Archive for September, 2010

When the new Twitter was first previewed I put down my initial thoughts on this blog post. Having had a chance to play with it and take some screen shots, I managed to confirm my concerns that:

• The new Twitter would affect delivery of brand messages and depersonalise consumer accounts
• The new Twitter would adversely affect current Twitter accounts (particularly customer service accounts) efforts at personalisation

Let me show you.

I have a close-up shot of a flower as my background on my Twitter profile currently. In the old view there is clear real-estate either side of the Twitter activity area.

In the new Twitter view the image is sufficiently diminished at the edges that you couldn’t really meaningfully say what it was.

So the profile customisation has effectively been depersonalised in terms of the background image.

Ok moving on to existing corporate accounts: I am a fan of the @vodafoneuk and @vodafoneukdeals accounts and that way that they use Twitter for customer service.

I had taken a screen shot of the old Twitter view of @vodafoneukdeals which is fine for illustrative purposes:
One the left you can see a mini-profile of each of the main participants on the @vodafoneuk accounts. This gives you a bit of a feel for the person that you would be dealing with. In contrast, on the new Twitter view their profiles are almost completely obscured:

This adversely affects the personal feel of the tweeted responses and the perceived customer empathy with the team. However I noticed one piece of silver lining from this image: it looks like the colours of the activity area can be tweaked, lighter colours provide a more translucent looking background so brand imagery on the right-hand side would appear like a watermark. So whilst brand ‘humanisation’ is diminished, brand identity can be reinforced.

Thinking about the designs of future background images and settings, using light colours for the activity area seems to make the most sense: use simple bold high contrast background images and typography with an emphasis on the right-hand side of the screen to maximise brand visibility to your audience.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Party Conference season is upon us once again and this week, to kick it off, were the Liberal Democrats who gathered for their first conference as a governing party in 90 years. How the times have changed, gone are the days of the media neglecting such an occasion and there being no real need for security. The media flocked into town, security has been stepped up, for now this great occasion offers not just senior Liberal Democrat ‘spokesmen’ but ministers and more importantly, the Deputy Prime Minister. Out of nowhere came this blast of importance, a realisation that when Nick Clegg talks, the British press should probably pay attention.

The media were baiting for a disgruntled hoard of grassroots supporters, disillusioned with the coalition, disenchanted with the Lib Dems. Unfortunately much to the displeasure of certain media outlets, this didn’t appear to happen.

They did of course get their headline when Vince Cable made an anti-capitalist speech referring to bankers as “spivs and gamblers”. This proved to be a relatively minor problem for the coalition for two reasons; Firstly because his speech contained no real embarrassing policy suggestions for the coalition and secondly, because Downing Street insisted that they approved the speech in advance.

For the Coalition, it could be described as a week of entering the unknown, when anything could have happened and more importantly, anything could have gone wrong. I imagine they will be quietly chuffed with the end result as all involved came away relatively unscathed.

For Nick Clegg, the conference was just the beginning of what was to be a busy week.

An important summit at the United Nations (UN) in New York took place this week to discuss the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Fresh from his speech at the Lib Dem Conference, the Deputy Prime Minister flew in to represent the UK on the global stage. Mr Clegg made an important speech, defending the Coalition decision to continue to invest millions into international aid.

The Deputy Prime Minister made a commitment to aim to direct 0.7% of UK Gross National Product (GNP) to international development and reiterated the importance of the MDGs to the Coalition agenda.
He said “my message to you today, from the UK Government, is this – we will keep our promises and we expect the rest of the international community to do the same”.

This was an important week for the Lib Dems as a party, and an important week for Nick Clegg. I suspect neither would ever have predicted such a meteoric rise to fame 4 or 5 months ago.

Now the spotlight moves from the Lib Dems as the Labour Party take centre stage this weekend, their first conference in opposition since 1996 and the focus will be on tomorrow (Saturday) when the new leader is unveiled. The bookies new favourite - Ed Miliband.

Baked In is different to many business and marketing books. It is written by a successful advertising creative Alex Bogusky ex-Crispin Porter + Bogusky who is an effective communicator rather than a business academic. The book is filled with anecdotes rather than quantitative research but that doesn’t mean that the concepts or messages within the book are lightweight.

On the contrary they bring a message that businesses have lost over the years - that the intrinsic nature of a product, service or delivery process is key to the marketing of that product.
This means that marketing a product can’t be done on spin or advertising smoke and mirrors but has to back to essential truth. As an a senior executive of advertising agency Bogusky worked across a surprisingly wide part of his clients business from customer service to product and process design. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

When I first started surfing the net I came across groups of sites usually on subjects like Star Trek or the works of J.R.R. Tolkein. You would land on a site and at the bottom would be a control that allowed you to move on to the previous-or-next site connected in a giant ring.
This was before search changed web surfing into something much more purpose-driven in nature. I found an example of a web ring for you connecting fans of the western TV show The Young Riders. Web rings are now largely artifacts of a simpler time online.

I was reminded of web rings when I came across a campaign by Pedigree Foods as part of their ongoing programme to encourage adoption of rescue dogs (and sell a few bags of dog meal in the process). They have developed a ‘Write a post, Help a Dog’ programme to engage bloggers in discussing rescue dogs and Pedigree Petfoods efforts. One of the key elements in this programme is something that they call a ‘blog hop’ which works in the same way as a web ring. The key difference seems to be that all the blogs are visible to each other.

This provides those involved with a greater sense of involvement, but also a denser set of interlinking which may look like spam to your friendly neighbourhood search engine. From a PR perspective it also makes the coverage generated easier to find. Pedigree Petfoods used Linky Tools to facilitate their blog hop.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

I received this captcha to complete in the midst of posting an update to Facebook, it hasn’t happened before or since.

The humorous caption is happenstance. Reposted from my personal blog.

Switched.com clued me into the story of Craig Henderson. In 1984, Henderson developed a sporty looking eco-car which required very little power to push it along and some slippery composite body work. Henderson’s car called Avion reaches back into automotive history where sport cars from the likes of Lotus and Abarth paired small engines with slippery body work to come up with decent performance.

Not surprisingly, at the time auto-makers and investors didn’t realise what they had on their hands, it was a decade since the last real oil crisis and whilst Iran and Iraq where knocking seven bells out of each other and taking pot shots at tankers in the Straits of Hormuz now-and-again life was pretty good. Environmental concerns were more about Three Mile Island, nuclear annihilation due the cold war, phosphates in rivers and the hole in the ozone layer.

Over the next quarter of a century further refinement of the car design has created a vehicle that can cruise at high-speed yet yield 80 - 100+MPG and make your average Prius look like a jelly mould. It goes to show you, that there is no such thing as a new idea, although it does remind me of the kind of thing you may have seen in Logans Run.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

The rail strike in London has come with an extreme weather warning across the country and surprise tax demands dropping across the country from HMRC. Looking at the updates the strike seems to have done a good job in shutting down much of the London Underground.

Looking at the rhetoric from the RMT and TfL I don’t think that there will be any obvious point of compromise. The RMT think that there is only a 15 per cent of a normal service going on. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.