Viral WoW

July 2, 2008 – 9:14 pm

Blizzard, the company behind the most successful and profitable entertainment franchise in the world*, World of Warcraft, held a mini-conference in Paris last week to announce that a second sequel to its Diablo series - Diablo III - was in development. Unlike a lot of press conferences, they invited along lots of fans, active forum members and bloggers about the game. So far, so cool, but it gets better…

image

As is customary at top-end press-conferences, there was a schwag-bag for all attendees containing various branded giveaways. Mouse mats, mugs and stuff - it saves having to buy Xmas presents for a lot of journos. *cough*

(As an aside - Yay! that more bloggers and vocal fans are getting their hands on this stuff.)

But the cleverest bit (for me) was that this also included an online keycode for WoW that would allow players of that game to gain a new companion for their online avatars - the characters they play in the game. Remember, they invited guild leaders and fanatical WoW bloggers along**.

The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.

Get it? The WoW pet is a viral promo-item for Diablo III! It’s limited edition, so it’s sought-after; it’s a sign of prestige in the community; and it’s constantly in the face of relevant audiences.

Pure genius. Or evil.

________________________________

*World of Warcraft - or WoW to its friends - an online roleplaying game which charges a monthly subscription - to around 10mn people.

**WoW players organise themselves into ‘guilds’ to assemble teams for online combat and for social reasons - their leaders are the most visible, longstanding and respected players.

Via. Kotaku

By Ian Delaney | Posted in VR, events, marketing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

So You Talk About A Revolution

June 24, 2008 – 12:03 am

Some bloggers do something called ‘live blogging’ from conferences, wherein they aim to note, more-or-less verbatim, the content of the sessions they are attending. I am far too busy with other weighty intellectual matters at conferences - Twitter messages about the speakers’ funny haircuts and who else is here from Twitter - so it takes me a few more days.

Anyway, I was at Media Futures 08 last Friday where one of the best sessions was the opening keynote from Dr. Brian Winston.

He started with a quotation ostensibly* from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in the Observer saying that it’s likely there’ll soon be digital revolutions in far-flung places we don’t tend to consider very much, such as Kazakhstan. With internet connections and the Web 2.0 tools that have become available over recent years, Wales says, it’s likely that they’ll be able to propel themselves very quickly through twenty years of technological progress and produce the next crop of internet tycoons.

Nonsense, said Winston. What both Wales and Wikipedia forget is that Kazakhstan has a Stalinist dictatorship. There will need to be a very different sort of revolution before there’s any kind of technological one that’s based on democratising technologies. It’s an example of the way Web 2.0 technophiles seem to find it extremely easy to forget about politics, sociology and history to try to establish the revolutionary impact of the next latest thing. They think technology has the power to change societies, whereas in actual fact, cultural and social conditions need to be met in order for technological advances to exist at all.

Digital itself has a history going back to the 1920s, he argued, which everyone conveniently forgets. And even then, it’s simply a system for encoding things. An equivalent would be the switch from AM to FM radio - and very few people talk about the FM revolution.

We are in a condition where we conveniently forget the years of discovery, exploration and mistakes that lead to whatever is in today’s headlines. We’re also conditioned into accepting the rhetoric of marketing as fact. Web 2.0 favourite theories like ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘the hype cycle’ and ‘crossing the chasm’ are actually commercial products, not independent academic studies.

The conditions for the emergence of new technology are cultural, not inherent in those technologies themselves. Edison didn’t ever envisage the gramophone being used to record music, because the likelihood of that use was not culturally probable at that time. The ability to create cheap electric cars has existed for years, but has only been allowed to come to life relatively recently as car companies have reached a point where they want to be viewed as environmentally responsible. And many new technologies - so breathlessly announced in the tech press and the press releases that spawn them as so very new and revolutionary - are based on fairly basic facts about the human race. People like to talk - if that’s via mobile phone, social networks or face-to-face maybe doesn’t make that much difference. We would do it anyway within the limits of whatever means we had available.

When we’re confronted with the latest, greatest, revolutionary product from the web or anywhere else, the proper response ought to be, ’so what?’ It’s likely that there will be no sensible answer to that question, but even if there is, it will probably be about it fulfilling or adding to a social imperative that already exists. Technology, Winston argued, is not going to create new social needs or desires.

_________________

Personally, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and I think it’s true that society creates technology, not vice-versa.

However, I didn’t used to need to know the day’s news at 7am in the morning. I didn’t used to read hundreds of people’s opinions every day. I didn’t used to hear from my friends and colleagues every day (albeit indirectly through blogs and social networks) and thus feel continuously part of an international professional community. While I could have created a printed fanzine instead of this blog, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered. It’s often remarked that before mobile phones were ubiquitous, you had to turn up to social engagements instead of cancelling. And there was a time when if I wanted to watch Dr. Who, then I had to be sat at home at 5pm on a Saturday. Some of those things are about the increasing demands for communication and information required by a post-industrial society that still needs to make a living, but not all of them.

Mobiles and web things and social networks may have come to exist as a consequence of social and cultural demand, but the consequences of their existence also go beyond what those causes required. There then emerges a two-way process whereby technology both fulfils social needs and then is stretched to create new patterns of behaviour as we tinker and test the new limits of our existence. Another basic fact about humans is that we are tinkerers and testers. Not always all of us, but enough of us to alter the nature of common discourse over time.

*Wales has since repudiated the article quoted in Winston’s talk, which was apparently written by a third party on the basis of a conversation, and has written a new one, which is more moderate in its position regarding developing economies.

By Ian Delaney | Posted in events, web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Off Topic

June 19, 2008 – 7:27 pm

But sorry it was too good, and at the very least, you must watch to from (thanks, Steve) 3:00′ish.

 

Via Jemima Kiss

By Ian Delaney | Posted in humour, oh yeah, and also | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

June 19, 2008 – 2:27 pm

quick test of asides here - sorry
you might enjoy http://watchthesimpsonsonline.com/

By Ian Delaney | Posted in Asides | Comments (0)

Wings of a Blog

June 18, 2008 – 4:12 pm

Quick report from last Friday’s Fuel conference. It was a well-planned day which I thoroughly enjoyed, so well done to Ryan, Keir and the Carsonified team. It was also good to meet up again with a couple of fellow bloggers. Andrew from Imagination has written already about the attention to detail shown in the design of the delegate badges, while Vero has covered off the presentation from the lovely bearded chap from Innocent drinks.

For me, the stand-out presentation was the case study regarding the launch of Virgin America, a new internal airline for the States and part of the Virgin group. It was founded in 2004 and started flying in September 2007. How come the launch took over three years?

As the presenter, Alex Hunter (Virgin’s Head of Group Online Marketing), pointed out, you might imagine that this would be a piece of cake. Virgin is a massive international brand. The group’s Virgin Atlantic service is well-known for being good quality and reasonably priced.

Not so. In some respects, the brand’s fame worked against them. The proposed launch met with loud protests to the US Department of Transport from the existing internal carriers. Virgin was a foreign company, they argued. Allowing them to launch would directly damage US businesses. It appeared (quite rightly) that a lengthy fight would ensue.

Virgin was hamstrung in two ways during this period. They couldn’t unveil the new planes’ impressive features and specifications - for all they knew, they’d be completely out-of-date by the time they launched. Nor could they use Richard Branson as a brand ambassador - his nationality was exactly the reason for which they were facing problems from the DoT. Also, money was more of an issue than you might imagine: they had already bought the planes and empty planes are a very expensive liability.

Legal fencing, defencing, shilly-shallying and fence-sitting ensued, for months. Finally, on December 26 2006, the DoT delivered its verdict: Virgin America would not be allowed to fly. This was a black day for Alex and the company. To that date, the Department had never reversed its decision on such a matter.

So Virgin decided to take the fight to the (metaphorical) streets.

They submitted a time-lapse video of one of the planes being painted to YouTube. Over the weekend, it garnered 200,000 views and found its way to the front page of digg. It wasn’t an especially remarkable film from a technical perspective, though at that time, there was nothing like it (all their rivals have since copied the idea, apparently).

They launched a blog called Let VA Fly (now defunct), unveiling all the sophisticated new features on their planes. At this point, they felt they had nothing to lose, so they might as well. They included an online petition, and forms which would create and send a correctly worded and legally valid complaint to individual users’ representatives, senators and the Department of Transport. Technically, it was a fairly simple site, based on open source Wordpress software. But it did the job.

Picture_2

Perhaps because the incumbent US internal airlines are so very terrible and anything better sounded like Nirvana, perhaps because it was pitched as a classic David and Goliath story, the blog was a great success.

They decided to launch a competition to let readers name the first eight planes, then capitalised on this by specifically inviting blogosphere celebrities and idols, Stephen Colbert and Cory Doctorow, to name two (Air Colbert and Unicorn Chaser, since you asked). They created T-shirts and gave them away. They put one of their planes into the San Francisco Valentine’s parade.

Perhaps crucially, they managed to get other online communities to do much of the marketing of the site, and driving people to sign the petition and send form letters, for them. The site or posts on the site hit the front page of digg eight times. Realising that community was clearly sympathetic, they invited Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht to film their diggnation video cast on board one of the grounded planes, driving scads of geek traffic to the site. Later paid and unpaid spots on diggnation worked equally well.

In total, 75,000 letters were sent to the authorities and 30,000 people signed the petition. It was enough. In September last year, the DoT reversed its decision and the service took off.

By Ian Delaney | Posted in PR, blogs, business, social media, social news | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5)

The New Economics

May 29, 2008 – 3:57 pm

Via. Freeconomics Part I – or who is paying for your Free lunch? - broadstuff and found somewhere on slashdot.

“You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped.”

I work closely in partnership with a music business site, MusicTank, and while those guys might seem like dinosaurs to the 2.0 crowd, there is one key issue that they are acutely aware of that always gets brushed over in the digital world. How do artists get paid? The idea of concert revenues or merchandise taking over from direct sales of music is bullshit. People will not buy things they don’t want instead of things they do. The same arguments are true of all content producers. This stuff, these people, these tracks, articles, pictures, whatever need to be paid for.

There’s so much inventory on the web - so many zillions of pages and zillions of users - that advertising isn’t working for publishers any more. So who pays, and how? I don’t really believe any of us know yet.

By Ian Delaney | Posted in web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

End of the Road for Trackbacks?

May 26, 2008 – 12:27 pm

I’ve just deleted two trackbacks that led directly to malware installation routines posing as Anti-Virus scanners. On IE7, it was necessary to switch off the iexplore process manually to get the windows to stop. I’ve scanned for any traces using Spybot - S & D and seem to be clean.

This is obviously really annoying for all of us, and if I find this trend continues, I’ll be forced to switch trackbacks off altogether. It’s difficult for the spam detection filters installed on the site (Akismet and Spambot Assassin) to detect these latent attacks, and the risk of damage to readers’ data - with me as an unwitting accomplice to the attackers - is very worrying.

By Ian Delaney | Posted in oh yeah, and also | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

A Last Note on the Carphone Warehouse Incident

May 24, 2008 – 5:06 pm

If you need the history - I had a big problem with the company (blogged here), which was resolved the day after I wrote a post about it on this site (blogged here).

A lot of people might see this as a victory for blogs and bloggers. I’d agree, sure. But, on reflection, I think it’s more of a victory for Carphone Warehouse.

It’s easy for anyone to set up a blog, and give themselves a platform on which to rant and rave about whoever is annoying them this week. OK, it takes a bit longer to establish any readership and authority, and being a decent-ish writer helps, as well. However, any old fool, given some determination, has the chance to do that, on a purely hobbyist basis. As I think I have sufficiently proven.

What’s harder than setting up a blog, is for big organisations with established systems, hierarchies and hide-bound tradition to change. To move from a position where “it’s not this department”, “you need to speak to X about that” and “sorry, there’s no one available right now.” To get to the position where an individual within that organisation can say, “I can see what you’re saying. I’ll sort it out now.” Not only that, but they’re polling for your opinions and ready to intervene where they can be helpful. That would be an enormous culture shock for most large organisations.

My negative experience using the traditional lines of communication, which I persisted with due to a misguided sense of moral decency, versus the guerilla efforts that eventually achieved results, speaks volumes. When the latter worked, it saved portions of C/W’s reputation in some ways, not to mention my relationship with the company. But again, it was the company’s response, not my rudeness (as my nana might have perceived it - and she still oversees my conscience), that got the result.

Technology and social media, in particular, are allowing these transitions to happen within even the largest organisations. But it’s happening on uneven levels and with unequal levels of satisfaction when it comes to people’s experience. The future is spead unevenly, like William Gibson said. The overall movement is positive, though.

Sometimes that’s because it’s on an outlaw level, outside the traditional hierarchies, and the bosses don’t even know about it. Often, it’s on a project basis or through an external agency. Sometimes, it’s individual champions injecting change into organisations, because they actually care about the company or organisation they work for. Less commonly, it’s established by enlightened managers. When the instigators (I still have the C/W hold music in my head) - whatever their methods - achieve real results for the company and create more trust, faith and humanity, the message will spread, inside and outside the company. When they get it right, the impact on the bottom line can be enormous.

Many of us end up hating the large organisations we’re forced to deal with; creating mechanisms to rehabilitate those relationships is crucial. Personal publishing platforms and individuals empowered to engage with them are the way to take this forward.

That organisations as large as C/W are allowing that to happen is extremely heartening. Facilitating that, of course, requires organisations to allow for extreme trust, 20% time or flexible working hours, mobile technology, and a realisation that your reputation belongs with your customers, not the marketing department.

By Ian Delaney | Posted in blogs, business, mobile, social media | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

How Carphone Warehouse Regained My Trust

May 24, 2008 – 11:44 am

This post is a follow-up to the last, rather less complimentary one, Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated…

At 10am this morning - and it’s Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, you’ll note, I got a call from Sarah, a customer services manager at Carphone Warehouse. She gets Google Alerts for mentions of the company’s name on her Blackberry, and had picked up on last night’s post. Less than 14 hours after I published it. Shocked at my tale of woe, she’d called into the office from home to retrieve my records.

After confirming the details of my story, she agreed that a mistake had been made and apologised for the company’s failure to act this week. Two hours later, I received this email (slightly abridged):

Dear Mr Delaney

Further to our conversation this morning, I am writing to confirm that I have just credited your account with £473.46 which is the amount that is showing due to data charges.

[...] Should you have any concerns about anything [...] please feel free to call me on my mobile number at any time. [...]

I hope that our conversation this morning and these subsequent actions have gone some way to restoring your faith in CPW and that you will remain a customer for many more years to come. I also hope that you can now get on with the important job of enjoying your N95 and the bank holiday weekend.

Please call me or email me on this address should you have any more questions or should you need any more help.

Kind regards
Sarah

I am still pretty stunned at this turn of affairs, I have to admit, and my fingers are trembling. And I am frankly delighted at the company’s willingness to listen and respond using these channels. It leads me to several observations:

  • The Internet makes everything really fast. I achieved more in 14 hours (none of which were during the work week, or even daylight) than a whole week of phone calls. I guess that’s bad news for organisations in some ways, because they have to be considerably more agile than they often are in order to keep up.
  • Writing a blog is a good thing to do. I am not an especially noted person, even in the very narrow circles in which I move. But the blog and other social media allowed me to get a message out to the right people in a way that traditional forms of communication did not.
  • Without the Internet, corporations are not likely to be very good at dealing with individual cases that don’t fit the standard pattern. I don’t blame Carphone Warehouse, in particular. I think it’s just the nature of modern corporations.
  • However, Sarah at Carphone Warehouse - and people like her - are using technology to rehumanise their organisations. Give an empowered person Google Alerts and a Blackberry (and the willingness to look at those alerts on a Saturday morning) and you can totally change people’s perceptions, stem a potential PR disaster and restore faith and humanity in your organisation’s relationships with customers.

Anyway, I am also honour-bound to say that I have changed my mind since yesterday. Carphone Warehouse are actually rather good eggs and you should all go and buy some phones from them straight away.

Many thanks, too, to Huw, David, Helen, and Jana among others for your messages of support, posts and advice. The world is beautiful again.

[I agreed to keep Sarah's surname private, but if any of her managers at Carphone Warehouse pick up on this story, please reward her bountifully].

By Ian Delaney | Posted in blogs, mobile, search engines | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Goodbye, Carphone Warehouse, You Lied and Cheated

May 23, 2008 – 7:21 pm

NB: This story has a happy ending!

Dear Carphone Warehouse,

We used to have it so good. I’ve been a customer for about four years, and you’ve never put a foot wrong until now. You found me good deals and gave me good advice on tariffs and handsets. But I’m not sure our relationship can recover after this week. Having memorised all your hold music over the period, might I suggest ‘we have got to get it together, now‘?

The Story

I was phoned on May 12th by Gareth Whittle from your outbound O2 sales team to tell me I was due an upgrade. Splendid, I said, what have you got? After much wrangling, we agreed on a Nokia N95 8GB, albeit for five pounds more a month than the price you published on your own website (I see you’ve fixed that now). The £35-a-month deal would get me a free handset, more minutes and texts each month than I’d use all year, and most importantly, unlimited data. You promised to send it the next day and I’d have 14 days to try it out. “What if I have any problems, Gareth?” “Oh you can call me on extension 4443220″.

Lo and behold, it arrived the next day - modern logistics can be so wonderful - and I eagerly starting testing all the new functions - it’s a lovely piece of kit. I’d have liked a qwerty keyboard, but figured I could get a bluetooth job from you later. The camera is excellent and using 3G for the first time was a rush.

The Sting

It’s now seven days later and I phone my wife - but who’s this on the line? “This number cannot be dialled - please hold while we put you through to customer services”.

I hold - and it actually turns out to be your finance department.

“Mr Delaney - you have an outstanding bill for (circa) £500. Would you like to pay by credit card?”

“What!!! But I’m on unlimited data - the guy told me.”

“Ah, that doesn’t actually start till the 26th May.”

“But I didn’t know that? How would I know that? You sent me the phone - why would I imagine I couldn’t use it yet?”

Gareth did tell me that the contract ‘rolled over on the 26th of each month’ (his exact words, as I recall - whatever that means). But he didn’t tell me that meant unlimited data didn’t start till May 26. He certainly didn’t warn me about using the Internet before May 26. I had assumed (oh, silly me) that it was the previous 26th, if I agreed to the deal - this was an upgrade, after all. And how would I be able to test the phone in the 14-day cooldown period otherwise? It seemed like common sense that the upgrade began when I received the phone.

I’d made a horrendous mistake. But there’s also been some big communication errors on your part. Of course, you’ll understand and rectify that, won’t you? We’re all human beings, aren’t we? And it’s not as though back-dating the contract by two weeks will cost you any money.

Turns out the lady I’m speaking to can’t actually do anything. I am put through to customer services. They tell me that the sales department concerned has to investigate the problem: their hands are tied. I ask them to put me through to Gareth on extension 4443220, but it turns out he lied to me about that - no-one I am allowed to speak to can make that call. Outbound sales don’t have any accessible phone numbers.

I get put back through to customer services. I ask to speak to a manager. I am put through to a manager at customer services. Turns out he can’t actually call anyone more senior - or Gareth - they are only allowed to send emails. This fact makes me wonder about how seriously you take customer services? Not to worry, though. I’m assured my incident has been escalated and I will receive a call from your sales department within the next 72 hours to resolve the problem.

72 Hours Pass

…And there’s no phone call from your sales department. More lies, then. I call my new friends Craig, and then John, at your Warrington customer service call centre. They both re-escalate my case. I am at three levels of escalation now. I need oxygen, I am so escalated, but evidently not sufficiently so to get anyone from sales to call me. And no, they really can’t put me through to anyone more senior, they assure me that more ‘VERY URGENT’ notes have been added to my case. (Craig and John are nice guys, by the way, being Manchester lads like myself. Useless, in this case, but nice). Apparently, I’ll get a call within another 72 hours.

But hang on. My 14-days’ grace period will expire by then. Walking away from the contract is the only thing I’ve got to trade with, if your people don’t agree that I wasn’t properly informed on the terms of the deal. I talk to Craig and John again and they - very kindly - answer my requests about doing this and tell me I can walk into a shop tomorrow and explain the situation and hand back the phone. And that’s what I’m planning to do - I have to, because the rest of your company might understand the science bit, then.

The Science Bit

  • Current disputed bill = ~£500, which I intend to resist paying, and I think I have a reasonable case.
  • Value of the contract we’d agreed = 18 x £35 = £630, which I agreed to happily pay. But now I won’t be doing that. You are down £130, at best. Nice move, slick.
  • Value of the next ten 18 month contracts after that which I would have signed up for = £6300, or so. You’re down another £5800.
  • By the way - value of positive word-of-mouth recommendations from me (which I have given in the past) = at least two or three other customers, maybe more = £12,000+.
  • Adverse recommendations word-of-mouth from me (which I will definitely give) = at least -£18,000, since I’ll be very vigorous about that.
  • Adverse value of this blog post/facebook/twitter/etc. and the others I’ll publish to your reputation and your bottom line = unknown, potentially enormous.

The Sequel?

I genuinely hope that my next blog post will be entitled ‘How Carphone Warehouse Regained My Trust‘. But that really is up to you. You are a communications company - surely you are a listening brand, as well? Oh yes, one more thing - the ‘Feedback and Complaints’ button on your site doesn’t work at all. Shame, that.

Best,

Ian Delaney

[Readers - want to help? This account combines several more phone calls to make it less boring.

As well as the phone exchanges above, I emailed the text of this post to the chairman, press office and enquiries addresses at Carphone Warehouse in order to give them a chance to do something.  No response, obviously, from any of them.

If you have been similarly disgruntled, cheated and trodden upon by telecoms giants, and Carphone Warehouse in particular, you might like to link to this post (or digg and delicious it) and help damage the company's bottom line by spreading the word. Make a stand, people! You're welcome to take the text as well, providing you attribute it. This is not about popularising this blog: my post rate should show that isn't a factor here.

Legal advice is also very welcome, as are recommendations of UK mobile suppliers who care about their customers. Most welcome of all, though, would be a response from the company itself.]

By Ian Delaney | Posted in business, cash, mobile | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)