Schelling points and football chants

Communication, Schelling points and the football.

I go to the football. I go regularly and like to sing and jump up and down.

When I was a child I would occasionally go to the football with my step dad and brother . From my seat I can still see the space where we used to stand as a kid and happily (for I am a Norwich fan), I can still hear the same songs we sang all those years ago (for those not in the know Norwich has the oldest football song in the world - the glorious ‘On the Ball City!’ – containing reference to having ‘a little scrimmage, a practise which disappeared from association football many many many years ago). I digress.

At the beginning of each match, an echoey voice crackles over the speaker system and counts the faithful down into their fortnightly rendition of ‘On the ball’ – it is one of my favourite moments in life.

Like many people I wonder in awe at football songs. Where they come from, how they spread, how it is that an individual can be singled out and a song composed in their honour (or detriment) within seconds of an incident. Football is a wonder.

Thomas Schelling is also a wonder, though he is not a football.



Thomas Schelling on the cover of his book



Thomas Schelling is a Nobel winning economist, strategist and game theory guru, after whose work is named ‘the Schelling point’. For those not in the know, a Schelling point is really useful. It describes a position which people will tend to adopt in the absence of communication. A Shelling ‘moment’ is the instant where a group of people act as one, in the same way without overt communication.

What in the world is Tony on about, I hear you cry (it’s not an uncommon sound).

There is a moment in every football loving adolescent’s life when he decides to hitch up his trousers, lower his voice a few octaves and start his (or her) own chant. Without the right conditions, this process is almost certainly doomed to failure. I know I’ve tried.

Chants I have failed to start:

·         ‘Your team’s irrelevant’ – to some Italian opera tune that is impossible to describe if you are typing and don’t know its name

·         ‘Come on ref that’s preposterous!’ – To the tune of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’

Chants I have joined in with and quite like:

·         ‘We’ve got more salt than you’ – aimed at the 30 or so Cardiff fans who were able to make the treck from Wales in during the big freeze a couple of years ago.

·         ‘It could have been you (oh Sammy Klingan!)’ – which the other three Norwich fans out there will get, aimed at a player who left Norwich upon our relegation to league 1 two years ago… sung on the final day, two years later, of the season that saw us promoted back to the Premier league.

·         ‘We shoot bur-ga-lars, say we shoot bur-ga-lars’ in reference to Tony Martin, a Norfolk farmer imprisoned for shooting burglars. Usually sung at Liverpool, Hull or West Ham fans.

·         ‘Ooo, arrrgh lets be avin yer!’ sung in honour of our delightful patron Delia, and her bibo centric activities.

·         Numerous, far from savoury anti Ipswich numbers which I will not repeat here.

The point is that they are all funny, clever (I think), erupt spontaneously, and suddenly spread to engulf a crowd. Their inception is a Schelling moment, where unbidden 26 odd thousand supporters suddenly erupt into song unbidden by pre-training or communication. It is, as I say, a wonderful thing.

 Why am I talking about this?

Firstly Schelling didn’t develop the theory to describe football songs, he was (amongst other things) talking about riots…

Why a riot kicks off is a difficult thing to say, but it is usually set aflame by a Schelling event. This is normally a window being smashed (since they are visual, potent symbols of rebellion and make a lot of noise – which means crowd members not in the line of sight hear about them).

Now for a Schelling event to take place, there are normally any number of other factors in place. All of which add up to people being primed. I offer two examples:

In a riot:

·         People turn up with the expectation that something will happen.  (Expectation)

·         There are generally far fewer authority figures than crowd members. (Empowerment – or a sense of it)

·         Signals are given off between crowd members (nervousness, defensive clothing, common/group language etc…)(Behavioural cues)

·         There is an underlying sense of dissatisfaction (not always about the target of the action) (Emotion)

At the football

·         There is expectation that there will be a good singsong (Expectation)

·         The crowd assumes authority (Empowerment)

·         Common clothing, commonly understood banter, nerves, posturing  etc are shared (Behavioural cues)

·         A prevailing sense your relation to the team e.g. D0isappointment, Excitement, Pride (Emotion)

I think this is interesting.

When we plan campaigns that encourage people to influence each other, or indeed when we plan a campaign that needs a bit of added oompf, we often look for a hook to build them round… something people do naturally.

Summer holidays, pre-Christmas, the football, the great British Sunday roast, Big brother…

Which is interesting.

I think we can learn lots by considering the common factors that prime for Schelling events.

·         How can we recreate the sense of anticipation at a football match?

·         How do we allow the audience to take control of a communication (rather than try to talk at them)? (authority point)

·         How do we use no bought channels to get them to share the communication (verbal and non-verbal) with each other (think about iPod earphones)?

As an aside, sponsorships aren’t normally sold on the basis that they allow people to communicate and act around common ground, but maybe they should be.

This weekend I will be attending Norwich City vs Stoke. The first game we have played in the top flight for 6 years. I am looking forward to the football so much that I can hardly think properly (which may account for the rambling nature of the above), but I am also looking forward to the Schelling point where after the countdown 27,000 fans (minus the away support), as one voice sing out our anthem.

On the ball city! (or OTBC as web savvy canaries like to say).

Love walls

I like those post-it walls.

For those of you who’ve not come across them yet, post-it or ‘Love’ walls are a response to the riots that hit London recently.

Areas affected by the riots now play host to walls on which locals have spontaneously stuck post-its, with simple heart-felt messages relating to the events.

As the BBC point out, there is generally nothing poetic or complex about these messages, just a simple ‘1 heart Croydon’ or ‘don’t burn my town’.

Some commentators have seen these walls as an analogue response to the way smart phones were used by the rioters – I think this is nonsense. To relate smart phones to rioting is like relating pagers to football hooligans. Sure these people used these channels, but they’re not somehow tools of evil. Smart phones were used in organising the clean up that followed the riots as well.

What is interesting, I think, is that people seem to be using post-its as a public way of communication. As a way of saying ‘I am a part of this community and I care’.

Over the years successive governments have legislated (explicitly an implicitly) to rip the hearts out of communities. As a result today, people feel alienated from public spaces and unempowered to connect with each other. Post-it walls are a way of reconnecting with community.

I gather that some libraries and museums are talking about preserving the love walls for the future. I think this is both lovely and amusing – there’s a part of me that finds the concept of putting short term outpourings on permanent display somehow artistic.

Mass influence, post riot political correctness and... yup communications.

I’m not for one minute defending them but...

I was chatting to a colleague of mine the other day and our conversation strayed, for a moment away from communications and on to the riots.

Over the past week of so I’ve noted that conversations of this type tend to follow a pattern:

·         What was your experience of the event (Experience).

·         Isn’t it awful (Empathy).

·         What’s your theory (Explanation).

Two people talking about things at work

Theories are then traded for a bit until a kind of nodding consensus descends on proceedings... Oh and empathy and experience often get switched around dependent on who you’re talking to and their connection to the event, (By the way, If I was trying to convince a client of something I’d probably re-order this type of chat, but there you go).

Anyway, once you get past the second (Empathy) bit of the conversation there is almost always a pause followed by one of two things; either an outright declamation against the rioters or (and here’s my point), this:

‘I’m not for one minute defending them, but...’

I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly because, most right minded people aren’t actually defending the acts of the rioters in London, but (and importantly), because we all feel under a tremendous amount of unspoken pressure from everyone else to behave in a certain way. Being seen to in any way defend anything to do with the riots is, currently, a massive taboo in English society.

Now I’m not for one minute saying the riots are anything like the death of Princess Diana... but I do remember quite clearly how, for a certain period after her death, if you did anything other than praise her as the princess of hearts you were shouted down by the mob. Come to think of it the same was true of Jade Goody too.

This is interesting for all kinds of reasons.

·         Mob (herd) mentality governs the way we think a lot more than we ever admit to.

·         This kind of influence can if we’re not very very careful, lead to dangerous actions based on ulterior motives or just bad thinking (think about the reactions of the main political parties to the rioting...).

·         It may well be the same mechanism that leads to otherwise ‘respectable’ people committing reprehensible acts in mob situations, that guides our thinking in the wake of such events.

There’s loads to be explored here, and when I get the chance I’ll have a proper think about it and try to write something more useful.

 Next up - what the new Premier League Football Season can teach us about mob entrepreneurialism. or 'Kick it off...'

Riots, stock market crashes... and metastable states.

Rioting. Very Nasty.

There’s been a lot in the news about rioting recently, and for good reason. It’s everywhere, and it’s very unpleasant.

London riot police

My own particular lowlights were:

• Seeing Mr Reeves Snr and Jnr of Croydon heartbroken by the devastation of their family business.
• Seeing the bus stop where I used to awkwardly wheel my (then) baby daughter to the pavement on fire in Ealing.
• Talking to a colleague whose local tube station was the centre of the Clapham disturbances last night.

The obvious thing to start talking about now is social networking, maybe drawing some parallels with the Arab Spring – at least in terms of how it has influences behaviour. I won’t do this. Everyone else will.

Instead I’d like to dwell for a moment on phase transitions.

A diagram

For those of you not in the know phase transitions are those things in physics when a substance turns from being in one state into being in another. Water into steam, butter into liquid, orange juice into refreshing lollipop etc.

Under normal circumstances substances tend to operate in equilibrium states. The obvious thing to do here is talk about water, but for fact lovers out there… mercury freezes at around -39 degrees c and boils at 357 degrees on the same scale… so below -39 solid is mercury’s equilibrium state, above 357 degrees it’s a gas and in between it’s the liquid that we all know and love.

However it is entirely possible for substances to persist in a state outside their equilibrium. Known as ‘Metastable’, And this is where things start to get interesting… Gas in a snow cloud for example can stay as a gas, or liquid in temperatures way below the point where water (or presumably mercury) would normally freeze.

The point here is that metastable states aren’t terribly stable. It just takes a little reaction (nucleation) to transform some of the uber cold gas or water into a solid and the whole cloud can suddenly change… And what you get is a snow storm.

Back to the riots…

…Or if you want another example, back to the recent stock market slump.

The theory then is that certain pockets of society are living in a state you could describe as metastable.

In general society people have a reasonable standard of living. They feel safe, happy, part of the bigger group and empowered. In certain areas – and particularly with youngsters in these areas this is not happening. They are in effect metastable.

All it takes is a nucleation and they all (all the rioters at least) spontaneously change.

I think this is a really good explanation of why the current riots (and the recent stock market slump) happened – or at least how they happened when they did.

Clearly this is not my thinking. It was pioneered by a chap called Phillip Ball, and then taken on as part of Mark Earl’s book on Herd theory.

I think it’s worth a look, or failing that it’s worth pondering its applications to marketing – which I think are considerable.

Meanwhile, on the ground I wish all concerned in sorting the rioting out the very best.

Consumers don't make decisions how you think they do

Consumers don’t make decisions how you think they do.

Or at the very least, most marketers don’t act like they understand how consumers make decisions.

sweets - kid in a candy store... see what I did there?

My wife is very intuitive… or at least that’s what she says when confronted by me telling her she hasn’t thought something through properly. I’m the type of person that over analyses everything.

I’ve often scoffed at ‘intuitive’ people who make decisions on gut feel …By all means make decisions based on rules you’ve perfected over years of practise but making decisions based on some emotional hunch is just plain scary.

Except, apparently, this is the way we all make decisions. We do not analyse everything objectively. We do not rationally consider all of the factors in our paths. We are all intuitive decision makers.

A while ago (‘02) Daniel Kahnemann won the Nobel Prize for economics for work he did into this area. In a nutshell he claims.

The first step in decision making is intuitive. We narrow the options based on rules of thumb we have taught ourselves, and occasionally gut feels.

We avoid the weirdo rocking strangely on the tube since we know unpredictability on the late night train is seldom a good thing. We avoid unlit alleyways. Turn down the ‘can’t lose’ money making scheme our unreliable mate presents us with. We choose a wine in a certain price bracket (often foolishly) etc etc. None of these decisions is thought through to the minuteist detail. We generalise.

The second step may sometimes be rational and considered. But this by no means happens all the time. Most of the time we just do stuff on gut instinct. I correct my balance when I get to the edge of a cliff, I pull the money out of my pocket to pay for a Big Mac blah blah blah.

What is interesting is that individuals often claim to have done things for certain reasons when actually they did nothing of the sort… they were driven by emotions and generalisations (Heurisms).

A lot of communications companies focus on the consumer journey these days – and well they should, the consumer should be at the heart of everything we do etc etc. But these consumer journeys are more often than not constructed from claimed rationalisation rather than actual emotional drivers.

I just think it’s worth a thought that maybe we should be building some emotion and generalisation into our models… and maybe start thinking about how these generalisations are formed.

Ho hum. I found it interesting anyway. 

Happiness and the caveman

There’s been a lot in the media recently about what makes people happy.

The government, and particularly the Prime Minister (UK) is driving the question and it seems to be causing a fair amount of controversy.

The argument goes thus:

Why are we fixated on the creation of wealth. The creation of wealth is assumed to make people happy… but what if it doesn’t. What if people are made happy by other things? Things like bank holidays and meals out. What if we’ve been concentrating on the wrong objective all these years.

One of the reasons the government is keen on this direction is so they can ask people what makes them happy, and in doing so make them think the government cares – it’s a good PR exercise. The other reason is that it seems to make some sense.

I was listening to some vox pops the other day on the lunchtime news, in which people were saying things like:

‘Lie ins make me happy’, ‘A good meal’, ‘My job’, ‘My family and friends’… etc etc.

What struck me was how like cave men (and women) they all sounded. None of the reasons cited were much different from those that might have been mustered by your average hole dweller (presumably with a few more ‘ugs’ (not the boot) and references to dry bear fur).

I mentioned this thought over breakfast today to find out that this has been known for years and that somehow I’d managed to overlook it. It was one of those theories you hear bandied around from time to time but never actually take the time to read. I subsequently read it.

So in a nutshell Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seems to tell us what we need to know:

Its good simple stuff and I am embarrassed to say I haven’t bothered to look into it before.

At the base you have your basic psychological stuff (Hunger, thirst etc) – these translate into ‘a nice meal makes me happy’, ‘I like a nice arm duvet’.

Then comes the safety stuff: ‘I like job security’, ‘I like a lie in’ (warm safe bed)…

Then there’s social needs: ‘I love my friends’, ‘I love my mobile phone’…

Then comes self esteem: ‘I like my job’, ‘I like being a good mum/dad’

Finally comes self actualisation: ‘I like completing things that make me feel good about myself’ (complex projects at work etc).

Essentially people climb the pyramid. Once you’ve achieved the bottom rung you move up to the second… etc. It all makes sense and explains quite a bit.

Now this is all pretty basic stuff and has moved on a bit since its conception (see ERG theory which allows you to be trying to achieve multiple levels of satisfaction at one time and blurs the boundaries between tiers), but you get my point.

There’s nothing new here. It’s just that no-one’s really bothered to think about it in policy terms before – oh and because it makes for good ‘honestly we are listening to your needs’ PR…

Two more thoughts I think I’ll come back to at some point:

1)      The rise of social networking, its fulfilment of the social need in the hierarchy and what this means for comm’s planning.

2)      A nice paragraph from the late great Douglas Adams – proving of course that there is nothing new here:

‘The planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.’

Twitter flatpack furniture instructions

I love great creative thinking, and it’s been a while since I’ve flagged any up. This one’s been tweeted for a bit but I thought it deserved its own little write up.

Tok&Stok were looking for a way to demonstrate the simplicity of their prepacked furniture…

What better way to do it then create instruction manuals in 140 characters of less. Enter the Twitter profile flatpack instruction manual. Ta da!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GorxdztVcI

Really nice and environmentally friendly too – each pack comes with a # rather than a booklet.

As I say simple, creative great.

If you haven’t seen it I thought you might like to. If you didn’t, fair enough that’s your call.

is FIFA a starfish or a spider?

I was watching BBC news earlier today with a chap from the federation of football supporters or some such being interviewed.

He was lending his weight to the controversy currently surrounding FIFA and was very much of the view that professional football doesn’t work without fans and professional organisations. Which I agree with. He ended his speech however by comparing what is happening at FIFA with what’s going on in North Africa – and there I had to leave him. It did get me thinking though…

One of my favourite sports books is ‘Football against the enemy’ which sets out as its founding principle that other than religion, football is the biggest mass participatory thing that humans do, and as such it is important. Very important. And I also think this is true.

To change course momentarily.

Something seems to have been very rotten in FIFA for a while. Something unpleasant certainly seems to be happening at the moment and it seems to be to the detriment of the beautiful game. Which is sad.

Yesterday a number of FIFA sponsors stood up and made a couple of vaguely strong worded statements about how FIFA really should get its house in order. The BBC’s point was that stronger conversations were presumably being had behind closed doors. Good.

It is not good enough that something so important to so many of us is run by (what seems to be) at best a highly secretive organisation.

One more digression.

Another book worth a read is called ‘the starfish and the spider’ it is about leaderless organisations and how if you cut the main part off a centralised unit (Spider), it stops working, whereas if you cut the main bit off a leaderless body (Starfish) it continues – and even grows into multiple bodies.

So here’s the point and the comparison between North Africa and Fifa that does stand discussion.

What sort of organisation is FIFA? Will cutting its head off (by which I stress I am only referring to removing Blatter from power), result in a different sort of organisation?

Libya, it is assumed, is a spider. Al Qaeda… is hopefully a spider but probably more of a Starfish.

FIFA because of its complex internal structures only answerable to its own members may well be a starfish… let’s hope not. Football is just too important to run on self interest.

Second tier sponsorships

I was driving past Carrow Road the other day, when I saw some tactical ads for the Barclay’s Premier league. In essence they were a nice little ‘welcome back’ to Norwich city and its fans in 48 and 6 sheet format, all bought in proximity to the football ground. All in all very nice.

I’ve done a lot of work over the years on sponsorships of one type or another - ranging from beer companies and football cups, to financial organisations and rugby trophies and insurance providers and athletics, heck I’ve even done some work on the premier league.

Now, obviously, the most high profile sponsorships are of the flagship properties The Premier League, The FA Cup, The Heineken Cup, The FIFA world Cup (ahem, less desirable now? discuss). But what about the others… the minnows… the vast pyramid system supporting the top tier? Who sponsors them? And frankly why do they bother?

Swansea City were promoted yesterday, via the play-offs, to the top tier. As a football fan I extend them a warm welcoming hand and note that they were one of the better sides I saw in the championship all year. All in all thoroughly deserved (justice is done… ahem? QPR? Any Cardiff fans discuss). And presumably there’ll be nicely placed tactical ads all around the Liberty stadium for the next two weeks. My question is… what becomes of the Npower championship?

For most championship fans the experience of the second tier is a painful one, punctuated by financial disaster and memories of the good old days in the Prem’. When they eventuially do get promoted, the sponsor is forgotten in a minute and all attention becomes focused on preparations for the next challenge. So why sponsor it?

The justification for second tier sponsorship is often about grass roots. We’re the real fan because we support the lower tiers. Well… no actually. You’re just a brand sponsoring the league we don’t really want to be in and if you treat us like you do premier fans we’re going to get annoyed. – I lost count of the number of Sky adverts I’ve seen in Championship toilets with grinning images of Chelsea and Man Utd players looking down on me.

Second tier sponsorships have to be about the fans, not the competition, not the ‘grass roots’… and to do this you need to do a few things.

Understand them – look at what they actually do.

Championship fans for example tend not to go near the football ground in the closed season. Proximity targeting fans there is a waste of money – I’m talking to you ‘the premier league.’

They also resent being told that you have a unique offer for them when every tom dick and harry is offering the same thing (you know who you are).

They hate the fact they have to sit through Match of the Day to get to the football league show.And they are some of the biggest users of the iplayer – for exactly this reason.

Here is my plea: Talk to real fans (there are millions of them). Ask them what they do on a match day, ask them why they do it. Ask them their frustrations; listen to how you can help. Then and only then act. And after it’s all over maybe, just maybe they’ll believe you’re on their side.

I’m not criticism second tier sponsors, I’m just saying if you’re going to spend your money that way, make sure you do it properly.

The nature of truth, libraries and tourism

A while ago now I did a talk about the nature of truth, and how it is changing in a digitally enabled world. The conclusions weren’t ground breaking but covered such things as:

Negotiated truth (the idea that truth can be reached via dialectic between two or more sources ala Wikipedia) vs Absolute truth (where one source defines what it sees as true. ala the Encyclopedia Britannica).

For young audiences the former seems to be the model for what is true and whilst there is widespread understanding that Wikipedia should not be used for university essay’s it is still the source they tend to turn to check a fact.

Amongst the other things we touched on was, sources of truth. From the research we carried out young people have a completely different set of trusted sources to say over 25’s. Now this isn’t surprising in a modern age – the kids are much happier to read around a news source online and draw their own conclusions.

I was chatting to a chum the other day who happens to work for a well known red-top. We were chatting about truth and papers and what’s going on with digital in that industry. One of the interesting things he said to me was that lately, his paper was being turned to by football fans checking their facts. They were literally e-mailing or picking up the phone to check on transfer rumours… interesting isn’t it.

We’re all really happy to read around a topic, but certain topics have traditional authority figures who we still turn to.

Again, the other day I was talking to someone about libraries. They came up with the fact that in the UK 85% of casual library visits (i.e. people who don’t routinely use the library) are tourist enquiries. Funny eh? Aside from books libraries are most trusted as sources of local tourist information. I think this is really interesting.

In a world where digital access and apps (library applications are there or there abouts) are all the vogue it’s really important to understand exactly what it is a consumer wants from you, what he or she trusts you to deliver… and then to deliver it. And then maybe monetise it.

This week saw the 100^th anniversary of New York’s Library. I noticed because I live in Norwich, and Norwich was the first city in the world to have a public library. I love libraries and I worry for them. I also love e-readers… I wonder what the future holds. Maybe I’ll have a think.

Politwits and deselection – why not to use social networks for personal politics

I like new words as much as the next man – spuffle is my favourite, it’s the word Hugh Laurie created to describe the foamy cover you put over a microphone.  So here’s a new one for you… Politwit. Go on then, I hear you ask derisively, if you must, what is it? And the answer, drum roll please…

Politwit

Noun

A person who makes a political point on a social network (e.g. twitter)

The verb should be easy enough to derive…

Over recent months I’ve noticed (as I’m sure we all have) the increasing trend towards using social media to make political points. Just about every modern political party is busy sinking their hands into the new social media opportunity – and this is all good and fine, I guess.

Now politicians spend a lot of time being boring. It’s expected of them. Invite a local councillor to dinner and you almost expect, after a glass or two of sherry, a discussion on PR or the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre (a hot issue where I’m from fifteen years ago, and one I saw Alan Partridge lampoon live at the Theatre Royal Norwich on one memorable occasion). Invite a Euro MP to tea and… well it’s likely to be expensive. Normal people on the other hand, tend not to bang on about politics so much.

Actually I talk quite a lot about politics, which is probably why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties. My point here is that most people you know on a social or superficial level don’t make sweeping political statements all that much.

So, yesterday the UK went to the polls. It was dubbed ‘Super Thursday’ by the media, though it had no shiny costume, cloak or pants as far as I could see. In the build up to polls opening social networks were awash with everyday people making political points (I did it myself). And to some extent this is all part of a healthy democracy. To some extent.

The problem is, I didn’t sign up to social networks so people could push things I don’t believe in at me. Most of my social friends and followers are business colleagues, mates, acquaintances and people who I can’t be arsed to send Christmas cards to… not you of course, I like you.

What I don’t want from these people, and what they almost certainly don’t want from me, is pushy political ‘Vote for X’, hilarious political cartoons clearly commissioned by X central office, or clever but misleading points on electoral reform.

In short the content did not match the context, and it failed to do so because we were making political points.

It doesn’t happen with these people in the real world. It shouldn’t happen online.

Stephen Fry (whom I love, and I expect to see at tomorrow’s post season celebration down at carra Rud. On the ball City! Etc.), spent ages trying to convince us that AV was the right choice – and he may have had a point, however that’s not why we all follow him. We follow him because we love him, because he’s warm, clever, amusing and a national treasure – not because of his political views. Which makes him (and me I hasten to add) a Politwit.

I’ll go further. Over the last few days I’ve seen loads of people saying that they are getting bored of Mr Fry (I’m not, I love him). I suspect this has more to do with politics than any sudden dislike of the man. I’ll call this ‘Deselection’ – see what I did there.

Politweet too much and you get deselected. Nice, and at the same time sickly huh?

It’s not just politicians. Recently a rash of charitable campaigns have sprung up insisting we change our status to reflect their views… and if we don’t. If we don’t... nothing actually. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter to tell people I support cancer charities (which I do, very much as people who know me well will tell you). I’m on Twitter because I like to tweet and to hear what others have to say. I’m on facebook for all kinds of reasons – but not for politics.

The lesson is obvious and as old as the hills – the content must match the context.

The buzzwords are new and instantly forgettable – Politweet and get Deselected.

There you go.