loose wire blog

Right Ears, Masked Passwords and Nail Printing

I have actually been appearing on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT--for the past year or so, but don’t always remember to post the links to the things I talk about (or intend to; there’s not always time).

Here’s to trying to remember to do it (and audio, now it’s available.)

• Researchers in Italy have been going around nightlcubs in Chieti asking people for cigarettes. Turns out if you ask them in their right ear, you’re more likely to be successful. It’s called the right ear advantage (via the Daily Telegraph.)
• Password masking is stupid, according to user interface expert Jakob Nielsen. Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing, he says, and that makes them more likely to use overly simple ones. (Interestingly, one commenter on FriendFeed said the masking thing has less to do with fear of shoulder-surfing than of old CRT monitors, whose analog connections would give off radio noise which could be reconstituted with special equipment.)
• Polaroid spin-off Zink has selected finalists for a competition to find novel ways to use its inkless printing (via Technology Review). My favorite: nail printing, via Singapore’s own Sonny Lim (above)
• CEOs are media slackers, according to UberCEO.com. Most don’t have a twitter feed, a Facebook page or even a LinkedIn profile. Only Tom Glocer of Thomson Reuters seems to be doing well.  (via WIRED)

HSBC “Rgerts to Onform”

I’m always amazed at how much money companies sink into sparkling advertising and PR, but so little into ensuring the emails their staff send and receive reflect the same sheen.

Especially when they call themselves the “world’s local bank”.

Take this recent email exchange with HSBC. I’m a customer, and sometimes use their Premier lounge at Jakarta airport. I’m one of those annoying people who make a point of submitting comments to companies about my experience, even if they’re not solicited.

A few months back I was impressed enough with the Jakarta lounge to send an email to a generic customer relations email address I found here on HSBC’s global site where the page says:  HSBC customers are invited to email customerrelations@hsbc.com.

I can’t remember now what I wrote, but it was complimentary about the initiative of one of the staff, a guy called Musli. I got this back a few days later:

Thank you for your recent e-message.
I have forwarded your email to Jakarta, Indonesia so that your positive comments can be feedback to Musli and their manager.
Thank you for taking the time to contact us.

Great. Just what I wanted. A slap on the back for the little guy.

But a few months later—last week--I had a quite different experience, so I fired off another email to the same address:

Hi, I thought I'd follow up my earlier message about HSBC lounge in Jakarta. Since my last email I feel standards have slipped a bit and the place could do with some attention.

I then went on to detail the slippage: my Premier card, it turned out, wasn’t in itself good enough for Premier lounge, and the staff seemed keener on getting rid of me than seeing whether I carried the magic card. The lounge felt more like a lower tier massage parlor, with four females sitting around the front desk, chatting, giggling, singing karaoke and exchanging backchat with male staff. It got so raucous I and some other travelers went to another lounge to get a bit of peace and quiet.

Anyway, I fired off what I felt was a constructively critical message. I got this back today:

Thank you for your further e-message. I am sorry you have had to contact us under such circumstances.
I rgert to onform you that I am unable to assist you with your complaint.
As you have contacted HSBC UK, we are only able to access accounts held within the UK.
Therefore may I suggest that you contact HSBC Jakarta for them to investigate the issues you have and provide you with a full response.
I apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you.

I wrote back:

Thanks for this, it cheered me up no end. The first time I send complimentary remarks to this email address, and they're passed on right down to the staff, but when I send criticism you "rgert to onform" that you are unable to assist me.
Lovely stuff. Couldn't make it up if I tried.

I’m a bit flabbergasted, actually, but I shouldn’t be. It’s pretty amazing that the global email address for customer relations for what is now one of the world’s biggest banks can spew out ungrammatical and misspelled dross like that, but more important, but that the staff member feels able to shunt responsibility back to the customer is shockingly shoddy.

Repeat after me: Every email sent and received by a member of your staff is an ambassador at large for the organization. Mess it up like this one and your whole brand suffers.

(Also being sent to HSBC PR for their comments.)

The Periphery of the Brand

(Updated Dec 8 with comment from IKEA)

I’m always amazed at how companies work really, really hard on their brand, and then blow it all on the periphery.

The pictures here are taken from the Milton Keynes branch of IKEA, an otherwise wonderful store that caters to kids, has the usual IKEA range of stuff and generally lives up to the company’s brand in spades.

Except at the entrance. The trash repository is right in front of the door, and is littered with cigarette butts, burger wrappers, ash, IKEA cups and a half-drunk glass of orange that, presumably, came from the IKEA cafeteria:

It stands out like a sore thumb, depressing newcomers and those leaving the store alike. At a guess it’s not maintained, or maintained enough, because it’s just beyond the scope of the store, and so is probably not, strictly speaking, the responsibility of the store. There’s probably no guideline for this sort of situation in the IKEA manual. But IKEA is the only user of the building, and the stuff being left here is all from IKEA shoppers—some of it sporting the IKEA logo.

The periphery of the brand is often just beyond the reach of all the normal boxes a manager would tick in ensuring the brand is looking good. But that is often the exact point of contact for a customer—coloring either their first impression or the lasting one they have when they leave.

IKEA have promised to address the problem: In an email, they said: “At IKEA Milton Keynes, we strive to maintain high standards of tidiness across our store both inside and out to give our customers the best possible shopping experience. On this occasion, the maintenance of the bin does not reflect these standards however, we are addressing this, and are stepping up measures to make the necessary improvements.”

del.icio.us Tags: marketing,brand,IKEA,rubbish,trash,image

Wifitising: Great Idea, or Daft and Dangerous?

WiFi has become a commodity, something we expect to be able to find, but marketers are slowly waking up to its potential to get the message out—by renaming the service. But is it such a good idea?

A Dutch company, according to Adrants, has started changing the name of its WiFi service continually—both to promote items and to nag freeloaders into buying coffee:

By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree, the chain is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn't totally free.

Some boring questions are not answered in the article, such as whether users find themselves bumped off the network when the name changes (I guess not) to whether regular customers complain that they have to change their WiFi settings every time they log on.

And they’re not the first to try something like this: A German car rental company called SIXT has set up WiFi networks in airports with names promoting the car company’s brand. Select the WiFi network and you’re taken to the company’s home page.

The article doesn’t explain whether these WiFi networks provide real connections, or merely access to the company’s page. Needless to say, if it’s the latter any positive message may be undone. And, as the writer points out, this “wifitising” is a form of spam that people may not appreciate.

On top of that is the growth in dodgy WiFi networks that offer free WiFi but actually launch “man in the middle” attacks to eavesdrop on your passwords and other data as you use the network. A hacker last month, for example, accessed personal emails of guests using a U.S. hotel’s free WiFi network. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research of 147 U.S. hotels found that only six of the 39 hotels (HTML version of the PDF file, which requires registerig to download) offering WiFi were encrypting traffic. It concluded hotels were “ill-prepared to protect their guests from network security issues.”

The problems with changing the names of WiFi networks are obvious: They further confuse the user and reduce the chances of a standard emerging that may reduce people’s vulnerability when using WiFi. Of course, anyone can give a WiFi an official-sounding name, so networks are vulnerable to start with, and the Cornell report shows that using even legit WiFi leaves users vulnerable. So it’s hard to see this wifitising trend—small tho it is—as anything more than a fad, because if it does catch on, it’s going to make using public WiFi more complicated and misleading, rather than less so.

 

 

 

 

 

Renamed WiFi Networks Guilt Freeloaders Into Buying Coffee » Adrants

XP and the User’s Loss of Nerve

Poor old Microsoft. They’ve had to extend the life of XP by offering it as an option to customers buying new hardware for another six months at least. They realise that people aren’t going to buy a Vista machine unless XP—what’s wonderfully called “downgrade media”--comes with it:

"As more customers make the move to Windows Vista, we want to make sure that they are making that transition with confidence and that it is as smooth as possible," Microsoft said. "Providing downgrade media for a few more months is part of that commitment, as is the Windows Vista Small Business Assurance program, which provides one-on-one, customized support for our small-business customers."

There’s a deeper issue here: Microsoft is beginning to recognise that no longer is there any appetite for users to upgrade operating systems themselves. Remember those lines around the block for Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and XP? Well, OK, maybe not all of them, but according to Wikipedia the fanfare surrounding the release of Windows 95 would nowadays be reserved for the ending of a major war. Or the launch of an iPhone, I guess.

Now we’re only interested in software upgrades if it’s a hardware upgrade. If then.

To be fair, I suspect this isn’t just the fault of Vista. I think a few other things have changed:

• we’re less excited by software these days. Hardware we can get excited about, but as the proportion of people using technology has grown, the appetite for tweaking that technology has shrunk. Apple understand this, which is why they merge hardware and software, something Microsoft’s Balmer still doesn’t get.
• Part of this is that I don’t think we believe our computers will do the things we think they will anymore. We drank the kool aid back then. We really thought the next iteration of an operating system would seriously improve our day. And, for the most part, it didn’t. So we moved on.
• We’ve learned that our computers are getting too complex, and we trust them less. If it works, we’re happy. We don’t want to tempt fate by changing it. This feeds into security issues: We don’t feel safe online and so if we have any configuration that hasn’t arisen in calls from our bank or weird things popping up on our screen, we don’t want to experiment.

This feeds back to my running theme of recent weeks: The computer is becoming more and more like an appliance. We need it to to work, preferably out of the box. Apple (and the likes of Nokia, up to a point) have shown that to be possible, and so now we increasingly expect it of all our computing devices.

For the record I don’t necessarily think this is a good thing, because a dulled appetite for experimentation and change is never good, but after the ups and downs of the past few years, and the apparent failure of Vista, I can understand it.

In short, we users have lost our nerve.

Windows XP gets another lifeline : News : Software - ZDNet Asia

Photo credit: Bink.nu

The Lucrative Loneliness of the Chinese

This piece from Web in Travel (a few weeks old now, but just delivered) was interesting and scary: China has created two generations of one-child families, and, in the words of Harry Hui, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo International, China Beverages, “one of the loneliest generations in the world”.

And a big one, to  boot: “Within those born in the post-80s, there are 470 million and their world is very different. The Gang of Four is a thing of the past. The Cultural Revolution is an art movement. They are brought up by their grandparents because their parents were working. They live in one household, shaped by three generations.”

Of course, it’s also a very connected generation: 590 million mobile phone users and 245 million online users. “Friendster has more virtual friends in China than anywhere else,” said Hui. Meaning technology has become a comfort food: “The mobile phone is more important than boyfriends or girlfriends for 90% of the younger generation,” said Hui, citing a survey by China Mobile. (I can’t find this survey anywhere, but will keep looking.)

This means great opportunities for business. The article says that PepsiCo launched its “Facebook on a can” campaign in 2007. It asked consumers to upload their pictures onto a website and people could then vote on the pictures they liked. The top 20 winners’ pictures were then put on a billion Pepsi Cola cans throughout the country.

Interesting implications from all this. On the one hand, it would seem to contradict my bold-faced assertion that social networks are about information-exchanging rather than mere socializing. I guess it’s true that for a lot of people connecting to Facebook et al is not merely an informational transaction, but a connecting one too. One can draw some comfort from seeing one’s friends’ updates, of them going about their day.

But I guess the bigger point is this: social networks fit the cultural requirements of a society. And societies are different. If people are stuck in traffic all day, then mobiles become more important, which is one reason why you’re seeing high adoption of mobile Opera browsers in places like Indonesia. (You also see a lot of usage of SMS, because people need to communicate short bursts of information to one another when they have little control over the speed of their movements, so to speak.)

In China, I guess, what we’re seeing is a combination of this: a generation that is comfortable with the mobile phone but lacking the physical social network that their parents had. In this case, maybe social networking is fulfilling a slightly different need: online friendships aren’t just a continuation of real-world ties, but relationships that are created and defined online. That’s the relationship.

Smart of marketing people to recognize and exploit this. But you can’t help wondering what happens next. If a society of single children have one child themselves, who in turn grows up and has one child with another single-offspring person, at what point does technology move beyond just being a crutch to being the cultural gate itself, through which all friendships, romances and connections evolve?

In short, what happens when Facebook becomes not just a reflection of one’s world, but the world itself?

Loneliness is big business in China

See also:

Harry Hui- How Pepsi engages China’s youth - Thomas Crampton

How to Get Your Pitch Read Part XIV

One way to try to get the journalist to read beyond the headline/subject is the EMBARGOED tag:

Although it does sound somewhat pompous, and can backfire if it's not a story worth breaking an embargo for.

Likewise a subject line prefaced by BREAKING NEWS:

As you can see, MySpace's PR seems to think anything to do with their client is BREAKING NEWS, and deserves CAPS all the way.

Both of these are in danger of Cry Wolf Syndrome. Use them too many times and they wear out.

Another, better way to get your press release read than to send it and then recall it:

I have no idea whether these were all intentional but they certainly had me trawling through my trash for the originals. The fact that no explanation is given for the recall just makes it more intriguing.

This reminds me of an ex-colleague who used to put tiny mistakes in his Reuters features so they'd have to be corrected and run again. Doubled his chances of getting them in print.

Of course, overused, both endanger the credibility of the author: the journalist looking like an error-prone hack, the PR flak looking like someone who says something and then promptly takes it back.

Generating Meaning or Fluff?

I love this: a mashup that generates great-looking ads from Flickr pictures and a computer. The conclusion: We realise how easily affected we are by words and pictures together, but how the mix often doesn't mean very much, especially when they're ads.

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

Of course, it also raises the question: At what point would it be cheaper and more effective to generate ad copy by computer?

THE AD GENERATOR

Technorati Tags: ad generator,ads,automatiion,ai,buzzwords,copy,advertising,PR

What Price Tranquility?

It struck me, as I lay on a chaise longue at the Conrad Bali trying to filter out the drone of the jetskis, that hotels are selling a complicated product. My wife, for example, loves the clean, crisp white sheets and thick feather pillows of a king-size bed. Others go for the food, some for the ambience, some for the adventure, others for the sun, some for the service.

But in this stressful age, money increasingly buys and hotels sell tranquility: a chance to relax, zone out, be pampered, wander around in a bubble of soft footfalls, bubbling little fountains, soft tinkling music and the absence of intrusion. Of course, there are different grades of tranquility: If you want total silence, you go to an Aman resort; if you want tranquility plus active night life you go to Seminyak or Kuta. Tranquility is actually quite a sophisticated product. You don't actually sell it directly, but it's implicit in every photo and description of your hotel: But it's also, it struck me, more or less the one thing that hotels can't guarantee.

Tranquility is the result of effort and a complex management of logistics behind the scenes: You can train staff to keep voices low, to not intrude upon guests, to keep the sound of crockery being piled high to a minimum. But there are events you can't really control. Like, in the case of the Conrad Bali, jetskis swarming the beach in front of the hotel like Sioux around a wagon train.

"It's beyond our control," I Wayan Sumadi, the assistant manager, told me. Although the Conrad has a cooperation agreement with some of the jetskis operators--you can rent one from one of the poolside booths or from a guy on the beach sporting a Conrad-logoed ID card--the hotel, Wayan says, can't prevent them from dominating the seafront. The result is that no guests venture into the water and a drone that can be heard from the hotel lobby.

I've seen this problem before in Bali, but usually the hotel is smart enough to find out a peaceful coexistence that doesn't annoy the guests (Wayan says I'm by no means the first to complain.) Of course, public spaces are public spaces, but clearly the jetski owners rely on guests from the hotel, otherwise they wouldn't parade in front of them all day.

I feel for the guests who have come thousands of miles to buy some peace and quiet, and have to retreat to their hotel rooms to find it. I feel, in a way, for the hotel management who don't seem to have figured out that--despite an otherwise beautiful hotel and good service--the jetskis undermine the very product they've tried so hard to create: tranquility.

If I was the Conrad I would put this to the top of my agenda on Monday morning, and not rest until the situation is resolved. For more than a few guests, I suspect, tranquility is non-negotiable.

Technorati Tags: bali,hotels,pr,conrad,noise,ambience,customers

Why Reporters Hate PR Professionals

Peter Shankman recently told the story of how lazy/dumb/thoughtless PR types can be when he forwards a journalist request and gets mostly lame and irrelevant replies. His conclusion:

Is this what the agencies are teaching their employees to do?

If it is, reporters have every right to hate public relations professionals.

We're not doing our job.

At best, we're an industry that relies on hope, and not skill, on the off chance that we'll catch a break.

We've become an industry of posers, hoping that we'll get through another day without being exposed as a fraud.

Peter's response to this industry-wide problem was to set up a Facebook group. Now that's gotten too large he's set up a website and list, to which PR and industry types can subscribe. Peter will post journalist queries to the list. He tags on an excellent proviso: 

By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Sadly, I suspect many PR types don't really care about relevance or blowing it with a reporter by making an irrelevant pitch; they just want to be able to add another number to their report. As Phil Gomes of Edelman points out, ProfNet owns this field but their usefulness has dropped off in recent years. There's plenty of room for more and better players. 

(Vaguely related vent: I got another one of those emails with a subject line "May I call you on this?" this morning. How useful is that? Does it give me any idea of whether it's relevant and interesting to me? That I now have to read the contents of the email to get a clue isn't going to endear me to you. That you are so keen to phone me tells me you're a high maintenance PR contact I don't want to waste time with. I take great joy in sending an empty email with the subject line "No" to these emails. And I add their domain to my "PR spam" filter. I know, it's harsh, but life's too short.) 

The home of Peter Shankman - Shankman.com

Technorati Tags: pitching, journalists, PR, pitches, shankman