Andrew Lark

Those Feral Media...

Focusing on his suggestion that media be better regulated and description of them as "feral beasts" - most of the media live up to his description of them, and intent to print what sells. Most fail to report his broader comments on the transformation of communications today.

He said fierce competition for stories meant that the modern media now hunted "in a pack''.

"In
these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and
reputations to bits, but no one dares miss out,'' he said. The result
was that the media was increasingly "and to a dangerous degree'' driven
by "impact'' which was, in turn, "unravelling standards, driving them
down".

But then goes on to say...

“Newspapers fight for a share of a shrinking market. Many are now read on-line, not the next day. Internet advertising has overtaken newspaper ads. There are roughly 70 million blogs in existence, so I’m told, with around 120,000 being created every day. In particular, younger people will, less and less, get their news from traditional outlets.”

This one is really great:

“The reality is that as a result of the changing context in which 21st Century communications operates, the media are facing a hugely more intense form of competition than anything they have ever experienced before. They are not actually the masters of this change, they’re in many ways the victims.”

Safari on Windows... Oh dear....

Turns out that Safari on Windows has been engineered to provide a very typical Windows experience. It's buggy, slow, and unusable on some of the systems I've installed it on.

Is this acceptable? Steve seems to think so - it's beta after all. Sorry, that just doesn't cut it for me. If Apple we're to use the same excuse, I'd label is a lame cop-out. I'm wondering if one of the realities that Apple has run into here is the extreme diversity of the Windows world. Diversity breeds complexity.

There is a vast difference between beta and useable software that the mainstream user can test - say, Google docs. Until it gets to that stage, tech companies have a responsibility to not to unleash broken software riddled with security holes onto the unwitting public (or Enterprises for that matter). That's not what Apple's brand or product promise is. I love Apple and have a ton of Apple kit, but this is a really sorry attempt on the Windows platform.

And, frankly, where I could get it to barely work, I.E. 7 appears vastly superior on a number of fronts. In my testing it's just as fast, Livewriter and del.icio.us plug-ins work great, and the interface is as slick. The bad news here is that there are so many cool competitive options I simply choose to uninstall Apple - and they'll have to do something wonderful to get me back to using Apple Safari on Windows.

Steve, business is in perpetual beta mode - we just choose not to make all our customers suffer through it.

The Speechmaker

Big speeches require a massive amount of effort.

Good communicators know this and smart executives commit to it.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece this morning on how Bill Gates developed his commencement address for Harvard.

What's intriguing is how committed Bill is to the process - this is rare in an executive.

A couple of observations:

1. Pick keynotes your execs can get passionate about. As much as you want to establish a sense of importance, it can only be important to them if it is important to them.
2. Pick issues, topics, themes that those same execs can get really passionate about. Chances are it isn't the industry you are in.
3. Models are useful - speeches by others provide good context and illumination. In Bill's case: "The speech, delivered at Harvard's commencement on June 5, 1947, outlined the Marshall Plan, the bold economic relief program that lifted Europe from the ashes of World War II. To Mr. Gates, the general was describing the challenges facing postwar Europe in terms similar to how the software billionaire sees his own, 21st-century crusade: using philanthropy as a catalyst for reducing global inequities in health, wealth and education."
4. Tone is as important as content. Don't confuse the Exec's tone with the tone required for the audience and speech. Bill groked that: "In late May, Mr. Gates tapped Mr. Buffett again. He wanted to press graduates to become more aware and active in helping solve global inequities but was worried about sounding "overly preachy." Mr. Gates went to Omaha, Neb., for the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, Mr. Buffett's company on which Mr. Gates serves as a board member. After the meeting, Mr. Buffett gave Mr. Gates some tips on delivery and tone."
5. The notion of the single speech writer might work in Political circles but you are going to have a greater chance of success by bringing in collaborators. In Bill's case: "When he started working on the speech in December, he used as a sounding board a Gates Foundation staff member who had written for Slate, the online magazine started by Microsoft. The two traded outlines and drafts of the speech. By the end, Mr. Gates and his staff had met six times for brainstorming sessions, completed six drafts and traded many long emails. Mr. Gates wrote some of the longest ones himself."
6. And, no matter how good you are at collaborating and crafting the content, the exec has to be committed to molding the speech into something special. I'm not talking about the standard rehearsal the day or hour before. I'm talking about time spent on putting their thumb-print on it.

Mark on Personal Productivity

Well worth a read. A do most of these things and find they work great.

1. Dump all tasks in to Outlook - three categories
1. Must Do Now
2. Do Later
3. Watch & Tickle Later
2. At the end of each day list on an index card the key priorities for the day ahead - do everything to get that list done
3. Don't answer the phone - everything goes to Voicemail
4. Do email three times a day - early AM, mid-day and end of the day. Leave the inbox empty. File email in the same way as you file tasks
5. Unlike Mark I keep a schedule - but I manage it myself.
6. Commit. Don't Commit. Move on. In other words, make decisions about what you are going to do and communicate the decision. Create standard "no commit" templates in Outlook - it'll help. As Mark says, "Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes".
7. Structured Procrastination is a good thing.

Why 47% of Campaigns Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeeds

Jon Beattie of Marker is up at the Future of Online Advertising Conference - he's put together a great summary of a keynote on why 47% of campaigns fail - a summary of the presentation by Greg Stuart at the Future of Online Advertising conference today in New York. Greg is the former CEO, IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and co-author of “What Sticks“.

He claims: Over US$112 billion ad spend is wasted out of a total of $295bn - Advertisers and agencies use the excuse of “publicity” to justify a failed campaign.

Here are the three highlights I liked:

1. Did the campaign message get through? 31% of campaigns failed
2. Out of 5 advertisers (P&G, J&J, Kraft, Nestle, McDonald’s) that did creative research of online campaigns: 1 was okay; 2 found half didn’t work; 2 all ads failed and had to start again
3. McDonald’s took 20 per cent from TV put 13.4% into online kept the rest and increased awareness by 5 per cent when it had previously leveled out using traditional media.

Site of The Week : Tablet Hotels: Unique Hotels for Global Nomads

I'm technically no longer a Yuppie - but in spirit I'm definitely so. When traveling its rare I don't use Tablet Hotels to see what is new.

My loyalty to airlines is unconditional - mainly motivated by a greed for points. One of the great things about airlines is they are universally bad - with a few exceptions.

Hotels tend to be more consistent and competitive in terms of services. So, take a look at Tablet. I've only had one screw-up with them - in the early days -- and they fixed it on the spot. On occasions I will find the hotel on Tablet and then skip over to Hotels.com to see if there is a better rate.

If you travel lots, there is nothing better than discovering that cool new hotel that is priced just right.

del.icio.us Tags: Travel, Hotels

Redemption - Step One...

 Wooohoooooo... (Reuters photo)

Adding Xeros to the Xero...

Congrats to Rod & the team at Xero on getting their listing away. Rod's leadership has demonstrated that great tech ventures can get funded in NZ outside of the VC market. I've been concerned for sometime that the only path for a NZ tech start-up seeking serious money is the VC (I'm a part-time VC). 

Here we see another avenue opening up. Diversity in funding sources will drive prosperity by ensuring more businesses are adequately funded to make it to market.

Is this something that could be done with this degree of success in the US market? The listing of a pre-revenue company? Doubt it.

I've played a bit with Xero and as a very frustrated user of competitive solutions really liked it. For me online financial solutions have always been less about the logistics of finance - I get other folks to do that. What this is about is business literacy - the ability to clue in to what your business is doing and why. To do this you need to be able to read and comprehend the numbers easily.

Go Team NZ!

4-up! Brilliant! First they pegged Oracle as the likely winner over Luna Rosa. Then, Luna Rosa over Team NZ...

How The New Opinion Leaders Drive Buzz On The Web...

Another interesting piece, this time on how opinion leaders drive buzz...

Bloggers, discussion-board denizens, and social networkers are courted by marketers, who believe they build buzz that can make or break new products and Web sites. But there's growing controversy surrounding such efforts, and debate over just how much sway these opinion leaders really have...

... The notion that a small subset of individuals has disproportionate influence was formulated more than 50 years ago by academics Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in their book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. But it was Malcolm Gladwell's 2002 best-selling The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference that popularized the notion. Gladwell divided people into connectors, people who bring other people together; mavens, who get a kick out of passing along knowledge to others; and salesmen, who like to persuade others of the validity of an idea or product. When taken altogether, Gladwell argued, these archetypes create "epidemics" that spread like viruses throughout the population, triggering massive trends that couldn't be achieve by traditional top-down imposition of messages on the general public. The Influentials, by Jon Berry and Ed Keller, published a year after The Tipping Point, comes to many of the same conclusions.

It's critical to understand, however, that all these proponents of opinion leaders as drivers of social and commercial trends aren't talking about media stars or personalities, but about otherwise seemingly ordinary members of a community who, through accumulation of knowledge or number of connections with others, act as catalysts for change.