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.

Tiptoeing through the Social Media minefield

After a break of about 4 months, I ventured back into ‘Social Media’ a couple of weeks ago and just in that short space of time I’ve managed to…

1. Offend my wife – by making ‘flirtatious’ comments on a work colleague’s Facebook page. ( This was a classic case of ‘context’ – an innocent ‘tongue in cheek’ remark – but easily and understandably misinterpreted.)

2. Offend my daughter – by requesting that she confirms I am her father on Facebook. (Clearly not something you ask a 13 year old to do)

3. Offend ex-colleagues – by being vocal and, no doubt, a bit zealous about things that bug me in the world of Web Marketing and Information Management. (Having worked at the sharp end of this for most of my career, and particularly over the last 3 years, I hate to see organisations being misled by meaningless and intangible concepts and acronyms dreamt up to make old solutions sound new)

4. Offend US followers – by showing support for Julian Assange (as a fundamentally good man) and Wikileaks on the principle of Freedom of Speech. (I tweet and blog as myself and thus have no constraints in having to appear neutral on matters that I see as extremely important in our world – if you don’t like what I say or what I stand for – don’t follow me)

5. Offend myself – by blindly following the NSPCC related Facebook meme without checking the facts first. (Although in retrospect I’m sure the charity has been grateful for the additional publicity it has received at a crucial time of the year.)

That’s pretty good going for just two week’s effort 😉

If I was being scientific about this, I probably should have monitored my blood pressure while I was ‘SM Free’ and then compared it with the results today. I’m guessing it is higher than it was and I can say for sure that my levels of anxiety have risen dramatically over the last week in particular.

So, if someone asked me bluntly ‘Does Social Media make you happy?’ my instant reaction, based on the last two weeks, would be ‘no’.

The underlying problem with Social Media, is that it is drawing us into deeper and deeper levels of Internet addiction. Is this a problem? Well, if the experiences of the most wired nation on earth are concerned then I’d say yes. South Korea has a big, big problem that has gained a lot of commentary over the last year in particular. In other nations, such as the UK, we are steadily heading towards the levels of bandwidth and ubiquitous web access the Koreans have been experiencing before us. Combine this ubiquity with the growth of Social Networking applications and you have a recipe for some very serious social issues.

Personally, I’m happy to admit I’ve battled with ‘Internet Addiction’ (in as far as it has been defined) for years since first experiencing the web as part of my job role back in 1995. Why do I know it’s an addiction? Well, I was a smoker for around 10 years and, at one point, was getting through at least 40 a day – so I understand the cravings addiction creates, the satisfaction the act provides and the horrible feelings that accompany withdrawal. I’ve experienced all of these things to varying degrees with the Internet over the last 15 years. As with smoking, things have built up and up until I’ve reached a point where I’ve found my behaviour to be ridiculous and unreasonable and been determined to change it. With smoking, I called an end to it for good and have never looked back in 20 years; Alcohol, I can binge on sometimes but also go long periods without; Food, again I can binge but I know that I can and will lose that weight with the same determination I used to kick a heavy smoking habit; Gambling, never appealed; Gaming, the occasional late nighter if I really get hooked on a game; Porn, yep – reached saturation and boredom levels quite a few years back; the Internet though – that’s a different matter…

The Internet is now so pervasive that there is no way, other than global Armageddon, that we are going to step back from it. I fear deeply though, through experiences over the last 15 years, that many nations and societies are only just starting to understand the impact of what is happening around us right now.

Someone commented to me during the last week that ‘The person who is tired of Twitter, is tired of life’ – I’m fast coming to the conclusion that ‘The person who is tired of Twitter, will get their life back’…

If marriage is out of fashion, what about engagement?

If you put ‘Is marriage out of fashion’ into Google, the statistics often quoted and the balance of comment suggests the commonly held view is that it is, indeed, ‘out of fashion’.

So, if, as the figures often state, the act of marriage is at its lowest since the 1800s it therefore follows that ‘the act of engagement‘ is also at its lowest.

If, as a society, we are resisting the process of committing to each other where does that leave the wider activity of engagement with, and commitment to, the world around us? My personal belief is that we have become even more non-committal.

This inherent fickleness is what gives me the biggest problem with the term ‘engagement’ and the way it is being used in the context of web content management and the broader ‘customer relationship’ environment. When I think of ‘engagement’ with regard to websites in particular, that wonderful phrase ‘herding cats’ springs to mind.

Regardless of the growth of social media, I still believe that the vast majority of online activity within the greater mass of websites is goal directed behaviour. When you are focused on a goal, the overtone of ‘engagement’ is that it will take more time and commitment than I am prepared to give. I want the information that satisfies my goal as quickly and easily as possible – if you put any sort of barrier in the way or make me feel I’m being ‘sold to’ or ‘manipulated’ in any way – I’m out of there.

Now, I’ve been kicking around the web virtually since its inception and I know there are countless ways in which I could ‘personalise’ my online activities and experiences that, if I analysed it from a time management perspective, would actually make my life easier – so why don’t I? More than often it’s just one step too far in making a commitment to a process, application, site, or organisation. The thing is, I don’t think I’m alone in continuing to do things the hard way online and I don’t think I’m ever going to be persuaded to change. Sorry – I simply don’t want to get ‘engaged’ – thank you…

No Likey, No Lighty

Sadly, my kids really like ‘Take Me Out‘ a UK TV programme where a hapless bloke is judged worthy of a date by a jury of women – ‘Paddy’s flirty thirty’. It’s the contemporary version of a long running favourite from my youth, Blind Date – only a lot more brutal and, in keeping with societal evolution, makes ‘men’ the main figures of fun. Its saving grace, other than it being similar to fantasies I’ve had in the past, is it sometimes challenges superficiality and pre-conceptions. This was something Blind Date did by hiding participants behind a screen so that they were judged on their personalities as opposed to their looks. Take Me Out often takes the opposite approach by sometimes revealing almost all of the male participants, especially if they have well honed six packs and prominent lunch boxes, it then takes delight in exposing these young adonises as shallow, chauvinistic mother’s boys – so that what started out as a full bank of approval lights from the ‘flirty thirty’, dwindles to just a handful who are clearly more interested in style over substance in their dating partners – “No Likey, No Lighty” is the show’s catchphrase.

Which brings me to the main subject of this post – ‘The Like Button’. I haven’t paid too much attention to social media over the last 4 months or so as it seemed pretty obvious it wasn’t going to go away and, quite frankly, I had better things to do. However, some recent experiments with Facebook advertising have dragged me kicking and screaming back into the arena and had me reigniting an FB profile that had laid pretty much dormant since 2007. On the surface, not much seems to have changed but then I went through the process of adding back in my interests and activities – which previously were just a text list – and realised that they were linking automatically to Facebook fan pages.

Now I know Facebook had been using these text based preferences way back in 2007 to serve up relevant advertising and it is this, at its core, that gives the organisation its market value and presents the only viable threat right now to Google’s Adwords dominance. However, I notice now that ‘The Like Button’ has gone into overdrive and is spreading across the web like a viral rash. It’s one of the those mechanisms that gives us the ‘Paradox of Choice’ described so well by Barry Shwartz in his book and TED lecture and also leads to his conclusions that ‘More is Less’. The speed with which it is spreading dilutes its impact and I’m already getting worn out making choices about whether I like something or not. You see, in the same way that Take Me Out and Blind Date challenge superficiality by not judging someone purely on what they look like and encourage those participating to ask questions that look deeper before deciding, I will avoid making instant judgements about things. I know that if I spread my ‘liking’ too widely, I’m going to get bombarded with wall posts and advertising and even if I do express a ‘like’ you can be sure I’m going to be asking a lot more questions before I make any further commitment.

The whole ‘Like’ concept also reminds me of the first psychometric test I did around 20 years ago when being interviewed for a job. Much to my surprise, I got the job and in my first meeting with the HR people, they gave some feedback on that test, that I’ve never forgotten. In their analysis of my answers, I had scored higher than average in Social Acceptability. Scoring high sounds good, but in this instance the questions were designed to test whether I would tell people what they wanted to hear and this was deemed ‘Social Acceptability’. In this instance I was young, keen, sharp-suited and had applied for a job in marketing, so having a higher level of ‘Social Acceptability’ was regarded as an attribute for the role. The terms ‘marketing’ and ‘social acceptability’ appear inextricably linked, so how much weight can you put into someone expressing a ‘like’ – has it been done through peer pressure, a desire to look cool, an affinity with the brand or a definitive expression of further interest? Does the motivation behind the ‘like’ really matter?

Well… faced with the cold hard facts of my trial Facebook campaign versus my Adwords campaign I think it does. Run over the same time period, at the same cost…

Facebook – click-through rate – an excellent 30% – product sold = 0

Google Adwords – click-through rate – a paltry 4% – product sold = 5

If my ultimate metric is ‘cash in hand’ then Google wins. Should I give Facebook Advertising the thumbs up or thumbs down? How would you vote on this?

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