Why Google is still up in the clouds

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

Bizarre video of a seagull stealing a camcorder:

Social Media storm in a tea cup

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

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

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

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 Mauriers, 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

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.