Twitter lesson for the money-saving expert: like wishes, choose your hashtags with care

By Alan S. Morrison

This morning Mr MoneySavingExpert, Martin Lewis, launched a crusade (check out its manifesto in his Daily Telegraph article, it’s more than a campaign) to have people resist the peer pressure to buy Christmas presents for non-family members so as to avoid unnecessary spending and waste.
To promote the article and the campaign, Telegraph editor Tony Gallagher tweeted a headline and link at 9.11am. Martin Lewis retweeted it almost immediately to his 178,239 followers. Seven minutes later he was tweeting to ask people not to automatically slate it, but read the details first.
Nineteen minutes later he tweeted his gratitude that people were supporting him. But, crucially, he included the hashtag #banXmaspresents
After retweeting a few tweets of support from his followers, he put out an appeal at 10.12am for retweets with the hashtag to get it trending.
By 11:24am he admitted that he was starting to get abuse on Twitter for his call and asked the antis to read the article before coming to judgement.
Three minutes later he was, all credit to him, retweeting a comment that, I believe, gets to the heart of the lack of wholehearted support — the hashtag.
People just reading that and the call for support were, wrongly, writing him off as a Scrooge and telling him where to stick his humbug.
After a few more retweets of support, by 12.03pm he felt it necessary to explain further while repeating the hashtag again.
Which he wouldn’t have needed to do if he had chosen a better hashtag in the first place. I actually tweeted him a suggestion - #KeepXmastoFamily I haven’t yet had a reply.
So what’s the lesson here? Simply, if you’re going to create a custom hashtag, do it with care. While it’s perfectly possible he created this one for maximum controversy (to gain most free media coverage of his campaign), I’d say it has at least partially backfired on him by alienating potential supporters who only had time to read the tweet and not follow the link to the full explanation.
The thing with hashtags is that, like newspaper headlines, they should help communicate the core of what you’re saying, or at least the feeling. They’re often best used for humorous, often sarcastic, comment on the rest of the message and can be very effective as rallying calls for support on a heartfelt issue. But they must be quickly and easily understood properly, which this one, IMHO, isn’t.
If he’d chosen a better one the amount of abusive reaction from misunderstanding would have been reduced to those who purely disagreed with what he’s actually saying, not them plus people defending gift-giving. Who knows what damage has been done to the brand of him and his company as a result.
For a big company like his, with long-established credentials as championing the public, this will likely be a blip on the road. But for smaller firms who are less well-known the potential reputational damage of such an error could be catastrophic.
One careless tweet can be misremembered for a long time and, as the old saying goes, it can take years to build a good reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
Martin Lewis may well be the money-saving expert, but he still has a few things to learn about managing his reputation online.

Here’s why you need to think before you tweet & retweet

This morning’s news that actor and comedian Alan Davies is among 10,000 Twitter users facing legal action over the false Lord McAlpine allegations is the latest, but biggest, example of why you have to think before you tweet…and retweet.
One of the problems of Twitter is that users very quickly forget that they’re not only sharing their comments, and, crucially, those of anyone they retweet, with their pals but also everyone else on Twitter. So you’re pretty much publishing it to millions of people. Just like the conventional mainstream media.
The difference is they have long understood the consequences of getting their facts wrong. Apart from specialist lawyers, no-one knows the laws of libel better than journalists. It’s a key part of their training because the power to publish to millions (or even just thousands) of readers is something that has to be treated carefully.
So they understand that saying you simply repeated something someone else said isn’t a defence in law — you’re responsible for publishing it again. Aside from the Reynolds defence, you have to be able to prove anything you publish, or face the consequences.
So the old advice that you shouldn’t tweet anything that you wouldn’t say to the person’s face is reinforced by this latest example of what happens if it turns out to be untrue.
Think not naming the person will protect you? Not so. Look at Newsnight. They didn’t name Lord McAlpine, but they said enough for him to be identified by enough people for his name to start circulating.
Again, the concept of what’s known as ‘jigsaw identification’ is already well-understood by the conventional media. They already have to watch for it with cases with child victims or accused under 18 as well as rape victims — ensuring that individually and collectively they don’t give out enough details for the person to be identified by someone who might know them.
Similarly, if you keep it too obscure you could be sued by several people who could argue people might mistakenly think it was them — 10 policemen successfully sued a paper in England because it ran a story about ‘a policeman’ from a particular station.
Once upon a time to be a publisher you needed a printing press and all sorts of other expensive gubbins and so realised that you had a lot on the line if you got your facts wrong in print.
Twitter may be free and easy, but the consequences of saying or repeating something you personally have no proof for are just the same. So think before you tweet or retweet.