AndrewBurnett.com» social media

Rant: “Live Tweeting”

Andrew Burnett — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:36:57 +0000

With the exception of the seemingly endangered FailWhale making an appearance Tweeting is ‘LIVE’ by definition.

You are NOT doing anything other than NOT paying attention to whichever poor sod it is that is speaking / presenting / dying / shaving their pubis.

Essentially you are implying that you are somehow tweeting in even more realtime than anyone else, you egotistical introverted spudnut.

I’ve had it with this terminolowankery.

IT IS TWEETING. THAT’S IT. STOP IT YOU SPUDNUTS.

Unicorns, Less ‘Meme’ More ‘Me Me’…?

Andrew Burnett — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 15:12:09 +0000

Yesterday a London based international digital marketing agency had a unicorn in their offices! Imagine that! A real live unicorn!

Not like an Oatmeal unicorn, no a real live unicorn, you know, like a white horse with a plastic horn sellotaped to its coupon.

An actual unicorn would make a tsunami of a splash on the internet, right? The internet loves unicorns, in fact the only thing the internet loves more than unicorns is bacon and kittehs! You can’t fail to go viral with unicorns!

Except you can. You absolutely can. You can even fail to rile PETA. It is possible to entirely miss critical mass despite spending astronomical amounts.

Believe it or not, it is even possible to get less views on your twitpic than you have global staff. Less views on your twitpic than half
of your global staff. For a unicorn!

Perhaps next time an agency tries a stunt like that they’ll have a bacon-scarf-wearing Nyan LOLcat riding a hoverboard. And do you know what? It won’t ‘go viral’ either.

No, for something to ‘go viral’ it needs a little more magic and a little less production.

Photo credit

The UK’s Best (and dampest) SEO Conference

Andrew Burnett — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:52:56 +0000

Thinkvisibility 5, the first thinkvis I’ve been to without Wiebke who stayed at home looking after Alexa, but I had a great crowd to look after me on my travels!

Before Leaving Edinburgh

The sensible thing to do when heading to a conference with a group of thirsty Scots, obviously, is to drop in past Illegal Jack’s for a BurritoBeerSponge™. Jack’s opened half an hour early, just for us! We even got a nice new booth reserved for us especially:

And so it was that at 1130 we lined our stomachs for the day ahead. Chris Clarkson, Clarke Duncan, David McClelland & George Currie all came through from Glasgow, while myself Ian Daniels & Mark Boyd made up the Edinburgher contingent. Fraser Edwards also joined us, though sadly wasn’t coming to Thinkvis with us.

Leaving Edinburgh

A perhaps little known fact about international travel from Scotland, is that a case of beer is compulsory – even if it is Spanish beer and is empty before half of the journey is completed. An even less known fact is that us Scots are incredibly generous, though there is now a Norwegian bloke who knows that, hopefully he’ll do his part to dispel the vicious stereotypes about us.

Arriving in Leeds

After all that travelling a couple of beers in the hotel bar were just the ticket and was good to see some familiar, and some new, faces there: Paul Madden, Branko Rihtman and Justin Parks

Being a lightweight, and nothing to do with WeeBurnett having been a bit grumpy the night before, I had to go for a wee lie down before the pre-conference party…

Pre-Conference Party

Apres snooze it was time for me and my hat to head to the pre-conference party, as usual I got some snaps of people wearing my hat. I didn’t get round everyone, but (as always) everyone who is pictured wearing my hat has my full personal endorsement.

Chris Clarkson from sunshine.co.uk:

Justin Parks, social media consultant extraordinaire and much friendlier than he looks here:

Ingo Bousa, who I seem to have known for years from StumbleUpon but never actually met, so it was brilliant to make his acquaintance in real time!

The first person that Wiebke and I met on the morning of the first ever Thinkvis was Steven Lilley who is now an official photographer of the conference – I do hope this snap is acceptable to you Steven ;)

Also be sure to check out Steven’s Thinkvisibility photo stream on Flickr!

Rishi Lakhani I also seem to have known for years, but only actually met at the first thinkvis – top bloke, truly top bloke.

Beers flowed relentlessly throughout and (once the bar was closed) Shaun Anderson, Richard Shove and myself were going to raid Shaun’s minibar… only to find that Shaun’s room was locked and most of the corridor was in the drink. There are a number of adjectives that I considered linking to Shaun with, but I think that UK SEO pretty much covers it best – besides just thinking the word “damp” still hurts from laughing.

Of course Richard also got a shot of my hat…

Thinkvisibility 5 – The Conference Proper

Without exception I thoroughly enjoyed all of the sessions I attended:

Self Promotion for Over-thinkers: How The Right Audience Could Change Your Life by Peter Cooper
Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost Your Conversion Rate by Stephen Pavlovich
Adventures in Oursourcing by Paul Madden
Twitchhiker – Sharing, Not Selling by Paul Smith
Dave’s Den by Dave Naylor
Alas I missed Annabel Hodges’ talk on KPIs, Data, Reporting and Communication. Stop Pandering to Others, Start Maximising your Relationships, I got sidetracked in a discussion about social media experts versus consultants.

If you’re looking for the details of the talks, well you should have been there yourself, shouldn’t you? You’ll know better for next time though won’t you?

After Party

By this point you could be excused for thinking that the entire point of the conference is to party, not true though. Granted there is a hell of a lot of partying before and after the presentations, but there should be a nugget or two for most people in most of the talks. Granted there is a lot of chatter and banter which is off-topic, but that’s what cements relationships.

During the after party for example, I confirmed my suspicion that I am useless at poker – I lasted all of 3 hands in the Jaamit fund game. I learnt that fish fingers can be used as incendiary devices, that dog’s beds are too small for people of 6 foot and over and that curtains have many uses. I discovered that great whisky is appreciated by people who sleep under manky carpets and that sometimes, just sometimes a support girdle should be worn in case your sides actually split.

Aftermath

Messrs Clarkson, Parks and Burnett raided the wee shop closest to the hotel for “medicine”. 6 bottles was all that the shop had and we bought the lot, after all travelling is thirsty work.

Can’t wait til next time!

Sometimes I am an Asshat

Get it? Hat? No, nevermind…
None of the above would ever have happened had it not been for His Hodgetasticness, Dom Hodgson

Forgive me Dom, and you’ll get another pic in the hat next time!

Social Media: Always On

Andrew Burnett — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:49:01 +0000

Social media is always on, simple as that, the internet never sleeps.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week people are tweeting, blogging, facebooking their delight, disappointment and endorsements (as well as a load of nonsense). The point is, just because you’re not listening doesn’t mean people aren’t talking – they are.

Even on Christmas Day, social media is always on. In fact that makes quite a good analogy:

Always on, even on Christmas Day

On Christmas, Aunt Mabel always tells her funny stories, Grandma Palmer complains about the price of Preparation H, your cousins giggle inanely at nothing and everyone else comments on their behaviour. Social Media is no different. Even on Christmas Day (or on Eid, Hanukkah, Pancha Ganapati or the Zarathustrian equivalent) social media continues its relentless idiosynchracies. Imagine Mabel, Grandma and the cousins all had an iPhone and were at it under the table… that’s what IS happening online.

Some questions you might have may include:
Whether you want to listen to what they’re saying or not?
Whether you want to engage in the discussion or whether you want to sit it out?
Whether you should participate or shut it?
Whether Grandma is a charlatan on her chosen topic?

The Social Media Alphabet

Andrew Burnett — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:46:15 +0000

Always on

APIs

Agencies

Brand

Blogging

Content

Curation

Community

Dialogue

Endorsement

Entertainment

Exceptional

Facilitation

Fake

Filter

Genuine

Graph [Social Graph]

Honesty

Hype

Influence

Intelligence

Instant

Join

Judgement

Karma

Links

Marketing

Monetisation

Natural

Network

Opinion

On & Offline

Personal

Quality / Quantity

Reputation

Reciprocation

Research

Social

Spam

Targeted

Unique

Universal

Vast

Value

Viral

Wealth

Yatter

Yourself

Zappy

Zeitgeist

Digg Removes Publisher RSS Feeds

Andrew Burnett — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:51:11 +0000

Digg is inching closer and closer to version 3. That would make most people who don’t know digg imagine they’re currently on version 2… but no, they’re regressing from version 4.

Digg’s version 4 alienated a lot of loyal users who, among many other things, bemoaned the ability of huge sites to auto-submit stories by RSS. Sites like, for example, mashable eagerly took the opportunity to add RSS feeds to their profiles. In essence mashable and co were spamming digg’s users with endless submissions of unfiltered shite. Digg misread their users bigtime with this, digg users spend great amounts of time searching for great content to submit – taking pride in finding juicy links and submitting them for peer review.

The further problem with the behemoth sites auto-submitting was that they didn’t interact on digg at all. Even a cursory look at mashable’s profile statistics shows us this:

Submitting 5 stories a day and digging 1 story a day, how very very antisocial of them!

Those Days Are Gone Now…

Well, not yet they’re not, but they will be gone in the next week. As an email from digg’s product management confirmed just over 30 minutes ago:

So in the next week, the feature will be disabled. We wanted to give advance notice of this change and encourage you to start submitting your best content manually to Digg. You can also enable your audience to help submit and spread your content on Digg by placing Digg buttons on each story item on your site. We are confident that removing RSS submissions will help increase exit clicks to your sites, and ultimately help you receive more value from Digg.

It really is reassuring to see digg reacting to their users, albeit somewhat late. Keep up the good work digg, you’re making it the user’s site again slowly but surely.

Digg REALLY diggs theOatmeal

Andrew Burnett — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:58:29 +0000

Today Digg have started giving a preview of a new look Digg.com to select users.

But at the same time it looks like they’re trialling another feature…

TheOatmeal link is in both versions of the digg design…

Has Oatmeal bought digg?

Has Digg bought Oatmeal?

Is this a new “sponsored” link?

Can anyone get a link?

How long until there’s a comic about this please?

Update: Answers! We got answers!

Quelle surprise, it was a joke – more about it over on Oatmeal.

Naughty, Naughty SEO Agency

Andrew Burnett — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:04:29 +0000

I have long suspected that such things go on, but it is only very recently that I have actually found proof. An SEO agency spamming social bookmarking and spamming it incredibly badly.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, agencies are tasked by clients to improve their search engine visibility. A large part of improving search engine visibility involves getting links to whichever page it is that should be more visible. There are literally millions of articles online dedicated to this. I won’t do them the disservice of rewriting them here, but if you don’t know about it (and are interested) there’s plenty out there for you to read.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a collective term for services such as stumbleupon, digg, mixx and a thousand other services. All of them allow users to both bookmark webpages which interest them and share them with their friends, the majority of these services have some sort of algorithmic sorting mechanism to sort the shit from the shit hot. Another thing they all have in common is that they are “social”, users can “follow” other users, comment on other users links. You know, social.

Evidence

I literally stumbled upon this particular instance of social bookmarking spamming by one particular SEO agency. I have blanked out everything which identifies either the username or the clients of this agency:

I have a damn fine way of finding more SEO agencies doing the same, and I am convinced there are loads to find. For the time being I’ll keep that to myself, though people with a decent idea of how the web works will be able to fathom it out for themselves too. This particular SEO agency has been particularly obvious in that they’ve used the same username across a huge number of social bookmarking sites, here’s a screenshot of a Google search for their username (with the identifiable bits removed):

Why would an SEO agency spam social bookmarking?

“Every link counts” might be one explanation, though I really need to ask “really? REALLY?”
Has this agency not considered the potential implications of their actions?
Why does this agency bookmark pages which nobody else deems worthy of bookmarking?
Why doesn’t this agency create astonishingly great content for their client and bookmark that?

By abusing social bookmarking in this fashion they are, in effect, linking each of their clients with a spammy footprint. Search engines reference social links as an indicator of quality! Anyone, but especially SEO agencies, considering spamming social bookmarking with spurious and mediocre bookmarks should consider these questions:

Will they also use spammy signals to punish rankings?

Is that a gamble that you should really be taking with your clients and their reputations?

Is that a gamble that your clients should be funding?

Why Use Hootsuite? No Really, Why?

Andrew Burnett — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:58:14 +0000

Is there a compelling reason to use Hootsuite?

Anyone who has been on Twitter for more than 2 minutes will have seen links being shared with various URL shorteners. Among them they might also see Hootsuite’s ow.ly and ht.ly shortened links. ow.ly links should redirect them to the original url whereas ht.ly links will take them to the original url wrapped in an iframe. It’s this iframe that I really don’t get, why does anyone use it?

The ht.ly iframe offers no real functionality to the end user, the ability to tweet or social bookmark is given on most sites now. Hootsuite’s user base of just over 1,000,000 is not big enough for the voting buttons to be really interesting. What about StumbleUpon’s su.pr toolbar you ask? Well, StumbleUpon have a user base of 13,500,000 whose main interest is in thumbing content up or down… different kettle of fish.

On top of that there are security concerns with using iframes to wrap content.

Features of Hootsuite

I know Hootsuite has various features which are great for social media consultants, managers and “gurus”. Hootsuite offers analytics, team working, scheduled tweets and a raft of other things that, whilst not exclusive to Hootsuite, are incredibly helpful to the professional user.

Why, of all people, these users use insist on using the ht.ly shortener is utterly beyond me. Shouldn’t they know better?

Or am I an arse? Have I got it wrong? Is there a compelling reason to use Hootsuite’s ht.ly service?

image credit

Edinburgh’s Social Media Midget

Andrew Burnett — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:35:03 +0000

I’ve been rather absent from social media the past couple of weeks, with good reason:

11th November 2010 @weeburnett was born. @wiieb and I became proud parents of Alexa Mae Burnett (yes, her name was inspired by alexa.com – but what started in jest became our favourite name)

The Evolution of Edinburgh’s Social Media Midget, aka @weeburnett

@weeburnett first tweeted 27th May 2010 – around 4 months into her stay in the womb:

This was @wiieb’s and my way of telling the world we were expecting. As time went on Twitter friends, indeed all social media friends, never asked “how’s the bump?” but rather “how is @weeburnett?”.

@weeburnett soon became a social media entity in her own right, although even @wiieb and I didn’t know she was a she at that point. @LittleDishy very generously held a baby shower in her (and @wiieb’s honour) and generally people got excited about our impending arrival.

Alexa Burnett, Edinburgh’s Social Media Midget is Born

How else would Edinburgh’s social media midget announce her arrival on the scene than via a tweet with a twitpic?

Given that this was Alexa’s first ever twitpic she did exceptionally well with it… 400 views in 3 hours certainly made daddy very proud!

Welcoming Edinburgh’s Social Media Midget

Alexa was initially welcomed by enough people on Twitter to make @weeburnett a trending topic in Edinburgh, her announcement on Facebook went through the roof too. She was no longer the mayor of @wiieb’s womb on Foursquare.

Social Media of course crosses over from digital to real life and Alexa got cards and gifts galore from as far away as New Jersey and as close as George Street. We were quite quite overwhelmed at everyone’s generosity.

Thanks to These Lovely People @WeeBurnett Became a Trending Topic in Edinburgh

Thank you one and all, each and every one of you is wonderful :)

@hazelh
@sherred
@scottmliddell
@ervinjuresa
@ceerbl
@applemacbookpro
@jackiewalker
@vivaboo4u
@dh00
@scottmcintyre
@kebirch
@DaveLoudon
@mike_mcgrail
@AlexDRobertson
@timread
@idle_bull
@iamageek
@KarynFleeting
@aboynejames
@rabbell
@bluedroplet
@ScottTsukuru
@MamzelleLil
@lemon_squeezy
@AmyVernon
@jimwolffman
@Darcie
@jerryjamesstone
@amypalko
@MrCCMiller
@salidatious
@RalphBassfeld
@jordanfleming
@technologyconsu
@nevstokes
@fraserwaters
@LittleDishy
@Happy_Appetite
@beyongolia
@brendanmacneill
@danfrydman
@craigmcgill
@setindarkness
@illegaljacks
@kaykoyamagore

Gifts From Internet Friends For Edinburgh’s Social Media Midget

We met all of these wonderful people through social media. Their thoughtful gifts for Alexa were truly touching.

The two and only Mike & Carol Coulter got weeburnett.com AND alexaburnett.com for the wee one, no doubt there’ll be some fun to be had with weeburnett ;)

A parcel came all the way from Roberta in New Jersey with a sleeping bag and two ultra cute Christmas outfits.

The wordy Mr CC Miller and the mouthy (in a great way) Darcie also graced our mail deliveries.

The delightful tandem team Hazel & Tim jogged past on a wintry night with a super cute outfit.

Our dear friends Francesca, Jonny & the team at Caliber Interactive sent a lovely wee hamper with clothes for the midget and bubbly for the (relative) giants.

Super Sally & Richard gave @weeburnett some comfy and cute sleepsuits.

Phil Adams sent Alexa her very first personalised clothing, a babygrow with “@weeburnett” printed on it.

Not to mention all the wonderful gifts for mummy and baby from the babyshower girls before Alexa was here.

Dads Often Get Forgotten

Not with such great whisky drinking buddies as I have though! Scott Liddell, Dave Loudon and Andrew Wilson got me a rather cheeky bottle of Islay (Bruichladdich / Port Charlotte) single cask whisky – from the Malt Whisky Society.

Midget Photography

The picture at the top of this post was taken by the talented amateur photographer (and whisky delivery man) Dave Loudon.

In Short, Thank You All

The point of this post was really just to say a massive thank you to everyone named (and anyone we’ve forgotten!) for your support, friendship and general sociability. Parenthood is a journey in itself, you guys and gals are great navigators, sherpas and innkeepers along the way!