Nasty Twitter tactics to watch out for

By Neil Patrick

I’m on Twitter daily, so I get to observe in sometimes gory detail how various folk use and abuse it. And lately I've noticed a nasty and cynical tactic getting more prevalent.

It’s the latest incarnation of what I call “binge and purge”.

It’s easy to spot when a Twitter account is doing this. When they follow you, scroll down their time line and you'll see how many people they followed at the same time they followed you. Binge and purgers will typically follow accounts en masse. Several hundred a day. Day after day. I’m sorry to tell you that despite following you, they are not interested in you and what you think or have to say. They just want to get as many people as possible to follow them back.

They have naively concluded that having a zillion followers trumps everything else. Big mistake.

It’s a bit like having a rather lame party or event to organise for 100 people and knowing that few people will really want to come. So you send out 1,000 invitations, because if you only sent 100, only 10 people would actually show up.

If you want to go to a lame party, be my guest.

The binge and purgers’ error is that they see celebrities and famous people as their role models.

As I talked about here, there’s a mass of celebrities and other famous people who follow very few people on Twitter. But because of their high public profile, they don’t actually need to do very much to get a lot of followers on any social media platform. They don’t really engage; they just tweet all about their daily lives. And their followers are essentially engaging in a form of voyeurism. It’s a lucrative formula which is exploited by thousands of gossip and celebrity magazines and websites all over the world.

And whilst I think this is a completed wasted opportunity, I get it. They see it as a low cost and easy way to help keep their face out there.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again. They are social media role models for no-one.

But sadly, many ‘normal’ organisations and people who ought to know better, have taken this non-typical and flawed model and assumed that social media success is about having a zillion followers, whilst following as few people as possible. I recently read a post which asserted that unless a Twitter account had 10 followers for every person they followed, it was not worthy of being followed.

This is absolute nonsense.

Why?

Because it makes a second flawed assumption that social media is like old media. In other words, a newspaper which has a higher circulation deserves to be paid more for its advertising space than one with a lower circulation. In old media this was more or less true. In social media, it’s also complete nonsense.

Why?

Because social media is about relationships and people, not old school advertising. It’s active not passive. It’s real time not scheduled. It is collaborative. And it is not, repeat NOT about me, me, me. It’s about US, US ,US.

It’s not an advertising vehicle.

It’s a place where we can grow our networks of friends, learn from each other, get feedback from our customers, share information, build communities, watch our rivals, help our friends and best of all sometimes just chew the fat…together.

Binge and purgers neither desire nor find any of this. Because they are on an ego trip.

Goodwill not reach is the measure of online influence - unless you are using social media in completely the wrong way. And you do not acquire goodwill by dumping your followers within a day or two of them following you back. It just leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

It’s the industrialisation of social media. A cynical and exploitative attitude where connections (that’s you and me) are viewed as raw material. And this mechanical approach kills the very thing every genuine decent person or organisation wants; real relationships, based on trust and mutual goodwill.

I can only see this cynical, exploitative and idiotic trend continuing. But all is not lost. Just keep an eye in your new followers for a few days and watch which ones have quickly unfollowed you. There’s your proof they are a binge and purger. Dump them immediately.

And don’t get sucked in to the mythology that you can’t be awesome unless you have a zillion followers.

Why you shouldn’t follow famous people on social media

By Neil Patrick

I observed an interesting thing this morning on Twitter. I found myself looking at a few verified Twitter accounts. In case you don't know, these are the profiles with a little blue dot on them and a white tick inside it.

Apparently Twitter allocate these at their discretion to the accounts of well known people so that we know that this is their real Twitter account not a faker or imposter trying to hijack their fame.

Actually you don’t have to be especially famous to get this. If you’re a broadcaster, actor, newspaper journalist, sports personality, you’ll probably have one.

But the little white tick is not a quality or merit badge. It just tells us that the person is well known and they are who they say they are.

It doesn’t mean they are worth following on social media.

A famous person yesterday (possibly)

When I looked at a dozen or so of these accounts, I spotted a few things they all had in common:

 

• They have many, many more followers than people they follow. This tells me they are not interested in what anyone else has to say. It doesn’t tell us that they are actually saying anything worthwhile. 

• They rarely share or comment on anyone else’s tweets. In other words, they are not interested in anyone else or engaging with others. 

• Their tweets are all about the boring details of what they are doing and/or how fabulous their life is. Hello? We don’t care (except for the minority of stalking obsessives that is) 

When I look at the people on social media who I follow and am interested in, almost none of them are verified accounts. They may have less than a hundred followers or several hundred thousand. But these are the truly fabulous people. The people who provide us with things that are interesting, valuable and helpful.

These people understand that we must give to receive. That no-one cares about the details of their day to day lives. That social media, just like real life is a two way street.

These people enrich my life every day. When they engage with me, they make me feel good. They inform and challenge me. They show me that they care about others more than themselves. That’s why I like them and that’s why I follow them.

Whether their Twitter profile has a little white tick or not.

How winning The Apprentice can wreck your career

By Neil Patrick

Sometimes I like to watch a few episodes of The Apprentice. On the one hand it ruthlessly exposes the contestants' weaknesses and on the other, how people can be coerced into doing and saying the most unbelievable things just to win. Of course, that’s all part of what makes it such compelling viewing.

We all know it’s constructed and edited to ensure the over-eager and often delusional contestants usually come out looking rather foolish  – if they are lucky – and downright idiotic if they are not.

It’s great entertainment that has probably done more than any other programme in history to make business an attractive career choice for the young. But of course it isn't really just about business. It's also about how the young and aspirational can be manipulated to behave in entertaining ways under the pretext of a competition to prove who's the best business person. In that sense, it's pure genius.

They are dazzled so easily with the the promise of a becoming a business superstar if they can make it through and get hired. They will resort to the most astonishing behaviors in their desperation to win at any cost. They display so much bravado and naivete so frequently that I think it's quite possibly the best anti-ageism commercial out there.

But possibly the hidden value of The Apprentice is in what it reveals about people and life. These insights are perhaps much more instructive than some of the 'tasks' themselves.

All that glitters...Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

So I was interested to discover what had happened in the real life of the winner of the 2010 series, Stella English.

Stella was born and grew up in Thamesmead, a deprived area of South East London. She left school with no qualifications, but at the time of entering The Apprentice had become Head of Business Management on the trading floor of a Japanese investment bank.

Due to her consistent performance throughout the series and solid determination, she made it to the final of the show. She showed excellent leadership and organizational skills, and Lord Alan Sugar took the decision to hire her.

At the time, she commented she was looking forward to the future and was extremely happy. After winning, English worked at Sugar's computer company Viglen. But she quit the job within a year, in May 2011, saying that she was just a "glorified PA". She moved to go and work for another Sugar business, YouView.

Just five months later, in October 2011, she resigned from YouView claiming she had had almost no contact with Sugar in her role. In March 2013 English sued Sugar for constructive dismissal.

On 12 April 2013 it was announced that she had lost her case, with the tribunal judge John Warren saying that, "Ms English, instead of appreciating a job with enormous scope for advancement, had been more interested in a glamorous role, and travelling in private jets".

Having successfully defended himself against the constructive dismissal case, Sugar then sued English to recover some of the £35,000 of costs he’d incurred in mounting his defence.

At the court case, English revealed that her attempted business ventures - including a fashion label and events company - had fallen flat, resulting in her now having to survive on state benefits. Sugar did not win this subsequent case, and English said that she was keen to put the saga behind her.

"I haven’t slept for about six weeks… and trying to cope with the fact that I’m now an unemployed single mother. It’s a nightmare, it’s a living nightmare.”

“All I care about at the moment is my kids," she said. "I’ve got two small children there now. Dad is not at home, Mummy is crying they don’t know why. I think it’s just gone too far to get back together with my husband. I suppose at the time I needed the support but I’ve found myself completely alone”.

"The only way is up, that’s the good news, I don’t think it can get much worse. Well please God I hope it doesn’t.”

This is the often brutal reality of real business life versus the manipulated and stage-managed version of it we see presented on The Apprentice.

I’m not going to attempt to work out whether Sugar or English was at fault. I don’t know and I don’t have access to any of the facts. But there are several things that I think are instructive in this whole episode:

Don’t become dazzled by glorious prizes

Time and time again, people are seduced into thinking that a chance to win some glittering prize has to be worth going for. Not always. The odds are usually stacked against you and the costs of losing or even winning can be huge. How many good jobs have contestants on The Apprentice resigned from just to have a shot at winning the show? How much money have they spent on their wardrobes just so they look really polished in front of the cameras – four figures for sure, possibly five. Good investment? For most absolutely not. Risk and reward assessment seems to be a skill commonly absent from candidates for The Apprentice. 

Getting the job isn’t the end, it’s the beginning

I don’t know this, but I suspect that after winning the show, English found herself unable to progress things and make them happen at Viglen. It’s a tech company and she didn’t have a background in tech. She would feel out of her depth and was quite possibly even resented by her colleagues. All speculation granted, but the point is this. If you’re set up as a star and you cannot live up to your reputation, some people are going try and shoot you down. 

Never resort to the law to resolve differences if your opponent is richer than you.

I think that trying to sue Sugar was not the smartest thing English could have done. I know that the law should protect us all equally. But it doesn’t. The richer you are and the better lawyers you can afford, the better your results will be within the legal system. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is and we have to act accordingly. 

Your fame is always vulnerable if you are not in full control.

Fame is powerful and always ready to bite you, especially if you do something dumb that brings you crashing down. But even if you don’t make a monumental error, it can still bite you as Stella English discovered.

I wonder if Stella ever wishes she had her old job back?

I think I can guess the answer.

What do you think?

What can we learn from celebrities about playing the fame game?

By Neil Patrick

Yesterday’s post looked at how society has changed from the old economic top down system of class to a more diverse model and how the question of growing wealth inequality keeps rearing its ugly head.

And I presented a slightly tongue in cheek model of my own. At the top of this new socio-economic pecking order I placed what I called the ‘media magnets’. Celebrities as most would call them.

I’m not going to discuss whether or not Tom Cruise, Kim Kardashian, Tiger Woods or Paris Hilton are actually worth the vast sums that they are paid. It’s an academic argument which divides opinion and helps us not one bit even if we could all agree on an answer…which of course we never will.

What are the lessons that the rest of us can take from these people?

Forget the headlines about them earning a squillion dollars for some movie or selling their wedding pictures for $100,000. What I’m interested in isn't their headline-grabbing antics, but the more useful lessons that we can take from their strategies.

So if you want a piece about how you can earn a $10m pay cheque next year, please look elsewhere.

Fame I think comes with a heavy price attached anyway.

Who in their right mind would want to be photographed by stalking press photographers every time they go shopping or take a vacation? Who would want to have their personal family matters shared with the world through the mass media? Not me for sure.

So whilst being famous might seem superficially attractive from a purely financial point of view, being famous also carries a ton of baggage that personally I’d rather not have.

So what’s to discuss? Well, let’s look at a few aspects of the fame game that are worth paying attention to.

 
A lot of famous people can only do one thing

But they do it really, really well. If you are in the world's top 10 of just about anything you can imagine, you’ll be famous. Whether it’s putting a golf ball into a hole, or being the most annoying character on a reality TV show, being the number one at it has a value ticket attached. So lesson number one is that whatever you do, however specialist or even worthless it is, being the most renowned person in that field is the place you should be aiming to be.

Credit: Kevin Ballard

Becoming famous is about who you know more than what you know

Celebrities mix with other celebrities and the people that surround them, whether they are agents, media people, politicians. They are heavy socialisers. And because they socialise with other influential people, their personal networks have great value to them. Networking has a sort of randomness about it whoever you are, but the more you do it, the more likely you are to make a connection with someone which might just be your next big opportunity. 

Celebrities operate like brands

This aspect is finally starting to enter the mainstream consciousness, as people begin to see the value of strong personal brands. Just because you are never going to have a perfume line or fashion label named after you, doesn't mean that you shouldn't think of yourself as brand. This involves established branding techniques such as maintaining a consistent presentation, having a clear benefit based proposition and understanding which environments are suitable for your brand and which are not. And having a strong and positive online presence - in the right places for you to be seen.  It might for example not be such a good idea for a tax accountant to invest in building a Facebook page. A good LinkedIn strategy however is quite another proposition. 

Celebrities understand that to make a lot of money, you don’t just sell your time for money

Celebrities are masters of leveraging their value. They understand that they are not just selling their time - like everyone else they have far too little of it anyway…especially when every function they attend probably involves a whole day’s worth of preparation and grooming etc. I don’t think too many people at the Oscars actually turn up after a really busy day at their desk! Celebrities think not just, what will I get paid for doing this…they think, what is the potential long-term value to my brand of doing this? 

They cultivate the media

This is another key lever celebrities work expertly. And the more media attention they get…the more they attract. It feeds on itself. Now you and I may not want or need to be on the front cover of OK magazine, but the value of media coverage is still immense. What’s essential to understand is that the rise of the internet means that suddenly the media has become more democratised that it’s ever been before. We can all create and own our own little piece of internet real estate. Do not underestimate the value of this. Treat everything you do publicly online as if you were in front of the world's press… and one day you might just be. 

They diversify

As a celebrity builds greater and greater profile and network contacts, they have more and more opportunities to lend small parts of themselves to others who can commercially benefit from the association. 

This can even extend beyond death…just look at Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen – all of whom are still pulling in revenues long after they left the mortal world. Though the rest of us may not have such a powerful and enduring personal brand as iconic personalities like these, we can still think like them about what we do with our careers. So for example, every positive association with other organisations or individuals you can forge has value. Conceptually there is no difference between Beyonce's name appearing on bottles of perfume and you or I having our name associated with a piece of research, or being cited as a source of expert opinion by a blogger, or posting a valuable piece of insight on a LinkedIn Group discussion.

So despite the fact that they may be overpaid, annoying or even completely pointless, celebrities have another value to the rest of the world that they don’t even realise or care about – they show the rest of us a different and valuable way of thinking about ourselves and how we can develop and benefit from our own personal little piece of fame.

And better still, you and I can do it without ever having to worry about the paparazzi chasing us round the car park next time we go to the supermarket.