New focus for ‘mu:kau and ‘mu:kaumedia

May 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Two new sites in development – www.mukaumedia.co.uk and www.mukau.co.uk. The changes represent the two sides to our business; Feedback and online reputation management and Podcasting and Blogging.

Both are being put together using WordPress software. Why? Because we want control.

Goodbye to the first site we had built by ROKK Media in Exeter. Very pretty graphically, totally static (no updated content) and entirely Google invisible.

Goodbye to the second site we had built by Lazymouse in Exeter. Great at the time, but with a not very intuitive CMS interface and a struggle to control and edit from the start.

Hello to the kind of web presence that brings you almost effortless Google visibility and lets you spend time creating interesting content instead of fighting with code.

Filed Under: news

Ding! Another villain in the Spam Hall Of Shame

May 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Ad Trader wins the Bronze Spam Award for continuing to send marketing emails after we unsubscribed. This, ahem, oversight or glitch seems surprisingly common.

The law says you have to provide an ‘unsubscribe’ option and Ad Trader does. But the law doesn’t have much concrete to say on what happens if the link – miraculously – doesn’t work.

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!

The Purple Heart Guilt Spam award – goes to… FACEBOOK!

May 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This is how ‘Guilt Spam’ works. Friend sends Good Karma request on Facebook. You have 2 options: you either accept (and give all your data to the Good Karma application, which I don’t want to do) OR you ‘ignore’ your friend.

All I can do is send my friend a message saying ‘I’m not ignoring you, I just don’t want to keep giving people I don’t know my personal data”. Their likely response? “Oh, lighten up you miserable old sod” – adding a dash of ‘peer pressure’ to the proceedings.

That’s why I consider Facebook to be one big, fat Guilt Spam application because the whole thing is designed to exploit people’s desire not to reject or be rejected to extract and sell on (“share”) valuable marketing data.

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!

Computer Warehouse – Bronze Spam Award winner!

April 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Dingggg!

Our first winner! Reason? For having an unsubscribe link email address that doesn’t work.

CW gets the Bronze Spam Award because although I did ‘soft-opt’ in to their list a long time ago while checking Mac prices, they’re now making it impossible to opt out.

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!

The muddle of ‘the entrepreneur’

April 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment

We did a podcasting job this week from a workshop at the Eden Project that explored the idea of the ‘entrepreneur’. There were some broadly-shared assumptions going around – such as that entrepreneurs were people who made the most of opportunities; that they were willing to risk failure in order to drive change and innovate.

A quick look at Wikipedia provides the following:

“An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a new enterprise or venture and assumes full accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome”

Interestingly, the workshop didn’t really focus on accountability as a defining characteristic of the entrepreneur. And on the willingness to risk failure – which most people believed a defining characteristic of the entrepreneur – Wikipedia also has this to say:

“The research data indicate that successful entrepreneurs are actually risk averse”

That’s somehow not surprising. Look at Dragon’s Den. Those people aren’t playing a risk game. They’re playing a game of calculated exploitation and they only put their money into things they know they can drive to success. So where do we get the idea of risk from?

The people who take risks are the crazy alchemists, the nutty inventors, the creative nomads and the random innovators. They’re the ones who throw everything into their idea with a high risk of failure. But they’re not entrepreneurs – a distinction the workshop seemed to miss. Entrepreneurs are, however, people who seize upon the inventions and the innovations and capitalise them in the right place at the right time.

So it emerges that the defining characteristics of the the entrepreneur are the eye for opportunity, the discipline and courage required to act on those opportunities and the willingness to be accountable for the whole process. While at first glance, it may seem like the entrepreneur is a risk-taker (compared with working 9-5 in the office for the rest of your life) in reality his success derives from his ability to minimise risk.

Filed Under: business insight

Shouting at 3

April 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Close your eyes and recall the last time you tried to explain the nuances of your problem to an Indian call centre agent. Bring to mind the feelings.

Think about it for a moment. Horrible, isn’t it?

I got charged internet usage for looking at RSS feed ‘headlines’ on my mobile. The problem is that nowhere does 3 tell you that you will be charged internet usage to do this.

The Indian customer service lady had no idea what I was talking about. At one point, I asked her to tell me where, online, I could read 3′s terms and conditions stating any charges relating to viewing RSS feeds.

After 10 minutes consulting her customer service colleagues, she proudly told me that www.bbc.co.uk would be a good place to look.

Eventually, she cancelled the £1.62 charge by way of good customer relations but warned me in the sternest tones to stop looking at RSS feeds.

Whether a company deliberately offers no channels of communication or whether it outsources to places where people struggle to deal with calls in a second language, the effect is the same. You are not being heard.

[BTW - did you know that the original painting by Edvard Munch was actually called 'Shouting'?]

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!

The company you keep

April 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Your online reputation involves subtle but powerful chemistry. Here’s a real life example of how it works.

5 minutes ago. I was reading a post by Andy Lopata (founder of Word of Mouse network and author of ‘And Death Came Third’) in the ‘Make Your Mark’ Connectors’ Google group. I liked his book (about networking and public speaking) and we’ve spoken a couple of times recently. His post announced that he’d been appointed a regional contributor to US-based ‘The National Networker’ and was writing a monthly column.

So I clicked across to read Andy’s first column – a piece about Ecademy’s recent 10th birthday. When I finished, I had a look round the site, a sort of digital ‘let’s-see-the-company-you’re-keeping’. Moments later, I was reading a column offering ‘Network Marketers’ a word-for-word script they could use to recruit other companies’ staff into their business ‘opportunities’.

Now, as those who know me know, I take a very strong and very critical position on network (or ‘multi-level’) marketing. Given that the vast majority (some sources say over 95%) of people don’t make any money at all from MLM / NM ‘opportunities’, and of the remainder only a tiny fraction make enough to live on, this ‘industry’ is slowly being exposed for what it really is; an exploitative system that preys on vulnerable people, takes their investments at the same time as brainwashing them to take full responsibility for their failure to make money. For the record, that view is not based on my own experience. Its based on a huge and growing body of direct, personal testimony of people who have been damaged by its practices – and, more recently, backed up by statistical evidence emerging from high-profile law suits against Quixtar (formerly Amway).

Would I write for an online journal that elevated Network Marketing to respectability? No. I wouldn’t – but that’s a personal choice. But this experience does remind me that online reputation isn’t just about knowing what other people say about you; it’s also about thinking about the company you keep and what they’re saying. Have I considered what people might think of the associations I make or the places I write? Probably not. Its worth thinking about it, though.

Filed Under: business insight, marketing Tagged With: , ,

A1, SAMFUK and my reading glasses…

April 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Congratulations A1 on a nice online forum. Its only been open a few weeks, but its already seen quite a lot of activity. Nice atmosphere, well worth signing up and joining in.

I’ve always been interested in what makes a forum work – or not work. Recently, I’ve been jumping between Sales and Marketing Forum UK – or SAMFUK as I like to call it :-) – and A1. Although SAMFUK’s gone through a considerable makeover recently it still hasn’t achieved the easy readability of A1. The simple result is that I’ve spent far more time recently on A1.

Moving from SAMFUK to A1 is like putting on your reading glasses mid way through trying to text someone. Its only when you’ve done it, you realise how much you were struggling before.

Filed Under: business insight, online networking Tagged With: , ,

Being right – an obsession

April 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I can’t tell you how many times I find myself sitting bolt-upright, way past midnight, suddenly wondering “Why the hell am I doing this?!”

If I’m really, really honest, a lot of the time I’m probably doing it because I suffer from a need to be right. Right?

Typically in our house it goes like this:

“Are you coming to bed?”

“I can’t. This is important!”

“What?”

“I’ve got to finish this post.. it’s…er.. very….”

Clare goes to bed. 60 minutes of furious writing / editing later:

“Why the hell am I doing this?!” [Quits without posting]

Filed Under: online networking, smile Tagged With: ,

Now that’s what I call viral… [2]

April 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I got an email from a perfectly sane, level-headed and intelligent friend today announcing that “the world famous Red Arrows have been banned appearing at the 2012 London Olympics because they are deemed ‘too British’ ” and asking me to sign an online petition.

Frothing at the mouth, I clicked the link and found myself looking at a petition signed by hundreds of thousands of people demanding the government let the Red Arrows fly.

Then above the petition I noticed this: “The allegation is not true. The government has not banned the Red Arrows…”.

A couple of seconds in Google revealed the whole thing to be a hoax. But the petition is still active and people are still signing it.

There are a couple of things that stand out from this. One is how astonishingly uncritical we can be of information that fits with the kind of things we expect to hear. Another is how the emotional response can take on a life of its own beyond the unmasking of the lie.

Filed Under: business insight, news Tagged With: , ,
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