Jim Traynor, Rangers, and the decline of Scottish media

Much as I enjoyed Michael Grant's piece in The Herald this morning on Jim Traynor's move from the Daily Record and BBC to a senior comms role for Rangers, it missed one important piece of insight.  

If Grant is right and Rangers are successful in their media strategy to move away from servicing the needs of Scotland's newspapers and broadcasters in preference to direct channels like Facebook and the Rangers website to communicate with their support, how does this impact on the Scottish mainstream media? If Rangers and their significant supporter base don't need the Record, Sun, The Herald or Radio Clyde to provide the latest news from Ibrox, this can potentially have a huge impact on their numbers of viewers and readers, and consequently their advertising revenues.

 While it's clearly difficult to attract paying subscribers to online news services when free alternatives are easily available, you can definitely see that there might be a market in providing exclusive content direct to supporters when the service provided to external newspapers and broadcasters is restricted. Why should Rangers let others make money from exclusive interviews and stories when the club themselves could be reaping profits from clicks and building closer relationships with their customer base?

 I'm sure a few of Jim Traynor's former colleagues will continue to attempt to have some fun at his expense over the coming days and weeks. I'm also sure that if Michael Grant is right about Rangers' media strategy they'll only have a few months grace before this directly impacts on their own future, and not for the better.

How Third Sector organisations can use social media more effectively

I had the pleasure of running a couple of group sessions at the ACOSVO Annual Conference in Edinburgh earlier this month. 

Here's a Q&As on the main issues raised on the issue of how Third Sector organisations can use social media effectively.

What should we use social media for?

Different organisations and projects use social media for different things, you have to decide what goals will help drive your business. The Social Charity Index should be able to give you a few ideas from organisations already engaged with social media.

Do you need to better connect with your client base to let them know about new and events? Do you want to have a forum for individuals to share experiences and provide support to each other?  Have a look at Facebook and Twitter Pages of other organisations and projects in your area of expertise or sector and replicate good practice.

How do you get buy-in from staff?

The best approach for this is to be open and transparent with your staff and then ask for their help.

Have a session with your team to give them an introduction to social media tools and then ask them how they think Twitter/Facebook etc could help them in their own work.

Be supportive of your staff, and be upfront about your plans. You already trust your staff to speak to customers and clients in person, on the phone, and by email, so using social media is just another communication tool for this.

How can we measure the impact of our work through social media?

There are a number of free tools which can help you measure the impact of your work around social media. The ones I use most are:

           

Facebook’s free analytics tools for Pages. These appear at the top of the screen which you login as a page Admin. They tell you a range of stats, including how many likes you’ve had, how many people have seen your page etc.

Tweetreach.com is a great free tool for Twitter. It has a range of metrics, including how many people have seen your tweets, how many times your tweets have appeared and which tweets and followers have contributed most to your impact.

Should we link our social media channels together, and if so, how?

No!

Different people use Facebook and Twitter for different things, so don’t hook up your Facebook page to automatically update from Twitter (or vice versa). It’s OK to share content or to advertise your Facebook content from a Tweet, but give some thought to this rather than joining everything up.

A good rule of thumb is to update your Facebook page a few times a week, and to Tweet a few times a day. 

How can Third Sector CEOs use social media effectively?

I had the pleasure of running a couple of group sessions at the ACOSVO Annual Conference in Edinburgh earlier this month. 

Here's the Q&A of the 3 main issues raised on the issue of how Third Sector CEOs can use social media effectively.

                                

How can I use Twitter to connect with and influence key stakeholders in my area?

You should follow people you want to hear from and those you want to connect with.

There are a few tactics you can employ to achieve this.

Firstly, Twitter can search your address book to find your existing contacts who are already on Twitter which is a good way to start out. Click on ‘Discover’ at the top of the Twitter homepage and then select ‘Find Friends’ from the boxes at the top left of the page.

The 'Activity' stream in the 'Discover' tab of Twitter also shows you which people your followers are following. Twitter also recommends people who have similar twitter networks to you.

If you attend an event which uses a hashtag e.g. #ACOSVO12), a search for that on Twitter will show you tweets from other attendees as well as a (hopefully) interesting selection of comments/observations/contributions from the day. (Likewise fans of X Factor can find likeminded souls via #xfactor, etc etc). Looking though the follower lists of other Twitter users can be a good resource in finding similar people.

Some people create Twitter lists to group similar users together. @BIGScotland has created a list of the Scottish Third Sector on Twitter which currently has 500 members from across the sector. You can either click on the button on the page to follow the list, or scroll through the list members to find individual users at you'd like to follow. Other useful lists may include @newdirect's comprehensive list of MSPs on Twitter or @stevebridger's Charity CEO list.

How can I get enough of the right people to follow me?

·         Follow them! Most Twitter users will follow back someone who follows them, especially if your Twitter profile demonstrates that you share interests/sectors/friends in common.

·         Use appropriate hashtags for events etc so that other users can find you (but please bear in mind that #overuse #of #hashtags #is #unnecessary #and #annoying).

·         Say interesting and informative things (!) that are appropriate to your audience. This can involve:

·         Sharing links to articles that you find interesting and/or useful

·         Retweeting content from others (always credit your sources)

·         Talk to people. It’s nice to be nice, so thank people who have shared a link that you found helpful. Ask questions, as everyone knows it’s flattering to be considered an expert so you might be surprised who you can get into a Twitter conversation with. 

           

How do I find time for this additional activity when I'm already so busy?

Don’t letter Twitter hoover up your time. Instead set aside a few minutes every day to catch up on what your followers are saying and thinking about what you might say to them.

I know of one CEO who only uses Twitter when on the train to and from work, and when sitting in waiting rooms or receptions for his next meeting. This approach means that he’s not using up time on Twitter when he could be doing other things in the office, but still keeps up with what people are talking about today.

Scottish Local Authorities and Twitter

A couple of months ago, I carried out a piece of research as part of my work on my CIPR Diploma on the use of social media by Scottish Councils. 

The aim of this research was to examine if and how Scottish Local Authorities communicate effectively through the use of Twitter.

I carried out a survey of each council, then gathered their answers together for comparison. I then measured the actual use of Twitter by each organisation through their main account at a specified point in time. This established the extent to which communications though this channel is simply a series of broadcast messages or whether there are examples of organisations engaging in dialogue with their followers.

I came up with a few conclusions at the end of the exercise, which I plan to share in due course. But over the past couple of weeks there have been a few Twitter conversations on the issue which made me think that it might be useful/interesting to publish my initial data for others to see. With this in mind, you can find a copy of the questions I asked and the answers I received here:

Scottish Local Authorities and Social Media

In addition, I've also put together a definitive Twitter list of the main accounts of Scottish Local Authorities:

Scottish Councils Twitter List

I'll be posting some of my findings in a couple of weeks, but please let me know in the comments if you've any questions or anything to add. 

The essence of the modern political interview

"Everyone seems painfully aware that my task as interviewer is to catch him out, to get him to say the wrong thing. Clegg's task, like all politicians, is to rattle off rhetoric, to be evasive and as uncontroversial as possible, and to fill up the tape with unquotable patter."

From Jemima Khan's interview with Nick Clegg in this week's New Statesman

#BBCfail will limit their election reach

The Scottish Election kicked into gear last night as the parties entered the first full week of campaigning following the dissolution of parliament last week. Both the BBC and STV launched election twitter feeds and while STV backed this up with an impressive new election website which integrates video content and a live twitter feed which is far more content rich than BBC Scotland's staid Scottish politics page. But where the BBC will lose out is on Twitter. Because rather than adopting the popular #sp11 hashtag to mark out their election stories, the BBC have gone it alone with one of their own. #sp11 has already been adopted by candidates and political organisations, and has significant use in the Twitter community. For the uninitiated, this is important to the effective use of Twitter, not just to be a happy par of the Twitter family, but because by clicking on the hashtag in a tweet you can follow the wider conversation on the topic. It places your tweets in context, and as part of a wider discussion of an issue. In this case, many Twitter users are already using #sp11, creating a live stream of national and local election news and views from across the country. For news organisations, Twitter presents an opportunity to drive traffic to your website for more in-depth coverage of an issue, gaining you viewers and readers. So, rather than join in this established discussion on Twitter, BBC Scotland has chosen to adopt their own hashtag, #sp2011. Although it's not their own. It's also heavily used by fans of French Canadian singer Seb Lefebvre So if you're looking for occasional updates from the Scottish election campaign from a single news source, alongside very, very regular updates of how Seb Lefebvre's album is going down with a group of VERY EXCITED French Canadians I'd suggest following #sp2011. For those of us who want to keep up to date with the Election, keep using #sp11. #bbcfail, as they say on Twitter. UPDATE: BBC just tweeted to say they are adopting #sp11. Welcome back to the Twitter community!

Scotland's Top Political Tweeters

In January this year I put together a post containing a list of the top Scottish political tweeters. 

Thanks to Total Politics' Blog awards, lists are back in vogue, and so I thought that it would be a good time to revisit the issue. It's been a busy 9 months in politics, and I wanted to see how usage and take up of Twitter had changed over this time, just ahead of the return of the Holyrood and Westminster parliaments after their summer break. 


There are a couple of notable changes in the last 9 months. 

There has been significant growth in the number of Twitter followers engaged with Scottish political figures since the beginning of 2010. The Top 10 in January had a total of around 12 thousand followers, while the updated list has over 24 thousand, a significant increase. 


Secondly, the top tweeters from the SNP  list and the second placed tweeter from the Tories have dropped out this particular race. Jeff Breslin (aka SNP Tactical Voting)  is no longer eligible as he's moved on to pastures new, while the Conservative's former Westminster candidate Alberto Costa's Twitter account has been discontinued. In there place there have been a number of new entries, in particular from MPs who stood for election esrlier this year. 

The rankings below are based on the number of followers on the afternoon of Saturday 4th September 2010. I've considered accounts which have a broadly political outlook, and are based in, or mostly about, Scotland. The number in brackets are the number of followers each user has at the time I checked. Those which didn't make the list last time round are marked as (NEW). I've compiled each party list on the basis of what I understand the general politics of each account to be.

All the twits below (and many, many more) feature in my Scottish Politics list which you can find on my Twitter page.

+++UPDATED+++
I've now added Kristofer Keane to the Greens' list and Lawrence Mills to the Labour list. Sorry for the omissions.

SNP

1. SNP Official 1233 (456)

2. Angus Robertson MP 661 (NEW)

3. Osama Saeed 521 (296) 
4. Subrosa 493 (325)  ++SEE COMMENTS BELOW+++
5. Holyrood Patter 449 (343)

Scottish Labour

1.Tom Harris MP 5226 (2848)

2. Douglas Alexander MP 4700 (NEW)
3. Eric Joyce MP 2057 (1156)
4. Lawrence Mills 1706 (NEW) +++UPDATED+++
5. Scottish Labour 1514 (859)

6. Jim Murphy MP 1433 (NEW) 

Scottish Liberal Democrats

1. Jo Swinson MP 4039 (2672)

2. Charles Kennedy MP 2776 (NEW) 

3. Danny Alexander MP 2406 (NEW)
4. Andy Reeves 1494 (1016)
5. Caron Lindsay 1301 (802)

Scottish Conservatives

1. David Mundell MP 978 (622)

2. Iain McGill 893 (NEW) 

3. David McLetchie MSP 253 (NEW) 

4. Iain Gibson 226 (NEW)
5. Ross Thomson 163 (114)

Scottish Greens

1. Patrick Harvie MSP 1091 (708)

2. James McKenzie 909 (526)

3. Kate Joester 744 (455)
4. Kristofer Keane 581 (NEW) +++UPDATED+++

5. Chas Booth 544 (359) 

6. Cowrin 491 (NEW)

Scottish Media

1. HolyroodDaily 1249 (345)

2. Newsnight Scotland 941 (NEW) 

3. Joan McAlpine 876 (401)
4. Severin Carrell 699 (283)
5. Torquil Crichton 680 (338)

Which makes the final Top Ten list:

1.     Tom Harris MP                      5226    (2848)

2.      Douglas Alexander MP           4700    (NEW)

3.      Jo Swinson MP                    4039    (2672)

4.     Charles Kennedy MP              2776    (NEW) 

5.      Danny Alexander MP             2406    (NEW)

6.      Eric Joyce MP                      2057    (1156)

7.      Scottish Labour                    1514    (859)

8.      Andy Reeves                        1494    (1016)

9.      Jim Murphy MP                      1433    (NEW) 

10.   Caron Lindsay                       1301    (802)

Discuss. 


(I may have missed someone out. I’m sorry if I have, so if you leave me a comment, send me a tweet or DM I’ll happily update the list.)