The campaign has scooped the award for “best use of social media by a public sector organisation”, as well as being shortlisted for “best use of social media by a non profit/charity organisation”, at the Some Comms Awards 2011 in Manchester last week. It also bagged the “Grand Prix” award, singling it out as the “best of the best” of all the entries.

Some of the things we introduced or improved for 2011 included:

YouTube videos of the candidates’ manifestos on a dedicated YouTube channel embedded on the elections page of the Council website, along with text versions. YouTube was also used earlier on in the campaign, to help generate interest amongst potential candidates.

SYP candidates presented their manifestos on YouTube

An interactive map of polling stations, including a “find your nearest” postcode search. This made it very easy for potential voters to find out where they could vote in over 50 different locations across the city.

An interactive map of polling stations

A strongly branded presence both online and offline, to catch the eye and imagination of young voters.

Strong branding played a vital role

A Facebook page for posting candidate photos and written and video manifestos, allowing people to become fans and to share with online friends. There was also a competition to win an iPod if people became a fan of the page, and even a QR code linking to the page for use on related printed material.

A Facebook page pulling everything together

Huge success

In 2009, 18 candidates stood for 11 seats and 5019 young people voted.
The 2011 objectives were to:

1. increase the number of candidates to 24.
2.  increase the number of voters by 50%.
3. ensure number of candidates is more than one in all constituencies to guarantee competitive election

These were ambitious targets, as the 2009 campaign had already seen an unprecedented increase in the number of voters. However, the 2011 results spoke for themselves:

1. Initially had 31 registered candidates of which 26 stood for election, equalling a 44% increase.
2. Voting more than doubled from the previous election with 10,228 young people voting – a 104% increase.
3. Each constituency had three or more candidates with one boasting seven.

Team effort

As with the 2009 campaign, this was a real team effort, with colleagues from across the Council and our partner, Stevenson College Edinburgh, pulling together the various strands of the campaign. And of course the young people themselves played the most vital role, working so hard and bringing so much enthusiasm to the process.

It’s another good example of the power of social media to reach out to audiences, to empower citizens and to excite interest in important issues.

Having already scooped national awards, including in the “Hard to Reach Communcations” category at the CIPR Local Public Services Awards and the “Government to Citizen” category at the Good Communications Awards, I’m proud to see the campaign get local recognition.

Me and my colleagues receiving the award

Find out more about the campaign, which saw us use Facebook, Bebo and YouTube to increase nominations and voter turn-out in the 2009 Youth Parliament elections.

Onwards and upwards

The next elections will take place in March 2011, and we’re already cranking up our campaign to again include Facebook and a dedicated YouTube channel.

If you’re using social media to target “hard to reach” audiences, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch or leave a comment below…

A YouTube caption fail

I’ve been spending some time on YouTube recently, as we’re hosting a number of videos on the platform for a campaign we’re running to recruit foster carers.

Obviously we wanted to make sure we added captions to the videos, and to save a bit of time I’ve been trying out the caption tools. Firstly I noticed that YouTube automatically ‘machine transcribed’ some of the videos. On inspection, though, the accuracy of these was way off – possibly made worse by the particular accents which the speakers had, to which I doubt YouTube’s voice recognition is very well tuned.

YouTube's auto-captioning is way off here

However, the transcript tool fared much better. This lets you upload a plain text file with the transcript of the video. This is far easier than creating captions, which require timecodes.

YouTube then processes the file in a matter of seconds and applies the text as captions to the video, making a best guess at the timing. With the 7 videos I had uploaded, the results were very good, with split second accuracy in many cases.

A bit of user input makes all the difference

One thing that did sometimes throw the timing a bit was where I had skipped some of the dialogue or shortened it for brevity and ease of reading. Overall, though, it was certainly satisfactory and a massive time saver.

In conclusion, then, I certainly wouldn’t rely on the auto-captioning, but it’s fantastic that YouTube are offering this given that the majority of uploaders will never bother manually adding captions. The transcription tool is an excellent compromise delivering better than average results, as it certainly worthy of praise.

Campaign graphic

Later this week I’ll be attending a national awards ceremony, at which one of our campaigns has been nominated for an award. ** UPDATE – we won! **

Edinburgh’s 2009 Scottish Youth Parliament election campaign has already won a Bronze award in the Marketing Society’s Star Awards – the only local authority campaign to win in any category. It was also a finalist in the CIPR national awards, in the category of best campaign under £10k, and won the CIPR Local Public Services Award for Hard to Reach Communications, where the judges commented on how the “strong and effective use of social media and online marketing together with celebrity endorsement succeeded in creating a vibrant and healthy parliament and increased vote.”

It has now been shortlisted for the “Government to Citizen Communications” category of the Good Communication Awards, and I’ll be representing my organisation at the ceremony on Thursday.

The tremendous reception that the campaign has received is thanks to the enthusiasm, innovation and hard work not only of my colleagues, but also of the young people involved in the elections, and I’m proud to represent such a campaign as just one of the many people who worked to make it happen.

The following gives a flavour of the efforts, and hopefully offers some inspiration to others, especially those involved in e-participation and youth engagement.

Scottish Youth Parliament Elections in Edinburgh

The challenge

Every two years, the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP) holds elections for young people between 14 and 25 to represent the views of their peers. In Edinburgh there are 11 SYP members. In 2007, 13 candidates stood for election, just 25 votes were cast and elections were held in a single venue on one day.

For the 2009 elections there was clearly room for improvement, and an integrated campaign was launched, utilising traditional, social and web-based marketing, to try to increase awareness of the elections and boost the number of candidates and voters.

The solution

To encourage more young people to stand for election, the following was carried out:

• A dedicated page was created on the Young Edinburgh website
• Posters were distributed featuring the celebrity endorsement of local lad John Loughton, former chair of the SYP and well known to the target audience as the winner of Celebrity Big Brother Hi-jack 2008
• Briefings went to all schools asking head teachers to use in-school communication channels
• Information was posted the Council webpage and an announcement made to the local press

We received around 25 notes of interest and eventually 18 candidates stood.

One of the election posters

Next, to get more people voting, we introduced social media, setting up Facebook and Bebo pages as well as a YouTube channel.

Bebo webpage

The Facebook and Bebo pages were used for posting candidate photos, written and video manifestos, allowing people to become fans and to share with online friends.

On YouTube, we uploaded videos of the candidates outlining their manifestos, again with links back to the information pages.

A video manifesto

We also:

• Made it easier for people to vote by extending voting from a day to a week and placing ballot boxes in schools, libraries and colleges
• Updated the Young Edinburgh webpage with information on voting, with links to the social media sites
• Distributed posters with details of the SYP social media sites and how and where to vote
• Ran a radio campaign
• Placed adverts on Facebook
• Secured a feature piece in the local press and in the council’s newspaper, which goes to every household in the city

The outcome

The results were outstanding:

• 18 people stood for election
• 5019 young people voted – an increase of 19,984% from 2007!
• All 11 seats were filled – three candidates in two areas were elected unopposed
• In total, there were 2727 views of candidate videos on YouTube. The video with most number individual views amounted to 404, the lowest 107

Conclusion

Probably the most telling aspect of the campaign was how social media was used to compliment the other, more traditional, channels. Social media is rarely a solution in itself, but it is a significant addition to your arsenal and can dramatically increase your reach. The video manifestos were hugely popular, generating a lot of interest in the elections and in the democratic process.

The campaign was also testimony to the continuing trend towards utilising social networking to engage with young people. Only a few years ago, most local authorities would have discarded such an approach as too risky, too unmanageable, and too unknown. Now, there is a growing interest and understanding of the benefits of these platforms, along with a more rational and considered appreciation of the risks. Good experiences such as this one will continue to build the case for the wider adoption of such channels as a key method of engaging and informing our citizens.

I look forward to seeing how many voters turn out in 2011…

The seminar was lead by John Campbell and Mark Baillie, and John began by considering the good, the bad and the ugly. Examples of good campaigns included:

• Coca-Cola’s 80s/90s “Can’t Beat the Feeling” adverts – a tune that many of us still recognise today and an excellent example of strong branding.
• The University of Birmingham’s Circle of Influence campaign to raise £60 million. Astonishingly, they’ve already reached the £50m mark, combining online strategies with a more traditional print campaign.
• Drinkaware’s drink diary, which allows you to monitor your drinking and compare with friends, adding a social element to the mix. You can even download a phone app. I couldn’t help thinking this could backfire though – imagine people using the diary to compare how much they could drink in a week and actually trying to beat each other!
• Volkswagen’s Fun Theory website, featuring various viral videos aimed at making people change their behaviour for the better:

John notes that common factors to all of these successes were creativity and innovation.

The bad and ugly examples including Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, which asked people to give 10 of their Facebook friends the boot in exchange for a free burger. As a result, a quarter of a million friends found themselves dumped in favour of a meat sandwich. John observes that this kind of campaign, based on negativity, is a very risky strategy and the uproar that ensued was proof of this. The campaign was quickly pulled.

Perhaps an even uglier example is the infamous Toyota Yaris advert, Clean Getaway, which managed to offend scores of people with its sexist (and, some argued, potentially incestuous) content.

(Note: for more examples, see my list of Social Media lessons learned the hard way)

6 steps to success

We are then talked through 6 steps to a successful campaign:

1. Understand your audience

An essential first step: make sure you know your audience and understand how they consume media. Where are they? What do they consider effective, or cool? Mark shows us an example of some face-to-face street research they had done, enabling them to build up personas to better understand their target audience. He stresses that you can only get certain knowledge from that sort of engagement.

2. Confirm your objectives

What are you trying to achieve? Is it realistic? Again, research is critical, and we are shown a number of useful tools which can help in measuring social media:

• Google Trends – shows what people are searching for – especially good for filtering info by region to get a more local flavour
• Google Alerts – email updates about Google results for keywords
• Social Mention – a social media search and analysis platform for aggregating user generated content
• Alltop – top headlines from popular topics worldwide

These sorts of tools can be especially useful for researching the competition and setting realistic targets accordingly.

3. Plan the customer journey and content

Taking what you’ve learnt from your earlier research, you should then decide the main message you want to get across, and which tools are going to be most suitable. This is the step that may sound the easiest, yet is perhaps one of the most complex, and requires a broad and deep knowledge of social media platforms in relation to marketing. We have all seen obvious examples of companies stumbling into social media without any real strategy or purpose, and they are usually found out very quickly.

As an example, John looks at why we might want to use Facebook:

• Go to the audience – we know that many people are already using Facebook, so to some extent we have a captive audience.
• Viral by nature – viral campaigns are undeniably the most successful, and see users to spread the word amongst themselves. Something recommended by a friend will surely carry more weight than a traditional piece of ‘push-marketing’.
• Understood by audiences – people are familiar with Facebook and its functionality, so you’re not asking them to learn new concepts.
• Achievable - low cost and easy to set up.
• Socially connected – if we reach one person, we may then also reach their friends too. Not to mention lateral links to other platforms.

4. Touchpoint strategy

Usually the ultimate goal of a campaign is to get people to your site. There are various ways of driving people through, from feeds and widgets to online ads and mobile integration. It’s important to have a strategy, though, of how to manage and optimise these initial points of contact, or touchpoints.

Mobile devices are arguably the perfect engagement tool:

• They are portable and convenient
• They are becoming increasingly hi-tech
• Users have a very high affinity with their devices – they love to use them
• They are always present and always on
• They are ready made for the job

Mark talks us through a number of intriguing uses of mobile devices, from the Golf GTI speedometer app, the ability to take a photo of a person and have it converted to Lego, and BMW’s Expression of Joy – augmented reality technology which sees Mark driving a virtual car around his desk. These are all excellent and entertaining apps in their own right, but ultimately exist to drive people to the end goal (be it ordering some Lego or booking a test drive).

5. Continual engagement

Launch day is, of course, not the end of the story. In fact, it’s only the beginning. Continual engagement is crucial – keeping the content fresh and keeping your audience informed. And again, making something viral is a fast-track to success. John mentions another tool, Kontagent, which analyses social networks and offers a range of viral tools.

And critically, all of this needs to come full circle and deliver a compelling website, where your users will end up. Without that, all of your efforts will be for nought. A decent main website has to be part of the strategy.

6. Measure, update, measure – and so on

Finally, you’ll need to measure your ongoing success. Update and adapt. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else. Don’t let any part of your strategy fall slack – work it all and make sure it is working for your audience.

Again, tools to help you measure your success include the excellent Google Analytics, which now offers integration with Facebook; Click Tale, which tracks user journeys and lets you watch movies of people browsing your site; and Twitalyzer.

10 commandments

John concluded with a mention of Augustine Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing:

1. Thou shalt not target customers with messages they don’t want
2. Thou shalt be truthful
3. Thou shalt respect your customers
4. Thou shalt make it easy for people to find you
5. Thou shalt be useful
6. Thou shalt make it easy for people to pass along
7. Thou shalt measure and optimize
8. Thou shalt listen to customers
9. Thou shalt remove any organizational barriers to speedy, collaborative innovation
10. Thou shalt not do brand-ing

Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing

Thanks again to all at Precedent for a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring morning. They run a whole programme of such seminars in various locations across the UK.

I hope to have a closer look at these features in the near future, especially as I’m currently involved in putting sign language videos onto YouTube. For now, though, have a look at the video below for more info.

PS thanks to Phil Teare for the original heads-up about this over at Accessify Forum.

Screenshot of a BSL video

Some of you will know about my project to get British Sign Language content on our corporate website. For the background to this, see the original business case and my experiences in the studio filming the videos.

Last week I got the BSL videos from our audio/visual unit, with all the audio editing complete, bringing us a step closer to getting them online. All I needed to do was add the captions and run them past our BSL expert one more time, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation.

With impeccable timing, Henny Swan blogged about captioning earlier today so I’d encourage people to read her post too as I’ll be referring to her findings here as well.

Online captioning tools

Due to my employer’s IT policy, which means I can’t install software onto my work PC, I’m going to have to settle for online captioning tools. This limited me somewhat, but I was hopeful that I could find something suitable.

YouTube itself recommends CaptionTube, but I’d also heard good things about YouTubeCC, so I decided to give that a go first.

YouTubeCC

YouTube CC

To start, make sure your video is uploaded and processed on Youtube. Next, go to YouTubeCC and enter the URL of the video that you wish to caption. This will bring up the video on the left with a box for the captions on the right.

The idea is that you play and pause the video, tapping in the captions as you go and adding them to the box on the right. YouTubeCC automatically adds the start times, according to where you’ve paused the video.

The first issue I encountered was that there seemed to be no way to preview the captions on the video itself, as you enter them. This makes it impossible to judge whether you have given each caption enough time on-screen, or whether you need to split them up.

Bigger problems were to come, though, upon completing my first video. Clicking the Export to YouTube button brought up the following error message:

Warning:
Some of the captions/timecodes are bogus and will not be added to the export.
Do you want to export anyhoo?

I have no idea why the captions or timecodes should be ‘bogus’, and could see no obvious error, so I went ahead and exported anyway, which enabled me to save the captions as a .sub file (YouTube requires either sub or srt file formats).

Adding captions using YouTube CC

Finally, heading back to YouTube and clicking on the Captions buttons under the video, on the My Videos page, it was a simple case of uploading the .sub file. The results weren’t bad – no sign of the bogus captions or timecodes – but as per my first concern, the timing was not perfect and some captions were far too brief. Also, captions remained visible until the next one came along, which in some cases was not ideal. I realised that you have to insert blank captions to achieve breaks between captions, which seemed a little convoluted.

Overall, then, I found YouTubeCC not bad but lacking features necessary to get really tight captions. Perhaps I wasn’t using it properly – I’d welcome suggestions or advice!

CaptionTube

Caption Tube beta

Next I thought I’d go back to YouTube’s original suggestion, CaptionTube. Henny has already done a great job of reviewing the pros and cons of this one, but I thought I’d add a bit more about some of the things I liked and disliked.

I really liked the timeline at the bottom. Anyone familiar with editing software such as Final Cut Pro will be very comfortable with this kind of interface. Unfortunately, it appeared to lack some of the functionality you might hope for, such as the ability to drag, drop or resize segments.

Caption Tube's timeline

Another feature I liked was the ability to set the duration of a caption. A fairly essential feature, I’d say, but having seen the difficulty of doing this in YouTubeCC I appreciate its existence here.

A definite down side was the need to swap between two pages to edit the captions then preview them. This slowed the process considerably, and although the Preview option is very welcome, I can’t help thinking it could have been integrated more usefully into the main view.

Caption Tube requires you to go to another page each time you want to preview your captions

A final plus, though, is that Caption Tube connects directly to your Google/YouTube account so there’s no need for a separate login.

Overstream

Overstream

Next up, then, is Henny’s preferred option – Overstream. Unlike the previous two, this one requires that you create an account. There’s no obvious privacy policy which is not great, and the password length can only be 10 characters long, far shorter than my usual hyper-secure passwords! Nevertheless, I duly sign up.

The first problem I encounter is the Overstream doesn’t appear to be able to access videos that are not yet public on YouTube. I guess this makes sense, although it wasn’t a problem for the previous two sites. Even using YouTube’s Limited Access URL option doesn’t seem to work. I don’t really want the video to be public yet, but to use this service I don’t have much choice (and can always hide the video again after adding the captions), so I temporarily make the video public.

Overstream has a handy demo video showing you the main controls so after watching this I plunge right in.

A screenshot of Overstream's interface

It’s immediately obvious that many of the issues I had with the previous two services have been addressed here. You can see the captions immediately appear on the video, each caption is given a default length which you can easily adjust, and you can drag and drop each individual caption on a global timeline.

Once finished, you can save the captions, or ‘overstream’, for editing at a later date, and can then export as a .srt file.

Uploading the .srt to YouTube worked a treat, and the timing was much better than before.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Overstream appears to offer by far the best online tool for captioning that I’ve used so far. The other options are ok, but far more basic and not without their faults.

I can’t show the results just yet as I promised to let our BSL signer have a look first, before it went public. I’ll be sure to update my blog as soon as the completed videos are online.

My talk started by introducing the idea of accessibility and how it applies to social media. I then spoke about CAPTCHA, and how this continues to be a significant barrier on many sites, preventing some users from even creating an account on certain sites.

I then went on to argue that if we are relying on social media sites to present content to our users, or to hold discussion and debates, then it’s our responsibility to make sure that the content is accessible. That’s where the following video kicks in (the text equivalent can be found below, after the video). Apologies for the background noise – Liz maintains that the saxophone was not added in later but was, rather, a bonus from the street of Edinburgh…

Transcript of video

If we’re putting our content on their sites, it’s our problem. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago and I wrote a brief blog post which I’d like to read from. Social media is a revolution and with all revolutions some people have been left behind. There are individuals who are at risk of exclusion – I’ve mentioned disabled individuals such as the blind and users of screen reader – but also the ‘digital divide’, where people aren’t connected to the internet and possibly even don’t want to be connected to the internet. We have to remember that these people aren’t going to be using these platforms.

It’s also an issue because it’s out of our control. We can make our own websites accessible but with other sites, for example if we wanted to create a Facebook account, we have to live with the consequences that those sites may not be as accessible as we’d want them to be.

Some of the other problems we need to be aware of. I’ve already mentioned CAPTCHA, impacting on the very first process of signing up to an account. There is also the fact that much of social media relies on dynamic web pages, rich internet applications – where pages update automatically as new content comes along. How do screen readers manage that? Do they know that the page has updated, and will they read out those updates? Evidence suggests that most new screen readers can handle some of these things but not everyone has the latest screen reading technology.

There’s also the issue of the volume of content; the pure number of videos there are out there on Youtube and so on, or the pure number of Tweets on Twitter. That makes it really hard to find content that you’re really interested in.

Probably the biggest overall accessibility concern of social media and our use of it is the fact that it is user-generated content. We don’t have any control over the content that other people are authoring to these sites. That’s the very nature of social media and, despite all of its benefits, that’s the big risk as well.

YouTube is an obvious example; anybody can put a video on YouTube but have they, for example, added captions so that deaf people can access the audio content, or audio description so that blind people know what’s going on on the screen? Probably not. We can do it – if we want to put a video onto YouTube we can make sure all of those processes are in place, but the average user may not want to or may not know how to.

So, if we’re directing people to this kind of content and saying ‘have your own discussions around that’ we need to be aware that some people may be left out of it.

So what can we do? The first thing is to put pressure on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, to tell them to make their services more accessible…

The video ends there, but I did go on to talk about the need to make sure that we are aware of any barriers that exist, making alternative arrangements where possible or directing people to more accessible versions (for example, Accessible Twitter and Easy YouTube).

As before, I’m keen to keep this discussion going so would invite any comments here. There’s also a discussion about social media accessibility over at Accessify Forum which I’d love people to contribute to.

My presentation at ScotWeb2 - photo courtesy of Jadu

This post explores some of the issues that I plan to discuss with attendees at tomorrow’s ScotWeb2 event in Edinburgh, regarding the current state of accessibility on Social Media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I hope to have some interesting feedback to post here after tomorrow, so for now here’s an overview of the subject. I’ve also thrown in a few open questions to kick-start the discussion.

[Edit: see a summary of the event on the ScotWeb2 blog]

What do I mean by Social Media accessibility?

Social Media has enjoyed an explosion of popularity in the past few years, making it easy for individuals to quickly and easily publish their own content and share it with the world, without needing technical skills in web publishing.

As with all such revolutions, though, some people have been left behind. Individuals at most risk of exclusion are those who require websites to be fully accessible in order to access the content. There are many barriers which can impact on the accessibility of a webpage, affecting people with many differing conditions. A blind user, for example, will probably use screen reader software to have the content read out to them. The content needs to be fully available to the screen reader for this to work correctly.

There are three distinct issues to consider when talking about the accessibility of Social Media platforms:

• Can everyone publish their own content without barriers?
• Does the publishing platform support the creation of accessible content?
• Is that content then presented to the end-user in an accessible way?

Why is it an issue?

There are obvious moral arguments why such systems should be accessible, as well as some important legal imperatives too (e.g. the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK). Essentially, if these systems are inaccessible to certain users, then those users are missing out on the opportunities and benefits of using that platform. Is it our responsibility, as adopters of the service, or the service providers themselves?

Sites such as Facebook have revolutionised how we build and maintain our social networks, on and offline. Sites such as YouTube have given us access to a huge variety of new media content never previously available. And platforms such as blogs and forums have allowed us to communicate with others and have our opinions heard across the globe.

What are the problems?

CAPTCHA

A State of the eNation Report from January 2008, published by AbilityNet, claimed that Social networking sites were locking out disabled users. In particular, it identified CAPTCHA as a significant and insurmountable barrier for many users, preventing them from even registering for sites. Many sites have since acted to improve this situation (for example, Twitter recently replaced their inaccessible CAPTCHA with reCAPTCHA, a far more accessible product). Yahoo is a surprising example of a high-profile company still getting it wrong.

Dynamic pages and Rich Internet Applications

Many Social Media sites rely heavily on dynamic content and interfaces powered by the likes of AJAX. Some users may not notice when a page updates, changing or adding new content. In some cases, certain functions may be inaccessible because of the scripting techniques used. Even where the elements are adapted to be accessible to modern assistive technologies, it is important to remember that many users will have older versions which are not compatible.

Volume of content

Social Media is a fast moving and high-volume medium. Anyone who uses Twitter, and who has built up a reasonable number of people to follow, will know how quickly the Tweet streams change and how easy it is to miss potentially useful content.

There is also the wider issue of usability and the common requirement to wade through masses of content to find what you want.

User generated content

Perhaps the most serious challenge to Social Media accessibility comes as a consequence of its very nature – the fact that anyone can publish content. Quality control becomes near-impossible, and accessibility is often the first victim. Is there a way of mitigating against this? Is any degree of content moderation realistic?

YouTube is an obvious example. Although YouTube provides the ability to add captions to videos, for the benefit of deaf or hard-of-hearing users, this is an optional extra that few will use. Equally, blind users will have no access to the visual content of the videos without decent video description. Is it realistic to provide this additional content, or could it make the process too time-consuming and expensive? If the latter, should we be providing the content at all?

Even worse, as Nomensa’s article on Social Media and Accessibility points out, the YouTube interface itself is inaccessible:

The (YouTube) website lacks many common accessibility features. The player is not keyboard accessible, nor is it accessible to a screen reader user. Recently, YouTube have introduced the ability to upload captions for people with hearing difficulties, yet the player itself remains an obstacle for many other users. The same problems are apparent when YouTube content is embedded on alternative websites using the standard player.

In one swift backwards step, the greatest social interaction of all time, becomes an obstacle. Perhaps even an impossibility.

Nomensa

Conclusions, and what can we do about it?

Perhaps the most important step is to put pressure on the providers of these services, to make sure that they are offering accessible platforms. How can we do that? And how effective will it be?

Until the platforms are accessible, we need to be aware of the barriers and act accordingly, offering alternatives to ensure that we’re including everyone. We could also direct our users to the accessible versions of key platforms (Accessible Twitter, Easy YouTube etc) until the original sites improve.

The inaccessibility of some of these sites should not prevent us from using them – rather we should just be sure of approaching them knowing the risks. Indeed, there are other risks of exclusion beyond accessibility – cultural, social and economic factors may all affect whether a person engages with these services, so we can never assume that these platforms provide a complete solution. Are there ways of bridging this digital divide?

Further reading

• OFCOM report on Social Networking attitudes, behaviour and use (PDF)
• Social Networking accessibility paper by Henny Swan (PDF)
• Blind Access Journal reports that Twitter Quietly Fixes Broken Audio CAPTCHA
• Are Social Networking Sites Accessible to People with Vision Loss? The American Foundation for the Blind
• Deafblind Web Users Engage With Social Media

I’ll continue to add to it as new stories come up so if you spot a good one, let me know!

It’s worth noting that I’m collecting these as useful ‘lessons learned’ – not to put people off using such platforms for their organisations, but to provide a clearer picture of some of the pitfalls.

McDonald’s #McDStories Twitter Campaign Fails – 24th January 2012

A Twitter campaign by McDonald’s aimed at spreading good news about the firm has backfired spectacularly – with people using the #McDStories to highlight their worst experiences of the fast food chain. (source: Huffington Post)

The only surprising thing about this story is that they didn’t see it coming.

Labour sacks candidate in Twitter row – 9th April 2010

The Labour party sacks one of its parliamentary candidates after details emerged of offensive comments he had published on Twitter (source: The Guardian).

Quite an astonishing one, this. The phrase “should have known better” has never been more applicable. I’ve written a brief post analysing the story.

Sunday Express makes a Twit of itself – 17th January 2010

The Sunday Express publishes a damning exposé of the BBC’s use of Twitter, claiming that they have no followers and are wasting their time. Unfortunately the writers have confused followers for following, and the accounts in question actually have thousands of followers (source: No Rock and Roll Fun).

The article has since been pulled, but is a reminder of how easy it is to criticise social media without fully understanding it, as Tory MP Anne Widdecombe will now be finding out, after giving the Express a quote based on their dubious findings.

Alpha Course online poll backfires – 23rd October 2009

The Christian Alpha Course’s multi-million pound advertising campaign has potentially backfired when an online poll, asking whether people believed in God, showed an abnormally high 98% saying ‘No’. (source: The Register). Suspicions of an online sting by atheists seem highly likely.

I’ve also written a post looking at the risks of online polls.

Staff at PC World and Currys mock customers’ ‘stupidity’ on Facebook – 6th September 2009

Comments describe customers as ‘really stupid’ and ‘ignorant’, with some suggesting that they should be punched or even cattle-prodded (source: Guardian). Parent company DSG plans to investigate and take ‘necessary action’.

Lloyds spams Tweeters going on their hols – 26th August 2009

Automatic tweets to anyone mentioning the word ‘holiday’, plugging the pharmacy’s Travel Health webpage, do not go down well in the Twittersphere (source : pezholio.co.uk). Attempts to contact the company, suggesting they change their tactics, are ignored.

MI6 boss in Facebook row – 5th July 2009

Personal details about the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, are removed from Facebook amid security concerns (source: BBC News). Foreign Secretary David Miliband denies that security had been compromised, saying: “You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit. That’s not a state secret.”

Habitat abuses Twitter hashtags – 20 June 2009

UK furniture store Habitat starts tweeting, but abuses the hashtag in a surprising spate of spammy behaviour (source: Social Media Today) which quickly attracts criticism amongst Twitter users. Misused hashtags include #iphone, #Apple and #MOUSAVI (in a pretty cynical attempt to cash in on the high profile Iranian elections).

Force disciplines police blogger – 16 June 2009

A serving detective, revealed as the author of a high-profile blog, has been disciplined by his force (source: BBC). The award-winning blog had included criticisms of government ministers and police bureaucracy.

Council freezes Twitter account after insult gaffe – 3 June 2009

A council-run newspaper accidentally Tweets a potentially insulting message (source: localgov.co.uk), apparently intended only as a Direct Message to one person. Twitter account promptly shut down.

Probe into teacher Twitter posts – 22 May 2009

Teacher caught Tweeting on her mobile phone during class time (source: BBC). Up to 38 comments a day, some discussing her pupils. An investigation is launched.

Facebook gaffe earns woman the sack – 27 April 2009

A Swiss Insurance worker is fired after using Facebook whilst off sick (source: PC Pro). She had claimed a condition which prevented her from using her computer, and insisted she had accessed Facebook via her phone whilst in bed.

Video prank damages Domino’s brand – 15 April 2009

Domino’s Pizza employees post a film of unsavoury kitchen activity on Youtube (source: NY Times). Within days, millions have viewed the footage, and outrage spreads across the internet.

Damage control - Dominos responds via Youtube

New Skittles Twitter homepage not so sweet – 2 March 2009

Skittles adds a homepage feed of Tweets about it’s product, only to be inundated with abusive, unmoderated comments (source: PC Pro). As one poster observes, Skittles have “opened up the brand so we can all deface it.”

Girl fired for comment on Facebook – 27 Feb 2009

Girls describes her office job as ‘boring’ on Facebook. Is subsequently fired (source: BBC). Employer says “her display of disrespect and dissatisfaction undermined the relationship and made it untenable”.

Ryanair and the ‘idiot bloggers’ – 25 Feb 2009

Ryanair employees leave abusive comments on a blog which had reported a flaw in their website (Source: Times Online). The official statement that comes afterwards does little to defuse the situation.

Further reading

• How Facebook can get you fired
• Social Media Pitfalls: 5 lessons learned
• Top Ten Branded Social Media Gaffes