It’s pretty much a given that SMEs are more likely to be passionate about what they do than lumbering corporates answering to the City. Let’s be honest, most SMEs don’t tend to start a gardening business if they can’t stand the sight of grass.
Unfortunately, that passion can overrun into myopia where those in business only play to themselves – the People Like Us syndrome.
I’m sure you hear it in your office all the time: I’d never buy it for my home (so I assume my customers wouldn’t either)… my wife wouldn’t like it (so let’s leave it out of the catalogue)…. I’m not sure we’ve the market for that here (because they wouldn’t pay for it themselves).
It’s said that ‘me’ and ‘I’ are some of the worst words to use in a sales pitch because the customer doesn’t care about you or your likes and dislikes relating to that car, that printer or that fridge freezer. They’re not buying for a complete stranger (i.e. the salesperson); they’re buying for themselves to satisfy selfish reasons.
People Like Us is the other side of the same coin to be avoided in business.
I used to work for someone who claimed proudly that he knew almost nothing about our product and he certainly wouldn’t use our products. He would even speak derogatorily of those who did. With pride he’d say, “I’m a businessman, I don’t need to know about a product to sell it.”
Of course there’s quite a parcel of truth in his arrogance: your estate agent didn’t live in your house before you bought it and Dr John Davis doesn’t really know what childbirth is like. But we all want our salespeople to be empathetic, don’t we? We demand advice and expertise and the only real way of gaining that is through experience.
Just how our teams communicate that to customers is as much a marketing issue as website copy or advertising budgets. And it might be worth reminding them that ‘do what I say, not what I do’ is even more unpalatable now than it was as a child. Would you take health advice from an obese, alcoholic, chain-smoker?
Yet another naval-gazing award ceremony took place last week where BSkyB were claimed Britain’s Most Admired Company from Management Today.
Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.
Every week or so Sky point me to sport I don’t watch and movies I have no interest in. Considering they have the digital knowledge of everything my household has watched for a couple of years, they display zero wherewithal in their emails.
A few ideas for Sky’s marketing team to increase email PR (personal and relevancy):
Croudsourcing – people who liked X and Y (stuff my house has seen) also watch Z on Wednesday at 10pm Follow on – if you liked The Apprentice you’ll love our top three business programs (some you may need to pay for)
Bundles – we’ve prepared three bundles of viewing which we think you’ll like. Please pick and amend them. These can be uploaded to my box and amending them lets Sky’s brain know and next week’s bundles will be even more relevant.
DVD iLike – Sky should ask me about my DVD collection to better profile my tastes. You could even take into account my book collection as well (I always think Amazon miss a trick here by only tracking purchases).
I am infinitely more likely to engage with, and probably upgrade, because of the relevancy of the above. So why do they torture my inbox with High School Musical and the Ashes?
Thorough email PR like this is way beyond the data mining systems at SMEs but surely Britain’s Most Admired could up the ante?
I was asked this week, ‘What does a manager really do?’ It was a fairly innocuous, rhetorical, jovial question from a well-paid, senior person.
The graduate switch flicked and I immediately thought, ‘seeing that the company’s goals are met’. After all, it’s the leader’s job to define and create those goals and aims, and it’s management’s job to realise them. Right?
But managing people is rarely a squeaky clean affair. I’m not a huge supporter of lofty job titles as they can often cause internal problems, but anyone claiming to be a ‘Manager’ will find themselves wearing several hats (in no particular order):
go between
consultant (to those above and below)
amateur psychologist
negotiator
dispute resolver
idea instigator
organiser
governor
role model
decision maker (the buck stops and all that)
communications expert (surely THE key to management)
soldier (ever metaphorically fallen on your sword?)
captain
big brother/sister (you need to eat more, drink less, curb spending)
counsellor
teacher
steward
servant
policy pursuer
change agent
supporter (of others, of the different viewpoint – perhaps the weaker voice)
challenger (of the status quo)
It strikes me that a manager who only wants to manage isn’t anywhere near up to the job. The seven-letter title is low-balling the variety of commitment needed in all but the safest of environments.
Most business leaders don’t need a poll or a study to arrive at the conclusion that managers are the largest reason for staff resignations, but the news this week sends us straight there.
Of course direct departure isn’t the only symptom of poor management. Professor Mike Kelly, director of public health, NICE said to the BBC that more than 13 million working days a year are lost because of work related stress, anxiety and depression.
How much of that is directly attributable to managers and bosses is pretty impossible to pin down, but haven’t we got to admit there’s likely to be an element of cause and effect there?
Photo: one of the UK’s most feared managers, Sir Alex Ferguson (image from Wikipedia)
Most people think the saying ‘first impressions count’ is all about clothes or hair. They’re wrong (to a degree). It’s more about attitude than anything else.
How you carry yourself when you enter the room; how you interact in the opening few seconds; your handshake; your eye contact; your confidence.
It’s the X Factor test. Contestants stroll out on stage and before they sing a note the judges have formed an opinion. I’m guessing that original sniff test of an opinion is correct in the vast majority of cases (Susan Boyle is the notable exception).
I had the horrific experience of calling an ambulance for a heart attack victim recently. Of course, just having the medics arrive released some of the pressure in the room (help had come!) but their attitude was exemplary. They were: calm, authoritative, professional, clear communicators, even humorous with an obvious chain of command.
It’s largely natural, but like most things, we can teach ourselves to improve our attitude. These medics clearly had.
Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.
This is primarily a drive for Dixons’ website, with their retail sites only operating at airports. The strapline is, Dixons.co.uk: the last place you want to go.
These are more ‘designed’ than the comparison ads seen from the supermarkets. By using rivals’ fonts and colour pallet, they’re well and truly ‘up yours’ ads.
Having seen them for a while, I still can’t fully decide if they’re touting an honest and clever reflection of modern shopping habits or even pushing a wee bit of a class divide.
Either way, I think they’re a bellwether of what to expect from copywriters this winter, where ads will be thin on superlatives and hard on competitors. The Christmas run-up is getting all in your face – don’t skirt around with clever copy, get down to brass tacks and call your competitor out. Just look at Tesco and Asda for more evidence.
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’
He went on to say that radio is much more authentic – like two blokes sat at the end of the bar in the pub. Just raw conversations really, making radio much more true to itself (I’m paraphrasing here).
Social media is described as many things, both good and bad. How about thinking of social media’s offer of authenticity as an opportunity for companies to host their own radio show?
John Battelle recently said, ‘Marketing is now like moving quicksilver. The marketer is the publisher and visa versa; the consumer is now both… that we should rethink, ‘our brand in the market’ as, ‘our conversation with the market.’
I’d like to chirp a complimentary point about synergy with product (otherwise it’s all about the sell and very little about substance). As I see it marketing, branding and product are now *more* than joined at the hip. They’re our own holy trinity of business.
All three are separate but suddenly they’re one and the same. They’re more than interlinked – they are each other. If marketing was a message or a story about a product/service, it has now become the book itself.
Simple example: the iPod was an instant phenomenon because of the product and how it made people feel, not because of its raw above-the-line marketing efforts. Great products and services are a conversation starter for me, how about you?
Audi is on the change. Silas Amos over at JKR Design blog praises their logo touch up and I agree. They’ve applied some Photoshop botox to rejuvenate their concentric circles and the font choice has been modernised. Not particularly noticable now but, when viewed on a timeline, the amendments/path of change becomes significant. Check out Budweiser’s logo timeline to see what I mean.
Audi is also rumoured to be launching an electric car at the Frankfurt motor show. Again, not particularly groundbreaking until you look at the marketing that’s preceding the show.
They’ve launched a micro site with video clips showing the power of electricity. The lawnmower clip could top the YouTube spoof chart and clearly took some producing. They all finish with, ‘on 9.15.09 electricity will be untamed.’ That’s the date Frankfurt opens.
The thinking is that ‘untamed’ doesn’t sit too well with an A3 owner with a pram in the boot. So is it implying something far sportier? Perhaps a Clarkson-heart-attack-rendering electric R8!
I understand the concept of a hero product within the line – which the R8 surely is – and I get that the Prius is de rigueur with Californians, but if electric cars are to make a pragmatic difference then I cant help but think the world’s fleet managers need to get on-board. Reliability, efficiencies, keen prices and whacking great big tax incentives for an electric A4 sounds like a winner to me.
Either way, it’s a hat tip for Audi who’ve had a terrible year but look to be pushing on with aplomb.
Just read Tom Asacker’s post on frustration and I needed to rebroadcast:
Marketers, we need you now, more than ever, to be the voice of value creation for the benefit of your organizations and other brand constituents (customers, suppliers, communities, et al). So please don’t let the frustration, and persistence, of the Social Web ecosystem cause you to aimlessly invest those scarce resources in “following,” “friending” or “tweeting.”
Some are proving there is a benefit to social media but don’t forget Twitter, Facebook, etc are all tools. Merely tools, not the whole ball game itself. If your business is using them successfully then kudos to you. If you’re employing them but not gaining value, then you must realise they’re no longer tools, they’ve become toys.
Does anyone rave on about email, fax or telephone use in business anymore? When did you last hear someone brag about their team’s wonderful clearing of their inboxes? All very useful, but tools nonetheless.
The Times is reporting on a modern classic. The Facebook faux pas is a recent phenomenon witnessed too closely by the head of MI6 as he was outed by his wife on her Facebook wall.
From the piece: …entries by his [Sir John Sawers'] wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.
As Yoda said, “Be mindful of your thoughts Obi Wan, they betray you.”
Dustin Curtis was so appalled by his experience at American Airlines’ website that he drew up a redesign and sent them an open letter.
I did exactly the same thing recently. My aunt’s ouiji board is more in touch with web design and best practice than what a company had created for a young, energetic start-up I know. So I redesigned it and set them my creation. My chosen patient wasn’t anywhere near the scale of AA, but its foe pars put it on the critical list and, like Dustin, I simply couldn’t resist.
But unlike AA, if I had published my critique (instead of sending privately), the site’s owners wouldn’t have noticed. AA did notice and their response is here. How about you, are you awake at the wheel?
If and when your company is mentioned online are you listening?
What an exciting and innovative client Williams F1 will be. Still, you can’t help but wonder what their view of having RBS in the stable will be. Will it make courting new sponsorship deals more or less likely?
Either way, Adam & Eve will take encouragement that financial companies are still willing to pay £80m to get themselves onto footy shirts. Surely then, the O2s, Intels and Ciscos of the world would like a slice of the F1 pie?
I’ve just caught up with my Sky+ recordings of Channel 4’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef, where Heston Blumenthal worked on a revamp of the Little Chef restaurants (I know it finished weeks ago, but I’ve been busy, OK).
The project finished successfully with the flagship Popham restaurant being rolled out nationwide, but the classic, and avoidable, failure was in communication. It became an example of how not to introduce change into a business.
These two aren’t natural bedfellows: Heston’s not a chef, he’s more of a food scientist, and Little Chef isn’t known for its quality of late. What did the two sides want out of the project? What was their motivation? What was the bigger picture for both?
The management rhetoric flowed from LC’s managing director, Ian Pegler, “I want blue sky thinking,” “show us the wow factor…” All of course are completely subjective and make it very easy to dismiss results as falling short. I appreciate he didn’t want to stifle Heston’s creativity, but he seemed desperate to avoid clarity at all costs – no aims, no objectives. This put them at loggerheads several times with Heston very nearly withdrawing.
I think they could’ve made life easier for all involved by targeting ‘Mondeo man.’ He (to continue the sexist noun) travels the country from meeting to meeting and despises the overpriced junk in Motorway stops. He spends £6 on coffee and a croissant rather than eat the drivel they serve in the café.
When Mr and Mrs Mondeo are too shattered to cook, where does the family go to eat? Harvester, Taybarns, McDonalds? Possibly. Little chef? Certainly not.
That’s where I’d have calibrated our positioning and targeting efforts from the beginning: business travellers for breakfast and lunch, families for dinner (remembering that breakfast is the cash cow for this chain).
They should’ve spent more time talking to each other, not the cameras. They operate at polar opposites of the food industry: one in a pub where dinner costs £250 per head, the other behind the desk of 400 Little Chefs. Change like this demands both parties really understand all view points of the project.
I love making lists. Of course it’s nothing compared to the palpable pleasure of completion by crossing tasks off. But if you want to get multiple and complex lists out of their silos, you’re looking at making a mind map.
You can botch these together in Word, Powerpoint or even Excel if you’re determined enough, but I’ve found a couple of better solutions:
Mindomo – this is a web-based platform that serves ads to pay for its free basic accounts. It’s surprisingly fast, very easy to use and comes with enough features to create a professional looking map. Dragging topics around and rearranging is very easy. You can format in 12 fonts, add some symbols alongside your text box and even upload your own images.
It’s an impressive package – lightweight and intuitive. The only thing I feel it’s calling out for is the ability to save as a PDF. Remember it’s in the cloud so backing up becomes a screen print.
Mindmap Pro – software available for PC or Mac from the Concept Draw team. This feels like a well-built piece of software but it can be a bit unintuitive e.g. holding CTRL and scrolling your mouse ball won’t zoom in/out. It’s also not as easy as Mindomo to place a topic and its subtopics exactly where you’d like.
That said, it looks slick, is very robust and has some nice extras regarding brainstorming and task scheduling (although no Outlook or iCal sync up).
Conclusion – if you need a one-off visual map for a meeting next week then Mindomo is perfect for you. However, if you want to work offline on several maps that you want to own yourself then you could do far worse than spending £140 on Mindmap.
Extra – I’ve also been told about mindmeister.com. It’s another web-based system that looks on a par to Mindomo, although I’ve not tried it for real. My fear with these web-based systems is if their business model fails and they unplug it one evening, you might well see your precious maps obliterated….
At first, ‘How did we do?’ sounds like a question designed around self-improvement, right? Wrong. It’s usually a worthless platitude on par with a client/supplier asking, ‘How are you?’ They don’t care that you had toothache or a head cold last month and that your fridge packed up last night.
The overriding majority of people who’ll ask ‘How did I do?’ or ‘What do you think of my new widget’ already have a strong opinion before they ask, and are unlikely to be open enough to have you or others change it. The course has been set, the training is done, people have been hired, the script is written, the ads are booked, the product is in play – don’t make me change all that.
Next time you’re asked, ask them what they do with the feedback? If the project manager was outstanding does he/she get that fed into their appraisal system? Perhaps they qualify for a bonus? If the sales training was a dire waste of time, will the course be changed? Bottom line: will the feedback be actionable or are we just making polite platitudes?
If I’m fortunate enough to receive your feedback I’ll want your unfaltering honest opinions, not some lame schmoozing which equates to a lie. And ‘good’ or ‘nice’ do me no favours either because they don’t help me change and improve what I’m doing – they cry for more of the same (which doesn’t take me forward).
I’ll take the whole truth please. How about you and your team?
Your supplier is very busy. You know this because you chased your order and were told so with plenty of excuses and apologies.
I’ve always subscribed to the theory that if a customer phones you for an update on completion, you’ve failed. Not in a ‘call the administrators sense,’ but in a service world, the supplier should be driving the contact. If I’ve ordered a TV, a sofa or new roof tiles and I’m told I’ll receive them in 10 days, then it’s no surprise that’s exactly what I expect. On day 11, I’m on the phone. Unhappy.
Preventing my call with one of your own on day nine makes delivering the bad news so much easier. No, I’m not going to do cartwheels at the delay, but I’ll be more tolerant than if I’ve done the dialing. It’s a small but hugely significant difference.
After they take my ‘chase up’ call, your team will say the client was actually fine with the delay. That he wasn’t in such a rush anyway, that next week will be cool. They’re wrong. Just because no-one got blood on their shirt, doesn’t mean the disappointed aren’t thinking you’re useless cretins who don’t care.
Name it whatever you like: diary calls, client updates, whatever. If you’ve got 500 to do, an email template or two is in order but if you’ve got a handful then bespoke contact should be possible. One-man-bands can email me while eating their sandwich or after the kids have gone to bed. Tell me, ‘the news is that there is no news’ or that ‘we’re still waiting on the solicitor’ but tell me something… anything. Get in contact – it is a golden rule. Honestly.
I’ve seen too many organisations revert to the ostrich method: ignore the issues and it might just all come out in the wash. The trouble is, if you wait for the screamers to start deafening you, it’s too late in the game and both you and your business are in for a torrid time.
Yes, it’s time consuming and, yes, it interrupts the actual task of completion, but professionalism demands it. Better still, improve your time and project management and trump your own deadlines (with regular update contacts along the way of course). Photo courtesy of: Thunderchild tm
A business is an organic entity. Most stakeholders would wish their company to ‘grow’ but it can be ‘starved’ of orders, ‘bleed’ cash and ‘haemorrhage’ profits. Yet the biggest indicator of its living matter is the fact that people make a company (well, certainly the vast majority). The attitude of staff is the telling piece here and you’ll not find a more obvious example than Gordon Ramsay.
Look beyond the ‘shocking’ persona and you see a caring and driven business leader who believes in hard work across the board. He has a huge tribe of followers and all those who work with him seem to sign up. Sound like a bullying waster to you?
His latest show from the States is currently airing and is, as usual, over-edited thanks to Channel 4, but Ramsay’s work is excellent. No, he’s not facing challenges on the scale of a motor industry bailout, but he does cut to the heart of the problems and offers simple solutions that he proves can work – usually by making their lives simpler.
A regular SME superman. Perhaps it’s time Jose Mourinho passed on his Special One mantle?
Viral campaigns are an enigma. Word of mouth is, by definition, viral, but marketers want much more bang for their brand communicating buck. How can you spread your ‘message’ by engaging users (and potential clients) exponentially without devaluing your brand or using slapstick comedy?
Few marketers can claim to have pulled this business magic trick off, but two significant examples have already been seen this year: T-Mobile and the Best Job in the World.
T-Mobile orchestrated an involuntary dance with 300 people in London’s Liverpool Street station. The fact that the public joined in to varying degrees, with plenty taking out their phones and capturing the moment to relay it to others, was right on cue.
This technology in the participation of the event is a masterstroke. No, they’re not in the dancing business; they’re in the communication business and they demonstrated how we all interact today through some very clever ‘cause and effect’ staging. Over 3 million YouTube views, 7,000 comments and a national TV ad campaign would certainly allow the team to claim that they ‘got the eyeballs.’
Best Job in the World
The self-proclaimed ‘Best Job in the World’ lit the blogosphere’s blowtorch. Marketing RSS feeds squawked with the ingenuity of Tourism Queensland accepting video applications for the job as caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. A once-in-a-lifetime job deservedly received massive exposure and applicants surged forward for six months of ‘work’ at $150K.
The tactic scored right from the off, but a touch of greed must’ve set in as the ad agency started posting fake applicants (which are public viewing). One of these was from the Digital Project Manager for the agency. Oops.
This was the pin to the party balloon. Trust evaporated and respectful praise turned into negative PR with the crying of ‘Fake’ from hundreds of keyboards. When caught they failed to pull the brakes and it went on to be a train wreck – they denied it. This went down as well as an oil spillage.
The job is real – more authentic, even, than T Mobile’s “spontaneous” dancers – but one campaign stepped over the line that the other seems to have courted.
Tread carefully, folks. Innovatively, openly and carefully.
Twitter, much revered as THE social media application by those heavily engrossed within, also finds itself slammed as a catastrophic misspend of one’s precious time by those on the sidelines (if they’ve heard of it at all). It’s all very Yin and Yang.
I got to thinking there’s a simile to be drawn with the recent snow across the UK that has loads of people excited (especially my daughter) while causing massive inconvenience – and obvious cost – for business.
Substitute Twitter or snow fights for the following viewpoint:
Sideline humbug of snow fight/Twitter – fruitless waste of energy spent on juvenile entertainment in existence purely for its own sake. Where workers are engrossed in something pleasing to themselves with no business outcome but for the few (e.g. grit suppliers in the case of snow, contacts in the case of Chris Brogan).
or
Engaged participant ofsnow fight/Twitter – liberating and inspiring in the sense of something different from the monotony. It’s not a task ridden process and outcome – it’s original, genuine and creative. It improves your outlook and certainly broadens it. No, ten more widgets weren’t sold but maybe, just maybe, my heightened spirits and/or that new connection I made might just turn out for the better.
What say you? Is Twitter the best social business tool since the telephone, or is it a toy for time wasters?
[BTW Stephen Fry is the most popular person on Twitter. President Obama is followed by the world's terrorists and every political party under the sun, so we'll claim his numbers void. Ergo Fry wins.]
The visiting is done, so is the postman and the elves have earned their holiday. Yesterday saw the last of the gifts depart/arrive and I realised you know when people have really thought about you when your book tally outnumbers the smellies you’ve received.
With a couple of leftovers from last year, I’ve now got enough reading material to last me ‘till the FTSE touches 6,000 again. My dad would have these done and in the church bazaar by Valentine’s Day and I’d kill to be a match for his speed-reading right now.
Why do you always want a movie to start, but can’t wait to finish a book?
Newspapers are in their twilight years. With every print run, they step closer to oblivion. Of course, you’re smart and you know full well that they exist for advertisers, not news, and there lies the rub: ad revenues are dwindling at an alarming rate. Oh, but what to do with that high brand equity and shrinking readership? Go online, right? Surely they’ll read us [insert major name] on tinterweb and we can sell banner ads instead of print ones?
If they’re half as committed to that oversimplified strategy as I believe they are, why don’t they help us digest their content more easily? Granted, they’re much better than they were (understanding that we don’t want to log in to read was a real boon) but much boundary pushing is needed if they’re going to carve a real niche out of the net.
Next to Google Earth, RSS is the best thing about the Internet. It’s simple and brilliant. Instead of typing in dozens of web addresses to check out what’s new, you can tell the web which sites you’d like to read and watch them all come into one page (or reader) as and when they refresh themselves. Instead of buying a paper or magazine which will have a good proportion of waste (i.e. I won’t read) Google can deliver 100% relevant content to any desktop or mobile device I choose – for free. Helpful. Genius. Time saving. Wonderful.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by Timothy Fadek at the Guardian.co.uk (note: no RSS in their address bar). Where is the feed for this page? There’s the usual social networking buttons, but what about a longer term buy-in? Sure, you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the business home page and get hooked up. The trouble is, it feeds you the whole of the business section (approx 270 posts per week) not the daily missives of your chosen journo or subject.
Telegraph.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk (what a dreadful URL) help you a wee bit by offering a selection of feeds, but they’re insufficient. You’ve got more chance of most writers cooking you dinner tonight than giving you an easy to find RSS feed. It’s a genuine shame that their technology is missing such an opportunity to gain attention and eyeballs.
A 20 second brainstorm on what could be better:
Allow us to plug in to ANY correspondent/writer;
Allow us to filter the feed by keyword or tag e.g. I want Brian Moore at the Telegraph.co.uk (actually possible if you’re persistent in your quest) but only on international rugby, not his club rugby, football or general pieces;
Allow us to skew to excerpt or full text (don’t force me to your site to read a whole article – it’s just tight);
Allow us to take the feed live, daily, weekly or monthly (as a magazine would arrive);
Allow the feed on keyword only but across all sections e.g. Lewis Hamilton could be in several areas other than F1 sport; and,
Allow a matrix of any the above.
RSS is chronically underused; newspapers could blow it open to become one of their saving graces. Of course, their content (and their contributors) is another matter entirely.
Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.
Most business leaders don’t need a poll or a study to arrive at the conclusion that managers are the largest reason for staff resignations, but the 
Most people think the saying ‘first impressions count’ is all about clothes or hair. They’re wrong (to a degree). It’s more about attitude than anything else.
Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.
I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’
John Battelle 
Audi is on the change. Silas Amos over at 
Just read 
From the piece: …entries by his [Sir John Sawers'] wife Shelley on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends’ identities and where they spend their holidays. On the day her husband was appointed she congratulated him on the site using his codename “C”.
Dustin Curtis was so appalled by his experience at American Airlines’ website that he drew up a redesign and sent them an 
Adam & Eve
I’ve just caught up with my Sky+ recordings of Channel 4’s Big Chef Takes on Little Chef, where 
You can botch these together in Word, Powerpoint or even Excel if you’re determined enough, but I’ve found a couple of better solutions:
Mindmap Pro
At first, ‘How did we do?’ sounds like a question designed around self-improvement, right? Wrong. It’s usually a worthless platitude on par with a client/supplier asking, ‘How are you?’ They don’t care that you had toothache or a head cold last month and that your fridge packed up last night.
Your supplier is very busy. You know this because you chased your order and were told so with plenty of excuses and apologies.
A business is an organic entity. Most stakeholders would wish their company to ‘grow’ but it can be ‘starved’ of orders, ‘bleed’ cash and ‘haemorrhage’ profits. Yet the biggest indicator of its living matter is the fact that people make a company (well, certainly the vast majority). The attitude of staff is the telling piece here and you’ll not find a more obvious example than 
Twitter, much revered as THE social media application by those heavily engrossed within, also finds itself slammed as a catastrophic misspend of one’s precious time by those on the sidelines (if they’ve heard of it at all). It’s all very Yin and Yang.
The visiting is done, so is the postman and the elves have earned their holiday. Yesterday saw the last of the gifts depart/arrive and I realised you know when people have really thought about you when your book tally outnumbers the smellies you’ve received.
Not so the experience you’ll find online at most of our British newspapers. Check out this article by