Brilliantly executed campaign. Hundreds of thousands views in a few short hours, thousands of tweets, hundreds of blog posts. Simply awesome.

p.s. I’m backing Old Old Spice Guy. Fabio is creepy.

I’m sure we’d all like to believe that what happened at NoTW was the result of a few, rogue, irresponsible journalists calling out for a no-stones-unturned investigation, no matter the cost. Practical experience tells me that most people are simply ignorant of the techniques and tools of their trade, and therefore aren’t so much lacking a moral compass as they are unable to read one.

Public Business Media is hoping to fund an open approach to investigative journalism that will see the transparent publication of data and the education and upskilling of journalists to do this job. It’s a job that needs to be done to ensure we have a responsible, educated voice in the media looking into the thousands of business issues that touch our lives on a daily basis.

The charity’s hosting a fundraiser and public launch tomorrow night. Go along, you know you want to.

Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to work on any AR projects yet, although some of my colleagues have.

Caught a few minutes of Panorama the other night, investigating medical equipment labelled ‘made in the UK’ but actually manufactured by poverty-stricken (but surprisingly well-trained) metalworkers on the streets of Pakistan.

What I want to know is: how come these guys always find a scandal? I mean, every now and then they find one that isn’t there and overdramatize it – the wifi story from a few years back springs to mind, ditto the Primark story from 2008 – but I’d love to hear some of the stories they have to reject:

"How about this one… all Dyson hand dryers are actually a portal to another universe?"
"What’s the source?"
"A professor of some science I can’t pronounce,"
"Sounds good to me, look into it."

"Hello Mr Dyson? Is it true that your hand dryers spiral underage disabled workers into a parallel universe made entirely of cheese?"
"I WISH. But no."
"Oh ok. We’ll go then."

I’d love to know how that editorial process works.

A cynical part of me thinks they must reject some stories that are ‘important’, but not sympathetic or controversial enough to work on the programme. But that’s a separate issue….

How do you say Facebook and Twitter in French? You don’t – at least, not if you are on radio or television, where French officials have banned any mention of them unless they are specifically part of the story.

Conspiracy theorists springing up all over the place as to why they’ve done it; the rationale makes a kind of sense to me, however – it’s in the spirit of fairness, so as to not discriminate against other lesser, commercial social networks. Even if its total rubbish, I love that sentiment. There’s something very colonial about it, and I’m surprised the British (given the other strictures at the BBC about supporting commercial organisations) haven’t tried it ("that anti-competition stuff, old boy, it’s simply not cricket.")

At least, force broadcasters to mention (and have a presence on) every other social network in the spirit of fairness. It’d take a week…

My boss is always pleased to educate me – a self-professed, archetypal earlius adopterus – with his technical insight and technology trendsetting. He didn’t quite beat me to Spotify (although he was very early to that service), but he has stolen the march by introducing me to Flipboard, a ‘social magazine.’ I’d read about it but a combination of iPad apathy and happiness with my methods of absorbing media meant I didn’t investigate further.

Having now tried it, I can tell you that it is an awesome app that is making me fall in love with the iPad again. Essentially, it draws on any feeds you put into it – including a number of useful preset social accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader – and delivers them to you in a magazine style format. You flip through pages in which the content on links people have shared on Facebook and Twitter have been pre-fetched – and you can then tap through to the full article – or watch the video etc.

It’s a wonderful media engagement experience – you can download loads of stories over wifi and then mess around reading offline (for the most part, although the pre-fetch isn’t perfect), commenting on Facebook et al works when you’re online (would like a pre-caching service for when offline so you could maybe queue comments for publication when you came back into wifi range). You can also add any individual blog or feed you like as a separate magazine – all your subscriptions and services appear as a grid of tiles, Windows Phone 7 style.

Really beautifully executed and a very good use of the touch interface of the iPad. Recommended for all you iPad lovers out there – and division6.co.uk looks awesome on it!

My only issue is that I’m not sure it’s very good at ‘getting through’ a magazine or set of updates on Google Reader. Unlike the handy ‘unread post’ notifications you get with the web app, there’s a seemingly endless, jumbled set of updates displayed through the interface. My Google Reader subscriptions include about 40 feeds I read regularly – and about 200 I just dip into – so might well find it frustrating to deal with that much (less relevant) content. Whether I should just flip through it (it is effortless after all) or finally get around to dealing with my mess of subscriptions, who can say…?

Definitely a big thanks to Giles for the pointer!

1. Always listen to to t’focus group. That’s why you do them. I think they get too much of an edge, here, to be honest – the focus groups are found for them and they’re told to go. Those idiots didn’t learn it last time (well, the Every Dog example), and didn’t do it this time. Raise the tone does not equal tits and a briefcase. Don’t patronise? Doesn’t translate to a magazine called ‘Hip Replacement’ with features on how to make a phone call. The banter between Lord Sugar and Nick on Hip Replacement’s content was brilliant.
2. Puns do not translate well. Glenn really loved puns and plays on words too much – hence leaping all over ‘Hip Replacement’ as he did over his own ‘Catsize’ two weeks before. Idiot. — Don’t get me wrong, though, I love a good pun. Just not in any context where I plan to sell anything, except maybe to a tabloid newspaper.
3. The balance between decision by committee and ridiculous high-handed authoritarian idiocy is apparently a fine one. Both teams struggled with inadequate leadership this week for opposite reasons; Natasha’s desire to take the credit when she thought they were on the up and her determination to do a lads mag in a crowded market that’s been evolving for the last 15 years – and on the opposing front, Jim looking to dissipate the responsibility for all major decisions for everyone.
4. Listen to the quiet voice. I’m really not a fan of Susan – I think she’s probably one of the lesser bulbs on the programme – but she was flatly ignored by her team. Lots of loud, vocal people agreeing loudly with each other makes it hard for the quiet insight to creep through – I think its as much the responsibility of the leader as it is of the team member to acknowledge the perspectives of the team.
5. Rate cards are a polite fiction. No-one pays the rate – I’ve seen discounts in excess of 90% off rate card rates on established magazines, never mind a start-up, and I’m in PR! The ‘offers’ they got from the media buyers were polite lies – no responsible media buyer would have put money into either of those publications without some very convincing demonstrations that they could hit some kind of sensible demographic. A free magazine called ‘Hip Replacement’ given out to 60+ people in the street? No wonder a couple of them actually laughed them out of the pitch.

A bonus lesson: ‘agreeance’ is not a word. Jim is an idiot, and should have been out. Don’t get me wrong – they’re all idiots – but Jim’s silver-tongued, mind-numbingly inept handling of the chief role won him the big wooden finger point this week.

Amanda asked why they hugged after the firing – but after this week’s boardroom backstabbery and the fact two of them have to go back and work on the next task together, it seemed like a necessary step. Alan Sugar’s boardroom is not an easy place to be, that last time.

Sidebar: in an act of genuine entrepreneurship, some clever people are auctioning off the magazines they produced in the show. Copies of both ‘Covered’ and ‘HIP replacement’ are currently running at £56 and counting on eBay…

WordPress, however, and its fellow open-source CMS kin, were just twinkles in the eyes of their creators – and so we persuaded our friend (and Science Editor), codename ‘Horney’, to build a system for us from scratch. Which he did an admiral job of – and gave us a platform that provided us with some more instant feedback – primitive, article-specific reader stats. It was great to get this in an environment where we hardly ever received letters to the editor, and where comments, Tweets and ‘sharethis’ links were just a little too far into the future, never mind Google Analytics.

However, Horney had a more effective way of eliciting a response from his readers. In a classic example of ‘knowing your reader’ (and before the Internet ruined it for everybody), Horney would publish a ‘mindbender’ puzzle as a regular recurring feature. Sometimes physics or mathematics related, but more often just an absolute brain muddle, the puzzle elicited responses with the tantalising promise a piece of cheap confectionary of Horney’s choosing for the quickest or most elegant solution delivered by email. Dozens of readers would have responses to us within a few hours of the papers hitting the colleges on a Thursday morning.

Idle students? Or did Horney just gauge the target audience well?

The column doesn’t seem to have endured, telling us nothing (in fact, a science page seems to be missing from the pages of the latest edition of TCS). Maybe we just struck it lucky? Or maybe the current editors of TCS can’t stretch to the inflation busting cost of chocolate bars today, or are once against facing off against the arts/sciences journalism schism…

Sidebar: the application for the roles of editors-in-chiefs at TCS is a 400 word statement including relevant experience. I still have the 52 page plan that Damian and I developed, complete with design mock-ups, to win the top jobs. Young people these days…

I was watching Chuck the other day and our favourite spies dropped in a reference to Microsoft’s cloud storage service – Skydrive. The reference jarred for any number of reasons: first, Skydrive?  Everyone knows Chuck would use Dropbox if given the choice . Second, they’re the CIA – they use a public cloud service? Didn’t they get the memo on the Federal Community Cloud?

Geekiness aside, I think the principle objection I had was one of subtlety; this is one of many clumsy modern references to sponsor products. Chuck also takes a chunk of cash from Subway, resulting in (amongst other people) the massively chubby store manager/assistant store manager, "Big Mike" chowing down on the latest sandwich chain from the fast (or is it fresh?) food chain (odd choice there, guys, after your years of working with Jared). I actually quite like Chuck’s veiled references to Alienware – at least I think that all the computers that Orion left for the family Bartowski were Alienware machines – because they allude to the awesomeness without writing it ‘on the nose’ – as Robert McKee would have otherwise complained (see commandment 9).

I’m probably more forgiving – and more aware – of product placement than most, but the ‘on the nose’ model of product placement always winds me up slightly. Nokia’s presence in the Star Trek reboot  for example – whilst the product wasn’t mentioned, the 23rd Century Nokia ringtone was just annoying. Ditto for the Bond films – every product is shot as lasciviously as they film Daniel Craig’s pectoral muscles.

I think product placement has so much more power when its incidental – and, in the case of the BBC, accidental (the beeb is not allowed to do sponsored product placement, despite the relaxing of that law for commercial TV in the UK). Although, that obviously cuts both ways – when I noticed Evil Janine from Eastenders using an Android phone last night it made me question the goodness of Google (not really, but, y’know)…

That said; if I used the products in question (if had had been Evernote or Dropbox) would I have been more forgiving? That glint of recognition that makes me feel validated in my choice of product or service? Perhaps. But then this isn’t an exercise in customer acquisition, its one of retention…

So my top tips on product placement, from a consumer’s perspective:

1. Subtlety wins out over blatant plugs
2. Brand relevance! How exactly do you want to position the product/service
3. Minimise the cringe factor
4. Context is vital. If it jars with the characters/plot of the show, fans will resent you instead of admire you
5. It’s probably more about validating your existing customers and maybe – subliminally (although that’s definitely not allowed) influencing prospective customers – than about wholesale customer acquisition.

What do other people think? Would you be more likely to desire/buy a product if your favourite character on your favourite show was using it? Or would it only work if you already had it?

First – the ‘obedient wife’ club’, founded by 800 married women in Malaysia in a bid to address the problems of domestic violence and divorce “at their cause”. The foundation of a social group – even one with 800 women in – wouldn’t ordinarily make the headlines in the International media. But the ludicrousness of this particular story must have tickled a few editors’ funny bones, or made some misogynists smile. I find it absurd that Malaysian society could have evoked the creation of such a club, or brainwashed women into thinking that their husband’s infidelity, violence et al, was their own fault. I may have missed something in reading this story – if anyone can explain a positive spin on this to me in terms other than this that would be appreciated.

Second – another leak – this time of a diplomatic cable to Washington:

A former senior government official has said that the country’s bloated and overwhelmingly Malay civil service was “completely loyal to Umno” and was the main stumbling block towards economic reforms according to a leaked United States diplomatic cable The confidential report sent to Washington from the US embassy here was leaked by whistleblower website WikiLeaks and published in the Malaysia Today news portal

This one hasn’t yet been picked up internationally, so perhaps the country is still on the laughing stock side of things…

If I felt any affiliation with the country beyond my family being there, I’d be ashamed. Instead, I just feel moderately contemptuous of the rulers and pessimistic about any positive outcome. After all, it may be droll and amusing today – but its a short leap from droll to impinging freedoms (both in practice in Malaysia and in terms of its international reputation).

Don’t get me wrong, the country’s not at tangibly uncomfortable levels of government corruption, control or oppression… but if it was sliding in a direction, that would be it… Remember the Sarawak story…?

Amanda brought me round. As with football and celebrity, and occasionally Eastenders, The Apprentice has become one of those shared frames of popular reference. Everyone has a view on it; everyone gets caught up in the exercises, and for those of us who work in marketing… there’s a thousand lessons of what not to do painted every week.

This week, I have a new phrase for an undifferentiated marketing proposition. The "Every Dog." If anyone tries to pitch me a generic sounding service again, I’m just going to say "No thanks, that’s too every dog." It might even work.

Talking to a colleague today gave me an insight as to why there’s such a strong appeal to the programme. They do seem to find curious, dysfunctional groups of people to collaborate on these projects. The net result is dramatic, exciting, and ludicrous television, in which modestly intelligent people get on so badly that they fail, in many cases, to organise the proverbial piss up in a brewery. Which makes you feel good about your own merits, modest as they may be.

Lord Sugar; thank you for this feel-good television. It’s the best thing I’ve got from you since my Amstrad PC 2286.

Narrative Science, a startup in Evanston, Illinois, wants to do just that, with data-intensive stories. Its technology uses natural language algorithms to craft rudimentary news articles about data-intensive subjects, such as sports and financial results.

I find this fascinating as a concept. Of course there are limitations, but given the concerns the industry has about the decline of ‘proper’ journalism – investigative reporting, in-depth analysis – basically anything beyond ‘churnalism’ – and the challenges new media presents in creative storytelling – demanding video, data visualisation and beyond – I hope this concept develops.

In practice, the market for human-written news (even churned) stories will remain, keeping that industry afloat (I think, if they can monetize well enough) – but imagine if a virtual writing assistant helps draw correlations and interesting facts out of a decade worth of financial reports to add some colour to the latest story, or automatically trawls through to get you the aggregate views the Internet has on a product you’ve been sent to test… Would make that industry more efficient and their output more meaningful.

Maybe Public Business should talk to these guys… Although the method of supporting the media is different (investment in training and specific types of journalism vs. creating an algorithmic automator for reporting the news) some of the goals will overlap – in terms of interpreting and presenting data back in a useful way that informs more insightful reporting.

Well, maybe not entirely new, but ‘Baby Social Media Management’ seemed a concept worth exploring, so we checked if http://emi.ly was available (it wasn’t, already registered to some doting Bavarian dad, apparently) and considered other stratagems for maximising my 7-month-old daughter’s social graph. Knowem seems particularly well named for my daughter’s use…

As part of this discussion, Chris pointed me at this case study – which, needless to say, is dynamic, interactive, synergistic, integrated social media success.

First – the Twitpic story (which seems to have been taken off the Metro website but is still visible in the search). In brief: Twitpic changed its terms of service so that it owned the rights to the pictures its users uploaded. Twitpic is a photo service built to work with Twitter. During the course of the day, as Chris charted so well, Twitpic redacted its changes and reverted to the original ToS. All sorts of bits have since emerged, including a letter Tom received from the Twitpic founders stating that the rights to all photos would be available through a specific photo agency (now gone from Twitpic?). So I totally agree there’s an interesting story here. BUT… front page? Twitter is a service used by a growing minority, but still a minority (I don’t believe the stories that say it has hit the mainstream in any meaningful way)… and Twitpic is used by a subset of those users. Doesn’t strike me as front page news by any stretch of the imagination. Still, let’s call it a slow news day.

Second: The dramatic front page: “Android phones ‘all leak secrets’” – later retconned/subedited on the web to “Android phones almost all vulnerable to hackers“  – I mean whoah. That’s one heck of a front page. PC Pro blogs explaining why people shouldn’t be concerned (I actually think PC Pro’s view of a world where people know they should not connect to an unsecured wifi network is more than a little naive) – but seriously, this is a) a story that affects a relatively small number of people (despite Android’s increasing user base) and b) in no way front page news. Seriously! If, every time Microsoft patched a flaw on Windows (and there have been more serious and more easily exploited vulnerabilities discovered on Windows XP, I’m sure of it) –> well then, we’d have a front page a month that would at least fit the criterion of relevance to the readership, if not one of the slightest bit of interest.

That said: the superinjunctions story (yeah, that one) did bring Twitter to the focus for the whole country, so those front pages – totally make sense. No confusion there.

On the whole, however, a little confused as to what the Metro editor was thinking here, and would love to know if its a tech agenda, a sense that it’s sexy to pick on web 2.0 companies in a Daily-Mail-sort-of-way, or if that really is how they see their readership; Smartphone wielding, picture sharing, Daily-Mail reading digital natives. Which, looking at the history of front pages on Metro that come up in Google images, might make sense: they feature evem more tech stories including £3 Amazon MP3 albums, “Planet Facebook” and an Android scare story from earlier this year.

Damn, tech is so mainstream.

Look at Waterstone’s, sold last week for a relative pittance. And the share price of the HMV Group – on a persistent downward spiral over the last 12 months – demonstrates how poorly that business has adapted to the Internet age. Contrast that with Amazon or even B&N and you’ll see that real innovation is needed to translate some of those legacy business models to the new delivery platforms we have for media. Amazon is selling more Kindle books than print books – absolutely astonishing. Who would have guessed that things would move this quickly?

B&N, worth around $1bn, as Tom pointed out on Twitter the other day, has managed maintain its valuation where Waterstones et al haven’t. The analysis points out that it has tried to keep on the edge of things with an innovative eBook portfolio in the US. Tom sums it up neatly:

If that’s not an advert for why old media businesses have to aggressively investing in digital platforms, I don’t know what is.

Waterstones’ e-commerce ventures were hopelessly bumbling – first a partnership with Amazon, then its own webstore, and then perhaps a slightly misjudged ebook strategy which I still don’t fully understand today.

I guess, though – that at least they tried. And establishing what insights are needed to drive appropriate customer-centric innovation requires an understanding of customers that goes beyond what they themselves think they need – three years ago when I first got an e-reader, virtually no-one I spoke to was willing to give up the feel of a rustling paperback. We would never have guessed that so many people would be reading everything on Kindle [apps] this soon – but here we are.

The worse thing anyone can do about the Internet is bury your head in the stand. It’s a rolling force for change, whether we like it or not, and is having a dramatic impact on virtually every business I come across – nowhere more dramatically than in the media sector.

My brother talked about the need for smart, digital people in the film and TV industry over on Screen Daily and the apparent dearth of them in his industry. As someone passionate about the media sector here’s hoping that the digital people find their way out of the woodwork and help with the industry in the evolution of its more traditional business models… so there’s not only aggressive investment, but sensible investment in the development of new business models…