Keith Collins' True Marketing Experience

Cassetteboy vs The Bloddy Apprentice

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Absolutely hilarious edit of Sir Alan by Cassette Boy

Marketing Art or Science

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:29:00 +0000

Seth Godin makes a good point again, about Marketing being an Art and a Science.

I did Physics at University - but also Art at School. I loved Art but thought science was a better career move. Funny that I landed up doing marketing, or maybe a good compromise.

Time to get going again

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:37:00 +0000

A few friends have suggested I should start posting again - especially as I am going to want to drive consulting business for TrueTalk.

So much has happened since my last post - I left Sharedband a year ago and have been working for Stone Computers until recently. (Note to myself to write a couple of posts on my time at Stone, and an update on where Sharedband is now).

Currently I am working on a number of new business ideas and looking around for consulting projects to keep the wolf from the door. I have been developing the proposition for TrueTalk consulting and believe that today there is real demand to understand the value marketing brings an organisation. Not just the tactical comms stuff (which is important) but the whole picture of the customer experience.

Without understanding of the true value of marketing the temptation in today's economic climate is for CEO's and CFO's to cut budgets and resources. Even if cuts are unavoidable it's extremely important to understand how to optimise what is available.

So I am going to pitch a service that gets a dialogue going with customers and partners first so that it's possible to paint that picture with the right perspective.

What’s happening to broadband bandwidth

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:30:00 +0000

People can't seem to understand there is a difference beteeen the access network that is the copper loop from the exchange to the customer and the backhaul from the exchange to the ISP network.

I will try and clarify what this means in terms of capability and cost.

The Access Network:-

With the exception of cable network (owned by Virgin Media) almost all the copper connections from an exchange to the customer premises are owned by Open Reach (apart from an area around Hull).

These are leased to BT Wholesale or Local Loop Unbundlers (LLUs) on an equal basis. There is little chance of seeing fibre deployed in the access network for many years to come - as this means £ billions of capital expenditure and lots of road digging. Therefore most customers will have to use the copper already in the ground.

There are physical limitations mainly due to cross talk that mean many people may not get more than 4Mbps bandwidth from one copper connection – at 4kms from an exchange even ADSL2 degrades to that level. Also note that the more people that take up broadband then that increases the level of cross talk – reducing performance.

There are some new software technologies available that enable lines to bond together – (disclosure: like my own company Sharedband ). This will help people scale services to meet their need for more bandwidth in the access network.

The performance is a physical limitation of the copper loop and the equipment deployed at the exchanges not financial engineering by ISPs or even BT. There is no congestion in the copper from the exchange to each customer.

One ISP with 200k customers (Plusnet) in a recent article explained their cost structure in detail and revealed that the cost of the access network was on average £8.50 per customer per month – regardless of how much each copper line is used.

The backhaul:-
From the exchange back through the central pipes to the ISP when provided by BTW or in cases when using an LLU service the ISP has to organize their own backhaul infrastructure. Note: LLU availability tends to be limited to more popular exchanges.

The backhaul pipes are always shared (unless you pay a lot of money for an uncontended service) always fibre and the more data that flows down these pipes the more congested they become unless their capacity is increased – which costs more – either to BTW or in building your own infrastructure.

The PlusNet figures show that on average the cost they are paying for this backhaul today is around £3.50 per customer per month, however that only allows for an average usage of 5Gb per customer per month. It also shows that the maximum bandwidth of their central pipes for their 200k customers is about 3500Mbps.

Therefore if the adoption of new bandwidth hungry applications like iPlayer grow in popularity then they will need to add more capacity to avoid excessive congestion – and therefore they will need to increase prices or more likely charge customers on a usage basis.

There are other costs for peering and transit etc but these are small in relation to these other costs.

Remember:
1) There is no such thing as a free lunch!
2) You only get what you pay for…

Sharedband Press Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:33:00 +0000

Last week Sharedband released three great press stories:

1) We signed a reseller contract with BT Wholesale, who will market and sell our products and services to ISPs in the UK
2) A great customer case study, based on a reprint of a story by Talk Internet about the use of Sharedband at the British SuperBike Grand Prix to help journalists upload their stories and photos.
3) Our new alliance status with Netgear as a global solutions partner.

All together they make a great story – not only did BT give our technology fantastic credibility but also a straight forward route to market. The customer angle clearly demonstrated we have a solution for a real problem and the alliance with Netgear was a truly global partnership.

After ringing a couple of dozen editors I was in no doubt we’d get some coverage – but I really hadn’t bargained for such a super uptake. Here are some links to articles and posts published by last Friday:

Techworld.com Peter Judge
Lightreading.com Ray Le Maistre
Telephony Ed Gubbins - also on Communications direct
PC Pro Barry Collins
IT Week & Computing & WiMax news David Bailey
Tech.co.uk Anne Lagerkvist
ZDNet David Meyer
Digital Trends – Christopher Nickson
Comms Dealer
ThinkBroadband
Telecom Paper – can’t read without subscription
Newswireless.net: Guy Kewney
ISPreview
One Stop Click
Broadband - Finder
Satnews.com
Blogs
Broadband Genie
The Hermes project
Tech Taxi

The last post - for Amstrad

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:03:00 +0000

The old Amstrad company may have been sold to Sky (R.I.P.) - but the memories of some great times with Sir Alan will live on as long as we all stay friends. 14 ex Apprentices from the 80's gather for some great fun, beer and pies at the Newman Arms last Tuesday evening. See the photos on Facebook.

This maybe the last post for Amstrad - but its my first blog post for months - I have been storing it all up - so there is lots to follow as I have been reflecting on 6 months of new social media i.e. Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, Twitter, Google Reader, Gmail, 400 Linkedin contacts - the progress Sharedband has made and where we are going next, extended stay in Seattle and visiting Portland, LA and San Francisco - meeting up with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and many other intersting people.

Please enter your passcode and press the pound sign!

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:44:00 +0000

There is probably a whole book on US v UK differences, but I keep hearing this one on calls to the US and I just don’t understand it – why do Americans call this “#” a pound sign – I always think “£” as a pound (sterling) sign or “lbs” for pounds as a weight measure. Is there another sort of pound? I'd call # a hash sign....!

More for less

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:37:00 +0000

In corporate life I used to commission work from many different types of contractors and used to judge their value by looking at the ROI or business benefit their work produced, cost was of secondary importance provided there was a budget available. We had some great results along with some disappointments, overall I am quite proud of my achievements.

Now in a small business every penny counts and there are no budgets as such - so I have found it necessary to delve into contractors’ time and materials and learnt a huge lesson as a result.

You can do so much more with so much less, and how much better would the ROI have been if I had dived into the detail and understood the minutia of the work – the devil is as they say in the detail.

Dog Tricks

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:34:00 +0000

How does the saying go: “teaching old dogs new tricks” or “teaching new dogs old tricks”? It must be a function of age but it just seems like same old tricks keep coming round and round again – just dressed up with a modern spin. It’s obvious in cover versions of pop songs and remakes of old movies but it shows up in business too like “the customer is king” now we’d talk about “the consumer being enabled by web 2.0 communications”.

Great Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:47:00 +0000

Thanks to my friends at Signals with some audio help from the podcaster at Focus Biz Sharedband has a really super flash animation that explains how it benefits customers and a simple overview of how it works.

If you find flash is choppy or poor quality then you could probably do with Sharedband service, so meanwhile best to download the exe file and view it at your leisure!

5 Resons to Hate Corporate Life

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:31:00 +0000

After working for a small technology start up over the last 6 months I have just paused for a moment’s reflection and realised what I was missing from corporate life.

Corporations sell employees “substantial benefits packages”, “job security”, "career prospects" the regular salary and the dream that a handful of share options will pay out enough to retire. Some of this is a little tough to swallow these days as there really is no such thing as job security .

There are a few other side effects for working for a well known organisation not often mentioned. For instance when you are trying to make contact with someone you’ve not met before, they are far more likely to take your call or respond to your messages. You can usually set the agenda and get others to comply – i.e. throw your weight around effectively.

If all you want is a regular income to enable other interests in your life then maybe disappearing into the corporate morass and picking up a regular cheque is just what you should do. This is not what I want from over a third of my week. It may be a bit of a cliché but I want to “make a difference” and get real “job satisfaction” whilst bringing home enough for a crust or two and have a realistic dream of significant success and financial independence.

So this leads to my top 5 reasons why not to go back to corporate life:

1. Personal commitment and hidden agendas
There is a need to establish personal motivations in a corporate community and they can range from complete indifference to monetary gains to megalomania. Success or failure of personal agendas can cause a wide range in levels of commitment – almost none of which are for the corporation. Right now the only thing that matters to us is the success of our start up – without which we all fail.

2. Just a replicating cog
Someone somewhere in a large corporation has done it before or already decided what you should do. I like to create and today that’s down to me and I get the satisfaction of being responsible for the results – good or bad – it’s a freedom that’s unbeatable.

3. Budgets
The budget reigns supreme in matters which involve financial planning and there is generally no concern about the funding, cash position, investments or real affordability. It’s no wonder so many crap decisions are made. Small business limitations force this awareness and this in turn drives innovation and efficiency.

4. Red tape and inflexibility
Controls are needed in a large organisation – at least that’s the defence for red tape – what I can appreciate now is the efficiency between taking a decision and making it happen, usually there’s a whole different critical path. i.e. can we afford it right now as opposed to have we got all the necessary signatures!

5. Human Resources
There is a science in crowd control or battery farming and HR is the equivalent in corporate life. Under the pretext of caring for employees, providing training and other personal development benefits their cover is blown during periods of reorganisation. Hopefully we can scale efficiently enough to avoid this parasitic role for a long time to come.

There were a few that didn’t quite make the grade like: meetings – room availability and scheduling fun, reporting for reporting sake and dividing up menial pay raises amongst a team all deserving the maximum award.

Thank god for our technology start up – hopefully we’ll come up trumps on the rewards as well.

Escape from Corporate Colditz

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:05:00 +0000

A very good friend of mine said to me tonight that they had been missing my posts and I replied I had been lacking the inspiration needed to write them.

I continued – “you know it’s hard to keep writing about things, I don’t want to write a load of crap about nothing, so much of what I read is trivial and appears to be written because the author thinks they must write something to keep their audience satisfied or perhaps they just need to write about everything to satisfy themselves”

The problem is that I find writing a good post quite exhausting and certainly time consuming – unless I get a sudden flash of inspiration.

Last year when I started my blog I had a real drive – a desire to get noticed and an enthusiasm from discovering this new medium but most importantly I had time – plenty of time whilst trying to start up my own marketing consultancy business.

Today I am wrapped up launching Sharedband, discovering a new market place and learning so much about the difference between a start up environment and my prior corporate Colditz life – and loving every moment of my new found freedom – I haven’t had time to reflect on what’s happened in the last 6 months.

Maybe I need to pick out the best bits and post about the changes in my life and the differences which in hindsight are huge.

The news is getting out there

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:20:00 +0000

Sharedband was officially launched this week with first ISP partner KeConnect and it was well reported in Comms Business, see their news piece. They have decided their product using Sharedband will be called Flexiband - I wonder how many other interesting brands will emerge as others launch their products.

Also picked op on a new blog for small businesses - Alex Bellinger had written a post about the growth in VoIP adoption by SME's and made the point that ADSL bandwidth was going to be an issue for anyone with even a modest number of VoIP users - especially if their office was remote from an exchange - so I got into a brief explanation on how our new service could help solve this problem.

Real Brands Score

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:17:00 +0000

As a follow up on my last post on brand virtues I thought it would be fun to think about how these virtues stack up in the real world, so I put together a simple table with some expressions of these virtues or lack thereof so as to score a brand. Try it out on your own or your competitor’s brand or just a famous brand. Simply think about the brand in question – maybe open the website in front of you and ask yourself which of the following expressions are most appropriate to describe the top 10 virtues:

Add the score up, the max score is 50 and minimum 10. Then in only the way women’s magazines can do well I have attempted to draw a few conclusions:

Score 10-19 :

The company responsible for this brand is likely to take your money and disappear, they are to be despised and hopefully customers will run for the hills and it won’t be long before they go bust. The world will be a better place without them.

Score 20-29 :

If you’re responsible for the marketing this brand you’ve got your work cut out. Plenty of challenges ahead, it takes time to alter these perceptions but don’t give up see where you’re marked down and find out why. These virtues are not just about changing the messaging or advertising copy it’s about radically overhauling the brand and company culture.

Score 30-39 :

A pretty good result, few large companies or famous brands will do better than this. But there is no room for complacency. One slip can undo all the value established – it’s better to keep trying to improve the margin so that in the event of bad times customers will stick with the brand.

Score 40-50 :

Check the facts – you could be deluding yourself – if you are the marketing manager try asking some real customers what they think. If the result stands please accept my sincere congratulations on a brilliant result. Your brand is a massive asset to your business. The only bad news is that the effort can never stop and there is only one direction you can go now – so stay ahead and protect your brand - its worth a fortune.

Would anyone be prepared to measure Sharedband for me?

Footnote: Thanks to Steve for coming up with a couple of great expressions and not disappearing up his own ass.

Life or brand virtues

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:12:00 +0000

A few months back I wrote a post about the value of Trust. In this post I mentioned that it was in my top 10 virtues for human life and brand value. Ever since I wrote about it I have wondered what else was in my top 10 and did they all apply to brand value as well as being human virtues. Perhaps you may have a view on the order but here is my best stab at the top 10 brand virtues:

Empathy
Lucidity
Trust
Quality
Wisdom
Honesty
Powerful
Humility
Responsibility
Organization

Did I miss any that are more important than those listed? How does your brand stack up (or even your own personal brand / image)? What do you think your customers or audience would make of these values when it comes to your own brand image?

Do you think it would be fun to score well known brands against each of these factors and reach conclusions as to their brand value as a result?

"Expletive" Cool Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:54:00 +0000

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has got excited about Google alerts in his blog and I agree they are a really useful way of tracking your key interests. He points out how he tracks his own key words “Scott Adams Dilbert” so he can see who is talking about his work and that he’s reasonably likely to read (at least some of the content to get the context).

So I got to wondering if adding a batch of obvious key names, words and links at the end of this post I might grab the attention of a number of prolific bloggers and pundits and tell them about our great new technology.

Sharedband is this really cool patented software technology that aggregates the bandwidth of broadband lines. This is a totally new low cost line bonding solution for the mass market - it uses commodity routers pooled together distributing IP packets across multiple lines.

This gives you much faster internet connection speeds, upstream and downstream, as well as adding greater resilience to your service. Great news if you depend on the internet for your living as do the illustrious bunch below....and many many more besides.

Dennis Howlett AccMan B.L. Ochman Kathy Sierra Creating Passionate Users Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid Om Malik GigaOm Jackie Danicki Brian Oberkirch Like It Matters Steve Rubel Micro Persuasion Shel Israel Global Neighbourhoods Naked Conversations Neville Hobson Shel Holtz Robert Scoble Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger Seth Godin Seth's Blog David Tebbut Teblog Sam Sethi Vecosys Techmeme Michael Arrington Techcrunch

Declaration: I am Sales & Marketing Director for Sharedband - and yes this an unashamed awareness promotion - unashamed because its great news for every broadband user who wants more than what their getting currently.

Michael CEO @ Dell again

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:48:00 +0000

Michael returning to the helm is possibly the best chance for a Dell comeback, what is needed is a human face to the business and Michael has the potential to achieve that. In today’s market it’s become far more important to have customer empathy and an image of understanding that is founded on real customer experience. I know from my own experience as a Dell customer that great strides have been made on the delivery of the service and the Direct2Dell blog is a great example of what I mean by developing customer empathy.

As an ex Dell executive I had the pleasure of meeting both Kevin and Michael on a few occasions and I believe that the right leadership boils down to personality. Kevin’s obvious, abundant intellect and organisational skills were brilliant and behind the successful scaling of Dell’s business, whilst leveraging operational costs to the nth degree. But I am sorry to say I never found him inspiring or compassionate, two essential ingredients for leadership. On the other hand I found that Michael exuded these qualities and for such a seriously rich guy – he was far more “human”. My guess is he really appreciated Kevin’s skills and track record as COO and assumed that was what was the magic ingredient needed to lead the business. Now the processes and organisation are fundamentally in place it’ll be down to Michael to add the necessary humanity to win the hearts of his customers. The moral has to be “You can’t buy customers goodwill you have to win it by building their trust.”

Sam Sethi Reports on Sharedband

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:17:00 +0000

Sam picked up on Sharedband and posted this article on his site www.vecosys.com. It started a few questions about how Sharedband can help the residential market get the bandwidth they need.

What have I been doing for 10 weeks!

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:25:00 +0000

If you've been wondering what's happened to my blog over the last few weeks I have been rather busy with a new job as sales and marketing director for a young exciting business.

This may sound like a lame excuse but I’ve held off telling everyone about it as we weren’t quite ready. Its been a challenge starting from basics on a shoestring whilst raising the necessary investment. Well that’s changing fast and tonight we published our new website www.sharedband.com

The elevator pitch is that we have a new patented software technology that allows you to combine ADSL broadband connections into one faster more reliable connection. This really helps with the upsteam bandwidth restrictions and distance from exchange limitations of existing ADSL services.

If you think it's all too good to be true then your thoughts are similar to my own initial reaction - then I had to take the job; how often as a sales and marketing guy do you find a business proposition as powerful with such obvious customer benefits.

The product goes live with a couple of service providers in the next few days and that’ll mean real customers, issues to fix and some very needy revenue. I hope you’ll take the time to look at the web site and let me know what you think – both in terms of the marketing and the business proposition.

Blogging in the Flesh

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:35:00 +0000

Last Wednesday I decided to join Neville Hobson and Debbie Weil at the Hereford Arms in London for their proposed blogger get together. An interesting group assembled and I got to meet Mark White who has commented on a previous post of mine and some other interesting guys: Tom Shelly from the Economist, Alex Manchester from Melcrum, Martyn Davies and Matt O’Neill.

Neville challenged us all to come up with some comments for a podcast – he’s now published on his blog and we had a wide ranging discussion from politics to the value of face to face meetings. Like the previous Saturday when I got together a bunch of people to meet face to face I found the evening great fun and very rewarding. It is interesting to note how much faster the conversation gets going when despite meeting for the first time face to face, there is common understanding and in some way a prior relationship, where one has been reading their blogs and may have been involved in an online conversation.

Although I didn’t join in the conversation that evening about the Edelman / Walmart controversy, I listened with interest to the passionate views and have been reading some of the many posts around about this subject. Although I understand the anger and disappointment exhibited by some commentators I am amazed at the level of coverage this debate is getting. Nothing and no one is perfect, and I am sure everyone is still on a steep learning curve when it comes to social media, mistakes and misjudgements will probably be made by everyone at some point.

We also discussed the lack of understanding of social media inside corporations today, the challenge is there for the blogosphere – let’s keep our passion and energy focussed on that.

Heaven help me.....not politics!

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:02:00 +0000

Not being a great fan of politics I never really considered making a political comment on my blog. But twice today people I know have hit me with a political view. The first was Shel Israel's encounter with David Cameron and now an old friend of mine sent me a link to this new blog called the Majority Party and I must say it was a great read. Hope you find it stimulating!

Corporate Comment Control

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 08:50:00 +0000

JB3 raises a very interesting issue in his comment on my earlier post about Strategic Marketing:

“It can do all those great things, but the problem as I see it is, if companies control the content of a blog. What if someone is posting legitimate problems or outcomes with a product or service? Should the company be allowed to erase that from their blog?”

Clearly the blog owner is responsible for the content on their blog and there is no issue in my mind that moderating out profanity and unnecessary bad attitude is totally acceptable. Shel Israel calls it his “living room comment policy”.

For me there is also an issue when it comes to subject matter, if I am discussing a topic- because this is what I know about i.e. marketing, and someone joins my conversation and starts discussing something I know nothing about (i.e. football) or where it seems totally irrelevant to my topic - I'd say it was reasonable to at least question the relevance with the commenter before publishing. Fortunately I haven't had to do this - nor do I really expect to have to do this on my personal blog.

However in a large corporation it is reasonable to expect that an engineering department in Europe would know nothing about customer service in North America. (Not even considering the fact that many multinationals have various siloed product divisions under one brand). I don't think it’s appropriate for commenters to expect to be published if they try to address their North American service issues in a European technology discussion.

Nevertheless if I was a corporate blogger and I received off topic comments I'd certainly be forwarding those remarks off line to those capable of responding. The important thing here is for corporate blogs to be clear of their mandate, their scope of conversation and their ability to respond. It comes back to setting expectations for your readership. However as a corporate blogger you need to build trust with your readers, it would be unwise to moderate comments on matters you are clearly involved with, your responsiveness and openness are vital to maintain credibility.

It is also interesting to note that it is only about 1 in 500 readers on my blog that actually make a comment – (and I hear that is on the high side) - so a good question is: how appropriate is it for a vocal minority to potentially shift the conversation off the blog or post topic.

I’d revert back to Shel’s analogy of the living room, however justified the person may feel in making their comment isn’t it a question of manners and how a participant goes about building a relationship. Those that are not interested in a relationship and just want to rant or get sensational should not be made welcome. How different are these approaches for the example I created with a corporate technology blog focussed on Europe -

"When are you guys going to fix my problem, you just can't get your act together and I am fed up beating my head against a brick wall here in North America"

"Excuse me do you know how I can get help with my service issue in North America, I can't find any other blog or individual to talk too on this subject?"

Shel, Rick Hugh et al

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:52:00 +0000

As per Shel’s post we had a great evening last Saturday when seven of my colleagues who have all been talking about the impact of social media on our lives and businesses met up with a few gurus on the subject.

Here is a picture of the dinner courtesy of Shel, and I’m sure there will be other pictures to follow.

Nick and Andrew my friends from Stonk media grabbed the initiative and interviewed Rick Segal, Shel Israel and Hugh MacLeod on the subject of corporate blogging, it’s a really good five minute insight. Download on thir post here

I have been asked a few times since the get together – what was the big take out for me. You know it’s very difficult to nail this with a good answer. I was delighted to see so much great conversation occurring and relationships being formed – who knows where any of them will bring value - but my expectation is that some will.

Maybe Bob will sell Shel an authorised signed reprint of a famous Pink Floyd album cover (yes Shel's last great rock music passion) – or perhaps Hugh and his business partner Jason Korman may have tempted a few more to try out Stormhoek wine – I doubt any of us can afford one of his suits. Also met with Henk Kleynhams from Skyrove and really interesting hotspot business concept, check out his movie.

Active Conversations but no mask on me

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:02:00 +0000

I invited a small group of friends and colleagues to dinner back in August. As a result of reading Naked Conversations I decided we needed to discuss the impact of blogging on businesses and in particular the ramifications for marketing and communication agencies.

We had such a good “on going” conversation we decided to start a group blog to represent and continue our round table discussion on line. This meant that everyone would need to start their own individual blog, mine was already up and running – although using the dreadful Blogger software.

Bob’s company Signals kindly offered to organise the group software and hosting. I plan to migrate across to the new platform very shortly. Two of the guys have already started posting on their new blogs: “The Podcaster” and the “The Signaller” and the others “The Voice”, “Talkin’ Pictures” and “The Navigator” will all start in the next few days.

To be different and create interest beyond the content (which we hope will be top notch) we planned to develop some interesting graphics (not as you see the blogs now) and a “mother” page that portrays the interaction in the group discussion. This emphasis on presentation and structure would also help us understand how corporate blogs could evolve, without compromising authentic individual contributions.

Unlike most of the group I have come from a corporate marketing background. In general corporations are not yet decided on the true value of blogging, however since leaving my corporate role I have discovered real benefits to shareholder value and customer relationships and have set about convincing former colleagues and peers (and anyone else who wants to listen).

Nevertheless despite allegations (as per Shel's reference to another misguided blogger) – I am not Apple’s "Masked Blogger", a quick check would verify I have never worked there.

Blogger Hell

noreply@blogger.com (Keith) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:23:00 +0000

Sorry it seems that all day I haven't been able to republish my blog. I don't think this is unsual for Blogger, although its ususally only been a problem before for a couple of hours, today its been impossible for at least 12 hours!

I wanted to republish as several comments are not showing up on the posts, so if you've added a comment and it hasn't showed up yet - its not because I've moderated it out!

I doubt I'll get this post to publish now (1st timed at 1.05 am 5th Oct) - but who knows with Blogger it's a real B*gger!

PS no need to comment on changing tools - I'm working on it now....

4^th attempt to publish – this time from email

tried again at 7am 5th attempt and now again at 10.40pm on the 5th Oct 6th try.........