Category Archives: Uncategorized

50 months to save the world …

… as we know it.

This is the stark reckoning from onehundredmonths.org who’s countdown process and excellent updates I have been following for a few years now.

Beyond this point, there is steadily growing scientific conscensus that if we have not taken sufficient action to curb greenhouse gas emissions within this timeframe there is the very serious possibility of runaway global warming. The resulting rise in temperatures will turn our planet into quite a hostile place for the vast majority of the human race in its current form and locations.

As usual, claim and counter claim continue from both sides of the climate change debate and without being blessed with a crystal ball or DeLorean time machine we have to decide as individuals which side of the debate we stand or else take no notice at all and carry on with our lives as usual.

Given the unpredictability of Mother Nature, who really knows for sure whether one event will counteract another in the future and the human race has shown it can rise to challenges when the need is strong enough. However, looking around us in the year 2012, it’s clear that things are changing. The wettest summer in the UK for 100 years and record levels of ice melt in the arctic are just two events relatively close to home that we have felt the effects of. A very tangible example of which I have discovered this last month in my back garden. Continue reading →

Wishing all my gadgets were like this…

I walked into a presentation to the Board the other day and couldn’t believe my eyes. Our Finance Director had exactly the same calculator as the one I use.

Errr wow???  So what’s the point of such a mundane observation?

Well, firstly that my calculator is my most reliable, faithful and long-standing gadget – dating back to my first job in 1987. It’s robust, fit for purpose and because of clearly very efficient solar technology just keeps running and running, even in surprisingly low artificial lighting conditions. For something that is over 20 years old it has a somewhat timeless design too – although doesn’t quite qualify for calculator museum status yet.

Seeing the FD with the exact same model, which I have since learnt is also well over 20 years old, my respect for my long-standing gadget has grown further. Unlike my device, which gets regular but not heavy use, the FD’s one has been hammered daily for a fair proportion of those 20 years. I would have expected some serious wear and tear after that – failed screen display, sticking buttons, cracked casing, power failures etc – but no – the only difference between his and mine is the ‘plus’ symbol has worn off – I guess if he doesn’t know what that button does by now then he shouldn’t be an FD 🙂

I like gadgets but I hate unnecessary waste. Seeing the mountains of tech waste grow and grow as we discard things like mobile phones on a distressingly regular basis is depressing – particularly when you see the toxic damage it’s doing not just to the environment but also the poor people who are forced to make a living salvaging valuable resources from the scrap.

Even on something as simple as my old calculator, there are at least 4 buttons I can’t remember ever pressing and a bunch of other functions I’ve never had reason to use and have long forgotten what they related to. I just want devices that do simple things well and don’t need replacing every couple of years.

I thought the iPhone looked promising but it’s hardly robust. Over the last few months I witnessed by brother-in-law crack the screen on his twice in the space of a week and my wife’s wifi antenna packed up beyond repair. I can’t see a current iPhone model lasting over 20 years unscathed and the constant recharging makes it far less convenient and instantly usable as my old calculator.

So, will there come a time before 2020 when I can buy a robust, solar powered mobile device that I can make simple phone calls on and access the web instantly to carry out all basic ‘office’ type tasks – but, above all, be able to undertake the same basic needs over 20 years later?

Join the dots – Convergence the talk at TFM 10

No doubt I was strolling the aisles of last year’s Technology For Marketing (TFM) show in a bit of a daze looking for relevant info for the project in hand. This year however,  I was introducing an ex-colleague from many years ago to the broader delights of digital marketing/technologies so was obviously paying a bit more attention than usual.

I’m not sure if I overlooked the fact that dotMailer was now just one smaller part of a much bigger dotDigital Group last year but I was somewhat surprised to see a whole bunch of ‘dotCompanies’ where once there was one. My eye was drawn to dotCommerce and dotContentManagement being promoted – I’m pretty sure there was a dotSEO in there somewhere and I’m guessing a dotSocialMedia must be on the cards somewhere.

It seems a single point solution doesn’t cut it these days and an ever growing number of organisations are expanding their offerings across the digital space, with a lot of commentary about the convergence of WCM, Social Media, Analytics, eCommerce and/or CRM.

Maybe on my upcoming web project challenges for 2010 this will finally be the year when I use one provider for more than one of the requirement areas mentioned above. Previously I’ve always focused on best of breed and/or tactical point solutions before but perhaps we are reaching a position where a traditionally Web Content Management orientated solution offers sufficient email marketing, social media and analytics capabilities to consider a more integrated approach.

I’ve had some promising experiences with Joomla, Drupal and EPiServer in the last year for integrating WCM with community building but I’m still drawn to familiar long established point solutions for things like email marketing and analytics. Does anyone have strong tangible examples of email marketing and analytics integration in Content Management Systems that counter the best of breed approaches?

Observations made in presentations about ‘conversation being king’ and content being boring are starting to resonate having seen first hand how social media generated conversation can have a direct effect on ecommerce activity.

Some chats with SEO specialists suggest an interesting time ahead with real-time search and also that Google may finally be making moves to squash link farming activities more effectively than before. I’ve seen increasing evidence over the last year that these old black hat techniques are still working and this really undermines the efforts of those who approach search marketing ethically and professionally. With Google’s ‘don’t do evil’ brand value increasingly being called into question it risks greater damage if it opens the door to even more search spamming in its efforts to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook.

What's the point of analysts?…

Or rather, what’s the point of analyst organisations? This is really a question that’s been raised for me by the debate about Forrester clamping down on its analysts producing and promoting personal blogs.

Reading this excellent article about Forrester’s action underlines the dilemma for many organisations thrown up by Social Media – who becomes the ‘authentic’ voice or voices of your organisation? Is the genie out of the bottle as far as this is concerned and by trying to pull the reigns back now will organisations face criticism in the way Forrester has about being heavy-handed and effectively limiting its analysts from establishing their own personal brands.

As this pyramid from SageCircle emphasises, Analyst Relations can be quite a personal thing and it’s not so much the analyst organisation itself who you are building the relationship with but often an individual who has specific experience and knowledge of your market sector and operations. The individualism of analysts has been brought into sharp focus by Twitter. Firstly it makes analysts, and the organisations they represent, more accessible but also more transparent. In the cut and thrust of everyday debate, you get to see fallibility more easily but likewise, knowledge and expertise shine through too.

I think what we’re seeing with the Forrester move and recent consolidation in the CMS analyst space is an exposed vulnerability of analyst organisations which have, in many respects, built their operations on inherently poor knowledge flows, communications and, primarily ‘conversations’ between organisations and individuals. To a typical analyst organisation, knowledge is power and wealth, that it benefits from being a gatekeeper to.  Twitter has been blowing this apart over the last year or so by enabling like-minded and/or commonly interested people to get together online and offline far more easily and effectively to exchange knowledge and information. With technology continuing to break down boundaries and facilitate conversation perhaps it’s more the case that ‘we’re all analysts now’?

Think global, act global…

People have been talking about ‘Thinking global, acting local’ for almost 100 years old now although it is a phrase more associated with environmental and globalisation commentary of the late 20th century.

Globalisation has moved on a pace over the last ten years, particularly from a web and information management perspective. That original phrase has been used a lot to describe best practices for internationalisation and localisation.

Experiences in recent years, combined with a view of the bigger challenges facing our world today, highlighted particularly by the current Copenhagen meetings has led me to a different outlook – ‘Think global, act global’

To put it bluntly, I don’t think we have the luxury to ‘act local’ any more.  To me, acting local seems like an indulgence that leads to inefficiency, unnecessary duplication of effort and wasted resources.

I know that the environmental movement was trying to encourage us to think beyond our borders but the world’s biggest polluters have been acting in ‘local’ interest for far too long and if they continue to do so then runaway global warming and its associated catastrophes seem increasingly certain.

The first challenge from a climate perspective is that politics on a local level is ineffective. Forcing a small country and its inhabitants to ‘act locally’ while the large developed and developing countries continue on in the same ways is hypocritical. Big problems need big global action.

One of the main thing I’ve observed in global web projects over the last few years is how similar things are from country to country as opposed to how different – even from one side of the world to the other. I’ve lost count of the number of marketing meetings I’ve attended where the talk is about how things are done very differently in this or that market, only to discover that the interests of the target market are essentially the same and the marketing approaches almost identical.

Globalisation best practice suggests centralised control with local empowerment. While this makes a lot of sense I think a lot of organisations could go further and faster with more centralised control.

Like the current debates around climate change and the need to drive forward a global agenda, I think too much local level thinking can be detrimental to global web projects. In my experience there are a lot of examples where online marketing activities in one market are direcly applicable in another and a lot of time, effort and resource can be saved reusing content and digital assets.