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Today is my 1444th day on Twitter.

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Last night’s Culture Show special ‘The Books We Really Read’ on BBC2 presented by Sue Perkins explored popular fiction down the centuries and how today’s bestsellers sit a gulf across from literary fiction. Perkins, a self-confessed literary fiction fan and past Booker Prize judge, decides to investigate the impact of popular fiction on culture across the genres of crime, romance and thriller. She reads Jackie Collins, meets fans of Dick Francis and interviews Lee Child and Sophie Kinsella.

What’s interesting about this is not Child attempts to shrug off the snooty High Art pretentions of the literary fiction as almost a class thing. What was stirred my stones is how he noted that he could do what they (the LitFiction crowd) do, but that they could not do what he does.

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Related somewhat to Child’s I’m currently reading Stephen King’s wonderful ‘On Writing’. This snippet from the foreword really struck a chord:

One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk—that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and then said: “No one ever asks about the language.”

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my own motivations—why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one like this, that would leave me feeling like either a literary gas- bag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those books—and those writers—on the market already, thanks.

But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

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Om wrote a thoughtful post entitled ‘Why the Medium Is Not the Message’. Om’s posts are always thoughtful, but this really stuck out for me me:

When companies can’t really tell the difference between the medium and the message, they get in trouble. Let’s look at the much-hyped photo-sharing service Instagr.am and Flickr, the granddaddy of photo sharing services.

At their core, both these services are about social broadcasting and social validation, not storing photos. But today, Flickr gives an impression of being a staid photo-sharing product. Why? Because mobile has become key component of this sociability.

Instagr.am embraced the medium but focused on what was its core task: social broadcasting and social validation.

At first, it sounds like Om is directly opposed to King – but while in different realms, they both question the hows and whats.

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In the last week Twitter has started to roll out its grand plans to monetise. Hello #dickbar. In a strange way, I’m confused to how they came to the decision of executing on this. Heavy consideration of medium as platform and message as add-on?

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Christmas 2010 and I’m closing Twitter in my browser in favour of old Usenet groups I used to frequent. Anemic and somewhat web-filled. They too have been scooped out and branded as Google Groups.

]]> http://golez.net/2011/03/06/of-medium-and-message/feed/ 0 http://golez.net/2010/07/19/the-independent-bookseller/ http://golez.net/2010/07/19/the-independent-bookseller/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:16:44 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=4629

Last week, Jenny’s post about the future of bookselling popped into my feed reader and it stuck a chord with me. Independent booksellers are close to my heart. It’s all tied up with family too.

My mother is an independent bookseller. To understand why she does it, you have to understand her.

After raising a third (and surprise) baby to school-going age, she decided she had enough of staying at home with the kids. She likes say she was never a housewife, never married to the house and that her third baby made her younger.

She made choices that perhaps that I would have shook her physically had I a time machine, but c’est la vie. Despite doing well in her Inter Cert in the Sixties and was offered a scholorship to become a chef. She passed on it. Preferring to stay home and become a carer for a relative. Opportunity gone, she settled into shop work. She’s always excelled at everything she’s done. She loved her work, her customers and the little shop she worked in. Fond stories are always at her fingertips.

That’s where books come in. Being absolute book obsessives, our house was always stuffed with books of all types – Mills & Boon, Choose Your Own Adventure, classics, library books, encyclopedias, second-hand tomes, audio books, pre-reader books with magic pens that read out the words, pop-up books, Dick Francis. It was really was Pick Your Poison. The converted cottage we used to live in, had a mini-landing-come-book-graveyard where we’d stack them high.

We’d go to the same bookshops and library trips were once a week. Book people became part of our family and us, theirs. Hearing that one of the bookshops we’d frequent was looking for someone part-time, she jumped the chance. The timing was right, the shop was right.

The shop was a mix of old books and new. Customers were regulars, people who’d pop in for a chat as much as a book. Books were laid away for people. Facebook a social network? Your independent bookseller is ultimate social network. All walks of life come in. Everything in every shape and size.

I dare anyone to spend a day in your local independent bookseller that sells new and *old* books and not be impressed. The old part is important. Second-hand booksellers are social treasure troves. Beat the joy of helping three generations of the same family buy books and leave the shop happy and enthused.

Things have changed in some ways for my mother. The bookshop she worked in closed. She decided that she’d open her own. So with some of the stock of the old shop, she moved up the street and around the corner in a little nook of a shop. She sells second-hand books. Competing with chains is impossible if you depend on selling new books and you’re a small bookshop. The margins you make on new books are just too small. Eason 3 for 2, Amazon and the Book Depository etc make it impossible.

I like to teasingly call her bookshop a drop-in centre. She’ll berate me, I am sure. Customers pop in with coffee for her.  Thieves reselling dubious books in perfect nick. Nurses traveling from Cork in for reads for a holiday in sun.

She’s a massive crime thriller fan. When she isn’t buying books off the Book Depository or Amazon for herself (American editions are treasured as the UK/Ireland publication dates trail US ones significantly), she’s buying books for customers and selling for little more than cost or just passing her reads onto them. It’s important to her that her customers are happy. Customer loyalty is her number one priority.

It seems to me that the independent bookseller has so many lessons for so many other businesses today. The ones that are doing well, are doing well because of their customers. Loyalty goes both ways.

Bookselling has changed in the last twenty years, it’s more than a book on a shelf. It seems to me that the really great independent booksellers will continue to stay in business, because they’ll just do what comes naturally. We could learn a little from their passion.

Two years ago as Lehman Brothers collapsed and AIG fell, This American Life began to try to explain what was happening and who the principals were. While the reasons of the global financial crisis differ from Ireland’s, the forces at work are the same – greed, short-term banking decisions, loose regulation and too much money chasing too few resources.

The thing why I really love TAL’s approach to reporting is that it doesn’t patronise the listener. How does a bank work? TAL explains. What is leverage? TAL explains. Don’t know what a collaterised debt obligation is? TAL explains. Working off a base of first principles, TAL opens doors for listeners as well as interviewing people that worked at those institutions about how they worked and about the morality of those decisions.

Ireland needs a TAL approach to investigative reporting now more than ever before. Imagine trying to get a handle on who knew what and when?

I doubt that we will ever see the like of the TAL approach to economic reportage. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The bankers that caused the damage are still working. We haven’t seen anyone go to jail for the damage they caused to the Irish economy. Excluding the top brass that have graced our Sundays, many of the bankers are shadowy bedfellows to developers and we will never know them.
2. The media isn’t interested in educating the public and it’s too hard to marry this with trying to source bankers willing to speak on the record. Investigating the area is expensive in time and manpower. Even more so when trying to liven up copy to a jaded listenership.

Investigative podcasters, check out

• The Giant Pool of Money – why and how the bust happened (updated show)
• Inside Job – how one firm created the risky product of toxic equity securities and bet against the market
• The Watchmen – investigates the murky world of regulators and rating agencies
• Another Frightening Show About the Economy – how the markets froze and non-regulation of credit default swaps
• Bad Bank – banking for beginners

The first three episodes listed are *highly* recommended!

Gwilym came up with the idea of a Disloyalty Card. He picked eight quality-focussed, interesting coffee places in London, printed their details on a card and gave these cards to his customers. If customers try coffee at all of these hand-picked places, Gwilym will make coffee for them for free.

Powerful idea.

Being an ambassador of your industry, means nodding at competitors you respect. Gwilym will sell his competitors coffee, but the trust his customer have in his expertise will grow, as they follow his coffee tour. And while they will try out other coffee shops, they will return for his free coffee.

Imagine incentivising your customers to check out your competitors? It takes confidence in your ability and knowing your own product, but what’s good for coffee drinkers is great for baristas don’t you think?

Spotted this via Ana today.

Graphic by Ben Hennig released under CC. Click for bigger.

Architecture 5¢ from John Morefield on Vimeo.

Found this interesting video on Good.is about the 5c architect who when faced without a job, turned to a market stall doling out advice at a nickel a time. As well as keeping the momentum his nickel business, he has been able to earn $50,000 a year from his customers willing to pay more. He also tried to keep business local – referring other professionals in his locality.

In this yellow-pack economic chasm, could we move this idea into other places? Are there certain professions that this idea would lend itself to?

It’s interesting to note that yesterday, the BBC Radio 1 website had it’s busiest day ever because of The X-Factor vs Rage Against The Machine death-match.

It doesn’t matter where you sit in the battle to the UK number one, the fact that a download-only single beat the traditional X Factor winner’s single to the top of the charts is important. It’s the first time that a download-only single has made number one in the UK charts, I believe. (Fact checkers, am I correct?)

Ironic that a campaign from the Internet from non-traditional buyers of singles was a boon to the BBC, one of the grandest old dames of media and to Sony, the X-Factor and RATM record company big daddy.

And now for the push – with the populations of Facebook and Twitter becoming older than the average single-buying/gross-out-movie-going teen – how many other negatively charged mini-campaigns could fuck with the traditional pop-cultural strongholds of movies, music and television? Like the last rebellions before the mid-life paunch drops and we get a little less ILFy…

In Ireland, the Wispa campaign on Bebo rekindled childhood bubbly memories and managed to jump the divide to revive the bar – a positively positioned campaign without doubt. Negative, ever the more appealing motivation for a nation of begrudgers, is a more tantilising prospect.

Perhaps this should be studied next to Obamamania; the opposition could weedle out a few tips. Whatever is next?

Starbucks are partnering with Project RED so that for every use of a Starbucks (RED) card at participating stores, 5c is donated by Starbucks to the Global Fund for the elimination of AIDS in Africa.

More details on the Join Red blog.

The IDA Campaign - Innovation Ireland

First, a little background. The IDA organised the meeting to showcase their new advertising spots for ‘Innovation Ireland’, their new communications campaign. The spots were simple. A chalk on chalkboard animation that squiggles and moves with script to end on chalk squiggle Ireland. Simple. The idea being that Ireland is a place where the brain can storm.

The brief, they said, was to catch the tech/biotech exec in a hotel room just out of the shower and get him to turn around. The spots will run on international business news channels that jetsetting execs watch – like CNBC.

The online campaign is also peppered with videos from execs like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Microsoft’s Paul Rellis advocating why Ireland is a great place to do business in – the competitive advantages in basing operations here.

Thoughts

As part of the briefing, we had the opportunity to ask questions on the campaign and generally on the IDA. The Q&A session was excellent. Passion was easy to see on both sides.

Back to the campaign. I really liked its simplicity.  It beat the oh so common set of talking heads style of adverts promoting innovation and HiTek stuffz.

The selection of media outlets seemed interesting.  Running with CNBC, CNN and WSJ spoke volumes about where the campaign saw its audience. Businessmen do watch those channels and occasionally read that paper. I’m kind of interested where blogs like Techcrunch, GigaOm or other younger publishing ports of call in the tech world sit. CEOs, CFOs of tech companies large and small read those blogs too. As do tech professionals. The sorts that build small startups – where 1% or less become tomorrow’s Facebook or Microsoft.

It’s not necessarily a criticism, but if we are trying to push the innovation button to market Ireland on the bleeding edge as a place for international investment, why are we trying to market using the same media points as every other other country hungry for capital?

So, Innovation Ireland sits beside Beautiful Bosnia and Amazing Asia?

Adverts on CNBC and CNN marketing countries usually equate to day-glo holiday catalogues in moving pictures. A smiling workforce, sharply-dressed execs and lasers – you get the idea.

GIEF, Pat Phelan and the Wider Picture

So with the launch of the IDA campaign by the Tanaiste done and in the pocket, eyes of the National media fell on the Global Irish Economic Forum meeting last weekend at Farmleigh. Like a post-modern, monied League of Nations, the rich and powerful Diaspora descended unto our  National house to discuss how to jumpstart the Irish economy and build international connections.

The Department of Foreign Affairs plans to produce a report on the findings of the conference. What will be interesting about this report is not only its contents, but also how much of it is implemented.

Indeed, the idea that the Government needs to convene a conference at all, seems a little preposterous. Look to Israel. Does their Diaspora need a kickstart to engage with enterpreneurs or researchers at home? No. The incentive to see opportunity, build links and drive innovation comes from entrepreneurship.

Reviewing Pat’s excellent post on TC50 and fostering innovation takes me back to GIEF and even, back to the IDA’s campaign with – You Reap What You Sow – in my ears. Pat’s piece is not new. It isn’t shining a light on something that we’ve just stumbled upon.

As a nation we navel-gazed our way through the Nineties. When our costs reached a plateau relative to countries with the same economic, regulatory and educational levels, we priced ourselves outside of our own market. What Pat, Damien and countless other commenters on the piece are saying is that we have to bear responsibility for not getting off our arses and building those business links, for not innovating in our ways, for not selling our own wares, for not opening new avenues when our older ways of doing business withers. Innovate or die.

I don’t have a clue whether the Government’s actions following GIEF will pump momentum into the Irish economy more than those who met at it and decided to take matters into their own hands do build business links organically. State-sanctioned anything in place of organic innovation needs soft step treading.

From Us and No-one Else

Innovation comes from us. Introductions come from us. Defending our ideas and showcasing our implementations come from us. Business comes from us.

Want another example? The Tuesday Push. It’s currently on holidays, but it used to happen once a fortnight. It used to select one company every fortnight and coordinate blog posts from bloggers on their offering.

While it ran fairly successfully for a while, it became clear after a bit, many of the companies that wanted the community spotlight of blog posts highlighting them just didn’t want to commit to paying that back to companies showcased before them or after them in blog posts for other Tuesday Pushes. So, on the heads of a few committed bloggers fell the responsibility of pushing week in and week out. That isn’t sustainable for a community. That’s not sustainable for business either.

Community isn’t a one-way thing. Business relationships are exactly the same. The Tuesday Push, just like the Irish technology scene needs people to give as much as they take. Successive Tuesday Pushes became ineffective as people could not be arsed in being part of a community.

If anything, the single biggest problem that the IDA, GIEF, the Government and Irish technologists have to face is building community. A community where giving and taking are interchangeable. We can sit and dirt and point fingers all we like, nothing is going to change until we pull together.

]]> http://golez.net/2009/09/23/when-innovation-means-sharing/feed/ 5 http://golez.net/2009/09/07/on-invisible-marketing/ http://golez.net/2009/09/07/on-invisible-marketing/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:27:53 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=3955
Photo owned by soggydan (cc)

And lo, the lazy marketeers have inherited our silicon Earth. Our communications channels have become a perverse marketing joke. Look to Twitter where the self-interested first tweet from accounts they have professional interests and then retweet themselve ad-nauseum on every account they and their partners have access to. Say this was a face to face meeting, what reaction would the listener experience?

The really effective marketeers already have the ears of their market. They’ve played with them, taken criticism from them and enriched their audiences’ lives. If as a company you are not adding value, you are taking away from the effectiveness of your communications and using up user gratuity.

Who wants to listen to the same message being whored by blowhards? Call me a freak but I want to feel, be challenged or be beset by wonderment. Great marketing is the stuff you don’t see.

Tonight the Rose of Tralee Festival comes to a head with the first night of the competition to find 2009′s loveliest girl. The Rose of Tralee Festival is one of the most important jewels in Kerry’s tourist crown. Tourism number crunchers expect over €6 million will be pumped into the local economy during the Festival.

The scope of the competition has so utterly changed over the years. Contestants travel from much farther afield. And while there are reels still rolled out as talents, there are certainly less tin whistle solos. The way the Festival is marketed seems curiously traditional. Lovely girls, check.  Circus, check. Parade, check.  Oirish Country and Western acts playing in the open air, check. Richie Cavanagh, er – check. Yes, a hodge-podge of plastic Paddy amusements that don’t really have anything to do with the contestants.

How about a couple of creative ways to connect to the Roses or the idea of a rose signifying one’s beloved to the Festival?

Rose of Roses
The biggest asset that the Rose of Tralee has are the girls that have taken part over the years. They are traces of the history of the contest. Last night, RTE showed some footage of the past Roses posing in a photoshoot. Of course, it was all very safe.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to make dresses of red rose heads or flapper dresses made of red rose petals? Dress past Roses in them. Don’t be afraid of older beauty and be representative maybe a few Roses ranging in age from 25 to 55. Perhaps get them a few of them together, asking each one to pose as a curve in a cubist rose.

Write Your Beloved Box
Roses are the currency of caring. Wouldn’t it rock if the festival left boxes with the head of a fresh red rose in them around selected towns and cities for people to find? The kick would be that those that find the boxes would be encouraged to write, draw or express on the box things they want to say to a person they love or care about – boyfriend to girlfriend, child to grandmother.. etc. You get the idea. Say you didn’t find a rosebox, it doesn’t matter, you could still enter and make your own. The more creative and fun the better.

The Festival could spice this up by, perhaps, asking people to photograph or video and share their personalised boxes on the Festival site. The Festival jury could judge the winners a month before the Festival. Prizes could be bunches of roses, boxes of Irish Rose chocolates, spa weekends in the Kerry wilderness or a VIP trip to the Festival.

Rose Snaps
Beauty is totally subjective. It could be the laugh-lines cracking under brown eyes, the elegant curve of the collarbone or a graceful step. Mostly though, it’s a glimpse of a feature or part of one’s self that we can’t but love. Those irreverent flashes.

Wouldn’t it great if the contest could somehow reflect this? So the girls are probably holed up in the Brandon Hotel this week. How about each of the contestants or their escorts are given cameras to take photos of things they love – people, places or sacred moments.

Or perhaps the Festival could set aside a hotel room to act as snaproom. The snaproom would have cameras on a flexible arms. Almost like stems. Different modified cameras could be set up. Old cameras, Polaroids, cameras with coloured glass mods like filters. You get the idea. The girls could move and position these camera to take pictures of themselves, others or things they find precious. Again, these photos would be shared on the Festival site.

It is proposed that the County and City Enterprise Boards, the Business Innovation Centres, the Western Development Commission and the enterprise functions of Údarás na Gaeltachta, Shannon Development, Bord Iascaigh Mhara, LEADER and Teagasc, as well as sector-specific agencies such as the Irish Film Board, should be merged within a re-constituted Enterprise Ireland. The streamlined agency should also lead to major savings in overall administration costs including staff numbers. The Group considers that the new enterprise body should operate a regional office network based upon the nine Gateways identified in the National Spatial Strategy, leading to savings in local office accommodation costs. Savings in overseas office costs would also arise.

What’s even more interesting is the proposal for restructuring the public sector’s own ICT spend in an effort to make savings.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) represents a particular sub-set of activities for which shared services solutions should be actively explored. Approximately 1,300 staff work in ICT in the civil service at an estimated cost of €65m a year. In addition, the civil service spends just under €200m a year on external ICT resources (consultancies, contractors and external service providers) and on ICT support and maintenance services. Substantial additional costs are incurred on hardware, software, telecommunications and training.

In outline, the Group has identified that greater sharing of ICT facilities and services, commensurate with improvements in the skills and knowledge of ICT staff and recruitment of ICT specialists from the market, can lead to a considerable reduction in the current costs of ICT provision. The Group notes that the Government has instructed a 50% reduction in the use of external ICT resources and the development of plans by each public body to increase their ICT self-sufficiency.

That equates to another drop of €100m. A lot of organic business for Irish SMEs, right?

This at the same time as a recommendation to outsource departmental tasks?

Activities that generally match these criteria typically include payroll, data entry, payments / claims processing, accounts payable and accounts receivable processing; however, the scope of outsourcing can in principle be much broader than this, encompassing every field of activity or business function for which outputs can be specified, and be subject to monitoring as regards quality and delivery. In transferring such operations to an external service provider, the primary focus is on achieving cost savings without loss of quality. The reworking of processes required to transfer to the outsourced operation should also result in better control of standardised processes.

Given the super-sharing of resources and the new spider-web of management structures needed to manage the sharing, are we really getting value for money?

One of my favourite jobs while in college was selling globes. Well, I worked in a bookshop, but I sold globes like no one’s business. I sold the small technicoloured desktops, the larger antique-coloured oak jobs. Globes with lights. Globes without lights. Globes whose longitudinal segments could be replaced on state dissolution. Globes that fit the budget of moms wanting to drum to some point-and-learn geography into their kids. All sorts.

The thing about selling globes or selling anything at all, is that every interaction I had with customers was a valuable transaction. Selling something was just an economic one.

Being open, friendly and helpful meant I could learn about what they wanted. “Those are too expensive”. “I can’t read the text”. “How much energy does that consume?”

More than this, it challenged me to ask myself loads of questions and gave me an opportunity to learn new skills.

• How can I be a better communicator?
• Am I listening to the real problem?
• Is this really something that the customer wants to buy?
• How can I precision question someone talking in roundabouts or someone that can’t express themselves correctly?
• Am I being patient?
• Do I understand the business imperative and how should I make decisions?

I’m not a Social Media cowboy, but it’s a 24/7 pitstop. Some of the lessons from selling globes are universal -  listening, learning and talking. Impacting change from those interactions. If Social Media be anything, it’s an endless opportunity to learn new things about people.

Looking across the rodeo, it’s not just about Moonfruiting yourself by flooding hashtags or just creating a blogger evening hoping for videos or collateral content to float up.

Seeding interest without first trying to learn and impact your business misses the point. Kinda like ringing someone up and then not being able to get in a word edgeways. Who wants to buy from a business that does that? Do they really respect you as a customer or as a browser?

Social Media isn’t just business, isn’t your Facebook page and isn’t your friends tweeting fart jokes – it’s an open door. If we avoid learning, we’re flushing time, money and effort down the toilet to appease the buzzword monkeys.

On the ground beside him a sign reading ‘Shop of Recession Flowers – Useless CVs’. Kinda says it all really.

Been thinking about the role of community manager. There are so few people that do it professionally in Ireland. Speaking to someone recently, we agreed that it seems like there are so few capable folks out there.

On seconds thoughts, looking at the attributes that community managers have – we all do it in a way.  A community manager is an advocate for that everyman in a project. His greatest skill should be listening and then preempting the slow bureaucratic machine of a company. Feeding back into the machine and being a catalyst for change in that same organisation. If constant change be chaos, then the community manager is its soul.

He thinks about new ways to talk an audience that is abseiling from one social nook to that cranny. He cuts the time to wait for customers and the cost of support. He has fun with the tool. He’s humanises the organisation.

I’d like to think we’re all kinda community managers of something. Nowadays on the web, everyone has a project. We’re playing with tools and building treehouses – blogs like Liveblog.ie and IrishElection. Being active in a community means trying to instill an ethos of sharing, openness and humanity. A community manager does this, but with a business bent.

Before you quit you job, to professionally whore Facebook groups, there’s more…  You have to be subtle. Knowing how to use tools isn’t enough. Being a professional whore that links to everything and anything isn’t enough. Being that Johnny Social Connector isn’t enough. Were I hiring someone as community manager for an online project, I’d like them to have an independent voice, but more importantly, strong moral fabric that’s part of their DNA. Were I starting a project as a community manager, it would be one of the first lines I draw.

How important is following ethics when balancing a community management role? Where do you draw the line?

Fileswapping has changed the way we look at TV shows, movies and music. When was the last time you bought a CD? Or bought a movie on DVD? Entertainment has changed. Acquiring it is no longer a physical transaction. Efforts to stamp out filesharing have so far failed to stem the flow of P2P traffic.

Consumers have less disposable income nowadays. Staying in is the new going out but they are less likely to splash out and buy DVDs. Even the rental market is being pinched. So what are they watching and more importantly where are they getting it from? Hello, Mr P2P.

Instead of studios and music companies trying to stamp it out, wouldn’t be interesting if they jumped aboard?

Fileswapping brings nothing but pain for content owners, by adopting its method of content delivery and hosting monetised files, studios and music companies could realise a measure of advertising revenue and promotional momentum.

Content Delivery – A Risky Proposition?

The first studio that adopts filesharing for content distribution will make a killing. Why not use the muscle of filesharing? Millions of fileswappers offer a free distribution channel for studios. Hosting and bandwidth cost – zero! There’s not a single red cent of cost to the studio.

Spending massive buckets of money upfront on building content delivery networks is a boon to hardware manufacturers, but entails massive financial risk to the studio. Studios should be adding capacity to these networks. They should, of course, host only their content. In a climate where every penny matters, piloting this now makes sense.

Smart Watermarking

So where is there money to be made? Commercials are a no-no, but how about advertising watermarking the TV show or movie with icons like channel logos. TV watchers and web users are well-used to seeing.

Of course, the Devil is in the details. Execution on tasteful watermarking would be important factor. Make the watermarks too busy and people will switch off. Next time they choose to download content it will be ripped straight from the TV. The design of advertising watermarks should be muted and add to the frame rather than attract attention away from the action.

Perhaps the studios could develop a way of watermarking frames in the file so that they dynamically change based on show and geographical location. Say I’m living in Dublin, perhaps the encoded file I download could have a payload that knows from my IP address I’m located and applies a localised advertising watermark to the file I’ve downloaded.

360• Advertising and Interactivity

Advertisers could be offered 360 deals on the portals that the studio host for indexing torrent files. Advertising banners, quality sponsored content and watermarks. Extra content in and around the making of could be offered too. Studios could encourage and/or contractually oblige cast and crew members to blog and video blog to build up a bank of exclusive content and interactivity.

An Enhanced Offering

Given that the studios have the content on tap, they could provide multiple formats for viewers to download.  Encoding aimed to optimise sound and visuals on each format ready-made for dropping on your computer, phone or tablet for viewing is an easy target for the studio to meet. The more ready-to-eat they make content, the faster users will move to their bank of torrented files.

To The Future

Instead of fighting the strengths of torrenting, studios need to adopt these principals swallow them as methods of connecting with viewers. The days of slash and sue are numbered. The studios know this. The sooner they jump ship onto serious content delivery, the sooner they realise that they are really just an advertising company.

]]> http://golez.net/2009/04/09/studios-need-to-become-fileswappers/feed/ 2 http://golez.net/2009/04/08/popularity-of-the-budget-liveblog/ http://golez.net/2009/04/08/popularity-of-the-budget-liveblog/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:25:59 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=3379

Very impressed with all the contributions that people made to the Budget liveblog yesterday. It made for great reading. I noticed the numbers peak at 159 watchers. Did you notice it get any higher?

Brian Lenihan has just delivered his Supplementary Budget and the numbers are being crunched all over. For the ding-dong buzzword laden push on the ‘Smart Economy’ that Lenihan delivered, the Budget falls far short of the mark on encouraging real innovation in the tech sector.

Call this a first cut..

To the Young Potentials, Sling your Hook

Specifically, jobseekers allowance for the under twenties will be halved to €100 a week so as to incentivise the young unemployed to participate in training programmes.

What will these cuts mean to those already living in poverty, with very little education? Cuts need to be paired with incentives. By ‘incentivising’ the young, does the Government mean that these young people are lost causes that will only seek jobs when they are being pushed further into poverty? By shrinking social welfare payments, is the Government pushing these kids further towards crime? Kids this young need to be working.

This incentivisation does not come with a matching programme to boost the skill base of young unemployed people. How can a Government commited to pushing Ireland towards a “Smart Economy” model, willfully abandons its young people?

Enterprise Stabilisation Fund, enough?

In an effort to support Irish businesses operating in Project Economic Meltdown, Lenihan is proposing the establishment of the Enterprise Stablisation Fund.(pdf link)

The Fund will have a total budget of €100 million over two years, with €50 million being provided in 2009 and a further €50 million to follow in 2010.  The Fund will be administered by Enterprise Ireland and approvals will be based on business plans submitted to the agency by applicant companies.   Particular attention will be paid to small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in exporting.

The ESF is a Band-Aid. A bloody plaster set to help staunch the flow of capital in SMEs. A tiny measure. Something that doesn’t go far enough to nurse real innovation that’s hurting. We’re not even waving at situation Status Quo. We’re flushing this money down the fucking toilet. €100 million is nothing in the scale of things. Nothing.

I’m interested in seeing the decision-making that EI puts in place to evaluate business plans that companies submit to the ESF.  Will it differ from other schemes?

Corporation Tax Stands Still

Corporation tax is not moving. I’m not sure the Government could have pushed it down any further without serious heat from an already prickly Europe still smarting from a rejected Lisbon One.

The Smart Economy

Lenihan’s statement on Government’s commitment to the “Smart Economy”:

The Government will also implement measures to support the “Smart Economy” through investment and incentives to reach an R & D target of 2½% of GNP by 2013. We have already trebled our economy wide R&D spend over the last decade. It is now around €2.5 billion of which some two thirds comes from the enterprise sector. It is not just a matter of saving jobs where we can but of re-orienting the economy to produce the export-led growth we must achieve.

What does this actually mean? Without pointing to exact policies or schemes to support a knowledge-based economy, how can measures on boosting R&D really be evaluated? Supporting the “Smart Economy” isn’t only a cash transaction, but a commitment of capital, attention, oversight and flexibility. Just shoving target spends in silos will not yield strong and sustainable job growth in the Sciences, Engineering and Information Technology. Also, without mentioning policies upfront, if and when a further squeeze on expenditure is made, wouldn’t it quite easy to bleed financial support from target “Smart Economy” spends to other places?

What Broadband?

For all the buzzword jockeying on the “Smart Economy”, there wasn’t a mention of broadband. Broadband doesn’t exist on the roadmap of the Governments budgetary strategy to turn around the country. And they don’t stray far from the truth, Ireland’s broadband infrastructure is nonexistent. On a day when Australia is committing A$43B on a publically-owned, high-speed national broadband network, Ireland closes her eyes. The Australians project that the network will stimulate economic growth to the tune of 37,000 new jobs. Ireland still turns away.

At the same time, thousand of miles away, the US Congress is setting aside $7.2B to boost broadband in far-flung areas underserved by high-speed connectivity. What of Ireland? Again, She turns her back.

Dulling the bite of capital expenditure by fixing spending over the next couple of years without placing specific attention on rolling out national broadband as an exception means another decade of Irish Internet users pissing into the wind, speedwise. Another decade of Ireland moving in slow-motion with little inventiveness and economic imperative. Creativity plugged.

]]> http://golez.net/2009/04/07/emergency-budget-2009-what-does-it-mean-for-tech/feed/ 6 http://golez.net/2009/04/06/mapping-out-inequalities/ http://golez.net/2009/04/06/mapping-out-inequalities/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:11 +0000 Alexia http://golez.net/?p=3360 This past weekend, a seminar ‘Women in the Economic Crisis’ was held.

As Tim O’Brien reports:

The seminar, which addressed the question, “Would we be in this mess if more women were in charge?”, heard business, particularly finance, was one of the areas where women were least visible.

Some 89 per cent of board members were male, rising to 93 per cent when it came to heads of corporate bodies. The board of the Irish Central Bank was, it was claimed, exclusively male.

Great to see a seminar address the fundamental issues that caused our economic meltdown. Because we all know that genitalia makes all the difference

It also seems that women don’t know where to go for information on funding or mentoring.

So, more women need to be in charge in areas of business or finance but they require someone else to tell them how to source capital? Here are the lines. Colour them in, do.

Séan Gallagher. Found on the RTÉ site this morning.

I finally decided to publish the page after seeing Emily’s post on Irish media people that Twitter. I find it interesting and entirely fascinating that we’ve both come up with lists of media folk that twitter, with only a little overlap. Damien also has a very nice list of Irish companies on Twitter.

I expect the page to morph and change. For old names to pop off and new ones to arrive. If you want to suggest an add, drop me a mail and I’ll take a look.

The Irish Twitter Index is easily accessible to the right of my Zombieroll under Pages.

Oh, yes and this is all just a smokescreen. I’m just linkwhoring for Blog Awards votes.

Update: Table cleanup!

In the wake of Dell upping sticks and moving to Lodz, “task force” has been on the lips of many. Task force this and that. While attention is very much needed to concentrate minds on finding new employment for the many thousands who have lost their jobs, in the long-term does the nuclear option of task forcing really work to grow indigenous businesses?

Details of the Limerick task force came to light over the weekend and it appears to have a decent mix of representatives from the public and private sectors.  The task force has lots of experience on hand. But you kind have to wonder where jumping on the Task Force Express will take us.  Undoubtedly, there will be proposals to beef up the skills base of laid-off employees. Quite possibly a hat-tip to post-grad research too.  Could this turn out to be just more window dressing for Dell 2? They have three months to come back with a plan, so we’ll see.

There are lots of plans being touted for Limerick, including chatter that it could be Ireland’s Silicon Valley. Could Limerick seriously emulate Silicon Valley if the hand of the Government is close by? Compare that to Valley where entrepreneurs live and grow on failure.

The Silicon Valley model is more an ideal, I think. An analogy to describe a services industry based on R&D. Were one to marry the Silicon Valley model with the Limerick region, there’d be help from Enterprise Ireland and the like at incubation level. I’d love to see a task force work on a report that found ways for public bodies to nurture SMEs in the right way before leaving them to develop organically – almost like a father knowing when to remove stabilisers.

Task forces also have interesting addons. The consultative process on task forces would, of course, include  local focus groups. I’m sure they contribute greatly to the process, are  they paid to talk shop? Payment is not the issue, but rather the environment for the free exchange of ideas. That’s why in Silicon Valley  ideas, feedback and advice is more freely given. That’s why events like BizCamp will be wildly successful. That’s also why some of the canniest business people always have open ears. Open minds do not need to have open hands.

My point is, if Limerick and Ireland continue to use the traditional task force hammer to entice in companies to employ people droid-fashion, we’re screwed as a region and as an economic machine. Wouldn’t effort be far better spent on eliminating Revenue and compliance as much red-tape as possible for SMEs, evening out the gaps in knowledge amongst EI reps and seeding greater collaboration between local businesses?

The supermarket wars are upon us. Superquinn are shouting from the rafters about their return to 70′s prices and how we all end up buying that rubber dingy from a German discount supermarket. Dunnes are keen to give us 20% off in niche parts of our basket on their Clubcard scheme and Tesco are reminding us that every little does indeed help.

So, what kind of ideas could Supermarket X put into play to in a very tight market to attract us Recession-wary customers.

Happy Hours
Mondays and Tuesdays can be the slowest footfall days of the week in supermarket life. How about creating a hour or so of extra discounted selling? Perhaps mid-morning. Say from 10:30 to 11:30. That’s a prime slot of possible mammy shopping time too, with kids at school.

During this time, the further reductions on selected items could be offered for purchases paid for during this period. Extra messages informing customers of the offers and the time left could be announced by tannoy. That would definitely get interest going.

Voucher Receipting
One of the smartest receipt tricks is printing vouchers on the back of them. Want to discourage the flow of unnecessary returns? Make the customer want to rip up the receipt. Yeah, I kid.

What I can’t understand is why major retailers ignore the opportunity of distributing vouchers on each receipt? Ignore those flat dry-cleaning-esque vouchers of yore, now. Stay with me.

All the value clubs seem to want to do is take the approach of opening another line of direct marketing in club mailshots. The expensive sort. You know, with colour printing and lots of photos. What’s the first thing that customer do? Fiddle for the vouchers.

Wouldn’t be a lot more cost effective for stores to print vouchers at the bottom of receipts? Vouchers would blurbs and barcodes on the bottom of the receipts. Just In Time printing to the rear of a receipt would be costly. For the sake of a couple of inches at the bottom of a receipt, massive conglomerates could drastically cut the spend on direct marketing.

Taking this a step further, club members might like to choose to allow their purchases to be data-mined so that targeted vouchering can be created at each visit. Of course, this would be an opt-in for club members, but it might be paletable to customers that want more relevant discounts.

Easy to reach and see

Just because supermarkets can pile them high doesn’t mean they ought to. The average mammy should be able to reach the top shelf. Take the average height of an Irish woman at about 5’5″ with a window of 2″ above and below. That model height should be able to comfortably reach the top shelf in an aisle.

Cans, jars and glass bottles on the top shelf are the devil. Course, one can’t avoid them in the off-licence section. Oh and stacking of jars and cans on the said top shelf is * insane *. Got a deathwish, reach for that jar of carrots.

Softer lighting in a supermarket helps. It makes the place seem less like a homogen-market and more like a place I want to shop. Cost effective too, if the supermarket uses energy-efficient lighting.

Simplify and target

Like every other business out there, supermarkets need to look at their core activities and see where there are opportunities to simplify and target their efforts to nab custom. There’s definitely going to be consolidation in the supermarket sector in the next couple of years and, like Lord of the Flies, the fittest will survive.

So my question is, why buy space on social network to market one’s wares to its user if you don’t allow them to interact? I wonder did the blocking of user comments on Bebo mean a nice discount on Nintendo’s monthly advertising spend too. After all, user comments are metrics or so say Bebo. And hey, if you don’t have that metric to set beside those ROI projection flavours  then how can you call a campaign successful? Did you have that pinch of salt?

In true Mulley style, he cuts the crap and focuses on what’s important.

This is probably a bit scary but you will now know more about the group of people clicking on your ads and will know that an ad that mentions X is liked by people who like Pearl Jam and The Wire etc.

Like the above, the more data you have on these people, the better you can make your ads which gives value to you and those clicking on them.

PR Ninja? Better that that, he’s one of those warriors from Monkey but with a spiky combo of PR, online marketing and web training in his arsenal. 

While the most of the mischief will stay on his .net site, there are sure to be some sparks on the pro blog too! Anyone with an ounce of business ambition or interest in how we interact on the web should subscribe immediately. Best of luck, Damien. 

Starbucks is feeling the pain. Last night, the company reported a 97% drop in profits for the last quarter alone. The coffee giant reported net income of just $5.4 million or a cent a share in the quarter, shoddy performance when compared like-for-like with income of $158.8 million or 21 cents a share a year ago. Where the hell are they going wrong?

Starbucks have tried lots of things. Rapid expansion, selling music and expanding their menu repertoire into faffy Vivanno blended smoothies. All have failed to bear fruit. All are costing the bottom line.  The rapid expansion plan is costing them dearly. Despite the shitty income numbers, revenue was up a pinch, by $100 million. (And $100 million is a pinch when revenues stand at 2.5 billion for the quarter.) Restructuring, i.e. shutting down shop, ate up income. Yeah, it was Pacman.

One in a million

The biggest problem facing Starbucks is Starbucks. It’s just too damned successful. Traveling around the world, one is comforted by the siren in her familiar green livery. At the same time, the homogeny of the experience offered by franchisees is akin to McDonalds. It’s all a bit Fight Club. First rule of Starbucks, noone speaks of the flatpack experience of Starbucks. Second rule, go back and read the first. Don’t get me wrong, I love my warm Starbucks-cupped beverage like the next girl, it’s just that the outlet experience that leaves a lot to be desired.

Instead of each Starbucks having a spiritual twin half a hemisphere away, could national or even regional planners introduce local flavours? So, I’m in Starbucks somewhere in Barcelona, could I listen to some ad-hoc local musicians in an open-mic setup? How about Central London, could my Starbucks on Regent Street have dedicated shelves of poetry – perhaps ones I can browse and/or decide to buy? Or maybe the Starbucks in Piccadilly, mindful of the heavy footfall of tourists in the area could hold exhibitions of up and coming London artists with maybe the odd historical show now and then? What I’m hinting at is that large chains are winning on market breadth and scale for great value of produce, but have a way to go to add a twist of something local to their menu.

Small cafés should really be chomping at the bit for these distinguishing features. Nimbly set, they could adopt book shelves or evening comedy shows much faster than their conglomerate cousins. Wouldn’t you love that?

Plug Me In

Starbucks customers in the States can avail of up to two hours of wifi if they have a Starbucks card or are an AT&T customer. Not so in Ireland, where only some of the outlets have shabby Eircom nets of wifi. Want to make sure young customers steeped in coffee culture come in and stay at Starbucks? How about opening up those wifi nodes?

Yeah, it sounds like your customers are cheap. But are they really? Not when they are spend €4 or more on a single cup of coffee. Open up the wifi nodes. Make the dead air come alive and keep young customers wanting to have that extra cup of mud while they sift through their mailboxes.

Want another simple suggestion? How about integrated power points hidden away in every table?Childproofed, by default of course. Now, we’ve sorted out the wifi drought how about being generous with power?

Small cafés are already offering open wifi, so why is Starbucks being mean with theirs? The power point issue is a bear bug that every outlet offering free wifi ought to be addressing.

How about a café goes the extra step and starts a blog? There’s so much that can be done with a café blog – news, menu adds, recipes, pictures, stories, competitions, mail order sales of goods and memorabilia. And that’s just the beginning.

Free Topups of Filtered Blends

Average filtered coffee blends are far less expensive than their roasted, toasted and hugged bean cousins that are brewed individually for each customer. How about endless refills for customers that go the filtered route? American diners live by this. Bottomless coffee mugs rock.

Starbucks is not doing this, some independents few and far between are. This is coffee shop 101, right?

Pitch the price of filtered coffee at half that of your regular barista Americano, if possible. Of course, it all depends on raw materials.

Wow, more free filtered coffee? Hmm, maybe I’ll splash out on a sandwich or possibly a pastry. How about a slice of cake? There’s profit in pastries.

Local Living/Giving Tree

Charity begins at home. Why aren’t Starbucks or other chains partnering with community groups to help the aged, ill or needy in the locale? The idea of nurturing charity giving from a seed to a tree is not a new one.

A lot of customers would willingly pay 5 or 10 cents a cup extra, so that money could go directly to the local Hospice, Respite House or community club.

And chains could do matching gifts. For every €1 donated, they could match it and possibly spend the money on produce (like hampers or presents) they could source from suppliers. Saving on goods by using their scale as muscle. Double benefit for the charity or community organisation, right?

This idea may not add to the bottom line directly, but the idea of supporting local charities is a big PR win and could be something that customers use their judgement in choosing where they buy that cup of coffee on the run to work.

The Future is Cloudy, the Future is Change

Starbucks is facing massive challenges, whatever way it turns. It’ll be interesting to see how it tries to succeed against its greatest threat – itself. One thing is for certain, the tried and tested formula of expansion, expansion, expansion under a superflag of Starbucks homogeny is over. The changes, though painful, will have to come. Small cafés should be positioning themselves in local niches, before chains try to elbow in. It’s all about great food, good times and little local touches at the right price, isn’t it?

He who hath created the Internet doth proclaim we should STFU and focus on Green. His Al Goreness starts:

“Web 2.0 has to have a purpose.”

He continues using a big, pointy foam hand:

“The purpose, I would urge all of you — as many of you as are willing to take it up — is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth,”

The NY Times says it succinctly:

In other words, Web 2.0 should be used to fight global warming. He didn’t say exactly how, but that didn’t stop the audience from giving two standing ovations to the Oscar-winning movie director, venture capitalist, money manager, book author, cable television mogul and Nobel laureate.

Where’s Bono when you need him? Maybe he has the missing cue cards. De Masterplan. Web 2.0 should be about bringing a “higher level of consciousness about our planet”? WTF? Isn’t that what parenting and educating our kids on the goals of society is all about. Web 2.0, 3.0 – or whatever Bullshit Bingo His Goreness is serving is just a toolkit. Ways of empowering individuals and organisations with an arsenal tools to manage and analyse data to synthesise information. Web 2.0 is business.

Businesses are all about profitability, achieved through innovation and increased efficiency. If that innovation uncovers an advance that ends up changing our daily lives for the benefit of the planet, then great stuff. Ethics in business conduct – yes, but profits drive innovation. In fact, as push comes to make increased use of our very rare resources (manpower included), those Web 2.0-ish tools will be used naturally as the economic benefits make them viable.

His Goreness makes tidy speech goals aimed to bearhug his Green supporters, but his vague approach says more about his belief in viability of Mammy-State Green businesses. Your Al Goreness, leave raising the consciousness of Green issues to the family and society at large. Great enterpreneurs will see promise in the problems our planet faces today. They will be the ones that will solve those problems through innovation and create value and jobs where hithertofore there was none.

So just to make your life easier, here are the phone numbers of O2′s shops on Grafton Street. Good luck getting through and I hope your call doesn’t get left on the counter like John’s and mine have.

O2 Experience Store, 87 Grafton Street, Dublin 2

• Phone: 01 670 5577
• Fax: 01 6671384/01 670 5586
• Email: expgrafton@o2retail.ie

O2, 50 Grafton Street, Dublin 2

• Phone: 01 670 5470
• Fax: 01 670 5478
• Email:grafton@o2retail.ie

And the number of the general-purpose O2 customer care rollercoaster of fun is 1850 92 30 30