Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • In defence of experiments

    The recent uproar concerning experiments run by Facebook is really worrying.   Because without experiments, there is no business, there is no progress and we learn nothing.   Most of my working day is spent conducting experiments or setting up experiments.   Most of my business advice ends with “well, let’s try it!”  Facebook being accused now is ludicrous.  Google runs much more experiments on a much grander scale and nobody has ever complained about that, have they?

    Anything we do on the internet is set up as an A/B experiment.  I, Facebook or Google do exactly the same thing: we send one user to one type of setup and the next to another.  Then we measure.  It is no different to what I did when I was in retail.  You set up a shelf one way, see how it sells, how people react.  You set up a different store differently.   Then you measure.

    This attitude really is the only way to learn.  Whether you are Leonardo DaVinci or Bill Gates, this is your tool.  Experimentation.   And of course in business, until animals get their own credit cards, most experiments concern human behavior.    We want to sell more, change attitudes, change beliefs, influence you.   We play music at different volumes to change the speed you walk in the supermarket, we use different colors to change the way you eat in McDonalds, we use even smells to sell more in a travel office.   You do the same thing everyday in your job too.   Two year olds do the same things to test their parents limits.

    Much of my best consulting has been in finding ways to conduct experiments despite limitations.   How to test demand for an eshop idea without actually building it for real?  How to find potential buyers for a service which hasn’t been completely defined yet?   How to run a competition for our product without risking the edgy concept backfiring on us?

    So give Facebook some slack and stop pretending.   Look at your everyday life.  If you’re not experimenting all the time, you’re not learning.

  • 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.

  • Why I think the “Elgin” marbles should stay in London

    I am often accused of taking “extreme” positions just for the heck of it.  Well, sorry, this isn’t one of those cases.  I truly believe that Greece is better off if the parts of the Parthenon frieze stay where they are.  Here are my arguments, numbered for reference.  If you have a counter argument, give me the number and some logic, fact or new information.

    1. The frieze was never “stolen” from Greece.  It was taken from Turkish lands.   Get a grip on international law please.  They had been Turkish for 400 years and before that a rather insignificant corner of the Roman empire for one and a half thousand years.  The Byzantines had already destroyed thousands of ancient Greek monuments for political reasons and through religious hatred, the Turks had let them fall to ruin through laziness or for profit of the local overlord.  That famous rock in Athens they were taken from had not been “Greek” for thousands of years when Elgin took them; it had been Athenian almost 2000 years earlier.   You have to have a pretty twisted view of history to find a direct legal line of “Greekiness” from the time the Romans conquered to 1800 when the marbles were taken.   In fact you can easily claim that the three empires after ancient Athens were in charge of the area for longer than the ancient Athenians!  (Which kind of “ancient Athenians” would you pick?)

    2. Elgin saved the marbles.  Imagine where they would be if he had sold them to Napoleon?  (Napoleon offered more money that then British museum for starters!)  The Turks were in no way kind to antiquities and neither was the bunch of shepherds that lived around Athens in 1800.   We have no way of knowing whether they would have survived the war for Freedom from the Turks in the 1820s or even the German occupation in WWII.  London was one of the few places in the world to remain Nazi free at the same time as the Swastika ruled the Acropolis and many works of art completely disappeared forever from the world via Nazis which we never found somewhere in South America.

    3. The new museum under the Acropolis is indeed a wonder and worthy of housing the frieze if it was to be returned.  Does anyone remember how many decades of bickering it took to build?  And the people demanding the return of the Elgin marbles were equally vociferous even before the museum!  In a city which is often completely disfunctional and horrible for tourists, where the center of town is closed for demonstrations, where you can smell the roses less often than tear gas, where the wonderful metro station near the new museum is often closed due to protests or strikes… now we think we can suddenly demand the marbles back?   Let’s just remember that for the past 200 years they have been permanently accessible to the world thanks to Elgin.  If they were returned they would simply go from one museum to another.  There is no scientific or practical way they would be reattached to the famous monument anyway.  (Nobody would be able to see them up there, they wouldn’t really fit and would probably look odd to us nowadays after all these years we have been seeing the Parthenon without them anyway.)

    4. What tourists?  Millions of people visit the British museum annually.  1 in 4 tourists to London, that international hub, the place where Americans, Japanese and Chinese go first and foremost when they “do” Europe.   If the Greek government were to choose the absolute best place to advertise Greek tourism, a place to plant the idea “hey, make your next trip to Europe include Greece please” it would probably be the Ground Floor of the British museum!  Or, to put it another way, if the frieze left London, visitor numbers would be unaffected there but people visiting Greece would decrease.  The Parthenon’s status as an important cultural site would be diminished.   The copies in the new museum work fine to tell the story, what would Greece gain if the originals took their place?   It is not as if thousands of people would think “great!  Let’s visit Athens this year to see the marbles where they belong at last!”

    5. Leave the “Elgin” marbles as a lost cause.  It is good promotion for all involved.   It wouldn’t even be a big deal without the fuss.  Hey, let’s start a “get Venus of Milos back from the Louvre” motion while we are at it too!  Get some of the French tourists thinking more about coming to Greece next time, why not?

    6. Most of all I am ashamed of the way my compatriots whine and complain about this issue.  How they consider it their God given (which God?  Is that Zeus or the other one?) right to selectively claim anything “Greek” as and when they wish.   How they put Greece in a political corner of “spoilt brats” who act like there is no such thing as international law.  They make up excuses, imagine “facts” and twist everything at will and whim.  At a time when internationally museums are more proactively seeking exchanges and new ways to become financially viable and pertinent to society, Greek museums are as dead, inactive and bureaucratic as ever.  Greek Universities more useless than ever, especially in things related to antiquity, at the same time as British museums remain a hub of activity, innovation and collaboration.   Denying all this takes audacity and selective perception at a scale which clearly emphasizes the immaturity of this country and its citizens.  We are digging ourselves into a hole much like on the “Macedonia” issue, simply proving that in the few years since we became a unified “Greek” country for the first time (two centuries ago, just after Elgin left really) we have little understanding of what it takes to make a functional country-state.

    Well we are not all like that.  So comment away about how I am not patriotic enough, how I am working against our “national interests” or whatever else you want.  But if you can’t find a decent counter argument, you have just proven my case.  Greece needs to work much much harder for much longer to prove itself internationally.  Just like two years of austerity doesn’t suddenly make us a paradigm of economic health, a few years of a fancy new museum doesn’t prove we deserve the world to suddenly give us whatever pieces of ancient art we selectively take fancy to.

  • I wish the Economist ran the world

    It dawned on me some time ago that I know exactly what sort of political system I agree with.  It doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t end in “ism” and as far as I know there is no perfect example.   Other than a magazine.   A very old magazine, with a very British sense of humour.

    I love the Economist.  Can’t get enough of it.  It is inspiration, explanation and exploration all rolled into one weekly fix for me.  But more than that it is pretty close to who I would love to have as government.  Here are a few of the reasons:

    1. They always remind us of their mistakes.  “As this newspaper falsely wrote then…” features in almost every issue.  Clearly and openly.   They are not perfect but they try.

    2. They take a clear position.  No sitting on the fence.  It is partly why they need to own up to mistakes.  Even in thorny, complex issues, the ones other publications (and politicians!) end with a vague “this is a tricky one….” the Economist will come up with whatever is possible as a practical proposal to move ahead.

    3. They have the know – how.  Or they find it, borrow it, steal it.  End result is that they will be able to come up with that practical proposal no matter what.  And it is so practical it makes you want to get up and do the business yourself.

    4. Stakeholders out in the open.  “This newspaper is partly owned by” someone we are writing about now.  Or “this topic is related to part of our business”.  Sure, I have caught them out doing a publimercial without it being clear, but it is rare and so finely done that only a pro in the field of sneaky beaky marketing like me would even get a whiff of it.

    5. They have a heart.   It is way too easy a generalisation to call them “liberals” or “big money ideology”.  Because (point No2 above) they always take a practical and public position in writing, they are very far away from any sort of unethical Scrooge position most of the time.  Being harsh to people is not good for anyone in the long term and the Economist…

    6. …is as long term as you get!  They have been around longer than most political parties and because (point No1 above) they are always checking themselves for mistakes, they improve all the time.  The adapt to the changes in the world, adding sections, removing others, asking for our help.

    7.  First and foremost you have to admire the persistence in seeking new communication paradigms.  I am not talking about technology, I am talking content.  From obituaries to special reports they boldly go where other publications (and politicians) don’t dare.

     

    So take any measure you want for good government:  accountability, transparency, responsiveness, effectiveness, strategic vision… the Economist scores tops on all of them as far as I am concerned.  Now, how to get them to form a government…

  • 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.

  • Ariel Castro needed to rewrite Greek history?

    As we walked through central Vienna, I pointed to one of the windows:

    “You know”, I explained to an interlocutor who probably knew better than me, “when Greece was formed as a modern country in 1828, the people living in those buildings had several centuries of experience of living in a city with other people.”

    I stopped by a water fountain which looked two or three hundred years old:

    “This fountain has survived upheaval and waves of military events here.  But the people around it found ways to agree despite their differences.  In Greece we would probably have destroyed it from some internal bickering.”

    I have no idea where you start in order to get over trauma like being held in a basement and raped for many years.  But I assume that coming to terms with all that you missed out during those years of captivity is a big part of it.   At the start of the economic crisis I used psychological terms to help readers understand the denial symptoms expressed in Greek society.     Now I want to point out a huge problem in our national narrative.

    Most Greeks are taught a pretty twisted version of history.  Ancient Greek wonders, mainly Athenian, a little bit of a vague Byzantine history and then… a huge gap.    Like prisoners of some Ottoman Ariel Castro, like a rape victim that doesn’t want to talk about it, 400 years are ignored.  During that time the West took off, shook away the obsession with Aristotle and other Greeks and set the stage for the modern world.

    Greece got out of its prison in 1828.   A country of shepherds and people of little means, were suddenly called upon to become a modern Western country.   Athens was little more than a village.   Which grew way too quickly with absolutely no associated experience of how to live in a city.  Yet we cling to fantasies that are a bit like Superman rushing into a telephone booth to change into a super identity.   As if we can instantly turn ourselves into a world leading power based on some magic fairy dust that the location or the DNA of Ancient Athenians have bestowed upon us.

    We need to face the facts.  To openly express our regret that we missed out on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.   We need to cry over all the stuff we missed.    Retrace the steps we didn’t make with the rest of Europe.   I often get accused by nationalists of being a “Greek basher” because I systematically try to get Greeks to let go of their obsession with Ancient Greek wisdom.  Maybe if I reposition it as a “rediscovery of the wonders of Europe” it will work better.

    Elsewhere in this blog I pinpointed the mistake that European leaders have systematically made in “selling” the European idea to their citizens.  Maybe the whole of the Continent and not just Greece could benefit from revisiting those great moments in European history as it led the world for many centuries since the Middle Ages.

    Rewriting history is good.  It can be fun.  And – if you get it right – it is a cathartic  experience for all involved.  Not as in catharsis  of Ancient Greek tragedy.  Get over it  I said!

  • 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.

  • Do the stripes in our flag make it look fat?

    GUIDELINES FOR INTERNATIONAL MEDIA COVERING GREECE

    Since the start of this economic crisis, Greece has struggled with its international image.  Journalists trying to fathom where to start in the coverage of the story, most obviously need help in understanding how to handle issues such as:

    1. We love it when you emphasize the rustic, Zorba the Greek image of our country!  Lay it on.  Don’t shoot any report from Greece without showing some Greek coffee,  part of an ancient monument, old men in a taverna looking at the camera as if they are all retarded, or twenty year old archive footage from a horrible beach full of drunk Northern Europeans.

    2. It really helps when you choose people to interview that can’t really speak English.  Might be cheaper to just hire an English actor to put on a fake “Stavros” accent.  Oh, and dress him like a waiter to, your audience will relate to it much better.

    3. Always, always, pick an angle that shows chaos in the background.  If there is a demonstration with just 30 people outside Parliament, yep, you guessed it, pick a close angle, shake the camera around and make us all sick as if we are watching “Saving Private Ryan”.

    4. If the demonstration was over in half an hour, no worries, for the next 1-2 days just show old footage of street riots anywhere in the world and get a journalist to speak over it from a bad telephone connection.

    Now, the above four points might confuse you in practise, so here are four more to make you feel less guilty:

    1. Yes, no matter what you write, some Greek will hate you.   Get used to it.  Truth is that even Greeks struggle with the idea but it seems to be the way it goes over here since Ancient times.

    2. When a Greek disagrees, yes, be sure he will tell you about it.  You could see it as a great traffic generator for your news organization’s website, but over time it gets tiring.  Use sparingly.

    3. When one Greek disagrees with your article or news item, be sure that some other Greek will immediately disagree with the first Greek.  They will proceed to argue amongst themselves.  Leave them to it or they will instantly gang up against you.

    4. Don’t bother trying to word things carefully.  It doesn’t help.  Also useless is any attempt to contact sources and get them on your side before publication.  Depending on the situation in Greece, they are liable to make a 180 degree turn overnight.

    You may think all this conflicting advice  is like walking a tightrope.  You are wrong.   We understand media better than most countries.  This is the birthplace of tragedy.  All stories are by definition as crazy as you want them.   You want soap-opera material?  Prime minister marrying a flight attendant OK?  A bit thin on the sex scandals lately, but 3-4 families in control of everything is usually enough like next year’s PBS series on the mafia to do the trick I think.

    So stop complaining.  The food is good, the weather is great and we just keep producing great media events.  You don’t even need to work that hard; you can always take even minor developments and set them against our permanent structural problems to blow them up enough to submit something to your boss before heading to the beach…