Virality on Twitter: the #welovethenhs trending topic

If you happened to catch my previous post, you may have been wondering what had prompted Britain to start defending the NHS on Twitter.

Well, Dave Cushman (Disclosure – friend and former colleague), has a nice summary of the factors he feels were involved in the creation and spread of #welovethenhs.

They include the fact that something many people cared about was attacked, it’s a belief that could be shared by many people who had been emotionally affected, and the tools etc were really quick and simple to use to get involved.

It did have a small bit of celebrity involvement from British comedy writer Graham Linehan, but I suspect this trend had it’s own momentum.

Of course, as a further postscript to the image from my previous post – within the same day Les Paul had died

Dave also raised the issue of how newspapers and organisations feel odd when they’re reporting on Twitter – as I wrote before, this is the stage where we finally accept that TV, Radio, Internet and Mobile have made print-based newspapers into paper archives. There’s still a place for them, but if you were able to study the numbers of people discovering breaking news of a specific event on Twitter, for example, and compared that with those seeing it for the first time, I would be that one is increasing almost as fast as the other is falling. And that is without considering how many people would hear about the event, e.g. Michael Jackson dying, from friends/colleagues/family before they got near a newspaper.

Paying followers on Twitter – Ellen offers $1000

If you’re thinking about paying to increase your number of Twitter followers, you may have to increase your offer after Ellen DeGeneres announced she would randomly reward one follower with $1000.

The offer came as part of winning ‘Choice Twit’ in the Teen Choice Awards, and was not only hinted at on Twitter, but was also broadcast on air and confirmed on her blog.

image

Only one thing springs to mind in the rush to add @TheEllenShow and joining the 2,784,700 potential winners – was it a conscious decision to avoid using a hashtag and going for a trending topic to attract new followers?

Paying followers on Twitter – Ellen offers $1000

If you’re thinking about paying to increase your number of Twitter followers, you may have to increase your offer after Ellen DeGeneres announced she would randomly reward one follower with $1000.

The offer came as part of winning ‘Choice Twit’ in the Teen Choice Awards, and was not only hinted at on Twitter, but was also broadcast on air and confirmed on her blog.

image

Only one thing springs to mind in the rush to add @TheEllenShow and joining the 2,784,700 potential winners – was it a conscious decision to avoid using a hashtag and going for a trending topic to attract new followers?

Interesting use of a Twitterfeed to make money

It’s not exactly engagement or interaction, but women’s online publishing and advertising network Glam has been using a widget which allows manual editing of the Twitter feed around an event to ensure the content is suitable for advertisers (From Venturebeat).

The widget is available throughout the Glam network, and to third-party publishers, who receive a cut of any revenue. And soon even publishers outside the network will be able to receive micropayments via Paypal.

It’s a traditional model, but one which appears to have worked, at least for the #Oscars.

But it suffers from the traditional problem of display advertising – in which the amount of eyeballs doesn’t always translate to the amount of people actively clicking on an advert. Although the sponsorship in this case was for a skincare company, which is likely to appeal to a female-targetted content network, would positioning it next to Oscar content give it relevancy or credibility?

And what does it mean for people who use Twitter hashtags without the knowledge that another party may profit from them?

After all, they were originally used to collate information for aggregating information about fires in San Diego, and have since been used for collating conversation around disasters like #Mumbai along with mainstream entertainment and sporting events.

It raises the eternal content question of the internet – should aggregators be able to collect all the revenue without compensating the content creators?