Alexander Chalkidis

Author: alexanderchalkidis

  • Selling sea weed for colored ribbons – the homeopathic communication example

    It is a Greek expression which implies someone who manages to make something terrible look good.  For profit.  Hey, isn’t that what all business is about?   Except there are those that do it better and merit our attention.   Steve Jobs, Mr “we burn Pentiums to the ground” one day, on the Intel platform the next, is a prime example.   Homeopathy is even better.

    Suppose you run an advertising agency and someone comes to you with this proposition:  “We want you to promote a service which has been around for a few centuries but has never proved it works.”   Like selling strawberry jam which contains no strawberries.   It is an extreme example which has a lot to teach us about how to spread disinformation on the internet.   (Greek articles of mine here and here contain a specific analysis of the official Greek Homeopathy website and what we can learn from charlatans.)

    1. Be vague.   Promise nirvana (a “strong” immune system, whatever that means) but never be more specific.   If you read through the Homeopathic texts they manage to convert specific symptoms into something that reads like astrology!   A bit like the whole issue of climate science, mobile phone radiation or cigarette induced cancer.   (Here my post on Machiavellian politics.)

    2. Invent an enemy. Are people worried about vaccinations?   Ride on it!  When cornered go for the conspiracy theory.   No matter that there is loads of money spent trying to prove homeopathy works (completely unsuccessfully) pretend that Big Pharma is at your throat.  (They don’t mind, the profit margins selling homeopathic remedies is even better!)

    3. Murk the waters.   This is a variation on being vague.  Especially as pertaining to evidence.   Reinterpret it freely, provide plenty proper looking bibliographical details.   Even if they are completely unrelated!  My research shows that absolutely nobody will click on them, read them or bother to understand them anyway.

    4. Go for the “middle price” approach. Just like we put a luxury item and a cheap item next to whatever we want to sell on a retail shelf.   People instinctively find it difficult to go “all the way” to one side of an argument, even if the other side is complete nonsense.  (As long as you have dressed it up sufficiently as per points 1-3 first.)

    5. Focus on anything they couldn’t really deal with anyway.  Like making Macs a closed system, ie hard to compare with the rest of the world.     Like Tinnitus (here a good article on the advertising of remedies) or anything in which your opponents have no adequate solution.

    6. Don’t get into situations where you will be publicly forced to give a concrete answer.  Don’t go on television against even a mediocre journalist who might put  “difficult” (ie self evident objections) questions.

    7. When in doubt, just lie through your teeth!   Best communicational defence is attack.   Just don’t give anyone a split second to let it sink in.  Like Bill Clinton, Mr “I did not have sex with that woman”, just throw out your best lie with conviction.   Even if you eventually get caught out, if you insist on your line, most people will follow you in the long term.

    So in effect, if you sell homeopathy, your best approach is similar to the Royal Family.  Keep a low profile, dress up fancy and stick to your guns.

     

  • Branding and social media lessons from Muhammed

    We live in a sandstorm of information.   Blogs, tweets, status updates, emails, sms and everything raining down on us.  In such a desert 1500 years ago a man worked as a merchant meeting various people of the region and listening to them carefully.  He gathered data. And then what did he do?  Inbound marketing!   He went to his cave and developed a religion.  (Through revelation for those that believe this religion, no offence taken I hope !)   In this desert storm of information, make your own oasis.   Provide good information, food for thought, entertainment for all of us tired from crossing the barren wilderness.   Design an environment where we can relax.

    And once you have the people in your oasis?  The Prophet eventually went out to preach of course!   His wife converted to his religion. Impressive!  I doubt my wife would be the first convert of anything I came up with!  His family followed.   He built a circle of followers around him, like a well seeded Facebook group.   He left Mecca when things got tough, just like a brand might drop an approach that doesn’t work.   Rebranded himself as he landed in Medina and turned to diplomacy.   Like a company looking for synergies with other partners.   Like finding “friends” in social media, early adopters in technology, allies in the politics of entrepreneurship.

    And then, before it got too stale, full scale attack!  The rate of growth of Muhammed’s doctrine is still impressive all these years later. Like a viral YouTube video, his beautiful poetry conquered.   What the verse didn’t do, his sword finished off. One simple message, one doctrine in one language.   Accepting other faiths as long as they had “a book” and paid taxes.   Like letting people post on your wall.  On one common platform for everyone like Facebook or Twitter.

    Perhaps most impressive was that the rate of expansion accelerated after he died.  A few decades after Jerusalem fell to the Arabs and the Romans lost to them.   Will Apple keep up there success rate when Steve Jobs dies? The Prophet set up a system which conquered even Persia (not conquered by the Romans or anyone else…ever!), reaching Spain and setting up massive empires.   And a cultural legacy which still affects the world in a big way.

    One man.  One brand.   One product which is in fact a simple idea.   But so many tweaks along the way…

    (Blog post inspired by a truly terrible pseudo viral campaign by Nestle in Greece for Fitness products.)

  • Using paradigms to find opportunities: how an inkjet is like a coffee machine

    “So people get this 100 euro coffee machine, but then have to pay almost double the price for the capsules?”  I love consulting because you get to play with different business problems every day.  “This sounds a bit too much like the ink jet business!”   They are selling the machines below cost to people tired of instant coffee.   Or those annoyed at the complexities of semi automatic ones.   But they are then killing them with the consumables.

    “Why don’t you make a machine that simply refills capsules?”  Technically much much easier than ink jet cartridges.   There are no electronics, it is simply a plastic cup full of coffee.  In most cases, not even under pressure or in a vacuum.   And the available selection is terrible, just 3 or 4 tastes per manufacturer.   All you need is a machine that grinds coffee and puts it in little plastic buckets with a seal on top.  You could even install these machines at…ink jet refillers.  (Techies drink a lot of coffee.)   The margins are great and the taste will be better (freshly ground coffee).  Consumer choice increased.  There are no real licensing issues.   If they can navigate around a complex machine-chemical interaction like ink jets, they can do coffee.

    It is a point that has often struck me.   The first time I met up with big wigs from the U.S. arm of InFocus projectors I asked: “why don’t you make a bespoke system of interchangeable lenses?”   I have been using Canon cameras all my life because of my lens collection.  Whether you are trying to make a monopoly or break one, it is often some peripheral which points the way.   If you have deep enough pockets, you can sponsor the transition; in times of economic crisis this is a form of lending.

    A bit like giving a capsule coffee machine as a wedding present but then selling them the capsules…

  • Facebook ads don’t add up: how I proved they are cheating

    “So why don’t you cheat?”  It took me a while to recover.   My father has always been my moral compass.   He has stood through many decades of doing business with absolute integrity refusing to bribe anyone in a country where this is unheard of.   He didn’t fall for the trap of taking funding from the European Union or going to the stock market when all other tech companies where making a quick buck.   He is almost a saint in the way he helps everyone and anyone he meets, often without them even knowing about it.

    We were discussing a recent client of mine, a difficult case.   It is still in the early phases and I haven’t quite figured out how to work my social engineering magic in order to bring them clients. What my father was really asking is “how will they know that it is real customers clicking on their website and not some click farm?”   The man is a born business person and goes straight to the heart of a problem even though he has never used Facebook or any social media.

    The answer is simple.   Anyone with a slight knowledge of how to use web site analytics will see right through it.   And – more importantly – it just won’t make any business sense medium term as they will not be getting new customers and new business.   Which is what I promise them.   But this is not what Mark Zuckerberg promises my customer when he entices them with Facebook advertising.   He is simply selling clicks to ignorant business people.

    Most of my customers have already used Facebook ads before I start with them.   They are all perplexed. “I saw a big spike in traffic but then…nothing.” It isn’t just that the traffic disappears the day you stop paying for FB ads, it is that all that traffic seems to amount to …nothing.    Are you paying $50 a day?   Funny how you get a completely stable amount of hits during those days.

    This bothered me on a methodological level initially.   “What if my customers’ budgets are all spent on ‘early morning’ type people?” I worried.   So I begun to set up experiments. I split the day into particular time segments that seemed to make sense to me based on experience with status updates, Likes and such.   I am the Greek Dan Zarella after all.     Women checking Facebook between 6.30 and 8.30 are quite a specific bunch.   Organized!   Men online between 11 and 12.30 another.   Lazy!   I have even discovered a niche of females that do a “facebook lunch break”.   So all I had to do was set up the same advertisement and shoot it out to different demographics.   And then monitor it every hour to see what is happening.   (Yes, you need big monitors to handle the big spreadsheets without getting dizzy!)

    It was amazing.   “Boy, these guys at Facebook must have some really clever algorithms” I mused.   They somehow seemed to be spreading the clicks around the day.   It made no sense.   Humans are highly unlikely to be so consistent.   As the day closed the clicks trickled and everytime by midnight Facebook had managed to get the campaign to the exact daily target.   “Wow, hiring all those geeks from Google must have paid off” I thought.    “They have build something that even Google AdWords can’t do.”

    And then, somewhere near midnight, in between stats, being more online on Facebook than I think is healthy because of this project, it appeared.   Right there, in front of me, on top of the other adverts was one of my test ads.   I left the tab open and scrambled to the summary to triple check.   Yes, this one was clearly targeted to men aged 45-64.   I double check my profile.   Yes, Facebook knows very well that I am male but only 41.  So what is it doing?

    It is bending the rules! If “The social network” showed the whole world something is that someone who cheats and lies once, will probably do it again, given the chance.    The people at Facebook know that it is extremely unlikely that anyone would discover this trick.   After all most people only have one profile.   Unless you specifically set out to prove them wrong, your website analytics will be hard to monitor for such small variance in age of visitors.   And all too many advertisers on Facebook are only using it to funnel people into their Facebook page where the analytics are even worse.

    I have criticized Facebook advertising on many levels, ranging from the pathetic demographic information they provide (outside the US it is much worse) to the kind of clicking you usually get from it.   But this is different.   They are wasting what can soon become a powerful tool by rushing to capitalize on it by cheating.   Judging from their rate of improvement in search they have the brainpower to do a proper job.   They have the network to make something more powerful than GoogleAds.   They should just focus on what is unique about this new advertising medium rather than trying to bolster up the numbers to impress investors.

    10/3/2011 Just discovered an even worse thing Facebook is doing.   There are charging above the set limit!  (Article and screen grabs in Greek here.)

  • Why the Business Software Alliance can’t sue me

    When the BSA started out, it was pretty obvious that they were making up the numbers.   Having studied statistics and living in the IT world, to me, it was painfu to watchl.  Not only were they generalising in a bad way but they were communicating too forcefully.     This is a recipe for a backlash.

    In the past week I put out a series of articles explaining why BSA Hellas has dropped in revenues this year in Greece and how they are terrible at what matters most right now; social media.   They have bought their way into mainstream (=boring + nobody notices) media references but blogs and social media are simply disregarding them.   To add insult to injury my guide with “ten things the BSA doesn’t want you to know” seems to be going viral.

    BSA has structural and communication problems.   Initially it was just a few major American software companies teaming up to clamp down on piracy.  They spent on promotion and rode on the novelty.  They lobbied hard.  In Greece Bill Gates shook hands with the prime minister and received a number of agreements behind the headlines going as far as getting civil servants in tax enforcement to work for BSA!   But on this basic level, software piracy is more like pharmaceuticals than the music industry.  Especially in times of economic crises the question will inevitably pop up:   Why should a poor country, months away from restructuring it’s debts, be paying billions of dollars to extremely profitable companies for a recipe they invented many years ago?

    Adobe or Autodesk will be hard pressed to claim they are innovating much in features that really make a difference to productivity.  They throw together teams to produce incemental improvements and then do the rounds collecting update revenue.

    BSA is also languishing in committee-itis.  They can’t catch pirates for the same reason countries around the region can’t clamp down on Somali piracy.   As more member companies joined in, it slowed down.   Less decisions, less forcefull, slower reactions.  More companies, more opinions, more objections, more need for transparency.  It is becoming clear to the public that this is more a consortium for lobbying of private interests than anything to do with the good of the economy like they tried to portray themselves when they started.   So individual members are just improvising, like Adobe’s CEO saying that cloud computing will reduce piracy.

    On a communicational level they made mistakes.  Plenty mistakes.   The scandals about piracy whistleblower payments, hyperboles about piracy encouraging violence and kidnapping, ridiculous quasiscientific generalisations about the relationship between software piracy and the economy or job losses.   Microsoft’s otherwise quite admirable PR machine overdoes it by making claims like the “fact” that Indians are quite consious about piracy.

    As the dust settles and the world focuses on getting over this crisis we could rename BSA as the Bull Shamefully Advertises… except they aren’t even advertising much anymore! It would only take a nudget in social media to position the Business Software Alliance as a first class legitimate enemy.    So please, someone from the BSA, please come after me.  I have three PCs at home more or less doing everything online with no software installed and two at work.  I think it is all legal but I am sure you can find some ridiculous way to go after me.   Maybe I don’t have the “proper” (in BSA terms) invoices or proof of purchase for one of the preinstalled software on my laptop.   You know the drill.   Maybe you expected me to do a software audit annually.  I will just wear a Tshirt saying “today I am acting as network administrator” and waste a day doing it and five days communicating with BSA members to ask if they have changed something in their terms.  (I won’t be sure I am legitimate even after all that effort – many Greek reps of software companies don’t really know how it all works.)   Or maybe I will purchase some used software just to ensure a good legal precedent.

    So please sue me.   Make my day.

  • Nokia-Microsoft. A serious case of “I told you so”

    People in the technology sector often get their predictions wrong.   Many saw a “multimedia revolution” coming back in the 80’s but few knew what it would entail.  Would we sell speakers and CD-roms, or more software and color printers?   And sure, we need a new DVD format but will it come now or in ten years?

    And there are other predictions that take guts.  Back in 2000 on my TV show I first went on record to state that Nokia has a serious long term problem.   Then in 2007 I explained it forcefully in a blog post.  “Why I would not rush to buy Nokia stocks or buy their stocks” was heresy.  My point isn’t so much that I am good at predicting technology trends but that there is a serious communication problem.   Journalists are all too often caught up in their own agendas.  Even more so in an economic crisis where they are being converted to machine cogs producing more and more content for various channels.  Journalists were never good at this game because they were never close enough to the action.    Somewhere between trade shows, closed door meetings, technology previews and actually trying to sell the stuff, people in the industry have a much much more rounded picture of what is really going on.
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    So it is people in the industry that need to learn to communicate more.  Get blogging.

  • Rebranding Iraq. On a human sized, stone stele

    ” If you’re a country at war and you’re getting gigantic amounts of bad media, basically you are stuck. That’s billions and billions of dollars in negative publicity; how can you fight against that?”  So says Simon Anhalt, country branding guru.   But he is only half right.  “Iraq” has negative publicity.   “Mesopotamia” doesn’t.   In fact, the more I look at  the Code of Hammurabi, the more I get filled with ideas of great publicity campaigns.   This is the cradle of civilization, the place that started it all.

    There are plenty reasons why branding a country is nothing like branding a product.   A pretty good summary here points out how much more complicated and long term an effort is required.   And here’s a good case study on destination branding.   But you don’t need a decade and multiparty support to change the name.  And one good, globally successful advertising campaign could redefine how the country sees itself forever.

    Iraq, I mean Mesopotamia, started it all.   A human sized stone stele in every city defined the very first set of laws, what Justinian and English law later followed.   It defined a minimum wage before unions, slave rights millenniums before Americans struggled with the idea, women’s rights and a framework for free market operation which would put a G8 gathering to shame.   Nation branding is correct to point out all the positive aspects of the situation, there is a real opportunity for this much battered part of the world.

    While Hummer jeeps still drive up the wrong side of the road in Baghdad, there’s some food for thought.

    I’m Mesopotamian and I’m proud!

  • The empty LinkedIn profile results

    By way of an experiment, I removed absolutely everything from my profile on LinkedIn. It made absolutely no difference to the number of people visiting it (20 per week on average) or the number of people clicking through to my personal website.  So at http://gr.linkedin.com/in/alexanderchalkidis you can only see a very brief description of my studies.   All my recommendations have disappeared as LinkedIn considers them “unassigned”.

    The data I have to assess the situation is limited as I refuse to pay for a premium LinkedIn subscription.   A “senior manager” or “someone in the management function” has been looking at my profile.   Quite often I can figure out who it was in relation to what I have been doing or writing.   I may have found LinkedIn extremely useful on several occasions, particularly setting up new business in a new country or region, but it is not worth paying for in order to know more.   I don’t do recruiting that often and even if I did, there are plenty other tools around.   Spending anymore time with LinkedIn other than the once a week I do now would demote it to Facebook timewasting status!   (Or Branchout – the latest of Facebook’s advertised LinkedIn killers…)

    A couple of years back I wrote that “the social media profile is a particularly bad way of making an impression” and now I just put my money where my mouth was!   I suppose for junior positions it may make sense but any headhunter worth his or her salt will find me through my 1500 contacts and what they think about the results I can bring to a business; no fancy or empty resume is of any use at this level.

  • Personal Communications Advisor: better than golf

    Yes, yet another acronym.   I am now officially a PE.C.A.   I coined the term because it is going to become a popular profession.   Not for me personally.   I only got involved and am developing the know how in order to assist corporate clients.   The problem is that the personal branding of their top brass is important.   Really important.   And they have no clue how to properly use their social media.

    Top CEO easily accessible via Facebook?   Not a good idea.   His or her personal information available?   Most high flying execs have no idea just where and how the stuff they post online might be accessible.   So, most of them avoid it all together.   Also not a good idea for many.   (Depends what business you are in and what your overall company communications plan is.)

    So, they need to be online, trendy and creating buzz but aren’t sure what exactly the latest Google, Facebook or LinkedIn policy change means.  In comes the PE.C.A.!   Setting targets, measuring results, checking what the reactions are.   Somebody has to be online to check that a storm isn’t brewing.   The CEO isn’t going to be signing in every five minutes…

    For many up and coming entrepreneurs or other business people social media is a valuable way of getting up in life in terms of connections.   I was once advised to take up golf in order to meet “the right people”.   Unfortunately it is true that many a major business deal has taken place between swings.   (And – in my experience – this nonchalance often leads to catastrophic results.)  But by projecting the right message, the CEO can get the equivelant of golfing contacts online.

    Take your best swing!

  • VISA, Google and racism

    “We would like you to confirm a transaction made yesterday in San Fransisco.”   A few years back I used to get a lot of calls from my bank.   Customers that travelled as much as me and shopped a lot online were obviously an extreme rarity in Greece.   So I had hardly hit an airport shop or finished buying something on the web and my cell phone rang…

    Their logic was algorythmic:  an individual buying a lot of stuff with a credit card in widely different parts of the world is likely to be a fraudster.  But imagine getting a call like this:   “Mr Chalkidis, we know you are an illiterate schmuck so are you sure you bought all those high brow books from Amazon today?”    It would be similar to the British banks that denied me a credit card when I landed to study in England because of my Greek decent.  (Too many Greeks before me had ran enormous bills and then skipped the country!)  

    I fought (and won) the banks then, like the European Union lawyers can fight Google now.   Racism!   Forget complex tech talk about algorythms, focus on human rights.   Google cleverly has tried to make their search contextual.   Based on past searches and other customer data.   ie hazy enough to confuse provability.   So get several brand new computers in different locations and build carricatured profiles on them.   Log what they surf and what they fill in as a profile.   Then do a web search.   Any differences in search results and you can yell “racism!” “sexism!” “nationalism!” or any other “ism” you like.

    It is easy mainly because this language of rights makes no sense really.   It is however extremely succesful in the court.   Especially if you manage to find a difference, no matter how trivial, between different races or ethnic groups; anything that affects an underpriviliged group.   If one personae has declared he or she is crippled in any way and they don’t get as many sports results for example.  

    It may sound ridiculous but imagine actually been cripple and getting a telephone call like this:  “we notice three charges for fancy running shoes on your credit card this week.   Can you please confirm them?”