Ged Carroll

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  • Power & more news

    Power

    Weekend Essay by Jonah Lehrer: How Power Affects Us – WSJ.com – “… the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity. One recent study found that overconfident CEOs were more likely to pursue innovation and take their companies in new technological directions. Unchecked, however, these instincts can lead to a big fall.” – in this reading essay about power, I was reminded about Roman history and the role of Auriga. The Auriga was a slave who drove the two horse chariots and stood behind Ceasar holding his laurel crown above his head during triumphal parades called ‘Roman Triumphs’. The Roman Triumphs celebrated and sanctified Roman victories and were demonstrations of power. But the Auriga would be continually whispering in the leaders ear ‘momento more’ remember you are mortal. Where are the Aurigas for our leaders across the seats of power in the government, business and the media?

    Design

    SOPHISTICATION: Hirofumi Kiyonaga and Hiroshi Fujiwara | Hypebeast – I need to go and see this next time I am in Hong Kong

    Electronics Designers Struggle With Form, Function and Obsolescence – NYTimes.com – NYTimes.com – Interesting essay on design. Electronics products are not engineered based on function defining form and are not built to last according to design experts

    How to

    5 Ways To Download Torrents Anonymously | TorrentFreak – handy for seeding content. Just remember just because its anonymous doesn’t mean that it won’t be ‘suspicious’ activity under the Digital Economy Act

    vinyl recorder – cut your own vinyl discs

    Japan

    FT.com / Management – How Seiko dissidents called time – fascinating tale of how Seiko cleaned house in its senior management

    Online

    European Governments Unleash Online Gambling to Help Fill Coffers – NYTimes.com – pragmatism reigns in Europe

    Will Yahoo China Find A Search Suitor? – China Real Time Report – WSJ – Baidu makes much more sense

    danah boyd | apophenia » Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight – even more complex when you think about the work | client relationships that may be on social networks as well

    The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets – WSJ.com – I have said for a while, but I think society needs to work out what is acceptable practice online from both individuals and corporates. Stories like this whilst nothing new in terms of content make me feel that that reckoning is coming closer

    Shopping

    audioScope – amazing collection of hi-fi

    Technology

    Information technology in transition: The end of Wintel | The Economist – What a dramatic introduction: “THEY were the Macbeths of information technology (IT): a wicked couple who seized power and abused it in bloody and avaricious ways.”

    Telecoms

    Nokia Declines to Go All In on Chips – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – interesting misunderstanding about Apple’s approach on silicon. I don’t disagree with Tirri’s point on the pendulum between specialist and general purpose silicon. Where I disagree is in terms of it all being about power, rather than space and power consumption. Apple optimises existing chip designs rather doing its own

    Wireless

    MediaTek and NTT Docomo in 4G alliance | FT.com – interesting following on from the Nokia | Renesas deal. Am sure Qualcomm and Intel won’t be happy

  • Corvette ‘roar’ campaign

    The new Chevrolet Corvette marketing campaign has had a lot of positive vibes out in adland so I thought I would share it with you along with some thoughts.

    The video

    The idea

    The two-and-a-half minute video is designed to promote a Corvette experience: for an extra 5,800 USD you can help build the power-plant which is fitted into your new Corvette.

    Here is in Europe a number of sports car companies used to allow to to visit the factory (it was part of the experience of buying a TVR for instance) and in the case of continental companies drive it back home. This way you could see the craftsmanship that went into your vehicle and meet some of the people responsible for it. In the same way that the lord of the manor may meet some of the landscape gardeners who were remodeling the maze or the alpine rockery.

    Being able to participate in building the engine, struck me as something different. If you think about the ‘golden days of the 1960s and 70s’ real men were renaissance creatures regardless of their profession they could also throw themselves into DIY and major mechanical work on the car. It was supposed to be a major bonding opportunity between father and son, working on the car together like Yoda and Luke Skywalker.

    My Dad has a garage full of tools that he accumulated over time, some of them handed on to him by friends or given to keep at the end of a job. I used to help him working on our car, though not much of it made sense to me. I haven’t inherited his practical gene, but it did give me a good worth ethic.

    It was also a time of family breakdown as divorce and womens long-deserved independence finally came into its own.

    It used to be that clocks and sewing machines were the only non-user serviceable items on a household; but as time moved on globalisation and technology meant  that cars like most household appliances and consumer electronics needed an expert. Not just the handyman with a garage and a service pit around the corner, but the correct software to understand the different diagnostic outputs on the car.

    Manufacturers have taken advantage of this development to shore up their total lifetime revenue funneling these customers into dealer service centres, requiring special fitting tools and clamping down on third-party parts in a similar way to HP’s chipped toner and inkjet cartridges.

    Instead real men are now likely to be slightly buffoon-ish a la Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in Top Gear.

    So is the building the engine experience less about demonstrating the handmade craftsmanship of your sports car and more about selling you the mythical father-son bonding experience that the car’s owner may not have had as a child?

    The soundtrack

    So I was thinking about this Corvette ‘auto-worker as father-figure’ concept when I thought about the soundtrack to the video. According the video titling the Corvette is all about the roar, yet there is no engine noises in the soundtrack at all. Don’t get me wrong I quite like the soundtrack, it’s the kind of sound you’d expect if the Chemical Brothers drafted in Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish from Tack>>Head as collaborators to come up with an appropriate soundtrack. It would fit right in with the first Matrix film soundtrack – again planting this very firmly in generation-x territory.

    But there is no engine noise, making the statement that its the roar seem dubious. Have a look at the Audi R8 microsite whilst it has brooding electronica pretending to be a Wagnerian mood music, the engine noise does feature in the video clips as you explore the site. The new Lexus LFA website makes no bones about the cars sound even allowing you to download it as a ring-tone (though I imagine that it would grate on the nerves after a bit).

    So I don’t think that its about the Corvette ‘roar’ at all, instead I think its about a mythical father-figure | son experience – a blue-collar bromance: it is the Brokeback Mountain of car adverts.

    It’s a smart offering and campaign which I imagine was probably based on some sort of clever consumer insights programme. And it breaks away from the usual ‘our car is an incrementally better phallic compensator than X, Y or Z’ personified by recent Nissan Z-series marketing efforts. More marketing related content can be found here.

  • BP & more news

    BP

    How the Gulf crisis made BP British again. – By Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine – interesting study in crisis communications. BP is one of the oil industry’s ‘seven sisters’ or supermajors. Although that term doesn’t reflect the power of national oil companies in places like China, Saudi Arabia, Norway, India and Qatar. BP is vertically integrated in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and extraction, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation, and trading. It has been steadily building out interests in alternative energy such as solar as well. The British positioning of BP is at odds with the fact that the company operates in 80+ countries. The company came out of British efforts at oil exploration in what’s now Iran at the beginning of the 20th century. BP has been in Alaska since 1959 and was one of the first majors in the North Sea.

    BP

    Culture

    Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap – NYTimes.com – Derek B’s 808 roll on Rock the Beat is a cornerstone, immortalised like The Winston’s Amen Brother. Really interesting sound very similar in spirit to the roots of hip-hop like the live shows back in the day at Harlem World

    80 Blocks From Tiffany’s – gangland culture in 1970s New York

    Economics

    Long-term unemployment: Leaving the labour force, bit by bit | The Economist – interesting article on the economic impact of the long term unemployed

    How to

    Apple – Support – Manuals – goldmine of Mac stuff

    Japan

    中古レコード・CDの販売／買取　COCONUTS DISK – awesome Tokyo record store

    飛騨高山 留之助商店 本店 – amazing Japanese store full of modern pop art and cool kitsch stuff

    As Some Vow to Scale Back, Panasonic Pushes Vast Catalog – NYTimes.com – similar challenges to what Sony faces

    FT.com / Companies / Automobiles – Japan’s new rules change face of AGMs – will this make it harder for Yakusa to disrupt and hassle Japanese company AGMs and will it help corporate governance?

    In a Partnership of Unequals, a Start-Up Suffers – NYTimes.com – Bill Gates-owned Corbis convicted of fraud and ‘misappropriation of trade secrets’ – basically piracy

    Media

    People worry about over-sharing location from mobiles, study finds | Technology | guardian.co.uk – may hamper adoption of where2.0. Yahoo!’s FireEagle project was precient in the way it allowed users control over how exact location data was

    Online

    Will Zynga Become the Google of Games? – NYTimes.com – nice profile of Zynga

    People worry about over-sharing location from mobiles, study finds | Technology | guardian.co.uk – may hamper adoption of where2.0. Yahoo!’s FireEagle project was precient in the way it allowed users control over how exact location data was

    Yummly – Think outside the recipe box. – interesting take on the recipe site using semantic technologies

    Software

    Digital Domain – Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem – NYTimes.com – Microsoft’s financial performance is not not reflected in its share price and a far bit of that has to do with the corporate communications letting the organisation down

    Windows Phone 7 a ‘disaster’ says Infoworld after developer demo | Technology | guardian.co.uk – could Microsoft have a completely screwed ‘Vista-like’ mobile strategy on its hands? This isn’t the first time that a Windows demo had gone wrong for Microsoft, in the past the company still managed to do really well selling the Windows product in question

  • Closing the innovation gap – Judy Estrin

    Closing The Innovation Gap is a rare breed of book. It looks with a clear eye at the subject of innovation and Silicon Valley.

    Innovation is an overused word, companies like to have it associated with their brand, products and services as it affects both the share price: covering management sins and providing investors with a veneer of hope for future growth. In a previous life, I worked at a firm where we used to talk about doing ‘innovation communications’. Where the theory went, we helped innovative companies communicate the fact that they were innovative.

    All this pre-supposed that we had a clear definition of what innovation was. From my time there, there seemed to be an assumption that all IT and biomedical related businesses were essentially innovative (unless they competed against our existing client base).

    Whereas a food business that borrowed the ‘virtual fab’ model from chipmakers in the semiconductor industry to take on big guns like Proctor & Gamble or PepsiCo wasn’t. I guess the bottom line I am trying to get across is that innovation is critically important, yet tragically misunderstood by many people.

    Judy Estrin has a genuine pedigree in innovation coming from a family of innovators. Her father worked with John von Neumann (the father of modern digital computing) at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and her mother was a professor at the computer science department of UCLA.  Judy has a Silicon Valley pedigree having had senior roles or been a board member at: Sun Microsystem (who build servers on which banks, telecoms providers and many dot.coms depended – now part of Oracle), Cisco (who pretty much are the internet infrastructure) and FedEx.

    The book addresses the challenge of innovation that we currently have.

    I have had a gut feeling about the decline in pace of innovation over the past decade or so. In a lot of respects improvements in computing have lost their sparkle, they longer feel like a leap forward, but more of the same.

    When I think about the dot com period there were meaningful improvements in telecoms hardware, web technology, software and business processes – not all of them where financially successful but things felt as if they moved forward.

    If I think about web 2.0 – the biggest single improvement was more of a software engineering improvement with a deliberate focus by the likes of 37signals and the original flickr team on avoiding feature bloat at the expense of usability.

    Facebook is an evolution from the likes of The WELL, Friendster, Friends Reunited and MySpace – rather than a true innovation.

    The iPhone whilst beautifully crafted in terms of software and hardware, increasingly reminds me of my long departed Palm Vx PDA – but with a shitty battery life.

    In Closing the innovation gap, I found the book to fall into three distinct sections:

    • Charting the origins and progress of what I will call ‘innovation entropy’ in the west. This talks about how the cold war was entwined with the rise and stall of innovative research that helped in creation of technology that we take for granted today: keyhole surgery, the internet, modern computers, cellular phones and CCDs (coupled-charged device which go into digital cameras.)
    • The economic and cultural effects of ‘innovation entropy’. In this respect Estrin echoes the work of Will Hutton’s The state we’re in published in 1996 which I read in college. Like Hutton, Estrin is a critic of short-termism in business, the financial markets, academia and government spending. Some of this short-termism was unintentional as the law of unintended consequences kicked in due to changes in regulations that were designed to encourage innovation. A secondary factor that Estrin points out is a corresponding lack of appetite for risk – or the rise of risk management which has helped cripple long-term research which begat big innovation
    • How to address ‘innovation entropy’. In Closing The Innovation Gap Estrin maps out the areas where educators, government, financiers and businesses need to change and collaborate on. This collaboration requires root-and-branch change

    Estrin’s book is powerful as she pulls together a coherent story which makes it easy to read. As a prominent person within Silicon Valley she gains access to many people who are at the head of organisations driving innovation at the present time. More related content here.

  • Influence singularity

    This post on what I am calling influence singularity (and some other trends) came from discussions whilst travelling. I have been on the road a fair bit and have speaking to a number of people coming from all aspects of communications and marketing. Speaking to these different people has covered a lot of areas but three trends stood out:

    • Influence singularity
    • Welcome to your new press spokesperson, your customer care rep
    • Inhouse vs. agency

    I have explored these trends in a bit more depth below.

    Influence singularity

    Increasingly we are seeing agencies of all ilks: PR, advertising, marketing, digital and everything in between are descending on the area of influence – creating an influence singularity. This influence manifests itself primarily through social media and digital; though it can manifest itself in experiential events like un-conferences and meet-ups. One of the best campaigns I have come across was the RNLI’s efforts to engage with young people.

    RNLI

    A social media campaign thought through and brought to life by a direct marketing agency: they saw the interaction in a similar way to the relationship between an organisation and the recipient of a direct mail piece. Instead of a purchase call to action, they provided a task to be completed. It is not only at agencies where this conflict is happening, I hear anecdotally that marketers are having PR discussions both online and offline actvities and carving it up with no PR people involved.

    The communications heads that were left out instead retreated to focus purely on corporate communications: outflanked, outgunned and out of their depth in a digital world. PR agencies where they have been involved, are often working with marketing managers as the inhouse PR people are not clued in.

    A secondary aspect of this, is that where the role is reversed and the PR department has led on social media, they are now having their efforts hijacked by marketers playing catch-up – because the marketers feel that they should be the owner, have better budgets and often have the ear of the board.

    This then begs the question: does PR the profession, its practitioners and the business need to have a rapid rebrand as a profession before it becomes roadkill?

    Welcome to the new press spokesperson: your customer care rep

    Back in 2004, I wrote a blog post about some comments that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had made about iPod owners having devices full of stolen music. I dashed off a missive to Microsoft.com’s customer service form and got a response.

    At the time John Lettice, when writing about the affair in The Register said:

    We’re sure iPod owners will regard being called law-abiding by an exec from a company with Microsoft’s legal experience as a high point to end the week on. But, you ask, how the blazes did we get to this one? We have Ged Carrol’s blog to thank. Mightily offended by Ballmer’s original comments, Ged used the feedback system at microsoft.com to demand an apology, and he got one. The possibility of feedback systems of this ilk actually working had never occurred to The Register, so we’ve never bothered trying, but if you want your very own grovel, insert your outraged howls here.

    At that time, journalists didn’t think of customer care representatives as a source of comment. Six years later and with social media on tear, the customer care representative is increasingly on the frontline of reputation management.

    Some of the discussions I have been involved with has been about the interface between PR and customer services. Where is the overlap? How do you ensure efficient and effective task management between the two? The last question is being addressed with solutions from the likes of Brandwatch and Salesforce.com.

    Inhouse vs. agency

    I was discussing in-house versus agency with some people recently and one of the key points they made was that whilst agencies provide flexibility in terms of manpower and access to tools that an in-house team couldn’t justify because of cost, social media’s need for immediate and decisive responsiveness required organisations to re-address their in-house requirements and expand their current capability.  This is a great opportunity for measurement companies, other organisations that provide ‘horizontal’ services and e-lance digital communications people to interject as these considerations are being made. It may also cause some agencies to start thinking about what an agency means and how they can change the structure of their offering to ensure that they remain relevant.