Virgin Atlantic’s got it

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 6:57 am UK

I saw this TV ad for Virgin Atlantic for the first time last night. The airline first used it in 2010. As you can probably tell, I don’t watch a lot of TV.

It captured my imagination. Beautifully made. And it ticks a lot of “connection boxes.” Attractive people, terrific sound track – “I’m Feeling Good” – contemporary and futuristic settings, aspirational, even experiential, solid brand value, shows the company as leading edge.

I want to fly with people like that!

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Virgin Atlantic’s brand new TV advert – “Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t” – Virgin Atlantic
Welcome to our first ever global TV advert. Featuring the strap-line ‘Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t', the campaign takes the viewer on a metaphorical flight with Virgin Atl…

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Trust in Twitter takes a knock

Posted on January 4, 2012 at 3:08 pm UK

If Twitter says a Twitter account is authentic, you trust it, don’t you? That little tick on a blue background you often see alongside accounts of prominent politicians, celebs and others is your symbol of confidence that the account belongs to the person whose name appears on it, and not someone else.

After all, Twitter has verified that it is so. Indeed, Twitter says of its verification:

Verification is currently used to establish authenticity of identities on Twitter. The goal of this program is to limit user confusion by making it easier to identify authentic accounts on Twitter.

The bold emphasis is Twitter’s own.

The trouble is, no one is sure how Twitter verifies the identity of an account nor how verification as a whole actually work, something that assumes some importance when a verified Twitter account turns out to be a fake. Such an eventuality challenges your assumption of trust.

That’s what happened this week with Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng Murdoch and the spoof Twitter account set up in her name during the Christmas holiday period by a still-unknown prankster.

Among the many reports and opinions about it, Mathew Ingram‘s assessment for GigaOm on why Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters is a credible one.

[...] Twitter has refused to speak publicly about what happened with the Deng account, or to explain why it was verified and then suddenly un-verified – and the company has also repeatedly refused to talk on the record about how the verification process as a whole works, and why some accounts are chosen for verification and others aren’t. Even if the Deng verification was a simple screw-up due to reduced staffing levels over the holidays, Twitter’s radio silence on the issue makes it even harder to trust the entire process, and that could have ramifications that go beyond just the Murdoch case.

Writing today in CorpComms Magazine, Clare Harrison asks how reliable is Twitter verification?

[...] Sadly, like so many implausibly good tales, [the Wendi Deng Twitter account] turned out to be false. And The Guardian wasn’t alone in falling for the ruse. The account appeared even to fool News Corp. A spokeswoman confirmed to reporters at both the BBC and The Guardian that the Deng account was real on Sunday, only to change her mind the following day.

People don’t like to be made fools of.

Alongside some good opinions from Stuart Bruce and Danny Whatmough, Clare’s analysis includes this quote from me:

[...] In an age of increasing transparency, it seems bizarre to see one of the key services that shores up the social web acting so opaquely about a matter that’s part of the fabric of the social web.

If you can understand more about how something works, you are in a better position to assign your trust to it. Or not.

Until that happens, caveat lector.

[Update Jan 5] “The Case of the Unfortunate Underscore: How Twitter Verified the Fake Wendi Over the Real Wendi” – some light on how it happened, from Kara Swisher.

The key word in Carrier IQ is ‘FUD’

Posted on December 4, 2011 at 8:38 am UK

carrieriqsolution Quite a kerfuffle blew up during the past week over privacy and what happens to information about your mobile phone usage that, unknown to you, is captured on your device by logging software made by US diagnostics and analytics firm Carrier IQ and then transmitted to their servers.

The story so far:

1. A security researcher published a report on November 30 alleging that Carrier IQ’s software is a rootkit and secretly transmits data – including personally-identifiable information – from your phone to Carrier IQ without your knowledge or permission. The researcher made a video illustrating his concerns which he published on YouTube on November 28.

In essence, what the video and the report mean is broadly this: because a mobile phone user hasn’t given explicit permission for such data sharing (and doesn’t even know this software is on his or her phone) and they can’t opt out of it, surely it’s a violation of your rights to privacy.

2. Uproar ensues, with mainstream and social media alike posting critical commentary and opinion on the Big Brother-like evils of such behaviour, which is possibly illegal depending on jurisdiction and matters that could keep lawyers busy for months. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the non-profit digital rights advocacy organization, rallied to the researcher’s support to counter legal threats from Carrier IQ that the researcher had breached their copyright.

Vilification of Carrier IQ was well underway within hours of publication of the researcher’s report.

3. On December 1, Carrier IQ issued a press release “to clarify misinformation on the functionality of Carrier IQ software”:

[...] While a few individuals have identified that there is a great deal of information available to the Carrier IQ software inside the handset, our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video. For example, we understand whether an SMS was sent accurately, but do not record or transmit the content of the SMS. We know which applications are draining your battery, but do not capture the screen.

Notwithstanding Carrier IQ’s attempt to logically explain what their product does – and perhaps of equal significance, what it doesn’t do – the kerfuffle continues with “yes it does / no it doesn’t” arguments being conducted by pundits and opinion leaders alike that muddy the waters of clarity to stir up a huge amount of FUD.

Interestingly, Carrier IQ isn’t anywhere to be seen in those online conversations: no comments to blog posts, tweets of engagement, or Facebook and Google+ comments.

Observing developments these past few days reminds me of other crises of confidence that threaten reputations that erupted quickly and before you knew it, an unplanned-for crisis had presented itself to you to deal with right now.

Think of:

Healthcare company McNeil’s baptism of digital fire over the Motrin Moms debacle - the communicators weren’t paying attention to a groundswell of critical online commentary about a marketing video promoting their market-leading over-the-counter ibuprofen pain reliever that erupted over a weekend until it reached the mainstream media and sucked in parent company Johnson & Johnson.
Domino’s Pizza’s education regarding the social media effects from employees doing disgusting things with food products and posting the videos they made to YouTube – company executives were paying attention to increasing criticism in social media and calls for a response from the company but a senior executive had dismissed social channels like blogs as “unimportant.”

To be fair to these two companies, those events happened in late 2008 and early 2009 respectively – a time when many people in companies large and small were still trying to figure out social media. If mistakes were made, they tended to be hugely visible and high profile, as these two cases certainly were (and, in the case of Domino’s Pizza, subsequently resulted in a direct negative impact on their financial results).

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In Defence Of Influence Metrics

Posted on November 16, 2011 at 7:39 am UK

Is Klout getting a bum rap, spitefully pilloried in critical commentary such as my post on November 12 on opting out of Klout? Guest author Tammy Kahn Fennell believes that services like Klout and PeerIndex deserve fairer assessment.

Let me open with this. I am not invested in any influence score company. My company, MarketMeSuite integrates with Klout and Peer Index as one of about 20 other integrations. And we also have the option to turn off influence entirely. I am writing this because from where I’m standing, influence (specifically Klout) is being given a bad name not because of what it measures, but because how the company profits from it. I thought it was time to think long and hard about whether we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Neville was nice enough to give me a chance to post an opposing viewpoint to his “Out of Klout” article. Thanks Neville.

Let’s look at the facts of recent events:

Klout made an announcement they were shifting their algorithm to focus less on how much you post, and more on how engaging you are.

They gave people a week’s notice for this.

A couple of weeks ago a whole lot of people woke up to realize they were a fair bit less influential than they were the day before.

Whenever there’s a big change, it causes people to re-evaluate. And when an algorithm shift “disses” a whole bunch of people and flat out says “you’re less cool than you thought,” people can get a little angry.

Anger Turns To Spite

But what I’ve seen happen goes beyond anger. What I’ve seen happen is that people have turned incredibly spiteful toward influence metrics. Now, if you think it’s a load of BS and that there’s really no way to measure or rank, then fine, I’ll leave you in peace. But what I’m striving to put to rest is the ambiguity around whether people are attacking influence metrics themselves, or just Klout. Neville pointed out in a comment reply to me that he doesn’t feel the same about Peer Index, because he feels the company is run by a nice group of people and that may be true.The folks over at PI are very nice, that’s for sure, but, when my PI score and Klout score are within points of each other, one can’t help but wonder if the metric is actually correct, and that people are condemning influence as a metric because they have it in for one company, Klout.

(As an aside, I have spoken to the folks at Klout and have never found them to be the Ogres they are being painted as, but that’s not the point of this article. We must not judge usefulness on how much we like people in the company, but on whether it is actually useful.)

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Out of Klout

Posted on November 12, 2011 at 7:53 am UK

The kerfuffle about Klout, the self-styled ‘standard for influence’ service, that blew up last month has largely settled down now as most online kerfuffles tend to.

Yet the storm that erupted following Klout’s change in how they measure an individual’s rank focused a great deal of attention on what Klout’s business model really is – just a marketing scheme for its perks programme? as I wondered – and on some of its practices in how it captures data and how it markets its perks to users.

A key aspect of the sense of unease such revelations provoked in me was knowing that you had no means of removing yourself from Klout if you had an account. That’s now changed as Klout enabled a way to opt out of its service. Cancel your account, in other words. (You find the link to start that in your Klout settings.)

Since then, I’ve noticed a number of people whose opinions I respect saying that they’ve left Klout. Lynette Young, for instance, who says it bluntly:

I no longer feel dirty and hypocritical

I’ve just done the same – opted out of Klout. Cancelled my account. Revoked access for Klout to interact with all the other online places I’d given it permission for.

My comment on Klout’s opt-out form as to why I was cancelling out was a simple one:

Thanks, but I no longer believe your service offers me any value.

With that, I hit the ‘Submit’ button.

The tipping point for me to do this was a highly-critical post by Rohn Jay Miller a few days ago uncompromisingly entitled Delete Your Klout Profile Now!. This blunt comment in his post caught my attention:

[...] The fundamental evil of Klout is that it’s a venture capital-backed company looking to leverage into a big IPO payday and the only value proposition they offer is their ability to identify, train and exploit people they can sell to advertisers as “key influencers,” in a taxonomy of business interests.

What do these “key influencers” get for their efforts? Pennies. Swag. Chocolate bars. Little discounts. These people are the entire sum of the Klout value proposition. Klout exists for the benefit of advertisers, not for the people Klout measures and then chooses to engage.

Heavy stuff indeed. But it added greatly to my sense of unease about Klout. How could I trust them? Whywould I trust them?

Well, I don’t, simple as that.

So I’m out of Klout. And moving on.

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