In No Particular Order

Andrew Edmunds | London Restaurants | Fodor’s Online Travel Guide

Who’d have thought it? Fodor’s, voted Most Trusted Brand by the travelling American Blue-Rinse Saga set (ok – I made that up) getting UGC so, so, so wrong…

I was inviting a friend to my favourite restaurant in all of London Town and – he being new to this parts – thought I’d send him an interwebnet link, entered “andrew edmunds” into google.

The Fodors review seemed the nicest but, upon looking at the site, I find the contribution of “Fernando Hemmingway from The Land of Confused Ducks”. Promising.

I’ve grabbed the entry (in case anyone from Fodors reads this) but it’s reproduced below – with full apologies to anyone who gets sacked as this is parsed by your firewall’s content filter…

The Cream at Andrew Edmunds Isn’t the Only Thing Being Whipped!
Posted by Fernando Hemmingway from The Land of Confused Ducks on 05/22/2006
I was delighted with this restaurant, until I discovered that it was actually a gay bar. I was raped several times by various people, including the head chef. I can only pray he remembered to wash his hands before preparing my meal!

UGC is all well and good, but while the consumer (joker, mendacious troll, saboteur) may _generate_ the words, you don’t have to accept them! It’s your brand, Fodor, look after it!

Now, let’s hope that they have the confit of duck on the menu next week…

Welcome To Dogster, Where Every Dog Has A Webpage!

Having just taken issue with whether social Web2.0 mania had gone too far, I now have to eat Numble pie.

It’d only be more funny if it were called “dogstr” and listed your pooch’s favourite bookmarks…

Web 2.0 needs to lose the social software thing, please | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com

Interesting post on the vibrant e-consultancy.com blog by Gareth Knight. Gareth’s tired of the obsession with ‘add a blog’ or a ‘social dimension’ to software when there’s so much more to Web2.0 than that. He says:

I wonder if this is because the people who drive solutions to business problems are the managers and CEOs, whilst the people that create and implement new technologies are techies who are scratching an itch they have for something that they can’t already do. The techie is motivated by challenge, whilst the manager is motivated by ROI – simple paradox, but this I think is what is underscoring the situation at the moment.

While I share some of the frustration at oversimplification, I don’t accept the characterisation of the problem. My comment, on their site, reads:

Nice post, however I don’t think that the proposed Dilbertian opposition (ie marketing and CEO woofties versus the Grand Viseors of Truth, technochrats etc) is correct.

Rather I think we’re seeing the latest (but not the last) incarnation of a twofold fascination: 1) human beings desire to communicate with/at others; 2) human beings obsession with commenting on 1.

You could replace “social software” with “My Home Page”, website, instant messenger, texting, the first wave of business flirting (Friendster, Orkut, Ryze), self-promotion (ecademy, linkedin) and now Bebo and MySpace.

All of the systems, ironically, are proxies for human contact so – here on e-consultancy – I’m predicting that we’ll move beyond ‘proxy contact’ for Web3.0 and have truly social approaches. I’ve applied for a bizmeth patent and will be marketing this revolution under the SayingHello i’theStreet [tm] brand. You never know – could work!

In the meantime all of this pseudo-social communication/broadcast/posting activity (more heat than light, even on a good day) simply gives tired brands the veneer of communication and engagement. The real question for brands is how to distinguish substance from form and to engage in a dialogue with customers. To miss this opportunity is to demote a customer into a ‘purchaser’, with all of the consequences for business sustainability that entails.
Posted 22:10 14 Sep 2006 by Ian Jindal