Musing on Hashtag Popularity

The current module in #engl211 has us delving into the murky world of social media marketing.

What makes one hashtag trend and another fade into oblivion?

Nobody really knows. There are lots of people out there writing essays on the subject. People who want to sell you on  their social media marketing expertise will make lists of ways to get more eyeballs on your content and write them up in neat little bite sized articles. But they don’t really know. They’re making educated guesses. Sometimes their advice works, sometimes it drives people away.  

Our assignment right now is to go on Twitter and promote a hashtag of our own design. The group I’m in decided to go with #BorderlandPics. It is a brand new hashtag so we can shape it any way we want without interference from or piggybacking on preexisting tweets. On my Twitter account I introduced it with this new pinned tweet:

Our idea was inspired by another hashtag - #WolWednesday. This is a hashtag that was started by author Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) back in March 2015. This hashtag, which is all about sharing pictures of owls, is still going. Apparently lots of people like owls. Er, I’m sorry, I mean wols.

You might wonder how sharing owl pictures could possibly be marketing. My Twitter experience is largely in the publishing world. I follow authors, publishers, and the like. From what I’ve observed, if an author goes on Twitter and just tweets about his or her books, that drives potential readers away. I know I unfollow an author after two many straight up promotional tweets and I am not alone in that. Therefore, authors on Twitter generally only do straightforward promotion during specific times. If an author normally tweets like a human being making connections, tweeting excitedly about a book release is quite acceptable. Whether he did it deliberately or is just Sam Sykes being Sam Sykes, the #WolWednesday promotes Sam Sykes author brand by drawing people to his Twitter account in a fun way. This is an indirect form of marketing.

We don’t actually have a product to promote, so the indirect marketing of a picture sharing hashtag seemed like a fun way to go. If anything, we are promoting where we live.

So far, my group has shared a few pictures and we’ve gotten one post to our hashtag from someone not in our group. We’ve only be going for a few days now, so I won’t speculate on reasons why we’re not getting more eyeballs. Of the tweets I’ve shared, this has been my most popular:

I know exactly why it has gotten all that attention. One of the re-tweets was @poisonedpen and that put it in front of a lot of people. Poisoned Pen Bookstore has almost seven thousand followers on Twitter. Given time we can get more tweets in front of more people. Eventually some might join in.

One final thought - after Tuesday’s election, I’m starting to wish I had suggested my other idea for a hashtag - #WarmFuzzyTwitter. The idea behind that one would have been to spread kind and supportive words throughout Twitter and encourage others to do the same. A hashtag like that could be helpful to a lot of people any time, but right now especially. Small joys keep us going in dark times. I thought it was too silly to share, but now it doesn't feel quite so silly.

The Dark Side of Social Media

Today we have a critical response to When Online Shaming Spirals out of Control TED Talk , an academic blog post for #engl211.

In this TED Talk, Jon Ronson claims that Twitter was originally “a place of radical de-shaming” where the voiceless found a powerful voice. He argues that this was good, but it evolved into something terrible. A few tweets that picked up momentum could make a giant corporation realize that people are watching and they aren’t going to get away with being heartless or evil. From giving the voiceless a voice, Twitter evolved into a place where people didn’t just keep corporations from being evil, but also went after people who are perceived to have had and abused privilege.

Ronson supports his assertion with two examples. The first was pop science writer Jonah Lehrer. After being caught faking quotes, self-plagiarizing (re-using prior material without noting it was from prior work), and plagiarizing the work of others. Mr. Lehrer had a speaking engagement that would give him the opportunity to apologize for his intellectual misconduct. The foundation that he spoke before set up two screens with Twitter feeds, one that the audience could see and another that he could see while he was making his speech.

The people watching the live streamed event made comments to and about Mr. Lehrer on Twitter while he was speaking. Seeing a privileged white man make a speech about his poor decision making brought out some of the ugliness of the online world.  

With the help of a stapler and a conveniently placed down arrow key, I scrolled down in the #infoneeds feed to the day of the speech. The comments that are there now are mostly not that bad. I understand that people can delete tweets and a bunch of negative comments may have been deleted. However, the overall tone of it now is a bit of negativity with a lot of reasonable tweets and the occasional reminder to be civil.

I have to admit that although it is ugly to have a man apologizing for getting caught in a pattern of journalistic misconduct while surrounded by a Twitter feed that contains a number of negative comments, I find it hard to sympathize with him. His intellectual dishonesty benefited him and he was apologizing because he was caught. If he had to be uncomfortable while apologizing, I’m sure the $20K honorarium that he received for his speech was a comfort. I find it interesting that a Knight Foundation post the day after Mr. Lehrer’s speech says that they regret paying him a speaking fee.

While the story of Jonah Lehrer is indeed an example of online shaming, I think Ronson could have found many better examples to support his argument. That may be why he spent more time on the second example which is much stronger.

Justine Sacco, a PR professional with a small following on Twitter, made a stupid ugly tweet while traveling. One of her followers sent that tweet to a journalist with many followers and a massive Twitter storm ensued. Being a woman on the Internet is far more dangerous than being a man, and the kinds of responses she got for a moment of indiscretion were terrible. As Ronson says:

Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus."

I was on Twitter when the Justine Sacco Twitter storm hit. I remember seeing this woman’s name pop up in my feed and thinking that her tweet was terrible. I wondered if she was really that racist and ignorant or if it was somehow supposed to be a joke that just didn’t make sense to me. I remember being shocked that a PR professional could come up with such a tweet.

Having watched the Justine Sacco Twitter storm play out in real time, I can only agree with what Ronson says about mob behavior on Twitter. It starts out small with disbelief and shock that quickly turns to anger and personal threats. The more people talk about something like this, the more likely it is that someone will say something negative. Negative tweets bounce around the echo chamber and can lead to horrible threats.

This was a valuable talk on a difficult reality of social media. Ronson makes solid points and supports them well with real life examples. In the after talk he notes that it is important to stand up for people who are being shamed so that there’s a “babble of voices” instead of straight negativity. He suggests this, knowing that standing up for the target of a Twitter mob makes you a target too. He suggests this as a way to keep the Internet from turning into a place where fear silences us.

The Internet is an ugly place. If you make a mistake that goes viral, it can literally ruin your life. Both of the people Ronson used as examples were eventually able to start over, but the recovery process is long and difficult. Ronson ends his talk with a call to action. Don’t let the Internet turn into a place where we give up our voices to survive.

News and Social Media

And here we have another academic blog post for English 211G. The mission - write a critical response to The Facebook Effect on the News.

In this Atlantic Monthly article from February 2014, Derek Thompson argues that in 2013 claiming that Facebook and Twitter were the Internet’s new homepages might have been a nearly original observation, but in 2014, such a statement had become fact.

Thompson supports this argument by noting that traffic from homepages had dropped across many websites while traffic from social media dramatically increased. He includes a supporting graph showing that in December 2011, Google and Facebook sent near equal numbers of clicks to the Buzzfeed network. By December 2013, Facebook’s share of the traffic was more than three times that of Google's.

Do we want news or cat pictures?

From that foundation, he goes on to consider the question of what kinds of stories do people click on from Facebook. He notes that The Atlantic’s most successful Facebook stories ‘aren’t news-pegged’ but are “what journalists call ‘evergreen’ stories”. Evergreen stories aren’t about recent events. They are about subjects of ongoing interest such as happiness, dieting, and decision making. He notes that these are stories of the sort that Upworthy specializes in and that Upworthy was definitely enjoying an abundance of clicks from Facebook pages.

Thompson points out that Facebook’s News Feed isn’t really a news feed at all. As Thompson says it can be better described as an entertainment portal. He cites a 2013 Pew study that fewer that half of Facebook users ever even read news on Facebook and only 10 percent log into Facebook specifically to see news.

To support this observation Thompson supplies Top 20 lists of Twitter’s top stories in 2013, the Top 20 most searched stories for 2013, and Buzzfeed’s Top 20 most viral stories. The Buzzfeed stories being the ones most clicked on from Facebook. Based on those lists, Twitter seems to be a blend of news and evergreen stories, heavily skewed towards entertainment news. The most searched stories are much more strongly focused on news stories. The Facebook (Buzzfeed viral) stories are largely entertainment and evergreen stories.

Cats can be awfully cute.

He goes on to claim that the primary difference between Facebook and older forms of entertainment is that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation”. This is the first statement in the article that I have to disagree with. I can’t actually recall how the News Feed was in 2014, but it currently is only somewhat based on your activity. Yes, we do choose our friends and how we interact with our friends’ posts, but that only gives us the illusion of creating our own News Feed.

I can think of at least one reported instances of Facebook manipulating News Feeds:

Facebook Tinkers With User’s Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry

Even when not manipulating the New Feed actively, the Facebook algorithm exercises a great deal of control over what we are shown. Follow someone and interact with every single post that appears in your News Feed and Facebook still won’t show you all of their posts. Follow a page and it is even worse. Facebook wants page owners to pay for advertising and limits how many of their followers see each post organically.

Me? I prefer dog pictures.

While we can certainly influence what we see on Facebook, we do not create our own News Feeds. Although I disagree that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation” I do agree that it does indicate users’ preferences.

All in all, Thompson’s article was worth reading and very appropriate to this class. He highlights one of the major differences between social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other means of getting information from the Web. I found it interesting that Twitter usage skewed more towards news seeking than Facebook usage. I would have thought that the shorter format of Twitter would not encourage that. It shouldn’t have surprised me though. Even though I follow mostly authors and publishing related people on Twitter, I still see a ton of news come through my feed.

What do you think? Do you know anyone who’s Facebook (or Twitter) feed is all news all the time?

Author Blogs

Today I’d like to share with you some of my favorite author blogs. Most SFF authors have websites. The author website is a marketing device. Share a bit of information about the author with the readers so that the readers can feel closer to the author. Readers get attached and the author sells more books.

Visiting an author's site is a great way to learn more about that author. An author's site will usually have a brief bio for the author, information about the author’s books and series, and information about upcoming appearances.

Some authors also maintain a blog on their website. I am far more likely to visit an author’s website multiple times if they have a blog. The blogs are generally what draws me to their sites and keeps me coming back. The information on the rest of the site can be useful, but the blogs are what makes it worth the visit for me.

Five author blogs that I love to read, in alphabetical order by author name:

Aaron/ Bach, Rachel

Pretentious Title: Official Writing Blog of SFF Author Rachel Aaron/Bach

On strategy that authors may use to help give readers a clear idea of what kind of book they are about to pick up is to use different pseudonyms for different styles of writing. Rachel Aaron signals to the reader that the book is fantasy. Rachel Bach signals to the reader that the book is science fiction. Her blog generally deals with topics related to writing and the business of writing. The posts might be written by Rachel or her husband Travis and I generally learn something from reading them.

Cole, Myke

mykecole.com

Myke Cole’s blog contains a variety of posts from contests to soul searching. He sometimes speaks out about things he feels strongly about. His language is not always safe for work, but his posts are always worth reading.

Dawson, Delilah S.

whimsydark

Delilah S. Dawson posts mostly about writing and being a professional writer. She also shares bits of her life on her blog. Many of her blog posts come in the form of Storified Twitter sequences where she shares writing advice with her followers.

Hearne, Kevin

Writer’s Grove

Kevin Hearne’s Writer’s Grove is a mix of posts about his work, appearances, and things he geeks out about. Although I do like to keep up on his work, I think my favorite posts of his are the ones where he’s geeking out about something. I also love it when he posts reviews of books by other authors. It is always good to see authors supporting other authors and his reviews are fun to read.

Wendig, Chuck

Terrible Minds

The vast majority of Chuck Wendig’s blog posts are not safe for work. His use of language can be creatively colorful or just downright crude. His writing advice is generally awesome though and well worth reading if the language won’t trouble you.

Do you know of any awesome author blogs that we should check out? Share your favorites in the comments!

Academic Post for English 211G

Academic Post: Critical Response to Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed

My first reaction to the article linked above was that Danah Boyd sure likes to use big words. Luckily she used all those big words well. Nothing makes me crankier than a writer who just has to use big words but then doesn't use them properly. Also, as this is an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal it is not inappropriate to use higher level vocabulary and/or jargon. I just hold a personal prejudice that authors who are exceptionally fond of big words tend to be worried more about sounding smart than about communicating clearly.

My second reaction was almost as snarky as my first. Where are the citations? As noted above, this is an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.  Even an expression of opinion and call to action in a scholarly journal is typically backed up by citing relevant work.

Quibbles about writing style aside, the author offers several thoughts that sound reasonable to me. It describes social media as “a set of tools, practices, and ideologies” developed by “folks who had grown up with Usenet and BBSes, email and AOL’s instant messenger” who wanted to create tools to  “take community and communication to the next level” (Boyd 2015). From what we’ve learned in this class and other bits of information I’ve picked up along the way, I believe Boyd is correct here.

Boyd (2015) notes that “few who got online in the late 1990s and early 2000s moved past the user-friendly world of the web browser and easily configured email.” Although I’ve slept since then, I do remember all but the staunchest computer geeks moving to near exclusive use of web browsers and more user-friendly email systems in the late ‘90s.

I may smile with nostalgia when faced with a command line interface, but I suspect that many of my classmates would be traumatized. It’s not that they couldn’t figure out how to use older computer systems. It’s just that they’ve never had to work in that kind of environment. User interfaces have changed drastically since the first computers I played with. Most of my classmates have never heard the sound of a dial-up modem except maybe in a movie.

Boyd (2015)  argues that “social media emerged as the new paradigm for connecting to information, people, and ideas.” This is another statement that I have to agree with. The amount of interconnection that social media allows between people dramatically changed the way we share information and ideas. Now we are a society of too much information. People need filters just to find what they need from the grand mass of available information.

The article concludes with a call to analyze social media as a phenomenon important to “contemporary digital life” around the world. I agree that social media is a phenomenon of growing importance to our world and therefore definitely worth studying.

P.S. In the informal writing of a blog post, a link back to work under discussion is generally considered more than sufficient as a reference. Just for fun, here's a formal citation of article being discussed.

References

Boyd, D. (2015). Social media: A phenomenon to be analyzed. Social Media Society, 1(1). doi:10.1177/2056305115580148