Today, BBC2 is showing the Royal Ballet's Alice in Wonderland, and the Royal Opera House's media department have tried, rather dismally in my view, to control the Twitter coverage.
To some extent, there is some benefit in establishing an obvious central reference point, but they have gone about it in such a cack-handed amateurish manner it makes me *Facepalm*
A few weeks ago they put a shout out for people willing to tweet about the TV coverage. I pointed out that anyone can tweet about anything, and anyone can use a hashtag. They replied that they had something very special planned, more details later. I responded something like 'Oh please don't aggregate all the tweets under a hashtag on a website, because that might go horribly wrong'
Today, they announced that they would be aggregating all the tweets under the hashtag #aliceintwitterland on the ROH blog, and also listing all the people who have signed up to tweet it. At which point I double facepalmed!
Such aggregation carries several risks.
- Deliberate manipulation for cynical purposes: this is low risk in this case, but has been seen to go horribly wrong for more controversial ventures.
- Spam hijacking for no particular purpose except promotion of porn or whatever, which should have no place on the ROH blog.
- Tedium. It serves no purpose to read that So-and-so with 11 followers is Sky+ing #aliceintwitterland (noise, not sound).
- Dozens of retweets of the same insightful comment. The repetitiveness is noise, not sound.
After Simon Boccanegra was broadcast I gathered together on my blog all the meaningful tweets I could find and blogged them
Simon Boccanegra: What Twitter said
Maybe I'm wrong but I firmly believe that this lasting record is of more value to those who are interested than a dynamic, unedited random listing of a few gems and much rubbish. Surely anyone genuinely interested won't want to wade through information overload actually while the ballet is being broadcast?
I think the choice of hashtag #aliceintwitterland is misguided and twee. For a start, because Twitter is limited to 140 characters*, hashtags work best when as short as they can be to be understood.
Furthermore, calling it 'Alice in Twitterland' makes the exercise about use of Twitter rather than about the televising of Alice in Wonderland, the Ballet, meta rather than substantive.
If people are sitting watching and enjoying (or not) the ballet they may feel moved to tweet about it, but this way it reads that if you want to want to tweet something, why not do it about the ballet?
Agreeing on a hashtag is a good idea - there were problems for the TUC March Against Cuts when there were great leftist splits about #26march,#march26, and, even, god help us, #326march. But rather than 'imposing' a 19-character hashtag for people to use, ignore or abuse, why not ask 'What are people using to hashtag ROH's Alice in Wonderland on BBC2?' I suspect a consensus may have grown around something like rohalice, aliceballet, or alicebbc2
There is a slight irritant in listing those who are tweeting about it. Some people will offer their names, and then happily carry on tweeting about their other activities and interests, engagingly or not. Possibly the most interesting tweeters won't even sign up to the list.
ROH is now saying
We haven't appointed a list of people. It's a sunny day and we wanted to make sure people remembered to tweet.
Which, I'm sorry to say this, still sounds like an attempt to impose some sort of order from the centre of what is essentially anarchic, which is the nub of the problem. The Royal Opera House don't *get* Twitter. They rarely use it to broadcast important info, eg cast changes, or even what's on this week and whether tickets are available.
By the time that one of their productions appears on the TV, they should have the confidence that people will judge it on its merits.
I will award them a C- for effort in trying to get social networks involved in what is obviously a very important broadcast for them and for ballet fans, but I'm afraid this a big bad 'F' for Fail in not understanding how Twitter works and failing to consult with their followers and friends.
* there are services that allow longer tweets, but they don't transfer well across apps - for example, when using Ubersocial on my phone, to see a longform tweet sent from Tweetdeck's Deckly I have to open my web-broswer
