.
#11: Make sure it connects with other channels of communications. Write the press release. Send it. But also send it via your other channels too.
#12: Cut, past and send your positive feedback to off-line officers. It’s amazing how effective this is at breaking down barriers to social media. If you are doing something residents approve of they will thank you for it.
Hat tip: Nick Booth who first told us about Twitter and what it could do.
Get out of the social media bubble, talk to real people and you may be surprised.
Digital skills may be valuable online but offline they’re part of a mix of things needed to make an event work.
One blogger has argued that its such a part of her life she didn’t think of ‘social media’ as such anymore. It’s part of life.
That’s fine for digital natives. But that’s not the case for people like Walsall artist Alan Cheeseman.
Together with a team of like-minded volunteers he helped stage a festival in the Caldmore in Walsall in the West Midlands.
Walsall Council chipped in with funding and support. So did social housing provider whg, the National Lottery and one or two other places.
Where’s Caldmore? First, it’s pronounced karma. Narrow Victorian terraced streets crowd around a small green hardly big enough to host a cricket square. Legend has it that Boy George lived there in his Walsall days.
Sari shops, balti houses, pubs and shops that sell cheap calls to the Indian sub-continent dominate the shopping area.
It’s a place where migrant workers settled amongst the indiginous English to take low-paid jobs in factories. The communities have remained while the factories they came to have gone to the wall.
It’s a place a mile square of three churches, a mosque and a Sikh temple.
It suffers from deprivation, crime and suffers the stigma of a prostitution problem that has eased.
But as the Caldmore Village Festival shows, the place has a powerful resilience and a creative and community-minded people.
In part its scores of micro-communities around the mosque, the church, the pub or the temple.
For this event they came together.
More than 11,000 came to 15 venues across three days for the festival.
Kibadi, Bollywood dancing, live music and dance brought people in. So did the Pakistani sport of stone lifting. An amazing sight where men lift carved stone.
Ask Alan what made it worth while and its not the numbers that excite him. It’s the little stories. It’s getting the tearaway kid to put a volunteer’s orange bib on and give him what could be the first piece of responsibility he’s ever known.
But what role did social media have in all this?
“Things like the internet. That’s for educated people really, isn’t it?” says Alan.
“I’m not sure how much of what we did actually helped.”
It’s a fair point and you have to admire Alan’s honesty.
In Walsall,the percentage of people online every day is below the national average of 60 per cent.
Caldmore is the place the Talk About Local project was invented for.
An initiative to bridge the digital divide and equip communities with an online voice the initiative trained Alan and set him up on a blog.
Sessions open to all backgrounds were run at a neighbourhood resource called Firstbase by community worker Stuart Ashmore where the basics of WordPress were explained.
As a tool for communities this blogging platform is as powerful as a printing press in the 19th century.
Easy to use and simple to master it gives an online presence to anyone with an internet connection.
Alan explained: “We used the blog. We’d update it maybe once a month and we had links to it coming from around 50 other sites.”
Alan was quietly impressed at the digital waves he did make: “I was quite suprised to see 1,000 hits in the week before the festival started.”
But as Alan says the main lesson is to see digital as just one part of the jigsaw. That’s something some forget. It may reach some people. It won’t reach everyone. So what does?
“Networking helps,” says Alan. “A piece in the local paper helps. So do leaflets.
“We made contact with several organisations and we found that their agenda was similar to ours in many places.
“But face to face is really helpful too. It is like a jigsaw. By doing several things you’ll reach a lot of people.”
In effect, Alan was doing the things that work on the web in the real world.
The message to the online community? Online is part of the answer. It’s not the answer on its own.
Or to put it simply, the equation is this:
Face-to-face + networking + leaflets + digital + newspaper support + community groups + public sector + council staff + ward councillors = a successful community event
The Caldmore Village Festival’s digital footprint…
Blogging – A WordPress blog with monthly updates.
Flickr – Walsall’s Flickr group members were invited along to the event too were made welcome. Some amazing pictures came out of it. A group was created as a repository for images.
Plug into the blogging eco-system – Walsall news aggregator The Yam Yam – named after the way Walsall people are supposed to speak – plugged the event through its website, it’s Twitter and Facebook streams.
Twitter support – Walsall Council Twitter stream @walsallcouncil linked to new blog posts.
Link support – Links to the blog ended up on around 50 sites.
YouTube – A short film of the stone lifting attraction helped raise the profile.
Ideas for future online activity…
1. Twitter — A face to the organisation on the @hotelalpha9 would work brilliantly. Or simply a festival stream.
2. Facebook — In Walsall, Facebook is the platform of choice with 197,000 people registered in a 10 mile radius. A fan page for the festival will capture that support.
3. Flickr — Use the images from year one to promote year two. Bring the Flickr group back for a second year.
4. Foursquare — Add the venues to the geo-location game. Leave tips for things to do.
If William Wordsworth was alive today he’d be using Twitter.
Not the old stick-in-the-mud he became but the young man fired by revolution.
Why? Because he celebrated the English countryside through the media of the day.
How we think of the landscape was shaped by Wordsworth. Before him, mountains were frightful places. After? Beautiful. And Willie cashed in with an 1810 Guide to the Lakes that was the iphone app of its day.
Exploring how our countryside team could use social media made me trawl through some examples.
Whoever said places work can really well on social media were bang on. That’s especially true of parks and countryside. So how is social media being used by to promote the countryside? There’s some really good ideas in patches out there but nothing fundamentally game changing that makes you sit up and write verse. That says to me that there is plenty of potential.
Photography should be at the heart of what the public sector does with countryside and parks. Why? Because a picture tells a 1,000 words. Because they can bring a splash of green into someone’s front room or phone at one click. Criminally, many sites should be promoting the countryside relegate images to a postage stamp picture.
Here are 10 interesting uses:
1. The British Countryside Flickr group has more than 4,000 members and some amazing images. It’s a place where enthusiastic amateur photographers can share pictures and ideas.
2. Peak District National Park chief executive Jim Dixon leads from the front. He blogs about his job at www.jimdixon.wordpress.com and tweets through @peakchief. It’s a good mix of retweeting interesting content and puts a human face on an organisation.
3. Foursquare, Walsall Council added a landmark in a park as a location. The Pit Head sculpture in Walsall Wood was added to encourage people to visit and check-in. You can also make good use of ‘tips’ by adding advice.
4. On Twitter, @uknationalparks represents 15 UK national parks run a traditional Twitter feed with press releases, RTs and some conversation. With 2,000 followers it’s on 145 lists.
5. But you don’t have to be in a national park to do a goods job. In Wolverhampton, @wolvesparkies have a brilliantly engagingly conversational Twitter stream. There is passion, wit and information that make most councils seem the RSS press release machine that they are.
6. National Trust have an excellent Facebookprofile. You may get the impression that members are 65 and own a Land Rover. That doesn’t come across here. They observe one of the golden rules of social media. Use the language of the platform. It’s laid back and it’ll tell you when events are planned.
Yorkshire Dales by Chantrybee
7. Even more relaxed is the quite new I Love Lake District National Park is quite brilliant. It allows RSS, it blogs and it really encourages interaction. Heck, they even encourage people to post to the wall so they can move shots into albums.
8. On YouTube, West Sussex County Council have a slick short film on tree wardens that deserves more than 45 views in five months. Or does this show how much take up there is on YouTube?
9. The rather wonderful parksandgardens.ac.uk is an ambitious online tool for images of 6,500 parks and gardens and the people who created and worked in them. @janetedavis flagged this up. It’s a project she worked on and she should be proud of it. There’s a school zone to to connect to young people too and is populated by google map addresses and photographs. Really and truly, council parks and countryside pages should look like this but mostly don’t.
10. Less a government project, or even social media Cumbria Live TV celebrate the landscape they work in utterly brilliantly. Slick and powerful broadcast quality three minute films do more than most to capture the jaw dropping awe of the fells. They self-host some brilliant films on a changing site. Check them out here.
EIGHT things you CAN do aside from write bad poetry about daffodils and shepherds called Michael…
1. A Facebook fan page to celebrate a park or open space. Call it I love Barr Beacon. Yes, the Friends group can use it as a meeting place. But naming it after the place not the organisation leaves the door open to the public too.
2. Give a countryside ranger a Twitter account. Use @hotelalpha9 as an inspiration. Let them update a few times a day with what they’ve been up to. Post mobile phone pictures too.
3. Despite a dearth of amateur good examples there’s potential in short films to promote countryside. You only have to point a camera at something photogenic for people to come over all Lake Poet.
Flowers by Vilseskogen
4. Start a Flickr group to celebrate your patch of countryside. Walsall has 1,000 acres of parks and countryside with amazing views and vistas.
5. Start a blog. WordPress takes minutes to set-up and after messing around only a short time to master. Tell people what you are up to. Whack up a few images. Lovely. For no cost.
6. Make your countryside and parks pages a bit more web 2.0. Use mapping to set out a location. Use Flickr images – with permission – to showcase the place.
7. Add your parks and countryside to a geo-location site such as Foursquare. If the future of social media is location, location, location then venues, landmarks and places will score big.
8. Text. With more mobile phones in the UK than people sometimes the humble text message can be overlooked as part of the package of ways to connect with people. Most councils are also text enabled. Create info boards around a park or countryside with numbers to text to recieve info on what they can see. Change it for the seasons to make best use.
Picture credits:
Newlands Valley, Lake District, UK: Dan Slee.
Wordsworth: Creative commons courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
Once upon a time there was something more powerful than Twitter, MySpace and Facebook combined.
It was a platform that brought people together and allowed a you a chance to paint on a blank canvas with music.
This, ladies and gentleman was the mixtape.
This was a cassette filled with tracks you’d selected. It wasn’t just art. It was an art.
For over 25s the mixtape was the status update of the day. They could be a love letter, a sign of friendship or the grandstanding of musical knowledge. All recorded across two sides of a C90 cassette with 45 minutes on each side (or if you were a real oddball, a C60).
From the 1970s to the mid-1990s the cassette was a standard medium for music. With my bedroom too small for all but a ghetto blaster cassettes were the way I listened to music. I wasn’t alone. As a teenager, music was massively important. It help shape who I was. Through it all, mixtapes were how I circulated my thoughts.
Brian Eno used to make mixtapes for his mates. He’d record slow classical music movements back-to-back. They were a prototype to the ambient music he pioneered.
“Composers hadn’t caught up,” he recalled on BBC Radio Four’s Frontrow .
“People didn’t buy records and sit at home between two speakers listening to an LP.
“They bought music and they were cooking or washing up with music in the background.
“New technology means new music. Always.”
In 1990, more than 400 million cassettes were sold in the US. Many for home taping and unlike the slogan no, it didn’t kill music. But what did die was the cassette as a popular platform. By 2007 barely 200,000 cassettes were sold in the US. Those figures are likely to be reflected in the UK.
SO, WHAT ARE THE MIXTAPE RULES?
When making mixtapes I’d arrived at a series of golden rules. Always start with two fast paced corkers one after the other. Make the third slower. Surprise with a build between fast and slow. Be unexpected. And never, ever let the tape run out before the track finished. Ever.
In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s story of a music obsessive the mixtape is a way repressed men could communicate. He impressed his girlfriend with a mixtape.
In the late 1990s powered with red wine I compiled a cassette for a girl. With Stereolab, The Stone Roses, The La’s and The Beatles it was a combination of care and bravado. Just enough sensitivity with a layer of cool disregard just in case.
The girl who I made that tape for 12-years ago, dear reader, is now my wife. The tape? Somewhere in the loft.
MIXTAPE NIGHT SCHOOL? VIA TWITTER?
A rather marvellous conversation on Twitter sparked the idea of Mixtape night classes. Like woodwork or macrame these skills could be kept alive at Stafford College. What would those sessions look like? Check @janetedavis’ quite excellent Mixtape night school syllabus. There is input there from @sarahlay and @jvictor7 too.
Philip John’s excellent blog on how Spotify risks failure by not tapping into the social side of compiling play lists is here.
Jim Anning’s Twitpic of his mixtape. I could have had a borrow of that back in the day. The shot is here.
A mixtape USB stick. The dream present for geek music lovers over 25. Amazing. Thanks to @cahrlottetwitts it’s here.
You can rely on Flickr for having a mixtape group. They’re here.
Steph has written a fantastic post about the mix CD that her chap James game to her in the mid-1990s. It shows brilliantly the stories behind the homemade selections. Read it here.
Epic visionary Sarah Lay has written a great piece on what the mixtape means to her. It’s a great read and it’s here.
Jamie Summerfield blogged about how a mixtape helped provide the answer after his father died. You can read it here.
This is genius. An idea by Andrew Dubber for a mixtape making service was picked up by a Canadian web developer who created this wonderful, amazing, brilliant thing here.
There is one truly brilliant thing about Harrogate copper @hotelalpha9 on Twitter.
It’s not the fact PC Ed Rogerson has a truly cool Hawaii Five O sounding name online.
It’s not even because the police are using social media. Although, that is great.
What’s really brilliant, is that he has succeeded in putting a human touch on what is by definition a large organisation.
In North Yorkshire there are 1,500 police officers serving 750,000 people. @hotelalpha9 is able to connect with his beat particular brilliantly.
Here is an example: “Residents of Camwell Terrace – there’s a meeting for you at 10am tomorrow at St Andrews Church. Let’s make your street the best it can be.”
“@annicrosby Hi, I’m following you as I saw you location is ‘Harrogate’. I follow anybody from Harrogate as I want to communicate better.”
“Just dealt with some criminal damage. Paint thrown over a car.”
It’s stuff specific to a small area. It’s in effect hyperlocal blogging for an organisation.
The debate about whether or not police should use digital is a short one (answer: yes).
On that topic there is an inspiring and groundbreaking blog by Chief Inspector Mark Payne of West Midlands Police – on Twitter as @CIPayneWMPolice – that deserves a special mention: Police and social media: Why are we waiting?
But what it really opens up is how best to use this stuff to connect.
By all means have a central presence with a corporate logo on.
However, in Twitter 2.0 shouldn’t we start putting the individual to the fore?
If we call a council, government – or a big company for that matter – you are often met with a name when you ring or write. Why not do that with social media too?
Recently, when Walsall Council contacted a protest group on Facebook an officer set up a dedicated work profile to make contact. It wasn’t a logo. It was a real person that made that connection. On behalf of the council.
So, isn’t there a case the closer we get to an organisation hyperlocal blogging we start allowing the individual to be the organisation’s face? They are in real life over the phone and at other contact points. Why not in social media too?
This may well create new headaches. Would staff be prepared for the potential for brickbats, for example?
How about if they leave?
Then there is the usual ‘what if they say bad things to us?’
But let’s not forget that these dilemmas also apply offline too.
A possible three tier organisational model for Twitter and other social media platforms:
1. THE CORPORATE VOICE WITH NAMED INDIVIDUAL. Eg @anycouncil. Biog: news from Any Council updated by Darren info@any.gov.uk. Content: general tweets.
2. THE SERVICE AREA. Eg @anycouncil_libraries Biog: updated by Kim. Kim@any.gov.uk. Content: niche tweets from a specific service area. More specific info for fans of that subject. Eg author visits, reminders to take out a holiday book.
3. THE HYPERLOCAL INDIVIDUAL Eg @artscentreguy Biog: Bob from Any Arts Centre. Content: More personal updates from an individual first and foremost who just happens y’know to work for a council. Eg. Twitpics of rehearsals, behind the scenes shots and listings info.
Months before Stephen Fry turned Twitter’s guns on injustice a happy band of cricketers got there first.
Instead of Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir the target was the heirarchy of a Midlands village cricket club.
Angry at the ousting of Fillongley 2nd XI cricket captain Richard Bennet the Save Benno campaign was launched.
Inspired by Barack Obama, Soccer AM and Top Gear the Save Benno online campaign was started across a blog, You Tube with more than 300 views and Twitter with 440 followers.
PRESSURE
It raised a smile, support and pressure on the powers that be.
Every time the club’s committee tried to outflank the campaign with the club’s rule book it was across social media. They appeared wholly out manoevred by the protesting players.
The campaign was designed by frustrated player David Howells and his team mates. In the end they were beaten by the club’s committee. But was it all fruitless? Not entirely. A point was made.
It was also an imaginative marker for how a campaign using social media could be waged.
What could be the first cricket match arranged over Twitter was also played as a result. Looking for a fixture Save Benno used Twitter to broadcast an appeal.
‘NO BRAINER’
As press officer for Stone SP Cricket Club and a Twitter user the fixture was a no brainer.
The game was excellent, except for my comedy run out with just 1 run on the board.
Aside from this, it was an excellent match decided by a boundary hit on the final ball.
Footage shot on Flip was taken for a Sky Sports-style highlights package. After much beer was drunk in the Pavillion that idea got kind of scaled down.
Instead an A Team-style You Tube calling card was made for more fixtures.
SO, WHAT DID IT PROVE?
1. Social media are excellent campaigning tools.
2. Sports teams looking for fixtures can use Twitter.
3. Sports teams should use Twitter to broadcast score updates.
4. Flip video highlights packages for You Tube are a brilliant idea.
5. Brilliant ideas are dreamed up over a beer.
6. Cricket is a superb sport played by superb people. It’s just the administrators that let it down.
7. If you are not part of the conversation (in this case the committee were not) you look leaden footed, slow and unresponsive.
One day we will all click a button and some kind of advanced free analytic will do it all.
There is of course twitter.grader.com.
But a score out of 100 isn’t really going to cut the mustard with the chief executive.
What are we doing? One way is to keep a log of the traditional opportunities to view figure. In other words the number of times a tweet has been put in front of people.
Until something better comes along we’re keeping tally ourselves with little more than a word document and a pocket calculator.
I’M AN OPERATOR OF A POCKET CALCULATOR
We do it monthly. First, we keep a tab on the number of followers on the first day of the month.
1. At the START of the month log the current number of followers
2. At the END of the month log the new total of followers
3. Work out the average number of followers that month.
4. Work out the number of times you’ve tweeted that month.
5. Then its MONTHLY AVERAGE FOLLOWER score multiplied by MONTHLY TWEETS. You are left with opportunities to view.
OPPORTUNITIES TO VIEW: THE MATHS
This is the formula we use. It’s a formula that is designed to show the impact of our Twitter use. It’s not neccesarily the one for everyone but it’ll do until a smart app designer comes up with something that gets traction industry wide. It works like this: If there are 100 followers at the start of the month and 200 at the end the average follower score is 150. Yes?
Let’s pretent the tweets we sent that month was 50.
If that was the case our opportunities to view score would be 150 x 50 = 7,500.
In other words, there were 7,500 opportunities to read your organisations tweets.
As a swift number crunch, work out how many months you’ve been tweeting, your followers today, divide your followers today by the number of months and you can come up with a rough figure without having to put in months of investment.
A CASE STUDY: @WALSALLCOUNCIL ON TWITTER
From April to November ’09 our tweets could have been read more than 700,000 times. This sounds a compelling score – and is – but is by no means unique.
April 09 — 59 tweets x 77 average monthly followers = 4,543
May 09 — 172 x 175 = 30,100
June 09 — 251 x 166 = 46,646
July 09 — 450 x 288 = 129,600
August 09 — 540 x 215 = 116,100
September 09 — 642 x 244 = 157,136
October 09 — 758 x 293 = 222,094
Opps to view total April to November ’09: 706,319
WHAT ABOUT MEASURE LINK CLICKS?
If you are really keen you can use a link shortening website like bit.ly.
From that you can also get data for the number of clicks. However, this is only collected link by link so you can’t bring them all together. It’s also time consuming going through each click. Mashable reckons an average is about 3 per cent click through.
SO, GO AND TELL PEOPLE
Now you’ve got your stats what are you going to do with them?
You could leave them on your hard drive but isn’t it better to spread the word?
Stick it on the intranet. Tell all your friends.
With thousands of organisations on Twitter I’m amazed a free killer app hasn’t been designed already to properly measure.
Until then, I’d be genuinely interested to know what others do…
Three basic things organisations should be doing when they use social media:
1. Measure. Whatever the way you want to measure – followers, friends, opps to view or views – keep a log. Yes, it’ll take time. Yes, you will come up with some compelling figures that paint a picture of what you are doing.
2. Broadcast. Tell people in your organisation what the statistics are. Don’t keep them to yourself.
3. Circulate case studies. Turned around an inaccurate Chinese whisper using Twitter? Take a screen shot of each tweet. Put together a mini Power Point and circulate. Let non-adoptors know what you can achieve.
4. Put your social media stats with your Press monitoring stats. Don’t keep them in the box bedroom. Let them breathe. It’s also a good way of getting the message over to people that the weekly paper that has had the monopoly for 100 years is not the only game in town.
Okay. Quiz time. So when was it I realised I took my blog obsession just a little too far?
Was it a) when supermarket giant J.Sainsbury’s started tweeting us?
Was it b) when the excellent @sarahlay designed a superb google map around it?
Or perhaps c) when I loaded my two poorly children and drove to a garden centre just to photograph a piece of cake so I could write a 140 review blog post?
We sat there in the complex’s empty cafe the three of us. Joe, aged five. Libby, one, and me looking every inch the out of touch divorced dad who has no clue of what makes his children tick any more.
I’m not divorced by, the way. I just have a very tolerant wife.
“But Daddy,” said Joseph, aged five. “You don’t like gardening. Mummy says so. Can’t we go to the park? I like the park.
“No, son.” I tell the hopeful faces. “We can’t go to the park.”
“Why, Dad, why?”
“Because, Joe, They don’t sell cake there.”
I write a blog about cake. I’m quite partial to the odd slice but its never ruled my life.
The blog http://mmmmmmcake.wordpress.com/ was founded in August It has received 1,400 hits in eight weeks with almost 60 blog posts. It tweets @mmmmmmcake with 150 followers.
Amazingly, there have been 15 contributors so far from as far afield as Mumbai in India, Nova Scotia in Canada and Brownhills in England. They are people who love cake and enjoy the ridiculousness of pointing a camera at it in a cafe and sharing it with the world.
So why Dan, why?
It began as a wheeze. Make mistakes on your own rather than for your organisation. Besides, I wanted to better get to grips with wordpress.
Why cake? A chance remark on Twitter sparked it.
I introduced a friend new to Twitter. Silence. No followers.
“This is @sarahjpowney. She loves cake.”
Within seconds she had been welcomed on board the Twittersphere with open arms by several people.
“Cake brings people together,” @jaynehowarth enthusiastically tweeted.
She’s absolutely right.
I tweeted a picture of a cake I’d taken in Shropshire. It led to 40 hits on my flickr page in a day.
@brownhillsbob then responded with pics of his own in a kind of sponge and frosted icing arms race.
The penny dropped. This needed a blog to bring things together. From there it’s grown.
But the best bit?
It’s not actually the cake I’ve liked about doing this. It’s the enthusiasm and ideas people are having sparked by cake.
Cake really does bring people together.
The google map by @sarahlay, the Indian contributions by @rbx, the Nova Scotian contributor @halifaxcakes.
There’s a man in Sussex who blogs and photographs cakes with a skill of a baking David Bailey and zeal of a Cuban revolutionary.
All magic.
Then there’s parallel blogs @mmmmmmwine and sweets and chocolate versions by the writer’s children. There’s @mmmmmm_beer by Stuart Harrison (@pezholio) and @mmmmmmcurry by Philip John.
So what lessons to learn?
Any good social media project is listening, collaboration, trial and enthusiasm to be fun.
Having something that people connect with helps. Whatever that may be. Cake or a passion for your estate, model buses or football.
Twitter has been brilliant for this. It taps into the network of social capital. Post the blog. Post the tweet signposting people to it. Marvellous.
Joe’s favourite cake is chocolate, by the way. He’s rarely happier eating it. Me? I’m partial to Mrs Slee’s flapjack.
Birthdays are nature’s way of telling you to eat more cake. So, happy birthday.
