Archive for the 'media' Category

Why I don’t read Public Address

Published July 9, 2009 Internet Business , NZ Business , media 51 Comments
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Via Not PC I see that there is a top NZ political blog ranking system.

That’s interesting.

Well not really – but I do like to read a range of views, and follow No Right Turn (#6, blogspot), Kiwiblog (#1), not PC (a rabble rousing #3 – also on blogspot) and The Visible Hand in Economics (#13). I also occasionally read Whale Oil (#8),  Roarprawn (#13 – blogspot) and rising star Offsetting Behaviour (#23 – blogspot)

I’m amazed at the number of blogspot hosted sites. I just don’t get it. WordPress is not only a far simpler platform to use, but it doesn’t show the blogspot toolbar on the top, and it makes it trivial to buy and host the site on a personal domain name.

Surely it is time for the better sites to move from something like norightturn.blogspot.com to norightturn.com?

I don’t read number 2: The standard, 4: Public Address or 5: No Minister. The Standard and No Minister have never compelled me to stay (especially versus No Right Turn and Kiwiblog – who really are excellent) while I have issues with  Public Address.

Let’s work through those personal issues I have with Public Address, because it is a much read and loved site by others, and people get really engaged there. Here are the top ten issues

  1. The front page has snippets of articles only. Reading shouldn’t be an active sport – but on Public Address I have to click multiple times to read the posts on the front page
  2. The articles are, well, articles. They are far too long for the internet media – seeming more suited to magazines.
  3. The articles often contain more than one topic – this one contains about 4 different thought streams. That may work for an email newsletter, but in a blog (or indeed a newspaper) the expectation is one story per story.
  4. Actually that link isn’t to one post – but to a series of posts (I was referring to the one on 7 July) on the same topic. That’s just weird.
  5. The link buttons and so forth under each post don’t look quite right – they are not standard and so I am not sure how they function.
  6. The comments are somewhere else – so you can’t read the article and see the comments straight underneath without clicking yet again
  7. Once you are in the comments section you can’t get back to the main Public Address site – there is no home link.
  8. It’s http://publicaddress.net – that’s weird. I still think of .net sites as being technical ones to do with running the internet. What is wrong with .com or .co.nz?
  9. The RSS feed is clipped. This is important as everything above is forgivable if I can read entire articles in my RSS reader. However like the homepage you can only see a few lines of the hundreds in each article.
  10. Overall it’s just too hard – the site makes me think too much about how it functions, and not enough about whatever it is they are talking about.

The solution is easy – move the site over to WordPress. There are plenty of people in NZ to help with the transition and even a WordPress camp coming up in Wellington.

None of these issues are to do with the actual content of the site – which is apparently very good. It’s a classic case of the usability getting in the way of the product.

I often wonder just how much traffic Public Address would get if they adopted standard usability and technology.

So is this just me – or do others have the same issues?

How NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation

Published May 26, 2009 media , telecom 43 Comments
Tags: , , ,

A little while back I praised Vodafone New Zealand for their excellent Twittering, inside an article on How to Twitter if you are a Corporation. They reached out to customers, solved problems, gently nudged opinion their way and generally were liked by everybody.

The account was run by Paul Brislen – who let his own account lie idle while he put himself into the Twittersphere.

And then something happened.

Vodafone decided to launch a campaign where “3G Guy” tours New Zealand giving away new net books. A great idea.

Unfortunately rather than using @3Gguy or similar to promote the tour, Vodafone instead passed the respected @vodafoneNZ account over to a pimply youth – 3Gguy.

The results are a fascinating case study.

Twitter

The audience split into three – those that liked the competition (including new followers), those who saw a corporate PR account turn into a spamming machine, and the silent.

Unfortunately the second category contains many opinion leaders, journalists, web industry stalwarts and telco industry commentators.

Twitter

While Paul Brislen re-opened his own account, and many people went off to follow him, many more have decided to unfollow @vodafonenz. The net goodwill is negative, and it now leaves @vodafonenz well behind the previously slightly less respected but still very well run @telecomnz team. As Twitter goes, so to the brands and companies.

Twitter

So what are the lessons here?

Lesson one:

Twittering is better done by individuals, but when those individuals leave and are replaced by folks that don’t get it, their followers may leave with them. If they are disgruntled then the damage could be severe. (So be nice to Paul)

Lesson two:

Keep the promotion and PR accounts separate from each other. The PR account should point to promotions, but not run them. People will find the account that helps them get free stuff very quickly.
Twitter

Lesson three:

When your audience reacts negatively – do something. The most frustrating thing about this promotion is the feeling that our Twitter friend, Paul Brislen, has been taken over against his will (my theory, not at all backed up by any fact) by out of control cluless marketing lunatics. It’s as if we now see the real Vodafone coming through – a Vodafone that doesn’t listen, that steamrolls over opposition and that has lost all the goodwill that Paul built up. It’s sad.

Twitter

What Vodafone should do is simple – accept and acknowledge the error, move the 3Gguy twitter stream to his own account and put Paul back on (exclusively) the @vodafonenz account. Vodafone also need to learn from Paul, and take his guidance on how to run his account going forward.

So let’s have a look at the Twitter stream damage. It’s pretty fun actually, like watching a slow motion train wreck* in action.  *one where nobody is on the train

Here’s a recent page of @vodafonenz mentions from my Tweekdeck. I’ve helpfully colour-coded the tweets. Orange refers to the competition website being broken, Green is a customer service request, and Red are negative comments about the campaign and Vodafone. I’ve named the boxes for the colour blind and those that don’t read this bit and just want the pictures:

But wait – there is more – a lot more, under the fold I have pulled out some of the latest (mostly) negative twitters about Vodafone.

<update – But first – an ad break!

>

There’s also @vfNZno3Gguy, which retweets all the @vodafoneNZ and @paulBrislen tweets that are not about the promotion. If that isn’t a cluestick enough then there is no hope.

Continue reading ‘How NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation’

Red Bull is a tobacco company

Published May 24, 2009 Business , NZ Business , media 4 Comments
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A scary article in the NZHerald on how a Brooke Robertson lost 55 Kg of weight by abandoning foods and solely drinking Red Bull.

“I managed to wean myself off it by being in hospital for that long but I had severe withdrawals – sweating, nausea, shaking. It was an addiction. The doctors stated that.”

We get the occasional odd story here in New Zealand, but I want to concentrate on the quote from a Red Bull spokesperson who

denied the drink was addictive and said there was “scientific evidence that caffeine is not addictive”.

That’s exactly the sort of disingenuous statement that the tobacco companies made for years about nicotine. There may be scientific evidence for one side and the other of an issue, but the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that caffeine is addictive.

I don’t know whether this was a misguided spokesperson, an external lawyer or whether the Red Bull organization truly believes there is a chance that caffeine is not addictive. The fact is they are selling stuff which contains an addictive ingredient, and they should have acknowledged that, say that they recommend one can a day as part of a balanced diet and move on.

They didn’t – instead they tried to infer imply  that caffeine is not addictive – according to ’scientists’.

But even without the scientific evidence we all know that Caffeine is addictive – it’s not even a debate in society. The world consumes about 120,000 tonnes each year of caffeine, and it’s consumed in the full knowledge that it is a stimulant and it is addictive. It’s like alcohol and tobacco – a legal way to send a mind altering substance to your brain.

So I’ve purchased my last drink of Red Bull, will not support their crazy sports events (which are brilliant way to do marketing) and will sneer at the Red Bull and Toro Rosso Formula 1 teams.

I also recommend that Red Bull spokespeople read Wikipedia – the Caffeine article is excellent – well written and with plenty of footnotes for those in denial to follow.

Withdrawal symptoms—possibly including headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints[71]—may appear within 12 to 24 hours after discontinuation of caffeine intake, peak at roughly 48 hours, and usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to “normal” levels, uninfluenced by caffeine consumption.

And now I’ll go make myself a coffee. I forgot to this morning and I can sense a headache coming on.

Uncovering the truth behind “50% of teens post senstive information”

Published May 12, 2009 Life , media 9 Comments

Last week we saw a plethora of New Zealand headlines bemoaning the poor behaviour of ‘kids today’ – this time in how they handle their sensitive information online.

The punchline was that one in two students had posted sensitive information about themselves online in the past year.

TVNZ went with Half of NZ teens post sensitive info online while NZHerald went with Nearly half of Kiwi teens post sensitive info online – both remarkably similar to the original press release.

Some went further though – and the three best articles that I read were from:

  1. The venerable ODT – with Teens lax over online security a very well written article that included a local angle and even a call to a local academic.
  2. The Dominion Post with Internet’s effects may be taught – an interesting angle, and with only passing reference to the survey. Well done to the Dom Post and Greer McDonald.
  3. TV3, with some new news Policing unit to monitor internet for criminal activity which probably means bald 50 year old men masquerading as 15 year old girls are going to start flirting with me online.

The articles all stemmed from preliminary findings published by PhD student, and research manager at Netsafe – John Fenaughty.

Colour me skeptical. Indeed I am frighteningly skeptical about any headlines that say “the youth of today are….” as I remember all too well that the youth of my day were actually pretty on to it.

I suspect (and from what I see, know) that the youth of today are much better at figuring out what they can and cannot put online than their older peers. In particular I see that horribly inept early Bebo pages and youthful utterances are increasingly becoming the norm, and employers and voters of the future will accept it as such.

But I was also concerned that the survey itself was a bit of a half baked scaremongering exercise. So I decided to dig into it a little. The Netsafe website was useless – but I did find the press release after a fellow twitterer shared the link.

So I called (there was no email address) John Fenaughty and left a message. He got back to me very quickly on email, and I posed him 12 questions – cunningly displaying them as 10:

1: How was the final respondent group selected, including response rates etc? How did you avoid bias across the multiple dimensions?
2: What were the exact dates of data collection?
3: What were the actual survey questions used to derive these answers? especially the “wouldn’t want to find” part.
4: How were the questions asked? – e.g interviews, filled out by students etc.
5: What was the age (or school class) distribution of the responding students?
6: What percentage of students didn’t use the internet? were they included in the survey?
7: How was the “one out of two” figure derived? – can you provide a break down (crosstab) that shows the combination of sensitive information provided?
6: What is the breakdown of age (or school class) versus provision of the four sensitive informations identified in the press release?
7: What other questions were in the survey?
8: will you be making all of the coded source data available?
9: How do you define cyber bullying?
10: What convictions for cyber bullying have there been in NZ?

Quietly readying myself for a nice evisceration of the study, I noted that his reply wasn’t instant – and perhaps wasn’t ever going to come. I mulled on the state of research these days, but eventually I did get a reply almost a day later.*

It was rigorous. In fact it was an excellent reply, and I am posting it in full beneath the fold.

John sent me back complete answers to all of my questions, and satisfied my greater concerns about the study. Simply put – he is doing the best he can within the constraints he has been dealt.

I noted to myself that this is just the sort of evidence that you would want to see from a PhD student, especially as a PHD needs to be defended in front of a committee. Having sat on one of those committees before (we had to say no in the end) it is a grueling exercise for the student, but with the quality of this response John is demonstrating that he will be ready.

If you read the reply, ask yourself whether any research that you conduct or read about can be answered just as well. Are your questions tested? Are all ethical grounds covered off? Are the samples truly statistical and non-biased? and so on.

So well done John – Not only have I deleted most of the blog post I’d drafted, but you’ve even managed to turn it into a “how to respond to questioning bloggers” lesson.

Continue reading ‘Uncovering the truth behind “50% of teens post senstive information”’

The spectrum of blogging engagement

Published May 11, 2009 Life , media Leave a Comment

While I may not agree with it entirely, Mikearauz has come up with a useful way to look at the way casual interest can turn into advocacy online.

Since I don’t agree with it – I decided to have a crack at my own version. This is my take on “Blogging Engagement”  – written from my perspective as both a blogger but more importantly as a reader of blogs  (or columnists or news websites or authors).

What do you think?

The XT network debable – Winners and Losers

Published May 7, 2009 media , telecom 2 Comments
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I was pretty angry at Telecom yesterday when I wrote Pay the $900,000 Telecom you cheap sods, but a day later it seems that they will do so. Good.

Now that the debacle is over, let’s check the winners and losers tally.

Winners – in order
Vodafone, for a well-timed legal action which created a major PR win and delay of a rival network

NBR – and Chris Keal for two excellent articles – one head and shoulders over the rest in summarising the court proceedings, and the other tipping that a settlement was likely today. Even their reporting of the final result is excellent.

Telecom – for capitulating in the end and continuing the journey on the long road back from purgatory

The Lawyers – they always win

Losers – in order

Telecom

  1. For not doing the right thing from the start, and installing the filters to prevent interference with Vodafone’s network
  2. For not understanding how this was going to play out early enough and letting it get to court
  3. For the resulting major PR loss, the delay of the new network and the wasted marketing spend
  4. and bonus for all this happening so soon after releasing a video that says how wonderful they are

All of us customers – To have to watch two giants playing silly buggers with each other while we cope with inadequate mobile and broadband infrastructure

Vodafone – for having released into the public domain information that makes us thing you are stretching your network’s capabilities, making us realise why our call and 3G connections are so lousy.

<update: Reynolds is unrepentant, and says that Vodafone will share the costs of Filters. He also says that there are already 1000 filters in place. Courtesy of the NBR – yet again.

Money quote:

Although Dr Reynolds sees his company in the right, Telecom settled the case, seeing a two-week delay in XT’s launch as a price worth paying to rid it of Vodafone’s High Court action, and to answer a request from the Justice, in Dr Reynolds’ words, for both sides “to sort it out”.

and

“there will be some circumstances in which we share costs”.

which has the ring of  Telecom paying almost all of the time.

Also

“Give me a break. The first I heard of it was late last week,” says Dr Reynolds, of Vodafone’s threat to go legal. “They finally came to the table two days ago”.

I would be looking searchingly at the strategy and engineering folk in Telecom if I were Dr. Reynolds. How the heck could this threat have been missed?>

And for your enjoyment after the fold are some tweets from this morning: Continue reading ‘The XT network debable – Winners and Losers’

The media is no longer the message

Published May 4, 2009 Business , Internet Business , media 6 Comments
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An interesting survey by eMarketer, via WebProNews:

Stop. Don’t look too hard at the table. This survey is fundamentally flawed.

The flaw is simple, and it reflects an old mode of thinking: These days the media is not the message.

For example there are over 200 million blogs (they have stopped counting), and to rate them all together is patently unfair. You cannot compare, say, Bernard Hickey’s Interest.co.nz/blog with The Bad Blog (which is what I found when I googled “bad blog”, and which is actually not that bad).

To put it another way, on interest rate matters the interest.co.nz blog is more trusted than, say, TV1 Business News. However on general business or current events news, TV1 would be better.

Meanwhile Bernard and the rest of the team’s blog is less trusted, by me, than the Wall Street Journal – a publication that is a newspaper, has a online news site, offers video, does product comparisons and has blogging.

How do we measure all of this that? How do we compare the WSJ video with their print edition? How do we compare Fox TV news with their internet site with their internet delivered video?

The answer is that we don’t, as we know that increasingly the media type irrelevant and the publisher’s brand is everything. We seek our trusted providers, and we are getting pretty agnostic about where we find them:

  • If we are watching TV then we know that the BBC has a better global perspective than Fox News – unless we are right wing and living in the USA.
  • If we are online then the NYTimes is better than the Waikato Times – unless we live in Waikato and want the latest Hamilton news.
  • If we are reading about something esoteric then we know to search the internet, and that Wikiedia or a blog is probably going to have the best answer.

We assess credibility very quickly. We look for the publisher (e.g. Bloggers that write for newspapers have more credibility), we assess the credibility of the writer by looking at the production or site design, checking the publisher or writer background (about 2.2% of the traffic here checks my bio), see who refers to the that source, then look for well-crafted writing and video solid references and so on. We are often not really aware of how we do it, but we can do all of this in less than, say, 5 seconds.

It used to be that we looked for beautiful people to deliver news that we trust, but Fox news in particular has made this increasingly irrelevant – as we have come to realise that beauty is not correlated with intelligence or trustworthiness.*

We have already made decisions for older media – The Dominion Post and TVNZ news have a rich heritage, and so we tend to trust them, while a new magazine like Idealog will need to earn our trust through excellent writing, distribution and product design. However the older media can lose our trust, and when it goes, as it has for me and most TV news, it is very hard to earn back.

So how should the survey have been written? Here is one possibility. It’s not ideal but I feel it is a better way to ask the question. The audience is of course biased – and it will be interesting to see how biased.

Praise, yes praise, for Telecom

Published April 29, 2009 Broadband , media , telecom 3 Comments

This really is a stunning piece of work – even made this cynic think twice. Well done Telecom.

It’s important because it shows that Telecom increasingly gets it – they are getting that it is about delivering the right service to New Zealanders (fiber to the home rated a mention), they get that it is about the people that work there, and they get that Youtube (and twitter) are great mediums for spreading the news.They manage to say this while taking little digs at themselves and being very human.

It was uploaded yesterday Youtube time, and  had just 392 views when I saw it. It will be interesting to observe how far and fast the views go.

The cast list was telling – the boss is the eighth listed, which means he was the eighth person to appear in the piece. That’s leadership.

It’s so nice to be able to write something good about Telecom. Roll on the days when we can write a whole lot more.

Global warming and you

Published April 29, 2009 Global Macro Trends , media 2 Comments

Here’s  excellent graphic from FiveThirtyEight via Treehugger and via New Zealand’s The visible hand showing data from a report from the the Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies School Climate Change project. It needs no explanation.

The project’s survey: “Climate Change on the the American Mind” is a lengthy and ponderous read, and is so queued in my reading list. It contained this graphic, which has the same (and a bit more) information as the inverted triangle above – It’s a chart that any consultant would love, and it is difficult to read and, well, boring.

The learning here is that each chart should deliver one message, and to focus the chart on that message alone. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in presenting everything sometimes, when taking out the key facts has much higher impact.

This chart is has great information  – however it really could have been drawn better. It says that 69% of Americans believe in Global Warming now, but more importantly that only 10% deny (to one extent or another) that it is happening and only 3% are extremely sure it is not happening.

(*Incidentally the FES school was until pretty recently called just the Forestry school. Also I did one course there so anything I say about them will clearly be biased. )

Wear your safety equipment – dorky glasses are cool

Published April 26, 2009 media 4 Comments

This chap ended up with a grinder blade in his head and is lucky to be alive.

What the article does not say is whether he was wearing a face shield, and it also makes no comment on the safety of the tool itself, whether he was wearing other safety equipment such as a face mask and so forth. It certainly doesn’t sound good.

@hellonearthis commented on twitter “I think its more the need of a guard on the 9″ grinder than a face mask. A 9″ grinder would flick a face mask of the head if hit.“

I absolutely agree about the grinder guard, but I would question whether an face shield is not available and also ask why such a big grinder was required. A decent sized face shield attached to a helmet should divert the blade away from the face. Here’s one for sale in the USA – $10.50 each or $8.50 in bulk. The visor flicks up when you don’t need it and has a cam to lock it in place. Price isn’t the issue with safety equipment – usage is.

I dare say this example from safetyglassessusa.com looks a little short for the task, while the open shirt is inviting trouble and he is wearing glasses but not goggles and it appears he has no hearing protection.

Minimum standard equipment on a safety oriented site for grinding is normally a face shield (to protect against face injuries and big chunks), safety goggles (to protect against smaller pieces in the air and a second line of protection), helmet, earmuffs, gloves and so forth.

Indeed @hellonearthis “9″ grinder only cuts 4.5″ A better mask, a full face helmet design. For the grinder to kick back, he was using it upside down.”, agreeing with the helmet/face shield approach. He also points out a very important fact – this accident happened because the tool was not used appropriately – reinforcing that the operator didn’t take the time to make sure the job was safe.

I cringe every time I see people doing tasks without any sort of protection. Indeed the risk of hurting yourself at home is probably higher than at work – because at home people take safety shortcuts, thinking that wearing safety gear is something that work imposes rather than something that is just plain dumb not to do.

It can creep up on you as well – just the other day I saw a woman escape possible eye injury from an angry exploding barbecued chestnut because she was wearing normal glasses. That’s not the sort of accident you can plan for, but kudos must go to the BBQer for making sure that the BBQing process was otherwise conducted safely, and for cordoning off the offending nuts when the incident happened.

So start by wearing safety glasses when there is risk – it’s easy to do, and is the  thing that will save you from most harm most easily. These days you can get cool glasses from the likes of Oakley, but a dorky $10 pair will work just as well.

The two dorky options below are cheap and cheerful – the first is $4 odd and the second $10. The third pair is one of a bunch on safetyglasses.com – another US site, and they sell for $5.75 each or $4.25 in bulk. So there is not a lot of difference between cool and uncool – though I daresay not wearing them at all is the least cool option.

I wear a set of glasses when I am working on stuff and even (and/or a visor) sometimes when I am motorcycling off road*.

I went the full hog and purchased a pair of compliant prescription glasses that change shade with the sun. It means that they are comfortable to wear for long periods of time (while they do look very dorky) and that I can keep them on indoors and outside when working in an industrial setting. While motorcycling I actually found that they are better when in the sun than my prescription sunglasses, and when the sun is low they are substantially better as they adjust to the changing conditions.

Glasses are a few bucks at Placemakers and the like – pick some up next time you are shopping and hopefully we won’t have to read about a nasty lawnmower or workshop accident.

*I could wear a motor cross helmet and goggles when riding off road, but I find that the advantages off road are lost on road – they are noisy, less aerodynamic and much more tiring. I should really wear goggles in very dusty conditions – goggles seal against dust whole glasses are open to the air. In reality I just drop back or take a break if there is a vehicle going at my speed just ahead (which is rare as I wouldn’t have caught them if that was the case) or if a vehicle is producing angry clouds of impenetrable dust.

Stealing content from bloggers

Published April 22, 2009 media 11 Comments

The latest blog to steal my – and others – content is jobs.org.nz.

They should know that they are in good company – the previous offender of note was a <redacted> site.

So I’ll do the google-ads-filled jobs.org.nz a favor and directly  link the two together: redacted

<update 2 – after a chat with a very polite domain owner I removed the link above. See comments at the end of the post>

Incidentally I saw ads for Starnow and Finda – guys you are wasting your money.

So along with that childish response I also did the adult things

First I complained to Google Adsense. They have a nice little set-up for receiving complaints – just click on the gooooogle link by the ads.

However I got an auto response which says Google’s policy is to respond to all alleged infringements under the DCMA – which is right. However in order to do so I need to send something in written form – which will not happen as bits of paper confound me.

It should be really easy for Google to make this work automatically.

They just need to give me a form when I can put the copyrighted material (mine) including links to specific copied articles, along with a link to my feed. Similarly let me put a link to the stolen copyrighted material and a link to the culprit site’s feed. If the site is taking other site’s source information then give me the ability to put their feeds in as well.

Then it should be a trivial matter to automatically monitor the feeds of the source sites and check that the culprit site feed is appearing after the source. Automatically take the Google ads off that site – it is clearly of low quality anyway.

If the site wants to challenge Google to get the ads back, then so be it – but the onus is now on them to prove the content isn’t from the names sources.

I do recall when I first got Google ads for a site that it was actually quite tough (it was SmokeCDs or Snow.co.nz I think). Now it seems any man and dog combination can get the ads, and the results will vary for adsense buyers.

Next I did a whois search, and found that the owner of this shame is <edited> from Christchurch.

I’ve emailed him and also the hostmaster at 1stdomains to request that they stop. We shall see what happens next.

I am happy for people to grab content from this site with attribution and add commentary  – it’s all adding to the conversation. But to do so to a google ad filled site with no context is clearly wrong.

<update 1: I’ve received an email reply (2 actually) from the site domain owner who tells me “I did not set any feeds up personally” and offered to remove my content.

I also notice that right now there are no longer any Google ads on the site.>

<Update 2: As noted above I’ve now chatted to the domain owner Rob. While he owns the domain but the site is owned/operated  by a student out of India. He proactively removed the Adsense code from the site once he saw this post.

I’m struggling with this exchange. I think I was a bit heavy handed and perhaps wrong – and I give credit to Rob for being so proactive and polite. The jobs.org.nz site does after all link back to my site, and doesn’t take entire articles – both the right behaviour.

So I removed the references to a previous offender site that dabbled in pictures of unclad gentlemen engaged in mutually consensual activities.

And as Don asks below – what is the difference between jobs.org.nz and Google News? – aside from the site design, the number of ads (Google News has none) and so on. Shouldn’t sites be glad to have their content syndicated elsewhere?

My answer rested in the design of the site, the number of google ads and an over-riding sense that the purpose of the site is simply to harvest content and surround it by Google ads.

My determination was that is is a splog – a spam blog – something that Louise talks about in her post on Changememe. She links to an article on Techcrunch which talks about sharing the joy. Perhaps it would be ok for ad-laden sites to grab content if they do so with permission pay the content providers a commission. You could see a world where this is semi-automatic, but also one where there are lots of errors.

There is something else going on here – we are in New Zealand. I was able to find the domain owner, he was able to find me and we were able to have a nice conversation (and emails) about it all. Because we are a small country we can self-edit to an extent.

So I am going to let this rest as far as jobs.org.nz goes.

But what do you think? is the site (and it is more informative to see it with the ads turned on) adding value? Should I be upset or happy that my content is taken? I feel my response was pretty tough – was I clearly in the wrong?

>

How to twitter if you are a corporation

Published April 22, 2009 Business , Internet Business , NZ Business , Trade Me , media , telecom 16 Comments
Tags: , , ,

Twitter, for members of my family and those other 4 people that read blogs and have not yet discovered it, is a microblogging service that has just hit the main stream media. By definition it is therefore passé, but in the meantime we may as well use it well.

Examples: How not to twitter.

@NZStuff (sorry) sends through groups of news, either at 530am or during the day. The 530am news is from when the news is posted to the Stuff.co.nz website in an overnight process. The news sits unreleased until the morning so that the newspapers are not scooped. I don’t agree with this approach as to me news fails to be news when I can read it somewhere else first.
The ones during the day are the ‘most popular’ (I think), and also released by a bot (I think). By definition they are already out of date when they are tweeted, and almost by definition the audience of active twitterers will have already read them.
@nzstuff

Rather than @nzstuff’s automatically redundant articles, instead follow @NZStuffEditor, who is not very prolific but at least sends out news that is timely – and timeliness is a vital component of the definition of “news”.

Examples: How to Twitter
While the Wall Street Journal (@wsj) also twitters articles, it does so very rarely in groups of three, and most often the tweets are through the day. Almost invariably their tweets are before anybody else’s, and are therefore news in the truest sense. @NYTimes is not quite as quick, and will sometimes deliver in clumps, but they tend to beat the local alternatives and like the WSJ also link to longer articles on interesting and topical things.
@wsj

What all so far are missing is the human element.

I’d really like to see @NZStuff reply to people’s twitters, and to give a bit of extra juice that we don’t get from the website. Stuff and others need to remember that their customers are not just people that read the news, but people that evanglise their services and want some inside scoop, people that want to send them news (but need to know it will be looked at) and, most of all in these times, people that are thinking about buying advertising,

Rather surprisingly the best corporations at Twittering in New Zealand are the telcos. I’ve had conversations in public and private with @TelecomNZ, @VodafoneNZ and ISP @orcon. They reach out to customers and help them – often walking down to the customer service folk and asking them to resolve an issue. Indeed they have each helped solve (or at least help me understand) a personal customer service issue, and their corporate reputations with me are all a lot better for it. Here they are earlier today each helping someone out:

@telecomnz
@orcon
Vodafone

I’d like to see them extend this beyond the corporate communication people – especially to Customer Service and also to the real tech-heads.

Air New Zealand’s  @flyairnz does well – sending out specials, but also being a human – replying to questions and making comments – such as welcoming @johnkeypm to Twitter.

Trade Me has  unleashed a few people – with twitter names like  TradeMe_Ross , TradeMe_Jay, TradeMe_Jobs along with Trademe_NZ and Travelbug. The latter has a combination of background tweets and specials. Kudos for this topical tweet:
@travelbug

This stream from TradeMe_Jay is an exemplary example of how Twitter can extend your corporate PR reach well beyond what a PR team can do. In four tweets Jay helps a member (and ex Trade Me employee admittedly), personalizes the continuous development work that Trade Me does and links to an ‘expose’ video that most corporations would cringe to see appear on YouTube.

However Trade Me’s main twitter account is dormant, and we have yet to see Motors, Property or Customer Service make an appearance.

Google allows their staff (it seems) to twitter as they like – here’s Webstock speaker Pamela Fox announcing the release of Google’s new analytics Data Export API – something that I think has tremendous potential to change the advertising scene in NZ and elsewhere.
pamelafox

I’ll point to @powershop and @lingopal as two other examples, but to be fair I am involved as a supplier to the first and shareholder with the second. That shouldn’t stop you following them though :-).

Enough of the examples – what should you do if you are thinking of twittering?

How to take advantage of Twitter

The real power of Twitter is the 1-1 interactions, and yet there are only so many people that sit in corporate relations units. Moreover their job should not be to look after every tech nerd’s customer complaint, nor to understand every bizarre happening on the internet.

To me a great corporation would have three things on Twitter:

  1. A corporate voice – run by the corporate relations unit and staffed by a person. They would tweet press releases, reply to tweets that discuss the bigger picture (investor, employee relations, big stories) and generally have a slower beat but positive and official response.
  2. An active Customer Service voice – this would be staffed 24/7 but owned overall by a single person. That means that while a number of people will answer the tweets, the owner would make sure that there is consistency, speed and humanity behind it. The CS twitterer would continuously search for good and bad experiences from the organisation’s products and give thanks or help accordingly. They are the front line and so would have a very quick response time. They would deal with problems in public, take them to Twitter direct messages and ultimately call the customer directly.
  3. Unleashed individuals. Great companies would unleash everybody inside their organization to tweet about what they are doing, engage in conversations and show a genuine human face (warts and all) to the company’s customers and the public.This last one is scary.

    However if you are concerned that some employees will somehow destroy your company and brand then perhaps instead you need to do some serous internal navel gazing – and ask yourself “why would they do that?”. Even if some employees do tweet negative things, then see it as a fine way to take the pulse of your staff – and also fix the underlying problems.

    While I would put in place simple guidelines, most of those would already be in any employee contract. The main things not to tweet would be things like investor-level commercially sensitive information, competitively sensitive pricing and Apple product development news.

The progress made by the companies above is pleasing – and I hope we will see more of this as the use of Twitter and other tools expands.

Understanding our animal spirits

Published April 15, 2009 Business , Investing , Trade Me , media 2 Comments
Tags: ,

Prof Shiller (remember him from “Irrational Exuberance) has partnered with George A Akerlof in a strangely titled new book: Animal Spirits. I’m recommending it even before reading it.

It’s basically about why we don’t behave as rational consumers when faced with economic choices.

If you don’t want to wait, then there’s an excerpt from the book – the first chapter, which you can read over at Yale MBA’s Financial Crisis website.

Here are the five animal spirits – emotive things that often dictate our economic behaviour.

  • The cornerstone of our theory is confidence and the feedback mech­anisms between it and the economy that amplify disturbances.
  • The setting of wages and prices depends largely on concerns about fairness.
  • We acknowledge the temptation toward corrupt and antisocial behavior and their role in the economy.
  • Money illusion is another cornerstone of our theory. The public is confused by inflation or deflation and does not reason through its effects.
  • Finally, our sense of reality, of who we are and what we are doing, is intertwined with the story of our lives and of the lives of others. The aggregate of such stories is a national or international story, which itself plays an important role in the economy.

Just those five statements make for interesting pondering – so here is my quick take.

Confidence is everything – it is the difference between buying something (on credit even) and choosing to hunker down and not spend. When a depressed or optimistic feeling rolls out to entire populations then it causes and exacerbates busts and booms.

It’s true that we care most about parity and fairness when setting wages and paying prices. This is particularly evident in New Zealand where we tend to look down at those with unhealthily large incomes and spending habits and where we have a nationally loved TV program called Fair Go that goes after companies that rip people off. Interestingly the feeling of fairness to members was the overriding thing that governed our thinking in the days when I was involved in setting prices at Trade Me.

We also score pretty well as a country on corrupt and anti-social behaviour – scoring at of near the top of the list in the annual Transparency International surveys as a result. On the other hand we are a little divergent on our strong norms about what is anti-social behaviour – though we tend not to shoot each other and mostly we don’t rip each other off.

It’s true that we all tend to compare our income now to our income years ago, and fail to understand that $1m now is worth a whole lot more than $1m at retirement. This is the money illusion – where we look at the dollar figures and not at the real worth, the nominal not the real. Having grown up through inflationary times it did improve my own approach to this versus, say, my grandparents generation who often didn’t change the dollar value of their Christmas presents to grandkids (mine were a bit different). The trick is to constantly reset the current value of everything.

Finally I am guessing “stories” refers to the formal and informal coverage of things like bubbles and busts. Everyone was talking up dot coms in 2000, real estate in 2007/8 and stocks in 1929.  Fast forward a couple of years and the picture was (and will be) diametrically opposed – the media coming down hard on what were correctly seen in hindsight as speculative investments. I try to be contraian, using taxi drivers and ultimately my mother as the unfailing barometer – if Mum says buy, then I go ahead and sell.

They use these five animal spirits in the rest of the book to answer eight questions – such as why do economies fall into depression and why do real estate markets go through cycles?

Interesting stuff to be sure – I recommend just reading the first chapter and having a ponder – the answers may not be that difficult to work out, and if we can be internally aware of those “animal spirits” then perhaps we will make better decisions.

Now I need to decide where to buy it from. Fishpond don’t have it but Amazon who do. However I am really annoyed with them as most of the things I want (electronics, accessories) are not shipped to New Zealand.

ANZ’s tragic teller system

Published April 14, 2009 Business , NZ Business , media , wellington 2 Comments
Tags: , ,

First you dub an application as “Platinum” – critical to your business. That’s a good idea, so you now know you need to get the system and support absolutely right.

You choose to run a trial before rolling it out to all branches – another good idea.

However that’s where things started going wrong for ANZ.

You chose also to run it on Windows, which not exactly secure nor stable in a banking sense, and attracts licensing payments for each installation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if done right.

However it seems that it takes 30 to 45 people to support the application at the 20 pilot branches – which implies that it really doesn’t sound like you are “providing tools to make banking easier” for your branch staff.

You next announce to staff that you will outsource support for this application to India, which means the 30-45 people that are currently supporting the trial are going to be out of a job or very nervous about being so. Their personal inclination to professionally support the pilot will be challenged as concern about job stability preys on their minds. This does not bode well for the roll-out.

Finally it all gets leaked to the media, and as a kicker it appears that the Reserve bank may need to approve outsourcing these jobs supporting a core system. Meanwhile an Australian bank gettting rid of New Zealand jobs will not play well in the media or with customers contemplating the (currently) better mortgage rates over at Kiwibank.

The application is MyTell, the new teller application for ANZ and National Bank. It is, I guess, only used when tellers and back office staff are actually in banks, which is during normal working hours, and the jobs to be lost are in Wellington.

From the short article my guess is that ANZ was overwhelmed with the budget required for the amount of support demanded by this application, and are seeking to do everything they can to reduce costs.

I would humbly submit that either fixing the system so that it needs essentially nobody to help, or abandoning it and trying again are the more viable medium and long term options.

This is of course my analysis from a scant 7 sentence article – not doubt there are nuances large and small.

However I’m guessing that this saga will bring a smile to the faces of the folk at Kiwibank.

Homepage review: Pundit

Published April 10, 2009 Business , NZ Business , media Leave a Comment

I was shown Pundit the other day. It’s a site that is agglomerating a few writers to create a super blog.Good idea, but the home page needs some work.

The site design does little to draw me in, and indeed I was not tempted to click on any of the articles during the time I was looking at the site. So I trust that the owners are constantly improving the site usability.

pundit

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