the google+ iphone app: who's the biggest loser?

I read on twitter earlier today that the iPhone is the third most popular smartphone in the UK at the moment, behind BlackBerry and Android-based devices (second and first respectively).

I can’t remember the original source of that stat, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or not – the choice is yours.

Coupled with all the brouhaha about the lack of an iPhone app for GooglePlus, this got me thinking. Who has the most to lose from the lack of such an app?

I’ve seen a lot of comments on GooglePlus (and again, this is – I’m afraid – anecdotal) saying that Google needs to pull its finger out and get an iPhone app sorted out… and fast.

I’m not sure that’s a perspective I share.

The success of the smartphone phenomenon is down to the ability to use apps and other data-dependent services on the go. If those apps and services weren’t appealing, didn’t offer any value to the user, would the smartphone be as ubiquitous as it has become? I, for one, think not.

It is still too early to say whether GooglePlus will be a long-lasting success or just another flash in the social media pan. So far though, I think all the indications are pretty positive.

The lack of an iPhone app isn’t going to impede the success of GooglePlus. Some of the most active people I know on it are also iPhone users. They’re using it because it gives them value. Not because it is associated with one device or another.

The same might not be so true in reverse.

If Apple’s loyal iPhone customer base begin to see there are other smartphones that offer a better all-round data experience they may start to consider jumping ship rather than upgrading to a new iPhone next time their contract is up for renewal.

Apple risks, therefore, experiencing some of the same disintermediation that blights the network operators. In the UK Orange, Vodafone and O2 used to enjoy significant brand loyalty among their customers. Not any more. They are the plumbing that allows the cool stuff to flow. Nothing more.

If Apple finds GooglePlus (or anything for that matter) starts to come between the iPhone brand and its customers it will be the one who loses out ultimately.

The onus therefore, in my opinion, has to be on Apple to redouble its efforts in being more open, something where it still has much to prove.

did social media bring down the news of the world?

On Friday night I found myself watching BBC2’s Newsnight programme (a topical news analysis programme). Unsurprisingly, the closure of the News of the World was still dominating the news agenda.

A number of discussions took place into various angles of this issue.

I was struck by remarks made by Justine Roberts the co-founder and CEO of Mumsnet. Essentially, one of her opening remarks was that News International was forced to close the News of the World because of social media.

Great, I thought, now the angry mob has bigger pitchforks, more flaming torches and a megaphone.

One would have to be implausibly naïve to truly believe News International had bowed to Consumer Pressure 2.0 – of course that isn’t how it happened.

Did social media amplify people’s voices? Well, if it didn’t something would have gone terribly wrong with one of the cornerstones of the new social order.

Do big brands kowtow to such amplification?

No. Of course not. This industry (by which I mean all things smedia and digital) is still very much in its infancy. Any business that is serious about listening to its customers, understanding and delighting them, ought to be using social media.

There is a clear three-pronged strategy most businesses have adopted (or ought to adopt) where social media is concerned – listen, analyse, engage.

But the hard facts are, very few brands have got this right.

If there’s one sector that ought to be fearful, suspicious and maybe even hostile in the face of social media it would be the newspaper industry. They’ve seen circulation and advertising revenues go the way of all flesh in the aftermath of mass adoption of the internet.

Within a few days of some appalling revelations about phone hacking and related activities,  there was indeed a huge outcry on twitter and Facebook, not to mention countless blog posts. Some advertisers pulled out of the News of the World, but not all of them.

News International’s decision to pull the plug on the News of the World was, of course, a damage limitation strategy (albeit one of the worst I can remember in its execution).

Its roots are in an organisation where journalists, editors and their managers felt they had a right to break the law and access the private lives of well-known and the everyday people. Its branches extended into police corruption. It has blossomed into a tangle of compromised politicians, journalists-turned-PRs, and private investigators receiving six-figure sums from more than one source in the newspaper world.

If I was the person ultimately responsible for sorting this mess out, God knows I’d want to bury it all in a deep dark hole too. And as quickly as possible.

But I might, just might, be tempted to bury those who had created the mess at the same time. Which hasn’t happened here. Maybe it’s the residue of my journalistic spider senses that makes me want to know why not.

William Cobbett, the English essayist and reformer of the 18th and 19th Century, once said: “I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomach.”

When people are hungry – in a literal or figurative sense – they are more likely to rise up. Do something about that hunger and you can pacify them. Often without giving into all their demands.

News International wants to buy the whole of BSkyB - the UK satellite TV company it already owns a chunk of.

Due to concerns of media plurality (NI owns a lot of UK newspapers) the deal has to be given the green light by the UK regulators. The last thing Rupert Murdoch needed right now is a high profile scandal concerning elements of his media empire breaking the law and offending common decency.

Throwing the News of the World to the wolves is perhaps the least worst option for him. Under these circumstances I expect it wasn't a difficult call to make.

news of the world: goodbye and thanks for all the fish

Faced with a dilemma, many people (generally christians, admittedly) would pose the question: what would Jesus do?

What wouldn't Jesus do, is perhaps a better question.

But I'm not here to talk about Jesus.

I've written about the News of the World and the phone hacking scandal before. I've touched on the allegations of police collusion, which have now been linked in the public domain to the payment - by the newspaper and its owners of more than £100,000 to serving police officers.  I've voiced my take on the illegal and immoral accessing of people's mobile phone voicemails and the distress it has caused.

I've posed the question do we have the press we deserve?

When, just a few days ago, it became clear that the underbelly of the News of the World's phone hacking scandal was seedier than at first imagined.

I saw someone on twitter ask what could be done to dig the paper out of its hole.  What, I wondered, would Rupert Murdoch do?

Now we know. Holed below the water-line, the News of the World is to be closed down. The final edition will be published on 10 July.

But that's far from being the end of it. The image of British tabloid journalism is unlike to walk away from this episode pestilence-free.

Friends and colleagues in the US and Australia have talked to me about the News of the World in recent days and have all expressed surprise that a mainstream national newspaper could ever have behaved in this way.

But this is not an isolated incident, an aberration. This is a systemic disregard for the law, for privacy and for standards of common decency.

So what if on 17 July the News of the World is no longer available in your local newsagent. Do you think the people behind the decisions that led to the recent appalling incident will cease to exist? Of course not.

The list of innocent casualties in this sordid affair goes on and on, and now includes (potentially at least) an as-yet-unknown number of News International employees who were nowhere near this scandal but who have become collateral damage.

Unless the government and the police (preferably an arm of the police service that doesn't have grubby hands and sticky fingers) instigate a thorough and unexpurgated investigation the reputation of British tabloid journalism may never recover.

klout, klout, let it all out

Influence comes in many guises. As a child you will have been influenced by those that raise you – parents, guardians, teachers and so on. When you grow a little older your friends become the biggest influence on you, and in later life influence can come from your colleagues, the people you manage, your partner. The list goes well beyond that, of course.

By and large, we all know who we are influenced by and to what extent. At least in the realm of the personal.

But identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As with most things in life, where there is demand there will surely be supply, and consequently there’s no shortage of people who want to appear to have influence and a growing trade in tools to tell you who has it.

The art critic and columnist Brian Sewell, when asked to comment on class and the English preoccupation with it, said: “You can acquire the trappings, but you can’t buy it.”

Can the same be said of influence? Well, yes and no.

The thing about being influential is that in the main either you are or you’re not. People will read what you write, listen to what you say and click the links you post because they trust you. This is influence.

There’s a whole chapter of a reference book that could be written on paid-for influence, but that’s not what I am concerning myself with here.

If people don’t respond in any of those ways, then – by definition – you lack influence.

However, there are plenty of things you can do to influence the way in which your own influence (can you see what I did there..?) is measured and scored by the likes of Klout, PeerIndex and TweetGrader. Most of these services will even give you tips on how to do it, with some of my favourites coming from PeerIndex who, essentially, advise you to be a person of influence if you want to have a higher rating on PeerIndex. Hard to argue with that logic.

But if you’re after shortcuts to a higher ranking there are a few quick and simple steps you can take. Here are three things you could consider.

• Take a look at who you are following on Twitter, and have a bit of a clear out. Get rid of dormant accounts, bots, spammers and the like. While your follower numbers will go toward the score you achieve, the quality of those followers and your level of engagement with them is actually far more important.

• If you are genuinely trying to cultivate an image as an influencer, have some focus. Decide what it is you are trying to be perceived as an expert in and cut your cloth accordingly in terms of the content you create and share as well the kinds of people you share it with. But don’t fall into the trap of creating a social media walled garden. If your tweets, and other content, are only picked up by your colleagues you will never achieve any meaningful amplification and your social media echo will be exactly that – just an echo.

• Tweet often, but not too often. Sorry, you’re on your own as far as working out what on earth that might mean in terms of actual frequency. But clearly spamming the Bejebus out of everyone is more likely to cost you followers in the longer term, while letting the cobwebs settle won’t help your cause much either.

Having seen my own Klout score leap by almost 20 points since early June I feel pretty confident that some of this works. Even if I’m not entirely sure I know what I mean by “works” in this context.

I’m not advocating any kind of obsession with one’s online influence score. But the issue of who wields influence online isn’t likely to go away soon, so why not take an interest in the factors that determine the way in which others perceive how influential you are, and the part you can play in it.

democracy, disintermediation & dining out at the all-day information buffet

Remember when you watched the TV news in the evening to hear about important stuff for the first time?

Remember when you read a newspaper in the morning so that you would feel informed of the weighty matters of the day?

I’ll bet neither of those things has happened to you for a while.

In pretty much every aspect of modern life, not just when it comes to the news, relationships between the public and the various providers of services and information have changed irrevocably.

You can call it disintermediation.

You can call it the democratisation of the means of publishing.

You can talk about citizen journalists if you really feel you need to.

But those of us who have regular contact with the internet no longer get our news in the old-school manner. Instead we use our RSS subscriptions, lists on twitter, messages via Facebook and other social media platforms and news websites to get our daily feed of news.

And we graze. A lot.

We take a mouthful of twitter-gossip, a bite of bloggetry, and chew on the wares of our favourite news sites. From this we get our fill of news.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a very important role for broadcast news and newspapers. But they’re rarely the first place you get to hear about something.

A growing number of people create content as well as consume it – blogs and tweets are some of the most obvious mechanisms for so doing, but there are others.

Ordinary people, for want of a less pejorative way of putting it, are now right in the centre of the flow of news and information, and are no longer reliant upon the traditional methods of staying informed. This is a trend (dare I even say phenomenon) that can be witnessed elsewhere.

How often does seeing one advertisement inspire you to go out and buy the product concerned?

Not often I imagine.

Would you buy something because a brand you like (or even “like”) is on Facebook? Again, probably not just off the back of that one thing, I expect.

Tweets, likes, reviews on blogs as well as in magazines (and their online variants), personal recommendations and so on, all go toward helping us make what we feel are informed choices about the goods and services we buy, and the ones we avoid. A lot of that information doesn’t come from what might be considered traditional sources, but is user-generated in the main.

Mobile phone companies are experiencing something similar. Do you feel much allegiance to your network provider? Despite statistics I’ve seen from research done by one of my clients (which indicates that two-thirds of us have been on the same network for at least three years) the likes of O2 and Vodafone can only dream of enjoying the kind of brand-kudos many of the handset makers revel in – Apple, BlackBerry, SonyEricsson for example.

It doesn’t stop there. The growing use of data-based services on smartphones, some of which will let you make VoIP calls (via 3G or wi-fi) effectively bypassing the carrier’s voice network completely, is another headache. People don’t get excited about the network they’re on – unless it stops working. The network has been usurped in people’s hearts by the app makers and handset manufacturers.

The common thread in all of this is that the old order is no more.

If your job involves managing customer relationships, or sales, or marketing, you ignore this at your peril.

If customers don’t see any perceived value in dealing with you they will simply ignore you and direct their attention to those people and organisations they feel an affinity for.

The challenge then is how to be valued in what is an undeniably information-rich world where there is no shortage of voices clamouring to be listened to.

You need to be present wherever your customers may be – and in every format they will be coming into contact with. You need to present a human face and treat people with the same respect that you would like to be treated with yourself.

Ultimately you want to be trusted and believable.

And it’s not rocket science, which makes it all the more noticeable when brands get it wrong.

go ugly early

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is uncomfortable.  The killing of Osama Bin Laden prompted this revelation from the man-of-the-cloth’s man-of-the-cloth.  But more particularly, he was referring to certain inconsistencies in the story regarding that killing; at first the White House told the world Bin Laden was armed, then that he was unarmed.

Dr Williams’ reaction to this, as quoted by the BBC, was: "I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn't look as if justice is seen to be done.  In those circumstances I think it's also true that the different versions of events that have emerged in recent days have not done a great deal to help.”

Getting to the heart of the matter quickly and being able to determine, often amid a great deal of confusion, the right course of action, is not easy and it’s not something everyone can do.  It’s a rare chance for someone in PR to tell the top brass to sit quietly and pay attention.

I can’t be the only person who has always thought the White House and the Pentagon would be stuffed to the rafters with the keenest minds in the comms world.

It’s easy to understand the difficulties in getting reliable information out of a combat zone.  Life-or-death split-second decisions don’t leave much scope for a thorough assessment of a situation before events start to take over, and in the aftermath it can take time to gather information, hear the accounts of the military personnel that were involved and so on.

Which is why the later version of the story released by the White House is the one we should, probably, put more faith in.

But it begs a question – why release the story at all before verifiable information had been received?

There was a lot said in the aftermath of Bin Laden’s demise about Twitter having broken the news.  A friend of mine said something to this effect… I may have read about Bin Laden’s death first on Twitter but I went to the TV news for verification.

After all, how many fake deaths have been ‘announced’ in 140 characters or less?

The title of this piece, go ugly early, is a phrase relayed to me by someone I know who was in the US Army in Afghanistan, as part of the comms team.  He was alluding to a principle that applies in crisis comms generally… get the story out first – before anyone else does – and stay in control of the message.

However unreliable the millions of sources on Twitter may be, its capacity for dissemination remains.  One of the consequences is that for someone in my line of work, whether in Windsor or the White House, you have to assume that someone somewhere knows something and if you don’t go ugly early they might. 

loneliness and the late night vocalist

I've never really written much about my band, The Subtitles, on here.

We rehearse most Tuesday evenings between 9pm and 11:30pm.

Each night driving back from rehearsing - in recent weeks anyway - I've passed a woman who always arrests my attention.

I often seem to encounter a red traffic light at a particular junction. And she is always there.

She is what, when I was a boy, would have been called a tramp. Although there's something about her that makes me think she isn't actually homeless in the classic meaning of that word.

But home is more than just bricks and mortar, a roof over your head.

Probably in her mid-to-late 60s, painfully thin, with very long straggly grey hair and bedraggled clothes, she looks to be about six feet tall. And almost not-of-this-time. Or even this world.

On each of the occasions I've seen her she has been scrutinising the houses for sale displayed in an estate agent's shop windows.

She seems as fascinated by them as I have become by her.

Agitatedly rushing from one window to the other, she looks intently at the houses advertised and seems to be comparing the details of each as she stalks the shop front.

Why is she doing this? What is her story? I am filled with an urge to leave my car, get out and talk to her. Who knows, maybe one day I will. But I haven't yet.

The most I've seen her carrying is a bag of shopping, bought at a near-by late-night convenience store. Which is the main reason I think she lives somewhere, has a roof over her head, bricks and mortar that surround her.

But is that her 'home' I wonder.

Is it a place where she is surrounded by love and warmth, a sanctuary from the obstacles life has put in her path? Does it contain family, or a loved-one? Memories of what was. Regrets over what was not. Is she lonely? Or maybe just alone.

Does she look at the houses for sale and wonder about the lives people lead when they make them their home?

Then, inevitably, the traffic lights change. And I continue my journey home.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

bonfire of the profanities

Swearing. It’s not big, it’s not clever, and it’s not funny. That’s what I was always told anyway.

Plainly two out of three of those are open to debate. We’ve all heard people use uncouth language in ways that were both clever and funny. In some cases, hilariously funny.

By and large though those occasions have probably involved listening to a friend regaling a group of mates with a funny story, or maybe while watching a stand-up comedian deliver their set.

It’s rare (although it can happen) that a complete stranger swearing in public will be anything like as funny.  Often it can be embarrassing.  And if there are small children or seniors within earshot it can be very uncomfortable.

We all know this. It’s not news. And while you’re welcome to disagree with me I’m most likely going to dismiss you as some sort of gauche moron. But that’s as much to do with me as it is with you.

Anyway... back to swearing, everything’s different online though, isn’t it?

No, not really.

Maybe it’s because my first encounter with the internet was 20 years ago that for me the distinctions between the virtual and 3D worlds are more subtle.

Maybe not. Frankly I don’t care. Let’s face it, neither do you.

Most of the people I’ve encountered on twitter over the last couple of years are unlikely to be the kind of person to start dropping the f-bomb should they be invited around to someone’s house for dinner, let’s say.

So why is it, I sometimes wonder, so many people (and more often than not it’s blokes) think it’s ok to swear online in a manner that is not attempting to be either clever or funny?  What’s their motivation?

I can only assume they are trying to look big.

They end up though looking immature, sounding offensive and losing credibility in front of people who can only form opinions of them based on what they see on screen.

So, next time you feel like telling your 450 followers that all the people in the supermarket checkout queue you're standing in are c-words, remember we’re all nodding in the kind of agreement you perhaps weren’t banking on.

let love be genuine. abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good

The build-up to the royal wedding, all the hype and expectation, left me fairly cold.

I don’t have a problem with the institution of marriage, nor with the monarchy per se. But the fuss that takes place on the periphery is, for me, a massive disincentive to pay much attention.

So it was that, after weeks or even months of taking little or no notice, I found myself instinctively sitting in front of the TV on the morning of Friday 29 April to watch the proceedings.

I know I am not the only person who reminisced about the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, as she was known back then in 1981. Similarly, I’m not the only person who reflected upon their own wedding day while watching the spectacle of two young people full of love and hope becoming husband and wife.

The 1981 royal wedding was the point at which my mother decided we were through with watching the world in black and white, and we got our first colour TV. For us, it was a pretty big deal. Although I don’t recall watching very much – if anything – of that royal wedding.

I guess it’s fairer to say it was a big deal for my mum.

Roughly mid-way between that royal wedding and the one that just took place, I got married.

My mother didn’t get to see it. She had died just less than a year prior to the occasion.

So it was that, as I sat listening to the readings and homilies at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, I thought about love, and hope and expectation. I thought about life and it’s uncanny knack of paying no attention to the plans we make. The people we become as we grow older are not the people we once were. We are changed by the lives we lead, the highs and the lows, the cards we are dealt by fate.

The joys and the disappointments.

If you have never found yourself wondering, in the face of a mountainous set-back, what the point of it all is, whether you have the strength to carry on, or why you foolishly made the decisions that led to the point you’re at, well you simply haven’t lived.

When children are very young they fall over – a lot. Parents watch anxiously to see if they are hurt, or if they will start crying, and there is always lots of encouragement not to cry, not to dwell on what just happened.

As we get older we forget how easy it is to fall over.

Failure, I read very recently, is a better teacher than success.

But it’s up to us to pay attention and learn from the lessons it delivers.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

the revolution will not be televised

The revolution will not be televised. That’s what Gil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. And if that’s news to you, if that’s a piece of music you are not familiar with, then take a few minutes to click on this link and listen.

Then come back.

No, the revolution will not – in all likelihood – be televised.

Not that I am someone who blindly supports insurrection or feels that “the people” (whoever they may be) are somehow owed something by someone. I don’t condone violence, nor do I believe that simply rejecting the status quo will deliver a better future.

But I can’t be the only person in the UK who feels that something somewhere has gone wrong with the country I live in and call home.

This startling/not-so-startling insight came to me recently (last week to be more precise) in the most unlikely of settings…. while watching MasterChef – the UK flavour.

In the episode I watched four contestants were making tea for Henrietta the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, her son and his wife – the current Duke and Duchess.

According to the Sunday Times, the Duke was worth almost £500 million in 2005, making him the 102nd richest man in the country.

So, there I sat watching a show on a TV channel which is – by and large – funded by the TV-watching licence-paying public along with government subsidies, where one of the most privileged families in the country in their fabulous, inherited, stately home sampled a succession of High Tea offerings.

The same episode of MasterChef featured ex-service men and women from the Royal Air Force who served in World War Two. And as I wrote this, on ANZAC Day – when the sacrifices of the failed Gallipoli campaign of April/May 1915 are remembered – my thoughts turned to those generations that gave so much. In too many cases, they gave everything they possibly could; around 22,000 British servicemen died during that campaign.

Lloyd George promised the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the First World War a country fit for heroes. The post World War Two government set about building a network of social structures designed to bring about a greater degree of equality.

Those hopes, those dreams, the sacrifices of the fallen feel to me to be horribly at odds with the increasing inequalities of UK society that I see in 2011. According to a presentation given just a few weeks ago at the University of Cambridge, the rate of social mobility in Britain is slower now than it was in the Middle Ages.

If this is true, and far be it from me to pick a fight with the University of Cambridge, where is the incentive to work hard, do well and try to progress in a country where you are less likely to improve your lot than your ancestors 600 years ago?

Whether it's law, medicine or politics, the most influential and prestigious professions in the UK remain dominated by the tiny proportion of the population that received an expensive private education.  Access to the top professions is probably as good an indicator of social mobility as anything else. 


I don’t want to live in a country where ne’er-do-wells get by comfortably thanks to state handouts. But nor do I want to live in a country where the descendents of a feudal elite continue to enjoy a super-rich lifestyle not because of their efforts, endeavours or enterprise, but because of a quirk of fate.  Where the sons & daughters of top professionals automatically follow in their parents' footsteps, first to fee-paying prep school, then to top-flight public school (if you're reading this from outside the UK 'public' in this context actually means private and fee-paying), then to a good university and so the cycle repeats.

The current generation of young Britons, graduates entering the workplace, could be – according to some estimates – the first that will not, en masse, enjoy a higher standard of living than the generation before it.

These are the same graduates that are leaving university with debts of as much as £30,000, at a time when unemployment is as high as it’s been for 15 years and when stringent government cutbacks have seen some towns and cities slash their spending on public services by 50 per cent or more. Public libraries are closing, museum opening hours are being restricted, and the provision of social care to “at risk” families and children is more precarious now than it has been since 1945.

Meanwhile, the cost of policing and security for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on 29 April is estimated to be in the region of £20 million.

No, the revolution will not be televised.

But that’s ok, the Royal Wedding will be.