Online stakeholder engagement in a corporate world

Can you damage your brand yourself? Step forward Mark Ames and XXL Club in London

2010-07-07T09:34:00.005Z

Can posting something inadvisable on Facebook (or elsewhere) damage your brand in the long term? And how much damage does it do in the short term?

Most of you probably are unaware, but last week there was a bit of a furore in the gay community here in London around a rather inadvisable posting made by a club promoter on his Facebook page.

Some background..... Mark Ames promotes a pretty successful club in London called XXL. It was originally aimed at the more hirsute members of the community, and used to pride itself on it's open, non judgmental approach to gay clubbing (which, back in the day when it started, was a pretty new approach). In fact their tag line was "One size fits all". And it used to be a hoot to go to - lots of hi energy dance music, a fun busy crowd, cheap booze and a generally a really good night out. The crowd has changed a bit now (well, it has been open for nearly 10 years) but generally its still a fun night out - as long you're a fan of the Freemasons/Kylie/Lady Gaga.

Mark posted a bit of a rambly posting on his Facebook page, about boycotting Muslim businesses and "sending them all back" because of the number of casualties we're experiencing in Afghanistan. The Pink Paper and PinkNews.co.uk both picked up on this and ran with it. A couple of Facebook communities then started up in response - including Bears Against Bigotry. There were talks of a ban on XXL, and people did march with Imaan, the support group for Muslim LGBT people on Saturday's Gay Pride march here in London.

Mark closed off his Facebook page pretty much immediately (not sure that was such a good idea, but understandable knee-jerk reaction), and on Thursday last week he (or his PR advisers) published an apology, which also appeared on the XXL website (well, kind of - there's a link to Mark Ames Promotions' page on Facebook, which has no apology on it... oops!) and elsewhere.

All within 48 hours of the news breaking!

So... short term, what happened to XXL? Well, Mark allegedly banned some of the organisers of the Facebook groups from XXL. Bears Against Bigotry marched. They now have over 900 supporters, and have a logo and everything - and arguably are now not a group to be pissed off lightly (well, if they ever mobilise and actually *do* anything).

And I've heard XXL had a busy night on Saturday. I'm not sure banning a couple of people will really hurt takings any great deal. Although time will tell - this news has got round the community (mostly through Facebook) and once the Pride party weekend has been forgotten, it'll be interesting to see what happens longterm to the attendance.

But to be honest, this will probably all blow over in a few weeks time. After all - Mark's Facebook page has been around for years, and if some of the screengrabs I've seen of the alleged photos he'd published on there are anything to go by, he's made no secret of his personal views. I hadn't noticed any significant pressure to boycott XXL then.

And lets face it, we gayer's aren't really known for putting our ethics before our lifestyle if it inconveniences us!

BP - corp comms teams can learn from this

2010-06-11T14:45:00.011Z

I’ve been watching the story of BP the past couple of weeks, and how the mess they created (and I’m not just taking oil here) has got worse and worse. So, if like me until a little while ago, you’re sitting in the corp comms team of a large corporate, one that is only one c*ck up away from a BP-style crapstorm, what can we all learn from this whole situation?

Be humble
BP’s response at the very beginning of this was poor. The early attempts to deflect responsibility to their US operational partners was badly thought out and inappropriate.
Never forget that the start of this was a horrendous accident which caused the rig to catch fire and sink, killing 11 people. BP’s public official response to this was a pretty hands-off press release on 21 April, where they “offered ... full support to drilling contractor Transocean” as they evacuated the rig. A day later, they followed this up with another release, to say they were activating “an extensive oil spill response”. Nothing then, until 24 April, when their next release “offers sympathy to the families of those lost”.

In each of these releases they make significant mention of Transocean – in many ways this is understandable (and accurate, don’t forget) but was it sensible? It was clear very early on that this was going to be a significant incident and a deeply sensitive issue. A UK company being so quick to blame a US company for this, right on their doorstep, and so early on, was not sensible.

Compound this with the comments made by Tony Hayward on the now notorious CNN interview (but more of this later) it was enough to sow the seeds of discontent in the US.

Anyone would think this was BP’s first major disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Own the story
BP’s initial hands off approach allowed the story agenda to be set by others – in particular the US media, the US government and it’s response agencies. BP has since been responding, rather than initiating, comment on the spill. This has not panned out well!

With no quick fix, the White House has been increasingly keen to find someone to blame; to deflect criticism from southern, deeply Republican, deeply hostile states, that they are powerless (who says Hurricane Katrina did no good for anyone – it taught the White House media staff a hard lesson!). Step forward BP – conveniently listed abroad, and with much more to lose (both reputation and money) than any of the other parties who may be responsible.

Even Transocean has been happy to hide behind BP’s large, corporate, well funded skirts. A quick look at the Transocean corporate website shows some real estate on their home page given over to it, but that's about it. More interestingly, a look at their press releases shows relatively little official comment since the accident itself. And who can blame them.

The official response site http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/ was setup and is maintained by the Unified Command center (mostly US agencies with input from BP and Transocean), and is powered by Pier Systems, a US based emergency response specialist. They also manage BP’s four state-specific response sites, but more of these later. If I was being disingenuous I might even hint that BP was outsourcing their digital response, but that would be mean...

Unfortunately, the media cat is now out of the bag, and BP are in the unenviable position of being permanently on the back foot. When Congressmen are even saying that “everyone with a British accent from BP is lying to the American people” you know you have more than a passing reputational issue (will the last person in BP’s press centre please turn out the light as they leave!). Mind you, he may have a point. Today, the US Geological Survey have announced that the initial spill figures may have been significantly lower than the reality.

The Attorney General has even said that the US government will not pay a dime towards clean up and that BP will be held responsible. Now, I wasn’t aware that the cause of the initial incident had been established yet, and that culpability had been decided (step forward Transocean, Halliburton, US legislators and indeed BP). If not then BP may have a legitimate claim for prejudice and have any potential lawsuit against them contested accordingly.
Talking of which, amazingly Halliburton seems to have slipped almost unnoticed under the radar. After testifying at the Senate hearings, they seem to have ducked out quite successfully. In fact, there’s not even a mention of the oil spill on their website home page, other than a cursory financial statement about an IR call. Mind you , the Halliburton website contained very useful information about their Texas headquarters. Read whatever you want into that...

Never mind, BP did buy sponsored links to their response site from the major search engines. so that’s OK then. Media response owned. Not.

Manage your senior management better
Never let your CEO in front of the press when he’s stressed. Never. Really, never, ever do it. Have a look at that CNN interview again I’m not sure about you, but I get the distinct impression that he’s continually trying to suppress a smirk. I’m sure that’s not for any other reason than he’s stressed, tired, and generally incredibly stretched, and is no more than a human defence mechanism. But still... a bullish approach to slicing up the blame cake by a smug overseas CEO was never going to play well in Peoria. Or Alabama.

And if you insist on taking him off his leash and letting him run around in front of the press unsupervised, please warn him against either saying something tactless (like about getting his life back) or being arrogantly dismissive about the impact your incident might have in the future (compared to the size of the ocean, the spill is tiny).

Hopefully the forthcoming meeting between and Obama and the BP chairman will be better managed by BP’s comms support staff.

Engage
Unfortunately, it took far too long for BP to engage openly with their stakeholders. Their initial hands off approach didn’t lend itself to any form of engagement – which has subsequently become a damage limitation exercise. Their four local response sites have been set up by Pier, who registered the relevant domains on 14 May. That’s nearly FOUR WEEKS after the disaster. Seriously people... what’s going on?

Well, at least they had some idea of doing something – on 7 May they registered bpresponds.com which is currently used for emails. Mind you, note to Pier staff, please check the “title” tags of your websites a bit more carefully. Oh, and while you're at it, please sort out the .ico images on the HEAD element of your response sites - check out the URL bar on
http://www.ms-response.com/ to see a rather lovely hurricane image. Best not tempt fate, eh? (Bet you can't tell that Pier System saw significant business during Katrina...)

I can’t see much in any of these official BP sites that is any real attempt to engage. There’s some fairly bland info about volunteering, reporting, wildlife and so on. But nothing that really reaches out. And the tone of voice really leaves a lot to be desired. Dry, corporate, unfriendly – there’s a time and a place for content like that, but arguably this isn’t it. And if you’re going to launch an official site, please at least try to follow your own visual identity guidelines. The site design is a mess! As is the IA, the UX and all sorts of other things. But I digress.

However, on the ground it looks like BP are starting to wake up to the benefits of direct engagement. The Belle Chase Outreach meeting on 9 June, and the video, is a great start.
And the official BP response site does show evidence of what they’re doing to contain the spill, but again tone of voice is dry and corporate. Even the failures of initiatives like “top kill” are smothered in corporate language. At this point, it doesn’t help, and it’s really adding to the wider perception that BP is not acting openly and honestly. However, when you start reading sections like this on the response site you can see why the whole ToV thing is a nest of vipers for BP. This magazine-stylee, chatty verbose crap is really not appropriate in this situation.

Social media has really gone into a frenzy on this. BP have tried in Facebook http://www.facebook.com/BPAmerica and in fairness have kept the page up to date. There’s lots of commentary on their wall, and it looks like they’ve undertaken minimal editing of user posts (points for that!). Their official Twitter account has also been busy at http://twitter.com/bp_america but mostly pushing out info, not much engagement. However, I can understand this, they’re using it as an update service rather than a conversation channel.

Let dissenters have their space
Big snaps to BP on this one. They’ve allowed space for critics and dissenters to have their say (they must have learned from Shell’s issues with Royaldutchshellplc.com)

So step forward my favourite have-a-go heroes:
Stop the oil spill by stuffing BP executives into the leaking pipe
Design a new BP logo at Greenpeace
How would BP handle a coffee spill? (this is a great, cynical view of the whole incident!)
and my personal favorite, the fake BP twitter account.

Clearly, this isn't over. BP is starting to get things under control, both in the GoM and in the media. But this has become so much worse for them than it needed to have been, and it's not over yet...

UK election, media coverage gets social?

2010-05-13T08:37:00.005Z

Just back from a long weekend in Berlin, so thankfully I've managed to miss most of the high drama of the hung parliament negotiations. The Germans did find it strange that we were making such a big issue of having a coalition government....

So now most of the dust has settled, it's been interesting to see how much, if any, digital media has managed to influence either the campaign, or actual voting.

I think the biggest impact on the whole party campaigning has been those sites that have given voters an ability to take the piss out of their politicians. One of the earliest, even before the official start of the campaign, was the "My David Cameron" fake Tory poster site where users could upload their version of Conservative party posters. This probably did more to bury Tory billboard ads than anything, particularly as the site went viral REALLY quickly, courtesy of their Facebook pages.

Sites like The Straight Choice (where people can upload local canvassing leaflets) proved a great supply of nonsense for the press to pick over. And gave all of us transparency on what out party of choice were doing at a local level - and all the major parties can hang their head!

The more mainstream, established political bloggers (Ian Dale, Guido Fawkes et al) have really become just that - mainstream. They were being covered in press and broadcast just like many of the other established media outlets, or as official outlets of one of the political parties - is this a sign that political blogging has now grown up? I do hope not, though checking sites like UK poll blogs makes for rather dull reading. I can only cling on to sites like Liberal Conspiracy or Old Holborn to restore my faith in old fashioned, nutjob political blogging....

And talking of Facebook, how many people joined any of the "I bet I can find a million people who....[fill in your hated election outcome here]" groups that were around? Or published links to various websites or news stories? I think Facebook has only just been noticed as a tool for grass roots political activism... and not necessarily by those people that really need to!

Twitter seemed to come into its own during this election, particularly during the leader debates. The number of people who felt the need to tweet every time they heard something they thought newsworthy was pretty astonishing. Quite who they thought was reading their tweets rather than watching the debates seems beyond me, but there we go.

So, now we have a coalition government, one that will need to work together in a consensus. One that could break up if enough grass roots support fails. Let's hope that they have learnt from the election, and not ignore the power of crowds.

Social Media in a Corporate Context conference

2010-04-28T21:40:00.003Z

I was one of the speakers at the Social Media in a Corporate Context event today, run by the lovely people over at Communicate Magazine. I was whittering on about the role of social media and investor relations.

(yes, again!)

Really interesting set of presentations and discussions, the summaries of which you read here.

What struck me most about this whole event was how the whole sector is maturing, particularly when comparing it with similar events I went to a couple of years back. I remember back in 2006/2007 talking almost exclusively about CEO blogs and wikis - we didn't even touch on Facebook or Twitter. And how scared everyone was - all the discussions then were about getting management buy-in, establishing a business case, looking at what IBM and people were doing.

Speaking to people today was so different. Now, we're looking at social media as being almost mainstream. There isn't the "fear of the new" that permeated the audience back then in the dim dark days. Now, we're openly assuming that most organisations are embracing social media, either as an established comms channel, or as a monitoring tool.

The challenges now are how we can get most bang for our hard earned comms dollars, how we can minimised organisational risk, and how we get people to start using the tools in the way that we comms professionals expect them too!

And if you want to follow up on any of the points I talked about, feel free to contact me.

That splintery sound you hear is newspapers scraping the bottom of the barrel

2010-04-23T09:25:00.004Z

Interesting article today on econsultancy all about the Express newspaper group flogging off links to advertisers, in piss poor advertorial copy. And there was me thinking that this type of bottom-feeding revenue generation went out of fashion about the time Boo.com went bust. You can even see a "list of shame" for those advertisers who have gone along with this at the econsultancy article.

But I can't say I'm surprised - the express.co.uk the dailystar.co.uk and the ok.co.uk website still uses popunders (remember them?) to some of the pikiest sites (online bingo anyone?); and the Express site hides links to commercial partners in the left hand main nav bar for their site. To help the user experience, each page is totally covered in ads and sponsored links, and to be honest looks a complete and utter mess. It's sometimes difficult to tell where the content finished and the advertising starts - mind you this might not be surprising when you consider the offline products, and the demographic of their readership (again, online bingo anyone?).

However, above all, this really does highlight a problem for newspapers - just how are you going to make money now, when circulation for your offline product is dropping, and people can get online news for free in real time elsewhere?

The Murdoch solution to this is paywalls. Fine for a bit of short term revenue generation, but this really doesn't have any long term future. In my last job, we used to take the temperature of online reputation influencers on a regular basis, and one of the surprises that kept coming up was how little people referred to publications like the Wall Street Journal, where users were charged to view content. This isn't good for these publications in the long term - if you can't share content or show off the quality of your editorial, not only will you lose off line readers, but your reputation as a quality publication online is in jeopardy. If companies like mine didn't see you as a key influencer (because people couldn't share your content) why would be engage with your journalists?

And the WSJ example is probably not even fair - it's a specialised publication aimed at a professional community who are used to paying for content. How this is expected to work for Joe Public is yet another question. After all, if would I want to pay (or could I even afford) a subscription to see a site that's covered in ads for dating, payday loans and betting sites?

Online bingo anyone?

FT Bowen Craggs 2010 results

2010-04-21T08:41:00.002Z

The annual FT Bowen Craggs corporate website effectiveness index has just been published for 2010, and pleased to say that my old site, riotinto.com ranked 5th globally for most effective corporate site.

Great news! and goes to show how much you can achieve on a limited budget, with targetted resources and a bit of thought, planning and a supportive team.

Google moves to web disclosure for Reg. FD

2010-04-16T08:55:00.001Z

Google moves to web disclosure for Reg. FD

Really interesting bit of news on IRwebreport.com, about Google moving away from the newswires for distributing regulatory news announcements. Traditionally, listed companies here in the UK and abroad have used these newswires to syndicate their announcements to a variety of news channels (in the UK this often covers UKLA requirements for market sensitive information), and so it's an interesting development that Google regard their own website as having the same (or better) reach.

Wonder if any UK companies will start to take this approach...?

reBlog from goingsocialnow.com: Twitter launches Ads, New Business Model

2010-04-13T15:13:00.001Z

I found this today. Realling interesting post from Shiv Singh, all about Twitter and their new "adwords" concept:

Something we've all been eagerly (maybe too eagerly) waiting for has finally happened. Twitter has finally launched Promoted Tweets which is a Google AdWords like program to further monetize its business. On first blush, I like the promoted tweets program unlike the third party sponsored tweets programs that I've blogged about in the past. But first let me explain how it works.Companies can buy search result terms so that their chosen tweets appear at the top of the page when a user searches for that keyword. So for example, if I were to buy the keyword "television" every time a user searched for television, he'd see my ad. My ad wouldn't be like a Google Adwords customized advertisement though. It would be a previous tweet of mine that I would have selected to appear as the ad for that search term. The promoted tweet would be clearly labeled as a promoted one and wouldn't get lost in the stream as time passes. It'll stay at the top of the page. Some other factors to keep in mind about promoted tweets:goingsocialnow.com, Twitter launches Ads, New Business Model, Apr 2010

You should read the whole article.

Social media conferences

2010-04-07T11:08:00.003Z

I'm speaking at the forthcoming Communicate Magazine conference on social media (Social media in a corporate context). Investor relations and social media and networks.... riveting stuff!

I'm also going to be on a session at the Investor Relations Society conference IR in the new decade, again about the use of social media in investor relations.

Get tickets while you can!

CSR awards

2009-12-08T09:19:00.003Z

Good news! Our corporate website has just come 3rd in a survey published in PR Week by consultancy Lundquist in the last week, where they looked at the FTSE100 here in the UK. Each website was assessed using a set of 76 evaluation criteria, drawn up on the basis of a survey conducted by Lundquist of 184 CSR professionals and sector experts from 30 different countries.

The end of micro celeb?

2009-10-28T13:31:00.002Z

Apparently, according to the press Lily Allen has given up all social media, and even given away her PC and Blackberry. Well, assuming this isn't just a publicity stunt by our Lil, what does it all mean to the future of social media as we know it?

Well, I'd suggest not a lot. The twitterverse is well served by random minor celebs posting what they had for lunch, or in Liz Taylor's case gushing uncontrollably about what shock awful film she's just been to see. Having one drop out really isn't going change that.

In fact, if anything it's a sign of maturity. I doubt Lil would have been so quick to drop social media if it had been giving her a decent return (trans. significant publicity) on her (trans. her publicist's) investment (trans. time keeping up to date with 17 year olds bombarding her with crap online).

So thanks Lily, you've just started to make my life a little easier. I can now point at you when I'm having discussions at work about "why are you using something like Twitter for something serious" and say "Well, that's great. They're leaving us to it, maybe it's a bit too serious to take lightly. Remember how that happened with websites? Remember how that happened with mobile phones??"

More about our use of social media

2009-10-06T14:32:00.002Z

I gave an interview to Q4 about our use of Twitter and other social media in investor relations activities

Enjoy!

http://www.q4blog.com/2009/09/14/how-rio-tinto-uses-twitter-for-investor-relations/

Webinar Replay - Social Media and Investor Relations Trends

2009-08-11T08:43:00.003Z

an interesting posting by the guys at Q4 web systems all about the growing trends in using social media in investor relations

Webinar Replay - Social Media and Investor Relations Trends

Posted using ShareThis

Twitter, the new presswire

2009-07-17T10:46:00.002Z

We've been having some issues in Shangai recently, and naturally our media relations and corporate comms teams have been carefully monitoring the situation through a variety of channels - most notably the more tradition media monitoring services provided by some of our agencies.

Most interesting in all of this, was how much quicker breaking news came through on Twitter. I use Tweetdeck here, and I've set up a number of searches on it - that means I was getting updates in realtime as I keep Tweetdeck running in background on my PC.

This really pays off, as you pick up the auto-tweet postings from many of the major newswires quicker than our media monitoring services were picking up the emails.

Not that I gloated, but to get breaking news from CNN or BBC news before our press team did made my day.

Twitter - coming to a ticker tape machine near you!

Habi-tweet. How not to use twitter.com

2009-06-23T13:47:00.005Z

Poor Habitat. They've been caught spamming using hash tags in their tweets.

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/103334 have the story in it's full glory from SMT's website.

Quite what they (or their agency) thought they were doing is really anyone's guess. It's just one step short of trying to embed Google-friendly keywords in the HTML code on your site and hope that it comes up in a search....

And to just then delete your tweets and hope they get swept under the marketing rug isn't really quite good enough. Particularly when people have been so kind as to screenshot them.

I think my biggest concern on this whole story is the rather cavalier way that Habitat has treated a social media platform, and for a consumer facing brand these days that's a fairly major issue.

@guardian. Funny, no really, very funny

2009-04-01T07:54:00.002Z

Apparently the Guardian newspaper is now only going to be available by Twitter.

And I quote...

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

Fantastic story. And what a great day to publish it. Time to sit back and see how many social media consultants fall for it.

MA in social media, new course offered by Birmingham Uni

2009-03-31T08:38:00.002Z

The Guardian reported on a new course being offered by Birmingham University - a Masters in social media.

I'm not sure quite how I feel about this to be honest. It's a £4,000, one year full time course. In social media. How on earth are you going to spend a whole academic year studying this stuff? And why are you going to spend £4K doing so? Add on your loss of earnings, and it comes out at a pretty expensive way to play with Twitter.

And you really need to ask what the real benefits of this course are going to be? They struggle even on the Birmingham Uni website, with the first thing they suggest you can do is "become a social media consultant". Which is just what the world needs, natch. Other suggestions include
"develop innovative and alternative media projects", or how about "contribute to the development of the social media industry". You can hear the straws being clutched...

And I'd like to see the field visits that they intend to make ("oh look everyone, here's someone updating their Facebook status in their bedroom").

Having said that, compared to some of the other (rather weird) courses on offer by other academic institutions, this seems almost mainstream. And who am I to tell someone how to spend their time and money.

So good luck to Birmingham for jumping on the gravy train as quickly as they did. Hope it works out for you.

Simples

2009-03-05T10:38:00.004Z

For those of us in the UK, undoubtedly one of the most irritating ads on telly at the moment is one for a car insurance comparison website, called CompareTheMarket.com It's fronted by a meerkat with a Russian accent, who complains about people getting confused with his site, CompareTheMeerkat.com.

"Meerkat, market, they are different things, no? Simples."

But it's a really clever use of social media tools - now our little Russian meerkat front man (who is called Aleksandr Orlov) now has his own Facebook page, (with >250K fans!) and is happily Twittering away. In broken English. To 6,880 followers, all of whom get a personal message when they join, and who appear to be in avid conversation with him on a fairly constant basis...

"Have a very happy birthday! Maybe celebrate with a piece of cake or a new cravat?"

...is a good example of his work - the tone and engagement with his followers is really spot on, and a good learning experience for anyone who want's to really get involved in this space, particularly on a b2c brand like this.

The agency behind this is VCCP, digital strategy by Amelia Torode, and details of their campaign can be found on their site here.

Learnings?

use appropriate channels. Facebook and Twitter are great in a situation like this - they create an interaction that invites people into the brand and creates loyalty (not easy in the overcrammed somewhat scuzzy world of car insurance comparison sites!)
use appropriate tone of voice. Anthropomorphosising car insurance into a Russian meerkat (now there's a sentence I'd never thought I would write!) allows soft selling of the product into a warm, receptive audience. Compare that with the Churchill or Admiral insurance products in the UK where they have tried something similar and just ended up being irritating!
update your content as appropriate. There are only 2 TV ads at the moment - yet the Twitter channel gets attention daily, as does the Facebook page, to keep the audience engaged. Facebook seems to be updating itself at the moment, with fan videos and over 700 photos uploaded.
don't be afraid to be a bit weird, and take risks. Facebook and Twitter can be risky, but your audience is much more forgiving - as with many social media environments they appreciate that it's a bit more informal, and you can get away with a lot more than you might otherwise do on your product/corporate website.

Simples!

2009-03-04T11:07:00.003Z

More on Ryanair and social media reputation comes from this post by Joanna Higgins on bnet.com.

As well as her take on the whole blogging response from the world's rudest airline, she reports on the Kaizo Advocacy Index, latest version released for Winter. They review online reputation, and measure 20 brands across 4 sectors - food, airline, software and mobile - against how they fair in social media platforms. Lots of talk here of the influence of both Twitter and Facebook (although I'm pretty sceptical about both to be honest).

There's an overview presentation below:

Kaizo Advocacy Index Winter 2009

View more presentations from guest542bc4.

Useful reading before you buy a phone or travel on an airline. Or buy ERP software for millions (I wish our IS&T teams had read this....!)

This is similar to the work we do here at Rio Tinto on a monthly basis (service provided by the guys at Market Sentinel), and it's a useful weathervane on how the world is perceiving your communications efforts.

Ryanair and social media

2009-03-02T13:16:00.003Z

Ah, Ryanair... donchya lovem?

First of all last week, there was the story about charging a pound to use their inflight toilets. Next, I came across this posting, from a web developer called Jason Roe. He posted on his blog about a bug he'd found in the Ryanair booking system. He then had the joy and pleasure of someone calling themselves "Ryanair staff" posting comments:

"...You didn’t actually discover a bug on bookryanair.You changed some numbers on your own screen tricking yourself into thinking that you could get a free flight, without actually succeeding.

Well known for years, and many others have tried it, ending up paying the full price for the flights after all.All good income for Ryanair..."

and my personal favorite:

"...If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things.

We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.

If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have..."

Now, apart from the really obvious things that are wrong (threatening a potential customer, being personal and vindictive etc etc), all of this pails into insignificance when it comes their official response to the issue:

http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/02/ryanair-doesnt-want-anything-t.php

"Stephen McNamara from Ryanair said:"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion."It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again."Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel".

I think those prophetic words of wisdom will come back to haunt, both Mr McNamara, and Ryanair's infamous cavalier attitude to the flying public.

2009-02-17T15:41:00.002Z

Sorry, not been posting here for a while (family reasons).

Anyway, back again now.... and for everyone who believes the user generated content is a good thing, here's a great product review from Amazon.com - the Bic pen!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B000JTOYLS/ref=cm_cr_pr_redirect?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0

Remember, it's not always a good thing to take what complete strangers say as truthful or serious.

Fly me to the dole office

2008-11-03T14:03:00.006Z

Oh dear, another hoo ha all about employees posting what some might think is inappropriate content on Facebook. This time Virgin Atlantic and British Airways staff saying mean things about passengers and planes.

(I have to say, I probably agree - a lot of passengers smell and yes, a lot are indeed "chavs". However, if your job is to deal with the general public on a daily basis, this may not come as a complete shock. And if this is a source of complaint, then maybe working in customer service is not an ideal career path. But I digress...)

What I find most interesting is that it's still making the news. Google had 121 sites listed today about the BA and Virgin cases for instance. Surely there have been enough similar instances for both employers and employees to understand how these things work - to know what is appropriate, and what is not; to know what is a reasonable response, and what is draconian.

The BA group on Facebook that seems to cause all the furore is actually a "closed" group, requiring moderated viewing. As it's not for general public consumption, and presumably closed off to non BA employees, does this make it a private work space? Arguably not, but BA's actions have made the whole issue a very public one, so have they managed to achieve at least some of their original objectives of reputational management?

To be honest, if I were BA I'd be a little more concerned with the group titled "STOP BRITISH AIRWAYS SELLING IT'S CABIN CREW!!!", a public group that is a bit of a focal point for Project Columbus, the apparent cabin crew outsourcing project. Or how about "British Airways Surfboard Ban" that currently has over 14,000 members and growing.

And while I'm up here on my soapbox, how about the groups "VIRGIN ATLANTIC HOSTIES", "The girls of Virgin Atlantic! On the ground and up in the skies!" or even "The Boys of Virgin Atlantic". Hoping that Virgin Atlantic HR and legal teams are scouring through the employee handbook about discrimination and fairness....

The point is the line between work and personal is becoming increasingly blurred: arguably it always was. But now, the blurring is much more publicly, and both companies and employees are finding it hard to define clear boundaries, and to handle (inadvertent) transgressions.

Maybe it would have been easier to ask the particular employees to delete their postings, reminding them of their work obligations, rather than fire them and feed the frenzy. Collaborative working through of these grey areas helps both parties define where their responsibilities lie, and should ultimately give a more workable code of conduct that everyone can understand and follow.

Well, enough from me. Am off to recommend "RIO SUCKS FOR BANNING FACEBOOK!" to all my colleagues.

Widget Expo

2008-10-10T08:31:00.003Z

I was one of the speakers (graveyard slot! *hmph*) earlier this month at Widget Web Expo London, where I whittered on about widgets and gadgets in an enterprise, corporate world.

The most interesting thing (apart from my pearly words of widsom, natch) was the direction that many of the delegates thought the internet would be taking, in particular that widgets were something new that would change the way we all interacted.

Hmm...

We were using this techology at Rio Tinto years ago, through our Plumtree Portal implementation. Plumtree was reliant on "portlets" for users to build intranet communities, which visitors could then view in situ, or tear off and add to their own customised pages.

Sound familiar?

Well, unfortunately it didn't change the way users interacted with the company intranet. In many ways it was a barrier, and over time the portal fell out of use, although to be fair I think the concept was unfamiliar to people, and our implementation could have been more robust.

We've now replaced Plumtree, and our new portal platform is proving much more successful.

And just to prove that things never really go out of fashion, we're looking at ways of integrating widget technologies into our new portal.

As they say, wait around long enough, stuff just comes back into fashion.

Our peers get updated

2008-08-13T13:22:00.004Z

Interesting to see that our peers BHP Billiton* and Anglo American both recently refresh their public websites. And even more interesting was how they've gone for a similar, more "web 2.0" look and feel. Well, you know what I mean.... some chroming on the menus, some fades on solid backgrounds, lots of big hi res photos.

Both have also gone for the "feature story" splash approach, trying to grab visitor attention on something interesting.

Hmmm nice big hi res photos on the home page you say? Prominent feature content? Wonder where that came from.

* just in case you didn't know, and it's important that I tell you, BHP Billiton recently made a preconditional offer for Rio Tinto.

Dear "One born every minute Co.,Ltd"

2008-08-08T08:59:00.003Z

Working in a company that's spread around the world, with thousands of domain names under our control, we're not immune to the occassional registration spammer from some internet cafe in the Far East.

Most of them in the same format...

Dear [insert any old name here],

We received a formal application from a company who is called AoMeiXin Investment Co.,Ltd are applying to register "[insert domain we've picked up using a whois bot]" as their domain name and Internet keyword in China and also in Asia on August 6, 2008. During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged Meiao Investment Co.,Ltd has no trade mark, brand nor patent even similar to that word. As authorized anti-cybersquatting organization we hereby suspect the alleged Meiao Investment Co.,Ltd to be a domain grabber. Hence we need you confirmation for two things,
First of all, whether this alleged Meiao Investment Co.,Ltd is your business partner or distributor in China.
Secondly, whether you are interested in registering these domains. (The alleged Meiao Investment Co.,Ltd will be entitled to obtain a domain not needed by original trademark owner.)
If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to appropriate dept.
This is a letter for confirmation. If the mentioned third party is your business partner or distributor in China please DO NOT reply. We will automatically confirm application from your business partner after this audit procedure.

Bst Rgs
Mark Li

Registration Commissioner
Tel: +0086-10-82771675-602 +0086-10-82772510-602
Fax: +0086-10-82771640
Email: mark@bj-hkzc.com.cn
Http://www.bj-hk.com

The most annoying thing about these people is that they just seem to use the same email template, modify a few bits and pieces, and send it out ad nauseam. They all even share same grammatical and spelling mistakes. Personally, I find it slightly offensive that they think I'd be stupid enough not to notice....

Some fun stuff here about this http://successfulsoftware.net/2008/04/19/chinese-domain-scam/ In fact, there's lots of fun stuff on all sorts of forums on the interweb - just Google it.

I've been getting 2 or 3 a week now from our business around the Group, and our legal teams have drafted up a rather pithy email response which we send out. See, lawyers *do* have a reason to be on this earth after all.

Tag. You're it

2008-06-18T13:30:00.002Z

Branding is prominent in the comms team at the moment here are work. We're all busy implementing our new visual identity, and there's a load of people doing work in internal engagement and so on.

Interesting to come across this site - Brandtags.net - which allows people to tag various well known consumer brands with the values and attributes they think are most appropriate.

Some very interesting things going on - check out SAP for instance. We're loving that one of the main brand associations is "??" Go figure.

(and no, we're not on there, so don't try)

Facebook hoaxes

2008-05-14T14:53:00.003Z

I remember, all those many years ago, when you'd get chain letters by email. Remember them? "If you don't send this on at least 10 people then bad things will happen". Yeah, whatever.

Invariably they'd come from your closest friends, family or work colleagues. And so you'd believe them, and duly send it on (or wait for calamity to strike).

Well things moved in the world of email. We now get the fake Gap vouchers and so on.

Meanwhile, back in the world of social networking, we're once again seeing the gullible make tits of themselves. My personal favorite is the "what's wrong here.... AAA BBB..." post that appears in Funwall in Facebook. Apparently you can see the answer if you click on "fast forward" to your friends. Hmmm. Hello, is that faint tinkly noise the sound of alarm bells?? Apparently not for thousands of poor trusting, curious, souls who did just that, and send the posting (sans answer) to all their mates, who in turn sent it to theirs and so on and so.

This for me highlights a couple of the major problems that are inherent in social media:

1. You trust your friends. Human nature to trust people that you know, but that doesn't mean they're right.
2. You don't check. A quick Google would have found the answer to this particular problem (oh, and btw the answer to our AAA BBB poser revolves around the phrases "found it impossible" and "80% couldn't find it". Go work it out, or Google yourselves).

We now have a medium where unqualified people are being trusted. Unreservedly. And that isn't healthy.

Now, send this post on to 10 of your closest friends and good things will happen. If you don't, then let the suffering of baby kittens be on your conscience.

Twittering in a corporate world

2008-04-30T08:28:00.003Z

Well, we've just dipped our well manicured corporate toes in the dimly lit pool of microblogging, by signing up for an account on Twitter.

I'm not yet sure of the business value of this. Yes, it's an interesting platform for p2p comms, and I've even heard it holds some value for those b2c.

However I wait to see whether we get much out of it. It's success depends on who else has signed up on the site, and our stakeholders - hedge fund managers, NGOs, business journos and the like - are not reknowned for their early adoption of social media. (OK, by now it's not really early adoption, but you know what I mean...)

If the chickens aren't in the yard, there's no point scattering the corn.

People looking for a job on our student or graduate placements schemes may very well come across us though, so that's a good thing. Mind you, it's a difficult thing trying not to come across as "getting on down with the cool kids". That's not really a core brand value for a mining company such as ours, trust me.

We'll see how we go over the next few months. And who knows, getting our feet wet may well prove to have some payback. (Probably more so than stretching this particular metaphor).

Am I allowed to....?

2008-02-01T15:28:00.000Z

We'll it's no news to anyone watching the financial pages since before Christmas that we've been under the watchful eye of the UK Takeover Panel. This is because of a proposal by BHP Billiton, another company in the mining sector.

One of the unexpected results of this, is the change in what we're allowed to talk about (hence the lack of postings here... yeah, I know) and what we're definitely not.

Blogging (however informal) by someone in a company which is in a potential takeover/merger situation can lead to a breach of all sorts of regulations, both here in the and abroad. The UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA), the Takeover Panel, and lots of corporate lawyers and bankers take a very dim view of people within such a company issuing potentially misleading or unverifiable statements. Our poor lawyers are checking every piece of marketing communications at the moment that goes out from us - and I think they're getting a bit bored writing "source, please" on the bottom of every email!

Of course, I've now got to submit this post to them for approval. No doubt there will be a comment in due course asking for my sources.

*sigh*

Enterprise 2.0 - "show me the money..."

2007-11-20T10:48:00.000Z

I spent a day or 2 last week in sunny Cologne, at a Red Dot Day summit thing (nice picture, non?). We use Red Dot Web CMS pretty heavily here at Rio Tinto, it drives www.riotinto.com, www.riotintodiamonds.com, www.riotintoironore.com, www.graduates.riotinto.com, www.procurement.riotinto.com, and all sorts of other exciting corporate sites.

Reddot is a product now of OpenText, who are heavily in the corporate IM space, and have business relationships with all sorts of people, including SAP. No surprise, we do a lot of work with SAP here at Rio Tinto.

One of the most telling aspects of the day, was the number of speakers hammering on about "Enterprise 2.0" , including SAP.

Listen people, that thing on the horizon... you know, sails, hull and stuff... that'll be the boat that's already sailed!

There were 2 speakers (who really should know better) going on about now that 23 year olds can access Facebook and MySpace at home, they'll expect all their business tools to work in the same way - that they'll expect corporate intranet and portal applications to have the same functionality. The main crux of their argument was that people expect work to do the same things as home.

Well, at home I like sitting in my pants in front of the telly, watching repeats of Eastenders, drinking red wine. If I did any of those things at work, I'd be fired. Well, laughed at, and then fired.

Life doesn't work that way. There are lots of things that people do at home that they don't expect to do at work. And vice versa really. It's all a matter of context. Yes, there is some functionality in social media sites that might work in a corporate environment, but a lot of it is completely inappropriate. Seriously, do we really want someone in our accounts department going round "biting chumps"?

Of more importance I think, is the concept of standing up for what you believe and think, and letting your peers see this. Translating to a work environment, knowing a colleagues position on a particular policy for instance, and being able to challenge and discuss this with others is a healthy and positive thing. To be able to do this openly, across time zones, and with a degree of informality that social media sites encourage should be seen as a largely positive thing to most large companies.

This is where the presenters at last week's conference completely missed the boat. They confuse function, content and outcome. Enterprise 2.0 *isn't* about bringing Bebo or Facebook into work. It's about rethinking the way that you collaborate with your colleagues, and how the enterprise manages its knowledge and processes.

Sharing my list of favourite friends, where I went on holiday, and giving "mega hugs" to people should only happen when I'm at home. Preferably in my pants.

2007-11-13T13:51:00.000Z

Well, long time no post - apologies.

And it's an interesting point: when should you post to a blog, how often do you need to keep coming back to add new content?

Blogging is becoming more frequent here at work, and one of the issues that we're facing is what is an acceptable level of activity before we step in and say that a blogger needs to do something to keep it alive.

Maybe we shouldn't do anything...? The content that's already up there may be relevant to others, and that it's not being updated any more may not necessarily be an issue.

We're still working our way through this. There probably isn't a correct answer, and we're probably going to have to just suck it and see.

Marriott, or not

2007-09-11T07:43:00.000Z

I've been watching the new blog on Marriott.com written by Bill Marriott, their 70+ year old CEO. Oh dear, where to start....

It's blatently just not a blog. There is very little attempt to engage with their visitors, and the engagement that there is consists of token replies to the odd comment. You'll need to really hunt to find any, trust me....

Much is made of the "audio version" of his blog -whereas in fact, the blog actually is a transcript of what appears to be a scripted audio show (see Alistair Cooke's Letters from America for a better example of this medium). There is absolutely nothing wrong in publishing regular audio updates from senior management (albeit that they're really heavily scripted) and it's a really useful channel for engagement. It's also a really good idea to provide transcripts of these for people who don't want to, or aren't able to, hear the audio. So far so good - we have the nice basics of a good podcast here.

The problem for me comes when this transcript is then turned into a blog, by the addition of comments and the attempt to add an element of chronology. The comments are then so heavily editted (and I really do mean heavily - see if you can spot anything critical) that they are meaningless. Virtually all the comments are from people saying:
1) how fantastic Bill is for writing a blog (seriously, if you think he's writing any of it, then you deserve to believe it!)
2) how fantastic Marriott staff were in helping them when they stayed there
3) re-affirming whatever apple-pie subject Bill was whittering on about

Anyhoo, up to this point, I'd been thinking we just had another large corporate who's PR/ad agency thought they should climb aboard the social web gravy train, and who's marketing department had let them.

And then, I started to see all the praise for the blog not only in the US media, but also (to their eternal shame) in a number of social media commentary blogs. Dear Lord people! What on earth has possessed you NOT to critique this! Have you been caught up in the homespun nostalgia and general schmaltzy quality of his posts (typically the The Importance of Working Hard and Doing Chores), or you afraid to criticise because it's been written by a very endearing pensioner (worth, at my best guess, in excess of $1.2billion)? More worringly thought, have you just completely lost any idea of what a blog should be?

If this is the future of corporate blogging, then we're all doomed!

Whole Foods CEO forum postings

2007-07-30T10:06:00.000Z

I was facinated to read about Whole Foods' recent monumental cock up over posting to financial forums....

"Whole Foods Market boss John Mackey has apologised for the renegade online PR campaign he conducted to boost his company’s image on financial messageboards.
In a statement, Mackey asked for shareholders’ forgiveness over his anonymous postings, which were uncovered last week and are now being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission: "I sincerely apologize to all Whole Foods Market stakeholders for my error in judgment in anonymously participating on online financial message boards. I am very sorry and I ask our stakeholders to please forgive me." All in all, it doesn’t look good for the businessman."
(extract from e-consultancy.com. Click here to read the Whole Story)

According to a number of sites, Mackey had registered on Yahoo and was happily talking his own (listed) company up, and dissing his biggest competitor, Wild Oats. Apparently he happily went about this for 8 years. And then proceeded to try to buy Wild Oats, also a listed company.

If this is true, apart from it being ethically suspect (the digital equivalent of anonymously fly-posting your neighbourhood bitching about a neighbour you don't like) it would appear to be on very ropey legal grounds. He should have clearly identified who he was when he posted about his own company, as a person who was clearly in receipt of confidential information - here in the UK he would have been an "insider" and his comments on the company's performance now or in the future are very heavily regulated.

Well, the US regulators and judicial system have now started their own investigations. This does make for interesting reading on Mackey's own blog on the Whole Foods website and the company's response to the FTC's investigations.

More interesting however is the company's share price, today trading at the US$36 mark, down from a high of $68 or so in October 2006, and from a price of mid $40s when the story broke.

2007-07-23T09:40:00.000Z

Just who *is* Jesus Cuevas on Facebook.com?

And who thought it was a good idea to let him have access to both a digital camera, and an internet connection?

Facebook

2007-06-11T12:47:00.000Z

I've been reading lots of coverage of Facebook recently. It's gone a bit mad, with everyone apparently getting themselves a profile.

There's an interesting article by Jemima Kiss on her "organ grinder" blog over at the Guardian, giving a really good overview of what Facebook actually is:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/06/facebook_its_just_gone_mental.html

More interesting are the communities forming around workplaces - KPMG, Deloitte and PwC apparently have a number of their staff grouping up on Facebook, presumably to network and collaborate with each other. I'm not sure what this says - either they don't have the necessary tools to do this at work easily, or they just prefer the Facebook experience. Time will tell whether this is just a fad, or if it'll become a future tool for large companies to facilitate collaborative working across a disparate workforce. Legal and IT teams around the world must be squirming at the thought...

Ask.com relaunch

2007-06-06T11:58:00.001Z

Just popped onto Ask.com today, to see the revamped site. Very nice it is too. They've added all sorts of new content onto the result page.

They talk about the reasoning behind it in their blogs on the site and it's interesting to see their take on confronting Google and Microsoft's Live search, and it's easy to see if you compare the results from all 3:

Search for Rio Tinto on Ask
Search for Rio Tinto on Google

Search for Rio Tinto on MS Live

Ask have gone for a much more intergrated approach - there are blogs, news stories, images, weather - even entries from Wikipedia. Interestingly, they have included related searches, based on the search patterns of others who have looked for the same thing.

This is pretty clever (well, I've always been easily impressed), but for us it's also a bit of a challenge. Potentially, if we have lots of activists or detractors searching for us, we'll start finding "anti-us" websites appearing more and more options, as their search patterns skew the results. Similarly, if there's a lot of anto company blogging going on, Ask are giving an nice easy way of presenting this to a wide audience, irrespective of its accuracy.

I can't see either Microsoft or Google hanging around after this, and it's probably only a matter of time before they too start aggregating search results in this way (to some degree, Live already does so).

This makes it even more important in the future to keep a close eye on your reputation online. You can't bury it anymore, or hope it'll just go away. It's out there, and it's gonna get you.

Blocked in China?

2007-06-05T15:46:00.000Z

As we do a fair amount of business in China, I was interested to find out whether our corporate website was blocked.

According to the Great Firewall of China, it is! Who'da thought, eh....

However the website did say that I was coming in from the Netherlands, and that there was disclaimer saying that it might just be technical problems preventing the site from being viewed in China, so I'm not entirely convinced of the accuracy.

Blog searching terms

2007-06-01T11:06:00.000Z

Unfortunately, spam bloggers have started picking up copy either from our website or from emailed press releases and using it in the padding text on their blogs, to drive traffic.

How annoying is that!

Thankfully Technorati and Google blog search tend to drop the sploggers pretty quickly, but it's started to skew our analytics and metrics here at work.

What to do about a splog? One thing you can do is report. The site Fight Splog has a number of other alternatives, including reporting them to Google AdSense, and reporting to StopSplog.com, a listing service.

Interestingly, the US government is taking the issue of spam seriously. They're holding a Spam Summit in July 2007, however as details seem to be sketchy I'm not exactly holding my breath on this one.

Thankfully for us, many of the Rio Tinto splogs seems to have died a death, so we're lucky in not having to handle this as a significant ongoing issue. Who knows why? Maybe the traffic directed to them on the back of relevant key words from our site wasn't good enough, maybe they got deleted and have started randomly picking up copy from other people's sites. I think it may havebeen triggered by a surge in our search engine traffic around take over rumours a while back.

I'm just glad it's as much of an issue for us at the moment, though no doubt it'll happen again.

BustedIn

2007-05-17T12:43:00.000Z

I've been surfing around LinkedIn for a while now, but only just started to set up my networks, and search for people. It was fascinating to see how many people I knew are on there already, and how many of them are from workplaces from years ago. Ah, the nostalgia... *wipes away a tear*

A couple of things struck me about LinkedIn though:

1. How similar the model is to many "dating" and *ahem* "personals" websites. The ability to post quasi-anonymously, with just teaser information about yourself to get others hooked; how you can list your interests and attract others of a similar mindset; how you can set up networks of people you recommend and know... so on and so on...

2. How expensive it was. Dating sites SO have to learn from this particular business model - people are apparently prepared to pay way more for professional hookups than they are for private ones. Or maybe we're all just expensing membership on our company credit card.

3. How easy it was to identify people - I managed to find someone sitting 12 feet away from me in the first 15 minutes of searching (interesting reading it was, too!). Unfortunately, the major drawback of this (for them, not for me) was that I got to see which of my (readily identifiable) work colleagues are on the lookout for a new job.

Let's hope our Talent Management team in HR don't learn how this stuff works any time soon...

Pitching

2007-05-16T10:19:00.000Z

There's been a lot of discussion recently in New Media Age about client and agency relationships, particularly around the issue of paying for pitch work.

My background is both agency and client-side. Yes, it is frustrating (and pretty expensive!) pitching for work as an agency. And when you don't get the job, and the reason from the client seems pretty spurious or poorly judged, then it can be devastating.

But it's also pretty expensive client-side as well. We have to arrange the review process, manage it (in a global company that ain't easy!), and then go through formalised selection and ranking criteria, before contacting successful agencies (and dealing with the fall out from the others, seriously some agency sales directors can get downright aggressive).

This takes hours and hours! Trust me, clients don't really like agency pitches either.

One solution is to use a number of preferred agencies only. You only then have to go through the pitch process once: judge them on their past agency work, on their ability offer specific digital requirements, on cultural/business fit, and then test them on a small amount of work to see if they fit (could they handle the pressure, is the work up to scratch etc etc) without making undue resource demands.

We did something similar, and now have a roster of agencies across a good mix of disciplines- technical, visual, content, user experience, production etc.

Once on the list, if we have a project for them we only ask for proposals (costs, approach, timescales etc) as we are confident in their particular abilities. Noone has let us down yet.

The plan is to update our list irregularly, and this should keep the pitch input from both sides down.

Result? Happy agencies, getting regular work + happy client, getting good service from selected, trusted agencies.

So, to learn - treat your clients and your agencies with respect, coz you both need each other. Respect that you have different requirements, and appreciate the differences.

But above all, talk to each other, so if the level of "free" input on a pitch is unrealistic (too much/too little) you both discuss other ways of achieving a fair selection.

May you live in interesting times

2007-05-14T14:44:00.000Z

Interesting times for us at the moment. Lots of rumour and analyst suggestions (they're gambling that we may be bought by another large mining company, BHP Billiton, or even by private equity) over the past week have led to a lots of movement in our share price.

Most interesting was the blog coverage. Financial and investment blogs seem to be breeding like rabbits, but many of them simply cut and paste the stories they read elsewhere (or RSS feed them... ) , unfortunately often without thinking how accurate the source story might be.
From Technorati - posts that contain "Rio Tinto" per day for the last 30 days...

Popular amongst the "cut and pasters" seems to be press releases from Reuters and Bloomberg. Understandable, as they are probably bit better thought through than many others, but I can't really see the point. I don't see the blogger adding any value, and there is no personal opinion or voice to the stories.

Trade shows

2007-05-05T14:43:00.000Z

Just back from Internet World 2007 in Earl's Court. There are days I wonder why I bother with these events - full of sales people who seem to be more interested in looking at your name badge (busy working out the "company name x job title = budgetary control = purchase /15% = my personal commission [optional licking of lips and rubbing of hands]" equation).

Interesting to see some of our existing suppliers there, and worrying to see so little technical innovation. More worrying than any of that though was the truly horrible sight of consultants, agencies and vendors trying to talk up the hype around web 2.0. Seriously, look... over there, on the horizon - those sails over there... that's the ship leaving port. Some of the seminars were pretty relevant, giving guidance to webmasters on how to incorporate some of the social stuff, how to build trust etc. However some of the tat on offer was truly shocking (pretty much anything with "next generation" or "2.0" in the title kinda missed the boat *points at horizon again*).

I'm not sure what I was most uncomfortable with - that digital professionals aren't familiar with the basics of this stuff yet (and can kinda see through all the hype), or that companies are still lazily bandwagonning (see "portals" in about 1999) and looking at social networking content as almost a replacement for innovation and new ideas. I would have thought we'd moved on a lot and people would want to see real world examples for UGC and ways to use online social networks, other than trying to surreptitiously "blog-flog" the latest gadget/pizza/car.

Web accessibility

2007-04-27T14:43:00.000Z

Accessibility has been a bit of a hot topic for me recently. I was at a netimperative.com networking dinner recently, where the speaker was Julie Howell (currently Fortune Cookie, ex RNIB). Her take on accessibility was particularly interesting - do it, because it makes sense, and not because it's "worthy". Making access to your site difficult to people with disabilities, either because you're unaware, lazy or dismissive, doesn't make good business sense.

For a company like ours, which is nearly all pure B2B (you can't pop along one day and buy a couple of tonnes of bauxite from Rio Tinto with your credit card) accessibility is a tricky one. For instance, we have tonnes of legacy content from previous iterations of our website going back 10 years or so, including thousands of speeches, presentations and investor documents that are in an "inaccessibile" PDF format. For us, we need to make a call on how many of these documents we republish, documents that are rarely (if ever) viewed - would you want to see a press release dating from 1998 about production reviews at a mine we no longer own, for instance?

This is further compounded by (ok, at this stage fairly annecdotal) evidence that we have fewer disabled viewers than many other sites. Our stakeholder groups that the site is aimed at (investors, journos, job seekers, governments etc) had lower presentation of disabled people than the general public. This doesn't mean that we ignore them, or dismiss them (far from it), however it does lead to difficult decisions - how much do we engineer areas of the site and our content (eg re-editing videos and adding captioning at huge expense) for a very small audience segment. We took the view that we should do everything that people would reasonably have expected us to do (eg making the site at least Priority A, and AAA where we could), but where the effort and cost was prohibitive, and where the content was of minimal or minority interest, to leave the legacy content as it was. We're reviewing all of our old content on a regular basis, and if we start to see there is a demand, then obviously we'll retro-fit this to current accessibility standards.

YouTube

2007-04-18T14:42:00.000Z

We've just launched our new channel on YouTube. We've uploaded a whole load of our corporate videos here, including a lot around our work in local communities.

It looks like we're the first company in the FTSE100 to have a channel on YouTube. At first glance it might seem a bit odd - after all, why on earth would a large corporate go and get a channel on a website that's seems to be populated by 14 year olds mucking around with camera phones?

If you dig around the site, more and more issues-based content (videos, opinion pieces and the like) is being uploaded, and it's this that's of interest to us. Increasingly people with opinions about mining are putting content up and tagging it - and now so are we. One of the important ways of engaging stakeholders is to also allow them to see our point of view. They can choose to disagree with us if they like, but at least YouTube gives us the opportunity to present our position.

Why blog?

2007-04-10T14:40:00.000Z

Well, it's a question I get asked all the time in my job. In fact, we're currently reviewing whether we think a company in our position needs to create "official" blogs at all (more of that later... *taps nose*)

For me, it's a case of getting on my virtual soapbox. My friends and colleagues *will* be pleased.

Most of my work here is (obviously) commercially confidential, and there is no way I can talk about it. But there are key issues that crop up in the context of doing my job on a day-to-day basis that are worth chatting about. And as my job is about stakeholder engagement, using digital media, how post modern and ironic that I have a blog about it.