Twitter Lists

So, Twitter lists are being rolled out and if you haven’t already had the option to create lists added to your profile, you will shortly.

The idea is that you can create lists of followers, much like setting up separate groups in Tweetdeck, to better help you organise the way you follow particular streams.

A good example of this is Dan’s list of Edelman peeps… http://twitter.com/djlazarides/edelfolk

You can follow this list by clicking on the ‘follow’ icon at the top of the page.

You will also notice that your main dashboard will change, with the number of tweets you’ve posted now replaced by the number of lists you are on – your tweets are now placed under your username.

So a couple of questions for thought…

Will Twitter lists end up being just another popularity contest?

Is the next measure of a brand’s twitter popularity the number of lists is appears on?

Should you be able to opt-out of being on someone else’s list?

Should you be notified when you are added to a list?

Let me know what you think!

Facebook World Peace Project

Facebook want to bring about world peace by connecting people from “some of the most bitterly divided areas of the planet, encouraging online friendships between Jews and Muslims, US liberals and conservatives, and Turks and Greeks”, the Guardian reported tonight.

The initiative is being run in conjunction with Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab and is part of the larger Peace Dot community project that has also just been launched.

Peace on Facebook says that In the U.S., 7.81% believe that world peace can be achieved, and asks “How can we grow this number?”.

The page itself aims to show this growth with a series of real-time graphs displaying different connections between groups according to religion, geography and politics. The data from this will be really interesting to see over the next few months. There is also a comment stream running on the page which encourages users to leave their thoughts on world peace.

So, can Facebook bring about world peace? I don’t know that it will, but what it will do is propogate that message through the third largest community on the planet.

You can follow the Peace Dot programme on Twitter @PeaceDot.

Barclaycard: Impressive Public Relations

Barclaycard’s PR team are extremely helpful.

After the frustrations of my user experience when using their website on Sunday, Kerryn, Barclaycard’s Senior PR Manager, got in touch and left a comment on my original post.

I am delighted to say that the issues I’d had with the website have been resolved and I can resume paying off my credit card!

I am very impressed that Kerryn took the time to leave a message on Seldom Seen Kid. I am only a blogger, and not a particularly influential one at that, so it’s great that she felt compelled to actively help me in my plight.

This is a perfect example of how social media, PR and customer services are converging, and a good example of a brand acknowledging the importance of these factors. We know of course that many still don’t.

So I’d like to thank Kerryn for her help and the fact that she responded on behalf of Barclaycard.

I will stick to my guns about the 21st centuryfying of the financial industry however…

Damien Hirst: Wallace Collection

Damien Hirst is currently featured at the Wallace Collection in London, with his new exhibition “no love lost, blue paintings”.

From The Wallace Collection

I’ve never been to the Wallace Collection and being a fan of Damien Hirst, I dragged Sarah along to visit on Saturday.

The Wallace Collection is a museum in an old London town house, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street. It displays mainly 17th-19th century French Renaissance art and ceramics, but the most famous piece is probably The Laughing Cavalier.

I found it compelling then, to see Damien Hirst, the bad boy of Brit Art, exhibiting his latest work in such opulent surroundings. I suppose it is however, a natural instinct to side with authority and then bring it down from the inside…

I particularly enjoyed the way that the pieces were totally out of context with the rooms in which they were housed, a grandly understated pair of open spaces which were not as obvious a sign of the grandeur throughout the rest of the building.

The pieces themselves, dark and brooding, seem to me to be bringing into question the nature of death and the way that the everyday consumerables that we feast ourselves on, eventually lead to our demise. Faint lines between skulls and inanimate objects seem to justify this supposition.

This video sees Damien talking about the collection in further depth. Again, this is from the Wallace Collection’s website.

I highly recommend taking an hour or two to wander round the Wallace Collection, and then focus on Damien Hirst’s exhibition – it is a great mix of two opposite styles of art, process and thought.

The collection is free, and the show runs until January 24th 2010.

Grafitter

Grafitter is the latest in a long line of Twitter analytics tool which aims to catalogue the way users interact over the microblogging platform.

Simply follow @Grafitter and then enter your Twitter handle in the search box on the homepage, let the tool do it’s calculations, and bingo – some text visualisations of the most common words you use, who you reply to most, what hashtags you use and your most-shared URLs.

Graffitter also allows you to get similar information for Delicious, your IM client and Blogger.

It’s interesting that in the digital age we’re looking for more and more ways to catalogue different aspects of our lives, not just the transformation of the journal to a blog, but to also get real-time data to show trends in our online behaviour.

It’s almost as if we have an interest in becoming better people…

A-Z With Ash

Ash, one of the last surviving bands from the pre-Britpop era, are still going strong and will be touring up and down the country in support of their singles tour. Their latest single is True Love 1980.

The tour takes 26 venues in alphabetical order, with musical hotspots such as Aldershot, Exmoor and Ventnor expecting a visit from the trio.

I liked this idea – it’s a different way to arrange a tour and get Ash’s music out to fans who may not otherwise get a chance to see them play, as well as giving them a decent news hook to talk to us bloggers about.

If you’d like me to send you an MP3 of True Love 1980, just leave a comment!

Stuff I’ve Shared on Twitter 24.10.09

Here’s the pick of the articles i’ve RT’d on Twitter this week:

Shut Up and Take Off All Your Clothes – LDNnudetech Calendar
Google Wave – First Impressions…
Ringtone or no ringtone
Gig Spotlight – Idlewild
The London Blogger Interviews #28: The London Eater
The State of the Blogosphere 2009 Edition

Barclaycard: Creating A Bad Online Customer Experience

[UPDATE 28.10.09: Barclaycard have now rectified this problem on thier site, hurrah! Much kudos to Kerryn from their PR team for getting in touch and helping me out - I know how tough it can be responding to customer service related enquiries as a PR.

The website issues have been resolved and the troublesome fields that were stoking my frustrations have now been made optional rather than fixed, which means that the Londoners without a county to enter now won't find their progress is halted.]

Barclaycard’s Online Customer Experience is rubbish.

When I was at University I went to a student fair and found myself lured by the seemingly easy credit on offer from Barclaycard. £450 extra to pay for all my books that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford – lovely.

Five years on I am still paying off the books and nowhere near clearing the debt. This is not the issue I have, indeed it’s taught me a valuable lesson: don’t get a credit card.

I found it laughable that in this digital world in which we live, it is so difficult to make minor changes to the way I choose to give money to Barclaycard.

A simple payment process is complicated by different security hurdles which force you to remember various different passwords via different screens.

My frustration at this process was confounded when, after several attempts to make a payment and my card being refused (why I do not know), I gave up and setup a direct debit.

I do not like using direct debits as I find they are restrictive when trying to juggle monthly finances. I do not like being forced to take one option over another because of a technical fault.

Being a green type, I thought I’d change the way I receive my bills to non-paper, requiring me to change the address to which the card is registered (it’s still at my old house). Using the change details screen I entered my new address, only for it to be refused. I tried again, once more it was refused, despite each detail being correct. The form requires you to enter a Village/Area or Town/City and then a County, based on details from a ‘find address’ function. London is my county, so I tried just entering this, but to no avail. I tried with both City and County as London – no joy. I tried various other combinations but these were not accepted.

Can it be so difficult in the 21st century for a financial service provider to make a fully functioning and easy to use website to complement the outrageous charges they hit the consumer with?

PR: Learning to sing

I was reading my colleague Jacqui Cooper’s blog about the merits of taking either a CIPR course or work experience as a route into PR when it reminded me of the time I was told to get singing lessons (yes yes, thanks, I know what you’re thinking!).

I’ve left this point as a comment, but thought it worth sharing and elaborating on a little further.

I do a bit of music, singing, writing etc, and I was told It would be worth my while getting vocal training to help me learn how to breath correctly, hold notes longer and enunciate properly, to help develop my raw vocal into something pleasing to hear.

I decided against the advice because it would mean that my technique and style would be dictated by someone who had trained other singers in exactly the same way, and as a result, my vocal performance would lose its individuality and distinct character.

It took me longer to get better, but I think in the end it was worth it as I learnt to control my voice in a way that suited me. And what’s more, I don’t sound like anyone else.

I did no course on PR before getting into it – I did journalism because of a love of communication (and a want to write about music for the Guardian). When I was lucky enough to land some work experience at Zest PR, I literally had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I was learning as I was doing.

Each day I’d do something new, learn about why I was doing it and what the end result would be. If I had taken a PR dgree or a CIPR course, I wouldn’t have had this experience – i’d alredy be aware of what was expected to occur. This process of learning has meant that I was thrown in at the deep end and didn’t ‘do PR’ in a conventional way, learning bit by bit what the job entailed. I was getting different bits of the jigsaw, completing it by myself.

There are merits to getting a PR degree or taking a CIPR course. You get to see the whole picture, learn processes that you might not otherwise. But I fear that it would take away the individuality you need as a PR, especially as the industry begins to focus on more specialised roles in the wake of the digital boom.

I don’t want to be a PR that is the same as any other PR – what differentiates me from them then, and what value does that add to my client?

Bing and Twitter: Real Time Search Just Got Interesting

Techcrunch reported earlier today that Microsoft’s Bing is set to become fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter.

The report said:

The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information.

It goes on to say that this integration won’t take place for “a few weeks” and asks two questions:

First, what will Google’s response to the Bing announcements be? And second, is Bing paying for this data?

This isn’t a shock as such, Business Insider said:

We’ve been expecting Microsoft to pipe-in Twitter since Bing began experimenting with the service in July. Word broke earlier this month that Twitter was in talks with Google and Microsoft about licensing its data stream.

What is really interesting for me is that we are seeing the first tentative steps towards a major real-time search engine. Yes we have lots of small independent search engines as the report acknowledges, but we are now seeing a major player in the online world look to take existing technology and use it within existing search results.

Will Microsoft then take this and invest heavily to reduce running costs and develop the technology even further?

There is also the issue of SEO, and how the deal will affect the way that data is presented. Web Pro News said:

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to.