twopointouch

I am obviously speaking in an out of work capacity here. And rather later than is fashionable in the blogging world - Calacanis’ announcement that he’s giving up blogging was nearly two weeks ago.

At work, we paid Jason Calacanis £5000 to come to London and speak at a conference last year. From reading the blog, it seemed he had a lot of interesting opinions and a very interesting background, we figured, so would add a lot of value and interest.

We’re a not-for-profit enterprise within a learning establishment. Budgets are hard, but we hoped his appeal would boost ticket sales considerably. It didn’t, but that was our misjudgement. Hands up. At least we’d get a great presentation, eh?

He came. He gave a sales speech for Mahalo. That was all he talked about - how wonderful it was and how it would save the Internet.

Then he cleared off into town to do interviews for competing media, coming back four hours later to sort-of take part in a closing panel session.

Not blogging any more? Good. He is a greedy, lazy, egotistical bastard who screwed us over.

Quick report from last Friday’s Fuel conference. It was a well-planned day which I thoroughly enjoyed, so well done to Ryan, Keir and the Carsonified team. It was also good to meet up again with a couple of fellow bloggers. Andrew from Imagination has written already about the attention to detail shown in the design of the delegate badges, while Vero has covered off the presentation from the lovely bearded chap from Innocent drinks.

For me, the stand-out presentation was the case study regarding the launch of Virgin America, a new internal airline for the States and part of the Virgin group. It was founded in 2004 and started flying in September 2007. How come the launch took over three years?

As the presenter, Alex Hunter (Virgin’s Head of Group Online Marketing), pointed out, you might imagine that this would be a piece of cake. Virgin is a massive international brand. The group’s Virgin Atlantic service is well-known for being good quality and reasonably priced.

Not so. In some respects, the brand’s fame worked against them. The proposed launch met with loud protests to the US Department of Transport from the existing internal carriers. Virgin was a foreign company, they argued. Allowing them to launch would directly damage US businesses. It appeared (quite rightly) that a lengthy fight would ensue.

Virgin was hamstrung in two ways during this period. They couldn’t unveil the new planes’ impressive features and specifications - for all they knew, they’d be completely out-of-date by the time they launched. Nor could they use Richard Branson as a brand ambassador - his nationality was exactly the reason for which they were facing problems from the DoT. Also, money was more of an issue than you might imagine: they had already bought the planes and empty planes are a very expensive liability.

Legal fencing, defencing, shilly-shallying and fence-sitting ensued, for months. Finally, on December 26 2006, the DoT delivered its verdict: Virgin America would not be allowed to fly. This was a black day for Alex and the company. To that date, the Department had never reversed its decision on such a matter.

So Virgin decided to take the fight to the (metaphorical) streets.

They submitted a time-lapse video of one of the planes being painted to YouTube. Over the weekend, it garnered 200,000 views and found its way to the front page of digg. It wasn’t an especially remarkable film from a technical perspective, though at that time, there was nothing like it (all their rivals have since copied the idea, apparently).

They launched a blog called Let VA Fly (now defunct), unveiling all the sophisticated new features on their planes. At this point, they felt they had nothing to lose, so they might as well. They included an online petition, and forms which would create and send a correctly worded and legally valid complaint to individual users’ representatives, senators and the Department of Transport. Technically, it was a fairly simple site, based on open source Wordpress software. But it did the job.

Perhaps because the incumbent US internal airlines are so very terrible and anything better sounded like Nirvana, perhaps because it was pitched as a classic David and Goliath story, the blog was a great success.

They decided to launch a competition to let readers name the first eight planes, then capitalised on this by specifically inviting blogosphere celebrities and idols, Stephen Colbert and Cory Doctorow, to name two (Air Colbert and Unicorn Chaser, since you asked). They created T-shirts and gave them away. They put one of their planes into the San Francisco Valentine’s parade.

Perhaps crucially, they managed to get other online communities to do much of the marketing of the site, and driving people to sign the petition and send form letters, for them. The site or posts on the site hit the front page of digg eight times. Realising that community was clearly sympathetic, they invited Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht to film their diggnation video cast on board one of the grounded planes, driving scads of geek traffic to the site. Later paid and unpaid spots on diggnation worked equally well.

In total, 75,000 letters were sent to the authorities and 30,000 people signed the petition. It was enough. In September last year, the DoT reversed its decision and the service took off.

If you need the history - I had a big problem with the company (blogged here), which was resolved the day after I wrote a post about it on this site (blogged here).

A lot of people might see this as a victory for blogs and bloggers. I’d agree, sure. But, on reflection, I think it’s more of a victory for Carphone Warehouse.

It’s easy for anyone to set up a blog, and give themselves a platform on which to rant and rave about whoever is annoying them this week. OK, it takes a bit longer to establish any readership and authority, and being a decent-ish writer helps, as well. However, any old fool, given some determination, has the chance to do that, on a purely hobbyist basis. As I think I have sufficiently proven.

What’s harder than setting up a blog, is for big organisations with established systems, hierarchies and hide-bound tradition to change. To move from a position where “it’s not this department”, “you need to speak to X about that” and “sorry, there’s no one available right now.” To get to the position where an individual within that organisation can say, “I can see what you’re saying. I’ll sort it out now.” Not only that, but they’re polling for your opinions and ready to intervene where they can be helpful. That would be an enormous culture shock for most large organisations.

My negative experience using the traditional lines of communication, which I persisted with due to a misguided sense of moral decency, versus the guerilla efforts that eventually achieved results, speaks volumes. When the latter worked, it saved portions of C/W’s reputation in some ways, not to mention my relationship with the company. But again, it was the company’s response, not my rudeness (as my nana might have perceived it - and she still oversees my conscience), that got the result.

Technology and social media, in particular, are allowing these transitions to happen within even the largest organisations. But it’s happening on uneven levels and with unequal levels of satisfaction when it comes to people’s experience. The future is spead unevenly, like William Gibson said. The overall movement is positive, though.

Sometimes that’s because it’s on an outlaw level, outside the traditional hierarchies, and the bosses don’t even know about it. Often, it’s on a project basis or through an external agency. Sometimes, it’s individual champions injecting change into organisations, because they actually care about the company or organisation they work for. Less commonly, it’s established by enlightened managers. When the instigators (I still have the C/W hold music in my head) - whatever their methods - achieve real results for the company and create more trust, faith and humanity, the message will spread, inside and outside the company. When they get it right, the impact on the bottom line can be enormous.

Many of us end up hating the large organisations we’re forced to deal with; creating mechanisms to rehabilitate those relationships is crucial. Personal publishing platforms and individuals empowered to engage with them are the way to take this forward.

That organisations as large as C/W are allowing that to happen is extremely heartening. Facilitating that, of course, requires organisations to allow for extreme trust, 20% time or flexible working hours, mobile technology, and a realisation that your reputation belongs with your customers, not the marketing department.

This post is a follow-up to the last, rather less complimentary one, Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated…

At 10am this morning - and it’s Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, you’ll note, I got a call from Sarah, a customer services manager at Carphone Warehouse. She gets Google Alerts for mentions of the company’s name on her Blackberry, and had picked up on last night’s post. Less than 14 hours after I published it. Shocked at my tale of woe, she’d called into the office from home to retrieve my records.

After confirming the details of my story, she agreed that a mistake had been made and apologised for the company’s failure to act this week. Two hours later, I received this email (slightly abridged):

Dear Mr Delaney

Further to our conversation this morning, I am writing to confirm that I have just credited your account with £473.46 which is the amount that is showing due to data charges.

[...] Should you have any concerns about anything [...] please feel free to call me on my mobile number at any time. [...]

I hope that our conversation this morning and these subsequent actions have gone some way to restoring your faith in CPW and that you will remain a customer for many more years to come. I also hope that you can now get on with the important job of enjoying your N95 and the bank holiday weekend.

Please call me or email me on this address should you have any more questions or should you need any more help.

Kind regards
Sarah

I am still pretty stunned at this turn of affairs, I have to admit, and my fingers are trembling. And I am frankly delighted at the company’s willingness to listen and respond using these channels. It leads me to several observations:

• The Internet makes everything really fast. I achieved more in 14 hours (none of which were during the work week, or even daylight) than a whole week of phone calls. I guess that’s bad news for organisations in some ways, because they have to be considerably more agile than they often are in order to keep up.
• Writing a blog is a good thing to do. I am not an especially noted person, even in the very narrow circles in which I move. But the blog and other social media allowed me to get a message out to the right people in a way that traditional forms of communication did not.
• Without the Internet, corporations are not likely to be very good at dealing with individual cases that don’t fit the standard pattern. I don’t blame Carphone Warehouse, in particular. I think it’s just the nature of modern corporations.
• However, Sarah at Carphone Warehouse - and people like her - are using technology to rehumanise their organisations. Give an empowered person Google Alerts and a Blackberry (and the willingness to look at those alerts on a Saturday morning) and you can totally change people’s perceptions, stem a potential PR disaster and restore faith and humanity in your organisation’s relationships with customers.

Anyway, I am also honour-bound to say that I have changed my mind since yesterday. Carphone Warehouse are actually rather good eggs and you should all go and buy some phones from them straight away.

Many thanks, too, to Huw, David, Helen, and Jana among others for your messages of support, posts and advice. The world is beautiful again.

[I agreed to keep Sarah's surname private, but if any of her managers at Carphone Warehouse pick up on this story, please reward her bountifully].

If this is here, then my upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress and a new theme won’t have been a complete disaster. If it isn’t here, then let’s keep it to ourselves, eh?

The newest thing is native support for tags, as well as categories. Everything is miscellaneous, of course (check this fantastic video  of a presentation by David Weinberger on this theme (57 minutes) if you haven’t caught onto this idea yet), so tags ought to supply a folksonomy for posts on the site, as well as the taxonomy it’s always had. Windows Live Writer apparently supports this natively now through the Keywords field at the bottom of the editing window. Except it isn’t quite right, since I am the only person who can add or edit those tags. I wonder if there are any plug-ins out there yet that allow this to be carried to the next level - to let users add their own tags to articles in a way that sits inside the system rather than through widgets and third parties like del.icio.us?

On the theme: it’s back to Cutline again, for the time being, since it’s one of the few that supply native support for tags. Yes, it’s easy to hack existing themes to provide that, but I really can’t be bothered.

Things to do:

Haven’t quite finished with the masthead - there’s still a couple of generic pics in there and I think the title of the site needs to be a few points bigger.

Add tags to previous posts. I used to use the very popular plug-in Ultimate Tag Warrior. It used too much CPU ultimately whenever this site became moderately popular, and I had to drop it. Nonetheless, a lot of the posts on this blog have already been tagged. Some sort of import for that would be more than welcome.

Database may or may not be screwed. Oops. (Proper IT person: "Of course you backed up your database before performing such a drastic operation?"; Me: "Uh… yeah… sure I did."). Updating old posts to add tags results in a MySQL error, though the edits are carried out nonetheless. Have to google it and see where I may have cocked things up.

This is what it looks like, for people in the know:

WordPress database error: [Table 'twopoint_wrdp1.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID

It took a lot to say that, but I’m a big man and I do this for a living, and I have to agree:

I know I keep going on about this… but I have no time to read feeds or blog anymore. Work has en[c]roached too far. Tonight I sat down to catch up on 3,000 unread feeds and realised the feeds aren’t going to make blog. I just need to start doing it again and godamnwell make time for it all. Godamnit again… I’m to turn my Twitter notifications on again as well and get social good and proper.

HONEY… I’M HOME!

I’m also going to find a prettier template for this site. I’m a lush, not a monk - I ought to find something that suits..

Just struck me, in a not-entirely-artificial way, that if you are interested in PR and the Web, as per the last post, then you ought to come to the event we’ve organised at NMK on Tuesday next week (20/11/07), ‘Clients in the Wild‘. There are about ten tickets left at this point, I understand. Click the link back there ( <— ) to find how to register.

Anyway, it’s about when companies embrace all this nakedness and transparency and conversations idea. If they do, where does the PR company’s role lie? What’s the logical outcome of this ‘cluetrain‘ railroad? It’s aimed at PRs, mainly, but everyone is welcome to come, as always.

I’ve heard some fascinating answers to that question, ranging from ‘get them to shut up quick’ to ‘embrace and dance’. If PR is reputation management, then are these power-ups, loose cannons, guardian angels, friendly fire or bulls in a china shop? Can you think of better metaphors than me? Have your Say!

Are you personally affected by this issue ? Then e-mail us. Or if you’re not affected, can you imagine what it would be like if you were ? Or if you were affected by it but don’t want to talk about it can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it ? Why not email us ? You may not know anything about the issue, but i bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad hoc reckoning, by going to bbc.co.uk…clicking on "what i reckon" and beating on the keyboard with your fists and your head".

(Thank you, Jem Stone)

If you’re in London and can come along, it would be great to meet with you, share a few beers and talk about this stuff. With less beating.

OK. I’ve been product-pitched by PR companies as a (sort-of) journalist many times. I have been pitched as a blogger a few times.

This week’s malarkey is a new thing entirely. A teaser/blogger-outreach campaign.

On Monday I received a plain brown envelope.

It contained a blacked out memo, but the remaining words revealed something about a military operation. Ooooh! There was a little brown envelope, too. What’s inside?? Oooh a mobile phone SIM card!

Plug it into my phone immediately, of course!

Oh

Nothing.

No top secret texts.. no nothing. No credit on the pay-as-you-go SIM either.

Meanwhile, my clever assistant was all over the memo and thought enough to google the word ‘nanosuit’, one of the few remaining legible words on the memo. There’s a new game coming out today called Crysis that involves the protagonist wearing a nanosuit. It has to be them behind this, since any other mention of ‘nanosuit’ on the web is about science and that.

Next day. I’m thinking they might send me a phone to put that SIM card into! Woo hoo! Errr.. no. I get an email (once it came out of the spam bin) from a ‘top-secret’ website saying they need help with an audio file. There’s a link to a deliberately unfinished site, so you go straight into the file browser. Lots of areas are inaccessible, what with this being top-secret. I poke about a bit, as you do. Eventually, I find an mp3 file - aha - that must be it!

I download it. My computer plays that format in iTunes. It’s called ‘Crysis - final - approved’ in the title bar. It contains some audio of combat footage and some guy talking about being behind enemy lines (or something). I am not at all sure how I am supposed to help them with this. Run it through some audio filters, perhaps?

Very top secret, then.

And I am supposed to write about the launch of your game because…? It’s not about anything that this blog is supposed to be about. I know I make exceptions sometimes, but come on?

P.S. Yes, I have written about it anyway and, yes, free stuff is always welcome so long as I am allowed to be sarcastic about it. Drew reckons it’s "Very cool and slick", so maybe I’m just a grumpy bastard.

Interesting piece on paidcontent.org, covering a talk by Henry Copeland, CEO and founder of BlogAds, a network which serves adverts to participating blogs. Copeland says that only around 100 of the 1500 blogs his company works with are likely to be self-sustaining from advertising - and these are the creme-de-la creme - participation in the BlogAds network is by invitation only. He also recognises that blogs have special problems for advertisers:

The appeal of blogs to marketers is their singular brand identity, making it possible to accurately target their ads. Copeland: “Advertisers say, ‘I know I can trust Blog X, but I also know that Blog X has 100,000 readers - and God knows what those 100,000 readers are going to say.’ It’s not me, it’s the advertisers who are saying this.” And so, BlogAds,which handles advertising for Perez Hilton, Cute Overload and DailyKos, offers to quarantine ads away from the comment pages. “If you look at Perez Hilton, there’s certain kinds of ads that can run on the front page where you can’t see comments. And then on pages where you can see comments, there are other kinds of ads. That is exactly what is occurring.”

Brands are happy to trust bloggers, it seems, but not blog readers. They’re worried that the sort of flame wars that popular blogs tend to attract will somehow create an adverse association for their brand. From this perspective, our nascent UK blog networks should arguably separate adverts from comments, or always moderate comments, if they’re to attract larger advertisers. This is relatively easy to implement: the blogger platform does this out of the box, and other sites could use Haloscan or similar to host comments separately from articles. However, a quick survey this morning would suggest that few UK sites are interested in the separation and pre-moderation of comments of the type that is found on US blog network Gawker’s sites (though I assume they all remove offensive comments, once they are discovered):

Paidcontent: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Blognation: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Techcrunch UK: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

Westmonster: register to comment; no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages

Shiny Media: no pre-moderation; ads shown on comment pages.

It’s an interesting conundrum. If blog networks start pre-moderating comments, that reduces their ‘bloggishness’. It’s not so much a conversation as a return to ‘Letters to the Editor’. But if that is what it takes to attract more advertising, and thus more investment in the content of these blogs, will readers forgive that? It doesn’t seem to have hurt Gawker - publishers of Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others - too badly.

Pure coincidence, perhaps, but there were two articles in my feed reader today arguing that there’s a need to avoid too much Search Engine Optimisation.

From Dharmesh Shah:

The Perils of Pandering to Google.

And from Ken Yarmosh:

Search Engine Deoptimisation

The trouble with ranking highly on Google is that any old riff-raff might turn up at your site. You could end up ranking on terms you’ve mentioned in asides or used for examples. Ken was ranking for a MySpace widget called Project Playlist that he wrote one post about - and presumably attracting a bunch of MySpace users rather than technical strategy afficionadoes. Twopointouch still ranks #1 for the term ‘myspace sex aide’, owing to a rather regrettable mistake (long story…).

Indiscriminate traffic isn’t much use to website owners, unless you’re a mass media site selling ads at a CPM. They aren’t interested in your articles, won’t comment, won’t link to your stuff. They don’t click on the ads you’re carrying, if you’ve got them, because the ads aren’t targeted towards them. By and large, they’ll turn up, take one look and scurry straight back to their search results. Waste of bandwidth.

So this could be another great use for your site logs. Any traffic report worth its salt will include what search terms people entered to get to you. If you write about dogs, and you discover that you’re getting a lot of cat-searchers, it might be time to root out that cat content, or err… sex aide content, as the case may be.