Twitter | Media Culpa

The Swedish Liberal Party leaves Twitter

[Updated] In September 2010, there was a general election to the Swedish parliament. Once again, it was expected that this would be the election in which social media would prove to have a strong influence on opinion. The jury is still out on what the real effects were, but most political parties and many politicians were active with blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook.

Since then, Twitter and Facebook have continued to grow at amazing speed. Twitter now has more than 200 million users who publish some 250 million tweets per day. One would like to believe that the importance of Twitter as a communications channel has grown even more during the last 12 months. But apparently some think it is too much work to pay attention to what is being discussed on the microblog. The Swedish Liberal Party, which was the fourth largest party in the last election and is currently part of the ruling centre-right coalition, yesterday announced they were no longer going to log on to Twitter, at least not for a while.

The tweet reads, my translation:

“We are now logging off from Twitter for a while. We don’t have enough personell to sit and monitor this channel. If you want to continue discussion [sic] you’re welcome to do it on (link to Facebook page)”.

As I noted in this analysis of Swedish political parties on Twitter, the Liberal Party was the last of the established parties to start using Twitter. The account was registered in January 2009, but while all the other parties started tweeting during that period, the Liberal Party didn’t start tweeting actively until November 2009. Now, they are also the first to leave Twitter, if only for the time being.

The account currently has 4,133 followers but it has only been active in periods. It went almost silent after May this year, with the strange exception of two days in October. During the party’s national congress, it sent out 150 tweets in two days. Only two days later, it is announced that the party is logging off.

Below: number of tweets in October 2011.

If find it interesting and a bit surprising to make such a move, especially since we are seeing more and more evidence that Twitter is at the heart of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and others. Twitter is and will continue to be a great place for interacting with opinion leaders and to bring forward political views. As a party, it will be at your disadvantage to log off for longer periods of time and try to come back when there is an election coming up. You can’t start to build relationships when you need them. They need to be cultivated over time.

Update: When people started commenting about this on Twitter (?!), the Liberal Party felt a need to clarify that they have not abandoned Twitter entirely. They are reorganizing and will still use the account, although “not as frequently as they would wish”.

Via Makthavare.se.

Delicious auto-saves your links before you hit “Save”

There have been some problems with the new Delicious site after it was relaunched the other week. One thing I discovered today is that when you use the Delicious bookmarklet to save links, it automatically saves all links as soon as you click the bookmarklet, i.e. as soon as the pop-up window opens. Take a look at this short screencast to see how it works.

It shows you my collection of Delicious bookmarks. Then I go to an article that I wish to save on Delicious. I click the “save on delicious” bookmarklet and the pop-up window immediately says that the link is saved. I didn’t click on Save, so the link is saved without tags and in my case automatically tweeted to my 3,000+ followers. As you may see in the video, although the box “this link is private” is ticked, the link is saved as Public.

When you save a link directly on Delicious.com, it is also saved automatically before you hit the Save button (and are able to add tags), but at least there you are able to choose Private mode before it is saved to the site.

I use Delicious every day and for a number of reasons, many of the links that I save are not meant to be public. I hope Delicious/AVOS will fix this problem soon.

How to publish your Delicious links on Twitter

Social bookmarking site Delicious was recently bought by AVOS, a company owned by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. A new version of Delicious was launched a few days ago and it includes a new sleek design and new features such as the ability to create “stacks”, a form of curated bundle of links within any topic.

But other features have either disappeared or requires some tweaking to continue to work (for example, I have not been able to get my iPhone/Safari bookmarklet to work so I am having trouble saving bookmarks on my phone). One feature that I have been using is to publish or share my saved (public) bookmarks on Twitter. I have used Twitterfeed.com and the old RSS feed that I used was this:

http://del.icio.us/rss/kullin

This no longer works so I need to find the updated RSS feed. You can find it under your profile image on your Delicious page.

The new RSS feed is http://del.icio.us/v2/rss/kullin (basically the only difference is the addition of /vs/ ) and yours will look the same, just replace “kullin” with your username.

To publish your links on Twitter, register with Twitterfeed.com and create a new feed. Paste the RSS link and then tick the box for making the feed active (you can do this later if you want to try first).

Then go to advanced settings. There you choose posting frequency, titles etc and you can also add a prefix/suffix to the tweet to explain to your followers that this link is from Delicious. The last step is to choose what networks to publish the feed on, for example Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Connect with your Twitter account and you are done.

New Delicious offers a wide range of RSS feeds and if you want to subscribe to friends, other users, topics or keywords you can create your own tailored feed and then paste it into an RSS reader like Google Reader. These feeds can be found here.

Why we follow brands on Twitter

Market research firm Labs42 surveyed 500 Twitter users about how they interact with brands. The majority of respondents (aged 18+) followed 10 brands or less. The main reason to follow a brand on Twitter was to get discounts.

Based on these answers, it would be easy to conclude that discounts and promotions would be the quickest way to build a large following on Twitter. However, when looking at some Swedish brands, the really successful ones are using Twitter mainly as a channel to inform about products and business related topics, in combination with answering questions from consumers. Check out @hm and@spotify as good examples. Sports retail chain Stadium is one example of an account with mainly promotions, but it is only followed by 500 people.

This survey had very few options to the question “why do you follow [brands]”. Another similar survey from last year revealed that information about new products is one of the main reasons to follow brands.

Also see this white paper about Swedish businesses on Twitter:

Swedish businesses on Twitter

View more documents from kullin

100 Swedish brands now have more than 1,000 followers on Twitter

Swedish brands on Twitter are getting more and more followers. Now there are more than 100 brands or businesses that have 1,000 followers or more, (currently 103 accounts). In January 2011, only 60 accounts had that many followers. Some of them, like H&M, are growing with amazing speed, adding about 70,000 new followers per month to its main corporate account (H&M also have several local accounts).

The top 10 Swedish brands on Twitter in terms of number of followers, are (as of Aug 25, 2011, compared to May 3):

H&M (@hm) – 431,000 (179,900)
Spotify (@spotify) – 161,000 (99,400)
Stardoll (@stardoll) – 134,000 (77,600)
Adland (@adland) – 26,900 (24,500)
Acne Online (@acneonline) – 24,900 (20,500)
Pingdom (@pingdom) – 20,200 (7,200)
Ericsson Labs/Tor Bjorn Minde (@ericssonlabs) – 16,700 (13,700)
Propellerhead (@propellerheadsw) – 10,100 (7,900)
SJ (@SJ_AB) – 9,300 (7,500)
Ericsson Press (@ericssonpress) – 9,300 (7,900)

A fast mover above is Pingdom, which is new on the top ten list. The number of followers have almost tripled since May, 2011.

For a full list of more than 540 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts, check this list.

Manchester police starts naming and shaming rioters on Twitter

There’s been a lot of talk about the use of social media during the UK riots, both for good (see #riotcleanup) and for bad purposes. Additional focus was added today when PM David Cameron discussed the possibilities of limiting the use of social media in times of social unrest. It has been interesting to study how for example the UK police have used channels like Flickr and Twitter to get help with identification of suspects. Now, however, it seems that the Greater Manchester police might have taken the use of social media one step too far.

Today, the Greater Manchester police started to tweet the names and birth dates of people who have been convicted in relation to the UK riots.

After this tweet, the @gmpolice Twitter account has published dozens of tweets this evening with the names, birth dates and crimes the people have been convicted for. Like this one below (I have masked the name of the individual).

Many of these tweets have been retweeted by hundreds of users on Twitter which spreads their names to a very wide audience. This has already created a lot of negative reactions, like the following tweet.

I can only agree with @iamminihorse, there is a huge difference between names being in the public domain and publishing them on a platform like Twitter where people can easily share them with potentially thousands of others. These things have a tendency to get out of hand and will the Manchester police take any responsibility in case some people will try to take revenge on the convicted people or their families? No, this was a bad idea from the very start.