PR from the Beach

Knowledge Engines inch us closer to Wikipedia immersion

Google's announcements today of its latest projects - the Knowledge Graph - sounds fascinating but takes us closer to a world history written according to Wikipedia. Google admits that much of the 'knowledge' powering their new search results - see their video below - is sourced from Freebase, bought by them in 2010, who in turn got heaps of data from Wikipedia and other data bases around the web.

My question is, if the source information is pulled out of areas such as Wikipedia - which is, despite their best efforts - still prone to inaccuracy, 'editing-out' and edit wars - how long before our history and the things we are 'allowed' to find are either rewritten, rubbed out or removed from actual experience or alternatively distorted by indiviual perspectives that can manipulate the systems?

It all sounds very useful and I am sure it will be. But - and it is a big but - the Knowledge Graph is filled with bear-traps and Orwellian group-think. It might seem that our knowledge is 'extended' by this -  I fear wisdom is being left behind.

 

Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts

It's that time of year when people dress up and pretend to be something else. The trend begins around Halloween, then on towards Christmas there is almost a perpetual parade of cowboys, pirates, fairies, elves and magical creatures that - in fiction - can provide all manner of blessings and benefits but in reality, well, they're just pretend.

So a word to the wise as we approach the season of giving. Beware geeks bearing gifts, particularly in the realms of social media and you truly will have yourself that merry little Christmas.

Over the last few months I've stumbled over several sites promising all sorts of miracles for those who buy their social media wares. If you are thinking of using social media and expanding what you do online, good on you. But,  if you are one of the small to medium sized businesses that these sites seem to be aiming at, my Christmas wish would be that you think very carefully and consider the points below before you load up a shopping cart full of exciting looking goodies and click 'send':

1. Social media is not about numbers. It is about people communicating with each other, building relationships and working together. If someone promises you 'thousands' of Facebook or Twitter followers they don't understand the environment and are likely to lead you astray. Expensively. This is not a popularity contest and 'follower' numbers don't buy results.
2. Social media takes time. Yes, you can get a 'message' out there quickly, but, in the long term, the relationships you forge will be the measure of your success, not how speedily something went 'viral'.
3. Look carefully at any site that purports to be run by 'social media gurus' or 'experts' or 'specialists' but features blog posts from 'admin' and has no real people associated with the site.  These are signs that you need to be very, very careful before you part with your hard earned cash.
4. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. That's been my message to, well, thousands of people now over the last ten years or more. Understand what you want to achieve, who you want to build a relationship with and why and how you are going to sustain and build that relationship - then start thinking about your strategy and then the tools you might use. Don't start with tactics first and work backwards. That's another Trojan Horse.
5. There are lots of genuine people out there who have solid experience in this area. If you are setting out to buy in help, be careful. Talk to real people. Hear some real stories. Don't buy 'off the shelf' - it won't work because your needs are very different to anyone else's - as are the needs of the communities you will serve.  And serving and service is a vital component of this space.

So, to recap. Think about what you want to achieve first, don't think it is about numbers and popularity  because this is the real world, not high school. Talk to real people, hear some real stories. Scrutinise all geeks bearing gifts. Remember at all times that just because someone is dressed up as Father Christmas, it doesn't mean you'll definitely find Santa underneath - it might just be a pirate or a cowboy looking to take you on a ride to nowhere.

Tweet thoughts from beyond the Grave

Over at Farmville, people are busy putting the finishing touches to their Haunted Houses ready for Halloween.  Me, I've been looking at digital footprints for one reason or another, and I have to say I've been struck by the number of organisations that have sprung up offering digital services for the dead.

I haven't had a proper play around with it yet, but must say that the Futuris.tk site is very intriguing - here you can send a message to loved ones, posted out when you are dead, or 'future-blog' your thoughts now 50 years ahead. Others like Entrustet, Legacy Locker and My Web Will all look to managing your digital assets once your big Switch Off has occurred and - if there is absolutely no chance of a reboot - your loved ones can activate all the 'deactivates' that will be necessary once your chips are finally down.  Facebook will enshrine your loved one's page for you, if you wish, but if, in real life, you have no close mates or family that can prove their relationship with you to Facebook then, rest assured, your party photos will live forever.

Spooky then, if you have diligently mashed your applications to auto-tweet during your living hours and a spam comment somewhere knocks it into action long after you've gone. Imagine the stick you'll get for not being a proper contributor to the conversation - it's bad enough now if you go quiet for a week or two!

My thought for the day on this one rests with those in the business community currently thrashing out digital strategies - and anyone else who has harnessed the power of their employees as brand advocates on their behalf. Imagine this. You have been asked to run a tweetstream talking about your place of work. You die. It doesn't. Who owns it? Who closes it down? And what if your digital footprint actually has financial value - in the same way as artists, writers, authors and other creative types have assets that increase in value after their demise, so too might the value of that Flickr stream you are so fond of. And if it does - who gets the cash?  If there's a digital will, then there will be a way.

For most, this probably won't seem like a particularly worrisome problem - a bit like cyber-security concerns seemed a few years ago - but believe me, as more advocates are born, so will they die. If I were to blog my thoughts today for use 50 years ahead, I guess it would include a brief sentence: "Remember I suggested you work out how to deal with the digital assets of the dead - bet you wish you had now!"

It has also got me thinking about the point at which people will - to put it bluntly - shut up. Are we going to experience a rash of 'death blogs' as one by one we shuffle off this mortal coil?  Unless they are really from beyond the grave and offer insight into a life beyond, then reflections of what dreams may come from the living - while they remain with us - will, I fear, simply be dead boring. Like the wonderful tombstone above, found here, there must be a time when we simply have nothing more to say.

PS: Would Vampires really want to engage with their Stakeholders?

BP Crisis Plan Fail - would yours be any better?

I wasn't surprised to read the Associated Press story that seemed to imply that the BP Crisis Plan - all 582 pages of it, with 52 of them site-specific to Deepwater Horizon - had been gathering dust in a draw somewhere.  One of the go-to experts named in the plan died in 2005, links to resources were null and void and all in all, the plans approved by the Federal Government as recently as last year were, to say the very least, wanting.

I have heard no mention of the Transocean plan, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig, who are continually conspicuous by their absence or indeed, America's Halliburton company, also missing in action and which was working down there prior to the explosion that killed 11 people. It seems that BP, however ill-prepared, is happy to take the blame for this one, even though they are not the only players involved.

The trouble with 582 page reports is that nobody ever really reads them properly. Nor would it seem in this case, do they check the detail, for if they did, surely someone would have picked up that at least one of their experts would not be available in a crisis? Or that the risks had been seriously underestimated? Or how hard it would be to 'fix' problems so far underwater? Or the impact on the environment? The list here really is endless.

As this environmental, social and economic disaster has unfolded, it has been obvious to everyone that someone, somewhere, who should have been responsible for crisis planning has failed in their duty, from the response to repair and re-engineering, to communication and culpability.  Equally, some blame must lie with the departments that passed the plans as acceptable - or perhaps the size of the report put them off a thorough read.

Any practitioner worth their salt knows that you must run a crisis plan regularly, that you audit-check contacts and details with a pedantic frequency and, at the risk assessment level, ongoing evaluation should inform your plan and the varying degrees of risk faced by your organisation, the community and your stakeholders.  How a company like BP, involved in one of the most risk-laden and dangerous businesses on earth could have a plan with apparently so many errors included defies belief.

AP quote BP's spokesman Daren Beaudo as saying: "...the response plans will be reviewed "so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement."

"Thus far we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us much to learn from."

I would suggest that they will be learning for years. I also wonder if anywhere else in the BP universe other crisis plans are being checked and overhauled. If I was there today, I would be getting people on to that double-quick-smart. Sadly though, I fear that they are probably oblivious to the need to do this.

I also hope that any practitioner out there  who has not created and run their crisis plan gets on to it today and, if there is an ancient plan festering in a draw somewhere, get it out, review it, check it, run it and practice it like a fire drill so you can test if it works, hunt down where the flaws lie and what you need to do as an organisation to make it work.  Accidents happen but incompetency is avoidable.  Good issues management reduces risk, but sometimes things go wrong, which is why a crisis plan is essential.  A good crisis plan should reduce or eliminate the danger to and affect of any incident on the public, the environment and the organisation and lead to swift recovery for all involved. It should be accessible, understood by everyone and practiced often. BP did not have a good crisis plan. I hope you do.

CEO Fail: Hayward 'wants life back' yet could have fixed BP in 2006

Like many, I have watched in horror at the unfolding BP disaster. The loss of life, the environmental damage, the illnesses reported among the clean-up workers - it really is unbelievable. From a professional perspective, I am staggered at the way the crisis has been handled by the company, epitomised by Tony Hayward's latest throw away comment 'I want my life back', documented in the video above.

A couple of years ago, as he was rising to the challenge of leading BP, Hayward commented at a town hall meeting in Houston, in the wake of a Texas refinery blast that killed 15 and injured 170 people: "We have a leadership style that is too directive and doesn't listen sufficiently well".

Indeed. And although at that time he was heir-apparent to the BP CEO's throne it would seem that after a couple of years at the helm, very little has changed. And this to me is his biggest failure in this crisis. He recognised the shortcomings of the organisation, but failed to fix it. That was his opportunity to avoid the crisis he is in the midst of right now.  Change the organisation. Improve practices. Keep your people and those around them safe. Make sure that the communication processes and the relationships you need to manage a crisis are in place, long before you need them. This is not just about 'making a crisis plan. A real crisis plan involves isolating and identifying what is wrong with your organisation - and fixing it, before it blows a hole in your company and the innocent lives of others. To acknowledge deficiencies and fail to act on them, well that's just negligence.

You can't be aware of, and say this : ""We have a management style that has made a virtue out of doing more for less. The mantra of more-for-less says that we can get 100 percent of the task completed with 90 percent of the resources. Which in some senses is okay and might work, but it needs to be deployed with great judgment and wisdom. When it isn't, you run into trouble."

"The frontline operations teams, I think, have lived too long in the world of making do and patching up this quarter for the next quarter...rather than really thinking about how we are going to maintain a piece of equipment for the next 30 or 40 years."

...and expect everything to be ok with no action required. Yet those are Tony Hayward's words from December 11 2006.

I see they have drafted in Cheney's old press spokesperson, Anne Womack-Koln 'to deal with the media'. All a bit late for that I'd say. In today's world, it is the CEO's responsibility to front up to all stakeholders, not just the media. The actions of the company prior to the disaster are paramount and the actions of BP prior to this event are wanting to say the least.

Tony Hayward is not one of life's natural communicators and whoever is advising him through this crisis would seem to be seriously lacking the abilities needed in this situation. Putting aside his lack of any obvious support, he is supposedly a CEO, which infers the ability to lead, change, act and resolve. Unfortunately, the problems apparently inherent within the company are as widespread as the surface oil slathering its way up the coast. Both require drastic action and the scars from both will remain for years ahead. Somehow, I don't think Hayward will ever get his wish.

Beware the cloudy crisis

After a bit of a blogging break on here, it is quite amazing looking back over all that has happened in the last few weeks. Probably the event with the most impact on the majority of ordinary folk was the Icelandic volcano eruption - and it is one close to my heart at the moment as my young 'uns are off on their first solo to Europe.

My worry isn't for delays and cancellations. No. My concern lies with the decisions taken to fly through the ash cloud. I fully understand the commercial imperative and also the significant personal difficulty travel delays and disruptions cause (having been on the end of them many, many times in life).  However I think most would agree that a delay is better than a disaster. Wouldn't you? Yet this situation presents passengers - and society - with a real trust dilemma and that should be of concern to us all.

The aviation authorities suggest dangerous flying conditions still exist but are now frequently contradicted by the airlines who say no, it is all just fine. In this situation, who should we, as users, trust? Whose word carries more weight?  As a complete layperson in the science of it all, but a frequent traveller, my concern isn't the 'St Elmo's Fire' scenario, but the 'wear and tear' that will result from persistent ash cloud fly through.  I know how gravel roads, dust and grit affect my car, so, as a layperson, I guess that similar or greater damage will result on aircraft exposed to the volcanic ash over time.  Nobody seems to be commenting on this possibility, yet to me, it is a serious potential risk.

If this extreme wear and tear does take its toll, I wonder how the first airline to hit the ground will react? Without wishing to be a doom-monger, it is very scary stuff. A European plane falling out of the sky is more likely to land on a populated area which means we are not just looking at the loss of life on the plane, but on the ground as well. Surely gainsaying aviation authority advice is a gamble not just with an airline's reputation but with people's lives? Me, I'm with the aviation authorities - stay on the ground and eliminate the risk - no commercial profit is worth a single life lost or endangered. Let's hope the airlines keep thinking this one through with the public interest uppermost in their minds and stop downsizing the optimum particle size in order to upsize their profits.

Buzz off Google

It isn't often I have a gripe at Google, but they really haven't thought the whole Buzz thing through at all. While some people like it, many others don't as it 'invades' their email system - something most people believe, rightly or wrongly, to be private. Fortunately, Google has started to listen to the hundreds of thousands of voices raised in protest over the whole thing. Interestingly, they are adjusting things slightly but in reality, I wonder how much they feel they have to adjust anything at all, given that Google puts the majority of apps out there for users for 'free'.  One to watch I'd say - but at least it is easier to turn Buzz off now, which is a great improvement on its launch last week.

When the Ghost in the Machine needs to back off

So this weekend Facebook decided that it would make some decisions on my behalf, selectively editing my friends' updates, information, quiz results, likes (but not dislikes as there is no button) et al. Today, Google launches social search so I can retrieve information from my public social graph that will take me one step nearer to the most recommended coffee shop this side of the CBD - but only if the Google machine considers it relevant based on decisions it has made about me - and you - as determined by our online profiles.

Marvellous isn't it. Clever almost beyond words. Deeply impressed that they can mine the data so efficiently. But one major thing has slipped the minds of the great and good - I don't want them editing my information or the news that comes to me, be it social news, mainstream news or an update from my Great Aunt Edy (if I had such a relative).  We had enough 'editing' of information during the reign of mass media. Information was power and selective distribution fed the hierarchical business models that have been collapsing around our ears the last year or two.

I am more than happy for them to find the information - but deliver it whole, unaltered, unchanged. Let me decide. The kind of selective editing currently being proffered is not about being a helpful 'free' service provider. It is about behavioural control, social selection for influence and steering users towards content that will power advertising revenue and stimulate a little mouse action. Methinks it is time to make sure that today's ghosts in the machine don't surreptitiously remove  the 'social' from social media and replace it with 'remote control'.

That marvellous Orwellian phrase 'Big Brother is Watching You' is now surpassed. Great Google and Fearsome Facebook will simply tell you what they think you should know.

A Darkening of the Cloud?

The concept of cloud computing has, as we know, gained considerable ground, tipped over by Microsoft's Azure, but established as a potential reality by the Googles and Amazons of this world some time past. The news that Googledocs 'leak' earlier this month, followed by this weekend's report that a 'vast spy system' was looting computers faster than you could say hacker, starts to sow the seeds of doubt among those whose nerves start to twitch at the thought of committing their information into cyberspace. Personally, I believe the bigger concern is the vast amount of server space that will be needed as we progressively mobilise our data. Sooner or later, I think the big switch off will be caused by a big server bang, rather than a big server hack. And who says the cyber pirates will want the data when eventually they could hold a floating server island hostage instead? In years to come, such islands be more valuable than the oil tankers currently negotiating their way through cut-throat waters. I'm guessing someone, somewhere is working on worrying about this?

Conning the consumer - is today's petrol hike simply unjustified profiteering?

I am stunned to see that the petrol companies have hiked the price of petrol in New Zealand yet again today - making a 10c rise in less than 48 hours. Yesterday's reason was apparently an increase in the cost of refined petrol. At the time of writing nobody has offered a reason for today's lift.  Given that the price of oil is still lower than it has been for some time and is approximately US$10 less than it was a month ago, I can't help thinking that the petrol companies are taking us for a ride (no pun intended).

When the barrel price lifts, the pump price rise is instant.  When the barrel price falls, the pump price fall either doesn't happen or follows quite some time after.  Now the barrel price falls still, but the prices go higher. As for explanations of this behaviour, they are few, far between and sketchy at best. Hardly the transparent and trustworthy environment that large and small businesses are encouraged to adopt if they wish to survive in these trouble times. Most of us are simply left with the feeling that it is all a remarkably successful con trick. Someone, somewhere is making a sharp buck, that's for sure. Either they are oblivious to the reported conditions that we all face and are happy to profiteer at our expense or there is something very wrong with the management of these companies if they are so cavalier with their customers. I'd love to know which it is.