Archive for January, 2009

Yesterday I wrote about Twitter name squatting and included a recent example where a rogue person had registered the name BBC on Twitter.

Earlier today Twitter Inc handed the account to the real BBC, after a BBC staff member complained to Twitter Inc. It’s been cleared of all previous tweets and all 7,684 followers.

It’s now impossible to follow the original links and see what happened. So here are some screenshots to illustrate my point about the importance of brand control. All were taken on 28th January 2009 just after 5PM.

The screenshot above shows an @ message sent to the BBC Twitter account.

The user @sputnik101 was surprised to see this reply from the BBC Twitter account. Like many people, including me, he was unaware that the BBC did not have control over the account. In that sense, like many others, he’d be duped into thinking he was following the real BBC. It’s generally expected that large corporations will protect their trademarks and copyrights to prevent this happening.

I tried to see how long the BBC account had been in third party control. Above is the earliest tweet I found – from 9th October 2008.

As far as I could see the message to @sputnik101 was the only @ reply from the impostor posing as the BBC. But many other people sent @ messages to the account about many different topics. You can see just one page of search results above.

We don’t know if the rogue posing as the BBC sent any private direct messages to any of his or her thousands of followers, in the four months he or she had control over the account. It would have been possible.

Today the real BBC have control. So do head over and read what they’re posting from the new look, genuine @bbc. If you’re on Twitter you can follow them too.

This BBC story is an excellent example of the need to control your brand name on Twitter. If someone has your brand name, particularly if it’s a trademark, you should complain to Twitter Inc by sending a message to @crystal in user support.

If your name or brand name is still available, then register a Twitter account today to prevent somebody else taking it.

It’s also worth using usernamecheck.com to check the availability of your name on a variety of other popular sites.

At Native our purpose is to advise companies on good use of online and social media. This is advice we give to all our clients. As such, the BBC story is given here purely as an illustrative example. I’m not going to labour this point – there are many other examples of Twitter squatting but I won’t be attempting to catalogue them all.

I do believe that Twitter squatting could lead to examples of phishing and other nastiness if companies are lax about this. Unfortunately the onus is largely on them to monitor this. (If you’re concerned about this or you want more information, call us.)

In this example, on the surface it would appear that the rogue was attempting to provide a useful service – by pulling in the legitimate RSS feed from BBC News. But it would be easy to do this for other purposes – including phishing – to give an appearance of authenticity to an account. The legitimate feed could easily be combined with a feed from elsewhere (using an RSS aggregation service such as Yahoo Pipes).

[ UPDATE 29/01/09: Some of the links here no longer work because the real BBC have taken control of the rogue Twitter account. Read this post for screenshots and updated info. ]

There’s enough hype saying you need to use Twitter. Just as TV presenter Phillip Schofield and other celebrities are discovering, there are few barriers to investigation. If you’re curious then just sign up, post a couple of tweets, start following a few people and see what happens.

What I will say is, whether you care about Twitter or not, you must protect your name or your brand.

Domain name squatting has been happening for years. Twitter is starting to tip and a similar thing has been happening there. Lots of people are reserving other people’s names, whether for pranks, experimentation, promotion of other projects, revenge, financial gain or reasons known only to them.

For instance, in December it took several days before we were sure that the Twitter account for Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was being run by an impostor. The poor spelling and writing style had me suspicious – but he or she still managed to gather a couple of hundred followers and dispense some tweets of pithy wisdom. It was mostly good-natured, but the risk of damage to the Archbishop was still there. (The account has been taken over now and is dormant.)

Again, back in December, tech blogger Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK admitted to stealing the account name of Andy Burnham, the UK Culture Secretary after a grievance involving Burnham’s opinions on net regulation. (I happen to agree that Burnham’s opinions were misguided, but I’m illustrating another point.) That one’s been suspended by Twitter Inc now. If Burnham had been quick to reserve his own name, it wouldn’t have happened.

(Incidentally, there are very few real politicians registered on Twitter, let alone actively using it. In Wales, we’ve seen the Plaid Cymru AM Bethan Jenkins and the Lib Dem candidate Alison Goldsworthy.)

This is not confined to individuals, it includes companies and brands as well. Lots of well known brands are taken by fakes.

Now most recently and amazingly, the name BBC on Twitter is being run by a third party, who have made no explicit indication that it’s unofficial. The fact they are pulling in a useful feed of current BBC news stories adds weight to the deception.

Look at my screenshot above. The account has 7,684 followers. This is very dangerous indeed for the BBC’s reputation.

Normally, only an eagle-eyed user would notice, with suspicion, that the only people they’re following back are Sky Sports, Manchester United football team and something called Funny Times. Or would click the profile link to discover the following disclaimer:

The news published on http://www.twitter.com/BBC is syndicated content taken directly from the BBC News website vie their public RSS feed found here. The account is not operated by the BBC but is offered for your convenience so that you may receive the latest news stories from the BBC website whilst using the Twitter Service.

Now though, someone called @sputnik101 discovered this when he complained to the BBC account about their broadcast policy on the DEC charity appeal for Gaza.

He then received a surprising and somewhat inappropriate reply. Here’s more on that story.

As you can see from the comments, somebody at the BBC has finally had the sense to complain to Twitter Inc to ask for the account to be suspended or handed over.

Here at Native, we like Twitter as a communication platform – and have got a lot of benefit from it in terms of contacts, information, useful links and smart conversation. Fortunately the culture of Twitter engenders authenticity and the confirmation of an account being fake, once known, can be spread very rapidly. But now that newer people are joining and taking time to learn how it works, the potential for deception is huge.

If you don’t fancy using it, make sure nobody uses it on your behalf.

If following this advice means registering for Twitter and – at least for now – leaving the account idle with a brief explanation, so be it. Here’s an example.

We are blog and news junkies here at Native. (We need to be.)

One thing that amuses me is when commentators emerge from the woodwork to direct their earnest advice towards the business and technology strategies of Google.

Google’s huge success in building an empire on search advertising is very well known. It’s enabled them to launch an entire suite of web-based applications.

(It’s likely you might be reading this blog post in Google Reader or Google Mail, for instance. If not, maybe you’re using their Google Chrome browser.)

But daily, hourly even, there is no shortage of people with some nugget of insight. Or withering putdown.

When you’re the best, you are at your most visible and you are the biggest target for ill-conceived challenges. Just ask any boxing champion who has to walk into a bar.

Admittedly Google’s recent 4th quarter financial results were down. But considering a tough market for advertising in general, they continue to do comparatively well – beating analysts’ forecasts with net profits of $382 million.

Media commentator Jeff Jarvis’ overall premise is different. While not without his own critics, Jarvis is not foolish enough to take cheap shots at the fastest growing company of recent times.

Jarvis has some good insights on his blog and Guardian newspaper pieces. I for one am looking forward to reading his new book What Would Google Do?.

His subject scope is large, judging from this book teaser:

It seems as if no company, executive, or institution truly understands how to survive and prosper in the internet age.

Except Google.

So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD? What would Google do? In management, commerce, news, media, manufacturing, marketing, service industries, investing, politics, government, and even education and religion, answering that question is a key to navigating a world that has changed radically and forever.

So, WWGD? (I’m looking forward to the bracelet and sandal franchises.)

Jarvis’ background is old school print journalism, so it helps to view his commentary as coming from that perspective. You might remember him from his Dell Hell online campaign in 2005 when he openly criticised the PC manufacturer via his blog and became responsible, in part, for the subsequent improvements to their customer service.

If you’re looking for more detail from Jarvis, read The Google Economy and The Imperatives of the Link Economy.

The book is out next week on Collins. (I wonder if News Corporation, their parent company, have anything to say about it.)

Native present the Safe Foundation’s new website http://www.thesafefoundation.co.uk. Built on Wordpress, the site gives the charity the capacity to operate online.

The Safe Foundation are a Cardiff-based charity that raises funds for small community projects overseas. They organise fundraising balls, parties and other events in the UK, getting contributions from their networks for communities they connect with directly.

Their new website provides them with a platform for operating online:

• A latest news blog with RSS feed
• Profiles of the projects they work with
• An events calender for their fundraising events
• A donation page where you can donate via PayPal, using Chipin
• A Flickr group gallery for their photos
• A cideo channel

The site is built in Wordpress, giving the Foundation an awesome open source platform that is infinitely extendable.

You can also connect to the Safe Foundation team on Twitter:

• Caz
• Lou
• Lucy D
• Lucy F
• Hannah

For their first online fundraising effort, the Safe ladies are raising money to send a Flip Camcorder to the kids they work with in Sierra Leone. They only need $125 (about $90), so why not give them a big welcome to the web by Chipping into their fund?

UPDATE: It took then 1.5 hours to raise $125! So the Safe Foundation are going to raise another $450 for Flip cams for the kids they work with in India, Ghana and Uganda too!

BBC have a 3-minute video on the joys of Twitter -  with well known user @stephenfry explaining how he sought advice on his household bat problem.

We are on Twitter as @carlmorris and @tombeardshaw.

[ UPDATE, 22/01/09: There's a link to the Chrysler website in the post below. It appears the car company took action and deleted their entire blogpost and comments on Thursday after some serious action on the recommendation site Digg. The image of the ad is still there. If you want to read the post and the comment pandemonium, Google have a barebones archive version in their cache. In my opinion, Chrysler would be better off owning this series of gaffes and explicitly dealing with the issue on their blog. As it goes, they've attempted to cover it up and censor the comments, thus being seen to fail once more. It kind of makes you feel sorry for them. ]

Here’s an intriguing article on Fast Company magazine about how Ford cars dealt with some negative publicity online last month.

While it mentions the rapid responses by their head of social media, Scott Monty, it may leave you wanting more details about the incident. So here’s the full story and Monty’s own account.

The key to this, in my opinion, is that Monty possessed additional information which he was able to share to calm down the bloggers and Twitter users.

In the meantime, many people emphasise the power of the web to engender good reputation for a product. But it’s just as powerful in the other direction. Elsewhere in the auto industry, Chrysler are suffering from the heat of almost a month of commenting fury. Why? Because after receiving a financial bail-out from the US government, Chrysler placed expensive national press adverts – to thank the public for “their” financial support.

This was viewed by many as a crass and wasteful move. The comments are largely variations on this theme:

Your resignation and the resignations of senior executives who have mismanaged the business would have been much more appropriate. Posted Dec 29, 2008, 8:03 PM by California Initiative

Oof! We also have:

My response to being forced to bail Chrysler out was to immediately purchase a FORD Focus and I will NEVER buy any car that Chrysler has anything to do with.  This ad you ran “thanking” us was an example of you wasting OUR money. Posted Dec 30, 2008, 11:44 AM by redwood tree

I don’t pretend to know very much about the auto industry. Even so, being based in Cardiff, Wales, I probably wouldn’t have picked up the Chrysler story – if it weren’t for the blogging frenzy that ensued and brought it to my attention. A quick look at Google Blog Search reveals hordes of US taxpayers expressing this. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. Yet another. That’s just the front page of results. Here’s Fox News for good measure. Chrysler never dealt with any of the individual comments. Eventually they did attempt to respond with a very brief post in their own defence.

There’s a good chance your brand or business will not be facing publicity issues of this magnitude. But these are useful reminders of the importance of monitoring what people are saying about you online. People won’t necessarily choose to make any of these comments directly to you. Nor will they necessarily come to “your space”.

Often it will be people saying complimentary things, which is a great way to improve your day. But at some point, you may need to respond appropriately to something negative, or indeed a full blown crisis. Preferably immediately.

Your own blog can be a good place to respond. (You don’t have a blog? It’s extremely handy to have an active blog ready for these situations.)

I must confess to being a collector of these kinds of stories.

Another one of my grisly favourites concerns Target, a retailer, and dates from January 2008. When a blogger complained about an image in an advert, Target’s PR people refused to answer properly. Instead they cited a policy that they don’t talk to “nontraditional media”, in this case a blogger (read: influential customer). Whether or not you agree with the nature of the original customer complaint doesn’t matter. This was a snubbing which backfired – even if Target did ignore the blogs, it ended up in the New York Times anyway.

At Native, we do like to note when current affairs and news intersect with online media.

The site Whitehouse.gov has just relaunched for the new US administration. We’ll be looking particularly at their blog as well as Barack Obama on Twitter and any other officially-sanctioned tools and sites, to see how the US government are embracing them.

If this flood of US news is getting too much, the Kazakh prime minister has not only started a blog but also ordered his ministers to start their own blogs.

This tag cloud was generated from Barack Obama’s speech and uploaded to the social photography site Flickr in double-quick time today. Here’s another.

Tag clouds have become a fascinating at-a-glance method of representing data. In this case, we see the words that Barack Obama has emphasised due to repetition.

Tag clouds began as a navigational aid for websites. Here’s a live example representing the content of the many thousands of pictures and photographs stored on Flickr itself. Each word is a link with the most common words given greater prominence.

I’m not sure which tool these used – if you want to generate your own, one such tool is Wordle.

Tom has written a post on his personal blog about the work of Mike Wesch, a prominent cultural anthropologist who researches social media.

Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the USA takes place on Tuesday 20th January.

Techcrunch have a wideranging list of a plethora of online sites and applications related to the event. These cover where to watch it, where to respond to it, approval ratings and more.

My favourite is probably the Obameter which tracks the status of 500 promises made by Obama during the USA election campaign.

I’ve previously mentioned Obama’s use of social media to gather supporters and communicate. If you’d like to read about that, here’s a good start.

So online media can assist politicians in gathering supporters. Can online media assist the electorate in holding politicians to account – and thereby improve the democratic process as a whole? It’s a huge question, I know. We can but hope. Actually it’s not just about hope – people have to USE these tools.

I hope you find these links useful. Although Native is based in Cardiff, Wales, I’m very guilty in this blog of being US-centric in my link recommendations. Although I will continue to reference useful US-based pages where relevant, I’ll also make an effort to redress the balance from now on!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in online tools related to politics and democracy in the UK then check out the various projects of mySociety. Game-changing stuff.