Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

The Government has published its Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments (even more impressively, it is available for download on a Scribd page), suggesting to civil servants to begin tweeting and explaining how to do it, with the ultimate aim of improving public engagment.

The document is a really interesting, well put-together twitter template. It sets out pros and cons, twitter stats, a glossary and a reasonably significant list of influential twitter uses including journos, departments, MPs. It also has devised twitter objectives and metrics, which I’m sure will spur plenty of debate amongst bloggers and tweeters.

Written by Neil Williams (a.k.a @neillyneil), a self admitted “Web strategy geek at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,”  the document advises civil servants, particularly those from the digital comms teams, to tweet on departmental campaigns, news releases, ministerial announcements, highlighting content on other social media platforms such as YouTube and even asking and answering questions.

Amazingly, this all means that civil servants will be crawling out of the shadows of Whitehall and will have a face, albeit a digital one.  By encouraging interaction, there will be a transparency and two-way communication that, possibly, has never existed in Whitehall before.

Tom Watson MP, the first blogging Parliamentarian and avid social media nut, was also on the Today programme on Radio 4, spruiking the benefits of social media and, in particular Twitter, as a method of communication and interaction.

Tom Watson also made the point that many old mandarins still get their secretaries to print out the mandarin’s emails for review.

MPs are similar; we are currently surveying Parliamentarians and politicos about the use of twitter in Westminster.  There are indeed MPs like Tom Watson, who was among a number of MPs on the Independent’s list of influential parliamentarian twitter, who are actively involved on the blogosphere and many of those listed have actively participated in our survey. But the truth is many still don’t get it and don’t see the point.

But surely, strategies like this show that social media has been adopted by the main stream  and the idea that social media is just for kids, computer geeks and a small sector of society is no longer true.  The powers that be have recognised the revolution will be digitalised and they have no choice but to get on board.

If you are interested in this issue and you would like to take our survey on the use of twitter in Westminster and Whitehall, we would more than appreciate your comments.  http://bit.ly/10sf8B

There has been a fantastic response to our survey  Why there are less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems? With MPs, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, political activists, PR professionals and many more telling us they have filled in the survey, we are building up a great bank of responses to answer this conundrum. The party political range has also been fantastic with Conservative, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and UKIP supporters tweeting the survey and passing it on to their colleagues.

BUT, we would love even more responses.

We are going to keep the survey up for a little longer and keep pushing it on Twitter, so please join in and help us get the broadest possible snapshot of how people view MPs’ contribution to Twitter.

Please forward it on to friends, family and colleagues and even your local MP so that we can have truly representative results and get the fullest answer to the question: Why are there less Conservative tweeters than Labour and Lib Dems?

Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Jag7hJARKIXxAZB5bkTmSw_3d_3d

As the late Michael Jackson once sang: “It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” A new study from Ruder Finn supports this hypothesis.

Ruder Finn Intent Index

The Intent Index reveals a new view on why people go online and redefines how we look at demographics. The important concept here for digital business trends is that marketers need to truly connect with their audiences, and not treat their online communications like a checklist of tasks.

As a result, Ruder Finn co-CEO Kathy Bloomgarden has said that “intent is the new demographic.” She continues,

“Delving deeper into the underlying motivations of online behavior is critical to developing proactive strategies. Just being online is not enough to leverage digital channels to drive business imperatives. Audiences must be targeted based upon their intent.”

She recently discussed the Intent Index in a video interview with PR Week in the US.

You can view the results, which will be updated quarterly, with a cool, interactive flash tool here: www.ruderfinn.com/intent

It’s quite addictive.

You can view the full press release along with interesting results here: RF’s New Study of Online Behavior Focuses On User Intent

The survey has the capability of being narrowed down for specific industries, and an EU-focused survey is planned for a future quarter. Please comment if you’re interested.

For those of you on Twitter, here are some “re-tweetable” findings (using #intentindex or #rfintent via @RuderFinn):

More than twice as many people go online to socialize (81%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%)

72% of people go online just to become part of a community

Seniors are going online today for the same reasons younger people are; to have fun (82%) and to socialize (80%)

More people go online to connect via a social networking site (41%) than to post comments or opinions (34%)

More people go online to be entertained (82%) than entertain others (48%)

People seek education and entertainment: most people go online both to learn (88%) and have fun (83%)

Almost half of people (47%) go online to learn to improve themselves and nearly one-third (31%) to find self-help experts or books

The desire to learn drives people to the Internet; top areas are new subjects (68%), the world (65%), a disease or condition (61%)

Three times as many people go online to compare prices (66%) rather than people via dating sites (21%)

E-commerce isn’t dead — one-third of people (34%) go online to purchase an item

Top things people go online to buy: household items (49%), electronics (45%); music (35%), movies (29%)

More men (42%) than women (36%) go online to do business

Women comment, men read: 55% of women go online to find venues for personal expression compared to only 43% of men

The age of blogs: 44% of people go online to create or update blogs and 42% of people go online to read other people’s blogs.

Women (48%) are much more likely than men (39%) to go online to advocate for an issue or position

The Ruder Finn Intent Index is based on a study among Internet users that asks respondents how frequently they go online for 295 reasons. The Intent Index shows that a person’s intent may be a better indicator for how to develop a communications campaign than demographic formulas. This post also appears on Left Brain.

Here is the survey we are conducting on why there are proportionally more Labour and Lib Dem tweeters than Conservatives.

Fill it in and have your say so that we can get to the bottom of this conundrum…

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Jag7hJARKIXxAZB5bkTmSw_3d_3d

The Tweetminster webpage, where Conservative MPs are outnumbered by their Labour counterparts

As a newcomer to Twitter, I can’t help wondering why there are only 66 MPs signed up to a social media site that they could use daily to stay in touch with their constituents?

More importantly I find it bizarre that of the 66 MPs on Twitter there are more than 4 times as many Labour MPs (over 40) as Conservatives (9) on Twitter.

Why is this?

The Conservative Party website is full of videos, YouTube links, blogs and audio messages and there are a couple of extremely successful Conservative blogs like Order Order and Conservative Home (although not directly connected to the central Conservative Party). David Cameron has packed his Shadow Cabinet with media savvy figures like Jeremy Hunt - founder of Hotcourses - and spent the last 4 years spearheading Webcameron and the Conservative Wall - innovative uses of interactive media.

So why are they so behind on Twitter?

I am going to put forward a series of hypotheses that could explain this mismatch:

• 1. Proportion - I thought at first that because there are more Labour MPs in Parliament it could seem like more are tweeting when the proportions are the same. But there are 349 Labour MPs compared with 192 Conservative MPs, yet there are only 9 Conservative tweeters and over 40 Labour tweeters. In terms of proportion this means only 5% of Conservative MPs tweet whereas 11% of Labour MPs do - a clear Labour margin.
• 2. Age - The Conservative Party has often had a reputation as a party of older more traditional members, which could be seen as a reason for the Conservative Party not embracing Twitter. But as of the 2005 election Labour MPs were on average three years older than the average Conservative MP at 52 and 49 respectively. So age alone cannot be a factor.
• 3. Occupation -Background could be a more important factor than age as the Conservative Party has a far higher proportion of MPs from traditional professions such as the law, business and finance as compared with the Labour Party’s greater number of teachers, lecturers and political organisers. This may reflect a greater background of engagement in modern media amongst the Labour Party as compared with the legal and financial careers of Conservative MPs.
• 4. Constituency Impact - But for me, the most redolent reason for why Conservative MPs can blog but not tweet is that whilst they are slowly seeing how blogs can help them to stay in touch with their constituents, they cannot understand Twitter’s benefits. In rural Conservative seats in Cumbria, Sussex and Hampshire there is most likely less frequency of creative and media jobs and less engagement with social media than the urban constituencies like Manchester, London and Birmingham where Labour MPs dominate. The greater number of students, teenagers and 20s-30s working in careers that use social media in Labour constituencies makes Twitter more relevant and usable in campaigning as Boris Johnson has showed as Mayor of London -a constituency with a modern and creative media hub.

These are my main thoughts on this twitter conundrum; but to get to the bottom of this question I am going to conduct a survey of MPs and people involved in political communications who may have a better idea of why there are less Conservatives than Labour MPs on Twitter.  With this in mind I will blog again in a fortnight and outline my findings on the big question:

Where are all the Conservative (MP) Tweeters?

John Prescott's twitter page

I was just pointed to a really interesting gallery on The Independent’s website titled Twitter’s speedy move to the centre of politics. The gallery is compiled with the help from the team at Tweetminister, which is a really useful resource that lists all tweeting MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).

What I really find interesting about it and is obviously the point of the gallery, is the evolution of twitter use by Parliamentarians. Initially, when I first joined twitter around 18 months ago, I think there were only one, maybe two MPs tweeting. Now according to the Independent, there are at least 66 MPs tweeting - 10% of the Commons. What’s even more exciting is that the vast majority of those MPs are active tweeters. Sure you have MPs such as @HarrietHarman who hasn’t tweeted since May and there is Shahid Malik (@DewsburyMP) who has never posted, but you also have avid users such as Kerry McCarthy [Lab] - Bristol East with 2623 updates, Jo Swinson [LD] - East Dunbartonshire with 1503 and of course Tom Watson [Lab] - West Bromwich East with 2368. There are apparently also 13 Ministers tweeting away.

Some MPs have even got so involved they have tinted their profiles green in support of the Iranian protestors. This may be a slightly questionable in terms of foreign policy decisions, but the fact is these MPs actively involved in the political social media revolution.

Most surprisingly, possibly in the majority of cases, it is actually them tweeting and not a researcher hidden away in Portcullis house as proven by @JoSwinson who tweets from the Chamber. And they reply if you contact them.

So the moral here is that there is a growing awareness of the power of twitter and social media in Westminster and this is surely going to grow. Twitter, facebook and other tools are becoming more and more legitimate ways to contact and engage with MPs and other key decision makers. I can only guess about what is to come especially in the lead up to the General Election

Michael Vaughan is delighted at being made to go on Twitter

English cricket is not known for its innovation and dynamism, on or off the field. Our lack of cricketing prowess will be demonstrated to the world (again) in the Twenty20 World Cup this summer and as much as I’d love England to win the Ashes the chances are at best slim.

Yet I was strangely cheered this morning by news that the England and Wales Cricket Board are to use Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as part of a wider marketing initiative this summer. With no football tournaments and no Olympic games, cricket has a chance to engage with a much wider audience than it does usually and it is encouraging to see such an austere and conservative organisation as the ECB willing to branch out and use social media for this purpose.

Cricket definitely has a perception problem with many people incorrectly assuming it to be stuffy, boring and only followed by old men. This is emphatically not the case and any steps to engage with a younger audience are to be applauded - if the ECB can use social media then so can anyone. I just hope they get some of the players involved as I’d love to read the thoughts of @KP “I wouldn’t have done it that way Straussy”, @vaughany “@Vaughanny is disappointed to have played at that wide one” and @belly “given it away again, gutted”

I attended an industry awards dinner last week and, as is customary with these events, much alcohol was consumed and much debate was had.  I’m writing this because one of these debates struck me as more interesting than most.  Can Brand PR really deliver?

The question was posed by the head of marketing for a global company with a long list of well known brands, so he’s well placed to make such an assertion.  His exact comment (obviously filtered through the hazy fog one tends to have following such an event) was this; “if it is a choice between spending 100K on Brand PR or buying a 100Ks worth of additional media, I would take the media spend every time.”

His point I thought was incredibly valid.  Here’s an in-house marketing person who is judged on sales and sales alone and who must ask himself always; “is this money well spent and will it deliver increased brand awareness and therefore increased sales?”

This got me thinking.  Is there truly a place for Brand PR in these current gloomy economic times?  Can we all put our hand on our hearts and say Brand PR has delivered time and time again?  I thought not. The bottom line is Brand PR is difficult.  Trying to get your brand intrinsically linked to a story is no mean feat.  Why? Because Editors don’t want your brand there and certainly not if it is saying anything positive.  They can smell a PR story a mile off and want your brand forcibly removed from it.

Can Brand PR, and I’m being specific here, no one is questioning whether other types of PR e.g. crisis, financial PR etc work, but specifically can Brand PR, show value against other, more guaranteed, forms of marketing.

The answer is categorically, Yes…sort of.

The classic PR answer, I know.  But I say ‘sort of’ for a reason. It can work but provided it is undertaken in the right way and, more importantly, for the right reasons.

So the first of these is the right way.  I see two fundamentals to Brand PR:

1)    Through the line campaign themes - If you don’t have one consistent theme that is running through every aspect of your campaign it is hard to get good Brand PR.

2)    The brand must be integral to the story - If you have 1), it makes 2) much easier.

If you have a consistent marketing theme running through your campaign and a creative angle that intrinsically links your brand to that theme, and therefore the core of the story, you can get great Brand PR.  Most importantly you can get Brand awareness above and beyond that which a straightforward advert could achieve.

Two great examples of this.  The first is the recent ‘Take a Benylin day‘ campaign.  A campaign that was clearly helped by a complaint from the Federation of Small Businesses which rocketed it on to the 10 o’clock news.  Either way it can’t be denied that it was based on a solid and creative idea that ran through the line.  It also boasted a link up with the British Chambers of Commerce which helped provide credibility for the campaign when the criticisms started flying.

Another example is the comparethemarket.com campaign ‘compare the meerkat‘.  No one would deny these are clever adverts but this theme is carried all the way through the communications.  The meerkat even posts on Twitter and has a Facebook site!  This raises a further important point.   With the diversity of communication mediums at a PR practitioners disposal there is so much that can be achieved with a good creative theme.  A creative theme, I hasten to add, that doesn’t have to be driven by advertising but can start from any one of the marketing disciplines.

So if the first consideration is the ‘right way’ the second is the ‘right reason’. The big question to ask, and this is my final point, is why are you doing this?  That should really drive whether you undertake Brand PR or not.  If it is to get a simple brand message to a hard to reach audience, then a bit more media spend might be the answer.  However, if it is to educate consumers / professionals about a broader issue relating to your brand, demonstrate 3^rd party endorsement or create a brand experience over and above that which can be achieved in a simple advert, then Brand PR should definitely form part of your marketing mix.

So can Brand PR deliver?  Yes it can.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, yesterday told Marketing Magazine of its plans to start charging the brands that use it. Could it be that Twitter has finally figured out how to make money?

Biz was largely unspecific about the associated costs, but what implications will that have on the platforms continued growth? And how will they differentiate between “commercial” and “business” use – and how does this impact the idea of the personal brand?

Spinvox - a voice to text conversion service - is a fairly well-known company, but James Whatley is the company’s key representative on Twitter and he holds much more weight in the Twittershere than the company itself. @whatleydude has the greater brand value, yet in theory will not be charged – as Stone insisted Twitter would not charge individual users.

Increasingly in the world of digital communications, it’s not what you know but what you share with the community that you have around you. Will we see a move to companies hiring people with a stronger brand value than their product or organisation? Does this happen anyway? Is it a new thing? Will this force people to be less transparent about the brands they represent?