Brendan Cooper is a freelance copywriter and social media consultant who helps clients win business, win awards, appear in national media and talk to people through compelling, direct, dynamic copy and social media strategy.
He has been helping people to communicate, online and offline, for fifteen years.
If you want to talk about…
- copywriting
- social media strategy
- blog strategy
- reputation management
… then get in touch by clicking here, or the contact link to the right of this page! If this button is green () then I’m online now so you can click here to instant message me in real-time. You can also catch me at twitter.com/brendancooper.
Or if you’re feeling a bit shy right now, and would rather listen than speak, subscribe. Or just keep reading the blog posts below. It’s up to you!
Tweetclouds of the Iraq Inquiry Blair session
The Iraq Inquiry plods on. However, Friday 29th January did provide some interest, as Tony Blair presented his view.
As Chilcot made clear, it wasn’t a trial, and no one was to be found guilty. However, there was still intense interest around what Blair would say, particularly given his recent interview with Fern Britton in which he appeared to have admitted that regime change was not linked to WMD.
I had some spare time that day – one of the perks of being freelance – so I decided to tweet the proceedings as much as I could. I just felt that, given I’ve got some 1,100 followers, if at least some of them who were unable to watch TV or listen to the radio could get an idea of at least some of the proceedings, it would be better than none. I’m not especially politically motivated but I find what has happened over Iraq to be fairly outrageous.
Since then I’ve taken a look at the tweets I produced, and created clouds of what each of the participants had to say. You can see them below.
Now, before I get hauled in front of any future inquiries being asked to explain myself, I should add some caveats here:
- I took the decision early on to report what was being said rather than give my interpretation. However, I did need to make some decisions along the way so that they would work in Twitter. For example, during discussions about the Attorney General, I tended to type Goldsmith instead, because it was shorter and more consistent.
- I did occasionally miss some of the questions or responses, simply because the phone rang a few times, or I needed to feed the cat, etc.
- Midway through the day I reached my daily status update limit and was unable to tweet until the afternoon. I missed most of the questioning by Sir Lawrence Freedman and for this reason I have omitted his tweetcloud. It was not even remotely representative of his session.
- I frankly and freely admit that Twitter is not an ideal way to follow the inquiry. The best way is, of course, in person. This is why commentators such as Nick Robinson of the BBC were able to tell us that Blair’s hands were shaking as he poured his water at the beginning of the morning session. Given that only a chosen few could attend in person, the next best is probably the TV broadcast. While this offers analysis, it is restricted in the camera angles offered and audio feed. This is why, for example, we were only vaguely able to hear the mild heckling at the very end of the day’s session, and not see it at all. But while a series of 140-character updates isn’t ideal, it’s better than nothing, and in toto it provides a body of text from which we can get top-level impressions. When the full transcripts are released we’ll be able to draw more meaningful conclusions.
- Given all the above, I’m not going to add any further interpretation to the tweetclouds either. Whatever conclusion you draw is up to you!
So, with that all in mind, here are the rest of the tweetclouds.
Note: ‘UORs’ is a military term, and refers to Urgent Operational Requirements.
What are people saying about… the iPad, iPhone and iPod?
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past week, you’ll know all about the iPad, Apple’s new wunderkit – what it has, what it has not, what it’s for, what it’s not for, and so on.
Fortunately, the term ‘iPad’ is very quick and easy to search for. So, it’s a doddle to monitor. So, that’s what I’ve done.
The same goes for iPhone and iPod, so I thought it would be interesting to see all three lined up against each other. Inevitably the other two models in the Apple i-stable receive attention, so right now, all their figures are up. But this is more of a slow-burner. In a few weeks or months’ time it will be interesting to see how their charts look. Will one product cannibalise another? Will any of them drop off the radar?
Let’s take a look. Click here to see the dashboard, or click the image below.
What are people saying about the iPad, iPhone and iPod? Click image to see dashboard.
Layout
First off, regarding the layout, well I thought it might be nice to nod to Apple’s design ethos and make it a bit more sophisticated than previous dashboards (all of which you can also see on the Netvibes tabs). This approach also endears you to clients. 
I also just concentrated on three sources: Twitter, because everyone tweets nowadays; blogs, because there are some very smart bloggers out there who can offer real insight into Apple strategy; and forums, because they’re often the forgotten social media platform and yet tech forums can offer heated debate, if not often informed opinion.
Twitter Conversations
Twitter buzz is, unsurprisingly, up across the board. There is a quite astonishing sudden spike showing when the iPad was launched (at time of writing – you won’t be able to see it after a week or so as the charts move on). Interestingly the iPhone buzz seemed to drop off quite quickly but also displays a ‘dead cat bounce’, that is, a sudden short spike after the fall. The iPad does too, but the iPod less so. This implies that the iPhone and iPad are seen as more contemporary products, the iPod less so.
The iPad tweets are all about the new kid on the block – what it does, links to reviews and so on. The iPhone tweets seem to mention the iPad and iPod, indicating a middle position in people’s attitudes. The iPod tweets are much more varied, talking about music rather than the product for example, which to me implies people have got over their wonderful new kit and are concentrating on the media instead. It will be interesting to see whether iPad conversations in a year or so will similarly discuss films, music and published media in the same way.
Blog Conversations
We see the same buzz profile as for Twitter – big red spikes, mirrored across all products. This time however the iPod peaked earlier than the iPhone, although it has approximately half the amount of traffic. The iPad trumps them all, with over 20,000 posts at launch.
The blog posts are all mashed up. Everyone seems to be talking about all products, comparing and contrasting. Maybe they will polarise in future.
Forum Conversations
Again, we see a familiar buzz profile, although this time the iPad, iPhone and iPod have a similar number of mentions at their peak. The actual forum posts aren’t that great in terms of quality however – mostly anecdotal and, strangely, Japanese. Maybe time to bring out the English language filter to snip them out.
Strategy
It’s always difficult knowing how to approach Apple. I sometimes wonder what their PR team actually does. I mean, can you imagine? Maybe you spend a few days in the office monitoring the buzz out there – none of which you really had to work to achieve – then go to the pub.
Of course, I don’t believe it’s that simple. But Apple is a strange beast. I’m tempted to say they really shouldn’t do anything with social media because they have such huge amounts of traffic and overwhelmingly positive sentiments. I think that, from a marketing perspective, they have to be careful not to cannibalise across the products. I’m sure they’ve considered this too. Smartarses.
But perhaps this is, as I said at the outset, a slowburner. Maybe this really is an opportunity for companies like Apple to watch what happens across social media, comparing and contrasting how different audiences behave.
For example, I was surprised to find that when looking at Bono’s twitter buzz, not only did it react much more quickly and at higher volume than other platforms – which is to be expected maybe – it was also more protracted buzz. That is, it took longer to die down than blogging or forums. I did not expect that, and I do wonder whether it’s a consistent pattern. I guess we just have to listen and learn.
Proof reading can be fun!
Get your stamp at the ready. Click image for source.
Proof reading is supposed to be a doddle. It’s just making sure everything’s tickety-boo and stamping it with your big red ‘Approved’ stamp. No?
Actually, no. Not really. Not when you’re proofing a 26,000 word document, like I just did today. It’s been a while since I did hard-core proofing and it reminded me that there are most definitely right ways to do it, and wrong ‘uns.
WRONG WAY – just make sure everything’s tickety-boo and stamp it with your big red ‘Approved’ stamp, then skip away singing “Hello birds, hello trees, hello sky.”
RIGHT WAY – as follows:
- Agree beforehand on what needs doing. There is a gulf of difference between a copy edit – where you’re more likely than not going to have to disassemble some scrawl and turn it into beautiful filigree curlicued baroque English – and a proof edit. The gulf, in my case, is precisely 2,000 words per hour. That is, I can proof edit at 4K words an hour but copy edit at 2K. So if I get the requirement wrong to start with, I spend twice as long, or earn half as much, or annoy the client. They’re all bad outcomes.
- Read the whole thing in one go. That’s right, even a 26K worder. OK, maybe allow yourself a Guinness or two (I did, but it was late last night), but make sure you’ve read it once before you even start to edit it. You get a flavour of the general tone of voice, where the voice changes (which it inevitably will if it’s multi-authored, or even if one person wrote it at different times or under the influence of different prescription drugs), potential problem areas, that sort of thing. Plus you get an idea of what the document’s actually about, which helps.
- Leave it. Go and do something else instead. Play with your tortoise, for example.
- Come back all refreshed and just get stuck in. You need to make decisions along the way but they’ll basically be along the lines of:
- Grammar: get rid of howlers, check the finer points of quotation mark useage, change the wording if you think you’re going to get into a slanging match over the apostrophe.
- Vocab: try and make it simple – for example ‘you will be able to’ is the same as ‘you can’ – but be careful if you’re just proofing because you’re getting close to a copy edit.
- Tone of voice: is usually copy edit territory but you might need to stitch it together. Put it this way: if you’re the first person bringing together a multi-authored report, you are most definitely not going to be just proofing it. Poo-pah.
- Handover from the old document to the new. After your first pass, save it under a new filename, accept all the revisions, and then read it alongside the original. In this way you get to see the revisions that didn’t quite go right – double spaces here, no spaces there etc – and can read two ‘clean’ versions next to each other. In this way you might even decide to reject some of your own changes in preference to the original.
- Hint: you might want to leave something untouched if someone in the document is making a claim that you don’t feel qualified to alter and you don’t want to ’sex it up’ at all. Lord knows, I’ve been watching the Iraq inquiry on TV recently and I don’t want to be hauled in front of a select committee (“Why did you change ‘could’ to ’should’, Mr. Cooper..?” “I don’t know your honour, can I go home now please?”). If in doubt, leave it, but flag it for the client perhaps.
- Check the new document. Save it again under a different filename, accept all the revisions again, and read the new document on its own. Yes, that means you’ve now read it four times in total, but it’s necessary: overview, detail, handover, check. You need each one.
- Make a note of the funnies. As you’re going along make a note of things you’re unclear of, or that the client needs to double-check. And make sure you tell the client to check the tables of contents, and page/figure/table references because copy edits sometimes muck up the pagination. It’s not your job to do this, but the client will love you for reminding him/her.
Oh, and use revision marks (obviously). If you haven’t, you can use Word’s ‘Compare’ feature. Good luck.
leave a comment