We all know that newspaper organisations are generally in a bad state at the moment, especially in print form. It seems that the business model required to keep professional journalism alive is still yet to be fully realised.
But whilst (apart from The Independent) we are unlikely to see any big name casualties in the near future (although the Guardian Tech Supplement is likely to be given the chop soon…), the local news situation is far more perilous.
And, according to Ben LaMothe, writing on Econsultancy, newspaper website design has much to answer for:
“For years if a newspaper had a website, it most likely served as a digital dumping ground for the print product. Design and functionality wasn’t a key concern because most readers still got their news in print. Times have changed, but unfortunately many newspapers remain unprepared.”
Ben cites an example from the US (where the situation is widely acknowledged to be a bit further down the path to destruction than over here) where a new breed of ‘local website’ – in this case AnnArbor.com – is successfully filling a hole vacated by the traditional media outlets (in this case it is actually owned by the publishers of the now defunct print title). It’s great to see the owners actively engaging with the local community to try and establish exactly what form the website should take and what content should be made available.
And so it was with great interest that I noticed a new website spring up this week covering a city where I grew up for about ten years. Bristol’s Evening Post newspaper hasn’t folded yet, but everytime I go back it seems to get thinner and thinner. Bristol 24-7 aims to provide the local residents with an alternative. It’ll be good to see how the site develops and whether it manages to differentiate itself sufficiently from the more established news outlet.
Because let’s face it and as Ben suggests in his post, newspaper companies aren’t necessarily the ones that are best placed to survive in this new digital world.
The thrust of the argument is that they should be more socially connected: “What CEOs need to realize is that millions of their customers are communicating this way, and it’s foolish for them to dismiss this”. That is quite a big jump between not being active and dismissing it, but I get their drift!
Blogging v. Twitter
However, a recent blog from tech-supremo Robert Scoble suggests that ignoring Twitter and the like might not be such a bad idea:
“The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.”
It’s an interesting argument. There has been a lot of talk recently about the role of blogs and how they will adapt and mature as ‘microblogging’ continues to grow in popularity.
Scoble’s point is that blogs are great for search engine optimisation (SEO) and so will help drive (if you do it right) relevant traffic to you from search engines.
Twitter obviously doesn’t do the same job as there are too many titbits of information. But, it can still help you drive traffic. Build up a big enough following and you will get click-throughs if you share valuable content. Of course, you need something for your followers to click-through to in the first place and, chances are, this will be a blog post.
A happy medium?
So, I’m not sure the answer is black or white. I think blogs still have an important role to play, especially in setting out your position or argument as a ‘thought-leader’.
But social networks are vital to increasing your sphere of influence; engaging and communicating with new people on a regular basis.
So I guess what I’m saying is that both have their place, but need to be approached in very different ways (even if they are ultimately complementary).
It is sure to go down as one of the social media case studies, taking pride of place alongside Dominos, Motrin and DellHell.
I am, of course, talking about middle-England’s favourite home furnishing company, Habitat, who this week was the centre of a social media scandal of epic proportions.
If you missed it, here is the quick-fire low-down:
Habitat’s marketing or PR department, having picked up some stories in the media about this great, new tool called Twitter, felt it was about time they got in on the action and so duly signed up and started tweeting.
Now, Twitter is esentially a very simple tool to use; you get some followers, start following some other people and begin transmitting a few messages. Habitat though decided to try and run before they could walk and came across hashtags – a way of ‘tagging’ tweets to make it easy to follow particular themes or events.
Unfortunately, Habitat didn’t really understand the last bit and some bright spark, seeing that thousands of tweeters were paying attention to certain hashtags in particular – e.g. #iPhone #Apple #Mousavi – decided to tag their tweets with these in order to get their message out to a wider audience.
Oops.
The long and the short of it is that it didn’t take very long for Habitat to be found out, and once they were, the floodgates opened with angry tweeters, bloggers, social media experts and, eventually, the national media quick to wade in.
And now, Habitat has responded with, quite rightly, its tail between its legs:
I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message. We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.
The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.
It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.
This is a good response; credit to Habitat for issuing it and holding their hands up. And the Twitter account (@HabitatUK) looks much better, so something to build on for the future.
But I do wonder whether much of the negative publicity this has caused could have been stopped much sooner if the apology had been swift and quick. The digital world moves very fast and, by letting it run for the best part of a week without a response, Habitat merely added fuel to the fire through their silence.
At 10am this morning, freelancer writer Daphna Baram published a shocking real-life account on the Guardian website about a recent heart attack she had.
The focus of the article is that, despite having collapsed right outside a branch of the popular gym Fitness First (where she was a member and had just been running), no one from the gym was willing to help her out or provide assistance.
The official reply from PR Alyson Marlow of the Leepeck Group (owner of Fitness First) was concise and factual but was not really worded in a way that would quickly and easily diffuse the situation.
All-in-all a pretty sad story.
But it is likely to get worse for Fitness First. As of now, four hours after the article was published, there are 182 comments on the article. That’s about one comment every 1.3 minutes! And the Twittersphere is also beginning to wake up to the news as well.
For me there are two major learnings here:
1) Brand reputation issues can stem from anywhere
For all we know, this saga was caused by a few employees in one branch of Fitness First that did or did not offer to help Daphna. But it just goes to show that the actions (or inactions) of anyone in a company can have serious reputation effects for a brand.
2) The social web can very quickly escalate a reputation management issue
It is unfortunate for Fitness First that the individual involved here was a journalist, but even so, this story is made all the more dramatic and poignant because of the instant and vehement reaction of those Guardian readers that were compelled to comment.
As of yet, Fitness First have yet to respond to the article.
For several reasons (mainly to do with lack of time) I’m a bit late to the game with this one. And usually I’d let that go. But the launch of Google Wave is, to my mind, such a hugely important technological development that I just can’t let it rest.
If you’ve missed the coverage (and that’s not difficult as it’s still in private beta) then you wont know that last month, at its I/O developers conference, Google announced a new product – Google Wave – that will be available later this year.
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. The central component is the ‘wave’ protocol which is best described as a mixture between email, IM and a collaboration suite like Google Docs.
It allows users to message each other in real-time (or not) and collaborate on documents. Google has also constructed a (hosted) application which will act much like Gmail does for email. But the technology itself is open source and Google is therefore actively encouraging anyone and everyone to build their own front end applications to display and use waves (the technology itself, like email, will be vendor or platform neutral however).
Confused?
The video below is the announcement and demo from the conference. It’s over an hour long but highly recommended. However if, like me, your time is precious then this detailed, but concise overview from Techcrunch should do the trick!
Google’s main challenge will be rolling this out. Email is ubiquitous. So is IM. And I don’t see this changing anytime soon. But Google Wave (like so many collaboration and social platforms) demands critical mass. Getting enough people using the technology will be vital to its ultimate success – I don’t necessarily want to be using email for some conversations and wave for others.
So there is lots to work out. And it’s hard to really evaluate the service without being able to try it. But, from what I have seen so far, this has the potential to be a real game-changer. And if anyone can do it, it’s Google!
Last night, Apple released the latest incarnation of its already iconic handset – iPhone 3G S. You can get the full, in-depth run-down of the new device elsewhere but, suffice to say, there is not really that much ‘new’ to write home about.
For me, the interesting part of last night’s eagerly awaited keynote at WWDC was the battering that AT&T (the carrier that has sole distribution of the iPhone in the US) took from the Apple fanboys.
AT&T’s failure to offer MMS immediately and its inability to offer tethering support, was met with jeers from the crowd.
But that’s not all. O2 – the iPhone’s ‘exclusive’ UK carrier – also took a bit of a bashing on Twitter moments after the keynote ended, with the revelation that there would be no special deal for those wanting to upgrade. It is a story that has run and run today and is quickly gathering momentum, including a growing Twitition.
I felt a bit sorry for the poor guy handling the O2 Twitter account last night. He simply had no ammunition that would satisfy the raging hoards. Sometimes, no matter how much outreach you do, you are always stuck with an unpopular decision or a lousy product.
And it makes me wonder exactly why O2 took this stance. Today, they responded:
“We understand that everyone wants to get the new device, but we have to treat iPhone customers the same as anyone else. All our iPhone tariffs are the best value: you’re not going to find a better deal anywhere else.”
This is a stance that is easy to take considering their ‘exclusive position’ and one that the Guardian is quick to dispel.
AT&T and O2 are fighting a losing battle though. Up against the can-do-no-wrong-company that is Apple, they will often come out second best. But it is a dangerous strategy, especially with these exclusive deals likely to end soon.
With Apple’s so-called competitors failing to make much of a splash, I don’t see the iPhone losing support anytime soon. But O2 and AT&T would do well to listen a bit harder and argue their corner against the hardware giant to try and garner at least a little bit of the limelight.
Revolution magazine is reporting that Twitter founder Biz Stone has said that the microblogging platform will release additional tools for businesses later this year:
“Twitter will launch a range of tools later this year aimed at helping both big brands and small businesses use the microblogging service, co-founder Biz Stone has revealed to Revolution.
“Stone told Revolution that Twitter’s long awaited commercial model is likely to focus on generating revenue through add-on tools aimed at businesses of all sizes, rather than advertising.”
Kudos to the guys at Revolution for the scoop, even if this was largely expected. The full interview is in the mag’s June issue, out tomorrow.
I’m all for web businesses trying to avoid building their businesses on deteriorating advertising revenues, but the Twitter move is very interesting.
Twitter is a fantastic tool for businesses, both for marketing and customer service and it is very interesting to see Stone acknowledging this and making efforts to support this use case:
“We think there are opportunities to support commercial use. How can we help a small bakery Twittering that the cookies are coming out of the oven and the big company using Twitter for customer support? We will be looking ways to encourage and support this.”
I’m excited to see what the tools will be. Excited to see how we can use them with our clients. And intrigued to learn whether Twitter users will continue to embrace a platform that will be driven by commercial objectives.
The beauty of Twitter is that it is opt-in. This could be a winning formula.
With over 25,000 apps and one billion downloads to date, it is no surprise that other mobile phone manufacturers are keen to capture some of the app-mania that Apple has successfully created.
And today sees the launch of Nokia’s effort – Ovi. So now all those who are fed up with iPhone fanboys bragging about their latest app (and I totally hold my hands up) can join in the fun. Possibly…
So far, the launch hasn’t gone particularly well with the traffic spikes causing all sorts of outages. And, with it, some negativepublicity to boot.
To be fair, Nokia responded pretty quickly (but not before TechCrunch got to the story) and some things just can’t be predicted. But surely, with a launch as big as this, high traffic volumes should be expected?
And the problem is that what should be an exciting and bold launch to counter Apple’s undoubted success, turns very negative from the offset.
There is no excuse for negative publicity if the reason for the negativity could’ve been avoided. It just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. One that I am sure Nokia could do without.
It means we all end up writing about the problematic launch rather than the product.
I have been alive for 9,471 days and share the same birth date as Blue singer Lee Ryan – the 17th June (yes, just round the corner), which incidentally, was 168th day of the year in 1983 when the sun set at 9.20pm and there was a waxing crescent moon.
And you would be quick to ask: what does this mean and why I’m writing about it?
But the right question to ask is how I know this useless information. And the answer to that is through the internet’s latest Google-killer: Wolfram|Alpha (I’m not sure if the vertical line is obligatory, but included it just in case!).
The computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha was launched this week to the usual flurry of media attention whenever a ‘Google-killer’ comes along. Despite the rather strange moniker (named after the creators, Wolfram Research, in turn named after British businessman Stephen Wolfram), the search engine is seen by many as the way the web in going. The semantic web.
Others far more wise than me have described in detail how the site works:
“It doesn’t mine the Web for pre-existing facts. It mines limited databases that the Wolfram Alpha team has amassed, curated and vetted for accuracy. Then it performs computations on those facts, giving you new, original data. Makers say it’s a Web engine that “answers questions.”
And many have poured scorn on the site (which is clearly still short of a lot of data). And not surprisingly, The Register has questioned its usefulness:
“I know that in evaluating a Stephen Wolfram production, my meager intelligence quotient may not be sufficient to grasp the gravity of what I’m dealing with. So I don’t feel all that put down that I can’t figure out how Alpha is useful to anyone outside of a small audience of college professors and professional engineers.”
This strikes me as unfair. I can certainly see a use case for a data bank of knowledge that deals in facts (unlike Google) that are credible and reliable (unlike Wikipedia).
“Wolfram Alpha couldn’t help me in finding cheaper car insurance. However, when I needed to know the number of vertices of a truncated icosahedron it did the job brilliantly! That optimises everything about the perception of Wolfram Alpha – it’s not a Google killer, it’s not a Google competitor, and was probably never meant to be – its self-proclaimed long term goal is to make ‘all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone’.”
So, it’s got some way to go. It’s not Google, or Wikipedia and has some early detractors…
I blogged last week about the Evening Standard’s relaunch advertising campaign and last week, the new issue hit the news-stands.
So what’s it like?
Well. the revised version has much to commend it (as long as we ignore the ridiculously large and slightly dull new masthead). The ES has focused on exactly what I suggested it should – valuable news content. Gone are the pages and pages of breaking news (because, let’s face it, most commuters will have read most of this during the day at the office), replaced instead by in-depth features and analysis.
It is a good balance and one that clearly differentiates it from the other freesheets London commuters have on offer.
The relaunch sees a revised version of the ’sorry’ advertising campaign, this time with a ‘promise’ to its existing (and new) readers.
So far, so good. We’ll see what happens when the next circulation figures come out.
The relaunch sees a revised version of the ’sorry’ advertising campaign, this time with a ‘promise’ to its existing (and new) readers.