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1238kmhcom

Listed below are comments made by 1238kmhcom between Thursday, 23rd April 2009 and Tuesday, 1st September 2009.

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What makes a tech story? 4:25pm on 01 Sep 2009 I think there are two categories, stemming from that brilliant Black and Decker marketing insight from way back. They asked themselves a fundamental question: “What do we sell – drills or holes?”

How does this relate? As a viewer/listener/reader I think you have a responsibility to deliver “drill” stories that deal with tech developments – new inventions, products that are going to make a difference to people, etc. You also have a responsibility to tackle the “hole” stories – what is the impact of all of this new technology on the lives of people, what can we do differently or better or worse and what are the implications?

The drill stories are easier to categorise and to find, though not without pitfalls/risks, especially when it comes to accusations of bias and favouring one stylish brand over another. There’s doubtless plenty at the uglier end of technology that has more of an impact on the way the world works.

The hole stories are where it gets a bit harder to work out where the boundaries are, given that so many of the things that we do these days have technology at their core – healthcare, shopping, marketing, travel, communicating, socialising, politics – really pretty much any of the categories on the BBC News website. I guess the criteria are whether tech is recently and significantly to blame, or neutrally responsible, or due praise for whatever it is you’re reporting on. Often a difficult question to answer, no doubt.

I’m not really sure that this helps with your existential crisis. Maybe the tension is in the word “technology”. It might be easier if you killed that tag and called yourselves something else like “wired society correspondent”.
Twitter - too corporate by half? 09:49am on 03 Jul 2009 There was some very interesting analysis from Robin Goad at Hitwise recently about the downstream traffic from Twitter versus Google, Facebook and Hotmail. It showed that traffic to retail sites is relatively low from Twitter and that most of it goes to news or entertainment sites.

This fits with Twitters pure, raw conversational style. It may be verbally transactional, but it isnt a shop. Because it is hyper-networking (you can be talking with many at the same time) mood also spreads amazingly quickly. The community is very spam averse, as evidenced by the Habitat story a couple of weeks ago (Habitat were said to have attached unrelated hashtags to commercially orientated tweets with the sole objective of getting a bigger audience for their message and thereby driving traffic to their site. Instead, Habitat was driven into retreat by a none-too-happy community and the story made the national media.)

There are a few interesting lessons emerging from the Hitwise data and the Habitat experience.

Firstly, overt promotional tactics will never work in the Twitter community. Its a bit like interrupting pub chats with enforced commercial breaks. It just wont happen.

Whats as interesting is what this says about how brands and brand advocates work on Twitter. Its too early to say perhaps, but my feeling is that the only promotional tactic that will work in the Twitter universe is the expression of genuine opinion, and then:

a) only if expressed in a raw and compelling way, and
b) only if Twitter is seen to be a secondary or even tertiary influencing tool rather than something more overt and direct.

If a shop sets up a Twitterfeed, for instance, who is going to want to follow it if the content is just about products on offer, however compelling they are? Thats advertising.

The shop needs to create an unspun voice, offer genuinely interesting content and build a community of advocates over time and time really is the killer punch. This is no overnight medium. Anyone who believes that Twitter will pay rapid commercial dividends for their business is mistaken. Its a long haul project, based on nuance, as anyone who is familiar with it will know.

The sensitivity with which Twitter must be handled was brought home to me the other day. I was interested in gauging the reaction to a programme on television that had focused heavily on a brand (a sort of crowd-sourced TV review, if you like). I searched all Twitter for references and looked at them chronologically. During the minutes prior to the programme and immediately after it started there were plenty of tweets pointing to the fact that Twitterer A, B, C, etc was about to sit down and watch, to paraphrase, an interesting programme about brand x on channel y. These died off after the first 10 or so minutes of the programme to be replaced by reactions to the programme, which in the main were less than favourable and had some pointedly critical reactions to the brand. The point is that the change in mood was very clear - moving from what looked like the staged tweets of relative automatons to the real views of people watching the programme.

I cant be certain, but it seemed to me that a highly paid digital media consultancy was probably stacking Twitter with references to the programme in order to promote it. And then the real voices came in. What all this says to me is that the raw and unfiltered world of Twitter will be un-exploitable by brands unless their advocates are truly interested in, and able to express a candid, interesting and engaging view about whatever brand they are advocating. Only the unvarnished truth will stand any chance of applying any gloss to a brands bottom line.
BT and the iPlayer 4:25pm on 10 Jun 2009 @Paul Freeman-Powell: Your analogy isn't a bad one, but maybe there's a case that the car owners pay (ie, those that seek to access the content - in this case, the BBC licence payers, aka you and me). After all, bandwidth is finite and BT needs to provide a service to all users. If there's a logjam in the evening, they need to find an answer and it's difficult to see what else they can do. They have a duty to their customers and their shareholders and the challenge is that they're in the future business. If they're to protect the interests of both parties over time, they need to be able to strike a balance between service provision and investment and I can't see another way of them achieving that without finding finding or seeking a compromise somewhere.
In search of audio perfection 1:02pm on 23 Apr 2009 It's true that the way that we listen to music these days has become more personal - and maybe part of the pleasure of collective listening has been lost. The hi-fi retailer Richer Sounds has been campaigning on this - the idea that the MP3 and iPod generation has really lost touch with good quality sound. The trouble is that the iPod is now the default music device and much of the equipment that turns it in to a hi-fi (cheap integrated speaker systems) are really low quality. What most people don't know is that good quality audio separates - an amp and good speakers - can be bought for the same as, or not much more than, the cheap all-in-one iPod accessories. Here's a video on YouTube that makes the case that Bad Sound Kills Good Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEyG7CJOpT0

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