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A thought about Margaret Thatcher, three legged stools and the car industry

Margaret Thatcher’s strength was as a conviction politician, driven by a belief in the qualities of self-reliance, hard work and determination. It was these qualities, applied to herself, which propelled her to success, created her appeal and defined what it is we now call Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher’s weakness was a failure to recognise that, admirable thought these qualities are, championing them in isolation is not sufficient to create the basis of a healthy society and economy.

It is currently fashionable to ask why it is that Britain, unlike Germany, no longer has a flourishing manufacturing sector, especially since right-of-centre politics in Germany, best expressed by the current Chancellor Angela Merkel, mirrors much of Thatcherite values. The reason is that socially conservative Germany, unlike socially conservative Britain, did not make Thatcher’s mistake. German leaders, such as Helmut Kohl realised that while it was a mistake for the State to control large swathes of industry, this did not mean that the State should surrender its role in entirety to a deregulated free market. Successive German governments have recognised that, even within a free market economy, government, capital and labour are three legs of the same stool. British governments, on the other hand, have seen their role as taking one side or the other in a battle between capital and labour – and no-one joined this battle more furiously than Margaret Thatcher.

We now know that you cannot simply roll-back The State, remove ‘rusting industries’ and deregulate labour and financial markets in the belief that you are thus creating a pristine space in which the virtuous qualities of individualism will flourish, drifting in on the beneficial winds of the free market. As any gardener or farmer will tell you, you can prepare a seedbed, but unless you sow it with something and then tend to it, all you will end up with is weeds.

The last 30 years have shown that if you pursue a Thatcherite approach, as admirable as its values might seem at the time, all you end up creating is a society which allows the most aggressive and self-interested to reach the top of both politics and business. A society which has a denuded sense of collective interest or responsibility, a society where everyone is compelled to be in it for themselves, a society where wealth is associated with virtue and poverty is a sin. And also a society which doesn’t have a car industry.

P.S. I know this isn’t really about social media, or social media training – but I felt compelled to throw my stone on the pile (and what is the point of having a blog if you can’t do that?)

Why social media is a dangerous concept

There is a hidden danger in the term social media.  It is dangerous because its name implies it can deliver all the benefits of media, but now with the added engagement opportunities that come with being social.  Media gives us scale, social gives us engagement – put the two together and we can now do engagement at scale.  Fantastic!

There is a problem though.  Unlike conventional media, social media does not have scale built into it and we can often forget this relatively obvious fact. Continue reading →

Truth in Twitterland

Here is a very interesting article by Alan Patrick.  It compares the Google and the Twitter windows on a current news story and proposes that the view through the Twitter window is actually more nuanced and investigative than the rather one-dimensional, or populist, view provided by Google.

This certainly chimes with my own experience.  Some while back I compared the Twitter versus tabloid media view, in relation to the Ryan Giggs / super injunction fiasco in the UK in 2011.  The conclusion I reached here was that the Twitter view was, again, much more nuanced and far less sensationalist than the view the tabloid press traditionally put out in these sort of cases.  Most people were really not that interested in Ryan Giggs love life, certainly not to the extent which might justify front page spreads.  Which is probably why many tabloid journalists are so scornful of ‘the people on Twitter’, because Twitter deflates the tabloids’ ability to titilate.

There is a further, more recent example.  Last year the BBC and its Newsnight programme got into a huge amount of hot water over the ‘naming’ of a former Tory politician, Lord McAlpine, as a paedophile at the centre of a child abuse ring.  Lord McAlpine is not a paedophile and while the BBC did not actually name him, it was inferred that his name was the one that was heading a list names that were ‘circulating on the internet’ – primarily Twitter.  McAlpine himself then went on to instigate legal proceeding against some of those people on Twitter deemed responsible.  This just goes to show how fundamentally untrustworthy and downright evil this whole Twitter-website-internet thing is – one might have thought.

Except – as this story was brewing I went and had a look ‘at Twitter’ to see exactly what was going on.  Now whilst Lord McAlpine’s name certainly came up, along with a whole list of other, frequently ludicrous, suggestions – there was another name which was much more firmly linked to much more specific allegations.  If one had looked at Twitter in the whole, you would not have reached the conclusion that Lord McAlpine was the prime suspect in this case.  I was thus astonished to see the BBC allowing McAlpine’s name to enter the frame on the basis that this was already out there on Twitter, because while some individual tweets may have been suggesting this, a consideration of the collective view of Twitter would have led one to a very different conclusion.  (I shall not name who Twitter saw as the prime suspect for obvious reasons).

Thus – the BBC effectively inferred that Lord McAlpine was the suspect – and got it wrong.  And the evil untrustworthy Twitter may not have got it right (we shall never know the truth because the powers that be have dropped this subject like a hot potato), but it didn’t get it as wrong as the BBC did.

The main point, from all of this, is that news in the social digital space, cannot be defined in an institutional way any more.  News is becoming a raw material, not a finished product and the distillation of what is truth is shifting from institutions into processes.  You can’t understand Twitter as an institution, you can only understand it as a process.  Twitter (unlike Newsnight) was not purporting to tell me that something was true or not true – it simply provided me with a process that allowed me to make my own conclusions.   And key to this process working effectively is transparency and the ability to put information in context.  It is what I call the ability to see the whole probability curve of news and where upon it, any individual bit of information sits.

And going back to Alan Patrick’s article, Twitter is much better placed to deliver against this than Google – certainly when it comes to news – because it doesn’t attempt to attach a score to a particular piece of information in order to rank it (or define its truthfulness).  Instead it allows you to see the spread of opinion and apply a probability approach.   Google’s strength is in other areas, where seeing the curve is less important.  Thus Google is good at answering question such as ‘when to prune raspberries?’ whereas Twitter is better at answering questions such as ‘is this news story really true?’

 

Public communication in the evolving media landscape: adapt or resist?

RS summary slideFor those at the EU Council / Club of Venice Public communication in the evolving media : adapt or resist? meeting in Brussels on Friday, here is my summary slide

You may also want to check out http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/richard-stacy/data-enormous-consequences_b_1233144.html

You may also want to check out http://richardstacy.com/advanced-social-media-training/

 

 

First TweetDeck now Google Reader

FireShot Screen Capture #158 - 'Official Google Reader Blog_ Powering Down Google Reader' - googlereader_blogspot_co_uk_2013_03_powering-down-google-reader_htmlGoogle is ditching Google Reader.  This is a new move for Google, because while it has a history of ‘sunseting’ various initiatives, these have generally been suns that have failed to rise very high in the sky – Wave, Buzz, Sidewiki etc. (Sidewiki? I hear you say – exactly).  Google Reader, on the other hand, was a pretty well established part of the social media firmament.

This has a couple of implications.  One, which is being much discussed, is the impact such a move has in confidence in Google’s products as a whole.  If things that work well and are popular get killed-off, how will this affect enthusiasm to get behind behind both existing and new products?

The other is that this sends a clear message as to where Google is headed – which is towards the cloud and data harvesting.  The problem, from Google’s perspective, is that Reader was a tool that helped people manage information: it yielded very little information about the people who were using it.

This is all part of what I think is a worrying trend.  The tools that help people create and manage their social media world are being sacrificed on the alter of creating cloud based mega-worlds within which people are managed (Chrome is Google’s brand name for its version of this world).  This is driven by the need, or expectation, that social media tools or platforms have to deliver a level of revenue per user that way outstrips the cost per user of providing the tool or platform.  Ultimately this view of the social media business model is unsustainable (just go back to David Ricardo’s theory of marginal costs and revenues to work this out) – but people are out to make as much money as possible before this reality kicks in.

Advanced social media training – it’s what I do

Richard Stacy Social Media TrainingI have been in the social media game now since 2006, but it is really only now that I have been able to put a finger on what it is I actually do – which is advanced social media training (click here to check this out and here to download the Infographic).

Because I always wanted to be a sole practioner, rather than create an agency, I previously described myself as a social media consultant.  Consultant is a label which sounds professional and strategic and in many ways it wasn’t a bad label because what I ended up doing largely revolved around producing strategies.

I remember one such project, which was quite a large assignment, culminating in a 3 hour session with the executive team of the organisation.  Two things really stick in my mind from this.  The first was the comment from the CEO at the end of the session.  He said, “that was fantastic.  I really enjoyed the session, except the bit where you told me my business model was going to have to change.”  The other was a comment from the marketing director, during a follow-up implementation session where she said, “the trouble with a social media strategy is that I don’t know where it stops, because I don’t know how to implement”.

I drew two conclusions from this. First, the production of a social media strategy has to be turned into a process so that an organisation can work both strategy and implementation  out for itself, rather than having something delivered.  This conclusion was strengthened when I finally realised that social media is actually much better understood as a business process, rather than a set of communications outputs.  The second conclusion was that there was no point in trying to draw a picture of how the world was going to change as a result of social media and the empowerment of consumers or customers, because embracing this is too difficult for most organisations – they have to see the flames and smell the smoke of burning business models in order to create the necessary sense of urgency.  Also, most organisations, especially the large ones, are not going to turn their businesses upside down because some upstart tells them trouble is on the way.  If McKinsey tells them trouble is on the way, that is another matter.  But even then, McKinsey would probably have to say it many times and extract many millions in consulting fees before the point strikes home.

As a result, while I still work on strategic projects, usually in cooperation with marketing or digital agencies, I dropped the idea that I provide social media strategies and shifted instead to the idea that I help design and implement a process – i.e. training.  The only problem with this is that training comes in smaller chunks, especially as I have refined my core offer down into a one-day session and it therefore requires greater volume of projects.  This is why my New Years resolution was to become more focused on promoting my training offer.  Hence a distillation of what I do in an Infographic (download and distribute widely!) some tweaks to the website (I now use WordPress.org so I can avail myself of the fabulous Yoast to optimise my posts) and a campaign where I will have to practise what I preach and get out there in the digital space within which people are asking the question, for which my training is the answer.

TweetDeck is to be killed. Why, and what wider implications might this have?

The death of TweetDeck has just been announced.  This is a shame, because it is a good tool – I use it and recommend it to others.  The decision has been explained on the TweetDeck blog but I don’t buy the reasoning here at all.  My explanation is more simple.  TweetDeck made Twitter better – but it did so in a way which Twitter (who bought it) couldn’t raise a buck from – so Twitter killed it. Continue reading →

Eurostar: good traditional customer service, poor social customer service

FailureI use Eurostar in many of my social media training sessions and presentations as an example of an organisation that (still) hasn’t really got social media.  The reason for this is that while their traditional customer care may be quite good, it hasn’t yet worked out how to do real-time customer care, using social media.

I use a couple of examples: one is an instance of lack of response to some rather poor food I was once served (see this post) and the other is in relation to a horrible delay I experienced nearly a year ago.  The issue, in both cases, is that fact that Eurostar are not doing the number one thing any organisation needs to do first in social media: listening to their customers and responding in real time. Continue reading →

Big Data: gold mine or fool’s gold?

(This was published in the print edition of Digital Age in Turkey earlier this month.  It also appeared as few days later as a Digital Age blog post – if you want to read it in Turkish!)

There is a lot of buzz about the concept of Big Data.  But it is really the potential gold mine that some are suggesting?

Back in July I was at the Marketing Week Live show in London participating in an event organised by IBM.  We were looking at data and consumer relationships within fashion retailing, using high-end women’s shoes as the example.  The big issue fashion retailers face is that everyone walking into a store is a stranger.  The sales assistants know nothing about them, other than what they can deduce from their appearance and any conversation they can then strike-up.  We therefore asked ourselves the question: how might it be possible to use data from the digital environment so that potential customers were no longer strangers?  How might we be able to create a digital relationship so that when a potential consumer walks through the door the sales assistant would be able call-up this relationship history and pull this on-line contact into an off-line sales conversation?  One of the IBM analysts put it thus, “we need to be able to identify the exact moment a potential consumer starts to think about buying a new pair of shoes, identified from conversations they have with their friends in social networks and be able to then join those conversations”.

Welcome to the world of Big Data.  In the world of Big Data it is theoretically possible to know as much about your consumers as they know about themselves: to be able to anticipate their every thought and desire and be there with an appropriate product or response.  It is a world of ultimate targeting and profiling Continue reading →