On privacy, the internet and being a dumbass

Nooo!! Stop taking my photo! (pic: Jolante van Hemert)

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a talk about hackgate, where the various nefarious means used by the media to stalk, intimidate and ruin members of the general public and celebrities were discussed.

Most of what we have heard come out of the Leveson Inquiry has been pretty awful and people’s lives – and livelihoods – have been genuinely ruined by what some journalists did.

But there was one thing that I just couldn’t find myself condemning – nicking people’s photos off Facebook.

I’m not talking about hacking into someone’s account and downloading private content, I’m talking about photos of the person in question that are freely and openly available.

Maybe I’m being harsh, but for a long time my feelings have pretty much been ‘if you wouldn’t be happy with the whole world seeing it, hide it’. Yes, Facebook (and Google, and others) keep messing around with their privacy settings, so it’s always good to once in a while check that yours are where you think they are. If you leave yourself open and people find out things or see pictures you wouldn’t have wanted them to, that’s your own dumb fault.

Richard Peppiatt, former Star journalist, disagreed with me quite strongly when I put this to him. He had earlier compared taking someone’s photos from the internet, when they become vaguely newsworthy, to sneaking in their house and taking their family photo album. I see it more like someone making thousands of copies of said album and hanging them from lampposts.

He also said that if people’s profiles (particularly their photos) were locked down, then he or one of his colleagues would send them a friend request and more often than not the person would accept. Once again, this is a real dumbass thing to do and if this is how a journalist or anyone else gets hold of your photos, I have little to no sympathy.

If you publish something online, you should make serious efforts to lock it down using all the privacy tools you have at your disposal. If it’s that private or embarrassing, don’t put it on the internet in the first place. It really is that simple.

If someone sends you a friend request and you have barely or indeed never spoken to them, don’t accept. Or, if for some reason you find yourself compelled to hit ‘yes’, put them on a limited profile where they can see virtually nothing – including your photos!

In fact why don’t you go check your Facebook privacy settings now, while you’re thinking about it? It’s ok, I’ll wait…

 

So does all this mean I have zero morals and all the empathy of a sociopath? Not at all. However, common sense surely dictates that if you don’t want something shared with everyone then, er, don’t share it with everyone.

More on the Facebook groups ‘upgrade’

you may remember I blogged last week about my general annoyance with Facebook’s continuous ‘improvements’, with particular reference to all old-style groups (i.e. those that have been around more than a year) being ‘upgraded’, with the risk of losing all members in the process. If not, you can read it here.

I have just been pointed in the direction of this nifty little blog, facebookprivacyandsecurity, which is an unofficial guide to, yes, privacy and security on Facebook. In this particular post, the author talks about his/her own suspicions as to why Facebook has taken this course of action. He/she also talks about all kinds of control issues that the new style groups bring in (members can create events without admin consent, there are issues re-adding people who have left or been banned). The whole thing is worth a look as I don’t want to simply repeat their blog here and also they have written many letters etc that are also worth a read.

Thanks again, facebookprivacyandsecurity, and you get a proud place on my blogroll down at the bottom right 🙂

Why I can’t wait for the next big thing

Facebook has become Frustrationbook. That’s right, Frustrationbook – this has gone way beyond the bounds of a mere ‘Failbook’. As I have mentioned before, the more ‘improvements’ Facebook makes, the less useful functionality it has for average folks like you and me.

This is a cumulative frustration that started with disappearing posts. Depending on how you use Facebook, you may or may not have had this problem, but if you use any of the myriad groups on the site, you will have. Post a comment on the wall, reply to someone else’s link or post and suddenly ‘poof’ – it’s gone. Then, if you’re lucky, it’ll reappear 20 minutes to a couple of hours later. This has been happening on and off for months, with an increasing frequency recently. Now Facebook are changing groups altogether – migrating the old-style groups over to new-style ones and potentially removing all members in the process (although as I understand it from friends, this doesn’t always happen). There are many disadvantages to this – new-style groups have no discussions and posts move around the page according to which one has been most recently commented on. Also, of late, these new groups have had a nasty habit of crashing people’s browsers.

This whole thing bothers me on two levels. Firstly, as an administrator of a group with nearly 14,000 members, it’s going to be difficult trying to make sure they’re all on our page too before the change over (another remarkably unbright idea on the part of Facebook is that, with a group as large as ours, you can’t message all members). For added excitement, we don’t know when this changeover will happen. I’m not being a Luddite either – I have been using a couple of new-style groups for a while now, so have extensive first hand experience of why they are crap.

My second gripe is why this is being done. Gradually, Facebook is becoming more and more geared towards corporate entities looking to use it as a promotional tool. I have no big problem in theory with companies using social media to build a relationship with their customers – that’s fine. What bothers me is that Facebook is being moved away from the idea of keeping average people in contact with each other and bringing together people with similar interests – like stopping the X-Factor getting Christmas No.1, for example. This move towards a more corporate angle for Facebook was explicit with Pages when they were first introduced, and I remain convinced that the ‘Questions’ function is the same.

Hence the title of this blog – I am very much looking forward to ‘the next big thing’. And there will be one: Remember when AOL was the internet? Remember when MySpace was the social networking site? Remember GeoCities? Even Giants of the internet fall. Sure, eventually the next big thing will start to annoy me, probably for the same reasons as Facebook is at the moment, but right now, I’m desperate for something – anything – to come along and save me.

A change of direction – and a gripe

When I started this blog all those many months ago, I intended to focus purely on the use abuse and lulz surrounding social media. However, I feel I gave myself too narrow a focus, which was thrown into stark relief after I published the Libya Blogs. The world of social media is not always buzzing, which leads to infrequent posting. So, pop pickers, I have decided to broaden my scope a bit, blog about general stuff, while still exposing social media strategy’s soft underbelly and generally laughing at the internet.

That said, having turned over a new page and started afresh, I want to begin this new era with a gripe about Facebook, also known as Farcebook, Failbook and, er, ruder variations thereon. I am thoroughly fed up with Facebook’s so called ‘improvements’, the last one of which – questions – was distinctly underwhelming, generally annoying and, frankly, thoroughly useless. I can see, from a commercial standpoint, that companies using Facebook as part of their social media strategy may want to ask things like “Where do you prefer to eat Fruity Blergs*?” or “Where should Laddy Gogo play next?” But as a general user and not a mad fan of anything (or at least someone who wants to be paid for her opinion as a consumer), most of the questionnaires that come up in my news feed are along the lines of “How tall are you?” or “Which is better x or y?”

Whatever, I can ignore them, it’s no big deal, even if it does clog up my news feed. However, while these ‘improvements’ are being made, they tend to screw up the whole website – posts that disappear into the ether, often temporarily, sometimes permanently. Phantom notifications/notifications that just won’t go away. And finally the (very few) applications I actually do have on Facebook stop working altogether for a couple of days.

I’m not saying that all the improvements are inane – hitting return to post, while it catches me out sometimes, is like using a messenger service and stops me having to expend extra energy moving my hand from keyboard to mouse and back again. I can use this conserved energy to work the telly remote later, so it’s all good. Sarcasm aside, there is something that I really would like them to sort out on Facebook and it’s not adding new functionality. An increasing number of viruses are circulating on the website, posing as actions by friends. I’m not talking about the obvious “L00k at this drunk tramp video – very funny it is ha ha” type thing on your wall; what I’m talking about is “Bob Jones tagged you in a photo” notifications, only for you to click and oh no!

Thank you, Admiral Ackbar, it is indeed a trap. You’ve unwittingly clicked on a link, now you have a virus on your computer and no new photos to gawp at. Sad times.

So Facebook, what I really want is not to see ‘memorable updates’ from my friends that really aren’t that memorable, or to be asked stupid questions by people I don’t know or faceless corporate entities. I want you to fix the existing problems – that people are still being fleeced by app developers on your website, that evil programmers from the dark side are getting better and better at using your website to deploy viruses and Trojans. I also want you to get wise to false report bombing, which happens on a ridiculously regular basis too. Then you can set about interfacing directly with our minds or whatever it is you’re up to next.

(*HT to The Oatmeal)

Revolution!

Last night I heard from a friend who is currently living in Libya. It was very much a relief, but it also shows how useful social media has been during the turmoil in North Africa, despite attempted crack-downs.

I have to be honest, I tried to blog about this last week, but couldn’t quite get a handle on where to start. One thing becomes obvious though – if social media was not so good at organising people and spreading messages then there would be no need for the attempts to supress it.

There have, of course, been popular uprisings in the past (cf. any of the revolutions of the 17^th, 18^th and early 20^th centuries). But the momentum and rapidity facilitated by the internet, which brings with it citizen journalism, and 24 hour news, is much more rapid. Popular uprisings of thousands of people have happened in multiple cities almost simultaneously without the ‘aid’ of a hard core of revolutionaries. Governments have toppled in a matter of weeks, not months or years. I am hopeful that, despite Gadaffi’s best attempts, there will be no civil war.

There is also the side that I alluded to in my first paragraph – in a time before social media we would have been relying on sending out a chain of emails, texts or phone calls to try and relay this message. Now I can broadcast it to hundreds of people at once. The power of social networking, eh?

It’s a trap! – A quick Anon update

Ah, Anonymous. There is no doubt they are the kings of trolling. But that hasn’t stopped a certain infamous church in the US from trying to troll them.  Last night this ‘open letter’ appeared on CBS news, apparently emanating from Anon and threatening Westboro Baptist Church with a DDoS attack. Within a very short period of time a response was put out as a PDF from WBC effectively saying ‘bring it on’. In fact, the response was so quick as to be suspicious and it quickly became clear that the original ‘letter’ was not all it seemed.

It has subsequently been more-or-less confirmed that actually WBC had put out the original letter in order to lure anons into a trap, as explained in this statement from anon themselves. The fail is strong in you, Phelps family.

Speaking of Anon…

I am an early adopter! Woo!  ‘Moot’, aka Christopher Poole, the 22-year-old founder of the notorious 4chan website, has launched canv.as – described in some sections of the media as ‘4chan goes legit’. Possibly. It’s in its beta testing phase at the moment and is ‘the kernel of what [they] intend canv.as to be’ but, from having had a play, it’s an image board at the moment. I’m excited about it (mainly because I’m never an early adopter), but at the same time, while it provides me with giggles, I can’t really contribute as I have the artistic skills of a potato. Ah well – you can’t win them all!

New Skool Word of Mouth

Lots has happened since my last blog – revolution is in the air, aided by social networking, Twitter is probably about to be bought out and I am an early adopter for once in my life. Much excitement and much to talk about, but I want to start with Facebook turning into something from a dystopian nightmare:

Word-of-mouth marketing has been around for decades and only became regulated in the past three years. The theory behind the concept is that people are more influenced by the opinions of their friends and peers than they are some shiny person on the TV. So people could be paid to endorse a product to their friends and, until 2008, they never had to say that they were actually working for the company that made the product. Sadly for the advertisers, but luckily for the rest of us, it was decided that this was perhaps a little unethical and anyone promoting a product had to declare their relationship with the seller.

Fast forward to now. Have you noticed any updates from your friends appearing down the right-hand side of your Facebook recently? Bit of an odd place, no? These ‘sponsored stories’ are the latest way of manipulating word of mouth and there is nothing you can do to turn it off.  Essentially, Facebook can use keywords and locations to advertise something linked to these factors. Ars technica have a good example and run-down of how it works.

In my opinion this is far more devious than anything that has gone before – if I have wanted to pass on a viral that is part of an advertising campaign before (see ‘old spice guy’ and co) I have done so voluntarily. I don’t really want to be used as a conduit for advertisers, especially not without my permission. So what to do? Firstly, I have geotagging turned off on my Facebook – not only is it pretty useless for me (I am always at home), I don’t like to encourage stalkers. I assume that this will have some influence on how much advertisers can use me to reach my friends. Other than that, I’ve had a couple of ideas:

Idea 1: Change my profile picture to a bare bum.

That way every time an advertiser uses me to advertise they will be mooning potential customers. This also works for rude hand gestures and various swear words.

Idea 2: Turn on geotagging, but be really unflattering about the business or product in question.

I go to Starbucks roughly twice a week where I eat a nice panini. However, my friends on Facebook have no idea that I eat a nice panini, because my status always complains about how vile the tea is and how they have the air conditioning on ALL THE TIME. Even when it was below zero outside. So every potential advert from me would actually be a comment on just how crap the place is.

Idea 1 is just plain silly and largely impractical (you probably don’t want to moon your parents or colleagues after all). However, idea 2 not only brings a wry smile to my face, it also has practical implications. I’m just one person potentially being mischievous – even if I could rope my friends in ‘for the lulz’, I wouldn’t get more than ten co-conspirators. But what about a situation like the one that launched this blog? A concerted counter-campaign could go out out every time someone mentioned a product. In the case of Nestlé is would even link back to a fan page full of protesters and trolls – beautiful.

(note: Ad Block Plus doesn’t work against these ‘sponsored stories’ – I have large white spaces where adverts should normally be, but these ones find their way through).

And the winner is…

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, who has been named Time magazine’s person of the year.

I wouldn’t be much of a social media blogger if I didn’t write about this event; lets face it, Zuckerberg is behind the most universal social media platform currently in use and probably the biggest ever so far. But it is hard to escape the controversy surrounding this award.

Why the controversy? Because I, like many other people, expected this man to be on the front cover. In fact if I didn’t have Tweetdeck turned on right now I would be none the wiser. The reason for assuming the person of the year would be Assange is all down to a Time reader poll that, when voting closed last night, had him at number one – 148,385 points ahead of second place Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

I’m not going to focus on the justice/injustice of the choice. Instead, lets take a look at why there is outcry and what can be learnt from it.

Although the magazine had always said “TIME’s editors… choose the actual Person of the Year reserve the right to disagree”, that’s not much consolation when the person who finally won  came tenth in the popular poll.

This is by no means the first time something like this has happened but it could all be avoided, even if you want to keep the interactive element. It may seem obvious, but you have to be equally comfortable with whoever wins the poll, otherwise there’s no point in running one – what starts off as engaging the public will quickly turn to alienation. Alternatively, if you want to be sure of the outcome don’t open it up to a poll. Once again, this may seem obvious, but in the rush to get interactive it often gets overlooked and causes frustration and disenchantment amongst your target audience.

As for the nomination itself, putting the poll controversy aside, Mark Zuckerber easily meets the criteria of a person who “for better or for worse, …has done the most to influence the events of the year.” For many people, Facebook is social media, it allows people to come together in ways they couldn’t have before and, for better or worse, it is probably the most influential social media outlet on the web. Whether it is more influential this year than at the time of Obama’s election or even last year is debatable, but with Christmas coming up and Julian Assange’s bail hearing tomorrow, I imagine it’s a debate that will soon be blown over by other things.

WikiLeaks: The crowd goes wild

While I have been sporadically tweeting about this latest round of WikiLeaks revelations, I had been unsure whether or not to write a blog entry about it for two reasons: Firstly, what is actually being leaked and the international reaction is being widely reported elsewhere and in a better way than I could hope to do with my own humble resources. Secondly, until two days ago, the whole saga fell largely outside of the remit of this blog, in that other than the Guardian live blog, social media had been a bit ‘meh’ on the whole situation. But then everything kicked off.

Before I go on to talk about what’s happening online and the full scale cyberwar that’s going on out of most people’s sights, I want to talk a bit about WikiLeaks in general and the fall out of this set of revelations in particular.

WikiLeaks has been around for longer than many people realise. It came into most people’s consciousness globally earlier this year, with the release of a video known as collateral murder, which showed a US helicopter firing on an unarmed Reuters crew. This explosive video was followed up by the Afghan War Logs, a set of classified documents that showed, amongst other things, the death toll amongst the civilian population in Afghanistan and put the official story vs the reality on the ground into stark relief. Next was the Iraq War Logs, which were released in July this year and had very similar content, including a video of a US helicopter firing on unarmed men and children. Most recently, the site has begun leaking US diplomatic cables, to the great embarrassment of all involved.

But before this, WikiLeaks exposed corruption in the Kenyan elections, which led to nothing short of a revolt and the installation of a democratically elected president, released the infamous UEA ‘climategate’ emails, and released the BNP membership list. In fact, the website has been active for over four years – something that has been almost completely overlooked. So they are about more than just what many see as exposing America.

You will notice that I am referring to WikiLeaks as ‘they’. This is no mistake on my part because WikiLeaks is not Julian Assange, or rather not just Julian Assange. What many, many people do not realise is that organisations like WikiLeaks are a hydra – you cut off one head and two grow back in its place or, in this case, hundreds. Since the original website WikiLeaks.org was taken offline, hundreds of mirrors and redirects have been set up. This is quite technical and I’m not going to get into it here, but basically whereas previously you had to access WikiLeaks files through one address, now there are hundreds to choose from, making it nearly impossible to take down, either through DDoS attacks or other means.

So now that we have that preamble out of the way, what’s going on in terms of social media? Whereas with previous leaks and the arrest of private Bradley Manning have brought about general chatter and outrage, this time the internet has practically caught fire. The reason for this agitation, and the reason I am quite literally unable to stay off forums, Twitter and Facebook, is the way that the political class, particularly the American political class has reacted. Calls for Julian Assange’s prosecution (read persecution) and even death have outraged a lot of bloggers, journalists, Tweeters, Facebook users and more or less anyone with an online presence. Importantly, the actions of the Swedish government, politicians such Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin, and corporate entities Amazon and PayPal have got right up the nose of the notorious Anonymous, but more on them later.

This is righteous anger. By looking to silence WikiLeaks and newspapers that have reported on the leaked cables such as the New York Times, politicians, particularly in America are seeking to stifle freedom of the press, freedom of expression and freedom of information. I don’t think that I can actually emphasise enough how important this is for the future of us all; we must have an independent press that is free to report all news, regardless of how embarrassing or annoying it is for governments and corporations.

So what’s been going on in terms of social media? I’ve been getting a lot of my information, at least initially, from forums and they’ve given me some nice pointers on who to follow on Twitter – particularly Operation Payback (@Anon_Operation) (once again, more on this later). Obviously there are trends to follow, with the major initial one being #cablegate, which was the official hashtag for this round of leaks. Things are a bit more, erm, ‘erratic’ at the moment, with accusations of censorship running rife (and not for the first time). Despite Twitter’s protestations to the contrary, many people find it suspicious that #keepyourpantson is, at 12.16 GMT, trending ahead of #WikiLeaks and #cablegate.

Facebook has been fun, especially with yesterday’s shenanigans. To recap, the US government machine has been going into overdrive over cablegate, (head to the resources page for links to stories). Additionally Julian Assange, founder and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was finally arrested yesterday in connection with allegations of rape and sexual assault made in Sweden. It was literally moments after his arrest that it was announced the US would be hosting the Unesco World Press Freedom Day 2011. Naturally, a Facebook page was set up and, unsurprisingly, the wall was covered in comments from ‘you must be joking’ to ‘will you be inviting Mr Assange?’ to ‘who said Americans have no sense of irony?’ and beyond. Some might call it trolling, but I disagree – this was not done in order to get a reaction, it was general mocking, questioning and expressions of disbelief. Nevertheless, a reaction was provoked anyway – the wall was closed and comments erased within about 45 minutes, all in the name of free speech (note to admin – you’re doing it wrong).

Finally, fire up your lasers guys, it’s Anonymous. I was surprised at how long it took anon to get into action, but they have been making up for lost time. As I write this, the website for MasterCard, who stopped enabling donations to WikiLeaks on Monday, is down due to a DDoS attack. This comes on top of other successful attacks on entities that have attacked or withdrawn support for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, including PostFinance, the Swedish Prosecution Authority Åklagare and, allegedly, PayPal. This is just a glimpse of what is going on, with DDoS attacks affecting WikiLeaks, Operation Payback’s own website and various others, as well as those mentioned above. As the rhetoric steps up in the real world, the war in cyberspace is already well under way.

(note: carrying out DDoS attacks is illegal and could result in prosecution)

Dealing with a Social Media Crisis

My apologies on two counts – first, it’s been nearly a month since I last posted and second, I’m not going to be talking about viral videos (I feel that post is cursed – every time I intend on writing about it something comes along and blows it out of the water!). What I will be talking about is dealing with a real life social media crisis from a personal point of view.

As well as being a blogger, I am also the PR representative for United Shades of Britain (more info on them here). The whole organisation started as a Facebook group and that is still where much of our online activity is focussed, although as you can see we now also have a website.

The crisis in question began when one of our members (I’m ashamed to say not an admin) came across a fan page that had been set up in our name, using our logo and generally looking pretty genuine. The person running it even claimed to be one of our admins. So far so boring, if annoying. However, what turned this into a social media crisis for us was that the page claimed we had joined forces with the English Defence League (EDL).

United Shades of Britain is against any form of extremism and we’ve worked hard to keep a reputation for tolerance. Given this outlook, a supposed link up with the EDL would seriously damage our reputation. Given the anonymous nature of the internet stemming something like this is more difficult, especially as it can be hard to identify a fan page on Facebook, rather than the relatively easy Groups.

Facebook take copyright violation fairly seriously, however it can speed things along if you have more than one person report. Don’t overload, maybe one person from your graphics department or agency to report violation of your logo, one from another department to report violation of your company name, and another one or two to report it as a fake profile.

Join the group, state that it is not affiliated with you and post official links back to your website. There is the possibility that you will be banned, making your post disappear, but hopefully it will last enough time for some people to see it. Don’t be afraid to send in another team member to post if the first one is banned. Once again, don’t overload it, but be persistent – make sure your link is on the front page.

If you just have a group but no fan page, or vice versa, set up the missing one (in fact, do it right now!). Having an official version of both, especially if it is well established before any problems arise, will help you to discredit the imposter.

Finally, contact the press, issuing a short statement to the effect that this group is not affiliated with you and that you are being misrepresented. They will almost certainly not publish the statement or run a story on it, but it should stop them from reporting false information about your organisation, which would be more damaging.

Using the internet as a promotional tool is not an exact science and whether your organisation would be susceptible to this kind of attack largely depends on what you are doing. Additionally, if someone is obviously lampooning you (e.g. Real Nick Griffin) without being offensive, then you may just have to suck it up – the people following them or engaging in their groups are probably not your target audience anyway and never will be.

Next week, who knows, we may finally get onto viral videos!

To tweet, or not to tweet…

Well, my last post was rather prophetic! With the launch of the new United Shades of Britain website, my personal social media went out the window, although I will try to make two posts this week to make up for it.

But this is an excellent example of exactly what I was going to talk about in this post: Social media is time consuming, and can often suffer in the face of other things. Of course, we all have to prioritise our work, and social media losing out does seem to make sense. But social media doesn’t like to be neglected – generally, we lose interest in things far more quickly online than we may do in real life. How often do you read an article all the way through online compared to ‘in real life’?

Overall, social media is like a party – for your target audience, it’s fun and interesting and something they want to interact with while there are things going on. Once the party dies down, it’s time to go. So how do you translate that into making social media work well for you? The first thing to realise is that each social media outlet behaves in a different way, and the respective audiences want different things.

Twitter: The logo is a bird and, just like a baby bird, Twitter needs a lot of attention. It needs to be updated at least once per day, preferably more often, but with information that is at least mildly interesting – the completely banal won’t keep your followers following either. For most corporate entities or brands, Twitter is probably the most difficult social media platform to use effectively; the constant need to feed it new and interesting information is very time consuming.

Facebook: A Facebook fanpage is less demanding than Twitter in that you don’t have to feed it so often. It’s also a great way to engage directly with your customers and to raise the profile of fledgling campaigns. However, as demonstrated by what happened to Nestlé, it requires greater monitoring and moderation, as your wall can quickly be overrun by people who want to take you distinctly off message.

MySpace and Bebo: These are older social networking sites and some of the first that were used as a platform to promote commercial entities, which followed musicians who were trying to get themselves noticed. The free flow of information, the ability to engage with your target audience and the potential for promoting a product or launching a campaign is much reduced on these platforms, but the information present is easier to control. The other disadvantage is that many people have either moved on to Facebook, or were never on MySpace or Bebo to begin with.

Blogs: Ah the blog, a favourite for many people, releasing short snippets of their lives and engaging with other people over the internet. From the point of view of a promotional tool, blogs are once again very dependent on what you are trying to use them for. They don’t need to be updated so often – once or twice per week should do it – but they do need to be interesting, informative and not too long. If it reads like an advert, no one is going to care; the style of the blog is somewhere between a short comment piece and a diary entry. Charities, individuals and ‘progressive’ campaigns or roadshows, where something new is happening regularly enough to update the blog frequently, are all suitable users of the medium. A campaign like the very successful ‘bring back the Wispa’ run by Cadbury would not really a suitable target for blogging, whereas something such as the Cancer Research Race for Life, if individual runners were able to upload a blog post, would be.

The lesson is that, whatever you want to use social media for, it is better to pick and choose, concentrating your effort in particular and useful places, than to go all-out on every platform for the sake of it and end up with something of a damp squib. A dedicated social media staff member or team can be very helpful, but targeting your outlets is more so.

With the General Election coming up, I will largely be focussing on how the parties are using social media platforms and how well their approach is working.