Whatever...

Shouldn’t it be called Twanking?

By Mike King

 

I’ve been playing around with Twitter ranking tools, trying to gauge how different Twitter users compare to others.  Needless to say, finding a meaningful measurement tool is not that easy.

 

Some of the most well known ranking tools, like Twitterhollic and TwitterCounter just use the number of followers to rank Twitter users.  While this is obviously one measure, it seems to me to be far too simplistic.  If users in the wonderful world of Twitter are going to be ranked, other factors need to be taken into account such as quality of tweets, activity levels and credibility. 

 

Fortunately, there are other sites that attempt to rank Twitter users with more sophisticated analysis than number of followers alone.  Examples include Twinfluence and, my personal favourite, Twitter Grader.

 

These tools are very easy to use, just stick in any Twitter name and they will check it out and come back with a grade and, most importantly, an overall ranking.   I have no idea how accurate these tools are or, frankly, much about how they work out their scores, but I like the way they attempt to bring some form of measurement to the world of Twitter.  And, of course, with tools like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence, it is fun to be able to see where you come in the rankings.

 

When I checked it out, ‘johnsonkingPR’ was ranked 323,549 out of 2,927,968 on the Twitter Grader with an overall grade of 89 out of 100.  Not bad, puts us close to the top 10% of Twitter users.   By comparison, mega-Tweeter Stephen Fry comes in at 251 with a grade of 99.99 out of 100 and Guy Kawasaki at number 2 with a grade of 100. 

 

Using Twinfluence, we faired even better, with an overall ranking of 76,783 and a score of 47%.

 

All of these ranking tools also have lists of the top Twitter users, the elite users. It all may be fairly meaningless but it is fun seeing where you stand in the rankings and then working to improve your position. 

Is Twitter the new Reuters?

 

 

 

By Alexandra Radius

 

In the beginning, Twitter was a social network which helped you to keep track of what your friends were up to. But its success and global notoriety has come from a different type of use. Twitter is now a media in its own right, having proved to be an efficient and (relatively) reliable source of news and insight about events happening all over the world.

 

One of the most recent examples of this was during the Iran crisis when the traditional media was heavily restricted. Twitter provided the platform for uncensored videos filmed on mobile phones to be broadcast, giving the world a rare glimpse of what many Iranian people thought about the country’s political situation. Another example was during the Bombay terror attacks when people tweeted as a way of contacting their families.

 

For me, the more quickly we are made aware of these type of situations the better, and the fact that the public can now break the news ahead of AFP or Reuters is a logical evolution, given the immediate and ‘always on’ nature of today’s end-user technologies.

 

So does this mean that we are looking at the end of the press agency and journalism as we know it today? Even if technology continues to increase the speed at which the news is spread, we will always need credible people to check and corroborate information, after all, the lines between rumours, speculation and truth can be very thin. Twitter is a great tool and plays a vital informative role, but this role can only be a complementary one.

 

Recently the idea has been put forward that Twitter should win the Nobel Peace Prize for its role during the Iran crisis and why not? The very suggestion will undoubtedly give Twitter and other social networks real recognition as information broadcasters.  But tweeting can never replace hard graft, in-depth journalism, especially now that we can read the news on a smartphone, laptop and maybe very soon, a Kindle.

 

Is Morgan Stanley really down with the kids?

By Tom Kirkham

 

This week everyone’s been talking about Matthew Robson and his revelation that – shock-horror(!) – teenagers don’t use Twitter.  Personally, I think this excellent news, as by and large, teenagers are not very interesting.

It is impressive nevertheless that following just one week’s work experience at Morgan Stanley, the young gent (15) has managed to achieve unprecedented global fame and recognition (check this profile in The Times for one) for his How Teenagers Consume Media report.  I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for our own work experience lad Louis, who also did a first rate job but unfortunately – to the best of my knowledge – his reorganisation of our media database hasn’t yet become the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City.

It does feel as though the significance of Robson’s report is being overstated – there’s no great evidence to suggest that he is the archetypal teenager.  He was given the task because he was in the right place at the right time, he admits that it really only sums up the views of some friends he texted, while his Headteacher describes him as “a very reflective young man” – hardly consistent with the image of the knife-wielding, hoodie-wearing, pensioner-intimidating youth we’ve all come to know and dread.

Okay, so this is facetious, and certainly a number of Robson’s claims do sound like they’re on the mark, but I suspect the real reason for all of the fervour is simply because most of the CEOs and analysts out there have NO IDEA what teenagers are actually like. 

  

The ridiculous pace of technological change is accentuating existing generation gaps as well as creating new demographics – “the mobile phone generation”, “the Facebook generation” etc. – based purely on the technologies that different bands of teenagers grow up with, and crucially, take for granted.  While CEOs may be able to use these same products and services themselves, it’s getting harder and harder to bridge the divide and understand the full extent of technology’s social impact on young people.  Hence Morgan Stanley and the business world jumping on the first glimmer of insight that comes along.

  

It will be interesting to see whether other companies now look to engage more directly with teenagers to track trends and identify emerging youth consumer habits.  Maybe in the future, we’ll even see kids opting to become part-time media consultants instead of taking on paper rounds or working in McDonalds.  One thing’s for sure – if I was Matthew Robson, rather than working on my next report, I’d be living out the fantasies of teenage boys everywhere and using my new found fame to pick up hot girls…

There’s life in the old dog yet

By Jonathan Mathias

 

This day last week, for the first time in as long as I care to remember, I was completely transfixed by the unfolding events of a TV news story – the untimely death of Michael Jackson.  What really struck me, in retrospect, was that I didn’t immediately search Google in order to find out more.  No, at this time, all that would do for me was old media – and I wasn’t the only one.  All my friends and family were glued to BBC News 24, and I’d hazard that an awful lot more people than usual picked up a newspaper last Friday.  

 

The story broke on the relatively small celebrity gossip website TMZ, and it was from there that other news agencies and services got their tip off.  But it seems that people just wouldn’t accept MJ’s death as fact until other, more established outlets, such as the LA Times, BBC and CNN, confirmed the reports. 

 

The below graph, made on alexa.com, shows traffic to various news sites at the time.  You can see that TMZ had a marked peak on the 25^th, when the story broke, while the other more mainstream sites peaked or experienced sustained traffic the following day (including Twitter, as the public conversation continued to flow).

 

 

 

Although this event demonstrates more than ever how online and social media has changed the way news spreads, it’s also clear that the traditional media is a long, long way from being written off.  People continue to revert back to more established news sources to confirm big stories, perhaps you could even argue that stories carried by these outlets are much more trusted, valued and remembered.

NLA to charge for web content – a step too far?

By Flora Haslam

 

The NLA’s plan to extend its licensing remit to cover newspaper websites has, unsurprisingly, been met with widespread condemnation from the PR community. 

 

It’s all very well for the NLA to want to ‘protect the rights of publishers’ – let’s be honest, they could do with all the help they can get in the current climate, but I thought the rationale for the NLA was to compensate publishers for loss of sales?  I really don’t see how charging for clippings of online news stories (which are freely available) can possibly be justified?

 

The debate on monetising internet content could rage forever, but while some – notably the FT – have gone down the subscription route, and other publishers have toyed with pay per page view, the fact remains that the vast majority of UK online news is available free of charge.

 

I still struggle to understand the basic argument that the NLA fee compensates lost revenue.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always found that when a client gets in the Telegraph or the Guardian, they’re usually very keen to go and buy themselves a copy – sometimes more than one!  So you could argue the PR industry is actually responsible for driving newspaper sales (and that’s before we even get started on the arguments that some copy is actually created by PRs and their clients anyway).

 

Extending the charges to cover web content just seems like a step too far.  The NLA’s own research shows that 23% of newspapers’ online content never appears in print which, by my reckoning, means we’ll all be paying twice for 77% of coverage... nice work if you can get it.