Whatever...

NYPD’s #fail

By Claire Ayles

Work took me as far as New York this week, a destination that never disappoints.  I particularly love US TV news coverage – just five minutes of FOX makes the plot of Breaking Bad seem completely run of the mill, and one of the few upsides of jetlag is that you can get a massive fix of programming before the working day even begins.

Getting the news anchors giddy with excitement this week was the NYPD’s spectacular Twitter blunder. For reasons only known to them, the people running @NYPDNews thought it would be a good idea to start the hashtag #myNYPD, which the good people of New York City could use to share photos of themselves with some friendly cops.  

Here’s what they wanted to happen:

But here’s what actually happened. And it happened a lot – there were over 70,000 tweets in just a matter of hours, with #myNYPD beating the much publicised #EarthDay in the trending ranks.

 

NYPD isn’t the first high profile victim of hashtag hijacking (we’ve even featured a few on this blog) so it’s a wonder that the folks there didn’t think about the potential ramifications of this campaign before they hit ‘post’. 

It’s what us soccer-loving Brits would call a classic own goal.

Airlines slow to lift ban on in-flight calls

A few weeks ago, I was on a flight into London City Airport when there was an announcement that we were going to be diverted to Southend Airport because of a broken down plane blocking the runway at London City.  This was not good news (anyone who’s ever been to Southend will know why). 

Immediately after the diversion was announced, a man sitting across the aisle from me pulled out his mobile phone to make a call. I must confess I was a little concerned.  I remember thinking it doesn’t matter, there’s no way he’ll get a signal up here but, much to my surprise, after a few attempts he did manage to make a call to the person who was supposed to be meeting him at the airport. 

My initial reaction was that it was dangerous for him to be using his mobile phone while the plane was in the air.  After all it’s been drummed into all of us for years that we shouldn’t use mobile phones on planes because of flight safety but, it turns out, there is no danger of phones (or laptops or tablets for that matter) interfering with in-flight systems.  There is no recorded instance of an air accident caused by a passenger's use of an electronic device.  The whole thing is a myth.  In fact, research has shown that anything up to 30% of passengers on a flight forget to turn off their mobiles anyway.

There are practical issues that may stop you using a phone on a plane - fairly obviously you could find yourself out of range of the nearest cell tower and, even if you do manage to get a signal, at high speed it is not easy for you to be handed off between different cells so you’ll lose connection.  But these are not safety concerns.

As far back as 2008, Ofcom took steps to licence the use of mobile phones on planes.  The FCC has also recently taken similar steps.  Although some airlines say they are responding, it is very odd that we are still told to switch to flight mode or turn off portable electronic devices during take-off and landing.  Maybe the airlines are concerned that passengers don’t want to listen to other people talking on their phones.

Incidentally, the broken plane was cleared from the runway and we were able to land at London City as originally planned; prompting, of course, another call from the man across the aisle. 

Whatever happened...

By Oliver Fischer

...to StudiVZ? You don't know what StudiVZ is? Well, then you are probably not German, or a good deal younger/older then I am. Because for most German students of my age, the social network StudiVZ was the big thing between 2006 and 2008.

In the summer of 2006, a friend told me about this new website for university students where you could network with people, share information about yourself and join discussion groups. I was curious – as a good journalism student should be – so created an account.  It had a pretty basic looking design, mostly in red and white, and asked me for some basic information: where I was studying, what I was studying, what kind of music I liked and so on. After about half an hour filling in more information than I would normally have told a girl on a first date back then, I uploaded a picture and my first foray into social media had begun.  Initially this was not as exciting as you might suspect, particularly because one of the first things StudiVZ told me was: “You have no friends!”

Thankfully that soon changed – after I sent the first few friend requests I also started receiving them, mostly with nice messages saying how great it is that I joined. In hindsight, this is rather strange since none of us really knew why we joined, except for curiosity. That was the first big phase of StudiVZ: First there was curiosity, then there was the hype, with people spending whole days on the platform as everybody and their mothers joined up. Then there was the phase where politicians started warning people about it, mostly because of privacy issues (but also because that's basically what they do – there's a whole group of German politicians that constantly warns people about the dangers of the internet...)

And then there was the lawsuit against Facebook. Early in 2008 there were already rumours that StudiVZ was basically just a copy of Facebook (which back then few people in Germany had even heard of) and, in July, Facebook actually sued StudiVZ.  The argument was settled out of court, but at that time the German social network was already past its prime – more and more users switched to Facebook and started deleting their StudiVZ accounts and, by end of 2009, the site was more or less deserted. I received some birthday messages on there in 2010, but that was about it – nowadays most people I know have deleted their accounts or forgotten their passwords.

The website is still online and it seems there are actually some people who still use it actively, but when I logged onto my old account again to do some research for this blog, all I could find were nostalgic memories which left me thinking if the same thing could one day happen to a site like Facebook when the next big thing rolls around...

 

In the land of the micro-blog, the little man is king

By Jonathan Mathias

A couple of years ago a friend pointed me in the direction of some pretty obscure Twitter accounts that were receiving some well earned praise. Two of them (a couple of the wittiest, yet downright unusual Twitter accounts you’re ever likely to find)  are being fawned over once again, this time in this Bloomberg article, which is lauding the unlikely social media triumphs of a Dalston kebab shop and one of East London’s most infamous late-night boozers – The Dolphin. 

These irreverent, provocative and often bizarre Twitter accounts are a refreshing break from what can be a sea of boringness.  It’s interesting, though, that such out-spoken accounts are linked with businesses, rather than individuals.  Of course it’s not always going to be a good idea to throw caution to the wind over Twitter – if you’re a public company, for example, it could upset the shareholders.  I personally think it’s pretty brave even for small companies to be so bold.  This does however bring up questions of self-censorship and dumbing down and, before long, you have to start wondering if anyone is really going to be interested in what you have to say if it has be to, for perfectly valid reasons, ‘boring’. 

Fundamentally there is a cost/benefit analysis equation for anything you post online – understanding the weighting of this is how to work out how your social media efforts are going to influence your reputation and, ultimately, if and how they are going to bring value to the business.