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?

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.

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.

Your lecturer this week, Nick Clegg.

When in a position of strength:

• 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.

Nope, branding really isn’t about logo, is it?

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;
• Rene’s slides are behind these pages: http://www.carayol.com/toptips/ and http://www.carayol.com/pitchperfect/

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.

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?

You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”

Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified the world. In between watching Steptoe and Son and listening to Elvis or the Beatles, someone asks you, “What do you think about this telephone phenomenon?”

With 20/20 hindsight you could’ve said, “It’s going to be amazing in ways we can’t yet imagine. The infrastructure we and other countries are laying now will be used for revolutions in communications and commerce that sound like science fiction if we talk about them now (think fax and Internet). User take-up will be so overwhelming that the lines will be stretched to breaking point and the ‘phones themselves will become like your watch or wedding ring – always with you. In short, phones will become an integral part of our personal and business lives.

The ‘60s Big Wig would nod sagely, probably with a slight smirk, and take the conversation elsewhere. But the answer to the question if you’re asked tonight at dinner is that, “History will repeat itself here…”

Unless you’ve been on Mars this week, you’ll know all too well that Kraft have now purchased Cadbury.

Well, it now turns out that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, hired by Cadbury, are – thanks to the purchase – to be paid more than if they’d successfully defended the hostile takeover.

It’s easy to flow with the anti-bank sentiment at the moment, but throughout the process we were led to believe that Cadbury’s management were hell-bent on seeing off the greedy American and retaining a British jewel. Let’s remember, Kraft is only in buying mood because they think organic growth is unlikely and Cadbury has a bigger future ahead of itself. They sounded like a deer being hounded by a savage tiger. Now it’s apparent that they gave the gatekeepers strong odds to leave the door open!

Nice to see the basic theory of management is still alive and well: what you reward, gets done.

Warren Buffet, Kraft’s largest shareholder, felt their shares were undervalued so instructed 500p in cash make up the 840p offer. That’s around £7 billion in bank debt added to balance sheet.

I guess it’s only fair banks both sides of the pond maxed out, right?

Charging for postage is the perennial debate of e-commerce. I think Amazon’s decision this week to extend its free postage charge trialled before Christmas might favour a good deal more consumers than Amazon serves. I can see other retailers having to follow suit as they look to win a friend and gain a client from their competitors.

You can almost see it as a cost per acquisition – how much would you pay a 3^rd party to get you a customer? Is it cheaper than banner ads and affiliate percentages?

Then again, when Amazon can charge $3 billion for a Discovery Channel CD-ROM, maybe taking the hit on their postage bills wont hurt the P&L so much.

Photo credit: Mooganic