More Digital blog

A wee while back, someone on my Twitter feed linked to an ebook review that I can only describe as constructively negative. The book, from what I could tell, was shoddily written, with little thought given to grammar, punctuation, sentence structure or even common sense. All in all, the concept was fine, but the execution was horrendous, and with one bad review comes a few good ones, surely?

No. With one bad review comes the author, and she was not impressed.

As you can see, she went completely berserk. Attacks directed towards the reviewer soon expanded to encompass the entire wealth of commentators delving into a writhing morass of criticism and defensive attitudes that became the pitiful sight of a debut author going down in flames. There’s little else to say. Within a few hours her comments had gone from long and badly written to profanity, and it didn’t take much to provoke her.

Some people say that it was unfair for everyone to jump on the bandwagon, but is it? In this day and age, being an idiot on the internet is generally a bad idea, especially if you’re selling a product, running a business, or you have some form of celebrity status, either online or not. Her mistake was doing this publicly, as the moment it hit the Twitterverse, even esteemed fantasy author Neil Gaiman was weighing in with his bafflement at her approach to a negative review, stating that this was how not to self-promote.

I decided to do some research, as she initially claimed she’d had a fair few five-star reviews. All of them jokes, apart from a couple which are written by either the author under quite an obvious pseudonym (given that the review itself contains the exact same grammar mistakes found in her magnum opus) or a relative who couldn’t even be bothered to change her surname. Astonishing stuff, really.

Sure, it’s a little disheartening to get a bad review, and of course the amount of people ripping into her must have hurt, but what would you do when someone’s lashing out with four-letter-words at you for agreeing that their book was bad? In the age of the instant search, there’s no longer room for error. Once you’re done, you’re done, and it seems like a harsh judgement to pass on someone, but if you’re going to upload an extremely short novel clearly written during NaNoWriMo, without any editing whatsoever, when why should people bother? Why pay for a product you’re selling as an independent creative entity?

I’d love to see someone try and pull this again. I think she stands as a strong warning to authors about to flip over a harsh few words from a critic. Pro Tip: people will never like everything. If your book had bad grammar, it had bad grammar. Suck it up and edit properly. But in an era where I could tweet about your bad reaction and have it appear on ten thousand accounts within a few minutes, I am the Consumer-Peasant, and you are the Unruly Sovereign. And the peasants will revolt.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this is primarily due to a lot of very big projects we’re working on here at MoreDigital, much to the benefit of our clients. We tend not to do something by halves, and are extremely, extremely fast when it comes to getting a client what they need, while maintaining high standards in terms of quality and research. If it means pizza delivery to the office front door and a constant hammering of keyboards and yelling into phones coming from my team’s desk, that’s not because we’re tweeting away instead of blogging, just holding down the fort.

While I’ve been away from the MoreDigital CMS, there’s been a lot of stuff floating around the web, none of it particularly important in the wake of what’s going on in Japan. The competition to win Jason a honeymoon didn’t go brilliantly, and the winners I’m sure are celebrating the viral prowess of their own media, but I’ve learnt a lot about what it takes to win big on the web, since then, and from what I’ve heard, he’s hard at work crafting the perfect wedding regardless; a graceful and admirable reaction.

There are a lot of different Twitter and Facebook accounts floating around the office, all of them used by either us, personally, or to just chat to people as a company, and it’s been interesting to watch people’s reactions to our various endeavours (such as the Jason-Stephanie campaign). In the next week there’ll be posts going up regularly again, and I’ll be back to covering a range of topics that centre around social media and technology that can help small businesses become big (or successful) businesses.

That’s the key, really – a great social media presence may help you to double your yearly revenue, but ultimately that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to upgrade, or get a dedicated tweeter. There are countless companies who’ve employed perhaps a couple more people since hitting the big time, but that’s it. If you can still do everything you want to do with the same amount of people, why splurge out on in-house consultants or social media experts?

For every in-house pro, there are a hundred agencies that can do exactly the same thing, minus the cost of a yearly salary, and if you’re working on a project with a window less than twelve months, don’t bother – save yourself the cash, even if it ends up going towards a team-building paintball session, though hopefully your employees don’t find the idea of shooting you more appealing than, say, going for drinks, but you never know.

It’s also spring, as evidenced by the weather getting ever-the-more wonderful as time slowly progresses, and of course the inset of looking forward to the various big media releases and second-quarter gadgets making an appearance, so there’s lots to talk about whether you’re into music, films, games, phones, computers and other bits and bobs. So there’s a lot to look forward to, and I’ll be behind the keyboard for most of it. Welcome back, readers.

Two-point-four billion dollars. The highest purchase eBay’s ever made, and now GSI Commerce is theirs, they’ve got access to a mind-numbing amount of brands, in an ongoing attempt to transform themselves from the site that’s sold everything from your old wardrobe to one person’s virginity and someone else’s blackness, to something more similar to Amazon.

Sadly, it’s not going to work. If you found yourself on the principles of an open market, an auction house that allows anyone to sell almost anything, and find success beyond your wildest dreams, you have one main advantage: your service tends to make Amazon’s Marketplace look fairly bad.

A crisis meeting may have been called. Evidence that Amazon Marketplace is, in fact, very reliable, was probably shown to company directors. And of course, most eBay users do not log on to buy anything from eBay itself.

In their new direction, I think this may be what eBay are missing – they are not an online shop to most people. They are the site where people sell their stuff, nothing but a middle-man. To start selling products out of their own garage is going to throw people, slightly. I’ve seen their brand pages, and even after getting over my aversion to eBay a wee while back (my old argument being it’s being run by anonymous users with infinitely less accountability than corporations – incorrect, I know), I wouldn’t touch them with a tent pole.

It’s worth asking what makes me feel that way, and I guess the answer would simply be that they’re not a company I buy things from, just a site I use to buy things from random people around the world. I’d stick with that angle, because no one’s ever going to out-do them.

Competing with Amazon, even if you’re just as big, if not even bigger, is a fairly silly idea. As is Microsoft’s attempt to rival Google’s eponymous engine with Bing. It begs the question of why, exactly, companies this large haven’t yet realised that they are their own brand. Amazon is “buy new stuff, at a shop on the web.” eBay is “bid on auctions”. They all have their unique angles, and bar Apple and Google, no one’s done that well by attempting to branch out.

Arguably, the range of brands is impressive, with GSI Commerce having deals with everyone from Ralph Lauren to Hewlett-Packard. The problem this raises is that sellers are now going to need to slash their prices.

It’s a buyer’s market – if I know eBay’s doing a Ralph Lauren polo for £80, I can guarantee someone’s selling it, with postage costs included, for £75. It looks like a bizarre eventuality, of eBay competing in a price-war with its own users. Then again, if it wasn’t going well, it wouldn’t be expanding, so we’ll wait and see.

Still getting my new stuff from sellers and Amazon, though. For now.

Recently, I came into possession of the monolithic handset that is the HTC Desire HD. It’s big, but extremely powerful, fast, and the screen size means that typing in landscape is a breeze.

But has it made me better at my job, or at communicating in general?

Well, that’s a question I’ll answer in several parts. The first is the fact that I’m writing this post on my phone, underground, on a train. I do this often now, as I find it relaxing to hash out blog posts when commuting.

I can also schedule emails to be sent, catch up on tweets, play games, read books and edit word documents. Bar the internet connection, it’s a laptop. Even better, it’s allowing me to do my job better by cutting down the time I lose when commuting to and from the office.

Some would argue that it’s also a distraction, but I’d tell those people to learn some self-control. I come to work, I plug it in, and I use my computer, picking up where I left off. For small businesses, where offices may not be in desirable or close locations, this is perfect.

I’ve also found that I’m generally more efficient in my day-to-day-life. I text faster. I shop faster. I read my Google Analytics data easier. If you feel like you’re just not in the right place for a long laptop session after work, just work on the phone. I’ve done that a lot this past fortnight, and I feel like I’m enjoying the web a bit more.

I suppose the most exciting part is the Android Market, the crazy, open-source beast that it is. If I can’t do something or don’t want to take the long route, I find an app for it. For those taking yonks to type a report and bit.ly and tweet it, switch machines and app that task!

I’m a convert, and all the rumours about battery life are not a problem if you know how to do a proper first charge and regular drain. So stop moaning, ditch the retro gear and get all 2011.

Well, it’s been a big rush, but after a brief chat today, me and Jason have accepted that convincing the many, many people who viewed the video of his proposal to fiancée Stephanie to actually vote for the happy couple to enjoy a free, luxury honeymoon was just too difficult. The three of us made an effort to make this work, but unfortunately there are some people out there who have colossal resources when it comes to click-happy online friends who don’t mind a five-minutes-or-less registration process when voting for someone they care about.

I commented earlier today that it says a lot about people when there’s 4,104 views on the counter, and only 570 votes. Sure, there were quite a lot of people who would’ve viewed it to double check (I probably account for almost a hundred visits to that page, not so sure about views though) but that’s not the point. It’s, if anything, a commentary on how unwilling some people are to spend a few minutes registering or logging in via Facebook to help a friend towards their dream honeymoon.

Am I disappointed that our little Twitter and Facebook campaign failed? Yeah, of course I am, and I feel bad knowing Jason and Stephanie are going to have to work out what they’ll do instead. But it’s taught me that there’s a lot more to social media campaigns than I previously believed. You can’t just say “jump” and expect trampolines. You need to own a few, first. Internet users are like children – if you want something from them, you have to give them an incentive and a means to claim their reward all within a minute or less, or they lose interest.

I don’t know if I’ll ever do a Twitter campaign of this kind again, but I will say that it was definitely nice to use a few tools to help someone and make them happy. I think you can offer a lot to someone in today’s economy – vouchers for HMV could be domain-name registrations, if you’re geeky enough. But a nice wedding present would’ve been the honeymoon. For anyone who’s been following the progress on this blog, don’t lose heart, because it is possible for these things to work. You’ve just got to really take it on as a full-time job, and that’s something neither myself nor the happy couple were able to do.

Until the next time, and once again – congratulations to a happy couple who may not have won, but are still happily planning a wedding and the rest of their lives together, because the latter is really the thing that matters.

I don’t think there’s anyone sane out there who’s not been at least slightly shaken by what’s going on in Japan right now. Nuclear power stations at risk of meltdown, 17,000 dead or missing after the tsunami caused by the 8.9 earthquake that started this horrendous series of events, and countless more disturbing facts and figures that don’t seem to be coming to an end any time soon.

The problem has been, like all major disasters, covered by the global media, though, due to very vague and slippery reports on how bad the situation actually is emanating from the Japanese government, the coverage varies. However, some people are getting their stories straight, and if there’s one thing that has kept me on top of the reality of the situation in the Land of the Rising Sun, it’s Twitter.

In fact, specifically, it’s one person who goes by the username @mikecane. He tweeted humorously at me during my discussion with author Adam Christopher about vanity publishing, and his display picture – the paranoid and politically insightful Rorschach, from Watchmen – drew me in. I then found that he was a veritable goldmine of unbiased, hard-hitting Japan coverage, even though it clearly wasn’t his day-job. I was getting more interesting and shocking reports from his feed than the BBC ever gave me after work, and I was grateful.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I know very well that those wading into the power plant are more brave and committed than we will ever be, but that’s not the point. The fact that someone is willing to go out of their way to catalogue everything and provide scathing, honest commentary and ask the hard questions, then share that with the world, is beyond journalism, most especially without a wage slip at the end of the month - it’s a commitment to an idea, specifically that this stuff is important and there’s a bigger picture at work, here.

It’s great that journalists in Japan are working damn hard around the clock to bring me news, but it’s all from one source, and if you’ve got a smidgen of anti-monopolistic thoughts rattling around in your brain you’ll know that listening to the Sky News filter is an extremely silly thing to do when you want to build up a picture of the event. So I’m going to stick with my social feed and, as a result, see the photos the BBC won’t show me, and the statistics and reports that Sky News (in the UK at least) are reluctant to throw my way. It’s horrific, and heartbreaking, and I don’t want it filtered. Thanks, @mikecane, and thanks, Twitter.

I’ll be honest, had it been April 1st, I might have dismissed this news as a joke, but it’s mid-March and it’s not only a very smart approach to communication, but a forward-thinking one, too. This year, for the first time in UK history, a solicitor has issued a court summons via Facebook.

No, seriously.

Debtors, as you can well imagine, are probably slightly reluctant to delve into the legal morass of court visits and other inconveniences that come with owing people a significant amount of money. However, this also means you’re not likely to find them responding to any letters or phone-calls. However, upon proving to Hastings County Court in Essex that the slippery individual was a bit of a Facebook user, solicitor Hilary Thorpe was allowed to jump on the site and put the fear of Zuckerberg in them.

Away went the summons, and assumably they’ve either now responded or are considering finding another, similar social network with their mates on (yeah, good luck with that one). It was a tactic that was used once before in a similar cause Down Under, and that particular Australian couple found their legally binding documents served to them via the social networking site.

If anything, it proves that there really are no limits to the uses of Facebook and Twitter. Yesterday, author Adam Christopher found that using Twitter to befriend publisher Angry Robot resulted in them offering him his dream career, after many years of effort. Social media is no longer a distraction from your career, but a tool you can use to take it even further. Not to mention that if your legal career is being impeded by someone’s unresponsive nature, you can start tracking them down via their status updates.

It’ll be interesting to see what other landmarks social media sees in 2011, though don’t be surprised if people start conducting lectures or broadcasting them through Twitter. I recently saw the novel idea of tweeting a live surgery, demonstrated by the cast of Grey’s Anatomy. Other doctor’s joined in, offered suggestions and even a loan of their medical equipment during an operation that wasn’t going well. There are so many possibilities that it encourages those who’ve not joined in to join in, or so I’d like to think.

Even if you’re not going to use Twitter to talk, it might not be a bad idea to just use it to listen, considering it’s none too interested in your real name. Think of it as an RSS Reader that’s evolved into something else entirely. Social media is rapidly becoming the preferred method of communication, conducting business and even bringing lawbreakers to justice. The first two uses are pretty great. The third one is just downright cool. Now all Judge Dredd needs is a login and he’s good to go.

So, it’s been another week, and there’s been some good news. Stephanie used her Facebook profile to get the link out to what must’ve been a considerable amount of people in her network, and within 24 hours 100 votes had been granted to their ongoing attempt to win a honeymoon for themselves. This was impressive, but as of today they’re now at 550 votes on the dot, and this places them behind two kinds of people, all of them having taken the first, second and third spots on the leaderboard: the Where’d You Come From, and the Please Stop Winning.

The latter is fairly self-explanatory, but the former is basically someone who plants their video, and gets a boost to a winning position in a short period of time. Hopefully, that’s just an initial rush, but if it keeps going at that pace there’s no telling where it will end. They’ve still got just over half a month to go, so it’s time to start thinking beyond simple promotion and asking favours, and start talking to people who can really make this happen.

The ideal people would be those who write their tweets and Facebook status updates under the enormous weight of thousand followers and friends eagerly awaiting the next TwitPic link or mention of their daily activities. These people are extremely powerful entities in an online capacity, and have more than enough potential to help push Jason and Stephanie’s campaign as far as it needs to go. In terms of the mathematics behind all of this, here’s what I’ve worked out so far:

• The competition’s been running for about two months, thus far.
• The top videos are all sitting at around 700 votes, which means they’ve pulled in about 100 votes a week.
• This means that in two weeks, at 550 votes in total, we have to generate at least 300 votes a week to win.

…Yeah. Not the easiest task, mind you, but one I’m going to have to push for with everything I have that facilitates that pushing. Stephanie’s Facebook votes kept them in the game. Now it’s a case of finding people with the right reach on Twitter and Facebook, even on forums. Not entirely sure who those people are, but I’ll be damned if I don’t find them.

I’ve noticed recently that every time I tweet about a topic I’ve never touched on before, I gain a couple of followers whose bio confirms their relevancy to what I’ve just tweeted. It’s pretty weird, at first, but then eventually the logical conclusion appears – the more topics I discuss on Twitter, the more followers I can gather in a short space of time. But are business Twitter accounts doing this?

You’ll often find that the Twitter account for any given business is full of self promotion and the odd bit of chat (or lots, if they’re friendly like @NaNoWriMo) with customers/users/members of their community, but ultimately it’s rarely about anything else save for the odd natural disaster. This is bad form. You’re using Twitter to make connections outside your regular customers, right? If so, why do you keep talking about the same things?

Write expansively. Write about a huge variety of topics, hash-tagging as you go, and never stop the commentary once it’s proven itself to you. If you start picking up a few hundred (or even a few thousand) followers a week just by extending your usual list of tweeting subjects, then it’s obviously pretty unwise to stop. There are no-go areas, however, and I find they’re the same two topics most people never discuss at the dinner table, either: religion and politics.

These topics are PR suicide should you get into them at the wrong time, or come out with the wrong remark. Do not comment on the government’s current cabinet, and do not talk about the Pope. It opens you up to a whole world of pain should people get the idea that your political leanings aren’t quite as noble and average-Joe-friendly as your company purports itself to be. Best thing you can do is get a politically ignorant agnostic to tweet for the company. Otherwise, set out a clear set of rules, because it’s astonishing how often people don’t pay attention, sometimes to what account they’re even using – drunken night out? Make sure that’s not the company account you tweeted about it on.

Most importantly of all, just have fun and enjoy speaking to people. You might even meet new businesses and gain valuable network contacts through this particular platform, and everyone’s so laid back and informal that it’s very unlikely any of your hospitable hand-waving to new customers, clients or potential business partners are going to be rebuffed. It’s a friendly internet in 2011, mostly, so take advantage of it and don’t restrict your tweets to your own little universe.

Recently, I’ve played quite a lot of a free game called Desktop Dungeons, by a company called QCF. For those of you not in the know, this type of game is what’s called a “roguelike” – a game similar to Rogue, a roleplaying game where your only graphical interface was comprised completely out of ASCII characters. Walls were | symbols. Empty space was a dash. However, Dungeons reinvented that “hard retro RPG” idea and I’m having a great time.

Sadly, so was another company by the name of Lazy Peon. Why? Because this one-man outfit, based in San Francisco, decided that it would be a wise idea to take the entire idea, mechanics and even the look of the first game, pretty it up, and release it on the iTunes App Store.

That’s a pretty low blow, but where it gets a tad offensive is when the development team, based in South Africa, were offered an iPod Touch in exchange for holding back their lawsuit. The shockingly arrogant implication being that the nationality of QCF somehow indicated that, as stupid backwoods Africans, they’d rather get a bit of shiny tech. At the same time, it still took Lazy Peon a long time before reality set in and he removed the game from the iTunes store.

The one thing QCF had going for it was the fact the product they were attempting to market was actually extremely good. If it hadn’t got the backing of the press, the community, and even other developers, I don’t think it ever would’ve been able to claw back its intellectual property. It sends an important message to any small team of people working on a new product with one or more USPs (unique selling points) – be very, very careful with how you present your work. If it looks all friendly and open source, people are going to try and nick it.

On the other hand, you’ve got people who can afford to create open source content. The OS I’m using right now is Ubuntu, based on Linux and named after the Southern African philosophy “Ubuntu” – humanity towards others. It was created by Southern African businessman Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur with a self-worth easily high enough to allow him to apply to judge on Dragon’s Den. By taking the approach that the community around an operating system should be able to fix broken parts or grant it new ones spread like wildfire, and as a result, the version of the OS I’m using now could compete with Windows with its eyes closed. If anything, it’s better (though I’m an OSX fan at heart).

Thing is, he doesn’t have to worry about intellectual property rights in terms of the operating system itself. He’s given the open-source community a huge gift, and they’ve reciprocated in gratitude and recognition. But he’s also got millions of pounds – if he didn’t, would people have tried to rip him off?

The issue with taking someone to court, especially over an IP that has as yet generated no revenue whatsoever, is that it’s extremely expensive. So much so that many large companies would take the stance that a smaller company does not have the access to the same financial and legal strength, so can take what it wants. But if you take QCF’s approach and threaten to go after someone no matter the size of the company, with a community of loyal would-be customers and industry cohorts at your back, they just might back down. It sounds like something from Toy Story, but social media means that when the bully comes knocking at your door, your friends can be there for you.