Criteria For Qualifying Social Media Consultants

I spent a happy hour following a discussion on one of my Linkedin groups: 5 Criteria For Qualifying Social Media Consultants. “They need to have at least three years’ experience,” opined someone confidently, “although I have ten.” “Oh no you don’t!” replied another, “it hasn‘t been around that long.” “Oh yes it has.” (Well, it is the pantomime season soon.) Another just went into a sales spiel and provided a (seemingly) auto-generated response which contained the term ROI several times over while a third ventured that “Perhaps someone should offer a certification programme - It could be profitable,” he added helpfully.

The interesting stuff generally comes when you scroll down these discussions. The people who really have something to say prefer dipping a toe in the water first. Several pages down someone ‘fesses up: “Many PR companies are using junior staff to handle this work because the technology terrifies them.”

It had been left to someone else to inject some sense into the argument. “I think a SM consultant who knows "old" marketing would be high on the list. As SM is just a tool, it helps to have a good knowledge of the basics. They may know how to use Twitter, but if your audience isn't there, who cares?” Nice one, Robin Horton.

So how do you qualify Social Media Consultants? Simple. Do they understand your business and its objectives? Does the activity they propose integrate into the comms plan? Have they taken the time to understand what’s happening ‘out there’ and who’s influential in your market place? Have they explained how they will take advantage of what’s already ‘out there’ or identified a niche that they can help your business to own? That would be a start.

Seventh Heaven?

Good news about Windows 7 then. The consensus is that it works with none of the sluggishness that got Vista such a bad name in such a short time. Some useful innovations but not a sea change - and none of the ‘in your face-ness’ of the previous operating system. For example it doesn’t keep floating word balloons at the user.

It’s important for businesses that MicroSoft doesn’t take inbuilt obsolescence to extremes. In many companies machines are cascaded through the ranks and retain the operating systems they were sold with. If I swap work stations with a colleague it can hamper my productivity when I encounter an unfamiliar system. They’re not as intuitive as the designers would have us believe.

One thing I like about Windows 7 is Aero Snap - comparing the contents of two windows is made much easier. If I shove a window into the left or right edge of the screen, it expands to fill half of the desktop. Then by nudging another into the opposite edge of the screen, it occupies the other half. Click here for a nice overview from engadget.

By the way, Christian Science Monitor reports that compared with Vista and XP, W7 is the quickest to shut down. I can see what they mean but it’s not a reason in itself to crack open the champagne just yet.

Life after newspapers (2)

An issue that is exercising many of the best minds at present - the future of journalism in the digital age (see also Sept 15 post). A new report into The Reconstruction of American Journalism (The Washington Post/Columbia University) places the onus on society to assist funding for start-ups.

“The ranks of news gatherers in the US now include newsroom staffers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smartphones. Some of the startup news organisations are trying to become profitable, while many are operating as non-profits, financed by donations from philanthropists, foundations and readers, plus some corporate sponsorship and advertising. They could provide communities with diverse sources of news reporting. But most of the startups and their budgets are relatively small, and their finances are fragile.”

As PR practitioners we all appreciate the symbiosis of journalism and PR, and the challenge and reward of gaining coverage thanks to ‘real’ journalists - as well as the importance of high quality reporting to the democratic process. But in the UK, where philanthropy is less common than the US, where is the money going to come from?

What a difference a year makes

The survey - whether genuine or contrived - has long been regarded by the PR fraternity as a good pretext for a press release, or as a way of boosting the chances of coverage for a weak story. Another is the anniversary.

We’ve recently been reminded about the outbreak of the Second World War sixty years ago and in November it will the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall - all good so far, but when IKEA issues a press release telling us that the Billy bookcase is thirty years old, things are starting to get a bit silly.

When interviewed on the subject, journalists fall into two camps - there are those happy to explain the rules of the game (it has to be a round number, eg. not 249 years since the event) while others complain that good stories get passed over by editors simply because they don’t tick the ‘relevant anniversary’ box. Broadcaster and former controller of the BBC World Service, John Tusa confirms that a “In an ideal world if you have a good idea, you do it … however we’re all poor, weak people and if someone says there’s an anniversary we all say ‘how wonderful.’ We all recognise an anniversary. We don‘t always recognise a thought and an idea.”

So here’s looking forward to celebrations of jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt’s centenary, the four hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter - both in January 2010 - and hopefully a smattering of product press releases from opportunist commercial organisations and their marketing advisors. If you can’t beat them, join them.

In the meantime, check out this website if you need some ideas: http://www.ideas4writers.co.uk/date-a-base.htm

Corn fakes and onion

Rumours of the Kellogg’s plan to laser brand Cornflakes and safeguard intellectual property rights - which probably isn’t true, but who cares - put me in mind of my own two favourite IP stories. Unfortunately they’re both stories of infringements.

One concerned a fitness company that I worked for. We sold a gym full of equipment to what we thought was a South Korean distributor who turned out to be a manufacturer. They just measured everything up and started building the kit themselves. But the funny part was, they scanned our brochure too to produce one of their own and in doing do air brushed the images of my colleagues on the computer aided design team to make them look more Asian.

The other concerns the well known Union brand - we’ve all got a Union product somewhere in the house, possibly on our doors and windows - that has had to contend with substandard and illegal imports bearing the logo Onion nibbling at its market share. I kid you not, and it’s hard to spot if you’re not looking for it. The packaging had the same Pantone reference and everything.

But I’m not forgetting there’s a serious side to all this. It’s not only lost revenue for the truly innovative business that‘s involved. In the construction industry specifiers and architects are liable for the equipment they choose. Counterfeit goods often don’t meet current legal standards, jeopardising people’s safety and leaving professionals open to the risk of litigation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/oct/14/kelloggs-cornflakes-laser-fake

Last chance to see

While Stephen Fry and naturalist Mark Carwardine have been wowing UK TV audiences with their series on endangered animals, the passing of another species is going unnoticed. Each week the show tells the stories of wonderful creatures, the tremendous pressures (read influence of man) that are driving so many of them to the brink of extinction and the heroic attempts that are being made in some quarters to save them. However the species chosen for the programmes are those seen by the late author Douglas Adams and Carwardine in a 1989 radio series - and the English language wasn’t among them.

Stephen Fry’s TV commentary - by turns funny, affecting and uplifting - is proof that the English language survives in some quarters, nevertheless it is gravely under threat from politicians, media presenters and so-called communications experts and we can’t say we haven’t been warned. As long ago as 1946 George Orwell criticised "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English and said that political prose was formed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Since then corporate speak has emerged to become one of our tongue’s greatest enemies. Personally I suspect that natural selection would weed poor communicators if it weren’t for the existence of supermarkets. Having to ask a shopkeeper for a ‘holistic midday nutritional solution’ instead of a sandwich, its worst practitioners would have gone hungry and eventually died of starvation.

Wherever the terms solution, ROI and value add (to name but a few) are thoughtlessly bandied about, it is the verbal equivalent to slash and burn of the rain forests - another nail in the coffin of the poor English language. But with your help it’s not too late to save it.

Image of globe by GraphixAsset, Bristol

Coolest Christmas gift?

When I logged onto Amazon last night I learned that Kindle starts shipping in the UK on October 18. As a marginal sceptic/late adopter I wasn’t the first to proffer my £175, but let’s face it, we’re all watching with interest. It’s going to be big and with Amazon behind it, the device isn’t going to become a white elephant. Unless someone comes up with something better …

All the stuff about how it differs from the US version goes over my head but it could be the saviour of the printed media industry, giving them another opportunity to charge for content. But what a pity many people are going to use such a fantastic device to read nothing more than Dan Brown. Sorry. Unworthy thought.

Which? report here http://www.which.co.uk/news/2009/10/amazon-kindle-available-to-uk-consumers-186096.jsp#

Climb every mountain?

Why did James Dean become an icon? Why was the Rubik Cube such a big seller? And why do so many people want to attempt the National Three Peaks Challenge? Somehow they all capture(d) the imagination of many people in a way that it’s hard to put one’s finger on. The difference, of course, is that James Dean doesn’t turn up in huge numbers in Wasdale in the early hours of the morning, disturbing the residents and eroding the paths. Neither is Rubik’s cube turning the summit of Scafell Pike into an enormous open air toilet and over stretching the mountain rescue services. (I think I've even lost myself here ...)

The Three Peaks Challenge is a totally artificial construct that involves driving 450 miles in 24 hours and climbing the three highest peaks in England Scotland and Wales. I say nothing of its pointlessness - climbing mountains is a passion of mine and gloriously pointless - but rarely in this country has this pastime been so unsustainable and lacking in sense. Climbing the three highest peaks in the UK (all in Scotland) would have some logic; this has none.

I understand that the prime beneficiaries (charities) find it hard to speak out. They know there are many other ways to raise money but they would be foolish to discourage any source of revenue by taking active steps against the Three Peaks Challenge. I suppose we just have to wait for it to go out of fashion - like the cube. In the meantime it raises interesting issues about just what makes some crazy ideas catch on. Answers on a postcard, please.

A local’s view of the problem: http://www.mountain-adventures.co.uk/documents/EnvironmentalImpact.pdf

BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n0tw6

Gone phishing: 90away4ack3r5

News of the latest phishing attack - this time the divulging of passwords for thousands of Hotmail accounts - is another reminder of how vulnerable we all are. But sometimes it’s difficult to know how to protect ourselves.

We might think we’re smart enough not to fall foul of phishing, but IT experts warn that email was never intended for anything other than text. It simply isn’t safe enough and if a bug goes undetected on your computer it might be capturing and transmitting confidential information putting the smooth operation of your business and, most worryingly, your bank accounts at risk.

In the same press release I also read that 40% of us use the same password for multiple sites. It’s hard to create strong, memorable for each account - especially when sites often have their own criteria and don’t allow total flexibility in choice of password i.e. limiting the number of characters - but I picked up some good tips from friends.

Alphanumeric passwords can be easily created that mean something to us, personally, but they aren’t based on our date of birth or other information that is too readily available. Hence the headline: go away hackers. You could also think about basing the string on the first letter of each word in a favourite song lyric or just Google ‘strong password’ and watch the advice come flooding in.

Good and bad science

If marketing is a science, we consultants owe it to our clients to be scientific. But pressures of time and especially the attraction of IT applications that do our jobs for us (and which we don‘t fully understand) mean that we sometimes lose sight of how we arrive at our ‘scientific’ conclusions and we leave ourselves open to criticism.

How often do we hear misleading statistics bandied around in the media, or see portions of graphs which have been cunningly selected to prove the presenter’s point? The continuing row between the UK Government and the Office for National Statistics and the propensity of even the most respected broadcasting organisations to dupe us with colourful histograms and pie charts are just two examples.

I was reminded of this by an interesting clip that has been doing the rounds over the last few days. It’s a presentation on the growth of Walmart stores in the US built in a great application called Modest Maps. Notice one thing at the end, though. It is the presenter’s intention to show how the brand ‘spreads like wildfire’ and therefore the rate of new store openings is what’s critical. The time bar seems to run in a linear way (1 second = 1 year) until it gets to 2006 which lasts a lot longer. As a result the presentation is less impressive than it might have been with a final burst of frenetic activity. Still a pretty interesting free application, though.

Ben Goldacre writes untiringly on Bad Science here http://www.badscience.net/ and in The Guardian.

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