ESSAYS
COMEDIAN AND WRITER DAVID SCHNEIDER AND PROFESSIONAL TWEETER DAVID LEVIN
“Doing adverts and working for
brands meant I ended up looking at what they were doing on Twitter,” he says. “Some of them were great. But a lot of them weren’t, or simply had no presence at all. So I had the sense of there being an opportunity to justify to my family all the time I spend on Twitter, and being able to call it work. What I find really exciting is being able to apply all that I’ve learned as a comedian and a writer to the way brands and businesses use Twitter.” Levin, meanwhile, is one of the UK’s
most practised professional Tweeters. A writer with a decade’s experience behind him, he’s the voice of The Voice and The Apprentice on Twitter, as well as a clutch of other accounts. Out of hours he runs the massively popular and shamelessly scurrilous @The_Dolphin_Pub. For him, it all began during the London riots of 2011 when, as a resident of Hackney, he started Tweeting about what was going on around him. One rumour sparked that night was that The Dolphin pub had burned down. It hadn’t. But in response Levin set up a spoof account for the pub which spread like wildfire.
“I don’t want to insinuate that the riots helped my career,” he says. “But Grace Dent and Caitlin Moran both started to Tweet about The Dolphin straight away. One of them said it was one of the only good things to come out of the riot. Now, that’s obviously not actually true. But it probably helped me!”
WRITING RIGHT Now Schneider and Levin now have a roster of clients including Beats By Dre Headphones, PG Tips and IKEA, and the pair also present the Guardian’s Twitter Masterclass events. “We come at this from a slightly different angle,” says Schneider. “David’s a writer and I do comedy, so we use humour a lot in what we do.” “A lot of the social media people who
work in big agencies are hired because they’re really smart with social media,”
says Levin. “They know how those platforms work, they know how to do clever things with hashtags, but they’re not writers. Twitter is a very editorial medium. I think you need to approach it in the same way as a blog or a magazine. With The Dolphin, for example, people say that if they haven’t been online for a couple of days, they’ll go straight there and check it out, which is exactly what I do with accounts I like. I’m not saying that to run a successful Twitter account you have to be a writer. But it makes it significantly easier if you are - or at least if you’re into writing.” It’s not just words on
Twitter that That Lot are interested in. They’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to have fun with the format. An eye-poppingly original example is the work done by @kpcuk, who creates ascii-style pictograms using punctuation points and special characters. “There’s so much noise on Twitter now,” says Schneider. “We’re really looking for ways of cutting through - new formats that make people go ‘wow!’ To succeed you really need a lot of personality.”
IT’S
businesses for whom comic content simply isn’t an appropriate approach? “There are very few accounts that can’t
benefit from being a bit more human,” says Schneider. “We did some work with a prostate cancer charity. They were trying to improve their Twitter feed during Movember – the idea was to get men to go to the doctor’s. We offered them some funny Tweets which they used. But the funniness there had a purpose: to get people to the doctor. You might think, cancer, right – no
comedy there. But you’d be surprised where it can
INTERESTING TO LOOK AT THE
STRUCTURE OF A TWEET AND COMPARE IT TO THAT OF A JOKE”
BEING HUMAN WITH HUMOUR So when brands come to Schneider and Levin, what are they asking for? “It varies,” says Levin. “For some it’s
‘we want to be on Twitter and we want to be good. Please help us!’ Others want a very specific thing doing. There’s a term we’ve started using – it may be a bit wanky, so I apologise – ‘reactive listening’. That’s the idea of looking at people who are talking about you and then chatting to them in a way that brings them over to your brand.” It’s the focus on funny stuff and
formal innovation that forms That Lot’s USP. But aren’t there some brands or
35 issue 21 july 2014
work if the comedy matches the message. It’s about tone of voice and humanity: being a person. A lot of businesses are still very formal – everything begins with a sort of martial arts bow - so it can be good to loosen up. It makes them more approachable and therefore more follow-able.” “I spoke at Social Media
Week on the same panel as someone from Woking Police,” says Levin. “They were featured in the Daily Mail in 2012 because they’d Tweeted the lyrics to ‘Ice Ice
Baby’ by Vanilla Ice.” In case you missed it, that Tweet,
alerting motorists to treacherous road surfaces, ran as follows: ‘If ice is a problem, yo, you can solve it. Check out this link while my DJ revolves it.’ Helpfully, the link took users to the force’s road safety information page. “That’s a very humorous approach,”
says Levin. “It trended, but it got a mixed reaction. Lots of people thought it was great. Other people wanted to know why the police were doing jokes on Twitter. I think they did well, though. It was great PR. And let’s not pretend there’s not a human at the end of your Twitter account. Why hide that?”
ARTICLE JON FORTGANG
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