Here’s why you need to think before you tweet & retweet

This morning’s news that actor and comedian Alan Davies is among 10,000 Twitter users facing legal action over the false Lord McAlpine allegations is the latest, but biggest, example of why you have to think before you tweet…and retweet.
One of the problems of Twitter is that users very quickly forget that they’re not only sharing their comments, and, crucially, those of anyone they retweet, with their pals but also everyone else on Twitter. So you’re pretty much publishing it to millions of people. Just like the conventional mainstream media.
The difference is they have long understood the consequences of getting their facts wrong. Apart from specialist lawyers, no-one knows the laws of libel better than journalists. It’s a key part of their training because the power to publish to millions (or even just thousands) of readers is something that has to be treated carefully.
So they understand that saying you simply repeated something someone else said isn’t a defence in law — you’re responsible for publishing it again. Aside from the Reynolds defence, you have to be able to prove anything you publish, or face the consequences.
So the old advice that you shouldn’t tweet anything that you wouldn’t say to the person’s face is reinforced by this latest example of what happens if it turns out to be untrue.
Think not naming the person will protect you? Not so. Look at Newsnight. They didn’t name Lord McAlpine, but they said enough for him to be identified by enough people for his name to start circulating.
Again, the concept of what’s known as ‘jigsaw identification’ is already well-understood by the conventional media. They already have to watch for it with cases with child victims or accused under 18 as well as rape victims — ensuring that individually and collectively they don’t give out enough details for the person to be identified by someone who might know them.
Similarly, if you keep it too obscure you could be sued by several people who could argue people might mistakenly think it was them — 10 policemen successfully sued a paper in England because it ran a story about ‘a policeman’ from a particular station.
Once upon a time to be a publisher you needed a printing press and all sorts of other expensive gubbins and so realised that you had a lot on the line if you got your facts wrong in print.
Twitter may be free and easy, but the consequences of saying or repeating something you personally have no proof for are just the same. So think before you tweet or retweet.

‘Sticking to the knitting’ and other things the local banks can teach the big boys…and other organisations

The second part of Michael Robinson’s BBC Radio 4 documentary series Fixing Broken Banking features the Cumberland Building Society and the German local bank Handelsbanken, which has branches in the UK.
Robinson’s persuasive thesis is that these comparatively small, locally-based banks have thrived while the big boys have floundered because they’ve stuck to the old-fashioned model of local, relationship-based banking. And when you listen to the programme you can hear why.
Here are some of the reasons why:

• They embrace proper relationship marketing by only accepting savings from and offering products to local people, only selling their products directly, not being driven by selling the most profitable products, quarterly targets or bonuses and by being “embedded with community”, in the words of the Cumberland’s chief executive. They demonstrated that after the floods in Cockermouth, when they were the only financial institution to contribute to the post-event flood defence fund.
  Their reward has been bad debt and repossession stats far lower than their rivals, partly because they know their customers better than simply from the data analysis tools used by the big banks.
• A key part of that is delegating decision-making to the level with the greatest knowledge of the customer, so managers aren’t just implementing top-down policies or sending data to head office decision-makers. This makes sense as the person meeting the customer will usually have far more relevant information than HQ e.g. local reputation of a business, NVCs from a customer talking about their financial situation.
• They “stick to the knitting” (in the phrase coined by Peters & Waterman in their classic In Search Of Excellence) by keeping their core business in the local banking they know (no leap off into backfiring risky sub-prime mortgages in search of continued high growth), being 98% funded from local savings (in the case of the Cumberland), staying at the scale they understand.
• They take managing their reputation seriously — by sticking to a low-risk strategy and walking their talk every day with their policies…which leads to stability and sustainable organic growth, which are, in mutually reinforcing.

Relationship marketing isn’t new or sexy, but its truths and benefits have never been more valuable in the uncertain times we all face.

How to spot new trends

Once again I have Wired UK to thank for some great new ideas.
The June issue’s “How to spot the future” feature has sage advice from a host of tech success stories about spotting trends.
My favourites are:

• Look for cross-pollinators: ideas which have been taken from one area and used in another. And people who integrate ideas from different fields.
• Demand deep design: where it’s a core part of the simplicity of something, the way Apple and Facebook, for example, do it.
• Favour the liberators: those who liberate something for consumers and users (like iTunes pricing policy did) and those who allow liberate underutilized resources by giving easier access to them, making them more liquid in the financial sense.

Go read the rest of the article for the rest and some inspiring examples.

A-B testing isn’t a-bsolutely right for everyone

Not for the first time, Wired magazine has been responsible for exposing me to an exciting new idea with a range of possible applications beyond its original use.
In this case it’s the notion of A-B testing featured in the June 2012 issue of Wired UK.
Put simply, instead of deciding which of all the proposed website designs are best, some firms or organisations simply put both or all of them live, split the website traffic to go evenly between them and wait for the resulting sales/conversion/hits data to tell them which the users/customers say is best. Once that’s clear, the winner runs solus. Simples!
It’s a neat idea which could be applied in lots of other areas, such as direct mail (one or more test postcodes could receive different versions of a mailing and response rates compared), TV and radio advertising or even newspaper page design (different geographical editions could have different versions of a limited number of pages).
But there are some areas you wouldn’t want to use this approach. Principally, those where the audience isn’t homogenous (of equal value to you or your client) or is a group of high value, such as key accounts, who you can’t risk being exposed to anything other than the best possible representation of your organization or client as a bad impression from receiving the ‘losing’ design could cost you/them a lot of money.
Doubtless, there are lots more areas where this would work really well. But think carefully before using it.

Changing the banking culture — not quick or easy, but necessary

Out of the furore and fuss over Barclays’ under-reporting of its borrowing rates in its LIBOR submission and Bob Diamond’s management of the bank has come a loud and frequent call for the culture of banking to change.
On the face of it, it seems a fair, reasonable and probably necessary step. But how can it be done?
The answer is not quickly or easily, but it has to be done if the banks are to repair the reputational damage their behaviour over “pay for failure”, bonuses, misselling and the risk-taking that led to the global financial crisis over the last few years has done.
The problem is that changing in an individual organization is hard enough, let alone changing that of a whole industry.
The reason is how organizational and industry cultures are formed. Geert Hofstede’s work looking at the different cultures within the national subsidiaries of international organisations showed that an organisation’s culture comes only partly from the corporate culture (espoused values and behaviours) promoted from the top — the rest is derived from the beliefs and practices people bring with them from their upbringing and local culture, as well as the industry culture elsewhere.
So Barclays management alone can’t fairly take the blame for all of the flaws in its culture which led to the mispractices as some of them will have come with staff who joined from elsewhere or came in thinking cheating was ok.
The other complicating factor is that the industry culture is partially derived from the nature of the work, as Deal & Kennedy have shown. Their model shows that places with different levels of risk (uncertainty) and feedback (praise, bonuses, promotions) create different cultures and that the high risk, quick feedback situation encountered in trading in the City creates a “tough guy, macho” culture. Which is why those who enjoy managing risk, competing with others and receiving very tangible rewards fit in well with that kind of environment.
So what can be done? Whether or not you believe that the City’s leopards can change their spots, the least the banks can do is be seen to be making efforts to change their behaviour with culture change programmes both at each organisation and industry-wide through accredited training programmes.
Each needs to be seen to reward those who live the new espoused organisational values as well as reward (rather than attack or sack) the whistleblowers who report misdeeds. By rewarding and praising those who behave in the new way required, they can be seen to be pushing for positive change and encourage at least compliance, if not belief change, in the rest.
Whether or not individuals’ actual beliefs about what is and isn’t acceptable will be changed, compliance with the new way of behaving is what everyone wants to see. And only once behaviour is seen to have changed will the rest of society be happy and prepared to improve their view of the banks.