Making information work

Before I start provoking people here, we need to set a baseline:

Firstly, Sweden has been socialist for a long time. Not only politically, but mind set wise as well. There is even something called the “Jante” law, which is easily summed up by “you shouldn’t think that you are special”. Great stuff, huh?

Secondly, the tax pressure practically mandates that anyone who makes obscene amounts of money must move away. All our sports stars are in Monaco, for example.

Thirdly, there is no understanding for the added pressure of a job at top international levels. That a CEO with responsibility for 10000 people makes 10 times more than a person on the floor is simply not feasible.

Now, I do not think that I am in a situation where I can change the socialistic mind set that has smitten my fellow Swedes for so long. I also deem myself incapable of quickly and dramatically changing Swedish tax pressure. The third point, however, is something that I feel passion for. I, for myself, know that the CEO of Ericsson has a job that is, when done well, worth 10 times more than the person on the floor (when his or her job is done well).

The first thing I think we must come to accept is that CEOs are differently able at their jobs. Simply put, a CEO matters. If a CEO does his or her job particularly well, a business might blossom in good times, or suffer relatively little in poor times. If a CEO does his or her job poorly, a business might still do well in good times but perhaps collapse in poor times. I argue that this is true for almost all companies in almost all open and free markets.

I do not think that the difficulties with accepting high CEO remuneration is based on ignorance around the fact that CEOs matter. It must be something else.

Maybe it is a non understanding around what a CEO actually does? Do they sit in their corner offices, smoking cigars, counting money? Do they laugh, whiskey in hand, and decide who to fire that day?

Of course not. Your average CEO has the immense pressure of qualified decision making, policy creating & enforcing, and corporate image upholding on their shoulders. This is no small task. And I think that the average Swede understands this as well.

So what might the problem be? I think it deals with the fact that there is gross misunderstanding around the skills needed to perform these tasks. But think about it this way: compare your average CEO with your average tennis player. Clearly, the top paid are the top historic performers, and with each individual great performance comes great reward. Those who get to this great reward are only extremely rarely there by luck. Most are there because they have worked like madmen for a large portion of their life. They have fought to get into the best schools, fought to graduate with the best degrees, fought to get the best internships, fought to do their best to build a career, all while sacrificing many other parts of their life the rest of us take for granted.

So, when a tennis player who has clearly sacrificed his or her whole life to stand as the winner of the US Open, does he or she deserve a reward? Does he or she deserve a bigger reward than the guy or girl who strung their racket, or massaged their backs between sets? Is it “fair” that the winner gets a bigger reward than the person who placed last? And, more to the point, should the US Open reward size depend on performance in the next tournament? To me, these questions have but one answer. I will not force them upon you.

But this boils down to the question at hand. Today, we have companies in Sweden who are performing poorly. During 2009 their market cap has slid dramatically, along with sales and overall performance. People are being let go. No issue here, really. But at the same time, some companies are paying out bonuses to the top management. Big by Swedish standards, a joke by international standards. (By the way, there is no form of payment that is as heavily taxed as this type of bonus. The hungry tax monster will lose lots of money if they are removed.) Many of these bonuses are based on great overall years in 2008. Should they be paid? Of course they should. They are completely separated from layoffs in 2009.

What would happen with the US Open if the rewards were removed? Well, none of the top players would play the US Open, because there is more reward to be had elsewhere.

What would happen if every job paid exactly the same salary? Well, there would be no incentive to sacrifice body and soul to make it to the top, so no-one would. We would become dumber and less educated with each generation.

What would happen if Sweden somehow (people are actually trying) removed the opportunity to pay top management bonuses? Top talent would move, and Swedish companies would suffer. With suffering Swedish companies, Sweden would suffer.

And we simply do not want that. Right?

David bonus, capitalism, CEO, effort, socialism

My previous employer, renowned PR agency Hallvarsson & Halvarsson, today released their Social Media Newsroom plugin for the immensly popular CMS EPiSever. Oh, how I wish I had been a part of its development.

My fearless prediction here is that this is the future of the SMNR - simply a function in the corporate website as natural as an image gallerly or document archive. This is likely the beginning of the end of the hosted solutions offsite, and I think that this is the way to go. Previously, reasoning around hosting the SMNR offsite has been mostly, in my experience, political. For some odd reason, it had to be built in one of any blog tools, and therefore clashed with the often Microsoft based web environments of many corporate setups.

With the integration of the SMNR technology and functionality in the corporate web space, so much more is won. We see many additional sources of information being able to be pushed in automatically. Contact information, financial results, and new documents for dowload rather than simply the flow of press releases and Flickr imagery.

I see other wins as well: SEO. We will be building link value for the main corporate domain, rather than a sub domain of some service provider.

In the future, we might even see the SMNR take the place of all press sections of the corporate website. I sure hope so.

Congrats, H&H, for a job well done!

David hallvarsson & halvarsson, smnr, social media newsroom

Hmm … I thought the optimization was to lower costs. It seems that it instead increases Google share value. At least in this case:

David google, optimization, sem

Two of them, and they are both dumb.

Firstly, a Swedish policitian has been called out and critisized because he is letting people rent his house and apartment at a very high cost. Oddly, he is a Social Democrat, and maybe that is why the whole left wing is going nuts. It is like they think that him placing a high weekly price on his apartment somehow steals money from the poor, or that him letting people rent his nice house at high cost will dictate rent for low income families everywhere. Well, the whole left wing is wrong. And dumb. If the price is too high, he will not get it rented. “Supply & demand”, market economy, and all that - you know?

The second media storm is TV based. TV has shown a reality show called (freely translated) “The Diplomats”. Turns out, Swedish diplomats are filthy drunk pigs. Does anybody smell a rat? Do you think they have selected only portions of the lives documented? Of course. And my brother thought of two additional things: firstly, getting local politicians drunk and happy might in reality be highly effective diplomacy. “Diplomacy through insobriety”, as it where. Seondly, this might be a great PR trick to create a queue outside diplomacy school. Can you see it? The kids seeing the supposedly glamorous and champagne infested lives of diplomats in third world countries, thinking “that could be me”.

So, in summary:

1. Yay capitalism.
2. Things seen on TV aren’t always the whole truth.

Obvious things to some, but clearly not to many of my fellow Swedes.

David capitalism, socialism, tv

This is getting old, but I am surprised that Boeing has not done anything as of right now online. Although Boeing traditionally does not offer a complete “take over” of the first page (as Airbus does) there should atleast be a little notice, indicating that they stand by to offer any support, and that they offer condolences.

Please, dear Boeing, take care of this now!

David accident, aviation, boeing

There are a lot of fun clothing stores online, but few if any come close to T-Shirt Hell. There you will without doubt find something that will make you laugh, and something that will make you mad. Some of the prints are so horribly vulgar that I am chocked to silence for minutes before I start laughing. Think of it as Monty Python on a t-shirt.

Now, the people behind the site have been through some exiting drama in the past; hatred in all its forms. That, together with the general downturn in spending, made me feel rather unsurprised when I got the first of a series of emails explaining that they were shutting down. They had made enough money, and they were tired of the hate. They even extended the deadline for a while. I imagine that few things create action in the shopping carts more effectively than a “you wont be able to shop ever again”.

Now I got another email. The shutting down was simply another spoof. They claim that this was there way to respond to the downturn, this was their “stimulus”. They fooled us all into spending money.

And I love it.

Expecting anything else, I now realize, was dumb. They were clever. And there is a lesson here for all in eCommerce. Urgency is powerful, create it you too!

David eCommerce, urgency

Once upon a time, when I was all glad about generating ideas constantly, I was under the impression that generating ideas was all that was needed to gain success. I even called (and in some places still do) myself an “idea guy”. And I assume that this is a skill that would in some companies (Apple, Sony) could be a whole job.

But it is not a whole job when you run your own small show. And likely it is not a job with major corporations during a recession.

I sort of figured this out a couple of years ago, and started focusing more on moving the ideas from a piece of paper or document into some sort of reality. My first approach was to spend money. If I was financially invested in the idea, I thought, I could do nothing but move forward on it. So, I started buying domain names.

Not much else happened. I have lots of domain names, but very few services launched.

Then, I found RentACoder and TemplateMonster. I was under the impression that if I specified an idea technically, and provided a design, I would have a service ready to launch. This has worked, but only to a degree. As a result of this approach some of my ideas are actually live and running.

But there has always been something missing. The love and the dedication, and the long term attention by all aspects of a team (design, development, marketing). I have been stuck here a long time. At one point, I almost gave up.

Today, however, is a new day. And one of my great old ideas is on its way to real true reality. How, you ask? By people, and people with skills. In my office we will in 2 weeks be four people. Two developers, a designer and myself. We will focus on a relatively small project (10 week time budget) and hopefully launch a fully fledged piece of awesomeness when the time is up.

This one dude said to me once, “ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. It is the commitment that separates the men from the boys.”

And this time, I am committed. Together with a team of great people. I will keep you updated, right here.

David commitment, idea development

• I need to get more sleep.
• My great cousin will likely get her work published, and I will try to help her.
• My sister lives in New York - how cool is that?
• I spend more time creating proposals than performing work as a result of a successful proposal. And I perform more than 40 hours a week on work as a result of a successful proposal,
• The Mexican island that disappeared? It never existed.
• In TAS we will have two new developers starting in 2 weeks. Their first project will be a great idea I had back in 2003.
• I have found that bitter competition is a great motivator.
• This week was one of highs and lows - great complex eMetrics discussions with global brands, tough nights of no sleep with sick daughter.
• Getting back into Twitter. And Facebook status messaging. The transparency is awesome.
• Next winter, my steep driveway will have no ice. I will have a four wheeler with a plow and salt/sand distributor. And it will be awe-so-me.
• I just pressed “Update Automatically” in my Wordpress installation. It worked.
• I have found lots of new friends recently on Facebook. Great fun.
• I have found Sash again in iTunes. Great music.
• My daughter is absolutely positively in love with Pippi Longstocking. As it should be.
• When push comes to shove, I might dodge.
• Oh, and I really, really need to get more sleep.

David randomness

We are just back from our skiing trip to northern Sweden, and the second leg of this trip was pure highway terror. Although the assigned speed limits are on average 90 km/h, I would guess that our average speed was around half that. We had been driving for but 5 minutes when the first relatively serious accident appeared: an 18 wheeler had rear ended a small family car. When I had stopped I saw in the rear view mirror a truck speeding against us, and he in the nick of time plowed out into the ditch to avoid hitting us.

He just made it.

After that, we had four eyes focused on the road ahead. The road that was visible, that is: each time a car passed in the opposite direction, there was five seconds of complete blindness. Some idiots were driving like crazy, putting all other lives on the road at risk. If I for but a split second let a tire leave the narrow semi plowed lanes between the snow piles, the car would wobble and pull toward the ditch or the oncoming traffic.

When we finally got home, our icy hill beckoned. I drove as fast as I dared, but we still did not make it. Ella and Kristina quickly got out of the car to avoid certain (slight exaggeration) death. After a while I got into my driving shoes to have full clutch control, to no avail. I slid backwards as soon as the foot was off the brake, and I started sliding backwards towards the cliff. I finally got the car to a standstill, after which I took my good time caressing her down to the bottom. Once there, I shook, scared to the core, for minutes.

Now I am regaining my composure. With some help from my favorite captain. His name is Morgan.

David car, driving, winter

Sitting in a rented Car with a borrowed iPhone, here we are! On our way to a longed for skiing vacation. First stop: Järvsö.

The gods are already smiling on us - we are in a gorgeous new Audi A6. Sitting in this car it is easy for me to understand why Audi broke sales records when the competition broke loss records.

David iphone

Half of this day went to a seminar/workshop focusing on the editorial aspects of search engine visibility, and visibility quality. I had been preparing for this day for e-v-e-r.

And it worked.

The audience had worked little to nothing with hands on SEO, or at least that was their thought going into the meeting. After a while, I feel that it dawned upon them that this is not magic, this is not rocket science - this is simple, and this is fun. And the modifications made in the process of creating content for the web is really not at all focused solely on search engines, but improving the quality for the website visitors.

It was a long time ago that I saw a group of people get so excited about the Adwords Keyword Tool, and the dramatic truths it sometimes told. Luckily, this company is not enslaved by corporate jargon restrictions, so the move from outside-in to inside-out thinking was simple, and resulted in the active optimization of several pages.

I learned a lesson here as well: I will from now on always spend the extra time necessary to prepare a presentation together with the buyer, and ensure that she or he is fully aware, and fully satisfied, before the live presentation starts. The two meetings I had prior to today with the client were likely the primary factor in today’s success.

And on another note - when I have been tense and charged up for this long, I always seem to crash completely after successful delivery. So, I went home. Slept for two hours. Then played Guitar Hero for 2 hours. Then played with my daughter until she went to bed.

The life of a sole proprietor might on occasion be stressful and demanding beyond belief. But for me, it is worth it by far. You will not find me on a corporate payroll for a long time. (With the one standing exception, of course. If Thomas Downey gives me the opportunity to take charge of the social media presence of the worlds best company, I will. For free. And it would be awesome.)

David seminar, SEO, workshop

I am preparing a half day seminar for a bunch of great editors in the art of “writing for search engines”. I have spent significantly more time than I am paid to spend, but with good cause: I have been racking my brain over the challenge of communicating this monster that SEO is to people who, in essence, are journalists.

Not that journalists are mentally challenged or anything, just that I need to consider the wording I use - naturally, talking about H1-tags and XML-sitemaps will not make me any friends. I have found that buzzword bingo:ing will alienate a crowd quicker than almost anything.

So, I have been working on making SEO simple. Really, really simple. And just now, just a minute ago, I fell for it! I actually had an epiphany - I saw my presentation and realized that is actually IS simple.

First, this made me happy. Now, I am sad. I am starting to realize the horridness of the SEO sales peoples advantage taking of a knowledge gap compared to the average buyer.

I wish that, from now on, each and every SEO pitch will begin with the magic words “SEO is not rocket science. It is not magic. It is technology and content in harmony, and it is hard work.”

I tried this, pre-epiphany, with this great client of mine, and I beat out all big agencies, practically because of this statement. I really hope that the days of SEO sales being of a pushy snake oil are over.

And I will do my part. I am meeting with a colleague in the field tomorrow (much bigger than my little agency), to have some resource sharing discussions. I am glad that this opportunity has risen, but not primarily for the obvious business benefits but rather for the fact that this might be the first sign that the Swedish SEO market is turning into the warm, sharing and caring SEO market I left back in San Diego.

When competitors share, everyone wins.

David seminar, SEO

Case in point: SIBA. After checking with all the electronics store on the local drag, I went with SIBA for an Ipod Touch. They have a queue system with little numbers, that after a while let me access a salesperson.

So there I was, with number 85. 83 was up for an eternity (ok, maybe not an eternity, but at least 10 minutes). Then, to my surprise, I heard three quick beeps, and now it said 86. I rushed to the desk and asked for service, expecting that the mass gathering of sales personnel indicated that three customers would be served at the same time.

But, alas, my eyes failed me. This was not a mass gathering of sales personnel, rather a gang of monkeys in clown outfits.

They blamed a sales rep who had just taken number 86 out on the floor and indicated that I should take another number and wait again. After this disgusting remark, the SIBA representative turned his back, and started talking to his colleague, completely ignoring me.

A customer service consultant with US experience could make a killing in this country.

So, I left my little number on the desk and left. Mumbling on my way out. Next time, I will try to be more constructive in my critique when in the store.

Well, I will not have a chance to do that: I will never again allow myself or my circle of influence to support this type of behavior.

SIBA, I bid you adieu.

David customer service

I remember when I stood in front of all my colleagues 2 years ago saying “I bet you all money that you will be faced with Twitter shortly”.

Boy, was I wrong.

It has not happened until now in Sweden. Big explosion of usage. I have seen a few companies jump onto the trend-train, but so far it is mostly media agencies.

I will shortly, together with Alexander Drewniak, (and a developer who will remain anonymous for a while) I will unleash a great awesome new corporate communications service with ties to Twitter. We will bust this market wide open, even more so now that the world is ready. More to come!

David

And in this case, I mean “User Generated Content”.

To the story: there is an online and mobile “yellow pages” service here in Sweden called 118100. Send a name or number there, and hopefully you will get some additional information. These services are a dime a dozen.

But these guys are going out and in TV commercials claiming that “we can answer ANY question”. So I gave it a test. I asked them if all Boeing 747-400 variants had winglets.

They got it wrong.

So here I was, having payed for a service and not gotten what was promised. I went to their website and soon found that anyone can sign up to become an “expert”. I signed up, and instantly I was put into the middle of their incoming stream of questions. I could pick any question and answer it. (Their system is somewhat buggy, but it seems as if all answers are moderated first.)This was incredibly addicting. And difficult. And disturbing. Many seriously depressing questions, many seriously dumb questions, and a huge amount of impossible questions.

But there I was. Answering like a madman. And then it hit me: this is UGC defined. I am donating my time and service to make them money. Awesome, right? But then I started to think about the fact that there is absolutely full transparency here. Although I can not see who sent the question, it does not take a detective in many cases. People leave their numbers, names. Questions like “I have cheated on my husband. Should I tell him?” signed by a real name and number.

Do people who send their questions expect this? I think not. Is this the only way to get a service like this to work? I think so.

Give it a try! Swedish only, I’m afraid!

David

Tada! Inspired by a friendly comment, here is a slightly updated version.And if you want to download a version you can actually see, simply click here.

David

I went out on a huge limb with my praise of Airbus’ crisis management online earlier. But now, more than an hour after the total loss of a 320 in the Hudson River, their site remains without mention.

Seriously, PR people, take care of this. Now.

Looking for a link to their Chief Information Officer I noticed that dear Airbus has no clear communications role in their Executive Committee. Give me a break.

Argh! Give me a break for real! Airbus has a login requirement for their press room?!

David

I will start by admitting it: I am tired of everything being environmentally conscious.

Now, let me explain.

First of all, I am not a barbarian. I do not throw trash in the wild. I recycle. I compost. I buy ecological milk. I am a vegetarian. I take the train. I try not to print stuff unnecessarily.

But, I drive a car with a V8. I like to fly. I will never buy something solely because it has been produced in an environmentally friendly way. I will activly not support a product which markets the environmentally concious aspects ahead of the actual benefits.

Why? Because I do not believe it makes a difference. I know that I can make the world a tiny bit better by donating time and money to a worthy cause. That cause is not buying a Lexus hybrid: it is by trying to save lives. I know this sounds ambitious, but I feel that my support to the “world cause” would have more impact by me donating money to Habitat for Humanity (or such), or even by travelling to a country in need and donating my time to help build a school or hospital.

When any type of trend appears, companies naturally jump aboard to sell more of their products. I know this, and as a big fan of the free open market I must support this. But it is my choice as a consumer to decide which of these trends I will accept as an incentive to make a purchase decision. And this trend has gone too far. I see ads for products ranging from cars to furniture to clothes not describing anything but the fact that I will be “saving the world” by buying them.

I’m not buying it. I will continue to buy products best suited to my needs, and I will continue to support those in the world who need my help to survive the day. The “world cause”, the environment? If technology is given the chance, I think it will be solved.

David

As you might know, I am heavily biased towards Boeing in the ongoing battle between aircraft manufacturers. My critique of Airbus, however, will end today.

Airbus has always been way ahead of Boeing in terms of online communications. Where Boeing has felt stiff and old fashioned, Airbus has felt fresh and young. Airbus does not use even close to all the opportunities in front of them in the world of online marketing and communications, but they use way more than Boeing.

Today proves this point. A tragic accident involving an A320 occured outside France, and Airbus reacted online immediately. Firstly, they have let the www.airbus.com start page become a divider between the crisis information and the regular home page. This is important. The crisis section is informative, time stamped, version indicated and there is background information of the equipment.

They have also had search visibility in mind: the entire crisis section has “meta robots” data indicating “noindex, nofollow” to ensure that these pages will never be placed in a search engine. (I was suprised that they did not enforce this with the robots.txt file).

In my opinion, this is good crisis management. Not excellent, but significantly better than what Boeing has ever performed.

David

As I gave my online marketing ninja colleague Alexander Drewniak some new business cards, he noted that I had the same type of business cards used by Heysan. And, apparently, the peeps at Twitter use them as well.

So, for you to stay ahead of the curve: go get some Moo. All the cool kids are doing it!

David