Kerstin Baker-Ash

Thanks, An Post!

We have a little holiday ritual in our house.  On the first weekend of December or the last in November, Barenaked for the Holidays gets cranked up on the speakers, we warm up a bottle of mulled wine and sit down at my great-grandmother's dining room table (more about its provenance and interesting lifetime in another post) to write holiday cards.  Two sets of cards with two sets of messages, and wishes inside for a wonderful holiday season.

As holiday cards are traded across the oceans, we always love stumbling across a new batch of cards through our letterbox (I'm turning into a Brit, forgive me please).  My good friend, who sang at our wedding and is an extremely talented opera singer sent us a lovely card in 2006 which got lost in the post somewhere between Germany and Ireland, where we were living at the time.  She was offered a contract with an opera company in Lisbon shortly after and two years later, she went back to visit Germany where a friend of hers had been collecting her mail.  Lo and behold, our formerly lost card had been sent back by An Post (the Irish postal service) nearly two years later.  I know this isn't an extreme case of lost post, but seriously.  Two years?

The explanation (as far as I can tell off the photo), is that they first believed it to be an insufficient address.  Hmm.  That was the address our bank bills came to, our electricity, and a bunch of other mail (including holiday cards) - so maybe it was insufficient en route rather than in Ireland. On the 2nd of July, 2008 (18 months after it was sent) - An Post finally stamped it as "Not At This Address" and sent it back on its merry way to Köln.  If you look at the blue stamp closely, it seems as if the mail somehow even made a detour to a French speaking country at some point (even though the postage stamp is German), with a bilingual tick box option.  I want to make a joke about efficiency and Ireland here, but it most likely spent 2007 and half of 2008 lying neglected, screaming out for someone to please pick it up and rescue it from the postal sorting floor in Dublin 14 (or if it was lucky, the GPO).

Maybe this year we'll start a new tradition - e-cards.  Credit crunch friendly and efficient, all rolled into one.

Social Media and Tragedy: Hysteria, Hype or Helpful?

I want to begin this post by offering my heartfelt sympathy and thoughts to those affected by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.  There are no words, there is no fix-it phrase or mantra.

I try to engage in social media.  I have accounts across the spectrum; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a heckuva lot more.  When an earthquake hit Sichuan Province in China, the Twitterverse erupted in a steady stream of information sharing and updates from those in the affected areas.  Last night, I rather accidentally read the first of many updates from Jason Calacanis about news of a terrorist attack in Mumbai.  Other news began to trickle in, and I flicked between the Beeb, CNN and Al Jazeera at home to get updates.  At one point, CNN told its viewers to check Twitter out for latest news and updates.

Okay, so has Twitter (and the wider social media universe) been helpful?  While some of the news coming out of Mumbai has been helpful - Aditya Sengupta being particularly helpful by updating maps and the list of injured and deceased as well as an aggregated feed of information from the aptly named account MumbaiAttacks - a lot of it seems to be hysterical chatter and bandwagon jumping.  How much of it is genuinely useful to you?  I can't say that much of it is to me.

For breaking news, Twitter is great.  It's the first place I heard about the Mumbai attacks, the Sichuan earthquake.  URL-shortening links from CNN or any other media outlet and tweeting it seems to be clogging the feeds of a lot of people today. The platform is designed for rapid-fire response, but I would venture a theory: the people who are then made aware of the situation are going to get their news elsewhere.  They're going to read the viewpoint that's important and relevant to them (i.e. Canadians wanting updates on the status of fellow Canadians might go to the Toronto Star, people wanting updates on the Chabad House attacked by the terrorists might go to VosIzNeias, and British people might go to the BBC).  The information on those sites, as much as we love to use hashtags, is far more organized and readable than a random mashup of TinyURLs and advice to stop Tweeting updates because the terrorists might be watching.

The Telegraph breathlessly announced that last night, the social media came of age.  Wait a second.  Did someone not say this about the earthquake in Sichuan, the cyclone in Myanmar or the arrest of an American in Cairo?  It's a great medium and feel free to call me old school here, but let's take a breath.  While print newspapers might be taking a last, raspy gasp of air, traditional media outlets are alive and kicking.  They integrate social media, alongside real, trained journalists (okay, maybe Faux News doesn't count here).  I'll eat my shoe (and it's a big one) if social media overtakes television or the internet as the place where people get their updates - it's simply far too disorganised to become a viable option for the masses.

Maybe it's time we stop thinking we're as important as we want to be or perceive we are in the social media sphere and give a thought to the people who are caught up in this tragedy of unimaginable proportions.  I'll venture a tweet here - please be with them, support them and help them as they deal with this attack.  It's happened, and I sure as goodness can't do anything about it from where I'm sitting.  Pray, meditate, contemplate, reflect.  Peace be with them.

Text Alerts - Worth It?

The Metropolitan Transit Authority dragged itself into the 90s (okay, the 00s...) today by adding a text alert service to update you on potential stumbling blocks in your NYC subway journey.  Great idea, in principle.  Silicon Alley Insider has already unsubscribed from the service, saying that the frequency of the messages (11) and the fact that the alerts were not SMS character limit friendly made it more of an annoyance than a helpful service.

I've been using First Capital Connect and Tube Alerts for as long as I've been working in London. More often than not, they add time to my journey by telling me a line is severely delayed (when it isn't and I end up taking a longer route), or not updating anything leaving me standing on the platform wondering where my bleeping train is.  The last FCC alert I got was on the 31st of October, telling me that Finsbury Park station was closed - helpful, sure.  But FCC haven't alerted me to the line problems this morning on the Hertford Loop, the cancellations on Monday on the Great Northern Route or last week's travel chaos because of overhead line problems.  So, a great service in theory but a poor service in practice.  Also, you can't specify a route (i.e. Kings Cross to Knebworth), but a larger line.  This means irrelevant texts as well - I'm really not interested that trains aren't calling at Peterborough, or any stops in between Kings Cross and home.  In fact, it's like unwrapping a surprise gift on the platform.  The train's not calling at any stops until Welwyn North?  Score!

TfL alerts are a bit better.  I can specify my normal morning and evening journey, as well as an alternative Piccadilly Line route if the morning commute gets jammed on the Victoria or Bakerloo lines. Again, the problems are both accuracy and timing; if Kings Cross closes because of overcrowding, I don't get a text message about it and instead learn about the closure when the train mysteriously carries on to Highbury and Islington.  I do understand that there are a lot of considerations running such a complex public transportation system, but if the station matrices can be updated and I can get API access for iPhone applications that are relatively up to date (i.e. within 5 minutes), why can't TfL automate their systems to pick it up? Thankfully, it's not a character limitation issue like the MTA's; I get a single text message (if I get one, har har) and a quick update.  The system is much more robust (and less 1998 web design-y), allowing you to add multiple routes and multiple times, and although you're restricted to two text alerts per day, you can always opt to receive e-mail alerts.  You can turn your alerts off when you go on holiday, saving you a wake-up call at a particularly gruesome hour to remind you of what awaits you upon your return to real life, and a particularly expensive roaming bill.

The most bizarre text alert I received was a youthful congratulatory message from the British School of Motoring shortly after I passed my driver's test.  Geared at text-savvy 17 year olds and not old farts like me who can't transfer their full Canadian drivers license over to a British one (at least without being Americanly restricted to automatic transmissions), it incentivizes you to sign up your mates so that you can all drive round like boy racers with full driving licenses.

Text alerts are a great idea in practice, but of all the major public transport networks involved in it, none of them seem to have got it bang on.  Either you can't choose your routes, you get too few or too many texts, and the alerts aren't relevant to you or up to date for your journey.  Far from relying on text messages, I usually check the FCC, TfL and BBC websites conveniently bookmarked (I make no excuses for my nerd behavior), which can sort of kind of help me out in planning my journey.  At the end of the day, I usually find out about a Tube delay, train line problem or massive football match overcrowding (damn you, Arsenal!) the olde fashioned way.  Stuck on the platform, ears plugged by soothing tunes and smiling.  If there's nothing I can do about it, I try to get on with it.  I wish I could provide this sage advice to some of my fellow passengers...

...and just as I'm about to press post, TfL saves itself:

 

VAT Reduction, E-Commerce and You

In an effort to stall or slow down the death spiral of consumer spending in the UK, Alistair Darling announced today in the government's Pre Budget report that Value Added Tax (VAT) would be reduced to 15% from 17.5%.  This means that from Monday, 1st December, that new 40" LCD television you want to buy is going to cost £538.29 instead of £549.99, saving you a credit crunch munching £11.70 you can apply to the case of cabernet sauvignon you intended to purchase for your office holiday party and the gas to ferry you to your kids' school pageants; the tax is actually increasing on tobacco, alcohol and petrol on the same day to make up for the loss.  If you're saying "huh?", you're not alone.  It seems like a very minor bandaid fix with major pain points for retailers and customers alike, not to mention the mad rush expected on petrol stations, liquor stores and tobacconists this weekend after payday.

What does it mean for retailers who operate e-commerce sites?  Firstly, VAT is already hard-coded into most e-commerce systems.  This means a major overhaul for only a 13 month period when this VAT reduction is valid (the kind folks in government are giving us a year plus a whole month to enjoy a £1.06 savings on that £49.99 pair of jeans).  VAT isn't applied to a lot of "raw" foods (i.e. meals that aren't pre-packaged/cooked/takeaway) or children's items (clothing, shoes, etc).  So the real "savings" are going to be for the bigger ticket items like TVs, furniture and holidays abroad.  My last little sarcastic dig: people aren't buying these things anyway, and a savings of £15 on a £600 holiday isn't going to be a make or break in the decision process.

The VAT rate change presents a huge problem for e-retailers come Monday morning.  With the team at Inside AdWords advising us how to prepare for Cyber Monday (which follows Black Friday, the day that you see news reports of people in Santa sweaters camping out at Wal-Mart after a hearty Thanksgiving meal in lawn chairs at 4 am waiting to bag Christmas bargains), we can expect an uplift in volume as people shop online for holiday presents.  Businesses are left to scramble and update their systems to the new VAT rate, and the same goes for online retail stores as much as it does for bricks-and-mortar high street shops.  Online businesses are now realizing that, in order to avoid stalling for the sake of a pound until next Monday, they're going to have to apply a 2.5% discount at the checkout right away. Currys and Body Shop were some of the first UK e-commerce sites to use this promotion tonight, and some enterprising PPC kids will doubtless use this in their ad copy come tomorrow morning.

What frustrates me is that the government has now created an artificial stagnation in sales (not just online) for the rest of November.  The Pre Budget report has snuck in a rise to petrol which hasn't gone down relative to the increase after the price of a barrel of oil tanked (pun intended).  Curiously, Darling has also included a sly whisky tax of 29p, which could hit Scotland's economy.  

Yes, the economy is in tatters.  Yes, decisive action needs to be taken in order for consumer confidence to increase.  The VAT rate decrease seems a ridiculously weak response to this, and something that is going to cause a bigger nightmare to retailers (who will doubtless raise prices by 2.5% in order to avoid temporarily changing their systems for a year).  I overheard people on my morning commute talking about how this rate change is going to represent a nightmare for them. At my favorite coffee shop this morning, the manager was already talking about spending the weekend at work changing the systems and price boards over to reflect the change.  Yes, I'm going to save a whopping five pence on my morning extra-shot latté, representing an overall savings of £12 (5p a day) for the entire 13 months this VAT reduction is valid for. For large and small businesses alike, this is going to be a headache of massive proportions.  For the average consumer, it's going to mean diddly squat.  It would be helpful if the government took a step back and thoughtfully addressed the problem, instead of creating a secondary mess out of the economic storm in the United Kingdom.  Oh well.  One can only hope...

Google Mail - Soothing Themes and Language Differences

I'm loving the new theme option that Gmail gifted us this morning.  I chose the beach theme, which then asked me to specify my location (probably for sunrise/sunset positioning, which it does on Google themes already).  

Interestingly, when I chose my location, I noticed a subtle difference in my navigation menu:

 

Bin.  Not trash.  Bin.  Nice and proper and British, isn't it?  I asked a colleague what he was seeing (he had chosen a new theme too), seems like they've kept trash for some and bin for others.  I hope that doesn't mean that I've started sounding like I went to Madonna's school for British accents...

Analyzing Your Site Traffic

While peeking around Google Analytics, I began to wonder if my visitor trends were anything like that seen in the wider SEM community.  Specifically, was I attracting the right people to my blog?  Is the content on the blog useful, or just random ramblings and occasionally helpful SEM information?  What does the average visitor on my site look at, and how did they get there?

  

I think I have a slightly above average Chrome to other browser ratio, and I'm always surprised to see that people are still using dialup.  Firefox definitely takes the cake in terms of users' browser preferences, and I'm glad to see that my browser of choice (Safari), does satisfactorily. DSL is definitely a misnomer.  If I connected to my site from home, it would register as a broadband visit.  The only thing is, my "broadband" connection behaves much like dialup.  Slow, barely creeping above 512k with streaming, BBC iPlayer and Wii internet functionality completely out of the question.  There's definitely a suggestion out of the Unknown and Dialup factions that site load time could be a factor.

I also wanted to take a look at geographic trends - unsurprisingly, my three biggest traffic drivers come from the UK (where I live), the USA (arguably where most of the SEM community is) and Canada (where I'm from).  I was surprised to see countries like Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire and a fair few visits from Romania show up on the list, but I think looking at the keywords that are driving traffic to the site gives me a bit more insight into the type of writing that gets my site listed in the SERPs.

The number one keyword? Fail Cat.  Not Kerstin Baker-Ash, but Fail Cat - after the new Twitter "fail" logo (a change from the Fail Whale of greater notoriety).  That's saying something (negative) about personal branding, I think.  A number of name searches, as well as a couple of mis-directs from people searching for Norwegian actress Kristin Baker (of Friday the 13th and other... ahem... movies).  People looking for information about my cousin, Ben Farrant, and the memorial bike ride from Seattle to Portland in his honor have popped up quite a bit as well.

A couple of learnings then:

1. I'm not sure my site is properly optimized.  By that, I mean that tags and URL titles aren't being taken advantage of, and my site is showing up for really irrelevant traffic.
2. Although I like looking at the map (my father was a geography teacher in a previous life) and spotting all the different countries that my site has been seen in, I'd really like to get a solid and relevant readership base - I'm not sure the search engine marketing nature of the blog appeals to a bunch of people who land on the site after random keyword searches.
3. I need to post at a much more frequent rate.  While I'd love to talk about every little thing going on in the industry, I think a lot of people read blogs that combine some sort of personal opinion along with newsworthy or current information.   

So, I'll try a bit harder to mix up the newsy-techy bits with more in depth criticism (or praise!).  And post more often... hopefully! 

Browser Language Settings

Things that bring out the obsessive compulsive in me: blinking mail icons on my app tray, voicemail on my iPhone that won't clear away, that sort of thing. So I logged into Gmail (which I very rarely use, and it's only in the last two days that I've re-upped and tried GTalk again) to clear that annoying red M and got this:

Huh? I don't speak Ukrainian, and I can't read the Cyrillic alphabet. Before you think I'm some language mastermind for picking out it's Ukrainian and not Russian - I did cheat a bit - my colleague Marianna is a native of Zaporozhye, Ukraine and clued me into which wonderful Slavic language it was.

This has happened to me more than once. I've never visited a Ukrainian website, nor have I set my browser preferences (in Safari or Firefox) to Ukrainian. Changing your browser language settings in Firefox to Ukrainian only shoves you over to Google.com.ua but doesn't change your Gmail page after the UK redirect (they can't actually use Gmail over here, some copyright issue from 2005). Wonder if it's some renegade Ukrainian Google engineer having a bit of fun? Hmm...

Google Video Chat

So Google has finally added video and voice chat to GTalk/Google Mail/Gmail/etc. It will be very interesting to see if these new additions have any traction in getting other various Google apps integrated into everyday business use. What I'm not entirely fussed about is the necessity to download a separate plugin so that video chat will now work on my machine. Certainly GTalk could upgrade itself and integrate video and voice into the current platform?

I've downloaded the plugin, and although my friends list isn't exactly extensive (I'd much rather use MSN or even Yahoo! Messenger), none of them has downloaded the feature yet. So basically even if I wanted to share video chat with them, they'd need to download it (regardless of their ownership of a webcam or microphone):

Interesting tidbit of information:

Fair enough it's only the first day, but still - it'd be nice if they spidered themselves for updated and relevant information... :)