Archive for October, 2009

The postal strikes continue here in the UK and with Xmas looming, it’s decision time for those of us who send Xmas cards. While I conduct most of my business and personal communications digitally these days - by email, instant message, Facebook messaging and Twitter - every Xmas so far, I’ve made the effort to sit down and write Xmas cards, enclosing a printed newsletter with some cheery reports and photos of what we’ve been up to in the past year.

This dead-tree method of keeping in touch with about 100 or more friends is a bit of a chore and often, we’re usually so busy that we only manage to do it all in a mad rush in the last weekend before the cut-off date for posting our cards in time for the festive season. Every year, during that pressurised weekend, I wonder, why don’t I just scribble a link to my blog where all my up to date news is already waiting anyway….? But many of my friends seem to live their lives un-digitised (though how on earth they manage that is beyond me….!) and anyway, if we’re shelling out lots of money on stamps, it makes sense to include something more than a couple of signatures to a pre-printed card.

But with the postal strike about to force us to make the choice of either sending out our Xmas cards ludicrously early this year or risk them arriving in January next year, we’re wondering about switching over completely to sending e-cards with perhaps a pdf newsletter or a link to my blog. And even as we were discussing this option at the weekend, The Times reported today that “people may snub postal service because of dispute“. Royal Mail’s chief executive Adam Crozier is quoted in the piece as saying, “The danger of the strike is that the trend that is there already gets exacerbated by this and that people speed up [the move away from] not just sending Christmas cards but paying bills by direct debit or standing order. People all over the country have changed the way they communicate.”

The thing is, in this time of digital communications, Xmas cards are still the one last remnant of that excitement we used to get when the postie arrived.

Back in the old days, it was an exciting moment, especially if you were in love or waiting for news (like whether your novel had been accepted by an agent) - you’d grab the post and sift through it, hoping to find the handwriting of your beloved or an envelope that might be from a literary agent. Now, the post just brings junk mail and bills and all the excitement has been transferred to the beep of a text message from your honey bun or a silent email slipping into your inbox from the one person who can make or break your writing career.

But at least once a year, at Xmas time, the traces of that old thrill is awakened. Amongst the junk are white or coloured envelopes, handwritten in script that you vaguely recognise. You put all those in a pile and bin the rest, then play a little game of guessing who each one is from. That looks like so-and-so’s writing; this one has a stamp from Oz, so it must from my cousin; wait, I recognise that writing - is it X or is it Y, they have such similar styles… And of course, the colourful cards are great to hang around the house or stand up on any flat surface, adding to the festive air of the season.

So I’m undecided. Shall I send Xmas cards but do so in November? Or shall I go entirely digital and send some sparkly pixels instead?

What’s your advice? What will you be doing about your Xmas cards this year?

Photo: thanks to a.drian from flickr.com (CCL)

These are the slides for my talk at London Metropolitan University, Business School on Thursday evening 15 October:

… together with the full length email interview I conducted with Martin Smit, host of The NBT Podcast:

If you’re doing something remarkable to become a “Social Media Idol”, I’d love to hear about it - I am researching a book by that same title and I’m looking for great case studies. Leave me a comment or email me via the Contact page.

I’d like to thank Milan Todorovic, Senior Lecturer/Course Leader for Music and Media Management at LMU for inviting my co-author Silvia Cambie and me to speak at the University. You can follow us on Twitter.com - Milan = @LondonMetUni), Silvia = @xculture and I am @fusionview .

As I was saying the other day, I love autumn. But this week, I only love it kinda.

It’s all very well waxing lyrical about the cool air and new beginnings. The reality of autumn is a little bit more mundane, I’m finding. Piaf might warble, “The falling leaves/ Drift by the window….” but did she ever have to go out there and sweep them off the patio?

Well, I comfort myself that it’s good for the soul. Meditative. Calming. I pretend that I’m a wise Japanese sage in a stylised Oriental water colour picture painted on a scroll, sweeping leaves, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping.

I sweep using what they call a witch’s broom here in the UK. In the East, we call it a plain old broom but over here, if you go into a shop and ask for a broom, they will give you something like an upside down T. You push the T along and gather your leaves in front of you, working in straight, regimented lines. I can’t get along with the T shaped broom - it feels weird and uncomfortable for being so strict and uptight.

Although I’ve been in the UK for 30 years or more, I can only sweep with the Oriental / witch’s broom, which is the one that looks like a giant paint brush. You sweep from side to side or gather the leaves like you would gather children together, sweeping them towards you in a protective motion. It feels to me fluid and natural - and sort of artistic, I suppose. As well as wise and Japanese sage-like.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how a thing as boring as a broom can be so, well, interesting - it’s almost as if by taking on a meditative air while I’m sweeping, I find myself actually meditating and noticing these nuances about sweeping and how the actions are making me feel… Huh, maybe I am really becoming a wise Japanese sage….!

Photos: T-shaped brooms - my photo; oriental broom thanks to kleinmatt66 from fllickr.com (CCL)

Online bookseller, Amazon, has got the bibliophiles all a-quiver with excitement with its announcement that the Kindle will be sold internationally from mid-October. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Kindle is a digital book reading device, rather like the clay tablets of ancient times in size and look but electronic and able to store over a thousand books plus mp3s as well as blogs and digital newspapers and magazines. So far, it’s only been available in the US so this next phase is very exciting for book lovers all over the world.

I use the term “book” loosely, of course. Those book lovers who love physical books will not be excited at all by the Kindle on the basis that it lacks all the tactile qualities they love about “real” books - paper, page turning etc. But those who love the content of books and love the idea of being able to carry a thousand books in their pocket, the Kindle is the next big thing.

I fall into the latter group for various reasons:

• I’m lazy and feeble and I like the idea of holding one compact tablet that I can read lying down as well as sitting up.

• I like the idea of being able to carry a range of books around with me but without the weight of the physical books to give me backache and arm ache.

• I like the idea of the text-to-speech facility so that I can load the full text of a book and have it read to me while I sit on the bus. The digital voice might be quite irritating, however - so it will all depend on how life-like it sounds

However, I’m not going to jump in with my credit card immediately as I have some reservations:

• I believe the Kindle ties you to buying all your ebooks from Amazon, in a Kindle-specific format. What happens when my Kindle dies - as inevitably it will, like all electronic devices? I guess I’ll have to shell out for another one - we’ll all start having to think of books like music: but with mp3s or CDS, I can buy my player from any supplier, not just the one company. With the Kindle, am I now stuck forever having to buy it from Amazon?

• I still need to be convinced by the screen quality and how quickly it refreshes when you turn the page - I had a look at the Sony Reader and what put me off is that the screen turns black for a second before it opens onto the next page: ugh.

• It’s a pretty steep price at US$279.

• I remain to be convinced about it’s usefulness outside the US. At the moment, a huge number of e-books from other ebook sites which are available to US buyers are not available to non-US customers due to geographical rights restrictions. Also, if you look at US Audible.com compared to UK Audible.co.uk, the number of audiobooks available in the UK is a lot less than those available in the US - and in particular, major latest releases in the US are glaringly missing from the UK list. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive on the Amazon.com site that gives me any clarity either way about geographical rights restrictions - can anyone help me with this question?

Speaking of geographical rights restrictions, the Kindle will not be available in some countries, including Malaysia - see the list of no-Kindle countries. So my litblogger, book loving friends there are still stuck with the tree-pulp versions of books - although Amazon did reply to blogger Sharon Bakar’s email query to them to say that maybe, perhaps, sometime in the future, the Kindle might become available there…

What about you? Are you going to get a Kindle? Or are you a hard and fast paperbook person?

Photo: thanks to jink (Derek) on Flickr.com (CCL)

Little Boy Blue. It’s a sweet little nursery rhyme - or so you thought.

Actor Michael Emerson makes it into just the creepiest monologue…

(You’ll need the sound enabled on your computer to enjoy this one!)

Leadership coach and good pal Nicola Stevens interviewed me this afternoon about my book International Communications Strategy and using social media for business. She used the Ipadio app on her iPhone to record our conversation and then posted it up to the web within minutes of our chat - so it was a little nerve-wracking knowing there was no opportunity for any editing before we went out “on air”!

She also snapped me in full flow with her iPhone and posted it up to her Posterous site.

Off record after the interview, we talked about how easy it is these days to publish images, video, audio and text. A click of a button on a mobile phone is all it takes! Even just a few years ago, it was still very fiddly to get the content from whatever source - a digital camera, a video tape, an audio recorder - convert it to the relevant format and find the software to FTP transfer it up to some specialist server and then to get it to your website… Now, even a self-confessed non-tecchie like Nicola can be a one-woman multimedia hub - all she needs is her iPhone!

Whenever I talk to businesses about blogging, this issue invariably comes up: “We don’t want a blog because, well, what about negative comments?”

The thing is, people are talking and commenting about your business online - as well as off-line, I might add - whether you like it or not and whether you have a blog or not. It’s difficult to track what people are saying offline because speech leaves no vapour trail. But chatter online does. The very least any business needs to do these days is to accept that blogging and social media are here to stay, whether they like the idea of these things or not - and to monitor what people are saying about their business or brand online. They may not be saying it on your business’s blog because you don’t have one - but they may be talking about you on their own blogs, in forums, on Twitter, on Facebook etc.

And now there is a new player in town that could transform the whole web into a social network of chatter and comment - Google’s Sidewiki, launched within the last few weeks. The unnerving thing about it is that it enables people with the Sidewiki app installed in their browser to comment on your website or blog or webpage right there next to it - the comments can be seen by others who also have Sidewiki installed BUT you won’t know about it unless you also have Sidewiki. As the webpage owner, you cannot control those comments in any way - not delete, not hold for moderation, nothing. You could add your own comment within Sidewiki if you install it on your own browser and as the site owner, you have the right to insert a sticky comment that always stays at the top of the comments once you’ve verified with Google that you are the site owner - but that’s about it.

So the old strategies of making your visitors register in order to leave comments or holding comments for moderation are all out the window. Anyone with Sidewiki installed in their Internet Explorer or Firefox browser can comment on your webpage anytime anywhere and those comments will be viewable by anyone else who has Sidewiki.

Here are a couple of comments I found on the Sidewiki alongside The Times Online front page:

• Anthony Anders - 28 Sep 2009
  We can now comment without limitation - Not one comment I have ever entered on any of your articles has been approved by your team of censors. Now, thanks to SideWiki, we can comment on your articles freely. As you gradually see the comments on your website move to Sidewiki rather than appear on the site directly, perhaps you will engage in some deep and thoughtful reflection about why this is happening. Perhaps you will even begin to recognise your own failings.

  Richard Hamerton-Stove - 1 Oct 2009
  Digital Healthcare, PH7
  Indeed - I’ve only been using the sidewiki for a few days and already I find that its pervasive nature suits my browsing habits much more than the somewhat awkward and clunky comment features. The moderation issue is one that we’ll have to watch closely.

Andrew Keen in The Telegraph and Charles Arthur in The Guardian take an “anti” stance and worry about Google dominating the web and collecting the data from Sidewiki to monetize users comments in some way. They predict that take-up will be slow or minimal and that Sidewiki will die its own death.

The level of entry is relatively easy for most people - click to add Sidewiki to your browser, sign up for a free Google account and away you go. So take-up could be huge. But I think that the problem will be spammers, flamers and trolls - if they take over and cannot be controlled in any way, then regular people will desert Sidewiki or not find it worth signing up. Personally, I’m finding the app interesting to play with at the moment - it’s fun checking out the “hidden” comments that only us Sidewikians can see (a little icon of a comment bubble appears on the left side of the screen to indicate that someone has left a comment on the page you’re looking at) and I’m having a go leaving my own side comments. There is integration with Twitter and Facebook, and you can also share your comment by email. My comments are all aggregated on my Google profile.

Web strategist Jeremiah Olwang has a much more interesting anaylsis of Sidewiki and its implications for businesses than the knee-jerk “hate it, hope it goes down in flames” angle of the two broadsheets I mentioned. My own view is that whether Sidewiki in its current form stays or goes, the trend is towards an open-source approach to commenting and discussions and we will be seeing more public, free-for-all (in all sense of that phrase) spaces for everyone and anyone to throw in their tuppence worth.

So, for any business reading this, whether you hope Sidewiki will live or die, you need to add it to your tracking tools for now…

Illustration: screenshot of sidewiki column alongside Guardian page

Earlier this year, while we were in Amsterdam, we visited the Anne Frank House one grey, drizzly morning. It was a short walk from our B&B and after a lovely breakfast of fruit, scrambled eggs and croisssant,s we meandered there along the picturesque canals. Amsterdam is one of the loveliest cities in Europe because of the water and quaint arched bridges, the canal boats and tall narrow houses, the good food and delightful cafes. We were one of the early arrivals at the Anne Frank House so we could go straight in and the thin, tall house was not overly crowded with visitors. I suppose we were not expecting how strongly we would be effected by our visit.

We began in the basement where the goods from the Frank business were stored and level by level made our way up the steep staircase to each storey of the house, up the main office on the first floor and then up again to another level of public rooms. At Otto Frank’s request, the house is empty of furniture - that was the way the Nazi’s left it and that was the way Otto Frank wanted it to remain, as a stark, physical reminder of what happened at the house. There were photographs and video interviews at each stage along the way and across one set of the upper level windows was overlayed a photograph of a view taken of the street outside during the Nazi occupation - it was strangely creepy to stand there and see the view from the past, especially as the occupants at that time had also witnessed other families being taken away by the Nazis from that window.

The hidden rooms are accessed by a secret door behind a bookcase. We climbed up a set of steep stairs and were in the upstairs attic rooms where the Frank family hid. Everyone fell silent as we moved softly and uneasily around the rooms - it felt as if we treaded on graves. The room that Anne shared with her sister was the most upsetting - the photographs that she had cut out from film magazines were still stuck on the walls by where her bed would have been, preserved behind glass frames. I used to put posters of my favourite movie stars and singers cut out from magazines on the wall by my bed when I was a kid - how many of you have also done that? And, of course, like Anne Frank, I had always wanted to be a writer, even as a child.

After the visit, we went down to the cafe in the new annexe next to the original house. It’s a beautiful space, with plate glass windows on two sides so you can seem to float above the canal and next to to the Westerkerk. We had coffee, looking down at the cyclists and swans on the canal but it felt strangely disturbing. We loved sitting there sipping coffee and we were loving our holiday in Amsterdam. And yet, we felt uneasily guilty at that pleasure when we thought of the terrible events in that house and what happened to its occupants.

The thing is, if you think about these things too much, you realise you are surrounded by the history of terrible inhumanity wherever you are. It wasn’t just the Frank family that experienced the tragedy of the Holocaust - thousands of other families did so too in Amsterdam and millions across Europe. And of course, it’s not just in that period or in Europe that such horrors occurred - they are still going on in places all around the world now.

I suppose I take comfort in the stories of humanity and courage that come out of such times of which Anne Frank’s story is just one. The Anne Frank House, for me, reminds us that we can find joy, pleasure and hope even in the most horrible times. And that we should appreciate such moments whenever and wherever we can have them.

Enjoy this little video that the Anne Frank House put up on Youtube the other day - but do try to go to the house itself if you manage to get to Amsterdam.

You can find out more backgrond information about this film via the New York Times article, A Brief Glimpse of Anne Frank on Film

Photo: from Anne Frank House website

I love autumn.

After the heat of the summer, the cooling air is so refreshing. But it’s not yet bitterly cold because the energy of the sun absorbed by the earth over the last few months still maintains an underlying warmth so we can wander around in T-shirts but without that feeling of oppressive heat that characterises July and August. We’ve had a couple of fantastic weeks here in London when we’ve been able to bask in the gentle sunlight in the garden without burning to a crisp or gasping for air. But it’s distinctly colder now and you can feel the radiating warmth from the earth slowing dying down.

It’s not just this sense of being air-conditioned while the sun shines that I love. September here in the northern hemisphere is the time for new beginnings - even as the year is waning. It’s the time that the new school year starts and my first experience of September in the UK was coming to London in 1975 to start my first term at a British boarding school. It was all so new and different from Malaysia. I was excited, scared, nervous, curious and full of wonder all at the same time - at this new country, the pale people, the different way of doing things and at the new adventure lying ahead of me. This September mingling of warmth and coolness always reminds me of that time.

And I guess each year, it’s not just the school kids and students who start new adventures in September. This is the time when everyone else also comes back from their summer holidays, refreshed and reinvigorated. The streets of London noticeably fill up again after the summer lull and the traffic is worse - that part of September I really dislike! Projects that have been postponed over the August holiday period get picked up again. There’s a sudden spurt of activity as people catch up with each other.

I often feel energised in the autumn. I’ve started running again - I had been finding it awfully painful trying to keep that up over the summer because of the heat and now, the cool air makes plodding round the park so much more bearable. I’m starting a new book project - which, fingers crossed, if all goes well, will come to something: more on that next week after a meeting that I’m having with my editor at Kogan Page… There’s a round of talks I’m scheduled to give as well as a bunch of social activities with friends. Yes, autumn is the time of new beginnings.

I’m struck by how the changing seasons really influences the way we mark time here in the temperate zone. The financial year is marked out in quarters and the legal marker dates for leases and quarterly payments fall on traditional feast days that celebrated each distinct season. When planning medium to long term projects in the business world, there seems to me a natural tendency to think in three month chunks. In our daily lives, we look forward to or plan for Christmas, Easter, the school holidays in July and the time when people are back from their holidays in September. We notice the winds and rain or storms during the “in between” seasons of autumn and spring. We grumble about the rain in winter - and also the rain in summer. We look back at our lives in seasons - “I remember around Easter last year…” or “Aaah, the summer of 1976…” (famous for its long heatwave).

I’ve never lived in Malaysia as an adult although I grew up there - it’s on the equator and has a warm tropical climate year round. I’ve also never lived in a place like California where there seems to be perpetual sunshine and an even temperature. I wonder how I would mark time if I were to migrate there? How would I remember my past if it all looks and feels like one season? Would I miss the variety of having a different ambient world every three months - and the opportunity to have a change of wardrobe every few months? Or would I just embrace the year round sameness and be glad that I were no longer in rainy London?

Photo: thanks to hichako from flickr.com (CCL)