Comedian David Schneider and professional Tweeter David Levin are the founders of social media agency That Lot. They talk to Jon Fortgang about writing, rioting, comedy and bringing brands to life on Twitter
Remember back in the 1990s when comedy was the new rock ‘n’ roll? Well, here in the hyper-connected tweenies, social media may have overtaken – or at least incorporated – key elements of both. David Schneider and David Levin, founders of agency That Lot, are on a mission to provide social with a shot of energy and innovation, humanising branded content with humour.
Making social work
David Schneider needs no introduction, but we’ll give him a quick one anyway: actor, writer, comic and director, he starred alongside Steve Coogan in ‘The Day Today’, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ and ‘I’m Alan Partridge’. He’s written extensively for TV and radio, worked with Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris and cropped up regularly on screens big and small for two decades.
Now, with professional Tweeter David Levin (“Yes,” says Levin, “that is an actual job,”) the pair have launched an agency that specialises in helping brands and businesses create effective and entertaining Twitter content. Schneider has been a passionate advocate of social media since its inception, but the move from award-winning comedy to digital content is an unexpected one. So how did he get into this?
“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 currently 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 youhave 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.”
Being human with humour
So when brands come to Schneider and Levin, what are they asking for and how do That Lot help them achieve it?
“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 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 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?”
Style and content
Unsurprisingly, Levin and Schneider have given a great deal of thought to the technique and technicalities of compressing a message into 140 characters. The anatomy of a successful Tweet, they explain, can be analysed according to clear criteria.
“There are certain things you can do that’ll just make you sound better as a brand or business,” says Schneider. “By which I mean like more of a human being. Brevity, of course, is important, but aim for 100 characters rather than 140. Contract, as the midwife might say. Use ‘there’s’ rather than ‘there is’ and suddenly you’re a human. Formal language has to go. On my own account I try to get rid of every comma I can. I’m always thinking: can I take out more?
“It’s also interesting to look at the structure of a Tweet and compare it to the structure of a joke – even in something like a missing person announcement or if your business or brand is outwardly poe-faced and not actually making jokes. You can always write it in such a way that the content’s more arresting. Joke structure provides the best template for how to write a Tweet.”
With so many brands now vying for users’ scattered attention online, who do Schneider and Levin hold up as successful practitioners of the eye-catching Tweet? Big-hitters Oreo, Betfair Poker and Skittles all get props for engagement and personality. But size, on Twitter, isn’t necessarily what matters. The beauty of the medium is that anyone with imagination can create and lead their own stories and community.
“One of my favourites,” says Levin, “is @WstonesOxfordSt. What’s great – and this approach could apply to any brand – is that they talk about all sorts of topical, zeitgeisty things, but always relate those things back to books. It just works. It’s really funny and it totally understands Twitter.” (Buzzfeed, incidentally, agree and last year published 21 reasons to follow the store’s ingeniously surreal account.)
For Schneider, who concedes he’s rarely in the market for buying bouquets of roses, @ArenaFlowers is a perennial favourite. “I’m interested in the Betfair Poker idea of doing a funny account that’s simply entertaining and doesn’t try to sell something. Arena Flowers is similar in its approach but much more mainstream in its humour and therefore probably more open to growing the account.”
Extending the story
Schneider and Levin believe that many brands are still paddling in the shallows of Twitter, but there are those pushing at the boundaries of what the medium can achieve. One of these was the #JFK50 project, launched by CBS News in November last year and chronicling – in real-time – the last eight days of JFK’s life, had the US President had access to Twitter back in 1963.
“It was incredible,” says Levin. “On the final day – it gives me goose-bumps just thinking about it – he’s Tweeting that it’s a beautiful day in Dallas. He’s about to step out into the motorcade. And thousands of people were Tweeting: “Nooo! Don’t get in the car!”
This, they say, demonstrates Twitter’s potential to develop whole narrative arcs and recreate the experience of long-form fiction or movies. “Just imagine,” says Levin, “applying something like that to a brand.”
Infectious though the pair’s enthusiasm for the speed and agility of Twitter is, don’t commercial concerns present an immediate obstacle? Sign-off, brand guidelines and compliance all run counter to the free-flowing, constantly refreshed picture of now that make Twitter such an exciting medium.
“This is something which at first I thought was going to be slightly tricky,” concedes Levin. “Actually, it’s not. One of the brands we work with doesn’t really want to get involved in what’s trending. In cases like that it doesn’t matter if you need sign-off. In other cases, yes, there’s nervousness with brands; if they do want to get involved in things that are trending then sign-off is going to have to be very quick. But I would actually suggest now having some form of sign-off during the first couple of weeks – it helps ensure the tone is bang on. There’ve been some accounts where I think, at the start, the tone’s been a bit too far one way or the other. Then it evens out and you know what you’re doing. Some brands do want sign-off but, as trust develops, they realise it’s fine.”
Schneider agrees. “Brands have to realise that the lighter they can be on their feet, the better.”
So, Twitter can be fertile territory for anyone prepared to sow their brand’s seeds with care and attention. It can also be a reputational minefield, as plenty will attest. What tips do Levin and Schneider have for those who want to reap social media’s rewards?
“Don’t be afraid to try something different,” says Levin. “You can be boring all week. But if on Friday morning you do that one interesting thing, you’ll be ten times better than someone who’s just slightly above average all the time.”
“Be short and be human,” says Schneider. “Be like a jockey, basically. Also, listen to the responses you get and adapt. Know thy audience. If something doesn’t work, Twitter will tell you very, very quickly.”