Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • 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.

  • Wonder Girls

    The Wonder Girls caused me to reflect on pop music as a business. We are so used to manufactured pop music artists by the likes of Tom Watkins, Stock | Aitken | Waterman and more recently Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. Some of these groups like Wham, Kylie Minogue and Take That had international success. We have gotten used to the dominance of western international recording artists.

    Wonder Girls Daum

     Wonder Girls Korean fan site.

    It is this heritage that makes the Wonder Girls phenomena: a Korean girl-band managed by a Korean team getting a Billboard top 100 hit all the more remarkable.

    Wonder Girls MySpace

    Wonder Girls MySpace page

    That kind of success takes more than talent and good looks – the world music industry is littered with talented beautiful failures. The Wonder Girls are creatures of the internet age, they started off conventionally enough in South Korea and then used their South Korean fan base to spring board into the US marketplace.

    There were two parts in this story which made a great use of social media:

    You could argue that they are a part of the ongoing Korean Wave: a rise in popularity of Korean music, television and film culture which has swept Asia and started to gain popularity in the west like the Japanese film, manga and anime industries before it.

    Wonder Girls Facebook

    Wonder Girls Facebook page

    However where the group breaks rank with the Korean Wave is in the proactive targeted nature of their marketing; which is more reminiscent of aggression and entrepreneurship of the Japanese car, camera and consumer electronics industries which shook things up in the 1960s and 1970s. More related content here.

  • An unscientific assessment of Baidu

    Google has finally left the Chinese market for search, so I thought I would try the alternative, hence an unscientific assessment of Baidu. My trial is unscientific in nature and not particularly rigorous. I did what most consumers would have done and searched for myself.

    I was quite open-minded about this, on the one hand Google has been killing the search market in Europe, nothing can touch it in the EU and they have made moderately successful forays into other sectors as well. I also know that Google is not all conquering. In fact the wheels start to come off the Google search wagon when you venture into areas with non-Roman languages such as Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

    On the other hand, Robin Li over at Baidu is no slouch. Baidu is famous for is huge index and its continued appetite to crawl content whenever and wherever it can find it.

    Baidu like its Korean counterpart Naver has also managed a successful social search product running a question-and-answer service like a better version of Yahoo! Answers – largely free of spam and a more middle-class range of participants provide highly relevant quality content.

    It is also blatantly obvious that Baidu doesn’t care whether it attracts a potential English-speaking audience as the entire site apart from investor relations is in Chinese.

    Methodology

    Outcomes

    I was expecting some divergence between Google and Baidu search engine results pages for a number of reasons. Google crawls an estimated 15 per cent of the total web, and Baidu is likely to crawl a slightly larger amount. That means that their search indexes are likely to be slightly different. Secondly, both will have started with slightly different algorithms and these will change over time with a experience of what users want. Finally, the results are usually ‘flavoured’ according to local market preferences such as language and local content.

    I was a bit surprised at the level of divergence between Google and Baidu, which was great than I had seen between Google and Yahoo! in the past.

    First of all flavouring. A comparison between the Japanese and Chinese versions of Baidu show a high degree of variance between the two versions of the Baidu search engine.

    Baidu CN vs Baidu JP

    Part of the reason for the difference may be due to Chinese regulations around permitted services, for instance an educational video of me by Econsultancy on YouTube is the top result on the Japanese site and a couple of twitter related hits come in at six and seven. The Japanese site skews much more toward video services than the Chinese site which picked up profile services Plaxo and Naymz.

    Interestingly, the Chinese site picked up the re-direct URI for my blog (renaissancechambara.com), whereas neither the Japanese or the Chinese versions picked up my proper domain (renaissancechambara.jp) at all. Even when I clicked a few pages down.

    Plotting Baidu China against Google Hong Kong produced an interesting diversity of the results.

    Baidu CN vs Google HK

    Their one point of correlation, my profile on Naymz. Again part of this may be because of my presence on services that don’t do business in China for instance YouTube and Twitter. Google rightly puts more weight and a consequently higher ranking on my Crunchbase and LinkedIn profiles than Plaxo which appears a couple of pages down on Google.

    Baidu obviously puts much more emphasis on a historic redirect URI I have for my blog than the ‘real’ one and doesn’t seem to crawl the site in any great depth. I am guessing that this is because of its largely English language content.

    Baidu JP vs Google JP

    In Japan, the Baidu | Google comparison told a similar story. The Google flavouring between Hong Kong and Japanese versions wasn’t that great only showing differences at position five and lower on the page. Baidu Japan managed to pick up my last.fm profile and twitter profile, but didn’t pick up my blog or any professional information on the first page.

    In conclusion, my unscientific assessment of Baidu has shown provides a great search experience for consumers. But I am uncertain how valuable it would be for people in a professional context, for instance researching foreigners with whom they may be doing business or finding foreign presentations. I can understand why Chinese scientific audiences would be concerned by the departure of Google.

    I also suspect that optimising content to make it searchable on Baidu is different to the process that I would go through for Google or Yahoo!, but that would merit far more investigation before I could blog with any confidence about it. More Baidu related posts here.

  • Nozoe Kuniaki & more news

    Nozoe Kuniaki

    Former CEO of Fujitsu Nozoe Kuniaki (野副州旦) – blackmail forced his resignation | Japan: Stippy – interesting story of boardroom intrigue. Nozoe Kuniaki was originally said to have resigned due to ill health. The FT reported that Nozoe Kuniaki was really forced to resign by Fujitsu. Apparently Nozoe Kuniaki was forced to resign over links to a company of “unfavourable reputation”. The FT hints the roots of this palace putsch: apparently Nozoe Kuniaki was opposed by colleagues due to his drive to refocus the group on IT services at the expense of unprofitable electronics divisions, including its hard disk drive business.

    China

    FT.com / China – China faces shortages of migrant workers – this is more about structural change than an economic problem, the demographic bomb hasn’t kicked in yet. Shenzhen and similar areas will go to higher value products and industry permeate deeper into the country FT.com / Asia-Pacific – Labour shortage hits China export recovery

    Consumer behaviour

    When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com – environmentalism causing maritial strife

    Culture

    Axe Cop – genius: a 5 year-old script writer and a 29 year-old illustrator create an awesome comic

    From Quantic Dream, a Child Killer and a Tormented Dad – NYTimes.com – interesting new direction in gaming. In some ways it reminds me of Myst and the vision that Philips had for the CD-i platform

    Economics

    Economists Urge Government to Stop War on Piracy | TorrentFreak – Digital Economy Bill-type measures don’t make economic sense according to Spanish economists

    Innovation

    Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – “Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?” and “Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever.”

    Chinese Premier Talks Up Internet of Things – NYTimes.com – interesting stuff here, however we need to move to IPv6 addresses fast in order to take advantage of it

    Ireland

    RTÉ News: ‘Guerrilla street’ hurling in US capital

    Japan

    Grads return to watches as job-hunter prop | The Japan Times Online – watches used to give the impression of being well-organised

    Tech Lawyers Say ‘Uh Oh’ as Microsoft Outsources Legal Work to India

    Google and antitrust: Searching questions | The Economist

    Slapdash Bill will damage Britain’s digital economy – The Irish Times – Fri, Nov 27, 2009 – external perspective on the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill

    Media

    Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyright – Boing Boing – WTF. The BPI-authored changes the effect of which was that “the security services concerns were not being met” and then goes on to talk about the irony that the Open Rights Group and the Security Services being on the same side as if it validates his standpoint

    ivi.ru — смотрите фильмы и сериалы с комфортом! – Russian answer to Hulu and iPlayer. Really nicely designed.

    When using open source makes you an enemy of the state | Technology | guardian.co.uk – interesting evidence against MPAA and RIAA of trying to incite unilateral US government actions against Indonesia because it uses open source software

    Online

    U.K. Kids Start Social Networking Way Under the Age Limit | Fast Company

    Philippines

    Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord – NYTimes.com – My Way correlates with karaoke-related killings in the Philippines. Fascinating bit of newspaper anthropology

    Retailing

    FT.com / Comment / Analysis – China: The jailed salesman – background on the Gome business

    Security

    China PLA officer urges new Internet control agency | Reuters – People’s Liberation Army Major General Huang Yongyin ‘For national security, the Internet has already become a new battlefield without gunpowder’

    Google Case Highlights Gaps in Computer Security – NYTimes.com – interesting take on security

    Software

    The best health apps for your iPhone | The Guardian

    Wireless

    FT.com / Telecoms – Students power BlackBerry growth – I can completely understand this, I miss a proper keyboard a la the Nokia Communicator

    Motorola’s First-Quarter Forecast Hurts Shares – NYTimes.com – Android failing to save Motorola’s bacon

  • Internet experience in China

    If you are like me you probably have some favourite platforms that you find useful for your online life. This is a list of what I found worked and didn’t work from my internet experience in China. I thought that it would be handy to know, so that if you were visiting you could put surrogate services in place to continue your online life.

    Works well

    • Flickr – both Uploadr and the site work just as well as they work at home
    • Delicious – again just works as well as you would expect it to at home
    • Google – seemed to work fine, though this may change because they haven’t been the best corporate citizen in China recently. Interestingly, typing Google.com took me directly through to the US site rather than their usual trick of geo-targeting and loading up their local country portal instead – which is a source of mild irritation when I am travelling
    • Google Analytics – dashboard worked as promised
    • Feedburner – worked as good as usual. The 120-odd drop in subscribers on the day I arrived in China I put down to my content being uninteresting as it picked right up again the following day
    • Pretty much all the major IM platforms worked well: I use Skype, Yahoo! messaging, AOL Instant Messenger, GTalk
    • LinkedIn – worked fine
    • Last.fm – worked just as well as it does back home. I scrobbled and listened to music from Shenzhen
    • Web radio – I logged on to RTE to keep up with the latest news and current affairs closer to home with no problem at all

    Patchy performance

    • Foursquare – whilst I could select Hong Kong as a city, it found it often difficult to register with a place as it struggled to match location with ‘geo-coding’. A bit disappointing to be honest with you. I did use it successfully in Shenzhen where I found free wi-fi. Your mileage may vary

    Didn’t work

    • Twitter – I found myself using instant messenger much more, to compensate for the way that I use Twitter as a communications tool. I use a multi-platform instant messaging client called Adium and had no problem with Yahoo! Instant Messenger, GTalk, Skype, .mac | MobileMe messaging, AOL Instant messenger out here so workarounds for communication are really easy
    • Friendfeed – to be honest I only looked at this because I thought I may be able to catch up on a few Twitter feeds
    • Facebook doesn’t work, but my account is a zombie account anyway with content being fed in from other places like Twitter
    • Bloglines – I would recommend downloading an RSS newsreader client and importing your OPML file to temporarily replace using Bloglines. I missed my RSS reader far more than the more banal communications of Twitter

    Internet experience in China: performance

    Generally sites can be a little slow and occasionally you need to use the refresh button. Traffic gets very slow indeed on Sunday evenings.

    The Chinese are enthusiastic adopters of the ‘net and families often log-on to watch a film or TV programming on a Sunday evening – during this time, website load times noticeably increased and I found video Skype calls worse than useless. So let’s hope that BBC iPlayer doesn’t get too popular in the UK, otherwise reality TV shows may cause the ‘net to grind to a halt. More China related content here.