Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

The ASA is your sensible friend

Snickers beat the rap, Nike were busted but are appealing and then TOWIE star Gemma Collins got a ticking off for getting her hair done. All ran forms of advertising on Twitter and every time it happened there was a bit of a Twitter brouhaha and some ranting at the ASA (including some particularly lucid points from CommsTalk’s own @simonhill).

The thrust of most arguments is that there needs to be a “common sense approach” and, in the ASA’s defence, I’d say there is one: it needs to be abundantly clear that you’re being paid to promote a product.

Twitter now has 10 million users in the UK, that’s roughly one in six of the total population, so Twitter is no longer a little bubble full of media and tech types, all eagerly enforcing accepted norms, cynically flushing out ne’er-do-wells on the net to vent their opprobrium. As more and more of the population sign up, the less we can assume that everyone’s able to tell what’s a paid-for promotion and what’s not. Beyond the hardcore mega users who tweet compulsively, there are an increasing number who simply listen or who tweet in an ad hoc manner. Twitter is something they dip in and out of. These users may only pick up snapshots and not necessarily entire conversations. Do they need to be safeguarded? No. Is it reasonable to expect ads to explicitly flagged so there’s no confusion>? Emphatically, yes.

The other argument usually thrust forward focuses on consistency. Well, of course there’ll be some inconsistency. Social networks are new and constantly evolving. Marketers are constantly thinking of new ways to exploit them. It’s unreasonable to expect regulators to draw a clear line and stick to it when the playing field is shifting. Change throws up inconsistencies. The ASA should be applauded for attempting to grasp the issues and protect consumers.

This piece was originally posted here on CommsTalk.

Seeing through the transparency debate

Recently, following the example of Google, Twitter issued its first transparency report. This was move lauded by many and the report’s contents was heavily analysed to see which governments were making requests for details about Twitter’s users, how many they were making and how many were granted.

To properly understand this debate, however, it’s best to take a moment to really understand the two forces at its centre: transparency and privacy.

First, let’s look at transparency. In the context of this debate, transparency is usually shorthand for holding corporations and governments to account; making sure that they’re doing the right thing when holding or accessing data about us. Of course, corporations and governments need to access our data for various reasons, but we don’t want them to have too much of it. Essentially, it’s seen through the prism of personal freedom.

On the other side of this debate we have privacy. This is the domain of the individual. The debate naturally centres on people’s right to live their lives without being surveilled. There is also a distrust of the ability of companies to securely hold private data. The recent spate of data loss by companies, including big technology brands like Yahoo and LinkedIn, have served only to underline this distrust.
The dual forces of transparency and privacy have come to the fore in the internet age; simply, there is more information out there. Companies like Google have been indexing it to make it easy to find. Governments have come under pressure to make more information available. Things are harder to hide, for corporations, governments and individuals.

On social media, data is plentiful but much of it is also personal. Social media companies are constantly under pressure to ensure users are able to protect their privacy but also required by governments to prevent abuses occurring – either online or in the real world. This is when the idea of a transparency report becomes useful. It enables social media organisations to frame themselves as protectors of people’s personal information, while at the same time giving information, which they have a duty to provide, to governments and corporations. The brilliance of such reports is that they not only enable social media networks to honestly tell users about the information they disclose to others, but also allow them to show how many requests they decline. By publishing the number of requests declined, they emphasis they are on their users’ side.

Companies like Google and Twitter should be lauded for launching such reports. By letting us know how much information governments and corporations are asking for, they’re treading a fine line by complying with disclosure requirements, yet keeping governments and corporation transparent while defending individual privacy.

This piece was originally posted here on the Huffington Post UK.

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.