Ketchum’s David Gallagher wanted to know whether he should have his own website as part of managing his personal online brand? He initially felt that publishing on Facebook and LinkedIn was enough. There was also discussion around platforms like Medium. None of which give you real control over your content. Wadds like me felt that owning your own platform was important.
Why have a website as part of your personal online brand?
LinkedIn and Facebook don’t have the same agenda as you. Your content becomes a hostage to their business whims
It is hard for users to discover your content, Facebook and Google make it so
Even on Medium you no longer really own your content. It can’t be easily exported like content on the Blogger platform
Even in the world of Facebook, Google is still a reputation engine
So show do you manage the process?
You need to find a system that works for you. Here is what mine looks like for social syndication.
IFTTT – if then, then that. A service that allows you to trigger actions based on pre-created inputs. It allows rules to be built up based around different inputs:
A photograph tagged with a particular label or hashtag
It supports numerous services including Flickr photography and pinboard.in
Buffer – buffer is a social publishing tool. I have pre-scheduled slots. It is also compatible with publishing posts sent via IFTTT.
Pinboard.in – pinboard is a way of storing your bookmarks with notes and tags online rather than on your computer. Your bookmarks then become accessible wherever you are. It is handy to be able to search things that you have found previously. Google seems to have moved away from organising all the world’s information to mainly focus on ‘now’ content. Pinboard helps you get around this.
I love Connie Chan blog posts and presentations. In this talk she covers how Asian applications manage to squeeze so much more features into their apps than their western equivalent to provide a fuller eco-system of services that she terms super-apps.
Connie Chan isn’t only smart, but manages to talk about Chinese eco-systems in a simple coherent way, which is an art in itself. More Connie Chan related content here.
For These Young Entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley Is, Like, Lame – WSJ – for most of the 18 entrepreneurs and investors, and especially for those in their 20s and 30s, last week’s visit largely failed to impress. To many in the group, northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabbier than the glitzy skyscrapers in Beijing and Shenzhen. They can’t believe Americans still use credit cards and cash while they use mobile payment for almost everything back home – not terribly surprised. Silicon Valley is no longer the place ‘where wizards stay up late’. Agencies work harder than their Bay Area tech clients and it is full of hubris
Luxury is thriving in China again, thanks to millennials — Quartz – Chinese millennials start buying luxury younger, and they buy high-end products more frequently, the firm says. (It undoubtedly helps that they have more spending power than previous generations did at their age.) What they’re buying is also different. Bain surveyed about 500 Chinese millennials and found their interests leaned toward casual and street-inspired fashion – Supreme rather than Prada, put into context here
Huawei – Really Convincing Story, Not. | Radio Free Mobile – this means that this feature (RCS – Rich Communication Services), like its AI assistant, AI chip and its now commoditised imaging offering will be unable to generate any differentiation for Huawei in its devices. This leaves it exactly the same boat as all of the other Android handset makers who differentiate purely on the basis of hardware
Introducing the WhatsApp Business App | WhatsApp blog – a free-to-download Android app for small businesses. Our new app will make it easier for companies to connect with customers, and more convenient for our 1.3 billion users to chat with businesses that matter to them. Here’s how: Business Profiles: Help customers with useful information such as a business description, email or store addresses, and website. Messaging Tools: Save time with smart messaging tools — quick replies that provide fast answers to frequently asked questions, greeting messages that introduce customers to your business, and away messages that let them know you’re busy. Messaging Statistics: Review simple metrics like the number of messages read to see what’s working. WhatsApp Web: Send and receive messages with WhatsApp Business on your desktop. Account Type: People will know that they’re talking to a business because you will be listed as a Business Account. Over time, some businesses will have Confirmed Accounts once it’s been confirmed that the account phone number matches the business phone number. Free to download on Google Play in Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S – surprised that Hong Kong didn’t make this list
Mark Ritson: The Diet Coke relaunch shows its marketers have lost the plot – Marketing Week – a few things I don’t get. Moving away from the one Coke brand architecture. Are they trying to position diet coke against Red Bull? (Thinking about the can size). Or is there some shopper marketing related insight at play that says they need to maximise choice in a given shelf space? Decidedly odd, I would have expected this lot of ‘product’ innovation more in a market like Japan where you see constant consumer demand for the new new thing. Don’t even get me started on the ad creative…
How China’s market economy has fuelled a prostitution boom | South China Morning Post – My grandma was always grateful to Mao, mainly because she was upgraded from a concubine to a wife under the Communists “one wife” rule. – There is also the shredding of culture and community during the cultural revolution probably ruined community / support mechanisms
Luxury
The Pet Shop Boys are the face (and sound) of Christian Dior’s men’s collection this summer.
American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy – Edelman – I suggest that the public relations business move itself from a reliance on advocacy toward a new policy of informing the populace more broadly on subjects of the day. That means providing the positive and negative facts, with third party attribution
Should the Tech Giants Be Broken Up? | WSJ City – Apple and Microsoft supply 95% of desktop operating systems – but this point hides the huge disparity in market size and power between Microsoft and Apple still in the PC market
Benedict Evans on ten-year future predictions (well as good as anyone can)
One of the key issues of concern for the financial services sector has been the lack progress in passporting. This is where the EU says UK regulations and processes are equivalent to theirs and consequently allow market access. More related content here.
China Smartphone Market 2017: Top 10 Best-selling Models – Counterpoint Research – interesting read, basically Apple is the premium smartphone seller. Huawei’s Honor brand makes the top ten along with Xiaomi. It also explains why Huawei wants to get its main brand into the US as that is the main way it can increase the razor thin profit margins of its smartphone business. The real winner is BBK-related brands OPPO and vivo
ongoing by Tim Bray · Google Memory Loss – the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day. Things like 10+-year-old music reviews that are never updated, no longer accept comments, are lightly if at all linked-to outside their own site, and rarely if ever visited… well, let’s face it, Google’s not going to be selling many ads next to search results that turn them up. So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure – the problem for Google would only be if you started to see search promiscuity
Knock and the door shall be opened unto you | FT Alphaville – in China, the data linked to technology companies is already central to the notion of credit provision. It also plays into the country’s planned social credit system. This has come alongside the rapid development of online payments, especially on WePay, part of WeChat. It would be no exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the most important technological development of the present moment, although, in part because of the impenetrability of the Chinese internet, it currently resonates less than it should
Directorate S author Coll is a veteran journalist and professor of journalism. He did time abroad working for an American newspaper covering South Asia. Later Coll wrote for The New Yorker on defence and intelligence.
In 2004, Coll’s book Ghost Wars covered America’s involvement with Pakistan’s intelligence service. He focused on the Soviet invasion Afghanistan through to 2001.
Directorate S is a natural successor to Ghost Wars picking up the story on September 11, 2001 to the end of 2016. Directorate S takes its name from part of the Pakistani intellgience service. It covers the perspectives from all the parties involved. Surprisingly it included more than I expected about clandestine operations in Pakistan.
Coll knows his material and what unfolds is an in-depth scholarly blow-by-blow account. It doesn’t have the zip and excitement of say Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Coll’s story instead sits at the seat of power. Colls tells the story of:
Ambassadors
Policymakers
Generals and civil servants
Politicians
When Coll dips into the operational reporting, it is used to illustrate a wider point.
What comes out is not one story of a war, but a succession of parallel agendas and pivots. The CIA and special forces had very different objectives to their military colleagues. The planning and chain of command was fragmented. Directorate S takes a good deal of commitment to read, but it looks as if it will be as much of a go-to book as Ghost Wars. More book reviews here.
