Vomiting On Twitter Potential

Following on from various blog entries I've written concerning commercial interests stealing in on the marketing potential of social networking, I thought I should share the following thoughts from Stephen Fry when he was guest on a recent episode of 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' on Radio 4.  Fry began by describing how his Twitter account became more and more popular, going from just a few hundred followers to a lot more...

...suddenly the numbers got bigger, and the requests that started coming in from charities and good causes for me to re-tweet this and re-tweet that, got enormous, so one felt one had a social responsibility.  For me the whole point of being on Twitter is that it's me, it 's not a corporate thing, I'm not a public service, I'm not a broadcasting station, I can sometimes be drunk or annoyed and tweet something stupid and I might apologise, put my hand up... But as far as the wider world is, I mean I've noticed two years after Twitter became something of a phenomenon, I would get these requests to address businesses with hideous titles like 'How To Harness Your Twitter Potential' and I just wanted to vomit all over them because  it struck me that it ignored the one point of Twitter which is, bizarrely small as a tweet is - 140 characters - people can read bullshit in it straightaway. They know when they're being preached to, they know when they're being sold to, and in the end all this social science is fascinating as science, but it's hardly peer science because it's really all about politics and money.  The people who really want to plug into this kind of science are politicians  - who want to know how to persuade us one way, and people who want to persuade us how to buy one way. There has to be a countervaling, open nature to this science which tells us what's going on and allows us to retain our free will and while we may be part of  migratory patterns or any other kind of pattern we also have within us the ability to say "no, I'm not going to be one of those, I shall not do this because I know I'm being pushed by someone who thinks they understand how the human works"  - inside there's the individual human heart and the individual brain and it's better than any system we can devise or an idealogy around it.

You can hear this episode (from June 6th 2011) and others here.

Manchester: Last Dance of the Exquisite Corpses

Whilst researching various items for this blog, I have been drawn to an inescapable conclusion concerning the march of on-line digital progress in Manchester.  It would appear that the expansion has at best peaked and at worse is in a state of decline, not to say freefall.

The trend is relatively easy to identify.  One example is that numerous once-headlining Manchester-based blogs are now retired, semi-retired or left incontinently filling their off-the-shelf CSS templates with mediocre PR fluff from RSS feeds.  A quick click through this list of Mancunian blogs will reveal that for many of them the lights are on but there has been quite literally no-one at home for some considerable time.

Some examples:
The Mancubist (missing presumed disinterested since 22 Sept 2010)
GastroGrrl (missing presumed dieting since 23 Aug 2010)
Lady Levenshulme (27 August 2010)
Rentergirl (evicted January 2011)
Diary of a Bluestocking (August 2010)
Your Call Is Very Important To Us (not that important since June 2010)
Yes, I Will Hold (actually, no I won't since July 2010)
etc... etc...

...and here are some examples of those who have at least had the good manners to say goodbye before relocating - for no readily apparent reason - to another blog address:
Concrete and flowers (fled for greener pastures Feb 2011)
The Fairy Tale Cupboard (flitted away Jan 2011)
Lost In Manchester (signed off May 2011, and a damn shame too)

I have not included the many that began as 'proper' blogs but have steadily replaced original content with links to other people's work (but yes, I am looking at you, Sarah Hartley).

How could this be?  We have been told for years that Web 2.0 has emancipated an entire generation of creative writers and artists who can now self-publish their work.  So why have so many of them simply stopped without so much as a final "farewell, dear readers"?   I think it's safe to say the novelty has worn off, interest waned and many bloggers have become frustrated with their low audience statistics and lack of comments or feedback, not to mention their awareness of just how many tens of thousands of people are self-publishing writing, music and art which is a good deal better than their own.

But while this could account for the decline in personal blogs what of Social Media?  Wasn't SM supposed to enhance this self-publishing and self-promotion trend?  Why isn't it working?  In Manchester it's probably fair to say that the Social Media Café has made the most noise about all this but it appears to have devolved into little more than a small cabal of unimaginative marketeers, as I wrote here.

Social Media was imagined to be the wind in the sails of Digital Development in Manchester but it now looks like it may have had its day.  A small minority of the populace use it merely to augment certain personal aspects of their lives (linking Flickr pix to their Facebook pages for instance), and those marketeers who tried to establish SM as a paradigm for the entire Web 2.0-based future have quietly retreated behind anonymous and unread blogs fed by other anonymous unread blogs fed by third- and fourth-hand RSS feeds generated for the most part by the youngest and most inexperienced people sitting in cheap-looking office units that masquerade as 'newsrooms' all over the city.

What is becoming apparent (and perhaps in hindsight should have been blindingly obvious) is that no-one wants to keep seeing the same old RSS feeds on every single blog they visit. One cannot underestimate the impact of well-produced, original content on the popularity of a blog, but many Social Media marketeers strongly suggest to their clients that all you need for your business is a nice-looking CSS site with a sprinkling of Search Engine Optimisation (all of which they will sell you) and then a Medusa's head of RSS feeds which will keep your homepage looking "fresh".  This is nothing more than a tired old marketing strategy that involves using every trick and subterfuge to keep luring customers back again and again in the hope that they will spend more money.  But guess what?  Customers are not going to keep coming back every day to your hotel's website because your Flickr photostream has updated some blurry shots of the Chef's Special from Friday night...  They will only visit your site - briefly - for just two reasons:  to get contact information or to book a table.  That's all.

By now many businesses have learned that their all-singing all-RSS-feeding sites are just not performing, and that unless they keep those Flickr streams and Your Comments streams truly engaging and fresh then in fact those same feeds actively damage their image, making their sites look outdated and uncared for.  The solution to this involves paying for talented, engaging writers, not witless marketeers.  It requires photographers, not a subscription account with a stock photo library service.  With the decline in the numbers of businesses upgrading or buying into this idea, the marketing companies themselves are finally feeling the pinch, and some of their own sites are now lying pole-axed, a semblance of life suggested only by the spasmodic twitching of an RSS feed of Forum Comments from six weeks ago, or a cycle-loop of five photographs from an event at the beginning of the year.

However, amongst these exquisite corpses can be found organisations like this still hanging in there. This company includes the following helpful definition of Social Media Marketing:

There's lots of hype and hyperbole about social media marketing. Much of it very well deserved. But what's so new that many commentators are calling it a 'revolution in marketing communications'? (There goes that social media hype again!)

Hype is hypebole and lazy PR speak with rhetorical questions like this is so old it is almost beyond cliché. How can a company that depends on its ability to use language publish something as poor as this?  And yet on the same company's Digital PR and Corporate Blogging page, the writing style changes completely.  So much so I was driven to Google some of its key sentences such as this one:

Blogs enable you to articulate your viewpoints, knowledge and expertise on matters pertaining to your industry.

If you do the same (or just use the link above) you will find the same definition on numerous marketing websites.  The oldest I could see was this one from an article written in 2005.  So what we have here is again a demonstration of how cynical and naïve these entities are.   Cynical in that they are still proudly claiming to be able to help customers create a dynamic and engaging 'corporate blog' by insisting on original copy (produced and written by their good selves of course), whilst simultaneously pasting any old copy onto their own site.  Naïve in that they think no-one will ever notice.

Anti-Social Media Cafe too

I decided to create a separate blog entry for another interesting aspect about the Manchester Social Media Cafe which I unearthed while researching this piece here.

It seems their Members group has been infiltrated by a spamming mad person.  But I think the way the members have reacted (or rather not reacted) says a lot about they way they see the group and in at least one instance draws attention to their own naiveté.

This is the Member page of someone calling themselves "Sharon Davids".  You will notice they began entering a website address then stopped and then typed a single letter as their response to the question 'What are you interested in learning about?'  On May 9th they sent the following message to (as far as I could tell) all Members of Manchester's Social Media Cafe:

Hello,
My name is sharon i saw your profile today at and i love it also  became intrested in you,i will also like to know you more,and i want you to send an email directely to my email address so  that i can reply your mail and also give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address(sharondavids52@yahoo.com) i believe we can move from here.my love distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life.i am waiting to recive your
lovely reply soon,

Yours in Love sharon

So far so mad, but surely this would have been reported and the user blocked immediately?  Well, unbelievably this is not the case and incredibly a member whose profile describes themselves as a:

Specialist in the recruitment of Marketing, PR, Advertising, Digital and Social media professionals. Looking to network with like minded people whom I may be able to assist in their next career move.

Responded to the spam like this:

Hi Sharon
Thanks for your comment, I find it a little strange I must admit. But thank you all the same.

...which has now appeared on 'Sharon's comment wall.

This exposes the hypocrisy that permeates so much of Social Media,  because it turns out the Member who responded is simply a recruitment agency cynically using the SMC as a way of touting for clients.  As such, they seem either to have a) wilfully decided to reply to the spam as a joke, or b) not known what on earth they are doing.

As for the failure of the group's organisers to respond to this spamming in any way and the collective apathy shown by the other members - well, as I say, it reflects badly on them all.