Social Media etiquette: How to lose friends and influence people

A few things have got me thinking about the etiquette of Twitter recently and the social norms that are developing around it. Many of these themes were addressed at the ‘Social media – a force for good?’ event held at NESTA yesterday that featured Biz Stone, co-founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; Reid Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn, and the inimitable Stephen Fry.

You can watch the whole event here, so rather than rehash their discussion, I want to highlight three instances where the unspoken social norms of Twitter were brought out into the open.

To Tweet or not to Tweet

The first was a reaction to my use of Twitter.

Earlier this week I launched the Urban Mashup blog with a post on the  ‘Social Media 09′  Mashup*event where I had been one of the speakers. As I was keen to get a debate going, I used Twitter to send a Direct Message (DM) to a number of the other speakers and participants that had attended the event. I also copied the DM to a few people that weren’t there who I thought might be interested.

I didn’t figure this was a big deal. After all, you didn’t need to be at the event to have an opinion about what I was discussing. However, I figured wrong.

I soon received this public rebuff from a recipient of my Direct Message:

1. I wasn’t at the event. 2. We’ve never spoken. 3. You DMing me a link to your write-up not exactly *social* media genius it?

Although I issued an immediate public and private apology (via DM) to the offended recipient, there followed something of a ‘Twitter spat’ between us that required an intervention from @paul_clarke, who knows us both, to help calm things down.

The harder they come, the Harder they Twitterfall

The second situation occurred at another Mashup* event where this time, I was not present. The story goes that during the panel discussion there was a delay in connecting the live Twitterfeed to the overhead display.

While this was getting set up, a member of the audience used the #mashupevent hash-tag to criticize Tony Fish, the Chair of the panel, using a four letter expletive and making a derogatory remark about his physical appearance. Moment’s later, the feed went live and the remark was made public to everyone in the audience, much to the shock of everyone in the room.

What happened next was interesting.

Emma – one of the Mashup* organizers – was so incensed by the remark that she identified the individual concerned through his Twitter ID (@swith) and attempted to confront him immediately after the event finished. His rather sheepish looking colleagues all claimed that he had legged it, but that didn’t matter because the Mashup* team had all the details they needed to get in touch with him and his employer (who had paid for him to attend).

Sure enough the next day, @swith sent a deeply apologetic email claiming that he was horrified when it appeared on the screen. But you’ve got to wonder why did he use the event hash-tag if he didn’t want it to be seen? Given that his company had paid for him to attend the event, who was responsible for his message? If the comment had been sent by email, would the consequences have been different?

The court of public opinion

My third observation comes from the national response to the appearance of the BNP’s Nick Griffin on Question Time.

According to Tweetminster (who did an excellent job of providing live stats throughout the broadcast), 99% of Tweets expressed anti BNP sentiment.  However, the comments received by message boards such as the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’, were far more varied, and apparently the moderators were overwhelmed managing the flood of offensive comments.

Why the difference between sentiment expressed on Twitter and elsewhere? A recent YouGov poll points to a different Twitter demographic, but I think there could be something else in play.

Unlike a message board that enables you to post messages as ‘Angry from Aldershot’, Twitter displays your personal identity to the world. As a result, I suspect that people Tweet the version of themselves they want other people to see.

As Stephen Fry and the other participants at the #svuk event acknowledged, Twitter is blurs the public and personal even more than Facebook. If you break the unwritten social etiquette – as I discovered – there is a powerful and immediate feedback loop.

The Twist in the tale

Ironically, it seems my public spat on Twitter led to more people viewing and commenting on my original blog post. So was it a case of  ‘lose friends and influence people’?

Photograph: Stephen Fry and Biz Stone at Social Media – A force for good? Courtesy of NESTA via Flickr

Social Media 09 – A Different Perspective

Although I’ve already written a short blog post on the last week’s Social Media 09 for Digital Public, I wanted to kick off my Urban Mashup blog by reflecting on the day from a different and more personal perspective.

The event itself was organised by Mashup* and featured a whole host of social media aficionados, digital guru’s, and online monitoring experts. The headline speakers were advertising luminary and Engine President, Robin Wight, and TV presenter Sarah Beeny, who generated a wave of positive Tweets from delegates when she picked up her newborn baby to sooth him during her presentation.

The event felt like a human Twitterfall, with speakers given strict 10 minute slots, and trooped on and off in quick succession.  Although this didn’t leave much time for reflection, a couple of impressions were left with me that don’t appear to have been addressed by other people’s write-ups of the day.

The first came during the talk from a pumped up Dan Klein who set out to convince us that nobody crunched more social media data than his firm Detica.

During his talk entitled ‘Social Network Analysis on Steroids’ he recounted how they had processed the data on every single transaction made on Ebay since 2001, and then went “looking for criminals”.  In this case, people buying Ammonium Nitrate. According to Klein, having found the top 50 traders, they reported the potential bomb makers to the US government. Although he kept emphasizing the legality of what they had done, I know I wasn’t the only one left feeling slightly uneasy by the civil liberty implications of all this.

However, it was Klein’s next case study that really grabbed my attention. He explained that Detica had also processed the details of every transaction made in Apple’s iTunes, and commented that this had revealed some interesting facts. For example, according to him: “people don’t pay for Hip-Hop in iTunes, and we know who they are”.

I found this remark extraordinary on two counts:

• Firstly, I was curious to know how artists like 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z had managed to amass multi-million dollar fortunes if people aren’t paying for their music.
• Secondly, I wondered who was the “they” he was referring to?  I caught the eye of one of the handful of black guys in the audience. We both shrugged and gave each other a look, as if to ask: “is he talking to me?”

At this point, a scene from the 1989 Spike Lee film ‘Do the Right Thing’ flashed into my mind. It’s the one in which the character named Buggin’ Out begins to question why there “ain’t no brotha’s on the wall” in the pizzeria owned by the Italian-American, Sal.  The point he makes is that since Sal’s pizzeria is situated in a black neighborhood and sells pizza to black people, Sal’s ‘Wall of Fame’ should include some pictures of black celebrities.

I began to wonder about the Social Media 09 parallels, because for all the diversity on display in terms of age, gender, and professional experience, a common theme seemed to emerge as speaker after speaker took to the stage.

The clues could be found in the cultural references involving the pronunciation of fine wine, to the names of the presenters. When the second speaker named Giles appeared at the front, he quipped that:  “Social Media appears to be full of people that went to Public School!”

Although I resisted the urge to emulate Spike Lee’s character Mookie by throwing a trash can through the window, I did feel the need to use my opportunity to speak to point out that not everyone in social media went to Public School, as did Josh Feldberg who spoke after me.

I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the event organisers Mashup*, who deserve credit for pulling together such an interesting line up of presenters. Nor am I having a go at the other speakers (well, perhaps with one exception). They were being themselves and using the cultural references that they could relate to.

I guess I’m asking a broader question of “where are all the brotha’s and sista’s?” when it comes to social media. We know that black and Asian people participate in social media just as much, and in some cases more than white people, so why are so few involved in the cutting edge of social and digital media production?

It’s not a question I think I can answer right now. It is one that is being asked in the US too. I’m sure that I’ll return to it in this blog because I passionately believe that we’ve got to Do the Right Thing.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or debate below.