Blogs

VLPW
Very Long Post Warning

I’m sure there have been gigabytes written on this topic, but I somehow feel the need to add to the weighty wodge that’s clogging up the useful stuff (like this) flowing around the Internet.

What should you do if a blog slags off your company or makes snarky comments about your customer service? What are your rights and how can you fix the damage? Here’s a handy ten point guide for companies that feel themselves wronged by blogs. And it's FREE! It might even help the smattering of dorks that have tried to ‘right wrongs’ on this blog by posting inane comments from behind their corporate firewalls.

1. Think
Before you rush to make a dim-witted comment on the blog, think about it. What has the blogger said that you disagree with? Is it an opinion or a factual error? Can you back up your assertion that there is a fundamental error? Can you provide evidence that the opinion expressed is ill-founded or at odds with the majority of people? If you work with a PR or communications agency, get their counsel before you act.

2. Remember: it’s a conversation
If you’re being attacked by blogs, it may be worth taking a look at the situation they’re highlighting and seeing if the point is valid and addressable – and then addressing it before going online and saying so. If the attack is invalid, then it’s worth acknowledging the point that’s been made before making your, well-argued, counterpoint in a measured, respectful way. The more aggressive the blogger, the more a measured tone will position you as the reasonable and authoritative participant in the conversation. It’s literally just like a face to face conversation – and wagging fingers or shouting will just get people’s backs up – even if in response to someone who’s obviously infuriated. Think how you’d behave in a customer service situation. Well, bloggers are just customers with an audience.

3. Most blogs don’t matter
Before you go making a great big song and dance, consider doing absolutely nothing. Most blogs are read by an average 1.1 people – the 1 being the blogger. Is the blog well respected and well read? Will it influence opinion? Just because someone in the company has emailed a link to the blog around every member of the management team doesn’t mean that the blog is normally well read. And a few hundred visits to a marginal blog prompted by that email, by the way, will just let the blogger know that they’re onto something that gets them more readers. So they’ll likely do more of it, not less.

4. Blogs can matter very quickly
I’m going to be very Delphic now. In deciding to ignore a blog, do bear in mind that blogs can go from zero to hero in absolutely no time. A lot of today’s journalists spend a lot of time on blogs and the oddest things can result in a huge amount of interest. Take a look at this blog, a case study of how a blog can make a fundamental difference – and do note that this is case study from the Middle East. There have been instances of a blog post making national front page headlines within 48 hours in Europe and gaining over 2 million readers as a consequence. And then there are companies that have turned expressions of customer dissatisfaction made on blogs completely to their advantage. The success story is built around actually listening to what people are saying, not ignoring it.

5. Don’t hide your identity
Like the Ray Bans ad says: don’t hide. There may be an urge to post a positive, balancing comment on the blog under an anonymous handle or a pseudonym. Do be aware that most bloggers have access to tools that allow them to track back visitors to the blog. You make a comment on my blog? I know who you are. So if you work for a major daily newspaper or a telco and you don’t like what I’ve got to say, have the guts to say so under your own name. Because I’ll know anyway and just ‘out’ you for being a custard. And so will most other people who write blogs.

6. Find out who the blogger is
No, I don’t mean set the secret service on ‘em. I mean take the time to read some of the blog at least, look at past posts and comments and see if the blogger is authoritative or a loose cannon. There’s nothing more awful than watching some corporate flak try to make a fool out of a widely respected expert because they didn’t bother finding out who the blogger was – regardless of whether they blog under their own names or pseudonyms, bloggers have an ‘identity’ in the overall conversation. Take a look at the blogs that link to/are linked to out of the blog. Look at Technorati and find the blog’s rating. Perhaps do a google or two and find out how the blog ranks on search. Authority is about tone, resonance and reach.

7. Take some time out to understand blogs in general
Know what a troll is? Or a trackback link? Understand the importance of RSS and feed readers? Know what IMHO stands for? If not, find a younger member of your staff and get them to explain it all to you before you start blundering around crashing conversations. By the way, if you want to know what blogs are saying about your company, consider setting up a Google alert.

8. Don’t crash the conversation
Think of it all like you’d think about joining a real-life conversation. In posting to my blog, I’m putting something into the public domain that I think people will find interesting or that I just want to get off my chest. Usually both! It’s a bit like standing on a soap box. People are kind enough to drop by and listen to me – some have a chat with me at the end of the lecture. And I go to their lectures too – to listen and have a chat afterwards. It’s all pretty civilised most of the time. It’s relatively easy to join the conversation as long as you don’t crash in without having bothered to listen to the preceding debate. Again, just as in real life you wouldn’t rudely barge into a group and vent your opinion on a topic without taking the time to find out what the prevailing opinion and tone of debate was like. Well, not unless you want the group to all round on you and tell you to shove off, that is...

9. You can’t make it go away
Barring access to a blog from the corporate network because it has attacked your company will just ensure all your staff go home and take a look at what all the fuss is about. I worked with one company that did just that, in the face of our advice, and we watched in frustration as they embarked on a futile and highly visible witch-hunt that resulted in scoring 11,000 visits to a blog that wouldn’t have got 11 visits otherwise. For one reason or another, you have earned the attention of a blog. Depending on the situation, it’s likely that the best and most advisable course of action is to engage with that blog’s author and balance the POV with your own or even, gasp, act on the input.

10. Consider blogging as a tool
Don’t think of blogs as purely a dangerous manifestation of unfettered opinion and irresponsible ‘citizen journalism’. Blogs are so much more than that. They are a powerful medium of expression that is increasingly becoming an important barometer of public opinion and source of public voice. They are self-correcting in a way that conventional media aren't - people will correct a mistake on a blog faster than you can say 'nmkl pjkl ftmch'. And they're part of the revolution in social media that is changing the way people today communicate. They're not about to go away, in other words. By the way, this post is a very good case in self-correcting point!

You can actually use a blog as a highly effective platform for your company to engage with customers. Take some time out to have a look around and you’ll find that they’re actually a neat tool. You don’t have to have a million readers for a blog to matter, either. It’s better to have a few hundred people that want to interact with you than advertise to 100,000 that don’t. Remember, this is the era of the ‘long tail’. So think about joining ‘the conversation’. I think, after a while, you’ll be glad you did.

Wheeee!

I'm sorry, three posts in a day (even if two ARE very silly) is too much, but I just HAD to share this deliciously silly PR shot from the Emirates Airbus A380 launch in Hamburg. You can, of course, click on it to make it bigger. BTW - they're wearing the new uniform...

I wasn't going to say anything about it, honestly. What with some 200 journalists attending the launch, including ace broadcaster Malcolm Taylor, and the papers all going mad about it, I already thought it had overkill scrawled across it - although (and I would like to be clear about this) I'm very happy for Emirates, which I admire.

However, asking the crew to run along the tarmac making big propeller arms has resulted in my favourite photo of the month, without a doubt!

Cuil

Thanks, as usual when it comes to geek stuff, to the usual Italian gent.

There's a new search engine in town. It's called Cuil, pronounced 'cool' after the Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or if you're American, apparently, Finn Mac Cuill. Fionn gained all the knowledge of the world by sucking his thumb. It's complicated and involves a salmon.

There are some potentially cuil things about cool, including the fact that its results aren't simply link based (ie: it doesn't rank sites higher just because they've got more links to them) but also promise to be more contextually relevant. Search results are categorised where relevant, which means if you search for 'Dubai', you get tabs which include Dubai Hotels, Jobs in Dubai and Dubai Airport. They missed tabs for 'Dubai Traffic and Dubai Rent' but it's already looking like a pretty different approach. Y0u also get a pretty smart drop down menu of categories, including one on 'neighbourhoods of Dubai'.

It's brave enough. I'm old enough to remember a world before the Yahoo! Google duopoly: Alta Vista, Lycos, Webcrawler and a million other search engines once jostled for our attention and our searches. Cuil offers, for the first time in years, something different and an alternative to the leviathan. Only time will tell whether it's going to work out a winner. But for now, take a tootle along and check it out before the servers break - everyone's talking about the Cuil new kid on the block and their servers are already creaking under the strain of all that buzz...

Scooped

On Wednesday 23rd July, this blog featured the news of the forthcoming Isra'a wal Miraaj holiday falling on Thursday (it was broadly expected on Wednesday), quoting Arabic daily Al Bayan. Gulf News finally ran it today. That's a five-day delta!

I have a new curse for journalists: May you be scooped by bloggers!

I have now, sad to say, amused myself.

Meejia

This link came to me thanks to Charles Arthur. It's an amazing blog that charts job cuts in US newspapers. It's looking like carnage out there: US media houses are reporting drops in their profits anywhere from 47 to 87%.

US newspaper advertising, local and national both, dropped by over 7% in 2007, together with smaller drops in specialist magazines, radio and a number of TV categories. The biggest rise in advertising volumes was the Internet, a growth of almost 19%.

UK newspaper sales have dived over 11% over the past four years on average, with year on year drops to April 2008 as high as 10 and 12%, as people move to the Internet for their news, views and conversations.

At the same time, many journalists are also using the 'new tools', including blogs. A survey by Pleon's US partner, Brodeur, showed that over 50% of journalists spent an hour a day reading blogs. Almost 50% of them blog themselves - and 4 out of 5 US journalists believe that blogs have made reporting more diverse. 65% of US media regularly read blogs that cover their area of reporting. We're even seeing a re-birth of media interest in, and reporting of, blogging in the UAE, although I honestly think this article today that quotes a certain devilishly attractive cove could, and should, have gone a lot further.

It's probably no coincidence that the biggest recent influx of journalists from 'more sophisticated' world markets recently to the UAE was to Abu Dhabi's The National - and that there are something like 20 blogs coming out of that team right now, including a 'team blog'. In other words, blogging is part of life for journalists from other parts of the world - online habits are ingrained in them that are perhaps lacking in our regional media - but that's changing fast.

If you doubt that change, read this (courtesy Gianni)...

What on earth am I getting at? Well, there's a movement going on here. As consumers' eyeballs are moving online, the money's following them. And media houses are being dragged along behind the money, trying to find new revenue streams that will replace the advertising and copy sales revenue of the 'conventional' media model. It does remind me of the struggles of circuit-switch mentality telecom operators trying to deny the existence of the virtually free of charge Internet telephony. And the typesetters I used to work with who didn't believe that desktop publishing would replace professional compositors. And the people at travel agent Thompsons who lost their jobs to people like me who book holidays on the Internet. And on and on and on.

The list is, of course, of people being disintermediated by the Internet. And media in key world markets are facing that self same pressure right now. To misquote Larry Ellison, "It's online business or out of business". The problem is that online revenue streams aren't acting like conventional revenue streams - and there's a shortfall in revenue that's behaving conventionally.

This, therefore, would seem to be a time to behave unconventionally...

Guildford

They used to be called The Guildford Stranglers. Then they dropped the Guildford, which is sort of lucky.

They were a huge influence on my protracted and turbulent adolescence. I used to clip their media coverage and kept it in a number of scrapbooks, but no, I don’t think that influenced my current choice of occupation. I used to pick up anything I could find on them: I’ll never forgive Melody Maker’s snide, ‘greasy white reggae’ review of No More Heroes. Bastards.

I have every single one of their records right up until the point just before Hugh Cornwell left, the point where they had started to lose me. To make ends meet, before the Stranglers and after he left Sweden and Emile and the Detectives, Cornwell used to play acoustic guitar for diners at Keith Floyd’s restaurant – Floyd still uses their music for his food programmes on British TV. I love him for that and, OK, for being a deliciously maverick boozy foodie too. But I’ve got ‘em all – every recording: Choosy Susie, the limited edition white vinyl Walk On By, the Peaches picture cover – rarities that I can no longer play because I don’t have a record player any more. Walk On By was the longest single, over seven minutes, ever to chart in the UK top 20, a massive jam session that still makes me grin like a lunatic when I play it.

10 was the album at the end of the road for me, when the magic of the best years was nothing but a distant memory. But oh, what magic. Battersea Park, Nice and Sleazy and a stage full of strippers. Shite ‘punk comedian’ Johnny Rubbish getting pelted with cans for being crap. He’d shouted that he’d walk off the stage if anyone else threw a can and the sky turned black. Agincourt.

Walking one day, a lonely kid failing to make sense of pretty much anything, past a block of flats and hearing The Stranglers playing. Knocking on the door: it’s a bloke in his 30s; he’s friendly, sees I’m a little taken aback and thrown by my own random action. I explain it’s the music. He asks me in. I’m confused. I just thought it might be someone I could talk to and I can’t explain to him and I turn and leave him there, on the doorstep. It’s a consequence of going to school over an hour’s drive away and living somewhere you don’t belong: I don’t know anyone in the town where I live. My mate Cliff was a boarder from Swaziland, just as alienated as I was. We got into trouble together. A great deal of trouble. The Stranglers were my criminal soundtrack.

Playing bass, that double punch at the start of Hanging Around... baow baow, then the heaving rhythm, putting little flourishes into it. Gigs at school, thrown off stage in Stanmore.

Stumbling with my schoolboy crush, the lovely Kay, out of the Rainbow, deafened by Dave Greenfield’s wailing, buzzing, rise and fall Oberheim OBX solo at the end of Raven, marvelling at her: dressed in black; vibrant, laughing, smelling gorgeous and sexy as fuck. I ached for her for years, then rejected her the night she finally got me to realise that she wanted me, too.

Travelling down to the Bear Garden by London Bridge on the train, working at the Stranglers Information Service, a new game that school chum Tom Noble turned me onto before he went off to shoot rabbits by lamplight in Australia. Working at SIS for no wage, taking home a bagful of band freebies after every day. Tomorrow was the Hereafter and Nublies, lyric sheets and t-shirts in lieu of pay. Watching their accountant despair after another ruinous tour of Sweden (Jet Black, a big bloke by any standard, had picked up a fruit machine and thrown it at a bar, an incident somehow rolled up with running battles with the Swedish teddy boys), talking to Black’s insufferable brother Paul Roderick, who ran SIS at the time. Mourning Simon Sparrow. The band think the Meninblack got him. Coke-fuelled paranoia or just bad PR?

Buying ‘Gold Watch’ with Jet’s Son, the Ayatollah, and watching the girl at Threshers fail to find the brand (“Gold watch! Scotch, love!” explains the Ayatollah, a true Bow Bells cockney), on the way to a booze and blues party. Going back to my parents’ place in Hemel Hempstead with Andy, a guy I’d met at SIS, and spending the weekend being naughty with some of the naughtier girls I knew ‘cos my parents were away. Getting caught when they copped the state of the bedsheets after they got back.

Jean Burnel’s hand-strengtheners in a box at SIS, handles wrapped in string and stained rust brown with blood. He’s worryingly physical. Playing Black’s warehoused Promuco drumkit (sorry, Jet) and Hazel O’Connor dropping by to say ‘hi’. Toyah Wilcox. Wow.

The Stranglers having to skip Queensland on Hells Angels’ bikes after pissing off the authorities. Hugh Cornwell goes down for three months at Pentonville for drug possession. Thank you, judge. The amazing benefit gig. The Stranglers imprisoned at Nice for inciting a riot: every window in the University Hall broken by infuriated students after the insufficient power fails the band and they walk offstage.

Golden Brown. Being delighted for them getting a real hit – they’d expected so much from The Gospel According to the Men in Black, thought they had it made with Who Wants the World. But they just had to fa fa fade. Strange Little Girl the followup, actually one of their first songs, not quite getting up there. Tori Amos’ cover is brilliant. La Folie, back on form. I’ll never forgive them for selling Golden Brown to Breville for a bloody sandwich toaster advertisement.

And then growing away from it, Aural Sculpture a disappointment but the first time I’d ever encountered an album with ‘content’ – and so the Spectrum led to the Amstrad which led to the computers which shaped my life. But Aural Sculpture was the Wrong Musical Road: horn sections and no life, straining, commercially inept.

Dreamtime, more of the same Linn Drums and parping horns. Losing interest and then the years when the rest of the world took priority, leaving home and finding my own way, discovering new stuff and then Hugh left to become one in a million children, segueing on to the brilliant, mad experimentalism of Nosferatu and Wired. Seeing them at the Irish Club in Northampton, Ellis on guitar, Paul Roberts on vocals. Not good enough. No Hugh and me feeling old and alienated, wondering what on earth I’d thought I was going to recover by going there. And then, years later and a whole world away, seeing Cornwell at the Dubai Marine Beach; a grumpy, ageing man toting an acoustic guitar and more attitude than stature. Buying a CD at Virgin in Deira City Centre out of sheer curiosity: Norfolk Coast. Not bad at all... playable: enjoyable. A few flashes of the Raven brilliance. Enough reason to go and see them again, that and a strange feeling that these people are part of my growing up, a huge part of me. A chance to let a lost world rush by me again, to relive some of the things I seem not to have truly appreciated at the time – some of which tear at my heartstrings now. Sometimes I watch young me walking down the road and want to shout out to myself, to tell me how to do it better.

I just bought my tickets for The Stranglers’ Dubai gig at the Irish Village on the 3rd October, in case you were wondering what the hell my head’s doing...

Pooling

Do go to the RTA's new Sharekni website and have a giggle.

Yes! Thanks to the brilliance of the RTA, you can now register to share your car with other people! Other people? Yes! Other people!

For those wondering what on earth is going on about this carpooling business, it was illegal to share your car with other people in the UAE because of the prevalence of illegal taxis - ie people sharing their cars for money. As I've pointed out in the past, if the taxis were a little nicer, neater, more knowledgeable about destinations and carried passengers at a reasonable market rate, the demand for 'illegal' taxis would be practically non-existent.

However, the issue was, apparently, that people were running 'illegal taxis', hence the move to make all car-sharing technically illegal. I'm really not sure that the level of 'illegal sharing' was such a safety threat, or revenue threat to the RTA, but there we go. The imposition of the law into this situation may seem a little draconian: others might have run an awareness campaign about the dangers of car sharing, re-evaluated the taxi service to make it more competitive or perhaps even just put up with a little natural attrition for the taxi company as those less well off shared their cars.

Having imposed the move as law, this obviously poses some problems, such as 'If I want to give my friend/colleague/neighbour/ a lift to work/the club/the beach then I damn well will'. And nobody would be particularly keen to live in an environment so mad as to actually seriously enforce such a piece of legislation. Would they?

The RTA's new solution to the issue, the 'Sharekni' service, attempts to allow drivers to register, stipulate the type of passengers they're willing to share with, the days they're happy to be 'driver' on etc - and then lets them log up to four passengers together. The site also supports passengers looking for a driver. The site then issues a 'permission' document that will satisfy even the most ardent police officer when you're stopped to see who the four strange people in your car are.

As Kipp points out, the Sharekni car pooling website isn't exactly a Web 2.0 marvel. Rather than making it all fun and social, the site is more like a government form filling exercise. The 'quick search' failed to find anything I tried and the registration link failed, the form failed and pretty much everything else I tried to do failed, too. I gave up in the end.

Although I'm sure they'll fix the site in time, the whole idea really does still make my mind boggle. To try and legislate, and enforce that legislation, against people having other people in their cars is surely an utterly pointless exercise. To offer them the chance to register for the chance to share their car with strangers for no incentive other than a 'permissible' sharing of the cost of petrol ("Cash exchange is not allowed between the passengers and the car owner; however the car owner can be compensated by paying the gas price.")?

I somehow don't think it's going to be wow of the century... but then I'm just cynical and overdue leave, so I might simply be wrong...

Holiday

For those of you who aren't lucky enough to work with Arabic speakers (particularly my lot, who are simply wonderful) or read Arabic and who might, as a result, have missed the news in today's Al Bayan, next Thursday's a holiday.

For some reason, none of today's English papers have the news, but next Wednesday is officially Alisra'a wal Miraaj, the holiday marking the ascent of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) to heaven. The UAE government's giving Thursday in lieu.

So start planning that long weekend, folks...

Stations

We should be hearing from the RTA soon, presumably once it's finished clapping itself on the back on the successful construction of an interchange, as to the naming of those 23 sponsored railway stations as well as the names of the first two Dubai Metro lines. Yes, the Dubai Metro Naming Rights programme, if the RTA's own documents are to be believed, is about to close its first phase, with the RTA datelining July 15th as the end of the month-long negotiation process with the first tranche of companies that submitted 'Expressions of Interest' or EOIs.

It'll be interesting to see how many of those 250 companies that the RTA claims expressed an interest will come through with the minimum 10 year commitment to Dhs6 million per year (30% up front, if you don't mind!) for the right to have people say they're going to take a train to their brand.

The RTA makes a number of stipulations for companies applying. They must be a company or brand, not a personal/family name, which is interesting if you're Al Futtaim or Al Ghurair or any of Dubai's other major family companies. They must have a presence in the UAE . They have to be financially stable (!) and have no history of fraudulent and/or unethical behaviour (One can only speculate as to what criteria they're going to apply there!) and must not be promoting fags, booze, porn or gambling. So Playboy Junction isn't going to happen.

Additionally, it is 'desirable' that companies have a 'commitment to Dubai', have a CSR policy in place or in process, should ideally 'fit' with the location and, if international, should be a Fortune 1000 company and be a 'multi-cultural organisation'.

The ham-fisted attempt above to try and define the 'right sort of company' that Dubai would want splashed all over its Metro system is one of many interesting areas to the whole scheme. We wouldn't want anybody 'wrong' to be splurged all over the city, now would we?

I can't wait for the list of applicants. We can only hope there has been no delay in finding 23 of the 'right sort of companies' out of that avalanche of 250 expressions of interest. I suppose we'll know soon enough when we start to see the 'RTA struggles under five billion applications, extends deadline' releases. Or, alternatively, when we see a list of our new landmarks to be.

Seat

If you've got a little time on your hands, make a cup of coffee, sit down and relax and take 15 minutes or so out to read this 10,250 word post from UAE based blogger and Etisalat customer service victim Sam. It documents his 43-day attempt to get his Internet connection upgraded from 1Mb to 2Mb.

It'll likely resonate with you if you've ever dealt with Etisalat or any other monopoly provider. It'll resonate if you occasionally cry into the void at the sheer frustration of dealing with call centre culture. It'll make you angry. It'll make you marvel at how he didn't commit any acts of violence, vandalism or inappropriate behaviour.

And, with a bit of luck, it'll get widely publicised and lead to a thorough-going witch hunt over at Etisalat towers. Because it's the voice of a frustrated, annoyed, ignored, disrespected and utterly impotent consumer being jerked around by people who represent disempowered, dumb, rote process gone mad.

Enjoy!