Irreverent Thinking

So much these days is made of your trust rating on the web that there is an argument saying that those with rarer names are easier to find and therefore easier to trust. So if you’re called John Smith then it is highly likely you will be lost in a deluge of other John Smiths or, worse still, mistaken for someone else. The growth of the social networking has seen an explosion in name searching is now one of the commonest activities, whether it’s inside Facebook of directly on Google.

Time to change your name, maybe?

I’ve just been away for a week on the rather beautiful Greek island of Kefalonia and on the transfer back to the airport the rep handed out the inevitable questionnaire with a supporting set of instructions that said I had to rate each of the questions as follows: 100-76% Excellent, 75%-36% Good, 35% to 5% satisfactory and only if I rated any of the items less than 5% should I mark it down as unsatisfactory.

Now, we all know these survey and reports form the basis of people making decisions of where to go but I couldn’t agree with a 7% rating as being satisfactory. I kept the questionnaire and plan to drop an email to the CEO of Going Places so I visited their HELP page to find….erm, no section for post-holiday communication and no way to speak to the man - this contrasts with this site which shows you how to contact all the top brass, okay, it doesn’t show the persons name but you still feel it will get to the desk of the person you want to talk to.

Following on from a post I made a few weeks ago on Pods I tried to turn the thinking on it head and see how the corporate world could benefit from analysing the use of pods and pod behaviour. Most companies now realise that they need to do more than simply put up a web-site, run a few email shots and start a blog - they realise the traffic (raw fuel) flows around these places and lots of other unrelated places such as independent blogs.

Understanding this “sphere” is something I have been trying to make sense of over the last months and I’ve always used words such as space or sphere and wondered why it didn’t feel right. My initial foray into Facebook provided the trigger for me to realise that it’s less about space/place/area and more about connections, family if you will. Hence pod.

So what role does my pod play, if any, when it comes to deciding how the corporate world should deal with me. It stands to reason that better understanding me allows the corporate world to sell/promote/educate in a far more focused way so the question then is how do corporates learn from this?

I think this is early days and I think the corporate world has to understand how these pods work before they can leverage them so step one is to build the corporate pod, the places and connections that the corporate touches. Understand this influence and then extend it outwards, sorry no solutions yet - just a mindset and an idea I’m going to try this week and see how well it goes down with a client. I’ll keep you posted.

And no, I’m not talking about funky coffee machines or Apple’s venerable portable juke-box I’m talking about the collection of sites, communities, blogs and forums that I derive the vast majority of my information from. I’ve coined/nicked the term from it’s common use to define a social group of cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins, etc.). As we trust traditional marketing less and less we are turning not just to anywhere on the web but places that we trust. So "who do you trust?" becomes the question and for me that’s an odd mix of well-known places (Wikipedia, sort of. Google, comprehensive. BBC, news…..etc). I recently changed my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K800) and wanted something more featured and useful for work so I was heading down the PDA route and decided to ask on the Internet and where did I ask….a Lotus forum of all places! They are pretty geeky and gadget-focussed on there and only have a high percentage of computer people so it seemed to me to be the natural place to ask. I also knew them and many of them I trust so why not ask there? I could have gone to a mobile phone forum but I would have had to learn about the people, the politics and the background and this decision was, put simply, not such a big deal. If I was going to have Laser Eye Surgery then I would spend ages getting to know the forums and researching but a phone is a phone is a phone.

So this got me to thinking about the places I go and I called *it* my pod - my home - my buddies. It’s the place I go first when I want to find something out. I like my pod and I’m eager to spread the word about it, I make recommendations to friends about stuff I learn in it and it also fulfils a certain community need. If I had to write down what i wanted in my pod then I would find the following:

1. Somewhere to the learn stuff about my interests, the things I am an expert in
2. A place to go to ask my idiot questions
3. An authoritative information repository
4. A place to rant, rave and generally let off steam
5. A safe place for my work ideas, separate from the places above
6. Where I prefer to buy stuff

No doubt there are many others but if I looked at the vast majority of my web activity using the Pareto principle then I would find a remarkably small number of web-sites and people. My real pod is actually quite small.

You can imagine the scene, Henry Ford is looking to expand car production and he knows to do that he has to buy another factory and a lot of machinery - it takes a lot of capital investment and that is all upfront. He also needs a workforce and they need wages, heating and lighting - that is revenue spend. Add the two together and there is a balance of financial needs, the machinery might last 10 years, each weeks wages last just, erm, 1 week so if we can buy machines that do the work of many it is good because although the machines cost more they actually reduce the ongoing costs.

This is a simple analogy because machine produces the parts for 100 cars per day and it can therefore be measured. It might be the latest and greatest machine in the market but over time it will become the worst machine in the market. On the other hand, the workers over time actually become the best in the market after (often) starting as the worst in the market. So what’s happening is that we are replacing machines (humans) that can improve with machine (physical) that actually get worse with time. Does that sound like a good idea? No, not to me either.

But what has this got to do with Stone Age accounting. Well a client recently asked me to separate out the revenue (ongoing) element from the capital (major project) for his rolling monthly contract. This is proving quite tiresome to do and he is paying for my time to plough through timesheets and control systems to dig out the information and it crossed my mind that we really need to update our accounting systems, practices & taxation in the 21st Century.

I can see the point of having capital and revenue systems in a world of big machinery but I struggle to see how the procedures and practices sit in this new world, a world heavily focussed on services. Maybe everything becomes revenue expenditure but I know that causes problems for the corporate world as they like to invest in capital projects.

Best of all - we are paid to think, to create novel approaches and great ideas that transform businesses. This items come under the somewhat grubby title of consultancy when the are central to much of the business process and generate the highest RoI.

My company is re-building the web-site for Ultralase at the moment, we are lucky as they are a pretty brave company and leave us to pretty much run their whole Internet strategy and as a result they are the dominant force in their marketplace. That’s nice, but recently I have wondered what it would be like if we had to explain to them everything we did. It would be damn near impossible to value it, sure we keep timesheets for programming and project management but so much of what we bring is measured in cleverness but not in the huge ideas. We had that huge idea (VITES) back in 2003! No, this is about the small, tiny, clever ideas we come up with day to day - our leading clever-idea bloke is John Hyde who has just immigrated to New Zealand. John will carry on working for us when he settles there but for the moment I am back in the harness working on these ideas and I came up with a corker today, a simple you have UNREAD mail link that appears on the web-site to all returning visitors who have not left any personal details yet.

Simple, yup! When it was tested in the office everyone said they would click on the link out of (either) curiosity or simple conditioning. We are used to seeing those 3 (4 in this case, it makes is more compelling) little words at places we stop at frequently. So, we’ve made a (as yet) unresponsive visitor click a link we wanted them to click…anything else whilst we are at it? How about a login/register screen….

Please enter your email address and password to retrieve your message(s)
Email [                        ]
Password [                        ]

Excellent, we have a way to let someone register and login at the same time and, for a bonus, we get his/her email address and we have closed the relationship gap slightly as they are now part of the family, they have opted-in to our love-generator!

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome - behavioural and conditioning are wonderful on the web and with the ever-changing landscape it should prove to keep us all on our toes.

They call it Bacn (pronounced Bacon) and it’s starting to play a familiar part in our lives. It’s essence is that it is unwanted, usually repeated, emails from organisations that you have had some contact with in the past. You might have subscribed to a search on Ebay who then sends you daily emails for 6 months, telling you the nice shiny luggage rack you wanted for your motorbike is available now on ebay - except you don’t need it now so rather than change the settings for the email or unsubscribe from the process you mentally check the item off.

So, has it any value? Well I think it does, it’s a bit of branding and if the emails are sent often enough that you recognise seeing one last week then you might delete the current one safe in the knowledge that another will come along next week. They make great bookmarks as you’ve done the hard work finding the product/service in the first place and now they are pinging you - it’s great. As someone said," Bac(o)n is better than spam but not as good as steak".

Officially Bacn came into existence just a few weeks ago and already the concept is starting to spread, probably via some Bacn method. Now, how to better leverage the value of Bacn? How about Company A sending an Outlook rule with the first Bacn transmission - this rule creates a specific folder and all the Bacn email from Company A gets dropped into that folder.

If you worry about the long-term survival of email under the deluge of spam then this just might give you an edge as a marketer. Still, if you are a marketer then there is a good chance you’d rather be blanket dropping inserts into the Croydon Daily Shopper but that’s another story.

Trust is one of my favourite topics as the whole dynamics are changing. Take Facebook, you actually trust your friends not to spam your email address and this trust is extended to your friends friends as these guys have access to you via your network. Strange really, in a world where we feel more and more insecure and worry about identity fraud, credit-card scams and all of these new threats we now face.

We interact far more through the virtual world and maybe that gives us the feeling of physical security but we also seem to be learning a new way to trust - we trust by actions and opinions and we respect those that are around us. The reverse is also true - I belong to SELOC a forum created in 2002 for drivers and lovers of Lotus cars and I’ve been pretty active racking at 8,000 or so posts in the last 5 years. There are clear boundaries for what can be posted and generally they are adhered to but every now and again the whole thing goes off the rails and a mass debate kicks off discussing the merits of rule 5.4 or whatever. When this happens the forum splits into factions that are quite vocal and sometimes abusive in complete contrast to when the waters are calm. Anyway, a newbie arrived on the forum asking about an Open Day at Lotus’ headquarters to celebrate 40 years…blah, blah get the idea. Lots of people chipped in opinions about whether it was a good or bad thing to go to and then someone discovered that the original poster worked for Lotus’ marketing company. This generated so much bad-press for the event and the company that they requested the thread to be deleted.

Me? I chuckled. It’s good that the agency world understands the importance of the community but woeful if they think they can influence it by registering a new user and making a single post. It that post had come from one of the SELOC big-wigs then many would have listened and quite a few would have turfed up the ?40 to show up.

Abuse the trust and you get caught out.

The web is getting really cluttered, messy and difficult to use properly and the very out of date method of going to web-sites is crap. Lots of sites have tried to help with this, bookmarking stuff and various other ideas but what we really need is myweb whereby the experience is designed around what I want to see. For example, on most days the whether is not really that important to me, I will generally walk to work in the snow if required as I really can’t be starting my car/bike to travel 1.1 miles and claim to love the environment at the same time. But, I dabble in racing cars occasionally and the weather at race meetings makes a world of difference so in the 2-5 days before I race I watch the weather diligently. Saturday and Sunday look really nice at Donington with 19-20 degrees and mainly cloudy - perfect. But every time I need to know this I have to go looking and in an ideal world I would get told this, automatically, on the run-up to race days.

So, the answer could be to build composite pages, composites of the information I need and when I need it. It would usefully have a Google search box aswell as a Wiki box and would also show me the last few posts that Seth Godin has made and probably show me my Ebay watch list. Wouldn’t that be great and even better if it highlighted what has changed.

Years ago I worked in the City of London for a company that produced composite pages, they were composites of different news and financial feeds (Reuters, Telerate, Bloomberg etc…) and showed the information that dealers needed on a single screen. In 1987 it was radical, brilliant and un-licenseable due to protectionism by the traditional video feed suppliers but it certainly was a giant step forward.

I am due in London tomorrow, at a meeting in the West End, so as I am daytripping rather than slog down in the car just for the day I would normally use the rather excellent train service out of Leeds. Recent changes have made traveling by train a real joy and not the drag it used to be. I book my seat online and therefore have a guaranteed slot to rest my head, do some work and catch up on some reading (I currently have a 223 page report on web analytics that I am ploughing through).

My fiance? lives along the M62 corridor and rather conveniently next to Brough (a mainline train station to Kings Cross) so I have the convenient option of deciding where I can travel from. I can take the train to Leeds (?8) tomorrow morning and get a fast connection to Kings Cross or I can take a direct train from Stella’s doorstep and arrive a little quicker than travelling from Halifax.

Now this is the shocker….a day return from Brough to Hull (via the excellent Hull Trains) this late in the day and getting into Kings Cross at 10:53 costs a very reasonable ?44 and this gives me a reserved seat, modern trains and a good service with no car parking costs.

Conversely, the best that GNER can manage is an eye wateringly different ?108! I make that a huge 250% more expensive than Hull Trains. The standard open fare from Halifax to Kings Cross (via Leeds) is pretty shocking at ?170 versus ?103 from Brough (65% more expensive) but it just goes to show the vast differences in the price of rail tickets at the moment. Both prices were taken on similar journey times and were designed to suit my meeting tomorrow. I also understand that they are broadly similar in terms of journey distance as well, making the price differentials even harder to stomach.

I am sure that GNER would argue that they have better trains, a sit-down breakfast option (which is very good, but you can only get access to the dining car after Stevenage as a second-class ticket holder). They also have more train services running but as long as Hull Trains fit the bill why is there any need to pay way over the odds. Looking closer I could have got the return for ?30 if I had planned a little further ahead and maybe altered my traveling times.

I don’t suppose you would be surprised that tonight after work I am driving along the M62 corridor and will enjoy a nice quiet bottle of wine with my future wife, we will natter and chatter all evening and I will get a good nights sleep and jump on the train at 8:24am tomorrow morning rather than being on a 7 o’clock train out of Halifax. Even adding the 1 hour the journey across the M62 it is still quicker and with the rather nice advantage of seeing Stella as well. What would you do?