@buzzin_fly DJ Ben Watt posted what turned out to be the first online news of redundancies at the vitally important London venue. Within an hour there was plenty of RT action of his original post and the usual overexcited Twitter chatter confusing the issue. By the end of the afternoon things were getting fairly heated on the clubbing forums, forcing Ben to make a statement earlier today.

The one voice that everyone wanted/needed to hear remained deafeningly silent. In fact, as opposed to posting a statement on either their homepage news feed or blog, @fabriclondon contacted Ben and asked him to remove his earlier tweets. As anyone using Twitter (and indeed any web media tools) should really be aware, this is an utterly pointless exercise. It also fuels the gossipmongers no end.

There is still no mention of the rumours – which have of course now spread far beyond Twitter and the forums – on any of Fabric’s online profiles. This late reaction will do more damage to their reputation than gossip ever could. We questioned why it took so long for an official statement to go up on the Matter website last week, but with the venue’s closure and staff being given their marching orders, it was understandable that getting online was probably not the most pressing issue. It’s different this time though. The Fabric blog is still being updated with info about this weekend’s parties, so the wall of silence makes the situation seem dire, when clearly every effort will be being put into making sure the club continues to open as usual, if this is possible.

During times of internal turbulence, no company really wants to have to stand up in front of the public and make a statement until the dust at least begins to settle. But it’s an absolute necessity these days. And it can be done quite effectively in 140 characters. A chatty “will clear up all rumours shortly, open as usual” would have been good. Instead there is confusion leading up to one of the most lucrative holiday weekends in the clubbing year, inflicting both short and long-term damage to the club and it’s fantastic international brand.

It serves as a stark example of how even the most apparently slick, youthful media operations – that are fully blogged, Twittered and Facebooked up – are still a long way off having the digital strategy required to react properly to today’s real time web.

It is not enough to simply be using all these tools, our entire approach towards communications needs to be rethought in order to cope with them. Adapting is proving difficult for most people aged over 25 and most companies with managers over 25, but this absolutely needs to be embraced.

Hopefully Fabric and the many observers of this incident will use it to improve their digital strategy in the ways we often advocate here. Long may the club continue.

So we’re only hours away from a general election result, but the influence digital media has played on it all won’t be decided until the dusts of history have begun to settle. The fact that it hasn’t dominated the commentary has been refreshing. Perhaps as a society we are finally getting over the novelty of being able to communicate ideas/images in real-time from/to anyone/anywhere?

Having said that, the breathtaking lack of digital media savvy from the Brown team in the ‘Bigotgate’ incident (breathtaking to Gillian “You’re joh-king!” Duffy at any rate) in not only leaving a mic on the PM, but then not thinking that a BBC Radio studio might just have a webcam set up, shows we’re still at a pretty basic stage.

Bizarre Limbo

Something as steeped in history and protocol as an election is bound to struggle to keep up with the pace of change. It feels like a bizarre limbo between different worlds to go to a polling station where a man with a pencil and ruler crosses off your name on a big list, while the person behind you updates their Facebook status to “…is voting” to the world from their phone.

If anything, being social online really has inspired younger people to engage with politics this time, even if it is inevitably in a more presidential, personality-driven way. No party may have mobilised support online in quite the dynamic method of the US Obama campaign, but this was never going to work like that in the UK. Acerbic wit on Twitter is much more our style. What real effect that has on voting patterns is debateable. A outright victory for Nick Clegg would seem assured when looking at the Twitter search feeds, with David Cameron’s Torys repeatedly mocked, yet the polls tell us they lead.

Unwritten History

Our society’s digital divide clearly remains wide, and particularly split by age and, of course, media savvy. But whether we notice it or not, this election has probably squeezed that gap a little more. Even if the blue rinse Conservatives are not part of the digital conversation, the way social media is changing the expectations of those who are is having a profound, unstoppable social effect.

The result of the election has implications for our media history too. Will the newspapers still be able to claim it was their desperate front pages ‘wot won it’? Will a hung parliament be said to result from tribal populism for the Lib-Dems invigorated by TV debates and Facebook’ed up youth? Are pollsters more or less accurate now we’re all wired up? All will be revealed tonight. See you on #ge2010 for the real-time action…

Twitter is far more established and important that it was even during Barak Obama’s famous social media election campaign. And the UK already loves to tweet during political TV shows like the BBC’s Question Time. It’s a real shame that the many Twitter-phobes are missing out on this important new dimension. One day soon, all big live events will have a feed of comments as a standard part of the broadcast. Then, status updates will be see for what they really are – far from egotistical personal broadcasts, they can be a simple but effective ways for any audience to participate in a communal event.

It’s fantastic that just as digital progress seems to signal the ‘end’ of event television by making almost everything available on-demand, we have a brand new medium for live events, that also has the added importance of immediate political weight.

The Chancellors Debate showed the shape of things to come once the party leaders have their TV showdowns. Of course the negative side of all this real-time digital commentary is that those in the spotlight become incredibly guarded and bland, plus attempt to exert way too much control. However, like it or not, this technology will play a vital role in the Election 2010. And this is really just the beginning of a new political era, so resistance to things like Twitter will have to simply fall away.

The Daily Mail and others may still find value in running daily scare stories about social networks and the anonymity of the internet for some time yet, but the next month will be an important move forward in the acceptance of all the ‘new’ media technologies – and how to use them effectively. Even if politics continues to annoy and baffle, hopefully the relevance and power of digital media will become clearer.

I can’t help feeling disappointed observing the glee many people are taking in the ‘battle’ to get Rage Against the Machine to Christmas No.1 over the usual syrupy X-Factor ballad. Yet again, a virtual-pitchfork wielding mob springs up on Facebook/Twitter, overexcitedly spitting bile about ‘sticking it to Simon Cowell’ and clearly relishing being members of some achingly cool, subversive arbiters of taste and democracy.

But since when was buying 3 copies of a track (that you may well already own) to push it artificially to Number 1 a victory for democracy? And when did subverting the mainstream Saturday night TV populism of X-Factor become about a pop music popularity contest of equally silly, mainstream proportions?

I suppose at least people are buying the music. Downloading ‘Killing In The Name Of’ from a torrent site would kinda miss the point (but I bet it’s still doing briskly on those too this week). Much has been made of the fact that Sony is behind both of the No.1 contenders anyway, so can’t lose, no matter how much ‘people power’ is exerted with a couple of lazy clicks of a mouse.

Odeous as Cowell can often seem, slagging him off on social networks just makes the “I’m buying RATM, yeah!” brigade seem more disenfranchised rather than powerful. Downloading singles is not ‘sticking it’ to any ‘man’. This over-excitement feels like the early days of email, when it seemed incredibly big and clever to send jokes to all your contacts. As the platform (or rather, its users) matured, the childish approach to its new thrills wore off. In 2010 we can expect plenty more mobs to spring up, since the social web is such a new cultural phenomenon. You get the feeling the possibilities are only just beginning to be realised.

Yes, this does give ‘the people’ some considerable new empowerment – the freedom of speech Twitter mob against Trafigura highlighted just how difficult it is for companies attempting to silence the free press – but the faux-rebellious #ratm4xmas campaign also proves how easy it is to mobilise huge numbers of people to join a ‘cause’ they have not thought very much about.

Culturally this is hugely negative. Comedians fear making their most cutting jokes without a ‘campaign’ springing up (@jimmycarr was satirising the lack of weapons for troops but still got pilloried for mocking disability) and politicians have to speak in such bland, cautious terms as to render most interviews pointless. And socially there are potential problems too. With the mob acting as real-time moral police, will groups advocating attacks on ‘peados’ whip up the necessary critical mass online to go and start throwing stones at the local ‘loaner’ without checking the facts of the case – almost certainly.

But this is all inevitable cultural fallout from the rapid assimilation of powerful new communications technology into the core of our daily lives. The mobs will spring up, but the excitement that a Christmas No.1 mob, or a ‘let’s get a rich celebrity sacked’ mob, and particularly the more extreme, hate-driven mobs can bring will surely wane once we’ve all got over how easy it is to make a shallow statement by adding your name to a Facebook group.

What interests me is what comes next. When we’ve collectively grown tired of the latest example of ‘people power’ hitting the headlines, how will these tools be used properly? Simon Cowell’s own ideas of a political X-Factor sound more than a little scary, but he certainly knows that asking the crowd in real-time is going to be far more significant in how we are governed, and by whom, in the near future.

And what forthcoming technological developments will have come along by the time we’ve all got used to these latest ones anyway? The playing field is likely to have changed repeatedly before we’ve had a chance to get comfortable. Living in this new world will require a high degree of media savvy of us all. So, if #ratm4xmas acts as the UK’s ‘email joke’ moment in the evolution of social media campaigning then it might yet prove to have had a little bit of substance. And ok, it has belatedly become a charity fundraising project too, so I don’t want to sound entirely like Scrooge here. Merry Christmas!

Forget the latest social media trends, communications fads and all those lofty opinions on the future of Twitter. The one thing that has emerged as a modern essential (one I believe we will soon consider on a par with having a phone number, or a listed postal or email address), is the status update.

It makes perfect sense in an age dominated by information, that we all provide a short ‘headline’ about what we are up to as part of our contemporary suite of work and social tools. We’re fast approaching a time when not to have a status update of some sort will feel as socially awkward as not having a mobile became in the late 1990s. And for businesses, it will be unthinkable.

It’s interesting to see the mobile operators and device manufacturers rushing into this space now (see the Vodaphone video below). The range of options they offer shows that this isn’t exclusively about Twitter, Facebook or any other brand. It’s also not about celebrity, or society’s obsession with self-importance, or an invasion of privacy, or a time consuming distraction. It’s a maturing of how we all use real-time social media in a way that isn’t overwhelming. It’s a practical method of communicating now we are all so instantly, permanently connected. An inevitable evolution of communication, no less. Ok, so it’s one that hasn’t featured in much sci-fi so makes us feel odd about our ideas of the future, but is ultimately very human.

Train Your Brain

The headline feed, whether this be news, marketing messages, blog posts or a public SMS from a friend’s mobile are the ultimate way to cope with and condense a torrent of real time information. Excellent free tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite help us to make sense of this as the feeds themselves become a flood. The mobile app and the personal website become important again as aggregators of particular feeds.

Our brains need to get to grips with this new way of receiving information, and its rapid advance is causing plenty of friction and resistance… of course. But the technology is guiding the way. Limiting the text characters (originally down to the basic restrictions of SMS) forces us to be brief and trains our minds to express ourselves in the concise way necessary today.

As society becomes more comfortable with sending and consuming information in this way, as yet unthought-of possibilities become apparent, both good and bad. Witness last week’s #trafigura and #janmoir outrage incidents (Twitter mobs could become a real problem, even if they can be mobilized for good), or the innovative #beatcancer charity drive. The best advice can only be that we all embrace the coming of the status update and train ourselves to be savvy as its cultural importance grows. What’s clear is that the pace of change isn’t going to stop, so those who remain resistant put themselves at an increasing disadvantage.

Such topics are to be discussed from a brand perspective at Media140 London on 26th October, a one-day conference on the impact of real-time media. Alchemy Content will be there, and we have a discount code for £40 off the ticket price for the first five people to buy a Media140 ticket using our exclusive promo code: E8NZAHJH. That makes it a very affordable £95.

Video for Vodaphone’s new 360 service, that is heavily geared towards the importance of status updates…

On Saturday 12 September at London’s Roundhouse Jem Finer (of The Pogues) directs the firsxt ever live performance of a section of his epic work Longplayer.

It will consist of a 1,000 minute section from its 1,000 year duration. A tiny fragment from its great expanse, Longplayer Live will be played by a 26-strong all-star orchestra on a unique 20-metre wide instrument effectively a giant bronze age synthesizer, with highly resonant singing bowls for tone generators and humans for power.

Based on Jem Finer’s graphic score for 234 bowls and six players, the concert will start at 08.20 am this Saturday and finish the following morning at 01.00 am.

This year’s Artangel Longplayer Conversation takes place in the adjoining Roundhouse studio, an epic relay of one-to-one discussions inspired by the philosophical implications of long term thinking and related issues.

Jeanette Winterson will begin the 12-hour talking marathon featuring leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists. These include Cory Doctorow, Marcus du Sautoy, Sophie Fiennes, Daniel Glaser, Bonnie Greer, Mark Haddon, Susie Orbach, Robert Preston and David Toop.

Alchemy Content has been providing social media marketing for this unique event. For a special discount of a third off the ticket price, click this link to the Roundhouse and use promo code 144.

Also see:
Longplayer Live on Twitter
Official Longplayer Live Facebook Group

Social technologist Christian Payne aka Documentally and OurManInside will be covering the live event via various social media channels, which looks really exciting too.

Here’s more on this exceptional project and this week’s big live event in a short video.

This video nicely brings together all of the current mind boggling statistics that should be making everyone sit up and take a long, hard look at this whole social media thing.

None of the stats are particularly new, but to see them all in rapid fire succession does a really good job reminding us why this is more than just the annoying fad it’s painted as by the old media protectionists.

It’s a promo for Socialnomics, a book by Erik Qualman (@equalman) that hits the shops next week (although it’s already available in the US Amazon store right now.)

Looks like a good read and hopefully it isn’t too evangelical, which is a pitfall of many social media commentators. Still, with stats like these, there is plenty to say in favour of these new platforms, wheather you like their cultural effects or not.

We’re currently working with exciting new band Burn The Negative on their digital content strategy.

The guys are playing at festivals every weekend throughout the summer and are active social media users, so we looked for a way of making the most of their stories to grow their fan community.

We designed a new ‘feeds’ section on their website which pulls in anything posted on their Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc in a nice real time feed.

Lifestreaming like this is not exactly new, however many artists have leapt onto the social media bandwagon quite randomly, sending their fans off to Facebook groups or Twitter profiles, then blasting out/repeating promotional messages across all these networks (often next to ads for which they receive no revenue), without paying attention to their own ‘shop front’ on the web.

Not long ago, many even spoke of abandoning their expensive flash websites in favour of simply pointing everything to MySpace. In retrospect (and really, at the time too) this should never have seemed a good idea.

We think that using each network for a specific type of content, then filtering everything back through the central hub of an artist’s own website, makes much more powerful use of all these great tools. It also gives a better sense of a single fan community than idle, spammed and poorly branded pages elsewhere.

The feed allows us to easily pull out the photos and tweets from each road trip, using the cool Storytlr tool, to tell a short story that is instantly compelling, visually attractive and easy to use. It’s even geo-tagged so you can plot the bands travels on a full screen Google Map.

All digital content is best served up at the top level as a feed, but how this information is aggregated and presented is vital, otherwise quality content will simply be lost in all the noise.

With an ever growing array of social media platforms requiring a presence, artists and brands need to find new ways of bringing these together as part of a coherent strategy for their own websites and mobile apps. Then, rather than struggling to keep up, they can really start to connect with their whole fan community.

Burn The Negative’s Social Media Feed
Buy their new single, ‘Low’, here now

But, with a couple of other celeb deaths today, the intriguing ‘news’ out there at the moment is of the ‘death’ of Jeff Goldblum in a fall while on a movie set, and of Harisson Ford variously going missing on a boat/helicopter, presumed crashed. We read they are both currently working on the same movie. I’d love to know the origins of these ’stories’. Could it even have a distant PR connection?

Every week we see how tools like Twitter are shaping the instant nature of global communication – and how the worst, gossipy tendencies of us as a species are magnified along with the unquestionably liberating power that comes with all this too.

At times like this the mainstream newspaper sites start to look a vital, rather than shaky proposition. But newsrooms deciding on tomorrow’s headlines have got a tough task trying to keep up with the user driven aspects of an ‘event’ story like MJ tonight. They also better beware of printing misinformation pulled from any source (Jackson ’suicide’, anybody?) – trust no site until this gossip frenzy has calmed down.

News of a potential global flu pandemic is content gold for news outlets. Did anyone see the Sky News feature running yesterday complete with gratuitous scary music?! With the continuing assault on ad revenues and competition for audiences, it’s fair to say that this sort of story is going to be worked for all it’s worth.

With the professional media pushing the hype levels into overdrive for their own reasons, the gossip driven world of social media is understandably awash with even more made up nonsense and irresponsible scaremongering.

Certainly a quick dip into the flow of #swineflu tweets provides some wildly inflated, totally unofficial death tolls, misinformation about eating pork and, of course, plenty of ‘this is God’s punishment’ type messages. If this does become the first pandemic of a wired world, the effects of all this chatter could create unnecessary panic and seriously compound the problems. But one way that authorities charged with minimising the impact of the outbreak could counteract our natural urge to sensationalise would be to be on top of technologies like Twitter with their official voice.

As we are constantly saying, today’s media is about the conversation. And the channels of that communication are constantly developing. Organisations will be left behind if they don’t keep abreast of the very latest ways to get their message across, particularly when there is the sudden need to act fast, as in this Swine Flu case.

Even with a full, official digital profile in place, the hype will still be circulating at pace via all forms of media. At times like these it’s hugely important for us all to take a savvy, level-headed approach to all we read, no matter what the source.

People are probably already better at filtering messages than we collectively believe they are, but human nature is still prone to herd mentality. As an exercise in developing media filtering skills, something that we’re going to need to be really good at, this particular news story could be one of our biggest tests yet.

Check out Mashable’s list of ways to track swine flu coverage properly.