Monthly Archives: December 2010

(20)11 predictions from the CMS coal face

I was described recently as a “self-proclaimed crusader on behalf of buyers”. Despite the rather condescending tone and context of the comment, I have heard from others that alternative views of web marketing and information management from those who spend each and every day as practitioners is welcome. Those practitioners who do post comment tend to get their voices drowned out of social media by the vendors, analysts and commentators who shout a lot louder and a lot more frequently.  So in the interests of living up to that label, here are some predictions for the coming year from the CMS coal face… Continue reading →

(20)10 lessons learned

The growth and evolution of social media often puts a different emphasis on the approaches to ‘blogging’ but I still like to use this site as a ‘weblog’ in its more traditional sense – as defined well over a decade ago…

A weblog often has the quality of being a kind of “log of our times” from a particular point-of-view. Generally, weblogs are devoted to one or several subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their particular themes. A weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated discussions.

So, the following post is a mixture of business and personal lessons learned from the last 12 months – if it proves useful to others reading, that is a bonus in this instance as its primary purpose is to log some thoughts to review at a later date… Continue reading →

It's not what you know, it's who you know

This post’s headline are the earliest ‘words of wisdom’ I remember being given. Despite the fact that it often proves true and is, no doubt, a fundamental aspect of human nature, I have always disliked the phrase.

Thinking about it recently, I believe this dislike comes from the ‘overtones’ of corruption that are often associated with it.

There’s an implication that no matter how much effort you put into learning something and doing it well, someone else is going to do better not because they’ve put in similar levels of effort but because they just happen to be mates with someone in a better position than you.

I’ve seen some great examples of this over the years. In my early career, I remember questioning some expenditure on the departmental marketing budget that was going directly to some UK MPs. This was before the ‘cash for questions’ scandal broke back in the 1990s where it transpired that MPs were taking money to ‘ask questions’ in Parliament. In this instance this was to ‘ask questions’ regarding the future of digital TV which it was clearly in my employers interest to promote. The fact that I saw these budget lines and, indeed, related paperwork from the MPs themselves, with my own eyes means I will always be inclined to believe ‘there is no smoke without fire’ when it comes to these type of scandals. Once the US management took over, things became even worse, cluminating in massive debts and legal action for corrupt dealings.

Then there was Lucent, a company I had admired from a distance for a number of years before joining it. Oh boy, what a hotbed of corruption that place was. I was working there when Rich Mcginn was fired and all the dodgy dealings were exposed. It was often heartbreaking to see these loyal lifelong AT&T/Lucent employees cast out in wave after wave of subsequent redundancies – the many years of hard work and talent sullied by the greed and corruption of its senior executives.

In the hosted services industry, I’ve seen, first hand, how ruthlessly organisations like Microsoft can act through personal and partner networks and how it infiltrates the analyst and consultancy ecosystem to spread its own version of the truth. When I see comments on how it is ‘gunning for Google’ I can certainly believe it.

In the software industry, I’ve witnessed similar vendor and analyst dodgy dealings which are far more about money than they they are about unbiased truth. Likewise, I’ve seen how professional services organisations conspire with vendors to extract maximum cash from clients. In crowded and confused markets, like web marketing and information management solutions, it’s been encouraging to see the growth of truly ‘vendor averse’ organisations like The Real Story Group – we need much more of this type of ‘trustworthy’ analysis in other areas.

In recent years, I’ve had the displeasure of encountering the very worst example of wealth driven entitlement and superiority in my life so far, which helped me understand how a combination of dysfunctional personalities and money driven power could create the type of society where horrors like apartheid and ethnic cleansing could exist.

So, based on over 20 years of seeing the good and bad in the business world, I welcome the idea that Wikileaks intends to turn its attentions on business organisations. It would be good to see some real transparency rather than the faux transparency it is currently fashionable to proclaim.

Are you standing on a burning platform?

The ‘burning platform’ sits alongside ‘the flagpole’ and ‘the box’ in today’s business lexicon and has been used quite a bit in the web marketing and information management arena as a method to move projects forward. It is particularly useful where there isn’t a definitive deadline for something but there is a general consensus that something needs to change. The biggest current example in the web world is ‘social media’ – with many a guru suggesting that if organisations don’t get their act together, the platform they are currently standing on will be burned to a cinder.

The challenge with ‘burning platforms’ is determining to what degree they are contrived and to what degree they are genuine. This last year has given us perhaps the best ‘literal’ example of a burning platform in history – the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. There was no question the Deepwater Horizon was burning, you could see the glow from 90 miles away apparently. There was also no mistaking the tremendous issues that burning platform created – they could be seen from a 1000 miles out in space. This event was also an excellent reminder to those who like to cast predictions on the future (me included) that the biggest stories of the last year were entirely unpredictable – the biggest oil spill in history, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, a volcanic eruption in Iceland that brought travel chaos across Europe and a bunch of miners rescued against the odds.

So, what about some of the less literal burning platforms? The biggest of these has got to be ‘the end of the world as know it’ – most readily described as ‘climate change’. I share the view, as expressed at various points on this blog, of those who identify ‘climate change’ as the inevitable consequence of a 300 year addiction to fossil fuels and that relentlessly rising population and ever increasing energy demands all contribute to a potential triple whammy of issues – that, all things considered, are simply too big to ignore. However, here I sit shivering in one of the coldest December’s on record at the end of what I’m being assured is the 2nd warmest year on record not really knowing what to believe.

In the last week I have read a very fascinating article in the Times Eureka magazine about ice core drilling in the Antarctic which has a graphic showing that CO2 atmospheric concentrations today are way in excess of anything seen in the data over its 800,000 year span (this appears to be an indisputable fact and I can’t help thinking there’s got to be a downside to it). Conversely, if you spend more than 5 minutes reading this highly Google ranked climatechangefacts.info site you get the sense that there’s nothing to worry about and the most important thing is to carry on living exactly as you are. Then the nagging doubts start to creep in that the interests of this particular site are driven by the US oil, gas and automotive industries. Then again, they could be driven equally by the climate change lobby trying to infer that US big business is trying to muddy the already oil drenched and acidified waters. At times you see why it is so much easier to attach the blinkers and play the dutiful role of corporate wage slave and brain dead consumer and just hope that things don’t get too painful for future generations.

In terms of the climate change ‘burning platform’, 100months.org sent me the latest update email telling me there is now only 72 months left to save the world. It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes ago I was writing Ten Hopes for the Tens – these last 12 months have rocketed by and what do we have to show for it progress wise on the world stage? I can’t believe it’s a year since the Copenhagen Climate Summit ended in what was widely described as a failure and here we are, a year later, with similar commentary being applied to the Cancun Climate Conference. At this rate, we will have reached the 2016 ‘tipping point’ as determined by 100months.org with little or no politically driven progress made.

If  the Deepwater Horizon disaster cost around $3 billion to clear up does this provide a more tangible illustration of what the costs of other ‘burning platforms’ might look like? The Stern report emphasised the potential costs of continuing the Business As Usual approach to energy, population and lifestyle and not taking significant action to address CO2 emissions. On lowest levels of warming, the impact was calculated at around 3% GDP and at the higher levels, around 10%. So, if we look at current levels of US GDP this would mean the lowest level of cost to the US economy alone would be equivalent to 150 Deepwater Horizons and at the higher level, 500 Deepwater Horizons.  Either way, after this last year, more than one Deepwater Horizon seems less than an attractive proposition.

Filtering out the noise

In common with around 9 million people in the UK and presumably similar proportions elsewhere in the world, I have hearing problems. Some of my posts on this blog have expressed experiences with this and the most recent one described the lipreading course I am currently doing.

Every week now, I spend a morning associating with a group of 20 people who all share the same or similar issues. The one thing we are undoubtedly all agreed on is that it is a very noisy world out there. If you don’t hear well, noise is the biggest problem. Unless you are profoundly deaf, the chances are you’ll hear the noise all too well but what you won’t get is any clarity.

The majority of us in the group have hearing aids that help filter out the background noise and this is undoubtedly the best innovation to have happened with the arrival of digital hearing aids during the last decade. This works, to a point, but we are all agreed we would prefer it to be better. If things get unbearably noisy, one of the options for the hearing impaired is to remove, or switch off, their hearing aids completely and rely on their lip reading skills.  There have been times over the last few years where it has been an utter relief just to ‘switch off’.

So, if the real world is getting noisier and noisier, the online world has got even worse.

I share the opinion of those who say that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 that works. What are often described as latest innovations and ideas existed in some form online 5, 10, 15, or even more years ago. What we’ve seen more than anything else in the last few years is mass adoption and a more ubiquitous web presence. In other words, it has got a lot more noisier out there. As in the real world, I don’t regard more noise as a good thing but it is the by product of growth, it’s difficult if not impossible to switch it off and we just have to learn to live with it.

Right now, I think the vast majority of organisations are in the same position with the web as a hearing impaired person is in the real world. They are bombarded with so much noise, it’s difficult to get any clarity.

So, what are their choices? Well they can choose to ‘switch off’ completely. However, although it may give temporary relief, in the same way that a hearing impaired person will become increasingly insular and insolated if they don’t join in the conversation, the same will apply to the organisation.

My advice, based on web development experiences going back to the mid 90s, is to focus on using the tools they’ve been using for years and not to get overly distracted by the growing noise.

Continuing the analogy of the hearing impaired person for a minute, the tool that acts like the button on my hearing aid that filters out the background noise is one that the majority of organisations know best – email!

One of the biggest lessons I learnt in web development back in the 90s is the value of getting web email traffic (sales, technical, service, general etc) copied into your inbox. Everything, and I mean, everything I’ve ever needed to know about the expectations of users, the type and depth of content required, the information flows for customer service, the hot buttons for prospects and, indeed, the best tips for furture product development has come via those emails.

In the last few years, when people have been talking about abandoning the tried and tested communication channels and methods in favour of Facebook and Twitter, I have done some direct analysis of what can be gained from Social Media Monitoring versus listening to the feedback gained via email. Firstly, analysing social media properly, even with automated tools, takes a lot of time and effort. What you end up doing is manually filtering out the noise through cross-referencing the context and determining whether sentiment is genuinely positive, negative or neutral or just laden with sarcasm. What you end up with is something that is still fuzzier than the direct and unambiguous feedback you’ve already got in the emails.

Ironically, I’ve also discovered on a number of occasions that negative feedback in social media often stems from poor email handling within the organisation. If questions are not responded to quickly and efficiently, that’s the point at which someone will take to a forum or start Twittering. So, if you focus on getting the basics right, more than often, that noisy old social media environment will take care of itself.