Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Business

  • No Zuckerberg, I don’t think we will ever trust you

    Facebook wants us to trust it.  Zuckerberg says they need to change their hacker mentality.  Stop taking advantage of users and start seeing our point of view.  It’s not going to happen.  And he isn’t putting his money where his mouth is.   Facebook is still essentially the same scammy way of thinking he had from the day he ripped off the idea from others and rushed to do it first.

    It is also about how businesses react to pressure.  Google is a fine example.   They do the philantthropy angle much more convincingly.  They did from day one.   Purple cow, Project X or anything else you want to call it, they made it part of their branding all along.

    But there is more to it;  the whole social network idea is simply not the right message.   Don’t look at youngsters leaving Facebook.  Look at Google starting to phase out the Google Plus logging from other sites.  Why?  Not because Google plus failed.  Because a Google identity either from Gmail or from an Android phone is pretty ubiquitous.  And serious.   Nobody will blink if you tell them you have Gmail.  Tell them you use Facebook and it takes a bit of explanation:  what, how, when, why.

    Social networking is not a core life activity.  Communicating is.   Facebook made it’s mission (along the way) sharing the things you care about with the world.  Well, Facebook is not the best way of doing that, is it?  Windows dressing, slogans and reacting to market research won’t save Facebook unless it really, really changes its actions before its words.

  • Book review: selling products to atheists

    Do you know any openly atheist politicians?  We have had openly gay ones for some time now.  Even a black president.  Yet, despite the fact that atheism is probably one of the major global trends to watch in 2013, atheism isn’t selling much other than itself.  This insightful book helps you open up the opportunities for any brand or product to this excited and exciting new market.   No, it’s not just for sellers of cheesy videos, candles or other “traditional” religious products.  This major shift is changing marketing for every product.

    “How to sell to the Godless generation: the critical thinking obstacle” is an excellent handbook for anyone in sales and marketing interested in finding a new communication channel to brand new customers.   Here’s the book’s anatomy in brief:

    Chapters 1 & 2 don’t waste too much time going over the “why faith died” timeline.  This has been done pretty well before.   We have read about religion as an economic activity or from a branding perspective.  Here the author puts it all together succinctly for anyone who hasn’t read “Acts of faith”, “Selling God” or “Faith no more”.  This is because he uses the perspective of “what’s in it for me?” angle.   Were you making money selling faith or on the back of religious ideas?  Probably not.

    Chapter 3 then proceeds to give you a kick in the butt!  Just in case you fell in the trap of simply agreeing with yourself and not really shaking up your thinking enough, the author really dives into why religion sells in the first place.  It is all too easy to make fun of Christian diets, or bumper stickers without deeply feeling the human need they are fulfilling.  Everyday habits are massive opportunities but also very hard to change.

    Chapter 4 continues peeling away layers of understanding by dissecting many examples of faith products and what opportunities they are leaving behind as they subside.  Who is going to be the new TV evangelist?  If they aren’t buying Tshirts that write “I love Jesus” what will they buy?  The Tshirt argument is actually where the book really starts because so far atheism has only really sold witty slogans.

    Chapter 5 retrospectively pays due to the author’s real idols, the religious and business leaders that used religion in the past centuries to sell.  They followed popular culture in order to sell religion and they used religion to sell products.  The “sneaky beaky” marketing, or what the author calls “social engineering” (don’t confuse it with what hackers use the term for) on a grand scale and with a long term view.  World changing stuff.   Which is why the books reaches it’s dizzying climax here with…

    …chapter 6 where we are inundated with ideas!  “If you were the CEO of General Motors, here’s what you need to do” followed by “and if you are the guy at the corner shop, here’s what it means for you.”  The collapse of religion, as with every major societal shift opens huge opportunities.  The closing chapter is a ray of happy hope in a financially depressed world and you are all too likely to drop the book here and run out to start a new business venture.

    Which would be a shame for two reasons.  One is that chapter 7 has some serious words of caution.  Human beings have eschewed critical thinking for most of their history; this is unlikely to change now.  And – more importantly – the author closes with the real ethical and moral underpinnings of a world without religion.  We aren’t out to game the system just to make money.  A world with more atheist products will actually be a much better world.

    P.S.  This book doesn’t exist.  I doubt I will find time to write it.  However like all good consultants I throw my ideas out to the world.  If any of you reading this actually get around to writing it some day, please let me know, I can probably help you sell it…

     

  • Apple Silli and Google Creepy

    I have been accused of being a “Google basher”.  This is rather unfair.  It would be hypocritical to use so many of their products and complain.    Google Now might well be called “Google Creepy”.  It draws on my email, calendar, gps, web searches and many many other bits of information I voluntarily hand over to them everyday.   And it gives me better advice.  It knows what I am really looking for.

    Anyway you look at it, when you conduct a web search it is well worth sitting back and thinking about it:  “You have just got relevant information from the sum total of human data available on a vast international network in 0.8 seconds“.  That’s not quite how it says it at the bottom of every Google search, but it sure could boast if it wanted to.  Nothing comes close.

    Which of course is why Apple bought Cue.  A desperate effort to get Siri slightly more intelligent by using what little social context you are willing to give it plus access to your mailbox.  Much like Apple’s humbling experience with maps, the point is to buy in some  know how.  Just enough new features for them to talk about at the next iPhone or iOs launch.  Enough to keep the fans happy.  But nowhere near as much substance as Google Now.

    What this approach to customization is effectively doing is making it even harder to monitor what Apple and Google are doing with our data.  Like the Hummingbird changes to Google search, they are introducing an even bigger “not provided” category in Google Analytics.  You will not know how visitors got to your website as it is not a simple matter of keywords anymore.  It might be because Google Now algorithmically guessed really well, or it might be influenced by an Ad campaign or it might even be the NSA giving Google instructions to get you to land on a website.   We simply won’t know and there will be no way to reverse engineer it easily either.

    So no, I’m not Google bashing.  I am in awe of the company’s ability to walk that fine line.  They persuade us that what they offer is so useful that it really is worth handing over personal data for it.     But Apple?  What exactly are they offering?

  • Klout sucks. And I have the influence to persuade you that it does!

    If you don’t know www.klout.com you are probably not really into social media.  Or advertising.   Or influence measurement.  It is meant to measure how much you influence people.  And about a year ago they changed their algorithm.  It was meant to get better.  But it didn’t.

    But how do I know that it got worse?

    Well, for starters I noticed that my Klout score changed.  Since I didn’t change anything dramatic on my personal social media accounts it was obviously them.   A little fishing around showed that Facebook had been seriously upgraded in terms of weighting and Twitter downplayed.  This was counter-intuitive.  It still seems silly.    Surely a more public domain like Twitter where people aren’t obliged to “like” something simply because you know them is more objective a measure?  And retweeting is generally a much weightier backing of a though than Facebook sharing.  There is much less pressure to stay attached to an account on Twitter, you can unfollow fairly easily.

    So how can I measure how “wrong” I think Klout is?  (Let alone that Facebook paid them to rig their metrics.)  Remember, this is a measurement that many other businesses rely on.  Many media monitoring tools have it on the x axis of “social media influencers”.  You want to know who is talking about  your brand or business and matters?  Eh, well, it might be based on something which doesn’t work too well any more.

    There were two ways for me to look into this.   One was using different accounts.   I have access to a lot of Facebook and Twitter profiles.  I experimented with older accounts (many with 5000 “friends” or 2-3000 followers).  With Klout you can associate your Klout to any combination you want.   So I would start off with one Facebook account.  Let it settle down….Klout of 55.   Associate a Twitter account….Klout goes up to 56.  Ahem…..  Unlink the Facebook account.  Measure again.  Link a different Facebook account.   Klout doesn’t seem to mind because obviously it wasn’t designed for data maniacs like me trying to reverse engineer it.

    The other way was to get people I know well to join Klout.   People whose Facebook or Twitter habits I understand in depth.  And this is were the current Klout algorithm lost any respect I had for it.   It is fairly easy to increase the level of interaction a real user with a real Facebook profile has with his Facebook friends.   Facebook hasn’t addressed this issue so much because they are too busy focusing on Pages and Promoted Posts and all that.   So friends who are active on Facebook, especially when they are photo heavy in their posts, can get ridiculously high Klout scores right from the start.

    There is another reason I assume that Klout have got it wrong:  people are too scared to tell them!  “What if they see this post and downgrade my score?”   Oh no!  Nobody will take me seriously anymore!….

    Influence measurement is serious business.   If a fake Facebook account which simply reposts stuff, or a friend who is just a decent photographer can easily hit a Klout of 65, it is probably time for somebody to take it a bit more seriously.  Or just come out and announce it officially that Facebook is funding Klout.

  • MotoX heralds a very quiet revolution

    People talk about Google being increasingly being a “hardware company” but they are missing the point.  It’s not about fancy gadgets, not about whether the Nexus has a better screen than an iPhone and definately not about the MotoX stealing market share.  It’s not even about Google knowing the next worldwide development through some fancy algorythm which crunches all our searches, emails and map data.

    It’s about processing power.

    No, not the CPU or GPU processing power.   Intel would be all over that, guessing when the CPU will be X times more powerful and all that. No, it’s about Google knowing how much stuff Google can process.   Today.   The feature of the MotoX that gave them away was voice recognition.

    Do you use Instant Upload or the iCloud to store pictures?  It is wonderful technology, just humming away in the background.  Yet after all this time using it, if you ask me “what were you doing on the 7th of October two years ago?” I can now tell you.  Because my phone has by all chances uploaded a picture from that day.  It might have been the kids, or a funny sign, or the fridge I promised to move for a friend for reference (to see if it will fit through the door) but chances are, I have a picture from that date that will help me remember.

    I have long held that our smartphones should constantly record what we are talking about.  It would be legal (as long as it only recorded your own voice) and it would be damn useful.  Imagine using the speed of Google instant search to find when you said what.   That conversation your girlfriend is talking about, accusing you of supporting fascism.   Now you can get the transcript!   That interesting chat with a professor.   You have your half of the talk, you can figure out the rest.   And of course…business meeting notes.  All automatically, silently recorded by your MotoX.

    Can’t wait for it to happen.  If they haven’t patented it already, there you go, my gift to the human race for today.

    The point is that only Google will know when Google can make this happen.  They own the cloud, in terms of pushing the boundaries.   They are now on the forefront of applied internet connections and speed issues.   With YouTube they have worked the data streaming issues to the bone.   Not on a theoretical level.  On the level of stuff you can use today, with your current connection.  They have millions of smartphone users to experiment with.  They are also on the forefront of supplying massive computing power to us all from their data centers.    So I can write away with all these theories and ideas but …

    …only Google can decide when it will become a real product.

  • Pimms, NewMediaAgencies and the Catch 22 in the world of advertising

    There are two kinds of companies:   the ones that do multiple long meetings and the ones that don’t.   Advertising companies always specialized in the former.   The inspired me to start writing a book entitled “The ‘who gives a s**t?’ management analysis manual.”   I need a catchier title and the book is still at chapter 3.

    As a consultant, you either meet the decision maker or not.   In media, the difference is enormous.  Two hours with a junior marketing person just to get the concept through.  Then, if you’re lucky and they aren’t too scared, you get another meeting with their superior.   Now you have to convince them that they will look good if they play along.   If all goes well, ie your idea is fantastic, they will organize yet another meeting where “the head of marketing might drop in”.   The Head of Marketing, didn’t get that title (or whatever different title they use to describe the job, depending on country and company) by being easy.    They pretend to be tough as nails, no matter how much they like the idea.   They make sure they take the idea, you have no guarantees and they do with it as they wish.    Whenever they feel is convenient for their current carreer path.

    You get the idea.   And yes, it can get even more complicated.   The point is that the organization is wasting time, my time and theirs, and we often don’t get anywhere.   Because if there is a person on the top floor who gives a s**t, none of this usually gets as far as the top floor.

    Enter the advertising agency.   They do useless meetings all the time with these same people.   They stay up late together pretending to work late when they need to.   They did the XYZ success story 1,2 or 5 years ago for this customer.  I can go on bashing advertising agencies ad nauseum.  Because they deserve it and because it is fun.   But it isn’t getting us anywhere.

    New Media Digital Agencies are meant to be the answer.  They are leaner.  Faster.  More responsive.   Basically, they are cheaper.   Are they better?   Well, some of them understand Social Media a bit better than some big old ad agencies.   Some have bright ideas occasionally.   Some of them might have a more clear focus originally, usually from one of their founders.   And what do they do?   They act like the old agencies!   They try and do everything.   And they sit through those same old boring and pointless meetings.   Essentially, they are turning themselves into the big agencies they make fun of.   Catch 22.

     

    It’s time to give a s**t.   It’s time for general managers to get directly involved in communication more.  And it’s about time I wrote that book.   Maybe I will do it the next time I cancel  a large account that is asking for yet another meeting…

     

    PS  Pimms is in the title because a rather bad social media effort in one of it’s campaigns is what started this particular train of thought today.

  • The so called tablet revolution is about my fridge

    Some of you might remember the “smart fridge” idea.  More than a decade ago some companies had made horribly expensive fridges which had built in computers and a touch screen.   You could surf the net, watch movies and generally do most of the things you ended up doing with your laptop parked on the kitchen table.

    There is a fine line in understanding New Media which most people get wrong.  New gadgets should not be viewed like Swiss Army knives.   It isn’t about what they can do.   Much like the top of the range Swiss Army knife, you know, the one with all the extras…well you can’t really carry that around in your pocket.   Which sort of defeats the purpose as you leave it in the car all the time “just in case”.  For all our Twitter, news aggregations, Google search intelligence, mobile apps and different ways to get to these things the correct way to understand all the different technology, all the hardware, the software, the apps, the search engines, the databases is as the ingredients of a very special personalised menu in our brains.

    It is a menu we all make up as we go along.   We consume media via our own understanding of the different options.     When you are about to fry an egg to eat you might think “hey, I wonder what is happening in the world?”   You then turn that need into an action which depends on what you have available and how you perceive those options.   It would have been a transistor radio.  Then a TV in the kitchen or – worse still – a very loud TV in the lounge that you just listened to while annoying everyone else in the house.  Then that laptop in the kitchen streaming your a TV channel for news.  Or your favorite news aggregator, Facebook updates or Twitter timeline.   Most of us missed the futuristic $5000 fridge with the touch screen and now people are getting to tablets.

    A tablet is essentially a smart TV.  Mainly for consuming information as passively as possible.  When they perfect the systems that detect eye movement you won’t even have to scroll up and down those Facebook status updates manually.  So just give them better way to attach them to a fridge and we can call it a day.

    The so called tablet revolution was essentially about how to stick another screen on my fridge.

  • Facebook has a secret weapon: making money from politics

    In Greece, the media has always depended heavily on politics in order to survive.   Which is putting it very politely.  Private TV is the playground of rich business tycoons.  They pay money, to get eyeballs and influence and then use that influence in order to get big public sector projects.   We also have a public broadcaster with  thousands of journalists on its payroll, most of them doing nothing other than taking a fat salary.  They also dish out money for “external productions”…   Both of these ways of controlling the media agenda are still working, but are not as powerful as they used to be.  Not so many big projects, not so easy to give a job to your wife’s brother or whoever else you want to make happy as a politican without everybody noticing.

    But this corrupt model of media financing is so powerful that everyone still tries to emulate it.   So right now, as we are gearing up for the next elections, hundreds of small or medium media people think they have the masterplan.  They set up a website, get a lot of traffic and then get business people or politicians to pay them to write whatever they need written.  At first it looks like a genuine new news portal.  They invest in building it up.   Which means getting some content from somewhere, maybe even hiring a few journalists and…

    …facebook ads!  It is part of the package and at first they simply tick it off:  build website, get social media entities, email blast, google ads, facebook ads…  But then they notice that it’s the only thing that drives traffic.  Their content is rubbish, or – at best – the same as everyone else.  It takes time to build an audience like that and they don’t have time.   They try a few email blasts and then get blacklisted all over the place.  Even in Greece, it is getting harder to simply email a list you picked up from “a friend of a friend”…  So Facebook ads are easy.  They are relatively cheap.   And they bring clicks.

    Because all a Greek (new) media tycoon is interested in is his ranking on alexa.com.   This is all this market understands so I assume it will apply to probably 80% of the countries in the world too which are even less advanced in understanding media.  So find a Facebook ad that seems to work and just plaster it all over the place.   No need for fancy targetting, just blanket position to “anyone that has a pulse and lives in Greece“.  Does it bring clicks?  Sure it does!   Do they hang around much?  Of course not!

    Google has a different system.  They usually setup a mechanism whereby they have a fixed sum, something in chunks of 50 thousand Euros, and they go straight to the top of the food chain.  Much like a pimp, political parties will pay them directly for protection.  Under the auspices of a Google Ads campaign, the search giant turns the screws of the algorytm in your direction.  But a similar amount of money on Google Ads will not bring you the same number of clicks outside of the run up to elections.  People searching for information, looking for answers, don’t idly click on an advert of an article on some news portal they have never heard of.  

    I proved the extent of this problem in the past (details here http://alexanderchalkidis.com/blog/?p=18670 ) when a lazy advocate of the technique used a Goo.gl shortener so I could track the number of clicks.  More than 64 thousand paid clicks for an article which was bait.  What they wanted us to read were other, political, articles next to it.  It cost them maybe 7 or 8 thousand Euro to get a topic into the public limelight.  Seems cheap to me!  And – an important added advantage – it is the media equivelant of money laundering.  Nobody needs to know how much you spent.  Sure, they might see your advert plastered on the top of all ads in their personal Facebook profile, but that doesn’t prove anything.    I could have taken out an ad and paid with my personal credit card simply because I am a fanatic reader and wanted to share it with the world.  It is my favorite news portal…

    A news portal of course that they probably won’t hear much about after the elections…

     

  • Let’s make a website and hide the fact that we are Greek

    It is a great website.  The English is correct.  The vibe is right.  The concept isn’t ground breaking but on the right path.  So why should it hide the fact that it is Greek?  There is no “about us”.  No physical adress.  If you look hard, in the blog section, there is mention of a “name” and a brief, very vague bio.  And based on this information they want me to shell out 3-4 thousand euro?

    It is a very common chorus in Greece these days.  Everyone starts a business conversation with the mantra “forget the Greek market” followed by some idea of  how to sell abroad.  Which is nearly always half baked.  Getting a truly global angle isn’t easy.  I had written some time ago about how the traditional Greek family business should emulate the German model.  Thinking it and doing it are two very different things.  The current crisis in Greece will take at least a generation to get over.  There has to be a generation of people that grow up and decide what to do in the world with no other option than an international market.

    Meanwhile the ministry of tourism and the prime minister debate rebranding Greece as “Hellas”.  As if they can.

    Using the internet to try out a business idea is a valid strategy.  Some are really good.  Nice branding, great website, good vibe,  content that works for Google…  But a real brand has a real home.  Be Greek and be proud.  You’re not going to convince anyone to buy otherwise and it will end up as yet another big Greek Ego exercise.  Which is great if somebody else is paying the bill.

    They are not.

     

    Note: The initial post contained reference to a website which I incorrectly claimed had no Greek address ;   it actually does have Greek information.   I just didn’t see it, must have been the position.  The gist of the article is valid, I just removed the specific reference.

  • Software features the industry forgot

    Everyone in the software industry knows how fickle users can be.  One wants it this way, one the other.  Everyone thinks that the interface or the features they need at this moment are what is most important.  Almost nobody really knows everything that the software can do, yet opinions are all over the place.   Somewhere there is a company guru (if you haven’t fired him) that knows the ins and outs, that has met many users, that has seen crazy applications.  But most of the time, everyone works the software in the “wrong” way.  You are clicking six times when you could automate it down to two.  “If you download the latest version and learn how to use that new menu properly….”

    But of course, users don’t care.  They just want to get their jobs done.  Quickly and easily.  Without having to learn new things.  So even saturated product segments can be shaken up.   Here are two examples:

    Media Player.   Settled matter isn’t it?  Windows Media Player, Quicktime, VLC…what more can we add to this simple software?   Here is one simple feature that would get me installing at the drop of a hat:  instant delete.  I get given loads of MP3 files.  Or I experiment with new types of music.   As I listen to a song I either like it (keeper) or don’t (delete).  I want one button to do it.  No, I don’t want to stick tags, or stars or rate it to delete later.  I want to send it to the Underworld of music not worth listening to ever again.  I listened for 5, 10 or 30 seconds and I don’t want to waste any more time with it.  Sure, the main use is for people downloading illegally.   Or with friends that download illegally.   But if that is how I like to occasionally listen to the Top40 (I usually weed that down to 3-4 songs that are bearable) that is the software I want.

    A similar example would be photo management.  Here more companies seem to see the sense in a new interface paradigm.   I shoot huge files with my digital camera, even if it is not in RAW.  And then I want to do something with them.  So I have to resize them, edit them individually, stick together whichever pics were meant as a panorama, hide the faces of any friends or relatives that don’t want to be on the internet, watermark them… it is a lot of work.  Get some technology to do this automatically in “good enough” way please.  Locally, on my hard disk.  Most of the planet doesn’t enjoy broadband speeds and even if you do, uploading everything at full resolution isn’t usually the way to go.   Sure I could write macro commands….macro what?  We are in the age of simplicity.  Users are twiddling their thumbs at phones and tablets.  Just get it done.  If you wan’t to stick it on the back of Google Instant Upload or Facebook’s latest attempt at convincing me to trust them with all my pictures, fine.

    These features may seem minor to a seasoned software developer.  It is a fad, you are just one user, you can do it in a million different ways already with other software, it isn’t really our main focus….etc.  But even I, the man who keeps his work computer carefully maintained for top speed and as uncluttered as possible, would probably install a new software to get them done.    User interface isn’t the thing anymore.  I am looking for a digital slave.