Dear Patrick Kershaw

I see that you are new to Twitter. You’ve posted two tweets from your Twitter account (@patrickkershaw1). Perhaps just one if we consider your latest tweet to be a sign-off:

“has decided twitter is a fad… and this will be his last update”.

I know Twitter can be hard to understand for a new user, so perhaps a brief introduction would be in order?

Twitter is a place where I can chat with 1,500 friends and acquaintances, and indirectly with hundreds of thousands. If I want to address a tweet directly to another Twitter user, I type @TheirUserName somewhere in my message.

It’s a place where I can tell my friends about the great web hosting service I receive from @sitehostnz, or complain about @vodafonenz’s roaming data charges. I can book a table at @thefallsnz, a local restaurant in Henderson, and if my @orcon web service goes offline, I can txt a message to Twitter to let them know. I can see what’s coming up tomorrow on TVNZ’s @BreakfastOnOne, I can get wine advice from @thewinevault, and follow design and new media trends with @idealogmag.

Twitter is a place where @LewisBostock can tweet “Help, I’m stranded in Auckland and need to get home” (‘home’ being 45 minutes north of Auckland), and be inundated with offers of help, lodging, and transport. It’s a place where Lewis can tweet later in the day, pledging his thanks for the generosity of Twitter followers.

For me personally, Twitter has netted several speaking engagements, and countless tidbits of wonderful advice. Just today, after landing in Sydney, I posted a comment of outrage at Vodafone’s extortionary $10/Mb data roaming charges. Minutes later I had a response from @regen suggesting I buy a pre-pay sim card, which gets me data for $2/Mb. I can post a question about the intricacies of some obtuse software development task, and receive educated, specific responses in minutes.

And yes, Twitter is a place where I can type a short message about what I had for breakfast. One of my favourite things is to post early in the morning, informing my friends as to how many times the 6 week old baby woke up in the night. They respond likewise. We call it Parent Poker. How good was your hand last night?

Yet Twitter is just a fad, according to Patrick Kershaw. It has nothing to offer small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand. Apparently, it might be useful for corporates and celebrities, but for SMEs, “the time spent in actually using Twitter as a business tool will be a loss-making venture”. I’d like to suggest that Patrick have a chat, perhaps on Twitter, to a couple of the SMEs I listed above.

One example from many: Jayson Bryant (@thewinevault) has picked up a wonderful niche on Twitter, and is now posting a daily wine video blog, including a cameo from @JohnJCampbell (yes, of TV3’s Campbell Live). Jason estimates that 20%-25% of his sales can be directly attributed to Twitter and Facebook.

Ironically, I think Patrick will be back on Twitter in a few months. If you look back through my Twitter history, you’ll find I had the same feeling early on. Just like jogging, Twitter has an early wall that you need to break through. The term ‘conversation’ is a cliché used far too frequently in social media circles, but quite honestly, the key thing is to find a few like-minded users to connect with – perhaps friends or businesses you know through the ‘real world’ – and join the conversation.

Then you can post about what your cat had for breakfast.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I had a massive flashback on Sunday. A flashback to the days of running a beat-up old car. Spending weekends underneath it, fixing something or modifying something else. A flashback of trips to the car wrecking yard, taking home something that ‘might just fit’, returning later to find something that’ll ’surely bolt straight on’, before finally fixing and refitting the original part.

I run a much more modern car these days, but it didn’t stop the WoF guys from pulling me up on a cracked brake light. Being a Sunday, the only place open was the post-apocalyptic Pick-a-Part. This place is a self-service parts yard. You rock on up with your tools, find a car vaguely similar to the one you need, and go to town. Anything you can drag away with you they’ll charge you for. The good part is they charge something like $18 for a tail light that would be $50 anywhere else.

Pick-a-Part is like something straight out of Mad Max. The gatehouse is barred and chained, the walls are made from scrap corrugated iron, and the yard is bare dirt covered in cars sitting jacked up on piles of disused wheel rims. On a cold Autumn day, the wind whistling through the iron fencing and the shambling, boilersuit-clad scavengers really added to the ambience.

Huge signs proclaimed the “Yard Rules”. Such gems as “No children in the yard or left unattended in the car park”; “No gas torches or plasma cutters”; and “No theft: we’ll check your pockets and socks when you leave!”.

The final touch of apocalyptical sweetness is the exit door. Once I paid for my shoddy wares, the toothless lady in the gatehouse untied a length of wire from the leg of her desk. Initially puzzled, I realised her diabolical genius when I followed the wire snaking up past the payment window, out a hole in the wall, and tired securely around the exit gate, holding it shut. In my mind I pictured some greasy, penniless scavenger, frantically dragging half an engine towards the gate, only to be foiled by Ma Dixie’s security wire of doooooom!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Just because your brand is a verb, it doesn’t mean you can charge a massive premium, and flush away a large part of your audience with provider lock-in. Yep, the exciting TiVo boxes will be available in New Zealand come November. But only if you have $900 spare (or $200 + $30/mth for 2 years). And they’ll be largely crippled unless you’re a Telecom broadband subscriber. That’s right. Unless you use Telecom broadband, you’ll be paying for bandwidth to view the program guide and any on-demand movies your TiVo won’t have a program guide, rendering it effectively useless.

If you put barriers like that in front of your potential customers, they’re just going to turn away. There’s plenty of decent Freeview DVR’s in the market, not to mention MySky.

The slightly shiny side on this – quite frankly – turd of a product release is the fact that if you are a Telecom subscriber then all your TiVo data, including locked-up DRM movies, is free.

So here we have two near-monopolies (Telecom and TVNZ), collaborating to lock-up one of the more exciting consumer electronics released in New Zealand this year. Good Times! Look for a $8m write-down from TVNZ in a couple of years when they fail to make any money whatsoever from their TiVo investment.

Update: on a re-read, I see I’m putting up a bunch of complaints with no suggestions. Here are my suggestions:

• Lower the price of the box. I’m surprised TVNZ is planning on making money on advertising with the box and haven’t even considered loss-leading.
• The zero-rated data is a brilliant idea, and very attractive to Telecom subscribers. How about a peering arrangement with other ISP’s (a-la Orcon’s O-zone – which you might be surprised to see TVNZ on). More options = more users = more revenue. Perhaps share the bandwidth cost in exchange for a cut of advertising.

Any other ideas?

Popularity: 25% [?]

I had a really interesting time on the panel for a PRiNZ Event last night. We were discussing the challenges and opportunities in social media for marketing and PR, and what PR professionals can do to participate. One could easily just laugh off the efforts of corporates and PR professionals trying to monetize social media. I’m a lot more sanguine. Like it or not, wherever people are talking about brands online, PR will be in there seeking to control the message.

Tim Nichols from 2Degrees talked about their strategy, commenting on the fact that they are rooted in social media, living and dying by the sword. One comment resonated with me: he said that they have “set up camp” on Twitter and Facebook. Marketers see social media as alien and perhaps even hostile, so setting up camp is a nice metaphor. They’re in there early and often, learning the language and meeting the locals. They still risk a backlash and eviction, but the chances are hugely reduced by their authentic and thorough participation.

On the other hand, you have your streakers. Marketing and PR experts preparing their strategy outside the territory, making a master plan like mini-generals. Then they drop their trousers and go charging right through the middle of the game.

Sure, at best you’re going to get some attention. People will point and laugh (some might appreciate your assets). At worst you’re going to raise the ire of a crowd of angry natives, seeking to skin you alive.

I wish I could have explained this better last night, but here’s what I’m saying to PR and marketing types seeking to understand social media: don’t be a streaker. Instead, sit with the crowd for a bit. Listen, cheer, chat about that great defence by McCaw, or wicked googly by Warney.

Then maybe you can tell the guys sitting nearby about your great brand experience, and watch the message propagate like a Mexican wave.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I recently said this in response to a tweet regarding a site dedicated to shoelaces:

If it exists, it has been taken too far on the Internet.

I’m not sure what to call this rule. It is of course a play on the ancient Rule 34, only less depraved and arguably more enlightening. Some examples of the rule in play:

• A wiki dedicated to historical and out-of-print sewing patterns (also via Keith).
• Cat ladders around the world.
• A Thomas the Tank Engine wiki, complete with plot summaries and goofs. I mean come on, of course it “would have required more than one engineer to fix the points“.
• People who, when presented with a flight simulator, would rather direct imaginary aircraft around than actually fly anything.

Of course, we geeks can’t exactly throw too many stones. I imagine a mortal would look askance at GDGT, for example.

So tell me, have you come across such a site while wandering the edges of the internet?

Popularity: 3% [?]