Looking at the coverage on the TV and the Web, it struck me that the news stories did not have a strong voice from Maclaren and that got me interested in how the company was managing the crisis and specifically whether they were using social media as part of the campaign.  After all, the decision to undertake a recall of these proportions would not have been taken lightly or quickly by such an established brand and surely the media/PR planning would have been meticulous …

A bit of web searching unearthed a fascinating blog post from Harvard Business Review entitled “Maclaren’s Product Recall: What Would You Do?”  The post discussed the impact of the recall on the company’s brand and business and then put forward some strategies from crisis management experts originally included in an HBR case published in 2001 on an eerily similar theme.  I have summarised HBR’s recommendations below:

Engage a reputable, independent, outside investigator …

Hire a crisis management expert charged with setting up and training a permanent, internal crisis-management team comprising people from the operations, marketing, IT, security, and legal departments …

Call the babies’ families. Offer to meet with them privately and provide whatever assistance possible, including paying the medical bills …

Announce the recall in paid advertisements as well as issuing the joint press release with the CPSC [U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission] …

All of these recommendations make complete sense of course, but they don’t go far enough.  What jumped out at me was that the proposed strategies completely ignored the role of the Internet and in particular how Maclaren should engage with their customers through social media to get their message out, tell their story, rally their advocates, answer customers’ questions and respond to their concerns and fears.

This omission looks all the more glaring as in this case, Maclaren has not pursued an aggressive, nor systematic online campaign – as Time has noticed.  Just take look at the very tame official twitter account for Maclaren UK, or indeed the slightly more proactive (but still lame) account for Maclaren US.

So to answer HBR’s question, this is what I would do …

1. Hire an experienced community manager fast:  You need a community manager (more likely a small community team) who can take part on Maclaren’s behalf in online conversations across the Web.  This person or team will also be responsible for bringing these conversations into the company and will be a vital interface with senior executives, product management, customer service and PR. Believe me an agency could not perform this role for you as they cannot be an authentic voice for the company in the public domain, and they are external to the org, so cannot help you with internal co-ordination.

2. Make sure you know what people are saying about you and where: if you are to have a responsive campaign around the recall, you need to be listening to the multiple conversations people are having about you.  Use a social media monitoring tool like Radian 6, Scout Labs, or Nielsen Buzz Metrics, to understand how the issue is resonating on the web and the impact your campaign is having.

3. Take part in conversations across the Web:  Once you know what people are talking about and where, don’t sit on the insight, but use it to engage with your customers.  Don’t assume that having social-media powered conversation means putting up a page on Facebook.  For an issue of this type the most active conversations may be across multiple parenting communities and blogs.  Send your Community management team to listen first and then engage where the discussion is happening so they can clarify issues, help customers with information and put your side of the case openly.

4. Use Twitter properly: Don’t fall into the big brand trap of using Twitter simply as a tool to push out press releases or company information.  If you do that, you end up (like today) with a handful of followers.  You need to build up a following and use Twitter as another conversational tool. So look for who is tweeting about Maclaren and the recall, reply to them, follow them so you can DM them, and retweet your advocates.

5. Work with advocates and detractors: There are many people who are still on your side across the globe and of course many who aren’t.  What binds them is both communities are emotionally involved with the issue.  So work creatively with both groups and make it easy for them to share and pass on information about the recall through the digital media they use and the communities they are involved with.  

6. Facilitate discussion on your Web site about the recall:  You are really missing a trick with your Web site. It won’t be effective for you, if you simply use it to push out a corporate message. That well-intentioned light box message on the home page won’t change what people think, and is intrusive to people who are trying to find out information and get advice.  So junk it, and instead use your customer service area as a place of conversation with your customers.  At this stage people are more likely to believe what others are saying about you than your official messages, so creating a structured conversation on your site will work to your benefit.  A tool like Get Satisfaction is a good option here.

Making online conversations a core element of the crisis management strategy for Maclaren will also deliver longer term business benefits for the brand as it builds a platform and team who can absorb and act on feedback quickly from customers. This will only reflect well on brand, improve Maclaren’s customer service, and help in new product development, long after the PR storm from the product recall has passed.

And as for Harvard Business Review, well, good effort but need to try harder. Time to update the case methinks …

What’s pretty clear is that in the UK there are two online players and many also rans . And only one of the players – Google – is a search engine.

So maybe Fred Wilson is right and we are going to see ‘social traffic’ on the web become the dominant force online in the near future. Arguably that point is getting very close with Facebook having a significant lead already in terms of time spent online (that’s shown by the size of the bubble in the chart).

I believe this trend has got some very important ramifications for the way money is made on the web today and specifically for online advertising models.

Text-based PPC advertising is a fantastic way to monetise traffic flowing through search engines.   However, that model does not in itself translate well into social sites where the focus is not search, but engagement/interaction/sharing/promotion.   In other words, if the power of text-based PPC is in its relevance to the search term, then it struggles in a medium where it needs to be relevant to the specific context of the exchange taking place in the social networking site.

Facebook’s performance ad platform seems to offer very granular targeting based on demographic data and interest profiling.  But the challenge is to make the ‘social ad’ relevant to the exchange taking place for people who aren’t buying, or even interested in buying anything, at that point in time.

The dilemma for advertisers is set to get even more complex with the continued growth of micro-blogging/real-time search on Twitter and Friendfeed etc.  Conventional online advertising models don’t stand a chance to deliver value in an environment which is constantly updating and in flux.

The good news is that online ‘audiences’ are still growing and where there is an audience there has to be a way to advertise to it! But advertising vehicles are going to have to change dramatically to exploit social.  The answer will be in becoming a participant in the conversation with a potential customer and making your advert a relationship builder rather than the mechanism to convert the customer directly to a sale.

Ironically, with old-style display advertising continuing to falter and spend often justified on the dubious basis of ‘brand building and awareness’, new social advertising models are likely to become a new form of ‘above the line’ marketing that is as much about establishing reputation and influence as it is about making sales.

I put myself down for thesis 18 which is the subject of the rest of this post:

“18. Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.” … here goes

Business feels more comfortable seeing the customer as ‘king’ rather than as a peer. After all, it’s easier for the marketing dept. of a company to objectify and bestow importance upon its customer as a segment (identifiable, but not easily actionable), a target market, trend or latent need, rather than go through the day-to-day, humdrum activity of talking to the people who consume its products and services.

The trouble is we as customers are down-to-earth republicans at heart and prefer to solicit the views of other people before we make a purchasing decision and indeed afterwards.   Online communities are now an integral part of the early stages of the purchasing cycle and after-sales support process.  We consult them long before we go near the official web site of a business …  it’s been a very long time since I booked a hotel room without vetting it first through Tripadvisor.  And off-line we use our personal networks to find trusted suppliers for the jobs we need to get done.  Some recent research from BT found that the biggest driver of new business leads for small businesses was still offline Word of Mouth – 70% of the sample got the majority of their business this way, going up to 88% for sectors such as professional services.

Companies have everything to gain from tapping into the power of conversations both on and offline. The example of  Walkers Crisps is a good one.  They have run a campaign to get the public to suggest new flavours for crisps (1.2M entered!) and then vote on the finalists made into packets of crisps like the Cajun Squirrel pictured here.

You may think this is a cheesy viral … I see it as a fantastic way for Walkers to become part of a fun, creative and meaningful conversation with its customers that will reinvigorate its product line and sales. The crisp company has made itself the subject of the conversation between its customers.

A related but alternative strategy is for a business to become the place of conversation for its customers, in other words a platform.  This is the approach of a community like Get Satisfaction for example.

In contrast I see many of the large customer review sites that provide a platform for consumers to comment on a company, but limit the means of interaction/right of response of the business, as a flawed medium.  At the end of the day it doesn’t help consumers if the subject of the conversation can’t take part in it!  Yelp’s recent change of policy to allow businesses to comment on reviews indicates that having a one-sided conversation is not the best way forward either for individuals or businesses.

The Cluetrain Manifesto ten years ago made a compelling case for markets to be seen as conversations that remains as valid today.  Business practice has yet to catch up with consumer behaviour, but the signs are positive and change is accelerating.

• Citizen journalism through formal networks such as Demotix (which recently had a photo used by the Guardian on the newspaper’s front page in relation to the G20 demonstration)

• Informal video reporting by members of the public that are not looking for a story, but just recording an event. The American hedge fund manager who filmed Mr Ian Tomlinson being struck and pushed over by the police at the G20 demonstration is an example of such ‘accidental’ reportage.

• Video activism: Protesters using video footage as ‘evidence’ of alleged malpractice or wrongdoing – an example here is the video of protesters challenging a police officer to identify himself by his number at the G20 demo.

Citizen journalists, video activists, and people like you and me with a digital camera or a Flip are new ‘social’ media agents. What has empowered these groups are the simple tools to shoot and share video and the massive consumption of online video through video sharing and social networking sites with the default of course being Youtube.

Does this mean that old media is now on the sidelines? Far from it. In fact, all three examples cited above got into the mainstream and amplified through traditional media, especially newspapers such as the Guardian and the Evening Standard that broke them as stories in their print and online editions.

But what has changed is that front page news that can in a matter of hours change the direction of a major story is as likely to come from footage shot by a member of the public as a briefing from an insider. As the American hedge fund manager commenting on the impact his video had had on the investigation into Mr Tomlinson’s death said “… You needed something incontrovertible. In this case it was the video.”

The perceived role of the Media as the Fourth Estate acting as a check on political authority has been rightly challenged – Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent being a particularly strong mauling. However, I believe that the concept can have real weight when broadened to include not just traditional media, but the new ‘social’ media agents (citizen journalists, video activists and members of the public) who are out taking digital pictures and shooting online video of the events around them non-stop all over the world.

The pen being mightier than the sword always seemed to me to be a hopeful statement, rather than something borne out in practice. However, I am now thankful and relieved that the video camera is proving itself to be more powerful than the police baton.

All went well until I asked a business whether I could email some photos of my sofa to them for a quote.  ”Sure just use the email address on the web site”, came the reply.  When I pointed out that there wasn’t an email address listed,  the response was “bloody hell, I’ve been waiting ages for that to get done!” 

So here was a small business that had the wherewithal to advertise itself on Google and yet struggled to keep its basic contact information up to date on its principal web site.   

Which brings me to the new .tel top-level domain and its promise that businesses can “join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…” and the ability to “integrate all your means of communication in a single place under your control…”

So will the .Tel TLD make life easier for SMEs?  At first glance it looks pretty useful in that it allows a business or individual to add all their contact data easily, control who has access to it and update it as they need.   

Moreover, .Tel is unlike other TLDs in that it stores a user’s information right in the DNS.

But so what? Going back to my search for a reupholstery service, as I didn’t have a personal recommendation to go on, I needed to find out more than just simple contact info.  That’s one reason why I went to Google and not a directory listings site … I wanted to look at company web sites or customer reviews to get some perspective on the businesses.  

In this regard, .Tel contact data would not have materially helped me at this stage of my search as a consumer looking for a business.  In fact it would have been no better than a standard directory listing, particularly as there is no reason why data accuracy should be any better for a self-administered listing on .Tel than a directory entry.  Looked at in this way, .Tel seems like the Net-savvy younger brother of the BT OSIS database which provides the backbone data for print and online listings in the UK.  Whereas OSIS uses the telephone number as the anchor point for its business and residential listings, .Tel uses the DNS … different technologies, same end point.

Another open issue in my mind is how the .Tel approach sits with the most recent developments in personal data/profile sharing from the likes of Google, Myspace and most of all Facebook which has built some serious momentum with Facebook Connect.   What these forms of data portability offer is not just sharing of singular contact information between networks, but richer contextual data about me and my contacts.  They deliver not just information but context about the information – i.e. the sort of added value I went searching on the Web for when looking for my reupholstery service.

Now .Tel could interface back into the social graph by supporting one or more of these data portability initiatives and this does seem to be on the cards.  Being able to keep a single set of profile information updated that would then feed into all my other online profiles and Web sites would be very handy indeed.  This is the sort of service a business like the one I spoke to Saturday would likely pay for.  However, couldn’t this service equally be provided by a profile/network holder such Plaxo or Linked In for businesses and a Myspace or Facebook for consumers?

It’s early days for .Tel and it’s going to be interesting to watch how it develops as right now it seems to be poised somewhere between a legacy directory model, Web 1.0 TLDs and Web 2.0 data portability.

For a good while now I’ve been thinking about buying a video camera and was settling on something like the Canon HF10 packed full of features and with a price tag at over £500. Then along comes Santa with a Flip Mino costing a little over £100 and with a feature set so limited it doesn’t come with a manual.

On paper these products are not at all comparable, but I now have a more usable and superior camcorder for my needs for a fifth of the price.  As a result, I think the maker of the Mino, Pure Digital Technologies, is disrupting the traditional digital camcorder business. More on that later, but first what’s the Flip Mino like?

It’s extremely quick and easy to get recording.  Press the ‘on’ button and then the big red record button on the back of the Mino and you’re off. You can zoom, but there are no options to change other record settings.  You get video at 30 fps and at VGA resolution and that’s it.   That’s easily good enough for the web (see video example I shot with the Flip Mino below) and not bad on TV playback either.

Getting video off the Flip is very straightforward.  Plug the built-in USB connector into your Mac or PC and use the Flip Share software to transfer or edit videos.  Uploading to video sharing sites is a breeze.

Any gripes? A couple. The touch sensitive buttons on the Flip are not that touch sensitive (!) esp. on zoom which can be irritating.  The Flip Share software runs slowly on my iBook G4.  That’s pretty much it on the negative side.

So why is this such an exciting product and is it going to disrupt the likes of Canon, Sony and JVC?

Well, the Flip Mino does fulfill a number of the key criteria for being a disruptive product as defined by Clayton M. Christensen, i.e  a good-enough, low-cost solution to a job that enough people are trying to get done that creates a new market at the low end of an established market. Specifically:

1. It creates demand from non-consumers (people like myself) who haven’t previously owned a camcorder.  The Mino is very affordable and simple to use and therefore accessible to consumer segments put off by the complexity and cost of the established camcorder market. On a related note, Adam Richardson has posted a good discussion of product simplicity and how it affects consumer adoption that also references the Flip.

2. It helps consumers do more easily and effectively a task they were already trying to do by other means.  In this case, record and share ad hoc moments online anywhere they want, when they want.  Before the Flip the three main options were:

- the limited video capability on a mobile phone or digital camera – available as a secondary or tertiary feature and often hard to really use

- the bulky, feature-rich camcorder that could be wheeled out for set-piece occasions

- or webcams that tied you to the computer.

Flip is not alone in this new market – Kodak’s Zi6 pocket video camera targets a similar set of needs.  But both Kodak and Pure Digital Technologies are new entrants in the camcorder business – the incumbents have not yet responded.  This is classic behaviour in markets experiencing disruption.  Sony, JVC, Panasonic and Canon appear content to continue competing amongst themselves on levels that are no longer or marginally relevant to most consumers, e.g. recording format, storage capacity, power of zoom and video resolution.  In so doing, they have missed the needs being addressed head on by the Flip and Kodak Zi6 in a different part of the market.

However, like all good disruptors, Pure Digital Technologies is moving up market by adding incremental innovations to its product set that pose a more direct threat to the established players in their mainstream camcorder market.  The new Flip Mino HD records higher resolution video (1,280×720-pixel) at 30 fps in 16:9 widescreen format, whilst at the same time retaining the ease of use, low price point and form factor that makes it so disruptive in the first place.

I just wish I had one of these new HD Flips.  But that’s OK.  When it’s available in the UK this year I can give the old one to my partner and keep the HD version for myself .  And this also shows just how much the camcorder market will change – it’ll no longer be just Dad who has one, but everyone in the family can have an affordable personal camcorder in their pocket.  If the incumbent consumer electronics giants don’t wake up to this new market reality (and massive growth opportunity) soon they will really suffer. Anyone remember DEC, the once dominant player in the mini computer market disrupted by the PC?

A text book case of new market disruption and the Innovator’s Dilemma I reckon.

As we are poised to enter possibly the worst global downturn since the Interwar years, a 1920s theme could turn out to be remarkably relevant! Weimar Republic anyone …

On a brighter note, I do hope this theme conveys a little more of the spirit of the original Fumoirs, as described in the French version of the Wikipedia thus:

“C’était un lieu de convivialité, qui pouvait être à mi-chemin entre le cabinet de curiosités et le boudoir.”

In other words, a place to kick back, share ideas and explore new things.  

And have a puff of course.

Bonne année à tous. Happy new year

The power of consumer reviews is undeniable in influencing purchasing behaviours.  However, I think it’s time we got our telescopes out and took a peek into the firmament to see what is driving reviews and ratings behaviour – in particular to assess whether review sites actually give a balanced perspective on the good, not so good and sometimes bad businesses or products listed thereon.

The 5-star-ratings model is the de facto standard for review sites.  But is the distribution of stars uniform over the 5-point range?  It would appear not … as this distribution from Yelp in September shows.

A whopping 67% of all reviews on this very popular site gave either 4 or 5 stars.  A measly 15% of reviews gave businesses 1 or 2 stars.   Why is this the case? and should we be worried about it?

I’ve just finished reading an intriguing report by Jupiter Research on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in Retail that highlighted a couple of very salient findings. For a start Jupiter underlined just how central reviews and ratings are to online purchasing decisions today as it found that 77% of US online shoppers look at product reviews and ratings.

But what really caught my attention was the difference in consumer behaviour after a positive and a negative shopping experience online.  Consumers are, according to the research, more likely to take a survey (43%) after a good experience than a bad one (17%), more likely to tell friends about good experience (31%) than a bad one (21%), and more likely to write a product review about a product they liked (9%) than one they didn’t (4%).

So it does appear that as consumers we really only want to tell the good news and this results in reviews being skewed towards the top end of the scale.  If this pattern of behaviour holds true then I would argue that the 5 point scale is potentially flawed as it presents an illusion of objectivity and a paucity of insight –   If 67% of the restaurants in a town I want to visit have 4 or 5 stars, how do I then choose between them?

And this gets me onto a second concern which is the trouble an aggregated star rating system has in conveying the richness of a product or service experience.  Julian Blom at LBi sent me this picture that illustrates the problem beautifully.

In this case a ‘neutral’ three star product rating is given based on the reviews of two consumers with polar opposite opinions.  This example shows that any aggregated rating system suffers from the degree of freedom it has from the original consumer experience.

Compound this distance from the original experience with the fact that consumers tend towards giving positive rather than negative reviews and I can’t help thinking that star-based review systems may have some fundamental limitations.

Looking beyond the instant gratification of a star rating, an alternative approach to getting deeper insight into a product or service experience, and the quality of the business providing it, is available through sites such as Get Satisfaction that enable consumers and businesses to interact openly around product or service issues.

A quick comment on the Small Business 2.0 event: I enjoyed it very much and hats off to Dan and the Conference People team for putting it together.  It was a very telling sign of the times that the audience was not a bunch of “2.0″ nerds, but small businesses either looking at how to branch out from established marketplaces and become really multi-channel, or wanting to get more from the Internet than their traditional web site has given them to date.  There is a clear convergence of interest from SMEs with very different online backgrounds looking into how the Web can become a more effective part of their marketing and sales strategy.  I sincerely hope there will be more Small Business 2.0 events because the need is evident.  

And on that note, I will no longer feel like a miserable sinner and am getting back into the blogging saddle again … yeehaa!

Whilst companies such as Eutelsat and SES Astra went about growing pedestrian but very profitable businesses distributing digital TV to the Direct-to-Home and cable markets, billions of dollars were pumped into projects of truly galactic dimensions to build new global communications infrastructures in the sky.  The two exemplars were Teledesic and Iridium.  Although, these two projects targeted different markets (Teledesic was all about high bandwidth applications, whereas Iridium was global voice communications), they had many similarities:

1. Backed by titans from the high tech sector: Microsoft put $30M into Teledesic, and Motorola was the lead investor in the $5bn investment in Iridium’s network

2. A large dose of philanthropy: both companies exhibited a strong belief that satellites could bridge the digital divide and bring IT and communications services to the Third World.  But forgot that whilst the need was there, nobody had the money to pay for the services brought by these billion dollar networks!

3. Some very costly experimentation in new technologies – LEOs and MEOs for the interested (whereas we at Eutelsat made do with the old faithful GEOs)

4. Complete failure – Teledesic wound up before getting a satellite off the ground in 2002 and Iridium went bankrupt in 1999 (although it came back to life in a different form in 2001)

Google’s adventure is remarkably similar.  $20M contributed so far into a project estimated to cost $750M to launch 16 LEO satellites into orbit to bring Internet services to the “other 3 billion” people in the Third World. umm …

As JFK said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“.  I wonder whether a similar sentiment has taken hold in the Googleplex.  Could this be hubris from a cash-rich tech behemoth at the apogee of its market dominance? They have after all remade the planet as Google Earth, so now let’s look to the stars … And will this well-intentioned project burn up on re-entry as the fundamentals of the business model unravel?  I really hope it succeeds, but fear that like its predecessors it’s destined to fail.