I Hate Mornings

It’s been a busy week. I played a load of gigs, and ended up on the BBC.

I got back from playing the Little Fish gig in Manchester at about 4:30am on Sunday, and by 2pm I was down in the Half Moon warming up for a Troubadour set as part of James Bell‘s rather excellent Offshoot festival. I revived 12×12 and played some of my more folksy numbers (Hugh F-W, Already Know, some of the Tweet Suite) before finishing with a particularly gruff rendition of How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around, my favourite Dr John song.

The Twitter song on the BBC World Service

In the evening I was playing some piano with Jooles from Little Fish at the Holywell Music Rooms (another Offshoot event). As we were setting up I got a call from the lovely Chris Vallance asking if he could use the Twitter song for a BBC World Service piece. I’m still quite pleasantly surprised that people contact me about using the song in podcasts, radio shows, presentations and lessons.

Like a proud parent I’m glad that something I created has done well for itself, and like an errant child the Twitter song calls home every once in a while to let me know what it’s up to. So (like an unwanted and slightly braggy Christmas family newsletter) here’s the bit of World Service radio with the Twitter song on it. It’s less than five minutes, and worth a listen even if I wasn’t on it. ;)

Little Fish on the BBC home page

And as if that wasn’t enough, I ended up making an appearance on the BBC home page on Monday. A tiny, badly lit part of a video of me playing Hammond behind Juju and Nez, but an appearance nonetheless. It was a video that BBC took of Little Fish playing the Radiohead song Just at the Oxford gig last Saturday. It was a classic BBC mix (loads of vocal, everything else dry and flat), but they filmed it on three cameras and it looked pretty cool.

The video seems to have disappeared off the BBC Oxford site since it was on the front page, but I recorded it while it was up so I could always sneakily post it somewhere…

On the way back to Oxford on Friday we stopped in at Xander’s parents’ house, where I found myself trying to explain what TEDxTuttle was. “It’s a combination of TED and Tuttle”, I said. “Oh.” On Saturday I ran into Wes and Dave (fellow Torchboxers) at Greens Café. “So what exactly was this TEDxTuttle thing?”, they said. I think it’s time for an explanation that makes sense to you (and not just the people who were there).

TED

TED is a conference where massively successful people give 18-minute talks and everyone schmoozes. It costs thousands to attend. People tend to either give inspiring talks on success and creativity, or demonstrate some futuristic technology.

The most important thing about TED is that all the talks are filmed, and the videos are available online for free. It’s an amazing resource which you should definitely check out. It beats watching reruns of Dragon’s Den on iPlayer.

Tuttle

Tuttle is a ‘loose association of people’ with an interest in social media. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday morning at the ICA (10-12 in the bar). Anyone can turn up. There are usually between 50 and 100 people there, most of whom are wonderfully interesting. There’s no structure (Lloyd welcomes people at 11, but that’s it). People talk.

The most important thing about Tuttle is the connections that are made there, all under the watchful eye of the Tuttle’s ukulele-playing curator, Lloyd Davis. All the interesting online stuff I’ve done in the last year has been somehow connected to Tuttle.

TEDxTuttle

TED is huge. They run international spin-off conferences, and have speakers like Al Gore and Bill Clinton. This year they launched TEDx, which gives any group the opportunity to organise their own TED event. There are some ground rules, and the events are filmed and submitted to TED.

So TEDxTuttle was 90 people (some Tuttlers, some not) in a conference centre at Monument. We watched some TED videos, we listened to some speakers, we drank coffee and chatted. I gave a talk on Babble + Context = Conversation, including live performances of a few of the Tweet Suite movements, and sang the Twitter song.

Photos, blogs etc.

Being a social media event, there was plenty of coverage online, both live and afterwards. Here are a few highlights:

• Adam Tinworth was liveblogging. He covered Maggie Philbin on Tomorrow’s World, Rachel Armstrong on The Future of Buildings, Lloyd Davis on Tales of Tuttle, me on Twitter(ish) and Mat Morrison on Measuring Social Media.
• Benjamin Ellis took some great photos of TEDxTuttle (a couple of which I’ve used on this post under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
• Andy Roberts posted a quick blog about Rachel Armstrong’s talk on ‘living architecture’ (including a video of Rachel from a previous event explaining her work with protocells).
• Jennifer Jones blogged about TEDxTuttle from an outsider’s perspective.
• Alan Patrick (who organised the event) wrote up his thoughts about the TEDxTuttle event and all the talks.

The lumbering mammoth of print media finally caught up with the zippy little Twitter bird, who had been sitting on the finish line and twiddling his thumbs for weeks.

I was in the newspaper!

The Twitter song was mentioned in The Guardian’s Tech section a couple of weeks ago, with a nice little picture and an amusing caption (thanks @iusher for the heads up and the photo. I was quite excited: for those of us born before 1990 it’s still considered quite an achievement to have your picture in the paper. It’s up there with membership of the Rotary Club and winning the welly-wanging. But once the thrill had subsided I realised how irrelevant the newspapers have become to those of us who get our communication fix online.

As I walked out of the newsagent I couldn’t remember the last time I had bought a newspaper. And the “hot tip” YouTube video was almost a month old. That might not seem like a long time but in that month my hits, views, and follows all jumped into the hundreds and thousands then slumped back down to their usual single figures. The moment had passed. The newspaper was too slow.

Speed of the puma (puma, puma, puma…)*

The cycle of interest and buzz is so quick these days that I almost missed the boat myself. By wasting a whole day thinking about making a Twitter song t-shirt to sell from the YouTube page I missed all but the last few stragglers of my potential groupie audience. And the next video I posted didn’t get 250,000 views. It got 2,000. Over a couple of weeks.

I’m not complaining. I gained loads of followers and subscribers I would not otherwise have had, and the Twitter song has been featured all over the place. This is all good. But the lesson to be learned is that it’s The Buzz that has value. Everything else is just a beautiful distraction. If you’re interested in cashing in on the ephemeral Social Media chatter you need to act quickly.

Background

I was lurking at the London Social Media Café (aka. the Tuttle Club) about a month ago, determined to write three songs in a day to catch up on my 50 Songs in 90 Days Challenge. Somebody (almost certainly @solobasssteve) suggested I write a song about Twitter, because all the SMC types are Twitterholics, and talk endlessly about how maahvellous Twitter is. So I wrote the song and posted it on the 50/90 Challenge site.

It got some buzz on Twitter (of course – that was the plan all along ;o), but people don’t like to listen to random anonymous songs without a context, so I made a quick video and stuck it on YouTube.

A few hundred people saw the YouTube video, and I was pretty stoked. Over the next few days, I followed its progress with Twitter search, and left a few comments here and there thanking people for mentioning it. The overlapping Twitter networks couldn’t resist retweeting a song that mentioned retweeting in the chorus, so I guess it must have appeared in a fair few Twitter streams around the world (I recorded a Skype interview for a BBC Radio Five Live show, and I woke up one morning to find the song had just been featured on National Radio New Zealand.)

Then @youtube tweeted the song, causing a bit of a surge in the view count. A couple of days after that, it was featured on the YouTube home page worldwide, and I watched the view count jump from about 800 to over 12,000 in 2 hours. By the end of the day it reached 50,000, and it’s now at 183,084 two days later. That’s a lot of views for a slightly silly song.

Why did this song get featured?

I have no insight into the YouTube editors’ thought processes, but I can see a number of factors that helped the Twitter song hit the big time:

• It was already getting hundreds of views in a short time. It’s not difficult, but most videos I put up get <100 views ever. So this one obviously had legs.
• It had an obvious target audience. As an editor you could look at the title and say, “The social media geeks will love this. There are loads of them, and they link to stuff a lot.”
• The hook is in the first 2 seconds. You can press play, laugh, and send it to your friends without having to watch the whole thing (ie. zero drop-off rate).
• YouTube viewers probably think Twitter is stupid, if they’ve heard of it at all. Given that popularity on YouTube is measured by the number of people who can be bothered to write “You suck. Buy my porn.” in the comment field, I think the Twitter song would be pretty good bait for that sort of thing.
• It’s funny (at least the backing vocals). And funny is always better than good.

So what do you get for being a YouTube megastar?

Well, I don’t know exactly. I’ve had loads of really nice comments, which I’m slowly responding too. It’s always a treat when somebody listens to one of my songs voluntarily and enjoys it. I’ve had loads of terrible comments, which have kept me amused for days now, and to which I’m also slowly responding. Nothing tickles me more than responding to an abusive comment in an annoyingly nice way, making an extra effort to live up to whichever stereotype you’ve been assigned.

I’ve had a few offers of collaborations with other musicians, which is always good. I’ve also been asked to play the song at the Harvest Twestival next week, and potentially to write some reviews of social media stuff for musicians. I suppose the aim of the experiment (if I can retroactively assign one) was to raise my profile in the Social Media community and that’s definitely happened.

It’s all a bit ironic because the whole thing took off days after I got a full-time job and decided not to bother becoming an internet superstar any more. I’m sure I had laid some important groundwork but, like with most successes, it’s only when you forget about becoming famous and concentrate on making better stuff that you get somewhere.

The Twitter song page

The Twitter song now has its own page, where I’m collecting fun stuff. Go read it. ;o)