I’m not sure what journalists did before Twitter. Maybe they phoned people or something. Nowadays though, all they have to do is type some inane request into Twitter, tag it #journorequest and watch PR companies and wannabes fall over themselves to help out. Maybe.

It’s perhaps a little lazy but the process is, at least, entirely open, which I suppose is an improvement on the days when lifestyle hacks just phoned up their London PR friends when they needed some “real-life” story. Still, it feels weirdly uncomfortable to have the base practices of journalism laid bare for all to see. Most of these requests tend to involve something “saucy” or prurient, or simply reveal journalistic laziness/incompetence (“Does anyone know the PR contact for so-and-so?”, etc.) The cleverer PRs have also realised that they can tout their clients to lazy hacks by re-appropriating #journorequest for their own ends.

Anyway, here’s a selection of my favourite #journorequests from the last few days. They’re presented (mainly) without context or explanation, just as they appear on Twitter.

We’re looking for people who’ve had sex at work for a naughty confessions feature. Any used will be paid. Please get in touch #journorequest

I’m looking for a 13 year old girl who is pregnant for a magazine feature. Please message me if you’re interested #journorequest

Anyone know the press office for Odeon/ Vue cinemas? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Financial Dynamics does the PR for Terra Firma, the private equity firm that owns Odeon; Vue's corporate website lists Clarion Communications as their PR company and provides a phone number]

Seeking women who think they’re absolutely marvellous looking and can’t stop admiring themselves in the mirror #journorequest

Looking for people who have taken the new ‘legal’ high ‘ivory wave’ #journorequest

Anyone out there tried this new recreational drug, ‘Ivory Wave’? It’s meant to be a rival to Meow Meow. Get in touch #journorequest

Ooh – I’m also looking for someone who’s had sex at work – will need to be pictured and identified for #journorequest

#journorequest Tiens Tianshi Toothpaste is launching in UK this September ….DM for more info

Does anyone know who does then PR for Aresnal / The Emirates? #journorequest [Dave's tip: Google > Arsenal Football Club > Contact us > Club switchboard > 020 7619 5003]

Need to find unemployed overweight women who think their weight stops them working. Good fee. DM me. Pls RT. #journorequest

I’m seeking examples of celebs who have had, or are planning to have, a Victorian themed wedding #journorequest

And so it continues. Forever.

By the way, does anyone know where I can find a medium-sized bag of heroin at a reasonable price? #journorequest

Gordon is right. She is a bigoted woman. Here is a tip Love, where have all the Eastern Europeans come from? How about Eastern Europe!

The tweet has since been deleted from the web but here’s a grab from Tweetie:

It was all very strange, since Amnesty rarely, if ever, uses its Twitter stream for anything outside the sphere of human rights. The use of the word “love” and the sarcastic tone were also most unlike them.

A few minutes later, this tweet appeared, disclaiming responsibility:

I can only apologise massively for our last tweet – trying to work out how it happened. Obviously, not Amnesty’s view.

Subsequently, the charity said it had changed its Twitter password. In an @reply, it confirmed the tweet had been sent by a staff member, but blamed a “very obscure Tweetdeck bug” for accidently sending the message from the AmnestyUK account instead of the individual’s own account, adding: “We’re a bit baffled.”

Commenting on a post on this blog in January, Garner said he wanted ManCon to “stick out like a sore thumb” – as though this is the key criteria for success in online publishing. He has since presumably realised that much, much more is needed to sustain a subscription-based model, and he has been unable to provide it. As another commenter wrote here back then, all ManCon managed to do was to cull its readership, thus alienating advertisers. Was this really so difficult to predict?

Over at How-Do, the sentiment seems to be that everyone should salute Garner for his boldness and for admitting it didn’t work. Fair enough. I’m just curious about those subscribers who signed up for ManCon for a year, paying up to £100 each. Will they be getting a refund?

Elsewhere in the world of Manchester-based online publishing, a new “hyperlocal” news site called Inside the M60 has launched. (Hyperlocal, in case you hadn’t realised, is the new word for “local”. Just as “binge drinking” is the new word for “drinking”, “hyperlocal” sounds zeitgeisty and now-ish and everyone is getting terribly excited about the concept.)

Inside the M60 was created by journalists Louise Bolotin and Nigel Barlow. According to its own “about” page:

As a result of cost-cutting measures, local papers have by nature become more insular, relying more and more on “churnalism” and breaking that crucial relationship with their readership and their customers, the advertisers. There are, therefore, opportunities for niche journalism projects with a small cost base that take advantage of the low cost of entry and can act as the voice for these communities.

The site has was only properly launched yesterday, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. It wants a range of contributors from different areas of the city to become “community reporters”. Once these slot in, the potential for genuine scoops seems realistic, particularly since the Manchester Evening News closed its local offices last year and now makes all its local reporters work out of central Manchester.

Presumably Inside the M60 is not expecting to recruit an army of NCTJ-trained hacks to man the bureaux in Crumpsall and Beswick and so the mysterious people who constitute “the general public” will be relied on to provide content. Michael Taylor has highlighted what he sees as the “chasm between the present reality of bloggers and the needs of a well-informed society”, using a crass question about Sir Richard Leese posed on Inside the M60′s Twitter stream as the basis for his argument.

I’m not so frosty towards the  idea of “amateur” news bloggers providing a useful service because I don’t believe that only journalists can do what journalists do. After all, some journalists aren’t very good at their jobs and there’s no reason why a moderately intelligent person with good contacts in a local community can’t break decent stories. But, on the other hand, some form of quality control will need to be put in place in order to retain accuracy and, ultimately, credibility. A dispassionate approach to an issue is often the best way to expose it. Nobody listens to a (hyper) local ranter with a chip on his shoulder, and that sort of approach is something that will need to be avoided.

I’m reluctant to be too critical of Inside the M60′s content given the site’s tender age but since its creators are ready to criticise what they see as the weaknesses of other local media, I reckon a little constructive criticism is justified. Firstly, I spotted a lot of typos on the site, including Harpurhey being misspelt, lots of mis-spaced, glitchy commas and the odd half-written paragraph. There also seems to be a bit of an over-reliance on press releases and surveys, which, of course, fall into the category of “churnalism” that the site is railing against. For example, of the ten stories on the front page, three start with a statement summarising some survey or official report, followed by a second paragraph starting with the words “That’s the conclusion of…”

Still, it’s all free to look at and, once the community reporters bed in, perhaps there will be a change of focus. As we have all learnt today, credit should be given for trying something new. So I wish Inside the M60 the best of luck.

If any of these people come knocking at your door in the next few weeks, you might want to cut this out and wave it at them accusingly.

The information is taken from Hansard here.

Today’s CashGordon fiasco has got me thinking about the point of a social media campaign and reinforces the point that simply getting your brand or campaign mentioned on Twitter is not an end in itself.

For Tories, the CashGordon strategy was based around creating something that would inflame people on Twitter, and then watching as the #CashGordon hashtag began to trend highly, regardless of the actual merits of the campaign or content of the CashGordon site (in this case, Charlie Whelan and the Unite union’s supposed hold over Gordon Brown and Labour policy). This much was admitted by Tory blogger Samuel Coates, who said on Twitter earlier:

Sitting back and marvelling at #CashGordon – we had an open hashtag policy, and have not changed that today, for a reason!

Other examples of self-satisfied gloating on Twitter earlier today came from the Tories’ in-house “online communities editor” Craig Elder, who praised Labour and lefty-types for drawing attention to the CashGordon site:

@psbook Such an own goal on your part, repeatedly drawing attention to our campaign. Please continue.

What was actually happening here was not any discussion of Whelan or Unite. Instead, there was lots of criticism for CashGordon. The Guardian had noticed that the site used a template that had been developed in the US as a campaign tool against US healthcare reform. The phrase also started to trend highly because people quickly realised that since the Twitter stream on the CashGordon website was unmoderated, you could write embarrassing things about the Tories (or indeed childish swearwords, or even adverts) and get them on to the CashGordon site in real time, provided they were tagged #CashGordon (see image, top left).

Then someone realised that the site could be exploited by script commands. Pretty soon, CashGordon was redirecting to a site saying “David Cameron is a c**t” in 48-point type, a Rick Astley video on YouTube and some OAP porn (link is safe for work). The site was subsequently taken down and remains offline. All in all, then, this was fairly obviously a total embarrassment, a mega PR fail and a terrible idea very poorly executed.

Yet, after a couple of hours, Elder and Coates reappeared on Twitter, still maintaining that all was well. After I sarcastically observed that CashGordon was “a social media triumph”, Elder replied to me like this:

@davidquinn Can’t disagree with that – it’s still trending in the UK…

How stupid do you have to be to think that just because a word or phrase trends on Twitter, that automatically makes it a good campaign? It obviously doesn’t, and to think otherwise is simply confusing the medium with the message.

I realise that as an employee of the Conservative party, Elder’s job is to talk up its “successes” against all rational logic but, really, does he actually believe that this idea was executed in a way that was positive for the Tories? His argument, and that of some other social media practitioners, seems to be that if you get something trending, you’ve automatically “won”. But in this case people aren’t talking about Unite, the BA strike or Charlie Whelan (the point of the Tory campaign). Instead, they’re talking about how a flagship Tory website has been forced offline in embarrassing circumstances – and having a bloody good laugh about it. How is this a win?

Using the Tory rationale, Nestlé had a good day on Friday, when the company’s name began to trend on Twitter following claims by Greenpeace about the slaying of orang-utans during Nestlé’s harvesting of palm oil, which was compounded by Nestlé’s disastrous intervention on Facebook, in which it told people to stop using its logo. In reality, of course, the brand has taken a dive and the thing is already a case study in how not to “do” social media.

Looking back, if it’s remembered at all, I very much doubt CashGordon will be seen as a brilliant use of Twitter as a political campaigning medium. Instead, it will be seen as a byword for total technical incompetence and a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social media.

Footnote: In case you’re wondering, and since there’s an election brewing, this blog is not pro-Labour, nor is it pro- any other political party.

Unpredictably, this comment led to direct contact from Nicky Campbell and, since I’m not one to pass up the chance of wringing a blog post from the most meagre of material, I shall now analyse his tweets in order to make an assertion about his state of mind, personality, etc.

First contact was established by Nicky in the following tweet:

There are a couple of things to note here, the most obvious of which is Nicky’s use of “lol”. Since he’s a 48-year-old, often quite cantankerous Scotchman, I never thought he’d have used this kind of webspeak, which I tend to associate with floppy-brained twenty-somethings who rely on Facebook for their current affairs intake. I suspect he’s been taught it by a teenage family member. Or maybe he’s secretly a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger. The other thing to notice is that I never used the @NickyAACampbell username, so he must have some kind of alert set up for mentions of his own name. Perhaps all celebrities do this. Or maybe they don’t.

Obviously I wasn’t going to be deterred by Nicky’s lol-ing, so I followed up with another tweet:

On reflection, I can see why it might look as though I was pretty much begging for a follow-up response from the erstwhile Watchdog host, and the big man didn’t disappoint:

Fortunately, this is where the dumb, lolcatty Nicky takes a backseat and the frightening, sarcastic Nicky we all know and love makes a welcome return. Witness the heavy irony apparent in the “hugely relieved and grateful” part, followed by the possibly menacing “nice website” – which suggests he has looked at my website, knows where I (metaphorically) “live” and will be watching me carefully for future signs of insolence. (There is, admittedly, another “lol” in there but we’ll let that pass.) Others have interpreted this second tweet as a piece of reputation management, which is designed to disarm me and make me think he’s a nice guy.

I can’t make my mind up if Nicky Campbell is a nice guy, or if he’s essentially a madman who stays up at night scanning Twitter for signs of anti-Nicky Campbell sentiment. I kind of hope it’s the second one but unfortunately it probably isn’t.

Next Sunday: Watch in astonishment as  Tim Lovejoy launches a foul-mouthed attack against me on live television after I take the piss out of his tight sweater.

]]> http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/02/09/nicky-campbell-lol/feed/ 2 http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/21/manchester-confidential-unveils-paywall-content-and-nauseating-redesign/ http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/2010/01/21/manchester-confidential-unveils-paywall-content-and-nauseating-redesign/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:15:06 +0000 David Quinn http://www.wordsdept.co.uk/?p=578 There’s been a not wholly positive reaction to Manchester Confidential’s “redesign” today. It looks quite a lot like the old site although it’s somehow more grotesque. It’s cluttered, it’s dominated by an almost misanthropic shade of yellow and looks like it was conceived in about 1999. By a drunk. ManCon has unleashed the dogs of war – or, at least, a couple of bitchy @replies – to anyone who dared to mention it on Twitter.

This coincides with the launch of ManCon’s paywall structure. To read this review of Pizza Express, for example, you now have to pay a minimum of three pounds a month.

This blog was the first to reveal details of ManCon’s “heroes” pricing structure (it really was, honest), which is backed by a cheaper “friends” model. For this, you get access to various stuff including special offers and competitions, as well as restaurant reviews.

I’ve nothing against paywalls in principle. My view is that the marketplace will decide whether you can make money on the web using a paywall model (although all the evidence so far suggests that unless you’re delivering either pornography or very highly targeted, valuable information towards business users, you probably can’t). But I am curious about what ManCon loyalists think of being charged money for something that was previously valued at zero. Bizarrely, a review of Papa G’s in the Printworks from ten days ago is now trapped behind a paywall, although if I Google it, I can find the exact same review for free. It’s hardly going to have me reaching for the credit card, is it?

And while the reviews are very detailed and well written by proper journalists and all that, does anyone, when it comes down to it, really care? If I want an idea of whether a pizza place is any good, I can either use a free review site like ViewManchester, or I’ll possibly risk eight quid by, y’know, going in there and ordering a pizza.

ManCon has done a very good job of convincing people to part with their cash in advance of its relaunch, raising at least £60k from subscribers. The crunch will come in a year’s time when these people will be forced to consider whether renewal is worth it.

The site, which has 260,000 (free) subscribers, announced plans for the paid subscription model last month. Its first move involves inviting 1,000 of its most “loyal” readers to pay to become a “hero”, which will allow “full site access with no restrictions” alongside a number of perks including 50% off the ticket price for ManCon events and a free ticket to the Confidential Food and Drink Awards dinner – itself worth £80. Alongside these benefits, ManCon “heroes” will have “responsibilities” – namely telling the site about new restaurants and bars they’ve been to. (Erm, shouldn’t they be paying me for this, rather than the other way round?)

Nobody, apart from Rupert Murdoch, thinks the subscription model can work for mainstream web content (excluding B2B). So it will be interesting to see if ManCon publisher Mark Garner can pull this off. The idea of flattering readers with “hero” status seems at least mildly imaginative but it remains to be seen if a thousand people will commit to a minimum spend of a hundred quid a year. Even if they do, that’s only ten grand in annual income for the site. Edit: Obviously it’s actually a hundred grand, pardon my shit maths. If this sum can be achieved then the need to get vast amounts of cash from remaining subscribers will be significantly reduced.

The screengrabs below show the detail of what is being offered, alongside the message that all subscribers can expect to receive over the next fortnight.

1.The email invitation

2. The “lowdown”

3. The benefits and “responsibilities”

4. The bottom line

Look kids! It’s DJ Davey C drinking a pint of bitter and looking like a dude! He’s going to be in town at the start of October and his peeps are hosting a wicked all night rave at the Pure night club!

According to the e-flyer (helpfully distributed this week by Manchester Confidential to all its subscribers), the knees-up will feature

a roller disco, celebrity DJs, an Xbox area, a chill-out lounge and a VIP room.

Not sure who the sleb deejays are – I like to imagine Norman Tebbitt pushing out the latest party bangers from his Wagner collection.

Everyone is encouraged to

Go along, meet the party members and educate yourself about what they have to offer.

Hmm. Sounds fucking unmissable.

Meanwhile, the Tories are attempting to get local bloggers and social media enthusiasts to turn up to the conference and tweet about it. This was revealed to those gathered at the Social Media Cafe in Manchester last night. I was there, and to call the response lukewarm would be a gross overstatement. In fact, the only way it could have been less enthusiastic would have been if a pissed Nicholas Soames had borne the invitation personally, immediately after vomiting fish head soup into the slot-loading SuperDrive of a brand new 17-inch MacBook Pro.

So remember, guys: DJ Gravy C’s Tories like to party all night and they “get” social media. ‘Kay?

Within each of these categories, you can assume that the individual Twitterer is between 25 and 49 years old and has a full time job. As such, it’s unclear how they have the time to permanently frequent what is basically a chat room for old farts.

1. The famous person

Most famous people have several thousand followers but only follow a handful back. The reason for this is ostensibly because they fear stalkers but is really because they think they are better than “normals” like us. The exception is Stephen Fry, who tries to follow all his followers back. He even follows me, despite the fact that I stopped following him some time ago after I got bored with his tweets about African wildlife and being stuck in a lift.

2. The “social media specialist”

As many as 91% of all people on Twitter talk about nothing except Twitter*. These people, who are often men with trendy beards, are bafflingly popular on Twitter. This is mainly because they were among the first people to “get” it. As such, when everyone else finally “got” it between October 2008 and March 2009, these people already had 900 followers and, like the popular kids at secondary school, were able to attract more. They apply hashtags to everything and often say “haz” instead of “have” because this is how people on the internet speak. LOL!

3. The weird semi-stalker/spammer

Beware of people who have 46 followers but are following 1,289. The sort of people who live in places like “Sacramento, CA” and mention “Zen” or “life-coaching” in their profile. There is no explanation for what these semi-stalkers want. (Most people don’t block them because even though they say they don’t care about their own follower numbers, secretly they are happy to have lots of apparently harmless people bumping up their stats.) Spammers are similar to the semi-stalkers, in that nobody knows what they want. The difference is they use a grainy avatar that looks like Britney Spears doing something unusual with a carrot.

4. The PR consultant

Twitter is a godsend for PRs because it allows them to bolt half-arsed “web strategies” on to otherwise lacklustre campaigns, which they (correctly) assume will impress their clients. Many PR people pretend they are being conversational about something new they have discovered (a “funky new ironing board!”, a “revolutionary new tampon!”, etc) when in fact they are “creating online conversations” about something they are being paid to “create online conversations” about.

5. The relentless cross-poster

Since most people have nothing interesting to say in their daily lives, it’s understandable that most people on Twitter can’t think of much interesting to say either. Consequently, they set up some kind of automated service that aggregates lots of other stuff (blog posts, bookmarks and general web waffle) and churns it out incomprehensibly, with odd sets of brackets, dots and bit.ly addresses to the annoyance of the entire world. It’s the equivalent of walking into a room and yelling “Page 41 of the Guardian G2 section!”, then reading out the first sixteen words from the headline and intro before walking off. Then doing the same thing again five minutes later with page 42.

6. The person who thinks you give a toss about their record collection

We’ve all been to a house party where someone hogs the record player and plays dreary music, failing to notice that everyone else in the room lost interest in the Bluetones after that one single they did that was quite good in about 1994. The online equivalent is the Twitter link to the Spotify/Blip FM playlist.

7. Some lunatic at a conference

There’s always someone on Twitter who’s at a conference that’s demarcated purely by a hashtag, an apparently random series of lower-case letters and “09″. In fact, up to 97% of these conferences* are about social media and/or “online engagement”, presumably because these are the only types of conference where the chairman considers it acceptable for delegates to sit typing stuff into a mobile phone like a pig-ignorant teenager while somebody important is on stage doing a carefully crafted presentation. They then tweet stuff from the unmissable #xmklwfdf09 conference every five minutes for six hours, AS THOUGH THEY ARE WITNESSING THE BLOODY OBAMA INAUGURATION. Clearly, they aren’t.

Considering all of the above, is it any surprise that 15-year-olds have found much better things to do with their time?

*All figures are made up