Wadds' tech pr blog

Saying goodbye is hard to do

2008-07-25T15:39:00.002Z

3mobilebuzz wants the 3G broadband dongle back that I’ve been trialling for the last three months. I really can’t bear to part with it. It's superb for travel in terms of the reliability and data speed – I’ve completely given up on wi-fi away from home or the office. And we've had a lot of fun as a family at home with mobile web cams and web conferencing.

In fact I’ve decided that I’m going to give it up. I like it so much I’ve asked the 3mobilebuzz team if I can sign up on a contract.

Tags: 3G, broadband, dongle, mobile

Losing Face

2008-07-24T16:13:00.003Z

A landmark ruling has seen the award of £22,000 libel damages to the victim of a fake Facebook entry. The perpetrator was a jealous former school friend.

Digital vengeance is surely going to rise as jilted exes and others seek to get their revenge with photo postings and the like, which will be potentially damaging for social networks but good for lawyers as we see more and more of these cases arise.

One of the Rainier PR directors has a great pub anecdote about first girlfriend ordered a load of skips to be sent to his address after being dumped. His family was ex-directory so they just drove up and down the road until informed that they weren’t required after all.

In the digital era those planning revenge should, in the light of today’s ruling, think again. Or just get on with their life.

Q&A with LabourHome on Party Treasurer Campaign

2008-07-24T13:39:00.002Z

What?
LabourHome launched a campaign to challenge Jack Dromey's re-election to the role of Labour Treasurer. It is the largest independent Labour blog (60,000 regular users), run by former NOP pollster, Alex Hilton, US web campaign guru, Jag Singh and media strategist, Mark Hanson.

Who?
Its candidate was Mark McDonald, a human rights barrister, who is also associate editor of LabourHome.

Why?
LabourHome was responding to discontent amongst Labour grassroots that manifested itself on the site.

How?
The campaign team wanted to show that ordinary members could be organised online, without big donors, influential backers and big infrastructure.

Where?
The campaign was largely conducted on the blogosphere and through engaging in online debates via the likes of Progress, New Statesman and Compass Youth online. It specifically targeted blog ads and a series of YouTube videos got over 25,000 views.

What was the result?
Mark McDonald got 41 per cent of the members vote versus 59 per cent for Jack Dromey. According to LabourHome, the block vote, accounting for 50 per cent, went entirely to Dromey.

What’s next?
LabourHome says that this will be the first of many similar campaigns to show that ordinary members can be mobilised behind a common cause online.

And maybe the Labour Party will sit up and take note. UK political parties are starting to ask how social media can be used to reconnect with the grassroots rather than just YouTubing versions of party political broadcasts.

Speaking your mind

2008-07-23T10:59:00.002Z

Here's Seth Godin on the benefit of having an engaging and enthusiastic company spokesperson.

Review: i-gotU GPS tracker

2008-07-23T08:10:00.003Z

I tracked my journey into Oxford Circus this morning by scooter from Ealing using an i-gotU GPS tracker. It's a tiny device weighing about 20g that's about half the size of a matchbox and logs GPS data at intervals of between 5 and 60 seconds. The integrated lithium battery lasts between 20 and 40 hours.

It's an extraordinary piece of kit more likely to be found in the hands of James Bond or Spooks' Adam Carter. In fact the manufacturer cautions that if you wish to use this device to track another individual or their vehicle, you must do so with their full consent and knowledge.

You suck off the data by plugging it into your PC and using an accompanying software application to display or fly-through data points on Google Maps. You can also squirt out the data in formats compatible with most GPS devices (to retrace or share routes), Google Earth and Microsoft LiveSearch Maps. Neat eh?

I bought the device for £30 in the sale from Maplin but when I looked last night its a tad pricer at £50.

Google Ad Planner stats don’t add up

2008-07-22T14:13:00.003Z

Has Google got its numbers wrong? That’s the question at the root of blog postings this afternoon from Tim Anderson and Andrew Smith.

Web traffic data used as source information for its new Ad Planner tool shows huge discrepancies between Google’s own data and figures cited by publishers.

Tim pulls up the stats for traffic to his own site:

I took a look at my own figures for June. My stats show about 6.5 times more page views than AdSense [Google] reports. This isn’t hits vs pages, incidentally. “Hits” record every request, so a page with several images requires several hits. Hits is therefore always the biggest number, but pages is in theory more meaningful.

Andrew cites the example of IT Pro:

According to the publisher (Dennis), IT Pro has 311,000 unique users and 1.1 million page impressions a month.

According to Google, it has: 33,000 unique UK visitors (86,000 worldwide); and 120,000 page views (260,000 worldwide).

Is Google using dodgy data? It claims:

Google Ad Planner data is estimated, based on an automated analysis of millions of search queries and site visits. However, Google Ad Planner data is accurate enough to be used directionally, and to provide valid planning recommendations.

Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Tim wonders how much web traffic is bot driven which could in part count for the discrepancy. Ultimately a web publisher’s own data will always be more accurate than Google’s data. But if media planners are set to coalesce around Google’s tools it surely needs to tighten up its act?

Twitter followers: how many is too many?

2008-07-21T14:04:00.002Z

Stephen Davies (@stedavies, following 294, followed by 570) asked on Twitter this morning at what point are you following too many people to keep up?

I posed the same questioned recently to Christine Perkett (@missusP following 1,159, followed by 1,207). I’ve always thought that 100 was as many as I could keep up with and so have kept the number of folk I follow to around this figure. Beyond that its difficult to follow threads.

But responses to Stephen from Becky McMichael (@bmcmichael, following 193, followed by 221) and Antony Mayfield (@amayfield, following 214, followed by 190) make me think that maybe I have been missing the point.

I’ve been thinking linearly, restricting the reach of my conversation to what I think I am able participate in. Both Becky and Antony reckon that you shouldn’t fret about the number of Twitter users that you follow and just dip in and out of conversations. I’m going to give it a crack and see how I get on.

Jargon watch: crunch-washing

2008-07-21T10:04:00.001Z

Here’s a new PR definition from Lewis PR’s Will Sturgeon and Nadia Saint: crunch-washing – using economic doom-mongering to get press coverage.

London Blogger's Summer meet-up

2008-07-21T09:23:00.003Z

Date for your diary if you're a blogger and you're based in London. The London Blogger's Summer meet-up is on July 29, 2008 at 7:30pm at Doggetts Coat and Badge, 1 Blackfriars Bridge, London EC4V.

Why I'm not buying an iPhone

2008-07-21T08:45:00.004Z

I'm with Ashley Norris of TechDigest.tv on the new iPhone. I've had a good look, but I'm not buying one because the specification will be surpassed by other vendors by the end of the year and the battery doesn't cut it for 3G. And while it might work as an accessory its too flimsy for a 24/7 phone.

Scooter commuters to be charged for central-London parking

2008-07-20T13:28:00.002Z

Scooter riders and motorcyclists in London are pissed off. Westminster Council has announced that from August it will start charging for parking in bike bays in the capital (£1.50 per day or £150 annually). I’m more than happy to pay. We’re exempt from the congestion charge and given the cost of parking a car in the capital should rightly be making a contribution.

The number of bikers commuting and parking in central London rose dramatically after congestion charging was introduced, and again after the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Westminster Council responded, albeit slowly, by increasing the number of bays but up until now hasn’t levied any charges.

I reckon that the annual cost of running a 125cc scooter to travel daily from Zone 6 to the West End is around £1,1 00 (including fuel, insurance, maintenance, tax and now parking). Even allowing for depreciation over a three- or five-year period it’s considerably less expensive, not to mention more pleasant and quicker, than traveling by tube.

Postings from around Rainier PR

2008-07-20T13:23:00.002Z

Some cracking posts this week from our clutch of bloggers: Steve Earl has continued as he started in brutal fashion, poking his pen this week at how the economy is likely to impact PR hiring and former employees that continue to use web-based subscription services after they've left an agency. It’s a cautionary reminder to regularly change usernames and passwords.

Congratulations to Matt Watson who posted about his graduation this week. What he failed to write about was an alleged encounter with George Clooney who was reportedly spotted on the Wirral this week for the Open at Birkdale. The Southport Visitor has the full story.

There are a few words on professional discretion at Custard PR Stu Campbell who this week overheard a couple gossiping on a train into Liverpool Street. He reckons that having second sourced information from Google he’s sitting on a story that’ll either land up in the industrial tribunal courts or on the front pages of a tabloid in the coming weeks

And finally Suse at Lighthouse PR charted the shift from print to online with the closure of IT Week at the end of the month.

Analysts on Twitter

2008-07-16T13:39:00.002Z

There's a list of analysts here (mainly US based) that use Twitter. Two points:

If you're in the PR industry and you're still a Twitter doubter get over yourself. Get your arse online and start building relationships.
Does this cross a line? How long before someone publishes a directory of journalists that use Twitter. Thought about it, but kicked it into touch. Inevitably it would get abused, and it breaks the intimacy of the format. It just wouldn't be nice would it?

Wadds' Photo Casebook

2008-07-16T12:48:00.003Z

Click on image to enlarge

Economic signposts

2008-07-15T09:09:00.003Z

Rising commodity and energy prices, coupled with public companies dumping profit warnings on the market in the two week period since the end of Q2 has done little to aid business confidence. But three data points are published this week that will indicate whether or not we’re heading for a full blown recession.

We’ve already had the first two numbers: The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors reported today that activity in the housing market has fallen to an all time low. The era of cheap mortgage debt and growing house equity is well and truly over and can only further erode consumer confidence.

The Office for National Statistics published the Consumer Price Index for June this morning. And at 3.8 per cent it’s not good. The Bank of England will likely have to increase interest rates next month making debt even more expensive, hitting confidence and business growth.

The Government’s official employment figures, published tomorrow, are expected to show job losses of around 300,000. There is always a lag between employment statistics and economic reality as businesses attempt to trade through difficult periods, but if these numbers are greater than expected it will point to more trouble to come.

Hold tight: as a contact in the City said to me in an IM this morning, I don’t think driving slower, changing gear earlier and not chucking away so much food is the answer.

Marketing budgets decline, but internet up

2008-07-14T12:33:00.003Z

The Q1 2008 Bellwether Report, the quarterly survey of marketing spend published by the IPA, reveals that current budgets have again been revised down for the second consecutive quarter; suggesting business confidence has fallen further. All sectors of the industry have experience cuts with the exception of spend on internet marketing suggesting that budgets are being diverted into this area. Budgets are predicted to fall further as a result on low corporate profitability through the end of the year.

When Northerners go native

2008-07-13T21:17:00.002Z

I met colleague Tim Hoang at London Waterloo last week to head out west for a meeting. We didn’t have time for breakfast so grabbed something as we headed out to the train. Hoang opted for a small tub of yoghurt and granola costing £2 from a fancy stall.

I was shocked. Really and truly. Forget the cost. Forget the fact that yoghurt could never fit the description of breakfast for a bloke. The Bradford boy-has almost certainly gone native.

Which brings us to a discussion in the office on Friday afternoon: is it inevitable that refugees from outposts of the UK go native after a period of working in London? I think it probably is; after almost 20 years in the capital it remains a daily fight for me.

Here are some of the warning signs from a northern bloke’s perspective. There’s an equivalent list for women and variations on the theme for other regions of the UK.

Pret a Manger replaces Greggs and Bagel Factory replaces McDonalds as lunch location of choice
Spend £100 on a night out with your partner when previously £30 would have more than sufficed, including a cab and a bag of chips on the way home
Read GQ, Mens Health or another bloke’s lifestyle magazine
Cease to think Peter Kay is funny and prefer the intellectual observations of Jimmy Carr or Stephen Fry
Moisturise
Spend Saturday evening watching subtitled art films instead of the latest Hollywood blockbuster
Pay £5 for a bottle of beer from Mexico instead of £2 for a pint of Old Git bitter
Trade your six-year old VW Polo for an annual travel pass
Graduate from barbers to hairdressers, and then onto hair stylist
Drink de-caf, herbal and organic teas. Pay £3.50 for a take-away cup of coffee
Swap Morrison’s for Waitrose and Sainsbury’s for M&S
Visit art galleries or museums and spend an evening at the ballet or a recital

Any others?

Project: Using a Wiimote to build a Minority Report computer interface

2008-07-12T22:42:00.007Z

In May I wrote about third party hacks for the Wii Remote (Wiimote). Having spent the intervening period building some of the applications posted on the web, I’ve developed a huge amount of respect for what is an incredibly sophisticated piece of kit and yet passes off as a £30 computer game controller.

The Wiimote contains a Bluetooth radio, an infrared camera capable of tracking up to four moving objects, a three-axis linear accelerometer, a joy stick, a motor (used to generate the rumble effect), a battery monitor, a speaker, numerous button inputs and four LEDs.

To begin to understand how extraordinarily clever this piece of kit is, connect it to your PC using Bluetooth and then download the library and test application developed by Brian Peek that gives you a read out of the 20 or more variables that the device is capable of measuring.

To pair a Wiimote with a PC hold down the ‘1’ and ‘2’ buttons on the remote and then run the Bluetooth new connection wizard on your PC. If you have any problems (there are Bluetooth compatibility issues with some flavours of PCs) read the Getting Connected section of the excellent article on the MSDN coding4fun blog.

Next, download and unzip Brian Peek’s .Net Managed Library for Nintendo's Wii Remote and run the WiimoteTest.exe executable file from the root folder. You can then watch how the accelerometer and infrared camera respond to you swinging the Wiimote around and test out the buttons, LEDs and rumble function. I guarantee Mario Karts will never be the same again.

Brian Peek maintains a discussion and list of Wiimote applications that use his library. My favourite is the Minority Report style computer interface created by Jonny Chung Lee from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

It was Jonny Chung Lee’s TEDtalk describing a series of Wiimote applications including a finger tracking application, a low cost whiteboard and a head tracking virtual reality display, that started me out exploring Wiimote hacks.

My favourite for its sheer elegance is the finger tracking application that allows you to interact with your PC by moving your hands in the air in front of the screen similar to how Tom Cruise manipulates computer images with his finger tips in the movie Minority Report. It is almost like magic.

The application uses an infra-red LED array (either a discrete device used for security applications or a series of individual infra-red LEDs assembled into an array) and a reflective sticker on each finger to reflect infra-red light into the Wiimote camera. Jonny Chung Lee describes the project in detail on his web site and has published sample code. Here’s his original video demonstration. My eldest daughter has shot a quick demo of my set-up which I’ll post in due course.

Any comparison between me and Tom Cruise begins and ends here.

New blogs

2008-07-12T22:40:00.002Z

At last my opposite number Steve Earl has launched a blog. Expect it to be fast paced and brutal, but fair. A bit like Steve really. His post this week about Cision’s piss poor performance was an interesting take on supplier management.

Brendon Craigie managing director at Hotwire PR has also started a blog but I’m not saying much about that as he’s a frenemy. As has Charlie Hoult who’s exploring new business models at the Opencast Project.

And Susannah Wyeth is attempting to restore some balance to the male dominance of the tech PR blogosphere with her Suse in the City blog over at our sister firm Lighthouse PR.

Welcome all. I’ve added you to my Google Reader.

Tryin' to catch the wind

2008-07-11T07:22:00.002Z

The sometimes not-so-silent killer in the greenhouse gas game is, ahem, ‘bovine flatulence’, which contributes greatly to Mother Earth’s current breathing problems. Now, boffins in cow-heavy Argentina are looking closely into the impact of the beefy fart by strapping giant plastic tanks to catch their wind. I’ve been crowing on about this for years – if we can positively channel cow waste produce and divert it from a major polluter to an energy form then that could give a whole new meaning to ‘natural gas’.

Recession 2.0

2008-07-09T12:46:00.004Z

The UK economy is like a bachelor turning thirty – after a run-away decade it’s now time to seriously slow down. Two very real signs emerged this morning that the economy is hitting the rails on top of the dent in consumer sentiment resulting from the slowdown in the housing market.

The first is redundancies – the labour market in the tech sector has been strong to date but Siemens announced plans to lay off 17,000 staff. Second is cashflow drying up, and it’s worth listening to the head of the British Chamber of Commerce on this one. Nothing will kills firms faster. Businesses will need to closely manage creditors and debtors over the next year particularly as cheap credit has all put dried up.

Despite this doom and gloom I remain optimistic – the tech sector continues to be very lean following the dot com recession of the early noughties and I believe that it is fit to trade through any downturn without an implosion.

Matt makes top marketing blog listing

2008-07-09T09:51:00.002Z

Congratulations to Rainier PR newbie Matt Watson who’s made this month’s Seventy Seven UK cut of the AdAge Top Marketing Bloggers, in at no 57.

Wife in the North

2008-07-09T09:48:00.003Z

Judith O’Reilly’s Wife in the North blog has become a self help manual for my family in our plan to co-locate in London and rural Northumberland.

Like O’Reilly’s husband I’m going to split my time between the two locations making regular use of the East Coast Mainline while my wife and three kids enjoy the benefit of a rural life in the north. Or not depending how literally you take Wife in the North.

Within days of launching Wife in the North O’Reilly caught the attention of Tom Watson, Iain Dale and Andrew Sullivan. Viking Penguin offered a book deal. The book was published last week.

Blog-to-book is becoming a popular route into publishing. But Wife in the North stands up in its own right largely because of O’Reilly’s candour and the quality of her writing. The site is damn site better read than your average blog and the book is a league apart from usual line-up of bookshop paperbacks.

Check out the blog, order a copy of the book or listen to excerpts this week on BBC Radio 4.

Mamma mia, smear we go again…

2008-07-08T16:07:00.003Z

Hark back to your earliest days as a PR exec and I’m sure there’ll be some mid-level manager harping on at you to make sure you proof the press pack before it goes to the media. Looks like this most elementary facet of common sense slipped those highly-trained hawks at the White House when they issued briefing documents to journalists accompanying President Bush on Air Force One with some pretty damning comments about Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi.

The document smears the media mogul-turned-prime minister as "one of the most controversial leaders" of a country "known for governmental corruption and vice", and added that he was "hated by many". Wow! There’s a wake-up call for all PRs embarking on a press event, or any client briefing documents for that matter - remember Waggener Edstrom? The White House claims it was an accident and has apologised. Have you ever done something similar?

Friends and family

2008-07-06T07:36:00.001Z

James Warren posted on Friday that social media is as much about being social as it is about media and is best summed up by the two words "be nice". James is spot on. Inspired by his generosity of spirit thanks to folk that have linked to my blog in the last week or so: Loewy founder Charlie Hoult, fellow ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08 shortlist nominee Paul Fabretti (yes I’ve voted for you), telco exec and author of London Calling Andrew Grill, fellow Three Peaker and Lewis PR’s Will Sturgeon, and northern photo-blogger and family friend Charlie Bell. Thanks all.