Riding the ripple

I can’t think of a single word in the English language that pisses me off more than the word “but”.

There’s no other word quite like it for sucking the positivity out of a room. No other word comes close to plucking defeat from the jaws of victory.

Just when you think you’ve cracked it, out pops the ‘b’ word and everything unravels. I’d love to help you but… I think it’s a cracking idea but… It’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had but…

Think about it. What does “but” actually do?

I’ll tell you what it does – it effectively puts a line through the words that immediately precede it, rendering them a pointless waste of time. 

The dictionary says that “but” is a conjunction used to indicate contrast. That’s far too generous.  Contrast is good – it provides clarity and makes things sharper and more visible. I think we need a new definition.

but [buht; unstressed buht]
A word used to dilute the power of the words that precede it.

Freedom of the press normally applies to the freedom of the press and media to operate and report without unreasonable state interference. It’s important all right, but not for me today. My mind is weighing heavily on a different interpretation of this much used phrase.

I’m looking at the freedom of the press to ride roughshod over the principles, ethics and standards of journalism. Principles like objectivity, impartiality, fairness and accountability. Principles that every journalist should swear by, but sometimes seem to stick two fingers up at instead.

Yesterday, The Telegraph’s Business Editor Alistair Osborne posted a news story bearing the headline “Betfair a ‘shambles’ says punter who lost £16,000”. With a headline like that it was soon all over Twitter like a rash.

Before I go any further I should declare an interest here. I worked for Betfair for two and a half years up until January 2011. I left the company by choice. I am not a shareholder. Regular readers of my blog will know that I am a long standing Betfair customer and fan of the company. My experience working for Betfair served to reinforce what I have always believed. It is a great business, run my passionate and capable people, as well as a great place to work.

After reading the piece I was left with an uneasy feeling that the author has a bit of an axe to grind. Since when has a customer service issue become bona fide business news in a quality UK broadsheet?  At best it’s the kind of story that given time may possibly develop into something Anne Robinson may take up on Watchdog – but even that is unlikely as there is no question of skulduggery or deceit.

I then noticed that the author’s last two pieces on Betfair were equally critical in content and tone. I had even tweeted about one of them at the time just a few days ago, as I was disappointed to learn that Betfair had physically prevented journalists (including Alistair Osborne evidently) from entering their AGM. My feeling at the time was that adopting a bunker mentality was not sensible for a public company with nothing to hide.

Anyway, after reading the comments under Mr Osborne’s latest piece I was quite shocked at how many people were taking the opportunity to indulge in a spot of Betfair bashing. So I tried to redress the balance and point out that in my opinion the author had an axe to grind and the story was a ‘shameful’ piece of journalism.

Well the moderator was having none of it and after a short delay my comment was removed. Luckily I kept a copy. This is what I posted:

“Shameful journalism. This is not business news. This is the kind of tosh I’d expect from Anne Robinson on Watchdog, not from a business editor on the Telegraph. The author clearly has a personal agenda here. Just look at his recent pieces on Betfair. Take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror Mr Osborne. Is this how they taught you to behave in journo school?”

At the last count the article has 91 comments. Many are littered with strongly worded abuse towards the company, the industry and even the ‘victim’. Some accuse Betfair of being rigged. Others of theft. One even makes reference to the CEO’s ethnicity and jokes about his access to triad gangs to enforce gambling debts.

One wag using the name “the_judge” wrote “Jon Weedon get back in your plantpot. Betfair is a scam outfit. It took me months to get my deposits back from these crooks. I hope they go bust and your shares go down the toilet.”

My point is that my comment was not half as rude or threatening as many posts that still reside in the thread. I can only conclude that it was removed because it did not comply with the sentiment of the anti-Betfair brigade who dominate the thread and it dared to question the author’s journalistic integrity. It looks like the expedient route of censorship prevailed over freedom of speech.

It feels very much to me like double standards are at play here. How can a member of the press corp being excluded from an AGM be an outrage, when a member of the public being excluded from commenting on a poor piece of journalism is fine?

Hurrumph…

I read a piece on the Seattle Post Intelligencer today that kind of amused me.

The plot revolves around the ‘Seattle Speakeasy Seven’, a gang of wannabe gangsters accused of running an illegal gambling operation in and around Seattle, recently exposed after a 4-year investigation by the city’s vice squad and state gambling officials.

Read the piece and you cannot help but be transported back in time to the 1920′s and the heady days of Prohibition.

Honestly, it could be a scene straight out of Bugsy Malone. For Fat Sam and Knuckles read DK Pan and his trusty sidekick Bill Donnell III. From several delightfully seedy sounding establishments, including a poker room in the now defunct Bit Saloon and a storage facility in ‘Tubs’ (where patrons could previously rent hot tubs by the hour), the wannabe mobsters allegedly ran their dodgy criminal enterprise.

I know this sorry tale revolves around wholly terrestrial activities but I could not help but relate this to the pickle that our North American friends seem to have got themselves into over their somewhat half-hearted ban on online poker.

Have they learned nothing from the Prohibition? In particular the unintended side effect of increasing the grip of criminal gangs who history shows will willingly fill the void created by attempting to ban something that so many of your people do and will continue to do regardless of well intentioned but misguided state intervention.

Never has history better shown that banning stuff that so many of your citizens do anyway is at best futile and at worse dangerous. Don’t ban it – licence it, regulate it, and protect your citizens by pulling the plug on the mobsters.

Allow your citizens the freedom to choose how they spend their leisure time and money. And at the same time stake your claim on all that lost tax revenue that is already out there swilling around just waiting to be put to better use.

Let’s start off with a little poll.  Please play along.

I’m going to stick my neck on the line here and suggest the pub quiz box is likely to be the clear winner.

Needless to say, always the contrarian, poker gets my vote. If you read my last post on this you’d already know that I consider poker to be a game of skill and therefore not really gambling. 

The biggest common denominator in all but one of the above options is that your investment (or stake) relies wholly on the performance of other people.  Except of course, poker.  Does this fact alone not distinguish poker from other forms gambling?  The way I see it, for poker to qualify as gambling you’d need to be betting on the outcome of a poker tournament – not actually taking part in one.

When you play poker for money you invest in your own ability.  It is your experience, knowledge and ability that will determine how well you do.  As I pointed out in my earlier piece on this, 75% of all poker hands win without any cards being shown.  By definition this means that 75% of the time what makes you a winner is not what cards you have been dealt, but how you play them.

I went to a quiz night at my daughter’s school a few weeks ago.  I remember one question in the music round was to identify the nationality of the mighty rock band Midnight Oil.  I knew the answer because I saw them perform live in a pub in Sydney during my gap year in 1979.  No one else on the team had a clue, so I guess we were lucky right?

Does that mean a pub quiz is a game of chance or a game of skill?  It’s a game of skill of course.  The winning team will usually be the most knowledgeable.  Just watch an episode of Eggheads if you doubt my wisdom on this.  Sure, occasionally skill, experience, and knowledge will be overcome by a bit of good fortune.  But generally speaking, in a pub quiz the strongest team will prevail.

Likewise with poker, the stronger players will generally progress further in tournaments than the weaker ones.  That’s why the same faces appear so regularly on main event final tables.

So what is the fundamental difference between a pub quiz and a game of poker?  And why is one classed as gambling and the other not?

Buggered if I know…

How often you see a requirement to be educated to degree level in Internal Communications recruitment ads? More often than not I’d wager.

Even for an entry level role there seems to be a belief in some quarters that a degree is a must. There is an assumption that a graduate will have the necessary intellectual capacity to cope with the demands of a complicated industry. There is an assumption that a graduate will have a proven ability to write well and work under pressure.

Well not here it ain’t. Business acumen gives you credibility. A sparkle in your eye helps engage an audience. A strong work ethic helps you meet deadlines. Fire in your belly lights up a room full of jaded executives. A sense of humour disarms a potential foe. I could go on but I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Going to university is no guarantee of any of these prized characteristics – and I’d place all of them above the need to see a relatively meaningless piece of paper.

Paper sifting any candidate for an Internal Communications role because they do not have a degree is nothing more than a sign of lazy recruitment and it reflects badly on the hiring company.

Anyone care to disagree?

Through the medium of piss, the essence of each Social Media website listed below has been captured concisely and with varying degrees of accuracy.

The list was inspired by numerous tweets doing the rounds over the last few days, none of which ventured beyond LinkedIn.

I guess it was quite funny up to that point and then I had to go and spoil it.

Mind you, I am quite proud of the Wikileaks entry!

Have I missed any?

Twitter:	I need to pee.
Facebook:	I peed!
Foursquare:	I’m peeing here.
Quora:	Why am I peeing?
Youtube:	Watch this pee!
LinkedIn:	I pee extremely well.
MySpace:	Peeeee, maybe the face I can’t forget…
iTunes:	Download the single for just 79p.
Bebo:	Mummy I need a pee pee…
Urbanspoon:	The pea soup was to die for.
Wikipedia:	I just passed a liquid by-product of my body, which was secreted by my kidneys through a process called urination and excreted through my urethral passage.
Wikileaks: Google+	I just peed my pants… Let’s all pee in a circle!

This time last year I scribbled down a few thoughts on Asda’s Green Room, a website where Asda staff can get together to find out what’s happening around the company as well as share their own stories, pictures and videos.

What makes the Green Room so special is that whilst most companies do this kind of thing, very few do so in public. There’s no hiding behind the corporate firewall here.  Customers, shareholders, media, rivals – in fact anyone with a passing interest in Asda can visit the site and have their say.

So when I heard that the Green Room had a makeover last week I rushed back to pay a visit – and I must say it looks amazing.

The new homepage is very easy on the eye and packed with attractive hooks to draw you deeper into some great content.  Additional functionality has been added to make it easier to submit comments, upload and preview pictures, and receive progress information on both.

New design elements have enhanced navigation around the site as well as point you to other linked resources like the Green Room’s Facebook page and Twitter feed. I really really like what they have done.

I said some pretty negative things last time round about my disappointment at the lack of obvious staff interaction with the site. I’m pleased to say things have improved on that front.

There was a lovely news piece from early December where Asda President and CEO Andy Clarke thanked staff for their Herculean efforts in keeping the business going during the extreme weather conditions, in short informal video. This in turn attracted a bunch of comments from staff and customers, telling their own stories of braving the Arctic conditions.

If I were to be really picky (which obviously I am!) I’d have loved to have seen a follow-up comment from Andy Clarke in the thread acknowledging the stories, in particular the comment from an Asda customer who explains why the residents of Slack Head in Beetham are “very lucky to have one of your employees in our community”. This kind of content is priceless. But only if people are reading it.

There is still a lot of work to be done to make the Green Room the runaway success it deserves to be. Despite improvements, levels of engagement with staff are still patchy. Most of the news stories don’t seem to attract comments, including one where the company announced it had raised £4m last year for partner charity Tickled Pink. Another story about a member of staff who had just won £5.6m on the National Lottery attracted a single solitary comment.

The same lack of engagement is reflected on Facebook, where since the beginning of December, the 30-odd posts on the Green Room wall have attracted just 4 comments.

The next step for the Green Room team has to be off-line.

The on-line offering is more than fit for purpose. It is actually bloody good. What is needed now is awareness, education, and encouragement.  Staff need to be encouraged and empowered to get involved. The easy bit has been done – the hard bit starts now.

The key to success in my opinion will be getting the entire management community to lead by example. They need to demonstrate through their own actions that engaging with the Green Room is not just permitted, but genuinely encouraged.

I got up extra early this morning to get into the office and get a few hours under my belt before belting up North for a funeral.

I never made it into work because some troubled soul decided to bring the West End to its knees by breaking into a shop on Regent Street and when the Old Bill turned up he threatening to blow himself up with what turned out to be a tube of Smarties.  

After several hours of tense stand-off and negotiations the man was nicked. Some eight hours later the last of the police cordons was finally lifted and normality returned to London’s West End. If such a condition exists in London’s West End…

Yep – hundreds, possibly thousands of people never made it to work today because of a lunatic wielding a tube of brightly coloured sugar coated chocolate drops.

Meanwhile I had been to the funeral of TJ.

Four years my junior, TJ was tragically taken from us last month by a sudden and fatal heart condition while travelling in the South Pacific. He was fitter and leaner than every one of his old colleagues and friends who turned up to say farewell today. By rights he should have lived for another 30 years and continue to brighten the lives of those lucky enough to know him.

I then spent 3 hours trying to get back into London because some other troubled soul decided to jump in front of a train in Slough, causing the usual network chaos that accompanies such behaviour.

One life taken far too early from a man that really valued it, versus thousands of lives inconvenienced by the actions of a man who clearly didn’t and another who clearly doesn’t. It just doesn’t seem fair.

Today was a crazy day. It was one of those days where the frailty of the human condition exposed itself in all its glory.

I’m no longer on the cusp of leaving my current mobile phone provider. I’m feeling much better than yesterday thank you very much. Two things have helped.

One is simply the cathartic effect of writing.

The other is the reaction the ‘deliberately provocative tweets’ I published as promised. It only took two tweets. The first one was too late at night to be picked up.

The second one did better.

First to react was T-Mobile.

Swiftly followed by Vodafone.

I responded to both, which prompted the following responses.

These interactions helped. They did not solve anything as I had to do that myself. But they did take away my anger and went some way to restoring my faith in humanity (or something like that). Not sure what happened to O2; they either missed my cry for help or decided not to play.

It matters not. I’m no longer on the cusp of leaving my current mobile phone provider.

And in the unlikely event that I do in the near future, it will be Vodafone that get the call.

I find myself on the cusp of leaving my current mobile phone provider.

Not because I can get a better deal elsewhere. And not because their competitors offer better handsets or have erected more masts.

Let’s face it, an iPhone is an iPhone, a Blackberry is a Blackberry and a signal is a signal. Does it really matter which company you choose to provide yours? OK, so price can be a differentiator, but fierce competition means narrow pricing spreads. Which is nice.

For me the real differentiator is customer service.

On two separate occasions recently, one over the phone and the other in the flesh, my current mobile telecoms provider has stretched my patience to the limit and caused my blood to boil. The crime on both occasions was borne out of nothing more than indifference and laziness.

I’m not usually this tolerant. A single piss-poor customer experience is usually enough to push me into the outstretched arms of a competitor; something I have done twice in recent years, once with my digital TV provider and once with my mobile phone provider. That said, I’m normally a very loyal customer. Ask First Direct; I’ve been with them for 22 years and I still love them because of their exceptional telephone operators.

On this occasion it’s going to be a question of 3 strikes and you’re out, because in fairness up until a month ago they had been pretty damned good. But given that 3 out of the 4 mobile contracts in my household are with them, I’d say they are in a state of high risk.

I thought I’d try a little experiment. I’ve read quite a bit about how enlightened companies are using Twitter as an additional customer services channel by intercepting negative sentiment and proactively engaging with unhappy customers and turning them from public detractors to advocates. I even wrote about it myself back in April.

I thought I’d try my current mobile provider out. I’m going to give them a chance to redeem themselves by identifying me as a seriously pissed of customer and go some way to restoring my faith in them by showing some interest and offering me some assistance if appropriate.

Instead of complaining openly on Twitter in the traditional manner I’m going to try something a bit different. Through a few deliberately provocative tweets I’m going to give them the chance to identify me as their customer without me actually telling them that I am.

I’m hoping one or more of my tweets will lead them back to this page, where they can read that they have my explicit permission to call me, DM me or email me to discuss the reasons why I am so upset with them.

If they manage to do this I will not publish details of the two very shoddy customer experiences they have recently forced me to endure.

In order to narrow the field, I will merely say that O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile or Orange – it could be you…