Like Me? Follow Me.
Yesterday afternoon, as we were laying a new floor, we had on BBC 6 Music in the background. As they often do on a Sunday, 6 Music had a musician curating the playlist for 2 hours via Twitter.
It's quite an interesting concept, really. Tom Robinson interviews the curating musician who chooses songs for half an hour or so. They then ask listeners to tweet song choices for the remaining 90 minutes at the musician using a special hashtag. The musician/curator then chooses the songs based on the requests. Usually it's a combination of tracks from their own back catalogue or related songs.
This week, it was Ben Folds, of Ben Folds 5, a band I have found excessively irritating for nigh on 15 years. The hashtag was #benfolds56music.
Now, a sane person might ask, "If you find Ben Folds' music irritating, then why were you listening?" Well, the choices he was making for the first 30 minutes of the program were actually quite good, and he seems an amiable enough chap. I just don't like his songs. Plus, we were laying a floor; messing about with the radio station til we agreed on something was not a high priority.
In the middle of this, I made the mistake of uploading a picture of our DIY achievements to Twitter, and then checked my feed - only to find that anything of interest was being drowned out by excessive retweeting from 6 Music.
6 Music was tweeting about the event, tweeting at Ben Folds, retweeting stuff listeners were tweeting and then retweeting everything Ben Folds was tweeting. It was, shall we say, massive overkill. If I'd been looking at Twitter and not listening along, it really would have drowned out anything of interest in my feed.
So what's the etiquette here?
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Live Tweeting is unbelievably irritating for anyone not participating in the event. In this instance, the event was being curated over Twitter, so I can understand 6 Music repeatedly reminding users, mentioning songs and encouraging them to follow Ben Folds and #benfolds56music.
However, when the retweeting started it totally dominated my feed. If I wanted to keep up I'd have followed Ben Folds and #benfolds56music. I didn't, which means I didn't really care about seeing that content. The hashtag served the same purpose as the bulk of the retweeting. Directing listeners there would have stopped potentially losing followers who were irritated by the excessive amount of content coming through. Normally I'd either unfollow or mute an account acting that way - I have yet to unmute any individual or hashtag I've muted.
Social media is meant to be conversational - which means drowning out other people's conversations with the sheer volume of your content production goes against the purpose. When you're curating an event live, think hard about what you're tweeting and how much, and make use of your hashtags.
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