FreshNetworks Blog

Image by hozinja via Flickr

Certain sections of the UK media have been ascribing some blame for the riots in London to Twitter. Aside from denying that riots such as this happened long before the invention of such social media tools, such statements also show a lack of real understanding of how social media tools like Twitter are used by people, and when they are less useful.

There are many things that Twitter can and is doing during the riots, but there are also many things that it can’t and isn’t.

Twitter IS NOT a good place to get a clear view of what is really happening

Twitter is flooded with conversations about the riots in London and across the UK. Most of these are accurate (at least as far as the original author is concerned) but many are rumour and speculation. Just because it is on Twitter does not make it true and there can be a danger to judge accuracy on the basis of the number of retweets. Over the last few days we have seen rumours of riots and looting on streets that were actually calm. It is difficult to separate truth from rumour on Twitter and this makes is a difficult place to understand what is really happening across London.

Twitter IS a good place to find people in your neighbourhood

Twitter is a great place to find like minded people. And during the London Riots we have seen it used as a real tool for people to find others in their community. Whilst it is not great for getting a view on what is happening across London it can be good for finding like minded people in your area. Rather than looking for people talking about #LondonRiots, many Twitter users have taken the opportunity to find people talking about the area they live or work in and then follow those they begin to trust. Messaging them to find out what the situation is nearby and sharing information and advice for your local community.

Twitter IS NOT a good place to get rational, reasoned argument

Twitter does not suit rational, balanced argument. It is short-form communication that typically comments (briefly) on an event or describes what is happening. It is actually quite difficult to present a rounded viewpoint or to expand on what you say. This can make it both a difficult place to explain what you say, but also it attracts simple statements that can often be inflammatory (even if they weren’t intended to be so). For real evaluation and discussion about what it is happening, it is best to look elsewhere – blogs, forums, Google+. Twitter is suited to short-form statements about what is happening.

Twitter IS a good place to find evidence and testimony

This does, however, make Twitter a great place for potential intelligence, evidence and reporting about what happened. The pictures people take and share. The comments people leave (and where they are when they leave them). These statements about what is happening from ‘spectators’ of the events could be a useful source of information for the Police and others. The number of people capturing and describing events is a potentially positive role that Twitter can play – recording events and storing evidence.

Twitter IS NOT a good place to organise a riot

There has been some discussion that Twitter caused the riots and that they were planned there. This seems unlikely. Twitter is a public social network where (except for the minority with locked accounts) anybody can see what you say even if they don’t follow you. Your contacts on Twitter tend to be quite weak social links – people you may share one interest with, or who may have said something you found useful once in the past. This is not the place to plan and organise riots with groups of other people you know and trust. You are more likely to do that elsewhere – in a private place (where nobody can look at what you are saying) and in a network with strong social links. This is why group messaging services, notably Blackberry’s BBM, are more likely to have been used. Closed private networks with people you have stronger social links with are much more useful for organising any kind of secret get together, including a riot.

Twitter IS a good place to organise a cleanup

But what about where you do want everybody to know what you’re doing? And you do want even your weak social links to see and potentially share what you are saying. In this case, Twitter is useful and we’ve seen that most notably with the @riotcleanup Twitter account and others that have encouraged people to descend on parts of London to help clean up the morning after rioting. Whilst some events (ones you want to organise in private) are best kept to closed networks, others (those you want everybody to know about) are best in public ones. Twitter is great for organising a cleanup and for letting people know that this is happening. Less good for organising a riot.

Having already charted how LinkedIn has grown over the last eight years, as well as comparing the growth of LinkedIn to Facebook,  it’s time to take a look at the top 10 companies on LinkedIn.

Users on LinkedIn can be linked to a company in one of two ways; by being an employee or by following the company. The top 10 followed companies on LinkedIn are  IBM, HP, Accenture, Microsoft, Oracle, Deloitte, PwC, Cisco, Apple, Google.

When looking at theses top ten companies on LinkedIn in more detail it becomes clear that there is a leader in both the number of followers and the number of employees on LinkedIn:

The chart shows there’s a clear trend between the size of the company (based on the number of employees on the platform) and the number of followers it has.

On average, each company has almost 2.5 followers for each employee on the site.

However, there are a couple of ‘top performers’ – Apple has six followers to every employee while Google has eight. Perhaps this is not suprising given the ‘aspirational’ nature of both these brands from a professional and personal perspective.

Courtesy of hozinja via flickr

The role of social media in the current riots across London and the UK has been mixed. Twitter, in particular, has had a lot of bad press due to reports that it allegedly played a part in inciting trouble. Unfortunately it’s a medium of communication to a mass audience and due to its public and searchable nature it is having the finger pointed at it for adding fuel to the fire. As social media is highly effective for bringing together groups of people to a common agenda, it has been deployed considerably over the past few days, BUT with a strong base using it for good rather than bad. 

In June we wrote about the Stanley Cup hockey riots in Canada, and how the sheer outrage of the local communities that were affected resulted in a mass ‘naming and shaming’ exercise on Facebook. Angry people were happy to call people out on contributing to the distressing and damaging events that rocked their city in spite of the relative transparency that doing so would result in (as tagging a person tells them that you have tagged them.)

If we look at social networks and break them down to their raw characteristics (scalable, persistent, replicable and searchable)  they are perfect for disseminating information to a large group of people. In my opinion, over time,  social media will play more of a positive role than a negative one in the riots.

I wanted to highlight the ways in which social networks have been and could be used to bring some justice to the bad things that have happened in the riots:

Ultimately social media has had both a negative and a positive effect in this situation but it’s clear that it is very powerful and ultimately it comes down to how people want to use it and what information they want to communicate.

Having already looked at how LinkedIn has grown over the last eight years,  we thought it would be interesting to look at the growth of LinkedIn in comparison to another online networking giant – Facebook – as well as in relation to Internet use in the more general sense.

Whilst LinkedIn’s growth has been continuous, the rate at which this growth is occurring has been in decline since 2007. This trend is in fact similar to both that of Facebook and also the Internet:

LinkedIn’s decrease in growth is not unexpected as saturation points are often seen within original/initial launch markets. In fact, when comparing the decline in growth across the three areas, LinkedIn’s user decrease correlates to that of the Internet, whereas Facebook has seen a rather more rapid decline.

What is interesting, though, is if you track growth for the first quarter this year and compare it to the previous two years growth, as this indicates that there will be a return to growth, not only for LinkedIn but also for both Internet use and Facebook too.

This is a bold prediction, specifically when news reports in June this year suggested that in developed markets, such as the USA, UK, Canada and Russia, there has been a loss in users month-on-month for Facebook.

So where will these new users come from? Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network, which includes Inside Facebook was quoted in The Guardian saying that:

“…by the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt … So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia.”

Eldon’s words actually apply to LinkedIn too and recent figures on LinkedIn’s own blog highlighted Brazil, Mexico and India as markets with the fastest growth rates.

Indeed, overall, global memberships – free and paid for – on LinkedIn grew to 115.8 million in second quarter of this year, up 61% on 2010. By contrast, Facebook, which is also said to be mooting an IPO, has more than 750 million members.

Our next post, as part of our LinkedIn Week series, will look at the top 10 companies on LinkedIn.