Plug

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As you may or may not know, I have the pleasure to work for the Middle East's first technology specialised public relations and communications agency, Spot On Public Relations. I don't often blog directly about work stuff, although my work obviously informs many of my opinions, but I'm going to talk shop for a second here.

Over the years, Spot On has moved from being a pure-play tech and telecom agency to encompass non-tech clients, from 'Freej' originators Lammtara through Virgin Megastores to publishing company ITP and media consultancy DMA. We still retain tech clients, of course, including IBM and Lenovo, as well as my favourite client (oddly enough), printer company Oki Printing Solutions. And we work with a lot of other companies too, from hotels through to mining and finance through to consumer electronics.

One of the things that's started to happen at work, something that has been a pleasant surprise, is that the old tech heritage has come back to inform how we work with a new wave of clients who are most definitely not technology companies, but who are using technology in their work - increasingly in their communications work. When Spot On started, the Internet was a new, and often regarded as threatening, phenomenon in the Middle East and we were very involved in arguing the case FOR the Internet - it's something that resonates with many conversations I have today, believe me.

Social media, you may have noticed it's taking up more and more of my thinking and even blog posting (And yes, I have had complaints), but it is starting to drive some very interesting ideas for us - increasingly in line with my personal dislike of 'big business' and the ways that 'big business' has been behaving.

I like the idea of companies being more open to communicating with the little guys, actually talking to their customers rather than glibly slapping 'customer-centric' on their brand values and then handing down the call centre to the nearest monkey. I like the idea that customers and companies could actually work together to make things work better - because the customers want to be involved and the companies are willing to listen. I like consumers having voice. (You may have noticed!)

I think we're heading towards more of that stuff and it excites me. Sorry, that's the geek in me showing through.

Anyway, this is all a thinly disguised plug for you to go join Spot On's fabby Facebook group, which you can subscribe to if you want to get more 'inside track' on the stuff we're doing with clients and in the social media space, as well as links to things like interviews and articles from Spot On people and the people we work with in our 'ecosystem' of like-minded partners.

Also, if you've a mind to, you're more than welcome to subscribe to a few of Spot On's other 'social media' resources:

Twitter. The Spot On Twitterfeed tends to focus on sharing news of interest to those who follow media, journalism, new media and Internet innovation. It's quite popular.

Netvibes. Arguably one of the most useful RSS readers, Netvibes allows you to aggregate content from multiple sources, from blogs through to newswires and even sources such as Twitter and Google Alerts. Spot On's public Netvibes page is a great 'one stop' resource for you to swing by every day and check out pretty much everything that's happening in Middle East media, journalism and social media.

Delicious. This is another strong media-related resource, where we basically share our bookmarks of interesting stories that are media, PR and journalism related. Again, quite a powerful resource for anyone that wants to get a fast snapshot of what's happening in these areas across the Middle East.

We use a range of other social media platforms for a number of purposes, audiences and clients - but I thought these might be interesting/useful to many of the people who swing by this blog.

[EndPlug]

The Amateur Anthropologist

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I discovered Google Silences yesterday. What’s a Google Silence? It’s when you’re having a big fat old argument with a colleague that’s degenerated from debating solid, intelligent, factually based arguments into ‘Is so!’, ‘Isn’t so!’.

It's at this point that the person you’re arguing with goes suddenly and terribly quiet.

Why?

Because they’re Googling the topic you’re arguing. A Google Silence is followed by two possible outcomes.

“Ha! I OWN you, punk!”

Or

“This is a stupid argument anyway and I think we should move on.”

Tortuous

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Here's something I think is worth sharing. It came to me (and therefore to you) by a tortuous route, I found the link on a comment to an article on Australian marketing uber-blog, Mumbrella (sorry Tim, can't be arsed with the caps and things). But that's how the Internet works, no?

It's the story of how the UK's Guardian newspaper crowdsourced a complex data mining job, using its online readers to help it sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of public records. By making the whole exercise accessible and enjoyable to the public, The Guardian effectively managed to arrange for something like 35,000 people to help intelligently sift through over 170,000 pages of public records unearthed by the great Commons Expenses Scandal. The result was that The Guardian managed to comb 170,000 pages of data in 80 hours, extracting the valuable stuff for its journalists to work on.

It's here. The site, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is a must-add for your RSS feed if you have any interest at all in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.

I love this case study because it's a really smart application of technology in the spirit of the IBM PC and the Toyota MR2 (two of my favourite things, both originally cobbled together by inspired innovators on shoestring budgets raiding their companies' parts bins). I love it because it's a witty and smart piece of journalistic initiative.

But most of all, I love it because it shows how much more powerful you are when you enlist the help of your customers in the development of your product - which means respecting your customer enough to believe they are worthy enough to begin to possibly understand the arcane intricacies of your unique and difficult profession. Calling for feedback, input, insight or participation from a wider commuinty extends your reach beyond your own organisation's staffing capabilities and brings a wider range of heads to a problem - sometimes solutions to a problem can come marvellously quickly from the uninvolved. It has the potential to broaden your capability to innovate, creates a stronger sense of connection and ownership from customers and folds marketing neatly into product development.

The article on Mumbrella was, incidentally, this one, where News Ltd's editorial director is being a goof about Twitter.

The Monster is Dead

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So Michael Jackson's dead. I had to switch off the television to stem the tide of grief. It doesn't seem more than ten minutes ago we were all being entertained by the sight of him dangling children over balconies, facing charges of child molestation and struggling to cope with a mountain of debt from an insane lifestyle that his ailing career could no longer maintain. The world gasped as his increasingly macabre visage leered out at them, caked in make-up and scarred by surgery after surgery, a grotesque mannequin piping platitudes in a ridiculous, squeaky-soft voice.

He died two weeks before the massive series of 'comeback' concerts, a 50 year-old man rehearsing, no doubt, to push himself through punishing routines that would defeat a 20 year-old as he put everything he had into that all-consuming gamble to try and win over the world that had turned its back on him. We can only wait and see if it's confirmed that he rehearsed himself to death.

The villagers chanting 'Kill the monster' as they marched on the castle with their burning brands are now clamouring to get in front of the cameras and wail about how they missed the monster and how he wasn't a monster really, but a globe-spanning entertainer that brought joy to millions and whose loss will be felt by the whole world.

And I sat there wondering why these people who had so much love for Michael had stood by as he sank into penury, turning away from him and tutting at the freak show. The outpouring of saccharine grief was, indeed, too much for me to bear.

Geek

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Some side effects from this morning's Business Breakfast slot, with no particularly massive point to make, it's just that I found them interesting. But then I'm a geek, no?

Google is the place where 30% of the Internet goes every day - and it spends an average of 8.5 minutes of that day on the site. As we know, those minutes are spent looking for stuff and clicking on the results - including those lovely, lucrative little Adwords. In fact, Google's Q1 2009 revenue was equivalent to the entire US ad spend on print media. Not bad for a few clicks.

In fact, Google's revenue is equivalent to something like 17% of total global TV advertising spend ($123 billion according to Informa). That's not bad for a single provider, no? It's certainly bigger than any single network. Google's pretty good at growing stealthily wealthy, actually.

Ranked #4 globally by Alexa, Facebook currently gets 19% of the Internet's eyeballs every day, BTW. Interestingly, people spend over four times as long there, though - an average of 25.3 minutes a day are invested on Facebook.

The time people spend on Google appears to be a little more productive, however, Facebook's revenues for 2008 were $350 million.

Twitter's revenue - and, indeed, its revenue model remains pure speculation...

When Twitter Falls Apart

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Some commentators are now, quite properly, pointing to the very real failings of Twitter as an ongoing news source on the demonstrations taking pace in Iran.

This chap, Maximillian Forte, link kindly provided in a comment to this post by Graeme Baker, is certainly in that camp and provides a strong and lucid viewpoint.

It's perhaps interesting to look back over events in Iran and how Twitter, as a community, responded.

In the first phase, Twitter clearly led the news agendas of mainstream media, providing on the ground witness and a diversity of updates that caught the popular imagination - including triggering the #CNNfail protest that eventually forced the channel to react publicly and defend its woeful programming in the face of an important series of events.

In the second phase, Twitter started to clog up with useless ReTweets (RTs) of stale information as the public mood drove the need to be somehow participatory. The students in Iran who had been Tweeting updates fought to keep their links to the world open, but were battling not only those who wanted to silence them but trying to have their voices heard in the babble.

With the almost hysterical outbreak of wannabe participants came disinformation - calls to change your location to Tehran to protect the student Tweeters meant that now anyone could 'Tweet from Tehran' - and so more chaff joined the flow of information. That was made worse by a call to remove the ID of anyone you RTed in order to protect them - effectively depriving any information of a source.

If you weren't in the game early or close to people on the ground, and therefore following the right people, by now you were getting some pretty duff information - and fifteenth hand information, at that.

Phase three has been the complete breakdown of Twitter as a news source. The 'turn your avatar green' movement is a symptom of this. Vested interest has meant that clear disinformation is now being sewn into Twitter, with Tweets claiming that Arabs have been brought into Iran, stabbing people's sisters and so on.

But then Twitter was never meant to be a news resource and, I think most people would agree, can not be relied upon as a news resource beyond the fact that, as a platform, it lets fresh eye witness news travel fast. That first phase is where Twitter is potentially solid gold and where it has indeed led news agendas - not only inTehran, but also in the Mumbai bombings and other incidents.

Once it descends into fads and conversation, there is no news value in Twitter - as, indeed, there is rarely news value in conversations. That's just chattering - what the service, in fact, was built to do. Pointing to the chattering then squeaking about how useless Twitter is doesn't mask the fact that Twitter brought the streets of Iran to the desktops of millions of people across the world.

And CNN didn't.

A Nony Mouse

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Whenever I get an anonymous comment on the blog, my heart does a little sinking thing.

Anonymity is the Internet’s great gift and at the same time its burden. It allows people the freedom to be who they truly are, to shake off the bounds of convention and propriety that tie down our everyday lives. It lets people share opinions they otherwise could not voice, speaking freely about their employers, their relationships or their governments. It lets people confess and share, unburden themselves and shout joy without having to worry about reactions, restrictions or repercussions.

It also lets people be mean, shitty and petty without ever having to worry about having to face their victims. It makes people into cowards.

I made the conscious decision to blog and express my own opinions under my own name (I think the only person to do so in the UAE at the time, but I’m sure I’ll be corrected on that one!). That’s something I’ve always done – as a journalist and as a commentator, columnist and contributor to TV, print and radio. I might be wrong, I might be a gob, I may well be a complete arse, but at least I’m out there taking it on the chin in public.

People that don’t have the strength of character to express their negative opinion or unpleasant reaction in the same way do irritate me. If I can be a brave boy, so can you.

Rarely have I seen anonymous comments on blogs justified by a reasonable fear for personal safety – more frequently they’re driven by vested interest. A distressing number of people representing companies still comment anonymously on blogs thinking that they can’t be ‘found out’. That is not the case – I’ve said this lots before – people who host websites, including blogs, can gain access to an amazing degree of highly granular information on visitors who are almost invariably traceable through their IP.

It’s not always about vested interest, of course. Sometimes anonymous comments are just from people who can’t be bothered to do the log-in thing. And sometimes they’re from people who are setting out to crap in someone else’s cornflakes but who don’t have the guts to do so in person. This last is the one that gives me the sinking feeling – a little slice of snarky nastiness dumped into someone else’s life by a person that doesn’t have the guts to do so openly.

Which is why I never bother taking up the conversation with anonymice. Just thought I’d get that out of the system, folks...

The Machines are Taking Over

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Etisalat, the telephone company that likes to say 'ugh', has decided to come to my aid in what has been a workmanlike and drab start to the week and introduce a spangle of special fun into my life.

The Directory Enquiry Service (181 to you, mate) has been cut over to an almost but not totally non-functional IVR system. That's Etisalat's secret - not to be utterly useless, just almost utterly useless. It's so much more devastating to give the subscriber a glimmer of hope before dashing it, I find, than giving no hope at all.

Now when you call 181 you get asked to press * for English. When you do, it talks Arabic to you. This is pretty special stuff, but it's only a start of a special journey into the unknown. You are given a list of things you could want like hotel, restaurant or pigeon fancier's club. You have to either say one of these things or say 'other'. The system will then automatically misunderstand you. This is disintermediation at its best - to replace a human that rarely understands what you want with a machine that never understands what you want.

When you say 'other' you get asked for what you want. So you say, 'Dirigible Repair Specialist' and the IVR system, in a female Hal9000 voice, says, 'Do you want Peter's Patent Pringle Painters Llc? Yes or no.'

So you say 'No.'

And the IVR says, 'Which Emirate are you looking for?'

And you say 'Dubai.'

And then you get an operator who agrees that yes, the machine is totally useless and yes, everyone's been whingeing and yes, he can help you. He sounds amused. As am I.

I called back to get the scripts right for this blog, but I got a human this time 'round, who assured me that yes, she was human and yes, she could help me. She was quite affronted when I told her I had actually wanted the machine so I'd call back for it...

(The system now cuts to IVR when the operators are busy, but only for landline callers, BTW)

(PS: I'll let y'all know when I get the search hit for 'Dirigible Repair Specialist')

Wheels Within Wheels

Part of this week's rich debate around Twitter and social media has been about who you can trust online.

That's an interesting debate when you take the 'turn your Twitter avatar green' service that a number of Twittering types have started to use. The idea's nice and simple - a one-click process via the helpiranelection website will turn your avatar green so that you can demonstrate your support for Mousavi's backers in their call for a recount.

The chap behind helpiranelection is Arik Fraimovich. When he's not helping people to show solidarity with Iranian political movements, he's a software developer. I have to note that, while he is not now, he has previously worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defence. That doesn't mean to say he is aligned to the MoD or is in any way carrying out its will. But the fact that an Israeli with government links is behind a 'back Mousavi' Internet scheme will sit uncomfortably with many in the Arab World, let alone in Iran itself.

I am quite, quite sure that Arik's idea was well intentioned. But 'going green' is, I think, an Iranian choice to make.

Thanks to 'Party Boy'... :)

Paris Hilton Dumb? Hell No!

It's going to be a long, hot summer, people. Not only do we have the tide of infinite-eyed yellow evil to contend with, popping up all over the place ready to embrace us in those little open arms (so that it can tear our throats out and feast on our livers), we've got a localised outbreak of Paris Hiltons.

Ably assisted by a number of drooling morons in our local media, Paris is going to be spending the next three weeks wandering around Dubaii looking for her BFF - Best Friend Forever. This has, somewhat predictably, polarised opinion. A number of people think that it's really amazing (huge, even) that she's here. A number of people are neutral or perhaps even mildly disgusted. And a large number of people are spitting bile at the shallowness of it all.

Chaque a son goute, as they say.

But Paris Hilton is a girl who knows how to create a brand, starting of course with Brand Paris - a global celebrity bandwagon that was launched on the back of the Internet success of a sleazy video. Her squeaky, valley-girl catchphrases (Everything's so, like, amaazing, huuge and hot) and outre dress sense have, hard as this might be to believe, been adopted by millions - including the good women of Latvia. She's famous and, as a result of that fame, she's wealthy - the Hello Kitty of celebrity.

She told media yesterday, mugging with Arabesque jewellery and dresses, that she wants to explore more Brand Paris, including perhaps a club or hotel. Well, we've got the Roberto Cavalli Club, why not the Paris Club?

She also told them she wouldn't discuss money. "That's tacky," she said.

Quite.