It’s a Mini Mockery

You may have seen links to the Mini E trial. This exciting outing for the new electronic Mini is likely to create some waves. The iconic little car is having a new power source, and it’s likely to make waves, because the Mini is already a cool car. The provision of environmental credentials – it doesn’t use fossil fuels in the creation of its motion (yes we know the arguments about electricity from power sources being equally fossil fuel derived, and we know that it is in the manufacture of vehicles that most of the damage to the environment is done) – will surely add credibility to its cool popularity.

Well that’s what I thought. And then there’s the Mini E trial. A cool research project in which the Mini E will be given for six months to a number of lucky research participants. Yes, a whole group of aspiring, not-tree-huggy-but-environmentally concerned drivers will spend six months living with the Mini E so that the company can assess what it is like to live with the product on a day-to-day basis.

There are some caveats. First of all, you have to live in the South East of England (they want built up areas to study but remain within a geographically compact region) so that’s Northern testers out (hey we’re pretty good at seeing how something will last up here). A South-East test means that most of the “team” on the programme won’t have far to travel. And you’ve got to have a private drive, carport or garage. So that means that most people who live in terraced, apartment or social housing won’t be able to take part (are they already socially engineering the electric car?)

And finally – you have to pay £330 for the privilege. YOU PAY TO TAKE PART IN THE TEST/RESEARCH. You pay money so that they can test the car on you. This cheap little marketing trick is strange. After all, testing will probably involve you keeping some kind of diary, being visited, maybe even filmed. Maybe they’ll look at you and how you live with the car. I can see all the UGC-derived adverts. Lots of video diaries, a kind of Blair Witch marketing story. And you pay £330 to for the joy of taking part. So – the rub is: you actually pay as you would for a normal car, which is still a prototype, still in beta. You pay as much as you would for a large contract hire diesel car (I’ve seen some C class Mercedes at this price).

I wonder what will happen if feedback is less than favourable. I wonder how it will work out, if I do a genuine test of daily use. “Day 3, and I drove the mini home pissed…… Crashed it into the private garage again. And now it’s been set on fire by outraged, impoverished product testers who live in the flats opposite me.” It’s going to be huge. It’s a Mini Adventure.

Traveling Geeks 2009: Econsultancy Roundtable

There are times in your life when you get to go on a gig that, on the face of it seems relatively mundane, but actually has some significant relevance to yourself, your work and maybe even your life.

Traveling Geeks, on the face of it, looks like another round of US entrepreneurs and commentators foisting themselves on a UK public. But for me a it was a bit different, the key thing being able to talk candidly, openly and at close range with some people that I have admired for a very long time. Not in a conference style, but round a table as equals.

Howard Rheingold and David

For me, meeting and talking with Howard Rheingold was a particular lifelong goal. Howard inspired me in the 90s to start thinking about communities of people as the source of learning for each other, and inevitably caused me to develop ideas on community-based learning (we call it “social” now) that I used towards the end of my time at the University of Salford and in the development work that I did at Academee. I still use those ideas now in the work I do with students in their online learning communities. Nowadays I think of it as ordinary, but it’s great to think of them as coming from a time when they were classed as ground-breaking.

It’s also good to see that as Howard has got older, his dress sense hasn’t gotten any better I hope I degrade as disgracefully as he does.

Hastings Direct AstroTurf FaceBookCreep

I wrote a little post about how I thought Hastings Direct had lost a little piece of business, because it was now easier to be part of an invisible community with a lot of power at it’s finger tips (see: http://facebookcreeper.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/hastings-direct-loses-out-to-the-invisible-community/). Some time later, a comment appeared on the blog purporting to be from a “grass roots” user (this is a key term as we’ll see in a minute) and you can see this here: http://facebookcreeper.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/hastings-direct-loses-out-to-the-invisible-community/#comments - look for Jackcat1’s comment. I particularly like:

“In contract however, but for a different reason (I had a claim with Hastings Direct) I found the call centre extremely helpful and put my mind at rest immediately when worried about my car claim. Everything was taken care off, I didn’t even have to dig for information like I have had to do in the past. The polite young lady explained everything I needed to know. Excellent service. Highly recommended and my renewal premium was competitive!”

Jackcat’s real name is Karen Sealy Bell (if her Hotmail address is anything to go by: nice trick). Karen Sealy Bell is Web Development Manager at Equity Insurance Group. You can check this by looking at her LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/karensealybell. You’ll note that Equity and Hastings Direct are one and the same company. Granted, this may be someone masquerading as Karen, but I can’t imagine why they would do this.

So what Karen has done is AstroTurfing – which Wikipedia describes as “formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior (sic)”

Karen has pretended to be a regular member of the public (and not mentioned she has an interest in the firm). If you look at the language, you’ll note that it doesn’t reference the subject matter of the original post (about the power of consumers in the digital age) but seems to focus on my apparent lack of understanding of the insurance market (I was once married to an underwriter so that’s not true). This is then followed by a personal anecdote of her own contact with the firm.

It doesn’t ring true – nice touch with the spelling and grammar errors. It’s too squeaky clean and lovely. People are rarely effusive about receiving normal service, especially about products where they don’t have an emotional involvement (I’m in love with my car but not the insurance).

So – a case of AstroTurfing: quite an old crime in social media, and one that can be used as an example of how not to engage with the public. Naughty Torty!

Thanks to @linkmonkey, @Buzzmartin, @Mattorchard and @Jenniferogrady for their professional twittered opinions.

Twitter status and Facebook status: fussiness & following

Whilst we all get to grips with Twitter and try and find ways we can monetize this channel, I thought it might be interesting to look at a few ideas that seem to be circulating amongst the Twitterati (love this new word).

What do you use your status in Facebook for? Many put how they feel or some witty riposte. Twitter as a status seems to be used for far more informative reasons, like asking a question of your Twitter constituency or for providing a useful nugget of content that you’ve produced or that you’ve seen elsewhere. It seems quite a place for viral distribution of info (retweeting) and it happens in real-time. I’ve noticed that people rarely openly tweet the mundane, beyond possibly pointing out what project they’re working on at the moment (with a view to solicit useful advice/input from their constituency).

I’ve noticed form my own followers/following, and from talking to other Twitter users, that unlike my Facebook constituency, my Twitter constituency is far more cognate: given the subject of my research, teaching and consulting, many of my following are working in the industry – people following me perhaps less so – but an interesting conversation with fellow twitterers led to a conclusion that we’re very fussy who we’ll twitter with, and that many twitterers regularly weed and cull their following/follower lists, particularly if they’re a daytime business user. Many block a follower who doesn’t have much of a bio or whose bio seems quite irrelevant tor their professional or personal interests. Others stop following a twitterer who, despite initial impressions, is simply a self publicist and/or a twitter spam merchant. On the other hand, these fellow twitterers had hundreds of “friends” on Facebook  – many of whom they did not know.

So my growing opinion is that Twitter constituencies are perhaps more tightly knit and a lot more fussy about who they involve. A great example of this is how Twitter users like to introduce a new Twitter user to their followers on the basis of trust – “I know this person, I think you’ll find them interesting and appropriate in your Twitter world.”

I’ll follow Twitter culture with interest, because I think it says quite a lot about how people feel about privacy.