1. Queenof
Cambridge Business March/April 2013 67
businesstweet
She’s the It girl of the Onesie’s, the über-princess of
social media, one of Twitter’s own “Top 75 Badass
Women” and a winner of the 2012 Shorty Award for “The
Best Twitter in Social Media” – and she’s having a whole
lot of fun, is Sarah-Jayne Gratton.
“I was born on Campkin Road and went to the Shrubbery
School on Barton Road – it’s flats now,” says Sarah when we
chat on Skype (she’s in France for
a break). Her already-incredible
career saw her emerge as a child
actor with her own agent by the
age of 10, and she was the subject
of a BBC Future Stars
documentary in the 1980s. “I loved
performing and what was really
wonderful was that I was excused
from sports,” she says gaily.
Right now, she’s preparing for a
new role: she’ll be a lecturer at
Glyndwr University in Wrexham in
September when the UK’s first social media MBA begins
under her guidance. “I won’t be a traditional lecturer, it’ll be
very interactive,” she says. Sarah’s big on interactive: she has
281,000 Twitter followers and her tweets come thick and fast
during the course of the day, though she doesn’t think of
herself as “Badass”: “I’m quite politically correct”, she avers.
But her Twitter output is frantic: how does she do that?
“I work to a schedule,” she replies. “As I say in the
book (Follow Me!, reviewed on page 101), you’ve got to
treat tweeting like broadcasting and it’s true that
sometimes I do repeat tweets throughout the day and
there is some controversy about this but I think of it as a
24-hour news channel, and the news does get repeated.
So you have to schedule it to provide news, business
quotes, stories – I curate stories on a weekly basis, and I’m
always looking at what my
followers are tweeting to
see if they have something
interesting to say.”
And the hours?
“Sometimes I’m up to 2
or even 3am, it’s not a
solid block of time, it
varies.”
And I have to say that if
you were to follow only
one single person on Twitter, think of Sarah: she’s sassy,
upfront, smart, funny, wise and always entertaining.
After her child star days ended she went and got a
psychology degree from Cardiff before becoming
communications director at marketing and design
company CBA in Cambridge. >
SSaarraahh--JJaayynnee GGrraattttoonn has got nearly
300,000 followers. Mike Scialom talks to a
Cambridge-born phenomenon.
You’ve got to
treat tweeting like
broadcasting

2. 68 Cambridge Business March/April 2013 www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Business/
businesstweet
“When the internet first came along everything was so
slow. Email was the first thing where I thought ‘This is
really useful’. I was at CBA and I thought ‘Let’s use the
social sphere to interact with clients’. It was ‘Yes! Let’s
start doing campaigns via email.’”
We constantly hear that there’s money to be made
from social media, but how does that work in practice?
“It’s not an instant thing, making money from Twitter,
it’s a shift, a marketing enabler, you’re building
relationships. Conventionally you’re striving for a quick
win but this is different. People ask how to turn a ‘Like’
into a sale, and it comes about through a long road of
building relationships, your social value is about providing
information to other people, so yes I’ve got close to
300,000 followers and of that 50,000 are talking about
what I have to say and they are my social elite and
through that many exciting things happen.”
OK. But here’s the $66k question. Show me the
money!! “How social media is giving me revenue?
Through people whose products I brand, things I’ve tried
out, places I was visiting, books I was reading… I was very
moved by a Cancer Research article and they contacted
me to say that since you tweeted the article, their
YouTube video views have rocketed and contributions
have soared.
“They asked me to work with them on several projects
which I was happy to do. I didn’t take any money from
them but I was very happy to take money from Bosch: I’m
not into power tools but this one doubled up as a
corkscrew and I represented them. A lot of revenue
comes from endorsements – my reach is greater than the
brands I’m representing.”
And here’s the punchline: because Sarah’s brand is
bigger than many of the brands she represents, she can
charge them for retweeting their tweets (Bosch UK has
2,500 Twitter followers, Sarah has 100 times that).
This year Sarah is busy busy busy. Another book is due
out in the autumn, called Twitter Killed the Paparazzi.
Yes I’ve got
close to
300,000
followers
TThhee BBoosscchh bboottttllee ooppeenneerr

3. Cambridge Business March/April 2013 69
businesstweet
But right now, she’s riding a new level of interactivity
which is based on opting in, and this is best reflected in a
new venture, based in New York, called Eden. “An
important social shift is taking place around information,
privacy and trust, so where there was an opt-out or ‘push’
form of content delivery, now you opt in based on your
interest in and passion for a specific topic.”
The communities on Eden will be “completely free to
join”, sponsorship comes from the likes of Saatchi &
Saatchi and Procter & Gamble, and it’s all about informing
members. For instance, you’re an SME and you need to
do some mobile advertising, there’s information and
“little surgeries like those Dr Phil (US TV talk show host)
shows”, and case studies, and forums to discuss topics
and strategies.
“Social media strategies are moving from reach to
relevancy,” concludes Sarah, in one of those judgement
call moments which make you realise that beyond all the
smoke and mirrors, and the glamour – she is hugely
glamorous – and the luvvie-dom, the sheer scope and
breakneck speed of her brain provides enough wattage to
dazzle, and that’s just on Skype.
Social media strategies
are moving from reach to
relevancy
FFoollllooww MMee!! CCrreeaattiinngg aa PPeerrssoonnaall BBrraanndd wwiitthh TTwwiitttteerr,, iiss
ppuubblliisshheedd bbyy WWiilleeyy,, ££1166..9999..
SSaarraahh--JJaayynnee GGrraattttoonn

4. businessread
You wouldn’t believe how many books are being
published about social media and especially Twitter
and one thing you can be sure of: the twitterati are very
eloquent over 140 characters but most are totally
incapable of holding
your attention over 140
words like alone 140
pages. So reading
Follow Me! Creating a
Personal Brand with
Twitter by Sarah-Jayne
Gratton (Wiley, £16.99)
proved to be a huge
bundle of fun.
“We’re living in a
relationship-based
ecosystem that has
finally found its voice,”
writes Sarah-Jayne,
before defining what
this new ecosystem is
going to look like and,
more importantly, how
you can play a
significant part in shaping it. Sections on building your
profile and developing your brand are helpful and
concisely written. The use of hashtags I found particularly
instructive. The technical side of getting your Twitter
account up and running is a delight in its clarity and
simplicity. That’s part one.
In part two things gets a little bit more complicated
and I found myself having a parallel internal dialogue
about whether Twitter is really worth devoting so much
time to. Building “your Twittertorial calendar” is jolly
enough, but effectively it seems to require that you build
your working life around a platform that is by its nature a
celebration of the ephemeral and transient. Only you can
decide if that is the best use of your time.
More and more, I wonder about what this technology
is all about. Twitter is good for breaking news a few
minutes ahead of other media, and it does force users to
condense their ideas to fit a restrictive word count. And
this book is brilliant: the best. But I worry that such
brilliance should be devoted to such an essentially vapid
medium.
I guess it comes down to the title: “Follow Me”: I’m
not a follower, so I would never sign up to
that proposition. And when someone tells me
that I have to “join the hype around a trending
topic” by tweeting my opinions about breaking
news or issues, the DJ in my head suddenly
puts on that Meatloaf song, I Will Do
Anything For Love (But I Won’t
Do That) – and I don’t
even like Meatloaf. I don’t do joining-up unless it’s
handwriting. I don’t do joining-in: just not interested – fell
out of love with the idea when I was in the schoolyard and
found out that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is about dying from
the plague. The idea of trying to get lots of people to
follow me holds zero appeal. It’s good to be liked – the
opposite option is surely very tiresome – but only as a
by-product of doing something enjoyable, not as the
central reason for any given activity. And the more I read
about how you can “curate” your Twitter feed, by using
software such as twitaholic, Twitter Counter, Retweet Rank
(how I’d love to hear Jonathan Ross attempt that phrase!)
and all the other dubious delights of search engine
optimisation, the faster I turned the pages – and not for
good reasons. And when I later discovered – and I must
stress this isn’t in the book – that you can buy 1,000
Twitter followers for £20 (“and as an added bonus you
also receive 200 free Facebook
likes with this service”) at
buyfollowerstwitter.co.uk, it
made me wonder how
desperate some people
are for “success”.
Anyway, I digress:
Follow Me is about as good
an introduction to setting up
and developing a Twitter
account as you’re likely to
find, and certainly the best,
in my view, to make it into
print so far.
AT HOME WITH THE QUEEN OF TWITTER
“‘Follow Me’?
I’m not a
follower, so I
would never sign
up to that
proposition”
Cambridge Business March/April 2013 101