We Brits are really world-class at remembering, as the recent first-class Remembrance Day pageants show. While we religiously and quite rightly observe two minute silences, our US brethren tried to reclaim 1/11/11 as Binary Day with special numerological significance for the digital worker. The world it seems moves on faster than we ‘Little Englanders’ would like. “Don’t forget Bletchley” we blurt.

The sad passing of Steve Jobs should and could be a learning point for many in the UK tech media. His amazing devices, contained few true innovations, but perfectly captured the hearts and minds of wealthy UK consumers. This in turn created an unseemly rush for their ‘eyeballs’ which resulted in scant coverage of real British innovation (some of which, in the form, of ARM processors, appears in the iPhone itself).

Pleasingly, a senior national newspaper tech journalist shared her opinion that the rise of the gadget had led to a corresponding decline in ‘tech stories which mattered’. It was then a surprise to hear at least some coverage of the 60^th anniversary of the ‘first ERP system’, used by the long defunct, but once legendary, Lyons Tea Company to calculate wages and tea room takings. The reality is that this was more perfect nostalgia, only coincidentally IT-related.

Some in the UK technology scene have seen the light. After Autonomy’s shareholders ‘sold the crown jewels to HP’, (a story which revealed just how uninterested the UK media is in technology compared to Westminster) the BBC’s coverage has picked up – albeit by trawling the same Cambridge campus which spawned Autonomy or the Government-backed and so over-hyped real estate of (ahem) Silicon Roundabout, where some chips are laced into cookies, but none fabricated into microprocessors.

Former Telegraph journo and one man contradiction, Milo Yianniopoulos, who lives in London and San Francisco and writes anti-porn, pro-gay, right wing prose, has been brave enough to ‘say what he sees’. His manifesto, carefully re-positioned ‘live’ in relation to a perhaps unfairly hostile reception from UK tech writers who feel underpaid for writing about the success of largely overseas companies, promises much, though it has yet to deliver.

Would some of the venom directed at this message of hope and change, perhaps have been better spent researching the UK’s new tech innovators? Looking for the UK’s Golden Geese, rather than admiring the Golden Eggs deposited across the ocean and into this island’s dying high streets from vast Asian container ships. Or should we just continue to electronically wire our wealth to the Eastern tech companies that increasingly look like tomorrow’s writers of IT history and mourn the passing of a Golden Age of British Tech?

Are we right to decry the celebration of the past and of the technology achievements of the past? Feel free to comment.

[ENDS]

From a Tech PR perspective The Silly Season is a God Send. Now is the chance to review progress, line-up customers and reach out to writers and bloggers, ready for the news feast to come. In a normal year, we take advantage of the downtime to raise real-life tech issues with writers who, unusually, are not busy checking flights to conferences or speculating on upcoming gadgets announcements.

Sadly this year’s window of sanity has been squandered by two events, one important; Autonomy’s purchase by HP (of which, more soon) the other a simple hoax which in their own ways both indicate a disregard for real technology news.

[Please note, I am disregarding the sterling work of journalists trying to trendsurf this summer's #ukriots and the UK tabloid hacking stories – well done James Murray of Business Green and Nic Booth of CityAM and well, various]

So it was that The Telegraph, CNN, Mashable and others ran a hooky survey story claiming Internet Explorer users were less intelligent than ‘the rest of us’ puffed up by a company none of them had ever heard of before – because the site was just two month’s old. Then the truth came out (for details see the excellent ‘Anatomy of a hoax’ for a dissection by competitive analysis expert Arthur Weiss). Some hacks, including The Register, were gracious in defeat. Others less so. The BBC pulled its own story but kept links to other technology writers in its amended story to point out other writers who had also fallen for the hoax.

Perhaps the Aptiquant yarn proves today’s IT consumerized ‘citizen journalists’ have more knowledge than generalist writers, but questions have to be asked as to why UK journalists, a cynical lot at best, fell for this ruse at a time when there is very little other technology news around. We suggest three major reasons

1. It appealed to their prejudices.
   Tech writers prefer new, over good-enough. To some extent this is understandable. The IT industry innovates more than most. But labelling non-techy Internet Explorer users as Dummies, merely for sticking with the default browser on their not-very-new-and-shiny PCs, seems like a low blow or, at best, defensive. Especially when grannies use Facebook and Readers Comments act as due diligence, picking up fake stories.
2. Damned statistics.
   Researching news is difficult, or more accurately, time consuming. These days, with fewer editorial staff than ever, PR surveys offer tempting pre-researched linkbait. But uncovering this hoax required very little effort. With 100,000 claimed subjects, this survey is unbelievably large. A moment’s pause would have realised that a no-name brand would never be able to fund research at this scale.
3. Big brands have more power than (most) writers realise
   Most writers would rather face waterboarding than admit being unduly influenced by PR from Apple, Intel and others. The truth is otherwise. A national tech journalist Twitter DM’ed us to explain that ratings often trump news value (innovation). He refreshingly honestly admitted there were so many iPhone stories because ‘Readers like them, I’m afraid.’

So surely, the delayed iPhone 5 (4.5?) and with no press conferences for two months, the Silly Season is an ideal time for the great industry sector we work in to ask questions. Alas, playing into the hands of global brands, it has just become a backwater concocted ‘survey stories’ and thumb-twiddling until the next junket. Hands up we too have also fallen for hoaxes and cock-ups (remember the Samsung Filelogger red herring?) and we love the odd survey story too – odder the better, but paying that much attention to Steve Jobs’ lunch plans is neither innovative nor interesting.

It is always much more interesting to speak to real users and canvass Thought Leaders. This is not easy because they give out mixed messages, hold no ‘black and white’ views and don’t sponsor press events. However this way, rather than confirming existing prejudices, perhaps even during the Silly Season, we all might learn something real.

Feel free to comment, or for more real tech stories, contact us (details www.positivemarketing.org)

Not that there is anything wrong with advertising, that, plus a good World War or Two*, are how great brands are made. But it is not what many in the UK call journalism; investigative, free-from-commercial considerations and provocative. And this revelation demands a new type of response from those of us who work in the ‘earned media’ B2B space that stubbornly resists being rebranded as anything other than Public Relations. First the evidence:

EXHIBIT ONE

TechTarget acquires Computer Weekly – 28^th March 2011

When a $270m giant, whose business is to repackage and distribute content built by advertisers to a highly qualified audience, swoops in to buy the UK’s leading technology title for small change, this is a seminal moment. TechTarget’s admirable business model (slogan ‘Where serious tech buyers decide’) is built on selling eyeballs to advertisers in much the same way that broadcasters sell slots between programmes. With one difference; almost all of the content has been pre-created by the advertisers themselves. It is too early to see what that means for Computer Weekly’s readership and long-term editorial direction, but no one is claiming this move increases the freedom the UK tech press enjoys. In fairness, it is the case that ‘free’ content, mostly whitepapers written by tech vendor product marketing teams, is very compelling, more technically detailed, if a lot less objective, than much UK tech media output, which all too often focuses on IT consumerisation and gadgets (as previously ranted about).

EXHIBIT TWO
Nasty US tech journalist spat Tom Foremski v Michael Arrington – April 2011 (ongoing)

There are few things more wrongly compelling than observing two girls fighting at close range – except for two grown tech journalists bitching. In the fascinating and deeply personal battle for the moral high-ground which followed failed media empire AOL’s surprise purchase of up and coming blog Techcrunch, the winner was not so much the truth, as the status quo. As both sides slung mud about whether investing in the companies they were writing about clouded their judgement – it was easy to see both sides. It got really bitchy when writer’s partners and their employers were cited, in a row that even the UK red tops would relish. Bottom line – there is a conflict of interest in writing about and investing in companies. This seems to confirm that there is a new code of ethics for those who create commercially beneficial copy about companies whose profits they ultimately share.

To recap, so far we have the cream of the UK’s tech media working for what some unkind souls might call a ‘content farm’ and reporters who describe themselves as well-paid by their employers, writing copy which may also contribute to their personal wealth. Confused? See a ‘smerging’ of roles here? Here’s more proof from another recent personal professional experience.

EXHIBIT THREE
‘they are not a PR firm’ – May 2011

OK, hands up there are some journalists who thanks to many years of careful nurturing, preferential treatment on stories and possibly the odd expensed refreshment, are ‘friends of the family’ here at Positive Marketing. On the other hand, we like all PR companies are entreated daily to submit copy for titles either too lazy or too cash-strapped to provide their own content. That is the status quo. So when we recently saw a competitor given a regular blog slot by a leading UK B2B tech title (who we agreed to keep nameless), we were intrigued at the possibility of getting in on the act. A quick call to a normally hard-to-track-down editor (coincidentally a former colleague) and then three rapid-fire email volleys disabused us of this possibility and I quote “X isn’t a PR firm as such = it’s a consulting firm”. According to this editor, the blogger in question did not work for a PR firm, so why would its hyperbolic Linkedin description be “the only PR and communications consultancy to specialise in the enterprise software industry”?

It seems the best of us can get confused in this new ‘smerged’ new world order. But rather than bleat about it, we at Positive Marketing are getting with this new charade and turning into a consultancy too, it’s just that some of our paying clients want to call what we do PR.

Hopefully these three examples confirm what many have said for some time, tech journalism, advertising and PR are ‘smerging’ together to become, well, just plain tech marketing. When editorial can be replaced by product literature [EXHIBIT 1], when journalists can promote companies they invest in [EXHIBIT 2] and when PR companies are the new journalists [EXHIBIT 3], the rules of the game really have changed. In some ways that puts us all into competition for the same vendor dollars that have always fuelled the information opportunity which surrounds the IT industry. Whether we have to change the name of our services, literally invest in our clients, create more Whitepapers (or even all three) we still love this sector and treasure its dynamism, so maybe it is better that the hypocrisy around editorial independence needs to die. Or maybe it was just a myth to start with.

In subsequent posts we will look at the repercussions of this new advertorial honesty and why with content as king, contacts as commodity and relationships the new currency, we like our position in the market for ideas more than ever. If you want to learn more about how we think, work and deliver results daily, leave a comment, email us at contact@positivemarketing or, if you can be pithy, send a tweet to @positmarket.

* If you have not yet you have to see the excellent BBC Three series ‘Secrets of the Superbrands’ where Alex Riley sees, amongst other things, the rise of Coca Cola and adidas as being aided by their roles in supplying opposite sides in World War 2

The Beeb is not the first to have suffered from having the full light of the Twittersphere trained on it and there are the well-publicised examples of Habitat’s sale fail and The Daily Mail’s gypsy miscalculation.

These days, if you are a brand owner, you need to be aware of ‘sentiment’ in real time. Something made eye-wateringly obvious by the large premium Salesforce ‘overpaid’ last week for the incomplete solution formerly known as Radian 6. When brands such as Pepsi have ‘brand control rooms’ which contain sufficient computing power to put men on the moon, one can see just how seriously brand sentiment is being taken.

But this was not about some bad experiences in purchasing sugar water. This is about disruption to a national information service. One which, allegedly until recently, had implications for global security as UK nuclear submarine commanders allegedly used its output to verify the know world beyond their vessel remained un-nuked. Its absence would signal Armageddon for their pre-programmed target cities.

The BBC’s original terseness in explaining itself, was remedied in part by a rapid resumption of service, it took just 30 minutes at around midnight on a working day for the sites to come back up.

I predicted at the time that, just as with the recent outages at the London Stock Exchange, there would be no accurate public apportioning of blame. Although the ‘culprit’ was allegedly traced to a router in Canary Wharf’s Telehouse, which we were told was protected by a back-up, there was no explanation as to why the hardware, as well as its back-up failed, who was responsible for the hardware, the service or the maintenance and no remedial action promised to prevent future failure.

By the next day, The Twitterati had moved on to another story, which in a way is a real shame, because this story at its heart proves three things:-

1. Enterprise technology is now so embedded into business that it has become a competitive edge.
2. Brands need to have the ability to respond in Real Time to technical issues which present them in a negative light.
3. The time when technical issues can be apportioned to faceless hardware faults is coming to an end. CIOs need to diagnose and call out the real issues behind such failures. The alternative, we all just accept such poor service as inevitable, is the opposite of progress.

The epilogue showed that moving on may have been the wrong instinct for many IT press. A story ‘buried’ on Friday morning, conveniently, April Fools’ Day, showed that perhaps there were reasons for the LSE and Beeb outages that were a little less benign than an unnamed contractor simply unplugging a router in a highly secure datacenter. Although there is no proof that the two stories were linked, at least the BBC’s redoubtable tech team was taking the issue of downtime seriously now.

This SQL Injection risk is one faced by thousands of enterprises every day, due to poor coding practices and is one taken seriously by banks and others who see the link between business success and reliable Enterprise IT.

However, this is not the stuff that parodies of 140 characters or less are made out of. In this way, the very strength of Twitter, with its ability to brew storms in the late night cocoa cups of BBC Website watchers is its weakness. It doesn’t have the attention span to analyze the real tech stories that matter.

What is your perspective on Twitter as a medium for observing Tech meltdowns? Is there enough coverage of enterprise tech and its implications in the business press? Feel free to leave a comment.

But, from an innovation point of view, it was a flop. Some blamed Apple for releasing its killer product nine months earlier. But there is an alternative theory for why we saw so little to excite the prosumers that we have all become. B2C is not where the innovation is today.

Don’t get me wrong, the consumerisation of IT was a nice distraction. Milestones included the IBM PC ruining the prediction that the global market for computers was less than 100, the Walkman personalising the gramophone, the iPhone proving to have more staying power than the Palm Pilot.

But seriously, what earth-shattering innovation came from CES 2011? The Playbook isn’t it, Windows working on ARM as well as Intel architectures ain’t it and, despite the justifications that European journalists will have to give to their editors as they hand over their expense claims, neither are netbook/tablet mongrels.

There may yet be a hidden gem, the jetsetting junketeers of Europe did not deem it newsworthy. So perhaps it is time to go back to where IT came from – the business.

In an industry which many see as analogous to IT, new technology is proven on the race circuit, not the production lines. In IT, this is likely to be the ‘boring old’ worlds of banking and science, not the handbags of Milan. Can I therefore respectfully suggest professional tech commentators return to what creates the wealth that buys all these gadgets. Let’s look at B2B computing anew.

While there may only a few European B2B tech shows left and no doubt Earls Court and Cologne are not the sorts of place where “What goes on tour, stays on tour’, this is where the next great advances in tech are likely to be on display. Furthermore, Enterprise IT developments need to be critically evaluated on behalf of customers frantically looking for the sort of expert advice only tech writers can give. Unfortunately bloggers can’t impress their friends by unwrapping this sort of technology as their colleagues and friends gather round in the office or down the pub. So I am guessing next year’s show is guaranteed to be ‘the best ever’ and the taxi lines longer than ever.

Did you go? Did we miss all the great innovation? Feel free to comment.

A brief review of the facts. According to various sources Skype went down for an extended period in what some in IT euphemistically call an ‘unscheduled outage’. As a consequence many millions of Skype users (Skype claims over 550 million users which is more than Facebook by some counts) were left high and dry with only traditional i.e. expensive, means of contacting business associates, loved ones and families. Christmas really came early for traditional telcos.

In common with many other recent outages, such as PayPal and VISA’s Wikileaks-related Denial of Service attacks, the world did not stop spinning, there was no rush on the banks and no animals were harmed. However, what this inconvenient downtime has done, is prove how unready for show-time cloud services can be and how foolish small businesses (Disclosure – Positive Marketing is a Skype subscriber) would be to rely on Skype. It surely also scuppered the talk of a Skype IPO any time soon. Not that you would know that from the coverage.

This was not a proud moment for technology journalism. At its best, technology journalists bring clarity to an erudite world not understood by mainstream news hacks. Their writing explains the relevance of the latest technical breakthroughs in tablet computers to how to avoid expensive overseas calls. They enlighten the less geeky and more importantly keep technology, which gets a poor press in Europe, on the media agenda.

As keen readers we want to be furnished with the Who, Why, Where and When of cloud services and have all the latest cock-ups be they phishing attacks or government IT cost overruns, explained. So what clear and salutary reason did the tech media give for Skype’s nosedive? Here’s a selection:-

• “Skype goes titsup” proffered El Reg
• “a software problem” The Guardian illuminated
• “some sorta glitch…took down the supernodes” declared the Wall Street Journal and
• “buggy software” proclaimed ZDNet a full week after the event.

How remarkably similar to the PR line from Skype itself (hat-tip to the internal team there). However, apart from some inconclusive speculation about mega-nodes, there was no sign of the detailed explanation surely owed to the users, potential paying customers and potential IPO investors as to what ACTUALLY caused the issue and how it would be avoided in future. To its credit, albeit a week on, Skype has now explained what happened, but arguably still not how it will be prevented in the future.

So here’s my real beef. How come, just a few days after a major outage, UK coverage of fanboy gadget the iPad (with just 5% of the users Skype claims) already out-numbers the Skype stories (see graph).

Here’s a confident prediction; stories like Skype, will not go away and in fact will become more and more common as we rely more on ever more complex cloud-based IT. This makes them precisely what we, the readers of tech bloggers and journalists, want and need to know about. We can read adverts for smartphones any time we like.

So I am laying out a challenge to my noble fellow IT investigators to get to the truth quickly when these stories break. Let’s hope the next cloud cock-up gets more than superficial coverage, because I cannot believe that this noble profession has been reduced to reeling off features from smartphone manufacturers’ releases.

Come on guys.

Oh and Happy New Year. Let’s hope 2011 sees some corking stories about Tech. IT matters.

What started as an interesting challenge, interviewing several IT services gurus on-stage, ended up somewhere between a game of chance and a military planning operation. Ten of my eleven team-mates opted for wild and wonderful escape routes with cross-border plane reservations and seven hour pre-dawn drives to neighbouring France.

There are worse places to be stranded of course, but weekends, although not work-free, are precious in fast-growing businesses. My Plan B, the overnight Barcelona to Paris train, would have been wonderful in high summer, but not on the third day of no air transportation in a cold snap and with the risk of poor internet connectivity. So I held tight and waited for events to turn my way.

As we always tell clients at Positive Marketing, with some careful preparation, savvy execution and a preparedness to be wrong, the news agenda can be your friend. We call it trend-surfing because of its many similarities to the preparation and the timing required for actual surfing. So it was, that after posting my comments on the UK’s BBC News Website, in-between frustrating server errors on the BA site, that a researcher from the broadcaster called to ask how things were going. This was the opportunity.

A couple of coffees later I was live on air, from my hotel bedroom, with BBC Radio 5. We discussed the implications for fast businesses, especially those experiencing growth like Positive Marketing, when state workers, in charge of national infrastructure, strike.

It was, the interviewer noted ‘a good plug’ but it is always good to ‘eat your own dog food’ because it reminds you of what you are asking your clients to do. Pleasingly enough, selected highlights from my rant also made it to the main BBC News Website. The twin hits resulted in a stream of emails from potential customers and partners, all tuning in early on a Sunday morning to catch-up on news, some of whom I had not heard from in a decade.

Modern news agendas move ever faster, making agile trendsurfing a critical skill. Marketing folks just naturally feel better when they crack on, experimenting with angles, rather than letting events wash over them. A two-hour turnaround from pitch-to-coverage proves we can walk the walk for their brands too.

If only the over-paid and unthinking Spanish air traffic controllers understood the consequences of their inaction would be for hundreds of thousands of revenue-generating passengers. But then, had they done so, this trendsurfing opportunity would not have existed. So, if you think eating canine cuisine beats letting the tail wag the dog, we would be happy kickstart your trendsurfing too.

Enthusiasm is what drives audacious editorial pitches, cheeky Tweets and newsworthy press releases.

Expertise helps you rapidly pick up when your news falls flat – sometimes for no reason except timing.

Experience determines whether to keep on plugging away or move on fast. Nice work by Nokia this week for signalling it is coming back from the smartphone grave.

Two recent innovations emphasise the need to make that judgement call faster in tech marketing.

Firstly Google Instant, which some celebrated as the death knell of the SEO cult makes ‘the Recent’ as important as the relevant by speeding up searches by 270 milliseconds. Then Twitter, in a much-hyped announcement as an information discovery portal, took on Google as the launchpad for our web searches.

The upshot is that messaging needs to be ‘on the fly’, adapting to the Real Time moves of the market. Positive Marketing is mid-way through a branding exercise with a pre-launch telco start-up. Last week we needed to rapidly course-correct its slideware from ‘SaaS 2.0′ to Cloud 2.0 following the recent Cloudforce London event. If the market is moving on, we need to stay on it.

Marketing professionals, now need much more than a passing acquaintance with the latest state of the market to do their jobs. They need to be ON IT. This means paying close attention to the announcements, successes and failures of customers, partners and rivals, not necessarily to emulate them but to position your messages in context.

Speed clearly matters for successful positioning, which makes failing fast and moving on as important as being right first time. Being out-of-synch in this highly-connected, rapid-change environment is one sign you are in the wrong industry. Others include ‘cloudwashing’ your existing offerings, launching [market-leading product]-killers and taking market leadership for granted.

This is not easy stuff. But there are agencies and tools out there to help. Regarding help, email us for a copy of our soon-to-be-released report covering products from all the key players in Social Media monitoring tools.

This is when development teams at almost every lab in the universe, realise summer is over and they have to release the products their CEO described as ‘expected in the second half of 2010′. Adding pressure, a rash of industry events makes this a very hard time to get any ‘push through’ for your PR efforts. But someone has to make the headlines, so, like the pros we are, we have been reminding clients new, old and prospective, about the definition of news;

Lesson 1.01 – News is something that happens today, that did not happen yesterday.

This can be a tough lesson. Whereas, strictly speaking, the announcement of sales figures, new personnel and products being ready to ship, however run-of-the-mill, are news, the mere desire to make a splash is definitively not.

However, when all your competitors are dropping releases like so many waves breaking on the shore, it feels like you should steal their wave. Especially when your nervous sales team berate your PR as creating a becalmed gyre. Well, turns out, surfing someone else’s wave, is a great idea.

Today’s Twitter-driven news agenda, especially in the technology sector, is very tidal. Waves of news break with a new regularity, wiping out even the most carefully prepared announcements. Unless you are the creator of the tsunami (recently examples include Intel’s break into security and Apple’s U-Turn in the face of Android), even the most carefully-prepared media relation campaigns can wipe out on the rocks.

Nothing wrong with your news, but in Q4 you just need to work harder.Fear not, jump up on someone else’s wave. Got a security product? Produce authoritative research about Facebook hacks. Got a back-up solution? Comment on record fines for data loss. Better still find a new angle to news stories that are guaranteed to happen, new smartphone launches, government belt-tightening plans or post-holiday depression.

Trendsurfing, like the real thing requires preparation. You need to wax your board, zip up that wetsuit and be brave. Not everyone wave will break how you want to, but that is when you get back onboard and paddle out again. If you want Positive Marketing’s trendsurfers to show you how to wax your board, head out into the surf and go with, not against the tide, you know what to do.