Pulling the grass out from under the organic industry

Yesterday's Food Standards Agency report found that organic vegetables aren't necessarily healthier for people to eat than normal vegetables. Apparently, the vitamin and mineral content is the same as in conventional vegetables.

So what?

This report got enough negative media attention, it could single-handedly quash the nascent organic industry. I woe the day my supermarket's organic section shrinks even further. What a huge, massive shame. The main reason for buying organic is not to fulfil some pipe dream that one is going to get super charged with vitamins. Vegetables already have amazing nutritional benefits that one shouldn't live without, and expecting organic vegetables and fruits to have 'more' is just quack science. The point of buying organic is that small goal called 'saving our planet,' or how about 'treating farm animals with humanity.' Not to mention 'fighting the case of the small farmer,' 'defending our precious farmland against the negative effects of intensive farming' and 'not wanting our nice, vitamin-filled fruit to be covered in a white ash of pesticides.'

During the BBC's broadcast coverage last night, out of an approximately 1 minute long piece, these other positive impacts of organic were only mentioned in the last 2 seconds and only the environmental benefit was mentioned.

Congratulations to the media, who have (largely) focused yet again on the wrong headline and irresponsibly reported a story with the power to kill an industry that has done nothing but good things for our communities.

It cannot feel good to go home at the end of the day, as a journalist, knowing how the power of your pen can be so perverse at times.

Spinvox response - how to approach a media crisis

This is part 2 of a blog post we started yesterday, found here.

We aren't trying to attack Spinvox or kick them while we are down. One of our bloggers is a big fan of the service. However, the company's response during their media crisis is just too good a case study to pass up. This is one of the best examples I've seen in awhile of a technology company under fire, and maybe this story has been cooking for awhile, but for many readers, it came out of the blue. We can't resist but to analyse how the company has dealt with it.

And Spinvox brought a lot of this attention on itself by not responding for a whole day.

Last night, the company broke its silence on the TV news show SkyNews.com (that's what it's called - not a typo). And it did several more things wrong.

Here are the key elements that need to be in place to face a media crisis.

1. Act quickly. This means your management team needs to 'get along' and collaborate well on key messages. This is no time to show cracks. Waiting a day to respond shows cracks.
2. The PR team needs to be a driving force, not a team that's just along for the ride. There should be internal or external PR people ready to face a crisis by going on the offensive - quickly.
3. Any written response should be factual but should not read like classic corporate drivel, which is what Spinvox's blog post yesterday was.
4. The CEO should be offered up for comment, not a director of engineering as Spinvox offered. This is a defining moment in the company's history and no one other than the CEO is placed to deal with it.
5. The company should be extremely honest, and attack the allegations with numbers, statistics and facts. In this case, Spinvox's best response* (which we have yet to see) would be a graphical description of i) how many voicemails / what percentage are listened to ii) what sorts of info is usually in those voicemails - numbers, etc - that make it hard for the algorithms to work iii) exactly how their encryption engine works iv) exactly what the timeline of 'learning' looks like to prove that the 'learning' is actually that - and presumably over time decreases the number of VMs listened to.
*This is reprinted from our comments on Mobile Industry Review's insightful post about Spinvox from yesterday.
6. If a live broadcast is the first response, as with Spinvox on SkyNews.com last night, the spokesperson needs to come prepared with the above. Just giving vague statements like 'some voicemails are listened to' is merely dodging the issue and doesn't help fight the crisis.
7. Taking an attitude such as 'we're being attacked unnecessarily! Feel bad for us!" doesn't work and shouldn't even be considered.
8. The best PR team will view the crisis as an opportunity and figure out a way to make their offensive push messages that maybe weren't heard before.

If your PR team (and management team) is not able to withstand the pressure and deliver the above, you need to consider whether your technology company is prepared for a crisis.

Will Spinvox get its vox back?

It wasn't a good day for Spinvox, the voicemail speech-to-text company which was accused in a BBC article penned by Rory Cellan-Jones of some very serious data protection breaches.

Allegedly, rather than having ground-breaking technology that listens to spoken voicemails and converts them to text, the company has been paying countless call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines to listen to at least some of the messages and translate them manually. Obviously this raises some eyebrows in terms of privacy implications and whether it meets the data protection act.

At the time of writing, Spinvox was radio silent, though the story was also picked up by Sky and is all over the Twittersphere.

Spinvox has no choice in this situation but to go on the offensive and prove the credibility of its technology. And it needs to be specific about how its algorithms work. Ambiguity will get the company nowhere at this stage.

There isn't much else to say at this point until they respond, but a point worth making is the age-old 'any PR is good PR' thinking. Many people who didn't know what Spinvox did, now do - and some of them won't care about Rupert on the street in South Africa hearing what their spouse picked up at the supermarket for dinner that night. Most of us receive voicemails so dull they would probably put the call centre staff to sleep rather than incite drama, though staff apparently claimed in Facebook group posts to hear death threats, sexual messages and all sorts.

Waiting to see what transpires.

UPDATE: According to Sky news Twitter correspondent Ruth Barnett, someone from Spinvox will be be on Sky News channel 501 at 7pmish tonight to talk about the issue. This is one interview we won't miss.

FT trying to teach an old dog new tricks

Old habits die hard and everyone knows it is pretty impossible to teach an old dog new tricks.

But the FT isn't past trying.

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predicts that within a year most news sites will be charging for content. He's bedded in with Rupert Murdoch in their stance against 'free' and they are both (now) very outspoken that the free online newspaper content model is broken.

The trouble is, there is a world of difference between being annoyed at a business model you yourself had a hand in setting up, when you find it doesn't work, and changing that model when you've already trained your audience to expect something else.

Freesheets are marked by crappy, poorly researched journalism and they're, on the whole, bad for the media scene. If you want proper intelligent journalism you should need to pay a small fee and enable the journalists to eat. I get that side of the argument, I do, and I often make it myself. I also get the 'give bits away for free and then charge for heavy usage' model that the FT claims to have invented. Although I read lots of stories on the FT's website and never seem to have to pay.

And so the fact remains that only 1 per cent of users actually go on to pay for journalistic content. If the newspaper industry is serious about this battle against 'free,' they need to make that 1 per cent their worst enemy and do something very clever indeed to increase it. With the (very free) blogosphere breaking every major news story, the (very free) Google enabling access to news stories at the touch of a mouse, the (very free) digital media sector enabling news at a glance and making it possible to read nothing beyond headlines for your daily news diet, and kids in our societies being brought up on a diet of free, this is not a job I'd want to handle.

Furthermore, dare I say it, but in countries like the UK with socialised media (the Beeb's online news site) giving great content away for free to the taxpayer, and probably rightly so, it's never going to work. In the US, I think there is more of a fighting chance with independent regional papers leading the newspaper scene.

And at the end of the day, no one feels that bad for Murdoch or the big papers at the loss of their profit margins. But everyone mourns the loss of their local paper and the horrible impact that has on unwatched politicians free to play with information at their choosing, unmanned regulators and all the implications of the loss of an investigative press. It's the small, local papers that suffer and we suffer with them. And the primary reason for their downfall is not free content being available online, but the free classified advertising marketplace the internet creates.

What do you think?

Recipe for the next Twitter

As Twitter becomes less and less conversational and more and more "one-way broadcasting" we think the time is nigh for a next Twitter to barge into the scene.

If you don't agree with me that Twitter is becoming pretty one-way broadcasting in nature, rather than what it is at its best, a two-way conversational tool, consider the latest big Twitter stories that were covered in mainstream press:

-Iran conflict - citizen journalism to get the word out when 'real' journalism was stifled - one way broadcasting

-MJ death - yeah, sure, a lot of people Tweeted about it. A blog still broke the news, just like what would have happened with a big news event 8 years ago

-Habitat's horrendous attempt at a social media advertising campaign, highjacking stories of human suffering to push furniture - one way broadcasting on crack

-Ashton Kutcher's one million followers tirade - if he thinks it proves that he wants to converse with a million fans, rather than just broadcast to the world how 'special' he is, his ego has damaged his ability to reason

Finally, maybe it's just the people I follow, but I find that about half the Tweets coming up on my list are one-way thoughts rather than conversation starters or links to interesting stuff. And more importantly, when an interesting two-way conversation does come up between two of my followers, I have to click into one or both profiles to see what they said first, then click back for the next comment, then so on. I get lost and distracted while trying to trace a conversation.

A lot of early Twitterers were worried that as Twitter became more mainstream, it would somehow 'get worse.' I'm starting to believe it is getting worse. But I don't think the primary reason is that it's becoming mainstream.

The thing Twitter is doing wrong is not improving and evolving its UI to amplify the two-way conversational tools and steer it away from the one-way broadcasting direction. I still think Twitter is a breakthrough tool and I'm still a fan. And some of the one-way broadcasting, like the Iran conflict, is hugely important. But in some ways the UI is clunky and lacking basic functionality - especially for people who use it primarily as a two-way conversational tool. The stats are unclear about how many Twitterers use only the web UI and no other applications like Tweetdeck, but it seems to be at least half, if not the overwhelming majority. [Source for statistics: Hubspot, thanks to @handlewithcare, and Nick Burcher's blog, thanks to @crispyducks] Sorry to be harsh Twitter, but you are one of the most talked about technologies on the market today and your UI still needs a Tweetdeck for people who want more? Houston, we have a problem.

In my opinion, by not evolving the UI, Twitter has allowed a door to open for the next big thing to stir things up.

Here is our recipe for The Next Twitter - a groundbreaking conversation tool. If we had time to develop this ourselves, we would, but given how many proverbial pies we have our fingers in at the moment I'll give it to you as a freebie so someone brilliant can get it done:

1. Take the easiest web interface you can find, and make it interoperable with mobile (similar to what Twitter has done - we applaud them for their mastery of simplicity)

2. Shamelessly copy the follow / unfollow brilliance of Twitter. It's subtle and it works

3. Make search absolutely central to the tool. Don't confuse 'simple UI' with 'featureless' and don't kid yourself that any feature is more important than search. Twitter got this wrong in the beginning, and it still hasn't righted itself completely

4. Combine microblogging with elements of old-fashioned message boards, being the best of both, minus the annoying elements. Give people the ability to see entire conversations in a single glance on one screen, using plus/minus buttons so you can dig further into the conversations you want to see, and minus out of the ones you don't care about - all without having to navigate to a new screen. This seems technically hard to do, but I saw some truly innovative declarative UI programming technologies recently at our client Nokia Qt Software, and I have faith that techie geeks know how to do it and fit it all tidily on one screen

5. Initially, focus on convincing people how they can use it for their jobs and hobbies - Facebook's already got the masses' personal lives in the can

6. Excite and engage the media and PR scenes (much like what Twitter has done) to get the word out most quickly

7. Shamelessly market yourself as the thing that will unseat Twitter. The technology business world needs to take more lessons from athletes when it comes to bold, brash, super competitive statements

8. Be really strict with bots and spammers to keep them firmly out

9. Shake up the above ingredients, don't stir. Stick it in the oven and watch the world take notice

Do you agree with our recipe? Have other points to add? Let us know. We are dying to see this mystery tool be developed as we want to start using it now.