Pointless Really – By David Olsen

Twitter has always struggled to communicate what its use case was. Not being an IM application, or a social network in the ilk of MySpace of Facebook. It has flirted with a few concepts as to what Twitter is and what benefits a user could expect to get when using the service.

At first, it was a tool to notify your friends via SMS and the web as to what you were doing.

Twitter’s second use case was pitched to us as a service that provided access to a direct line to allow everyday people to communicate to the celebrities they admired. The publicity around Oprah Winfrey joining was a significant draw card that brought massive growth to the Twitter platform. People though were disillusioned after signing up when the celebrities they signed up to communicate with either treated the service as a one way press release syndication tool, or (simply due to the number of people tweeting them) were not able to meet the communications demands their followers were asking of them.

This lead to a re-branding of the Twitter site, to focus on the sites potential to tap into the pulse of the globe at this very moment. Changing the question posed by Twitter to users from “What are you doing” to “What’s happening” is a very important evolution in the psyche that powers the Twitter universe. Additional to this has been location based twitter trends so users can tap into the up to the minute news and hot topics from locations of interest.

This is a great step to realising the true potential of Twitter as a service. There is a problem however, which is that if Twitter is positioning itself to be the pulse of the world. That when significant events occur, the service needs to be able to handle the additional load on it’s systems that major world events can put on it.

On Wednesday 20th of Jan, an aftershock measuring 6.1 hit Haiti, almost immediately after. Twitter was unresponsive for 90 minutes, suddenly the use case of Twitter, that of connecting us to what is happening right now fell to pieces, and showed us that depending on Twitter to deliver on the use case pitched at us is not wise, and raises questions over the services long term survival if hey cannot deliver on the core of their business.

The official word is that there was a “failure” somewhere (possibly hardware) behind the outage, however it is entirely possible that the outage was triggered by the surge in tweet volume after the 6.1 aftershock. Twitter already has trimmed the number of tweets it will cache significantly for search.twitter.com results citing performance issues, so it is reasonable to assume that a considerable spike in traffic might be enough to tip Twitter over the edge.

Regardless of whether this outage was caused by a hardware fault or capacity limitations, if a service pitches itself as being the pulse of the globe as Twitter does, it simply cannot be unavailable for a significant period of time during a crisis like this.

This tells us,  that in its current form, Twitter can not deliver the service required to meet their own use case to us. This undermines the brand, and until Twitter can iron out the bugs and capacity issues they face, they need to re-examine their use-case message and branding to users.

My girlfriend bought me a shirt a few months ago from ThinkGeek with a slogan on the shirt that read: When in Doubt, Try Another Hole. When a hole developed in the shirt after only two months wear, I figured this was ripe for a joke on Twitter. So I tweeted about the irony of such a situation occurring.

To my surprise, 8 hours later I received a tweet from @Thinkgeek offering me a replacement shirt. Now I wasn’t angling for a free shirt, I didn’t even know @ThinkGeek was listening,  but by contacting me (a slightly frustrated customer) in my medium of choice (I was venting on twitter) they effectively neutralised what could have been a serious venting of outrage by a customer and returned me firmly into the happy ThinkGeek supporter camp. I certainly won’t be badmouthing their products or service in the future, and if anything I have become a brand evangelist for ThinkGeek (As is indicative by this posts existence).

Moreover, given the rapid pace of social media, ThinkGeek understood the importance of acting promptly and from when I Dm’d @ThinkGeek with the orders details, to the time the replacement T-Shirt arrived, was no less than 72 Hours. Given that there was a weekend in the middle of that, and I’m in Australia, this is an amazing response to what was a relatively minor issue.

Thinkgeek gets social media and the importance of doing the little things right. Creating goodwill amongst your existing customer base is one of the best ways to create brand evangelists who will create positive sentiment ripples for your brand when using social media. Monitoring social media with tools such as Radian6 to pick up mentions of your brand in order to act fast on issues raised in social media is an essential part of creating a social media army willing to put their reputation and social capital behind your brand.

**Update** I’ve talked to @ThinkGeek and they have confirmed they use a combination of Google Alerts and Tweetdeck to monitor and track their social media presence. Social media monitoring doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition, these tools are a great first step to managing your brand online.

The comments on my post Why the language of #nocleanfeed dooms the movement to failure. were overwhelming, and has prompted me to write a second post in the series on the language surrounding the #nocleanfeed debate. Josh Mehlman’s post over on The Drum Filter opponents: change tactics or fail mirrored many of my sentiments in my original post but raised an interesting issue.

These arguments have also failed to convince the public because the anti-filter groups have allowed their opponents to set the terms and language of the debate. Senator Conroy has consistently framed the filter in terms of protecting children from online nasties such as child pornography. The mainstream media has almost without exception taken this line uncritically when reporting on the filter.

This is an important roadblock to taking the language currently used online into the offline space. By making arguments based on censorship, you immediately are on the back foot against the Government, as by opposing the filter, you are automatically labeled as being in support of child pornography. Once you are tarred with that brush, whatever arguments you make from that point, no matter how technically correct, will be tainted by the belief that you aren’t interested in saving the children.

As we all know, this isn’t the reality, but it is the perception of the issue by Joe Public and Government alike. The language of the debate has been dictated to the #nocleanfeed campaigners by supporters of the filter. By this stage it is too late to re-frame the debate in our own language, we must use language that is compatible with the debate as it currently stands.

This needs to take the form of:

a) We want to protect the children as much as you do

b) The current plan for a filter will not achieve this

c) Here is a viable alternative

Simply opposing the filter with no viable alternative undermines our argument that we want to protect the children as much as the Government does. What form the viable alternative takes, I’m looking for suggestions, but a viable alternative needs to be established in order to overcome the public perception that we do not support the protection of children by opposing the filter.

With the Australian government seeking to push through their ‘clean feed’ legislation and effectively censor chunks of the internet from the public, an important fight over our rights as citizens has broken out taking the form of the #nocleanfeed movement.

A movement which suffers from a PR problem.

While the majority of the ‘internet savvy’ can wrap their heads around the lingo of #nocleanfeed, to a layperson, it would appear strange to be arguing that we want a ‘dirty’ feed. For this reason, the language of #nocleanfeed is unclear and does not serve the purpose of the movement. To succeed, the greater populace needs to get behind the idea, and to do that, we need language that they understand and can relate to.

A perfect example of this phenomenon comes from US political pollster Frank Luntz who when working with the republican party, nailed the language required to change support for what was the ‘estate tax’ (which a large % of the population supported, since they didn’t think taxing an ‘estate’ was such a bad idea) but when relabeling the estate tax to a “Death Tax’ (ie: you were taxed on your death..) it changed the support for the tax considerably as people realised this tax applied to them on their death, not some abstract concept of an ‘estate’.

This is what #nocleanfeed needs, the movement needs to engage with your ‘average’ voter and speak with them in their own language about how this will impact them in their daily lives. Pushing the idea of #nocleanfeed is too abstract a concept for these people and will not result in their support for the campaign.

My currently preferred choices for branding the campaign include #openinternet and #netneutrality, but these would require a wholesale reworking of all the efforts this far. Is the disruption worth it to change direction with the campaign? Maybe not, but I can’t see the movement succeeding in its current incarnation.

**Update** Some people are confusing my post as simply a call to change the hashtag and continue as we have been campaigning online. This is not my intent, fracturing the existing movement is counterproductive and would only be useful if an overwhelming number of people supported it.

What is necessary though, is the #nocleanfeed campaigners, when transferring their action offline, is a concerted effort to frame the language  in a way that appeals to Joe Public, saying #nocleanfeed to a these people conjures up the following:

1) Something that won’t affect their browsing, because they are ‘not paedophiles’
2) Something that will protect the children

But as we all know, this isn’t the case. Framing the issue instead as something (for example) that will affect their download speeds for legitimate sites, and due to errors in the system see their favorite overseas sites ‘accidentally placed on the list (as with that Dentist in QLD) is needed to communicate the everyday impact this will have on *everyone*.

I also really like the approach in the comments by @nicwalmsley below, so I’ve cut and paste his comment here to highlight his point.

Everyone still seems focused on the internal process within the various internet-based movements that oppose the government’s censorship policy. We need to forget that, and move onto the details of how we can build this into a popular civil rights movement.

Forget the internet angle – it doesn’t matter which form of communication is censored, it is the censorship that is the issue; the average person doesn’t care if the net is a bit slower; just drop the whole “free internet thing” – it’s not the point

Some censorship is right and proper and is widely supported – you can’t just say “no censorship” because it goes against hundreds of years of political philosophy and practice; don’t get bogged down in the technicalities of whether the government can or cannot block bad porn, just say “yes it is great you are trying to block that stuff, we all agree with it, but that is not the problem with your plan”

Focus on the fundamental problem with the Government’s plan – they are going to open the door to banning political content! Every conversation should quickly drift you, “yeah, but they are gonna ban political stuff like euthanasia and abortion and who the hell knows what else – you might disagree with it, but we don’t need to ban that stuff?”

We need the Liberal party to come on board. Sorry but they are the opposition and so if they say “sure” to the Govt then we have lost before the whistle’s even blown, but if the Libs see a sensible civil movement building up against this, and they can see that there are weak points in the Government plan (ie, political censorship), then they will do what oppositions do – seek amendments and frustrate the government’s agenda.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of banning discussion of criminal activity, because it presupposes that the law will never change. If it is black and white, sure, but if it is conceivable that the law could change, then we should never accept a prohibition on discussing it.

What about fiction: are they going to ban a story about abortion or euthanasia or drug taking?

So it should be “No to Political Censorship in Australia” and the main argument we should be driving is, you can try and block bad porn and terrorism, great, but don’t start banning political stuff because there’s no saying where that will lead.

I still think the language used online needs to change, but doing so in a fractured way is only going to hurt the #nocleanfeed movement. @DarkStarSword created Twibbons for #netneutrality and #openinternet that you can use if you like. However I would like to see a phased transition to something like #openinternet with both terms being used for a time to see if #openinternet gains traction. But most importantly, what I want you to take away from this post, is that preaching to the converted isn’t the answer, we need to make noise in spaces other than Facebook and Twitter, that will reach the average voter in language that is appropriate for them, to create a groundswell of support sufficient to convince the Liberal Party and Independents that the clean feed is a bad idea.

In a previous post I discussed the reasons why Facebook couldn’t win the real time search war with Twitter. Namely because of the advantage Twitter has with mobile clients. Facebook has come along in leaps and bounds since then, with the release of the Facebook 3.0 app for the iPhone a particularly strong offering. Even my platform of choice, Windows Mobile has a perfectly functional, albeit poor looking Facebook app available.

The one area I didn’t cover in my previous post, was perhaps the most critical factor to Facebook competing with Twitter in the real time search market. Facebook as a platform has since it’s inception, been an inherently closed social network. People need to be part of your network before they can gain access to your information, either by being by being a friend directly, or belonging to your extended network should you have chosen to allow “friends of friends” get access to your information.

Twitter on the other hand, is an open platform by default. Sure users can opt to restrict access to their tweets, but for the most part, this is counter to the workings of Twitter. If people can’t find you by seeing you participate in conversations with others, you don’t exist to them. Which limits your “Twitter experience” considerably.

As a result, Twitter generates considerable amounts of publicly searchable information every second. Whereas Facebook is stuck with it’s data being in silos around each individual that are inaccessible to the general public. In order to make this information available to search engines to provide meaningful results (and more importantly generate revenues from Bing/Google in the process)  it is *vital* for Facebook to change from a closed social networking platform. To a more open one, at least in regards to peoples wall posts (that which provides the best real time data).

This week Facebook offered it’s users what they called a ‘Transition tool’ to manage the transition to the new structure of the privacy settings. The tool itself is illustrated below by a screenshot taken by @beaney.

Now what this transition tool offered was the new default options for each setting for Facebook on the left, and a column of radio buttons on the right to allow you to select to keep your old settings if it was different from the new default. Instead of allowing users to select from all the  privacy levels for each  option, they only permitted the default (for the primary options this was the most permissive ‘everyone’ option) or the existing setting. Nothing in between.

Surely Facebook could have offered drop down boxes as with their normal privacy options menu, and simply listed the previously used setting next to each option and allowed the users freedom of choice. But no, this is a deceptive move on Facebooks behalf to scam its users into opening up their data so that Bing and Google can mine it and pay Facebook for the privilege.

Coinciding with this change in privacy settings for Facebook was an announcement not long ago that Facebook and Microsoft had ‘inked a deal’ to index all of Facebook users data. Obviously it is in Facebook’s financial interests to push users into opening up their status updates, but doing so in such a deceptive way will only result in users over-sharing and exposing themselves to risks unknowingly such as having their payoffs cut off when insurers see pictures of them on Facebook ’smiling’. I expect Facebook’s response to such incidents as being “well the user opted in to up opening their profile” which may be true, but is unscrupulous and not the sort of behavior I would expect from the company.

You can do better Mark Zuckerberg. You evangelise the user experience with Facebook, but you have let your users down with this one.

I attended the SME technology summit last week where I sat through a presentation on managing brand and reputation online. The presentation dealt with such things as leveraging ‘new’ opportunities such as blogging for a branded media outlet (NineMSN for example) in order to manage your reputation online. The presentations content left me feeling that this was just old media PR in a shiny ‘new media’ jacket. Pushing out press releases to social media platforms is not an effective use of social media.

While it is important to engage your publics in their preferred environment, with social media platforms the preferred platform for many. Treating social media as just another channel for your brand fails to acknowledge how social media reverses the balance of power from your brand placing and gives it to your customers.

When I posed a question of how would you manage a crisis for your brand online, the old rules of PR crisis management came out. Simply publishing a press release on your companies blog is insufficient to manage a crisis with social media.

Why?

It comes down to trust.

Over time, those participating in social media have earned social capital with those in their networks, those people trust their opinion. Often to a greater degree than information from authoritative sources such as your brand. Working to overcome this trust differential begins long before a crisis starts, establishing a dialogue with members of the social media community is a critical step in your preparedness for managing a crisis online.

The motivations for people acting as evangelists for your brand is different than journalists acting as conduits for your information to traditional media. Journalists are only looking for the scoop in the short term, another notch in their belt, they have no strong relationship with your brand, they will push your story only when it benefits their needs as a journalist.

Social media brand evangelists have an all together different motivation, they have an intimate connection to your brand which has evolved over time, they feel like your brand is a part of their life and who they are as individuals. As such they are compelled to defend your brand in the same way they would defend their own reputation. That said, there will be varying degrees of relationship along a continuum from highly engaged to not engaged, however when crisis hits, it will always be those most engaged with your brand who will create the most noise in social media, acting in your brands best interests.

Failing to leverage the social capital of these brand evangelists will leave your brand high and dry when a crisis hits. Have you changed your PR crisis plan to account for the risks and opportunities social media carries?

If you live in Australia, it’s hard to have not been exposed to the turmoil sparked last week by the factional fights within the Liberal party over the ETS/CPRS legislation that was defeated in the senate today. With the leadership spill driven by the climate change skeptics within the party who believed that Malcolm Turnbull was doing the wrong thing by brokering a deal with the Labor party over the ETS legislation, believing the science needed more analysis or at the very least, needed to wait until after the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference. The Liberal Party has in the process of electing their new leader Tony Abbott just ruined the best chance the climate change skeptics had in clawing back this issue from the hands of the Labor party.

Given the Liberals poor showing in the polls even before the ETS issue erupted (Worse than at the last election) the Liberals were likely to lose their majority in the senate at the next election. The Liberals only have a majority in the senate still due to the half senate elections cycle and the large number of seats Howard won in the 2004 federal election. With this in mind, the path Turnbull took in regards to the ETS was very sensible, he understood the likelihood of losing the ability to block the legislation after the next election, and regardless of his position on the science behind climate change knew that now was the time to negotiate a deal that would best serve his constituents. This opportunity existed because the Labor party is keen to be seen as a world leader with the ETS  and use it for political gain  around the Copenhagen conference, the time was right, Labor wanted action on the legislation before the next election, and the Liberals held the majority in the senate. But instead, by imploding over this issue the Liberal Party has ensured that after the next election, the Labor party will be in a position to pass whatever legislation they want without amendment.

While the climate change skeptics in  the Liberal Party never held a strong enough position to block the legislation past the next election, they held a strong enough position in the short term to win a number of important concessions from the Labor party to benefit their members. The Liberal Party has squandered this position, and ensured the worst possible outcome for their members and the climate change skeptics alike.

This is a complaint that I often come across when discussing Twitter with non-users, they cite media hype and their own experience with Twitter claiming that the majority of tweets on the service are of no interest, or simply “people telling the world about their breakfast” or some variant on the inane comments theory.

They are right.

But they are also missing the point.

For any individual 99% of the internet will always be useless noise. For instance, when was the last time you went to YouTube and watched all the top videos and were interested in them all? I’m guessing never. Does this mean that YouTube is useless because so little of the content is of interest to any particular individual? No.

In reality you filter the videos you watch on YouTube by search, by channel, or by receiving the video as a recommendation by a friend. Twitter is much the same, You cut through the noise by following those users who match search criteria, by following twitter lists or by following those other users/friends recommend.

The critics have made the mistake of confusing the Macro-Twitter environment (ie: All the tweets from every user) with the Micro-Twitter environment that an individual user experiences (Only tweets by persons of interest/value) when they are discriminatory in how they use Twitter.

It’s up to the users of Twitter to explain this important error in perception to non users, or risk the continued alienation of a large segment of the online community.

So how will you do this?

I attended the Windows 7 launch on the 22nd October in Sydney (Apologies for the average quality of the above photo, I was up the back of the auditorium taking photos on my mobile) and the one thing that struck me (other than the relief Microsoft employees had they weren’t promoting Vista anymore) was the belief that the audience had in Windows 7 from first hand experience, with approximately 2/3 of the audience having already used the OS prior to launch, either participating in the public beta program or running the release candidate of Windows 7 that was made available prior to launch to iron out the last few bugs in the wild before the RTM version went to the manufacturers.

Obviously the audience at the launch event is one that skews heavily towards ‘geek’ so the 2/3 figure isn’t something that would carry over to the general population. However it is an important group of influencers who are already acting as evangelists for the product before it has been launched to the general public. For the most part the beta releases of Windows 7 were very nearly already polished enough to be released as the final version, so the public beta served Microsoft more as a marketing exercise than an engineering one.

Microsoft managed to convince this key group of influencers that they could safely put their online social capital behind the product by letting the influencers get hands on with Windows 7 throughout the beta program. By creating an army of influencers who evangelise Windows 7, this acts to overcome the distrust of marketing pitches coming from companies trying to sell us a product.

This effect was dramatic, where normally with a major OS release, most consumers would take a wait and see approach, holding off to the next service pack before upgrading. With this army of influencers Microsoft was able to achieve a 234% increase in sales for Windows 7 above that of Windows Vista in the first weeks of the products release.

While Microsoft couldn’t have been created an army of  Windows 7 evangelists without it being a good product. The public beta program was instrumental in creating positive word of mouth for the product in the influencers likely to sway consumers choices. Many companies would shy away from letting the public use a non-final version of their software, for this I believe Microsoft needs to be commended, not just for using the public beta to create the most polished version of their OS yet, but leveraging the public beta as a marketing tool to build critical momentum prior to the Windows 7 launch.

In a recent trip to Melbourne, I thought I was taking advantage of Tiger Airways extremely low prices and landing myself a great deal on airfares. Sure the process seemed smooth enough (despite the extra wait time required at Sydney terminal before the flight at check in). The flight itself was straightforward and the extra fee we chose to pay to get seats in the exit row was worth it for my 6′4″frame.

Although once you add in charges for ‘extra’ luggage (above your included carry on allowance) and the ‘exit row’ suddenly the $25 ‘bargain’ tickets no longer look like such a bargain (Approaching, but not quite at VirginBlue or Jetstar rates for a comparable flight). This was not entirely a surprise, as there is always a catch somewhere, and we felt like taking a punt on a new airline “for the experience”.

What was a surprise though, was how Tiger Airways treat their customers once they arrive at their terminal (T4) at Melbourne Airport (Tullamarine).

The baggage claim area for Tiger Airways was essentially a tin shed with chicken wire walls on a concrete floor.

The exit to the terminal/baggage claim area.

I couldn’t help but feel like I was being herded through the terminal like a cow to the slaughter by Tiger Airways. What was interesting on reflecting on the experience was that Melbourne Airport is Tiger Airways primary hub for operating in Australia. This struck me as odd that they would construct their premier hub in Australia in such a cheap and nasty way.

On further analysis though, it is entirely reasonable for a cut price operator in any industry to ‘dress’ the part. If the visual cues when flying Tiger are true to the sense that you are saving money, this reinforces the purchase decision and acts as a feedback loop to solidifying the perception that the customer has managed to purchase a ticket on the cheapest airline around.

Does this ‘build’ Tiger Airways brand? It certainly acts as an important differentiator to the other airlines offerings in Australia, that in itself is important in carving out a niche  for the brand against a market that has two strong ‘value’ offerings in Virgin Blue and Jetstar. Being ‘value’ isn’t enough of a differentiator. But being ‘cheap’ is. I’d call it a success, though I’ll be flying another airline next time.