The views and musings of me, myself and I
Feeling it after riding the Cheshire Cat sportive yesterday. It was a fun day, with the infamous Mow Cop a good challenge (see pic below), but the strong crosswinds in the middle section particularly tiring.
Still, I finished in around 6h30m so am quite pleased with that time. A good day that should set me up for the rest of the season.
Mow Cop
As an Everton fan I normally approach the derby games with excitement but our awful form coupled with our injury list havn’t filled me with optimism this time round. Thankfully Liverpool don’t seem in any better form so we may well sneak a result and turn our season round.
You’ll have to forgive me for being less than partisan but the game I’m really looking forward to is the Gran Classico between Barca and Real Madrid. For me its the biggest match of the year between the biggest teams in the world. Hopefully Messi and Ronaldo will both be passed fit for what should be a belter. Can’t wait.
I’ve recently switched bank accounts to Alliance & Leicester and activated my card today. After it was activated the call operator tried to sell me ID theft insurance.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of someone who it is impossible for me to verify was actually from Alliance & Leicester, and who had just secured a wide range of my personal information in order to activate my card, was now trying to sell me insurance against someone stealing my ID.
Far be it from me to advocate phishing or ID theft in anyway, but it would seem much easier to send out fake letters with a fake telephone line than it would be to set up a fake website.
At least with a website you can judge fairly accurately that the site you’re on is in fact an official one. How can you do the same with a telephone number?
A few years ago I setup an Everton fan page on Facebook as there was no official page at that time. It proved really popular with fans and quickly grew to 20,000+ followers.
Recently Facebook have been cracking down on pages and as mine was not an official Everton authorized page my publishing rights were revoked. Finding out how to contest this decision was an incredibly difficult job, but that’s probably for another blog.
What has amazed me however was the response from Everton when this issue was put to them to see if they could help out.
Instead of seeing the potential for communicating with this large list of fans the club instead started threatening legal action for using things like the club logo and daring to use the clubs own Facebook application on the page. The only way they would help is if the page was changed to something not mentioning Everton at all.
Talk about biting your nose off to spite your face. Such a shame as football clubs are such a natural audience for social media as fans are so willing to do an awful lot of work on the clubs behalf. Sadly few clubs seem willing or able to let go of control and leverage this enormously powerful resource. A message to the clubs should surely be that the brain power of these supporters is just as important, if not more so, than the money you can extract from them.
I went to a ‘measurement camp’ last week with the aim of finding out more about how social media activity can be measured. Unfortunately it didn’t really shed much light on things.
Do you go after the revenue approach to measurement, in which case it almost inevitably means last click wins? Do you look for a more PR type measurement? I’m fairly sure that headline numbers such as that of Twitter followers is useless, but what else is there?
What do people use to measure the effectiveness of their social media work?
adi on Mar 8, 2009 in Default 
Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name. You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.
Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside. However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet. The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before. The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company. The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.
Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly. The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about. But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products. Now that can change.
The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.
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adi on Mar 5, 2009 in Default So often we do things for the money we gain or the prestige, but how often do you do something purely for its own sake?
Study for instance is often undertaken with the aim of earning a qualification or meeting new people. But how often do people learn purely for the sake of learning?
I think motivation is greater and longer lasting when we do something purely for its own sake. Is it however something we do often enough?
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