Set the world at nought

The folklore of black dogs in Yorkshire

2011-10-31T16:41:00.000-07:00

The problem with Hallowe’en is the Americanisation of an ancient festival.

What we fear nowadays has more to do with Hollywood. Forget the Vampires, the werewolves, Frankenstien’s monster, and the return of the mummy.

The forgotten history of the West Riding holds much more frightening things:

Behold the BLACK DOG – a creature to strike fear into the hearts of anyone – well may be not this one. But for many centuries a large Black Dog with glowing eyes could paralyse anyone with terror.

It can also manifest as a demonic Sheep or an enormous black donkey. The black dogs appears at night seeing it would herald the untimely death of someone nearby.

Throughout European mythology, dogs have been associated with death and guardians of the underworld. This association seems to be due to the scavenging habits of dogs.

Just hearing the Berghest is enough to herald the death of a close relative. Try to stop it, and you will only hasten your own demise rather.The name derived from the same term for other bedtime monsters like bogie men and boggerts, the term Berghest comes from burh-Town and ghest–ghost.

But it seems to have Germanic origins - linked to Odin, the leader of the Wild Hunt a lone hunter tracking down a lady of the forest accompanied only by his two dogs.

In Leeds one term for them is Gabble Retchets, or gabriel’s hounds, from the Old English word “ræcc”, meaning a dog that hunts by scent. Appropriated by the church Gabriel is an angel linked to death who serves as a messenger.

As Mother Shipton's Prophecies "For storms will rage and oceans roar, when Gabriel stands on sea and shore, and as he blows his wondrous horn, old worlds die and new be born.”

In 1879, folklorist William Henderson described them as “monstrous human-headed dogs, who traverse the air, and are often heard although seldom seen.” In the neighbourhood of Leeds the phenomenon is held to be the souls of un-baptised children doomed to flit restlessly around their parents’ home.

A man called Nichols, writing in 1828, sai :-'Leeds has it's distinct Padfoots, distinguishable one from another, for almost every street'.

Padfoot, another name for the black dog, come from Wakefield, Leeds, Pudsey, and Bradford The soft padding of feet is first heard before the clanking of chains. It pads softly behind you and if you look back you’d see a shadowy, half-real creature in the hedgerow. Enough to frighten some to death in an instant.

Although dismissed by some as bean geese, In 1664, Reverend Oliver Heywood wrote: “There is also a strange noise in the air heard of many in these parts this winter, called Gabriel-Ratches), the noise is as if a great number of whelps were barking and howling, and ‘tis observed that if any see them that person dies shortly after.”

Whilst One source from Sheffield informed Henderson that “the sound was exactly like the questing of a dozen beagles and highly suggestive of ideas of the supernatural”.

Story is told of a man, whose way being obstructed by the Padfoot, kicked the thing, and was forthwith dragged along through hedge and ditch to his home, and left under his own window.

A man in Horbury saw a white dog in the hedge. He struck at it, and the stick passed through it. He was so "flayed" that he ran home trembling, went to bed, fell ill and died

But is this just a tale from the past? In 1993, a driver saw a large shaggy beast roaming between Horsforth and Rodley, that left him in dread fear for days.

In 2001 in Leeming bar: A large blackdog with no face and floppy ears ran in front of a car with two women in it. The hound pass through the bonnet untouched. A man that the women spoke to once they reached their destination later killed himself.

In 2009, a large black beast was been spotted on the tracks near Burley Park station by railway workers. In 2011 in Carlton, organisers of a rave heard unearthly growls and snarls that appeared to follow them wherever they went but they couldn’t find the source of the noises.

Take care and don’t have nightmares.

How good is your Reputation? Let's make a list

2011-10-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

I can’t help feeling that the Lists function on Twitter is one of the most underused resources on the social media platform.

The problem is that lists evolved after many started using twitter and the early adopters found it too onerous to populate them.

I feel I underuse them and will often find folk who I’ve not categorised in a key list of mine.

One advantage of lists is you don’t have to follow anyone on them but you can get a feed of tweets.

This means a project at work, news feeds or accounts of mild interest can be separated from your main twitter feed, reducing the useless tweets.

I’ve also used them to follow particular events or conferences. In particular, I use the lists to follow the Tour De France by getting the latest reactions from the leading riders as they send them out shortly after each stage. During the stages, the breakaway updates can be tracked at a glance.

But there is another intriguing way of using lists. It is an easy way to look at someone’s reputation and find more about a person or company. It’s also a way you can register a protest, affecting someone’s reputation without their knowledge or ability to change it when they finally cotton on.

So how am I thought of by the good folk of twitter?

Most associate me with my work with 47% linking me to my core industry sectors or recognising my ability to help their business. Even within this list there are positive phrases that help show my reputation; for example “PRs I Like”. I also personally think “Grow my Business” is another list that shows I’m offering them assistance.

My locality accounts for 16% of the lists made about me. They recognise I’m from Leeds although some add me into Wakefield where I have worked in the past and done a fair amount of business. The global nature of Twitter does also show itself as I am also classed as a British tweeter by one account out of the UK.

The next significant grouping is blogging with 1 in 10 listing me related to my blog posts or in relation to the cultural blogs posting I make on this and other blogs.

But 14% of the lists I’m baffled by. What does IRL stand for in relation to me? Or Honk and Towit? What connection do I have with music promotion and why does someone think I am a shop? Answers on a postcard please.

One person does think that I’m cool, which is erm…. pretty cool. (But Just one? Pah)

Most of the rest know me personally and add me as a known friend with only one person sadly following me because of my hobby rowing. I say sadly as I follow quite a lot of people involved in rowing, and they follow me back. I’d have thought more would have listed me.

So what does your twitter listing say about you? May be its your chance to change your output to make people think of you in a different way.

Do companies really value social media?

2011-09-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

Social media is often seen as the panacea, the cheap alternative or that silver bullet to solve a company's problems.

It isn’t any of these things, but a successful social media strategy can make a major impact on the way a company does business.

Because of the transparent and open nature of social media, it can affect a business down to its very core values and change the culture of the staff.

Finding different and effective ways of communicating with customers and stakeholders can turn a good SME into a growing business.

The problem is that some companies see the success of their peers and decide they want a slice of the action.

Social media strategies, particularly among SMEs, are becoming more ‘me too’ and less strategic.
I’ve been involved with projects which owe more to sticking a moist finger in the air than any analysis, benchmarking or realistic targets. 500 followers or likes sounds a good figure to aim at, so that’s the target even if the major competitor with a 2 year old Facebook page only has 125 followers despite a lot of hard graft.

The same goes for the level of investment. Just because a project is “cheap” to set up, labour costs and the intellectual property value of a concept or idea is seriously undervalued. Just because something is cheap to make, doesn’t mean that a fashion brand will charge basement prices.

Look at the adverts for vacancies linked to social media. They often look for someone who can impart a vital board-level vision for the company, deliver campaigns and carry out the day to day management. Sometimes this includes direct reports.

Change the words ‘social media’ for marketing, human resources or accountancy and you’d be looking at a big salary. Yet many firms think they can purchase this strategic knowledge for a wage just above the graduate entry mark.

There are enough examples of companies brought down by poor social media strategy, ignoring customer services, abusive messaging and failing to deal with issues with products despite plenty of people trying to help the business. If Vodaphone can be caught out, then what chance does the local cake shop have?

That said, the local cake shop social media is possibly run by the owner who is sensible, has strategic knowledge and knows their customers inside out. The danger comes when you give the task to a recent graduate because “young folk know about that social media thing.”

There is a massive myth about the capability of twenty somethings with social media. Some understand it, but basing strategic knowledge on keeping in contact with your mates is a very odd concept. They are also good at talking on phones, but does that make them experts on creating voice based information services or a search engine for a mobile based website?

Equally, why does being good at Facebook qualify you for understanding LinkedIn which has a hugely different demographic.

The people who get social media most are thirty to forty year olds. Social media started around 2000 with the growth of forum websites, Friends Reunited, online journals and chat rooms. LinkedIn is over a decade old.

They’ve more need to use technology to keep in contact with school and university friends scattered across the country and the world, rather than a group close to their friends bound by geography.

Equally, the older age group has some commercial experience and acumen. Social media experience is linked to more traditional communications theories and the application of these ideas is complex. Learning how to build a community is an ongoing process, not just a simple process.

And if anyone thinks these are just small companies, its large household names who think that by bringing in a youngster they can transform their business. But even if they were a whizz kid at twenty, if they are adding real value to your business, then paying them a decent wage will retain them for yourself. Do you think the best will stay for £20,000 if someone else values that individual more?

Look at the big brands, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Disney and even B2B firms like Ernst & Young. See how much they invest in social media as a strategic communications tool. They value their campaigns which is why they are happy to spend the money.

So before you join the social media gold rush, stop, think about why you are doing it and check it will be effective for your company. Get advice, benchmark against similar companies inside and outside your industry. Then you need to invest in the right people to manage or create campaigns.

This might be agency or in-house, but really understand what you are asking for versus what you’ll get in return. Remember, if you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys!

Hamlet: The Emotion of movement

2011-09-11T03:30:00.000-07:00

My latest blog can be found on the Culture Vulture's site

When Journalism chased the rainbow

2011-09-05T12:57:00.001-07:00

Social media has changed journalism for good in a number of ways. Whilst many of the changes have been positive, not all the developments have been positive. On balance, does the positive’s still outweigh the negatives?

Ten years ago when the twin towers fell, social media didn’t really exist but online was suddenly became the most important media for the first time. Twenty four hour rolling news could only cover the pictures and the shock of the images on that day overshadowed the level of factual details of the event.

News of loved ones, details of the initial damage and the need to know what else was happening from billions lead to major news corporations drowning in the additional traffic; Message boards overflowing with comments. It was here that a new breed of internet only websites came to the wider public’s attention.
A few years later, the Hudson plane crash broke as hundreds of New Yorkers saw a plane descending at an unerring height – unsure whether it was a repeat or something else. By the time the plane had landed, the story had been recalled across Twitter countless times and the news stations were struggling to get the story.

Even now the pressure on rolling news sees them chase the story, often in vain. I’m regularly hearing about stories, particularly from other countries.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that rolling news is getting it wrong trying to catch up. Take the bomb in Sweden where Sky and the Sun were heralding the arrival of Al Qaida based on assumption upon assumption until they had built a constructed news story on speculation. The same people a few hours later were making similar claims about far right extremism.

Weeks later the riots were blamed on social media, despite social media being blameless – again because of speculation, guesswork and a desire to push the news agenda on.
Journalists feel the pressure to get results, but they are sometimes missing the trick of making the most of the medium you are in. When I trained as a journalist, I learnt that there were three stages to a news story:

• The initial breaking news
• The detail of the incident
• The analysis of the ramifications.

Then, this could mean a story lasts three or more days. Nowadays all three phases are covered off almost concurrently. As the news breaks, the details are assumed and the guests are wheeled on to discuss the assumptions without having had any time to gather their own information on the event. Relying on the news source, their views are skewed from the beginning.

Traditional media is never going to beat social media to the next earthquake. But it has the resource to get reporters to the scene with professional VJs (Video Journalists) relying more accurate and objective reports than the partisan mobile phone videos, however intriguing they are.
The death of radio has been exaggerated for so long now, but radio realised the power of the theatre of the mind. Emotions seem rawer with a detached voice and evocative wildtrack. Print cannot be beaten for double page spreads of stats and visual layouts that are tricky even on a computer screen. Yet journalists are chasing the big story while missing some of the more popular quirky stories by days – something online news sources and scraping services have been taking advantage for years.

The world has changed with social media but the basics of journalism are being lost. Attributing sources are becoming vague or non-existent. This week alone I heard a news story begin “according to reports on Facebook” – not quite the trusted news mole in the home office or facts based on cast iron documentation. Reports need to be checked and double checked. Many of the conspiracy theorists on 9/11 basis their entire fiction on the misreporting of a confusing and ever changing events of that day. It are these inaccuracies that distort the truth and perpetuate myths and fears.

The world of 24 hour news needs to slow down, play on its strengths and not rush past the story before its even begun - ensuring all three stages of reporting are played out. If they don't, then it is the viewers who lose out.

Why Google is still up in the clouds

2011-08-05T13:31:00.000-07:00

Google is a smart, slick organisation and the launch of Google+ demonstrates they’ve put their nouse together with the lessons learnt from previous Social Media launches.

While Google Buzz and Wave were greeted with expectation, they flattered to deceive and became moribund very quickly.

Many of the criticism of the poor interactivity, the lack of applications, the difficulty of friend finding have been addressed with Google+. It’s closer to what one might have expected the first time when Google Wave was announced as a social media game changer.

But we’re over a year on from that time and social media has continued to develop, entrench their audience and gain mainstream acknowledgement.

The problem with Google is they’re chasing other social media and trying to blend the two. Most social media has been developed independently for purposes which are vastly different to their end use.

Twitter was a way for surf dude friends to check the sea conditions and which beaches people were going to. Facebook was a virtual year book system.

Equally, the rise and fall of social media has been sudden and difficult to predict. The loss of MySpace and Bebo show how fickle the industry can be when they find a new way to interact.

Not content with mashing existing social media, Google have also been looking to control how Google+ is being used. They are ensuring that it is a personal user experience, free from corporate or brand led accounts, which have led to accounts being suspended.

It will be interesting to see how industry gets round Googles rules. The adult industry is often the first to find a way. Will the breakout video rooms by full of young ladies who are desperate for a chat? Or will Google shut them down for being unsuitable.

I just feel that no successful social media can grow through interference and controlling how the users want to use the system.

But Google seem to be looking beyond the current and seem to be creating a platform that will be of importance in three to five years time.

Google+ sits as one of a number of tabs on a personal account page for Google. It has no prominence or priority in the navigation over a whole plethora of applications.

Far from being the big part of the offering, it’s a new service branching off the already heavy portfolio of services.

So why is this the case? What seems to be happening is a move towards cloud computing. Buy a laptop, install Chrome and you can run virtually everything without even muttering the name Microsoft.

Google docs, mail and chrome manage your documents, email and internet browsing. Google+ adds in Skype like connectivity and social media channels, with the ability to link pictures and videos stored on YouTube and Picasa. The data is held remotely along with the software keeping operating speeds high, as long as you’ve got a good broadband connection.

Bearing this in mind, it is odd that they aren’t looking at the SMEs who would love this sort of cheap and easy system. May be they are looking at creating a bundle package for consumers further down the road, ending the ad related business model.

Attracting them in and locking their data into the system could lead to long term loyal customers, like the overdrafts offered to students that are hard to clear once the real bank charges kick in after graduation.

The cloud’s the key, and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the future.

Seagull steals a video camera

2011-07-21T03:15:00.000-07:00

Bizarre video of a seagull stealing a camcorder:

A Tour de Force for Twitter

2011-07-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

It tends to be events that show the value of social media. Sometimes these events are unpredictable like the Hudson plane crash, and other times they are scheduled like the inauguration of Barak Obama.

I first found the value of Twitter around this time of year when the Tour de France started.

There’s always been something fascinating to me about this endurance race ever since it started to be broadcast on Channel 4 in the late eighties. Despite not being a cycling aficionado, I’ve watched the race ever since.

But the Twitter dimension brought a whole new way of getting involved in the Le Tour.
It’s one thing watching Laurent Fignon, Miguel Indurain, Sean Kelly, Stephan Roche and Greg Lemond and another to find out how they found the stage, their feelings and how their teams are operating.

For those following Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and Thor Hushovt in the race, you can find out their thoughts regularly. You can understand the races in a greater detail with many riders on Twitter. The teams, media, relations and former pro-cyclists are also giving their opinions. Most use English as a language and some translate their tweets if written in French or Spanish.

I think it was the first time I used the Twitter list function, a much underused feature that allows you to “follow” groups of people without having to add them to your Twitter feed. I quickly built a list of Tour related feeds and followed the race live with commentary during the race and pictures sent in on Twitpic or similar services.

After the stage, there were messages of support, congratulations, commiserations and gamesmanship. Glimpses of what goes on in the team buses and on the warm up are also demonstrated.
There doesn’t seem to be the paranoia of the footballing world with this social media twaddle”.

I suspect part of it is cultural. You’re not going to find a pro-cyclist in a nightclub enjoying a drink with a blonde girl from Big Brother. It demonstrates that most problems with Twitter are created by the account holder not realising who they are engaging with.

The cycling world sees long tours and travel across the world. Twitter allows them to communicate and the eaves-dropping fan gets to see the insight.

But leaving sport aside, it demonstrates what Twitter adds to an event:

1. Insight
2. Images and video
3. A human context
4. ‘As it happens’ commentary
5. Analysis and comment

Follow my list of Tour de France racers here

Social Media storm in a tea cup

2011-07-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

Social media might be the latest fashion in communications strategy, but it doesn’t mean firms full understand how it affects them. There is a necessity for many firms entering the social media scene to evaluate some pretty core and fundamental cultural issues.

The problem is many social media projects are sold as the new must have by agencies or by internal PR functions keen to keep up with the Joneses. It is not normally looked at in greater detail.

While your consumer brand thrives on the boost given by a warm campaign based around giving out freebies, launching competitions and inviting photos, it sometimes hides problems that need to be addressed at planning stage.

Take a look at Twinings. Who could not like this warm and very British company, producing good quality tea and with a slick set of subtle adverts.

However, if you look at their own website there is a torrent of negative user generated comments pouring through, let alone their Facebook site. It seems a change to the blend has upset a large portion of their customer base that dislike the new blend brought in around June.

Looking around the social media sites and through their press release, there seems to be a key part of social media missing. There is nothing which engages with the customers whom find the new blend too lemony for their tastes. The closest to customer support seems to be talk of private correspondence confirming the change in product.

The Customer is Always Right

It might be an old adage, but the inaction is suprising for a brand with growing competition in the specialist tea market. Why would you buy an expensive blend you no longer like? Even if it leads others to experiment with other blends, it’ll lose customers as some will find that the supermarket own brand isn’t too bad.

There’s also a thought that a blend of Earl Grey available through the internet only or via specialist stores might actually retain loyalty. If its YOUR cuppa, then you’d be willing to pay a little more for the experience.

Brands are stronger than products

My other thought was the experience of Coca-Cola when they changed the formula of their drink.

Blind taste testing proved beyond doubt that a new formula was a preferred drink. So changing the
contents of a can should be an easy sell? Right?

We all know that wasn’t the case. The problem was that Coca-cola was the drink of choice for certain people. Changing the experience changed their relationship with the brand and made them sit up and think about why something seen as reliable and safe had changed.

I see the same issue here with Twinings. I’ve no idea which is the “better flavour”, but they’ve created an issue which could have been avoided. The person who buys a slightly different pack, is unsure about it, sits down and tastes the new blend will find their world has been changed a little. This makes them unsure about the world, the brand and the certainty the old blend gave them.

When I worked in radio, a change of DJ would cause a week of complaints, even if it was just for holiday cover. On the original DJs return, the same people would complain about the change.

Coca-Cola has learned from their experience. Have you ever wondered why they have so many diet colas? It’s not just to segment the market. They can launch the new TAB, or Zero cola whilst maintaining the original diet cola. Natural selection dictates whether the market fragments or replaces a moribund brand. Soap Powder companies have been doing it for years.

How could this have been avoided?

Good social media planning can avoid all the issues.

1.Is your organisation happy to be involved in an open, two way relationship with its customers. Not all firms are for reasons ranging from customer service strategy to resources available to quality of product to internal culture.

2.What social media will be entered into, who manages it and how.

3.What protocols do you have in place regarding topics, subjects, who should respond and when.

4.Putting in place a crisis management plan specifically for social media. Remember, silence is not an option and likely to be seen as an admission of guilt, even if you’re blameless.

5.What secondary channels can you use if their social media is flooded. Firms like Google use their blog to overcome torrents of feedback during outages. Traditional media is another useful channel despite obvious fears.

From the looks of it a big brand like Twinings haven’t grasped these five points. Deleting comments from your Facebook site and stoic silence is hardly a good strategy in the age of social media openness. It’s the second storm after an issue regarding the shifting of some operations to Poland and Twinings need to take a long hard look about how they react in future.

Just look at the problems caused to News of the World advertisers on social media. It doesn’t have to be an internal or controllable issue that causes a customer relations crisis.

The problem with good branding

2011-06-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Good branding is obvious and stands out in its environment to get your company’s messages out there in the open.

A well sited poster can direct those messages at thousands of people, creating an easily identifiable product or service.

Despite what people say, they do align themselves with brands even if it is an unconscious action. We all have our favourite snack or preferred clothes shop even if we don’t want their logos emblazoned across the backs.

But what happens when the branding is placed in the wrong environment? Or in the wrong context? How does that message appear?

During a short walk I carry out most days, I’m exposed to branding messages despite the journey taking me next to open fields. Whatever the intention, my personal reaction to the companies is negative.

I’m talking rubbish. The litter left at the side of the road and blown across open fields is something I’ve never been able to understand – far better to have a clean car than an unspoilt countryside?

It isn’t the firm’s fault that their logos are left as an eyesore, but they do have a responsibility. They also have an interest to ensure their brightly coloured logos don’t send the wrong message. It also says a lot about a company’s customers.

Creating Market segmentation through a litter survey

So just who are these litter louts? One technique is to look at trying to create a profile based on the information available. This is hardly a precise way of looking at things, but it does create interesting results.

So what did I find? Cigarette butts everywhere; left, right and centre. The brands are too indistinct to be noticed.

Discarded smoking packets were brand specific. Richmond, B&H and Lambert & Butler seemed to make up virtually all of the packets found. I could name a number of brands, but I didn’t see any of their packets.

The most noticeable was McDonalds. Cups, meal boxes and bags seemed to be everywhere. Interestingly, I didn’t notice any KFC litter despite having the same number of restaurants in the locality.

Snacks made up the majority of the litter. Coca-Cola, Tango, Fanta, Robinson’s flavoured water seem to be the drinks of choice with takeaway coffee cups also prevalent.

Walker’s crisps packets and multi-pack bag wrappers making up a sizeable portion of the snack rubbish. There was surprisingly few chocolate bar wrappers, and some litter from Jellybeans.
Larger cans made a few appearances through the undergrowth with Fosters seemingly the brand of choice.

From this we can create a profile of a thirst, larger drinking McDonald’s fan who likes Walkers crisps and smokes one of the two brands mentioned. You can imply age, sex and demography to a certain extent. The danger is to create a single profile, where there might be two or three.
One question I have is whether this profile could be replicated or whether it is particular to the route. Having lived in the countryside I’d suspect more the former.

Equally, although the litter is everywhere, it’s not a huge amount suggesting that the problem is caused by relatively few individuals.

So what are the solutions?

Packaging is far from straightforward. It’s quite interesting to look at the McDonald’s coffee cup which is much less obvious than many other items of its packaging. Its muted green still does stand out in the correct environment, but is a little more hidden in the long grass. Clever design can be invaluable.

Degradability is a red herring. Products can take around a year to degrade even if it’s degradable. It can help, but is far from being an answer. Litter bins? I doubt they’d help. Some research shows a badly placed bin can create litter problems by attracting too much rubbish for the level of collection available.

Education is the best solution. I remember my father challenged some youths dropping litter, and they politely suggested it was keeping someone in a job. Litter pickers don’t work in the countryside and even community service projects cover an insignificant portion of our roads and pathways.

It is somehow easier to drop, even when it’s not, because it’s ingrained. I’ve not really seen any campaign by leading companies to tackle the issue or fund it. Possibly they think the halo effect of litter is too bad to go near in case it admits liability.

The alternative is to shame the companies into helping educate the public, particularly the young, through surveying the brands that leave the litter. The survey could even be linked to school projects clearing an area near them.

Or even better, could the local McDonalds create this sort of campaign to reduce their share of the litter and educate the kids at the same time.

Too often litter education is untargeted and by looking at the rubbish dropped we can start to identify where to target education. Equally punitive measures like a rubbish tax affects all companies. The most interesting thing in my small scale survey was the brand specific nature of the rubbish.

And finally, if it is you who has dropped the litter, carry it a little bit further and drop it in a bin.

A sculling boat tour of the river Aire

2011-06-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

This is the fabulous view of the River Aire between Hirsts Mill and the aquaduct just before Bingley five rise locks.

Strapped on to the stern of a sculling boat, its a fantastic view of the 700m or so that makes up Bradford Amateur Rowing Club's stretch of water.

The sound of the water moving past the hull is very hypnotic.

A portrait of Naomi Jacob: A true Yorkshire character

2011-06-13T07:52:00.001-07:00

This is the story of Naomi Jacob, possibly one of the biggest Yorkshire characters of the twentieth century and I want to revive her name. I do have a vested interest as she was my great great Aunt.

With a gruff Yorkshire accent and well known for wearing men’s clothes, she was often mistaken for JB Priestley. But she was best known a prolific author, playwright, journalist, broadcaster, actress and a political activist.

Known as Micky, she is best known as a writer. Walk down the large print section of any library, if they haven’t been shut down, and you’ll find many of the 80 plus books she wrote in a 30 year career.

Unfairly compared to pulp fiction authors like Barbara Taylor Bradford or Barbara Cartland, she tackled issues such as anti Semitism in the 1930s when many authors were barred from producing works on this subject. This is possibly due to the fact that it was seen as women’s fiction rather than serious, weighty literature.

In 1935 she won the Eichelberger Prize for "services to humanity" but was forced to reject the accolade because she shared it with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Naomi grew up in Ripon; the granddaughter of two time mayor Robert Ellington Collinson and owner of the Unicorn hotel. Her father Samuel Jacob was the son of a Jewish Taylor who had escaped the pogroms of Western Prussia and settled in Towcester. He had converted to Catholicism, had become a teacher and moved to Ripon to become the headmaster at the Ripon Grammar school.

But Naomi became the daughter of divorced parents when her mother left her father due to his unreasonable behaviour.

Her mother and sister left for the south and, later, on to New York. Naomi wanted to stay in school and moved around a fair bit. She finally went to a school in Middlesborough where she became a student teacher on leaving.

It was during her time at school when she fell in love with the theatre. Repremanded for wearing trousers and for her care of her pupils beyond the classroom, she soon lost her job and became a PA for a music hall star.

She was the married Marguerite Broadfoote and Naomi also became her lover. She slowly climbed the ranks to become a successful character actress, mainly in rep. But Micky loved the music hall –knowing all the great names like Little Titch, Fred Karno, Vesta Tilley and Dan Leno. Other people she associated with were the Gielguds, Du Mauries, Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt.

Marie Lloyd was another of her friends and shortly after her death, she wrote the first official biography. One close friend said of the book “[Naomi Jacob] doesn’t let facts get in the way of the truth.” Although some have questioned the accuracy of the book, it remains true to Marie Lloyds spirit and a truer image can be brought to life by reading it.

Naomi also had a political side to her, standing as a Labour PPC despite coming from a staunch Tory background. She was also a suffragette, Once sealing a clock in a biscuit tin and leaving it on the holiday home of then Prime Minister Lloyd George’s seaside retreat. The bomb was made safe when a panicked aide found the ticking device and hurled it into the sea.

When World War one, “Micky” claims she fooled the navy and joined as a male rating. She also spent time in the women’s corp managing a munitions factory.

TB took hold, an illness which would take her to Lake Garda in Italy, an enforced exile where she started writing with the stage no longer a long term option. Here she lived in the British ex-pat community with her Pekinese Sammy, associating along with people like Radclyffe Hall, the celebrated actor, who lived there with her partner Una Troughbridge, a woman Micky had a serious crush on.

During the Second World War, she came back to England working for the Minister of Information and then for ENSA near the front line, where she contracted Malaria.

She returned to Italy and at one stage was asked to bring her papers to the town hall under German occupation. The daughter of a Jew, she marched in and demanded they mark her papers as such, embarrassing the town’s officials and ordered to leave without the J being stamped on her documents.

Micky had also helped the many Jewish refugees in her home in Sirmione during the ends of the conflict, a fact I only recently learnt from an article on CNN’s ireport.

This stubborn Yorkshire women lived out the rest of her life in Italy, writing cook books on Italian food (“boil past for 30mins”), churning out novels and returning for many appearances on Woman’s Hour.

How many other strong regional accents featured on key BBC programming around this time?

It’s time we took another look at a truly remarkable Yorkshire woman.

But the story is not over with one of her books turned into a movie script. What an end to the story if the project were to get financial backing for a major film?

(Adadpted from a presentation for Bettakultcha: Bradford)

Why injunctions are an outdated solution

2011-05-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

I doubt many people in the country are really that interested in the love life of Ryan Giggs particularly if you consider the the personal issues faced by many of his team mates and peers in the premier league.

The Daily Mash parodied the fact that it is hardly an earth shattering news story.

Yet the story has been played out for weeks. Even before the discussion about injunctions rose, the rumour mill had been churning out suggestions over the Manchester United player.

Like cats, curiosity is something most people have as a nagging urge in the back of their mind. Who was it and why keep it secret? Why an injunction? It’s this that has driven the media frenzy. My cat certainly hates a closed door.

The world has been changing subtly over the last ten or so years. With the information age has come a democratisation of facts, statistics and documentation. With the world opening up, the old tried and trusted tactics of the crisis manager have changed.

Many companies have learnt that clamming up is costly and it’s not the first time that an injunction or super injunction has caused this type of furore. A similar thing happened with Trafigura, one of the world’s biggest oil traders who put an injunction in place over claims made by The Guardian that waterways were being polluted in the Ivory Coast.

The barring of comment brought anger, recrimination and a serious vault face by Trafigura and their law firm Carter Ruck. This damage of reputation was worse than the investigation itself. Not only was there a slur on their names, but there was a concerted effort to cover it up.

That’s basically what an injunction is and an individual or organisation has to think really hard about why they are using an injunction and what it will achieve. In a blackmail case it would be justified, particularly if someone was being set up. Equally there might be genuine privacy issues at heart.

Playing away, in my mind, isn’t a privacy issue. It is a choice that individuals have made and normally the actions caused are made in public buildings like hotels rather than in the home. Equally, if you do something wrong, you face the prospect of being found out. Trying to obscure and hide your identity from your wife and children is a choice unavailable to most and hardly a just cause.

The easiest way to prevent a crisis situation is not to get yourself buried in one voluntarily. If a situation arises, you have two options. Silence or honesty.
In the older days it was easier to assess the situation. Who knew what, what evidence there is and how would a situation arise? A journalist asking uncomfortable questions would be trying to find a fact he can’t prove by bluffing and bravado. Ignoring journalists and carrying on regardless used to be the best way.

Nowadays with more information, it is easier to request information and search documents which may or not prove guilt. It is far more practicable to be honest and open. It not only makes businesses think more about the decisions they make but it also impacts on their social responsibilities in the community.

Corporate Social Responsibility has been seen as a smoke screen for business decisions. BP still has the oil tankers which claim to be carbon neutral. But true Corporate Social Responsibility goes to the heart of a business, its values and its brand. Footballers, too, have a brand image linked to countless sponsors desperate for their endorsement. Brand Giggs is/was a wholesome family man, active with charities and a vital part of a big team.

So he, and possibly his advisors, tried the closed door approach to crisis management to protect the reputation of the Giggs brand. At the point the information was to come out, Giggs instead should have taken a different course of action. He needed to tell those closest to him the situation and what was to happen. He needed to manage the information flow, possibly getting an “exclusive” with a tabloid. The reaction would be "oh dear, another footballer in trouble, now where’s the news."

Being honest, open and holding up your hands is more of a virtue than running for cover at the first sign of trouble. What has made it worse is the litigious second half of this situation – the legal disclosure request from Twitter and the potential contempt of court. Telling people who believe in free speech to shut up and stop mentioning his name isn’t going to do anything other than infuriate that group. It is against the public interest to prosecute en masse thousands of people for a widely circulated rumour.

There have been similar issues over graffiti before social media, proving knowledge outside court injunctions. If one person is selected, it is then seen as a malicious prosecution: “why only me?”. If the originator of the rumour is ever found, how can you prove their knowledge of the injunction and that they hadn’t found out another way. Looking at the twitter account mentioned in the media, it looks like a list of guesswork, parody and speculation rather than someone with any real knowledge.

Is West Yorkshire the Centre of the art world?

2011-05-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

The opening of The Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield is set to place West Yorkshire as a must see destination for anyone serious about twentieth century art. The new collection will bring some of Barbara Hepworth’s finest works to the former mining town, just a few miles away from another major sculpture gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Add in the David Hockney exhibition at Salts Mill and the Leeds Art Gallery and it makes it a compelling region for modern and abstract art from Francis Bacon to Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer to Anthony Gormley.

The project creates a home for Barbara Hepworth’s work in her home town. Many of the works have been in storage at other museums like the Tate or which could not be displayed at the other Hepworth property in St Ives.

The involvement of David Chipperfield in the project also demonstrates the importance of the facility. One of the world’s leading architects has built a bespoke gallery allowing fine views and buckets of natural light to show off the works to their best.

Having visited the building before the installation of the works, I can safely say the interior is simply stunning for art works and is breathe taking. The exterior is more up for debate. The building does connect with the industrial landscape both on land and the canalised river.

Locally it is seen as a drab concrete building in amongst other drab, concrete buildings. The Hepworth sees it as a sculptural design which changes with the light. I’m somewhere in the middle. The design of the building is an interesting jumble of shapes, however it gets lost in the 1970s concrete flats and industrial buildings. A cream Mediterranean colour would make it otherworldly and improve the environment – but maybe I’m missing the point.

The Hepworth also has the advantage of being a stone’s throw from the mainline from London King’s Cross. It makes it an easy day trip, or even weekend escape, from the capital. Those used to the London galleries will get an opportunity to see a different environment. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a world away from the Tate Modern in display space and more in harmony with the type of environment Hepworth and Moore’s work were often placed – the civic parks of the British Isles and beyond. Salts Mill is another distinctive gallery.

But what makes Hepworth and Moore special. They brought modernism into sculpture, creating works that were based on natural curves and form. The works increasingly became more abstract but still gave the impression of figures, life and vibrancy. They are appealing to the eye and the touch, using a range of materials from wood to bronze to plaster. There is also a bringing together of classic art and the sort of work Picasso might do, but in three dimensions.

Hopefully the opening will bring a focus on the region’s art and its national importance. With free entry this can only help to inspire the region’s new breed of artists. It will also be interesting to see how it can inspire the young children taken along, with no preconceptions of art. In an area with high youth unemployment and low aspiration, may be it will inspire Wakefield’s children to see what education can do for you.

It will also bring economic benefits to the region. Wakefield is particularly in need of a boost to make it a worthy centre of modern art studies.

The Hepworth Wakefield
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Leeds Art Gallery
Salts Mill

A fascinating video from The Guardian (If a little over edited).

Images: The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery, The interior of The Hepworth Wakefield and Juame Plensa's work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Why the Liberal Democrats need to rebrand and communicate a new message

2011-05-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

Communication should be at the heart of all politics. Communication isn’t a one way broadcast to the people. It’s a two way process where information flowing to the politicians should actually take precedent. They are the people’s representatives and are meant to represent their constituents.

At a local level, the Liberal Democrats have had a fine pedigree of taking on local issues, listening to the people and delivering a policy that won favour from the people. The local councillors probably paved the way for Lib Dem success at a general election level, particularly in by-elections.

It seems odd, then, that the party has been dogged by the national party and personality issues rather than the local fight on the doorsteps. In fact, it’s this variable message which has seen the party criticised over the years. The party is different in its grass roots policy making and it is this disconnection with the traditional Lib Dem members and the group of MPs that is making this worse.

In the weeks preceding the elections, the Lib Dem MPs were parading the party line as if there was no problem. People like Norman Baker and Sarah Tether were suggesting that the reports that grass roots supporters were unhappy with reforms to the NHS, tuition fees and the depth of cuts were untrue. Surely this tack was just sticking in the craw of potential voters and the results bear this out.

Norman Baker used to be the attack dog holding Governments to account through a ruthless search for factual evidence to undermine unfairness.

But why hasn’t this affected the Tory vote? Well, basically, their supporters are quite happy with the small government approach. There aren’t the issues which clash with the manifesto which the Lib Dem’s have. Equally, the party is not supposed to divert its attentions too much from the straight and narrow.

In areas like Chesterfield, a majority of 26 has turned into a Labour majority of 20 seats. In Barnsley, the Liberal Democrats had a lower share of the popular vote than the BNP. At the time of writing, the Party were approaching losses of some 500 councils. In Scotland the Liberal Democrats have a quarter of the seats they had last time.

So what are the issues which could have improved the situation?

Before the government was formed there were problems. The deal struck entwined the Liberal Democrats into the government inextricably. The coalition was a whipped single front with little room for dissent, disagreement or a clear division of responsibility.

Since then, the Liberal Democrats have been paraded when there’s bad news, the Conservatives when it’s good irrespective of who came up with the ideas to resolve the situation. The confusion has caused much negative press, often going against the impression voters had of their aims and objectives.

Had the Liberal Democrats taken a different approach, they could have followed the Northern Irish example. There, the coalition partners could not be more diverse and it works because departments are run by one party or the other, coming together as a cabinet. This means there is autonomy and clear accountability. It wasn’t us - the other lot run that department.

Second, the party has barely mentioned that they cannot influence the government fully. They have made some positive contributions to “toning down” the Conservative policy, but they also have less mandate and less people to push the points. If the Conservatives want to do something, they will. Rather than stand up and say this is a Tory policy we are supporting purely to get other policy through, they pretend to support the initiative.

Thirdly, they are not used to mudslinging. They put forward positive stories that have been swamped by negative focus on Nick Clegg by the Conservative supporting allies.

And finally, what makes the Lib Dem’s distinctive from the Conservatives? Because they are so entwined, the public don’t know what they stand for any more. Before the coalition, you might have felt the Liberal Democrats stood for Education and supporting the student. That group has been lost and there is no direct approach to win them back. Standing on a platform of no tuition fees and ending up trebling them, even if there are advantages to the system, could only lead to disillusionment.

So what should they do?

Listen – What are members and former members wanting.
Engage – Rather than blindly follow opinion, discuss the situation with key groups in, for example, the argument over the NHS reforms and make strategic alliances to force reform.

Differentiate – Put forward a policy document that shows voters what Liberal Democracy stands for in the coalition. It needs to be distinctive from the Tory view and show the divisions in policy making. It can’t be woolly and needs to be substantive, based on real action.

Claim Ownership – Take sovereignty over issues in the government or at least argue to be given power that makes it clear what difference they are making.

Ditch Clegg – It might not happen straight away, and it might not all be his fault, but it was he who agreed to a raft of policies that go against their own manifesto. He is the scapegoat who can hold his hands up, say mia culpa, and refresh the ‘old’ party vision.

And if they don't? Well the Greens are making some strong gains....

How telling stories can improve your reputation

2011-05-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

Stories are as old as the hills and such a simple way of communication. A good yarn can create a positive narrative that reaches across audiences, let alone across generations. Some of the oldest tales have lived on thanks to their ability to capture emotion and imagination despite the lack of written records.

The Bible, the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, many of the Roman histories all record stories that existed many centuries prior to their publication. Although details may have changed like Chinese whispers, central themes remain the same.

Everyone has a story or two to tell, and while my mother’s tales might get taller with every retelling, there’s a value to repeating them for entertainment, information and education. Even the most simple story can have a learning point as I mentioned in my blog before

So at the Harrogate 4N meeting, I decided to tell a story about myself to illustrate how stories say a great deal more than you may at first think.

How I saved the life of a celebrity donkey

As a sixteen year old, I delivered the newspapers around my village. Being a rural community, some of the homes were farms a mile or so from the next nearest house. The final house on my route was a fair old walk or cycle from the rest of my route.

At the top of the long winding drive, a donkey stood in the middle of the main road; quite motionless. Being on the brow of a hill and a blind bend, I feared this donkey was soon to cause one almighty accident. Assuming the beast had escaped the paddock of the house down the drive, I struggled to haul the donkey off the road.

Donkey’s aren’t called stubborn for nothing. After Struggling for ten minutes I had barely got the animal off the busy main road, and a further quarter of an hour later I was at the front door of the owner’s house.

A knock on the door early on a Sunday morning was not greeted warmly by the home’s owner, a dress maker to the Queen, who opened his bedroom and telling me to buzz off and stop waking him up. When I explained I’d returned his ass safely, he was even less enamoured with my Sunday morning alarm call.

I had drawn his attention to the noble stead now merrily munching on his best border plants whilst I was at the door. I quickly found out the donkey was not his property. A long haul back up the drive, and a similar stubborn journey down the next led me to discover this, too, was not the animal’s home. At least this was a proper farmer and he agreed to take the donkey and ring the police’s “Missing Donkey” department.

I thought nothing more about the incident until I looked at the front page of the local weekly newspaper the following Thursday. A large chunk was devoted to the sad tale of a Donkey, used in the filming of Tots TV, a programme from the same stable as Tellytubbies and In the Night Garden. The programme originally had a pony and donkey in it, but the pony had died. Mourning the loss, the donkey escaped its paddock and was found several miles away. The newspaper credited the discovery of the TV donkey by a local farmer, quoting his thoughts on the discovery.

So what does this actually teach us about Stories?

- One learning point is there are different versions of the same story. My story was the stubborn beast refusing to move, and the struggle to make the animal safe. The newspaper focussed on the sad tale of loss and reconciliation.

- If you don’t tell your side a story first, you might find someone else distorts the story, getting in first. This could be a corporate competitor.

- Stories are based on emotion and emotive issues. Even a big business story is about creating jobs and communities, and not about how many noughts are written on the contract.

- Stories tend to have a hook early on – in my case you want to find out more about why the donkey is a celebrity and what happened. Normally the first line or headline encapsulates the whole story.

- Stories have a halo effect on an individual or organisation. How do I come out the story? Caring, determined, struggling against the odds, sympathetic.

- If you have a message, make sure your stories reflect any relevant key messages you are trying to enlighten people about.

Public relations is about managing reputations and stories can help develop and build a reputation. The best stories are based on real life and true experience. Describing untruths as reality are also damaging to reputations. What I’ve discovered talking to people in business is how mangy good stories there are, and how little mileage businesses make of them. The times they’ve saved another person’s bacon, gone way past the extra mile yet failed to tell their customers and potential customers.

The image is taken from The Donkey Sanctuary, a worthwhile charity helping to protect the animals from abuse around the world.

A Fresh Look at Creativity

2011-04-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

This story begins with a young man, quite an ordinary, unremarkable man. And it’s all true.

Brought up in a large family, the eldest of five.

The most interesting thing about him is that his father has an interest in local politics.

He grew up in the same town as me – a small market town and again quite unremarkable.

Here it is – this is where he spent all of his early years.

Not much else to do growing up here.

He even went to the same school as me …… although not in the same year.

Unlike me, he crawled into school like a snail, reluctantly carrying his satchel which weighed him down – And he left with no qualifications.

Whilst still a teenager, he pursued a woman almost ten years older than him until she caught him. Quite literally.

But there was good reason. His wife was carrying his first child and this was very much the shotgun wedding.

The marriage had been rushed forward and there were rumours he’d actually proposed to another woman around the same time.

So six months after he exchanged rings with his wife, along comes Susanna.

No qualifications, married reluctantly to a woman much older than him and now a father. Life wasn’t easy.

He scraped by as a farm hand, often surviving on the charity of his in-laws farm a few miles away. How embarrassing.

Stone broke, so what do you do. You have two more children over the next three years.
And it wasn’t just hard for him. His Father is declared bankrupt and narrowly avoids a prison term.

It’s around now that he fell in with the wrong crowd.

And when I mean the wrong crowd, we’re not just talking about shoplifting and petty thefts. A few years later this lot were caught attempting to bomb the capital.

Our man was eventually caught stealing from one of the big houses in the area,

It was around this time he went missing. Nobody had seen him for about a decade, enough time for the heat to have died down.

What happened during this time is still a mystery. Some say he hid out in Lancashire, others say he went abroad.

But, Just like Dick Whittington, he turns up in London as a bit part actor – as far away from the West End as you could imagine.

He banded together with some friends and they created their own theatre company.

Performing in a theatre which backed onto a street full of brothels.

A good start so far isn’t it – but this is where he started to invent.

Being a young man and jobbing actor near the pubs and bordellos of London, he can seriously lay claim to having invented addiction in his evenings, followed by arousal and, finally, puking by the end of the night.

But he did invent some real things – the Blanket - imagine bedtime without one.

Most people have eyes, and half the population have balls – but this man put them together and invented Eyeballs,

And he even invented the alligator – imagine how you’d say see you later without them?

These creations have led him to developing one of Britain’s biggest industries, worth a cool £1bn a year.

That’s the same amount as the snow damage caused to the UK in December

The equivilant to the “grey” economy in Wales, or over 400 Valley Parade Stadia.

His inventions have inspired thousands of others including writers, dramatists, composers and choreographers.

Here are just some of the people he inspired –some you might not want to have him inspired but inspire them he did.

Yet he’s commonly described as a crow, a fraud, a plagiarist, an upstart
Often seen as irrelevant, inaccessible boring and stayed. There was even a pamphlet questioning his sexuality.

Some people claim his work was never created by him.

The person is William Shakespeare, possibly the most influential person in the Western World.

The terrorists were part of the gunpowder plot and he didn’t abandon his family, making regular trips back from the capital.

But why this subject –I wanted you to take a fresh look at him and his achievement.

We often get lost in the language and forget he was a real man.

He brought common language to the arts – or as he called them, household words.

It is not the plays, but the words, the rhythm, the vocabulary and emotion. It’s not always easy but it is almost 500 years old.

Take Anthony and Cleopatra – two of the great leaders – yet Shakespeare makes them talk like an old married couple.

And look at his start in life – he wasn’t the high achiever and while he wasn’t the poorest in society, it was still a meteoric rise.

Take a fresh look at the young people in your life and see how you can inspire them to achieve greatness.

A recent survey in Wakefield found it wasn’t attitude and laziness of teenagers that created youth unemployment, but the stifling of creativity by parents, friends and relatives.

And for those who ask why it’s relevant today, in Bradford, I can only thank the RSC.

His Birthday is celebrated on the nearest Saturday to the 23rd of April – only this year, due to commercial reasons, they’ve shifted it to the 30th.

And the Rosemary? The herb of remembrance mentioned in Hamlet by Ophelia.

To finish, some other inventions of Shakespeare’s we couldn’t do without.

What would Science Fiction be like without Wormholes – time travel from the 15th century.

What would Britain’s Got Talent be like without Buzzers? Breakfast without Skimm’d Milk Or Mary Poppins without the Chimney Pot.

Even my own Blog, Set the World at Nought, is inspired by Shakespeare, although he stole the line from a prayer by St Thomas More.

So remember to wear your sprig of rosemary, like the townsfolk of Stratford will be, on Saturday.

Review: Where's Your Mama Gone

2011-04-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that struck me when I was a publishing student was the understanding that the white space around text on a page is as important as the black squiggles that form the words. So what struck me when walking out of Where’s Your Mama Gone was what wasn't said in the play which is as important and powerful as the words of spoken by the cast of six at the Carriageworks in Leeds.

The play is only half the story and it is the questions and thoughts that leave with you out of the door that are almost as important to the work as the performance itself – but this is only possible by experiencing the play. The set also has this quality - A plain black stage, with black chairs and harsh white lighting, focusing attention on the players and their words without distraction.

There was an added dimension during the performance. Richard McCann.

Richard is the son of Wilma McCann, the first of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims and it was his book Just A Boy that inspired Brian Daniels to write the play. It was what Richard didn't say as he quietly left the auditorium that was important. A tacit approval, a shared experience and slight smile at the end of what must have been a deeply moving experience for him. On Twitter he commented that it was a: “Bloody powerful play, for me and some of the acting was extremely close to reality.”

The play, set in Leeds, tells the story of non-identical twins Stephen and Carol and the effect the murder of their mother. It deals with how they deal with the stigma of being “Kath Connor's” and how there life was dominated by what was missing and unseen. The flip side of the play shows the story of a serial killer, his motivations and his background.

While there is a macabre interest in the serial killer, it is a tough subject and yet it is surprisingly unusual to have a work focusing on the aftermath and the individual.

Having only had a few previews, Charlie Harrison and Emma Gordon have developed a powerful on stage relationship in the lead roles. Despite the deliberate physical mismatch, there quickly becomes a genuine family bond and togetherness which allowed the pair to create a microcosm of their own on stage. A protective bubble that sees the other characters interacting with their world rather than with the twins as individuals. Like the proton and the neutron, they get agitated the closer they are, yet the more distant they are, gravity brings them back together.

The timeline is mixed but the story flowing, taking you on the journey through their lives but losing the sense of stability and home, what Brian Daniels' calls heritage. Loss is a big part of the work and the characters spend most of the play searching for faint memories and something that isn’t there. Most of the Dialogue is delivered in monologue, interrupting the action and giving the innermost thoughts of the characters. But even in the monologue there is a feeling you aren’t getting the whole story. The feeling that Stephen and Carol cannot be honest about what lurks in the dark part of their mind.

Brian Daniels acknowledges there are more themes running through the play than you can deal with, but that is a consequence of the situation rather than a desire to cram more in. Serial killers, institutionalisation, care homes, abuse, broken homes, community, loss, family ties, addiction, domestic violence, drugs and more are touched upon. The way Carol jokes about being beaten and sexually abused by her father in a throw away comment could almost be the subject for a play in itself. But it is just a phrase within a sentence - the white space on the page.

The play turns on a scene between the Serial Killer and twin Stephen during a prison visit. Will Fox gives a compelling performance as Peter Sutton. He walks a fine line between normality and madness. It would be easy to ham up the performance of such an obvious villain, but there is just a hint of something not right which makes his performance chilling. It is the similarities he has with the twins that are as disturbing as the differences.

The twin’s mother haunts the play. Carolyn Eden plays her character on stage and you get the feeling she is of her time background. Again, there is a fine line in her character between caring mother and street worker.

Seeing Christa Ackroyd in the play as herself also adds an interesting dimension. Having trained as a journalist in Leeds and worked the patch, I met a lot of journalists who worked at the time of the ripper and a few policemen. She is someone who experienced the fear of the ripper as a young female reporter, not only a potential victim, but someone talking to the victims’ families.

Like the play, there’s a lot to cover and there is a danger of over running. However, Brian Daniels' play feels slightly unfinished. Again, this is deliberate. You could add twenty more minutes and the feeling would be the same. The characters will carry on being haunted the whole of their life, but the ray of hope offered is how they chose to accept their legacy and deal with their emotions.

A new play with limited stage time means there will be more improvement and development. The scene changes need smoothing out as the flow often slipped between scenes. I’d also liked to have seen more use of the sound effects used very well but so sparingly. The comic relief is needed and needs polishing to bring it to the forefront. But these are small gripes and it will be interesting to see the show closer to the end of its run.

Where’s Your Mama Gone isn’t a performance you watch as pure entertainment but it is an experience worth going through. After the applause, you can tell it has made people think as the normal chatter is replaced with near silence as they contemplate what they’ve seen.The play runs until the 28th May at The Carriageworks Theatre, Leeds.

Some of the issues tackled can be summed up in Richard McCann's self written article here.

The Alternative View on the Alternative Vote

2011-04-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

The problem with the debate on AV is the ridiculous position about which is best. In reality there is little difference between the systems being offered with marginal benefits. But the nub of the issue is that this could have serious implications for individuals and parties as many seats swing on such small margins.

Both sides have explained the systems poorly and it seems to be missing the point. Rather than focus on the benefits of AV and First Past The Post (FPTP), we need to look at the failures of both systems and work out which is our least disliked system, rather than our preferred systems.

First past the post gives the result to the person with more votes than anyone else. AV gives the result to the person 50% or more prefer to be the candidate.

The flip side is that FPTP can mean that people with 30-40% of the vote can win despite the majority voting against. Hazel Blears is a case in point. Equally, with low turn outs, you don’t necessarily get a clear indication of preference. Look at the Welsh devolution vote when the yes campaign was determined by 24% of the population.

Equally AV is seen as a system that rewards the 2nd best option and although you might want candidate A, you’ll actually promote candidate B through your 2nd preference because you prefer them to Candidate C.

People already carry out a form of AV when they tactically vote. They discount their preferred choice and put a cross on their 2nd/3rd preference as their least worst option.

The statistical evidence on various forms of democracy from people like Richard Lipsey and Kenneth Arrow shows that it is the least bad system, and your choice is effectively what you consider the least bad.

Let’s debunk some myths:

In a huge number of parliamentary seats, there will be no difference between AV and First Past the Post. Look at a place like Barnsley. There will be over 50% of the electorate wanting a Labour candidate possibly until the end of time itself. It’s pointless even bothering to put a number next to a second or third place vote.

The overall result is still decided via first past the post. Get 50% of the seats and you have an overall majority – even if your share of the vote is lower than 50%.

The BNP votes count more than everyone else’s. There are two points here. First, no they don’t. Secondly it’s a massive assumption to believe that, however horrid they are, that the BNP will be the last placed. In my Pudsey Constituency it was UKIP, in my parents it was the English Democrats, Green party and an Independent and where I went to University it was The Animal Protection Party. The BNP stood at two of these hustings.

Secondly, the system says if you vote for a numpty party, then they get disqualified for being unrepresentative – now pick a proper party. It does not ‘reward’ facists with an extra vote, only make the minority parties less single issue.

What about the Cost issue? A few hours extra on to the hourly costs of running an election can’t be much. Most are volunteers using council owned property so where’s the cost? Oh, the fancy electronic booths that no one will buy, let alone use. This could also be claimed back by other reforms set to cut the cost of campaigns.

It is unimportant what Nick Clegg thinks, or Ed Milliband, Or David Cameron. What makes more sense, selecting what you want or “trying to upset Cameron/Clegg” and not selecting what you want; frankly a bizarre state of affairs. Yet I imagine many confused (by the campaigning) and ignorant voters will select their preference this way.

Apparently, it will make two party politics a thing of the past really? And is this such a bad thing? I notice the Scottish parliament in grave strife at the moment. Oh! wait, it seems to work fine. There seems to be confusion over tribal loyalty to a party and how politics works. Just because other voices are heard in parliament, doesn’t make it bad. Nor do parties who work together negatively affect the party.

The campaigns will be based on ‘appealing to everyone’. At the moment, British politics is so negative and mudslinging that anything is an improvement. But AV doesn’t really change much. If you have a passionate belief, it’s as likely to win you votes as blanding out a campaign to the lowest common denominator. Does no-one actually see how voting happens on reality TV shows? They spend more time being passionate about how there pet budgie died when they were 7 than demonstrating any talent. Those with no passion and plenty of talent get voted out.

As we’ve come to complex voting systems. Firstly neither is difficult and if the public can fathom out the random rule changes of I’m a celebrity, they can work out how to count to five. This doesn’t mean that this is the preferred choice, merely it isn’t an argument against.

The final myth is that we need change. It’s not desperate and FPTP has worked well enough for a few centuries and will for a few more as well.

The point about the vote is that it isn’t a choice. It’s a Cameron stunt to prove no one wants voting reform when it’s clear that it needs looking into. There are about three alternative voting systems not even being considered that most the No2AV campaigner Lord Owen would prefer.

Contemplating Jaume Plensa

2011-04-11T03:42:00.000-07:00

Normally when I sit down to write up a blog of an event or happening, I like to sit down straight away and relate the experience while the memories are still fresh in my mind.

Due to a hectic four days, I've not been able to this time and, in a way, I'm glad because I've reflected on the Jaume Plensa exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is also fitting as, in his introduction, Jaume told us "We do not spend enough time in our own space just thinking."

This is demonstrated by a pair of glass brick boxes, just smaller than a telephone booth, that both cut you off from the outside world yet are open and airy. I thought that entering the box would be claustrophobic but far from it. The muffled sounds of the outside world and bright lit space was calming and a place to think, even if its thinking of nothing.

Jaume also said the themes of his work were the self and in the confusion caused by conflicting communication channels that dominate our lives. I personally felt the work was more of the self.

Despite promising to visit for more years than I can remember, this was my first visit to the sculpture park. Jaume Plensa's imposing crouched figures make an impact from the moment you enter the park, with a figure high on a plinth. The figures placed in the park look part of the outstanding scenery across the Valley despite being far from natural.

The silvery bodies view the vistas in calm reflection as if considering themselves and their lives, taking inspiration from their surroundings. Made of letters, these stunning and lifelike sculptures are meant to show how something as simple as a letter turns to a word, sentence, idea and on to being something more like a book.

And this is where my own reflections come in to play. The day after my visited, I was at Twycross Zoo with my family. The zoo specialises in caring for monkeys and I saw how they, like the statues, sat crouched with their arms wrapped around their legs contemplating their surroundings. Monkey's also see a smile as threatening behaviour and they show happiness when relaxed and with a downward turn to the mouth.

Thinking about the pieces in the Yorkshire Scultpure Park, it shows how Jaume Plensa has created something primal and slightly melancholic. But the melancholy isn't something sad, but just a reflective mood that shows a future hope and renewal of spirit.

One of the pieces is made from mesh and have a ghostly quality. You can never quite see them and the they don't impinge on the view but are always there and present. Another sees a series of figures hugging saplings in a quiet area of the gardens.

The exhibition is in two distinct areas. As well as the sculptures in the gardens, there are those in the underground galleries. You move from the brightness of the outside to the dark subterranean world. Had Jaume Plensa not said so, this reserved Englishman would have missed half of the exhibition. The experience is as much about touch and sound as it is about the visual art.

The galleries have a long curtain of verses strung from floor to ceiling separating the outside world from the interior. Running your hand across the letters make them chime, with the tintinnabulations evoking Jaume Plensa's memories of a beaded curtain from his childhood home.

The first gallery has the same crounched figures on the wall in the see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil. The evil here is the stress and anxiety of modern living rather than behaviour. The theme is replicated in the next room with three giant heads looking inwardly at each other.

The third gallery is an experience in itself and photographs do no do it justice. The six foot high elongated heads are lit brightly in a dark room and are so unexpected compared to the other rooms. Similar to the giant head Jaume created near St Helens, these androgynous and beautifully lifelike faces are calm and serene. Although digitally created, they feel ancient and almost living. Their feels to be a presence in the room as if something living inhabits the heads, may be only opening the closed eyes after midnight. A magical set of sculptures.

The final gallery is filled with gongs of varying tones which resound throughout the exhibition space. These red gold gongs are in a circle, filled with the words from the song of songs in the old testament.

The end room shows more detail and information about Jaume Plensa's life and work. It includes a mobile, lit deliberately to make the shadows as much part of the work of art as the figures clinging on to the mobile almost for dear life. This work is constantly changing as the strands of the mobile move round.

Before leaving, I climbed the hill to see the one, major sculpture as tall as a house, looking out across the valley. The work is totally different viewed from the inside than from the outside. With the light fading, it was also fascinating to see how the silver letter sculptures changed from bright silver to red tinged figures to dull grey before being lit up to being almost white beacons shining across the panorama.

My overall impression was this was as good an art exhibition as I remember seeing. This is partly down to the setting of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Having also been to the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire a few days after, the vistas of Capability Brown have nothing on the Yorkshire countryside when finding locations for sculptures. No white room in a London gallery could do the sculptures justice either.

The alabaster heads in the third gallery stayed with me, along with the inner contemplation of many of the works and will for a time to come.

The exhibition is on between the 9 April 2011 - 25 September 2011. For more information, visit the YSP website

How important are local newspapers to the community?

2011-04-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

This was a question that I wrestled with when asked to fill in a survey recently. Even at the time I thought this a complex issue that could hardly be answered by ticking one box over another box.

This wasn’t even the question on the survey, but my own thought. The actual question was over communities and whether newspapers are an essential part of an effective local community. My answer is no – but that is doing newspapers a disservice.

Why did I say no? Community does not need newspapers partly because there are alternatives from the old fish wives gossiping to social media and beyond. Partly because local newspapers are so different and their role is so diverse that you couldn’t really identify what its core purpose is. Finally, what is a community and how big a geography does it cover? IS it even bound by geography?

What it is true to say is that local newspapers are a social glue. They bind people together by imparting information and requesting feedback. This isn’t just a noticed board for events and minutes of meetings. It also offers information over crime and punishment, emotional stories and pleas of help.

If I think of my own area, there are several layers of newspaper that make layers like an onion of community information. Starting at the Wharfe Valley Times, the news is focused mainly on charitable events, school projects and sports news. In fact, the main reason people read it isn’t the news but the car and house adverts. Go up a layer and you have the Yorkshire Evening Post, a good metropolitan evening paper focusing on crime and human interest stories. There’s also the Wharfdale and Airedale Observer, a rural focused weekly looking at life towards Ilkley and awy from Leeds City Centre. Then there is the Yorkshire Post, the newspaper read by the business community and those in the know from Scarborough to Sheffield.

Comparing local papers also gives you a flavour of key interests and how fast paced life is. I grew up with a weekly paper focussed on the rural community a world away from the Barnsley Chronicle.

But if I do what local information, is the newspaper the best or only way of accessing it? With an increasingly open information society, public information is increasingly available and, if you don’t understand the figures, there’s sure to be some person developing an app. to explain it. There are blogs, twitter feeds, community message boards and real events which allow me to engage in the community at a deeper level. My sense of community is not dictated to by the news agenda.

Equally, community has become disjointed. Is my community where I live? Where my children go to school? Where I work? Where I play sport? They are all of these things. When I was growing up all were available in reasonably small area, but now I can travel to different areas to engage with different areas of my life.

I think this is why newspapers have struggled. There is information relevant to me in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, the Harrogate Advertiser, The Wakefield Express and the Bradford Telegraph. It would be unfeasible for me to buy all these newspapers. Add in the school publications, the parish magazines, the sports club quarterly newsletter and it’s a mass of information I don’t necessarily have the time to consume.

Newspapers also have never recovered from the age of the internet and still struggle online. Their role has been superseded whether its small ads, selling homes and cars, message boards and piped information services. They also struggle with the balance of free information over paid for content.

Each person has their own communities they want to keep in touch with and newspapers are so restrictive in how you can access and consume information. To be effective, they need to be that social glue – responding to the needs of their community and not trying to dictate the agenda. They need to look at what is required and bundle those services in a branded offering. It is different in different places. They also need to look at how I could get the business news from the Evening Post, say, the sports reports on Bradford City from the Telegraph and Argus, my Facebook feed of friends and the message board from my sports club. People are already creating piped services that cut out the newspapers and people can create their own feeds of information.

The difficulty is working out who pays for the service at what point. Technology and newspapers can engage communities whether geographic or virtual. The final question is whether we want to remain a disparate group of individuals flitting between communities, or whether we want to go back to living in a local community where all our needs are met within a small geography. There are benefits and disadvantages to both, but personally I feel we have become a little too well travelled and need to discover what’s on our doorstep and re-engage in our locality. May be we would value our local newspapers more if we did.

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why cuts to the arts budget is an advantage

2011-04-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

While many in the arts a bemoaning the cuts to the grants received from the arts council, at least one Yorkshireman sees the flipside of the situation. Far from being a problem, it is an opportunity. Now opportunities aren’t handed out on a plate, but his belief is that the cuts give the arts a chance to show its creativity and create new business models.

What can’t be allowed to happen is the loss of arts in the region or nationally.
This was message from John Godber at the First Friday event in Wakefield. His appearance at the Cedar Court Hotel was one of his first for his new theatre company now based at the Wakefield Theatre Royal.

Along with the theatre’s director Murray Edwards, there was optimism for the future, not just for the headline grabbing plays created by Godber, but also for the youth and community projects which use the facilities on an almost daily basis.

Restrictions tend to follow grants and it is these restrictions which are now removed from the business model. The challenge is to persuade private money that there is an advantage to getting involved in the arts. To paraphrase, how can you be creative if you don’t have inspiration.

The loss of Government funding is a loss to the arts community and this presents a challenge. But it is not the only challenge for John Godber. He’s left a theatre and company he’s built up for well over twenty years to start from scratch. The new company needs to establish a reputation but it does create a freedom to start afresh.
There is a commercial realty to the challenge.

It might be easier to obtain sponsorship for a new play written by one of the greatest living British playwright than for an educational group dealing with unemployed teenagers, but both are valuable. The argument might be that the workshops offering skills, confidence and life skills to NEATS, an endemic problem in the Wakefield district, is far more valuable to the business community than exposure to a theatre audience.

Equally, the acting community tends to have more than one vocation. Training, community projects and other endeavours tend to provide the basis for a jobbing actor to also do what they love – appearing on stage or screen. While the big names might get a living wage, that can’t always be said for the stock characters and ensemble roles. It’s a far more complicated interdependency between the headline performances and the community workshops which may not even result in a performance.

Convincing businesses that there is real opportunity in the arts isn’t easy. Bizarrely the focus on the funding cuts does help in showing what could be lost to a community. John Godber said losing arts provision is like losing a playing field and isn’t felt straight away. Like Arthritis, it erodes over time from a mild annoyance to a severe problem. Losing community projects weakens the community and loses skills. Highlighting the good work at risk means companies are better placed to find synergies and understand that supporting a project for the homeless,NEATS, the elderly or the disabled could bring greater benefits in terms of local reputation, audience and reciprocal benefit.

Having commercial packages and sponsorship in some ways is a cop out. It is an easy way of getting in front of known an audience. Funding a project that gives hope to young people who feel failed by the education system identifies potential new employees, recognition from the community and creating economic activity in the local economy.

The new venture in Wakefield comes at a strange time with the Arts Council announcement, but another plus must be the key artistic developments in the region. Three years ago you might not class Wakefield as an artistic hub, but with the creation of the Art House studios, the creation of the Hepworth Gallery and the success of the art walks there has been a real boon for the district. The Leeds Fringe and the other developments in Leeds means there is a real opportunity for Yorkshire to be a cultural centre envied by other regions.

There are also valuable lessons in life and business. Where one door closes, another door opens. Turning round bad news into good is difficult but can only be achieved through creativity. And as I’ve mentioned before, where would we be without the inspiration of the arts.

Image: scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Statistics that make you shudder

2011-03-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you see something in the press and you think:”that can’t be right”. Apparently 58% of mobile operators think that SMS and MMS advertising will grow massively in the next few years.

I started working on MMS and SMS information products around eight years ago. Either the advertising industry is very slow or this seems a ridiculous statement.

Mobile phones are becoming a vital way of communication for us but it seems overly simplistic to think that this means its rich pickings for advertisers.

The attraction must be the high usage from the small device in our pockets. The technology means we can now stream video, share photos, send emails, create documents or update social media sites easily on a reasonably priced handset. All of these functions are available on mid-range phones and affordable tariffs. You don’t really need an iPhone, whatever the Apple marketing implies.

If you’re accessing it regularly, then it’s prime advertising space. The traffic on a mobile website is no different than putting a billboard on the heavy traffic of a trunk road.

But a mobile phone is also something personal. Money is spent personalising them whether it’s a stylish leather case, a wallpaper, screensaver or ringtone. The photos on the phone are personal, often of loved ones and days out with them. You wouldn’t tend to share the whole contents of your texts or voice messages, particularly if you’re a premiership footballer. This is where the problem is.

Why would anyone open their phone up to SMS and MMS adverts? How would companies find the numbers? At the end of the day all of these adverts are SPAM and defeat the whole object of the exercise.

Modern marketing is looking to engage customers and communities. Nothing would alienate me more than getting an MMS message clogging up my in box. By spamming, the numbers game becomes more of an issue. What proportion of your customer base will shut off communicating with you compared with those who chose to look further into the offer.

The other question is what will these companies be selling? Email spam is mainly adult in nature and I’m not sure I’d want my children receiving them on a phone in years to come. If it’s the sort of companies who send junk mail through your door, it would be an annoyance for me.

I’m open to advertising if I get something of value. Banner ads can be annoying, but it enables game apps like Angry Birds to be offered free. Information and news can also be valuable, but I’d suggest most message based advertising is nothing but worthless.

Let us make it clear that the same survey suggested 66% saw a growth in marketing coupons and vouchers. I can understand this. An opt-in system would enable you to become brand loyal and would mesh nicely with other social media platforms, particularly location based. It’s not for everyone, but vouchers are already popular using q-codes or unique passwords to gain access to special deals.

I still go back to my earlier point. If advertisers and mobile operators haven’t been able to make it work in eight years, what’s changed? Or do analysts play with stats and see pound signs before they engage their brains.

A Farewell to Screen Yorkshire and inward investment?

2011-02-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

The problem with cuts is they just remove expenditure.

To reduce debt, you have to do a whole lot more than cut costs. In fact, cutting costs can result in further problems down the line.

Screen Yorkshire is a case in point as it sees its funding under threat. As the BAFTAs bestow accolades on films made with Screen Yorkshire’s help, the organisation is looking at shutting its doors. The Kings Speech used the Odsall Stadium and Elland Road.

The end of Yorkshire Forward would always see a number of the regional development organisations biting the dust – but at what costs?

Some of Yorkshire Forward’s funded bodies might have been a white elephant than a great white hope, but Screen Yorkshire has been a net contributor to the region’s economy.

I haven’t all the figures, but the last report suggests £70.6 million invested in the region as a result of the organisation between 2006 and 2009. I’d heard a figure of £82 million, suggesting a further £11.5 million being invested in the last year.
The investment from Screen Yorkshire last year was £5 million.

So we save £5 million and potentially lose around £10 million. Add to this the tourists brought to the region and the knock on effect of having associated businesses busy with supporting the film crews, and the benefits are probably greater.

Not all the filming will cease but it will make a big dent into the region’s film economy, already suffering from the centralisation of TV production.

The funding is difficult to directly replace as the ‘benefits’ don’t come in a big cash sum paid into the bank. Private capital won’t get the 100% return in the same way that the region’s businesses and councils benefit from the money spent across the region.

So we trust Manchester and London based organisations to represent Yorkshire? Would they be more likely to promote a cobbled street in Salford or Bradford? A railway arch in Brixton or Leeds? Or maybe the loss of support sees films moved out of the UK altogether?

If the financial side didn’t add up, fair enough, but we need small businesses to grow through investment and prosper. This is the only way we can stimulate the economy to get business booming again. The tax take increases and we can start to pay off the debts of the past government.

Yorkshire has a fine tradition of film making from Louis Le Prince to Billy Lair; from This Sporting Life to The Railway Children and from Brassed Off to Four Lions. The loss of Screen Yorkshire wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of this heritage, but it certainly would make it harder for the next Yorkshire blockbuster.

For more information on Screen Yorkshire, click here.

CSR - When a good idea looks like a mistake

2011-02-08T03:25:00.000-08:00

How important is Corporate Social Responsibility to a business (CSR)? Many big businesses spend vast amounts on CSR policies, but is it really worth it? BP look to be the latest company to shoot themselves in the foot by coming up with a fantastic idea, and then scoring a massive own goal because they haven’t thought it through.

People across the UK are starting to get angry about the back of their Tankers – which read “This vehicle is CO2 neutral”.

The problem with CSR is that it is often used as propaganda rather than really being at the heart of business. The statement’s read like a pillow of fluff and puff, often linking in with PR activities or existing activities. There’s often no harm, and something positive to say, but it is often meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Look at First Groups’ CSR policy. Most of the document lists activities you’d expect them to do – pay their workers fairly, abide by the laws of the land, not to lie or cheat, to offer a reliable service and the like. Get on to the environment and they say:

We are committed to: preventing pollution and reducing the overall impact of our operations on the environment.

Now what does that mean? Not much. It could mean they are working tirelessly to eradicate carbon emissions. It could mean they’ll try not to knock over any barrels of oil in the yard so it doesn’t get washed in to the local water. It could also be anything else inbetween.

Compare that to Tesco who have put hard figures in their environmental CSR policy, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2050 and with a range of other targets for 2020. They may be too long term to bring to book, but they are demonstrable.

So what’s the issue with BP? On the face of it, there’s no major issue. The objective is for BP to be carbon neutral and they are making some significant steps. According to their website:

Over the last seven years we have achieved real sustainable reductions of 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MteCO2e). In 2008 we reported 0.4MteCO2e of reductions, including for example, expansion of the use of 'smart' well automation to reduce venting and improved well completion procedures to reduce flaring at our Wamsutter natural gas operations in the US, which resulted in emissions being 48,000teCO2e lower than they would otherwise have been.

The problem is the communication and the messaging of what this is and what it means.

What does it mean to be carbon Neutral? BP has a definition which basically covers its back. Its aim is to reduce green house gas emissions where possible and offset a significant proportion of the rest. Offsetting in itself is controversial in itself and there is debate about how effective it really is, but let us leave that to one side.

Now BP isn’t Carbon Neutral and a tanker certainly isn’t CO2 neutral, so how can they make this claim? I’m imagining they’ve set themselves a target of offsetting all tanker journeys and paid to plant the trees. Some bright spark has come up with the idea of promoting this fact by painting it on to the tankers.

Now shift forward away from the company to the man or woman in the street. When you say BP what do you think of? Oil spills, petrol stations may be even a North Sea oil rig. Does this seem carbon neutral activity? The problem is the statement is probably right in terms of running the vehicle but it seems such a lame attempt to cover up environmental issues.

I’ve dealt with environmental issues for a major company and it is amazingly complex. There’s a lot of propaganda and not much fact.

But when a large industrial tanker is staring you in the face and proclaiming to be carbon neutral, it is like a heavily obese person telling you they’re on a diet because they now have a sugar free soft drink with their burgers.

It all chimes with the Cadbury CSR disaster. Buy lots of chocolate and get a free skipping rope. Deliver tonnes of fossil fuels and plant a few trees.

So how do you use CSR effectively? When I worked at Orange, they claimed only to use fair trade coffee. The drinks machine I used definitely didn’t contain fair trade coffee. Even if your failed objectives don’t leak out to the press, its not great for staff morale to see a promise broken.

It must be part of a brand and be at the heart of your operations. It’s great to say “this company values its workers” but what does that mean? It has to have deliverable and preferably quantifiable objectives. The days of warm words and fluff are gone so the greenwash won’t wash. If you support a charity, why was it chosen, how much are you donating and how else are you helping?

Do you really care about the local community? What have you done to help it and have you volunteered your skills or people to help?

Finally, is what you are saying true? Even if it is, what does it say to the man on the street who doesn’t read your environmental manifesto, your press releases or your internal memo?

CSR comes from the heart, needs to be genuine and needs to be reported tactfully.

Top image from © BP p.l.c
Other images courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

From Chaos to Calm (or Communications in Egypt)

2011-02-04T04:07:00.000-08:00

In this age of communication and social media, how would you cope if you mobile and landlines stopped working? Could you really keep you business going or make arrangements with your friends and family?

This is just what happened to people in Egypt this week and I found the development of the situation fascinating for many reasons. Through the terrible scenes and the remarkable peaceful start demonstrate a whole mass of communications theory in act.

Social media is very much seen as an online revolution but it really describes the creation of communities. In such, social media tools help to create communities in a virtual world but are inferior to the real communities where people come together.

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered peacefully in the Tahrir Square, brought out by the word of mouth and not by technology. When the government switched off Twitter, and then the web, it was clearly an attempt to stifle the ability of individuals to co-ordinate a demonstration.

This failed because the real way people co-ordinated was by talking and sharing in a genuine community. This was spontaneous and the rabble rousing of the past. Mosques, churches and community halls were the social media on the ground.

We’re so used to the power of flash mobbing and the co-ordination of protests like the tuition fees protests, that we forget that protests used to have a spontaneous nature to them. In some ways this may be why it started so peacefully. It was people coming together for a common cause rather than a strategic and lead revolution.

The start of the violence was also telling. Within a few hours of the internet being “switched back on”, the Pro Mabarak faction took hold two facts I personally feel are linked. There was a coordinated violence element to their reactionary protest.

The weaker of the two communities would benefit from the use of mobile and internet technology without a clear community to draw its support from or coordinate protests. Ignoring the claims of corruption, the protest worked. It brought Pro Mabarak supporters out and not all were hell bent on violence. There were some peacemakers but they never had a chance.

The disturbing scenes of violence created chaos for a while, but the chaos theory suggests order would return. What I found surprising was the speed with which a crowd organised itself. From a disparate group, a hierarchy developed and a strategy to deal with the violence being forced upon them. Within an hour there seemed to be roman style tortoise formations of protestors, using any sheet metal they could find as shields and barricades. At the same time, foreign journalists were targeted to minimise coverage of the violence, often by the police, absent from their peacekeeping duties.

Another disturbing thing happened later that day. Rumours started flying that the anti Mabarak protests were being run by foreigners and other misinformation. The problem is, though, that in a tight knit community you know the difference between your kin and an alien influence. Protestors claim dozens if not hundreds of undercover policemen had been challenged for making these claims.

Several days in the Egyptian Government started to speak again. They echoed the misinformation heard in Tahrir Square with an unnerving similarity. It seemed very much like a classic divide and conquer approach to their propaganda.
The spin didn’t wash with the western journalists and large holes were present. The president was definitely in Ciaro but no one had seen him, yet it is not unusual in a crisis for a president to see his cabinet. This seemed to be the nonsensical argument.

And despite the Egyptian Government’s claims, Friday’s big putsch started with the biggest protest yet and a peaceful protest. Just think of most G20 protests and the student protests, add in the strength of feeling in Egypt and the provocation and this is remarkable. The level of communication and community needed to draw out the crowds and maintain the peace shows how coordinated yet spontaneous these demonstrations are.

So what are the learning points:

Online communities and communications are important but are never as strong as genuine real life communities

There is nothing stronger than spontaneous and unconnected action

Movements can be created organically and quickly. Here’s a lighter example

Propaganda is only effective if it’s believable and based on fact. Once it’s been shown as a sham, it actually harms your cause.

It’s amazing to see the power of humanity which can bring a riot back to peace.

Headingley and the Scyre Ac

2011-01-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

Do you know the story behind the Skyrack in Headingley? I reveal more in the Culture Vulture here

Taking communication for granted

2011-01-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

For me, communication is a vital part of any organisation. It never ceases to amaze me when companies get the basics wrong. I’m not talking about small companies on the whole, but companies who really should know better.

Sometimes it’s just a bug bear – the person who emails you from 5 yards away when it would be easier to talk. Other times it’s more serious.

Over the last three months I’ve had an issue with British Gas for a service which was spot on and well done. The problem? The communication was abject and showed a complete disregard for the customer.

I’m going to share the experience to highlight some of the pitfalls of communications as it seems to be a good case study of how things can go wrong and some advice on how to avoid these issues.

In late November I signed up to the British Gas Homecare service which offers free boiler repair and an annual service. Within a few days of signing up, I received a call and an appointment was made for 4th December. Here, the system was working effectively and well. An automated system had placed my enquiry in a queue and I was dealt with promptly.

The day before the appointment time, we experienced very heavy snow and, knowing my road, knew that British Gas would have to have a snow mobile to be able to get anywhere near my house. I telephoned British Gas and spoke to two different people. I was trying to cancel the appointment and rearrange for the next available date. As I’d been offered an appointment within a fortnight, I assumed this would not be too far in the future.

The first person confirmed I could get a reappointment, but it would be 27th December at the earliest. They couldn’t make the change and passed me on to the person dealing with the enquiry. The second person claimed there were no slots available for over a month and they could not give me a new date. They were incredulous at my suggestion that the engineer would not be able to get to my house and that the conditions in Leeds had affected any of their services. I was reluctantly given the option of waiting for the engineer the following day.

This shows two things. Different operators seem to have different information and that’s never helpful. Secondly, there is a problem with listening. Listening is an important part of the process and customers can be in a better position to know certain facts.
That evening I cleared out the cupboard under the stairs to ensure the engineer would have enough space and the next day I waited for my 8am-1pm appointment. I waited. And I waited. It was 3pm when I called British Gas. Failure to contact customers is unacceptable and the easiest way of losing trade. There is a saying “eat your frogs first” which means do the tasks that need to be done but you don’t want to do first, and your day will only get easier.

British Gas seemed not to have any information at hand and unsure what to say. The operator had no way of confirming what had happened and if the appointment was still going to take place, although this was doubtful. They blamed the engineer for not contacting me to let me know the situation. Twenty four hours later, I was now being told there were serious issues in West Yorkshire and emergency calls were being prioritised but I would be contacted to rearrange the appointment. The problem now is the company is in a crisis situation. They are getting a lot of calls but the systems have broken down and there is no understanding of what to do. This means they cannot advise the customer who just wants some help.

A couple of days later I sent a tweet annoyed that no-one had called me, as promised. I got a phone call from British Gas, or a call centre acting on their behalf. The person didn’t know anything about my situation but seemed to understand I had a customer services issue. On explaining the situation, the end of the conversation was” Oh! Right, erm there’s nothing I can do”. Again the machinery was working, picking up social media issues, contacting and trying to resolve. The issue was there was no help available and there were no slots available for an appointment.

The snow fell thick and fast and I thought it best to wait until the New Year to make an enquiry. I was sensible enough to realise they were having problems and it was an inconvenience I could have done without. A fortnight or so after the snow had gone, I called again. The advisor listened to my request for a new appointment and he said it was still busy but he would personally ensure I got an appointment within 24 hours.

Now over a month and half after my appointment had been cancelled, my main gripe is that I had made initial contact every single time and British Gas had not contacted me once. The operator said they were still making reappointments and those with a low priority call were being put to the back of the queue. Thousands of people were being affected, or so I was told. The policy was to NOT contact them as there were too many.

It’s great to be told your problem is being personally dealt with, a nice touch. But why weren’t the customers being told? It would take a day at most to draft a letter apologising for the situation and giving an indication of when normal service would be resumed. This was the biggest sin and preventable. I can only think someone was being a skinflint over postage costs.

A week past and the operator who said he’d ring me back in 24 hours had lied. Don’t give promises you can’t keep.

Finally, my boiler broke down a few days ago. I called and an engineer was sent out to my house within a few hours. I asked if my annual check could be done at the same time. I was told I had an appointment for mid February that I should be aware of. I hadn’t been aware of it. That said, it would be fine for the checks to be carried out.

So what are the learning points?

• Listen so you can help rather than resorting to mechanisms
• The customer is normally right
• Be first to contact your customers when things go wrong; don’t wait for them to come to you
• Ensure everyone is delivering a consistent and accurate message
• Ensure the left hand knows what the right is doing
• Ensure that there are crisis management systems built in so when the proverbial hits the fan, at the very least you have a holding statement or position
• If you can’t communicate in your normal way, think how you can get messages sent out
• Don’t over promise and be honest about the situation
• Don’t lie

Were you affected during the bad weather? Let me know if I was the unlucky one or if you also suffered from poor service.

Fringe: Leeds and the Culture Vultures

2011-01-25T09:34:00.001-08:00

I've blogged on the Culture Vultures blog on this subject. To view the article, please go here

The power of collaboration

2011-01-20T05:13:00.000-08:00

I’m a believer that no one has a great idea. Good ideas only become great when they get passed around, discussed and improved on by several people. I am also a fan of the US approach to new technology where companies in the Silicon Valley share commercially sensitive intellectual property in order to fast-track their development and create new products.

There is a way of using twitter or a chat application to foster these ideas and share the expertise others that requires a little over an hour of time a month. It also has the added benefit of raising your profile, promoting your business and making you as thought leader.

I’m still surprised that twitter events aren’t more commonplace. I first came across #PRStudchat a while back. A US PR practitioner called Deidre Breakenridge created a forum for discussing the PR industry by encouraging students, lecturers and people from the industry to discuss issues relevant to them. Within the first few chats, contributions started coming in from across the globe going well beyond the group she had targeted. Since then, Deidre has had working trips to Europe, including the UK, based on the profile generated by #PRstudChat.

Other examples include #Edchat, channel 4s #twinge and #SN4BW (social networking for business women.

So how can I take advantage of this event? Like all things, the idea is simple, but you will require some leg work to get the initial idea off the ground. It also helps if you have something interesting to say yourself.

1. Work out who you want to talk to and about what.
2. Look for people may be key influencers. In Deidre’s case, getting the buy in from lecturers brought with it groups of students. You will also need a critical mass to make the first ‘event’ a success.
3. Think about when you want to hold the event and an appropriate name for the event. When is convenient for the people you are trying to communicate with?
4. Create a hashtag and check it doesn’t clash with anything else being used on twitter.
5. Raise awareness of the event using social media and direct marketing, asking for questions. Don’t keep the format too open ended as this will reduce the questions being set.
6. Create very simple rules so you can identify the question and possibly area of expertise.

How it works:
1. Add your own questions to the ones suggested, ordering them to create a theme/narrative for the discussion. You’ll need six to ten questions for an hour.
2. Start the event just before the advertised time telling people the ‘rules’ and format of the event.
3. Open with the first question, may be offering an answer to get the ball rolling. It might be helpful to get a few close friends/colleagues to add opinions or even play devil’s advocate.
4. Respond back to the discussions being created and/or to individuals.
5. When the replies dry up or 5-10 minutes later, post the next question and repeat.
6. At the end of the discussion, formally close the chat, thanking participants.
7. You may want to invite people to give feedback or take a quick survey using a tool like survey monkey.

By now you’ve had a valuable conversation, covering a number of areas and enabling you to understand whether your views fit in with or challenge your peers. As host, the valuable discussions reflect well on you even if they’ve been created by others. But there’s more you can do now the event is over.

The next day, harvest the comments by searching for the hashtag. Report on the discussion in your own blog, write a press release, newsletter or use the responses as market research. This expands the reach of the event and acts as advertising for the next event. Make sure you understand what a personal view is and what a corporate position of a company or individual is.

Over a number of months, you’ll develop a wider following and find people you’d never find any other way. Think how you can take it further to make the discussion fresh. You could create a ‘real’ event or even finding a sponsor

Just remember, not everyone is on twitter – particularly students – so you might need to explain twitter or how to sign up to a chat application. You’ll also need to ensure you have someone who can step in if you can’t host the event for whatever reason.

Image courtesey of freedigitalphotos.net

The Social Media Paradox or why SMEs have the advantage

2011-01-14T03:32:00.001-08:00

I was having a discussion with a small business owner over the use of social media. His view was that it wasn’t worth investigating. His limited team couldn’t even start to compete with big business which has the resource to invest heavily in social media managers, operatives and agency support.

He felt it was pointless to even try as his best efforts could not match the inventiveness and scale of the campaigns he’s seen. The businessman had played around with some social media on a personal level but didn’t really engage heavily in it.

This approach led me to think whether this was true. It is hard to remember that only a few years ago, few businesses large or small engaged through social media and there was that window of opportunity where entrepreneurial spirit in the social media world allowed some small firms to rise to prominence.

Companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsico have gradually been shifting their massive advertising budget over to PR and online marketing campaigns. Look at a company like Dell sifting through social media data to continuously audit feedback and proactively eliminate customer complaints. Even government departments are spending vast amounts of money on ensuring their messages are being received and are monitoring how they are being discussed.

A company like Sony employs an agency to promote its activities in the social media world and its almost expected that a technology savvy company has integrated video, images and copy. Even the strict rules of the financial industry are being tested as banks, led by First Direct, are exploring how to best use social media tools to advise its customers and promote their products.

How could a small one man band operation compete with a promotion like Morphy Richards World Ironing Championships, for example.

If this were advertising or pure marketing, you might have a point, but there is a paradox with social media. The more successful you are at social media you become, the worse you are at social media. Whatever social medium you use, the point is to engage and interact with a community. Much of the work doesn’t even need to be done by yourself, as the community can do it for you.

Once you reach a critical mass, however, it becomes tricky to engage in the same way. Is it really possible to listen to the postings of 2,000 people in the same way you listen to 80? Can you respond to your followers in the same personal and well thought out way? Can you categorise your audience as neatly, ensuring you deliver to all of them.

The answer is no. There may even be a rise in the churn of your followers or an increase in spammers slogging up your social media accounts. With more people, there is a need for more time – and let’s remember it might not be your organisations raise en detra to use interact on the web.

The smaller firm doesn’t need to chase followers. They can establish a good core audience of loyal customers, suppliers and brand ambassadors. LEGO select a small handful of bloggers each year to review their products, and this tactic can work whatever your size.

I’ve always seen engagement as conversation in a pub, say. There’s a chap at the bar with a crowd around him, and he’s telling tall tales. The conversation might be entertaining, but the value is low. Two people can be having a business conversation in the corner planning an idea that will make them a fortune. Which conversation is more valuable? It’s a no brainer yet companies often get blinded by the numbers and miss the point. Would you rather one repeat buyer or a handful of one off purchases? Take the example of Millies’ twitter account in Leeds which ensures the family run shop remains distinctive and accessible to its loyal shoppers.

If you want to go big and escape the niche, there are examples of the SMEs that have gone big. Take Tailor Thomas Mahon and his blog, or Gary Vaynerchuk’s wine tasting videos. And how about the Creme Brulee Man and his twitter account.

If you’re still not sure whether to use social media to help your business, just join in, listen to your customers and engage with them. What’s the worst that can happen?

Image courtesey of freedigitalphotos.net

Panto: The art of retelling a great story

2011-01-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, you sometimes have to watch when someone cries out “He’s behind you!” Even more so if you’re sitting in the front row of a theatre audience. We’re just past half way in the annual pantomime season, and it is hard to grasp that this is a particularly British art form that most other countries don’t understand.

Very few arts have been developed within Britain and this form of theatre is one of them. Over the festive period I’ve seen two pantos in theatres and a handful on television. But there is a perception that they are low brow and hackneyed. I think this view is unfair and there is plenty of life in this annual festival of fun.

The one advantage of the Pantomime is the elasticity of its genre. It encompasses everything from a tightly produced small ensemble cast to a largely improvised set and everything in between. To understand this a little further you need to understand the origins of panto.

The word Pantomime originally comes from ancient Greece but there it refers to a performance that “imitates all” as the words suggest. Even in English theatre history, the term originally referred to a low form of opera that imitated the real thing. However, the low opera did tend to retell familiar stories and it is this retelling that is important.

There has been a tradition of retelling stories over generations in Britain. Think of the Mummers’ plays or the Chaucerian idea of people sharing stories for entertainment. There isn’t just one version of Cinderella, its plot or even its characters. Probably the original pantomime, the story is a European legend that existed for hundreds of years before the pantomime was invented.
I imagine the 1870 Drury Lane version of Cinderella, possibly the first real panto, would be quite different to “Cinderella Rocks”, a local youth theatre group production being performed in Leeds this year.

The idea of a small footed beauty is believed to have its origins in China where women used to fold their toes back with bandages to give the impression of smaller feet. The Disney version has no Dandini and no Buttons. There are Cinderella ballets, Operas, books and films which are distinctly not Panto. It’s even believed that the “glass slipper” is a mistranslation of “the shoe of fun” – a slipper that allows the wearer to dance.

It is the retelling in a new form every year that makes it relevant to a new audience, evolving over the decades to reach new audiences since its creation in the nineteenth century. What makes the pantomime is a number of common features which can be overlaid on many a story, but even some of these common features can be absent. Aladdin at the West Yorkshire Playhouse had no cross dressing but it did have a dame.

The modern construct of the pantomime was heavily influenced by the musical hall. Many vaudevillians saw the panto as good seasonal work. Rather than two or three acts, the pantomime tends to run several varying scenes or skits together allowing for comedians, singers, dancers and magicians to do there “turn” even if it adds nothing to the story. A good pantomime is also interactive involving the audience and responding to the heckle.

It is also a form of art where the amateur production can be as good, if not better, than the professional production with the big cast. With few rules, the strength of the Pantomime relies on the satire, the gag writing and the relationship with the audience. Special effects can help a production but aren’t the heart of the performance. The panto will only die if it stays the same. We are no longer in the variety hall era and inspiration should come from the current. It should go back to the roots of imitating all whilst holding on to a good yarn that has survived the test of time.

Are you Celebrating Twixtmas?

2010-12-24T02:43:00.000-08:00

As well as Christmas and New Year, will you also be celebrating Twixtmas?

Over the last two years the Twixtmas movement has been growing.

Originally, it was a word developed by the US travel industry to describe the period between Christmas and New Year so they could promote these vacations.

The word has been hi-jacked by Andy Green, the man behind Beat Blue Monday, to promote a better way of celebrating this period.

As a rule the five days are sent doing very little apart from the odd sales shop and a visit or two to relatives. In reality, much of the time is spent eating, drinking and watching films on the television.

The Twixtmas campaign urges people to do something for other people, the planet or something beneficial to your future. It's a nice idea and offers people the chance to find their own level of engagement.

- The first day of Twixtmas is about spoiling yourself and thinking more positively about you, enjoy an indulgence.

- The second day of Twixtmas is to do something for someone else, help a neighbour or good cause.

- The third day of Twixtmas is to help a friend or maybe get in touch with someone you have not called in a while.

- The fourth day of Twixtmas is about doing something for the planet.

- The fifth day of Twixtmas is to do something for your future, maybe think about your goals for 2011 or learn a new skill.

So for day four you could do everything from recycling your cards to setting up a neighbourhood litter pick using up you Christmas scraps rather than throwing them away. Equally, if you miss the odd day, it doesn't really matter.

In such a time poor society, it is sometimes good to have a focus on such days and I'll be drawing up my Twixtmas list soon

There is a brilliant presentation on ‘How to start a mass movement in 3 minutes’ by Derek Sivers, an inspirational entrepreneur speaking at a TED conference that springs to mind Andy's quest. But if everyone is having fun and the world's made that little bit brighter by your actions, then everyone gains something.

So will you join in this year? You can find out more at Twixtmas.com.

The Pudsey Pudding – Christmas on a giant scale

2010-12-21T15:38:00.001-08:00

Christmas shopping, something caught my eye in the window of a charity shop.
It wasn’t the thought that this would be an ideal present - far from it. I can’t really think of many people I’d want to give it too.

Let me explain. It was a print, possibly an original print, of a newspaper item from 1846. The local article demonstrated an event that made Pudsey a well known place in England long before anyone had knitted a bear for the BBC. It was also seemed festive, although I later found this not quite to be true.

Although public relations is seen as a modern practice, it’s something practiced for millennia even if the term “PR” is something new.

This article talked of the Pudsey Pudding, a giant steamed Christmas pudding, made in the town to celebrate the repeal of the Corn Laws. The gesture had to be original and capture the mood that saw one of the most unpopular laws in British History consigned to the dustbin. The pud represented the end of an import duty that left many poor people starving and the gesture saw a democratic sharing of a celebratory dish made by the community, for the community.

The pudding may have been made to a Christmas recipe but it was actually steamed on 31st July by the radical free traders of Pudsey. The details are staggering even to the modern media. I’ve seen a “world record tower of pompadoms” that looked barely two foot tall and managed to squeeze into the papers:

The result was a pudding weighing nearly 1000 lbs.

Twenty housewives each mixed her twentieth share to the proper ingredients ready for the final blending.

One of the dye-pans at Crawshaw Mill was thoroughly cleaned and filled with spring water.

The twenty dames, with assistance, brought their twenty bowls containing the mixed flour, fruit and suet and tipped them into a large and strong and new canvas "poke" specially made for that purpose, and by means of a windlass which had been fixed over the pan, the "weighty matter" was hoisted into the vessel.

For three days and three nights the pudding was kept boiling, along with half a dozen smaller puddings, to keep it company.

On July 31, 1846, the pudding was craned out of the huge copper and placed upon a wherry. There the steaming monster sat in triumph, with the smaller puddings around it.

A procession was formed, and went round the town, with thousands of people looking on.

The final scene was in Crawshaw Fields, where tables had been arranged in the form of a large military square, and with a special "spade" provided for the purpose, the pudding was "dug up" and served to the crowd."

This historic story shows that communication has always been key. Engage a community with a common purpose is the “new PR” of the social media age – yet this feat could not have been created without a real community coming together.

May be the modern media is trying to re-engage with a sense of community that is fragmented and no longer as strong as it was in those days. May be we don’t have the political events to celebrate.

Sadly the largest Christmas Pudding no longer resides this side of the Pennines. The current record weighed is 7,231 pounds, and was made in Aughton, Lancashire, on July 11, 1992. The village has a once every 21-year tradition of producing puddings to celebrate the cutting of their reed beds.

I can only see records going back to 1886, so may be it was inspired by the Pudsey Pudding – let me know if you have more information than I do.

But there is an opportunity for Pudsey to get find some community spirit again and regain the title and start a friendly war of the roses. Aughton is due to break the record again in mid July 2013, so maybe we should start planning for the 31st of July and hold the record for 21-years.

The Nativity Social Media Style

2010-12-16T02:28:00.001-08:00

Just because this is a superb video worth sharing:

How many ways can you peel a Banana?

2010-12-14T04:46:00.000-08:00

No this blog isn’t a PC version of how many ways can you skin a cat. When I first saw the question “How does a monkey eat a banana?”, I thought it was a joke. But the answer wasn’t because he found it ape-peeling.

What’s more the answer came in a video, the video that’s featured below. After trying the monkey peeling method it got me thinking of a lot of different things.

It is actually easier to peel and the stalk acts like a handle. Equally, you don’t get to chew on the bit on the end that tastes pithy.

What if you just assume you know how to peel a banana and skip the video? One thing I’ve l heard from older business people is that they’ve tried everything once, so it’s not worth trying it again. That might be true to an extent. There are few truly original ideas. However, societies change and opportunities can be missed by not looking at other viewpoints. The hotel that still sends out its direct marketing via the post is adding massively to its costs by not considering electronic messaging and promotion.

The company that ignores social media to connect with its customers can’t engage with them. They then can’t find out what they truly feel towards their products, services and brand.

Learning to eat something like a banana is a meme. We don’t know where we learnt it but it must have been from watching our parents eat bananas. The stalk looks so obviously like a lever that it must be the ring pull of the natural world. Let’s not forget that the fruit was still fairly rare in the UK even up to the 1950s so it is still a relatively new food to these shores.

It’s not just the British. I’ve yet to see any mainstream American or European media featuring upside down banana eating – yet in the countries where bananas are grown, this is not unusual and they’ve developed their own meme for peeling a banana.
There is an assumption that our ‘meme’ is best, that the lessons of our fathers are better than those from other cultures. The problem is that these prejudices are often subconscious and the British way to be understood is to shout louder and more slowly. It is not about understanding the cultural landscape or listening to alternative ways of working.

Take the Greek example. A shake of the head tends to mean yes in that country, and the word Nai means yes. A nod and the word Ochi means no. It is counter intuitive to most of Europe and these differences can lead to mistakes.

In my work life I’ve often had to translate the cultural aspect of a business or news story. Think of a company in the UK that’s made a new product made from recycled plastic. It’s a great selling point on the environmental side of things – right?

Well, it depends where you are selling that item and in which markets. Yes the environment is high on the consumer agenda in most European countries, but is this a key point everywhere in a recession? What about countries where recycled products have an image of inferiority or a potential health risk? The facts may be clear on this area, but a public perception can be damaging even if it is wrong.

We’ve all heard the stories about how American working practices were shoehorned into the UK in the 1960s and 70s or the stories of product names that just don’t translate tastefully.

Another good example of why memes mean different things to different people comes from Andy Green on the Greenblog. His posting pointed out that Cheverolet dislike the term “chevy” to describe their products, despite the shorthand being so common in US culture and beyond. To the company, it cheapens the image of the brand yet they’ve not tried to find a different way for people to associate with the name. The company is trying to raise awareness of their brand in the UK, and I’d have thought people would associate a little more with the term Chevy.

What’s my advice? Try it out for yourself and learn a different way to do something. I’m not talking just about bananas, but the way you do business.

Learning points:

• Remember a meme is just one way to peel a banana.
• Your way may be good, but is there a better way
• Just because you understand something, it doesn’t mean that everyone gets it, or finds it straightforward.

Getting a sense of community in the snow

2010-12-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

The weather has brought more than a knee deep torrent of snow, freezing the icy hills of Leeds into an impassable blockade. It has also brought about a sense of community which tends to vanish as fast as the snow vanished under the heat from the sun. But while it lasts, hopefully we will be able to rediscover the joys of community.

I’ve been thinking about community thanks to events like TEDxLeeds and the launch of the Leeds Community News Hub. Hopefully this blog will draw together some key learning points into something demonstrable.

On a basic level, the snow actually brings people out. Bizarrely the bad weather forces us out of the comfort of our cars and onto the streets. Most people on my street have been walking to work, or at least to the bus stop. Rather than rushing past they’ve been stopping to chat.

While one foolish driver attempted to get up one of the steepest roads in my area, first one, then two then three and four people went over to help push the back of the car. The car got up the hill, but it was a sense of community that helped get the vehicle up over the hill and onto the top road.

Community can be defined as people coming together for a common purpose or for a shared interest. I’ve also heard comment that communities are not created. They are sometimes latent, but rarely can you force a death metal music fan to enjoy watching the X-factor.

I think communications professionals miss the point about latent communities. They sometimes hit on a community in need of a social glue and mistake it for creating a new community that hasn’t existed before.

On my street, I’ve always tried to keep my driveway clear – mainly so I can get my two wheel drive cars out if there was an emergency. Last year I got some comments from neighbours saying I should keep up the good work, and one negative comment that I was wasting my time and causing more ice to form. The area near my cars cleared sooner and the other half of the cul de sac turned into a skating rink.

This year I did the same. I noted that many of the 4x4 vehicles able to drive on the snow used my ‘cleared’ area as it was less slippy. Unfortunately the warm tyres create ice tracks which are nigh on impossible to shift – but shift it slowly I do.

Now a couple of days ago, a few of my neighbours were out clearing the space out of their drives. We engaged in conversation and discussed the weather, the airport, the struggles of other locals on the roads and general chit chat.

Today that escalated. Far from just clearing the drives, we moved on to the main bit of the cul de sac. There were more of us and we had a common purpose – clearing the snow.

We’d created a community. We’d also created momentum and were picking up on the latent potential of the cul de sac. More people came out to help. One person joked to a twenty something girl that she’d have to bring her shovel out when she came back. Amazingly she took the joke to heart and came out to help. One of the men with a 4x4 took up the shovel and snow plough despite not needing to. In no time at all, the cul de sac was cleared.

Further down, the hill section of our road had been cleared and now just a narrow strip of road is still clarried with snow.

Once a community becomes successful and an aim seems achievable, you can draw in people to the community- much like a blackhole draws in material around it because of its gravity. The caveat is that those who might join in the community must have a latent interest in joining the group.

And what of the one person who made the negative comment? Well they’re enjoying the benefits of the community, but is one person I’ve yet to see with shovel, snow plough or brush in hand - proving that you can’t force people to join a community.

To recap:
• Community can be defined as people coming together for a common purpose or for a shared interest.
• Communities are not created
• Some communities are latent and need some way of bring people together
• Some potential community members may not be active
• Creating achievable aims for a community can invigorate it and create a movement and gravitational pull for potential new members
• You cannot force someone into joining a community

Why are we measuring happiness?

2010-11-25T03:36:00.000-08:00

There is a misconception that measuring happiness is somehow un-economic. Big Businesses don’t do it, so why should we? Surely we can work out that less police means more crime, and few cleaners in hospitals means dirtier wards?

These are the sort of comments seen in the media and from high profile commentators. If you do understand economics, though, happiness is an integral part of the study. There is an ugly word, utility, that is used to describe economic happiness and it’s factored into a lot of theory.

Granted, a very basic pure free market economics ignores utility in the main, dividing resources down to the most economical outcome without affecting an individual. But I’ve always felt that if you can redistribute a resource that makes one individual slightly worse off, it could be justified if the resource boosts the overall economy by a larger amount

The Laffer curve is an easy example demonstrating personal happiness. It measures labour against pay and appears as a hump or a hill shape. Basically, the more we are paid the more we will work, up until the point where we have the money to enjoy our leisure time and still maintain a good standard of living. Why work 24/7 if you can afford a big house, expensive holidays and a horse to ride?

The demand for goods and services is measured using utility. Why buy filet steak when you can buy sirloin? It is because we enjoy the flavour more and see a stronger demand. Politicians often like to think of themselves as economists, but this is an example of where most get it wrong.

The question is why should happiness values be so divisive and seen as a gimmick? The problem is that utility is very hard to measure, and even those measure that are used can be more trend lead than something you can look at in isolation. On this basis these first figures are not that useful and are merely a first step.

Because they are hard to measure, people haven’t bothered with it and have ignored it. Traditional measures seem to work on the whole so the status quo has continued. Cameron has tried to show that the UK is leading this field. This isn’t true. Several countries have been using these measures like France.

So how does it work? We can also see the economic figures of GDP, RPI and so forth, but we also need to understand about confidence, likes and dislike. The stress of spiralling inflation or interests can affect someone’s state of mind. An individual carries these in to work and they don’t perform as well.

The nation becomes less healthy through poor diet and they again can become less economically useful in certain industries where physicality is an issue. Something like the Olympics can lift the nation. The Ashes might either lift or depress a section of the population. Although financially, a road building problem might seem marginal, the relief of stress on commuters could see a boost to the economy.

It is measured by surveying people about how they feel about aspects of their life. The questions are not yes or no and getting the questions right is key to finding the right answers.

It is the smaller decisions, rather than the big questions, that happiness measures should affect. Equally, it isn’t a question of more of one or less of another. It might be which one of two projects should be cut or which of two is better value.

In a work environment, how would you feel if tea and coffee facilities were removed from your office and you were not expected to leave your desk. Would your work levels increase? Logic might say yes because you are now working for the 15 minutes it takes to brew and drink your beverage.

But another logic suggests the brain might work better after a short pause to clear the mind and set it ready for the task ahead. The workers are happier as well as they can demonstrate community spirit (getting the round in) and chat for a limited period. Now extend that into laws on work time and breaks.

One thing to remember is the measure follows unhappiness as well, so real areas of concern can be highlighted.

If you want to know more about the subject there is a great TEDx presentation that explains it in an even more accessible way from Chip Connley.

Behind the scenes of the Northern Art Prize

2010-11-18T05:09:00.001-08:00

It is not often you get a chance to have a sneak preview of a significant event or product. When I was invited to see behind the scenes at the Northern Art Prize, exhibited at Leeds Art Gallery from the 26th November, I couldn’t refuse.

I have an appreciation of art but I am no critic. The blogger event wasn’t aimed at critical appreciation, but of opening a discussion and debate about the Northern Art Prize and its accessibility. The people who ‘know’ about art will be aware of the event but the very word art sometimes puts people off experiencing work they might just enjoy. The event attempted to address this by finding honest comment on the works as they prepare for exhibition.

Another part of seeing behind the scenes is appreciating the hard work that goes into creating an exhibition. Seeing the works of art as they are being assembled, or re-assembled, shows how much work is needed to put an installation in place. Even those who experience the works of art can miss the appreciation on the organisation, logistics and time consuming precision needed to place everything just right.

Most exhibitions have a theme but what was remarkable about the works of art on display was they worked as a collection despite being selected individually. Liverpool still seemed to be a cultural reference and with it themes of industry, migration and multi-culturalism. The works we were able to see had positivity and playfulness; even when looking at bigger socio-political subjects.

Alec Finlay’s four glass blown apples was the first exhibit that caught the eye. To me apples bring to mind the countryside and orchards, having been brought up in the Midlands close to the apple growers of Hereford and Worcestershire. The shear skill required to create such delicate and natural looking apples is impressive in itself but placed on a white background in pairs, you can’t help but look at the differences.

Another of his works is a bowl of seaside rock pieces with the words You have to choose to be chosen written in it. Other than a comment on the prize itself, and the fact it’s fun, I’m not sure what else it says. The same could be said for rock, paper, scissors ARC (Sofia), a neon sculpture showing the childhood game.

Unfortunately the audio-visual display from Haroon Mirza in the same room was not there. The combination of three works called Anthemoessa (the islands in Greek mythology where the sirens come from) will interact with each other and Edward Armitage’s painting The Siren. This sounds intriguing and I want to see how it works. Unlike most of the other works, this installation will have a strong audio element.

David Jaques work North Canada – English Electric also has an audio element but we were unable to hear it. There are two stereoscopic viewers, a Victorian 3D invention created by overlapping two slightly different images through the viewer.

Although only two viewers are set up, the wall is adorned with masses of the image plates. The black and white industrial landscapes is compelling as social history but the work is also structured well so the collection as a whole is visually attractive.

Across from the room is a cabinet filled with bottles in another work by Alec Finlay. Each one has an essential oil in it written as an Acrostic poem. It invites you to look into the cabinet and the poems are more intriguing than the mere cabinet display itself.

David Jaques work Por Convencion Ferrer charts a fictitious conference and journey of a Spanish anarchist through Liverpool. He’d visited Liverpool in 1908 but without the notes, I wouldn’t understand this from the work. The meetings are advertised on silken pennants that suggest a link with the trade unions and their banners and hang together as a collection of finally made banners – although I understood the concept, this side of the exhibit was a little lost on me. But it does stand on its own as a visual piece.

The final exhibit on show is a huge number of works which make a bigger piece. Lubaina Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavillions is something you could spend hours looking at and still find something new that catches your eye. It’s made from a number of jelly moulds, each one designed very differently meaning you can appreciate each mould as a separate work as well as the vista created by the piece as a whole.

The work has railway set models added to it, giving the jelly moulds a human context. A range of interesting characters from balloon sellers to sailors to children to adults have been carefully placed on the exhibit interacting with the moulds. There are also trees and cars adding to the scene.

One more element is the plans of the exhibition are laid out. These pictures contain the backstories for each mould. The notes suggest the exhibit tells something about the afro-British culture created from the migrant communities. There is certainly an African feel to some of the moulds, but it’s not a forthright display of black culture, more a collection of themes many of which reflect that side of the work.

This is my view, and I think I’ve sounded more like a critic than a voice of the common man (the later my intention). I can be sceptical of the installation lead art shown in galleries. A pile of bricks in a Burges art gallery didn’t move me at all, neither did a black square. But these works did on the whole connect with me. It is hard to comment fully on the work in an uncompleted form. Those who I met had their own views about The Northern Art prize which lead to a discussion on why the art seemed thematic and how the selection processed was reached. I’m certainly looking forward to returning to see the completed work and getting the full impact.

If you’re not the usual art goer, this is accessible and child friendly to a degree. There will be more to see and hear than I’ve described and best of all it is free to wonder round if you’re looking for some respite from the weather or the Christmas shopping over the next month or so.

Hopefully it will inspire the region’s artists in the same way that Liverpool has inspired the artists on display. With the opening of the Hepworth Gallery next May and a number of artistic projects being set up, it certainly is an exciting time for art in Yorkshire and the North. If that happens, hopefully the general public will also be able to get more involved reclaiming the arts from an elitist persuit.

You can find out more about the the Northern Art Prize, follow the event on twitter or use the hashtag #northernartprize

At the hub of Leeds community

2010-11-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

The Leeds Community News Hub held its first forum at Trinity and All Saints University College in an event bringing together journalists, bloggers, community groups, charities and those interested in their locality.

The presentation by Meg Pickard of the Guardian might have been on the changing nature of media and the need to engage with the wider community, but the overall theme was very much about connecting; connecting not only people, but technology, data and content.

A joint venture between the college (or is it a university) and the Guardian, the hub throws the doors open to the school of journalism. The media courses ground students in community engagement, but the hub switches this around offering community based projects the ability to gain expert knowledge from the hub (not just from Trinity). For example, a community project might work with journalism students to help work on a news story relevant for a small locality but not gaining the attentions of the wider regional press.

Sarah Hartley, who is in charge of the guardian local projects in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff, discussed the need to be more collaborative and bring together multiple points of view and contribution to a story – much in the way that wikis work – to bring a greater insight to a news story. She also discussed the use of space. So far the Guardian local project has been focused on virtual space and the Guardian Leeds blog. The new forum events bring the event into the real world and help those who might not actually blog or tweet.

I’ve seen Meg Pickard speak before. She is an engaging speaker with a passion for her subject. Not a journalist but a social anthropologist by trade; I wanted to see what had changed since I last spoke to her.

It started much in the same way her last talk did – the discussion around a picture of a bus stop. Are these people in a queue for the bus a community? The answer is potentially – there share many things in common but equally they are all different as well. If they begin to chat about the weather, the lateness of the bus or something quite random they start to engage in a community which will grow if they visit the site on a regular basis. Their journey does not affect who they are and their passions, but they might find other like minded person on their bus route. Or not.

She used Jake McKee’s definition of community:

A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around contexts which are of interest to all of them for various individual reasons.

However, Meg added this definition was loose as what constitutes time, relationships, what a group is or what is of interest. In the words of Mark Zuckenberg: “Communities already exist”. |what this means is it is a lost cause to ‘create’ a community. Echoing words I’d heard last week at TEDxLeeds, community projects often ignore the infrastructure and the people already there and are intent to overlay a new template to create a new community – often in failure. People are passionate about things for a reason and that’s what binds them. You can’t make some interested.

It is easy to “create content” and to consume it, but if something is driven by a passion, you want to do more with that information. You can react to, curate and create new content but not everyone will have the passion to do all. While some will read an article and move on, others will vote on a discussion, fewer will added the link to their twitter site and fewer people will be moved enough to blog about it.

But why do people do any of these things? There has to be a reward for it; a greater sense of being a member, an ego massage for someone wanting to be influential, a channel for venting your spleen or just an interest being sated by reading an article and doing no more.

The mechanics of a story also have to be in place. This is not just words. Increasingly it is pictures, video, sound and data flows. It is also a community voice.

Meg then discussed how crowdsourcing can play a valuable part in modern journalism. She gave the example of how the Guardian opened up the expenses documents for MP and got people to engage with them. It meant 27,000 people helped identify the stories within the expenses scandal through varying layers of engagement. Some clicked on poll buttons which basically said nothing of interest to interesting information.

This created a filter for the journalists to investigate further. Others wrote notes on what they believed they had uncovered.

One student challenged Meg on the exploitation of the public, but the response is that journalistic rigour has to be behind the opening up of the story. The motivation of the individuals was to gain the information and feel a buzz from uncovering a scoop. (I remember doing this and finding not a dicky bird on my local MP). It would be possible to exploit people, but it would be short-lived as people would not help again.

The contribution moved to mutualisation and citizen journalism. By this Meg meant the involvement of multiple groups in creating news. Rather than an editor commissioning a story, researching it and publishing it, a more organic model sees opportunities to engage, contribute and react to news, creating additional news angles that could not be opened up in other ways. But the editor needs to remain to determine fact from fabrication and to ensure the information is the right side of the law.

A case study of @abc_investigates on twitter demonstrated that community needs a context. The Australian TV channel offered the opportunity to have people’s questions answered. They meant investigative journalism questions. The public sent questions about odd socks. Only by further engagement did the account work by demonstrating it meant it would investigate trading standards and council abuses.

But the point of community is that what is relevant to me isn’t relevant to many. I’ve often pondered the failure of Social media is that it pigeon holes you into twitter lists, Facebook friend connections and LinkedIn colleagues even though you may have multiple ‘lives’. Am I the communications manager, the father, husband, football fan, rower, media law geek or ... I could go on but I hope you get the point.

The Danger is that we pigeon-hole audiences and communities and, worse, mix up the difference between opinion and fact.

What will community groups gain from this forum? I think it’s an understanding of where they fit into the story and encouragement that their voice can be heard. If the hub is to work, they will need much more support. In my mind the community groupings need to be identified and a way of bringing them together needs to happen. This includes new media, the forum and other events.

The problem is these groups are not obvious and it will take time for people to get involved. Equally there is an issue of creating an infrastructure to enable people to talk without imposing one that disrupt the existing infrastructure. Equally, it will need to be easy to involve as many people as possible.

The advantage is that an art exhibition in Beeston might be able to link to the Leeds art community, to the locals in the area, to people interested in the subject matter rather than art – and Leeds can benefit from people coming together to talk. Isn’t that what community really means?

(Picture courtesy of http://www.freeimages.co.uk/)

The Joke

2010-11-15T03:39:00.000-08:00

In a television interview, Milan Kundera’s first book, The Joke, was described as an indictment of Stalinism. The author was quick to respond pointing out that the book was nothing more than a love story. The English language version has since been retranslated and edited to ensure the love story is as obvious in this language as in Kundera’s original version.

For those unfamiliar with the book, a young man living in communist Czechoslovakia writes a note, heavy in irony, in which he praises Trotsky. The authorities intercept this message and take it seriously. His life and love is affected for ever as he is expelled from the communist party and all the disadvantages this brings.

Kundera had already been expelled from the communist party and the banning of his work in his homeland later lead him to live in Paris. Despite Kundera’s view, the book is seen in the same way as 1984 or The Trial as a warning over the interference of the state over the rights of the individual’s life.

In another review suggests “This novel exposes the dangers of living in a humourless world”

Why am I talking about his book? Because of a case that mirrors the story. At its heart is a love story. An English young man starts talking to a girl in Northern Ireland using social media. The couple fall in love, and the Englishman arranges to meet her.

A few days before he is due to fly, it snows. It snows heavily and the UK infrastructure grinds to a halt. Robin Hood airport, where he is due to fly from, is closed and he writes a note on Twitter to show his frustration to his friends.

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!

Five days, later he’d forgotten he’d even typed the message but wheels had been set in motion. An off-duty manager at the airport did a search and discovered the message. He did nothing initially, but thought he’d pass it on to his line manager. His line manager saw it as a harmless comment, but, was duty bound to send it to the police. The police saw the message believed it to be of no threat but felt duty bound to check it out. They visited the young man who apologised, showed regret for his comment and cooperated with the Police. They found nothing to indicate this man was a threat.

So far it’s reasonable and proportionate. Then the story takes a twist when the CPS gets hold of the report. Despite no-one seeing this as anything more than a rash statement, the CPS decides to prosecute. Terrorism laws do not cover the tweet as the standard of proof would require some sort of intent. The CPS turns to section 127of the Communications Act 2007, an extension on a law based to protect telephone operators from receiving abusive calls. The 1930s based law added in communications that are electronic.

Despite the “joke” not being seen as menacing by the Police or the airport, two trial judges have ruled the comments were not just “menacing” but “obviously so” and that the public could not see the message as anything else. Context of the comment seems to be irrelevant as does the possibility the comment may have more than one meaning. The meaning implied by the judge, devoid of irony and humour, is the one that stands.

The young man has, as a result of the trial, lost his job and been fined by the courts. He is still unemployed – although he is now living with the Northern Irish girl he struggled to meet almost a year ago.

So far tens of thousands on social media have strongly disagreed with the Judge. Personally, I totally disagree but then I’m not a judge. What is worrying is that the law sets precedent for communications on this medium.

Regular users of twitter will have encountered the problem of misreading someone else’s tweet. The difficulty is in implying tone to words written down. The comedian David Schneider described how he’d tweeted a joke about wishing they could grow apples which didn’t have stickers on them. He received a reply from someone pointing out that the apples had stickers added after the pick process.

Companies have been caught out on twitter from Vodaphone to Habitat. Those in the spotlight get caught out with ill-judged comments, mistakes and worse. Next time you tweet, “I could murder for a cold drink now” you’ll have to think twice. Most of all it seems that the state has lost its sense of humour.

So just be careful if you’re quoting John Betjeman’s Slough or Dr Feelgood's Boom Boom lyrics as the law may see it differently. The state sees fit to interfere with notes and comments with no intent or no impact, just as in The Joke. A book once held up as ludicrous behaviour, possible only under the communist regime, is now reality in the self same country which made the comment.

Even if this isn’t the thin end of the wedge, it affects those linked with communications and might lead to a less engaging and more safety first approach. This does no-one any good.

However it effects us, though, this is a love story between a boy and a girl which the State feels desperate to interfer with.

TEDx and the City (Leeds) Part 2

2010-11-12T04:15:00.001-08:00

The second half of TEDxLeeds opened with Stuart Childs Eulogising of Audioboo. Although Stuart uses it in a different way to me, I’ve been a firm admirer of Audioboo. The application accessible on iphones and the web, enables you to record up to five minutes of speech or sound and post it like a blog.

On one level it is a podcast platform but it is something much more creative as well. Stuart made the comment that its founder Mark Rock created it after lamenting that he never recorded the speech of his grandmother after she died.

I hadn’t realised this when I met Mark Rock at a Connect Yorkshire event in Sheffield when he was a key speaker at one of the organisation’s events. As I used to be in radio, I totally get the power of sound and the theatre of the mind. Why not just have video with pictures? Because the pictures are better on radio.

It is a different medium and we are a visual society that we sometimes forget the power of the US radio production of HG Wells War of the Worlds, the power of hearing the Bradford City fire by the match commentator that day or the brilliance of someone like Kenny Everett in editing sounds together to produce radio comedy.

Stuart likes collecting sounds and discussed how they are emotive. The sound of your school bell, the public transport, the ambience of a workplace, factory, market or city centre. What we don’t get is the sense of how this changes. Would we recognise the sound of Leeds in 20-30 years time? My father grew up in Leeds but had been away from the city for a long time before I came back and he noticed a distinct change in the Leeds accent.

This brought him on to the UK Sound Map, a project to collect sounds as memories and historical documents. What might not seems important now, might be valuable to historians or social commentators in the future.

I see there’s a strong use for Audioboo as a tool to interview and store information. Seeing as it is a week of remembrance, we have just lost are last WW1 veterans and there is a value of collecting the stories of those involved in the second world war from Bletchley Park to the Coventry Blitz to soldiers and those whose lives were affected at home.

The next presentation was a video from Pranar Misore who flipped the concept of bringing the real world into the digital world, by discussing how the digital world can be brought into the real world.

What I found interesting was the way he discussed how we can bring objects into gestures – much in the way the ipad is touch screen rather than using an interface like a mouse. He took this a stage further suggesting gestures are also memes. We all know what thumbs up means, a salute or handshake. In this way we can make technology more intuitive and allow is to interact with the physical world by overlaying some 6th sense devices to help us retain information or interpret the real world.

Matt Edgars talk was well prepared and presented, linking the historic industrial past with the now. He did this without really referring to the digital industries of Leeds, or his own part in creating innovative avatar and social media products at Orange.

His first champion was Louis and Lizzy Le Prince who used the ‘new media’ of chemistry to create the first films, linking technology from photography and ticket dispensing to create something revolutionary. He discussed how the standardisation of pins lead to an open source platform where textile factories could construct looms with the knowledge of knowing they could get the right pins supplied.

He discussed the innovation of the steam engine in Leeds, created by the abundance of the right raw materials and the way Leeds used the inspiration of others to build the corn exchange, the Temple Works and the Florentine tower.

He suggested these were good tales to inspire Leeds but that there were other claims on the individuals. The power of the good story is to show how innovation occurs and suggested Leeds needs to be inspired and aspire to the greatness of these people in the past to develop the new technological future.

He mentioned Charles Leadbetter’s six Cs which further illustrate the point:
• Combination
• Conversation
• Challenge
• Commitment
• Connection
• Co-evolution

The final speaker was Rahid Parmar from IBM. I took very little in the way of notes during his presentation on smarter cities but I did make plenty of notes on my thoughts.

My notes consist mainly on the fact that there are over a billion transistors per
human on the planet, a figure 10 times the number of grains of rice. I also noted that technology isn’t about making better machines, but about people. We make better vacuum cleaners to give us more leisure time and less dust irritation, not just because we can.

He also made a point about the vastness of technology and technological change, noting that grandparents at a family birthday didn’t understand how teenagers talked using social media on their phones. Now, I’d argue you could say that of many ages and this isn’t unique to the present day.

Another tale told of how a bad plane flight by his son lead to two plane companies following him on twitter and the power that social interaction has for both consumers and companies if used well.

I noted on the time that the law has to catch up with technology sometimes and misinterpretation comes, just like the Paul Chambers Twitter Joke Trial. I had no idea this point would be magnified just a day later by the appeal court ruling.

Rahid also kept banging on about apples. He made a point that the average apple in the UK has travelled 3,700 miles and this wasn’t right. I have some sympathy of the view. I remember a news story about how UK fish was sold to French wholesalers before being sold back a day later to the UK, an odd and needless shipping of goods purely for financial gain of a few.

But there was no justification or understanding of the apples he was passionate about. Is it more economical to grow in bulk in New Zealand, the US or South Africa and transport than to grow them closer to home? Is it because we value choice and certain varieties can’t be produced in the UK?

Equally it is a simple statement which would involve huge amounts of cultural and economic change to bring about. The UK apple industry is a fraction of what it was and the cheap imports have led to a terminal decline in the number of orchards in this country. Even in places like Herefordshire, there are moribund orchards which would need decades of support to resurrect.

This isn’t to say we don’t invest in apple production or favour the British apple – but it sounds more greenwash than a considered statement. There is a difference between the long and the short term gain. Many of the government cuts offer short term gain, with the promise of long term benefits. But some of the more ill-conceived cuts ignore long term growth created by investment in education and innovation ( the cuts made to the Film Council for example).

My other thoughts were around the drivers for change. Rahid suggested it centred on issues (a resource that is unsustainable), investment (changes made in London ahead of the Olympics) and inspiration (finding a better way)

He suggested the future will also see more pressure on basic utilities and we had to look how to do things differently. He added that even in the UK we might come under growing water shortages with a growing population in ever more densely packed cities. The focus should not be about providing better transport or education, but on seeing what individuals need and trying to empower their own health and happiness. That said, solving the problems with the Kirkstall road would make my life healthier (less stress) and happier.

TEDx and the City (Leeds) Part 1

2010-11-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

Emotional memory and the empowerment of individuals through open data sources seemed to be the theme of the third TEDx conference in Leeds, held in The Mint in Holbeck.
The following is a mixture of my notes and thoughts following the event.

Megan Smith, a visual artist originally from Canada, opened TEDxLeeds with an emotive and personal journey from Ottawa to Armley.

It started with a map of where she grew up, with a singular arterial road. Points of reference were drawn based on memories and people. This in itself was visually interesting as a piece of art, but it wasn’t the aim of the image.

Her journey continued there the discovery of Canada and her disillusionment caused by a heavy handed response to a peaceful demonstration she was observing and the subsequent government denials of the event.

Her journey then takes us to Leeds where she felt the need to discover her new surroundings. The more densely packed urban environment means that she felt it would be harder to understand the area in the same way.

Using blogs, mobile technology, social mapping and GPS in 2005, she embarked on a project to collect suggestions of things to do, see and events to experience in Leeds. The project not only helped her to discover Leeds but also enabled other people to discover the more secret side of Leeds that some locals might not even know.

This emotional mapping offers something more than geography, enabling people to come together to share experiences.

She left us with a lesson from Peruvian Economics. You can’t change the world – but you can have an impact on how people experience it.

The second presentation by Julian Tait dovetailed neatly, further exploring emotional mapping. Using the sat nav as an example, he suggested that it guides us through the landscape without reference to names, places, historical places of interest, experiences, memories and much more.

He started, though with a history lesson contrasting two ideas of the state – in the United Kingdom the nation state based on the ‘vulgar’ English as a common language and the empowerment through knowledge and learning. The other situation was the Italian city states which had free trade and exchange of ideas that gave rise to the renaissance.

The use of emotion mapping (following people round cities with monitors to gauge emotional response) can show how people feel about it. Responses to leisure and environment are not the whole story as we spend time in work or doing tasks that aren’t enjoyable. By seeing how good and bad experience map themselves, we can start to see how we can improve the cityscape.

The opening up of data means that other forms of maps can be created and shared. A UK company can now make maps of trees in San Francisco without ever having been there. Centres of data are being created in an echo of the renaissance. In the Britain the renaissance came later due to the difference in language.

The problem is that the American, Canadian, European standards of data capture and use are different using different systems and a common language is needed to empower the masses.

Susan Williamson breathed a strong breathe of fresh air into the world of retail marketing analytics and understanding trends.

Her approach is different from the majority in this area. Instead of looking for broad statistics looking for shallow trends, she advocates looking very narrowly at a few people to get a deeper and richer understanding.

Rather than a tick box approach to finding out what people like, it’s about finding out what individuals really do and why they behave in that way. It is an approach I used when in radio. Rather than look at the ABC figures, think of a particular listener and talk directly to them.

Retail is about finding the right mix of products for a particular space and this doesn’t have to stop in the real world. Space can also be virtual. It might be easier to find the pub regular who has seen the establishment over 40 years than a user of a website set up three years ago but it is possible.

An idea needs to be visualised and brought into the reality of the shopper or user.

A case study on Rolex saw the company look to capitalise on the Bond brand. The Rolex comes well down the list of essential Bond items so a good idea misses its target. The way to capitalise is to look further up that list and use the Bond brand that purchasers might think was pure Bond – like gadgets.

Rather than thinking about aisles and psychological theory, you to understand what goes on in a buyer’s mind and give them what they want rather than what you want to sell. It sounds simple but is far from simple.

Another case study showed how a council wanted to develop a cultural centre. They proposed building a new facility and targeted certain groups they felt would benefit. Actually talking to people meant they realised there was no need for any buildings. Assumptions about venues, accessibility and the knowledge locals had were far from the mark as were assumptions about what they wanted.

A cultural quarter turned in to something that more resembled a cockroach and the emphasis on whom the events were for changes too. And not one new building was created as the venues already existed.

The final session in the first half saw Usman Haque talk about Pachube and how his business has been created out of a need to create inter-connectivity. But Usman was clear the ‘smart’ technology was nothing without the intelligence of the user. To have a smartphone doesn’t make you smart but using a smartphone might enable use to use its feature to your advantage if you understand the technology.

On one level Usman was unsure of what Pachube (pronounced Patch Bay)actually offers but on another level he knew it was about making sensors and devices easily accessible, often using six sense technology.

Six sense technology enables users to view a virtual world laid on top of the real world on devices like iPads or phones. Point the device at a temperature sensor and you can read the temperature not only now, but over the last day, week or month.
By making the data sources connect with easy to read dashboards, you can help various data streams come together to make a new improved service. I personally thought of two services that did this – Traffic-i which uses the data from the highways agency to offer real time traffic services and the Weather Pixie, a great site using weather station data and mashing them into avatar weather pixies who tell you the weather conditions.

But he advocated going one step further, may be offering a logistics firm details about traffic and weather to better predict their delivery schedules.
People also want to do different things with data and the tools have to offer different services:

• Visualisation – showing what the data means
• Controlling – enable users to vary a sensor or device depending on the results
• Mapping/tracking
• Pipes/ mashing – bringing two sets of data together to form a new stream
• Output tools and alerts
• Feeds and search functions
• Mobile applications
• Augmented reality
• The ability to query data

There is also an element of democratising data that is often lost. Creating such links shows how other people can use your data in new ways to produce new services which may help you – or just help others. For example, seeing how much energy a company uses might lead to people being able to suggest how you can lower your energy costs and save money. Relationships can be created between diverse groups can take place creating horizontal integration.

Co-operation and democratisation isn’t straight forward. I agree with the principle but in reality it can be used by pressure groups to sling mud rather than help, but at the same time my view is it’s worth the risks. It is the same argument with opening communications channels and the fear and risks are often never realised whilst the benefits are greater than first thought.

Is the web destroying our language?

2010-11-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

Ben Kingsley seems to think so.

At The People Speak event, he suggested digital distractions in “the cyber planet we’re now living in” has resulted in ever decreasing attention spans. He blamed the internet for stopping many people being able to “think and speak in paragraphs”.
He said: “I’m here to share the power of the spoken word and the resilience and beauty of the English language. I’m concerned about the disintegration of our sublimely beautiful language, which is the spine of our culture and has produced the greatest dramatists ever. You set that diamond against the trash that it’s becoming – it’s shocking. We have a language that’s like sprung steel and we’re turning it into chewing gum.”

My initial reaction to his comments was anger that someone so linked to the arts was denigrating the development of language and those who use digital platforms. Coming back to the statement, I thought I’d investigate several of the many points Ben throws up.

The rise and fall of the Attention Span

There is one point that looks credible. Attention spans are decreasing. There is certainly some evidence for this but looking closely at the studies, I’m not completely convinced by these arguments.

Many of the reports are by interested parties – a PR related study by Lloyds TSB Insurance for example; studies that compare now with the nineteenth century. The most recent study from the University of Iowa compared children who spent less than two hours in front of a screen with children who spent more than two hours.

When you add in computer time at school and a couple of TV programmes, I’d be hard pressed to find enough children who spend less than 2 hours of screen time.

The inference from this is that screen time is bad. It prevents you from doing something worthy like reading a book which will enrich your intelligence more. This in itself is a flawed concept. Reading Tolstoy or Dickens might be rewarding, but what if you read Mills and Boon? Is watching the latest documentary on natural history less valuable? Is viewing science or law blogs mind numbing and watching a play enriching?

The communications stream

What has changed is choice of entertainment. When I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, music came from a limited number of radio stations or from tapes and then CDs. The internet was sparse and very slow. Mobile phones had the capacity to show a two colour screen and cost the earth. TV was restricted to 3 or 4 channels. Communications were more concentrated.

What the bombast of Kingsley ignores is that communication has become broader meaning we have more choice to select what we want to hear. A diet of X-factor, Coronation Street and Facebook isn’t going to enrich me as much as watching the latest dramatic production on TV, reading the Jack of Kent blog and reading Dickens on a kindle (surely that’s screen time too).

There is a level of competition in the communications channels that means we can scan certain documents or programmes, but I was taught at University that whilst certain text should be read in full, others should be sped read to absorb the basic principles, so this approach is hardly un-academic.

A chewing gum language

Another implication is that language is being eroded by this digitisation. I disagree. Let’s go back to the 80s when many children spent a huge amount of time playing manic miner and watching the limited TV. Is this more likely to produce good language skills than the teenager of today, able to discover interesting content online in seconds?

We often assume people sink to the lowest denominator, but that isn’t a correct assumption. Equally we all enjoy a guilty pleasure from time to time and I’m sure there is something extremely low brow which Kingsley enjoys.

One thing that marks the best wordsmiths out is a strong vocabulary. A written vocabulary isn’t the same as a spoken vocabulary but being surrounded by a rich environment of language is important. Churchill used a vast number of different words.

Using social media and engaging in dialogue is different from being a passive observer. Responding to twitter users means we have to develop our own language skills.

A simple hashtag game might not be to everyone’s liking, but to play you do need mental dexterity a good vocabulary and an understanding of culture. On message boards, I’ve come across a lot of pedantry when it comes to language and it also teaches you a lot about argument, even if you’re discussing football. A clear, concise argument using good grammar will be more persuasive than a poorly worded answer. It will also prevent a quick putdown purely based on the poor grammar.

Equally, if I’m putting together an argument, I can search for pithy quotes in seconds.

The evolution of language

I doubt Ben Kingsley tends to speak in iambic pentameter all the time. Even Shakespeare understood that you could change mood, impart meaning and change the dynamic of a play by breaking structure. Just look at a play like Anthony and Cleopatra where grand speeches use rhyming couplets while private conversations use coarse and common language. Equally Shakespeare would not have recognised the words or spoken like Chaucer.

We no longer speak like those in the 1940s, but neither did the Victorians. That’s the genius in the Armstrong and Miller Airmen sketches. They use the homophonic similarities of the 1940s and youth speech to juxtapose the difference in attitudes. If you look at American English, it is rooted in the past and actually has an older form of English at its heart. Which is more correct? Whatever you say, I’ll never say the word ‘gotten’.

Equally, language evolves through fashion, the need for terminology and use. Watch the Monkees TV programme of the 60s and see if the fashionable language there is still in use. I remember a cartoon called Rude Dog and the Dweebs- who uses those terms now (NB Dog referred to a canine and isn’t the same as calling someone a ‘Dwag’).

Shakespeare is one of the great innovators in language and you can’t critise the modern generation for changing the language and praise the dramatic greats in the same breath. You might tar computer users with the LOL generation of talking by writing GR8 rather than great, but even that language is functional. Although there are certainly people who will write in that way, many use the longer forms in tweets or text because they prefer to, reducing only when they see little option.

To sum up

There are issues with the use of technology and the written and spoken language. Some of these are related to schooling. But to denounce technology is to deny the future and ignore their potential. Ben Kingsley’s comments come across as cheap and from someone who does not engage with technology in way that many now do. The last five years have seen massive advancements in communication technology and to consign these changes as not important doesn’t help his own cause. It makes his argument weak, high brow and non-exclusive. To win, he needs to make people listen by engaging with the very people he feels aren’t living up to his expectations.

Image curteousy of www.freedigitalphotos.net.

The Utility of Communication

2010-11-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

The problem with communication is the subjective nature of a message. Even if the message is good and honest, the perception or miscommunication can lead to big problems. An article that demonstrates this is here where web administrators failed to realise that Pen Island can be misread in a URL.

It can be as simple as not looking directly at someone important when talking to them, the method of message delivery or other conflicting messages.

I always remember the Macclesfield Express with a front page headline splash of Double stabbing after family row right next to Cheshire Police celebrate drop in crime figures. The second story might be true, but it seems insensitive and crass despite the force not having any idea the two news items would appear on the same page.

The way the communications industry gets around this is by measuring sentiment. This isn’t perfect in itself. As well as the additional cost of in depth analysis, some systems are automated picking words with emotion without checking whether there is irony implied by that word. If done by a real person, one person’s perception could be different from another.

Now although it is possible to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of communications, it isn’t always done and it is not always the main business focus.

In economics, there is a similar problem – how do you measure the feel good factor as happiness affects confidence and the decision to invest. They came up with the express utility which is the amount of happiness someone derives from a good or service.

Why is this relevant you may ask? The reason is that in the downturn cuts are made to reduce costs to minimise the impact on income. There’s an excellent TEDx presentation by Chip Conley showing how a hotel came out of a downturn by looking at making his workforce and guests happier rather than cutting the costs. It marked the company out as more than your standard hotel delivering a service.

Communication is a key area where cuts can be made. In the film Up in the air, there is the dichotomy where a firm of HR consultants, taken on to fire employees, shows its humanity by rejecting video link technology even though it saved costs. No one wants to hear they’ve broken up with someone by text or that they’ve lost their job via email. But it does happen regularly.

Companies can see communications as a soft target for sales without looking at what the function of the role is and how maintaining a good reputation can be valuable to retaining business. Equally I’ve noticed some very good communications campaigns being hamstrung by clients scaling back projects to a point where a good idea is made pointless by missing the key element of the proposal.

In difficult trading conditions I’d argue communications is more important. There is a difference between finding cheaper ways of getting a message across and falling between the two stools of a highly creative campaign without the funding. Without it how do your customers know how hard you work, the great people you employ, the innovations you’ve created and the care you deliver to each one of them.

(pictures courtesy of www.engrish.com)

Steering the right course in communications

2010-10-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Communication is key in many sports but rowing is quite unique in the way athletes have to respond. It’s an endurance team sport where the sense of feeling is as important as speaking or visual stimuli.

But the role of the coxswain, or cox, is probably unique. In such a physical sport, you have a team member who is meant to be inactive, light and an excellent communicator. Many who don’t know the sport don’t understand what role this steersman has.

It echoes the role communications professionals have in business. Little understand and seen as periphery but at the same time communications have the ability to make or break a company at key times. Yes, the business might be able to run effectively in the short turn, but a change in socio-economic climate, a crisis or just the ability to make consumers grasp a concept.

Coxing is the same, a crew may have the best athletes but a cox can galvanise the crew to perform above their potential, keep them from reaching breaking point or bring a disorganised crew back together yet rarely are they noticed for their role.
So what learning points can you take from coxing.

The misconception is the belief it’s about shouting and controlling. Good coxing is about silence and timing – the understanding that white space on a page being as important as the text.

It’s easy to give instruction constantly, it’s difficult to take in the information around you, assess it and wait for the right time to make a comment.

Language is important. To motivate, your vocabulary has to be positive yet firm enough to deal with any issues that arise. It also has to fit in with the individual crew, which means a lot of hard work has to happen off the river to work out the character of a group.

Communications professionals spend plenty of time reading papers, magazines, social media streams, listening to the radio and watching TV just doing that.
Coxes have to give coaching advice about technique they might not be able to do themselves with the confidence of their crew, understanding the business of rowing.

Communications professionals often have to give advice about products and services without having an understanding of the business they are dealing with – but they have a different perspective either as a customer, a journalist or even just as an outsider. Without confidence in our ability, it would be difficult to persuade companies to take our advice.

To recap:

1. Shouting hardly ever works, yet silence can have its own effect.
2. Timing is everything.
3. Selecting the right words and language is vital.
4. Understanding your environment, colleagues and business is an ongoing process.
5. Confidence in your key message or belief needs to be at the heart of you communications

If you do all these things, you might just steer a straight course.

A to Z in an instant!

2010-09-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Trying out the new Google instant service, I decided to check out the difference between the US and the UK service.

If you aren’t aware, Google instant is a service that updates the search list with every keystroke. There already was a predictive text box, but this takes it one stage further anticipating the most searched for content.

That said, after looking at the results I have become a little sceptical about them. I’ve compiled a UK and US A-Z and 0-9 and hopefully this will demonstrate why. There is certainly some censoring going on but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I was surprised about many of the top searches but whereas the US list had a broader range of returns but both lists were very commercial.

This begs two questions. Does this mean that UK internet users are looking for commercial sites and internet shopping has taken off? Does this mean that retailers are paying for these slots? I’d like some transparency as it looks like we are an unadventurous nation looking for high street retailers and not exciting and dynamic content.

Judge for yourself (UK first, US second):

A is for Argos in the UK and Amazon in the US
B is for the BBC or retailer BestBuy
C is for Currys or Craigslist (a US classified ads service)
D is for Debenhams or Dictionary.com
E is for Ebay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google maps or Gmail
H is for Hotmail
I is for ITV or Ikea
J is for John Lewis or Jetblue (a US airline)
K is for KLM or Kohls (an online retail site)
L is for Lotto or Lowe’s (a home improvement retailer)
M is for MSN or Mapquest (interestingly M (space) brings up M&S)
N is for Next or Netflix (DVD rental site)
O is for O2 or Orbitz (a travel firm)
P is for Paypal or Pandora Jewellery
Q is for QVC or Brainy Quotes
R is for Rightmove or REI outdoor gear
S is for Sky or Sears tools
T is for Tesco or Target.com (online retailer)
U is for Youtube or US Postal Service
V is for Virgin or Verizon (mobile phones)
W is for BBC Weather or Weather.com
X is for Xbox
Y is for Youtube or Yahoo
Z is for ZARA or Zillow (real estate)
0 is for O2 or 007.com
1 is for 192 or 14th Amendment on Wikipedia
2 is for 24 (TV) on Wikipedia
3 is for 3 mobile phones or 3 DS from Nintendo
4 is for 4 on demand or 4Chan
5 is for BBC 5 day weather or 50 Cent
6 is for 6Music or 60 minutes (CBS)
7 is for 7Zip file service
8 is for 8Ball T-shirts or 84 Lumbar (professional contractors)
9 is for 90210

So out of 36 UK sites, the BBC has 4 hits, Youtube and O2 twice. There are 10 retail sites, 9 TV related sites, 7 technology or web service sites, 5 phone related sites, 3 social media sites and two others. It doesn’t reflect my searches, but does it yours?
I’d have expected say Ancestry to out-place Argos – or Amazon. There’s little media or sites like digital spy, drudge report or The Onion.

The 11th of September

2010-09-10T05:58:00.001-07:00

This date affected virtually everyone in some way and the images which are so familiar were being seen for the very first time. It’s so shocking that we can’t comprehend the magnitude of what was happening in front of our eyes. This is a personal recollection of my small part in that day, not even a footnote in history – yet it is one of my proudest days and one which will affect me and my career everyday.

I remember watching the news before coming into work for my shift at Ananova, Orange’s recently acquired internet news syndication service. It was in the Guinness book of records for having created the first avatar news reader, Ananova. There wasn’t anything major happening, but I like to keep up with current affairs. I switched on the radio in my car but changed my mind and listened to a CD instead.

Taking the lift up the five flights of stairs, I walked into the office with a smile on my face around 12:50pm. “Hi everyone” I said to the video team – my team – in charge of animating the Ananova character. The mood was odd and Natasha said to me “Have you not heard the news – a plane’s crashed in New York”. This in itself wasn’t shocking, planes’ crash. I lifted my eyes up to the TV screen above the desk to see a burning skyscraper. I’d missed the reporting by minutes but the story had gathered apace.

At that moment little was clear apart from the fact that a plane had hit the world trade centre. The wires were already going crazy. The Subs desk was filtering AFP, AP, PA and all manner of news sources. The reporters had a channel each, transcribing and checking the information coming through to them. Another team was filtering the filtered wire stories and creating copy for the web, text message alerts. We were creating a special bulletin for Ananova to read out. I put the copy together while Natasha and Nicky gathered the pictures and raw information for me to use.

Then I looked up – I’m not sure whether I did it myself or somebody said something. There was a plane circling the twin towers and I watched as the second plane ploughed through the building and flames leapt out of the far side of the building. The story had changed. Reports were coming in of further hijackings and the grounding of all flights worldwide.

The job was all consuming. The information was out of date before it was published. You’d have 20-30 facts that would make a front page story, and room for ten. It only intensified during the day. The pictures were unbelievable. Witnessing jumpers. Trying to work out what was fluttering in the air. Trying to comprehend what else was happening. It was chaos yet we were managing to make sense of it all. And little time to worry about my brother working that day in Canary Wharf.

What I wasn’t aware of was the technical staff’s role. They were working hard just to ensure the servers could cope with the traffic loads being put on them. Every available space for a new user was being created getting the most from our IT infrastructure. Even the IT support desk helped in a small way providing water and refreshments.
The story changed again. The pentagon had been hit; another plane confirms a hijacking shortly before crashing. A car bomb in Washington. Nothing would have surprised us at that point. It was actually feeling scary to be 5 flights up under a flight path despite nothing happening in the UK.

Then Natasha said: “look the building’s collapsed.... it’s just gone”. I looked up. The camera was focussed on where the building was. All there was to be seen was dust. It cleared a little, and I saw the other tower and suggested it hadn’t collapsed – how could it just go? I didn’t know about the twin towers before that day, and I just couldn’t believe there was just one all of a sudden. If I’d have know the view, it would have been obvious.

More mountains of copy, more images, more to write. Yet we were ploughing a furrow for others to see, updating the story as concisely as we could. Our secondary sources went. CNN, BBC we started to lose sight of the opposition. The sites weren’t working and error pages were up. Ananova kept afloat. We didn’t realise the important of what we were doing. The whole world was on the internet and the old media was being swamped to the point of breaking point. Somehow, Ananova coped with millions of visitors to the site – most logging on to Ananova for the first time.

I changed jobs some way through, it needed a fresh focus and we needed to act as a team. Ananova was running perfectly despite the crisis. Everyone had a job and just did it. No one wanted to leave. Besides, we had the best seat in the house – a world of wires, a bank of TV screens and the most amazing and compelling story – a horror story – unfolding. And to repeat, the technical team did as much if not more to deliver the service.

I don‘t remember how long I stayed that day, but even over the next few days, the story developed and changed we all worked longer than our shift to catch the latest develop,ments. We’d always been concerned about the escalation procedure if the Queen mother died, but that seemed straight forward after 9/11 coming some 6 months later.

Equally the ease in which we all found a role should not be taken for granted. I was working as a press officer at the time of the bombings in London. It was chaotic in that business and it took leadership to assign people roles and tasks. It was trying to put in place a structure that should have been in place before.

I feel I part of history and I’m proud I was able to keep millions of people informed about what was happening, trying to bring some clarity to a muggy and confusing picture. I wasn’t a senior manager nor anyone who would be called upon as an expert – but every one of those members of the Ananova team should feel as proud as I do.

One final note. Having worked on the day and seen the con fusion, I have no time for the sceptics view of 9/11. Pulling single misreports out of hundreds of thousands of reports isn’t a conspiracy, its just statistics. No one knew what was happening and the reports were sometimes best guesses. The reports changed all the time one way then another and back again as people struggled to find the facts and work out what facts were important.

My time with TEDx (Part 2)

2010-09-10T05:03:00.001-07:00

The second half kicked off with Alex Graham from the BBC, discussing his five blocks to creativity:

• It can’t be done
• It’s been done
• Let’s think outside the box
• What does the boss think
• Listen to your Customers

The ones to note are the third and fifth. The ‘let’s think outside the box’ argument is that being totally free is limiting. This Paradox applies to the supermarket. They could stock a whole isle of instant noodles to offer a limitless choice – but that only confuses the customer and limits what other products are on offer.

It may be useful to think differently but there needs to be guidance and rules. Rules, of course, can be broken, but it establishes a direction and framework to create a solution. His example was going for a walk. You can be free to go to your local shop anyway, because you know where you are. You could go via the park, the cinema or even just go straight down the road. Go to Borneo and try the same thing. You’ve never been there before and you’ve not seen a shop. A map might help, but you may also need a guide and a translator. This aides the exploration of new territory, not hinders it.

The last point is controversial and deliberately so, but it is more a devil’s advocate point of view. It ties in with the theory of second best, and the view that democracy may be a good solution but it is imperfect. Ask 1000 people what TV shows they want to watch, and create one show to fulfil it. I bet it will be absolutely rubbish, pandering to everyone and no one at the same time.

While it is important to listen to people, it is also important to have your own mind and use the advice to improve an idea, not to drive the idea forward. While a cafe might benefit from someone suggesting serviettes are available from the counter, the same person telling to the chef how to cook the food without any specialist knowledge could be a disaster.

Tom Scott’s presentation speaks for itself and can be seen here http://vimeo.com/10060159 - very thought provoking and worth a watch.

Andy Hessleman, a management consultant, said a lot – most of it was interesting but amaountedf to reviewing your business. How can you not only be better than your opposition, but be demonstrably better in a way that’s hard to copy. Part of it is about having a culture, and the other part is how you do your own job better. He had a thought that marketing is a tax on the uninspiring company links in with Cennydd’s comment that only one company can be the cheapest, the others need design. Equally it shows why PR is being increasingly seen as important. Not only do people have to create a compelling product or service, but people need to be aware it exists.

The final presentation was from former Dragon’s Den’s Doug Richard. I wasn’t expecting a rich economic argument about the sate of this nation and a criticism of the current government. It was refreshing to see a view that I hold being held up when we only get half the argument from the politicians. They say the timing of cuts is critical and the two sides bicker over how miuch and how fast to cut. But like a mortgage, you could pay it off quickly or spread it over a longer period of time. There is a cost to spreading it over time, but it might make repayments easier.

Now Doug’s main argument is that cuts are all good and well, but there has to be investment, innovation and growth as well. Just like the earlier ‘happiness’ measurement presentation, the discussion misses the value in the economy and the way we make it stronger. Growth can only come by using the same resources better, not by working harder or using more.

There has to be an investment in people, in infrastructure and freeing up the capital resources of people who create wealth. These aren’t the big companies, but the SMEs who need help to take on apprentices, develop new products and create the new industries of the future. He hailed back to Schumpeter, his ideas of creative destruction. Vinyl wasn’t ‘improved’, it was destroyed by the arrival of a new and better format, the CD, which in turn was eroded by digital technology. In between you get tape, MiniDiscs, Digital tape and the like.

Equally we can’t support everyone in trouble. He was a bit too Friedman in his approach, but I like the way the Liberals put it in 1911 “What we have done is to strap a lifebelt around him, whose buoyancy, aiding his own strenuous exertions, ought to enable him reach the shore”. It’s a good starting point for a successful British government. Hopefully Mr Cameron will listen to the advice.

My time with TED (Part 1)

2010-09-10T03:38:00.000-07:00

When I go to conferences and events, I’m always trying to find a learning point from what I’m listening to. The following are the learning points I picked up from TEDxSheffield. This is not a regurgitation of what I heard, but the elements I drew out from the talks – possibly reinterpreting them or linking them with my own thoughts and opinions.

TEDxSheffield started with Cennydd Bowles, a user experience specialist discussing beauty, design and how this hadn’t translated onto the web. He suggested there were no ‘design classics’ on the web to compare with the London tube map, or even the applemac. Webdesign was either highly functional or highly designed but rarely both.

I’d disagree with this stance for a couple of reasons. I think Google is a design classic but I think it is too commonplace to understand why. It was launched in a time when web pages were getting ever more complex because “they could”, losing usability by being clever. Along with usability comes accessibility.

Google was a white page with a single text box and a couple of buttons and remains largely the same, although, like Tate and Lyle golden syrup, you can see subtle variations over time making a big difference.

The other thought was that web design should be something linked to emotion. The experience of a website is a journey. Sometimes we want a quick solution, other times we may want to wander. But to make a journey memorable, it needs to be linked to emotion. The best designs and art summon up emotion and create an attachment, a loyalty and a desire to return.

Now I think there are deeper elements in web design than visual stimuli and that architecture plays a part and I also think the journey is important in making it personal to the user.

We shared a TEDx video from Chip Connley on measurement and defining what is important to a business.

To the world of business and accounting, his words might seem a bolt from the blue, but from an economists point of view its actually something they’ve been trying to grapple with for a long time. As I have a degree in the subject, I’d like to count myself as an economist. I understand the concept of ‘utility’ a cold word which actually describes your hopes, aspirations, dreams, enjoyment, love and passion.

Chip’s message is that all this stuff is ephemeral, but not immeasurable. You have to make assumptions and it’s not perfect, but you can survey to find out if people are secure or insecure, worried about certain things or looking forward to particular events. Just because TEDx is free it doesn’t make the event have no value – quite the opposite. He used Einstein’s quote “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

So why does this strike a chord with me? It is because I’ve seen blinkered business decisions throughout my career based on accounting practice and with very limited vision of what is important to a company. Hard times tends to mean fewer people and more graft for no or little extra reward. The problem is that this view is dictated by looking at figures and ignores how people spend their time. Especially in a customer focussed business, making people do more admin and less time actually helping customers and solving their issues can have a negative effect. As you lose contact you can lose the ability to change to new circumstances, lose your mission statement and end up in a downward spiral of de-motivated staff producing less.

Newsrooms are prime examples. You can run a newsroom in August with a skeleton staff as there’s not much happening and as long as the story flow is OK, it can look after itself. In an accountant’s, mind, this suggests that the newsroom could cope like this at any time. It ignores the fact that the best stories, the ones that create the buzz with the audience of a media group, are created through hard work and digging and not from making the odd change to a press release. Equally, when a major incident happens, that’s when the strength of a news organisation can be tested. Without the manpower, you can’t cover the events. This is why the scaling down of so many newsrooms is so sad to see as an industry makes itself moribund by the greed of a few shareholders.

So in the downturn, create the conditions for happiness in your business. It’s more important than ever to have a mission that people buy in to, that’s genuine and that you can all strive to achieve. Cutting corners reduces your costs, but it doesn’t add value to your business and its important any savings don’t affect the ability of your staff to deliver the value your customers strive for. That’s why in a recession, high value products often do well – because there is a genuine quality and value in them.

The first half ended with a slick presentation on success from Richard St John. What I valued most was the slick production and visually strong presentation. This was a good example of how to present with the caveat that it was too visual.

The substance of the message would generally be common sense. To be successful you need to work hard, have a focus and a genuine passion for what you are doing, distinguishing workaholics from ‘workafrolics’ – people who work hard because they love what they are doing.

According to the presentation I’ll never be a success as I’m intelligent and have eclectic interests. I’m also keen to ensure my children see me occasionally. While I’ll never be Bill Gates, I hope most will still see me successful in my own way.

Tiddler, Tiddler, Tiddler’s Late

2010-09-05T04:34:00.000-07:00

Reading a bed time story to my three year old son doesn’t normally make me think about public relations and brand management. Thinking about one story made me realise that perhaps there are some lesson’s in Julia Donaldson’s Tiddler.
This is just a bit of fun, but hopefully it will get you all thinking.

Some of you may be aware of the story, but if you are not here’s a synopsis. Tiddler is a small fish who is always late. He’s not big, doesn’t have any attractive colouring and not the best swimmer. Because Tiddler is always late, he spends his time dreaming up imaginative stories of why he was late that day.

One day he’s so busy daydreaming about his latest excuse that he’s caught in a fishing net and taken far from home. Being just a tiddler, he gets thrown back to the sea not knowing his way home. Then he hears a story, a story that he’s heard before – one of his stories – and he follows the trail of sea creatures who’ve told the tale back home.

So what are the lessons? Surely making excuses all the time and being late isn’t good PR? Well, firstly there’s brand management. Tiddler is unprepossessing, yet the other fish remember him. His imagination is his USP and he plays to its strengths. Had he be a bright, colourful fish, the real heart of the story might be confused and they might remember him for a different reason.

Secondly Tiddler has an audience. Some of the other fish dismiss his stories, but Tiddler stays true to who he is and his strengths. One fish in particular, Johnny Dory, loves his stories showing that Tiddler knows his audience and delivers what that audience wants. You don’t have to be relevant to everyone, as long as you understand the niche, market you are involved in.

The third lesson is the power of word of mouth and viral marketing. Tiddler told his stories to his friends. He made them creative, genuine and compelling. His initial audience was just his class and his expectation went no further, but his friend told his granny who told a starfish, seal, lobster then eel – multiplying the audience and extending far further than he dare dream. It only works because it was a good yarn that people and fish wanted to hear meaning genuine content is at the heart of a successful viral campaign.

The fourth lesson is engagement. When Tiddler was in new waters and far from home he listened to the conversations around him and chose to engage with the one that was relevant to him. Even though that fish didn’t know the answer to the question of how he got home, it was six degrees of separation which allowed him to return safely. Equally, Tiddler asked the right questions to find the information he needed, engaging with new creatures he’d never met before and discovering his wider audience.
It’s amazing what you can learn from a bedtime story ;).

Should you open your doors to honesty?

2010-09-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

A siege mentality is an easy position to take when the media bangs on your front door demanding a press statement as it investigates the very heart of your business, or even your own personal life. Some of these events are a storm in a tea cup, whilst others are a full scale crisis. It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference until the moment is past and you can see it from a different perspective.

Two very different ways of handling crisis management have been in the press recently and both have got me thinking on whether the strategy was effective. One is William Hague’s recent personal statement; the other is the British government and the Catholic Church’s decision to cover up the involvement of a priest in an IRA bombing.

Not only are the two cases quite different – but the way the allegations are dealt with are also at polar opposites. However, neither is totally without fault.

Let’s start with the 1972 Claudy Bombings which saw nine people killed and 30 injured as a result of three car bombs. Relatives of the victims and the walking wounded have had to wait 38 years for a report into the investigation to get some idea of who was to blame.

The report is baffled by the fact the British Police failed to interview Father James Chesney, an alibi witness for one suspect and a suspect in his own right, despite British intelligence keeping close tabs on the staunch republican priest. The conclusion that seems unchallenged is that a political deal was struck between the British government and the Catholic Church to hush up the situation. The Catholic Church was anti-violence and was keen to remain at arms length from the IRA.

It is highly likely that Chesney knew significant information that was never brought out purely because he wasn’t questioned. Even if a deal was struck, surely some sort of discussion should have taken place. That aside, the main crisis management of the situation was to cover up and protect the Catholic Church.

I understand the situation was volatile and complex, but I don’t feel that this was the right course of action. We know from other scandals, that the Catholic Church liked to cover things up. A siege mentality is a natural position when things are uncertain – but again, it doesn’t mean it is right.
Equally, the decision to move a man less than an hour away from his home to avoid police investigation looks cowardly.

Rumour took over from fact and hundreds believed they knew who carried out the attacks and also knew of the cover-up by association. This can hardly have left those in the community with any faith in the church, the government or the police. We will never know Father Chesney’s true involvement (he died in 1980), but there is more than enough evidence pointing towards the republican sympathiser’s involvement at some level.
Equally, the Catholic Church’s reputation has been tarnished by those who perceived they knew the truth and lost faith in the church on both sides of the divide.

Almost forty years later there’s a second problem when the truth, as it often does, comes out. The Catholic Church is wrapped in scandal for the second time within a year as it shows its backhanded way of dealing with priests involved in murderous activities.
In my opinion, the Catholic Church should have made an example of Chesney. Decisive action to out, rather than protect Chesney, would have sent a sharp warning to the rest of the Church. Putting pressure on other republican sympathisers to strongly denounce the IRA, Chesney and the ‘shame’ brought by the un-Christian actions of Claudy would have made it more difficult for other clergy to stray down the same path.

Embarrassing, yes, but at the end of the day the actions were understandably outside their control. Justice could then have been served and fact replaces rumour. More importantly this ticking time-bomb wasn’t going to explode.
The opposite could be said of William Hague. A smirk, a nudge, an offhand and baseless joke about all the Tories being gay has turned into front page headlines. It is a calculated risk and may work, but Mr Hague has legitimised a rumour by directly referring to the story.

He could have made exactly the same statement avoiding the ‘gay’ slur altogether. It’s a strong story to openly discuss the heartache of not being able to have children. Mourning the death of an unborn baby isn’t easy. Yes the rumours might have still floated about, but it would never be front page news.

From what I gather, it is based on the fact that two men have shared a hotel room in the 21st Century and they look ‘chummy’ despite a big age gap. May be I should feel upset that when I interviewed the then Tory leader, soaked to the skin after a downpour in Halifax, he didn’t wink at me and show me to his room to warm up. Or may be it is just bunkum – this certainly isn’t another Mark Oaten.

I’ve roomed with – not just one other man- but several. I even shared a bed with a Frenchman ahead of a rowing race in London as there were no single beds available. Does this make me gay? No it doesn’t. I could still be proved wrong about Hague, but I think it a ridiculous story created by the sleazier end of political journalism. There is a difference between being open and replying honestly, and fanning the flames of a storm in the tea cup story.

A Victorian lesson in the high art of war

2010-08-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

We sometimes think that propaganda is a 20th Century invention but in reality it is a discipline as old as the hills. I was reminded of this when I went to the Leeds Gallery and saw two Victorian paintings which created two strong images of Great Britain at times of great British loses.
The first painting is the Death of General Gordon at Khartoum by George W Joy. This is a painting I remember from my History lessons at school and evokes quite a lot of memories to me thanks to George Benson my teacher. But I was seeing it through slightly fresh eyes as I’d not seen it for a while. The painting shows Gordon defiant, magnanimous and strong in the face of certain death – and a death unlikely to be quick nor painless.
The advancing Mahdi army are seen to be numerous and violent, having already taken the standard with one soldier urging his companions on. This images shows Britain defiant against the savagery of Africa, brave and true in the face of adversity and proud with it.
If you read General Gordon’s memoires days prior to the final defeat, it is far from brave and defiant. He is far from home in a dangerous place, full of strange noises and the sounds of battle all around. He was likely to have died an inglorious and brutal death; and needless as he had been asked to retreat weeks before.
The painting meant something else to the Victorian audience and the death was transformed into act of chivalry, bravery and spirit. A defeat was turned into a moral victory. Whether George joy painted this to demonstrate the Victorian ideals or whether he was compelled to capture the tale spun to him I do not know, but either way the tale was turned successfully and still makes an impression 125 years after General Gordon’s death.
The second painting is earlier from 1858, Retribution by Edward Armitage. The image here is not a real painting but an image of Britain’s relationship with India. A white, European woman is dead, a baby with two tears is lying by her side and a young girl hides from a ferocious Bengali tiger. Britannia is there with her sword of justice, come to rescue the innocents slaughtered by the wild and savage beast depicting the artist’s view of India.
This painting struck me just days after the Rupert Penry-Jones Who Do You Think You Are? Programme dealing in the same period during the Indian Mutiny. It is nice to think the British “civilised” Indian, but the rule of ‘English’ law didn’t really apply to India and commercial law left many Indians disaffected, dispossessed and driven from their lands. The Indian mutiny may have been brutal and savage, but it was not unprovoked. Equally, it was suppressed using military might.
It may have changed the way Britain ruled India, but it was not immediate and had little impact on those suffering at the hands of the commercial British interests. The painting doesn’t depict this side making the British subjects out to be innocents, pure and godly. Your empathy cannot be with the Tiger, digging its claws into Britannia’s arm seconds before the fatal piercing of its flesh from her sword. Yet this is an image for the British to justify the tough tactics in Asia Minor after the deaths during the mutiny.
Flash forward to 19th August, and images are flashed around the world of an American soldier leaving Iraq screaming “We’ve Won”. Have the US really won? Was this staged? Is this just the justification of the war by creating an image of victory over the ruins of a damaged country?

Sharing the benefits of a 'Social Event'

2010-08-20T06:46:00.001-07:00

It wasn’t that long ago that I was trying to convince a client of the benefits of Twitter. They claimed it wasn’t a relevant media for their industry but were open to being convinced. We had a further discussion about a major conference and asked whether it was using twitter and was hash tagged.
The client said it wasn’t – but after brining the conference webpage up, the first eye catching thing on the screen was “follow this conference on Twitter”.
Social media is gaining popularity in events but you need to understand why social media can help improve an event. Equally, you should not be frightened of using social media no matter how small your event is. You don’t have to be hosting the next major conference event to use social media.
The benefit of using social media is to be able to hold a conversation without boundaries. This means you can have a simultaneous conversation with multiple people at the same time or have a discussion with one person thousands of miles away in real time. These conversations can be stored, returned to or discovered by people you would never normally be able to find. Integrating this principle is the first stage to making it work for you.
How else can you know whether your thoughts are similar to others or different? You couldn’t talk to 100 other people in this depth.
Equally, what is an event? My definition is when people come together to share ideas and discuss issues. This covers internal meetings, collaborative web-chats, networking events, festivals, conferences and much more. Also, how do you want to communicate?
• Informally to delegates
• Formally to inform delegates of the programme/etiquette
• To create discussion
• To ask for feedback
• To share information
Before an event social media can be used to attract an audience. Twitter can spread the word that an event is taking place, allied with a Facebook page or blog describing the programme, date and time. You can gauge your potential audience by adding open source event ticketing software like Eventbrite, for example. Creating a hashtag (the # symbol and an event identifying code used on twitter) will also allow people to discuss the event even before it has begun, but check it isn’t being used for another purpose. Create a community of attendees using a platform like Ning.
During an event you can continue to use a hashtag to open up an event. May be you could welcome guests, invite them for a pre-event drink, start a discussion by asking a question. If it’s a real event, you can project a twitterfall of the hashtags onto a screen. May be you can use polling or survey apps to help demonstrate or discover the answer to a question as part of a presentation.
Events can be recorded for those unable to attend or for future discussion. Flickr can hold pictures, Vimeo can hold videos of key speakers and Audioboo can capture up to 5minutes of audio. May be your event brochure could be made like the Skittles website – a series of links to other sites. Why re-write someone’s biography when it already exists on Linkedin, their blog or their website.
It is not just about content – it is about demonstrating the atmosphere of the event.
After an event there is more that can be done. Invite people to give their feedback using facebook, twitter or online surveys. Invite them for a drink at the nearest bar. Ask more questions using the hashtag. Create a review on a blog, Audioboo or facebook site and then share or encourage others to share their reviews.
After the event you can look at the data collected by collecting the survey data, hashtag responses and comments across social media. Use this to create press releases and share your peer’s view of the world. You can also share this information on the event page or your blog.
Here are some examples of events I’ve been involved with. The first category is online chats – a much underused tool that can bring vertical markets or different people together to discuss real issues. Deidre Breakenridge’s #prstudchat is a monthly event which brings together PR students, lecturers and professionals from across the world.
It works by asking anyone to submit questions. At a set time, the discussion starts and single questions are asked over the state of the PR industry and hot topics. It is useful for the professionals to gauge industry thought, while the students learn, ask additional questions or put forward a fresh look on a topic. People identify the question and whether they are student, lecturer or professional.
A similar chat event on twitter is #edchat for the education industry where a diverse set of questions is posed on a Tuesday. Further closed discussions sometimes carry on using Google Wave.
The social media is used for Barcamps I’ve been to, with promotion exclusively through facebook and twitter. At the events a twitterfall has helped gain an impression on what is going on and created discussion on presentations. Delegates are encouraged to bring laptops/ smartphones to engage in the un-conference.
I noted that an internal meeting of the CWDC used Flickr to display the results of training sessions and brain storms online so that the material could be stored and used in future. The images are used in future work.
All these elements feed into many TED events with presentations videoed for those unable to attend and a strong virtual discussion from those not attending as well as those who are there.
The events don’t have to be massive though. A local development organisation, Wakefield First, have started using hashtags to promote their monthly networking events - creating a community of local businesses through Facebook. This concept is extended by profiling delegates in a rolling presentation, allowing people unfamiliar with delegates to identify and find those they want to get in contact with.
A good conversation is always positive and that’s the benefit of social media, but if you can extend this into a community – you’ll find a small event could be turned into something really valuable and special.

Are marketeers failing to get social?

2010-08-11T09:25:00.001-07:00

[This article is written in a generalising way to provoke discussion and creates a position that can and should be challenged. Please feel free to comment]

The argument over whether marketing or PR is the dominant force in commercial organisations has been going on for decades, if not a century or two. In one respect, it doesn’t matter much as long as organisations understand their communications and they are being delivered effectively.

But I spotted an article that concerned me in the CIM backed magazine The Marketeer. If right it, shows that marketing has a head stuck in the sand approach which could see it make itself moribund and irrelevant to the modern age we live in.

The way people access information is changing and there are socio-economic shifts means Generation Y behaves very differently to even Generation X. PR is routed in getting coverage in the media and has to mirror media to survive. If a PR function doesn’t deliver content relevant and of interest to newspapers, broadcasters, the web or and other journalist, there content won’t be picked up.

Marketing is more sheltered with a toolbox of strategies which have been successful so should work in the future. It’s ploughing its own furrow. Advertising has had to change its tactics to fit in with a media fragmenting to leverage the best opportunities from smaller audience bases, but, again the direct approach from marketing has left it vulnerable from a changing society.

And so to the article I spotted http://bit.ly/aR07te . It states almost a third dismiss social media as something for PR to deal with. A further 58% of public sector and charities are scared of it. That’s a lot. As someone in PR it should make me feel secure that the new ground is being taken up by people in my profession, but it doesn’t. It leaves me concerned that there are many people in marketing (and probably PR as well) who aren’t developing the skills they will need for their future communications programmes.

For example, I spoke to a marketing person in a hotel chain. They stated that their mailing list costs £500,000 or so each year but the returns were diminishing. The cost had always been recouped because the marketing tactic worked but it was becoming less effective. It ignored the fact that some people would rather receive this information in electronic formats and it ignored the cost savings of reducing print.

Some companies now no longer offer printed literature with the belief that people will either print it themselves or would rather access web based media for the same information. I no longer pick up the yellow pages to find a number; I’ll now look online first. (Incidentally they’re now only publishing paid for ads which totally erodes their previous USP). Look at Volvo and their brochures.

Why is this reluctance there? It’s partly fear. Discussing social media with businesses I’ve seen a lack of understanding not only with what social media is but what it can do. It isn’t a silver bullet, a medium to push communications, a drain on time, an opportunity to get slagged off on a daily basis. It’s a medium to create discussion and dialogue that can replace and enhance your reputation. This doesn’t just mean gaining reputation from your audience, it also means improving you SEO rankings meaning potential new customers find you even more easily.

Most companies have a marketing function. I’d suggest less had a PR function. This survey indicates marketers don’t see the need to up-skill in social media. This would, in my mind be a mistake and would accelerate this may be changing. The big FMCGs like Pepsi are already diverting cash into PR and social media taking resources away from marketing. There will always be marketing, but will it soon be a part of the Public Relations department. When will the PR/Social media spend start to become bigger than the marketing spend? Because that day is coming unless marketing departments start to take a look at this area.

Is it time you got Social?

2010-07-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

When I often present about social media, there is an element of fear about what it involves. The fear is purely one of the unknown and not about the reality of using a new tool to do what you do every day in business. Even at a networking event, you can be fearful of stating a conversation particularly if it’s your first time at an event. The sooner you chip in the sooner you feel comfortable with those around you.

Social media is about having conversations. It’s always best to pop over and have a chat, or pick up the phone and talk to someone – but there are only so many hours in the day. It’s about listening to others, engaging with their conversations then adding something new.

Equally social media enables you to talk to multiple people at the same time whether they are in Hong Kong or just around the corner. It too is about listening, joining in with the conversation and then adding value to the discussion with your own experiences.

Another fear is that the new social media tools will cost time and time equals money. There is a small grain of truth in that statement, but the reality is you need to assess your communications and then find ways you can save time and money.

Here are a few steps to achieving that goal:

1. What do my customers, colleagues and peers think of my business. You know your USPs, brand and your skills, but do the people who matter? Find out by talking, creating a blog or services like Surveymonkey.com.

2. You now know the areas you need to communicate, try and condense them into 3-5 messages you consistently want to get across.

3. How do you get that message out? Carry on as before, or find out how your customers talk to each other. Is it in a magazine, Twitter, Linkedin or industry events. Volvo have recently stopped using printed brochures saving millions on their costs as they know most people are happy to look online.

4. Saving time is a case of creating content and linking to it. I’d suggest you create a blog and use it to host your press releases, newsletters, background information, announcements and so on. This prevents the duplication of work.

For example, rather than print a newsletter and/ or designing an eNewsletter get a web company to design a nice leaflet, just write it as a blog and send a single link to your customers. This can be linked on twitter or Facebook further broadening your reach. Sometimes we add tasks without looking to see why we are doing them and what it can replace. Is this achievable? Yes, and companies big and small adopt these principles.

Everyone knows the best referrals are those that come from word of mouth. So take a look at the way you have conversations and you might find using social media can multiply the number of people who hear that word of mouth, even if it’s ‘word of tweet’ or ‘blog’. So go on, try starting a blog at Blogger.com. It’ll take you five minutes to create a tool which will help you make conversations, boost your reputation and improve your SEO rankings.

Thomas Atcheson, PR Manager and former Journalist.