Remember institutional racism?
This term was coined in the 1960s in the US and widely adopted in the UK in the 1970s to describe a situation where an entire organisation, rather than just one or two individuals within it, collectively fail a particular group of people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. In the UK the term was used to describe the police after a number of high-profile events such those at the Brixton riots, Broadwater Farm and so on.
The idea is that, at least to some extent, the inappropriate behaviours and attitudes of individuals are so widely adopted within the group that they become social norms – because they are so prevalent, no one questions them. Of if they do question them, their questions fall on deaf ears.
I guess it’s another example of group conformity in action.
Sometimes I wonder whether some organisations today suffer from institutional corruption.
We all know the extreme examples: Enron, BCCI, Satyam, and so on. Companies where, ultimately, criminal behavior crashed the companies to the ground.
But isn’t corruption sometimes more subtle, and more pervasive? A few days ago, and this is going to begin to sound like an episode from Money Box, my insurance company sent me a renewal notice for my household insurance. Something made me check – and I discovered that they had increased the premium by 30% compared to last year.
When I called them, as soon as they heard the problem was “price” they put me on to their “loyalty team”. When the salesman heard the price he quickly recomputed it (without apologising) and said it would be the same as last year.
Now my guess is that probably quite a few customers can’t be bothered to check last year’s premium and automatically renew. Personally, I think the company’s behaviour is verging on the criminal. Imagine if I was leaving a shop and the shopkeeper tried to overcharge me by 30%.
When I enter into a relationship with a company I expect to be dealt with honestly – I want to trust that company and have them reward my trust. Would that shopkeeper retain my trust?
Is it possible, then, that an entire company can be institutionally corrupt? Is it possible that the salesman thinks of his role as an upstanding member of the “loyalty” team – when actually he’s in the “covering up our corruption” team?
That his managers and others in the company think that this kind of behaviour is so normal that it’s “commercial best practice”. Is it possible that even the senior management, and the CEO, are so institutionally blind that they believe it right and proper to accept large compensation packages even while their employees are behaving in ways that verge on the criminal?
Could this institutional corruption extend beyond the company to the whole industry? To other companies? To its regulators? To the media? Sometimes there’s not a critical voice to be heard, anywhere – “this is just the way it is in this industry”.
When the UK police were accused of institutional racism I can still remember the confused, questioning voices from their representatives: “You can’t be talking about us? We’re not racist”. It took a long, long time for the idea to really sink in.
The irony, is of course, that as with the police force, or any other organisation, the public recognise this institutional racism, or corruption, or whatever it is. It feels wrong; but the fact that everyone else is telling you it’s right makes it harder to put a name to it.
Of course, businesses that are institutionally corrupt will lose loyalty in the long-run, especially in a social-web-enabled world. My insurance company has already lost mine.
But how do we get beyond this – to a better world?
Pete wrote this on 07.07.10 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Accountability, Behaviour, Culture, Institutions, Mistakes, NixonMcInnes box
Today, Nestlé has become the latest “how not to do social media” case study. Following a campaign by Greenpeace to put an end to the company’s unsustainable use of palm oil, a number of people have been changing their Facebook profile pictures to Greenpeace’s KitKat mock-up logo.
Nestlé’s response on Facebook? “Please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.”
Unsurprisingly, this censorship statement on the social network has caused a crescendo of backlash. But rather than try and diffuse mounting anger towards the brand, Nestlé’s sarcastic, dismissive responses have only served to inflame and enrage fans even more. Read more…
Louise wrote this on 19.03.10 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Mistakes, Social media, Social networks box
I’ve just been catching up on my pre-Christmas backlog of reading and listening matter and discovered this little gem on the last Penny Arcade podcast.
Apparently, before the launch of Tomb Raider Underworld, Eidos’ PR company decided to contact all UK press and ask them to not publish a review for three days after its launch if they intend to give it a score of less than 8/10 in an attempt to bump the game’s MetaCritic scores. Of course, it wasn’t long before word spread about — Gamespot UK’s Guy Cocker was the first to innocuously Twitter about it.
What’s more amusing is their obscure effort to cover it up. Or, rather, not. When contacted videogaming247, their PR company responded
“We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos … we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”
Uh. So that’s cool then. Obviously this intervention didn’t stop any reviews going ahead. Their PR firm’s director later added in an official response
“Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend – but to suggest that we can in some way “silence” reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence.”
Cool. So that’s all right then.
Trevor May wrote this on 06.01.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, Gaming, Mistakes box
The conversations we have on the social web are no different to conversations we have in the real world. Except that once they are out there, they are truly ‘out there’, so it’s even more important to conduct ourselves in the best way as we can, even when faced with negativity.
It’s important to recognise though that we’re not all perfect in real life, we all make slip ups, say what we don’t mean, lash out and react to unfair criticism and negativity. We all need a ’sanity check’ now and again, something to remind us of what’s really important and what will help us stay on track and on this mission of creating stronger unions between our brands and our consumers.
So with this in mind, we have decided to put together a charter to help guide us in how we conduct ourselves on the social web when faced with negativity.
Here’s a starter for ten:
- Don’t be afraid of criticism. Be curious about it. There is always a reason behind it. By getting to the bottom of it, we are best equipped to deal with it. Make like a doctor who suppresses an emotional reaction to clear their minds to best understand and diagnose the problem.
- Criticism can come in many forms – fair, unfair, fairly put, snidely put, constructive, unconstructive, wrong, right, right but put in a ’school yard’ way and so on. But if we stay consistent in our approach we can soon weed out the bad from the good, convince the sceptics and learn from the constructive critics, and our reputation for being decent and consistent will see others come to our support when we really are being unfairly attacked or misunderstood.
- Negativity presents opportunity. An opportunity to learn and grow from constructive criticism, an opportunity to explore and understand unfair criticism to get to the point where you can give your side to the story that they may not be aware of, to turn around sceptics in the same way, or to not rise to ‘trolls’ and see them scuttle away (due to not getting the equally troll like reaction they were hoping for).
- Don’t be afraid of debate. But be clear on the line between debate and argument. Argument is unconstructive and alienating, debate is healthily challenging and exciting. Debate is based on only after listening, understanding and acknowledging another’s viewpoint putting forth your own viewpoint, argument is based on emotional reaction and failing to look beyond your own rationale.
- Don’t be afraid of mistakes made – practice makes perfect as they say, and no truer than in finding the way of conducting yourself in the world and now the new online world. If you make mistakes, if you react in a way you’re not proud of, hold your hands up, put them right – you will be respected for your honestly, braveness and awareness of your own failings.
- Get on with it, react fast – fresh and honest beats ‘too late and carefully contrived’.
- And finally, keep in mind all the time the ‘8 magical philosophies’ of conducting yourself generally online (and real life too!) that we like to hark on about at NM:
- be authentic
- be transparent
- be helpful
- be remarkable
- pull, don’t push
- be open
- act fast
- be brave
Can you think of anything else that should be included on this list?
Anna wrote this on 06.11.08 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, Mistakes, Social media, Social networks box
I stumbled across this survey, Survey Reveals Brand Marketers’ Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future, produced for Sapient, which caught my imagination a wee-willy-winky bit.
The premise of the survey was ‘what would 200 chief marketing officers (CMOs) and senior marketing professionals describe as their Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future?’.
I would add that given that it was sponsored by Sapient and was such a small sample size, the findings whilst useful and interesting aren’t conclusive in any way!
So here they are:
1. Greater knowledge of the digital space. With more than a third of marketers surveyed revealing that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising, it‘s clear that agencies need to have a greater knowledge of the digital space in order to thrive. In fact, nearly half (45 percent) of the respondents have switched agencies (or plan to switch in the next 12 months) for one with greater digital knowledge or have hired an additional digital specialist to handle their interactive campaigns. Further, when it comes to an agency‘s area of expertise, 79% of respondents rated “interactive/digital“ functions as ‘important/very important.‘
2. More use of “pull interactions.“ When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions‘ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push‘ campaigns.
3. Leverage virtual communities. An overwhelming 94 percent of respondents expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities (public and private) to understand more about their target audience.
4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending. Ninety-two percent of respondents said it was ‘somewhat‘ or ‘very‘ important that agency employees use the technologies that they are recommending. For example, it is important that agency executives regularly use Facebook, Flickr, wikis, blogs, etc. in their personal social media mix.
5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing. Forty-three percent of marketers surveyed said that agencies with chief digital officers are more appealing than those without.
6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy. Sixty three percent of marketers surveyed said that an agency‘s Web 2.0 and social media capabilities are ‘important/very important‘ when it comes to agency selection.
7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior. Seventy-six percent of respondents deemed this as an ‘important/very important‘ aspect of their agency‘s online digital marketing and interactive advertising area of expertise.
8. Demonstrate strategic thinking. Seventy-seven percent of marketers surveyed ranked strategy/brain trust capabilities at the top of their agency wish list.
9. Branding and creative capabilities. Sixty-seven percent of respondents ranked branding at the top of their agency wish list while seventy-six percent ranked creative capabilities as ‘important/very important.‘
10. Ability to measure success. It‘s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.
My lightweight conclusions:
Well it’s awfully comforting for us digital agencies isn’t, as you’d expect from a survey commissioned by a digital business.
And doubly-triply-super comforting for those of us digital agencies that already specialise in the social media aspects of digital, given that this neatly ticks off points 1,2,3,6 and 7. (And for us at NixonMcInnes, where we hire on the basis of ‘Agency executives using the technology they are recommending’ too, so that’s nice).
But where does it really leave us? What are the gaps?
I think point 10, the measuring success piece, remains a yawning and tricky chasm between what we as marketers would like and what’s acceptably and reasonably achieveable right now. I hope that initiatives like MeasurementCamp are helping us take steps towards a better grasp of the measurement thing, but it’s a hugely complex task.
I reckon the other stuff on the list is very achieveable.
In fact, in the email I sent around to the team here at NM HQ, what I moved the conversation (or was it a monologue?) onto was instead the building blocks of professional services success that these wishlist items need to sit on top of.
Not the cherry-on-the-cake digital specialisms and cutting edge ‘Web 2.0′ expertise that clients also rightly demand, but actually the basics, the bread and butter. As I suggested in my email to the guys:
“However, I would add that this is built on top of a list of ‘What clients expect from all agencies’ which always includes things like:
- Delivery: they do what they say they’re going to, by when they said they would
- Communication: They keep me informed
- Honesty: tell me when they can’t do something
- Proactive: bring ideas to us, suggest things, don’t wait to be told or asked
- Responsive: can turn things around quickly, nothing is too much
And it’s here, in these much more mundane pragmatic areas, that we at NixonMcInnes are working hard.
The top list is well under control: that stuff is what we do, and we’re increasingly recognised by our clients and the client community for it.
But the bottom list, the agency-underpinnings, that’s where we need to do much much better…
As a small agency, our limited resources can be easily stretched.
And as a specialist in a new, complex and rapidly evolving area, how we actually deliver work can change on every single assignment. So these practical delivery bits are the pieces we’re now working on.
What do you think of these suggested client wish list items? Ring true, or sound a bit wonky to you?
Will McInnes wrote this on 08.10.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Industry news, Marketing, Mistakes, NixonMcInnes, Strategy box
Anna sent me a link to this new blog on the Guardian website. It’s the diary of a 19-year-old about to embark on his GAP-year travels in India and Thailand, hoping for ’swimming, sunbathing and partying’.
After the first post, the comments start flooding in, and the readers are aren’t unimpressed: “posh 19 year old goes to Thailand to find himself amongst all the other ‘gappers’, and we can follow his every move? wow.”
By the 4th comment, suspicions of nepotism start to appear: “who’s son is Max then? terrible terrible terrible, shame on you guardian”
By comment No. 20, he’s been rumbled: “Well, given that Paul Gogarty is a travel writer for the Guardian, I guess that answers the question about who he’s related to”
Ouch!
The final nail in the coffin is an astute reader who finds an article written by the lad’s father in 2002, about a holiday in Thailand, no less, mentioning his 13-year-old son, who would now be 19.
Game, set, and match.
This is very poor stuff from the normally very social-media-savvy Guardian. And the lesson to be learnt (putting aside the uninspiring subject matter of the blog)?
You can’t out-smart your readers. If you aren’t being authentic, you will be found out by the crowd.
Tom wrote this on 14.02.08 – 10 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Mistakes box
Rule No. 1 – “All content on a website should be accessible within three clicks from the homepage”
This is a popular myth that we often see in requests for proposals from new clients. I’m not sure where it originated, but it crops up all over the place, including several academic websites. At first glance it seems to make sense – you’re trying to make it easy for your users to get to the content they need, but if you think about it, the rule misses the point. It’s not the number of clicks that’s important, it’s simply how easy it is to get to the content that really makes the difference.
At NixonMcInnes, we regularly carry out usability tests on websites. In these tests, we observe people using a website and find out where they get stuck. On many occasions, we’ve seen users stare at a homepage for several minutes, unable to find the link they need because it’s not got an obvious label, it’s too small, or sometimes it doesn’t even look like a link at all. It doesn’t matter to the user that they’re only one click away from what they need, if that click is not obvious.
We would re-write this rule as:
When you’re designing a website, make sure that the navigation is easy for users to understand so their next click is always obvious. And to prove you’ve got it right, test the site on real people.
It’s not as catchy, but if you follow this one, you’ll end up with a better website.
Rule No. 2 – “Get as many other websites linking to your site as possible. The more you get, the better your positioning on Google will be!”
This one really makes Search Engine Marketers cringe. ‘It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality’ they’ll cry, and they’re right.
Incoming links are a vital part of success on Google and if you’re serious about search engines, you should absolutely have a programme of link building in place. But the thing you need to focus on is not simply the number of links, but the relevance and importance of the sites linking to you.
To successfully build your Google positions, look for other sites about related subjects and ask them to link to you. This helps Google build up an overall picture of what your site is about, and therefore which keywords to give you the best results for. If you have all kinds of sites about a range of subjects linking to you, this dilutes the keywords and you won’t fare as well. It’s also important to get your keywords into the link text (the underlined words that a user actually clicks on).
Finally, look for sites which themselves have lots of quality incoming links. Google will judge your site to be important if the sites linking to you are themselves important. This is where the ‘quality, not quantity’ mantra really comes into effect. It’s better to have 10 important sites linking to you than 100 sites which don’t have any incoming links themselves.
So how do you find out if a site is ‘important’? Easy – just download the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com and it will tell you the PageRank (Google’s measure of importance) for every page you look at. Only bother with links from pages with a PageRank of 3 out of 10 and above, but the higher, the better.
Rule No. 3 – “Pages that require users to scroll down are bad. All of your pages should fit onto one screen.”
The problem with this one is that it’s a sweeping generalisation. Websites contain such a wide variety of content, serving so many different purposes to many different types of user, that when it comes to scrolling, the rule is ‘it depends’.
You should certainly make conscious decisions about what the important information on a page is, and which elements should be visible without scrolling down the page, but scrolling isn’t always bad.
In her book ‘Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web’, Christina Wodtke talks about a phenomenon she has observed in usability testing sessions which she has dubbed the ‘land-and-dip’. She has observed users landing on a page, where they notice from the scrollbar that there’s content lower down. They sometimes quickly scroll down to see what’s further down before returning to the top. This can be perceived by the user as being less of an effort than clicking through to further content on a different page, and it helps the user to scan the entire page to decide if they want to read it.
Conclusion
Rules of thumb can be dangerous as they over-simplify the process of building effective websites. Every website is different and presents its own challenges. Rather than blindly following rules of thumb from ‘web gurus’, just remember to focus your attention on the users of the website, and their needs.
If you would like some help maximising the potential of the web for your business, give NixonMcInnes a call for a friendly chat. Speak to Will McInnes on 0845 345 3462.
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.08.05 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Design, Development, Interesting, Internet, Mistakes, SEO box
