Karan Chadda

Digital experience, marketing analytics, and AI

Uncategorized

Nudge nudge, tweet tweet

Having had a chance to play around a bit with #newnewtwitter, two changes strike me as particularly interesting, one is a small change in mobile browsing and the other focuses on anonymity. It seems to me that they are both changes designed to alter users’ behaviour.

Placing Twitter at the centre of mobile browsing

On the updated iPhone app you can no longer copy a link and paste it into a browser. This means you have to browse through the app’s built-in browser. Facebook’s app takes a similar approach. It means that if you want to view the content someone is trying to share, you need to do it through Twitter and without leaving Twitter. So you stay on Twitter, it acts as the hub for your mobile browsing.

When you couple this change with Twitter’s new discover tab (an amalgamation search and trends with a new stories service), it’s clear that Twitter is making a serious play to challenge Facebook and Google as people’s starting point when exploring the mobile web.

Nudging people away from anonymity

Names now take precedence over Twitter handles. Is this a way to make online relationships more personal? Is it a small change in the larger push to make Twitter big in China and other countries where the government has a preference against anonymity? Or is it a move to placate Western governments who, now feeling some pressure of movements organised through social media, are less enamoured with free speech when it’s coupled with anonymity?

Regardless, one thing it will definitely do is make users associate people by their names instead of their Twitter handles. This means that, unless you’re writing under a pseudonym, people will associate you with your tweets. It won’t be @quirkytwitterhandle said something, it will be Trevor said something.

Obviously, there are easy workarounds to this change, for example you can change your name in the settings to your quirky Twitter handle. Most people won’t do this though and, over time, this will change behaviour. I suspect people will moderate their tweets because they will recognise that those tweets are directly associated with them instead of their chosen online identity.

So, two very different changes, but both designed to change behaviour and both more significant than they initially seem.

This post also appeared on the Huffington Post.

The difference between reputation and brand

It’s not uncommon to see the words reputation and brand substituted for one another in a manner not dissimilar to the way politicians use the words deficit and debt interchangeably. Like debt and deficit, brand and reputation are linked, but they aren’t the same thing.

By far the best definition of a brand that I’ve heard was given by Interbrand’s Rita Clifton who described a brand as the “organising framework” for an organisation. It is central to an organisation and guides everything from the logo and the colour of the reception sofa, to how its products are developed and the way its employees interact with customers, suppliers and one another. The key point is that an organisation owns its brand – it defines and controls it.

Reputation is a different beast. Reputation is how everyone who comes into contact with an organisation, and those who have never come into contact with it, perceives that organisation. Reputation is owned by people not organisations. Reputation is individual. My perception of a company is different from your perception of that company.

Reputation can be influenced, perceptions can be changed over time, but a company can never actually own its reputation.

Regulators flexing their muscles

Recently, Sir Ken Morrison was fined £210,000 by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for failing to inform the market of share sales in good time. The FT (£) quotes a partner at a city law firm as saying:

“This is a very significant fine for breaches of what some people have regarded as a ‘technical requirement’.”

The fine issued to Sir Ken is not unique. The chart below shows FSA have been handing out more fines since the financial crisis hit.

Indeed, the FSA’s records show that last year, they issued £89 million worth of fines compared to £7.4 million in 2002 (the first year for which data are available).

The credit crunch saw calls for financial regulators to be given greater powers. Although some new powers have been granted, it is worth noting that the FSA is also using its existing powers to a much greater extent. This trend is visible in other regulated sectors.

Alastair Buchanan, chief executive of Ofgem, has taken a very confrontational approach to the energy industry. Discussing competition among energy suppliers, The Times (£) quotes him as saying:

“We will pursue breaking up the stranglehold of the Big Six on the electricity market to encourage more firms, like new arrival the Co-op, to enter the energy market and increase the competitive pressure.”

Other examples of regulators flexing muscles include the continued pursuance of BAA in order to further reduce its influence in the airports sector and the Office of Fair Trading’s (OFT) referral of the concrete and aggregates sector to a Competition Commission enquiry.

The upshot of this new, more confrontational style of regulation is that companies are facing more immediate regulatory challenges than previously thought. The days of light touch regulation are over.

The big issue for companies operating in regulated industries is how to deal with regulators who will not only have a greater number of powers but also demonstrate a greater willingness to use them.

Why Scrapbook?

Like a lot of people, I’m a bit eclectic in my interests and they often blur between professional and personal, so scrapbook seemed to fit the bill. There’ll be bits about politics and big issues like the economy, but also updates about my sub-standard squash game or my latest culinary success (I tend not admit to food failures as readily as sporting ones).

Keep an eye on the header photos. At the moment, I’ve only loaded up three images but will add more as I take more snaps that can somehow be squeezed into 1000×288 pixels without making them look horrible.