An open request to online course organisers

I’ve written before about the opportunities offered by MOOCs (massively open online courses) and how they threaten to disrupt and transform the education sector. The number of subjects available keeps growing, the quality of the material continues to improve and my opinion remains unchanged.

However, I have a modest request for course organisers that would make them much more useful.

One of the more challenging and rewarding courses available so far is Stanford University’s “Human-Computer Interaction”. Here is one of the course certificates …

.. and you still have no idea what this student learned, do you? The course title gives no sense of its scope, though even a stark outline would look like this:

Now you might be thinking that this is a pretty comprehensive list, but any fool could sit through a few videos and answer some multiple-choice questions. What if I told you this candidate devoted at least 15 hours a week for two months on it? Amongst other things, students had to find volunteers to interview and observe; take photos; solve practical problems; make prototypes; design, build and evaluate their own apps …

My request is simply that the certificate should give an idea of the scope and depth of the course, with some of the challenges it presented, otherwise it serves no purpose. This would give the certificates some currency in the workplace and make the courses even more appealing.

You might be intelligent but are you a good communicator?

I have come to the conclusion that there is no correlation between intelligence and communication skills.

This should hardly be a surprise when we know from our schooldays that some teachers, despite their academic qualifications, just could not get the information out of their heads and into ours.

It reaffirms the wisdom of using a professional communicator in preference to a subject expert with poor delivery.

Aristotle believed that effective communication depended on credibility, emotion and logic. Modern coaches say you need to be a good listener, articulate, expressive and fluent in body language.

I don’t disagree but, to my mind, the most fundamental qualities of a good communicator are a generous spirit, empathy, attentiveness and patience.

A generous spirit makes you want to share ideas and information with others. It motivates you to find a way to do this, regardless of obstacles and misunderstanding. Someone with a less open nature might not be so inclined to give the message the context it needs for the audience to absorb it. When I am learning new procedures, I always wonder: Why must we do this? What if we didn’t?  What comes before and after? Why doesn’t somebody else do it? Why doesn’t it come earlier or later in the process? Are there better ways of doing it? What’s the worst thing that could happen if I get it wrong? I try to address these questions when training someone else.

Empathy is essential to view the problem from the other person’s perspective. It helps you decide the best way to deliver your message. Should it be written, oral, a diagram or a chart? This in turn may determine the best medium to use: email, telephone, face-to-face? Is it best delivered to a group or individually? In a training room? In an informal setting?

You need to be versatile and capable of using different means of reaching people who prefer to digest their information in a variety of ways. I always used to write procedures for my staff to follow but one of them just would not read my, ahem, excellent instructions, which used to frustrate me no end. Eventually, I learned to show him what to do and watch him have a go himself and we never looked back. I should have followed Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

In contrast, another manager told me that her team was thick because she had showed them how to do something SIX times and they still didn’t get it. If she did this the same way each time, did it not occur to her that the outcome would be the same? Isn’t that a definition of madness?

Being attentive helps you recognise when your message is being received and understood. More importantly, it tells you when your words of wisdom are falling on stony ground and it’s time to try something different.

Patience will prevent your frustration when you don’t succeed first time. You will appreciate that the other person’s failure to understand is your fault rather than theirs.

So, assuming that you are capable of organising your message and articulating it, aptitude is more important than intelligence when it comes to communication. This is good news to those of us who might not be the brightest, but the two combined will always be the ideal.

A conundrum for newspapers

I started reading newspapers when our sixth-form economics teacher insisted we do so to keep abreast of current affairs and the habit stuck. My allegiance has changed more than once, but I would be lost without my daily fix. In contrast, I doubt if my two adult sons and  their peers have bought a newspaper in their lives. This is symptomatic of the problem faced by the publishers: circulations, advertising and revenues are all in sharp decline.

Despite restructuring newsrooms and commercial departments and ploughing the ever-diminishing revenues from print editions into new, digital, versions, none of them have found a viable business model. Online advertising revenues and subscriptions combined will always fall far short of the income generated by the old print model. Subject to basic laws of supply and demand, infinite online advertising space is driving ad rates relentlessly downwards.

Essentially, publishers are focussing on delivering their titles to us on new platforms, while their market is shrinking faster than George Osborne’s fan club.

We can now access our daily newspaper via websites, e-book readers and apps on our smartphones and tablets, but it’s still the same old package that holds no appeal to my sons and their friends. Publishers need to appeal to a wider audience and develop new revenue streams at the same time.

I have a couple of suggestions:

• They should personalise – I’ve no interest in horse-racing results, city prices or autumn fashions, so why force them on me? Likewise the Scottish weather forecast or Welsh TV schedule. I could find the content I’m really interested in more quickly without all these distractions. We know from e-commerce that personalisation improves the user experience, builds loyalty, increases engagement and raises conversion rates, so it looks like too good an opportunity to miss.

• They could let readers pick and mix. By this I mean that publishers could allow readers to choose which pages or sections they buy. Rather than force their entire package on me, I might prefer the business news from one title, the political pages from another and the sports coverage of a third. For example, the sections that are most important to me are the op-ed pages (opinion and editorial), along with a few star columnists and readers’ letters. In an ideal world, I would subscribe to just these parts of two or three titles. Another reader might want the football articles from all the qualities so he can read all the different stories on his favourite team. This would require co-operation between publishers. Unfortunately, they are too busy competing for shares of a dwindling market to join forces in promoting themselves to a new audience.

There is little time for publishers to turn their fortunes around, and I am afraid that their unavoidable cost-cutting efforts are likely to accelerate the spiralling decline of their print editions.

• Cutbacks have led to the loss of talented writers, along with some of the peripheral content that lends each paper a character of its own. Readers have also noticed reductions in the space allocated to particular sections and some days the papers feel less substantial than Boris Johnson’s wedding vows.

• Another consequence is a greater proportion of stories and pictures supplied by agencies. As more content becomes common to multiple titles, readers have less reason to prefer one paper over another.

• Savings in sub-editorial costs have caused a decline in standards of grammar and punctuation.

Readers also sense that the editorial content of print editions is devalued as it plays second fiddle to advertising, which it is now tucked beneath or wrapped around.

In order to maximise revenues, there may be opportunities to re-imagine the way newspapers sell their advertising space. For example, in a practice that should have become obsolete with the introduction of presses giving full-colour on every page, papers typically offer 40% discounts for mono advertising that competes for the same space as full-priced colour ads. Why?

It saddens me to conclude that our newspaper publishers seem powerless to arrest the declining fortunes of their printed editions. Offering the same package in new formats shows no sign of raising sufficient revenues to secure their long-term future. They need to co-operate to increase the size of their market and they need to find new ways to make money from it. I hope they can. The clock is ticking …

Life after death – on LinkedIn, at least

I had a shock last week, when LinkedIn suggested I might like to connect with a friend who had, sadly, passed away three years ago. David and I had worked together for several years and become friends before he eventually succumbed to cancer.

On seeing his name on my screen, my first thought was for David’s family and close friends who also have LinkedIn accounts. How many of them must have had a similar experience over those years, and how distressing must it have been? My next thoughts were how much longer this might go on and what I could do about it.

According to LinkedIn’s comprehensive help centre, I need to complete a ‘Verification of Death’ form. So far, so good, but then comes the catch:

“This form requires an email address registered to the deceased member’s account. Without this important piece of information, we will not be able to address your request.”

Unsurprisingly, I don’t know what email address David used, all those years ago, to create his LinkedIn account. I guess this must be the case for many others in a similar situation.

My only remaining option was to appeal to the compassion and common-sense of one of the LinkedIn Customer Experience Team, which I did via their online form. That was a week ago and my only response to date has been an automated acknowledgment.

Then I looked at the approach of other social media networks to this problem.

Twitter

In the event of the death of a user, Twitter offers to “work with a person authorized to act on the behalf of the estate or with a verified immediate family member of the deceased to have an account deactivated.” In order for them to process an account deactivation, they ask for all of the following:

• The Twitter account’s username
• A copy of the deceased user’s death certificate
• A copy of your government-issued ID (e.g., driver’s license)
• A signed, notarized statement including:
• Your first and last name
• Your current contact information
• Your email address
• Your relationship to the deceased user
• Action requested (e.g., ‘please deactivate the Twitter account’)

Wow. This was obviously written by a lawyer, but it must be totally OTT for 99.9% of cases and should have been rejected in favour of a more subtle and sensitive approach. Why should it be as complicated as closing a bank account? Did you have to send Twitter a copy of your birth certificate and driving licence when you opened your account? Me neither.

Google

This information is not easy to find, but the authorised representative of a deceased user can apply for access to the contents of his Google account or/and close it. The process comprises two stages:

Part 1 is almost identical to Twitter’s. Google will review your request and notify you by email as to whether or not you will be able to progress to the next steps of the process.

Part 2 requires you to get additional legal process including an order from a U.S. court and/or submitting additional materials.

Again, this all seems rather unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. I know from experience that anyone who has suffered a bereavement would prefer to avoid these formalities and see the account closed before it causes any more distress.

Facebook

Facebook’s policy is to memorialise the account of a deceased person. If you need to report a timeline to be memorialised, they invite you to contact them. Facebook say that verified immediate family members may request the removal of a loved one’s account from the site. They also ask you to contact them if a deceased person’s account is appearing in “People You May Know.” I don’t know how efficient they are in implementing this procedure, but it seems the most sensitive and personable approach of the lot, which the others might be encouraged to adopt in most cases.

So at least one social media network has what appears to be a sensible solution to the “deceased member” problem, but that’s little consolation to me.

The success of a commercial operation like LinkedIn depends largely on building its membership and, of course, it publishes these figures to stakeholders, the business community and potential advertisers. Newspaper and magazine publishers’ businesses similarly depend on circulation and readership data, which are audited independently and regularly, such information being vital to advertisers and their agents.

On 9 January, 2012, LinkedIn announced it had reached 200 million registered users worldwide, including:

• USA (74m)
• India (18m)
• UK (11m)
• Brazil (11m)
• Canada (7m)

Assuming LinkedIn’s users reflect national averages, about 60,000 of their UK members will pass away each year. When you add in duplicate accounts, lapsed and dummy accounts and corporate members that have ceased trading, it’s easy to imagine that LinkedIn’s membership claims could be overstated by several hundred thousand. I had always assumed that LinkedIn’s registered membership was audited independently, accurately and frequently – but how can that be if it is riddled with dead and dormant accounts?

So, in order to improve the accuracy of their registered membership data, LinkedIn could make a start by simplifying the removal of deceased members’ accounts and I would appreciate it very much if they could start with my friend, David’s.

Panasonic delivers, with a minor clunk

Our new Panasonic 42-inch plasma Viera was due for delivery from Argos yesterday. We chose Argos because their corporation tax actually makes a contribution to UK Treasury coffers.

My wife ordered it and, the day before it arrived, received a voicemail confirming the delivery time and reminding her to keep the plastic on while testing the mattress. Had she placed this order the old way she might have suspected a slip of the stubby biro, but this was an online transaction and she had electronic confirmation. The possibility of a cock-up at the warehouse remained, however, so the suspense built as the scheduled Saturday lunchtime delivery window neared.

When the box arrived its huge dimensions alone were inconclusive, but the label clearly stated we had indeed received a hi-tech device for sending viewers to sleep rather than a hi-sprung mattress to accommodate them.

My wife, being the more practical of us, had no trouble in assembling the slim stand, fixing the TV to it and attaching all necessary cables to the various boxes (PVR, DVD & media streamer). With the aid of the slim, well-designed, manual she soon had it tuned in and turned on, while I cooked dinner.

We were mightily impressed by the picture quality on the regular Freeview channels, but once we had tried the HD ones our £299 outlay, already a good deal, seemed a bargain. After seeing a nature documentary, a rock concert and Match of the Day in high definition I don’t want to go back.

I’d feared the huge screen might be overwhelming but this was alleviated by the fact that it could stand 18 inches further back than its CRT predecessor, which had been encumbered by a backside bigger than Venus Williams’.

I do have a couple of questions for Panasonic. Why is the on-off button one of six halfway up the back of the TV rather than at the bottom, on the front? This is awkward enough when it is free-standing and in danger of toppling and it can’t be any easier for owners who mount them on the wall.

But the biggest clunk of all comes with the remote control. It is, without doubt or exaggeration, the ugliest, most unpleasant and least ergonomic that I have used. Ever. I suspect it was designed by a Lego enthusiast, using the same material as their bricks and moulded in a similarly angular fashion, by a robot with no concept of the human hand. Panasonic’s designers should give this an immediate overhaul and explore the latest materials being used by the makers of mobile phones, tablets, readers and remotes, to come up with something tactile and handy.

Otherwise, nine out of ten.

Panasonic remote (right)

How to come back from 3-1 down to win 2-0

This is not as impossible as it sounds, since it is just one of the amazing things you too could witness if you supported a football team like Wycombe Wanderers.

Blogs about the trials and tribulations of local football fans are often dominated by ironic accounts of shivering for ninety minutes in a sparsely-populated stand at some obscure midweek away game in February, but there is much to be said for supporting one of our less fashionable football league clubs.

Before I start, I should point out that I believe we should all support our nearest club, come rain or shine, rather than our favourite Premiership club. The experience is far less cynical, more intensely satisfying and much more affordable.

Loakes Park, where Wycombe played when my uncle first took me to home games in the sixties, sloped 11 feet from side to side. It stood between the gas works and the hospital and, on those frequent occasions when the ball was booted over the roof of the low stand, us kids would race to recover it from the steep bank of stinging nettles behind it. In those days, the original match-ball would be reintroduced to play at the earliest opportunity. If too many clearances went the same way, they might even run out of footballs, so the game would have to wait until one could be retrieved. The record played over the PA before kick-off was always The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill.”

We played in the Isthmian League in front of a few hundred die-hards. The older men stood on the sheltered terrace at the foot of the slope, smoking their pipes and rollies, while families and suits took seats in the wooden stand opposite. Youths stood on the open terrace behind whichever goal we were attacking. At half-time, after a cup of tea or a pint with a hot-dog or roll, they would stroll to the other end for the second half, passing their opposite numbers marching the other way. This was when the loud telephone bell would ring as the evening paper’s sports desk phoned for the latest score for their half-time edition. A few minutes later, the large painted letters displayed on the hoardings would be underpinned with the scores from the games they represented; if you’d bought a programme you would know that game A, which was nil-nil after 45 minutes, stood for Arsenal vs Stoke City.

Wycombe have enjoyed some great successes (by our modest standards), winning the non-league double one year, followed by a League 2 Wembley play-off victory the next.  But enough nostalgia – here are three incidents from the 21st century alone that make Wycombe Wanderers unique:

Scoring two goals in nine seconds, without the opposition touching the ball (2000)

This otherwise dull game was distinguished by our goal with the last kick of the first half, followed by another only nine seconds after kicking off the second. Poor old Peterborough. And pity anybody who left their seat early to join the hot-dog queue and got back late. Read about it here.

Advertising online for a striker to play in the FA Cup quarter-final (2001)

Nobody expected Wycombe to win this tie at Premiership high-fliers Leicester City and the club was so short of fire-power that they advertised online for a striker. This was a big opportunity for Roy Essandoh, who had previously played for minor sides in Scotland and Scandinavia. He joined the Wanderers a week before the game and was given a place on the bench. It was almost inevitable that, with the scores level at 1-1, he came on as a sub and nodded home the injury-time winner. See the BBC story. In some bizarre circularity that infests the game, Peter Taylor, Leicester’s hapless manager that day, went on to manage Wycombe in 2008. That didn’t end well for him, either.

Coming back from 3-1 down to win 2-0 (2012)

Back in August, Wycombe were losing a league game 3-1 after 67 minutes, at home to Bristol Rovers, when Adams Park was hit by an intense thunderstorm. The Health and Safety official insisted the game be abandoned, for fear of lightning. Despite the visitors’ protests, the referee accepted this decision and the game was rescheduled for 1 December. You can probably guess the rest. Wycombe won 2-0. You can see the details here.

We take what pleasure we can from these rare moments in the spotlight. You are more likely to see Wycombe Wanderers’ name on Family Excellence or League Groundsman’s awards than on the European Championship trophy, but for a football club with average gates of 5,000, owned by its Supporters Trust rather than a billionaire, surviving to fight another season is a victory in itself.

Online innovators are missing a trick

As part of my transition from a print past to a digital future, I’ve learned a lot about web content strategies and content management. There are some clever people out there, paving the way in these fledgling areas, learning from their own successes and failures and those of others who are happy to share.

It’s fascinating to see philosophies, procedures and best practices emerge from what is still a chaotic and evolving online environment.

I just read the second edition of ‘Content Strategy for the Web’,  by two of the leading advocates for this young discipline in a growing field. This book is a thorough and comprehensive guide to what it means, why it is important and how to harness its potential to help your business achieve its key objectives.

Barring the odd typo, it is well-written and well-structured, as you would expect, offering practical and accessible advice on how to go about making a success of your company’s website.

But … when dealing with the design of workflow and governance processes, I can’t help thinking the authors might have benefited from taking a screen break and making sure they weren’t re-inventing the wheel. Did it never occur to them that similar obstacles might already have been overcome by practitioners in other fields? How do they think the media and creative industries managed procedures, workflows, proof-reading, sign-offs and quality controls for the last half a millennium?

The book describes the creation, revision and approval of online content as a messy and daunting process. Coming from a background of production management in the publishing industry, I can’t disagree. What I can do is suggest that budding web content managers and content strategists look at some of the tools, methods and workflows that editorial departments, design studios and advertising agencies have developed to make their operations as effective and efficient as possible.

The first thing I would suggest is a simple job-booking system, with mandatory fields for essential information. Live jobs should filter into a digital dashboard, accessible to all, using a traffic-light system to give an instant overview of job statuses and highlight problems. There are several such trafficking systems, usually based on FileMaker Pro.

If none of these customisable off-the-shelf solutions suits you, flesh out your user requirements, write a business justification and lobby your directors to sponsor it as a development project.

Just as the offline world can learn lessons from their online colleagues around issues such as disintermediation, disruption and personalisation, the digital natives might occasionally cast an eye over more established business models, just on the off-chance that they might have something to teach them.