Skittles and black hat PR

Please retweet: I had a rather loathsome thought about how to produce some black hat publicity cheaply and easily. All you need to do is set up a twitterbot to post the following message or a variant of it about once every minute:

ProductX is much nicer than skittles! We have a better website too. Please retweet what we are doing to the skittles site. www.productX.com

It will then show up all over the skittles web site front page (www.skittles.com). If it is not giving enough coverage just up the frequency and it will cover more of the page (currently once a minute will see you in the top half of the page fairly reliably); you need to keep it reasonable though as you don't want to be nasty.

After the skittles site became plastered you then "tip off" all the newspapers about what has been done to the site. Send them screenshots and so forth. There should ensue a furore where skittles get credit for leading the way with social media, product X get credit for cottoning on fast and the whole thing is seen as an amusing battle of wits. To help this along submit articles playing it that way so lazy journos can just copy them. Any good PR firm could make this work,.

If you are really lucky skittles would try some sort of law suit making for even bigger publicity.

Asking around suggested that Nestle might be the best people to sell this to as they are innovative online and sell sweets which compete directly with skittles.

Oh, by the way, the usual black hat disclaimer applies:

"Don't try this at home boys and girls"

Rufus Evison

P.S. One final question: How long before someone uses this as a place to propose marriage? I have already used it to talk to someone, so why not to propose marriage? If Skittle are not forced to kill it first it will happen...

How to lose influence

I am on twitter. For those of you who are not, it is a micro-blogging site for which I cannot see any reason. And yet I still use it. Each entry is 140 characters long, so "blog entries", or tweets as they are known, are short and often pithy. There are two types of people, those you follow and those who follow you.

I do not often tweet and never anything of note. I do not really see a reason to tweet and so unless I am asking a question, why would I bother? Despite this I have followers. I only follow people I know in some way, so clearly some of them follow me out of politeness. It is hardly much trouble as I am not going to appear on their screens that often, as most of them are following hundreds of people. What is suprising is that I have other followers. My followers out number my followees by more than two to one. This is silly, I have nothing to say.

There are many measures of what influence on twitter means but it seems to generally come down to having lots of followers who retweet (pass on) what you say.

I have noticed that if I start tweeting often then my following (small to start with) goes down. This could be because my tweets lack focus, they do not have a central theme so people who have followed because of one tweet may well be put off by another tweet and leave. That said, having noticed this I became curious about how best to lose influence. Dan Zarrella has done some work on the viral nature of twitter which offers some insight. As does http://bit.ly/iyvVd which talks about how to get your tweets retweeted. It is worth noting that both of these have an underlying assumption that you put some text in your tweets and actually want followers and influence. Having spent much of my time with more influence than I like I am coming at this from the other end. To that end I am going to list my thoughts on how lose influence and avoid being retweeted.

How to lose influence: the rules

* Be rude (asking people politely to retweet sometimes works, as does treating your followers with respect)

* Be random (have no one topic where you could gain a set of followers interested in your usual/main topic)

* Be boring and mundane (the bizarre and interesting gets retweeted)

* Never explain ("How to do X" is useful stuff)

* Be the last to break the news

* Be obscure. If you must have a link (which might add dangerous amounts of credibiliy) then do not explain what it is a link to. Otherwise make bald statements with no backup. Having an explanation and a link is asking to be retweeted.

* Be an outsider (Insider news is difficult to get hold of and so has value)
Tweet when your followers are tired or busy. Busy people will mever see your tweets and tired people will not bother retweeting.

* Do not ask to be retweeted (people might actually do it).

* Avoid times when your followers may be free to retweet and have the energy to be interested in doing it. Middle of the business day or late at night is good. Avoid lunchtime and just after lunch like the proverbial.

* Ungramatical, mis-spelt and trypo-ridden good is.
* Do not retweet. Anything that you retweet has not only value but also can be seen to have value. It is sort of pre-approved.

* Have no followers (so there is no one to re tweet)

It is worth noting that "Have no followers" is last for a reason. Not only is the level of retweeting not as strongly correlated to having lots of followers as you might think, but having no followers is actually hard unless you cheat by blocking everyone. If you are going to cheat then you might as well not botther. I know it is hard because I created a false twitter ID and told no one about it. It has never tweeted and has followers. Most of them are really spambots, but sadly not all of them. Why do people follow a non existent ID that does not do anything???

One final question that I have not tested but if someone draws this to the attention of Dan Zarella he might be able to answer:

Does making your tweet appear to be a retweet of someone elses tweet (even though it isn't) increase your chances of getting retweeted. If you set up multiple IDs to tweet the same things does that have a compounding effect?

Rufus Evison

P.S. It is worth noting that to be boring one must avoid the following topics like the plague (though whether the plague is considered interesting remains to be seen).

1. Sports News
2. US (and possibly other) political parties internal news
3. Cool computers and gadgets (Apple, iPhone, ...) news and developments
4. Insider news on well known companies such as Google
5. Media and entertainment insider news
6. Social media (particularly twitter)
7. New media insider information
8. Mash up and Twitter tools
9. Lobbying within the UK
10. Coupons discounts and offers
11. Collaboration and networking tools

P.P.S. I have followed some of the rules above in this blog post. I just want to state that this is deliberate and not just me being bad at this (although I am bad at it).

Share a jumper to save the planet?

Another way to do the green thing with style and amusement: A bit silly but http://tinyurl.com/6yerfg provides an altrernative to randomly hugging cold people. Well it removes the randomness for a start...

Things I have found in the books of my sone aged 2 1/2

Books are an integral part of Theo's (Theodoric's) life. He has been in to them for a long while and over this time I have noticed that there are some good books out there. I am not dismissing the power of Thomas the Tank Engine and the other staples of young people today, but I find them boring. If I find a book boring I am likely to find a way of avoiding reading it to my son. Thus he has a more varied and interesting collection of books than many children his age. I say all this by way of explanation of the list that follows. All of the following appear in books that are no innapropriate to a child his age, but are somewhat more exlectic a set than might be the norm.

What my son read about:

1) Election rigging, Vote for Duck by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin

2) Dynamite, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas and Helen Oxenbury

3) Industrial Action, Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin

4) Biassed referees cheatin in international rugby matches, Misadventures of Dougal by Eric Thompson and David Barnett

5) Meteorology balloons, The Iceberg (The Sagas of Noggin the Nog) by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin

6) Untrustworthy used car salesman, Bear Buys a Car: A 3-dimensional Reading Book (Hardcover)

There are a fair few others, but these are the ones I can call to mind right now. I may publish more later...

Rufus Evison

The model of preventing mal-redemption by only letting people print coupons once from their home PCs is just fundamentally flawed!

Untitled

I have now posted a few more double page spreads from Written in Crayon which is my humorous collections of excerpts from fictional books. I have also altered the image sizes to make them more readable. It kind of messes up the whole blog layout, but makes the book legible, which mattes more. I would welcome comments on the book bits you can see there as more will follow.

I am also debating writing a book on the pitfalls you can encounter within start up companies as they grow. It is the sort of topic where I have a fair degree of expertise, so I would want to see if a publisher might be interested before I started.

Rufus Evison

See more progress on: Get a book published

You can clean the floor if you are good!

The other day (a bit over a week ago now, I have been too busy to blog) I was sitting down at the table in the conservatory with my two year old son Theo. It was his dinner time and he was eating nicely but he managed to drop something.

Now when he was nine months old I taught Theo about tidying up and he is quite good at it. He enjoys the praise he gets when he tidies or cleans up. His first time tidying up was with me in the bath when I got him playing the game of helping me put the bath toys back in their containers. This was in out old house in Cambridge and the containers were wire corner cage things that are stuck to the wall by suckers. Because there are a limited number of corners above the bath this meant that some of the containers were out of his reach even when he was standing up in the bath, so for those ones he handed me the toys to put away. The rest of the toys he could put in the lower container.

Theo has a routine where he has dinner, then has a bath, then goes to bed and is read a story. I added the sub stage where he would put away his bath toys before he came out of the bath.

Not long after I started him on playing this game whenever I was bathing him Theo had a bath with Coralie (his mummy). Now Theo was, as I said, nine months old at this point so he wasn't really talking yet. When Theo started feeling tired and wanted to go to bed he couldn't ask, not being able to talk, but he decided to start putting away his toys. The problem was that there were not many out so that the bottom cage, that he could reach, was full, so he gave the toy he had to his mother to put in the top cage. She did not know about the new game and thanked him for the toy and then gave it back to him. He looked a little annoyed at her not doing it right and thrust it back at her. She did the same thing again. After two or three more passes he went over to the cage while she had the toy and pointed at it. She finally twigged and put it away, where upon he held up his arms to be picked out of the bath.

I mention all this to give the understanding that he has bought into the concept of tidying things up. So you can imagine that when he dropped something on the floor he wanted to sort it out. Now it had created a splash so it would not be a quick wipe so I had to tell him he needed to finish dinner first. Being an inventive two year old it was entirely possible he could decide, either at the time or in the future that throwing things on the floor would get him a later bed time, so I did not want to set a precedent that would encourage the idea. This left me in the position, if I wanted to break the routine to let him clean up (a good thing for him to enjoy) I needed to set the context properly. I found myself saying:

"You can clean up after dinner if you are really good"

It was about then that it struck me what I had just said. I suddenly thought to myself how lucky I am and how it really doesn't get much better than having to be in the position of saying something like that to your son. At that point I realised that I would have to put this in one of my blogs lest I ever need to look back on it and smile happily.



It was about then that it struck me what I had just said. I suddenly thought to myself how lucky I am and how it really doesn't get much better than having to be in the position of saying something like that to your son.">Rufus Evison