‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary.
I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park (it certainly isn’t Disney)? How about the Trainline? Or Firefox?
Yes, Facebook is hooked into 8% of the world’s population (26 million in the UK) but when such buttons become ubiquitous clichés, what will you do to stand out?
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is now a year old and it’s been a good one.
They’ve clawed 12.7% of the enormous search market, which is no small feat. And they’ve got what political campaigners crave: momentum. Bing will be powering Yahoo search from this autumn and Yahoo’s got 18.9% of the market. Granted, it’s early days and Google is still undoubtedly the goliath, but there’s plenty of reason to break out the cake.
But what about Twitter? According to its co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter isn’t a social network, “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.” He’s not kidding as they’re clocking 24 billion search queries a month! Test it yourself here. Look for your company name, your brands, your services, your competitors, your customers – it’s illuminating.
Fast Company have the search big hitters lining up like this:
Google 88 billion searches per mth
Twitter 24 billion searches per mth
Yahoo 9.4 billion searches per mth
Bing 4.1 billion searches per mth
Sky have been ordered by the media regulator Ofcom to open up their Sky Sports 1 and 2 channels to competitors. But just before the physical sharing is to take place there’s been a typical Murdoch move.
The wholesale price Sky can charge its (not so friendly) brethren at BT Vision is linked to their own retail price. Sky have lifted their retail, and therefore the wholesale price. This is cutting your nose off to spite your competitor. Of course they knew that BT had advertised the service at £16.99 forcing them into a loss-leader position.
The silver lining on BT’s cloud is that they’ll be the cheapest on the market until they decide the pain is too much to bear. They should vacuum up some price sensitive viewers from rivals, giving Sky an own goal in the short term.
It’s the epitome of bargaining versus negotiation. I met a wonderful professor recently who hit home that there’s a massive difference in the two:
- Bargaining occurs when each party seeks the best outcome for themselves i.e. win-lose (think about buying/selling a car with a complete stranger – you’re bargaining)
- Negotiation occurs when both parties try to ‘create value’ in unity. Our coalition government is a timely example of this win-win situation (they have little without each other).
Sky were forced into negotiating with competitors and turned it firmly into a bargaining situation. When you sit down with that supplier/client next week will you be bargaining or negotiating with them?
Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.
It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.
Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.
The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.
As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.
Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.
Old news: technology and consumerism are intertwined. Simple example, the cheque book and then the debit card were tech replacements for cash.
Today’s smart phones and the rush of tablets we’re about to see really are changing the landscape now, not just tomorrow. Watch Scoble interview the head of eBay mobile, Steve Yankovich to see how serious one of the globe’s largest retailers is about mobile.
They’re serious about augmented reality; serious about decoupling from the desktop PC; and serious about going truely global. It’s 25 minutes long but hang in there, the second half is more ‘business’ than the first.
I was reminded this week that management is about doing things right and that leadership is doing the right thing. I’m sure you’ve come across that before.
But I’ve been thinking about small business leadership and exactly what that all encompassing term means on the ground.
Surely everything a leader of an SME does needs its output to ultimately fall into one of these two categories:
Scale – grow turnover, profits, clients, reach, output, customer perception etc; or,
Simplicity – repeating a good day every day; setting in place the systems to cope with stormy waters.
Go out with a group of friends and notice how many times Facebook crops up. Did you see it on Facebook… don’t put that on Facebook… I read about your holiday on Facebook… are you on Facebook (instead of the hassle of swapping mobile numbers). It really is becoming ubiquitous with socialising.
Where there are customers, companies will follow suit (like lions to the zebra). Every vertical from retail to radio; from celebrity to cinema are clambering to get aboard the good ship Zuckerberg.
Simple example: the Radio 1 Xtra blog is now their Facebook page. The BBC has scores of blogs and other social media eye candy but Facebook makes it easier for people to comment (and spam), to ‘like’, to interact with. This equals an increase in engagement – isn’t that the Holy Grail that marketers crave so badly?
What’s the problem then? Well, after flipping their privacy policy three times, Facebook has the same level of trust as your average politician. A-list tech folks have deleted their accounts in protest. Well, they tried. It’s a lot harder than you’d think.
So, crucially, whose data is it? Facebook would say it’s yours, but this difficulty in exporting/copying your data and then deleting what Facebook and its partner sites are holding for you says otherwise.
It also looks awful and if every site ends up migrating there my brain will melt from the bland sameness that threatens my screen. The explosion of the web is more than partly to do with the fact that individuals have become the creators – the publishers. Instead of doing this individually through their own HTML skills, or via blogs or micro sites, we’re facing the Borg. Star Trek fan or not, do you really want to join the Borg?
Regardless of shelving your existing content and only publishing on Facebook, there’s a real possibility that Facebook becomes the portal to the web. You can vote by liking items all over the web but there will be a covert element to this because data and consumer habits, along with profiling, is pure fertiliser to the advertiser.
You’ll also stay logged in and even though you go off and surf elsewhere, because you’re logged in, all your habits and actions are registered. Google are extremely clever with their AdSense but Facebook threatens to become so clued in as to make AdSense look like an abacus versus a scientific calculator.
Virtual currency, micro money, Facebook Connect, store fronts, adverts, gaming and the ever growing social graph (The Open Graph as Facebook call it) etc, etc mean Facebook is THE force to be reckoned with online.
A crucial argument from the protesters is that the pure web is open. Facebook are closed and – arguably – they stand to gain more by remaining closed. Come behind our walled garden, fertilise our product by increasing your interaction, and growing the whole ecosystem, and we’ll cash in from your data. Incidentally it’s the same data that we keep changing our privacy policy on.
Some would say it’s giving the web over to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. My problem isn’t necessarily with Zuckerberg’s leadership; the moneymen will be sure to right that ship. My problem is the possibility of it becoming the de facto site on the Internet.
Facebook has an amazing product. It’s staggering in size and hugely successful. If you’d built something 1,000th the size then you could pat yourself on the back for a monumental achievement. But if the populous web migrates there, I for one will be calling on Captain Kirk to save the day and defeat the Borg.
Managing Director of Emerging Media for Proof Integrated Communications, B.L. Ochman recently wrote about ‘the top 10 companies in the Fortune 100.’ She’d been checking if ‘they included their social media involvement on their homepage.’
Ochman quotes a study by Burson Masteller and her own firm indicating that 54% of Fortune 100 companies employ Twitter; 32% use blogs; 29% have Facebook fan pages. Yet her look at the top 10 found only three who show any involvement with social media.
I decided to do the same in the UK by looking at the top 10 of the FTSE100. These 10 were calculated only by sales price, not any other measure.
2. Reckitt Benckiser Group (RB.L)
Nothing, but there is a news aggregator dragging in stories that mention Reckitt Benckiser (shows some grasp of interaction).
3. Rio Tinto (RIO.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.
4. Astrazeneca (AZN.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.
5. Carnival (CCL.L)
Very small Twitter & Facebook icons at the very bottom of the home page.
6. Anglo American (AAL.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.
10. Sabmiller (SAB.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.
This is all way off the 54% engagement that the Fortune 100 apparently sees, but what does it mean?
Are we less communicative than our American counterparts?
Big Business doesn’t waste time on the latest fads?
Proper business isn’t for wishy-washy social media?
Established stalwarts aren’t clambering for market share like some others?
The top 10 are involved but aren’t yet broadcasting that from their home page?
Does it mean anything transferable to you and your business? What do you think?
Someone recently told me about a conversation they’d had with Henry Engelhardt, the founder and CEO of Admiral Insurance. Engelhardt, an American, said the key to his success has been managing to the numbers.
At the close of business each day he gets a report (presumably a dashboard) of his core KPIs. One sheet of A4 tells him exactly how his business is doing. He says us Brits don’t manage by the numbers enough.
But isn’t leading and managing a business all about moving the numbers?
Feed more of the hungry, house more of the homeless;
Decrease the cost of sales, grow stakeholder value;
More page views, fewer bounces;
Acquisition costs down, conversion rates up;
Increase quality, decrease errors;
More support, fewer complaints;
Waste less, save more;
Ship more goods, shrink the deficit;
More followers, less churn;
Golf handicap down, stamina up (more a metephor, but you get it).
If you agree with Engelhardt, what numbers are you trying to move this month? This year?
Frank Tyger said, “Progress is not created by contented people.”
Yet again this savings figure of £6 billion is caught on the newswire this week. What a joke.
Our deficit is in the region of £167 billion. Trumpeting about saving £6 billion in a year is the fiscal equivalent of downgrading your weekly toilet paper and tea bag shopping to Tesco’s value range – all well and good but really a drop in the ocean. Let’s get our eye on the prize, the RIGHT prize.
The interest payment on this deficit is nearly £42 billion. On interest! That’s more than we spend on defence and more than three times our policing budget. We should all be praying to the house of credit that we don’t lose our AAA rating or we can add another £5 billion p.a. to our troubles. It’s starting to look like a Guy Ritchie movie, isn’t it?
The real issue is that after the longest period of consistent economic growth in our history – 16 years – we were spending 4.5% of our national income more than we raised in tax. You don’t need advanced math to know that puts you in the red.
Forget ring fencing, surely nothing is off the table. Scrutiny belongs everywhere, including our three largest areas of spending: social security, health and education. All budgets, from the Olympics to waste collections must come under microscope.
Our medicine will certainly be a bitter pill to swallow but Greece is the starkest warning to anyone who thinks simply muddling through is an option. Debt is a powder keg waiting for fireworks night.
With a new face in 11 Downing Street I was really hoping to hear a more honest fiscal message than £6 billion but I guess we’ll have to wait until the emergency budget. Emergency – what an understatement.
My daughter was given charge of the class teddy last week and became completely engrossed with him. He was part of nearly every sentence – Teddy Eddy this, Teddy Eddy that. They were instantly joined at the hip: at the dinner table, in the bathroom, washing hands, cleaning teeth, bedtime story and, of course, in bed itself.
This OTT passion was completely out of the blue and somewhat overwhelming. You honestly couldn’t hold a winning lottery ticket with more fervour than she did with this scruffy bear.
Seeing it, I was reminded of meeting an excellent facilitator, Pammy Johal of Backbone. Pammy is a captivating individual and exactly the sort of person you’d want to be stuck in a lift with. Our conversations have run into cycling. She’s confessed she’s mad on her four bikes; they’re her babies.
To calibrate her self-proclaimed madness she told me about her selling an old Trek bike. She bumped into the lady that bought this bike from her a couple of years later in the supermarket. “How are you enjoying the bike?” Pammy asked. “Dunno really. It’s at my sister’s. I think it’s in her shed,” came the unwelcome reply.
Pammy was so desperate for her (former) bike – her offspring – to be with a family that loved her, she wrote the lady a cheque there and then to buy the bike back for the original sale price. The beloved Trek was repatriated.
Yes, these are two extreme examples of passion but what if you could get your teams feeling and acting 10% of that level toward your products, your services, your clients? What would 50% look like?
Drucker’s infamous dictum goes along the lines of, ‘Business is all about finding and retaining customers.’ A fraction of the passion shown above would have your clients returning every time – the trouble is fostering it certainly isn’t child’s play.
Have Suitor A believe they can be replaced by Suitor B at no cost to yourself;
Indicate to both Suitors how good the other is with you and your organisation;
Have Suitor A and B both believe they are playing second fiddle to each other;
Leave no stone unturned and explore every option from the start gun – you can never anticipate all the outcomes;
While various suitors are making offers, consider what all your stakeholders would appreciate and have other suitors make counter offers from those positions thus keeping momentum towards your goals;
Have your spokespeople dirty their hands with the groundwork leaving you free to play the trump cards in the 11th hour;
Keep your private thoughts just that, private. (Mr Clegg said far too much about who he’d do deals with during his campaign).
Note to dealmakers: this leverage negotiation can only work when you are strongly courted by suitors who appear, to each other, to offer you similarly successful products/outcomes. Sound familiar?
Questions:
Is Mr Clegg regretting what he wished for?
Will he overplay his hand?
Will he be wrongfooted?
Is it all a poisoned chalice?
Rebranding is an ugly word. All too often it’s a euphemism for ‘we were rubbish but a cleaner logo and new strapline means you should forgive our history and buy into this new stuff.’ Perversely, not rebranding is one of the reasons Mr Brown is going to be punished so badly on Thursday.
But I am a fan of change. I love improvement and progress and no one needs that more than a trio of uber-brands: Toyota, BP and Nike. All three have had a disastrous time in 2010 but the BP spill is sickening beyond belief. All three are surely hiring branding experts to refocus messages and ensure customer buy in?
But that’s the problem with most branding. It’s not the logo, or font, or jingle, it’s what the company does that makes it what it is. That’s why the purest marketing is a reflection what you are (your true story), not what Madison Avenue portrays you to be. Actions are what customers truly judge you on. The slickest branding in the world won’t get you to invest in Bernard Madoff!
So, Nike needs Tiger to stay on the wagon, Toyota needs consumer confidence more than we need oxygen and BP (along with everything they’re about to devastate) need a biblical miracle.
Nestle are used to their fair share of bad press; students the world over have seen to that. But March 2010 is when they will go into social media case study history.
For anyone who’s not read the full saga, here’s the short version: a video was staged which drew a play on eating Kit-Kat and orangutans’ fingers. Nestle had the video taken down but, of course, it reappeared. They chased it around the ‘net like a drunk trying to bath a cat and made life pretty miserable for themselves by fumbling over logo violations when Greenpeace were organised.
I’m struggling here between ethics and communication tactics. If you make a bad product – deem that as you will – then, with or without a great web interaction, you deserve to be called on it. But, lets assume you aren’t evil personified and you deserve your place in the world of commerce, what do you do when attacked online?
Despite what some experts portray, social media isn’t always a simple mirror, signal, manoeuvre affair. On top of the immense variables, there is the fear of inflaming situations, adding sugar to the fermenting jar that forums and blog comments can become. I don’t believe there is a definitive three, five or ten-point plan. Social media has only one absolute for all organisations: listening. If it’s nothing else for you, it’s an opportunity to listen.
That said, Seth Godin believes he’s got an answer: brands in public. He launched this aggregator back in September last year.
Strangely for a Godin fanboy I wasn’t convinced at launch. And after six months or so I can’t say I’m overly impressed with their client list – no Coke, no Cisco, no Microsoft, all of whom are being critiqued hugely online. If anything, is this not a $400/month garden where a bad ‘vibe’ can grow? From a brand manager’s standpoint, doesn’t she prefer any negatives to be disparate across the web, rather than collate neatly in one screenshot? Of course, the positives mentioned online will also look more powerful together.
Which brings us right back to our variables problem: join in and risk inflaming the situation or enter and solve problems with a swath of your service sword? The trouble is unless the Nestles of the world truly engage (as in adopt some of their philosophies, ecological or otherwise) with the likes of Greenpeace, they’re likely to find hugging a tree has morphed into overtaking a Facebook wall as the militant tool of choice.
But don’t be frozen by fear. The wonderful John Battelle at Federated Media recently wrote, “…all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps….”
How many Microsoft Office users really exhaust the package, employing it as its designers dreamt they would? Not very many.
How many stretch the package to more than even 25% of its functional capacity? I’d be very surprised if it’s more than one in twenty.
It’s probably about the same ratio as 4×4 owners who’ve actually taken their off-roaders off road and Porsche owners who double-declutch – very slim indeed.
Let’s imagine you’re a newly launched SME with a small office needing to equip four computers. With Office 2007 Small Business costing around £350 for the standard version, you’re down £1,400 before any other costs, like the hardware itself and networking etc. You want to be honourable (and safe) with the licence keys but struggle with the expense.
Well, Google docs is the MX5 (to continue the car metaphor) of the office world: smaller, lighter, more nimble and less bloated on superfluous features. GD is the retractable pencil, not the NASA ballpoint pen – frugal function, not fancy fluff. Until now, I wouldn’t have said GD was an Office killer but the latest feature upgrades this week have me thinking this is a genuine alternative. And the collaboration features are a real boon (work from home and share a file with someone at the office live). Check it out:
BTW: it’s official, Google now counts site speed as a ranking factor.
I was at a Barclays Springboard event with Rene Carayol this week. You’ll have seen him on the box with his shows, Pay Off Your Mortgage In Two Years, and Mind of a Millionaire.
What charisma! Watching the guy holding the stage he reminded me of the actor, James Earl Jones (voice of Darth Vader, Patriot Games etc).
But Carayol’s career is every bit as impressive as his persona. M&S, then Pepsi and the board of Pizza Hut. His golden moment was at the board of IPC Media as the young, noisy upstart. He soon recommended a management buy out, and convinced the board’s other nine members with his enthusiasm.
To raise the £860 million in capital needed, Rene delivered 72 presentations on five continents in three weeks. The board got their money and a 1% share each. Three years later they made the biggest exit in UK history by selling to AOL Time Warner for £1.1 billion. Unsurprisingly, he had the room’s FULL attention at this point of the story telling.
Couple of nuggets from Rene Carayol and others on the evening:
A players are twice as productive as B players;
Selling is about building relationships, not making transactions;
Hire a great attitude, not just a great skill set [if you can't have both];
Those on Facebook and Twitter are three times more likely to experience high growth [I think that’s because of mindset not necessarily the tools employed];
Rather than the common cost/investment thoughts, spending needs to pass a ‘value for money test’ (that was from a bank guy);
If you are bold you may fail; if you are not bold you WILL fail;
I’ve always had a fairly neutral opinion about Barclays, but an excellent event with a chance to hear the thoughts of some of their senior staff has risen them a notch or two in my mind. They did infinitely better on the feel good factor than the Word of Mouth Marketing Association did this week with their robotic cold-calling fiasco.
MPs have published a report this week, from the Business and Enterprise Committee, wagging fingers at Kraft for closing Somerdale after it promised otherwise.
Did anyone old enough to spell ‘business’ actually think Kraft weren’t going to slash costs as quickly as they could? As the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.
Does Mandelson et al actually believe Irene Rosenfeld – Kraft’s iron lady – cares one iota about what they do, let alone think? What possible retribution can they threaten her with? Perhaps they’re angling for an excutive discount at the latest coffee shops in town?
Westminster were stupid enough to believe the American’s rhetoric, now they’re scoring own goals by commissioning a report whose Executive Summary could read, “Hey everyone, we were naive schoolboys. Look at what the nasty business lady did under our noses.”
Mr Cameron has started his election campaign referring to the voting masses with the phrase “the great ignored” (stolen from Nixon’s silent majority). Maybe he was actually referring to the Business and Enterprise Committee.
Did we really need to spend money on this report? What’s the expression, ‘fool me once…?’
I have been using more and more of Bing lately because: a) Microsoft c0-sponsor Jason Calacanis’s TWiST show (gotta thank the sponsors, right?) and, B) they’re doing some great, underrated stuff.
Check out this video from TED presented by Blaise Aguera. I know it’s about maps not search but it’s a good barometer of how bleeding edge Microsoft are lately and how they want to stick it to Google.
Take a look at Bing and leave the G thing alone for a week. It’s truly invigorating.
Twitter is on a meteoric rise. In 2007 folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day; 300,000 times a day in 2008; 2.5 million per day in 2009 and now it’s 50 million tweets per day. This month the whole shebang crossed the 10 billion tweet milestone.
Which of your eyes would sell for a growth chart like this?
But dissenters say that folks don’t stay involved. That 60% of people who sign up, get bored within weeks and don’t return. That the noise from the few is deafening and that the many just listen and regurgitate. They’d say (ironically, probably via a blog) that it’s all a narcissistic fad.
Businesses are looking at Dell as the poster child of Twitter use and think they can all show offers in 140 characters that convert highly. But the fact is transactional sites get less than 10% of Twitter’s exit links, the majority goes to other content driven sites (social media). Others take a more puritan stance and think it’s the conversation – engagement – that wins in the end.
Personally, I’m likening the whole thing to cricket. Is there a more polarising game in existence?
Chances are if you like cricket, you’ll love cricket. You’ll want to skive off work and sit for hours watching what many would call ‘nothing much.’ You might even want to drop your fabulous music career for cricket commentary (Lily Allen does). The non-believers would laugh at you and say the whole thing is a waste of good grass.
Understanding and liking Twitter is every bit as binary. You either do, or you don’t.
But the one marketing area that unquestionably lends itself well to Twitter is sport. Take Lance Armstrong. Lance is the Stephen Fry of tweeting sports personalities and his build-up and insight to the Tour de France will be fascinating.
F1 newbie, Lotus are also on the guerrilla marketing bandwagon, allowing chief technical officer, Mike Gascoyne and others to give us real time access to their thoughts. During the Bahrain GP he actually told us that Jarno Trulli was pitting on the next lap. In the ultra-competitive and secretive world of F1 racing that level of engagement with outsiders (fans and rivals, obviously) is astounding. I’d argue that it’s to the benefit of the Lotus brand – to its share of mindset, to its growth, to its media coverage (as others write about it) and to its value as we get closer to the heart of Lotus as an organisation and build a relationship.
What about you and your organisation? Will you be donning your digital cricket whites this summer or would that be a time-wasting bore?
We want the best for our teams so we work hard. Sometimes we recognise that we’re not winning so we turn it up a notch and work even harder. But wait, that’s not working either.
At some point, we can see the failing – at least internally – but all too often we plough on with the bit between our teeth and nothing new in the arsenal that’ll change the situation. I bet you’ve seen it happen recently in your organisation.
It calls for something new. Some assistance. For the hubris to say, “I’m struggling with this project. Could I pick your brains for a minute?”
Help is the winner (and your team really want to win, don’t they?) so it’s counter intuitive not to seek it. But asking is the really painful bit. I don’t know about you, but I want to be asked rather than witness eleventh-hour meltdowns?
Smith-Harmon has released a study of American retail email trends for last year. Unsurprisingly, 2009 saw record volumes distributed.
It states that the 100 largest retailers sent an average of 132 promotional emails to each of their subscribers. That’s an average of 11 emails a month and 2.5 per week, per subscriber (peaking at 15.4 in December). Overall, top online retailers sent 12% more promotional emails in 2009 than they did the year before—and 39% more than during 2007.
You’ve got to wonder if we’re going to kill the golden goose here. The overwhelming number of emails threatens to neuter your subscribers’ inbox. I’d argue consumers are becoming numb to special offers and super savings.
This is about perfecting frequency, not necessarily content. It’s a nexus that lies between maximum engagement (revenue in most cases) and maximum disengagement (unsubscribers). Think about consumers’ distain for physical junk mail promotional mail shots. It’s not too much of a leap to imagine that feeling about your inbox - even if you did volunteer your address.
It tells about his unorthodox hiring process, about his talent development and his $200k consultant’s bill. But essentially, it’s about his business’s culture.
Culture is surely one of the most intangible aspects of business and as such can be the most frustrating. The culture can all too easily be clockwatching and pilfering in an entrenched oligopoly, but if you’re looking to push scale or improve net profits then you’ll find it almost impossible without the correct culture – whatever that is.
Culture in a company dictates whether you follow a 50,00 word business plan religiously or you hand the bank manager a one page outline of your ideas and put your best foot forward. Fred Goodwin’s culture of ‘win at all costs’ crippled RBS and Dick Fuld’s sent Lehman off the cliff. Culture is what Scorsese and Spielberg embody in their actors before letting them navigate a scene.
Isn’t this all really HR’s job? Well, I’m afraid I see too many organisations with HR departments that seem to treat their jobs in two facets: personnel operations coupled with a fear (and avoidance) of legal proceedings. Do you know many HR folk who treat their fellow employees like those at Nick’s Pizza & Pub? I’m sure you know more who would say that it’s not their remit, that line managers and supervisors should push those boundaries, not HR.
In an entrepreneurial business like Nick’s the form filling takes a distant second place to structure, satisfaction, autonomy and development. If your culture’s right then surely the marketing becomes the story of that result?
Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet report’ shows the average UK broadband speed is 3.5 Mbps and just one in 12 surfers are achieving 5 Mbps and above. At present, South Koreans can get speeds of up to 100 Mbps and Soth Korea plans on raising the bar further with a tenfold increase in their ultra broadband to 1 Gbps by 2012 (200 times faster than our ‘fast’ 5 Mbps).
Whitehall’s shoot-for-the-stars plan? Well, their Universal Service Commitment wants every postcode in the UK to get a bare minimum of 2Mbps by 2012 (yep, just 2Mbps). In order to install this they’re talking about a 50p per month tax on landlines (cumulatively that’s around £1billion).
£6 a year to get a fibre optic line everywhere probably sounds like a reasonable deal. But the naysayers point out that the poorest – and least likely to take advantage of it – will be funding the speed and convenience for the wealthier.
It could be argued that if broadband is so important for the future of the UK’s infrastructure then our Government should step up and make funding available. But let’s be honest, as our economy’s gone to hell in a hand-basket, the IT slush fund disappeared into RBS long ago. No, those who want to use the infrastructure to become more successful need to take care of things themselves – nobody is coming to help (at least not any help worth having).
That’s where I think they’re looking to the wrong group to fund this. There’d be more traction and less voter pushback for a Business Broadband project (that’s my new label for uber-broadband).
UK business should be canvassed to put its hand in its pocket. Granted, now isn’t the best time to ask businesses for a handout, but when is?
Many large businesses operate on leased lines (such as banks) and don’t suffer the same bottleneck problem of demand we do but they too would benefit from faster coverage and the chance of increasing customer interaction.
This is an investment in their future, not a cost. As such, perhaps we could be allowed some accountancy leeway where we could do some fixed asset right down.
Contributing to it could be thought of like a church collection: the plate goes past everyone but only those who wish to partake do so. That said, we’d need the stern, furrowed brow of a priest-like character to make sure we all give fairly and not shirk out of our cumulative responsibility.
That’s where I see some A-list business folk coming in (think Alan Leighton, Alan Sugar, Deborah Meaden etc). These ‘celebs’ could form a steering committee. Their real value would be in persuading CEOs and proprietors to part with cash; they’d push the hard sell by demonstrating an understanding of their difficulties and a vision of the future.
Branches of request:
Peer levy – perhaps by business category e.g. shop keepers donate £500p.a. Perhaps by staff number (e.g. £75 per employee) or by turnover (e.g. £200 per £100k t/over).
Profits – pressure should be levied at those who stand to gain the most. That’s Internet service providers, search engines, telecoms companies and larger multichannel retailers for a start. Get the telecoms guys to dig as deep for this as they did for their 3G licences. Google donated $2 million towards the upkeep of Wikipedia this month because the strength of one affects the other.
Individual – the pot would also take private contributions. If Robbie Williams wants to throw in £100k to get a better Spotify connection it’s ready and willing to accept.
Google launched the Fibre for Communities program this year in the states. Essentially they want to pair up with providers and show the world that super fast broadband can get to the masses. The difference with a partner like Google is they’ll do so much of the heavy lifting. Personally, I’d take my Universal Service Commitment to the shredder and have Mr Mandelson on a plane to California (with his new pot of business money), persuading the Google team that the UK should be the first outside the USA to benefit from their new insight.
Have I got it all wrong here? If not, what would you and your organisation be willing to give over the next three years (if anything)?
You know all too well that traditional journalism has changed. We’ve read the Huffington Post and heard about the Google-Murdoch punch up. The journo genie has left the bottle.
So when change has taken place in your industry and the future indicates far more, what are you expected to do? Unsurprisingly Gary Vaynerchuk advocates jumping the sinking ship. What’s new is his push to start a collective of freelancers building a new centre of journalism.
From his inspiring Crush it! “…those who possess that rare combination of fiery entrepreneurial spirit and reporting chops could team up and form a killer online news service without any biz dev partnership at all. They’re going to really win big.”
I completely agree. No, you don’t need to send four people to New York to cover a plane landing on the Hudson. Or send a John Simpson wannabe to a war torn corner of Asia. Instead, save the airfares, expenses, insurance and security costs by running original, insightful and discerning thought pieces, commentary and analysis. Suddenly, a handful of talented ladies and gents are delivering true fidelity.
Thanks to some sharp printers you can even go old school and get a paper run along side your site. The Newspaper Club will print 12 page tabloids in quantities as low as five!
The web has disrupted nearly every vertical on the planet and sent the established incumbents into a spin (obvious example: the Royal Mail). With so many undiscovered opportunities, which will you choose?
By day, Nick Fluck is a director of Tredz, a bicycle retailer with a strong web presence. By night, Nick can be found moonlighting on Digitally Minded, waxing un-lyrically about marketing, business, new media, technology and innovation. This semi-personal, part-professional blog is a collection of Nick’s weekly(ish) ramblings as the wannabe business partner/love child of Seth Godin Want to know more?
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