06 Mar 09 This is a test post
Sitting here testing out this platform - ignore this …as usual
11 Jan 09 Social Notworking (2009 A MySpace Odyssey)
Sent this to @FiBendall on Twitter when she had writers block over an article she was working on. I don’t think she was so convinced. Anyway, seems a shame to waste it.
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You know how sometimes you’re out walking the dog when a bunch of alien interlopers abducts you. Before you know it, you’re warped off to the planet Q’Zog in the Fourth Quadrant, your brains picked clean en route, only to have other vile experiments visited upon your person on arrival.
Yeah I know, it happens all the time. So what’s new? Well this week, during one of these otherworldly episodes, my alien hosts subjected me to experiments based on research into web-based social media patterns on Earth. It turns out that a few millennia back they went through the same thing themselves and were interested to see if we were making a mess of it all yet.
Eventually, I cracked under pressure and told them about spontaneous uptake, web 2.0, multi-channel integration, SEO benefits, corporate blogging, Mobile blah, micro blah, digital blah and so on. They rubbed their chins, nodded sagely and did that thing with the sides of their mouths that universally means “If only they’d bothered to ask us, we’d have told them how to avoid getting everything wrong”.
So I did ask them. “Where did social media go wrong for you guys?” Quickly followed by “…and do you mind if I pick your brains for a change ask your advice”. It seemed to do the trick. The big alien, the one who usually does all the cross-species sexual experimentation (but that’s another story) picked up his MacBook Core DecaQuadro, running OSMXM Sabretooth and fired it up. He pressed a few keys and Hey Presto! They launched qzogblog.com and clicked onto the category entitled ‘Social Notworking’.
And they talked me through the tale of woe that once passed for social media on Q’Zog.
Once upon a time the ordinary aliens of QZog found it fun to keep in touch and cement friendships through social media sites. A load of them sprang up – TrouserBook (they use a different body-part for speech and visual recognition), Twaddle (like us, there are lots of them with nothing important to say and they like to say it a lot), Flockr (they like pictures of sheep) and so on. Eventually people thought they could make money out of these sites with PPC and other propositions. In time, corporates started to notice that they were being cut out of the loop. No one was going to their websites to find out about their products. The alien masses were asking each other and liberating their buying habits. So the corporates moved in to try and find a place in this great new SpaceBook. And for a while all was well on QZog. But it didn’t stay that way.
The first problem was all about money; isn’t it always? Social networking, it seems, was just too difficult to monetize. Strangely, back on Earth, this dynamic is now beginning to show its face also. Google has begun to make less than optimistic noises about it. Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes has said. “We have found that social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected”. Which is Earth-speak for “Oh Shit”.
My alien hosts went on to talk about too many players flooding the market. Particularly white labeled channels (i.e. a site full of pre made functions which can be branded so that people can create their own versions of e.g. Facebook). The more this happens, the more dispersed and fractured the user base becomes. And sure enough, free, open source and plentiful white label options have also made it to earth
It was noticeable that my extraterran hosts were pretty ticked off with corporate intervention in social media. Over commercialization was clearly a killer in the Fourth Quadrant. What started out as a one to many tool, became a corporation to consumer tool and all the people got fed up with being sold at and went somewhere else. I thought about this for a while. Surely as social communities form, Earth’s marketers would not dream of piling in, taking over and crapping all over the experience. Would we?
There was a problem as well with inaccurate member data on sites. This is less important to socialization so users didn’t care. Additionally, identity fraud in the fourth quadrant led to users purposely loading inaccurate data. From a commercial perspective, this began to create problems; CRM is only as good as the data validity. All that effort aimed at the wrong people! Strangely, on earth this seems to be happening. Some say as many as 33% of users load duff info into their profile.
Another issue over in the Fourth Quadrant was the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of these social media strategies. As with earthly hosting, if you want to deploy a campaign via a social network, you can’t access the host’s server data and logs by automatic right. You can manually monitor the interaction on the site, or measure click through, but it is almost akin to redeploying slate and chalk as a core technology.
Data privacy also started to unravel the network. You may think that this could not happen on Earth, what with all the regulatory concern and cautionary tales. But then again, Facebook had already been caught tracking and releasing user habits back to developers and others involved in advertising initiatives. And what if your average Joe Alien wants to leave. Well have you noticed that no matter how often you opt out or don’t opt in, the level of spam keeps going up? You have to think that the data options are being somehow abused. Surely not on Earth? Well think again, it’s a bit like a religious cult. Once you’re in, they don’t let you leave. These are the very things that eventually dissuaded Q’Zogians from joining social media sites and led to their abandonment followed by collapse of the network platforms.
Here’s a new phrase for all of us on Earth: “Social Network Fatigue”. It started on QZog with people getting fed up with maintaining multiple spaces on multiple platforms. It further manifested itself with people just falling out of love with the whole thing because, like nostalgia, it just wasn’t what it used to be. It might not sound like we have that problem down here, but on closer inspection, there are people writing PhD theses about it.
The QZogians also started to experience a slow-down in the use of social media platforms. It peaked over a few years and then declined. Perhaps because of the tedium of the operation, or something else happened, but it stopped being the next best greatest thing. And, you guessed it …Earth is seeing the same pattern.
The Q’Zogian saga continued to get played to me out like a Greek tragedy. Networks had inconsistent performance, companies got fed up with employees cyber-sciving, so they started locking social media sites outside firewalls. The sites variously suffered: scaling issues; user overload leading to downtime; hacking and scandal. The social media moguls largely fiddled with their Geek-Up PowerPoint presentations while their empires burned.
“So”, I asked. “If you had your time again, how would you make sure that this didn’t happen?”
“Easy” they answered “We could have kept it all together, increased the marketing value to business, re-enfranchised the users and made a packet on the way. We’ll drop by next week, pick you up and tell you how you get this entire social media gig right.”
“Oh and by the way…” they said as they dropped me back by my still walking dog, “… Has anyone talked to HP about their pay-per-post digital camera social media campaign on YouTube. It really sucks”
20 Nov 08 Read this – Important.
I win a bet if more than a hundred people log on. Thanks
20 Nov 08 This is Important – Please read
I have lost my marbles. Please help if you find them, give me them back.
31 Oct 08 This BBC Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand thing is making me cross
The BBC did not employ Ross or Brand because of their ability to stick within socially acceptable boundaries, in fact they employed them partially because of their inability to do so. The BBC gave these two airtime, knowing that it is likely to offend certain types of people, mainly the self appointed holier than thou – the modern day Mary Whitehouses.
That is the joke: the naughtiness; the irreverence; the unashamed offensive bluntness of it all. Brand has made the same claims before about Rod Stewart’s daughter – where was the furore then. Every week on BBC1 Ross insults, offends and effs and blinds his way through a TV show and the BBC condones that.
But it doesn’t matter, because the BBC protects us. The show is not live and there are mechanisms in place to cut it if it gets too close to the bone. The problem is not what was said, but that it was not cut by the BBC.
Besides, the claim they made was apparently true – no one is talking of libel here. You might as well have a news headline that reads “Russell Brand Has Consensual Sex with a Young Actress” – it’s not even newsworthy until he says it himself.
This is an exercise in blaming leopards for having spots. The BBC employed these people to do just what they have done. Modify, advise and slap their wrists if necessary, but this sort of extreme discipline for doing what they have been employed to do, simply because it inevitably offends people, is shameful.
The BBC has a rich heritage which has given us the genius of Hancock, Milligan, Python and others. Each in their time offended and shocked and each are considered, years later to be comedic genii. The BBC might just have trashed so much of what it has been great at delivering over the years.
29 Oct 08 Guaranteed cure for Man-Flu
Ironically, only women are able to make a genuine diagnosis of man-flu. It is ironic because women cannot get man-flu but only they can spot it.They also have no idea how bad it is and that it is potentially life-threatening, always incapacitating and very painful, which is probably why they find it hard to show much sympathy for the man-flu sufferer.
This lack of clear understanding makes it important, once the diagnosis has been made, to take it upon yourself to do something about it.
Do not hesitate, act quickly and take your condition very seriously. Above all, you must believe your wife’s diagnosis and take her exactly at her word.
- Go to your bed immediately.
- Do not go to work, stay in bed doing nothing more strenuous than reading or watching TV.
- You are, at this stage, in peril of letting your health deteriorate to dangerous levels. Now, more than ever, all that stuff at your wedding about “…in sickness and in health” actually amounts to a binding contract. Remind your wife of this, and you should take the opportunity to outline some of her specific contractual responsibilities:
- You should not, under any circumstances, undertake any domestic or child-care duties, your wife can do those for you.
- Under no conditions can you prepare food or refreshments for yourself, your wife must do that for you.
- Your wife will need to plump your pillows each hour to stop further discomfort.
- You must not get cold so your wife will need to serve hot whiskey toddies regularly to your bedside.
- She should leave the bottle with you because keeping up your liquid intake is important.
- It is absolutely vital to boost your morale at this difficult time. It is therefore fortunate that blow jobs are not further detrimental to the health of the man-flu sufferer. Impress upon your wife how essential this is, she will need to understand that you require several of these a day.
29 Oct 08 How to beat the credit crunch
“Young Roger moved to Hanley Swan and during a few drinks down at The Swan one Thursday night ended up handing over £100 to a local farmer for a donkey. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.
The next day the farmer phoned and said, ‘Sorry Rog, but I have some bad news, the donkey’s dead, it got hit by a convoy of Audis driving through the village.’
Rog replied, ‘Well, then just give me my money back.’
The farmer said, ‘Can’t do that. I spanked it all acquiring a leisure boat business in Upton Marina.’
Roger said, ‘Ok, then, just bring me the dead donkey.’
The farmer asked, ‘Where are you going to keep it?’
Roger said ‘I know a bloke with a camper van, I’ll stick it in there’
The farmer asked, ‘But it can’t stay there forever. What are you going to do with him?’
Roger said, ‘I’m going to raffle him off.’
The farmer said, ‘Raffle off a dead donkey?!’
Roger said, ‘Yeah. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.’
A month later, the farmer met up with Roger and asked, ‘What happened with that dead donkey?’
Roger said, ‘I went down to the school and got the teacher to get all the kids to sell raffle tickets to win their own donkey. I sold 500 tickets at two quid a piece and made £997.’
The farmer said, ‘Didn’t anyone complain?’
Roger said, ‘Just the guy who won, some bloke who works at Waitrose. I just gave him his two quid back and an extra quid to keep him happy.’ “
28 Oct 08 Quote of the Week
Courtesy of my Brother -in-Law, Duncan Bendall….
‘I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.’
Thomas Jefferson 1802
27 Oct 08 Reaching out to Earthlings
Hello… crackle…come in… is anyone there…. calling Earth…
I am Dave from a plant called Realitus. We are our own planet very much at the centre of our own universe. You my friends, are just a distant dot in the night sky. You may have burnt out long ago – frankly we don’t care.
On Realitus we are a race of communicators (web, WordPress, Print design and so on). The most sacred thing on our planet, the Holy Grail of communication, is knowing what to say to people at just the right time and in just the right way to be genuinely helpful to them.
To this end, three of our commandments are as follows:
- If you are the answer, what is my problem?
- You’re obviously in it to make money. What’s in it for me?
- You can say one thing well, two things half as well and three things badly. This self-penned mantra has served us well over the years.
In short, you need to show that you understand my situation and problems; demonstrate that you can supply something of value to me; do it concisely and with impact.
We do a lot of business with the people of Earth. They are very egocentric. The first line of their constitution is
“Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”.
They are also constantly short of time and culturally they are all selling something and buying nothing. It is interesting that 71% of businesses on Earth fail within a decade of starting up. Our hypothesis is that they are so obsessed with trying sell their own ideas, that they don’t take the time to learn what people want to buy.
So what is the point of all this. Can all these bloody self-appointed coaches, experts and others stop sending me emails that tell me how bloody great they are. Instead could we have emails from people who can understand that we need money, customers, sales and aspirins and we need them right now. Could those people tell us where we find these things and explain how we do it and show why we can afford to pay them and where the return on that investment will be. And for the love of JC, can they do it in less than 5000 words of self-aggrandising bollocks.
Thank you. As the song goes, “Back to Life, back to Realitus”
