twopointouch

I left a comment on a blog that wouldn’t leave me alone all day. So here’s a fuller response, and I hope it breaks my blogger’s block.

Antony Mayfield is delighted with Dell’s approach to social media, as represented in this video interview, in particular. Even without that, it’s clear that the company has embraced many of the concepts wholeheartedly through initiatives like IdeaStorm. As Antony the interviewee, Andy Lark, Dell’s head of Global Marketing, points out, the company’s commitment to social tools is pretty thorough:

The social media stuff is probably the most important we do today, from a marketing stand point. The other elements of marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. Social media stuff is much more strategic… Use social media to power the fundamental of the business. That’s what we’re focused on. [Mayfield's transcription - thank you]

Great stuff. And here’s that interview in full:

To be clear, Antony is one of the good guys - I just disagree with his opinion on this one.

The part where I started to become anxious comes late in the piece, at about 4:00. Lark contrasts the approach taken by new media journalists with the old school. BBC journalists apparently now come along with a digital recorder and immediately ask if they can podcast the interview. The old school - regional journalists, he says - turn up with a notepad and pen. That’s a failure on the part of the latter group, according to Lark:

“The content that I’m giving them is the asset, not their translation”.

That’s *not* true. The media is there to question, to analyse and to be sceptical about the ‘asset’ that’s been given to them by Lark. It is certainly not its function to broadcast that ‘asset’ verbatim and without question. That’s what we people who turn up with a notepad and pen and ‘don’t get it’ call an advertisement.

I think we raise a couple of questions here about quite how wonderful 24-hour on-the-moment publishing and releasing to social media sources at the same time as traditional media sources is. If the statements issued by marketing directors are taken as ‘the record’, then we miss out on the opportunity to compare a company’s claims with their financial records, the research that’s been done into their brand value and customer service records, comparisons with competing propositions from rival manufacturers, and the benefits of a broader view. I have nothing against Dell - my current PC is a Dell, and it’s fine.

But, goodness, if I were head of global marketing at any brand, I’m sure that a podcast of my words on a well-trafficked website would be far preferable to an in-depth review of my products or an analysis of my financial performance somewhere else.

The function of journalism is not simply to report or transcribe what powerful figures and institutions want us to. We need to question, analyse and remain continually sceptical, while also remaining neutral. If we can’t do the latter, then declaring our interests immediately.

Taking a little longer to file a story doesn’t mean that you don’t ‘get it’ (a dreadful expression) but might mean that ‘oh yes, we get it alright, and we’re not letting you get away with it!’

Lovely day out last Thursday with Robert Loch’s ‘internet people’ group. I have no idea how I came to be invited. Normally, my lot is a bit more ‘meeja’, but it was great to get out to meet some entrepreneurs actually ‘doing the do’.

The day started at the Boat, Coq D’argent, the East Rooms on Tabernacle St., where it was great to catch up with reprobates like my old friend Simon Prockter, Robert Loch and new media dilletante Paul Carr, who, it seems, has a new book coming out about the Web 2.0 start-up scene in London over the past couple of years. (review soon). Also great to catch up with the people from Crimson, past and present.

Photo credit: Mulquem. More here.

And then off to the Moo Party down at Brick Lane.

And did I learn anything? Mainly, not to mix beer and wine and indiscriminate cocktails (again) but also that there are a host of UK startups on the horizon, which I can’t tell you about. That the London dotcom entrepreneur crew are indefatigable in their desire to create something worthwhile and wonderful, and will not stop until they’ve done it.

And most interestingly, the ones that have done it already are among the hungriest to do it again.

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.

I was totally taken by surprise by this one.

(A little further research has revealed that it was created by WCRS, and that there is some controversy over the originality of the idea. What a shame.)

A TiddlyWiki, of course. You can see my very small TiddlyWiki here or a more impressive example from Jeremy Ruston, who created the thing, at the main site.

It’s a sort of wiki - but wait, come back! There’s a few interesting differences from the sort of wiki software you might be used to:

(a) the whole thing is contained in a single HTML file - the javascript, the CSS, the data you’ve added.

(b) so you can download it and use it on your laptop or travel with it on a USB key. If you like you can sync that with an online version.

(c) you can use it on any browser - even the iPhone.

(d) it’s written to encourage short posts - Tiddlers - rather than the massive empty spaces found in the MediaWiki software and others.

Apparently, there’s some way to use it as a blog platform, but I’m still working that bit out…

via Richard Sambrook and David Brain, here’s a great presentation from the Lift conference, given by Genevieve Bell, who works as an anthropologist at Intel:

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time - how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example - and this hasn’t changed just because technology has speeded up. According to psychologists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (’I'm fine’), for play and fun, to hide misbehaviour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and preserving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-and-large but which normally involve deception. Our actual practice means that deception is implicit to our social existence.

New information technologies that attempt to insist on personal transparency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our biological needs. There are conflicts between our cultural practises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meatspace, dealing with machines tends to expose those conflicts. (”Date of Birth?” on the registration screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of confabulation. The construction of a lifestyle we present is both a biological necessity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the presentation fascinating. I am troubled by the idea that transparency is coming to be seen as a moral necessity. It’s like the web 2.0 equivalent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As individuals, hiding, privacy, confabulation, imagination and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very concerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide different circles and different personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.

In case you missed any of the interminable ‘hot trends for 2008′ posts. Snagged from Read/Write Web.

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Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excellent presentation to the collected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening.

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolutionary, they are about long-term, irreversible change.

The printing press, like the explosion of social media, changed access to the means of production and distribution of media forever. It smashed feudalism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think - new modes of behaviour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emergence of continual partial attention through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revisionist aberration, Mayfield suggested that marketing had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He suggested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about promoting the writer - think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reactions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical materialism and Web 2.0, then. The subsequent conversation revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent transferal of the means of production into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-button publishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolution. But that apparent liberation is contained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few corporations. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and ownership in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If corporations are the new states, then much of social media might be classified as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real relationships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bourgeois social media intelligentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals controlled by media giants. Unwitting collaborators, my comrades, not revolutionaries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake withdrawal from one account and investment into another for a sea change in how capitalism works.

(c) the myth of transparency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incapable of acting altruistically. If they do anything about the social media revolution, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/where is the revolution? Regrettably,there was reactionary talk based upon non-scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that censorship and control will ultimately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new communications medium. Applying the scientific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue and that the inevitable victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth sometimes. Print led to education, secularity and the spread of scientific thought, eventually, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.

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.