Month: May 2012

My £0.02 on who owns your Twitter followers

/ Raj / Leave a comment

Yes! this has been utterly discussed to death. But I’ve got to have my say on this.

I first started grinding my teeth about on this topic when Laura Kuenssberg, formerly BBC Chief Political Correspondent defected to ITV overnight, switching her Twitter account from BBCLauraK to ITVLauraK.

Today, Mehdi Hassan of the New Statesmen has announced he’s joining Huffington Post UK as Political Director in July.

There are all sorts of legal opinions on this, but my personal opinion is more simple.

I think that when people follow you on Twitter, it’s usually on the basis of something you’ve tweeted and a combination of reading your name and bio.

If you state where you work and, particularly, if you include it in your Twitter name, you have an obligation to your followers not to hijack what they’re reading when following your tweets. For example, I chose to follow Laura because of her position as BBC Chief Political Correspondent – hence BBCLauraK. If I had chosen to follow her as an individual, I would’ve happily followed an alternative shared feed.

The BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones happily operates this approach (@ruskin147 vs @bbcRoryCJ) as does their technologist, Bill Thompson (@billt vs @bbcbillt)

Yes, there is an argument that your Twitter account is yours to do with as you please – but it’s a slap in the face of your followers and your employer by stealing their audience in this fashion. It certainly reflects negatively on you and what you think of your followers.

Funnily enough, I was discussing this with my hairdresser the other day. Poaching clients from salons is a huge no-no for stylists. It’s a form of carpetbagging – and ultimately, as word gets round, that stylist will no longer be able to work in that industry.

It’s telling now that, having unfollowed Laura the moment she moved to ITV, she now makes zero impact on my life. Perhaps it’s because I don’t consume much news outside the BBC or tech publications, but this is the real impact that her move would have had if she’d not taken her Twitter followers to the BBC’s key competitor.

Mehdi now has to think carefully. As @ns_mehdihasan, can he simply change to ‘HuffPoMehdi’ or should he create a new account? If I was the New Statesmen, I’d wonder what audience I’d lose by allowing him to take his followers to HuffPo. Individuals are powerful brands, but these accounts have been grown by their association with their employer’s brands.

Personally, I’ve never stated my employer in my profile and have no plans to. Where work stuff is interesting to my followers, I’ll retweet it. And usually, I’m on the shared work account tweeting enough interesting stuff with personality without the need to create a ‘Corporate Josh’. This doesn’t mean I’m not proud of my current association with Melbourne. I just like to a draw a clear line that won’t leave me in a sticky situation if my employment ever changes (I hope it doesn’t!).

In any case, a light-touch policy for employers is essential. Agree what you’re going to do if or when the time comes for a staff member to move on – will they hand over the keys like a company car used for work and business? Or will you let them take the audience they’ve grown for you to your competitor?

Make Twitter work for you – Digital Skills Workshop at the Cornerhouse

/ Raj / Leave a comment

I recently did some training at the Cornerhouse on Twitter, as part of the Digital Skills Workshops they run. If you don’t know about these, they’re a great series of events where industry professionals come in and share their advice on making the most of digital platforms. The series is marketed towards those who work for an arts organisation, are a freelancer in the creative sector or a student – but all are welcome.

Briefly, my session was aimed at existing Twitter users who wanted to make the most of the platform. I covered a few basic principles and then outlined my top tips for effective tweeting. I also outlined some of my favourite tools for effective management of tweets.

I’m doing another workshop again this Monday – but it’s already sold out! So I thought I’d share my slides from last time. You can also read a write-up of the last session.

Naturally, I’ll be tweaking and updating what I do so if you’re booked, make sure you do still come along ;) The best part of these workshops is the Q&A and last time, we had this throughout which made for a very relaxed and informal approach.

App of the week: Drawing the Cloud with Paper for iPad

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Originally posted at Melbourne.co.uk

There’s so much marketing guff about the cloud, often couched in dense, endless PowerPoints or thick PDF whitepapers. So for my talk at Business North West 2012, I decided to do something a bit different :)

I’m always a fan of brief presentations, where the slides are mostly visual prompts rather than on-screen notes to read off. The weekend before BNW, I was off to Brussels so I didn’t really have time to put together anything too comprehensive anyway. I downloaded Keynote onto my iPad but quickly realised that learning to use it on a smaller form factor was going to be a pain. At the time, I didn’t own a stand for my iPad either, so typing was a bit difficult.

Luckily, a couple of weeks earlier, I’d seen a presentation from Garry Byrne at Manchester’s #smc_mcr talking about the state of mobile (report). He’d used the iPad app Paper by fiftythree to create his very simple, effective slides which acted just as I prefer – non-distracting, visual prompts for his engaging talk.

So before I got on the Eurostar back, I downloaded the app, paid for the extra brushes and by the end of the train journey back to Manchester, had produced my entire deck. If I’d had a video adapter, I could’ve presented directly from the app but, for compatibility, I exported each page as an image and pasted them into PowerPoint.

This was my first attempt at designing a presentation using Paper.app but it went pretty smoothly. However, writing words is a bit odd with your finger, so I’ve recently invested in a Cosmonaut stylus on Twitter-based recommendations. We’ll see if this makes a difference.

Paper is currently a free download so watch the video or get it now. And you can flick through my slides above or on Speaker Deck.

Tip: Download the Speaker Deck Embed plugin for WordPress!

Why SocITM surveys are destroying council websites and how to block them

/ Raj / 5 Comments

If you’ve visited a local council website in the last few years, you’re very likely to have encountered a request to fill out a survey on how useful the site is to you.

It’s great that councils and other public bodies are seeking feedback on their online services, but unfortunately, many of them appear to have been misled into using the most awful and intrusive methods of doing so.

The main offender seems to be SocITM: an obscure and stuffy sounding body that describe themselves as  the “professional association for public sector ICT management”.

SocITM provide some kind of turnkey feedback service that can be slotted straightforwardly into the code of council websites. Presumably, they then manage the reporting and feedback to council staff. Unfortunately, it is the most annoying and ugly method for collecting user feedback that I’ve encountered in recent years.

The problem is, no-one ever visits a local council website simply to browse around it for fun. They visit it to rapidly find out information, like when to put the bins out or complete some kind of task, like paying council tax. To be presented with a screen where the content is completely obliterated and ugly, poorly-styled and composed text demands you provide “feedback” is tedious as hell. No: I am not going to feedback to you on your site right now and you should be lucky, because I’d tell you it’s crap.

Much better, to provide an unobtrusive feedback link on the right, a la UserVoice or at the completion of transaction. SocITM are doing their clients as massive disservice by insisting on the installation of ugly wrapper code to then ask for poor quality feedback.

What’s worse is that, despite repeatedly saying I don’t want to provide feedback, I continually get hassled for it as the code appears to move around different pages on the website.

How to block SocITM surveys from interrupting your browsing

Anyway, I’ve had enough. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can permanently block scripts provided by SocITM (or their partner Govmetric) from running on your computer again.

The offending script (pulled from this page) is here. To block it, you simply need to add an exclusion for the domain from which the script runs – in this case, govmetric.com.

In Chrome, click the wrench menu (top right). Choose ‘Under the Hood’ and scroll down to Javascript settings.

Choose ‘Manage Exceptions…’. Then simply add govmetric.com as an exception. Make sure you set the “Behaviour” to Block.

If you have Google Chrome syncing turned on, this should then reflect across all installations.

Boom! No more SocITM surveys or, in fact, any powered by usability-hating survey house govmetric. Sad smiley faces all round!

UPDATE: Adrian Short has produced a beta Google Chrome extension that will do similar by adding a cookie but it’s a bit buggy at this stage. Feedback on both methods would be welcome.

UPDATE 2: It seems SocITM surveys are now polluting search engine results on Google:

SocITM screen grab from Martin Wright.