Category Archives: Reality checks

December 11, 2017 · 11:38 am

The Spanish Inquisition

I’m a big fan of Monty Python, as I am of anyone or anything that provides great insight amidst great silliness. One of my favorite Python sketches is The Spanish Inquisition. Not only is it funny (if you like really silly) but it also provides a great business reminder:

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

It’s a phrase I’ve found myself saying many times in business as some unforeseen circumstance causes great disruption. You see examples of it every day. Just this morning, there was a report of a newspaper closing in Houston which is blamed primarily on the effects of Hurricane Harvey. I’m sure there wasn’t a business plan built around that sort of natural disaster.

Sometimes, the disruptive event can be seen but its dramatic effects aren’t. Take, for example, the discussions I used to have with some higher-ups during Internet 1.0. One person was totally convinced the explosion in web properties and the dawning digital age was “a scam.” He didn’t believe that people wanted to watch TV on their computers when a brand new HD-TV was in their living room (HD was pretty new at the time). Of course, he also didn’t expect that broadband would make delivering video to any device wirelessly as good an HD experience as that same TV, nor did he understand that it literally was the same bits that comprise the “broadcast” signal.

Those same broadcasters denied that cord-cutting would have any effect on viewing. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, you see. However, ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011. You think the recent waves of layoffs aren’t related to cord-cutting? When cable is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers each month, you can count on there being an effect on the business.

The hardest part of being in business is seeing over the horizon. Brexit? President Trump? China leading the charge against climate change? The Cubs winning the World Series?? Who expected those things? Equally as difficult can be in believing what you’re seeing. Nobody may expect The Spanish Inquisition, but part of our job as businesspeople is to be ready when it pops into the room. Are you?

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December 4, 2017 · 12:41 pm

Losing The Lottery

We’re all bugged. If you carry a smartphone, you may rest assured that it’s possible to identify that device as it moves through the world and interacts with various services. How difficult do you think it is, once someone has a device ID, to associate it with a phone number‘s owner?

I think none of that is a surprise to you, nor is it to me. I try to keep the list of organizations tracking me to a minimum and to a list of companies I trust. Unfortunately, that takes more effort that most people are willing to exert but it can affect you in more ways that you might know.

I uninstalled a lottery app this morning. It was doing a number of things that caused me concern. First, it alone was responsible for 65% of the data traffic from my phone when the phone was idle. The app was idle too, or so I thought. In fact, it was busy sending my phone number, my device ID, and several other very personal pieces of data (Facebook and Twitter ID’s among them) to…someplace. Who knows what happened to the data from there.

I installed this app a few months ago when the Powerball prize pool was ridiculously large. It seemed like a convenient way to input my tickets and get notified if I won anything. What I won, apparently, was the ability to be tracked as an individual and have my battery drained unnecessarily. Buh bye.

What’s the point today? I guess it’s a message for you as you’re on either side of the desk. As a marketer, we can’t violate our customers’ trust by using the permissions they give us to collect usage data and selling or sharing that data to companies with which the customer has no relationship. More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics. Generally, those companies are there to improve the user experience. The problem is that in many cases, app developers that that permission as carte blanche to send the data anywhere. I’ve seen how that data can be used for profiling and targeting and believe me, it’s frightening.

As consumers, we need to pay more attention to privacy and where our data goes. It’s not just to keep your battery from running down. Given the role that our smart devices play in our daily lives, it’s quite possible that a bad actor could know way more about you than you’d care to share. I don’t just mean by monitoring your texts or any unencrypted data you send. It’s also tracking your movements. As a positive, location-based services can help us (you get an alert for a sale at a store you frequent as you pass within a quarter mile) but the possibility of an unscrupulous third party misusing that data is exceptionally high. Check your app permissions. Why would a game need to know your location or have access to your camera, for example? Turn off the permissions that don’t make sense.

I’ll be looking up the results of the money I risked on Powerball some other way since trying to make my life a little easier made it a lot more risky in other ways. It was a good reminder to let my devices work for me and not for people who want to spy on me. You with me?

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November 6, 2017 · 3:11 pm

Are We In An Information Death Spiral?

Sometimes I wonder if we’re in an informational death spiral. That’s when an aircraft is out of control, loses lift, and heads in a corkscrew motion toward the ground. My pilot friends say they usually begin with a random, increasing roll and airspeed. That’s where I think we all just might be with respect to information. We’ve had a random, increasing rolling of what “real” information is and the speed at which it is generated is increasing.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Why this matters to you, both in business and in life, is that it’s becoming increasingly impossible to tell fact from fiction. The revelation that the Russian government created thousands of fake accounts across the social sphere to generate and amplify “news” items that were made up out of whole cloth is devastating to anyone who tries to figure out fact from fiction. That devastation is multiplied by the findings of this year’s Pew study which found:

Two-thirds of Americans (66%) use Facebook, and a majority of those users get news on the site, similar to 2016. Looked at as a portion of all U.S. adults, this translates into just under half (45%) of Americans getting news on Facebook. While a large share of its users get news on [Twitter} (74% say they do), its audience is significantly smaller overall. This means that overall, fewer Americans get news on Twitter (11% of U.S. adults).

In other words, we’re increasingly relying on the least reliable sources for news and information. Imagine if you were doing this in your business. Rather than looking at actual revenues, you based your appraisal of how things were going on how full your warehouse seemed or how busy your staff was. Sure, a warehouse that’s becoming empty can signal great sales but it can also signal an issue with your supply chain or with your accounting department who hasn’t been paying suppliers. Maybe it’s a collections issue. You don’t know until you get the real facts.

Being able to separate fact from fiction is the basis of being an educated, competent person. When others are out there trying as hard as they can to mask facts or to impose fiction, that job is thrown into a death spiral. When Facebook changed from being a place when you could focus on friends and family to a platform for news and information, the spiral began. When their algorithm began to reward the click bait that was able to deceive enough people by being outrageous, our collective noses headed toward the ground.

Don’t be fooled by fake news, either in the office or out of it. Find the facts, level off your wings, and fly on.

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