Jason Stamper's Blog: August 2009 Archives

Labour's 'Twitter tsar' in sense of humour failure shock?
August 25, 2009

After a satirical blog I wrote asking whether the magician Paul Daniels would make a better 'Twitter tsar' than Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, I receieved the following short shrift from McCarthy herself in a reply to me on Twitter:

(a) the party is not calling me that, (b) it's Bristol East, (c) look at % of replies not just tweets - that's what counts.

Obviously I have now corrected the fact I had said she was MP for Bristol West, rather than Bristol East. Mea culpa.

As for her point (b) -- "the party is not calling me that" -- I concur. I understand they are calling McCarthy their 'New Media Campaigns Spokesperson'. However I think my use of 'Twitter tsar' can be forgiven, since her own office is calling her that. This from her own Parliamentary web page:

Kerry becomes Labour’s New Media Campaign Spokesperson - 17 Aug 2009 - The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be the "Twitter tsar" with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.

Finally we come to McCarthy's point (c) - isn't it uncanny how politicians always seem to make three points about anything? OK, so McCarthy says the @replies (people replying to your tweets with tweets of their own) are a more important measure than followers.

McCarthy may be right -- @replies can be a sign that people aren't only reading your tweets, they're often a sign that they are responding to them too. But she may be wrong, because @replies aren't necessarily replies at all, but simply people trying to get the attention of that Twitter user.

So there's an awful lot of @reply 'noise' out there, as people make their various points or simply try and send a message to a user. You can guess how many @replies certain celebrities are sent, not because they have written a tweet that people are responding to, but just because they are trying to get that person's attention. Let's not even begin to talk about @reply spammers.

In the case of an MP using Twitter, there is also the fact that constituents use Twitter to complain about all sorts of things going on in their constituency, or try and garner some publicity for a local event. Does receiving lots of @reply complaints or advertisements make one an influential Twitter user?

Kerry McCarthy MP: Labour's New Media Campaigns Spokesperson, a.k.a. 'Twitter tsar'.

Suffice to say @replies are not a scientific measure of the extent of a user's Twitter influence any more than the number of followers as a percent of total tweets. As 'Twitter tsar', or at least New Media Campaigns Spokesperson, McCarthy is surely aware of this.

Besides I'm not sure (I could be mistaken) if it's possible for anyone other than the Twitter user themself to count up their total @replies very easily. If you are not that user, you can do a search for their Twitter account name, such as @KerryMP, and start counting. But since it displays only 20 per page, you're in for a long session of clicking 'more' to count the next 20, and so on.

McCarthy didn't seem to realise that I was being flippant when I asked whether Paul Daniels would make a better 'Twitter tsar' than she. But let's stick with the Paul Daniels comparison for the time being. McCarthy has had 20 @replies in the last 20 hours. Daniels had 20 @replies in the last 13 hours, which suggests that Paul Daniels is replied to more often than Kerry McCarthy (caveat: I didn't say it was that scientific, did I?)

So I'm very sorry Kerry, but:

(a) my original blog was what's known as 'satire', (b) your own office calls you "Twitter tsar", and (c) Paul Daniels gets more @replies than you as a percentage of tweets. So there.

In my view one of the prerequisites of a true 'Twitter tsar' is the art of the witty riposte. So come on Kerry, I know you can do better than simply a, b, c.

UPDATE:

Kerry McCarthy gamely got back in touch to tell me, "Next time - make it funnier!" A fair cop. She also tweeted that, "At the risk of being accused of another sense of humour failure, u missed my point - I meant my replies not ppl replying to me."

Another fair point, though replies by a user count as normal tweets, taking us perhaps back to the metric between the number of followers as a percentage of total tweets. And as I've mentioned, Paul Daniels still has the lead there.

I guess one could split out replies from other tweets, and then come up with another metric based on replies as a percentage of total tweets. I've not got time today (a job for a rainy day methinks) but that will give you an idea of how responsive the Twitter user is, rather than be a metric of Twitter influence in its own right. So I'm still not ruling Paul Daniels out of the running for 'Twitter tsar' just yet!

I also notice that McCarthy has got her team to revise the document I quoted from above, in which her own team called her a "twitter tsar". The line,

"The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be the "Twitter tsar" with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media."

now reads:

"The Labour Party have announced that Kerry will be their New Media Campaigns Spokesperson with the responsibility of encouraging MPs and others to use new media as a form of direct engagement with voters."

Near the bottom of the release, this paragraph has now been added too:

"The appointment, which has led to Kerry being dubbed 'the "Twitter tsar", comes following the recent study conducted by the Independent newspaper which declared Kerry the most influential politician on Twitter."

So that's cleared that up.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jasonstamper

Digg this

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by Jason Stamper on 11:49 AM | Comments (1)

Would Paul Daniels make a better 'Twitter tsar'?
August 24, 2009

News that Labour has hired what some are calling a ‘Twitter tsar’ - in the shape of Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East – begs the question as to what qualifications make one suitable for such a post.

With just 2,424 followers on Twitter despite 4,555 tweets, one wonders how much she really knows about micro-blogging.

To put McCarthy’s following in context, it’s worth noting that magician Paul Daniels has built up a following of 22,421 through almost exactly the same number of Tweets as McCarthy: 4,614. That's magic!

Paul Daniels' profile picture on Flickr.*

Not fair, you cry: Daniels is a celebrity while MPs rarely are (though a fake LordMandelson Twitter profile quickly racked up 2,793 followers despite only 23 Tweets to its ‘name’.)

You have a point. But fair or unfair, McCarthy has only added 0.53 followers for each of her tweets. Paul Daniels’ ratio is 4.6 followers per tweet. So who would you back to raise MP’s influence on Twitter?

To be fair, The Independent newspaper named McCarthy the most influential MP on Twitter, based on a combination of followers, mentions and outgoing links to stories. So that explains it.

It’s clear why Labour would want to hire a ‘Twitter tsar’. I’ve written in the past about the huge positive impact that social networking had on Barack Obama’s election campaign. Labour must replicate that success the best they can.

Twitter and other social networking sites are thought to be a conduit to an audience that might pay little or no attention to more traditional media. Their potential to encourage dialogue, and the informal nature of what one publishes on such sites, gives them a quality that is hard to copy in other formats.

Little wonder then that Tory MP Alan Duncan, who was forced to apologise “unreservedly” after he was secretly filmed complaining about MPs' pay and expenses in early August, set up a Twitter profile and uttered his first Tweet last week. If rebuilding your reputation is required, ‘look no further than Twitter’ seems to be the mantra.

After a single Tweet, Duncan has 30 followers at the time of writing. That gives him an outstanding ratio of 30 followers per tweet. So what was his first Tweet? ‘Sorry’? ‘Mea culpa’? Of course not. “My first tweet ever,” he wrote, “So be gentle. Weather here fabulous”.

To follow Paul Daniels: Twitter.com/ThePaulDaniels*
Kerry McCarthy: Twitter.com/KerryMP
Alan Duncan: Twitter.com/AlanDuncanMP*
Me: Twitter.com/jasonstamper

* While I believe these are the genuine Twitter profiles of Paul Daniels and Alan Duncan, it's not always easy to tell, because it's easy to set up a fake. But that's another story.

Digg this

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by Jason Stamper on 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

Podcast: SuccessFactors on clouds, competition and enterprise social networking
August 20, 2009

This is a podcast of an interview I did this week with Paul Albright, SuccessFactors' general manager of SMB and also their chief marketing officer. In it, I ask him why he believes SuccessFactors' software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach to what it calls talent management helped it record 44% revenue growth in its latest quarter despite the down economy.

We go on to discuss the difference between cloud computing and SaaS, internal versus external clouds and why Albright argues that SuccessFactors would not have been possible were it not for social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Finally, I ask him whether the company has ambitions to broaden its cloud platform to third party applications providers, as salesforce.com has done with its Force.com platform. As you'll hear, Albright claims his firm will take a rather different approach to openness than salesforce.com has.

If you're wondering why I ask the question, you might recall that salesforce.com has faced criticism in the past for failing to make Force.com a completely level playing field.

Online apps provider Zoho even claimed that salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff used strong-arm tactics such as trying to buy the firm in a bid to prevent it competing with salesforce.com's own applications; Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu wouldn't sell the company, and Benioff wouldn't let Zoho put its apps on Force.com even though it had spent time on integration work before Benioff pulled the plug.

It was perhaps a little ironic then -- or perhaps just a sign of Benioff's cheek -- that he left the stage after his keynote at his firm’s Cloudforce event recently to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ hit Get off of my Cloud.

Stream my podcast with SuccessFactors' Paul Albright in Windows Media format by clicking here (right-click to download) or if you prefer it's in MP3 format here.

Some clouds.

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by Jason Stamper on 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

CBR podcast: cloud computing, guinea pigs and territorialism
August 05, 2009

Here's a short podcast I recorded yesterday with Maggy McClelland, managing director of Colt's Managed Services division, and Steve Hughes, who is cloud and virtualisation specialist in the same division at Colt.

I was keen to know what McClelland thinks about Atos Origin UK MD's recent comments to CBR that his clients do not want to act, as he put it, as "guinea pigs" by becoming cloud computing early adopters. Does that view resonate with what she's seeing in the market?

I also asked whether she believes cloud computing differs from managed services as we know and understand them today; and why Colt's Managed Services Division saw growth in its most recent quarter of almost 30%, despite Colt as a whole seeing fairly flat revenues.

Is the economy puhsing people to look to such services, or could it be internal pressures such as compliance, budget constraints and increasing infrastructure complexity (or all of the above)?

Maggy McClelland, managing director of Colt's Managed Services division.

Later in the recording, you'll hear Steve Hughes' views on the role of emerging standards in cloud computing, and we discuss the current fears over cloud computing amongst many CIOs, such as governance and compliance, security, quality of service and even IT department territorialism.

Here's the podcast then, in Windows Media format: Listen now. Click the link to stream it to your PC, or right-click it if you would like to download it to your PC and listen to it later.

Steve Hughes, cloud and virtualisation specialist, Colt Managed Services.

Digg this

  Email this entry to a friend

Posted by Jason Stamper on 12:55 PM | Comments (0)