Sarah Palin. Twitter. Why…It Would Be The Perfect Storm!

The story pans out like this. Sarah Palin is speaking at an event in Arkansas and someone asks “what’s the greatest threat to America today?” Someone else in the audience shouts out (predictably), “Obama”. Palin’s response;

See, they said that, I didn’t. Just you watch now, too, because somebody will be here with their little Twittering thing, and it’s going to be on the Internet any minute now.

That’s a smart response. It identifies the prevalence of mobile technology, the speed with which news travels, and the extent to which stories can be easily twisted and misunderstood. You can tell what Palin’s saying, that it’d be no surprise if a story didn’t turn up along the lines of “Palin says Obama ‘Greatest Threat To America’” based on a cat call at an event she was at. Let’s face it, the facts don’t get in the way very often when it comes to media coverage of Sarah Palin.

OK, so Palin has responded pretty quickly to diffuse one issue, so she gets jumped on for using the phrase “little Twittering thing”. Oh dear god, a criticism… of Twitter?! Obviously you have to ignore the fact that a) she’s talking about mobile devices, not Twitter and b) it’s not disparaging, but then it’s game on. Present Palin as making a critical remark of Twitter and here are some responses from Mashable’s site comments and also from their Facebook page.

I think she needs to close her mouth and her legs and the world will be alot better off…

That we still have to hear about her is a sad commentary on PART of society.

Sadly, it is not her doing alone- and it’s not because of those of us who are sickened by her…. who gives a rip what she thinks.

She’s as dumb as a rock.

just a dismissive remark, made by an unthinking, arrogant hairdo masquerading as a human being. we should be just as dismissive of her.

This mini story combines two important strands of online life; an overly aggressive response to conservatism in any form (and Sarah Palin in particular), and a preciousness about the sanctity of Twitter or similar technology, both of which exist for the same reason.

But I Thought You Were Liberal…

In many ways web design and online technology blogs and discussion are refreshingly non-political. When politics does rear its head, however, it’s almost exclusively of a liberal bent. Obviously there are a number of reasons for this. The demographic of web workers means that it’s more left leaning social group than average.

I find it funny though, because it leads to an expectation about my own political views. I only have to mention my profession and people will think I’m a left-leaning, liberal, Democrat. It’s surprising that such a young profession as “web design” already has such stereotypes attached to it. A demonstration of its acceptance and importance in the professional sphere maybe.

For the record, I do manage to successfully balance creative and professional success with a conservative political philosophy!

If You Diss Twitter, Well … You Just Suck!

Are we really so precious about the likes of Twitter that it’s insulting if they’re disparaged? So insulted that we have to invent criticisms when they don’t occur, just so we can get angry about them? If anything it suggests that Twitter users simply don’t have enough confidence in the service. If they did, then they wouldn’t have to react aggressively to “put down” a critical comment.

I like Twitter a lot, I use it regularly (@fogofeternity). I’m also confident in the service, I think it can stand up to criticism without my going crazy to defend it. And I’ll accept that lots of people use it for spurious or boring reasons. They still use it though. And, hell, if the best defence people can come up with is “you’re not using it right” then Twitter’s got bigger problems.

Any service that isn’t straightforward enough for people to use easily is always going to fail. I don’t think that’s a problem for Twitter, but perhaps there’s an elitist attitude to that defence; I like Twitter because I’m smart, you don’t like Twitter because you’re dumb.

Reinforcing My Own Belief, Undermining My Ability To Argue That Belief

This is all a demonstration about how the internet, for all the free information out there, actually reinforces people’s beliefs to the extent that they become blinkered. It’s “been decided” in left-leaning arenas that Sarah Palin is to be a figure of hate, to be disparaged regardless of factual accuracy. Passionate Twitter users have decided that Twitter is the most awesome thing ever.

The problem with this reinforcement is that it’s screwing up people’s ability to argue their point effectively. Contrary beliefs become a threat, to be shouted down, not something to engage in debate. The nature of online debate, the immediacy and relative anonymity, encourages this closed off attitude. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone reasonably address their political ideals and why they are better than Sarah Palin’s, better to call her a dumb blonde. I can’t remember the last time someone made a worthwhile defence of Twitter instead of suggesting that people who don’t use it or criticize it are simply too dumb to understand.

And, if I can kind of bring it back to the idea of web design right at the death of the article, blinkered thinking is never a good thing for creativity. I already see it online on web design blogs. There’s a right way to do things, there’s a wrong way to do things. There’s an incestuous self congratulation, where web design inspiration is taken from other web design. The internet for all its freedoms encourages that kind of blinkered thinking. Don’t fall prey.

Social media is often misunderstood, in its purpose, importance, worth and nature. I dropped a note to some experts in the field to see what they thought were the most common misconceptions about social media. As a web designer I was also interested to see what my peers thought, so I contacted not just social media “experts”, but also bloggers and designers whose work I respect and who I see using social media effectively.

Chris Brogan

chrisbrogan.com | @chrisbrogan

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, working with global companies to help them integrate social media into their marketing activities. He’s an author and speaker, and one of the premier opinion leaders and trendsetters about social media technology. He calls himself a typist.

The most common misconception is that social media is simply a new channel for marketing. Instead, it’s new technology for communications. Marketing is one way to communicate, but it ends up feeling like a bullhorn or someone standing on stage, whereas the experience of social media is more like a telephone, or theater in the round.

Darren Rowse

problogger.net | @problogger

Darren Rowse is a professional blogger. He’s Vice President of Blogger Training at b5media, one of the largest blog networks in the world. He also runs ProBlogger, one of the premier sources of blogging advice and tutorials online. He recently released the e-book ‘31 Days To Build A Better Blog‘.

There are many misconceptions but here’s two (hope that that’s ok).

1. you can’t make money with social media – you can, but you just need to do it in a way that delivers value to those you’re interacting with.

2. social media HAS TO BE a conversation – while it is often at its best as a conversation there are plenty of examples of people who use it successfully as a broadcasting tool.

Paul Boag

boagworld.com | @boagworld

Paul Boag is founder and Creative Director at the award winning Headscape web design agency. He hosts the long running and hugely popular web design podcast and blog Boagworld. He writes for .NET magazine and speaks regularly on web design at events such as SXSW, @media and FOWD.

In my opinion the biggest misconception is that social media is new. Social media is about people interacting online and that has been around since before the world wide web existed. People think social media is about leveraging Facebook or having a Twitter strategy. It is not. Social media is about building community and having real relationship online. It’s about communication. This can be done through tools like Twitter and Facebook. However, it can just as easily be done in a chat room or on a forum. Don’t get caught up in the hype, build long term communities that will outlast the current fashionable tool.

Mark Dykeman

broadcasting-brain.com | @MarkDykeman

Mark Dykeman is a Canadian based IT professional who observes and writes on social media in all forms. As well as his own blog, Broadcasting Brain, he’s contributed to the likes of LouisGray.com and Mashable. He’s the writer of the free ebook ‘Social Destinations Of The Web‘.

The biggest misconception about social media, like many other things, is that phrase from Field of Dreams:  “if you build it, they will come”.  Even though you (as an individual or a company) may build a social media presence, it doesn’t mean that people will flock to you, despite any fame or recognition you may have outside of social media.  You need to actively engage people.

Lee Munroe

leemunroe.com | @leemunroe

Lee Munroe is a Belfast based front end web designer whose work has been featured in publications such as Wired and Web Designer Magazine. He writes a wide ranging blog examining all aspects of the web design process, and his articles seem to have a knack of encouraging great discussions in the comments.

That by taking part all of a sudden makes your company hip and cool

I was really interested in the responses I got. There seemed to be one common theme running through the answers, and one which I agree with. Social media can’t be a one way street. It doesn’t work if it isn’t a conversation, a two way communication (I loved Chris Brogan’s analogy of the theater in the round). Unless you engage with social media, and add value to your networks, you’ll never see a benefit.

A failure to understand that need for two way communication and added value is still very common. It’s the friend you have who thinks Twitter is just people sending boring tweets about what they had for breakfast, it’s the newspaper columnist who’s taken an anecdotal story about YouTube as hard evidence without learning more, it’s the multinational corporation thinking that merely having a Facebook fan page means they’re “doing” social media. As Paul Boag said, social media is about having a real relationship.

For me the biggest misconception is that the tools are the story. It’s like saying that the room where a cocktail reception is held is “networking”. Just as you gain no benefit from merely being in the room at a cocktail reception, whether sitting in the corner or talking without listening, there’s no inherent benefit in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or any other tool. Social media is activity and communication.

It’s Her Life

My peer group of web designers, developers and bloggers spends a lot of time tweeting links and resources. If you’re a celebrity, however, people want to focus on the real person. They want to think that using Twitter is going to give them a special insight into that person’s life and personality. They don’t want a stream of mundane information like “taking the dog for a walk”, nor do they want to be overwhelmed with plugs for new TV shows, products, records, etc. People want a celebrity Twitter user to give them some insight into their lives.

I haven’t seen anyone better than Tila Tequila at using Twitter as a way for a celebrity to pass on a genuine lifestream. She’s clearly hugely interested in the medium, which makes her both active (over 20,000 tweets in six months!) and original in her tweets. More importantly, the tweets are a genuine insight into her life, uncensored and unfiltered. A great example is a couple of nights ago where she spent seven hours tweeting, in effect, her life story. An autobiography in miniature, with details and opinions that used to be the kind of secrets the traditional press would spend ages digging up.

It’s Exclusive

Tila also uses Twitter and its tools to their full effect, to provide her followers with content they wouldn’t otherwise see. She’s used TwitPics to post high school photos of herself, or candid “real life” shots. She’s linked to video footage of songs she recorded when she was a teenager. Even her Twitter profile page reinforces this, with regularly changing backgrounds and new images.

This not only means that following Tila as a fan means you get genuinely exclusive content (and for free), but it reinforces the open nature of her Twitter feed. The exclusive content she’s posting isn’t sanitized public relations shots, or glossy music videos she’s trying to sell. It’s very casual, honest and therefore much more real.

It’s Genuine

Tila’s Twitter account has only been active since March this year. In that time @officialTila has picked up over a quarter of a million followers. That puts her in the top 500 most followed Twitter accounts, but obviously still some way behind the several million who follow the likes of @aplusk.

The difference is that Tila’s follower numbers seem to be real organic growth. I’ve not heard of her talking on TV about trying to achieve a certain number of followers, or offering charity donations when the followers reach a certain amount. She hasn’t provoked contests with other celebrity accounts to see who can get the most follows. Those methods might provoke a lot of people to sign up, but not make them truly engaged with the person they’re following.

Tila’s simply tweeted. Sure, she had a public profile before she started using Twitter. But it does seem very much that her followers are there because they’re interested in her tweets. Not because they’re jumping on a bandwagon to help a certain person get x million followers by next Friday!

It Links Together

Tila is very effective at linking her main online portal, Tila’s Hot Spot, with her Twitter activity. Not only does that site itself have a very open and active blog from Tila, but she directly references back and forth. She posted a compilation of her seven hours of autobiographical Twitter discussion into a single article, which she could direct people to in her tweets. She uses Twitter a lot to interact with her “Tila’s Army” group, and maximizes that by focusing on the #TilaArmy hashtag. That’s great, because it reinforces the idea that you can get genuine insight from Tila’s tweets, but it also drives traffic to her main site and to her other fan groups.

It’s Interactive

For obvious reasons Tila’s followed rather than a Twitter follower herself (she follows only 77 people). That doesn’t mean she’s not interactive though, and I can imagine that replies directed at her account are probably more numerous that my own Twitter stream in full. But watch her Twitter stream, and see how many times she retweets other people.

The importance of being regularly retweeted has been discussed in lots of articles. It’s a demonstration of trust, and it gets your message and your profile to a wider audience. The power of a celebrity retweet is presumably even more, given you’re being retweeted to a huge audience and also receiving the endorsement that the celebrity found your comments interesting enough to repeat. It demonstrates that not only is Tila tweeting heavily, but she’s also paying attention to what her fans say.

A Role Model For Celebrity Social Media

I said at the start of the article that I had a soft spot for Tila Tequila. That was it, I just vaguely thought she was a pretty cool celebrity. I didn’t check her website or take time to watch her TV shows. I wasn’t engaged with her profile in any sense.

Since I followed her Twitter stream out of curiosity I’m far more engaged with her profile and her activities. The way Tila uses Twitter provokes that level of engagement. And it’s not because she’s a beautiful girl, or that I’m a big fan of her music or her TV shows. It’s because she’s a very open, engaging and interesting celebrity who’s using Twitter to really open up to her fans. In that, she’s a model for great celebrity use of social media.

Of course those Twitter users probably have several thousand followers for a reason. They provide good tweets and contribute to the wider community. But users with smaller numbers of followers can be equally worthwhile, and they don’t get the publicity. It’s harder to grow your follower numbers at the start, even if your tweets are worthwhile.

I’m hardly a big pull on Twitter, but with approaching 600 followers I’ve at least got past the initial hurdle. What I’d like to do is highlight five people I follow who you almost definitely haven’t heard of, because they don’t have many followers, but who are worth taking a look at.

@justsofestival (44 followers)

Designing for technology is great, but it’s easy to overlook the wider world of design. It’s also easy to overlook the most creative people there are, kids. Highlighting great creative resources for encouraging children, justsofestival has a chatty and engaging style. Tweets that are great if you have kids, but equally interesting and worthwhile resources if you want some alternative inspiration as an adult.

@bombaycrow (45 followers)

Open source PHP/Linux based technology is a powerful model. Which means that .NET, C# and development tools and resources surrounding them are often overlooked in the social media community. With a heavy focus on these areas and the EPiServer content management platform, bombaycrow provides a different view on web development and technical architecture. It makes a nice change from everything being PHP based, without losing relevance to development and design.

@WilsonPortfolio (69 followers)

An eclectic feed from a talented artist (check out his work on his website). Ranging the whole gamut from technical comments on Gmail development to artistic discussion, UFC predictions and movie notes. Enough of a regular update to be worthwhile without the tweet overload that you might otherwise face when covering so many different topics.

@pixana (104 followers)

The profile says “passionate about webdesign” and that definitely comes through in her posts. An intermittent flow of great links featuring quality web design, technical tips and good practice. Seems to tweet in small bunches every few days, but when she does the links are worthwhile and a nice low ratio of retweets compared to new content.

@HeatherEx (114 followers)

Regular posts from someone who’s clearly excited about the possibilities of web design. It’s great to see the application of a non-technical focus background to learning the theory and practice of web design, CSS and HTML. HeatherEx posts great links and comments on the nature of web design freelancing, with a fresh perspective and an accessible style.

Why not take a moment to look at the people you’re following, identify some of them who are less well known, and give them a boost that they deserve?

Twubble

I’m not a big fan of #followfriday, because it’s just lists of “people to follow” without context. My preferred tool for finding new people to follow is Twubble. It’s a simple tool; it will search through people you’re following and give you a list of suggested links based on who they’re following. I check out the site at least once a week.

Why I Like It

I like to be able to make a quick judgement of who I want to check out further from a suggestion list. Twubble gives me three important pieces of information:

• Profile picture
• Link to their Twitter profile
• Which of my friends follow them

I can make a good judgement based on those factors. I’ll check out their Twitter profile and posts, and their blog/website, but the gut feeling from the Twubble list is usually right. It’s also useful that Twubble keeps its list manageable and expandable.

TwitterCounter

The best analytics tool I’ve found for measuring raw data. The site tracks your follower growth over time, details the average growth of your followers and gives overall Twitter ranking as well as geographical options. It provides raw data and graphical representations, future predictions based on past statistics and allows you to compare statistics between any two Twitter users.

Why I Like It

TwitterCounter gives me the most useful overview of the general trends of my account. I love the prediction tool, flexible enough so that you can predict follower numbers at any point in the future. For those who have more than one Twitter account then the comparison tool can give you a handy overview of the differences between the two.

Tweepular

Tweepular’s over the top color scheme hides a solid management suite. It tracks your following/followers and allows bulk management of these users. You can see reciprocal follows and one way follows, and sort and manage your account in various ways. It also ranks you based on your “Tweepularity”. That’s a good idea but  it would help if we had at least some hint as to what factors its measuring or there’s no way to judge what Tweepularity actually means.

Why I Like It

The color scheme is kinda fun, but it’s the functionality that’s attractive. Bulk follow/unfollow is invaluable. It’s also helpful to be able to sort out people you’re following who don’t tweet any more (you can sift by date of last tweet). Unlike many web based Twitter services you don’t have to proceed to someone’s Twitter profile to get more information – a mouseover of a user in Tweepular will give you their username, screenname, location, bio and latest tweet. With the promised addition of adding “recent unfollows” to the statistics Tweepular is a serious piece of kit, even if it looks a little crazy.