At first thought, I have a hard time disliking Justin Bieber as much as I think I should do. Certainly, his cocksure attitude and posey self-awareness are at best irritating – but then, if we boycotted musicians for that, we wouldn’t have many musicians. Or bloggers.

Anyway, he did genuinely start up on his own, did genuinely get noticed on his indivdual merit (and obvious commercial appeal), and is, essentially, a boy done good – even if his songs are crap. So that itself is hard to hold against him. However, what is very easy to hold against him – or rather, his caretakers, producers, and marketing machine – is the cynical positioning and messaging designed specifically to corral the emotions of his followers, who now number over 20 million on Twitter alone (as a side note, it is interesting to compare the relative efficacy of Twitter and Youtube in the terms of followers vs. subscribers vs. views, and how that information seeding works).

Fans of the JB are noted for the frenzied – some might say feverish – dedication to their idol. They will point out Beiber’s personal relationship with his fans, in the sense that he dedicates, or is perhaps instructed to dedicate, unusually high amounts of time to individual responses and discussion. This is where things differ from previous crazes such as the Beatlemania (or even Lisztomania!) phenomenon, where the band was still very much a separate entity.

Part of this, you may say, is the inevitable product of growing up in an era of social media, which is inherently interpersonal due to everyone having individual handles/accounts, rather than manifesting as a foaming sea of people. And indeed, you only need to look at Lady Gaga and other recent megastars to see that an avenue of social media is now not only desired but expected. It’s not solely a one-way relationship, of course, with many celebrities and other people who are, or who have risen to, prominence on these channels frequently evangelizing about the ‘connection’. Which I, may I just say, completely believe.

However, the thing about Bieber is, well, he’s awfully manipulative. The nature of his particular account and fanbase means that he benefits immediately and disproportionately from romancing his followers:

It’s ultimately difficult to dissect the appropriate reaction to this – girls and women are of course able to arbiter their own emotions and are not simply helpless – but to my mind it seems to demonstrate that manipulating his followers is of such immediate commercial advantage to BeiberCo that it simply must factor in to marketing plans. In other words, I am reasonable sure that those ticket-selling tweets are very much deliberate, and very much with that end in mind. His latest album is rather unambiguously titled ‘Boyfriend’, for heaven’s sake.

Now, the question as to the rightness of this is long and complicated and filled with historical precedent. Rock bands of the 70s, anyone? Where girls were separated from their boyfriends after the show so that the band could ‘meet’ them? More recently, the mega boybands of the 90′s were forbidden to have girlfriends, so as to create the illusion of availability to the fanbase’s imagination. As you might imagine, I’m generally against such exploitative chicanery, but there are reasonable arguments to made along the lines of perfomance and showmanship for at least some elements of this.

However, irrespective of the above, it’s something users of Twitter have to put up with almost every day in the trending topics sidebar. There are two particular issues – firstly, that the practice is expanding to include other guff such as 1 Direction (currently trending as I type: ‘Directioners Love 1D’) and their ilk. Secondly, that Bieber and his fans are both growing up, and so are the trends.

almost legal

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) February 29, 2012

What sparked this post was someone complaining that “The current Bieber “wet” trend is a bit R-rated for comfort” – referring to a trending topic of ‘Justin Bieber makes us wet’. Some of the star’s more fantastically reckless tweets like the above, sent ten minutes before Bieber’s birthday, have started to lend the mania a distinctly sexual tone.

It must put Twitter in a tremendously difficult position.

On the one hand, Bieber and his fans should surely be able to say what they like without fear of censorship – Twitter is noted for being a liberal-leaning platform in any case, but it has always had an identity as an enabler of free speech, especially in the Arab Spring. Furthermore, stamping on the explicated lust of predominantly female participants smacks unpleasantly of denying female sexuality. To cut off this kind of content would come across as prudish at best, and a betrayal of core values at worst. At the same time, though, should people have to put up with such domination of the sidebar by the sexual effervescence of a crowd of whipped-up teenagers?

Twitter have tried to guard against such things by the evolution of what must be an increasingly complicated algorithm to nip spam-trends in the bud – but it’s clear that it hasn’t really worked as intended, and actually caused a minor PR crisis when it inadvertantly obstructed the #Occupy movement (isn’t it remarkable that I automatically included the hashtag there, by the way? Didn’t even stop to think about it).

Of course, they could always just leave it to the Darwinist tendancies of populism, in that if people want something to trend enough (which is indeed the explicit intent of many of these trends), then their collective ingenuity will always find ways around the bulwark. And indeed, Twitter will be enjoying the business benefits of this kind of activity: more users, more advertising options, more exposure, more integration appeal for publishers, and so on. But it’s probably not great in the long term, as they need to avoid the Craigslist scenario. It’s a very good job that Twitter is self-curating and that users aren’t exposed to this stuff too much, but equally they can’t just cross their fingers and hope the practice dies.

Every social network that makes it struggles with spam. Facebook is perhaps the only one that really managed to control the problem by requiring phone and email registration and operating a real name policy. Twitter has far fewer defenses. Hell, Pinterest must be quaking in its boots. But Twitter might be facing the toughest problem of all: controlling a massively vocal segment of the userbase without alienating them or compromising communication values.

It’s spam, Jim, but not as we know it.

I won the Oscar for Least Surprising use of Header Image.

So, I’ve been mucking around with online finance recently, which has been making me think about the world of finance at large, and recent developments that might be signposting the way for an industry that seems to be – finally – waking up to the fact it’s the 21st Century.

It took long enough for banks to get their act together and offer proper, robust online banking. It’s taken an equally long time to get apps onto the market. Most of them are… okay, I guess, letting you check your balances and whatnot. But they’re all blown out of the water by Mint, a fantastic product out in the US and Canada. Mint doesn’t just show you one account, like official bank apps do. Instead, it pulls your data – encrypted, certified and read-only – from all your financial operations and combines them in an easily digestible format. This not only helps you understand, well, just how much money you have collectively and where it is, but also keeps you up to date on the minutae most of us don’t quite get around to managing: interest payments, budgeting, and breakdown of spend on activities. When you’re then able to aggregate that all on a mobile app, it’s a great tool for spot-checking whether you can afford that new desirable shiny.

In an age of being fucking broke austerity, I think it’s a pretty good value offer to allow your customers more control and transparency over their cash. Even though people might be feeling helpless, that probably means that they’re looking for better ways to live within their means. We live in a world of data and representations of data. The smart money is, well… smart. Putting this kind of intelligent power in consumer’s hands, and taking advantage of new channels (especially mobile) in order to do it, is going to be super-important in an age of wavering customer loyalty. Give people a reason to stick around, y’know? Or, like me, you’ll miss out on getting that sort of information to other people, like LoveMoney, which is sort of like Mint for the UK, but lacking (at least for now) a mobile app. I can’t tell you how useful LoveMoney’s MoneyTrack service has already proven in getting a better grip on where I’m spending.

(That deficit is planned and well under control, by the way, thank you very much.)

Now obviously, most banks that are single institutions can’t just dip into other competing banks’ records like Mint or LoveMoney does. However, we’re finally seeing some innovation from Barclays in the form of PingIt. This is a pretty interesting development, because it dips its toe into the rapidly-developing market of mobile payments – something that is set to explode very soon with the rise of NFC and services like Square. The UK’s ultra-conservative finance industry has predictably lagged well behind not only the pioneers of tech in California, but also the pioneers of necessity in Africa and South Asia.

It’s a fascinating little thing: its premise is allowing you to send money to phone numbers, rather than accounts. Of course, it only works if the recipient also has the app, and currently only if they are also Barclays customers. But it’s stolen a hell of a march on the competition – and once it opens up to being able to connect to any UK account, it’ll be a service with significant clout. Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t getting geekishly excited about all the data analysis you could do here, geolocation and check-in based in particular. For illustration, please consider how much money is invested in supermarket aisle layout. Now imagine understanding not only the immediate data points, such as times of repayment and your social graph, but also where those payments are coming from and how that might dovetail in to broader media strategies. Looking at the permissions requested from the app, I reckon Barclays are probably thinking along the same lines.

As well as the trend toward management of finances and mobile payments, the recent launch of Virgin Finance showed us how the future of banking – and perhaps retail in general – might look. This is their flagship ‘bank’, in Manchester:

It’s pretty apparent that, like Square, the approach from Virgin is that digital conduits mean less clutter. Branson apparently smashed the glass screen separating teller from customer in the launch with a sledgehammer. A PR stunt, of course, but nonetheless carrying a message: that the days of a binary customer relationship are numbered. It’s not ‘us and them’, it’s ‘we’. Sounds fluffy? Well, I suppose so. But there’s a serious point underneath it, which is that the consumer experience is going to evolve to become precisely that: an experience.

The coupling of more demanding customers – see coffee shops in Waterstones – and technological presets that can disrupt the clone-like formats of current shops are leading to a thought process that centres far more around the consumer, like the outlets of old. The more pleasant a premises is and the longer people stay in it, the more likely they are to buy something and the greater loyalty you foster against ferocious competition. It’s only with wireless technology and digital advancements that this particular breed of shop is becoming viable – but just watch this space. I expect tech to lead the way; you could argue Apple’s stores are halfway there, but finance is an ideal sector for this as well. Banks that don’t look or act like banks are a far more appealing prospect than waiting in line to be served by someone behind glass who you can’t particularly hear because the mic is on the blink. Expect to see more walk-in-and-sit-down stores, with staff trained as much in hospitality as sales. Expect to be beguiled and made to feel at home. Expect to see shelves and racks and tills disappear as assistants wander the floor with wireless payment services. Not tomorrow, perhaps, but not too far in the future either.

Lastly, it’s weird that we live in a world where I can’t easily send money to someone in America despite being able to video chat with them in real time. Someone should probably fix that.