Ged Carroll

Category: event | 事件 | 그룹 회의 | 出来事

If you look at the dictionary definition for event it comes out as:

  • A thing that happens or takes place, especially one of importance
  • A planned public or social occasion.

It’s also a synonym for contests that might be part of a larger sports competition. I can’t think of any event that I have covered in this blog on the basis of my being a speaker or attendee would really qualify as one of importance.

Event is a category that I get to use sporadically. You will find a mixed bag of posts in here.

Social media marketing conferences that I spoke at or attended, particularly when social media was immature sector. The ironic thing is the lack memory in the sector. The problems that people are having are still the problems that were being had on social media marketing over a decade and a half ago.

In that respect I feel that conferences were a poor investment of my time. The benefit from the events were the people that I met and got to have sidebar conversations with. Thats were the most interesting conversations happened, some of which influenced thinking that I have shared here down the line.

I also managed to go to a few talks including one by the likes of Charles Dunstone who was then the head of Carphone Warehouse. Carphone Warehouse were a major retail presence in the UK, Ireland and some continental European countries as an intermediary between the mobile network provider and the customer.

That business now seems to be largely gone. And my record of his speech is of historical interest only.

  • Ian Jindal on retailing

    Ian Jindal was on top form at the Sense Loft where he presented some interesting ideas about the future of retail. I know Ian from my work with Econsultancy. Ian Jindal is also the editor of Internet Retailing and consults for the great and the good of the retail sector. Some of the observations about technology made by Ian Jindal are of particular interest. I made some notes on the presentation in real time on my mobile phone and will try to elaborate around them in italics:

    The UK

    Ian Jindal addressed the overall health of retail and e-tail in the UK.

    • UK most onlne country outside Korea – we may not have 100MB/second fibre into the home broadband connections, but the way in which UK people engage with the web and engage with e-commerce in terms of the amount they spend and the frequency that they shop online means that they are more online than most other countries outside Korea. Hong Kong has a strong broadband infrastructure but e-commerce is superflous in such a compact space. Japan has become almost post-consumer in the way that they no longer splash out on fast cars and Louis Vuitton accessories. One of the things that makes the UK online is the ubiquitous nature of credit cards – still the most effective payment system infrastructure that has seen off a host of rivals
    • UK is the most sophisticated market – consumers have better knowledge in the UK, they know how to play the system. They understand where voucher programmes are and how to best game them to get benefits. UK consumers haven’t stopped spending but are very value driven. They know retailers weak spots and exploit them to get the best deal for themselves

    2008/2009 sales

    Ian Jindal commented on a retail sector struggling with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis

    • November big growth due to fire sales – retailers dropping prices enticed consumers online: its a value crunch as much as anything else
    • Volume big but not making money – consumers are buying goods at lower prices and for a given amount of revenue far more is having to be spent on logistics
    • Winners include John Lewis because of gift voucher sales, PCWorld due to the reduced costs of modern big plasma and LCD screens, New Look – why?
    • Successful businesses need to deliver on product, price and promise (and make a profit)
    • Logistics companies screwing the small businesses to service big players like Amazon – in the run up to Christmas 89 per cent  of consumers received their purchases on time, with Amazon it was 97 per cent. Small upstarts will get screwed over on performance as delivery companies prioritise their largest accounts
    • Customers a lot cannier play voucher schemes – they abandoned the voucher sites as soon as the sales kicked in and play the system to maximise value
    • 2009 its about cash, ROI, business focus, focus on SEO and conversion – In the credit crunch the first priority is cash flow, a focus on business efficiency and effectiveness. It moves emphasis from getting traffic to getting conversion as business. Pay-per-click (PPC) buys traffic, but does not guarantee a sale. The high price of PPC means that extreme SEO (search engine optimisation) including hand-building the top 100 search pages
    • Ruthless chopping product lines – To reduce the amount of cash invested in stock and focus product lines on those that sell. A focus on the ‘head’ of the long tail

    Future

    Ian Jindal on the future focused on the problem of getting to close a sale online and the role of data to signal user intent which is still a major problem.

    • PPC is outmoded as a marketing communications vehicle as attention is the goal: PPC gets traffic to the site but is no guarantee of ‘stickiness’ or completion of a sale
    • One-page department store – This was a concept that Ian mentioned. There is no point having consumers trawl through a site the only page that matters is the page that they buy from. This page needs special attention. 
    • Context vended pages based on user intent – The example Ian gave was two consumers using Google: one looks for Levi’s 501 36 inch waist cheap. Price is obviously important so you don’t display a lot of options and put the price front and centre on the page. The second searches for smart jeans dark blue, you provide them instead with a series of large images that they can click on to buy since they don’t know what they want and reduce the emphasis of pricing information on the page
    • Google as department store of the world. Google,  niche players and brands are what will drive online shopping. Affiliates will not exist in present from in two years time. Affiliate marketing falls down for many of the same reasons as PPC, Google is the department store of the world because of the pre-eminent position of search as the front door to the web. Niche players will do well as they can meet consumers need and won’t be under so much price competition pressure
    • CPA (cost-per-acquisition) is symptomatic of an overly simplistic world that doesn’t understand a complex decision making process – Consumers may go to multiple online and offline brand touch points in order to make a purchase. Who is responsible, how do you measure assists and infer linkages?
    • Social bored him shitless, reviews not believable, people moving beyond reviews as inspiration stories – As Ian so eloquently put it social bored him shitless, it achieves very little for a lot of effort on behalf of the retailer. Current review offerings don’t provide a lot of utility to customers who often don’t trust them, whether it is an act of ‘sock puppetry’ or consumers with a very different viewpoint to our own. Reviews are also based on a viewpoint that is needs focused rather than desire focused. We live in a consumer society where most people’s needs are already met, much of current consumption is about desire and aspiration. Consequently, empowering consumers to tell their own aspirational stories is much more powerful – a kind of crowd-sourced version of the old TV ads from the 1980s
    • Co-shoppers as retailers – Ian highlighted a new US site called ThisNext, which uses individuals as retail curators. As their authority increases and consumers click through on their recommendations they get rewarded with ‘maven points’. This is a mix of the best attributes in social and affiliate marketing – tapping into consumer aspirations and their trust of people like them
    • nikeID vender management, intelligence gathering on trends and colors – Rather than nikeID being about mass-customisation and prosumption Ian thought that it was about getting information on trends, what colour ways should Nike be making products in. What combinations never sell. It is more scientific than coolhunters tracking down kids in urban setting of New York or Tokyo and helps support buying decisions. It is all about trying to understand the head of the long tail
    • Cross channelists – retail businesses who can deliver experiences through different channels are more likely to be part of consumers complex purchase decisions

    Evolution of data

    • Data – screw this and you build it on sand – the right data and the right architecture to structure the data is the lifeblood of any retail business. If you get this wrong your decison making process and business is at risk
    • Data is facts – facts works as a good definition of data
    • Meta data – data about data that the data would not know itself
    • The way we use data has changed as the number of nodes that process it change, moving from business analysis to data as a service and mash-ups – Google services and APIs are supported by thousands of servers in a given data centre
    • Social web – evolving to responsive and self configuring services – context, location all start to become important – flickr uses camera details from metadata to provide shopping recommendations
    • APML and microformats – APML is a proxy for intent and understanding the consumer. It shows where they put their time. Microformats allow for data to have more utility than plain HTML data – addresses can be readily imported into address books a la Google Maps using the hcard format
    • Rescue Time time management software allows consumers to make use of their own APML data
    • APML-powered commerce: engagd, phorm, google checkout
    • Entering network age with services such as pique and bazaarvoice  – where predictive services offered based on APML and population monitoring to spot patterns of consumer behaviour
    • location: omnifocus brightkite – includes where 2.0 techniques. From a consumer point-of-view this means a move towards apparent ESP by services as they have an emergent intelligence

    You can find Ian’s slides for this event here.

  • Cyprus notes

    I spoke earlier this week at an eTourism Forum in Cyprus. It was my first time on the island. It is an interesting mix of contrasts:

    • The main language is Greek, but everyone speaks English
    • Everyone drives on the leftside of the road and the even the road signs look British
    • The island has a series of micro-climates with snow on the mountains when I was there and a pleasant 20 celsius down nearer the sea

    I spoke and participated in panel discussions over two days. You can find my presentation on Online Reputation Management and the Personalised Web. It was good opportunity to catch up with some old friends and make some new ones including: John Horsley founder of the Marzar social network, Gerd Leonhard media futurist, Richard Sedley of cScape, Andrew Gordon,  Theodoris Koumelis of Travel Daily News and Dr. Natasa Christodoulidou of UNLV. The conference was enthusiastically hosted by Petros Mavros of Avantless on behalf of The Cyprus Tourism Organisation.

    The audience were enthusiastic and eager to learn about what online marketing techniques could do for their businesses. It struck me that there was more demand than there was the local web and design talent to address it, though some of the attendees seemed to already have a sophisticated understanding of search marketing techniques.

    What became apparent was the unequal nature of market power. The local businesses needed to reset the balance between themselves and the large tour groups that had traditionally brought travellers to the island.

    Large tour groups immense market power was used to screw these businesses into the ground on price. Cyprus even needs to import its own drinking water, so a downturn in the economy would be disastrous.

    Whilst I had been there on a professional basis, I wouldn’t mind going back during the winter or spring as a tourist to sample some of its more cultural aspects. More related content can be found here.

  • London Bloggers event

    Hidden upstairs in West End pub (like an Victorian anarchist’s meeting in a Joseph Conrad story) is the monthly London Bloggers Meetup. The pub had an old world feel to it and still advertises Double Diamond beers (at least that’s what the in-pub signage said). Up the tight winding stairs and into a friendly room equipped with a plasma screen I felt like I had been transported back from the 1950s into the 21st century. I finally got to meet  organiser and marketing expert Andy Bargery in person, we had talked previously online.

    There was more familiar attendees including Annie Mole, Rob Hinchcliffe and Spinvox‘ James Whatley. All of us had managed to parley blog writing into some from of professional benefit. With Annie having managed to get a book publishing deal to channel her passion for the London Underground system.

    New people I met included Improbulus who shared her emperical experience in developing a search engine-friendly blog with the rest of the group:

    • Think about key words  and make sure that they are in the post title and first paragraph of the posting
    • Configure your domain so that your posting title is in the domain
    • Include similes of words thoughout the copy (include language variation spellings like US and European English variants)
    • Tags
    • Outbound links to high-authority sites

    Improbulus also is a die-hard Psion 5 user, but I may have tempted her to shop around for a Nokia E90. Other people included Pete and Julius who blogs about event management.

    There were presentations at the London Bloggers event from:

    • Commentag which provide a service that helps sort and browse comments on a blog.
    • Wordcamp UK a WordPress user and developer conference to be held in Birmingham this year.
    • M3: is a location aware social network for mobile devices. The focus on where 2.0 and mobile devices changes the context of the service rather like the Flickr ZoneTag mashup and Dodgeball that was a spinout from New York University. Both look to take advantage of the GPS modules appearing in modern smartphones

    London Bloggers are running these events on a regular basis, managed through Meetup.com.

  • Slugger O’Toole – social & print

    The people at Taylor Bennett and Unicorn Jobs invited me along to an event which discussed social media and how it relates to the mainstream media. The panelists were Drew Benvie, Simon Nixon of Breakingviews and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole and the Brassneck blog at the Daily Telegraph.

    Here is the notes that I made from the event (but I’ve cleaned up the spelling):

    Simon provided an introduction to Breakingviews which drew some parallels between internet mainstream media and social media (though social media elements like the dialogue with readership like letters to the editors and opinion pieces work just as well in print). Simon acted as a chair for the discussion.

    Mick started blogging whilst working as a researcher. He found that it was a handy way of tracking research on the net. Over six years later and, Slugger O’Toole was said to set the political agenda in Northern Ireland by the editor of the Irish News. The compelling reason for blogging is its capacity to get news issues out to the readership 12 -13 hours faster than print media.

    Slugger now run by five contributors with much less day-to-day input from Mick.

    Drew started using technology to help with his job agency-side in PR, the blog started by posting coverage so that he could read it when he got home. Over time, he gradually became aware of the community of readers that went to his blog.

    Everyone on the panel is a blogger, but are they are a journalist?

    Drew said straightaway that he is not a journalist.

    Mick said being a journalist is not whether you right for a mainstream media title, instead its about how they use the technology, does the writer have a good nose for a story? Mick is a member of UK advertising network MessageSpace, whilst there are bloggers taking a professional approach, there aren’t the revenues there yet for the majority of its members.

    How do the panelists go about agenda setting?

    Drew started off by looking at news feeds, looking at other bloggers and mainstream media, now he also tracks keywords including client names and industry topics. Drew reads some 200-plus blogs about public relations. PR has moved past press releases and is now about infiltrating the feeds of key journalist. Bloggers offer an ideal opportunity to do this.

    Mick said that all the stories in Brassneck and Slugger O’Toole are peer-to-peer stories. In terms of advice for PROs, they need to know who it is that they are reaching out to and to do it in a conversational style and keep it brief. Group emails don’t work, instead even a url to story thats interesting is fine.

    Are blogs replacing old media?

    Drew: He has received double the amount of requests from clients to get in blogs compared to even six months ago. Blogs may not be killing mainstream media but is certainly strangling it.

    Simon described blogs as being live and rough around the edges. Mainstream media is absorbing the ways and methods of online media and bloggers in order to survive. As the media has brought blog content into the papers as columns. The web has become a cheap way to run a fast-failure development process for new content.

    Mick: Things are going to change, the primary driver is disaggregation, where the consumer has become the new editor. A major challenge for mainstream media is that it is not in constant touch with audience

    Are journalists more professional than bloggers?

    Drew: Admitted that he is careful about what he writes as he doesn’t want to get sacked for anything that he says online. However he would still like to see snarky content like The World’s Leading… when it was running.

    Blogging sped up the response. Bloggers can post instantly

    Mick: bloggers and commenters can deliver a rapid response, but they need to play it straight. A recent survey by IPSOS MORI found that bloggers are more trusted than journalists by consumers. Pew Internet found that 57 percent of journalists stories had been sourced from the net.

    The editorial time-space is putting mainstream media at a disadvantage, they end up with online one chance at getting a story right. Whereas a community of bloggers can digest and discuss a story to get every element out of it.

    The power of the mainstream media brand covers journalist sins, whereas bloggers personal brands run the risk of being damaged if they write a dodgy story.

    Is blogging and social media open to misuse?

    Drew: Abuse will always happen, PROs need to be careful in their guardianship of their clients reputation, track where they can be done, media law still applies

    Mick: The nature of the bloggers peer-to-peer relationship with their audience, also puts an onus on the audience and the blogger to not be passive. A good blog is like a pub and a good blogger is like the landlord who will kick out trouble-makers before it gets to be of a serious nature. From a readers point of view they need to be aware that lower orders of knowledge are being manufactured.

    Mick: The real value in public relations is in audience insight, social networks are an ideal tool to gain audience insight. Currently one of the key mistakes that PROs have been firefighting too hard.

    Audience member Sam Bottrell of WestLB asked Simon Nixon about how practical blogging and social media really was for financial institutions. Simon pointed out that social media presents a high level of risk for financial institutions, I pointed out that the research team at Piper Jaffray provide a list of links to interesting articles each day via Google Reader.

    Justin Hayward pointed out how search had grown beyond finding information or discovery to become a reputation engine.

    Post-event I caught up with Steve Waddington, had a quick chat with Drew Benvie, Ben Matthews, Jaz Cummins and Justin Hayward. More on related content here.

  • MobileYouth trend workout

    MobileYouth trend workout introduction

    Nokia E90

    Here is the notes that I made mostly from the morning sessions of the mobileYouth trend workout. There will be presentations and videos of the event available from their site next week. I was speaking on a panel later in the afternoon so was able to pay attention to the earlier panels.

    Graham Brown – mobileYouth, the organisers of MobileYouth trend workout

    Event introduction

    • Young people spend about 1.3 trillion USD per year, 130 billion of which is spent on mobile services (or roughly ten per cent of their total income). This impacted the sales of chocolate, music (in the form of CDs) and cigarettes
    • Young people spend an average of 20 – 25 GBP per month
    • Mobile services of young people grow at about 4.5 – 5.0 per cent year-on-year. This growth comes at the expense of, and in competition with television, entertainment and clothing

    Brown asked the audience of mobile operators to think beyond ARPU and instead think about lifetime spend. By the time that consumers are 33, they have already completed half their lifetime spend. Yet this is the age group that is currently most attractive to carriers looking at the ARPU model. It was an interesting counterpoint to marketers viewing the grey market as the next big opportunity.

    Mobile marketers run the particular risk of ending up with an aging or aged brands due to the virtue of a misplaced focus. Brown delivered a case study on Harley Davidson to prove his point. In the 1960s circa Easy Rider, Harley Davidson was a youth brand, now their average customer age is 51 years old.

    If things carry on this way, in a little over twenty years, their customer base will be 70, possibly only ready to ride a zimmer frame. According to Brown the consumer lifecycle begins at 10 years old.

    Geoff Goodwin and Marc Goodchild – BBC

    Children still view as much children’s television as ever, however their consumption of television overall has declined as expected

    The BBC is now looking for integrated media properties and partnerships. No one organisation has it right, hence the need for partnerships. Young audiences churn at an incredible rate so the BBC is constantly having to rework itself to remain relevant, rather than having the brand advantage that most people thought they had.

    Important mobile technologies for young people are FM radio, SMS and Bluetooth. This low-level tech is because most young people get by with found technologies: hand-me-down mobile phones, an old TV from the living room or a discount model picked up at ASDA or Tesco and vintage computers from work or the living room.

    Roundtable: Johan Winbladh mobile channel editor – Danish Broadcasting, James Davis head of mobile – News International, Michiel de Gooijer business development manager – Endemol, Giovanni Maruca director interactive and mobile EMEA – Paramount and Tim Hussain head of mobile monetisation – AOL UK

    Mr Winbladh was the hawk in the discussion: mobile devices weren’t ready to put to the kind of mobile experience that users wanted and the industry thought was appropriate, whereas the other audience members felt that the latest generation of mobile handsets and all you can eat tariffs are readdressing the issue.

    Maruca was excited about the way that advertising could be delivered in a context aware manner. By adding value to the advertising it can become unobtrusive and essentially no longer be advertising, but information.

    Roundtable: Richard Miller general manager for consumer convergence – BT and Derrick Heng director segment marketing and communications – Singapore Telecommunications Limited

    BT’s vision of Wi-Fi as a mobile technology is at odds with the GSM/W-CDMA orthodoxy of the mobile industry.

    SingTel in contrast has complete fixed and mobile integration and pay TV. SingTel segments its customer base and actively manages the customer relationship with a long-term view. They provide email to mobiles on an ad-funded revenue model. In Singapore the killer apps for mobile usage by young people were email and SMS. By comparison audience member Jonathan MacDonald sales director of Blyk pointed out that for UK mobile users the three killer apps are voice, SMS and the phone’s alarm clock.

    The audience debate then raged, the killer application for young people is doing the basic things well, providing decent customer service, having a decent relationship with the clients and not charging them excessively for that relationship. More related content here.