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The Meanwhile team decamped to Mombai (aka Bombay) this week to find out what’s happening in the ‘I’ in BRIC – one of the fastest growing markets in the world. With a population of 20 million in a country of 1.2 billion and 771 million mobile phone subscriptions , no visitor to Mumbai is left in doubt that there’s an energy and urgency about the place, even if the traffic ends up being very far from fast as a result. (Seriously, the 3km between hotel and airport mid-morning took 30 minutes.) The Indian economy The OECD’s June 2011 review of India identifies adult literacy of 74% and a GDP per head US$1068 (equivalent to US$3296 of purchasing power parity). The review starts with this assessment: ...

In an endeavour to improve customer satisfaction, Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín has taken the decision this week to bring call centres back from India to the UK. Actually, “to improve customer service” is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it’s actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction. Call centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004). Interestingly, the FT reports that Santander UK’s move follows a diktat by the UK’s Financial Services Authority that banks publish complaint numbers for the first time in 2010, making Santander more visibly the most complained-about bank for the first half of the year, and second only to Barclays during the second half. ...

We have a fundamental tenet in our Western societies – innocent until proven guilty. The problem we have now is simply that reputation pivots faster via the social Web than can be adjudged in the courtroom. I have no idea whatsoever whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn did or did not rape or sexually molest the hotel maid. But he has already lost his job heading up the International Monetary Fund. His chances to run for senior government office are dashed. If he’s found guilty, then you might say all’s well and good, but he is currently innocent until proven guilty, and may never be found guilty. Charges may even be dropped. Where’s the “all’s well and good” in that? This trend is significant for reputation management – of organisations as well as individuals. And yet given the radical and real-time transparency of the social Web, I’ve been saying recently that ‘reality is perception’. I posit that this is a more relevant axiom today than the one that dominated the 20th Century, ‘perception is reality’. Am I not, therefore, contradicted here? ...

I’ve just arrived in Zurich at HWZ (Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration) for today’s Social Media Conference. I’m delighted to be keynoting at 1.30pm, and here’s my presentation. I know… it’s a bit text heavy in parts. @gabbicahane has already pointed that out to me. I protested that for a slidestack to make sense to those people who are interested but who cannot make the conference, it needs to have more context than some beautiful pictures and seven words per slide. ...

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies. The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data. Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding. Big data When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable. What does this mean in everyday terms? ...

The very nice people at Global Dawn invited me in a couple of weeks back to meet the team and speak about some of the stuff covered in The Business of Influence . They were particularly drawn to the aspects of measurement / ROI / business performance management, and the convergence of the traditional influence-related silos come to that. I was videoed as the inaugural session of The Global Dawn Influencer Series. ...

I posted about the Profiting from the New Web conference last month, and now the video summary of the day has been published. It was a real pleasure to chair the event and have the opportunity to provide some commentary in the video too. Thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch after the conference. I’m sure, given the overwhelming positive sentiment, that we’ll be making this conference into a series. Watch this space. ...

You’ll know that consumer facing organisations are investing shed loads in social media. Right? But how intelligent is this investment? Are they even getting the basics right? Thinking or just acting? This is the number one differentiator in my book between the success stories and the also-rans. There are those who truly ’think’ social. They have reviewed operations from the ground up in light of the age of social media. Every aspect of business is reviewed systematically through the lens of social media, and strategy is developed on this basis. And whilst they are to be celebrated, this post is about one company that has visibly #failed in my eyes in recent weeks. BT’s woeful social inadequacy BT is the UK’s number 1 Internet Service Provider, yet a May 2011 upgrade to the firmware of its customers’ home routers left Linux users unable to connect to it. And in case you didn’t know, Android, the world’s fastest growing operating system for Smartphones, is based on Linux. So BT does not currently provide me Internet service for my Android phone, leaving me and other customers in my position having to use the more expensive 3G data networks than home broadband. Disgraceful. But this isn’t a blog about ISPs. This is a blog about social media and customer relationships and business performance. Enter BT’s support forum (at http://community.bt.com ). ...

The AMEC European Summit of 2010 is famous for killing anyone’s lingering hopes that advertising value equivalence (AVE) represents any kind of measure of the value of PR. As I like to say, AVE is a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain. Apart from that, it works just fine! This summer, the European Summit delegates set AMEC’s top priority as determining an approach to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations. Sounds a most admirable ambition, but should this be interpretted in the way I think it might, I fear we may be at risk of having dethroned one false idol only to pursue another. Why? Because investment in public relations is investment in strategically important intangible assets, and such investments cannot be designed, executed or analysed in isolation. As Drs Kaplan and Norton put it in their 2004 book Strategy Maps: “Economic justification of these strategic investments can be performed, but not in traditional ways. The common approach is on a stand-alone basis: ‘Show the ROI of the new IT application’, or ‘Demonstrate the payback from the HR training program.’ … But each investment or initiative is only one ingredient in the bigger recipe. Each is necessary, but not sufficient. Economic justification is determined by evaluating the return from the entire portfolio of investments in intangible assets…” What does this mean? Well consider the hypothetical instance of two organisations designing, executing and analysing exactly the same public relations strategy delivering precisely the same results for the same investment. ...

“CELEBRITIES, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results. Online ‘reputation management’ agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings.” So opens an article in The Times on Wednesday this week. (I can’t provide the link to The Times as I’m not a subscriber to its paywall, but it’s syndicated here , sans paywall, to sister publication The Australian.) On reading the article, part of me recognised this sort of capability at the same time another part of me felt very uncomfortable with it being associated directly with PR. And then I winced some more… “[These agencies] typically use thousands of social networking profiles - set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person - to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.” This is NOT public relations. This is not two-way communication aspiring to foster mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. Such activities clearly breach the CIPR’s code of conduct , specifically its references to integrity and honesty. A PR professional never knowingly misleads about the nature of their representation. ...