Using content to complement your brand

The morning keynote was an awe-inspiring look at the Red Bull Media House, founded in 2007, 20 years after the drink/brand organisation, to focus on creating a media business – building a structure and organisation for the commercialisation of Red Bull’s content assets.

Red Bull’s Chief Commercial Officer, Alexander Koppell, believes that brilliant content should be at the centre of every great brand. But, with content as the company’s major asset, Red Bull found that they needed to consider how to create more; to create a platform and tools; and to handle distribution. Rather than turn to agencies the Red Bull Media House was created as a 360 degree media business with content, its own production facilities, marketing communication, publishing press, music label publishing, broadcasting, platform provision, and worldwide distribution. As a result, Red Bull is the third most influential social brand globally.

Now, as YouTube has become the world’s global video pool, it has partnered with brands to move into content creation. Red Bull is one of those brands and this is just one of the results:

Koppell summed up by highlighting Red Bull’s key focus areas of:

1. Brilliant content
2. Multichannel execution
3. Reach and monetisation
4. And a new paradigm based on Google’s Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT).

As for his advice to other organisations? Build structures, invest inside your company – if you go for third parties be aware of the risks to you as a content player – and at same time build up your asset (be that technology, events or Formula 1 racing teams!). Whatever your core product is, make sure that you can differentiate your company from its competitors!

Online video: great to watch, even better to share

The next session was a panel on video and, as is usual with this format, I found my mind wondering to other things – panel discussions just don’t engage me! I did get to a session later in the day on the topic (more in a moment) but a couple of quick points I picked up were:

• We have always loved video but it’s now easier to distribute and consume.
• An emotional video ad that makes you feel good about a brand is unlikely to lead to an immediate purchase – it may influence future decisions though.
• And, as for the future of social video:
• Expect to see more value exchanges – e.g. watch a video in preference to a micro-transaction (e.g. buying a crop in Farmville).
• Infomercials will become common.
• The democratisation of video creation (as the barrier to content creation is now very low) will create an explosion of channels and an amazing amount of content.
• Brands can be content creators too and users will decide whats good or not (great stuff will bubble to the top).

The accidental social campaign: understanding the multiplier effect

As the conference moved into a series of breakout sessions, I decided to join Jonathan Wolf (@JonathanWWolf)’s workshop looking at creating the multiplier effect – taking advantage of user generated content and using it as many times as possible to maximise value.

In stark contrast to a later workshop, Jonathan took a refreshing approach to self-promotion, joking about having six slides to present about his company first, and then saying “not really” and moving straight into content. Thank you, thank you, thank you Jonathan. That, combined with some quality advice is an example of thought leadership. And it meant that I did actually read the literature about BazaarVoice rather than blanking them from that point forward (take note Wildfire and Telligent – more on Telligent in a moment…).

Jonathan outlined a couple of case studies where companies used user generated content to build loyalty and brand advocacy:

• White Stuff‘s UHT campaign gave customers the opportunity to put their man on a charity calendar. In step 1, people contributed stories/photos and participated, but step 2 was to get people back to vote on the best stories – a second wave of the campaign (for free as heavy lifting already done). Once the finalists had been selected, White Stuff got people to come back again and vote once more (and if your partner was there you would have got all your friends to vote…). Now they have selected a winner but not told us who yet – so expect a fourth wave as they market back out to us – combined with the press opportunities as this is a charity calendar… In all, the same content has been (or will be) used four or five times so the return on investment is great!
• Domino’s Pizza had a brand crisis in the US – so they reformulated their food and gave people insight into how things work (Amy is making your pizza, Joe is delivering your pizza) with a pizza tracker. On top of this, they encouraged customers to write reviews and the company put them on screen in New York’s Times Square. This campaign has several effects: it gives insight and solicits feedback; it is used internally as a measure of how well the company is doing; it engages employees to have pride in their work (employees don’t want their name on a bad review…); it serves as an advertisment (in Times Square); and it’s driven from the web – so the Times Square activity acts as an ad campaign in itself.

After whetting our appetite, Jonathan stopped and got us to have a go at a practical exercise. But I wanted more… the workshop was good, and well-run, but it was a lot to squeeze into a short session which ultimately led to us over-running the time-slot. Hey ho, I guess that was the brief…

Video: it’s how we see the world

In this next session, Google’s Harry Davies (@HarryDavies) gave some insight into the world of online video (and advertising… after all he does work for Google!)

He’s absolutely correct that it’s to video we turn to to understand great events (citing an example from 9/11 – watching events unfold on the TV in his boss’ office [I did that too]).

Harry’s hypothesis is that video is the closest media we have to life and that makes it “super-important”. And advertisers have long understood the magic of television and used that so that they can ride on back of great content and provokes an emotional response (for example the John Lewis Always a Woman ad) – which attempts to connect with customers on an emotional level:

Quoting from Daniel Kahneman’s ”Thinking fast and slow”, Harry highlighted that we make snap decisions based on emotional connections – and that’s what TV ties into. Online provides an opportunity to take the emotional journey further.

Some more snippets from Harry’s talk:

• On average people watch 4 hours and 2 minues of  TV each day and 54 minutes of online video viewing – but half of the ads are not watched, so Google developed skippable ad format to avoid annoying users.
• Skippable ads are  good from an advertiser perspective – getting rid of those who don’t care about your product/service and retaining those who are truly engaged (you don’t pay for those who skip).
• So what’s next? The democratisation of video – examples include:
• Jamal Edwards, who went from a teenager with a video camera to creating SBTV (the UK’s leading online youth broadcaster).
• Walk off the Earth’s cover of Goyte’s “Someone I used to Know” becoming successful and driving interest in the original song!
• Red Bull becoming a media company from a soft drinks company…
• Money Saving Expert videos advising on home finances (all Financial Services companies could be doing this) – and this plays into an idea of “branded usefulness” – become useful to people every day (far easier than being funny or entertaining every day).

Of course, Harry demonstrated some YouTube functionality, like trends, charts and video statistics (look for the button next to the play count), but that was in context, and useful… so not really pitching.

Summarising the session in four points:

1. Emotional ads work.
2. Follow the user (where are they watching – if there is an 80/20 split between  TV and online watching – split your budget and plan accordingly).
3. Only pay for engaged users.
4. Develop content for the new video generation (you don’t have to stay with traditional ads – think about generating your own content – people don’t care where it came from as long as it’s good).

How to transform your marketing with social customer engagement

This session promised a lot. And delivered very little.

In short, Telligent showed us a 3 minute corporate video (with United States contact details) and then their partner (Insites Consulting) spent some time telling us about themselves… Hello? We are not here to hear your pitch!

I'll say it again: *do not pitch to me at a conference*. Use as an opportunity for *Thought Leadership*; sales will follow later #iStrategy

Wednesday 23 May 2012 12:48 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@markwilsonit

Mark Wilson

I very nearly walked out of the session at this point, but I stayed to listen to Insites talking about the co-creation that they did with Heineken and upcoming designers to create  the nightclub of the future (I could have just read Insites’ blog entry - and there is an expanded version of the slide deck online) but there was nothing about some of the other brands mentioned in the conference brochure (Heinz, Unilever).

I’ve used Telligent’s software (Community Manager) in the past and I hope it’s a lot better now (that was in 2003). I won’t be engaging with them though based on their performance at iStrategy. And next time I see a presentation is being delivered by a “Sales Director”, I should know better than to expect anything other than a pitch…

The iPitch

Post lunch, the conference moved in to a Dragons’ Den-esque session with six companies each given six minutes to pitch their product. It was a bit of fun – and quite interesting, although, by this point I had one eye on the clock as I needed to leave soon…

Redefining marketing success: why ROI and marketing don’t always belong in the same sentence

The first thing that this panel did was to redefine the topic to “A decade of focus on metrics (measurement, accountability and ROI) is inhibiting innovation and progress in social…”

Moderated by Thomas Brown (@thinkstuff), the panel included Georgios Kolovos (@gkolovos) Azeem Azar (@azeem), Delphine Remy-Boutang (@delphineRB), Joshua Graff (@joshgraff) and Marc Munier (@marcmunier) and there were some interesting points put forward.

Some of the key points raised in this debate included:

• The Days of Don Draper are over – we need goals, not just eureka moments – and what better goal than ROI? Combine this with an iterative process to get closer to that goal.
• Metrics make sense when you know what to do and you have done it before but don’t make sense for innovation. To deal with this and avoid being late to the table 90-95% of time needs to be driven by metrics (in order to be operationally efficient) but 5-10% should be around experimentation, within a framework and with the right people.
• Scale is an issue – in a large organisation it’s not so much about new ideas but ideas that are scalable. That means that a rigorous approach to assessing innovation is needed, and process and rigour come with ROI. Marketers need to be bold enough to agree that others brought an idea to market and also to say it’s not viable for us.
• Perhaps, consider a “return on ignorance”, which also has a cost. Eurostar spent €6n to reduce journey times but meanwhile customer feedback suggests they are less concerned about journey times and want Wi-Fi on trains. We need to listen to our customers – not so much for the I in innovation as the C in collaboration.
• It’s not either/or (ROI or not) but striking a balance: data vs. creativity; and data vs. innovation. Data driven marketing decisions help drive innovation by better understanding consumer behaviour, segmenting customers and what they are doing, we can be  more thoughtful and creative. Data, creativity and innovation are not mutually exclusive and the greatest innovations come from a balance: work with data, innovate and then mesh with creativity.
• Marketing needs invest ahead of curve (unlike sales, finance, customer service, etc. who can ramp up as need to based on sales, invoices, customer interaction, etc.).

Going global: how Ford Motor Company sets the tone for a global social media strategy

I had to leave early and missed the final keynote, scheduled to be delivered by Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) from Ford although I understand he was unable to travel and Alex Hultgren (@AlexHultgren) stood in for him.  Even so I’m sure it would have been a pretty interesting close to the conference as Scott’s story at Ford is an often-quoted case study on crisis management and I’m sure they have a pretty good grip on social media with lots of advice for the rest of us.  In leui of my own opinions, I’ve picked some tweets from others that were in the session

#istrategy secrets to reinventing Ford Motor Co 1 - break down silos, get common vision

about 23 hours ago via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@KayWesley

Kay Wesley

Universal truths in social: create strong products, create engaging content, speak like them,let people speak, & then listen #istrategy

about 23 hours ago via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@georgeioannou

George Ioannou

The important thing for Ford is to make the brand more human #istrategy

about 23 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@thesocialbureau

the social bureau

"How to make your brand more human? Showcase the humans that work at your brand." @AlexHultgren of @Ford #istrategy

about 23 hours ago via TweetGrid.comReplyRetweetFavorite

@NealSchaffer

Neal Schaffer

Ford driving massive numbers with Yahoo! activity and Facebook for 2012 Explorer. Outperformed a Superbowl ad! #istrategy

about 23 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@philptaylor

Phil Taylor

#istrategy Ford gave a fiesta away in a competition on Facebook using Instagram.

about 23 hours ago via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@KayWesley

Kay Wesley

Here's that winnning fiesta picture http://t.co/CvEle1Kq #istrategy

about 23 hours ago via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@georgeioannou

George Ioannou

Wrapping up

Yesterday I said that I had mixed feelings about iStrategy and the major letdown for me was the apparent inability for certain presenters to avoid their own marketing pitches. I’m told by one of the conference organisers that guideline number 1 for speakers is “do not pitch”. I guess you can’t help some people but it’s particularly galling when “social media gurus” and marketing professionals don’t understand the difference between promoting your brand from a thought leadership perspective and turning your audience off with thinly (or not so thinly) disguised sales tactics.

On the whole though, iStrategy has let me take stock (and think a little about my own future direction) as well as to arm me with additional knowledge about the world of digital media (although it’s also true that some of that knowledge can be obtained from free events too – I’ve written on these pages about Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddles and about Digital Surrey and those are just two examples). Nevertheless, for busy marketing professionals, iStrategy should represent a pretty good return in their (time) investment – particularly if they are grappling with their own organisation’s move into the brave new world of connected consumers and data-driven marketing.

It has a good mix of keynotes, workshops, case studies, networking and the ever-present panel (in a variety of formats) and, whilst not all formats will appeal all of the time, there should be something in there that works for everyone.

That’s not the end of my iStrategy coverage on this blog – I’ve got some additional notes that I’m likely to shape into blog posts over the coming days and weeks but, in the meantime, I’ll be switching modes, back from geek marketeer into solution architect as I fill the rest of my week with the immediate day-job concerns around IT strategy and governance…

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

Highlights from day 2 of #iStrategy London

iStrategy attracts a broad range of marketing professionals and executives from all sectors (a quick glance at a few badges shows a wide range of brands that we would all recognise) and, equally, features some high calibre speakers. Its multi-stream approach is both a blessing (allowing delegates to attend the sessions that mean most to them) and a curse (inevitably some sessions run up against one another but this post gives a rundown of some of the highlights from the sessions I attended yesterday.

The social media brandsphere

Kicking off the event, Adam Burns (@AdamRobertBurns) welcomed us to Stamford Bridge, home of the newly-crowned European Champions, Chelsea FC, before international speaker and author Brian Solis (@BrianSolis) spoke about what he calls “frictionless sharing”. I’ve heard Brian speak before and he is certainly entertaining and engaging but the subtext to his talk is “buy my book”, giving just enough to whet the appetite but not enough to make anything real (some might say that’s smart).

I’ll probably write a more complete blog post over the next few days but, in short, Brian suggests that:

• We have lost our way in digital media, confusing brand engagement metrics with likes/comments/shares whilst missing the true metrics which are about how people feel and engage.
• The challenge for digital marketers is to design a form of engagement which provides a worthwhile interaction, to make today’s more discerning “connected consumers” come back and to get them talking/sharing your content.
• Context is now king: mobile and web, online and offline need to work together seamlessly because, whether we like it or not, customers contribute to the state of our brands simply by sharing their experiences.
• Great content is consumable; and great social content is sharable – alwyas think about relevance, resonance and significance. What we say is far less important than what we do.

Mobile first, exploiting the potential of the mobile economy

The next session was a panel discussion about the use of mobile technology in marketing. I’m not a fan of these panel discussions and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the audience checking his email etc. as five people sat on the stage chatting amongst themselves with very little audience interaction…

The most useful points (for me) can be pretty much summed up with a tweet:

Yes! Apps vs. HTML5: not an either/or; make mobile site work (concentrate on UX); mobile accessible; apps about rich experience #iStrategy

Tuesday 22 May 2012 10:37 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@markwilsonit

Mark Wilson

(I’m not sure, but I think most of that was based on comments from Mastercard’s James Davlouros (@james_davlouros).

The (real) value of social media

Introduced by Alistair Beattie (@bicameralman) from Tribal DDB, this break-out session was a workshop looking aiming to ”look beyond the value of media in social media.” and to reconnect with the importance of the social graph, and with marketing as a whole.

Re-enforcing some of the messages from Brian Solis’ keynote, Alistair highlighted:

• Interaction: the 200 top brands only get 1.3% interaction on Facebook and other social platforms – and that’s likes, commenting is even lower.
• Reach: fans are only a small portion of the available market – and pages naturally reach just 5-20% of those fans.
• Loyalty and advocacy: purchasing frequency doesn’t increase after becoming a fan – and, because of a phenomenon known as edgerank, likes aren’t actually seen by 250 friends – the real number is closer to 16 as not all friends will see that status update.

Regardless of the above, social media is still a powerful medium. When considered with the “Four Ps” of promotion, product, price and place we can use the social graph to improve connections and the session broke out into groups looking at how to apply this principle to a second tier shoe brand looking to retain and attract 16-24 year-olds to its brand.

Open innovation: how EMI learned to love APIs

Betrand Bodson (@bbod)’s case study session was another one that warrants a more complete examination in a separate blog post – and I found it very interesting to hear how EMI Music has managed to create an environment for open innovation (OpenEMI) in a market sector that is traditionally considered slow to adopt new business models.

By creating a secure, managed environment (a “sandbox”) for developers who have signed up to OpenEMI, the company provides a brief and content to for the creation of commercial apps for iOS, Android and the web.

The system is based on a partnership approach with regular reviews and a 60/40 revenue split between EMI and the developer/platform owner:

• Developers are responsible for the apps, engineering, product development, upgrades and maintenance.
• EMI provides content, manages the clearance with rights holders, and markets the app
• The EchoNest provides a technical platform and tools, intelligence on app trends, and facilitates the creation of a network of developers.

Incidentally, one of the other case studies in the same slot examined at how Macdonalds used crowdsourcing in Germany for its Make Your Own Burger campaign – and the challenges that presents to the business if adopted more widely. I would have liked to have heard that talk, but there’s only one of me so I can only be in one place at one time! Nevertheless everyone I spoke to who attended seemed to find it interesting.

Social unleashed: unlocking the transformative power of social media

After a pitch-side lunch, the afternoon keynote was probably the biggest disappointment of the day and, based on the RTs I received, I was not alone in my view that hijacking a keynote to promote your product is unacceptable – even if you have paid a lot of money to sponsor an event.

In fairness to Wildfire’s Doug Laird (@dougbytes) he was a substitute speaker but instead of using the keynote as an opportunity to be a thought leader he simply marketed Wildfire’s social media marketing platform and, ultimately, put me off any future engagement.

If “earned media” is the holy grail of social media marketing – exposure via word of mouth marketing – maybe 13,000 brands can’t be wrong but it all felt a little “me, me, me”:

MeMeMessage #istrategy #wildfire http://t.co/Q6uXxz0v

Tuesday 22 May 2012 14:06 via InstagramReplyRetweetFavorite

@jangles

Neville Hobson

Adaptive brands: delivering contextual value in a shifting world

In what was probably the best session I attended at the first day of iStrategy, Neil Clemmons (@neilclemmons) from Critical Mass got me on board right from the start when he said that everyone has a list with two columns: urgent (those things you need to do to hit your numbers) and important (those things that will become urgent if you ignore them).

Neil’s presentation was about the “important” things and examined how the 4Ps (used in the morning session on the value of social media) no longer apply – how brands need to adopt new attributes to adapt to a changing market as the emphasis moves from product to service to serving.

Much better than any synopsis from me, Neil’s team had his slides on Slideshare soon after he finished – and I recommend you take a look:

(It struck me as a little odd that fewer speakers are sharing their decks this way – after all this is a digital marketing conference…)

[At this point I missed Didier Drogba being interviewed an photographed on the pitch about his impending departure from Stamford Bridge!]

#istrategy Drogba on the pitch. Might be the last time we see him here. Id like £250k a week! http://t.co/ooOfGvax

Tuesday 22 May 2012 15:53 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@RobertArwel

Robert Arwel Hughes

Data and creativity: the near future of display advertising

Micheal Steckler’s session was full of insight into the future of display advertising as the data held on each of us allows for more personal approach.

Michaels own final thoughts make a good summary in that:

• The data you own is still the most powerful.
• Consider that most activity is talking to existing users online.
• Differentiate creative, offer and pricing by user group (this is the future of display ads).
• Use sophistication to marry data insight and creativity.

The social club

Hosted by Adam Burns, the final session of the day actually made the panel discussion format work (more chat-show style than discussion around the table). Some of the highlights from Gillian Muessig (@SEOmom), Kerry Bridge (@KerryatDell) and Azeem Azhar (@Azeem) were:

• Corporate values have to match brand values – we can tie employees up with social media guidelines but not their friends, family – or our customers… and they will talk about their experiences.
• When people come to your “place” to discuss something (your website, your blog, etc.) then you are the centre of the conversation… be that place for your industry or topic…
• Dell trains employes in social media just as they do for presentations…
• For proof that word of mouth is real – Telenord found that if someone has a frind with an iPhone, they are twice as likely to buy one themselves within the next 90 days. If they have two iPhone-toting friends, they are five time more likely – and that’s based on real world conversation (not social), together with Telenord’s insight nto phone data (i.e. who calls who).
• We are putting more online… expect to see more companies seamlessly segment users – not as rough as influence engines but in same way might by, for example, postcode, today…
• We often compare influence scores with credit scores but Experian would never disclose your credit score – that’s a key difference with influence engines (and credit is due to Azeem for his transparency and honesty in highlighting this!)

End of day 1

At the end of day 1, I have mixed feelings about iStrategy. As an event it has a lot of potential, but I’m not convinced the mix is quite right (maybe, given the early start, providing some breakfast might have put me in a better mood!) – and I’ve already given my views on Wildfire’s abuse of the afternoon keynote. Even so, I got a lot of value from some of the other sessions, so it can’t have been all bad – and I am writing this on my way back to London for day 2 after all! Watch this space for highlights from day 2 (and some more of the detail from day 1 too).

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

Highlights from day 1 of #iStrategy London

It seems that certain versions of Symantec Endpoint Prevention (ahem…) Protection 11 have an issue with Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 file copies. Disabling SMB 2.0 is one option, using the following commands on the client machine:

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi
sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled

(I’m not sure if a reboot is required, but I rebooted anyway.)

Whilst this could potentially reduce performance of the file copy operation, I could that it did at least allow it to work. (There’s also an unofficial Symantec tool that can be used to disable/enable SMB 2.0 on Windows 7.)

Unfortunately, the copy process was still not flawless and several times a dialog box appeared warning about Error 0x8007046A: Not enough server storage is available to process this command. Restarting the Server service on the remote PC (net stop server, then net start server answering Y to continue the operation when prompted about existing sessions or dependant services such as Computer Browser or HomeGroup Listener) and then clicking Try Again on the client, let the copy process continue

Once the file copy was completed, I enabled SMB 2.0 again, using:

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi
sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto

Sadly, the lost time circumventing issues caused by security software doesn’t seem to be a criteria used by IT departments when considering their approach to desktop service provision, which is another reason I believe that a “dirty” network is not such a bad thing…

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

File copy issues with Symantec Endpoint Protection on Windows 7

Earlier this month, I wrote a post with a few hints and tips I’d picked up whilst developing a site based on SharePoint.  Since then, I’ve come up against a few more barriers…

Item level permissions on document libraries

SharePoint allows administrators to set permissions on lists so that users can read and/or edit only their own items. Unfortunately, whilst that functionality is exposed in the user interface for lists, it’s not for document libraries (although it is in the object model). Basically, if you can write some code, you might be able to set the requisite permissions, but that’s beyond my abilities.  Thankfully, others have done the legwork, either in the form of a rough-and-ready utility like Matt Morse’s or Tim Larson’s Read/Write Security solution.  Either way I need to get the the changes applied to our SharePoint farm… which may well be more trouble than it’s worth…

Changing the contact for a page

Even though there is a page contact in the properties for each page (at least there is in my company – that might just be metadata that we use…), changing that property doesn’t seem to affect the page contact (which our templates show at the bottom of the page – and is also shown in a view of all pages).  The answer is to edit the page settings (in the same way as to change the page layout). Thanks to Ian Mitchell (@ianmitchell2) for setting me on the right path there…

A calculated column, with a formula based on a Yes/No field

I wanted to display a tick or a cross instead of a yes or a no in a view on one of my lists and, in order to do this I needed to create a calculated column that produced the necessary HTML (and a script to display it…). I’ll write another post about the fancy formatting but I really struggled to work out how the Yes/No is recorded (Yes/No; 1/0; TRUE/FALSE?). Exporting my list to Excel proved that SharePoint stores boolean values as TRUE/FALSE (confirmed by Peter Allen) but the trick is to leave out any quotes – if you look for =IF(Column="TRUE","This","That") it will always be negative and the outcome will be “That”.  The correct formula is =IF(Column=TRUE,"This","That").

Editing in data sheet view but the view is read-only?

I needed to perform some bulk updates on lists in SharePoint but, frustratingly, the view was marked as Read Only so I couldn’t make any edits.  I couldn’t see why this was, but googling turned up an explanation – the list was set to require content approval.  PointBeyond has more information on configuring approval in SharePoint but temporarily removing this setting allowed me to make the necessary updates, before re-enabling it.

Connecting data in web parts

Back in around 2003/2004, I remember attending a SharePoint training course where I connected a couple of webparts to work together.  For someone like myself with little or no coding skills, this was magical… and then I forgot how to do it.  Yesterday, I ran up against an issue where, partly as a result of some database design decisions by the previous  designer, I found myself unable to display the view on a list that I wanted to, as there was an implied hierarchy in the data, but the lower levels in the hierarchy link to their parent, rather than parents linking to children (it would be better still if things could work both ways…).

The workaround, albeit clunky, was to configure two webparts, each showing a view on a different list, before configuring a data connection so that the first list provided a row upon which to filter the second list.  I needed to be careful in selecting columns (i.e. the second list needs to have a column that is a lookup on the first) but, with that in place, I was able to at least show the relationships between the items in each list.

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

More SharePoint shenanigans

It seems that the various OpenManage tools were no help – indeed many of the information sources I found for configuring the Baseboard Management Controller and kicking SOLProxy and IMPI into life seemed to be out of date, or just not applicable on Windows 7 (although ipmish.exe might be a useful tool if I get it working in future and it can be used to send WoL packets). I did find that, annoyingly, WinRM 2.0 needs an HTTPS connection and that a self-signed certificate will not be acceptable (according to Microsoft knowledge base article 2019527).  If I ever return to the topic of WinRM and IPMI, there’s a useful MSDN article on installation and configuration for Windows Remote Management.

In the end, even though my system is running Windows 7, the answer was contained in a blog post about a PowerEdge 1750, WoL and Debian

“Pressing ‘CTRL-S’ brings us to a configuration panel which allows for enabling the Wake-On-LAN (WOL) mode of the card.”

I’d been ignoring this because it the Ctrl-S boot option advertises itself as the “Broadcom NetXtreme Ethernet Boot Agent” (and I didn’t want to set the machine up to PXE boot) but, sure enough, after changing the Pre-boot Wake On LAN setting to Enable, my PowerEdge 840 started responding to magic packets.

On my WoL adventure, I’d picked up a few more hints/tips too, so I thought it’s worth blogging them for anyone else looking to follow a similar path…

• According to a white paper describing WoL support on Dell servers:

“Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 do not require that WOL be turned on in the NIC’s or LOM’s firmware, therefore the steps using DOS outlined in the Out?of?Box and Windows NT 4.0 procedures are not necessary and should be skipped.  Enabling WOL with IBAUTIL.EXE, UXDIAG.EXE or B57UDIAG.EXE may be detrimental to WOL under Windows 2000 and Windows 2003.”

• Presumably this advice also applies to Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 7 and Server 2008 R2 as they are also based on the NT kernel, so there is no need to mess around with DOS images and floppy drives to try and configure the NIC…
• I downloaded Broadcom’s own version (15.0.0.21 19/10/2011) of the Windows drivers for my NIC (even though Windows said that the Microsoft-supplied drivers were current) and I’m pretty sure (although I can’t be certain) that the Broadcom driver exposed advanced NIC properties that were not previously visible to control Wake Up Capabilities and WoL Speed. (Incidentally, I left all three power management checkboxes selected, including “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”). There’s more information on these options in the Broadcom Ethernet NIC FAQs.
• There is a useful-sounding CLI utility called the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite that I didn’t need to download; however its existence might be useful to others.
• Depicus (Brian Slack) has some fantastic free utilities (and a host of information about WoL) including:
• Wake on LAN tools for Windows 3.1, modern versions of Windows (GUI and CLI), Mac (GUI and CLI), iPhone and Android (with Windows Phone version in development)  – although I only used the Windows CLI version.
• A Wake on LAN .net web service to deploy on your own web server (there’s an ASP version too and a COM object).
• A WoL over the Internet service (which worked for me, once I configured my router to forward UDP port 7 requests to the IP address that I reserved for the PC I want to boot – there’s a static ARP solution too, but I didn’t use that). There’s even a Facebook WakeOnLAN app!
• Some other interesting tools including an ARP Viewer and a WoL Monitor/Sniffer.
• Other WoL tools (although I think Depicus has the landscape pretty much covered) include:
• Matcode Wake-on-LAN (mc-wol.exe), which seems to work well, although the Depicus monitor doesn’t see the packet.
• ReadPixel WakeOnLan for OS X.
• Nirsoft WakeMeOnLAN, although this scans the network to look for devices – it doesn’t seem to allow entry of target device details.
• AMD Magic Packet Wakup Application (MPWake), an elderly application written for MS-DOS that needs to be compiled before it’s run (I didn’t bother!).
• Sourceforge Wake On LAN project (I haven’t tried this).
• There’s also some more information about WoL on Lifehacker.

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Wake on LAN braindump

Unfortunately, every time I booted it, I had to press F1, until I worked out that it was still looking for some hard disks that I had removed.  Delving into the BIOS and switching the spare SATA ports to Off, rather than Auto, sorted out the problem and now the system boots without issue.

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Fixing a Dell server that required F1 on every boot

Unfortunately, some half-baked EU directive about privacy and cookies (half-baked – get it…) takes effect this month after even the UK government needed a year to get its act together (the Information Comissionners Office, which is responsible for enforcing the associated UK legislation, only removed its last cookie in March).

What’s worse is that the ICO’s guidance for website owners is really difficult to follow. Peter Bryant (@PJBryant) pointed me at an article in PC Pro magazine that suggests I should be OK without doing anything, meanwhile Kuan Hon (@Kuan0) from the Cloud Legal Project at Queen Mary University suggested a few weeks ago that we all need to be looking carefully at our sites if we want to avoid a fine…

I’m no lawyer and I can’t afford to be paying fines so I checked out some WordPress plugins that might help me. Some were linked to websites that should check my site for cookies… except they didn’t seem to work – and, anyway, I don’t really want to be making a big deal about cookies (they are, mostly, harmless).

I selected a very simple plug-in called Cookie Warning that presents a message (importantly, not a pop-up) to first time site visitors. The message is customisable (although changing the size of the text on the buttons will involve me editing the plugin) and it seems to be enough for me to gain consent from users. Importantly, it doesn’t seem to impact the way in which search engines see the site.

Only time will tell if this change negatively impacts my traffic – I’d like to think that most of my visitors understand enough about cookies to realise that this is not really such a big deal – but it will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months as companies big and small update their sites to comply with the legislation.

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

Half-baked cookies…

I went along to yesterday’s IT Pro Camp on Consumerisation as a result of a Twitter conversation that suggested I come and see what Microsoft is doing to embrace and support consumerisation.  To be fair, I should have known better. For the last 20 years, Microsoft has provided desktop (and back-office) systems to enterprises and the consumerisation megatrend threatens this hegemony. Sure, they also operate in the consumer space, but consumerisation is increasingly mobile and cross-platform which means that Microsoft’s dominance is weakening*.

What the UK TechNet team has done is to put together a workshop that looks at how Microsoft tools can be used to support consumerisation in the enterprise – and, at that level, it worked well (although I’m pretty sure the event synopsis changed at some point between me booking my place and it actually taking place).  Even so, I was naive to expect anything more than marketing. Indeed, I nearly went home at lunchtime as it was starting to feel like a big System Center Configuration Manager pitch and there was very little discussion of what is really meant by the consumerisation of IT.

There is little doubt in my mind that the event provided a great demo to show off a host of functionality in Microsoft’s products (and, to be fair, there is an increasing amount of cross-platform support too) but, time and time again, I was the awkward so-and-so who asked how I would implement a feature (for example Direct Access) in a cross-platform estate (e.g. for BYOD) and the answer was that it needs Windows.

So, earlier in the week I was slating Oracle for an event that basically said “buy more of our stuff” and this week… well, it’s just “stuff” from Redmond instead of (different) “stuff” from Redwood Shores, I guess.

Even so, there were some snippets within the product demos that I would like to call out – for example, Simon May (@simonster)’s assertion that:

“We need to be more permissive of what’s allowed on the network – it’s easier to give access to 80% most of time and concentrate on securing the 20%.”

In a nutshell, Simon is re-enforcing the point I made earlier this month when I suggested that network access control was outdated and de-perimiterisation is the way forward (although Microsoft’s implementation of NAC – called Network Access Protection – did feature in a demonstration).  There was also a practical demonstration of how to segregate traffic so that the crown jewels are safe in a world of open access (using IPsec) and, although the Windows implementation is simpler through the use of Group Policy, this will at least work on other devices (Macs and Linux PCs at least – I’m not so sure about mobile clients).

Of course, hosted shared desktops (Remote Desktop Services) and virtual desktop infrastructure reared their ugly heads but it’s important to realise these are just tactical solutions – sticking plaster if you like – until we finally break free from a desktop-centric approach and truly embrace the App Internet, with data-centric policies to providing access.

There was no discussion of how to make the App Internet real (aside from App-V demos and SharePoint/System Centre Configuration Manager application portals) but, then again, this was an IT Pro event and not for developers – so maybe a discussion on application architecture was asking a little too much…

Other topics included protection of mobile devices, digital rights management, and federation, featuring a great analogy from Simon as he described claims-based authentication as being a bit like attempting to buy a drink in a bar, and being asked to prove your age, with a driving licence, that’s trusted because the issuer (e.g. DVLA in mainland Britain) has gone through rigourous checks.

Hopefully this post isn’t too critical – my feedback basically said that there is undoubtedly a lot of work that’s gone into creating the TechDays IT Pro Camps and for many people they will be valuable. Indeed, even for me (I haven’t been involved in Microsoft products, except as a user, for a couple of years now) it’s been a great refresher/update on some of the new technologies. But maybe IT architects have a different view? Or maybe it’s time for me to get more intimately involved in technology again?

* I don’t see Microsoft being pushed out any time soon – Windows still runs on a billion PCs worldwide and analysts haven’t given up hope on Windows Phone either – at least not based on an IDC event I attended recently.

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

A Microsoft view on the consumerisation of IT (#ukitcamp)

• A micro-USB mobile phone charger (I use the one that came with my Nokia Lumia 800 but any 5V supply that can feed a micro-USB cable will do)
• A USB keyboard
• (Optionally) a mouse
• (Optionally) some speakers
• (Optionally) a USB hub (powered)
• A wired network connection
• An SD card
• A display – but watch out as Raspberry Pi supports HDMI and component out (RCA) – not VGA.

My monitors are mostly VGA (I have one that will take DVI) and my TV is far too old for HDMI (it’s a 14-year-old Sony Trinitron 32″ widescreen CRT!) so I set the Pi up to use the analogue  connection to the TV.

Installing the operating system

I selected a Linux distro (the Raspberry Pi blog suggests that Fedora Remix is the recommended distro, as does the FAQ, although there is extensive discussion about whether to use Fedora or Debian, the Raspberry Pi quick start guide suggests that developers should use Debian and there are alternative downloads too). Eventually, I managed to install the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix on my SD card (my Ubuntu machine recognised the SD card, but the Python version of the Fedora ARM Image Installer didn’t*; meanwhile my work laptop installed an image on the SD card but it wouldn’t boot – I suspect that’s down to the disk encryption software we use; finally I managed to run the Windows version of the Fedora ARM Image Installer on another Windows 7 PC).

Once I had an operating system installed, I booted and the RasPi picked up an IP address from my DHCP server, registered itself in DNS (raspi.domainname) and set to work expanding its disk to fill the 8GB SD card I’m using.

*getting this installer to work involved installing the python-qt4 package in the Ubuntu Software Centre, then running ./fedora-arm-installer.

Switching displays

Unfortunately, standard definition CRT TVs are no better at working with Raspberry Pi’s than they are with any other computer (except a games console) – and why I thought that should be the case is a mystery…

With only part of the display visible via component out (and not exactly easy to read) I started to investigate options for use of the HDMI port.  It turns out that HDMI to VGA is too expensive, but an HDMI to DVI cable cost just £2.39 at Amazon (thanks to Chromatix, The EponymousBob and GrumpyOldGit on the Raspberry Pi forums for sharing this info). With the RasPi hooked up to my only digital monitor, everything was much easier, although I did have to plug the cable directly into the monitor and I’m now waiting for delivery of a DVI-I female to female gender changer so that it’s a bit easier to swap the monitor cable between my computing devices.

So, what’s it like to use then?

Did I mention that the Raspberry Pi is a fully functioning computer for around £25? Well then, what’s not to like? Sure, performance is not lightning fast – the Raspberry Pi FAQs suggest:

“… real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics”

but that’s plenty for a bit of surfing, email and teaching my kids to write code.

I am finding though that I’m struggling a little with my chosen distro. For example, I haven’t yet managed to install Scratch and it doesn’t seem to be one of the recognised packages so I may have to resort to compiling from source – hardly ideal for getting kids started with coding. For that reason, I might switch to Debian (I’m downloading it as I write) but for now I’ll continue to explore the options that the Fedora Remix provides.

I’m sure there will be more RasPi posts on this blog but if you’re one of the thousands waiting for yours to arrive, hopefully this post will help to prepare…

And once the educational models are available, I’ll be encouraging my sons’ school to buy a lab full of these instead of a load more netbooks running Windows XP…

This blog post was written for markwilson.it. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2004-2012 Mark Wilson. All Rights Reserved. (What is this footer about?)

Getting started with Raspberry Pi (#RasPi)

It was a full day of presentations and I’m not sure that reproducing all of the content here makes a lot of sense, so here’s an attempt to summarise it… although even a summary could be a long post…

Big data trends, techniques and opportunities

Tim Jennings (@tjennings) from Ovum set the scene and explained some of the ways in which big data has the potential to change the way in which we work as businesses, citizens and consumers (across a variety of sectors).

Summing up his excellent overview of big data trends, techniques and opportunities, Tim’s key messages were that:

1. Big data is characterised by volume, variety and velocity [I'd add value to that list].
2. Big data represents a change in the mentality of analytics, away from precise analysis of well-bound sources to rough-cut exploratory analysis of all the data that’s practical to aggregate.
3. Enterprise should identify business cases for big data and the techniques and processes required to exploit them.
4. Enterprises should review existing business intelligence architectures and methods and plan the evolution towards a broader platform capable of handling the big data lifecycle.

And he closed by saying that “If you don’t think that big data is relevant to your organisation, then you are almost certainly missing an opportunity that others will take.”

Some other points I picked up from Tim’s presentation:

• Big data is not so much unstructured as variably-structured.
• The mean size of an analytical data set is 3TB (growing but not that huge) – don’t think you need petabytes of data for big data tools and techniques to be relevant.
• Social network analytics is probably the world’s largest (free) marketing focus group!

Big Data – Are You Ready?

Following the analyst introduction, the event moved on to the vendor pitch.  This was structured around a set of videos which I’ve seen previously, in which a fictitious American organisation grapples with a big data challenge, using an over-sized actor (and an under-sized one) to prove their point. I found these videos a little tedious the first time I saw them, and this was the second viewing for me.  For those who haven’t had the privilege, the videos are on YouTube and I’ve embedded the first one below (you can find the links on an Oracle’s Data Warehouse Insider blog post).

The key points I picked up from this session were:

• Oracle see big data as a process towards making better decisions based on four stages: decide, acquire, organise and analyse.
• Oracle considers that there are three core technologies for big data: Oracle NoSQL, Hadoop, and R; brought together by Oracle Engineered Systems (AKA the “buy our stuff” pitch).

Cloudera

Had I been at the London event I would have been extremely privileged to see Doug Cutting, Hadoop creator and now Chief Architect at Cloudera speak about his work in this field.  Doug wasn’t available to speak at the Manchester event so Oracle showed us a pre-recorded interview.

For those who aren’t familiar with Cloudera (I wasn’t), it’s effectively a packaged open source big data solution (based on Hadoop and related technologies) providing an enterprise big data solution, with support.

The analogy given was that of a “big data operating system” with Cloudera doing for Hadoop what Red Hat does for Linux.

Perhaps most pertenent of Doug Cutting’s commenst was that we are at the beginning of a revolution in data processing where people can afford to save data and use it to learn, to get a “higher resolution picture of what’s going on and use it to make more informed decisions”.

Capturing the asset – acquire and organise

After a short pitch from Infosys (who have a packaged data platform, although personally, I’d be looking to the cloud…) and an especially cringeworthy spoof Lady Gaga video (JavaZone’s Lady Java) we moved on to enterprise NoSQL. In effect, Oracle has created a NoSQL database using the Berkeley key value database and a Java driver (containing much of the logic to avoid single points of failure) that they claim offers a simple data model, scalability, high availability, transparent load balancing and simple administration.

Above all, Oracle’s view is that, because it’s provided and maintained by Oracle, there is a “single throat to choke”.  In effect, in the same way that we used to say no-one got fired for buying IBM, they are suggesting no-one gets fired for buying Oracle.

That may be true, but it’s my understanding that big data is fuelled by low-cost commodity hardware (infrastructure as a service) and open source software – and whilst Oracle may have a claim on the open source front, the low-cost commodity hardware angle is not one that sits well in the Oracle stable…

Through partnership with Cloudera (which leaves some wondering if  that will last any longer than the Red Hat partnership did?), Oracle is positioning a Hadoop solution for their customer base:

Oracle describe Cloudera as the Redhat for Hadoop, but also say they won't develop their own release; they said that for Linux originally

Tuesday 1 May 2012 12:24 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@debralilley

Debra Lilley

Despite (or maybe in spite of) the overview of HDFS and MapReduce, I’m still not sure how Cloudera  sits alongside Oracle NoSQL but their “big data appliance” includes both options. Now, when I used to install servers, appliances were typically 1U “pizza box” servers. Then they got virtualised – but now it seems they have grown to become whole racks (Oracle) or even whole containers (Microsoft).

Oracle’s view on big data is that we can:

1. Acquire data with their Big Data Appliance.
2. Organise/Analyse aggregated results with Exadata.
3. Decide at “the speed of thought” with Exalytics.

That’s a lot of Oracle hardware and software…

In an attempt not to position Oracle’s more traditional products as old hat, the next presenter suggested that big data is complementary and not really about old and new but about familiar and unfamiliar. Actually, I think he has a point: at some point “big” data just becomes “data” (and gets boring again?) but this session gave an overview of an information architecture challenge as new classes of data (videos and images, documents, social data, machine-generated data, etc.) create a divide between transactional data and big data, which is not really unstructured but better described as semi-structured and which uses sandboxes to analyse and discover new meaning from data.

Oracle has big data connectors to integrate with other (Oracle) solutions including: a HiveQL-based data integrator; a loader to move Hadoop data into Oracle 11G; a SQL-HDFS connector; and an R connector to run scripts with API access to both Hadoop and more traditional Oracle databases. There are also Oracle products such as GoldenGate to replicate data in heterogeneous data environments

[My view, for what it's worth, is that we shouldn't be moving big data around, duplicating (or triplicating) data - we should be linking and indexing it to bridge the divide between the various silos of "big" data and "traditional" data.]

Finding the value – analyse and decide

Speaking of a race to gain insight analytics becoming the CIO’s top priority for 2013 and business intelligence usage doubling by 2014, the next session looked at some business analytics techniques and characteristics, which can be summarised as:

• I suspect something – a data scientist or analyst needs to find proof and turn into a predictive model to deploy into business process (classification).
• I want to know if that matters – “I wish I knew” (visual exploration and discovery).
• I want to make the best decision now – decisions at the speed of thought in the context of a business process.

This led on to a presentation about the rise of the data scientist and making maths cool (except it didn’t, especially with a demo of some not-very-attractive visualisations run on an outdated  Windows XP platform) and introduction of the R language for statistical analysis and visualisation.

Following this was a presentation about Oracle’s recently-acquired Endeca technology which actually sounds pretty interesting as it digests a variety of data sources and creates a data model with an information-discovery front-end that promises “the simplicity of search plus the power of BI”.

The last presentation of this segment looked at Oracle’s Exalytics in-memory database servers (a competitor to SAP Hana) bundling bsuiness intelligence software, adaptive in-memory caching (and columnar compression) with information discovery tools.

Wrap-up

I learned a lot about Oracle’s view of big data but that’s exactly what it was – one vendor’s view on this massively hyped and expanding market segment. For me, the most useful session of the day was from Ovum’s Tim Jennings and if that was all I took away, it would have been worthwhile.

In fairness, it was good to learn some more about the Oracle solutions too but I do wish vendors (including my own employer) would sometimes drop the blatant product marketing and consider the value of some vendor agnostic thought leadership. I truly believe that, by showing customers a genuine understanding of their business, the issues that they face and the directions that business and technology and heading in,  the solutions will sell themselves if they truly provide value. On the other hand, by telling me that Oracle has a complete, open and integrated solution for everything and what I really need is to buy more technology from the Oracle stack and… well, I’d better have a good story to convince the CFO that it’s worthwhile…

Slidedecks and other materials from the Oracle Big Data and Extreme Analytics Summit are available on the Oracle website.

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Big data according to the Oracle