It's been three months since the storm died down over Sky News enforcing a new set of antisocial media guidelines. There's evidence that the decision has been a disaster for the news organisation, preventing its reporters editorial staff making best use of Twitter and undermining the value of social media for its reporters.

For anyone who missed it, Sky News told its reporters they could no longer tweet breaking news without first giving it to the newsroom.  Reporters were also banned from tweeting content from rival news organisations.

The response to this edict was overwhelmingly negative, drawing criticism from the full spectrum of media commentators.  Any pockets of support, such as this post from Kate Bevan, focused mostly on the need for accuracy in news reporting, but also suggested a corporate brand such as Sky should not want to help rivals by retweeting their content.

To say this totally misses the point of Twitter is an understatement.  At a stroke, Sky News shredded its reputation for innovative use of social media - a reputation that it had brilliantly won only months earlier through its phenomenal coverage of the London riots.  The organisation even set up a page on its website for you to follow the tweets of its reporters on the ground in London during the riots.

One of the defining features of Twitter has been its refusal to be defined.  Is it a news organisation?  Or an social network? Or a raw data feed?  Well it's all of these and none.  But what it is almost certainly not (not yet anyway) is a news organisation in the same way as Sky News is one.

By banning its journalists from freely engaging on Twitter in case they get something wrong, Sky News has demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what sort of medium Twitter. It's now paying the price.

How the new guidelines have impacted Sky News journalists

Sky News' decision has had a tangible and negative impact on the relevance of its reporters on Twitter. One mark of the relevance of a news organisation is the number of people that follow its feeds, including those of its reporters, on Twitter. The more people think your news output is relevant, the more they will subscribe to it by following branded Twitter feeds and those personal feeds of their favourite reporters. Indeed, the ability to get closer to breaking news by following reporters has been one of the extraordinary benefits of Twitter.

But a simple look at the growth in follower numbers on Sky News reporters' Twitter feeds shows that they were growing significantly faster before they were hamstrung by the edict from their bosses.

The timing of this is extraordinary.  All the evidence suggests Twitter is currently making the leap into the mainstream. This week, a new report from Fishburn Hedges showed the percentage of people who say they engaged with a brand on social media doubled to 36% in just eight months between August 2011 and April 2012. And Twitter just announced it has 10m "active users" in the UK, who sign in at least once per month.

This is a time that all kinds of brands and organisations need to be embracing Twitter, not shunning it.

Losing momentum

I looked at five staffers with over 1,000 followers on Twitter. I used Twittercounter to look back at how their Twitter follower numbers changed over the past six months.  The findings tell a compelling story.

The five journalists I looked at were Neil Neal Mann (@fieldproducer), Emily Purser (@EmilyPurserSky), Peter Spencer (@PeterSpencer), Hazel Baker (@HazelBakerSky) and Ruth Barnett (@RuthBarnett). Two of these five, Neil Mann and Ruth Barnett, announced one month after the new guidelines came into force that they were leaving Sky News.

The first chart shows the daily average rate of new followers on Twitter for each staffer.  The blue bar in each case is the average daily new followers count based on the three months before the new guidelines came into force.  The green bar shows the growth rate after the new guidelines, measured as a daily average over three months.  In the cases of Mann and Barnett, I measured this second average over just one month because their growth rates were significantly affected by their decisions to leave Sky News. I looked at that separately.

What's crucial here is that in nearly all cases, the growth rate slowed considerably after the new guidelines took force.  It's not clear why Barnett didn't seem to be as affected as the others, who all showed a real drop-off in the number of new follows they received per day.

Figure 1: daily growth in Twitter followers for each reporter, before and after the new guidelines BLUE = before, GREEN = after

As I mentioned, Mann and Barnett's decision to leave Sky News had a big impact on the rate of new followers they attracted on Twitter.  The second chart makes the change in follower rates for all five staffers much clearer.  It shows how in four cases, the change in follower rates was significant and negative after the new guidelines came into place.  But it also shows how Mann and Barnett's Twitter growth rates took a further tumble after announcing their decision to leave Sky News.

Figure 2: difference in Twitter follower growth rates before and after the new guidelines (BLUE), and after announcing departure from Sky News (GREEN)

What causes this kind of slowdown?

There are many drivers of Twitter follower growth, but one of the most easily explained is simply being active on the network. By posting interesting ideas or links that merit being shared on via retweets, you expand your reach, grabbing the attention of new Twitter users and earning their follows.  By responding to other's tweets, you are noticed, encouraging them to follow back.  And by using Twitter to ask questions and provoke debates, you prompt people to search you out as the source of the discussion.

Conversely, by going quiet, using Twitter less actively, the opposite happens - you become less relevant, fewer new people become aware of your presence on the network, and your star burns less brightly than before.

When I looked back at the tweet volume data produced by Twittercounter, it's clear that this is exactly what happened to Neil Neal Mann after Sky News issued its edict to reporters.  Prior to 8 February when the Sky News guidelines became public, @fieldproducer tweeted an average of 58 times per day over three months.  In the month between Sky News' decision and the announcement that Mann was to leave Sky News, his frequency dropped by almost a quarter to 44.5 tweets per day.  Since his departure from Sky News, Mann has been tweeting more frequently again, at 50.9 times per day.

Figure 3: volume of tweets for @fieldproducer over six months showing the drop-off after Sky News announced its reporters had to check their use of Twitter.

There's little doubt about it: by forcing its journalists to stop using Twitter to participate in the conversations taking place around breaking news events, Sky News has damaged its ability to be relevant in the new media landscape.  And worse, if Mann and Barnett's decisions to quit the organisation were in any way related to this heavy-handed approach, they've paid a very high price indeed.

Epilogue

Yesterday, the high profile Conservative MP Louise Mensch tweeted to her 57,000 followers that they should follow @fieldproducer and his reports from Burkina Faso.

This is the kind of endorsement, the viral spread of your reporting via Twitter, that reporters would not have been able to benefit from in the past.  Neil Neal Mann is now a freelance journalist pursuing his stories on his own but using both Twitter and Facebook to reach new audiences and get his stories out. What a pity Sky News didn't think this would be a valuable asset.

I know on the face of it, it must look to Sky News top brass as though the reporters are using Twitter to build their personal brands.  No doubt many of the reporters are delighted at the power of Twitter to do this. But surely that's a secondary issue, the primary one being to tap the information flow around breaking news stories. Journalists need to have their tentacles out in the fast flow of social channels like Twitter, the better to detect and entrap the information they need to feed their news organisations. And news organisations need to understand that.

For the management at Sky News, they need to reassess their position.  They have nothing to lose.  This is a zero-sum game.  No single news organisation will suffer if all reporters are equally well-regarded on Twitter, will they? Except now Sky has fewer reporters who are adept at playing this new game.

I just received an email from Glancee, one if the much-hyped location-based discovery services at SXSW this year, telling me Facebook has bought it and will shut it down.

This reminded me that Facebook six months ago acquired Gowalla, before shutting that service down as well.

Facebook is on a spree. The consolidation that I mentioned recently when Zipcar acquired Wheelz is happening. The fragmented social and mobile scene is being sucked up by the sheer gravity of giants like Facebook.

So do these location-based acquisitions mean Facebook will finally now get round to putting some proper investment into Places, the location-based service that has languished since its launch?

I'm not so sure. There are two dimensions to Facebook and location. First, as we suggested in our Digital Trends white paper six months ago, at any moment, Facebook could turn its guns onto the location field and win.

The offers and discovery elements of Foursquare, the current location champion, are easily replicable and Facebook's scale and social breadth could squash it. It could squash Groupon and Living Social too, if it felt like it.

But Facebook launched Places and Deals both in 2010 and pretty much sat on them. It then killed off Deals late in 2011 (although, oddly, you can still find Deals pages alive and well on the site). Something is holding Facebook back. It's not ambition. It could be the fact that other development projects are keeping it occupied, but Facebook is famous for its small dev teams running parallel projects, vying for attention and success.

So it seems that the only thing holding back advancement of real-world location-based services on the world's most popular social network is the unpopular truth about them: that most people feel spooked by them.

Here's an old pal of mine who's been personally and professionally involved in social media for years:

@psigrist I'm v open on my social networks but must admit I sometimes get funny about location

— Kate Stevens (@katesteven) May 5, 2012

That said, if Facebook keeps acquiring the firepower, it will likely go big in location. So watch this space. At some point, the time will feel right to the Menlo Park crew.

Until then, stalkery services like Glancee's are likely to stay off the menu for mainstream social and mobile users.

I've never been a public figure, so I don't know whether it's normal to receive verbal abuse in the course of your work.  That said, I would imagine that being a high-profile politician comes with a fair share of criticism, some of it aggressive and some of it vulgar.

Twitter doesn't change that.  But one big difference between people slinging verbal abuse online rather than as part of a crowd at a rally or event is just how public and lasting those comments are.

This morning, Louise Mensch took a stand against Twitter abuse on Radio 4.  Louise makes some really fair points, particularly about who's to blame for the volume of nasty tweets she received.  She said:

It’s not Twitter’s fault, Twitter provides a social media platform. It’s the fault of the users. They have to be responsible for their own words and what they say.

Well-said.

She also took the unusual step of favouriting the worst tweets she received, thereby publicising them for anyone to see.  This is smart, and a quick look affirms that they are neither intelligent nor palatable.

Over the stand she took on Radio 4, Louise has received much praise, from people including other MPs and journalists.

Hi @LouiseMensch just heard you on R4. Good for you on taking on abusive tweets. Shouldn't have to take that rubbish.

— Rachel Reeves (@RachelReevesMP) May 3, 2012

Happy @louisemensch has taken a stand.Sadly nothing will change though until @twitter provide better controls & filters telegraph.co.uk/technology/twi…

— Emma Barnett (@Emmabarnett) May 3, 2012

Some have called for authorities to do something about this verbal abuse on Twitter.  But surely it's better to do what Louise has done - to bring it out into the open.  I hope Louise has reported these tweeters for spam, though I imagine that could become a full-time job.

Perhaps we could all help by reporting these tweets for spam.  Could that be a crowdsourced solution to this problem?  It would be preferable (and more plausible) to getting authorities involved, though you could easily see how that power might be abused.

I'd be very interested in anyone else's thoughts on this issue.

Changes that occur over many decades are sometimes hard to measure, leaving little evidence of their progress.  But sometimes events happen suddenly, that reveal just how far things have come.

This weekend, one such event took place that gave a glimpse of how far the internet, and social media in particular, has undermined the traditional hierarchy of the media. This weekend, the mighty Sunday Times was outsmarted by a single blogger.

What was particularly revealing was how poorly newspaper culture translates onto social media.

In the blue corner

Here's how events unfolded, as far as it's possible to tell.  The Sunday Times was planning a scoop that implicated former Conservative party press officer Edward Staite in its ongoing "cash for access" investigation, that just a week ago claimed the job of Conservative Party Treasurer Peter Cruddas.

The scoop was based on statements Mr. Staite made to undercover reporters from the Sunday Times posing as wealth managers. In essence, Mr. Staite appears to have explained how companies can influence UK political party policy through donations of one sort or another.

I'm going to leave to the experts discussion over the appropriateness of making payments like this. Suffice to say that it doesn't seem that Mr. Staite was suggesting anything more than what is currently considered "best practice" within political lobbying (if anyone can clearly point out that this is not the case, I'll be happy to include that here).

Ruining the surprise

The first Mr. Staite knew about the fact he'd been stung by a newspaper was when he was called and then emailed on Friday, inviting him to comment on the points the paper planned to publish. What Mr. Staite did next was unorthodox, to say the least.

He published the email he'd received in full on his blog and gave his opinion on why the newspaper was wrong to make the allegations against him, and further, why he felt its tactics were underhand.

It's a powerful blog post and worth reading.  On Friday evening, it began circulating widely on Twitter and was retweeted by a number of influential people including Iain Dale, former political blogger and now presenter on LBC.

So the Sunday Times tries (and fails) to entrap former Osborne SPAD Ed Staite - truly desperate stuff bit.ly/H6Z1AP

— Iain Dale (@IainDale) March 30, 2012

Where the Sunday Times went wrong

This had an interesting effect on the Sunday Times Insight team, which shortly afterwards used Twitter to deny the claim that it had entrapped Mr. Staite.  The "tapes prove it," tweeted @insightST.

Spin doctor @edstaite's allegations that Insight tried to entrap him with offer of £250k to meet Osborne absolutely untrue. Tapes prove it.

— Sunday Times Insight (@insightST) March 30, 2012

As if that wasn't enough, fourteen minutes later, the Sunday Times team - presumably to be on the front foot, which as any journalist will tell you, is the best foot to be on - tweeted a challenge to Mr. Staite: why did you send a proposal to charge £40k for your services, demanded the newspaper.

If spin doctor @edstaite thought meeting with Insight "bizarre," why did he follow up by sending proposal to charge £40k for his services?

— Sunday Times Insight (@insightST) March 30, 2012

This is typical of a British newspaper. The barracking tone of voice and demands for answers are part of life for anyone working in media relations. But on this occasion, the unorthodox approach previously employed by Mr. Staite once again came into play.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Staite cranked up the pressure on the Sunday Times to show its hand by showing literally all of his.  He published, in full, the proposal he'd sent to the Sunday Times reporters (believing them to represent a wealth management company) including the £40K bill for the work.

This was Mr. Staite's masterstroke. But why did it work?

Three lessons we can learn from Ed Staite

The first lesson we can learn is that transparency is a powerful tool.

The first thing Ed Staite did was adopt a position of complete transparency.  This is something that many organisations are understandably nervous about. Who knows how many skeletons will come out of the closet when you open the doors?

But as any company that's been through a major crisis will tell you, the worst is only truly in the past once the company starts communicating transparently. Whether you take BP in the Gulf of Mexico, UK members of parliament claiming for second homes or Nestle with baby milk formula, the road to recovery only begins when you stop obfuscating.

Ed Staite adopted a totally transparent position at the outset. The Sunday Times even challenged him on this, assuming he wouldn't have the guts to see it through. He did. It worked.

But this leads us quickly to the second lesson to be learned here: reputation matters in the long run and radical transparency is a good route to a good reputation. The advantage Mr. Staite had over the Sunday Times was that he clearly operates in a very transparent way and this has resulted in his good reputation.

There were plenty of people jumping onto Twitter to share Mr. Staite's blog post and point out that he is one of the good guys.

Good to see support for @edstaite, one of Westminster's good guys, after he blew lid on attempted entrapment by S.Times edstaite.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/how-su…

— Nigel Fletcher (@nigelfletcher) March 30, 2012

There's no substitute for goodwill and this can't be built up at short notice. The day you'll wish you'd spent more time investing in transparent communications practices in your business, or even just being honest with clients, is the day your reputation is in trouble.  Operating transparently becomes a huge advantage when the chips are down.

Ideas now spread on a level playing field

But the biggest lesson of all we can learn from this is how the playing field for spreading ideas, for getting your message across, has been flattened by social media.

By using a blog, Ed Staite was able to rebut the claims of the Sunday Times.  It gave him a voice and a channel to reach the world through his network. The Sunday Times, on the other hand, made a real hash of its use of social media.  For example, rather than adopting a conciliatory tone, or even moving on and leaving this story in the past, the team behind the Insights Twitter feed didn't stop harassing Mr. Staite until well into Saturday evening, almost certainly after they would have taken the decision not to run the story as originally planned. They were retweeting the few - and I mean very few indeed - people who suggested they thought Ed Staite might not be so innocent.

One tweet, by journalist Ian Fraser, looks at best speculative, at worst just churlish, but the Insights team gladly retweeted it:

Methinks ex Tory media adviser @edstaite doth protest too much re: serious allegations from @insightST bit.ly/H0dL6V

— Ian Fraser (@Ian_Fraser) March 31, 2012

By retweeting this and other similar tweets, when the story was already as good as dead, the Insight team merely projected an attitude of arrogance. It didn't leave any room for the team behind the sting to do something newspapers find distressingly difficult: accept they were wrong and apologise.

The media needs to accept reality

The playing field has been levelled. There's no advantage sticking to your guns when you're on the wrong side of the facts, as the facts will come out. Understanding this new reality is possibly the greatest challenge facing the media.

When, this morning, I saw the story that the Sunday Times did run about Ed Staite, I was disappointed that it had bothered.  It felt like a poor attempt to save face.  As is now common practice, I added a comment to that story. It contained a link to Ed Staite's blog post, so that any readers could make their own minds up about this story.

Commented on the @insightST story that *briefly* mentions @edstaite - wonder if they'll approve it thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/insig…

— Peter Sigrist (@psigrist) April 1, 2012

Perhaps not surprisingly, my comment has still not been approved.

The Insights team at the Sunday Times has a long and venerable history of uncovering stories that are important to the public. To do so, it may test the boundaries of journalism, take decisions that may later be called into question or deploy techniques that some might, sitting comfortably at home, find distasteful.

This is why it's vital that the Insights team can do its job with the right motivation and be allowed occasionally to get it wrong.

But if that's true, it's just as vital, in this age of transparency, that the Insights team can see the value in accepting mistakes, apologising for them, and moving on.

So Brian Solis publishes yet another attempt to justify online influence rankings, causing much debate among the social media chattering classes.

Two quotes I liked in particular.

Chris Reed of Restless Communications said:

...trying to find a single algorithm to measure influence is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Fun trying. Maybe a degree of success, but you’re going to basically end up in a bit of a mess. Link

And Heather Whaling of Geben Communication said:

This isn't a new phenomenon. A decade ago, I was working with a public school district on a levy campaign. We identified 'gatekeepers' in the community—religious leaders, PTA and other influential parents, neighborhood block and homeowner association captains. There was no score then. You just had to roll up your sleeves, do some research, talk to people, and ask for their input, etc. Link

I quite agree with both points.  Do the work.

Most of the time, you tell companies and brands that it's better to look like you know what you're talking about; like you understand what's going on; like, in short, you get it.

But when commenting on litigation raised against your company or brand, it pays to look confused, bemused and generally puzzled.

Here's Facebook yesterday, reported in the Financial Times, responding to Yahoo's decision to sue for patent infringement:

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation,” Facebook said in a statement. “We learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

Beautifully put.

The point is to suggest innocence. This is the first stage in the negotiation that's about to ensue through the courts. Expressing anything more than sheer, unadulterated, vestal innocence could cost millions.

And what says innocence better than total mystification?

Do you remember the game whac-a-mole? The one where the pesky creatures pop up unexpectedly and its your job to zap them? Welcome to community management after Facebook Timeline for brands rolls out next month.

I was impressed when I saw Red Bull's Timeline page today. It looks great. But I was surprised to see a good friend of mine had posted one of the top posts - I didn't realise she was such a big Red Bull fan.

Then I noticed - all she actually did was mention "red bull" in a Facebook status update about a recent trip abroad. And that was picked up and posted to the Red Bull timeline for me (and presumably any other friends of hers).

For Red Bull, this is great.  But what if her comment had been critical? Or highly offensive?

Time to start whacking....

If you've ever been responsible for managing a Facebook page, you'll understand immediately the implications of this. How many posts will pop up unexpectedly on the Timeline, needing to be zapped?

Even worse, what if your brand is something that is also a generic word like Virgin?  That could be interesting...

What if your brand has become a verb in common usage, such as Hoover.  Or is a common word like Windows? What if it's a common name like Robinson? What if your brand is a word that's common in another language, like Fiesta?

Conversely, what if your brand is a name that is unlikely to ever be used in full, such as Pret a Manger? (Actually, they now refer to themselves as Pret, presumably because everyone called them simply "Pret") Could your page feel quiet by comparison with your competitors?  Will this lead to a simplification of brand names?

There are lots of unknowns, for sure.  But for most Facebook community managers, they'd better start honing those Whac-a-mole skills.

What do you think? Have I missed something here? If you've managed a page using the new Timeline for brands, let me know in the comments...

P.S. check out the Wikipedia entry on Whac-a-mole gameplay - an awesome level of detail.

Having just moved house, I was digging around in old boxes I haven't looked in for a few years.  A lot of junk. A lot of memories.

At the bottom of one box, I turned up something that completely changed the direction of my work when I discovered it in 2000. Mixed up with the philosophy books I read at university ("Meaning", "Naming and Necessity", "Groundwork Of The Metaphysic Of Morals" and other such heartwarming titles), lay a book that ignited a passion in my impressionable mind like little before or since: The Cluetrain Manifesto.

What a book. What a set of ideas. This little volume challenged me to think far bigger about the web than I had ever dreamed possible, even though I'd been happily surfing since 1992. It challenged entrenched powers in the media. It challenged the concepts of brands, the public and communication. It challenged the hegemony of the "crypto-religious" power of advertising (yeah, I loved that!). It challenged the idea that we are here, in this life, to consume.

Even though I'd barely started out in my career in public relations, it challenged me to think of all that communication, fostered by the net, could be. It could connect people. It could bypass the organisation. And it could force companies to restructure, not merely their communications department, but the whole shebang.

I shared the moment and some people heard it

Having leafed through the book, I lazily instagrammed the cover (it was the first UK edition) and the comments and likes started trickling in. Why does Cluetrain still resonate? As Stephen Waddington pointed out in a comment on Instagram, Cluetrain is "still as relevant today as it was a decade ago".

Here, in case you've never read it, is an example of what Wadds means. Bear in mind, this was written many years before smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, hashtags, web 2.0, social media and all the rest....

Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. They're passive, yeah, but more than that: they're isolated from each other.

Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking all these poor bastards up. They're still watching the same old crap. Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-colour aside - and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that? People are rolling on the floor laughing. And it begins to happen so often, it gets abbreviated: ROTFL. The audience is suddenly connected to itself.

From Internet Apocalypso, by Christopher Locke.  Doesn't he predict precisely how people behave on Twitter when they watch television today?

Here comes the mainstream

As for many of the other predictions made by the book's four essayists - things like companies being forced to restructure, to reconnect buyers and sellers in conversation, to unleash on the public the knowledge, the passion, the humour and the care of the people within the corporation - these changes are still, only now, beginning to happen.

But happening, they are.

If there's one big change I expect to see in the next few years, it will be this: corporations trying to present the passion of their people to their customers, instead of tightly controlled, anodyne marketing bumf.  And in the years ahead, I look forward to helping companies loosen their grip on "the message" and begin to speak in human voices (again).

I'm just as excited today as I was almost a dozen years ago about the promise contained within the 95 Cluetrain theses.  If you haven't ever picked up the book, these days it's all available for free online.

Recommended reading for 2012.

The answer, published in the current issue of Science [sub required], is very good.  Very good indeed.

In December 2009, DARPA, the US defense research agency launched a competition to find ten red weather balloons at fixed locations across the US.

The rules were simple.  Use any social networks of your choice to find the balloons as quickly as possible.

Four thousand teams entered, using anything from university alumnus networks to Facebook and Twitter to spread the word and find those locations.

The winning team, a group from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), added an additional element to the mix - game dynamics.

This team offered cash incentives ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars to the people who first offered the correct location of a balloon.

It took the team less than nine hours to find all ten balloons.  They won $40,000, which they used to pay their helpers, and then give the rest to charity.

Social networks changing the balance of communication from top-down to bottom-up. Game dynamics tipping people into participation.  It's all there in this fascinating story.  Check out this blog post from MIT for the full details.

Lovely.

Here's a video showing how the networked communications spread in the search for the red balloons.

Red balloon picture by James, Studio Sushi, on Flickr