What new marketers need to know

Following a request from a colleague, I thought I'd turn this into a post.  Five questions (with my answers) aimed at newly graduated marketers:

1. How did you discover the world of Online Marketing?

I was an expert in music before finding gainful employment in the internet and was recruited as Director of Content & E-Commerce to a start-up selling CDs and other music-related products online. They needed someone who knew their ABBA from their Zappa and could segment music lovers from medieval madrigals through to garage and grime.  My role naturally included all non-music related content and marketing too and expanded to include all areas of digital.  The slow death of the music industry helped me decide to focus more on digital in the future than music.



2. What are 3 common mistakes that marketers make?
1. They forget who the competition is.  Marketers often only focus on the brand competitors, and ignore the other things that compete for the customer’s attention and wallet.


2. They forget who the customer is and what they want. Marketers often focus on showing how great their brand is and how different and special it is compared to the rest – when in many cases the customer simply wants something reliable and to know they have made a sensible purchase.  This all comes down, clearly, to buyer behaviours and psychographic segmentation.


3. They forget about the marketing mix (on a basic level, Product, Place, Promotion, Price) and focus only on the Promotion or advertising side.   Zara is an example of a highly successful global brand that has had minimal advertising, but has been extremely effective using other elements of the mix, by paying a premium for core locations of their stores, competitive pricing and ensuring the client base know that their products are fashionable and also only available for a limited time before a new collection arrives.



3. What advice would you give to young marketers after they graduate?



Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1. Don’t set your sights too high at the beginning;
2. Get experience in as wide a variety of roles and jobs as you can; and
3. Only think about specialising after a few years.



The reason for this is that if you start work in an agency you might find it very hard after a few years to get work on the ‘client side’ where the demands are different (you might have to do a lot more stakeholder management inside the organisation).  





Equally, if you are only ‘client side’ within an organisation, you might find it very hard to make the jump to agency.  Equally, if your role is more offline or broadcast media, then you might find it difficult to convince a future (or existing) employer that you are also capable at the digital side, and vice versa.  




The analytical side of SEO, PPC and so on can be less attractive to some than, for example, being on the creative side. But having those analytical skills is essential and will grow in importance as more data becomes available through the use of mobile devices by larger sections of the population.



4. Google has recently introduced a new social media platform, Google+. Do you think that one day it can take over Facebook and Twitter?

Can it? Yes. Could it? Yes. Will it? No idea. Remember that 5 years ago MySpace was the all dominant social network, and 5 years before that it was sites like ‘Friendster’ or ‘Friends Reunited’.  It looks like Facebook has achieved now a global domination that makes it harder for  others to overtake, but there are still more people not using the platform than are.




And many people choose not to have a social life on social networks and only use them for business connections or as productivity tools. So there is still scope for someone (it might be Google, it might not) to produce a platform that adequately deals with all those other uses.  All the social networks are currently limited and, for me, frustrating. Twitter, equally, is a very limited tool and there is no reason why another tool cannot topple it.  




Remember in the 90s Yahoo! was all-dominant, everyone had a Hotmail account and there were dozens of search engines available that people would use according nothing more than aesthetics (they all worked equally badly).  Any firm that thinks it is unbeatable is setting itself up for a big fall.




5. Do you believe that Facebook’s $100B IPO is setting a precedent among all the social media competitors? 

Is it setting a precedent where the social media competitors believe now that the market is ready to understand they have a future?

Yes.

Is it setting a precedent where good business models in the social media world can have successful IPOs?

Yes.

Is it suggesting that all social media organisations are worth tens of billions?

No. Like everything, it depends.  

Some large organisations might get equally high billing, but it all comes down, unsurprisingly, to the business model.  How do they make their money? If they rely on advertising (as Facebook does) is there enough revenue to sustain it? Is it profitable now? Is it likely to be profitable?

There are companies that have great ideas, as many did in the dot-com boom of the nineties, that haven’t properly thought about how to make a business out of the idea.  Any organisation that successfully bridges that gap should feel confident about being able to have a successful IPO… but it is unlikely that they will get close to Facebook’s evaluation.

How to stop the endless stream

'Information Overload'

Everyone complains of too much information these days. 'Information overload'.   We are constantly bombarded by images, messages, advertising, emails, texts, Facebook status updates, tweets and good old-fashioned news.  And let's not start talking about the inanity of celebrity gossip.

To even find examples of information overload on the web, I've wasted valuable time sifting through excess examples to find a small video with a nice graphic that suggests information overload:

So the irony of complaining about this and adding to the information overload is not lost on this writer. Everyone is a publisher today. Everyone is offering advice.  Everyone has something to celebrate or share.

So to mark my 1000th Tweet, this post, where every word is linked to the first(ish) search result on Google for that word, will be the link from the Tweet:

"1000th Tweet on 12 January 2012"

How to understand online marketing in an instant

Having several courses to teach next year on Digital Marketing, I'm in two minds as to whether or not I like the inforgraphic from unbounce.com as:

1. it makes my life so much easier... being able to give students the infographic and telling them to get on with it; whilst also
2. realising that this might make my role teaching digital marketing somewhat redundant.

However, seeing as everything in life is futile and we are all merely passing time until the next change, I share the infographic below...

BloMob: the future of digital publishing

One of the most frequent excuses I hear from clients, students and colleagues when we are discussing blogging and the use of digital publishing tools to encourage sharing and collaboration, is "I don't have time to blog".

One of the reasons I think Twitter is so popular is because the format is so limited that people feel less pressure when posting and can publish ideas without expanding on them.

The problem is that Twitter is limiting as well as limited...and there are many ideas and comments that cannot legitimately nor legibly be reduced to 140 characters.

The growth of tablets like the iPad has probably helped people create content on the go....although it's not easy to type on most tablets while on the move.

Recording thoughts like a personal podcast is possible on a variety of platforms like AudioBoo, but the disadvantage of audio is not being able to skim-listen, unless you are partially sighted and used to absorbing audio information really really quickly.

So what is the future?

There are two sides:
a. It has to be mobile, clearly, to allow people to develop posts on the go.  But that's not ideal as this post can attest....being written through an app on a train....creating links and embedding images is fiddly to say the least...
b. dictablog: being able to dictate thoughts into a mobile or other device and hoping it correctly transcribes the dictation into text. It would also need to become clever enough to insert links and images... and you have the downside of having to speak loudly and clearly into your mobile, possibly in public, definitely looking like a fool.

So what alternative is there?

Simple....keep your thoughts to yourself....           

Automating value judgements

In my role as a professor of marketing and technology, I fully expect to have to assess and grade students. That is part of the lot of a teacher of any kind, from kindergarten onwards (although, arguably, the assessment may take different forms over the years).

As a conscientious educator, I am keen to ensure all the hard work of the students is also fairly and fully assessed.  There are possibly those, as rumour and legend would have it, who throw their papers down the stairs and then start grading those on the top step as 'A's, those on the 2nd step as 'B's and so on down to 'F's on the bottom step.

Tempting though it might be, I am determined to be as paperless as possible.  So far I have saved at least 700 sheets of paper in just one course (assuming double-sided printing) through not printing the submitted assignments.  And throwing a laptop or iPad down the stairs to achieve the same effect just wouldn't do. Think of the splinters.

However, grading 2000+ word assignments is time consuming.  If you do it properly, it involves reading each assignment at least twice, possibly more. Comparing papers to ensure the comparative grades in the class are fair.  Composing specific feedback (100 words minimum? 200 words optimal?) to help the student understand their grade and improve for the future.

Group work needs assessment and, by the nature of group work, involves fewer actual papers to read and assess. But it removes the individual assessment and is therefore subject to slacker students benefiting from the hard work of other team members.

There is no getting past it.  Detailed, objective and rigorous individual assessment is essential.  But how to do it efficiently?

My first thought was to build the most advanced AI computer in the world and get it to grade the computers.  As soon as the patent comes through I'll let you know.

My second thought was back to throwing everything down the stairs.

My third thought was carrying on as I have been and grading at 2am until I get through them all.

So my final thought seems the only viable option, other than me pulling an 'all nighter' or 7.  If Amazon, and every e-commerce site worth its salt, can tap into the crowd to assess and vote on how good (or not) individual books are, surely that would work for individual assignments from students?

All one would need would be a simple website, such as Scribd, where the PDF documents of assignments could sit, visible to the world.  The world at large could then read the assignments and grade them. Once a critical mass of assessment is reached (such as 500 votes), the average is taken as the final grade.  Space for comments would provide the feedback.

This is, in fact, I am certain, genius. There are only two obstacles to overcome:

1. Getting that critical mass of people to read and vote on all the assignments in a short timespan; and
2. Ensuring the students and their families do not vote for them.

If, therefore, you ever see such a business model come into existence, remember you read it here first.  Until then, it looks like I have an 'all-nighter' ahead of me....

Top image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Art of Innovation

Guy Kawasaki's presentation on 'The Art of Innovation' is worth recommending not just for the anecdotes, insider view, venture capital experience and pithy rules to innovate, but also for showing how to present to a conference.

Humour. A good sense of humour is good. If you don't have it, don't try and fake it, but if you have it, flaunt it....

This keynote was from 2007 - but having only just discovered it 4 years later I thought it worth passing on...

The only way is up...unless you drill down...

This post is a copy and paste from a brief summary of the state-of-the-nation I had to produce today, giving a summary of the global economic climate at the moment.


As 2011 draws to a close, three years after the start of the current financial crisis, there is no indication of the situation improving. The OECD says all economies it monitors suffered a downturn in September with the U.S., Japan and Russia returning to their long-term trend (with the U.S. achieving 2.5% growth) but the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Brazil, China, India and the Euro area falling below.  It predicted the G7 countries would grow by just 0.2% while Germany, the world’s second largest exporter, falling by 1.4% in the Q4.

Within the Eurozone, the Greek economy contracted by 5.2% in Q3, an improvement on 8.3% in Q1 but still painful. Portugal, the previous danger area for bailouts, shrank by just 1.7%, Ireland and Italy were stagnant and Spain rose by 0.8%, compared with the UK’s 0.5%  growth.  Lithuania and Estonia, by contrast, rose by 7.8% and 7.9% respectively.

After days of speculation about Italy and Spain needing a bailout with Italian bond yields exceeding the 7% threshold beyond which it is believed they could not pay back the loans, and Spanish bond yields rising, both countries have seen the bonds bounce back after the European Central Bank has agreed to buy the country’s debts.  However, confidence in Italy’s economy is still shaky as yields rose once again shortly afterwards.  The focus on Italy remains high as it accounts for 16.8% of Eurozone GDP compared to Greece’s 2.3%.

The domestic problems in those two countries, however, have forced the resignation of Greece’s Prime Minister Papandreou and Italy’s Prime Minister Berlusconi have led to a new era of technocrats with academic economists Lucas Papademos, a former VP of the ECB in Frankfurt, and Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner, taking the reins respectively, providing a warning to politicians in charge of all failing economies that their successors could be civil servants, not fellow politicians.

UK inflation has fallen slightly to 5% from a ten-year high of 5.2% thanks mainly to current supermarket price wars, whilst clothing, electricity and gas prices continue to rise.  By comparison, prices in the Eurozone held steady at 3%, whilst the US rate of inflation fell slightly to 3.5%.

To help boost the UK economy, the Bank of England announced it will resume quantitative easing in the near future, whilst the US had aimed to provide a $447 billion boost to the economy through tax cuts and an increase in government spending.  This plan was, however, blocked by republicans, leading President Obama to seek new ways to pushing through changes to help housing, education and employment issues.  Furthermore, Obama has sought to create a Pacific-region trade pact with a new Trans-Pacific Partnership rivaling the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Finally, Britain has helped the love-hate relationship between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy by giving it something to join together and fight against: David Cameron and a proposed Tobin Tax on financial transactions which the Tory leader is adamantly opposing.

All this, of course, is good news.  Whilst the present outlook is bleak, it means that things can only get better. 


A brief look at today's FTSE 100 index, showing the past 10 years, shows how things go up, and then they go down. Sometimes they go very down, but they tend to go up over time.

FTSE 100 Index

So here is hoping that the global economy is going to follow that trend....now just to cross those fingers and toes...

How to put out a Flash in the pan...

Twitter has been loud this morning talking of Adobe killing off its fancy animation language 'Flash' for mobile devices.  The news first came, it seems, on ZDNet whilst the Adobe website still talks about creating Flash for mobile devices, but then Adobe wouldn't be the first company that failed to tell its web team what it had told the rest of the world.

Some commentators have been remarking, probably rightly, that Steve Jobs has finally won, beyond the grave, in his war against Adobe.  It was in April last year that the Apple anti-Flash venom started spitting.  Mashable ran a series of emails between Steve Jobs and an Adobe developer that suggested Jobs' hatred of Flash was purely about the stability of the platform and the ability of Apple to be able to lock in both app developers and iPhone and iPad users by making it harder to create the same app for multiple platforms (Android, Windows, RIM etc.).

The 'Roughly Drafted Magazine' blog ran an article just after the Mashable one that gives a nice summary of the real background to the Apple-Adobe spat.  In short, it has nothing to do with Flash. It has nothing to do with whether or not Flash is unstable or not.  It clearly has nothing to do with delivering a great user experience, as most websites had some element of Flash when the iPad first appeared (not to mention the iPhone before it) which could not be viewed by Apple users.

So if Adobe won't support Flash for mobile devices, surely it cannot be long before Flash dies out? HTML 5 will take over completely once Internet Explorer adopts HTML 5 with version 9, (despite many users still on I.E. 6, such as corporate clients too frightened to update anything once they have locked it down enough to make it secure) and no website will be developed using Flash.

So what is the fall-out to this?  Flash developers had better start retraining and fast. Flash trainers had better start teaching something else.  Accessibility experts had better start charging for something else as they won't be able to spend hours pointing out how un-accessible Flash is.

And pages will load faster...(take note Burberry!)

And the world keeps turning...it just no longer uses Action Script...

How do you know you have failed?

"99 percent of success is built on failure." -  Charles Kettering

I have recently heard much talk about how all good entrepreneurs have lived through failure and that, in fact, an entrepreneur needs to fail on the road to success.  The Guardian's Tech Weekly Podcast recently discussed this when talking about the new 'Silicon Roundabout' area of London rich in technology start-ups and why none have achieved comparable success with their 'Silicon Valley' counterparts.

Apparently the British don't tolerate failure the way those in the US do.

If one peruses the millions of words recently written about Steve Jobs, much is spoken about his products which failed, his personal failure in being sacked from Apple, and how he spoke in the (now famous) Stanford Commencement Speech about how he learned from those mistakes.

But no one seems to know how to answer one simple question:

How do you know you've failed?

There are hundreds, if not thousands of potential entrepreneurs worldwide who have great ideas.  Many of them put the ideas into practice and develop those ideas into a functioning product or service or artistic endeavour (such as a composition, an artwork or a novel).  Many of them are persistent in trying to get funding for their company or to get others to back their ideas both financially and morally.

Some are lucky. Through friends, family and serendipitous connections with investors and mentors, they are able to get their business off the ground. They might get a mention in the local press or even the national media. They might present at trade shows or speak at conferences.

But they do not achieve the critical mass necessary to make the business profitable.  Some investors are patient and, as with Amazon, will wait up to seven years before seeing even a modest profit; but many investors are less patient and will stop funding a start-up after a few years of operation.  Would Amazon have survived if it had taken two more years to move into the black?  Bill Gates said "Microsoft is always two years away from failure".

When should creatives, in business or the arts, decide to cut their losses and try a different direction?  Pulp, the Sheffield band, took sixteen years from forming to reaching national and international success.  In 2009, The Economist wrote how entrepreneurship was finally 'cool'.

So all the angel investors, VC funding, government grants and deregulation of start-up bureaucracy is great, but perhaps what is really needed is some objective guidance and advice for when someone should persist with their idea because their time will indeed come; and when they should just pack it in and try something different.  We could call them "Reality Checkers".

For those who do wish to persist, I recommend reading the quotes on innovation on ideachampions.com.

Perhaps the best quote for me, however, is by Douglas Adams:

"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'"

An atheist's view of Steve Jobs

It was two weeks ago today that the world started an outpouring of comment on Steve Jobs and his sad death. As it is sad whenever anyone dies... a bit of a tautology that is repeated by every media outlet whenever anyone famous dies of any cause at any time in their life.

Apple's website is still, two weeks after his death, showing the memorial photo any time you visit the website.  A day of memorial one would expect.  A week might be appropriate for the founder and CEO of your company.  But how long will it now stay up? Will it be dropped, unceremoniously, without notification, after three weeks? Or a month? Or will they keep it there for a year?  What is the appropriate amount of time to grieve for someone you didn't know at all, except through the vicarious the spotlight of celebrity?

Candles outside the Apple Store, London

The outpouring of emotion, such as flowers and candles laid outside the Apple store in London, echoed the sudden quivering of the traditionally British stiff upper lip and ultimate breakdown of the previously stoic public into a collective, sobbing, emotional wreck, when Princess Diana (or Mrs Diana Windsor, as some might prefer it) sadly died (see the flowers below).

Flowers outside Kensington Palace

Then, as now, I find myself wondering why people care so much.  Surely, it is because the person (Jobs, Diana) was famous? That people felt that they knew them? Or was it that they found the death of a celebrity a useful catharsis for them to release pent-up emotion for some other, more private, loss?

I am not a psychologist and shall not attempt to understand it, suffice to say that I don't.

However, another phenomenon seems to have occurred around the death of Jobs.  Stories of him being a bully and a tyrant have finally seen more widespread coverage since his death, which allows one to reasonably address the fact that far from being the best CEO in the world, his is a case study that should be used in business schools to show how a great leader should not behave.

An apparently obsessive care for the detail of products makes a great product designer, not a great boss.  A culture at an organisation where people fear the CEO does not make for the best working environment.

When Jim Collins studied exceptional leaders and came up with the concept of a 'Level 5' leader who enabled great change at an organisation that survived a change of leadership and continued to make the organisation highly successful, he  described parable of the fox (which knows many small things) and the hedgehog (which knows one big thing).  Jobs was probably a hedgehog - he knew how to make great products and charge customers a premium for them.

Ansoff's Growth Matrix

When discussing technology innovation on the masters courses, Apple is frequently  cited as an example of an organisation with a great growth strategy - for product development and diversification - creating new products for existing markets and creating new markets (as per Ansoff's Matrix shown here).

Through the use of iTunes, Apple have also managed to ensure casual customers become loyal customers (achieving market penetration).

It is also worth remembering how much Apple's stock has risen recently, from an average of $7 to $10 for most of its life to 2004, to a current $420 - showing how much the iPhone and iPads have radically changed Apple's revenue structure.

Apple stock from 2000 to 2011 from Yahoo! Finance

So it can be safely stated that Steve Jobs was a great CEO in delivering value to the shareholders and creating products that became market leaders for several years after launch.

Image by Edward Eustace

But that is it.  The deification of Steve Jobs is somewhat unnecessary.  I realise that posting a blog about him is perpetuating the impression that he is the only person of worth who has died.  His inventions certainly changed the technological landscape by influencing how Microsoft developed Windows (the OS that most people still use) and how mobile technology can become ubiquitous.  Interesting to note, by the by, how Microsoft make no mention of Apple's use of the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointing device) in their own potted history of Windows.

The BBC documentary in May 2011 showed through MRI scans how "Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith".  The theory (by Dean Hamer) that there is a gene which predisposes people to being religious or having 'spiritual experiences' helps explain my own perplexed view of the Apple faithful (or iCult as it has been dubbed).

So if Hamer is right, I am genetically predisposed to treat all evangelicalism with suspicion...be it for Apple, football, or one of the many gods.

The Church of Apple has many devotees - and a higher than average percentage of them work in the media - helping fuel the constant messages of Apple omnipresence.

But in the end, us atheists must pray, with ironic tongue firmly in cheek, that sense will see the day, reason will out, the blind shall have their veils lifted and that everyone shall see that there is no god. There is only:

5 ways to gamify trade fairs and expos

Attending the Ad:Tech exhibition at Olympia in London yesterday and today, I am struck by how untechnical it is. No suggestion of participating online. No suggestion of accessing information online as one moves about (an ideal Layar layer would surely be information on the stands and products on your smartphone as you move about the show floor). No suggestion of moving towards a virtual fair...which is surely the future...but when? I am also struck that between seminars, which can be divided into two groups: those that make an effort to tell you something new and those that don't attempt to hide the fact that they are here to sell their products and services, the show floor can be a little boring if you are not specifically looking for a new supplier of universal analytics or mobile widgets.

So here are some ways to gamify your trade fair experience:

1. At a fair like Ad:Tech, which combines marketing and technical elements, there is a fun game of "spot the techie". The techies who go to this fair are more socially aware than many of their backroom cousins, but still tend to dress differently from your core advertising people. That's not a bad thing. The world needs people who keep servers running and set up websites and provide analytics software. But you can, if you wish, divide your targets along a spectrum from 'Too cool for school' through to 'Übergeek and borderline Asbergers'.

2. Related to this, is spot the brands who do not realise this is the 21st century and there is no place for sexism. They are easy to spot. They have young women dressed in skimpy clothing with the company brand on their chest giving out leaflets and other freebies. If they had men in skimpy clothing that would not improve the issue....we're at a business trade fair, not a disco.

3. Freebies. This is fun. Go around the fair to pick up the best freebies you can. So far I have an aluminium water bottle, a book, a beach ball, a squishy Einstein and a desk-basketball set. No need to buy Christmas presents this year!

4. If you are not trying to watch your weight as I am (well, watch it not changing and wishing it would go away), see if you can get a free lunch from the diffent sandwiches and canapés on offer at the different stands. You could try and get drunk too....there are occasional offers of cheap champagne and wine.

5. Create your own version of X Factor. At the seminars, score the presenters on their performance. You could have different criteria, such as appearance, vocal style, PowerPoint slide quality, audience interaction.... You could even give em feedback, such as "Enthusiastic delivery John but you are in danger of sounding like you are hectoring the audience and borderline irritating" or "Great content Jane but think about how you can use your voice to keep the audience awake".

In fact, this suggests to me a great new idea for a start-up. We will create an app for all mobile platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, Windows) that for any given trade show will provide a list of seminar speakers and exhibitors. The exhibition organiser could use the app to share schedules with attendees, but the game part will be to have easy one-touch buttons to score speakers on different criteria, a sliding scale from übercool to übergeek which you can use to rate speakers and attendees, a 'name and shame' feature to spot shameless sexism by different exhibitors. You could even award badges such as "Runner-up best speaker" or "Too cool for school" to individuals. You could earn points too according to freebies and food consumed.

We could showcase the app at next year's Ad:Tech. We just need to get the chocolate teapots to give away, branded miniskirts, sock-and-sandal combinations for sales staff, and we'll need to take a course on presentation skills. If anyone wants in, just let me know. This time next year we'll be millionaires....

HTC Sucks - and not in a good way

Having been a fan of Android phones in principle since they came out (the open nature of Android, the viable alternative to iOS and the Apple fanfest, the particular liking of Google's way of doing things as opposed to how Apple or MicroSoft do things) I have been traumatised by my experiences with my first Android phone.

Money being an object for most people like me, I could not go and buy the Google Nexus S (a Samsung phone) but haggled with my mobile company (Three) to get a £10 per month SIM card with all-you-can-eat data, 750 minutes of talking, 150 texts and a few other things.  I then bought a mobile separately working out that over 2 years I would save almost £200, as opposed to paying a monthly contract of £25 or more.  I bought the HTC Desire (the precursor to the HTC Desire S and HD versions) as a friend had one and had had no problems with it and I saw good reviews on the internet.

The friend in question doesn't use apps.

I've uninstalled all apps except for Google's own apps and a couple more, and yet am still in danger of running out of internal phone storage space. Again. After 8 factory resets trying to remedy the matter.

Yesterday, three apps (Goggles, Maps and Evernote) automatically updated themselves and the remaining internal memory went down from 44MB to 22MB in an instant and then trickled down to 15MB with me doing nothing on the machine!

HTC only made 150MB of internal memory available for apps. So even though I move all my apps to the external storage (the SD card), they still leave residual memory on the internal storage that eats away until there is nothing left.

When the memory slips below 15MB, Gmail and Exchange stop updating.

HTC have, eventually, offered to repair the mobile, and I might ask them to just to make sure there is no fault with the hardware. But I fear the fault is with the design.

For the first time ever I'm jealous of iPhone users who have no issues with app space running out.

What this has taught me is two things:

a. avoid HTC like the plague: there is a reason their handsets are cheaper...although TechRadar does list 3 of them in the top 10 Android phones, and 3 in the top 5... irritatingly...
b. look for internal storage for apps when buying a smartphone.  I have never, however, seen this listed on the product specifications online or instore.  You have to dig deep to find it...but it is worth digging.
c. if you want a recommendation for any hardware from a friend, make sure the friend is a similar user to you. If they are a light user, then it won't help a heavy user judge performance.

Yes...that is 3 things...but anyway...

All of this is, of course, obvious. But the obvious only presents itself sometimes too late...

When do real books beat e-books?

Of late I have become a fan of e-books, being able to read a few pages on my mobile phone while waiting in a queue or travelling on the tube without needing to carry the whole book with x-hundred pages of type.

The advantages for learning are obvious too - instant search to find the paragraph needed for that essential quote being the most important, though not having to carry several kilos of books to class is also important.

Where e-books fail, however, is in the 'feel'.  With services like Amazon's 'Look inside' feature and 'Search inside' one can get a good feel for what the content of a book is, how it is laid out and so on.  But it still is not the same as actually going to a bookshop, picking up the x-hundred pages of type and flicking through it.  Does it have (in the case of text books) the right kind of pictures, headings and sub-headings? Are there summaries at the end of a chapter?  Are there footnotes, chapternotes or other aids for further reading?

Of course one can find all these things through Amazon's service (and others) but, maybe this is a generational thing, I still feel the need to physically hold the book and, in the case of text books, physically own it.

This is paradoxical as it is precisely text books where e-books are able to truly innovate, showing videos, dynamic interactive charts and have lots of links between sections throughout the book in question.  Many of the big textbook publishers have all manner of online tools for students to test their comprehension after a given chapter.

In short, e-books are best. But choosing a book to recommend as an e-book? I need paper. Hence needing to make a special trip to the largest academic bookstore in Europe (apparently) and make a final decision on the books I'll be recommending on the Masters in Digital Marketing programme I will soon be teaching on.

The students will have iPads and will be encouraged to use e-books...so my task is two-fold. Find paper-format books that I'm happy with that have e-book equivalents for the students.

Yes...I can smell the irony too...

How does a social network get social?

As with many people around the world, I was looking forward to Google getting on the social networking bandwagon to see if it could cast off the mistake of Orkut and create something compelling that would steal some of Facebook's thunder and, indeed, crown.

However, perhaps it is to be expected that only those quite deeply entrenched in geekdom have so far obtained the full benefits of Google +. The problem, as affects all social networks, is that of critical mass.

People will not engage until there is critical mass. Without engagement, there will be no critical mass.

The geek world, as shown by those blogging and Tweeting about Google +, has shown that within their circle, critical mass was achieved weeks ago.

For the general public, however, in which I largely include myself as most of my direct contacts and friends are not what one could call 'geeks' (I'm the token geek in their world) have hardly heard of it.

As a result, I have a large number of circles on Google + but only one or two people in those circles are actually on Google + themselves. So there's no point broadcasting and sharing with them when I can do it through Twitter and Facebook, right?

But, I remind myself, Twitter was a geekfest for a few years before really hitting the public consciousness last year...by which I mean those who are still wary of the internet for it might steal their soul have also heard of it.

So I shall wait. And bide my time.  Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" and Everett Rogers's "Diffusion of Innovations" talk of the importance of critical mass...so hopefully the masses will leave criticism to others and get on board so that people such as I can play properly.

I could, I suppose, actively go out seeking geek friends... but then we'd be in danger of only talking about Google +... and that would not be healthy.

What business could learn from the riots...

There seems to be little else to talk of in social media and through broadcast news in the UK these past couple of days than the riots spreading through London and to other cities around the country.

Photo from the Guardian

This blog talks more about social media than social unrest, though it is easy to see how different the riots now are different from the riots of the eighties.  True, both happened under a Tory government imposing swingeing cuts to public services.  Both happened at a time of great recession and increasing unemployment.  But the riots of today are not politically driven. They have simply become a combination of street-party and shopping spree (with 0% credit and nothing to pay until you get caught).

The Great Google has, once again, provided a lovely mash-up to show exactly where the riots have been having across Britain's capital:


View London riots / UK riots: verified areas in a larger map

The traditional media have spoken of the rioters (or looters) self-organising through social media; whilst the Urban Mashup Blog has pointed out that it isn't the usual social media the looters are using, but BBM, Blackberry's Messenger service, which is private and has recently been heavily promoted to the urban youth in the UK with promotions by Jay-Z etc.

So what can business learn from this?

First of all, Blackberry is still a robust system for internal communications and the messenger service could be used more (I've not seen corporate use of BBM).

Secondly, the legal profession should be flooding BBM with ads for criminal solicitors as looters are slowly hoovered up by the police and will need representation.

Thirdly, buy shares in glaziers - a lot of windows will need replacing very soon. Sell shares in insurance companies (or are riots considered 'acts of God' - a strange god that would allow such things...but anyway).

Fourthly, there is a great opportunity for producers of GPS and RFID locator chips. Many products are already have such devices already fitted. What I predict will happen more from now on is that everything from expensive trainers to LCD TVs will have the chips fitted, meaning that producers can locate them at any time. This should help after-sales service and warranties (are there more defects occurring in specific areas that might be due to a particular shipping agent?); but will also mean that looters and normal everyday thieves will no longer be able to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.

Fifthly, and finally, mass collaboration. It has been shown time and time again (see Wikinomics for some examples) how mass collaboration can not only benefit businesses through knowledge sharing, ideas generation and stakeholder engagement, but also create huge profits by tapping into the 'crowd' and using the world as your workforce.

If rioters and looters are able to self-organise when the incentive is a new, free TV, the only obstacle to harnessing that energy for good is to find the right incentive.

That, for businesses today, is not only a challenge, but an opportunity.

What if a robot could write this?

Ironically, only a day or two after writing the previous post about digital excess and transience, I saw this TED video (see below) by Adam Ostrow  from Mashable on how our digital selves - that is all the content we have created and uploaded during our lifetime - will be replicable by machines, to the extend that robots could continue producing content in our style long after we're gone.

What Adam, or the people he refers to, forget is that our online selves are often not our offline selves.  Our online content might be, as this blog aims to be, focused on a specific subject and not a general insight into our personal lives.

We may choose to publish nothing at all about our families, friends and home life.

Equally, we may choose to only show photos of our children and never talk about our professional lives...many still not seeing the value digital holds for every type and sector of business.

What would be interesting, however, is if the robots could be trained to produce content in our style while we're alive.  If the robots could be trained to do our work for us.  If the robots could be taught to give us more free time, to do with what we wish...

What if a robot had written this?  Would it know when to stop (I rarely do)? It would probably produce better and more logical tagging... and importantly... it would allow the world to see what a wealth of opinions I have without me having to think of them...

...roll on the future...

The price of digital is excess and transience...

Back in the good old days, we used to have vinyl albums and cassettes and photographs that you might actually put into albums.  We were limited in how many albums we could own only by the size of our shelf/room/house and the depth of our pockets.  You could tape someone else's albums, and build a large music collection off the back of the local library and friends who bought vinyl, but then the cost was in time, sitting by the turntable and putting in cassettes at the appropriate time, waiting for the record to end, pausing, turning over, writing out the inlay cards.  If it would only have been an interesting task it could have become a hobby...

And with photographs, films were relatively expensive, developing them even more so.  During some of my childhood years in the seventies, there were probably no more than 20 or 30 photos taken during the whole year!  As a result, one valued the photos, kept them safely in a special drawer and selected the best ones for frames or albums.

Digital has changed all that.  Despite the best efforts of the large record companies, some artists, the performing rights agencies and various governments, the sharing of mp3s is abundant and the cost of albums and individual tracks sold digitally is far lower than it was when a physical product was involved.  Most people now have a far larger digital music collection, whether or not they paid for it, which they may hold in two places: on their main computer and on their mp3 player.  New services from Apple and Amazon allow collections to be pseudo-saved to the cloud, but the lack of a physical product to care for and cherish means that most people don't actually make sure their music collection is safe.

And again, the same goes for photographs.  The advantage of digital is that you can see the image immediately after taking it, and take another, and another, if it isn't up to scratch.  But do you then delete the 'bad' images? I don't, and I suspect many don't. I intend to, but don't have the time when it comes to putting the images on the computer, so simply save everything to go through them all carefully and properly (with appropriate Photoshopping where necessary) when I have time.  Who has time?

Cloud services, such as Flickr and Picasa, have existed for many years, but I'd be interested to know what percentage of casual photographers put their photos up on such sites?  I started uploading photos of our baby, born last August, to Picasa so that his grandparents who live abroad could see the evolution. I didn't have time to edit the photos, so after 8 months had uploaded over 2000 photos!  And thank Darwin I did.

I have always taken 'back-ups' seriously, having a good quality large external hard drive to make a clone of everything stored on my computer, including images and music.

Then I changed my computer...so the back-up was temporarily the only copy...and as soon as I had a moment (new babies notwithstanding) I was going to create a new 'original' from the back-up.

However, before I could do that, the external drive took a wee knock and stopped working.  Three so-called professional data retrieving companies later and over £350 spent and there is no possibility of getting the data back from that hard drive.

In short, I have lost all photos and all memories for the past 8 years. All holidays, friends' weddings, family gatherings, pregnancy...(my partner's, not mine)... if only we'd printed off a couple of photos per 'event' for an album... if only I'd backed-up to the cloud as well (which I now have...can you hear the horse galloping away from the closed stable doors?)... if only I'd made the 'new original'... if only if only...

The music I can rerecord/repurchase/reborrow... though it might take a long long time to do so. But what price memories?  The very fact that I had thousands and thousands and thousands of digital photos stopped me selecting the good ones for printing. The very fact that I had so many photos stopped me creating more back-ups (e.g. to DVDs).

When I look at my grandparents' photos, there are probably no more than 50 images to look through, showing a few relatives and their friends promenading in a park or standing formally in a front room.

When I look at my parents' photos, there are over a hundred... probably... but not an abundance.  Our childhood birthdays warranted maybe a maximum of 5 photos.  A holiday might warrant a full roll of film, but with 120 films that meant 12 images.  Whoopie doo!

When our grandchildren look back at our photos, however, if they ever find the time, they will find tens of thousands of photos.  I can't look at them all, will they?  Is there any point in saving so many photos? If I'm ever rich enough to retire, will I want to finally sort them and print the good ones?

What we need, therefore, is an artificial limit placed on our digital files.  Programs such as Picasa, or the camera software itself, should force us to choose a maximum of 5 photos per day for storing.  The others will self-destruct after a given time limit forcing us to make the choice now.

Perhaps we could get a special 'event' button that would allow us, only twice per year, to increase that limit. To what, 10?

We would still have the problem of making sure we backed-up our back-ups, but perhaps that would force us to make sure we made copies, printed the best ones and ensured that our descendants had a vaguely manageable set of memories to look at.

Digital has cost me my memories. The solution is to create scarcity and permanence...

...and I would have put a photo or two in this blog...but I lost them all...

The internet will not make us equal

Aleks Krotoski wrote in The Guardian today "Money and the internet: The next topic for Untangling the Web".

The following is my brief take on the subject - also posted as a comment on the Guardian.

Whilst the utopia of an egalitarian system that rewards all according to their efforts rather than according to the artificially inflated value placed on their particular sector (such as derivatives trading) - which in itself is a long way from rewarding all according to their needs - the ability for people to engage online already depends on a social divide: the digital divide.

So whilst it would be nice for everyone to have the same access to education and the same opportunities in life, making the whole 'life' thing a lot fairer, that isn't going to happen for decades to come, if not centuries. Likewise, if everyone had the same access to the internet and other digital content and opportunities, had the same minimum broadband levels, the same power in their computers, and the same knowledge of how to use the internet, be it for searching, shopping, authoring or learning, then we could discuss the possibility of the web making life a little fairer for all.

That clearly is not the case, however. The only difference with the internet is that those who are 'wealthy' in digital terms: heavy internet users, bloggers, gamers, app-users - are not necessarily the same as those considered 'wealthy' offline. The differences exist - they are simply applied to a different group.

When did the 'internet' become 'digital'?

The time has come, the walrus probably never said but was misquoted as saying, to think of other things.

However, rather than shoes and ships and sealing wax, I have began to think of the next stage in my career...and this has provoked a lot of questions for me that I thought might be useful to share:

When does a  job or work become a career?

Do 'kids' come out of university now with clear ideas about their 'career' (doctors, lawyers and accountants notwithstanding) - or do they get what looks like an interesting job and then see where that takes them? As some of my contemporaries can attest, it is easy to follow the dream - but when do you decide to abandon the dream (realising you're getting nowhere) and get a job that will pay the bills? Everyone has their own limit, depending on their dream, their pride, and the size of their bills.

  How many careers are you allowed to have previous to your current one?  


A headhunter recently told me that my twenties, when I had a 'portfolio career' of doing voiceovers for cartoons and sales videos, a radio programme, mis-managing local bands (mis-managing because I wasn't able to retire on the earnings), effectively running a small indie record label as well as doing some teaching and translating to make ends meet. What I hadn't realised until the kindly headhunter told me is that that was my 'first career' - which in retrospect of course it was. I was trying to have a life in 'music' and 'voice'... but music lead to the internet and what has now become my 'second career'.

How long do you have to be in the same line of work for it to become a career path?

Which is another way of asking:

Are you working in a particular function, or a particular sector? 

This is very much on my mind now, as I have been working in the internet for around 13 years - since the late nineties - covering all areas of the internet from technology selection, specification and design, user experience, e-commerce, online marketing, digital communications and online or virtual learning. So, which is more important, that I can work in any area of the internet, or that I have x years working in a particular sector?
This seems to be an important distinction in the minds of some recruiters.  They will see, for example, that I have spent the past 5 years in the education sector (sub-branch: executive education); and therefore assume that I am unable and incapable of working in, for example, the retail sector, or consumer electronics, or financial services.

Fundamentally the strategies one develops and the tools one uses on the internet, whether it is to sell, market, communicate, educate or collaborate, are the same.  It makes no difference whatsoever if you are selling a programme on leadership, a pair of jeans, an Android tablet or an insurance policy - you do the same things. As with any area of marketing and communicating, you have to think about your audience and change tactics accordingly.  With pharmaceuticals and accounting/auditing firms, for example, there are specific regulations as to what one is and is not allowed to do, but those regulations take all of half-an-hour to learn.

Furthermore, I have found that some firms are looking for a square-peg for a square hole, rather than a malleable peg that will fit any hole.  It is no good, for example, being in e-commerce if you do not understand user experience architecture.  It is no good, for example, trying to do online marketing if you do not understand social media.  And it is no good thinking about online learning without also thinking about how one communicates, how one uses the AIDA framework (for those that don't know, the steps that you must go through on a communications campaign:

• Awareness - make the target audience aware of what your message or product is
• Interest - get them interested in it
• Desire - make them want it
• Action - make sure they actually do something about it...

As I discussed in my post on Learning through Advertising and Porn a fundamental part of getting the learning to stick is using the same techniques that are used for advertising and pornography: getting the message across quickly (using advertising techniques) and making the user want to see said communication (porn - although please note that the world would be a better place without porn - this does not condone - but observes and notes its popularity).

And so to the title of this blog:

When did the 'internet' become 'digital'?

When I started creating and managing websites 13 years ago, everyone talked about the internet.  With the increase in various forms of communications through the same use of broadband (such as email marketing) we  began to refer to it all as online: as opposed to offline (using print or traditional broadcast media).

Now every single job I have seen advertised uses the word digital.  This is, no doubt, to cover the range of tools one must now employ online, from websites and email marketing, through to viral marketing, social media, virtual worlds and video conferencing and more.

Fundamentally, though, it all comes down to online stuff and y'know...the internet.  And it is shocking at the huge divide emerging between those who have just understood the need for an internet presence, and those who understand that to engage with anyone, be it customers, potential clients, suppliers, employees, management, unions or old media - one has to use the full range of digital tools available.  The sector doesn't mater.  The industry doesn't matter. 

All that matters is that you understand that all things are connected.  Understand that, and the rest follows naturally.