Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • 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…

     

  • Trend detection: there can only be two?

    You can play with Twitter data all day and come up with all sorts of interesting conclusions.   As a social scientist, it is Pandora’s box.  Free research to an extent you couldn’t even dream about a decade ago.   But of course it is just Twitter.  Mainly U.S. and well….just Twitter.

    Compare that to the amount of data Google has in order to detect trends.   Gazillions of web searches.   Gmail.   Google Maps.   And anything going on within at least half the smart phones in the world.  That’s more like it!  Other’s try and guess who your friends are, hell, Google knows if they are in your phone list and if you emailed them today.   You don’t need a particularly smart algorythm to figure out what stock to buy, which songs are on the rise, or which companies are doing a good job.    Google kindly gives us back some information on trends.  It is badly crippled of course, randomized or normalized or generally scrutinized to make sure it isn’t commercially usable .  And it is not quite real time of course.  More like a promotional vehicle.

    Google knows what you are thinking.   Not because of some “1984” like surveillance scheme but because that amount and variety of data they have can bring pretty accurate results.   We know that they sell this know how, but it isn’t an official product.   Which I guess makes it illegal.   Maybe Edward Snowden will illuminate us on this topic, though it is secondary.

    And where is Apple?   Maybe the only other company with a pretty complete understanding of the behaviour of a big chunk of people.   They don’t even give us any data.  They announce no initiative to use this data to make better products for their customers.  They just sit on the lid, like they sit on their cash pile.

    With the amount of data flying around the internet, many other companies will come up with pretty accurate correllations between indicators sooner or later though.   It won’t be as complete as Google and it won’t be as tidy as Apple’s data.

    But it will work.

     

  • 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.

  • Communication lessons from Afghanistan

    These days in Greece we celebrate independence from Ottoman rule.  It was in essence guerilla warfare.  Greeks have a tradition of sorts in this type of war.  But of course the true and proven modern masters are the Afghans.  The greatest powers of the world have tried their best to conquer the place and failed.

    In corporate communications and especially in selling ideas, we often emphasize the need to coordinate messages.   We try to aggregate them or centralize the sources.   We try to get disparate groups to converge around a single “authorized” source.   We do our best not to let some stray independent voice confuse the information market with conflicting views.   We want to be able to react quickly and without noise when necessary.

    But that is not how the Afghans fight.   One of the main advantages they have, from the time they fought the British, to the Soviets and now the retreating Allies, is that they are not coordinated.   You can’t easily agree something with one of the tribal leaders and expect him to get the others nearby to follow him.     You will have to find your way through the mountains, risk getting shot by an AK47 and locate the next tribe yourself.  Then figure out the leader, then start a whole new conversation.   And – even if he agrees with your proposal – there is no way to guarantee that he will communicate to others in the way you want him to.

    This is an encouraging and useful as a model for certain types of idea propagation.   Interest groups, from environmentalists to anarchists, often lament their lack of resources to create big communication machines similar to the multinationals or government agencies they are fighting.  They try to centralise information flows using social media.

    But maybe it serves better to think like an Afghan warlord some times…

  • 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…

     

  • Why Apple won’t make an iPhone for the masses

    Don’t go looking in the detailed cost breakdowns.  Sure, Apple has plenty of profit margin to shave off the iPhone.  They could sell one for $150 and still make a profit better than most.  But it is not in the market share figures either.   And it isn’t some complicated marketing reason, anything about a premium brand and the Apple aura.  The reason that Apple doesn’t go downmarket in price to attract a greater market share is actually much more simple:

    They can’t suppport it.

    If you have ever played the Mac vs PC game, there are a few trump cards.  Mac users always (rightly) claim superior design and good looks.  PC users however often ask their graphic designer opponent something closer to home:  “…and what OS does the computer you are doing your company’s accounts run?”  Outside the US and UK the answer is usually Windows.  “What company makes the OS on your medium sized companies’ servers?”   That won’t be Apple either.  In fact I have yet to find any compelling proof that even Apple Inc itself runs any heavy duty work of its own on machines made by Apple.  (If you have evidence to the contrary, please drop a comment at the end of this article.)

    Apple’s famous ecosystem doesn’t run on Apple servers.  While Google leads the planet in data center design and software economies, while they pioneer efficient energy usage and blazing speed in every transaction, Apple is very very far behind.  And then some.   This is a company that couldn’t even support it’s own emailing system properly, not even for die hard fans was it good enough.  Apple buys capacity from others.  This is a company that basically rebrands other people’s technology, they have no idea how to design a system as elegant in it’s massive scale as Amazon’s server infrastructure.  Others are breaking new groung in improving databases and every aspect of computer transactions while Apple plays around buying patents and suing.

    So how exactly would Apple support us if the entire planet started using iPhones and iPads?  While they are all just playing games and – literally – twiddling their thumbs on their touch screens, things hold up.  If they all started looking for serious infrastructure support, if they started actually trying to work online concurrently, the system would crash and the lawsuits would start.  Apple would have to announce a partnership with someone like Google or Amazon to scale up quickly.

    We can all find bones to pick with Microsoft but this is a company that has made sure that roughly 90% of the planet’s personal computers and a lot of its servers actually work and exchange software, files and information for the past two decades pretty well.  I can take the accounting software I used on MS Dos, stick it in the latest PC off the shelf and run it.  It will even support an amazing selection of the planet’s hardware and accessories.

    So don’t hold your breath.  If Apple wants to take market share, I look forward to hearing about it’s robust infrastructure first.  Doing business in regions where most people won’t actually use anything “smart” online on their smartphoen doesn’t cut it.  Unless Tim Cook just goes ahead anyway and admits it:  “we don’t make the fastest or safest browser, we don’t even control Apple computer hardware ourselves really, heck, we in fact we outsource all our infrastructure.  Get a life!  Apple isn’t about superior technology, it is about the user experience.”