Tower Bridge and the End of Innocence

Fair warning – my language in this post may imply I believe certain things to be “true”. Since I am figuring out some ideas that may not be the case. Please append “might”, “perhaps” and “could” where appropriate.

News reached the Internet today that the @towerbridge Twitter account had been taken over by the company that runs publicity for the tourist attraction within Tower Bridge in London. Not the bridge itself, just the touristy bit inside it. Which I found interesting.

If you hadn’t heard of it, the @towerbridge Twitter was one of the things that people who get excited about these sort of things got excited about a years back. It was an early example of a “spime“, part of the “Internet of Things”. In short, Tower Bridge told Twitter when it went up, and it told Twitter when it went down. Not a person, a bridge, talking as if it were a person, powered by public data. There was quite a spate of these things at the time. I remember a conference where a bubble machine would spurt bubbles into the room whenever it noticed someone had tweeted a hashtag, which was quite distracting to the speakers. Useless, sure, but that wasn’t really the point. The fact was it could be done, which was cool, and it might be useful in the future.

Back then people didn’t have any idea what Twitter and Facebook, and by extension Social Media as a whole, was for, so dicking around with bubble machines and bridges was fine. Let the nerds have their fun while the rest of the world gets on with important things that actually make money. But now, in 2011, we think we know what Twitter and Facebook are for. They’re for selling things.

Now I’d be a hypocrite if I were to kick up a stink about this. I make a significant part of my living helping people to sell things on the Internet. I try and give them good advice and explain that it’s generally harder to use Social Media to sell stuff than old-style broadcast media, but I still make money from the sort of people who were responsible for turing the @towerbridge account from a neat experiment in open data and object interaction to yet another marketing mouthpiece. I don’t particularly like how it’s been handled, and I think from a marketing perspective the old account was potentially more valuable, but I can’t get too angry about it.

I can, however, become sad, because we’ve managed to screw up in the last couple of years. We got so excited about the potential of the tools that we mistook their brands for their models of interaction. But more critically we were so desperate to justify this exciting new thing to the wider world that we let the marketeers set the definitions and parameters. Social Media may be many things but it’s only real value is for selling.

Which should be fine. You can un-like and de-follow those really obnoxious salespersons. We’re forever being told social media creates a bubble insulating the user from opinions and ideas they don’t want to engage with. But that style talking, that broadcast mentality appears to be bleeding through. A friend of mine tweeted this tonight (private account so I’ll respect that and not link).

“It’s getting a bit self-promotional broadcasty, this Twitter is sometimes. I am struggling to want to follow folk at the moment. [...] I don’t recognise some folk any more. I’m finding that bit of Twitter weird as toast with nails in it.”

This is someone who’s been on Twitter as a relatively “normal” person (not like me) since about 2008, who is not a weirdo or a geek and who generally uses Twitter to wind down at the end of the day, making jokes and having fun. She doesn’t follow brands, she chats with people and she’s noticing this change of tone.

Social Media was supposed to be the “authentic” media, but the twin poster children of social media – Twitter and Facebook – have been infected with inauthenticity, not by their corporate owners or the brands they sell your information to, but by the very people who create that environment. On Facebook I have to swim through a sea of non-commercial promotion and event invites before I can get to the interesting stuff. On Twitter I have to implement a strict unfollow policy when people stop being the interesting, vital souls I met in the pub that time and turn into vacuous promoters of their and others activities.

Our status update media has, in effect, shifted from “What are you doing?” to “What are you selling?”

(Interestingly I don’t see this so much on the blogs, presumably because blogging is so old fashioned and passe these days.)

Before anyone picks me up on it, yes, I’m guilty of this myself. I tend towards broadcast in my online activity and I do try to promote stuff that I feel a connection to. But I do also try and temper it with a dash of authenticity, to make the delivery of the message a little more personal. I have no idea how well I succeed at this, but then I also encourage people to unfollow me if they’re not enjoying my output.

There were many great things about the model of communication that Twitter stumbled upon but the best thing was it had no specific inherent use. It still doesn’t, but there are countless advisors and consultants who will try to tell you that the inherent use of Twitter and Facebook is to sell things. And when the dominant activity by dominant figures on that service, be they celebrities or brands, is to sell things that activity is going to trickle down.

Returning to Tower Bridge, some folk have been labelling this a “marketing fail” because it’s generating bad publicity for the attraction. I don’t think it’s a marketing failure. I think it’s a very wise and sensible decision from the perspective of the marketing department for a tourist attraction. As it stood the account was doing nothing to sell tickets for the Tower Bridge Experience. It was merely a fun and occasionally useful (apparently taxi drivers would check it) part of the wider London community – the bridge that tweets. Now it helps in the campaign to get more people to get tourists through the turnstiles. From a marketing perspective it’s a very sensible move. And that’s the problem.

Once you start framing communication platforms through their value to marketing you miss the things that make them so attractive in the first place. For the marketeer a high street is somewhere to distribute leaflets, a wall is somewhere to hang a billboard, a doorbell is something to ring when you have a product to shift and Twitter is where people engage with brands. But no-one normal goes onto Twitter to engage with brands, just as no-one normal walks down the high street to collect leaflets. That’s not to say some people won’t appreciate the leaflets or enjoy their conversation with the brand – people will do what people will do – but it’s not the written inherent purpose of the activity.

You can, of course, do whatever you like on your Facebook or Twitter. That’s one of the great things about it. But if you’re in the business of selling please think hard about what you’re doing and whether it’ll actually work. In my experience the social internet is not a magic sales machine. You don’t stick your message in at one end and get an instant return on investment out of the other. Most of the time you’ll be ignored by people who have better things to do with their attention. Unfortunately for you those things have no real “value” in your world.

I’ll be developing my thinking about this more over the summer as I gear up for a course I’m running with Helga Henry in the autumn. You thoughts are, as ever, welcome.