Category Archives: Social Media

Playing the Logo Game

Beyond the overt commercialism and religious hypocrisy debates about the Christmas break, it is a great time for families to get together and play together.  It’s often said, ‘the family that plays together, stays together’ and while we can all ‘make’ the time and opportunity to do this at other times of the year, life often gets in the way – so, for me, the Christmas and New Year break will always serve an excellent purpose in the opportunity it provides for family fun.

I also like the fact that despite the relentless rise of sophisticated electronic toys and computer games, the humble ‘board game’ still finds a space in many families’ collective entertainment experiences. Continue reading →

(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.