Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Photo analysis: light shines on John Terry

Today’s Guardian front page runs with a headline about how much City firms spend on lobbying, but the main picture has nothing to do with that story. From a distance, you can’t read what story the photo’s about, however, everyone will know instantly what it’s about.

Yesterday, England and Chelsea footballer, John Terry, appeared in court to answer charges of a racially aggravated public order offence. The photo, taken by Reuters’ Andrew Winning, brilliantly tells the story.

A shaft of light cuts Terry’s face in half, the top drenched in a strong, bright glow, while the bottom half in the dark. The message is clear: If sunlight is the best disinfectant, then it’s only going to partially clean up this mess.

Terry, sharply suited, has one eyebrow raised and gives the impression that he is slightly unnerved by his situation. He is, however, staring straight into the strong light. He’s nervous, but he’s not backing down.

The police officer in the background completes the image, with flecks of grey hair showing from beneath his cap, he looks senior and sombre. His presence underlines the fact that this is a serious situation.

Is your Klout changing or is it just Klout changing?

Many opinions have been put forward about the ability of Klout, Peerindex and others to measure social influence accurately. Suffice to say, they’re controversial, few buy into them 100%, and those who do use them do so as one part of a broader spectrum of measures.

In their defence, the measurement providers talk of developing models and tweaking algorithms. Recently, after beingrumbled for purchasing twitter followers, PeerIndex CEO Azeem Azhar explained that he’d done so as an experiment to prove that follower numbers don’t affect your score. He explained that the boost in followers did change his score a little. They analysed it and then they changed their algorithm to eliminate the spike.

A couple of weeks earlier, Klout’s CEO Joe Fernandez was speaking at LeWeb and announced that they’d be changing their algorithm too.

Changing the algorithm to make scores more accurate is, of course, sensible. The models are new, they need to be developed and the fact that PeerIndex, Klout and others are monitoring and improving them shows the investment in time that these companies are making to become better.

This changing of algorithms creates a problem: where does that leave tracking data?

If you do use Klout or PeerIndex to measure influence (at whatever level), then every time they change their algorithm, you’re technically starting from scratch because you can’t really, accurately compare the scores from before the change to the ones after the change.

This is a common problem in market research. Do you change your methodology to improve accuracy, or do you stick with your current process so you can retain the validity of your time-series data.

Realistically, most changes to the social influence algorithms won’t be so large that they’ll throw scores massively off, and comparisons to some extent will still be able to be made. However, that’s assuming you know when the algorithm has changed and how it’s changed. I’m not aware that it’s the policy of any of these firms to announce the date of an algorithm change and its likely affects.

Those who do use these scores for measuring and tracking social influence may well be watching a score rise or fall with no real change in their actual influence.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

A photo tells of Diamond’s departure

Bob Diamond’s departure from Barclays has, predictably, led to a lot of puns. No doubt headline writers everywhere are celebrating their good fortune at receiving such an obviously mockable name, but at the same time straining their brains in an effort to avoid the most obvious gags. However, take a moment to appreciate the early goal scored by the photo editors and researchers at the FT.

Selecting the right image to go with a story is incredibly important. Photo editors search through thousands of images every day in the hunt for the right image for every story. With news breaking online, there isn’t the luxury of an afternoon to scour the archives and databases, images must be sourced quickly, but quality must not suffer.

It is for this reason, that we must laud the team at the FT for selecting this brilliant image of Bob Diamond.

The dejected look on his face is the classic pose of someone walking away. The positioning of Bob Diamond on the left, with his back partially toward us – simultaneously walking into the image, yet walking away from the viewer – tells us of his departure.

Finally, the defocused background hinting at a sparkly object just screams ‘diamond’. The photo editors have skilfully told the story and made the pun.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

Cheeky chorizo

Having a young child has had a big impact on when I eat – he eats, then we eat, which means we eat late. Treating this as an opportunity rather than a burden, I’ve started hunting out quick, simple snacks and meals

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The recipe is incredibly simple. In fact, it’s probably too short to be a recipe. Just slice up some chorizo, bash up some garlic and pour over some decent red wine. Set aside for a while (I leave it for an hour or so), then whack it in a hot pan for a minute or two and serve. Boom, a nice little tapas-type snack.

An additional bonus is that it leaves you with a sensible amount of wine to share mid-week.

Old ideas revisited

Last week there was a brouhaha (or twitter storm) about a website with Shell branding which made preposterous comments about drilling for oil in the arctic. Some were taken in by it, others quickly spotted that it was a spoof. The truly shocking aspect of the whole affair was the number of people who thought it was a new and novel idea.

Back in 2001, animal rights activists set up a spoof website attacking the Bank of New York for its work for Huntingdon Life Sciences, a medical research firm that conducts research on animals. The site, called BankofNYKills.com, was a replica of the Bank of New York’s website with the content changed to highlight the activists’ grievances. BankofNYKills.com spoof website wasn’t the first of its kind by a long shot. The practice is as old as corporate websites.

What has changed since then is how well coordinated the best spoofs are. The recent mocking of Shell reached public consciousness around the Rio+20 summit, where arctic oil exploration has been a big issue. The spoof website was just one tactic forming part of a broad range of articles, tweets, Facebook messages and videos designed to keep awareness high.

Spoof defence

Companies’ fear of spoofing is very real. Back in January, the FT reported that Blackstone Group had hired a firm to purchase hostile domain names, including the wonderful blackstonesucks.com. The hope is to purchase all the spoof-able domain names before activists are able to use them. It’s a tactic that costs a lot and is destined to fail.

In reality, there’s little companies can do to stop spoof sites from springing up. People are creative and domain names are abundant (and growing). Companies can move quickly to have sites taken down, but with the speed of distribution that social media makes possible, it’s likely that the spoof will have achieved its goal before it’s taken down.

Ultimately, if a spoof site gains traction, then you’re probably facing a well planned campaign and focusing on the site isn’t the solution. You still need to acknowledge and deal with the spoof, but you’ve got a bigger reputation issue to deal with.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.