Bloggasm

On the day the AP Stylebook announced it would change the requirement that its users refer to online destinations as “web sites” to the more widely-used “websites,” I sent a message to a person named Justin LaBerge requesting a phone interview. He responded quickly saying that he was “about to go meet up with my GF for our Friday night plans (In light of today’s event, we have much to celebrate!)” When I spoke to him a few days later he said he was mostly kidding about the celebration part (he had been planning to go out with his girlfriend already) but that they did raise their glasses to “toast” the news. “You wouldn’t believe how many emails and Facebook messages I got when people saw that,” he told me.

Back in 2008, LaBerge had created a Facebook group called “Dear AP Stylebook: Could You Please Spell ‘Web site’ Like a Normal Person?” Working for a Missouri PR agency, LaBerge said that he had become frustrated after constantly sending copy to clients with the “web site” spelling only to have them send it back edited to include the more widely-used “website.” “I just get sick and tired of having to spell and explain why we spell ‘web site’ this weird way,” he said. “I am the AP Style writer in the office. I really like AP Style, I’m a fan of it, and I use it, and when something you love messes up, it almost hurts you more than when something you don’t care about messes up.”

So LaBerge created the group and he sent invites out to a cadre of other PR people he knew regionally encouraging those who really believed in the issue to then forward it to their friends. In the first month or two it amassed around 200 to 300 people and continued to grow from there. When I checked in last week it had reached 700 fans.

LaBerge had used other methods to lobby the AP Stylebook to no avail, including emailing the book’s top editor and also a magazine journalist who had interviewed him. But he saw his golden opportunity when the Stylebook made an open call for user input into changes it should make, specifically in regard to social media.

“They said we’re going to make some changes to AP Style, specifically social media, and a woman who is a member of our group saw that and forwarded it to me and I forwarded it to the group and said, ‘here’s a website where you can go and they’re actively soliciting these requests, tell them you want them to change ‘web site.””

Though he didn’t remember the name of the woman, it most likely was Tracy Russo, a DC-based Twitter user who had begun her own campaign — in this case on Twitter — to get the AP Stylebook to change its policy. Russo told me via email that after seeing the AP announcement soliciting input she had messaged Justin. But her lobbying didn’t stop there. “I submitted my own comment, but then wanted to rally friends and colleagues as well. So I e-mailed 200 or so friends, most of whom work in online or political communications and asked them to chime in as well.” She also began directing Twitter users to the suggesting form, tweeting things like, “Tell the @APStyleBook “Web site” (2 words, capital W) is lame. It should be “website” (1 word, lowercase w),” and “Have you told @APStylebook it should be “website” instead of “Web site”? ”

Obviously, the demographic that felt passionate about this style usage was relatively small, but the above demonstrates how one can funnel a small but eager audience into a very targeted campaign, one that produces results.

“You can see there doesn’t appear to be that many,” Russo said. “But a clear coordinated message offered up an obvious correction that a lot of people are excited about today.”

And that’s how your AP Stylebook sausage is made.

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Angelo Carusone says he didn’t start his campaign to pressure advertisers into ditching Glenn Beck’s radio and Fox News show as an opposition to his politics — though he admitted that their views significantly differ — but rather he saw Beck’s rhetoric as distinct from other commentators. “For me, the real motivator was what he had been doing to the political process, which was really feeding it into a frenzy,” Carusone told me, and then he listed off a number of the more outrageous claims that had escaped unfiltered out of Beck’s mouth over the last year — warnings of concentration camps being set up by the Obama administration, calling Obama a racist, and any number of the outrageous, much-parodied conspiracy theories that had debuted on Beck’s famous chalkboard.

So in July of 2009, inspired in part by the success of a civil rights group in getting advertisers to back away from Beck, Carusone launched his Stop Beck campaign. Since then, the University of Wisconsin law student has pressured between 100 and 200 advertisers (depending on the source) from either pulling their advertising from Beck’s program or from Fox News all together.

“The way I sort of looked at it was that appealing to Fox News wasn’t going to cause any results because they’ve already made their support of Glenn Beck very clear by hiring him and paying him,” Carusone said. ” … It’s about getting ad revenue, and part of the reason that he stands up there and says all these outlandish things is so that he can get attention and then try to translate that into advertising dollars. The way I looked at it is that companies, by supporting him through advertising, they’re continuing to support his platform. So I decided that they were the appropriate targets here.”

His methodology is relatively straight forward: Compile a list of Beck’s advertisers and approach them (usually on Twitter) one-by-one to point out the host’s more outlandish statements, and then encourage other Twitter users to do the same. Rather than going after all the brands at once, Carusone told me he’d usually pick one or two a day and focus entirely on them. “I don’t want to make it about politics, I just highlight the indecent remarks that he makes,” he said. “The sexism, the preying on racial anxieties, some of his more willful distortions, the ones that have dangerous consequences, and I ask if they’re comfortable associating their brand with that. And by and large, many of the advertisers say no, and they modify their advertising agreements accordingly.” Because he typically warns the companies privately before he begins the campaign, sometimes they say they’ll pull their advertising before he even publicly targets them.

Though it can be difficult to determine how many pulled advertisements are directly attributable to the law student, he pointed out that every advertiser from the UK has pulled its ads from Beck’s program (“His UK broadcast, instead of running commercials, runs Sky News updates during the breaks.”) and some companies have publicly announced via Twitter their decisions.

Fox News spokespeople have vaguely responded to his efforts, claiming that when most brands pull their advertising from Beck they simply move it to other shows on Fox News, meaning no lost revenue for the network. “For them to suggest that it’s not having an effect is nonsense,” Carusone responded when I brought this up. “I fully acknowledge that it would have a better impact if these advertisers were dropping Fox News as a whole, but just because we’re not having a maximum impact doesn’t mean we’re not having an effect. I think, in part, there’s such a progress in the UK, but in the UK the reason he’s not running with any advertisements is that advertisers there were dropping Fox News as a whole, and they were dropping Fox News entirely because of the Glenn Beck controversy. I think the effect there was very visible.”

The organizer said that his project has even slowed down a bit simply because there are very few major brands left that will touch Beck. In fact, when you check the remaining sponsors on his compiled list, it does seem to be populated with smaller (and shady) companies — Goldline, Carbonite, among others.

Many in the blogosphere have complained that mainstream pundits seem to face few consequences no matter how wrong or outrageous their comments, and I asked Carusone if his method was perhaps a vehicle to bring real accountability. “This is a very first step,” he replied. “What has excited me about it is that people have started taking action. On the one hand I think this could be over and done with if we got more attention. The fact that he has lost so many advertisers, the fact that he’s lost all his advertisers in the UK is a major story. The fact that he’s still on the air is quite significant; the reason he’s still on the air is that Fox News is absorbing the loss and nobody is pressing them. The whole point of us doing this is to create the question so Fox News would have to address these issues and there would be some accountability. I think this is a very good model.”

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Near the beginning of the Oscars ceremony, movie critic Roger Ebert was about 1,000 shy of 100,000 followers

Soon, Twitter users began an organized campaign to propel him over the 100,000 count:

And in the middle of a tribute to Precious, he crossed the finish line:

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Why would someone turn away the potential for thousands of new followers?

By the time Scripting News blogger Dave Winer was added to Twitter’s Suggested User List earlier this month there was no turning back from his headlong fusillade attack on its very existence. For months the blogging pioneer had criticized the arbitrary, corporate media-like structure of the SUL, publishing charts and an array of anecdotal observations about the nature of the list and how it affected the users who were placed within it. Of course it escaped nobody’s attention that being placed on it could result in a half million additional Twitter followers, and when you consider the fact that the number of followers correlates strongly not only with a user’s ability to drive traffic, but also his very authority and influence, it’s not surprising that the methodology for composing the list would come under close scrutiny. Winer arguably led the pack of scrutinizers, going so far as to suggest that Twitter employees would use the SUL to manipulate coverage of the company, drawing favorable coverage from those who made the list and punishing its harshest critics with removal.

Late last week, Winer wrote a post acknowledging the fact that he had been included on the list, and one could almost detect an attempt to fit this inclusion within the parameters of his criticism. “Since I found out I was there, I haven’t posted anything on my Twitter account,” he wrote, “because that’s a terrible place to discuss something like this, and until I decide what to do I want to be very clear about whether I’ve gained from being on the new list.” His hesitance to denounce his placement on the SUL had to do with the fact that Twitter had created a new one — or rather a series of new ones — each based on a different niche. According to somewhat vague reports, these new lists were somehow predicated on algorithms rather than human editorial control.

Ultimately, however, Winer concluded that these changes were not enough, and true to form, he wrote a note to Twitter and asked to be removed. “People might think that I held back criticism for Twitter if I got this boost from the company providing the communication platform,” he wrote. “I know this because I’ve already felt inclined to withhold criticism because getting the approval feels nice.”

Though he remained intellectually honest, it’s hard to imagine the mental tenacity it must take to contemplate the addition of hundreds of thousands of new followers and then reject it. Being included on the SUL could propel one into the stratospheric elite group of Twitter users who can direct thousands of click-throughs to an article or blog post. Given that Matt Drudge’s power has been largely attributed to his ability to drive readers to off-site destinations, anyone could recognize the power that the SUL bestows.

But Winer wasn’t the only one to be placed on the SUL and then subsequently ask to be removed. Several months ago, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen promptly requested his own removal from the list. Coincidentally, Rosen co-hosts a podcast with Winer called Rebooting the News.

“It just seemed arbitrary to me,” Rosen told me recently. “Poorly thought-through. That was my main objection … It had a ‘because we say so’ feel to it, so in that sense you could say it was akin to Big Media.”

Unlike Winer, however, the NYU professor didn’t have a suggested alternative to the current methodology for compiling the list. He agreed with some who have suggested that a large quantity of followers does not automatically equate to value. For instance, those who are introduced to the list are often new users, ones who have relatively few followers and may abandon their accounts before launching a single tweet, whereas most of Twitter’s early adopters and most influential users joined the site long before the SUL was in existence. “I was not convinced that the additional users following me were really following me,” he said. “And I knew I would lose any natural metric for how I was doing in building a constituency … I liked the growth curve I was on.”

Rosen said he wasn’t comfortable with tens of thousands of what he considered “unearned followers” and he didn’t want to forfeit his right to be critical of the SUL. “The harder I looked at it, the more I felt that even people in Twitter would eventually realize that the SUL was a mistake, and they did,” he said. ” … Follower growth was the closest thing they had to a reputation system and they distorted that system. [Twitter founder] Ev [Williams] admitted it was a mistake and contrary to how they want to run Twitter at the [Online News Association] where I was present, in the audience. He said we don’t think we should be making editorial decisions of that kind.”

But despite his reasons for removal, as with Winer I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any hesitancy in his decision. After all, even if the additional tens of thousands of followers were not high in quality, there is still a level of prestige and celebrity that coincides with a large number of followers. Seeing as how Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and has carved out a sub-niche in social media, surely his accomplishments in this medium — including a large follower list — could contribute positively to his career when it comes to salary raises, speaking fees, and other advancements. Were there any regrets?

“The only time I think that is when I am in an argument with someone who has 250,000 followers and I think he or she is very wrong … It’s just: ‘…why does he have a bigger megaphone than I do? Oh, right, Suggested User List.”

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As someone who doesn’t go to a movie without first checking its Rotten Tomatoes score, it’s interesting to see its editor weigh in on all the stories touting claims that Twitter can make-or-break a movie’s opening weekend.

I think [Twitter's power is] overstated. It’s an interesting word of mouth, but I think only for a certain part of the audience. For the younger, more connected audience that may be true but for older audiences, I don’t know. Twitter probably has a larger influence in the media because they are all on Twitter. The average American sees less than 10 movies in the theaters per year. Do I think Twitter is affecting my cousins in Kansas City and what they see? If it’s a big enough movie, they are going to see it

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