another social blog

"10 tips for social media measurement 1. Get the search terms right 2. Clean up the data 3...."

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:43:53 +0100

“

10 tips for social media measurement

1. Get the search terms right
2. Clean up the data
3. Automated analysis can be very misleading
4. Measure what matters
5. Don’t ignore your competitors
6. Correlation does not imply causation
7. Don’t limit yourself to brand mentions
8. Be measured in your conclusions
9. Influence isn’t everything
10. Context is key

”

- http://bit.ly/15CcHDn (via precisebrandinsight)

"All polls of opinion must be superficial. They reveal the top of what people think organized into..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:46:38 +0100

““All polls of opinion must be superficial. They reveal the top of what people think organized into common sense. What people really think is always partly hidden” - Susan Sontag”

- http://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/the-value-of-qualitative-research/

"When we talk about the value of using Twitter at work, we frequently focus on the direct results..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:23:30 +0100

“

When we talk about the value of using Twitter at work, we frequently focus on the direct results we’ve achieved, such as whether it’s led to any new business, or helped us share our blog with a wider audience.

Or we talk about the value of our followers: how many we have and who they are, the two most popular obsessions.

Other than the obligatory ‘Follow Friday’, we rarely talk about who we’re following.

For me, this is the real value in checking Twitter every day.

”

- http://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/homage-to-the-following/

A teenager perspective on Tumblr use

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:01:00 +0100

“Reblogging is a great and made-easy way to define my newly-established online self. It is how I quickly pass along the things that I care about and keep my followers interested in my blog. Despite it not consisting of all-original content, my blog is the equivalent of making a portfolio to sum myself up.”

http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-do-teenagers-waste-hours-upon-hours-consuming-Tumblr#

thenewinquiry: CHAT ROOM: Activist Microcelebrities An edited...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:13:05 +0100

thenewinquiry:

CHAT ROOM: Activist Microcelebrities

An edited gchat about the perils and possibilities for activists seeking attention for movements through social media.

By Rob Horning and Nathan Jurgenson.

“Do activists need to get something done before the hype cycle invalidates them?”

"With an increasing level of distrust in the media, the unmediated access to the ‘truth’, as reported..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:03:00 +0100

“With an increasing level of distrust in the media, the unmediated access to the ‘truth’, as reported by Bieber himself, helps to create a proximity to the star; in addition to maintaining the illusion of direct access to him.”

- http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gareth-price/look-at-me-im-a-true-belieber_b_3176872.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

"I think we’re right to warn teenagers that they need to examine what they’re sharing publicly online..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:41:51 +0100

“

I think we’re right to warn teenagers that they need to examine what they’re sharing publicly online but I wonder whether the reaction would be as strong if Paris had said the same thing on Facebook. While some of her comments are clearly indefensible, is part of the overreaction to what she said based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how a different demographic uses Twitter?

Just because what she said was public at the time, is dragging those tweets up years later any less an invasion of her privacy than if the newspaper had created a fake account to befriend her on Facebook to search her old status updates?

”

- http://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-playground-extends-to-twitter/

The obfuscation of culture (how to hide your shit online)

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:02:53 +0000

The obfuscation of culture (how to hide your shit online):

kenyatta:

One of my favorite bits from Jacob’s post on “seapunk” was this bit about keeping subcultures “sub”:

It is an impossibility for a subcultural style to be “owned”. Sub-culture exists when gazed at by mass-culture. The only way to ensure that your aesthetic is not going to become used by others is to never share it with anyone. Another approach is to protect your aesthetic with physical violence (see: gang colors). Otherwise, once you allow your presence to be seen, it can be consumed.

Most communities protect their culture through some form of obfuscation: hiding the meaning of their communication by making it hard to interpret.

This is a practice I’ve been studying for some time and some of it is incredible.

Tum bl r an d L J u sers sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes.

Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo.

General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode.

4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn.

More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems.

If you want your subculture to go undetected, all of these techniques are moderately effective at keeping your activity away from people and their machines. Until they *want* to find you. Then they’ll find ways around the gates you throw up.

update #1:

rickwebb replied to your link: The obfuscation of culture (how to hide your shit online)

We see a lot of people posting whole posts in tags, so that they’re only visible in the dashboard and not their external-facing blogs, too.

Brilliant.

update #2: Alex Leavitt points me to this First Monday piece by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection & Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation’

"Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:48:48 +0000

““Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time””

- http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/12/how-we-think-about-technology/266527/

"In a research context, social media effectively acts as a giant, disorganised focus group where..."

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:54:54 +0000

“In a research context, social media effectively acts as a giant, disorganised focus group where anyone is free to share their opinion about anything… offering the chance to do qualitative research at scale.”

- http://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/what-does-pews-twitter-analysis-mean-for-social-media-research/

"In an environment where everything is about monetization and who can get the most clicks and the..."

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 13:05:00 +0000

““In an environment where everything is about monetization and who can get the most clicks and the most page views you can imagine, we have this ratcheting up of what can get attention and, needless to say, one of things we see about what gets the most attention is that which is most humiliating or grotesque or otherwise problematic. So we see this kind of trafficking in problematic content, whether it’s these major news agencies desperate to figure out how to get advertising revenue or whether it’s individuals trying to play with it… we see a lot of dis-empowered populations fucking with the attention economy just because they want to have power within a system in which they have no power” - danah boyd”

- http://www.theorizingtheweb.org/2013/videostream.html

"The pervasiveness of documentation throughout virtually every aspect of our daily lives has led us..."

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:40:35 +0000

““The pervasiveness of documentation throughout virtually every aspect of our daily lives has led us to start living for the documents, rather than the documents simply reflecting some aspect of our lives””

- http://precise-mail.co.uk/t/1HL1-1B4LA-9C82UW3E44/cr.aspx

"While Agger rightly regards social media as capitalism’s attempt to deploy technology to subsume..."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:16:21 +0000

“While Agger rightly regards social media as capitalism’s attempt to deploy technology to subsume sociality — it tries to capture our interactions with friends and reorient them toward value production (brand building, immaterial labor, etc.) — he wrongly connects oversharing with pornographic self-display and people making banal observations about everyday life, which seems myopic to me, a misunderstanding of how social media is used”

- http://marginalutilityannex.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/591/

"All that social-media presence amounts to an intense ideological pressure to be overinvested in what..."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:07:38 +0000

“All that social-media presence amounts to an intense ideological pressure to be overinvested in what we can signify about ourselves and to use sociability as an identity-construction tool. It posits the identities of others as competing goods on the shelf.”

- http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/social-discovery-vs-sociability/

"While trending has no discernible outcome, and potentially many drawbacks, the democratisation of..."

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 12:15:00 +0000

“

While trending has no discernible outcome, and potentially many drawbacks, the democratisation of fame and the chance to trend is perceived to be worth the risk.

While previous teenage generations arguably had a similar notion of what fame was, their understanding of what it really is was able to evolve with age; without the ease of achieving it at the click of a button from within their own bedroom

”

- http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gareth-price/trending-on-twitter_b_2684677.html

"The point isn’t that there exists a digital world that’s fake; it’s that there..."

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:27:00 +0000

““The point isn’t that there exists a digital world that’s fake; it’s that there isn’t a digital world””

- http://precise-mail.co.uk/t/1HL1-196HA-9C82UW3E44/cr.aspx

"The digital environment is not a parallel or purely virtual world, but is part of the daily..."

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:22:23 +0000

““The digital environment is not a parallel or purely virtual world, but is part of the daily experience of many people, especially the young” - Pope Benedict XVI”

- http://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/the-pope-critiques-digital-dualism/

This rather dream-like video promoting Graph Search also...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:53:00 +0000

This rather dream-like video promoting Graph Search also suggests that Facebook is as much afraid of the growing misconception of digital dualism, as it is of being seen to invade privacy.

The advert encourages the idea that people who use Facebook are also more social away from the site.

The fundamentally flawed notion that the ‘real-world’ is different and separate to the ‘virtual’ one overlooks the fact the two are completely immersed.

As this advert sets out to make clear, there’s no such thing as complete disconnection.

Facebook is still driving the behaviour and how we experience the world. We’re still looking at the outdoors as a potential update to share later.

The idea it’s a zero-sum game and time spent on Facebook detracts from time spent in the ‘real-world’ is, as this video looks to make clear, fundamentally flawed.

"In seeking validation through likes and re-tweets, and without the tools (such as a dislike button)..."

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:50:00 +0000

“In seeking validation through likes and re-tweets, and without the tools (such as a dislike button) to dismantle the opinion of those with whom we disagree – without risking a very public trading of views – do we avoid saying anything that might be deemed at all controversial?”

- http://socialmediatoday.com/gareth-price/1123536/outrage-only-mode-online-discourse

The story of how and why Rupert Murdoch replied to a tweet I’ve...

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 19:48:00 +0000

The story of how and why Rupert Murdoch replied to a tweet

I’ve been inspired to write blog posts by Adam Curtis before (here and here) and although this piece focuses on a particular, and lesser known, documentary of his (available on his BBC blog), it also draws on many of the stories he’s told in his televised work too.

‘Forward with the people’

In the 1960s Cecil King ran a powerful media group called IPC that owned both the Daily Mirror and The Sun.

King’s vision for the Daily Mirror was to create a newspaper that educated the “little man”.

As well as connecting with their hopes and fears, it hoped to change them; believing that tabloid newspapers could transform society by leading opinion.

The paper’s motto was ‘forward with the people’.

At the same time, Harold Wilson wanted to change the British people with a vision of social progress.

King saw an opportunity to use his newspapers to bring Wilson and his Labour party to power to help him achieve his aim of transforming society.

At this time, the Bank of England was focused on preserving Britain’s global power by maintaining sterling as the dominant world currency.

The governors at the bank believed that Wilson’s lack of interest in reducing the deficit would destroy Britain.

When Wilson refused to grant King a peerage because of his political beliefs and, as a consolation, gave him a place on the Bank of England’s committee, he brought his old and new enemies together.

King was persuaded by influential people at the bank to launch a political coup against Wilson. It ultimately proved to be King’s own undoing.

He was ousted from the Daily Mirror and the new chairman sold The Sun to a little known Australian newspaper magnate called Rupert Murdoch.

Although they disagreed about the direction the country was heading, King, Wilson and the governors of the Bank of England were all united by a patrician vision.

But, at a time of economic crisis, these stories no longer worked and were the remnants of an old empire.

In contrast, Murdoch wanted to attack the British elites and their patrician snobbery.

Instead of trying to change the British people he believed you should serve them and give them what they wanted.

Margaret Thatcher was a politician that thought the same way.

Together they created the framework for the way we see the world today.

Our reaction to social media, the manner in which we talk about the future of social media and the way the media report social media is an extension of the vision of the world given to us by the likes of Murdoch and Thatcher.

It’s the idea that the people always know best and that the opinion of the “little man” is just as important as the experts.

It’s the inspiration behind ideas like crowdsourcing, which suggest that listening to the aggregated opinion of the masses, rather than the experts, is the best way to solve a problem.

It’s why everyone who works in social media keeps telling companies that engaging with consumers (whatever that really means) matters more than anything else.

It also explains why Rupert Murdoch, who by now was one of the most powerful men in the world, felt that he needed to join Twitter and reply to a reader whose newspaper had been delivered late to his door.

And it’s why we all got very excited when he did.