Ged Carroll

Blog

  • My Web Toolbox

    Hong Kong Go Bag - Timbuk2

    Over time I’ve built up a web toolbox that help with my workflow. This is many of the ones which have bailed me out of trouble time and time again.

    Communication

    Slack – yes i know that it seems like hipster CB radio. But its popular and you are likely to need to get with the programme. I am a great believer in only accessing Slack only via the desktop interface, by booting the app up once an hour. Part of the reason for this is because it can be a time suck; in the way that email was when it came into offices back in the 1990s. A second reason is Slack keyboard short cuts make life so much easier.

    Content

    Facebook Cheatsheet: Image Sizes and Dimensions 2018 – hypebot – the most up to date guide that I have for Facebook image formats. Really handy for briefing artworkers.

    Hemingway – I have paid good money for the native app, but Hemingway’s web interface is a great gateway drug to improve your writing. I have friends who would recommend the fuller featured Grammarly. Try them both and see what works best for you. In the UK a key consideration is that you can’t always get online; which is is why went with the Hemingway native app.

    Development

    Balsamiq – great rapid wire framing tool that I find easier than Adobe’s offerings. Also worthwhile looking at OmniGraffle – I’ve used the Mac version for years.

    BuildWith – this has saved me hours of work over the years. A client wan’t extra functionality on their website. You need to know what they use to understand if you even want to pitch for it, or if you have to scramble to find a Sitecore developer to partner with.

    Influencers

    Takumi – make the briefing process of Istagrammers a bit easier with Takumi; when you are dealing with them en masse with this specialised outsourcing service

    Digging out influencers in a given area for influencer mapping and influencer marketing programmes is a time intensive process to validate and sieve candidates. Traackr is a good tool to start this process with. They also have workflow tools in there which may be of use depending on what else you use.

    Networking

    network Utility
    Once upon a time there there used to be a great all in one tool called Sam Spade. It was a Windows app and a web app. The Windows app hasn’t been maintained and the web app has gone.  Central Ops does at least some of the things that Sam Spade used to do. If you’re a Mac user who has dug around at all in your machine you will know that there is also a handy little app called Network Utility.  Central Ops provides you with a way to validate and trouble shoot email addresses and see if a domain is available for registration.

    Research

    Google – Yeah I know. Not exactly surprising; but I have a couple of articles on how to get the most out of the privacy-violating search engine: Grokking Google and II.

    Pinboard – When you discover things, it is often hard to re-find them again with your search engine of choice.Algorithmic changes, personalisation of search results and an ever growing web can all work against you. Pinboard keeps the links that you find within easy reach. It allows you to notate the links and categorise them with tags. I use the Pinner app on my iPhone to access my Pinboard account on the go. It’s a lighter weight service than Evernote or Mendeley. If you are already an assiduous user of those services instead, keep going with them. The key thing is develop a habit that will facilitate smarter research. If you use Pinboard in association with a web page capture service like archive today and you can protect yourself if the page changes.

    Standard Deviation Calculator  – This just makes life so much easier. Take a string of numbers, drop them in and get the appropriate values out. This makes data analysis so much easier.

    Wolfram Alpha – handy search engine with a lot of verified data. You can get tips on how to get the most out of it here.

    Search marketing

    Ahrefs – paid for service that’s really good at understanding your competitors SEO mojo including a back link checker and pretty comprehensive competitor research tools.

    Rich Results Test – Google Search Console – see if a site takes advantage of Google’s rich results functionality (particularly handy when you are trying to highlight key information on a website). More on the how and why of them on Econsultancy.

    Sitebeam – an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive technical SEO audits on websites. It even outputs the results as a PDF. This makes life so much easier.

  • China technology transfer + more

    China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable A Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of U.S. Innovation Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh – China is executing a multi-decade plan to transfer technology to increase the size and value-add of its economy from its base as the world’s 2nd largest economy. By 2050, China will be 150% the size of the U.S.2​ (with the goal of being double the US economy by that time and decrease U.S.’ relevance globally)​.  This technology transfer to China occurs in part through increasing levels of investment and acquisitions of U.S. companies which are at record levels today. ​China participated in about 10% of all venture deals in 2015 up from a 5% average participation rate during 2010-2016. China is investing in the critical future technologies that will be foundational for future innovations across technology both for commercial and military applications: artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, financial technology and gene editing. ​The line demarcating products designed for commercial vs. military purposes is blurring in these new technologies. Investments are only one means of technology transfer which also occurs through the following licit and illicit vehicles ​where the cost of stolen intellectual property has been estimated at $300 billion per year. (PDF) – China technology transfer is like the piracy or opium trading of past centuries. China technology transfer is war by other means. More related content here.

    PwC hangs up on landlines in shift to ‘mobile first’ culture | Business | The Guardian – makes sense given the amount of under-used IP telephones that lie around in offices now

    WhatsApp groups can now be restricted so only admins can send messages | VentureBeat – which could take out a lot of SMS gateway offerings for marketers, enterprises etc

    M&C Saatchi beefs up presence in ‘influencer marketing’ | Financial Times – The rise of influencer marketing, which Mr Kershaw calls “performance marketing” because recommendations can have a direct and measurable impact on scales, complements traditional advertising (paywall)

    Luxury Car Buys Want to Declutter & Human-Centric Design | auto connected car news – This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no esti­mate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

  • Sicario 2: Soldado

    https://youtu.be/WSVP5BYDgAk

    I was a big fan of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. It conveyed the monotony and horror of the war on drugs really well. Taylor Sheridan crafted a taunt storyline, you had great actors in Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Donovan as Brolin’s foil. Alejandro Gillick as a character played really well to Benicio del Toro signature mix of pathos and violence. The music was the film’s unsung character that turned out a virtuoso performance. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack carried a lot of the weight in the film with its dark dissonant ambience. It was in many respects a modern day spaghetti western in the grand tradition of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci.

    Sicario 2: Soldado had a lot to live up too. Denis Villeneuve handed over directorial reins to Stefano Sollima: one of Italy’s best crime film directors. Sollima kept close to Villeneuve’s style from the previous film. Jóhann Jóhannsson was replaced on soundtrack duties by Hildur Guðnadóttir. This wasn’t due to Jóhannsson’s deadly cocaine overdose in Berlin; but a decision by the director to recruit an entirely new team.

    She went from playing cello on the first film soundtrack to taking over the composition and performance of Sicario 2. Guðnadóttir kept a similar formula in the soundtrack, all be it with an even harder edge to the film. Most of the main players are back the exception of the FBI agents from the first film. Given the ending of the first film where Gillick made it clear to the Emily Blunt character that she wasn’t morally flexible enough. Sheridan Taylor takes on writing duties again.

    Plus points
    • Matt Craver (Josh Brolin) and Steve Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) chewing the fat, in classic spaghetti western cornball dialogue; that reminds me a lot of the

    Nice day for a drive ha?

    Aww, beautiful day. Blue skies, large calibre weapons. I love getting out of the office.

    • The film starts with a grand vision that feels very zeitgeist with illegal immigration being front-and-centre
    • The film does action exceedingly well. The assassination, kidnapping, bombings and shootouts are all incredibly well choreographed
    Minus points

    The Plot, the plot and oh did I mention the plot? ***Spoilerish ahead***

    • At the beginning of the film it paints a big canvas as the film moves from the border, Kansas city, Somalia, Djibouti and Washington DC over the first half hour. This grant vision fizzles out
    • The plot lacks morality centred in one person like the first film and the director compressed with the story arc. So that leads to….
    • Character inconsistencies. del Toro’s character Alejandro Gillick kills a cartel leader, his wife and his kids at the dinner table at the height of the first film. In Sicario 2; the film hinges on him having a massive change of heart and going soft. Matt Craver’s ‘the end justifies the means’ viewpoint suddenly goes soft, when he is required to have a cartel leader’s child killed
    • Plot logic: they are obviously going after the head of the Reyes cartel, with a view to understanding the organisation structure and operational methods. They are keen to find key decision makers. They find one and then abruptly drop it. Maybe it was editing and what we are seeing is a film pared down into just over two hours in duration
    • A weak flip-flopping president who is concerned that the deaths of corrupt Mexican federal police officers will impact his standing amongst 50 million Hispanic voters. In sharp contrast to signing off on covert action just a short time before to combat foreign terrorists using people smuggling rat lines to get into the US. Chances are he’s probably already screwed by his law-and-order stance a la Trump
    • Injuries that should have caused nasty disfigurement, don’t
    • The weak ending that is obviously setting up a franchise a la Marvel. That’s if Marvel allowed itself to go as dark as say Garth Ennis’ interpretation of The Punisher

    I felt divorced from this film rather than numb from the grimness of the original. It’s hard to maintain power and impact, but Sicario 2 had so many doors that it could have gone through with the start of the plot, that the last half of the film felt like a cop out.

    In summary

    Modern day narco spaghetti western Sicario 2: Soldado is faithful to the original. It has bags of style and the kind of kinetic experience that you’d forget. A worthy successor to the original film with the exception of a story line that fizzles out and then comes back at the end to set up a Marvel-type franchise. Sicario 2 won’t have me watching it several times in the way that the original film did. I just hope that this is the movie making equivalent of a difficult second album and Sicario 3 will raise the bar again. Maybe hand the reins back to Denis Villeneuve and support Taylor with a writing team that will collaborate and challenge him to do better with the story, rather than the reductive process that Sicario 2 seems to have gone through. Stefano Sollima’s admitted as much in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter

    We condensed the script’s narrative arc in order to preserve and pronounce the soul of the movie. The script was a bit wider in scope at first. Then, we organically pit the two lead characters [played by Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin] against each other, something that wasn’t present in the first draft. Story-wise, I felt it was a really important and interesting turning point

    More related content can be found here.

  • The Bureau season 3 & other things

    The Bureau season 3 on Amazon. It is one of the most well written series I have watched in a long time. The Bureau season 1 and 2 where taunt thrillers that were James Bond reimagined by John Le Carre. It is the show that Spooks should have been. The ending was on a cliff hanger and I didn’t think that we’d see The Bureau season 3 The Bureau season 3 sees our protagonist captured by ISIS. Guillaume Debailly is captured by ISIS who know him by his former cover of Paul Lefebvre.

    A brass band cover  of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name

    This amazing episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert featuring Rakim (of Eric B & Rakim fame). What people tend to forget is the difference that Rakim made to hip-hop. Before him, most rappers rapped on the beat. Rakim used his rhymes the way a jazz musician plays their instrument. They go around the beat, yet are in time.

    With Amazon delivering analytical data like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more sites signing up to Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme, even if they don’t want to sell anything for the beast of Seattle. The recommendation areas draws from its massive retail data set that shows what consumers are interested in across various different product categories.

    This week I have mostly been working my way through John Kelly’s Mystery Train for my listening pleasure.  Kelly is a veteran Irish DJ who has a rare skill in the quality of his sections. Naturally this is all backed by the massive music library of RTÉ. The original run of it in the mid to late 1990s was legendary and thankfully Irish state broadcaster resurrected it. Kelly just nails music selection. More culture related content here.

  • Preparing to get a brand on social media

    Master TV Control Room 2

    In order to get a brand on social media it isn’t about dropping brand assets on social channels but thinking about what it actually means.

    Distillation of this process is likely to appear on a social media document:

    • It contextualises why social, there must be a business and brand reason to be there beyond ‘well everyone is on Facebook’ in order to get a brand on social media
    • An explanation of how to use the document. Those involved need to view the document as a ‘north star’ for social. It needs to be clear that the document is a set of guidelines, but not immutable
    • In order to get a brand on social media, you need to understand what what will look and sound like

    How the brand manifests itself on social:

    • What’s the brand’s tone of voice on social media channels. Does it want to want to sound like an everyman, does it want a bit of distance and gravitas,  does it want to be an authority on a given area?
    • What’s the personality? If it was a person, what kind of person would it be. This frames the content, what questions it will answer and the view point that it will take. It’s adding extra dimensions that won’t necessarily be applied in public relations, print or even TV advertising due to the nature of social channels
    • What are the content pillars? Think of this as the core messages. Every piece of content created and shared will demonstrate at least one pillar. These are typically things like organisation innovation, heritage, values, point of leadership (thought leadership, authority / expertise, style leadership etc)

    Cross channel rules:

    • How will you handle hashtags
    • How ill you handle localised domain names? (Will their be local domains?)
    • Who has the right to publish what first? For instance if you look at sports brands like Nike or New Balance; you’ll see that soccer related content first appears on their specialist football channels
    • Should local channels link back to ‘global accounts’?
    • Are there any sponsorship or IP-related watch outs? When I worked on New Balance; any club kit related content had to feature a minimum of three players. Otherwise there would be problems with the players other sponsors (notably their boot sponsors and their agents who would be looking for another pay day). Who needs to approve use of sponsorships and how long will approvals take? Can you do a flow diagram to provide insight into the process? How do you handle successes or set backs of partners?
    • How do you handle rumours and speculation? (New iPhone launch or renewal of sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods)
    • How do you handle images that might have a competitor brand in shot?
    • Do you ignore controversial news?
    • Will you share partner content? What channels and handles are legitimate partner content to share?
    • What kind of tools will you put in place? Large brands often use an intermediary platform like Percolate that provides measurement, asset management and an approvals workflow as needed. It even allows the localisation of content by the local brand team

    Social channel-specific rules

    • How often will you post on a  given channel? This might be dictated to you by the kind of account you have on some channels like WeChat. With most others it will be driven by audience content consumption. Twitter generally lends itself to more frequent posts than Instagram or Facebook
    • Specific channel aims over the coming year
    • How will the channel be used? Are there particular segments that it is good at reaching?
    • What kind of content can be published? Example content categories. Best practice executions from other (non-competing) brands to get best practice ideas

    Social crisis response

    • Crisis like accidents have an incident funnel marked by small events, the more of these that happen, the harder it is to climb out of the funnel.  The trick is to limit these before they take you down the funnel.
    • Have a clear workflow in place to handle negative criticism. The US Air Force had a really good workflow to borrow from.
    • Real-time monitoring should highlight things before they escalate. How is this intelligence distributed and to whom?
    • Who is going to be part of the decision group, you’ll likely need people from: customer services, product expert, public relations, management. How will you ensure that employees and the supply chain speak with one voice?