Business as usual

I was recently asked what 'BAU' meant on some documentation I produced and had to explain how an online project took some resources away from their day job, whilst it left others to continue with their usual work.

However, this got me thinking about how web projects and all things digital have now become the standard thing to do, rather than the latest & greatest they were several years back. No longer do people raise a suspicious eyebrow when you say "I'm working on a great new website for a High Street retailer" or "We're delivering a online application that makes it easier for customers to contact a holiday company"

The web has become business as usual.

It the newspaper was a new idea

What if the newspaper didn't exist?

What if just recently someone came up with concept of printing the latest information on paper and making it available in local shops, street stalls and via subscription?

Would in succeed?
Would anyone buy it?
Would be the 'killer' analogue app?
Would anyone invest in the infrastructure to support it across towns, counties and countries?

I guess not. Which does raises the question of why the press now has the distinguished position it does..

Has Brand Measurement got any better?

A year or so ago i blogged about brand and sentiment monitoring tools I had experience of. The market back then was just starting really, but you would have hoped that things would have moved on somewhat and products would have matured (atleast a bit)

A recent piece of research (from Insight Express) has found that:

“Other than the economy, brand measurement is the single biggest obstacle
holding back the growth of online advertising.”

So I asked a few large company contacts recently what they were doing about brand measurement and most said "err... nothing really" or words to that effect. Now, I undertsand that this wasn't a representative sample of the entire UK business world, but given that some of these people were at least considering brand buzz monitoring tools or services last year., I do have to ask...

Has Brand measurement got any better?

Symbian joins the application goldrush

Making a very late entry into the mobile applications market comes Symbian.

The operating system for almost 50% of the smartphones around the world has had a development platform (called Horizon) in Alpha release for a while now, but this has now moved into Beta and they are encouraging developers to sign-up and build apps.
http://developer.symbian.org/main/horizon/faq/index.php

This move means that a significant proportion of Nokia phones which use the Symbian OS will now be able to have the same sort of functionality that devices such as the Apple iPhone have had for ages. In fact, Apple announced only earlier this week that its own App Store has had 1.5 billion downloads in the last year.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2350194,00.asp

Has Symbian arrived too late to the party?

Don't index my newspaper site

I've been following the growing fight by some newspapers against Google indexing their site. They are angry that google spiders them & gets their traffic.

However now Google has responded by politely re-stating the very simple way any site can stop all search engines indexing them, by using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).

Could it be that newspapers don't actually want Google to stop providing their content, they just want a share of Google's revenue? Perhaps.

Business Week to be sold?

Keith Fox said today “We all know that the media industry is facing unprecedented challenges. The growth of digital innovation has created new entrants, new challenges and entirely new business models for media companies."

Apparently it is considering it's "strategic options"

Blogging from my iPhone

I've started blogging today from my mobile. It's actually a strange feeling to blog from my mobile device, when the most I've done before is tweet http://twitter.com/haydens30

For me it blurs the line between personal life streaming and my blog, which is for me the intersection between my business and my private life & opinions.

Therefore expect shorter (as it's harder to type on my iPhone) and more personal postings in the future.

Viral feedback

I've read and re-read the article 'The Age of Viral Feedback' by Umair Haque at Harvard Business.

Here he asks how companies are feeding the system to generate the correct feedback in today's modern connected world.

So here's a fundamental question every decision-maker should ask: what are you feeding feedback with? The same old toxic industrial era junk? Or stuff that makes people, communities, and society better? Are you feeding viral effects with stuff that enriches, or stuff that impoverishes?

My thoughts are that a lot of companies still haven't learnt to listen yet, let alone deal with the feedback. What do I mean by this? Well a lot of them are still living by the 20th Century method of communication (e.g. focus on the message and ignore the feedback, hoping that the signal-to-noise ration you can generate is greater than those who are complaining).

But this works less and less in a world where news isn't just around until people eat their chips*, it now stays out in the public domain far longer! Today (negative & positve) feedback can have a greater and longer-lasting effect of the brand and finances of an organisation than ever before. Blogs stay written, reviews link to products for their lifetime and customer support forums keep the postings of their members far longer than the problem persists.

So, has feedback (or links from feedback) become the longer lasting currency of the new economy?

*This is a reference to when people used to eat their fish & chips off of newspaper, before they started printing them with water-soluble inks. However, I'm sure the inks back then used toxic substances, but it doesn't seem to have done anyone any harm right?

Has Internet Journalism finally become mainstream

Iran has been subject to scrutiny, not just from Western Governments but by new media (as well as its mainstream counterpart). Everyone's favourite UK inquisitor asks Arianna Huffington about using unverified news sources versus traditional journalism.

I love this clip because it seems the concept of crowdsourcing news (posting then correcting, not correcting then posting) is lost on Mr Paxman and Ms Elvoy of London's Evening Standard newspaper.

Yes, unverified news should not be knowingly published, but if taking time to verify it would delay this news being distributed (and potentially not keep those most affected updated about things), then as long as the unverified news source is disclosed as this.... then to the reader beware!