Well in the case of a Facebook fan page this can literally be true!

Read my latest Birmingham Post column to find out why.

I can help but think that if Sky add three celebrity judges, a premium rate phone vote and put on a ‘results’ show, an hour later to remove the worst ‘candidate’ from the next debate- they could have a seriously good game show on their hands!

Admittedly the studio audiences are not allowed to heckle or clap, but the x-factor-meets-blind-date format is starting to disturbing me.

Judging by the subsequent plethora of posts on PR agency blogs after each debate, the election will be won and lost on the best performer in these debates.

But judging the acts, sorry I mean ‘priministerial candidate’ on how well they listened to their PR trainers is not a good way of choosing a government.

We all seem to be obsessed with discussing this charisma contest rather than the future of the country – perhaps that is because it is too hard.

Old media has long since turned elections into personal popularity polls, where the personality of the candidates and how good looking their wife is, seems to become more important factors than the policies of their parties.

Meanwhile the real political debate is happening in social media. Follow the tag #leadersdebate on Twitter before, during and after the final debate and you’ll see real enguagment and quite a few expletives too!

During last nights show alone, 117 thousand live comments were tweeted featuring the above hash tag  (source @Tweetminster).

And a real debate – i.e with more than the half dozen carefully fielded questions and only three people allowed to speak – is happening on Facebook too, but not on the parties official pages.

The Conservatives seem to be winning the Facebook war, with 53K fans to their official page, the LibDems close behind with 50K and Labour languishing with a megur 27K ( as of 22/4/2010).

It is worth visiting these pages just to see which of your friends’ mugs appear as fans divulging their political persuasion. Note: I have become a fan of all three parties while researching this blog – in case you see mine.

However, in true X-factor style the ‘We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the LibDems into office!” unofficial discussion group out trumps them all with 134K members so far, where a lively pro Nick Clegg debate is raging.

However, given that the original RATM campaign gained 500K+ followers you could say that more people cared about getting Simon Cowell off the Xmas #1 spot than getting Nick Clegg into number 10! Which is an interesting measure of the nations interest in the election outcome

(More election fun can be found at Facebook’s own ‘Democracy UK’ page where there is even an App to help you decide whom to vote for!)

With UK electoral turnouts on the decline, some argue that the TV debate will improved the population’s engagement with the political process and records turns will result on election day.

But if they are voting on superficial style, not policy, this will be a hollow victory for UK democracy.

Last week I had an encounter with ageism. This is not unusual in social media circles but for the first time, at work at least, it was aimed at me.

While introducing myself as the presenter of a social media training course, one of the attendees mused that he was expecting someone “considerably younger” than me to be doing the training!

Now its true, I’m no spring chicken and time hasn’t been particularly kind to my face, but age does not preclude a person from understanding social media.

Or even participating in social networking, as I’m about to prove.

Lets assume old is aged 45 and over (obviously I’m considerably younger than that). Well, according to the latest social networking demographic report 40% of Facebook users are over 45!  Here are the figures for the other popular sites:

YouTube:  45% of users are over 35
Facebook: 40% of users are over 45
Twitter:     63% of users are over 35
LinkedIn:  48% of users are over 45
MySpace:  28% of users are over 45

Of course we are assuming no one’s been lying. After all one of the main advantage of online socialising is that no needs to know exactly how old you actually are, unless you tell them.

As you can see, it is just about true that MySpace is still for the kids and LinkedIn is for the infirm, but YouTube and Facebook has now been infiltrated by the silver surfers.

I remember, when email was the preserve of the youth (OK , I am over 45). Now it’s a mandatory communications channel for everyone between the ages of 10 and dead.

As technology matures it will, like its users, gain a middle age spread.

My sarcastic student was only joking and wasn’t that much younger than me. He, after all, had signed up for a social media training course rather than being of an age where its benefits were inherent.

Having spent much of my early working life trying to convince crusty business people that online should be taken seriously as a marketing channel I found his comments ironic.

My much fresher face and its implied inexperience was a barrier to credibility then but now the older version was a liability too!

But ageists and marketers need to take note; the inhabitance of social networks may not be as youthful as you might think.

Now, I’ve finally got my LinkedIn status hooked up to my Twitter feed, my blog posting to my Facebook page and can just about monitor everything from my phone.

The last thing I’m inclined to do right now is join another time consuming social network!

Before I got my current collection under control, I barely had time to check my email and when I did it was full of mail from my social networks, alerting me to new activity forcing me to return.

Even with its 146 million captive Gmail users, Google has its work cut out if it is to get enough people using Buzz to make it worth my while.

Google tried before with a social network called Orkut, but failed to make it a global success – so why are they having another go?

Well Google is under attack from the social networks on two fronts.

Firstly, Google sells adverting space and as consumers spend increasing amounts of time on social networking sites advertising budgets are migrating there too.

Secondly, people are increasingly using their social networks to communicate instead of email. Mostly because they want to talk about content and social networks are designed to associate content with conversation.

Facebook is rumored to be upgrading its messaging system to be more email like. The project is code named Titan. Some are calling Titan the “Gmail killer”, which is why Google might be worried.

This also explains why Google has integrated Buzz with other popular networks, like Twitter, Flickr and its own blog site eblogger, but not the more popular Facebook!

Increasingly people are keeping a traditional email address for their professional lives, for colleges and customers, but conducting their personal communication via social networks.

Whether future generations of net citizens want their main email integrated with their social networks or, as Google hopes, the other way round is yet to be seen.

Being presented with death and suffering, before you’ve even left the house, is a bad way to start a day, but guilt wouldn’t let me turn it off.

I then started wondering why valuable plane space was taken up, flying a Kate Adie wannabe with camera crew, to the scene of a disaster just hours after it had happened?

Did the piece-to-camera clips really need live earthquake scenes behind it?

We’ve all seen the aftermath of an earthquake before – piles of rubble and human bewilderment.

The Haitians have complained that too many US soldiers have been flown in with guns, but I’d be complaining about the army of men with cameras.

I know broadcast media help galvanise aid, but unless one of the dozens of ‘news’ videos features your family, what useful information do they actually provide?

With over 280,000 members, “Earthquake Haiti” is now the largest group on Facebook.  Let the sceptics of social networking take note: not only are people using social media to find missing loved ones, but using it as a source of on-the-ground information.

More harrowing is that by searching for #helphaiti on Twitter, you’ll find tweets of longitude and latitude with request for food and water – grim.

What finally made me turn the TV off, was when Simon Cowell appeared!

I love it when rich people want to ‘give something back’ as long as it’s not actual the money they made, and they get plenty of publicity thrown in.

I feel sorry enough for the people of Haiti, without some piece of pop pap, to induce my sympathy.  I’ll give to the cause, without getting something in return.

However social media is not immune to the words ‘band’ and ‘wagon’.

Birmingham tweeter, @stevegerrard (not the footballer), promised to donate £2 for every comment he got on his blog.  Not the most altruistic of Twitter marketing as many of the comments, now removed, pointed out!

But thanks to social media, I find that I’m not alone.

I hate every nauseating minute of the show. From the insipid voice over to the hackneyed ‘old spice’ music, through the endless regurgitation of clichés, that make footballers sound intelligent, right up to the gurn inducing, blart infested melodrama that is the vote.

Yes it has been a “journey” for me too Dermot.

The only way to get through it, is to follow the xfactor hash tag on Twitter for reassuringly clever sarcasm about the minute by minute happenings on the show.

(For the uninitiated – people label their tweets with a # label in order that it can be found by people like me!)

Yes there are lots of ‘Go Joe’ tweets from the mindless, but interspersed with them and the blatant advertising tweets, are funny and intelligent observations, far more entertaining than those of the bland judges.

But then I discovered the #ratm4xmas tag and found my kindred X Factor hating spirits, who are saying “no” to the cult of Simon Cowell.

The tag led me to, what is currently the most popular discussion group on Facebook,  ‘RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1’ .

The idea is that by synchronized online purchases of a track called ‘Killing in the Name’ by the rather appropriately named band, ‘Rage Against the Machine’ – we can knock X Factor off the Xmas number one slot.

I’ll let others explain why X Factor is a cancer on the music industry and as I work ‘in marketing’, I’m in no position to point out the immorality of playing on the aspirations of the nations susceptible no-hopers to be rich and famous or indeed laughing at the mentally ill in the auditions.

The important thing is that, instead of shouting at the TV, I can now use social media to vent my frustration! In fact, I’m feeling much better already – proving the cathartic nature of blogging and its power to spread the word of resistance against the Karaoke King.

I don’t suppose the 20 million lemmings that like the X Factor can be beaten, and I know few of them are likely to buy ‘Killing in the Name’ for the Nan’s xmas present, but it will be fun to try.

Actually what am I saying, the woman deserves no sympathy. This is she who wrote an article in Friday’s Daily Mail, sensitively titled “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”.

Cutting to the chase, she concluded that Gately died of being gay – a terrible ‘unnatural’ lifestyle, his death being confirmation of this and that all gay marriages end in disaster, and quite possibly – death.

I won’t get into personal opinion any further you’ll be pleased to hear (however, read Charlie Brooker’s view for a particular angle!).

This story vividly highlights the effectiveness of social networking for galvanising public opinion towards particular issues, in this case homophobia and bad journalism!

More specifically, it demonstrates the power of Twitter not only as a platform for creating campaign content, but also as a channel and mechanism for distributing it.

Within hours on Friday “Jan Moir” and #janmoir were both rocketed to the top of the trending topics on Twitter, and stayed there almost all weekend.

How did this happen?

I can explain it as social media and online PR in action: the result of the interactions of a combination of content creators and retweeters – individuals (you and I) and relevant influencers (bloggers, organisation reps and mainstream online media predominantly).

These individuals and influencers were sharing their retorts while retweeting others’ content at a ferocious pace. More and more people joined what, in effect, had become a focused and successful campaign against Moir.

Influencers like Stephen Fry and Giles Coren added explosive fuel to the campaign.

At one point, Fry retweeted a humourous comment by a blogger which immediately sent thousands of visitors to his website resulting in the said blogger asking Fry not to do it again as it crashed his server!!

The effect of even one influencer can be immense in social media, driving vast amounts of website traffic (as long as your IT can handle it!).

Mainstream online media lent a hand too, in particular The Guardian who were supremely fast to react, putting editorial about it online right as it was happening – creating yet more content to be commented on and retweeted.

Another feature of this campaign is how it evolved and diversified. It often went beyond the initial Moir article, turning heat on The Daily Mail itself for publishing it in the first place (and its record of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and so on).

At some point around midday on Friday a separate campaign evolved on Twitter and now on Facebook, targeting Daily Mail advertisers like BT and Marks & Spencer.

It was pointed out to these brands that they had display ads on the same webpage as Moir’s piece and so were aligning themselves with right-wing bigotry and they should do something about it. And guess what – they did.

And this is the crux of the matter.

This example could easily be interpreted (as social media has so often been in the past) as a flash in the pan. But this argument against social media is wearing thin these days, and this case study proves why.

It was actually Jan Moir herself who summed it up correctly on Friday (wait for it!).

Not in her original article (phew!) but in her virtually unrepentant response to the furore, she blamed the whole thing on a “heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Well done Jan, it was indeed such a campaign and the results speak for themselves.

Today it has been revealed that The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has received 21,000 complaints about the article – that’s more complaints in ONE weekend than the PCC has received in the last five years! They are now investigating the matter.

Display advertising from some of the biggest brands in the UK was removed from the webpage. Even when the Mail desperately tried to claw something back by changing the headline of the online article, the advertisers stuck to their guns. (Great brand effect by the way, well done guys!)

The key features of this example are speed, content, opinion, engagement, interaction and of course influence – highlighting again that influence really does now live and breathe online.

You may not have any desire to inhabit the digital world but are starting to worry that, if you ignore social media any longer, you’re likely to be put on the endangered species list.

You’ve listened to the ‘kids’ in your marketing department rabbit on about consumer-to-consumer engagement and you’re wondering if they also speak English.

But strip out the technical jargon and the marketing double-speak and you’ll probably find it’s a more familiar world than you thought.

Firstly, you’ve been doing social networking all your professional life, just offline.

As every SME knows, in the absence of a large marketing budget, the best way to get new business is to “network”. By that I mean going to events where people you know introduce you to people they know, business cards are swapped and food is eaten on sticks.

You’ve spent a lot of time making friends and influencing people in your local business community. Recommending your business partners in the hope they will return the favor or at least buy you lunch sometime. It takes years to build an effective network and you’ll probably turn into an alcoholic by the time it’s complete.

Thanks to sites like Linkedin, this can be achieved in less time, with less geographical limitations and significantly less liver damage.

Secondly, you didn’t get were you are today, without taking every opportunity to be in the press.   You know editorial is far more powerful than advertorial.  The problem is fewer people are reading newspapers these days, especially local press but choose to get their news and insight online.

The press release is replaced by the blog post, mailing list by the Twitter feed and success is measured by the number of readers rather than by column inched, is about all you need to know about online PR.

Finally, personal recommendation has always been your goal. It’s customers that get you more customers if you treat them right. Now ,thanks to social media, this word-of-mouth has turned into word-of-mouse.

friend

“If you’ve no desire to go on Facebook, think Twitter is full of twaddle, haven’t got the slightest inclination to write a blog and ignore all invites from Linkedin, you’re probably a director of a successful company!”

Read more: The Reluctant MD’s Guide to Social Media

But hold on just a minute. In the words of another great drama queen, calm down dear.

In fact what Facebook are doing is changing their business model to include public content sharing, profile ‘fans’ and real-time search (these are the headline grabbers).

Is this a good thing?

It does sound a lot like Twitter doesn’t it – and this is exactly what’s caused the latest drama for social networking. Essentially it boils down to the “public versus private” content sharing debate and whether Facebook and Twitter can co-exist with similar features.

Privacy concerns are all abound but there are now arguments more specifically about who ‘owns’ private and public content sharing. Should Facebook be purist and stick to its roots in private content and leave Twitter alone to share content publicly? I think it’s time this debate moved on.

Facebook have been quick to address privacy concerns: these new features are optional and managed from the Privacy settings area – although it looks like new users will have to switch manually from public to private.

As with anything Facebook does these changes have been met with tremors of outrage and suspicion. What are they up to? Surely this proves once and for all they’re on a mission to destroy our human rights.

This time, however, it’s not just about privacy. It’s Facebook clearly trying to become more like Twitter that’s getting us hot under the collar. Is it a good or a bad thing?

There’s a good article by Mashable today balancing the argument for and against these changes but the results of their featured poll (at the time of writing) is less balanced: 21% say “Yes – this makes Facebook a better platform”; but 58% believe “No – Facebook should not be emulating Twitter”.

But why not? I can understand on some level. Clearly these changes – and particularly the introduction of a public content sharing model – are a significant shift for the Facebook we know and love.

The adoption of Facebook on such a massive scale has been because it has enabled people to connect with ‘friends’ not random strangers (like Myspace for example).

But since then the phenomenal rise of Twitter suggests that there is a huge demand for public content sharing. Why can’t the two co-exist in one social network like Facebook?

I personally see far more opportunity than threat with these changes. Facebook is simply evolving and responding to what our online behaviour suggests we actually want. There is a clear demand for private AND public content sharing and Facebook is stepping up.

Facebook is not going to kill off Twitter or vice versa. They can both thrive even with the crossover of features. They have distinct offerings, users and means of interaction.

For example, there are significant demographic variations between them currently. These changes to Facebook could help increase the use of public communication among a wider, younger audience, for example. This could further evolve the social media society I wrote about recently.

So I see this simply as Facebook responding to changes in the marketplace and developing its business model accordingly. No more drama.

And let’s not ignore the fact that there could be significant opportunities for businesses and brands if this works, especially bearing in mind that they already have a revenue model at Facebook.