Here are all of the posts from January 2009.

First they ignore you…

by Chris Applegate in News on 9 January 2009 at 16:18 Google+

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.

The Daily Mail’s reportage on Twitter has attracted the ire of the UK’s social media community – after a dismissive report on celebrity Twitter usage at the weekend, followed by reporting with relish about the Twitter backend hack a few days later. The result has been a mini online backlash against the Mail, including a spoof @Notdailymail_uk Twitter feed (contrary to rumour, I am not behind it), which has nearly five times as many followers as the real thing, and a spike in traffic to my own spoof Daily Mail headline generator as well.

Simon Perry points out at least one of the reasons the mainstream media can be hostile to services like Twitter – it allows celebrities to communicate directly to the public. With our help, Stephen Fry was one of the first celebrities to use Twitter and his phenomenal popularity has led a slew of British celebrities to follow suit, including Jonathan Ross, who’s making the most of his time off work by becoming Twitter’s self-proclaimed “Number One Twitter Detective”, tracking down fake profiles on his fans’ behalf.

Celebrities no longer need the intermediary of celeb magazines and gossip columns, and the Mail is among those newspapers who rely heavily on such content. Hence the hostility to Twitter. Twitter either has reached or is about to reach (a matter of recent debate between Vikki Chowney and myself) its tipping point in the UK. Just like other forms of social media in the past – such as blogs, Facebook or Wikipedia – the mainstream media are now moving on from treating it as a distraction to treating it as a threat. With outright hostility now the flavour of the day, are we beginning to see the endgame being played out? People are more likely to use online rather than newspapers in the UK and now even in the US for their news, and with the double whammy of newspaper sales declining and a recession reducing ad revenues, expect them to put up a fight to the bitter end.

Update: More in a similar vein from Matt Rhodes.

Update 2: From our very own Stephen Fry:

I’m not someone with press offices and all that kind of thing, but those like me in the public eye who have, have discovered it’s a magnificent way of cutting out the press.

If people want to announce their new this or their new that, they’re going “I’m not going to do an interview, I’m not going to sit in the Dorchester for seven days having one interviewer after another come to me, I’m just going to Tweet it, and point them to my website and forget the press”.

And the press are already struggling enough – God knows they’ve already lost their grip on news to some extent. If they lose their grip on comment and gossip and being a free PR machine as well, they’re really in trouble.

So naturally they’re simultaneously obsessed because they use it (as it fills up their column inches) but they’re also very against it.

So you’ll get an increasing number of commentators going “Aren’t you just fed up with Twitter? Oh, if Stephen Fry tells me what he’s having for breakfast one more time, I think I’ll vomit.”

They really will have a big go at it because it attacks them, it cuts them out.

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We’re on a Digital Mission to SXSWi

by Nathan McDonald in News on 9 January 2009 at 09:49 Google+

Digital Mission

We’re off to Texas! Along with 34 other innovative UK companies, we’re really proud to be selected from over 100 entries as part of the Digital Mission to the SXSWi Conference in Austin, Texas.

As Mike Butcher (also one of the judges) puts it in Techcrunch, the Digital Mission is “a kind of trade mission, but with more sex appeal” to SXSWi, “now a byword for emerging media.”

Chinwag are organising the Digital Mission for UK Trade & Investment, with the support of sponsors Sun Startup Essentials, Winston & Strawn and Core Objects. Thanks to them, and the judges: Mike Butcher, Techcrunch UK Editor; Herb Kim, Codeworks CEO; and Sarbjit Bakhshi, Head of Information & Technology Group, UKTI.

It’s great news to start the year with – we’re already looking forward to heading to SXSWi and making the most of this great opportunity. See y’all in Texas!

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The Great British Sandwich

by Chris Applegate in News on 6 January 2009 at 13:44 Google+

Hello everyone – Chris here with my debut post for We Are Social. And as I’m writing it at lunchtime it seems appropriate to talk about The Great British Sandwich – a collaborative project open to anyone to submit what they think should represents the UK in sandwich form. The site only went live yesterday morning but has already constructed a sandwich with over 1,000 layers, taller than a double-decker bus.

Great British Sandwich screenshot

The site is not only lovely in its simple design but by allowing anything and everything, edible or not, into the mix. Through it you can see some definite online humour creeping through Ninjas are currently beating Pirates, but Bacon is the clear winner. It’s not perfect – the censoring is a little overzealous, as Jaz Cummins found out when adding great British icon Jarvis Cocker – but it’s still really good fun. It’d be great to have some API access or tag clouds to find out which words or colours feature the most.

The Great British Sandwich is a product of the mind of our friend Utku Can. If you like it, you can follow the latest over on @gbsandwich on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

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US social media spend to rise in 2009

by Robin Grant in News on 5 January 2009 at 14:13 Google+

Hot on the heels of of similar UK predictions from Econsultancy, comes this from Brian Morrissey in Adweek:

According to researcher eMarketer, [US] online ad spending will climb 8.9 percent next year, from $23.6 billion to $25.7 billion.

Old school methods like display ads and microsites will come under pressure. Social media looks set to remain on the top of advertisers’ agendas, as they look to apply the lessons of their early missteps in the area while adding real measurement to what have been experimental forays to date. As the Internet becomes more social, there will likewise be an acceleration of a move from purely technical implementations to using the Web’s emerging social infrastructure to connect on a more human level.

Combined with the phenomenal growth in people’s usage of social media and the impact this has on their purchase decisions, this makes us even more confident that the help and advice that we’re able to offer brands means that we’re in the right place at the right time…

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Welcoming Chris Applegate to the team

by Nathan McDonald in News on 5 January 2009 at 11:32 Google+

Chris Applegate

It’s always good to start the year off as you mean to go on, and that is exactly what we’re doing today. This morning We Are Social is bigger and better than when we downed tools for the Christmas break – we’re very happy to announce that Chris Applegate has joined the team.

We’re always on the lookout for the right people, but it’s hard find to the right mix of knowledge, experience and most importantly enthusiasm for what we do. With Chris, however, it was obvious.

Chris studied Computer Science at Cambridge and then went on to get a Master’s from Edinburgh. He joins us from Outside Line, where he was their Community Marketing Manager, working on social media campaigns for LG, Nike, Eurostar and Vodafone, as well as the famous Berocca Blogger Relief campaign.

You also may know him from some of his extracurricular activities – his personal blog qwghlm.co.uk is ranked 16th in Wikio’s list of the UK’s top Technology blogs, he captured November’s zeitgeist in the UK with LOL Griffin and this satirical YouTube mash-up, has dispensed well received new business advice and, with his jaunty fedora, is a well known member of London’s social media scene.

We’re really pleased to have Chris on board, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the team.

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