Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • 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.

  • Pattern Recognition

    William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition moves his stories from a fantastical future to a world at the bleeding edge of today. A curious advertising company seeks to find out more about a series of video clips that have developed a cult following.

    The story evokes viral marketing similar to the complex story lines of games like Perplex City, The Majestic or online marketing done by industrial music band NIN and Trent Reznor. The resulting buzz in a passionate community is something that marketers aspire to create in product launches. The challenge that Gibson doesn’t fully articulate is identifying the target audience and watching it coalesce. It also reminds me of how conspiracy theories percolate online and seem to break out randomly. The Slender Man phenomenon and the obsession with number stations are classic examples of this process.

    Unlike Spook Country, Gibson only hints at a retreat from his vision of the web as an immersive experience inside virtual reality goggles. Most of the interesting locations and experiences happen in the real-world: central Tokyo, Moscow and London. Gibson’s literary obsession with Japanese culture and cities is part of the connective tissue that connects his early work to Pattern Recognition.

    These world’s are much more colourful than online. The web is now reduced to a silver screen on which the mysterious videos are projected.

    Marketing insight of the advertising agency and government intelligence operatives are seen by Gibson as two sides of the same coin. This makes sense when one thinks about the amount of data that web and mobile technology use now provides. In some respects big technology has gone beyond governments and moving towards the corporations envisaged in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

    All of this adds to the feeling that Pattern Recognition is a tale of now. More related posts here.

  • Authority beats leadership

    I had been thinking about authority versus thought leadership for a while and my interest in it got reignited over lunch with Wadds just before Christmas. We were discussing the pros and cons of sharing expertise on a blog or other social media, particularly when it comes to marketing and marketing communications disciplines.

    On the one hand, its giving your competitors (in the professional and the career sense) a leg-up. That expertise could be used for competitive advantage so I may want to hide my light under a bushel. I could then enshrine this expertise as a business process or service mark and leverage this in competitive situations. This assumes that I am smarter than everyone else online, which of course is complete hogwash: Mrs Carroll didn’t raise no fool, but she’s also aware of my limitations.

    The secondary consideration is that if I have this business process or service mark, how would the man in the street know the real power of it vis-à-vis competitor offerings? You are are in a ‘he said. she said situation’.

    Chances are I am not that much smarter than everyone else, but considerably smarter than some people (yeah and modest too.)  So kicking out ideas via this blog or other channels is way of having them picked, poked and prodded: kind of like peer review in academia but with only ten per cent of the politics and none of the corduroy jackets with leather patches or the reek of cheap pipe tabacco. Sharing ideas negates any leadership advantage that I may have, but does help to build authority.

    Authority is about trust which is more substantive than anything competitive leadership could have given me. Trust would be further enhanced by successful delivery.

    In addition, sharing ideas freely means that I don’t need to think about all areas all the time because I can build upon the thinking that other people have done elsewhere; I benefit from reviewing and critiquing commons content as well as adding to the body of the commons.

    Moving thinking forward allows the industry as a whole to grow and helps spur demand in clients once they understand what is possible.  At a time when over half the clients for online PR choose agencies from other disciplines to develop strategy and execute campaigns growing the collective opportunity has never been more important. More related content can be found here.

  • Industrial Action

    The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.

    My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.

    Newsnight highlighted two things of interest to me in the strike.

    First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party  are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.

    The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.

    British jobs for British workers Facebook group

    Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Harris’ Law

    I came across Harris’ Law due to Jason Calacanis. Jason Calacanis has touched on the issue of overconnectivity in a recent editon of his email newsletter. It dealt  with more certainty about the adverse social effects that connectivity brings which I first heard raised by Eric Benhamou of 3Com when he spoke about a decade ago in a keynote at Networld+InterOp in Paris.

    Key to the mail was a concept that Calacanis called Harris’ Law (after his friend Josh Harris):

    At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

    That sounds excessively harsh in most circumstances, since most social networks mirror life and society. Yes 4Chan and 8Chan can have lots of repulsive content on them. This is less about inflicting pain but more about the kind camaraderie that disgusting jokes brought in the school yard. Yes there are too many incidents involving bullying or hate speech on online communities, but it only makes up part of the content on these communities.

    Political groups aren’t motivated by ‘inflicting damage on the opponents, but by their concerns of things going on around them’. Their tribal ‘wars’ are reinforcing the community and manifesting those concerns rather than being purely about inflicting suffering.

    Even communities like Anonymous that seem to be full of pranking rally around some moral causes such as opposing Scientology or the Iranian government’s oppression of protestors.

    I wanted to end this post on a timely reminder which I have taken from Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame’s twitter feed:

    “People matter, Objects don’t”. That’s all you need to know about social media.

    Harris’ Law is also a good reminder to think about mental resilience and good hygiene practices with regards online interactions.

    You can subscribe to Jason’s email list here. More related content can be found here.