A Most Respectable Blogger

I actually have this as a t-shirt and I'm very fond of it, too...

I was asked by my co-host on the weekly UnWired radio programme, Rama Chakai, what it was that made me 'a blogger' (I'm introduced on the show as a public relations director, writer and blogger). The answer is, of course, other people. It's not a title I have ever given myself - other people, media in specific, give it me to validate me. You see, journalists do tend to think I'm not much use as a public relations person (unless the story is about public relations, of course), so they have to find something more acceptable to the public. Like bank robber or canary molester.

I have written here before about media using 'experts' with no validation of their expertise. It's an insidious game. And I'm part of it, despite the fact I have never introduced myself as anything other than my day job.

Would I still be 'a blogger' if I had a more acceptable job, such as Middle East Analyst at the SNAFU Institute? No, I don't think I would. So here is proof that it is more generally acceptable to be a blogger than a public relations person.

Yeah, I know the bar's incredibly low there. But it's perhaps interesting how bloggers have acceptability as qualified sources of information for mainstream media.

Hacks Smacked With Phone Hack Cack

Image via Wikipedia



"...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Thomas Jefferson



I have been watching with a growing sense of awed, horrified amusment, the escalation of the News of the World phone hacking scandal. From the British parliament baying sanctimoniously for blood to the smug opportunism of Ed Milliband (Am I the only person convinced he's the Heat Electric tortoise reincarnated?), the stony stoicism of Rebekah Brooks to the arrogance of Rupert Murdoch, the whole drama has been singularly unmissable.

Anyone who's read Piers Morgan's unforgettable memoir about his time as the darling of Murdoch's British empire would have had an insight into the snuggling up the red top tabloids (and the press in general) do with British politicians. It's a relationship built of loathing, one trying to use the other in a game of political power-broking and influence. Murdoch's ability to reach out to a huge slice of the electorate made him a political power broker, parties anxiously sought his backing - none more so than the Labour party, which has traditionally enjoyed Murdoch's support (but had to work damn hard for it).

Now the contagion has spread to the States, where a senator has started raising questions and will no doubt soon find himself at the head of a braying pack of political power-brokers desperate to minimise the massive power of Murdoch's US media holdings, including The Voice of Reason, Fox News.

This isn't about phone hacking at all; mercy me, no. And it's not about the freedom of the press, although it raises many questions about that most important of freedoms. This is about breaking the power of a man who was too powerful and too influential for his own good - and whose power and influence have waned sufficiently, because of the power of online communications, to embolden politicians to finally stand up to him.

They want to take him down, baby. And if Milliband and Cameron can stop sniping at each other for two seconds, they'll do it, too.

Will this be a blow for freedom of the press? I doubt it. It's more about the freedom of media oligarchs to extort politicians - and the freedom of politicians to do cosy, corrupt deals with media.

We can only look forward to an equivalent scandal breaking out in the Middle East, when journalists are found out to be lifting handsets and using telephones to call and verify facts rather than just hammering out press release and newswire copy.

BTW, This fascinating piece in Foreign Policy does a much better job of discussing the above than I did...

Google+ -- Information Overload?

Parental Guidance Warning. This video is icky.

It's like a helter skelter, this social media business. And there are times when you might just want to get off before your head explodes.

Google+ has finally pitched me into information overload. I'm dealing with too many streams of information and it's becoming uncomfortable. I know I'm an unusually 'connnected' person: quite apart from the Twitter, Facebook, Blogger triangle, I handle reasonably large volumes of email and follow a lot of blogs and sites. I'm rarely truly offline. It's one reason I find it funny when my bank tells me they tried to get in touch with me but couldn't. I mean, there are people who actively try to avoid me and find it hard. It got so bad that when we returned from getting stuck under the Tikkipukkapokka, or whatever it was called, Icelandic ash cloud, I actually gave interviews to media amused that I had been caught offline in a totally analogue rural lighthouse.

Apart from the radio shows, conferences and other presentations and workshops I do, I'm also spending most of my days managing one aspect or another of online communications. Online stuff has come to dominate my working life as we have started to transition from 'traditional' public relations practice to integrate more and more online thinking into our communications work with clients. When you add stuff like GeekFest which, despite my best efforts to be UNinvolved still has created a regional network of Facebook and Twitter feeds with thousands of people behind them, you can start to appreciate how very, well, online things are.

And that's been fine. I've been good with it. I've used a few wee tricks to help things glide along: I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but the blog updates my Facebook page with every post so at least there's the appearance of engagement. I rely quite heavily on NetVibes, an RSS reader which organises my many streams of information into nice, manageable tabs that let me dip into updates of what's relevant when it suits me. Twitter has become a comfortable background habit, a sort of place you drop into on the way from a completed activity to a new one. (If you find me on Twitter at the weekend, chances are that Sarah's trying on some new clothes in the shop.) And I have been quite selective about what 'social media' sites I use, so although I'm 'on' Quora, FourSquare and the like (you have to understand what makes them tick, at the very least, if you're going to advise clients), I'm not active.

Strangely, most of my writer friends are on Facebook and fewer use Twitter. Another oddity is that people have started commenting on blogposts on Twitter rather than using Blogger's comments feature. It's always fascinating to see the shifting dynamics of different networks and their interactions, a little like the iridescence of oil on water.

But Google+ has presented me with a dilemma. Do I stay or do I go? It's yet another social network, it's becoming more demanding as more people have joined up and started to poke around, exploring what the new room looks like. It extends the powerful sharing capabilities of Twitter, allowing longer posts than 140 characters along with link sharing, but brings the powerful 'circles' feature to bear. Circles are like Facebook's 'Lists', but are more siloed - you share easily with only the circles you want to share with.

It's very similar indeed to Facebook, in fact, but it's a lot faster - perhaps a result of the fact that it's still dominated by 'early adopters' and therefore a geekier, more aggressively 'sharey' crowd.. I was asked what Google+ was like yesterday and I replied "More Facebook than Twitter but more Twitter than Facebook". If that doesn't seem helpful, well, I don't know.

Google+ is disruptive. It's Facebook at near-Twitterspeed. I'm finding I have to consciously decide whether to share information on Twitter or Google+ and frequently wondering why I'm sharing at all and just don't bother. The world, as a consequence, has not ended. Life has gone on. The one decision I have not had to make is whether to share on Facebook, because I never really considered it a sharing platform in the same way as Twitter, for instance. and yet Google+ is just that - it makes it very easy to share links, pictures and thoughts. It combines some of the learnings from Buzz and Wave and makes crowdsourcing and conversation easy. But the wide-ranging topics and speed of updates are slightly scary and very distracting. Even Google has been caught out with the volumes - they had issues with their notification management servers as a result of demand spikes from Google+.

A TweetDeck for Google+ may be the answer, a Circle Manager. It might be that we evolve better techniques to manage circles based on topics and content flows rather than relationships.

But right now, Google+ is a time-suck and I'm having to consciously invest in it as everyone tries to figure it out. I suppose the great difference is I'm still there looking around - with Wave and Buzz, I was out of there within 48 hours. This time it's more sticky.

The jury's still out, but I'm beginning to see how Google+ could well do what Orkut failed to do. But something's got to give somewhere - we're fast approaching the point where I cannot see how people could maintain yet another platform. I reckon two's company, but three's a crowd.

Anyone else out there reached a limit?

Strength Through Joy

Image via WikipediaWe're about halfway through the Great House Rebuilding following the Great Water Disaster. It's actually been easier than at first thought, only the spare bathroom's had to be completely gutted and the hardcore packing the floor removed, the two bedrooms have dried out to a certain degree and only required the floor tiles to be lifted and new ones laid. Of course, the bathroom tiles couldn't be matched and so the walls have had to be smashed and new tiles laid to match the floor.

It's been a week of banging, dust and workmen scraping their way through the house - and another one to come, including tiling, repainting and the like. Sarah's driven demented. At least I've been escaping by day to our bijou offices in darkest Satwa.

The builders are Egyptian, with a couple of Bangladeshi labourers. I am ashamed to say I had strong preconceptions about Egyptian builders, at least any of 'em born after 2,500 BC. My prejudices have been turned on their heads by Mr Oussama and his merry men. They turn up on time, are careful and clean up after themselves, have so far (and no reason to assume this won't continue) done a grand, workmanlike job and have been a cheerful bunch altogether. They are highly amused at Sarah's grasp of the mechanics of building (Our girl's daddy back in Oireland is a builder, see?).

The fly in the ointment has been a number of routine maintenance tasks that have been taking place alongside The Big Rebuild. Our landlord is a wonderful chap, a very honourable National of Yemeni stock who is always scrupulous about any maintenance we've ever requested. The trouble is the execution of his desires is in the hands of his 'man', who combines a strong mendacious streak with a total inability to accept any form of practical reality, no conception of time or its value and an unerring ability to create situations where we end up hanging around waiting for him for hours on end.

Sarah, who has seen a great deal more of him than I have in the past week, wants to drink Vintage Grand Cru Extra Brut from the man's skull. Interestingly, he doesn't seem to realise how close that has been to becoming a reality as the days have dragged by.

In hindsight, we should have moved house rather than put up with this. But then hindsight is a marvellous thing, isn't it? I've locked up the champagne and sharp knives, just in case...

Amazon Acquires The Book Depository. And a Little Bit of Egypt!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAmazon.com's decision to acquire Guernsey-based online book distribution company The Book Depository was announced in a terse press release over PR Newswire from the online retailing giant. The move is subject to British regulatory approval, but would see a small online retailer gobbled up by the behemoth. Many people have seen it as a sort of David/Goliath thing.

Interestingly, the man behind The Book Depository, Andrew Crawford, has done it before - he was part of the startup team at bookpages.co.uk which was acquired by Amazon way back in 1998.

Even more interestingly, there's a Middle East angle to the acquisition - The Book Depository is the majority holder of an Egpytian business process outsourcing company, elkotob.com, which provides back-end solutions for online book sellers but which also has expressed an aim to "to lead the Arabic book market, in the Middle East region as well as becoming the biggest Arabic books supplier in the world."

Will the move bring Amazon, finally, to support readers in the Middle East with Kindles and content? Will we now be able to access amazon with Middle East addreses and accounts? Will Amazon start to support Arabic in a big way? Will Amazon's e-commerce engines replace elkotobs? Will the 65 staff be expanded or replaced by Amazon? Will this see Amazon outsourcing some of its own massive development and server infrastructure to Egypt?

This could be an interesting move indeed...

The ENOC Case Study Continues

Image via WikipediaSorry, but I started following this story and I can't seem to tear my eyes away from the wreckage even as I try. Today's newspapers report Dubai based petroleum company ENOC's denial of yesterday's Gulf News story.

Yes, that's right. ENOC Group suddenly had something to say after something like a month of obdurate silence.

Top honours to The National once more, which carries a better researched and more rounded story, taking the opportunity to recap the whole episode and referring to ENOC, with perhaps a grim smile as it rewards weeks of treating the press as if they don't exist or matter, as a 'troubled company'. Khaleej Times couldn't bring itself to name its long-term rival and refers to 'reports in a section of the English media'. Gulf News itself wasn't for stepping down, running ENOC's denial but affirming its report that 'sources in the oil industry confirmed the possibility that other retailers have shown interest in assuming responsibility for those [ENOC's] operations'

Breaking its long silence has certainly brought ENOC to the fore again and will once again step up the pressure from media and the public for some form of clarity. Sadly, there hasn't been a lot of that around but ENOC's statement to the media yesterday does rather protest too much when it accuses Gulf News of baseless speculation.

Here are five rules of Public Relations that may help:

Rule One
News expands to fill a vacuum
This is a Great Truth of Public Relations. If you do not speak clearly and with purpose, you leave room for speculation. The media, like the people it represents, will speculate. Experts, pundits, the public will all speculate. Many will happily speculate for the media to use in its own speculative stories. If you decide to issue 'no comment' or, worse, not to pick up the phone, you have invited speculation round to yours for dinner and have no right to complain when your paintwork gets scratched and your carpet ruined.

Rule Two
Responding to speculation legitimises it
If you respond to one speculative report, you respond to all of them. Many major corporates have a policy of not responding to rumour or speculation, precisely because you really don't want to start affirming or denying purely speculative plays. It's actually a journalistic technique, to speculatively assert something to see if you get a 'bite'. By all means respond to legitimate public concern and hard facts presented to you. But don't fail to respond to those and reserve your powder just to waste it on speculation.

Rule Three
Don't pretend to play hardball
ENOC's statement asks for an apology from Gulf News. This was, in my professional opinion, a basic error (one of very many). Gulf News hasn't apologised and has stood by its story. So where are you going to go now, big shot? If you just let that go now, you just affirmed the story, which only ever discussed a possibility in its original form. Discussing a possibility is, of course, pure speculation. Better not to have gone there in the first place, IMHO...

Rule Four
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
Interestingly, ENOC's statement only comments on one aspect of Gulf News' story, the possibility that ADNOC will be given the running of ENOC stations in Sharjah and the northern emirates. It doesn't comment on part of the story that discussed ENOC requesting a lifting of the price cap or the strong rejection of proposed solutions by government officials. It only talks to one fact in the whole story, but has now established the principle that ENOC will comment to correct facts presented by media. It's not a rounded statement, where one was most certainly called for.

Rule Five
Have a communications strategy
Have an agreed strategy in place, don't just go knee-jerking all over the shop. The National today gleefully trots out the original statement made to media by ENOC, that the affected stations were subject to 'technical upgrades' and the subsequent lack of any evidence to that effect. Having made a statement that few, if any, believed and then followed that up by totally ignoring the media, the company has now arguably lost public trust. As one commentator in today's National story has it:

“I doubt they want to hang onto the whole network, otherwise they would have supplied them. We’ve gone beyond that point now. It’s all speculation of course, but Enoc may just be trying to get a better price for them.”

That's pretty cynical, no? But it's hard to see what the company's management of the media and public transparency aspects of this story has done to mitigate such cynicism from the public, pundits and media.

ADNOC - The Winner Takes It All?

Image via WikipediaGulf News certainly has the bit between its teeth on the ENOC Group story. Today's paper asserts that 'sources in the oil sector' have said the UAE government is 'moving to cancel licenses owned by ENOC and EPPCO in the northern emirates and allow ADNOC to take over the running of the service stations.'

That this move is being discussed seriously is hardly a surprise after the past few weeks' shenanigans, but the discussions (at least, those Gulf News reports) are remarkably wide-ranging. Apparently, the ENOC Group has been arguing that the fuel price should rise to realistic market rates - that would treble the price of petrol in the UAE. Although such a rise in fuel prices would be felt at the pumps, the issue is much wider than that. As a component in economic cost, petrol is an insidious little critter. If the cost of transportation of goods went up commensurately, we'd see some serious rises in commodity prices here, something that nobody really wants right now. Even the suggestion that UAE Nationals receive a petrol subsidy was apparently rejected - and quite, right too - they wouldn't be immune to the rise in the price of basic foodstuffs and other daily needs that would be triggered by unleashing a 300% increase in petrol cost.

Besides, if Abu Dhabi's ADNOC can profitably refine fuel at the current capped prices, why buy the stuff on international markets at all?

However, worryingly, for the last three days my local ADNOC hasn't had any Masafi, just Al Ain water. Please don't tell me this whole scenario is about to be repeated in the bottled water sector - I only drink Masafi...

Joy

Image via WikipediaOn the morning of the second day of ArabNet in Beirut back in March, I was woken by a phone call from Sarah. It was a somewhat panicky call. Water was welling up from the guest bathroom floor, what was I going to do about it?

I'm sure I didn't sound terribly supportive in the circumstances, but given I was in Beirut speaking and moderating at a conference, my options seemed somewhat limited. Pointing this out turned out to be the marital equivalent of saying yes, your bum looks totally enormous in that; I mean, why not try something more suited to your age?

Pal Derek was a tad closer to hand and duly hove into view on a white charger as the upstairs of our house slowly filled with water. By the time I had changed my flight to the next available return, he had worked out what was going on. Our landlord had recently had the roof of the villa sealed (it's a semi-detached villa) and the workmen had brilliantly sealed up the outflow, but had left a nice gap around the pipework into our house. This had combined with next door's pump regulator malfunctioning and causing their water tank to overflow onto the roof of the villa. Derek, a hydraulic engineer by trade, estimated something like two hundred gallons had been pumped into our house. It was streaming down the walls in the kitchen, welling up through the tiles in the upstairs rooms and generally flooding the house as Sarah struggled to move furnishings, books and the like.

Villas in the UAE are constructed strangely. The upstairs floor spaces are something like eighteen inches deep and in-filled with compacted sand and rubble before the tiles are laid. The Great Water Disaster meant that the two hundred gallons had seeped into this filling, saturating the floors of the three rooms, two bedrooms and a bathroom, to the rear of the villa. Four months later, the water's still in there and the downstairs ceilings are yellowing as the sandy dampness penetrates the fabric of the house. There's only one way to get it out - take up the floors, chuck out the wet sand and replace it.

The builders are coming tomorrow. We've moved all the furniture, sealed the doors with plastic sheeting and covered our possessions, upstairs and downstairs, with more of the stuff. The entire contents of the upstairs of the house is now in our bedroom, tottering piles of books making the place look like a model of a dystopian cityscape. Why? Because we (well, more Sarah than I - I went to work while she stayed home and endured it) have been through this kind of work before and know precisely how much noise, dust and crap it creates.

It's going to take two weeks or so to dig up the floors, refill them and re-tile them, including rebuilding a bathroom. Two weeks of hammering, tile-cutting and shovelling, workmen trudging through the house and dust filling every nook and cranny. Two weeks of getting by in a covered-up, echoing skeleton of a home while July, baking hot summer in one of the world's hotter places, takes place outside.


Oh, joy.

The Pitter Patter of Tiny Potters

Image via WikipediaWe’ve seen a number of moves now symptomatic of a publishing industry struggling to work out quite what it should do about the considerable challenges posed by the Internet and e-books, including the recent well-publicised moves by literary agents to launch e-imprints and the launch of Amazon’s own publishing house.

The rise of self-publishing (and the inevitable references to Konraths and Hockings) has itself changed the dynamic of publishing forever - news broke yesterday that 12% of all US households now own an e-reader. That's a remarkable number and the growth in readers appears to be pretty near exponential - that 12% figure is a three-fold year on year increase.

The latest twist to the 'what are we going to do now?' tale is, of course, JK Rowling’s Pottermore. The website will sell e-book editions of the Harry Potter stories in an experiential multimedia environment. There are some interesting aspects to the move that have had publishing pundits speculating like crazy about what it means. Here are some of the bits that caught my passing eye:

Rowling’s publishers and agent come out of this smelling of roses
While agents are launching e-book imprints against publishers and publishers sign up authors' backlists on e-book format by cutting out agents, JK Rowling has made sure everyone’s getting a slice of Pottermore. Her agent has been a force behind the creation of the project and she will pay her publishers royalties on the sale of the e-books. Time was when publishers paid authors royalties, so this really is a symptom of this new age where men walk backwards, hens speak and snakes fly.

Rowling is potentially doing for Kindle what Apple did for Flash
There’s been a lot of talk that Amazon will open up the Kindle and support the forthcoming Epub3 format. Pottermore asserts it will support ‘all readers’  and yet takes a direct to market route, which would pre-suppose that either Amazon will go Epub3 or has done some sort of deal with Rowling to let her publish to Kindle via her own site rather than Amazon.com. What could be an interesting alternative is Amazon opening up the Kindle format to writers going direct to market in return for a lower royalty. Can’t quite see that, though. But Amazon has to do one of the two – it can’t afford not to support Potter. Will Potter change the way Amazon works, or will Amazon make a single exception for a phenomenally popular author?

You need scale
The Harry Potter books have been massive, for sure, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows alone selling 44 million copies. (To put that in perspective, Umberto Eco’s brilliant The Name of the Rose has sold 50 million copies and The Lord of the Rings 150 million.) The whole Harry Potter series has netted sales to date in excess of 450 million copies.

That’s a lot of trees, no?

With that kind of scale behind you, you can afford (literally) to build your own website and market books directly from it. Not only have you got the cash to splash, but you can also negotiate with your publishers from a position of glorious strength. But that scale was built (as Waterstones pointed out rather sniffily as it noted Rowling wasn’t going to be selling e-books through them) on traditional publishing techniques and channels. Few authors could pay for the development costs of a multimedia rich, experiential website and even fewer could garner the massive global media coverage of the move, build the levels of expectation of a large and loyal fanbase or stir up the kind of excitement that Rowling has managed.

Rowling’s scale is interesting because it lets her build a lot more into Pottermore than just the e-books: there are all sorts of possibilities, most of which are attached to revenue-generating ideas, including games and other sell-ons. The advertising clicks alone, on these kinds of numbers, mean real money.

Could she have got here without traditional publishing and the scale it offers? I very much doubt it.

This couldn't have happened if she had signed a modern contract
Signing as a new author, you get to sign away your digital rights too, for 20-25% of the total. Agents are up in arms about this and think 50% is nearer fair, but publishers are holding steady. If JK had signed with Bloomsbury today, she wouldn't be able to control her own e-book sales in this way. 450 million books down the line with no contractual (I assume, forgive me) obligations regarding e-books, she had the freedom to do this. It's doubtful whether any new author signing up today will get to play this way. You'd have to do this from a self-published perspective.And brave is the self-published author who shuns Amazon to go it alone with a standalone website.

The Potter franchise gets a new and highly lucrative lease of life
Given JK has said she’s not going to write any more Potter boilers and the films have now covered all the existing books, our Harry is pretty much a spent force. Except Pottermore changes all that. For instance, we’re not looking at all seven books going on line this autumn. Our JK’s smarter than that. This autumn you get one. 2012 you’ll get another one. With all the attendant fuss and media attention. And don't forget, Pottermore cuts the trees out of the equation, so the cost base is reduced to web development and multimedia production. Peanuts, in terms of the scales we're looking at here. With some smart drip-feeding, Pottermore could keep going for evermore!

Silence. The New Comment.

Image via WikipediaI know I've been going on about this, but it really is such a brilliant case study. The Great Sharjah Fuel Crisis continues, with ENOC and EPPCO stations shut down last Friday by Sharjah police after having failed to supply fuel to residents in Sharjah and the Northern Emirates for a month.

As I predicted a while ago, the story started to internationalise - this story in the UK's Daily Telegraph (kind enough to quote yours truly) talks of 'baffled' residents in this oil rich nation unable to buy fuel. Tellingly it ends with these words: "No one from either ENOC or the other main petrol company affected, Emarat, was available for comment."

Bloomberg filed an excellent piece today, linked here, which continues the trend of international interest in the story. Being a newswire, the Bloomberg piece has made it into a number of interntional newspapers and websites. Bloomberg's story, an in-depth analysis of the situation, makes an important link between the ENOC Group issue and Dubai's indebtedness and economic stability, as well as drawing some interesting conclusions regarding political stability. The story isn't going away, in short, and now it's arguably starting to affect Dubai's reputation in a broader sense. I would humbly suggest this would not have been the case if there had been an agreed and effectively implemented communications strategy to start with.

Tellingly, the Bloomberg story contains these words: "An ENOC spokesman declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. A Dubai government spokeswoman didn’t respond to an email requesting for comment, and an official in Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. public relations division didn’t answer calls to his office and mobile phone"

Gulf News filed today with a follow-up story on the issue, which talks about the Sharjah government's resolution in solving the issue. You'd almost think journalists were keeping the story alive to punish the silent spokespeople, wouldn't you?

Somehow tenacious GN hack Deena Kamel Yousef managed to get through to the man so many journalists have failed to buttonhole and so the GN story contains this timeless quote from ENOC's Silent Spokesperson: "I cannot give a statement now, don't ask me questions I cannot answer. I agree that we should be more transparent, I agree 150 per cent, but we have directives not to talk about this issue now."

Deliciously, Deena twists the knife: "Pressed for answers, he made casual comments on the weather to change the subject."

Tellingly, the GN story also points out that: "Enoc's silent spell lasted for about two weeks while the spokesperson was on holiday after the trouble started. Repeated attempts by Gulf News to contact the company were unanswered."

On holiday? You're kidding, right?