lunching with the dead, baying for the rope and the wisdom of the crowd

When I was a young man death was my living.

Determined, as I was back then, to eschew a traditional career and focus instead on becoming a professional musician, I took a seemingly endless array of dead-end jobs to pay my way and fund my musical endeavours.

And so it was that I ended up in the late 1980s with one of the most dead-end of dead-end jobs… working in a funeral parlour in Manchester’s Moss Side district.

Unlike some of my colleagues there, I could never bring myself to eat my lunchtime sandwich in the mortician’s workshop, with the recently-departed in various stages of preparation for company. No, I am not exaggerating – that really is how some people spent their break, lunching with the dead.

The business of other people’s loss and grief paid for my leisure time.

Despite what may sound like a disrespectful lunchtime ritual, the people I worked with back then never showed anything other than a complete duty of care to the bereaved and the departed, and they had a highly-tuned sense of the importance of life.

Last week the BBC and many other UK news outlets reported on a website set up by the government designed to give citizens an opportunity to influence future legislation.

It’s a very laudable aim, to attempt to engage the public with politics – let them feel their views will be listened to. But as someone much wiser than me once said, be careful what you wish for.

The site isn’t especially new. But the headline writers’ interest was piqued by the prevalence of pro death penalty petitions on the site. As many as 40 different petitions in total, all worded slightly differently but all asking for the restoration of capital punishment.

I shan’t argue that a truly civilised society doesn’t have the death penalty. For me, this is a personal viewpoint.

From those that want all crimes of murder to be met with a death sentence, to those who only want it applied to child murderers and those who kill police officers. Some call for parliament to conduct a thorough investigation into the possible restoration of the death penalty (it was revoked as the punishment for murder in 1965 and for all other offences in 1998) and others simply said hanging should be brought back.

Hanging.

Small word when said in passing. But stop and think about what it actually involves.

It’s quite grotesque.

Certain acts of murder do seem to cry out at us as being particularly brutal and unforgiving, whether it’s tortured rape victims, children or scores of innocents caught up in an act of unspeakable barbarity.

It’s not easy to argue against a certain kind of logic that says someone like Anders Breivik, who murdered almost 80 people in Norway on 22 July this year, should be put to death. He is beyond doubt the perpetrator of a terrible act. His guilt or innocence cannot be open to debate, although there are – of course – arguments about his state of mind. Although, from a purely personal perspective, anyone who does what that man did is clearly not in their right mind but I’m not at all sure that ought to be much of a defence.

Whether it’s the gas chamber, a lethal injection or at the end of a rope, the job of administering the death penalty is hardly likely fall to those who clamour for its return. Which, of course, makes it so much easier to adopt a black and white view of these things.

The overwhelming majority of those of us who live in the West don’t have to deal with life and death in a very hands-on way. Thankfully violence, and murder in particular, are statistically rare – long may it stay that way.

That you are here (wherever that may be), reading these words that I wrote one Friday evening in England is a remarkable mix of fate and factors beyond the ken of this simple man. As truly awful as some people’s acts may be I do not feel I have the right to decide who lives and who dies, and frankly I don’t feel you do either.

protectionism, ponies, and the hargreaves review

The industrial revolution is one of the most written-about periods in modern history, and as we are all fully aware it brought about many significant societal and economic changes.

On a micro level, mechanisation was bad news if you were an unskilled worker, or someone with very niche skills, such as a hand-weaver or some other one-trick pony. On the other hand, it was good news if you were an actual pony that was put out to pasture rather than spend its days hundreds of metres underground pulling cartfuls of coal.

There are winners and losers whenever there is a significant period of change. Recent announcements by Foxconn that increasing mechanisation in the factories where it produces the iPhone and other consumer electronic devices bear witness to this. Machine operators may find they no longer have a job. But some will have the opportunity to retrain in higher-value skills.

The urge to stop the tide of change can sometimes feel overwhelming. It is human nature to prefer the status quo – better the devil you know, and all that.

The displaced agricultural workers of the 17th and 18th Century didn’t have the luxury of hiring in lobbying groups. But in the face of seismic economic shifts in the 21st Century it is possible to see the same fears, concerns and protectionist attitudes in play.

Today’s announcement by the UK Business Secretary, Vince Cable, that the government is adopting the Hargreaves Review of Copyright and Intellectual Property is one such significant change.

One of Professor Hargreaves’ most compelling arguments (I heard him speak at the Westminster Legal Policy Forum) was that copyright and IP legal frameworks must perform two functions in harmony – protect the rights holder, and be a tool for economic development.

A rigid application of the current interpretation of UK copyright law, as laid down by the High Court in late 2010, would – in all likelihood – prevent a business like Google being created in the UK.

The case in question came about after Meltwater (a client I represent) and the PRCA were taken to the High Court by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), which seeks to collect unregulated licence fees on behalf of its owners – eight newspaper-publishing conglomerates.

Citing its belief that sending someone a URL from a newspaper (or similar) website is breaching copyright law, the NLA is effectively stifling the sharing of information and ideas online. Not only is this contrary to one of the fundamental building blocks of internet culture, it is an example of potentially dangerous protectionism.

The publishing sector has no choice but to react to and deal with the dominance of online media consumption. It is already hard to remember the time when we all got our breaking news updates from the TV news or the daily papers. That tide is unlikely to turn.

Rather than seek to use out-dated legislation to protect its interests, the newspaper industry would be better served evolving its business models and revenue streams to fit in with the way people want to consume information.

The Hargreaves Review is an excellent opportunity for the government and interested parties from industry to come together to create a copyright and IP framework in the UK that leads by example to the rest of the world. Innovation, creativity and flexibility are the cornerstones of economic growth and sustainable prosperity.

I for one hope that in years to come we will look back on this as the moment when the UK stepped up its game and became a true leader in the global digital economy.


Some further reading:

• Dear UK, the future of content and link sharing ... is in your hands
• Taking link licensing to a higher level
• Meltwater applauds the UK Government's commitment to overhaul its outdated copyright law

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.