This is particularly good stuff, especially in these times when companies want to hang on to their employees and foster a better internal culture. Insight Creativeâs Staff Engagement Masterclass video tutorial has some excellent advice, in line with a lot of what Iâve preached over the years. Their model is excellent and really breaks down the process with some practical advice on how to communicate with your team. Check out the introduction video from CEO Steven Giannoulis below (one of the very few Rongotai College old boys Iâm in touch with these days!) and click through on the link for the full tutorial (sign-up required).
Archive for the ‘branding’ category
Engaging your team: an excellent video tutorial from Insight Creative
02.11.2022Tags: 2022, Aotearoa, branding, communications, corporate culture, engagement, Insight Creative, internal branding, New Zealand, staff engagement
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More of Bing’s follies (they just keep coming)
16.08.2022I see WorldWideWebSize.com has wised up and figured out Bing was having them on about the number of results it had for their search terms.
When Bing says it has 300-odd results for the site:lucire.com yet doesnât actually go beyond a limit of around 50 (where it has been stuck for many months), I was actually being generous. I never deducted the repeated results on the pages that it did show.
Hereâs a case in point: an ego search for my own name. These are the first four pages. I realize I have the graphics a bit small, but you should be able to make out just how many pages have been repeated here. A regular search engine like Mojeek and Google show you different results on each page. Bing doesnât.
More strange happenings: youâll recall I noted that pages we havenât linked to since the 2000s were up top in a site search on Bing for lucire.com. The very top one was lp.html, a frameset (yes, itâs that old). I did what I thought would be logical in such a circumstance: I pointed one of the frames to the current 2022 page (which is still regular HTML, but with Bootstrap).
Result in Bing: itâs vanished.
Did the same to news.html, not linked to since 2012.
Vanished.
The current news page is Wordpress, but Bing still manages to index the occasional Wordpress page on our site. The fact it’s PHP shouldn’t make a difference.
These pages are just too new for Bing, which is really Microsoftâs own Wayback Machine. And Duck Duck Goâs, and Qwantâs, and a whole manner of search enginesâ.
Meanwhile at Brave: it does have an independent spider but admits to using the Bing API for the image search, as does Mojeek. But what Brave doesn’t say is that it also taps in to Bing for site: searches, rendering them largely useless, too. Brave does a far better job than Bing in its regular search though, picking up lucire.com for Lucire as well as some major index pages.
On a regular search, Brave does rather wellâit’s picked up the top pages.
Bing and Brave compared, using site:lucire.com. Brave isn’t as independent as you might think with site: and image searches. These screenshots were taken on Sunday.
Still well short of Mojeek in terms of its indexâbut then so is everyone aside from Google.
The saga continues, with still no one talking about Bing’s collapse (though I know of one journalist working away behind the scenes).
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2012, 2022, Bing, Brave, history, Microsoft, search engines, technology, USA
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Farewell, Sergei Mitrofanov
05.08.2022Farewell, my dear friend Sergei. Taken far too soon.
Sergei trying to corral us for a photograph in London in 2015.
I’m pretty upset by this so rather than write a fresh tribute (which I will have to do in time in an official capacity), I’m going to quote from what I wrote to his widow, Ekaterina, with appropriate edits: ‘I am so deeply saddened by this terrible news since I found out on Wednesday night. Sergei was a great friend, colleague and ally. We have known each other since 2006 and I have always found him warm, helpful, and kind. Outside of Medinge Group he even helped another colleague of mine with navigating Russiaâs complex tourist visas! Even today I was looking for the name of a computer program in order to read some messages and realized that Sergei was the one who put me on to it! What will we do without Sergeiâs social media posts hashtagging #Medinge to keep us all informed?
âSince I have further to travel to visit friends in Europe, the last time I saw Sergei in person was in 2015 and I truly wish that that was not the final time.
â⊠Please know Sergei was loved the world over and it was a blessing to have known him.’
He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.
Tags: 2022, friends, friendship, Medinge Group, obituary, Russia, St Petersburg
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Chatting at a pro level on Leonard Kim’s Grow Your Influence Tree
21.10.2021Shared on my social media on the day, but I had been waiting for an opportunity to note this on my blog.
It was an honour last week to guest on Leonard Kimâs Grow Your Influence Tree, his internet talk show on VoiceAmerica. Leonard knows plenty about marketing and branding, so I thought it might be fun to give his listeners a slightly different perspectiveânamely through publishing. And since I know his listenersâ usual topics, I didnât stray too far from marketing.
We discuss the decrease in CPM rates online; the importance of long-form features to magazines (and magazine websites) and how that evolution came about; how search engines have become worse at search (while promoting novelty; on this note Iâve seen Qwant do very well on accuracy); how great articles can establish trust in a brand and falling in love with the content you consume (paraphrasing Leonardâs words here); Lucireâs approach to global coverage and how that differs to other titlesâ; the need to have global coverage and how that potentially unites people, rather than divide them; how long-form articles are good for your bottom line; how stories work in terms of brand-building; how Google News favours corporate and mainstream sources; and the perks of the job.
This was a great hour, and it was just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is at the same level as me to begin with, and who has a ready-made audience that doesnât need the basics explained to them. It didnât take long for Leonard and me to get into these topics and keep the discussion at a much higher level than what I would find if it was a general-audience show. Thank you, Leonard!
Listen to my guest spot on Leonardâs show here, and check out his website and his Twitter (which is how we originally connected). And tune in every Thursday 1 p.m. Pacific time on the VoiceAmerica Influencers channel for more episodes with his other guests!
Tags: 2021, branding, California, Google, internet, interview, Jack Yan, Leonard Kim, Lucire, marketing, media, radio, Twitter, USA, VoiceAmerica
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Don’t give the keys to the company Twitter to just anyone
02.02.2020A few thoughts about Twitter from the last 24 hours, other than âPlease leave grown-up discussions to grown-upsâ: (a) itâs probably not a smart idea to get aggro (about a joke you donât understand because you arenât familiar with the culture) from your companyâs account, especially when you donât have a leg to stand on; (b) deleting your side of the conversation might be good if your boss ever checks, although on my end âreplying to [your company name]â is still there for all to see; and (c) if your job is âChief Marketing Officerâ then it may pay to know that marketing is about understanding your audiences (including their culture), not about signalling that your workplace hires incompetently and division must rule the roost.
Iâm not petty enough to name names (I’ve forgotten the person but I remember the company), but it was a reminder why Twitter has jumped the shark when some folks get so caught up in their insular worlds that opposing viewpoints must be shouted down. (And when that fails, to stalk the account and start a new thread.)
The crazy thing is, not only did this other Tweeter miss the joke that any Brit born, well, postwar would have got, I actually agreed with him politically and said so (rule number one in marketing: find common ground with your audience). Nevertheless, he decided to claim that I accused Britons of being racist (why would I accuse the entirety of my own nationâI am a dual nationalâof being racist? Itâs nowhere in the exchange) among other things. That by hashtagging #dontmentionthewar in an attempt to explain that Euroscepticism has been part of British humour for decades meant that I was âobsessed by warâ. Guess he never saw The Italian Job, either, and clearly missed when Fawlty Towers was voted the UKâs top sitcom. I also imagine him being very offended by this, but it only works because of the preconceived notions we have about ‘the Germans’:
The mostly British audience found it funny. Why? Because of a shared cultural heritage. There’s no shame in not getting it, just don’t get upset when others reference it.
Itâs the classic ploy of ignoring the core message, getting angry for the sake of it, and when one doesnât have anything to go on, to attack the messenger. I see enough of that on Facebook, and itâs a real shame that this is what a discussion looks like on Twitter for some people.
I need to get over my Schadenfreude as I watched this person stumble in a vain attempt to gain some ground, but sometimes people keep digging and digging. And I donât even like watching accident scenes on the motorway.
And I really need to learn to mute those incapable of sticking to the factsâI can handle some situations where you get caught up in your emotions (weâre all guilty of this), but you shouldnât be blinded by them.
What I do know full well now is that there is one firm out there with a marketing exec who fictionalizes what you said, and it makes you wonder if this is the way this firm behaves when there is a normal commercial dispute. Which might be the opposite to what the firm wished.
As one of my old law professors once said (Iâm going to name-drop: it was the Rt Hon Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer, KCMG, AC, QC, PC), âThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.â Itâs always been the same in marketing: the more marketers there are, the more poor marketers there are. And God help those firms that let the latter have the keys to the corporate Twitter account.
I enjoyed that public law class with Prof Palmer, and I wish I could remember other direct quotations he made. (I remember various facts, just not sentences verbatim like that oneâthen again I donât have the public law expertise of the brilliant Dr Caroline Morris, who sat behind me when we were undergrads.)
Itâs still very civil on Mastodon, and one of the Tooters that I communicate with is an ex-Tweeter whose account was suspended. I followed that account and there was never anything, to my knowledge, that violated the TOS on it. But Twitter seems to be far harder to gauge in 2019â20 on just what will get you shut down. Guess it could happen any time to anyone. Shall we expect more in their election year? Be careful when commenting on US politics: it mightnât be other Tweeters you need to worry about. And they could protect bots before they protect you.
Since I havenât Instagrammed for agesâI think I only had one round of posting in mid-Januaryâhereâs how the sun looked to the west of my office. I am told the Canberra fires have done this. Canberra is some 2,300 km away. For my US readers, this is like saying a fire in Dallas has affected the sunlight in New York City.
Iâve had a big life change, and I think thatâs why Instagramming has suddenly left my routine. I miss some of the contact, and some dear friends message me there, knowing that doing so on Facebook makes no sense. I did give the impression to one person, and I publicly apologize to her, that I stopped Instagramming because the company is owned by Facebook, but the fact is Iâve done my screen time for the day and Iâve no desire to check my phone and play with a buggy app. Looks like seven years (late 2012 to the beginning of 2020) was what it took for me to be Instagrammed out, shorter than Facebook, where it took 10 (2007 to 2017).
Tags: 2020, Alma Mater, Aotearoa, branding, Brexit, Eurosceptics, Germany, humour, Instagram, Jack Dee, law, marketing, Mastodon, nation branding, New Zealand, reputation, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, stereotype, Tawa, Twitter, UK, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington
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Baojun doesn’t scream ‘premium’ and ‘next-gen tech’ to me
10.10.2019I have to agree with Yang Jian, managing editor of Automotive News China, that Baojun’s new models âobviouslyâ failed to reverse the brandâs salesâ decline.
It is obvious given that the vehicles are priced considerably above the previous ones, and despite its next-gen tech, thereâs no real alignment with what Baojun stands for.
There might be a new logo (débuted January 2019) but GM expects that this, the new premium products, and (I would expect) other retail updates would undo nearly nine years of brand equity.
The associations of Baojun as an entry-level brand run deeply, and the new models are like, if youâll pardon the analogy and the use of another car group, taking the next Audis and sticking a Ć koda badge on them. Except even stylistically, the new Baojuns bear little resemblance to the old onesâtheyâre that radical a departure.
I wonder if it would be wiser to keep Baojun exactly where it was, and let it decline, while launching the new models under a more upscale GM brand, even one perceived as ‘foreign’ or ‘joint venture’ by Chinese consumers.
DaimlerChrysler made the mistake of killing Plymouth when it was surplus to requirements, then found itself without a budget brand when the late 2000sâ recession hit. Chrysler, once the upper-middle marque, had to fill the void.
Thereâs a reason companies like GM and Volkswagen have brands spanning the market: they feed buyers into the corporation, and thereâs something for everyone.
And while itâs possible to move brands upscale, creating four lines where the base model prices exceed the highest price you have ever charged for your other base models is just too sudden a shift.
Tags: 2010s, 2019, Baojun, branding, China, economy, GM, positioning, premium positioning, rebranding, SAIC, USA
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More Facebook lies in its ad preferences’ manager?
21.04.2019As Iâve often said, itâs wise to keep an eye on your Facebook ad preferencesâ page. Even if youâve opted out of Facebook targeting, Facebook will still keep compiling information on you. I see no other purpose for this other than to target you with advertising, contrary to what you expect.
Facebook also tells you which companies have uploaded their marketing lists to them, and this has been very interesting reading. A load of US politicians whom I have never heard of somehow have this information, and todayâs crop is no different.
Iâve written to Old Mout Cider, which I was surprised to find is part of the Dutch conglomerate Heineken NV, and await an answer, but the biggie here has to be Ăber.
Many years ago, I tried the app but could never get it to work. Neither could my partner. Then we started hearing from Susan Fowler and Pando Daily, and that helped confirm that we would never support the company.
Basically, Ăber would never let me log in, saying I had exhausted my password attempts after the grand total of one, despite sending a password reset link. My partner could log in but we could never figure anything out beyond that (it had credit card details she had never entered and said we lived next door).
Concerned about this, I went to Ăberâs website to request deletion of my personal details, but this was the screen I got.
Now, either Big Tech One is lying or Big Tech Two is lying.
To its credit, Ăber New Zealand responded very quickly on Twitter (on Good Friday, no less) and said it would look into it. Within minutes it was able to confirm that I do not have an account there (presumably it was deleted with a lack of use, or maybe I went and did it back when they wouldnât let me log in?) and my email address doesnât appear anywhere.
Therefore, we can likely again conclude that Facebook lies and we have to bring into question its advertising preferencesâ management page.
We already know Facebook has lied to advertisers about the number of people it can reach (namely that it exceeds the number of people alive in certain demographics), that there is a discrepancy between what it reports in the preferences and what a full download of personal data reveals, so I have to wonder what the deception is here.
Is it allowing these advertisers to reach us even when (as Ăber claims) they have no information on us? (Heinekenâs response will seal the deal when they get back to me after Easter.) In that case, it will be very hard for Facebook to argue that we have given them consent to do this.
Heineken, incidentally, is a major advertiser on Instagram, as I see their advertisements even after opting out of all alcohol advertising on the Facebook ad preferencesâ page (as instructed by Instagram). When we establish contact next week, I will be more than happy to tell them this. Who knows? While I doubt they will cease advertising on the platforms on my say-so, sometimes you have to plant the seed so that they are aware their ads are not being filtered out from those people who do not want to see booze promoted in their feeds.
Tags: 2019, ethics, Facebook, Heineken, law, privacy, software, Ăber, USA
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