Trolls don’t just tweet

Trolling was once known as a simple fishing technique yet today the term is entwined in a tangled net of abuse, challenges to freedom of speech and questions of morality. In a contemporary context, a ‘troll’ is someone who posts vitriolic messages and images in various online environments with the intention of provoking or mocking others.

Public relations practitioners have an interest in this issue as protecting and enhancing the reputation of others is a major part of the job. However, the courts and law enforcement are increasingly becoming involved.

In June this year, an important legal decision by the High Court forced the social media site, Facebook to surrender the IP addresses and details of a woman’s online abusers. Earlier in March, troll Liam Stacey was jailed for fifty six days for inciting racial hatred on Twitter stemming from his comments about football player Patrice Muamba who was fighting for his life in hospital. With the maximum sentence for inciting racial hatred carrying seven years – the same amount of time you can serve for carrying a loaded gun in a public place – it demonstrates how serious shooting your mouth off online can be, and the need to be mindful of the explosive effects of words.

Extreme cases have even occurred where trolling has been used to target and cyber bully the vulnerable. In some instances, the combination of bullying and trolling has forced a few young people to take their own lives. Celebrities are not exempt from these attacks; pop starlet Cher Lloyd recently explained her constant fear of online abusers on the BBC programme Panorama. Presenter Richard Bacon also led his own documentary The Anti-Social Network looking into his personal experiences with the morbid world of trolling.

Very recently author and journalist Grace Dent found herself on the receiving end of a troll attack on Twitter. The situation sparked great media attention when it turned out that the troll in question worked for a PR company Dent claimed to be in business with. Needless to say, Dent did not take kindly to being disparaged online by a complete stranger and threatened to have her troller sacked. Grace’s response can’t really be faulted given the cowardly nature of the attack by a not so anonymous troller. In fact her actions have been met with much praise in the media and by fellow celebrities.

And so, the anti- troll bandwagon trundles along picking-up celebs keen to exert their right not to be criticised, yet many need to look at their own behaviour. Grace Dent is not impartial to making judgmental commentary about individuals and celebrities she doesn’t know personally; in fact she recently described columnist Samantha Brick as ‘creepy’ in her column for the Independent. Dent would likely argue ‘fair comment’ whilst a person less thick skinned than Samantha Brick may well claim ‘trolling’.

Being horrible about other people, including members of an audience, makes up much of the material of stand up comedians. Anyone who’s been to a comedy club can retell a story about the complete annihilation of an unfortunate audience member done ‘for a laugh.’ Nobody- least of all the comedian- ever takes a moment to consider how their mocking has affected that individual. Leigh Francis- famous for his 2002 programme ‘Bo Selecta’ and more recently appearance as the character ‘Keith Lemmon’- based much of his TV show around a caricature of the celebrity singer Craig David. At first the show was taken in good humour by Craig David, but after two years and five series understandably, it got a bit much with Craig detailing how inside it was absolutely ‘pissing’ him off and hurtful beyond belief. When questioned about Craig David, Francis shirks all responsibility claiming the sketch was a joke and insinuating Craig was being too sensitive.

With this in mind it is quite difficult to empathise with celebrity comedians such as Isobel Fay who recently wrote a sketch song called “Thank You Hater” based on her trolling experiences. Although incredibly entertaining, well written, well produced and with an important message, comedians need to understand that if they’re going to take the higher ground they must ensure they’re on solid ground.

Everyone communicating in public whether on TV, radio, news papers or online must understand that words have power and can hurt. Humour, criticism and straight up abuse lie very close to the same fulcrum.

As with many tales containing monsters, goblins and trolls this one ends with the monster being persecuted- or in this case prosecuted- and rightly so. Their vicious ways plague society. But trolling isn’t confined to the internet; vitriolic abuse of others- effectively a form of bullying- is practiced everyday by public figures as well as seemingly anonymous internet trolls.

If you can’t say anything nice, you’re just an ugly, warty troll with no friends. And you need to get back under the bridge you came from.

LinkedIn Users Loving Twitter Breakup

More than three out of five LinkedIn users (61 per cent) say their experience of the business networking service is now “better” or “much better” since their connections’ Twitter updates were removed from their live stream. The poll, carried out by Parker Wayne & Kent Public Relations, also shows that younger LinkedIn users were more likely to be in favour of the change. 

In June 2012, Twitter announced that tweets would no longer sync with LinkedIn streams, severing the two and a half year partnership between the companies. Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content Products at LinkedIn, said the split stemmed from Twitter’s “evolving platform efforts”, suggesting a push in efforts by the micro-blog giant to channel consumers back to its own site.

According to Michael Sippey, Product Team Director at Twitter, some of Twitter’s new features, such as expandable tweets, were not visible on LinkedIn. He noted in a company blog post that “[users] need to be able to see expanded Tweets and other features that make Twitter more engaging and easier to use. These are the features that make Twitter Twitter.”

Whilst many may have expected this backtracking move to be met with objection by social media users, poll responses suggest otherwise. Of the 300 voters who participated in the poll on LinkedIn, just 11 per cent of voters feel that it has become “worse” or “much worse” while 28 per cent maintain that their experience of the site remains unchanged by the split.

Many assume that younger people are the most hungry for social media updates from every platform, yet the results of the poll prove that those in a younger age bracket appreciate the split most. Of the voters whose birthday is logged with LinkedIn, users in the 18-36 year old bracket showed a significant tendency to say that their experience has been improved.

When the partnership between the two social media sites began in 2009, the syncing of streams was set to boost the number of younger users on LinkedIn. In return, Twitter was to gain increased exposure to LinkedIn’s fast-expanding user base. The sync appealed to users as it allowed CEOs and employees on LinkedIn networks to provide real-time updates to their connections.

However, the poll revealed that the general sentiment once tweet updates were removed was one of relief. Participants said that having LinkedIn activity streams filled with tweets became a nuisance. Where many Twitter users may update every hour or so, LinkedIn users might only update their statuses once a week. The result was that carefully put together LinkedIn updates were swamped by a mass of tweets. One user commented, “The tweets on LinkedIn were akin to spam mail, rarely having anything to do with professional networking”. Another user commented “it is too bad that this feature was abused by so many”, whilst one referred to the tweets on LinkedIn as “pointless rambling”.

Senior Public Relations professional at Parker, Wayne & Kent, Richard Bell, said “If social media sites are going to collaborate successfully, there needs to be a way to filter what is relevant for the different sites and for the different users. Syncing updates across all social networks makes the content untargeted to each networks’ communities and users’ various groups of connections. The time-poor business community wants focused content with a personality on LinkedIn; Facebook users want deeper personal information from people they’ve met; Twitter users want information, recommendations and short comment from strangers as well as friends.”

It is still possible for LinkedIn updates to broadcast to Twitter. When posting a status on LinkedIn, clicking the ‘Share on Twitter’ button beneath the text box will permit the status to appear on Twitter feeds.
The results of the poll here. 

News you might have missed during the Olympics

One message pervaded the British media over the first 2 weeks of August 2012 - with a particular emphasis during the 6th - 12th August. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic's “inspire a generation” message was unmissable, dutifully mentioned in a mass of media articles - whether news or feature; print, broadcast or online - and expressed by presenters, interviewers and journalists as well as interviewees. It was a veritable cut-and-paste of key messages during a largely manufactured public euphoria surrounding the Olympics TV event. The last time a phrase was so eagerly taken up by the media was probably in 2001 - when a war was declared on an abstract concept - has media coverage been so on-message. “The War on Terror” message was adopted by the media as much as it was proffered by politicians. 

The dominant PR actor during August has been the Olympics and Team GB. In terms of actual content consumed, BBC Sports reported the highest viewing figures in the history of the UK for the Olympics; 51.9 million UK viewers saw at least 15 minutes of the Games – equivalent to 90 per cent of the UK population. Such content generation provided an unrivaled vehicle for key message delivery. Excellent media training of the Team GB athletes ensured that the key message was at the core of every interview.

The media committed a vast amount of space and air time to the Olympics, but for most other PR actors - whether businesses, not for profits or even governments - it's been difficult or impossible to attract journalists’ attention with news that’s not centred around running, jumping, throwing or rowing. 

Now that the Games are out of the way though, journalists suddenly have a lot of spare pages and airtime to fill, and are hungry for news. Understanding the media agenda is crucial to securing coverage, and a vital element of PR planning. Big events like the Olympics are bound to dominate the media agenda and so block opportunities for editorial coverage of other PR actors. Organisations that have planned well avoided conducting any PR activity over the period. However, the world hasn’t stopped. Big events and noteworthy news were taking place  over the last few weeks. Here’s just a selection of things you might have missed:

• Kofi Annan resigns as special UN envoy to Syria – Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations resigned his position as special envoy to Syria during the first week of the Games. The author of the UN’s six point peace plan for Syria blamed his resignation on “finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council” in a letter to the Financial Times. Annan closed his letter by asking “is ours an international community that will act in defence of the most vulnerable of our world, and make the necessary sacrifices to help?"

• NASA lands mobile laboratory Curiosity on Mars – NASA succeeded in shooting Curiosity – a roving, robotic, self-contained laboratory on wheels that is roughly the size of a Mini Cooper – to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour. The craft travelled a distance of 570 million kilometres and successfully landed in a circle approximately 20 kilometres wide. This is a distance that would take Usain Bolt – the fastest man who has ever lived – 1,459 years to travel, even at his top speed of 44.72km/h. Curiosity was sent to Mars to analyse the planet’s geology in an attempt to ascertain whether it could have once supported life. It’s nuclear powered, on Twitter and has posted several images from the surface of Mars. Yet it secured only one line on the BBC News front page, and the touchdown in the red sand of Mars was several pages behind Greg “Ginger Wizard” Rutherford’s arrival in the long-jump sand.

• UN Global Arms Conference dissolved – On the day of the Opening Ceremony, watched by 900 million people worldwide, a UN Global Arms Conference was quietly shelved without resolution. The conference had hoped to hammer out a treaty to prevent the sale of weapons to nations under arms embargoes, or to those who would use them to “promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.” The treaty has been supported by humanitarian charities including Amnesty International and Oxfam. However, the US, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea all asked for more time to deliberate, and it is unlikely that discussions will continue until after the US elections in November. This means that, according to Oxfam, it is still easier export AK-47s than bananas.

• Rebekah Brooks and six former News International staff charged over phone hacking – Former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks was formally charged with phone hacking (following the CPS's statement of intent weeks before) and importantly had court dates set. Brooks faces up to two years in prison alongside David Cameron’s former spin doctor Andy Coulson and five other former News of the World journalists. Brooks is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in September 2012, while the other seven accused will be heard earlier, at the same court, in August 2012.

• French Central Bank predicts slide into recession – France’s central bank (Banque de France) said it expected the country’s GDP to fall 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2012.  This marks the first time the country has officially been in recession since spring 2009.While this news compounds the ignominy of being roundly beaten in the medal tables by Team GB athletes, the UK itself was not immune. The economy continued to suffer as the Bank of England cut its growth prediction to near zero. However, in the wake of the overwhelming wave of optimism and positivity that swept the country over the Olympic period, this gloomy economic prediction was widely ignored.

• Rory McIlroy sweeps US PGA as Tiger lags – In our opinion, sports reporting isn't really news, but a record breaking is. Far from the madding crowds of the Olympics, golfer Rory McIlroy was quietly reclaiming his title as world number one. McIlroy, from Holywood in Northern Ireland, won the US PGA by a record-breaking eight shots – one more than previous record holder, Jack Nicklaus, set in 1980. Despite the fact that golf, along with rugby sevens, will be in Rio’s 2016 Olympics, coverage of one of the world’s biggest golf tournaments was pushed from both front and back pages by the Games.

• Magic Mike mix-up – A children’s entertainer from Scarborough, stage name Magic Mike, has discovered the hard way that all publicity is not necessarily good publicity. Following the UK release of Steven Soderburgh film Magic Mike, which features Channing Tatum as the titular character – a male stripper. The entertainer – real name Michael DeFreitas – has been receiving inquiries from confused punters seeking “adult entertainment.” Mr DeFreitas has expressed his bemusement and worries about the mix up, stressing that he has never taken a stitch off but is now unsure whether his audience will feature “screaming women or screaming kids.”

Nobody reads the papers for the adverts. They read it for the content – the news, the features, the interviews. But for the first two weeks of August in 2012, almost all of coverage in the UK was Olympic Games related.

While media dominating events can be planned for, circumstances can occasionally conspire to create a media storm that drowns out everything else. On 11^th September, 2001, only one thing was on the media agenda, and no product, release or event could hope to secure coverage for several weeks.

Some things are impossible to plan for, but events like the Olympics shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone planning a PR campaign. With careful planning, companies can avoid conducting PR activity during big, scheduled events such as the Olympics that are likely to dominate the media agenda. Instead, they should use the downtime to develop collateral and to schedule media relations activity for a more opportune moment. Ideally just before the media dominating event is over. The quicker off the mark you are to fill the resultant news deficit, the more likely you are to achieve coverage. 

Picture Perfect Data

They’re eye-catching, they’re informative and they’re easy to absorb. From maps depicting literacy rates across the world, to graphical comparisons of Starbucks coffee and McDonalds, successful infographics have permeated all aspects of contemporary media. They are concise, aesthetically appealing images which convey otherwise-daunting information in a way which is clear and accessible for the reader. But the key word here is ‘successful’. An attention-grabbing infographic is a valuable PR asset that enhances media coverage. Yet one which is too light on visual appeal or too heavy on information will fast lose readers and consequently, interest in your brand’s messages.

Infographics are not a recent invention. Although advances in technology have allowed them to modernise, infographics have held a staple role in media communication for hundreds of years. The weather map began as a chart depicting anticyclone patterns in the middle of the 19^th century. It has evolved into the finely tailored, animated infographic that we see on a daily basis on television. When presented online, the weather map is often interactive.   

Tim Frick, Author of best-selling social media and marketing book Return on Engagement said, “In this age of micro blogging and two-second sound bites, almost no one has the attention span, or time, to read more than a few sentences.”  Infographics provide a solution to this modern-day obstacle as they offer more detail than a photograph, and convey information faster than a video.  

Infographics improve media relations results as they offer variation from simple black and white text, helping to grasp the reader’s attention. They ensure that the communication of data, such as survey results and statistics, becomes more pleasurable as well as providing a vehicle for displaying company branding, corporate colours, messages and even company logos.

Social media also enables such infographics to be communicated virally. Making sure that an infographic is easy to share online by incorporating a ‘share’ link is imperative. Additionally, the images must be mobile phone and tablet friendly, and display effectively across social media platforms.

Poorly executed infographics are not only pointless, they can be damaging to a brand. A common error is to overwhelm the viewer with too much text, making the subject matter appear complex and boring – the exact opposite of what brands seek to achieve when using infographics. The principal purpose of creating these images is to condense information and present it in an easy-to-understand manner. The main ideas in the image should be accessible at a glance.  Information must be ‘bite-sized’. A picture should paint a thousand words, not contain a thousand words. An excess of text in the infographic will swamp the reader’s eye and make the key points difficult to decipher. Even if the media covers it, if media consumers stop viewing the infographic, it has failed its purpose and is simply a waste of money.

Every pie chart and bar graph comes with a key explaining the information presented, just as every map is printed with a legend listing and explaining the symbols used. Likewise, successful infographics help viewers to understand the data displayed. This is why infographics can work so well in PR when pitched with a press release. When an infographic is accompanied by an article, the text delivers expert comment and insight, while the infographic compellingly conveys the data. As a result, the main body of the text does not detract from the clear and concise presentation of the infographic, but adds value to the image. The consumer is given detailed content and varied presentation, which makes the information more interesting.

Aesthetics play a key role in the anatomy of any infographic. Generally speaking, the brain enjoys looking at colour and graphics more than plain text, so make use of this by employing colours which are friendly on the eye. The task that remains is retaining the reader’s attention once it has been attracted. Avoid deterring readers with difficult-to-read fonts. Too much complexity confuses the reader’s perceptions and makes understanding the infographic a chore. Structuring the image in the form of a flowchart is a popular way to guide the reader through the information that’s being presented. Simply using arrows, for example, helps to create a visual flow of data and represents a clear process.

One innovative infographic that deserves its social media acclaim is designer Rufus Blacklock's video infographic depicting the history of the Formula 1 car. This clip transports the viewer through 62 years of engineering in just 60 seconds, showing how the F1 car has evolved into its contemporary form. The visual effects, accessibility and soundtrack appeal to a demographic of viewers far beyond car-racing industry specialists. This resulted in Blacklock’s work being shared and placed on other sites including the BBC’s Top Gear website, proving just how successful a well thought through infographic can be.

This is not to say, however, that the recent surge in popularity of the infographic has gone without criticism. Some might see it as a representation of modern-day laziness, claiming that the simplification of data has become necessary to cater for our short attention spans.

But regardless of opinion, the use of infographics has revolutionised the transmission of information. Some even overcome the obstacle of language barriers – the map of the London underground, for example – as images are universal in language. The infographic is an invaluable tool for communication across sectors.  Not only does it create visual interest, it increases amounts of coverage, offers greater opportunity for brands to be displayed in the media and facilitates the understanding of complex subjects.

If you’d like help creating infographics for your company, don’t hesitate to get in touch at uk@pwkpr.com.