Whatever...

One nation under a brand

By Joe Banks

There was a great story in The Guardian last Saturday, which I’ve been mulling over all week.  Simon Anholt, an ‘expert in the field of image makeovers for nation-states’, had managed to convince representatives from 65 countries to attend an event on the topic of ‘nation branding’.

While many people were no doubt sent into a spin by this latest example of diabolical PR chicanery, I actually thought it had a very valid point to make – that is, whether nations like it or not, people around the world tend to have pre-conceived notions about what other countries are like and how their citizens behave.  Their ‘brand values’, if you like…

Depressingly enough, and despite the best efforts of the ‘Cool Britannia’ brigade a few years ago, Anholt said that the UK is still generally regarded as class-ridden, boring and old-fashioned.  Hard to believe, I know…  However, the article also touched on how certain perceptions can affect countries looking to attract technology-based investment or develop a more tech-savvy culture.

For instance, Scotland’s branding by its own tourist board as ‘a place of emptiness and wildness (except for) a thatched pub with some yokels inside drinking whisky’ was fine for attracting hardy holidaymakers with an interest in hiking and alcohol, but according to Anholt, “it's no good if you're trying to persuade Samsung to build their next factory there.”

Similarly, ‘the man from Madrid… glumly noted that a reputation for siestas and all-night parties was not exactly helping promote the Spanish technology sector.’

This inevitably got me thinking about whether these national brand values affect the way in which technology itself is bought and consumed.  The UK has been the source of some of the most far-reaching technological inventions in the past 25 years (from the World Wide Web to the iPod), but still we seem to get labelled as, at best, quirky inventors, at worst, fusty academics unable to ‘productise’ our ideas.  Along with a culture that isn’t always kind to the entrepreneurial spirit, is this one of the reasons why businesses often seem unwilling to buy British technology?

However, perhaps a bigger question than this (and one I’m genuinely interested to hear some answers to) is whether the ‘re-branding’ of the US since 9/11 has affected this tech superpower’s ability to sell products – particularly B2B technology - in the global market?  Certain countries in Europe (hello France) have always been resistant to the perceived march of Americanisation, but how have such issues as Iraq and global warming impacted on US companies trying to sell their wares abroad?

For the time being, the answer is maybe not at all – but as China and India etc continue to grow their indigenous technology industries, will the US need to seriously reappraise its increasingly isolationist brand values in order to help Silicon Valley et al continue to compete on the world stage?

Acer - now you're in trouble...

By Mike King

I’m currently in the middle of something that I can’t quite believe is happening.  In today’s brand savvy, socially networked, Web 2.0 world, you wouldn’t think that any company – let alone a PC manufacturer – imagines it can get away with treating its customers like dirt.  But that’s exactly what Acer is currently doing to my daughter…

Let me explain.  Last month, my 17 year old daughter bought a new Acer laptop from www.acernotebooks.co.uk.  Within one hour of switching on her new notebook, the keyboard packed up and the screen stopped working.  She was pretty upset, particularly as it had taken her two months to save up from her Saturday job to buy it. 

She called Acer.  They agreed to repair it and sent a courier to pick it up.  After a week, she chased them – at which point, they said she’d have to pay over 400 pounds (that’s only 50 quid less than it cost to buy in the first place) to repair the faulty laptop.  Remember, this is a brand new Acer laptop that she had used for just one hour.

The strange thing is they've sent through a repair estimate (that laughably they’re expecting her to sign to authorise the repair!) that confirms the fault exactly as she described it when she first called them – but Acer now claims that a ‘mark’ has apparently appeared on the laptop, and has conveniently concluded that it must have been damaged.  However, seeing as there was no mark on it when it left our house, this alleged damage has either happened in transit back to them or at their end. 

My daughter’s got onto the Office of Fair Trading and they say she is clearly entitled to a replacement, free repair or refund.   But of course, Acer is still trying to fob her off. 

What is the matter with this company?  They’ve sold a faulty unit and are legally obliged to sort it out.  There is simply no doubt or debate about it. 

So, curious about Acer’s track record, I did a quick search – and unfortunately, it seems like this is a common ploy.  On the PC Review forum, for example, there is an Acer thread complaining about poor support that runs to 27 pages.

Acer is clearly a company with some serious problems in the areas of product quality, customer support and meeting its legal obligations.  But just how long does it think it can get away with this behaviour? 

The internet has taken ‘people power’ to a whole new level of influence – and when unhappy consumers make their voices heard online, companies have to take them seriously or suffer the consequences. 

The 1.65 Billion Dollar Question

By Richard Scarlett

I used to have a very low opinion of the so-called ‘MySpace’ generation and their websites littered with grainy, user-generated content.  Just a channel for socially inept teenagers and/or geeks of a certain age parading often intimate details of their lives before an audience of 'virtual' friends. Or so I thought…

Well, sitting here writing my latest blog, clearly my opinion has changed.

The question that I’m now asking myself is does ‘Web 2.0’ signal a depletion or development of our social skills?  I mean nowadays, it’s often a case of “I’ll meet you online,” rather than “meet you in the bar,” and popularity is increasingly measured by how many hits, comments or linked-in friends one manages to accumulate. 

My own take on it is that people are migrating towards personal page creation and uploading videos in a reflection of our “fifteen minutes of fame” era of Big Brother, I’m A Celebrity… and Strictly Natasha Kaplinsky.  Everybody seems to want a piece of the action and everybody seems to love the attention – just check out all those users with numerous profile pages or a catalogue of personal videos to rival Universal Pictures.

No wonder then, with millions of profiles and videos viewed each day, that new media players such as Google et al are writing billion dollar cheques and talking about the massive financial potential of sites such as YouTube.  But the question remains:

How do you actually convert this latest craze into a money-spinning cash cow?

Advertising revenue would seem to be the obvious solution , but when you’re dealing with a community of headstrong, cynical users who are a) used to getting something for nothing and b) have no intention of paying subscriptions or viewing adverts that they didn’t request (hence the current popularity of Sky Plus and Tivo), this will be no simple task.

One social networking icon about to dip its toes into the murky pool of advertising is Second Life.  As a broadband TV service is launched within this strange little world, users can pick and choose Sky-type viewing packages and let their virtual alter ego while away the hours vegging out on their pixelated sofas.  The idea is that viewers watch programmes in a ‘branded environment’ that allows for unobtrusive, ‘ambient’ advertising…

(However, I find myself wondering exactly what kind of person would be prepared to pay real money for a digital replica of themselves to watch a TV within a computer screen in a synthetic parallel universe.  Anybody…?)

Still, I’m sure that Google - having followed the example of Rupert Murdoch and thrown a little pocket change into this fresh market - will find a way to crack those social freeloaders and reap the benefits of its YouTube investment.

Even if it does mean shrewdly gathering and selling the information provided at each video upload by the unsuspecting user – who is too busy storyboarding their next masterpiece to notice anyway…

The new networking – I’ll get my sleeping bag…

By Laura Cooper

During the last .com boom, ‘networking’ was one of the buzz words, being both a signifier of the newly-connected times and a popular way to ‘share’ knowledge, information and resources between companies and individuals.  However, more often than not, networking events just ended up becoming a front for marketing personnel to ‘sell-in’ their services/flaunt their egos, with no real strategic partnerships being formed. 

Michael Parsons, writing in The Times, sums it up nicely when he describes these events as bringing together a bunch of “badly dressed people with business cards to exchange lies about their website readership and drink a lot of nasty white wine”.

Parsons goes on to sing the praises of the Web 2.0 era, where like-minded people can exchange ideas and opinions in ‘cyberspace’ instead of conference space.  This has opened the doors to the kind of networking that social events in the eighties often failed to achieve – sharing the intelligence and resources of those people who really have a passion for the businesses in which their expertise lies.  It almost goes without saying that the people whose job it is to be at the cutting edge of technology trends ie. CTOs, developers, IT managers, are often heavily involved in social networking online.

The problem is, a lot of this discussion goes on in breezy online web chats left completely unsupervised, meaning that the outcome of these influential meetings of minds often remain archived away in the depths of the internet where even Google can’t reach.

As such, we’re now seeing the rise of a new form of face to face networking – the BarCamp. It’s a new wave of unconferencing - and it is every tech geek’s dream.

Basically, the BarCamp concept evolved from a Open Space Technology process in which the content of a conference is decided by the participants during the event, rather than by an outside organiser. The idea behind this is the ‘law of two feet’ – a foot in passion and a foot in responsibility – meaning that those who have the interest drive the sessions, in a spur of the moment and spontaneous manner.

BarCamps follow this principle to the letter.  Held all around the world, these events are open to all, but are designed to encourage key influencers from a particular industry to attend. Instead of an entrance fee, each participant is asked to run their own seminar on a topic of their choice. Their name and the title of the seminar they are leading is then placed up on a board against a particular time and area. Held in relaxed settings, delegates are then open to attend the sessions they are interested in, which are often very laid-back presentations or informal discussion forums.

At the end of the day, the group is then brought together, with a beer and a pizza to share what they have learnt that day and discuss on a wider platform the way their industry is going and how it may evolve in the future. Quite often these discussions - driven by the passion and interest of those who are in attendance - have gone on late into the night and organisers quickly took to writing ‘can bring a sleeping bag’ on the invites – hence the name BarCamps.

The overwhelming popularity of these unconferences has often been attributed to the ‘free flow’ nature and open forum style of their approach. This type of event brings the benefits of social networking online together with the advantages of face-to-face contact with key influencers – without the expense and formality of other conferencing techniques. They are on the rise in the tech sector, and I’m sure we’ll see the BarCamp format being adapted for a variety of other industries in the future.

We protect your data (by getting rid of it)

By Mike King

It seems like we’re always hearing about the huge pressures that increased regulatory compliance has placed on business, none more so than in the financial services sector.  The requirement to not only keep records, but also be able to retrieve information quickly and efficiently, have meant huge changes to IT systems and working practices. 

However, it would appear that these changes are not quite as far reaching as I thought…

Yesterday I received a bizarre letter from my bank’s ‘Personal Banking Customer Services Centre’ (call centre to you and me). The letter, addressed to both myself and my wife, said that the bank hadn’t acted upon ‘our correspondence dated October 2006’ because it had been ‘unable to verify your signature against our records’.

Now, for a start, as a long term customer of this bank (we’ve been with them for more than 15 years, both personally and through our business), there is no way on earth that our signatures shouldn’t match their records.

But worse of all, and the real crux of my problem, there hasn't been any correspondence from us to our bank in the last few months relating to our account.  None at all. 

So, I rang the call centre on the number quoted in the letter to find out what this is all about.  After the customary automated list of 17 irrelevant options, I eventually got through to a live person.   

Although she was very nice, she was unable to help in any way.  She confirmed that the letter related to our joint personal account and was issued in response to a supposed written request from us. However, she couldn't tell me what our correspondence related to nor when it was dated.  Apparently, my bank keeps no record of such correspondence.

Of course, having never written to them in the first place, we're concerned.  More so after discovering that our bank doesn’t keep any record of written correspondence, real or imaginary, that it receives from its customers.  Is this the Data Protection Act gone mad? Or an over-enthusiastic recycling policy perhaps?

But what about in cases of attempted fraud? Surely having an actual record of correspondence might be a good idea…

There can’t be many organisations that write to their customers to say they can’t comply with their written request, only to then admit that it’s unable to remember what that request was.  Maybe the reason why banks complain so much about over-regulation is because they’re already struggling to cope with what sounds like institutional senility.

Invasion of the ID snatchers

By Flora Haslam

Having just moved house and inherited an apparently endless supply of the former occupants' utility bills and bank statements (in among the deluge of offers for credit, insurance and the best curry in South London), I've started thinking more about the problems of ID theft. 

There's plenty of scare stories about people who've found - often too late - that their identities have been stolen and thousands of pounds of debt racked up - for example, in the UK, we're currently in the midst of National Identity Fraud Prevention Week, yet another initiative telling us we should all be shredding our bills and locking up our important documents.  And that's before we've even thought about what we need to do to protect our identities online (though I'm still amazed by the number of people who click on phishing emails to update bank details for organisations they've never even banked with).

But it’s not just consumers.  Tackling ID fraud, and simply managing identities, is also becoming a big problem in the business world.  A recent survey from the Institute of Directors revealed that ID theft cost UK businesses an estimated £50million last year alone and if companies fail to take action, this figure is set to increase to £700m by 2020.

Traditional processes for managing people and identities in the office environment are becoming obsolete as new platforms, systems, databases and applications are continually added.  Just remembering to delete ex-employees from the system and change passwords regularly can seem like a mammoth task.  With the growing number of web users in so many organisations, it has become increasingly difficult for IT staff to keep track of who should have access to what - and when. 

Just as with corporate email usage, organisations should have formal policies in place to ensure that both staff and the company as a whole are following best ID protection practice.  For example, documents are stored and disposed of appropriately, users only have access to the information they need, and everybody is following safe computing rules to minimise the risk of key-logging Trojans infiltrating the corporate network. 

The ingenuity displayed by data thieves means that identity management is never going to be easy - but the financial implications for companies that don't take it seriously can be huge, so it's vital that this issue is seriously addressed now. 

Poor online service is forcing me back onto the streets

By Tom Kirkham

A few months back, Kathryn gave us a cautionary tale about self-service on the web.   Well, according to Transversal, online customer service has hit a new low, with customers of telcos often waiting up to 52 hours just for a response to their emails.

Reading this made me recall a problem I encountered recently while shopping online.  Using the ‘search for your address’ function on a website, I typed in my post code and house number, only for the Highgate branch of 'PetSmile' to appear on the screen.  As I don't currently live in a pet shop, I made repeated attempts to re-enter the information - to no avail - before searching in vain for a manual input option.  The only method of contacting the company was a formulaic customer comment form… at which point I decided to head into town to buy the item in person instead. 

So why didn’t I complain? Well, because frankly, comment forms like these often seem designed purely to stop you from ever getting hold of an actual real-time customer service human being.  In the case of one hugely successful e-commerce website, I was once sent an email directing me to the online help page, which advised me to call a support line, which put me through five minutes of speech recognition software, before finally referring me to my original email!

The internet has by and large made shopping far more convenient, but it still suffers from the disadvantage that, unlike the high street, you don't receive the things you order straight away (or in my case, sometimes at all).  In order to give customers a compelling reason to wait that little bit longer, high quality customer service has to be top of the agenda. 

Yes, automated systems can improve many online procedures, but if you remove the human element entirely, you're taking a big risk - and according to E-Consultancy, 80 percent of UK consumers are less likely to return to a site after just one frustrating shopping experience.

The answer is flexibility - give customers more contact options, while still retaining the convenience.  For instance, Orbitz has just announced that it is trialling a live instant messaging facility for anyone experiencing problems booking online.  The majority of businesses recognise that technology can reduce overheads - but it must be used in a way that empowers both customers and service reps, rather than making one want to strangle the other by the time they eventually make contact.

Why Web 2.0 isn’t ‘Dot Com – The Sequel'

By Joe Banks

First it was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation buying social networking site MySpace, and now it’s search behemoth Google stumping up £880m for video sharing phenomenon YouTube.  The message is clear – big business is taking Web 2.0 very seriously indeed.

In fact, some commentators have opined that these companies are jumping on the ‘new’ new media bandwagon with unseemly haste, pointing out that neither MySpace or YouTube are making a profit, and that there’s no obvious business model to generate revenues in the future.

So, is this just the latest internet bubble, destined to burst messily in a couple of years’ time with red faces on one side and jeers of ‘we told you so’ on the other?

Somehow, I don’t think so.  There may be no defined business model yet (though the growing power of online advertising shouldn’t be underestimated here), but traditional media companies have finally worked out which way the wind’s blowing – hours before the deal with Google was signed, Universal Music, Sony BMG and CBS all agreed to officially license content to YouTube, whereas only months before they were threatening legal action for copyright infringement.

Contrast this with what happened a few years ago to Napster (neutered to the point of irrelevance), and you can see that the online world – and crucially the way it is viewed by ‘old media’ – has changed significantly.  Whether they like it or not, old media has had the good sense not to kill Web 2.0 at birth, having recognised that sites such as YouTube are providing something popular that they aren’t.  Google has certainly recognised this, which must have been a particularly bitter pill for them to swallow when you consider the failure of Google’s own video search service.

The point is that, while Web 2.0 standard bearers such as YouTube and MySpace might be the ‘new thing’, they’re clearly no longer operating in an immature market.   The original dot com crash happened because it was an imaginary economy talked up by the nascent online industry itself, rather than being driven by users and consumers.  In other words, the demand was for the most part illusory.  This is not the case with Web 2.0 – just look how quickly these sites have gone overground, with numerous articles about them already in the tabloids, broadsheets and Sunday supplements. 

There might have been sharp intakes of breath in some quarters when they saw the price that Google had paid for YouTube – but with traditional media being forced to embrace new delivery mechanisms as viewing/listening habits continue to fragment, this might still turn out to be a comparative snip. 

(As a footnote to this story, here’s another perspective on the valuation of Web 2.0 companies…)

Virtual school or virtual insanity*?

By Claire Gibson

Following Tom’s last post on ‘Whatever…’, and the debate that generated, I felt the need to put my fifty pence-worth in re the issue of bullying and technology.

An enterprising couple have come up with the idea of a virtual school, where pupils log on at 9.00am and chat to their classmates in the ‘school hall’, before starting lessons at 9.30am and finishing at 2.00pm.  I’m not going to allude (not much anyway) to the strangeness of these hours and compare them to my own school days, or even pay much attention to the four-day week...  No, the really disturbing thing for me is the complete lack of social or emotional effort required from the pupils.

One of the school’s founders, Ms Jayran, states that the school could be an alternative for pupils who have been bullied and need their confidence rebuilding. 

Now, I don’t know many people who haven’t at some point in their lives had an experience of bullying, and I’m also not of the camp that suggests bullying is ‘just part of life’, and in fact some sort of character-building rite of passage...  However, what I absolutely do not believe in is removing a child from this sort of situation and ‘rebuilding his/her confidence’ by offering a sterile and isolated alternative such as this, which appears to be more of a hiding place than a practical solution to the difficulties he or she has faced. The article claims also that the proposed introduction of microphones and webcams was resisted, because the students prefer to work just via the anonymity of text. 

Surely all this does is provide a cotton wool bubble, in which children grow up in seclusion - protected from bullying, but also strangers to the stimulating, if sometimes anxious, experience of growing up in a school environment.  How about never knowing the security of being able to say something stupid in a group of mates and laugh at yourself, without assuming that you’re being ridiculed or ‘bullied’?  It may sound extreme, but it’s perfectly plausible if emotional interaction is allowed to drop by the wayside.  Personally, I find it incredibly sad.

As for Ms Jayran’s comment that the school ‘puts [the children] in charge’ - well frankly, that’s just scary.

*Claire would like to point out that this title in no way condones the music of Jamiroquai

Guest blog – “More technobabble with your vol-au-vent, sir?”

As well as being a platform for JKers to rant, ruminate and reflect on the worlds of technology and PR, 'Whatever...' will periodically be running guest blogs from friends who live beyond the (fire)walls of Johnson King Towers.

Here's Phil Muncaster, senior reporter at IT Week, on life in the fast lane of tech journalism…

I used to think that as a technology journalist par excellence, the crème de la crème, number one with a bullet etc etc, I would therefore be invited to the best of the best parties on the London social scene.  Or at the very least rub shoulders with minor TV celebrities, has-beens and never-wills.

But no. Eventually you come to realise the sad fact that, as an IT hack, you are a few hundred places below Tourette's-afflicted Pete and clinically insane Nikki on the list of zeitgeist opinion-formers today.

Usually this isn’t a problem - over the years, one of the skills a successful IT journalist comes to acquire is the art of kidding yourself that free house beer, the roughest plonk and as much mineral water as you can physically stomach - all consumed in the delightful setting of a musty function room above a pub - is where it's at.

But then every so often an event comes along which dangles a cruel and glamorous carrot in front of you, involving a private members' club, bucketloads of champagne and, quite possibly, the close proximity of some celebs.

The other week, it was the launch party for .mobi at a secret location  in London's bustling Soho district, where we were located directly beneath a party for Gordon Ramsay and his missus, who was launching her new book. No doubt they were accompanied by an entourage of celebrity hangers-on, and allegedly Posh-Beckham-Victoria-Spice sans David.  Oh, and Jeremy Clarkson.

So near and yet so far - right venue, wrong floor!

What is most head-smackingly frustrating about this is you get to peek through the looking glass for just a second, before being yanked back unceremoniously, and once again cruelly forced to make small  talk about business cases, technical specifications and deployment strategies.

That said, most of the PR girls were canny enough not to stay put for long.  Up the stairs they quickly trundled without so much as a bye or leave, off to press the flesh and kiss the air with the great and good - and Jeremy Clarkson.

After exchanging risqué banter with Ramsay and nabbing a few copies of the free book, back they came to gloat. And found me trying to listen politely to technobabble while simultaneously catching the barman's eye, eating a miniature Thai green curry, and working out whether I'd make the last bus home.

Rock ‘n’ roll it ain't, baby*.

* Come on, Phil, we’ve seen that picture of you and the Hoff on your blog…