When to and when not to tweet…

Twitter has become an integral part of our society, it seems that there are a huge number of users who have signed up – quite a few people I know are ‘watchers’ rather than active tweeters. Certainly at work we have an active account and I know many of my colleagues regularly use it to publicise deals or events. In the correct hands it can be quite effective.

However, as with anything that has such a massive readership you need to keep an eye on what you tweet – and in responding you need to be accurate and understand the original tweet…..

So I couldn’t help smiling when I saw the news about David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham who was outraged by the BBC’s ‘racist headline’ about the smoke from the Vatican’s chimney being black or white. He was in the House of commons and misread the original headline…….

His tweet was swift and decisive.

I did think his subsequent tweet when he realised his mistake was spot on as well however.

This highlights two things – firstly you should think before you tweet and secondly MP’s shouldn’t tweet in the commons!

 

How was your visit?

I am all for customer service feedback, as a grumpy old man it gives me the ability to complain at their request! I also feel it is important to give feedback – how can a business improve its service without? So, if I see a feedback form or similar I will invariably fill it in – both positively and negatively – I am happy to give credit where it is due!

So this weekend at Caffe Nero on Foreman St in Nottingham when my wife picked up a ‘how was your visit’ card I felt honour bound to reply! An added incentive to respond is the fact that they are offering to enter any replies into a draw for free coffee for a month, or an iPad (I like coffee, but the iPad would be the one!)

The card has a web address to go to and a survey entrance code – so should be simple to do. But sadly the codes (both the wife and I tried) do not work which is not a great way to impress your clients! We were able to give feedback using our reciept and a store code. But that is not the point, if you have a system it should work – especially if it is for customer feedback!

So, Caffe Nero, I claim my iPad!

 

What’s in a name?

Quite a lot it appears!

I have blogged twice in the last few days regarding what I initially referred to as the ‘Post Office’ – we all refer to that name when we talk about mail, parcels or counter services in my household and I thought most others did. But, I was wrong, and have been put right by the Post Office via Twitter!

Firstly, good on them for watching the ‘twitterverse’ and contacting people about their comments, that is how good customer service often happen these days. I have also been contacted by Royal Mail on the back of this and they are trying to resolve my issue – time will tell how successful that will be.

It does make you think though – we take certain names for granted , they become generic – like Hoover (although perhaps now it should be Dyson), Sellotape (sticky tape), Google (for doing an Internet search), postit’s (for sticky notes) – you get the idea.

Royal Mail and Post Office parted company from each other last April, so should we now refer to sending something through the Royal Mail as ‘mailing’ rather than posting from here in? Certainly the Post office were quite keen to inform me that mail was not their province any more – glad to be rid? I wonder?

Just goes to show how important it is to get your brand across to people – get it wrong and you can get blamed for something that isn’t your fault!

 

It’s good to talk….

You may recall the BT advert from a few years ago that tried to get us all to use our telephones to talk to each other – it was apparently ‘good to talk’. Time moves on and it now seems that it isn’t and we are more likely to text each other than speak!

According to Ofcom while 58% of people communicated via texts on a daily basis in 2011, only 47% made a daily mobile call, the shift away from traditional ways of keeping in touch being led by young people aged 16-24 (no surprise if you have your own teenager).

The report confirms that on average UK consumer now send 50 texts per week while fewer calls are being made on both fixed and mobile phones (certainly our home phone is more of a decoration now).

However for the first time, there was a fall in the volume of mobile calls – by just over 1% – in 2011, while landline calls were down by 10% and overall time spent on the phone fell by 5% in 2011.

This change in behaviour is believed to be down to greater ownership of internet-connected devices – smartphones like the iPhone;

• 39% of adults now own a smart phone, a 12% increase on 2010.
• 42% of these now say their smart phone is the most important device for accessing the internet, with a similar percentage regularly using social networking sites and 51% using e-mail.
• The average consumer spends 90 minutes a week accessing social networking sites and email.
• Tablet ownership is also on the rise, with 11% owning such a device, up from 2% last year.
• According to Ofcom, tablets are most often used in the home as a “snacking version” of the home PC.

So probably no surprises here, but a confirmation that the smart phone is beginning to play a very important part in all our lives – and is perhaps going to kill off the basic telephone before too long. It is also sad that people now prefer not to talk to each other. Is this the start of something more insidious in our behaviour?

 

Are we playing too many video games?

We are all now well versed in the games that are available for X-box or Playstation, even if you have never touched a game controller you will have seen the adverts on TV. They offer the player a chance to live a totally different life without any personal danger (apart from RSI). The growth in the games industry has been staggering, and the UK is a major player. But just how massive wasn’t clear to me until this week when sales figures were released that indicated games sales now greatly exceed ‘video’ sales.

Taking over?

I am showing my age here as obviously videos are a thing of the past – but the figures relate to all DVD and Blue Ray sales as well as good old videos – and the figures are staggering!

Sales of computer games in the UK last year were £1.93bn! I know we all accept billions as small change now, but this is massive! By contrast, sales of DVDs and other video formats totalled £1.80bn, while music pulled in a ‘measly’  £1.07bn. Last year games accounted for 40.2% of the entertainment market, video for 37.6% and music for 22.2%.

In reality sales are falling overall (part of the reason for the demise of Game on our High Streets) and video won’t go without a fight. But I do think it is sad that we get our ‘jollies’ in this way – watching films is a social thing, playing games can be very anti social (it certainly is when my son is doing it)

So we have hit another ‘milestone’ in entertainment – I am not sure I like this one!

 

Why Microsoft “don’t get it “

For a while I have been ‘coming over from the dark side’ – that is to say I have been embracing the world of Apple. To some that classes me as a geek, historically Apple products were the preserve of the ‘Guardian reader’ set, not a bad thing in any way, but a stereotype that probably didn’t help their marketing! This puts me in the minority, but if I am honest I don’t care, as I find the Apple way so much less stressful.

With the massive growth of the iPod, iPad and iPhone, Apple are now a major player in the hardware market (for example they have almost 80% of the tablet market). Historically they have been weak in the world of software – and by weak I mean they did not have the business market particularly catered for – that was the province of Microsoft – and still is. But for how long?

Computing in the business and home market is going mobile, we are all getting smartphones, and the tablet is making desktop computing far less of a necessity. Our PC at home is used rarely now, either iPad or Mac has taken over. Consequently we are all keen to have our data available where ever we are – cloud computing by any other name. And who is doing this best and appears to have a game plan going forwards?

In my view it’s Apple and not Microsoft. I have started using Apples iCloud with its Numbers and Pages packages – all my documents are automatically available on all my devices (including my PC). The program’s are nothing like as ‘belt and braces’ as Word or Excel, but who uses anything like the full potential of those packages – they are just too complicated! Also on an iPad the Numbers spreadsheet is way better than anything Microsoft or any third-party converter can offer.

Apples iCloud is in its infancy, MobileMe was not a success, but the mobile OS has developed and I think we will see great things from Apple over the next few years in mobile data sharing and working – they never get things wrong more than once!

And what about Microsoft? Windows 8 is just about to appear and from what I have heard it is just Windows 7 with a weird front end. Their Office package has a web version, but it is not catching on (probably due to being too complex). Microsoft may be about to start to see the end of their dominance – a good thing?

 

4G Nottingham?

Not a good look - but you get the idea.....

We could become one of the first UK cities to get  super-fast 4G mobile broadband if Nottingham City Councils bid  for a share of the Government’s £100 million Urban Broadband Fund – which aims to bring world-leading super-fast broadband and wi-fi to ten of the UK’s cities – is successful.

4G – or fourth generation – is a more advanced version of 3G, the wireless internet that mobiles, laptops and tablet devices use. It is faster and means people will be able to access high-quality video and audio on the move – something that is becoming more and more of our everyday lives.

Only cities with more than 150,000 homes were allowed to apply for a share of the fund and from the shortlist Nottingham faces competition from Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester and Sheffield.

The UK’s four capitals – Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London – are guaranteed to be awarded funding as part of the scheme.

We have to wait until Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget speech later this month to see if the bid has been approved, but there is some additional potential for success – the high-speed data cabling could be laid along tram tracks while the works for line two of the tram are built over the next two years – saving money on the infrastructure costs.

How amazing would it be for Nottingham to be one of the country’s first 4G cities? Not only would existing businesses benefit from increased efficiency and improved connectivity, the city would also be in a much stronger position to respond to the rapidly emerging and anticipated future requirement of businesses.

Time to keep your fingers crossed and hope that the A453 announcement last year wasn’t a ‘flash in the pan’ for Nottingham.

 

Can cloud computing help reduce global warming?

There is a steady move towards cloud computing, both Apple and Microsoft are nudging their users towards it in different ways;

Apple via iCloud which is in its infancy, but has some potential. This however is currently based around machine based apps for word processing and similar, and only carries data.

Microsoft on the other hand is moving towards cloud based application use – Word, Excel etc accessed directly from their servers so that software is not PC based. This is perhaps more related to them trying to control pirated software than for our benifit though!

Is there a ‘green’ side to cloud computing though?

A study carried out late last year that focussed on large IT companies in France and the UK found that they could achieve large cost savings and carbon reductions by 2020 if they migrated their data storage operations to the cloud. The suggestion was that they could reduce their carbon emissions by up to 50%!

The study follows a recent forecast that use of cloud services could triple in the next two years, a fact that has  been backed up by a number of blue chip companies indicating that they intend to move to cloud solutions far quicker than many had thought. Obviously cost saving is the main aim – but a drop in carbon emissions has to be a positive side effect.

Cloud computing allows companies to reduce costs by buying less hardware and using servers located elsewhere to store, manage and process data. The report suggests that by 2020, large UK companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion and carbon reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles – figures not to be sniffed at.

And if your server farm is in a country that has lower emission electricity such as France, (where nuclear plants generate the bulk of electricity), that figure can be much lower.

So as we place more and more data in the cloud we can actually reduce our carbon footprint!

 

This is a brilliant explanation of social media…

This is just brilliant, often the best explanations are the simplest and this hits the nail firmly on the head – and I particularly like the reference to Google+!

 

iPad two years in…..

Amazingly the iPad is two years old (last week) – it has taken me two years to get into the iPad owners club, but I have to say now I have one I can really see the attraction!

When it was first launched there were a large number of people who said it was a pointless piece of kit which would never take off – well history has proved them wrong – and it is still in my view the machine to beat.

Why? Well it is a well worn adage about all things Apple – but it just works.

Hand an iPad to almost anyone and they can get into using it very quickly because everything is so intuitive. We have a number of ‘new users’ in the office and they just love it. They are all iPhone users but the experience is so much richer and better on the iPad.

Since getting mine a few weeks ago I have found a number of things that are better than I expected (and I had high expectations). They include;

Browsing – so quick and easy on a touch screen device, our desktop PC at home is slow and is becoming used much less because of this.

Wordprocessing – I have downloaded the ‘Pages’ app and have found it brilliant. the keypad on the iPad works really well (despite what some people say). And using iCloud allows me to share the files across my devices and keeps them synced.

Spreadsheets – The ‘Numbers’ app is also brilliant and allows me to use graphs on my iPad – something that other spreadsheet apps don’t allow. It syncs to iCloud as well.

Evernote – If you don’t use this you are really missing a trick – it is superb.

Games – I am not big into gaming but some of the driving games are amazing.

So all in all I love my iPad, it is not a total replacement for my laptop but it goes a long way towards it. The big plus is the fact that is instantly on. I am sure that Apple will develop the OS even more over the next few years which can only make it better!

And iPad 3 is due in only a few weeks?