For a couple of years now I have come to expect my home network will deliver 100 mbs between my broadband modem, computers in my house and at the end of the garden. Beyond the modem, that is, the (virtual monopoly) BT service, speeds are typically 5 mbs. But this week have died.
There are many vendors for my kind of domestic system. I use my electricity circuits and Devolo's dLan.
This means that the feeble BT wifi system that comes with their modem is not a problem and I can access both cable and wifi irrespective of the thickness of the walls or distance from the hub.
However, with kids on holiday, I have noticed that the network, the other side of the BT hub is struggling.
I typically get 5 mbs from BT but the last week has seen a drop as low as 750 kbs mid morning, late afternoon and when it rains. I guess, this is down to kids at home watching online TV or just surfin'.
So, its time to break the monopoly. The BT cables.
This is where the system I have at my home comes into its own. Use power cables. The country is wired up to electricity and electricity cables can and are being used for data transmission but not for the domestic user.
Broadband Powerline (BPL) is not some fancy dream or over the horizon technology. It is a reality and is simple to implement. It does not require fibre to be installed and it could be implemented as a national minimum 100mbs system very quickly.
A combination of BPL and Wimax could wire up the nation quickly and no doubt would relieve BT of the onerous task of providing consumers with what they want: fast reliable broad broadband at an acceptable cost.
So cheer up BT, salvation is at hand!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
IMRG Capgemini - online retailing to top 50% by 2011
Online shopping is poised to take 20p out of every UK consumer pound by the end of the year, a landmark milestone that analysts believe will make the channel a critical business for many high-street retailers.
An IMRG Capgemini E-Retail report notes that online retail sales amounted to £26.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 38 per cent from the same period in the previous year and projected online retail sales would be as high as 50% by 2011.
In B2B because of the growth of online trading, IT workers, now have to be creative, world-aware and business-savvy to succeed. They are now a central part of the wider workforce and drive future development in sectors as diverse as retail, transport, finance and hospitality, reports Retail Bulletin.
Booming e-commerce means sectors not traditionally linked with IT are creating brand new technology-related job roles throughout their businesses and working much more closely with IT workers to help them succeed.
Of course, this also should include the PR sector. But figures are harder to find here.
An IMRG Capgemini E-Retail report notes that online retail sales amounted to £26.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 38 per cent from the same period in the previous year and projected online retail sales would be as high as 50% by 2011.
In B2B because of the growth of online trading, IT workers, now have to be creative, world-aware and business-savvy to succeed. They are now a central part of the wider workforce and drive future development in sectors as diverse as retail, transport, finance and hospitality, reports Retail Bulletin.
Booming e-commerce means sectors not traditionally linked with IT are creating brand new technology-related job roles throughout their businesses and working much more closely with IT workers to help them succeed.
Of course, this also should include the PR sector. But figures are harder to find here.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Next results
The results from retailer Next today suggest that there is a lot more work to be done by the Group to boost its online sales.
The FT reports that Next’s online and catalogue business sales were up 5.6 per cent last quarter with high street sales down 2.4% over the same period.
No one will pretend that online sales can beat the downturn. There will be casualties and for a lot of organisations their online sales still remain only a small fraction of total sales.
So there are things to be done.
The first is to optimise online sales now. This will help with the immediate issues that will plague retailing for a couple of years.
Next is to plan for next year when the online experience and commitment to the brand from the online community has to be of a different order.
And then, as retailing begins to recover, it will have changed for all time because the experience of online shopping will be well established.
The immersive internet will be at hand.
The FT reports that Next’s online and catalogue business sales were up 5.6 per cent last quarter with high street sales down 2.4% over the same period.
No one will pretend that online sales can beat the downturn. There will be casualties and for a lot of organisations their online sales still remain only a small fraction of total sales.
So there are things to be done.
The first is to optimise online sales now. This will help with the immediate issues that will plague retailing for a couple of years.
Next is to plan for next year when the online experience and commitment to the brand from the online community has to be of a different order.
And then, as retailing begins to recover, it will have changed for all time because the experience of online shopping will be well established.
The immersive internet will be at hand.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Beating the downturn
"If we – as marketers – follow where our customers go, we will need sooner or later to make the mental shift to consumer generated media."
This is a conclusion made by Eric-Kintz over at his HP blog. Oh... this is just bait for a good ol' fashioned rant.
It is a real problem in PR.
Personal experience and as many reports on the impact of the internet on life, commerce and everything keeps passing the PR community by.
It is no good sticking with the press-releases are our bread and butter mindset. Its just not very effective any more. The Internet has roughly double the influence of the second strongest medium — television — and roughly eight times the influence of traditional print media.
Sure, there is a pile of press clips and exaggerated and meaningless AVE's and so called ROI to demonstrate that PR people can get coverage.
So what. They don't sell product and have a relatively low and declining effect opinion and brand success.
But clients are mesmerised by the glare of online and consultants seek a silver bullet.
I guess there is a simple answer as online spending bucks the recession: focus on developing online capability.
I know this means that the average practitioner will have to listen to FIR, join Linkedin, write a blog and Twitter like mad and, at the same time, learn to use and pay attention to experts using RSS.
But the preferred PR industry option is to advise clients (in house or as a consultant), to do more of the same and go down with them.
I am more convinced than ever, that online PR has a future but frustrated that its taking practitioners so long to wake up. If that was not bad enough, I am also alarmed at how bad...... I mean irresponsible .... PR education is when it comes to online anything.
Last week, I had a conversation with two PR tutors who told me that they had difficulty getting PR first degree students to engage with the internet and internet marketing and PR.
In the last month, I have been talking to PR graduates (at least that's what they hope for) from a number of different UK schools and they just did not have a clue about online communication. Sure, they did have a Facebook presence and many had course groups on it.
Some 'Had to blog'. Wow!
Not one used Twitter, none had made a podcast, they could not find an academic paper using a search engine, only one had heard of 'pay per click' the list goes on......
The present economic slowdown means that these young people NEED online capability to get a job this year and survive the next five years in their chosen profession. Failure to provide it in a fun and engaging way is irresponsible beyond belief. Equipping young people with skills in flint knapping is fine for a minority of archaeologists but not the rest of society!
Is it true that when the going gets tough, academia retreats into its ivory tower?
So we don't have expertise among practitioners, who truly can't square the life of tens millions, their own reality and the need to be professional in communication skills and PR students who have been turned off.
If you are a student with online PR on your CV... send it to me. If you are a practitioner who just wants to find out where you career is going, you are too late!
Friday, July 25, 2008
Online Retail - Its a disaster in the making
Today, a crisis broke out in retailing.
The BBC reported "Wedding present firm Wrapit says it is experiencing financial difficulties and is in talks with banks and advisers to avoid going into administration."
This is really bad news for retailers. Online retail has been the one bright light for retailers according to the latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
It shows that UK shoppers spent over £26.5 billion online in the first six months of 2008 despite the credit crunch – up 38% on the £19.2 billion recorded for the first half of 2007. Capgemini and IMRG report that for the first half of 2008, 17p in every pound was spent online. This is roughly equivalent to half of all supermarket sales and larger than all retail sales for clothing and footwear.
What the online retailers really don't want is anything to shake confidence in online retailing and especially this demographic sector at this time.
This is a PR issue for all retailers and I am happy to hold a meeting next week at the CIPR in London with practitioners to discuss the issue but in the meantime, this is a matter for fast work across the retail sector at a corporate level.
The BBC reported "Wedding present firm Wrapit says it is experiencing financial difficulties and is in talks with banks and advisers to avoid going into administration."
This is really bad news for retailers. Online retail has been the one bright light for retailers according to the latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.
It shows that UK shoppers spent over £26.5 billion online in the first six months of 2008 despite the credit crunch – up 38% on the £19.2 billion recorded for the first half of 2007. Capgemini and IMRG report that for the first half of 2008, 17p in every pound was spent online. This is roughly equivalent to half of all supermarket sales and larger than all retail sales for clothing and footwear.
What the online retailers really don't want is anything to shake confidence in online retailing and especially this demographic sector at this time.
This is a PR issue for all retailers and I am happy to hold a meeting next week at the CIPR in London with practitioners to discuss the issue but in the meantime, this is a matter for fast work across the retail sector at a corporate level.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Tiptoe Towards PR Meassurement
This weekend I anticipate being able to analyse all the pages of designated web sites using semantic analysis. The objective is to be able to identify values systems evident in the text in the form of semantic chunks.
Using this approach one can identify those elements of text (such as sentences) that are, by virtue of containing words (concept words) identified as having enhanced value by virtue of their strength of connectedness among the words in the corpus, of greater significance than others.
There are a number of approaches one can take. For example one can identify the strength of concept words by page or from the combined texts of all the pages.
My requirement is to be able to identify those concepts that are most connected throughout the web site to yield chunks of text ranked from most significant to least significant (and to identify the URL of the pages from which they are derived).
This is one of my approaches to help provide empirical proofs to support the Relationship Value Model .
The model posits that relationships are based on values shared between actors and semantic chunks of text have characteristics akin to values. For all intent and purposes, semantic chunks in web sites are expressions of values. They are not the complete set of because other elements such as design, site uptime, photographs, video and other images are also expressions of organisational (and personal) values.
This new development will take the hard work out of identifying the value systems inherent in a web site and is the first stepping stone towards being able to identify common values between organisations and actors.
I guess that a lot of people will be interested in the values their web site presents to the public (and those of competitors ) but this is only the first step in this journey.
Semantic concepts are valuable in other directions too.
Search engines use semantic analysis of web pages as part of their algorithms to match up search terms to web sites and an example of how this works is provided by Yahoo. Its 'Search Assist' service provides lists of semantic concept words to help people using its search engine.
Thus there is a commercial value in my research at an early stage. It can show people trying to optimise web site content how effectively their content has contributed to accessibility of their site to the public through both common values and search.
The next research aim using semantically derived values is the be able to compare the commonality of values as between different web sites. Thus one can combine the web page corpus of two sites to identify all the concepts for both and the extent to which there are common concepts, unique concepts and the relative significance (lets call it rank for the time being) of different concepts and their associated semantic chunks of text.
So far so good. But can this approach go further? Let us imagine comparing the values of an organisation as expressed through its web site (the place where more important visit most often) and the values expressed in, say, the media or blog posts or in social networks.
In theory, and we will be able to test this in a few weeks, we will be able to identify those values that these media have in common with an organisation and the values that are expressed that are unique to either the media in question or the organisation. This will offer a very powerful view of whether the message is 'getting through'.
The extent to which there is convergence and divergence is, surely, a test of how close the relationship is between the organisation and its stakeholders.
Is this a measure of the effectiveness of public relations as a whole?
It certainly has potential.
Using this approach one can identify those elements of text (such as sentences) that are, by virtue of containing words (concept words) identified as having enhanced value by virtue of their strength of connectedness among the words in the corpus, of greater significance than others.
There are a number of approaches one can take. For example one can identify the strength of concept words by page or from the combined texts of all the pages.
My requirement is to be able to identify those concepts that are most connected throughout the web site to yield chunks of text ranked from most significant to least significant (and to identify the URL of the pages from which they are derived).
This is one of my approaches to help provide empirical proofs to support the Relationship Value Model .
The model posits that relationships are based on values shared between actors and semantic chunks of text have characteristics akin to values. For all intent and purposes, semantic chunks in web sites are expressions of values. They are not the complete set of because other elements such as design, site uptime, photographs, video and other images are also expressions of organisational (and personal) values.
This new development will take the hard work out of identifying the value systems inherent in a web site and is the first stepping stone towards being able to identify common values between organisations and actors.
I guess that a lot of people will be interested in the values their web site presents to the public (and those of competitors ) but this is only the first step in this journey.
Semantic concepts are valuable in other directions too.
Search engines use semantic analysis of web pages as part of their algorithms to match up search terms to web sites and an example of how this works is provided by Yahoo. Its 'Search Assist' service provides lists of semantic concept words to help people using its search engine.
Thus there is a commercial value in my research at an early stage. It can show people trying to optimise web site content how effectively their content has contributed to accessibility of their site to the public through both common values and search.
The next research aim using semantically derived values is the be able to compare the commonality of values as between different web sites. Thus one can combine the web page corpus of two sites to identify all the concepts for both and the extent to which there are common concepts, unique concepts and the relative significance (lets call it rank for the time being) of different concepts and their associated semantic chunks of text.
So far so good. But can this approach go further? Let us imagine comparing the values of an organisation as expressed through its web site (the place where more important visit most often) and the values expressed in, say, the media or blog posts or in social networks.
In theory, and we will be able to test this in a few weeks, we will be able to identify those values that these media have in common with an organisation and the values that are expressed that are unique to either the media in question or the organisation. This will offer a very powerful view of whether the message is 'getting through'.
The extent to which there is convergence and divergence is, surely, a test of how close the relationship is between the organisation and its stakeholders.
Is this a measure of the effectiveness of public relations as a whole?
It certainly has potential.
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