Oh dear. Where do I start? Last night, on a whim, I challenged the people who follow me on Twitter to make fisting a “trending topic”. It worked. It worked very, very well.
Start at the beginning, I guess.
Saturday night. I was catching up on my reading. In quick succession I came across News Biscuit‘s Countryside Alliance furious at ban on badger fisting and The Bloggess’ I kind of wrote about this on twitter already so technically this is a re-run but you probably still need a refresher, also about fisting.
Fisting?
So, at 1948 on 28 February 2009 Australian Eastern Daylight Time (that’s 0848 UTC), I tweeted: “Yeah, why not? Official challenge! Let’s turn fisting into the trending topic of the hour. Retweet please.”
Well, retweet please you did…
Seconds later three friends with high numbers of Twitter followers had retweeted it. Others followed within minutes. Then more. And more.
An otherwise boring Saturday night, Australia’s larrikin sense of humour, the peer pressure of people competing to invent ever more amusing or inappropriate ways of using “fisting” in a sentence, the delicious naughtiness of using a “bad word”… It was the perfect storm!
Mark Pesce privately wagered me $10 that it wouldn’t make trending topic. To dispel the misinformation, my challenge was issued before that bet was made. Mark is somehow implicated, but is not an instigator.
It took only 10 minutes to prove Pesce wrong.
“Fisting” became the top trending topic on Twitscoop by 1958 AEDT. Ironically, the page was displayed with a Pfizer advertisement for Viagra!
Not good enough, reckoned Pesce. It had to make the trending topics display at search.twitter.com.
Well, that took just a little longer.
Not everyone liked what was happening. One guy thought it was pathetic and told people to grow up and unfollowed everyone who participated and complained that it’s just so unnecessary to talk about aberrant sexual techniques.
Well, Sir, off you go. Pop on your peril-sensitive sunglasses. Oh, and while you’re at it, consider the hypocrisy of caring about other cultures yet calling others “aberrant”.
Wouldn’t the world be a tedious place if we only did what was “necessary”? No play. No art. No new ideas. Just a drab plod through a dull grey “decency”. Food and water in, shit and piss out, the occasional missionary-position copulation — joyless, because joy isn’t “necessary” for sperm to fertilise egg. How. Fucking. Boring.
Still, the storm rolled on. I may have lost some followers, but I gained around 70 more. I don’t really care either way, as I tweet the full range of me and my world and people are free to pay attention, or not, as they wish.
In less than an hour after it all started, “#fisting” was number 2 on the Twitter trending topics display — yes, people started using the hashtag — and by 2034 AEDT it hit the number one spot.
But it didn’t stop!
Not everyone watches Twitter every hour of the day. Even as those closest to me were cheering the victory, others were only just receiving the handed-on retweet of my initial challenge. As Europe, the UK and then the US woke up to see #fisting as the trending topic, they tweeted this fact and asked around. Some started playing the game too. The number of fisting-related tweets continued to grow.
What had I started?
Interestingly, while #fisting remained the number one trend at search.twitter.com, it suddenly and completely disappeared from Twitscoop around 2 hours after it first arrived. “Censorship!” claimed some. Was there some manual intervention? Not so, it seems.
Pierre from Twitscoop emailed me:
No manual intervention, it’s just that when our algo deems something as not buzzing any more it gets off the cloud (same thing happened with the crash in Amsterdam for instance). We have a very different approach on this vs Summize [who run search.twitter.com] but we don’t want to go into details
But what did happen is that everyone started tweeting about #fisting being the trend, which meant the phrase “trend fisting” became a trend! It was still in the Top 10 twelve hours later.
As Miktar observes, perhaps “trend fisting” should be the new term for trying to game Twitter’s trending topics.
So what can be learned from this, the very first episode of trend fisting? My first observations:
- Smut trumps “decency” every time, at least in terms of attracting attention. Like we didn’t know that already.
- There was a real change in the style of the tweets once the “game” spread beyond the core creators. More people were wondering about the trend and discussing its meaning than playing the game. That’s presumably because they discovered it from watching the trend displays rather than seeing the original meme spread.
- Once the game spread beyond Australians, and especially to Americans, the NSFW issue emerged. This important cultural difference is an essay in itself — and maybe I’ll tackle that another time — but it’s worth saying that in Australia this is more a “smutty giggle” game than a “shock-horror they’re talking about sex” thing. Besides, who wants to spend 40+ hours a week in a workplace where our essential humanity is denied?
- Some people just assumed I was responsible for all this. What does that say?
I daresay there’ll be further thoughts once you all start commenting and asking questions [hint hint].
And finally, let me leave you with this chart from Twist, which shows that at its peak, “fisting” was being mentioned in almost 0.5% of tweets globally. Scary or what?
[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh’s cartoons published online, it’s free to use.]
Mainstream broadcast TV still trumps Twitter, it seems. On Rove Live last night, Rove McManus apparently went on about Twitter, asking everyone to create an account and tweet “Watching Rove”. An estimated 1300 people did just that.
I’ll write more about this later today when I’ve done a bit more data mining. However as Gary Hayes noted:
The graph shows it all, really.
While the #fisting meme kicked off, and Kate Carruthers’ counter-meme #badgers did well, The Man on TV triumphed, with tweets mentioning “rove” — either to say “watching rove” or to complain about the n00bs — peaking at 1.72% of all tweets globally.
Watching Rove last night was really frustrating. He could at least have someone on the show who actually uses Twitter or Facebook, rather than asking what this *social networky thingy* was. His guest Lilly Allen at least uses Twitter a bit & was able to explain to him what it is but she’s only been using it for about a month, apparently. Sigh.
I can’t recall him asking people to say ‘watching rove’ on Twitter, but maybe I zoned out during that section of the programme. I don’t think he’d have enough of a concept of Twitter to be able to ask people to do that!?
Well I thought it was fun Aunty Silkcharm.
Yeah, no doubt this kind of twitter trend gaming will be used for marketing purposes. Great, yet another form of twitter spam.
Also, it could be argued that you are using it for self-marketing purposes yourself 😉 I would never do that of course 😛
People who watched Rove Live last night tell me that Twitter was mentioned during his interview with Lily Allen, and then again during his conversation with Peter Hellyer, Myf Warhurst and other regulars “on the couch”. He didn’t issue a “call to action” asking people to join, but still stirred up enough interest to encourage what Gary Hayes now estimates as 1600 new users.
@Chad Capellman: That’s a very good result. But your real aim probably isn’t “score high on Twitter trends” but something like “create a positive impression for your work” or “build a long-lasting relationship with your audience”. Twitter trends are about fast-rising terms in the global conversation. I suspect that a slower rise in profile with a more solid foundation is of greater value.
@caronnect: Rove Live‘s role isn’t “explain Twitter to the uninitiated” but “entertain people through conversations with the stars”. Does it matter that his explanation lacked something?
@jjprojects: I’d label what I did “play” rather than “gaming”. To me, the word “gaming” implies an ulterior motive, an intent to defraud the system somehow. This was, I reckon, a genuine trend as people, of their own free will and without any subterfuge, kept using the word “fisting”.
I’d never even thought of it as marketing. Indeed, in that light it’s not much of a success. While there were a few new followers, yes, most people playing the game never encountered my name or URLs.
Ryan & Hughesy both use Twitter, unfortunately they weren’t on the show to go into explanation to the mass audience.
I wouldn’t over analysis what was said on the show, he was probably only drawing attention to the subject, as mentioned above it’s not expected that he go into technical detail about Twitter to the rest of the nation who are not tech savvy.
And assuming he did his research, he would have known that Lily Allen had a Twitter account prior to the interview. You normally ask questions that you already know the answer to. 😉
Oh dear. It gets worse. Skittles, a candy-covered chocolate like M&Ms, has started a promo which includes showing people every tweet which mentions “skittles” — with predictable results. As I write this, #skittlefisting is the top trending term at Twitscoop.
Just like the “-gate†suffix has been used for every political scandal since Watergate, the “-fisting†suffix now means something like “to disrupt by via Twitter†or “to disrupt with Twitter botsâ€.
As I missed ever seeing the initial tweet, finally reading this post when I couldn’t sleep explained a lot.
Stilgherrian, I salute you, and I think I possibly love you. 🙂
‘Fisting Twitter’ as a term just works so well!
I missed the tweet, but caught the RSS and have done my duty. Can I go now?
Ah, rheumatoid arthritis, you whore! How dare you make me miss fisting as a topic!
@Warlach: Thank you. Meanwhile, in an exchange of pure love, I should mention that your Twitter Nudes is a great little art project. Good fortune!
@CassieST: Yes, thank you, you have fulfilled your fisting duties. Oh. That sounds wrong.
@Jenny, Bloggess: Well, you were part of the inspiration for all this, so you shouldn’t feel too bad about “missing out”. Though do you really want to link “arthritis” and “fisting” in the same sentence? It sounds like a nasty accident waiting to happen.
Hi, if you’re interested — I asked a Doctor of Linguistics to comment about the phenomenon of #fisting and it’s my most recent post. Thanks for the inspiration! 🙂
Could be a coincidence but:
Web comic Questionable Content just used “fisting” as part of a joke title (in reference to puppets).
The author is very active on Twitter. I submit that (I think) it is not coincidence at all.
@Podblack: Your blog post has some excellent commentary, thank you.
@Giania: You’re not alone in pointing me to the Questionable Content cartoon. I’ve emailed the author to see if there’s a connection, but have yet to receive a reply.