Music that I discovered from adverts

This one is likely to be endlessly updated.

Adverts try and create good feelings about their product, hopefully leading to future sales - and I'm sure this works well, but the one things adverts usually do for me is sell me the incidental music. I'm sure that's intentional. For example I can't drive but car adverts are doing a roaring trade in selling me music or at least flagging it up to me.

In all cases the band name is in bold, it's not always clear who's the band and which is the song title ;)

1. Woodkid - Run Boy Run

This came from an advert for a mobile phone company that successfully managed to get into my consciousness precisely because I realised I had to pay attention to the advert so I could find out what to search for on YouTube. Well done them.

2. Stealing Sheep - Shut Eye

Saw this on a TV advert for the programme Hollyoaks. It seems to be a fairly unpleasant programme where nobody is nice to anyone else (not quite as awful as Come Dine With Me which is just flat-out unpleasantness, with catering).

3. Leila - Underwaters

From the enchanting Avios advert which turned out to be for Air Miles. Since I don't fly (not for environmental reasons and I love air flights, just hate the accompanying check-in faffy interminableness) they're not doing much business out of me for that reason.

4. ALB - Golden Chains
Since I'm a little bit in love with the guy who's running around with his yellow underpants on I thought I'd post the actual advert too. His name's Tom Bennett and he plays both characters.

Short course in flying by arm flapping (power of flight not guaranteed)

Recently I was followed by someone on Twitter who I'm sure is a lovely person but who is offering courses in 'theta healing' (1, 2). I pondered on the nature of these things, in terms of their separateness from everything else. It is possible to 'learn' about theta healing and train someone else in it, and so on, and for this all to happen entirely in parallel (so it seems) to the rest of the world, without any worries about science or evidence ever encroaching onto it.

It's the same with homeopathy really, although recently there has been a bit more of a breakdown in the wall between science and homeopathy where the evidence is now having a real-world effect in reducing the impact of homeopathy on NHS spending for example. The ASA's CAP code compliance team even has pages on its website devoted to what homeopaths may or may not imply in their advertising (see Therapies: homeopathy and Medicines: homeopathic medicines).

With things like therapeutic touch or energy healing where the therapist doesn't have to touch the patient but 'directs their energy' towards them it seems to be an uphill struggle to convince adherents that nothing much is going on. The therapist feels that something has happened and the client feels better for it. In one ASA adjudication someone flogging Reiki even "acknowledged there was little or no published or peer-reviewed evidence but argued that anecdotal evidence, such as testimonials, could support efficacy claims.  The ASA rejected that argument and concluded that Reiki had not been shown to treat the listed conditions."

I thought I should get in on the act and have decided to open up to the public my very successful courses on how to fly by flapping your arms. Thanks to whining by skeptics I have had to amend my claims in light of recent CAP code rulings so I am unable to state that I can actually teach you to fly and can only state that I will teach you the best techniques for flapping your arms effectively.

"CAP has not seen robust evidence to suggest that arm flapping results in any significant uplift and practitioners should limit themselves to claims of availability of courses only."

In the course we will focus on upper arm strength and fluid movement. The course may help you with the following:

• stronger arms
• a sense of buoyancy and oneupmanship over gravity
• better skin
• weight loss
• getting the best parking spaces

Testimonials from happy customers
"I found the course profoundly moving... mostly in the kinetic sense."

"I didn't actually manage to fly during the sessions but we heard that some of the people on the advanced course did manage it. That one costs £600, I'm saving up."

"The course was great - I learned so much and really enjoyed myself. And the plaster cast comes off next week so I'm keen to have another try."

For those who don't feel ready to commit to learning how to flap your arms properly there are also shorter courses in handwaving. More at the links below.

References
(1) Courses: http://www.whitewavehealing.co.uk/courses.html
(2) about Theta healing:http://www.whitewavehealing.co.uk/theta.html

We're going to need a bigger hashtag (iii) - separate session hashtags for big conferences

Big conference, lots of people tweeting in the first place (and people at home tweeting back on the hashtag) and people tweeting from different sessions too - harder to keep up.

How do other large conferences / attendees / watchers handle this? How can filtering be semi-automated (as it is with the main hashtag)?

I did a spot of research (Google) and haven't really found a satisfactory solution. Clearly the obvious way to do it is to have double hashtags for each session, so if there are 15 sessions throughout a two-day conference you could have

#mainhashtag #sesh1
#mainhashtag #sesh2
...
#mainhashtag #sesh15

and so on, although you may well want something a bit more informative than #sesh1 (however as long as everyone knows what it refers to and it doesn't take up too many letters it really doesn't matter that much).

In terms of filtering, it works perfectly - if you search for two hashtags it returns just those tweets so you can easily pull out all of the tweets from Session 12. (NB It wouldn't work to have one hashtag that covered both, eg #mainhashtagsesh1 #mainhashtagsesh2 as that wouldn't let you pick out all of the #mainhashtag tweets as well.)

How successful is this in real use though? Google pointed me to the BlogHer conference where they tried this last year, but the secondary hashtags didn't get that much use - the tweets were tagged with the primary hashtag of course but people didn't use the second one. Brian Kelly's blog referenced a situation where the conference organisears had suggested secondary hashtags but the ones in their app differed from those being recommended in the pocket guide, so a bit confusing.

Is this a cultural thing? Is it that people just need to know about using two hashtags or see them in use, and it probably helps if it's driven by the conference organisers? Or do people not see it as something to worry much about?

Reading the rest of Brian's post indicates that others have had this conversation and most people don't (or didn't at the time of Brian's first investigations into this in 2009) like the idea of using a second tag. Anyway I recommend reading his post on this, I'm a fan of more hashtags for clarity but I also note his final point "It would, I feel, be unfortunate if valuable Twitter discussions were fragmented across different session hashtags."

My previous ramblings on this topic
We're going to need a bigger hashtag(s) (28 August 2009)
We're going to need a bigger hashtag(s) II (5 September 2009)

Medical research charities, what action do you take against misleading health claims?

I wrote this on the LinkedIn group I moderate for people interested in science communication in the medical research charity sector. Possibly it's more helpful to have it on my blog...

Originally posted here  

Does your charity take action against misleading health claims? Do you involve members and carers in reporting bad advertising to the ASA?

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has just published its annual report and talks about the five things it's focusing on at the moment: free trials, misleading pricing, daily deals, misleading testimonials, misleading health claims.

Of these the latter two are clearly of most obvious relevance to charities that support patients and I wondered if any of you do, or have considered (or 'have rejected the idea of') involving your 'constituency' in scanning the internet for misleading claims and reporting them to the ASA etc?

Yesterday the ASA published an adjudication which was upheld against someone trying to claim that they had a cure for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). I don't know who reported it to the ASA but I'm sure there are many other similar claims that are also in need of reporting.

A couple of weeks ago a different advertiser was told off for claiming to be able to cure Crohn's disease, and almost every week there's an advert for a disease or condition that might be relevant to one or more charities.

These would seem to yield an opportunity for new website content and / or commentary on others' news stories, but also as an opportunity of getting patients and carers involved at the outset.

I see this as being something of multiple potential benefits (though perhaps there are disbenefits that I've not thought of, so you might disagree):

(1) taking action to remove misleading adverts

(2) an opportunity to write a news story about the ASA's actions. My former employer Diabetes UK wrote a news story about Diabetone whose adverts were 'banned' by the ASA for being misleading

(3) an opportunity to go back a step and engage in a mini-campaign with members, getting them (a) to be more aware of the scams that are out there if they're not already and (b) do something about it, perhaps under the umbrella of your charity, perhaps not.

I've reported numerous adverts to the ASA and a couple to Trading Standards and am more than happy to help anyone who wants to put in a complaint themselves. There's also the 'Ask for Evidence' campaign from Sense About Science - they're worth chatting to and they work with many charities already.

Interested to hear if anyone else has tackled bad advertising either individually or as an organisation, and whether or not you've done it internally or involved your supporters.

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See also The Nightingale Collaboration which "challenges questionable claims made by healthcare practitioners on their websites, in adverts and in their promotional and sales materials by bringing these to the attention of the appropriate regulatory bodies."

How often has that tweet been retweeted? Here are some ways to find out

People might want to find out the 'reach' of a tweet as part of measuring engagement or something like that, or just curious to see how often someone else's tweet has been retweeted. I'm certain there are clever tools or companies that do this sort of thing for you but here's how I'd go about it, in a fairly basic way, using free tools and a bit of cunning.

This post assumes you're using Twitter via its desktop / web browser version (http://twitter.com) but you can do some of these things on smartphones (presumably tablets too but I've never used one). Twitter is just a tiny part though as people will post information from your tweet on Facebook (or just share content that you've posted directly there) so this shouldn't be taken as covering everything.

Also, as always with these blog posts I'm assuming that there's knowledge and skill I've not discovered yet and if you have it I hope you'll share it in the comments or ping me on Twitter, ta :)

Summary for those who don't need any explanation or detail:
1. Click on tweet to expand, count RTs
2. Search for @mentions of the tweet sender, to pick up manual RTs
3. Favstar
4. If tweet contains URL search for and count those
5. Topsy

A thing that is quite helpful to know
Every tweet has its own web address which can be found in its timestamp (which says things like '4h' if recently tweeted or '10am, 5 April 2013' if more time has elapsed), or in the details link once you've expanded the tweet - the page has lots of information about the tweet including how many people have retweeted it and who they are, and other tweets threaded in conversation with that tweet.

1. Click on tweet to expand, count RTs
Click anywhere on anyone's tweet to expand it and count the number of times it's been retweeted.

If it's your tweet you're interested in then you'll get individual notifications in your 'Connect' page each time someone automatically RTs. Eventually (or if you press refresh) the individual notifications are recombined to show the tweet once with all of the RTs and favourites it's received so far. That tweet will be greyed out so you can't expand it yourself, but you can easily count the numbers.

You'll also get notifications if someone manually RTs your tweet (by copying / pasting and perhaps adding a comment) - but you'll have to add that to the auto-RT total.

Here's an example, from the day I started drafting this post, in which I was surprised to find myself retweeted by the Royal Air Force about a job of theirs I'd spotted.

This tweet has been RTed six times but eventually it will scroll down my mentions page and be harder to find. If it receives another RT later it will pop back up again but if you want to be able to check how it's doing at any time make a note of its address - you can find that in the bit that says 15h just before the text of the tweet starts (that's the time stamp of the tweet, and obviously the time since you sent the tweet will vary but the underlying URL won't). Ignore the bit saying 14h on the top right.

The URL for this particular tweet is https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/320098630407163904

and if you go to that page you can see it's since been RTed another time making seven in total, and favourited three times (edit: now back to two, so one person's unfavourited it).

My 'most popular' tweet (according to Favstar) was retweeted 72 times and favourited 18 times - this one is a bit of an outlier!

I was pretty pleased to discover Scottish wikipedia today: "Science is a wey tae find oot things" sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) March 21, 2012

If it's someone else's tweet that you want to keep your eyes on it you can get its URL from the timestamp in the same way, and you can visit its page to see how it's doing - here's the URL for my Scottish wikipedia tweet: https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/182559448697552896


2. Search for at-mentions of the tweet sender, to pick up manual RTs 
Annoying people like me who prefer to add comments to a tweet they're retweeting will muck up your numbers. Everyone who clicks on the 'RT' button will be automatically added in Twitter's own count, however 'manual RTs' won't be so you'll need to count them.

Search for their @name (you're going to have to do this within a reasonable timeframe of the original tweet being sent, if days or weeks later you probably won't find them) and look for manual retweets, an example below:

The above tweet appeared in my mentions page. It contains text from me but the whole tweet was sent by someone else, so the 14h timestamp does contain an active link (compare with mine above which doesn't) and it goes to a page with Sh4zny's tweet on it.

Note: It is also possible that Sh4zny's tweet has itself been retweeted (though it actually hasn't) and you'd need to click on her tweet (or visit its page from the URL in the timestamp) to see this.

For completists you can even try searching for the URL of the tweet itself (as opposed to the URL in the tweet, though you can search for that too) and see if someone's posted a 'have a look at this' tweet, often done to avoid alerting the sender of the tweet that their tweet is being commented on. (Unless they know how to look for it of course).

Here's an example of me linking to an older tweet of mine...

 

The URL for the tweet in the picture above is https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/315604924937420800 (taken from the 23 Mar timestamp on the top right, I'd also be able to get it from Expand > Details). The URL mentioned within the tweet is for https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/statuses/140492913049206784 though when I copied the URL Twitter gave me its shortened version https://t.co/eIwycGBAjf



3. Favstar 
This is a really useful tool that lets you see the most popular tweets from someone (in terms of retweets and favourites) and also recent ones. Most of it is free and doesn't require you to log in but there is a Pro version (I've got a trial version of the pro account as a freebie, this is my conflict of interest statement!)

Favstar.fm is the basic address to which you can add /users/screenname to see the tweets of a particular individual (I'm http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/ and Stephen Fry is http://favstar.fm/users/StephenFry) - by default the 'best of' page is shown first.

Because Favstar only captures tweets that have been favourited or retweeted it makes it a lot easier to browse within a much smaller pool of tweets.

Favstar's address formatting is the same as Twitter's so
http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/status/182559448697552896 is the same as
https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/182559448697552896

It also tells you what other tweets someone has posted that have been favourited or retweeted.

4. If tweet contains an address (URL) search for that and count any appear
In the example in (2) above I've referred to an earlier tweet of mine and also to a lipid-related blog. There are three URLs going on there - the URL of the tweet as you see it above, the URL of the earlier tweet that I've mentioned in this tweet and the URL of the blog.

Again, this is really for completists but you can search for the basic root of a website (http://xyz.com) and this will bring up any tweets mentioning (http://xyz.com/blah/blah.php etc).

Incidentally, I assume all business have a search saved on Twitter for their http://www.company.com address (which will pick up any tweet mentioning their company website). Sometimes I'm reminded of this when I tweet something about widgets.com and lo and behold a day or two later Widgets UK favourite it.

5. Topsy 
Sporadically brilliant this one. You can find a fairly random selection of tweets but I have always found it to be pot luck. You can also see where links have been posted on Google Plus.

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Hope that helps, remember this is just a handful of ways to find out a bit more about probably a small number of tweets and to do so without spending too much money or time. If you need to get information ('metrics') for how you or your company are doing on Twitter, eg to measure your return on investment as well as reach, then you might need to cough up some cash and use a paid-for service. Alas I know next to nothing about this.