Yasmin was right

The first big Twitter story this week was the "Twitter Joke Trial": the failed appeal of @PauljChambers against his conviction for a tweet threatening to blow up Robin Hood airport.

Twitterati are up in arms about the #TwitterJokeTrial, arguing that it is an infringement of free speech. "So that's the banning of sarcasm, irony, sub-text and any of the other subtleties of language that we use AS GROWN UPS", said Dara O'Brien.  Thousands are now retweeting Chambers' original Twitter threat, with the hashtag #IamSpartacus in a show of solidarity.

Compare and contrast with the second big Twitter story of the week: a tweet following journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's appearance on a radio talk show:

The sender, a 38 year old Birmingham barrister and Conservative councillor, was arrested yesterday and has been bailed pending investigation. He has apologised for the indirect threat against Alibhai-Brown, claiming that it was an "ill conceived attempt at humour".  The case has not (yet) attracted the support of civil rights campaigners and celebrities as the Chambers case has done - probably because the liberal media feels rather less comfortable about taking sides against one of their own.  But thousands of blog comments and tweets are criticising Alibhai-Brown, saying she is humourless, should "chill out", and "get stoned".

Chambers didn't really intend to blow up Robin Hood Airport. In fact, on spotting Chambers' tweet at the time, even the airport didn't take his threat seriously.  It's unlikely Compton really wanted to stone Alibhai-Brown either, although she DID take it seriously enough to report it to the police, saying that she and her daughter felt genuinely threatened.

I think she was right to complain, for the wrong reason.

Every day, thousands of people round the country get away with making sexist, racist and homophobic remarks in pubs, in break rooms at work, at football matches, and increasingly, on internet forums.  Some make threats of violence against women, gays and other groups: on a football forum I used to belong to, one long-time member suggested that another rape his female friend. I've also seen and heard groups of fans at football matches chanting for away teams from North London to be sent to the gas chambers.

But just because they can get away with it, surrounded by their mates in difficult-to-police situations, doesn't make it right.  These kind of threats and insults, if allowed to go unchallenged, create a climate in which young, easily influenced people think it is socially acceptable to view women and other groups in a demeaning light, and that violence against them might also be OK, even condoned by their friends and associates.  When I complained about the incidents I mention above, I - like Alibhai-Brown - was also accused of lacking a sense of humour.  But since when has rape been funny? Or being stoned to death?  Or Jews being sent to the gas chambers?

Councillor Compton has been a bit unlucky that Alibhai-Brown complained - many targets of unpleasant tweets or Facebook flaming do not want hassle or confrontation.  He's also been incredibly stupid, as an elected official, to post such an inappropriate remark in such a public place. The Conservative Party will be furious that Compton has undermined the rehabilitation of its brand:  he will now inescapably go into the same bag as Philippa Stroud, to be fished out whenever someone wants to "prove" the Tories are still the nasty party.   But I am glad he has been copped.  Whether the free speech Twitterati like it or not, it will make most people think twice about making mindless, offensive and menacing threats to, or remarks about, others.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

 Ta- dah for the annual BCS MP Web awards - taking place, after a year long election hiatus, next month at the House of Commons.  Having (mind-bogglingly) reviewed every single MP's website, the team at the Chartered Institute of Technology have come up with a shortlist of 77 digital-political paragons.  These will be whittled down to the final list of winners by a panel consisting of Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail,  politics professor Rachel Gibson, Mark Say of Government Computing magazine and Matthew Windle of the UK Youth Parliament.   The judges say they are looking for sites which are not only navigable and accessible and ""use social media", but also "engage, excite, provide information" and "encourage two-way communication between MPs and their constituents".

My strong hunch is that this final criteria - "two-way communication" - will sort the men and women from the boys and girls.    Most MPs and councillors would be in favour of flying purple turtles if they would broadcast their name and mugshot for minimum effort and cost - and for that not-very-well-disguised-reason, many MPs have duly added Facebook bells and Flickr whistles to their web presence.  But even the most digitally-competent of our elected representatives have yet to get the message that social media is NOT just another broadcast channel to share pictures of themselves making a "royal visit" to the local school or hospital, or to boom out their strident opinions on Trident.

Social media is about having two-way conversations with people who care about the same things you do, in the (online) places where they spend time: an incredibly powerful idea with the potential to transform the very distant, opaque and slightly cynical relationship that most people have with their MP.  Sadly, for the vast majority of MPs, the prospect of opening doors to these conversations is still a  horrifying one, which is a great shame for themselves, their constituents, and democracy.   For that reason I hope this year's BCS winners won't be the usual suspect celebrity bloggers, but the band of brave and few MPs who are daring to engage genuinely with us online.

My own interactive MP favourites:
Andrea Leadsom MP and Charlie Elphicke MP: clean sites by Politics Web that showcase innovative chat maps

Grant Shapps MP and Barry Gardiner MP  very unusually for MPs, have discussion forums on their websites. Shapps has vastly more traffic - partly because he makes more effort with social media (one of most followed MPs on Twitter) but mainly because his forum is at the very centre of his site and it's focused on the local community.
Alec Shelbrooke MP combines blogging and polling nicely to invite feedback on specific bills before he debates and votes
Alison McGovern MP:  has a Twitter feed on her site, and crucially, uses it to invite opinion, not just broadcast it.
Kevin Brennan MP:  puts reader comments and tweets right at the centre of his homepage
Mark Reckless MP, who manages to regularly update a dazzling array of social media sites (blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr), although they could be better integrated

Lynn Featherstone MP and Damian Collins MP:  just for being lifestreamers, though there could be more evidence of reader interaction on their sites.
Finally: Mark Pritchard MP, whose website isnt remotely interactive but is the most incredibly regularly updated.

The secret diary of a new media dodger, by M.P. aged 44 and a half

Just come back from a fascinating few days as a fly on the wall (watching, listening and tweeting...) at a party conference.  I went to understand how digital and social media is currently being used in the democratic process; where the government and elected representatives still need to do more work to connect and engage with people: particularly Gen Y millenials (those born after 1980); and what all this could mean in the context of the "Big Society".

Among the most encouraging things was meeting a vanguard of really savvy MPs and Assembly Members, who've managed to fund and create imaginative, informative websites incorporating bang up to date social media tools.  Even better, they are personally generating regular blogs and tweets and responding to comments, giving all their voters a better opportunity to get to know and interact with their elected representatives.  (See these two great Tory and LibDem examples!)

There are also encouraging signs from central and local government leaders of a new attitude to consulting tax payers, service users and employeees: using digital crowdsourcing tools such as Delib (used for HMT's recent Spending Challenge) and Counter Context to gather and evaluate new ideas, rather than carrying out a prescriptive box ticking exercises.    I also heard many inspiring stories from councils, companies and charities using new media to engage and motivate young people in their communities - such as ITV's www.itvfixers.com - and I think we'll see a lot more of this under the Big Society agenda.

More frustratingly are those MPs, MEPs and Councillors still stuck in the Stone Age:  either avoiding new media entirely or possibly worse still, regarding it as just another channel for broadcasting their name and opinions.  Expenses fallout is partly to blame, but is not a good enough excuse.  Greater transparency and visibility is the medicine to recover from that, not less.

Other excuses given by MPs during the week included:
the boring:  "I don't have time", "I have too many Blackberries",
the verbose:  "I can't say anything in less than 140 characters",
the narcississtic: "I won't start tweeting because if I stopped the media would demand to know why"
....and the disarmingly honest: "I'm afraid I'd get drunk and tweet something by accident".

Will you be ready for the data tsunami?

Horribly early the other Saturday morning, I blearily Boris-biked through a completely deserted Fitzrovia to attend Opentech 2010.  It's a refreshingly low-budget (think £5 entry, write-your-own namebadge, one-microphone-between-seven ) low hype conference, which aims to connect various types of geeks interested in how to change the world through data and technology.

This year a big catalyst for discussion was the Coalition Agreement's pledge to create a public "right to data" .  This should be a massive step forward in transparency from the previous government's FOI legislation.  All kinds of public sector data: ranging from procurement contract details to service usage and performance data - should become available to the public for the first time over the next six months.  What's more, the government has promised that our data will be published in a way that will make it clean, comparable, linkable, and above all, useful.  At which point, an army of geeks, entrepreneurs and journalists will move in to analyse the data and ultimately, make money educating, entertaining and alarming the nation with the results.

That's the theory, anyway.

If we lived in France, possibly the most bureaucratic, systematic, hydromatic nation on the planet, this might not be such a challenge.  The French Government has been collecting metric tonnes of data in centrally prescribed, standardised format for years - although there is an equally consistent complete absence of any political will to disclose it.    But  - fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective - our public sector in the UK is a devolved, highly fragmented collection of organisations.    Just on the procurement front alone there are over 44,000 public sector organisations in England that buy things.  All of them record their spend differently, using different software, different formats, different categorisations, different levels of detail: even different names for the same supplier.

"If you build it, he will come"

The task of addressing the mind-bogglingly enormous problem of how to link all this data together has fallen to an admirable group of digital pioneers.  Presenting at Opentech on Saturday, John Sheridan and Jen Tennison of the Cabinet Office data.gov.uk team explained their technical approach to cleaning up submitted data.   The team's hope, as with many of the other presentations at Opentech, is to encourage and inspire geeks to go forth and develop the APIs and applications that will help us all make sense of the gigantic data tsunami soon due to hit the UK.

And they will succeed.  That is to say, spend analysis is a multi million pound industry in the UK.  The same people who have historically made good livings from being given a council's own spend data and selling it back to them in a unique proprietary format have a very strong incentive to find new ways of making money from the right to data.  There are also true transparency champions like Chris Taggart (@countculture) whose site Openly Local already contains partial data from 158 local authorities, and  Hadley Beeman (@hadleybeeman) of LinkedGov.Org


What is of far greater concern - which I sincerely hope is being addressed very seriously by Cabinet Office and DCLG  - is collecting the data in the first place. Yes, data submission deadlines have been set by the Government  - autumn this year for most central government spend data, and January 2011 for local government.   But at present, these deadlines look  hopelessly optimistic.  Many PSOs don't even know themselves what they are buying, who they are buying it from, and how much they are paying - let alone be in a position to report it all to Francis Maude in correct standardised format by Thursday next please.  Small PSOs have never had the technical expertise, and post-Spending Review in November, no PSO will have the time or the resources to prioritise the difficult exercise of identifying, extracting and cleaning up data.


Most importantly - having worked with many local authorities, and regularly witnessed the trials of colleagues in OGC attempting to gather spend data,  I know how difficult it is to impose commands from the center onto the wider public sector.  Even an Eric Pickles shaped transparency stick cannot beat complete clean datasets out of a council if there is no serious will locally.  While PR and marketing has spectacularly fallen out of vogue under the Coalition, there's a very pressing case to direct whatever comms resources are available to selling this to devolved PSOs.  Councils need evidence that extra-organisational linked data can deliver local hard cash savings in order to commit fully - just as they are now beginning to recognise that extra-organisational collaborative procurement will also deliver cash savings.  In both cases, they want to see the gain for their pain.

CIPS awards

An innovative project I've been working on since 2007 for the London Fire Brigade and Emergency Planning Authority and Capital Ambition (aka the 32 London councils) was recently nominated for a prestigious CIPS award.    Naturally, the taxpayer can't be expected to fund our attendance at "lavish champagne-sipping" awards dinners at "expensive Mayfair hotels", but by an incredible stroke of Cinderella-like luck a CIPS fairy godmother arranged for us to be invited to last night's ceremony as the guests of key sponsors Bravo Solutions.   The Bravo guys there on the night clearly couldn't work out who we were or why we had been invited but proved most jovial and generous hosts - both at the ceremony and later at their Cuckoo Club after party.

Christine Morton (Capital Ambition)

Other people (such as the eminent Peter Smith) have blogged elsewhere about the winners and losers   - suffice to say we were beaten to the title of Best Supplier Relationship project by Premier Foods/British Sugar who went on to take the overall prize - but it was clear we'd done very well to be the only public sector project to win a nomination in our category.  In fact, there were surprisingly few public sector projects nominated in any open category:  it will be interesting to see if that's still the case next year, when spending cuts will have forced previously change-resistant public sector organisations to become much more radical in  their approach to procurement.

Having said that, it was inspiring to meet a nominee in the public sector category, Mike Melville, programme manager of xchangeWales, who has achieved millions of pounds of savings by moving all 22 local authorities of Wales onto e-procurement and more closely integrated purchasing  - and who frankly deserved to have won his category hands down (judges, are you listening?)    Mike proved his determination and stamina  is not just confined to driving through procurement change, outlasting virtually every other Bravo client and guest at the after party....

Mike Melville

  
Rory Bremner had the dubious honour of hosting the awards. He did a good job keeping things moving, but it was interesting to notice that his act is getting quite dated: he produced excellent Michael Howard, Ken Clark, Blunkett, Hague, Blair, Prescott and Bush - and had a good shot at Vince Cable - but he isn't doing Cameron, Clegg,  or any of the Milibonks or Eds.   As a 40 something ex-public-schoolboy himself - is he just too similiar to Cameron and Clegg to be able to do a decent impression of them?

Rory Bremner - can't remember who he was doing at this point!

Gavin White, Business process lead at Pfizer

Un sejour a Nice!

The thing that's impressed me most about Nice - where I've been on French bootcamp - is its absolutely superb public transport system.  Cheap (1 euro for as many journeys in the region as you can embark on in 74 minutes, or 15 euros for unlimited travel for a week), quick, super punctual, air-conditioned, and actually quite entertaining.

Heaven knows how much it costs to run: the public subsidy must be absolutely enormous.    And unlike the Paris metro and RER, it's clean and relatively odour-free....

The other thing which always impresses me about France are the supermarkets.  I've roamed around supermarkets all over the world:  from British Colombia to Bombay via Malawi, Abu Dhabi, and Venice - and my inescapable conclusion is that America's supermarkets are the worst and French ones the best.  It is all the more impressive if what our French teacher told us today is true: that there is a law in France which set minimum wholesale prices on certain goods.  Effectively this allows the State to intervene in the market, to reduce the advantages of purchasing power enjoyed by the big supermarket chains over smaller producers and retailers.  Kind of a modern day Corn Law....

"There's no point....it's not working!"

Having taken their first tentative steps into social media, lots of "traditional" businesses (ie, more or less anyone who doesn't work in the media industry!) worry that their effort and investment isn't generating an avalanche of new biz leads and increased revenues.

An interesting article by Mashable on the AmericanExpress Open forum tackled this subject recently, citing worrying data showing that visitors arriving on corporate websites from Twitter and Facebook are usually viewing only one page: and it's usually the blog (or other piece of free content), not the Contact Us form. 

Unsurprisingly - as it is the in house encyclopaedia for the digital media industry, and has vested interest in encouraging "traditional businesses" to carry on spending marketing money with its readers - Mashable concluded this was NOT a problem.   [And quoted the irritating, woolly and misleading aphorism from the former President of CBS News, who wrote in the Harvard Business Review last year that "every company is a media company"  - is that all it takes to get into the HBR???] 

So is social media worth the effort - particularly for B2B businesses -  if it doesn't seem to be making a difference to business lead generation?

I think it does, and here are just five very practical reasons:


1) An individual tweet may not necessarily deliver an electronic trail of new biz leads to your door, but social media can generate powerful positive word of mouth among communities of potential customers which may lead to email contact or a phone call....incredibly useful for consultancies, tradesmen, and professional service firms.

2) It strengthens your bond with existing customers.  Social media offers opportunities to provide after-sales support, make special offers on renewals or additional services, gather feedback, and keep your business in your customers' mind.


3) All organisations - even MI5 these days - have stakeholders in the media industry:  and social media is where they are.  Journalists are sourcing stories from Twitter now, not press releases.

4) Like Bovril, it's good for you.  Social media forces you constantly to think about what is innovative, interesting and changing in your business and your market, so you can talk about it in real time.

5) It's an easy, relatively low cost way to give your brand additional identity and meaning. Every piece of social media content you create and interaction you have is an opportunity to define your business from its competition:  as a trend-setter, an practical expert, a thought leader, or just plain contradictorian....

No friends, feeling lonely?

Yes, that's a depressed and lonely looking Keanu Reeves on a park bench in NYC- and while his agents at CAA insist he's fine, June 15th marked the first annual Cheer Up Keanu Day, a truly 21st century social media phenomena (see here and here if you're curious).

But you don't have to be a Hollywood film star to feel a bit gloomy if you don't have as many friends as you think you should.  According to Sysomos, half of all Twitter users are following less than 10 "friends", while 63% have fewer than 10 followers... making for a rather lonely Twitter experience. 


I'll write about the quest of attracting followers another time,but I think for many people one of the biggest obstacles to getting started properly on Twitter is finding other people to follow - and be followed by.   The suggestion categories Twitter offers are way too vague and broad, and the search function isn't as good as it could be.  The best  - and almost only place to start - is via the Find Friends function, which looks through your email contacts list to see if anyone you know is already on Twitter. That's great for personal contacts you keep on Gmail or Yahoo, slightly less good if your contacts are all locked up on work Outlook....


The good news for budding Tweeters  - particularly those of us tweeting for business reasons - is that as of yesterday, you can now ask Twitter (via the Find Friends tab) to automatically search your LinkedIn contacts to find relevant and interesting people to follow.   

And if you're business-Tweeter and aren't deterred by my previous post about Facebook, Twitter also has an app to find out which of your Facebook friends are tweeting.

Happy friending!
 

To Facebook or not to Facebook

Following a bruising meeting with my accountant this morning (scolded for being too detailed on some things and not even nearly detailed enough on other: sent back to try again....), am spending the rest of the day tied to my desk, sorting out some loose ends with my own social media presence on the internet.   Have reinvented www.beaglethinking.com as a Modernista-type site where social media does all the talking: drawing feeds from here (Blogger), Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and so on.    This requires quite a bit of tidying up...although quite doable because I'll be leaving Facebook out of the equation. 

Why?  One, (controversial perhaps), I'm just not convinced Facebook is a place to do business - certainly not B2B, B2G or G2G, but even the big brands are struggling to talk authentically and usefully to their consumers on Facebook.    Two, I think we need boundaries between our personal and our work lives.  I'm all in favour of building good personal connections with our business contacts - and there's no rule that says you can't let your personality show in your professional blog or Twitter feed - but too much information  (dodgy holiday snaps in Speedos, anyone?) can definitely get in the way..