1979 and 2009...Thatcher to Cameron

Introduction

There are some parallels to be drawn between the period 1978 to 1980, and 2008 to 2010 when looking at both the US and the UK political and economic environments. Both have seen changes in political direction, although possibly divergent as they stand today, but also and both are periods of serious economic crisis.

Comparisons between the two economies per se are some what meaningless. The UK could be geographically absorbed into most US states and the size of the economy has been compared to Florida and California. However it is more in parallell ideologies and international leadership in fiscal policy and public investment which are of noteworthy discussion.

Many economists ( ref.2,3,4) agree that in fact the Reagonomics and Thatcherite years did not, within their terms, achieve the fiscal and full ideological goals of balancing the budget and reducing both the PSBR and the state budget / GDP gearing.

However what both regimes were able to very firmly achieve was a change in attitudes, without which the "neo neoliberal liberals" namely Messrs Clinton and Blair, could not have enjoyed both sustained economic growth, balanced annual budgets and taxation effective policies. The main difference being that this lead to sustainable increases in public spending for the Democratic and Labour governments of the 1990s..

.......As the Actor Said to The Grocer's Daughter...

Thatcher and Reagan were both from relatively naive political backgrounds, which was in fact a help rather than a hindrance. Thatcher was brought up above a Grocers store in Lincolnshire, becoming a university educated Chemist and went on to view fiscal policy very much in terms of the whole country being run like a small business and policies being treated like hypothesis based on current scientific fact.

Ronald Reagan had been a would-be-star in Hollywood and even when rising to office as governor of California, showed often naive political judgement. (ref..)

This naivity was however, not at all at odds to a ground swell of economists who came to be known as the "liberal economists" and their immediate afterfolllowers, arguably, the neoliberals. They too agreed fundamentally that the books had to be balanced.

Furthermore the economists were very much of the view that the rate of inflation in public services had to be halted. There was in the 1970s an expectation in the populous and those working in public service, that public service provision would continue to grow, in order to enjoy incremental investment and operational budgets. Over allever better services would both contribute to, and match the better-expected-living standards based upon perceived need and not sustainabe budget.

The New Right's Legacy for the New Left

The Clinton and Blair governments inherited a political and fiscal environment where economic growth could be stimulated while public spending could both grow, and be paid for by near-time tax revenues, and not long term borrowing.

Gone also was the left wing's punative view on the rich. Instead the nouveau rich of the entrepreneurial classes and the entertainment and sports "industries" were welcomed by both Clinton and Blair in the new vision of meritocracy and righteous social democracy. No longer would the super rich and general self employed be taxed punitively, but rather tax revenues would be optimised by making it attractive to live, invest and run businesses in the UK and US.

First Terms With Backward Effects

The first terms for both Thatcher and Reagan were on the balance sheet, not good. The cuts in public spending in the general services area actually contributed to low growth as government employment was reduced and wage claims curtailed. Also liberlisation of corporate law made it easier for companies in the UK to disinvest or realise liquidation of their assets as the only growth in share holder investment. Privatisation also lead to job cuts in the short term.

The first term of Margaret Thatcher lead in fact to higher public spending and GDP gearing because of the large rise in unemployment ( benefits being payed by the state, and resulting loss in taxation) and the Falklands War. Reagan achieved little of the hoped for tax cuts and cuts in real terms to public spending, due to the same reasons perhaps:unemployment and defence.

What these two first terms did achieve was to releive the inertia of the slow, crisis filled and recessionary 1970s with respect to public spending as well as business investment, growth and birth-rate of new enterprises. Both governments foundered yet managed in political momentum to hold the electorate who continued to want a move away from the stagflation of the late 70s.

One alarming parallel to draw today to the conservative-libdem government in the UK and the potentially righ wing senate and congress swing in the US, is that cuts in public spending lead to slower growth.

Cuts in taxes were popular, but in the UK the "Tories" put in place a large rise in VAT in 1979-80, which in fact is a proportionately far higher tax on the poorest in society as it taxed all VATable items of food, clothing etc at 15% up from the base of 8%. If this had been enacted in a growing economy, it would have inevitably lead to inflationary pressures in both margin-fulcrum effects on traded items and wage demands due to the increased cost of living.

The Cold War Defrosts

In retrospect one area of puzzeling ideology both Reagan and Thatcher held to was a large defence budget, as a far higher proportion of GDP than most western economies ( this is however, weighted by the post WWII withstraints on the key German and Japanese economies).

Ideologically, they had the "Great Bear", the USSR and despite a fairly stable period of cold war post Vietnam, ageing nuclear weaponry and delivery systems meant the Russians had a possible advantage in having the SS20 mobile missile systems, making it virtually impossible to either react to strategic targets ( launch sites) or pre-emptively strike them.

One response was the multiwarhead, longer distance Trident Missile system. The other, which was not nearly as far fetched as the name it gained suggests, was an close-orbit defence satellite system which could identify launched ICBMs and destroy them in the upper atmosphere: Reagan's "star wars".

It took more than a decade for both these systems, Trident as a detterent in the UK and an effective "star wars" technology, to actually come to fruition: and of course by 1992 these systems were really obsolete or of little strategic importance due to the collapse of the USSR . However, star wars did precipitate the initial fall of the soviet ICBM dominance and the credibility of their economic investment in the military, possibly tipping the of the politbureaux into the folly of their brand of totalitarianism.

Boom and Bust

It was really the mid eighties liberisation of capital markets at "big bang" in the UK and following connectivity of capital markets by the use of IT which stimulated the huge investments in western economies, and possibly over investment and later crash of Asian capital markets. Further to this, consumer credit was liberilsed beyond inflationary sensible parameters in the UK ( ref need to support any such claim for the usa 1984-89)

I dare say that you could track the number of people reaching their credit limits and not being able to make payments with the decline in captial markets in the late 80s: this tipping effect from consumer spending and irresponsible debt has reared its' head again with the subprime market ( "white trash bring down all the great empires" )

Inflation headed back up into double figures, with interest rates matching suit and the finance markets crashed and did not fully recover after Black Monday, the first major "correction" to the newly liberalised capital markets.

House reposessions and personal bankruptcies ran high in the UK, although the tories were maybe quite right in their view point on the "nanny state" when it regarded personal investment, debt and home ownership. This would be the first "attitude correction" perhaps in the new right's view, in other words individuals should take and make responsible decisions over their budgets.

Certainly the boom and bust was remembered by voters after the lack lustre Bush I and Major governments failed to cure the ills, with multiple terms and larger influence for the left on both sides of the atlantic being the result at the ballot box.


The Neo-Neo Liberals Take the Helm: Enter Clinton and Blair

As with the implementation of strategic defence strategies, once again it took the Clinton administration of 1993-97 to actually put into place the balancing of government budgets which 12 years of Reagan and "George H" could not. Similarily in the UK, the PSBR and GDP/Spend gearing was only finally achieved under Blair. Both state leaders resided over the longest period of sustained economic growth since world war II. ( 4)

This however in many commentators view was not just the result of a fortuitous inheritence. The two governments were able to present cohesive internal party politics and secure broad support across a spectrum of govermental ( sivil service), public service ( like the NHS and many Quangos), trade unions and economic actors in both international government, capital finance and captains of industry.

Further to this, when both leaders took over in the 1990s they were able to plan for optimised tax efficiency, meaning that both the private economy could enjoy growth driven by tax, legislative and fiscal environments. Public spending could once again grow with the aim of delivering enhanced and more efficient services, which also fuelled economic growth.

Low inflation, and in post war terms, super low inflation of below 3% became the fiscal goal of governments and this was driven by increased competition in the ever more enterprising economies. How two left wing governments, despite having moved to right of centre on monetary policy, managed to achieve such low inflation and interest rates is a mystery to the writer here.

The balancing act of low interest rates from central banks to encourage investment in the real economy could, and later into the 00s indeed did, lead to increased inflation. Lower bank interest rates released working capital through cost effective loans for both small and larger businesses while also making investing in governmental bonds and just savings accounts, far less attractive for private investors. Capital markets would need to also secure higher ROI from the real economy and deriviatives markets, where in both cases, value multiplicaiton could be acheived at a far better ROI than those investments linked to base interest rate.



A Bleak Future for the Neo-neo Liberal Right

The new right face a bleak future once they come to power with their proposed raft of tax cuts.

Why?

Western economies were already failing to deliver ROI when the internet bubble burst in 2000/ 2001. There after higher ROI was sought in what I call the "funny money" markets: deriviatives and investment mechanisms geared around at the base, consumer debt. It is somewhat Ironic that the speculators chose to focus their efforts in maximising ROI on what in the USA was in fact a US governmental subsidised initiative for poorer families to buy their homes: The sub prime market was invented, and the whole house-of-cards built around this con trick has lead to the near total collapse of the capitalist investment system.

Fundamentally, an economy must multiply value at several levels: private business must add value from raw materials and peopl'es manhours in rendering these higher value or providing services at a profit. SInce the internet bubble burst, and the far east finance crisis became a long lasting syndrome, westernised economies havve failed to add fundamental value and have instead imported from China.; but bluntly, the chinese are the ones taking the fundamental value multiplication.

Intellectual property is the mantra of the west: we do the clever stuff, and the Chinese will make it. However add the costs of intellectualism to the costs of the supply chain and then divide by increased competition and a low cost base for actual production of something which does not need you patented widget to work as well, and you start to disappoint "the street" on your ROI and profit warnings.

The service economy is of little help in saving this situation of low growth and reduced margins in the product economy. The service economy is in my opinion, fully dependent on two factors: value multiplication in the product economy and consumer spending power from the employees in the public sector. Take the pre 2010 medicare situation in the USA: it is completely dependent on the US police, sivil service and other employees to be able to survive financially. Why choose healthcare, that is just for sick people right? Health care is a large proportion of GDP in western countries with the new sicknesses which take longer to kill us than the old. Smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise and stress mainly from trying to get ROI for your stake holders.

Summary

What Blair and Clinton enjoyed economically and politically will be looked back upon as a golden time for both businesses and the public sector. In these years prudent fiscal management and revenue effectvie structuring of personal and corporate taxation meant that the public sector could further boost growth in the economy while intending to support a higher standard of living delivered to the electorate.

What the legacy of this vision of continual improvement of public services, and the freedom allowed the capital markets has lead to is the largest crisis since the 1930s. The gamblers on Wall Street were not the only boys in the casino in the mid 2000s: that governments continued to service wars in areas of little political gain, and had expanding public services now needing PSBR, has well and truly dumped the next rack of right wingers who will promise to do what Reagan and Thatcher did in 1979, and probably end up doing as badly as their well known predecessors.


References

(1) - (3) TBC

(4) Fiscal policy convergence from Reagan to Blair: the left veers right

Av Ravi K. Roy,Arthur Denzau

Like an iPod, only Paddier

By the time Apple launched their tablet product, just about the only surprises were the name..... and the lack of USB ports.

Mr.Jobs closed the circuit in two respects here- firstly the pundits were betting on iSlate or iTab(let) as front runners, amongst a couple of other names: you can run the stats month by month on google advanced. However the second closed circuit I refer to was the channel and platform. What are the implications of a channel ( iStore) oriented web-book running a low-performance operating system?

Hype for an Underpowered Netbook?

Now we are getting a lot of hype about the iPad here in Norway, with its launch only a few weeks away to the local retailers. However, an astonishing 30, 000 have winged their way here already: mainly bought abroad by iPhone addicts, apple employees, app-developers and the largest group perhaps are journalists. That number is astonishing because it is nearly 1 % of the population BEFORE marketing actually have an iPad here.

Why are Journalists so Interested?

The traditional news media and publishing houses, finally see a controllable channel which will provide them with closed loop marketing and little copyright infringement: no more cut-n paste, no more hollow promises of XML, RSS feeds and syndicated news based on evapourating and thin ad' revenues. Apple hope to make a good take from the media houses and publishers through the iStore. At last, they have a socially acceptable and a corporate-brand-able channel button: the iPad "App" as a closed-circuit media delivery environment.

I hear the whining cry of superiority from the nerds in Linux, C++ and java land: it isn't as good, lacks the power, lacks the potential for developers, lacks the freedom.....well people trust those f##¤%ing litte app buttons on their iPhone to do something reliable and good for them...they will even pay a little for something that maybe could otherwise be free......if they can trust it.....that my whiny little geeko, is branding.

Wait up though: now the cat is well and truly out of the bag, with quite imodest goals! World media dominance no less?? Replacing the paper cover price with pay-to-read internet. News will no longer be free. Windows 7 / IE users will be teased over to the platform : "read the full story on your iPad". But can Apple repeat the iTunes success now with written media?

Jobs and Murdoch: Bid for World Dominance of the Written Word?

iTunes kind of crept up on us all: there were many sources for MP3 sales on the internet and the whole Napster thing: but iTunes brought branding for the music sector firmly back on the internet: a trusted source of qaulity product at a reasonable price, if you exclude the over priced iPod range itself! Perhaps the competition never got the critical mass they needed to be a serious threat to iTunes, but let's face it, when Spotify and maybe a major US player go on line in north America with on demand streaming, then were will iTunes stand?

Back from the tangent on music: the traditional print media are queing up - allegedly - to get in on this channel, direct to the shiny new pad on your lap. iStore will deliver closed loop apps But so will other channel players who will want to access millions already on mobile and windows devices. I think we will see more developed closed loop, non copyable user interfaces to pay-for published material running on a new type of browser and only exisitng in the clouds at MS and google.

Tablet, shortbread, palm oil?

But what about convergence mobile to data? Will HTC bring out something half way to a tablet: I mean their HD2 is huge, almost palm pilot size.

I mention good old Bill Gates and his almost fully functioning OS's. Perhaps android running on a linux background will threaten MS enough in the explosive tablet sector that Mr Gates will really pull out the stops and make a scaleable compact windows 7 or CE v8.0.


Missed Opportunities for Apple

Personally I think Apple should have gone for a hand held. Bigger than the iPod Touch but still pocket sized, or at least handbag or laptop side pocket sized. Remember the Apple Newton anyone? Not a bad product, ahead of its time, not at all profitable.

I guess we may see such a 2010s product from Apple but more serious contenders to the Pad GUI in palm size will be appearing at a hastened rate now: Android is going where microsoft CE failed, but I dare say Mr Gates will be pushing small and mid platform perfection for mobile telecoms and palm type machines.

2011 will be the year of the tablet, hand-and-lap-sized, and I can see why: touch screen has become normalised with you and I. Virtual keyboards are even PREFFERED by many punters

Missed Photo Opportunity

Where Apple have missed a trick is in providing a serious workhorse for Photoshop and their own image manipulation software. There are mobile versions of PS now, and an iPhone app but let us see this on a tablet! Why? well it will revolutionise how we handle pictures to becoming a far more immediate and tactile user controlled experience, leveraging Apples qualities as an image platform.

The iPad is not really powerful enough for running full PS, Corel or Gimp: it is less able than the average netbook. That is a major criticism of the product: you get a big iPod touch, only paddier.

A Short History of Consumer-Generated-Media

Definitions?

Social Media, aka Consumer Generated Media: the latter is preferable to the author in context of marketing.

Social - people being erm, sociable, erm.... people communicating in an unofficial atmosphere

Media - The king of Medes and his Persian enemies predate even the use of the word in latin to describe the written capture surface, the network and the nodes there upon. In his case the papyrus letters, the couriers and the writers and recipients of politcal information and commands.

Social Media is definable by to necessary conditions : distrubtion via a network and dialogue.

In other words, if a blogger bloggs and no one reads it, did they ever really write it?

A Brief History of Social Media

When was the first network available for dialogue? Depends what you see as a network: when was the first electronic network available to enable social media to happen?


According to some commentators, you can trace social media back to the early days of interlopers on the phone network and modem based systems: the phone phreaks and the hackers.

However, if you think about it the very first illicit social media e-comms go way back before then: to the first telegraph operators and Marconni's transatlantic preambles. The official version will be the press release and "only for serious communications" but you can bet these guys along the "railroads" tapped out " hey , how are the wife and kids doing?" in 1845.

There are of course some more alley ways and oddities, like ICQ and messenger, which relate to tweeting today and you can read more on great blogs like this link. Here I give a pretty personal account, your honour, of my honest experiences with Social Media and monitoring there of.

Growing Up WIth Social Media

I can actually say that I have matured alongside social media: back as far as doing a bit of phone phreaking myself in 1986, and seeing my first green-screen e-mail in 1988.

The first sign for me that social media had arrived was when I worked in an early University internet department, mainly dealing with the intranet as it was even called back then. Newsgroups by then were well established, and had predated the www and even internet protocol per se.

Newsgroups were a special area accessible by early e-mail clients like GOPHER and the early Netscape. Despite their unglamerous text based appearance, they were really the most interesting area available through the new browsers to many like me: they were REAL people expressing opinions from around the globe.

For me, these newsgroups encompass all that we would recognise as social media today: discussion, micro blog alerts ( the twitter "glue spots" as I call them), closed or open social contact networks and blogging.

Newsgroups quickly went http/www and became franchised into yahoo who maybe even dominated a while, some other independent http and POP mail providers and then google groups which is maybe the most active today with perhaps the longest living newsgroups surviving in this media.

Bulletins and Jumpers

With http, and it's predecessors from dial up modem days ( one at a time user postings and readings), another type of media surface appeared; the bulletin board and a closely related species, the jump station. The subtle difference from newsgroups was maybe anonymity or lack of e-mail alerts : bulletins were organised like web pages or even forums of today, and gave useful updates or just chatter. Jump stations gave firstly address and telefon numbers to other "communities" and then later www. links. In a way they were like search engines and today you can compare jump stations to Twitter and people posting links in FaceBook.

Newsgroups evolved fully into the forum with threaded and embedded discussion, just as newsgroups had in 1992. Also they mostly still retain e-mail alerts which was ther back in 1995 at least.


The Birth of Social Media Monitoring

Certainly by the time I was working with web sites in all earnest, we had started to pay good attention to forums. I would have at a guess that the FBI were pretty interested in Phone Phreaks. Probably the CIA and KGB were looking into the quirky little communications programmers on the early military and governmental networks made: maybe even tolerating them in order to give themselves some more work to do, or even placing double agents in the loops.

In 1998 I was required to look into a forum and newsgroup the company I worked for had just taken over the DNS address for and advertising revenue. We took pretty good care to walk the legal line then; don't get caught interfering with social media as a host! As soon as you started policing the forums, you took a responsibility to continue doing this. Legal precedents were still in their early days, some lawyers would argue no doubt that this is still and inconclusive area steered by purely case law and libel. Forum rules were to be self policed as has been the standard means of keeping ISPs and hosting companies out of jail ever since.

Anyway, we monitored the forum and reported back to our clients, the advertisers and some other trad' media ones on what people were saying about them. This was done purely on a verbal basis as far as I was concerned.

We also had an internal use only, atomz search engine IIRC, and I guess we could well have started doing stats on brand name hits, certainly we did manual sentiment rating on threads and brands! By 2000 we were delivering crisis management reports and closing forums if anything went out of hand. Redevelopment or loss of original data were the publicised excuses for pulling contentious and libelous issues.

So really there is nothing all that new in social media or spying on SM, it by in large has been done before.

Social Media Watchers

I was reminded on the danger of over-analytics when I visited a forum myself recently.

My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.

For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.

With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.

It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!

With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.

The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.

Photo Time: Simulated Depth of Field, blurred in GIMP

Simulating Shortened Depth of Field : Making a mask and applying it to layers to blur the background.

In the old days, most quality cameras could produce nice portraits with the background brlurred. These days the smaller digital cameras create a vert deep depth of field because of the short distance to the sensor chip from the lens, so the background is often very sharp. On dSLRs too, some lenses don't «stop up» enough to give an open enough aperture to «throw the background» either.

However help is at hand because t you can make up for this in PS or GIMP etc, by drawing out a mask and using it with layers to paste a blurred background onto your original sharp foreground. In the image above you can get the idea!

I had a go at the GIMP GURU's excellent tutorial, but found for GIMP v2.6 that there were a couple of functions that either differed, or were desirable to use.

WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO: Work-in-porgress Images are at the bottom of the blog: you are going to make a couple of copies of the original, and then on one make a "mask" which will be the area the original, sharp background will shine through, so to speak. You will blurr the edges of the white mask so it merges to the soon to be fuzzy background, and then invert the colour to black. This mask is then laid ontop of the other copy which is first blurred in the software options. Finally you merge the mask to the blurred layer using " apply mask" and then stack this ontop of the original so the person or object appears sharp on a blurred background.

HARD STUFF:

Small errors in the Layers Dialogue box can cost all: you have to take care to do things in the right order, with the correct settings for the "apply mask" and remember to stack them in the right order so the mask is on top. : worth saving WIP copies as you go as xcf files.


"toggeling" between selected area after cutting and background on the mask build, then both in order to go through "cutting" the mast needs to be done fully awake!

It can also be difficult in cutting the mask and then blurring it's edges to get a natural fade into the background, with no halo and no sharp, unnatural edge or vignetted outline areas. Also, getting the right amount of blurring on the background

WORK FLOW

> Copy Original > Lasso Select Sharp Object e.g. person!

> Blacken bacground with paint can fill

> Work up mask in white with an underlying orig' image as guide in BW >

> Blur the edges very slightly to 4 or 5 on gausian, invert to black on white [SAVE A COPY!!! ]

> Open a copy of the original image and blur it to more than '20' on gausian

> [Add Layer Mask] to the blurred image ; NB as ['white opaque']> paste on the mask to this layer in layer's dialogue box

> Open the original as a layer in the window> move it down the stack order in the dialogue box

> merge down the stack to end with. [SAVE as jpeg]

In Detail: On GIMP v2.6

1. Open image File, then CTRL D to make a duplicate GIMP window as a jhandy back up / reference

2. Make a new layer as follows: [Pull Down]Layer>new from visible> duplicate this layer with CTRL D while in the layers dialogue box > rename the duplicate "Mask"
   

3. Use the lasso to clip out the foreground or objects to be sharp. Go to a black and white view or a colour channel ( [Decompose], see GIMP GURU) if you need a clearer outline to work on ie more contrast between subject and background making it easier to lasso correctly
   

4. Once the area is drawn around, double click/click on the lasso in tool bar. The area should now be selected inside a hatched line. Press [CTRL-I] to select background.

5. Select FILL tool ( paint can) on black and fill the background

6. Save a copy once you are here as an xcf file

7. Now we want to try to force the outline of the subject to white. Right-click in the image and choose (Image/Colors/Threshold). Drag the middle pointer on the 0-255 scale left to extend white over the white areas

8. If you have the image (copy from start) open as a layer, then make it grayscale: otherwise make a new layer and paste ALL of the original image onto it, anchoring the floating layer with the little anchor icon in the Layers dialogue window. Choose this new layer and reduce opacity to about 50 -60% such that you can see a ghostly effect : now you can check the mask fits and captures the area you want sharp. Once done, delete the mask guide layer by right clicking and selecting delete layer.

9. Now apply a gausian blur to the mask layerAT ONLY 4 to 6 pixels: this blurs the edges of the mask such that it will run into the to-be-blurred background and avoids obvious lines. Once computed, choose COLOUR>INVERT to now make the image Black on White as the actual mask. Save this and save an xcf or jpeg copy.

10. In the Layers dialog, select the original image in the drop down box if you have it or paste and anchor from the other original open. Then click the Duplicate Layer buttonDouble-click on the name of the top layer. In the Edit Layer Attributes dialog, rename the new layer “Blurred”.

11. I (Filters/Blur/Gaussian Blur )). Experiment to find a value that works well for your desired “depth of field”. Generally you won’t want to go too crazy with this or the look will be all wrong.Try 25 for a partial blur and over 40 for quite unsharp.

12. SAVE A COPY of the WIP at this stage such that you can rework the blur if you feel it is not blurred enough or vice versa

13. Go back to the Layers dialog and right-click on the “Blurred” layer; select “Add Layer Mask”.NB: At this point the next radio button selection is vital ! In the Add Mask Options dialog make sure White (Full Opacity) is selected. Then go to the black mask and select all and paste onto the blurred layer ONTO IT IN THE DIALOGUE BOX. Anchor it and deselect the eye on the mask itself

14. You should see that there is a mask marked out in grey checker pattern over the area you want sharp and a nicely blurred background. Work back with CTRL Z if it is not to your burry liking!

15. Open the original as a new layer. Move the orignal down on the list in the dialogue box so it is under the mask-blurred, and therefore will appear as the layer beneath on the final image. This shouuld now fill the masked area but be written over outside by the nice blurr you have created ! Jobs a gud'n.
    

16. (delete the «mask»). Select the top layer, Blurred with mask, and then Choose Layers: Merge down save the image as a jpeg.

TIPS! When practising, reduce the image size and resolution to a web snap shot: this will make all the rendering and saving of your trial and errors a lot faster while you learn, and then you have a web ready series of shots!

TIPS! Be careful with the lower edge in portrait shots. When "cutting" ie outling the area to be the mask, check there is no foreground object to be blurred: short depth of field means it is just a slice into the distance which is in focus.

TIPS! It can be wise to give a margin to the figure for the edge blur: but if say it is a close up of a head with some diminishing depth of field on the person being good, then you can cut to the edge. This will vary with images : for instance, I find those with shadow from flash on one side need more there so that the shadow is softened. Trial and error will show you what works best, but it is difficult to extend a mask once «cut out».

TIPS! In GIMP 2.6 at least, when you have outlined the mask, and chosen to invert to background [CTRL I ] if the paintcan fill does not fill with black totally, then you can select a huge brush size and just go over it all in black: the foreground selected object will not be painted on as if it was "waxed". To fill in the mask itself, reverse with CTRL - I and then use white of course to remove any small specs or detail.

TIPS ! With similar images and a good contrast / edge to the background you do not really have to bother with an underlying black and white "ghost" to guide your fine working of the edges of the mask.

Footnote: Following on from that last tip:: According to GIMP GURU though " The best contrast between items can often be found in the green channel. It’s a good place to start looking, in any case. So the first thing we will do is decompose to individual RGB channels." as follows:

"Right-click in the image and choose (Image/Mode/Decompose). In the Decompose dialog box, choose RGB and click OK, Examine each channel to find which has the best contrast for isolating the subject. In this case the green channel image was the best. Close the other two images that you aren’t going to use. With a little work this green channel image will become our mask."

ISSUE HERE IS THAT I DO NOT SEE MULTIPLE COLOUR CHANNELS; ONLY ONE AND THIS DOES NOT EDIT:

Images

Too sharp

: too much detail in background to make the people stand out. The father is a little lost because the eye/brain places him more with the sharp sofa in the background

Mask WIP with blurred background. As you can see, the mask is not terribly detailed on the edges, but in this case it is quite sharp into the bodies with only a 3 or 4 pxl blur on the mask edge.

NB I have also been careful to exlcude foreground objects from the people so the foreground is also blurred, and been careful with the table edge and books: a lower edge should be checked for this in head-shoulders shots.

Voila!!!

The eye now picks out the girls much quicker as being that to spend time on looking at, and the father is then pulled out more from the background detal.

The more you look at this shot, the more your eye-brain brings out the people from the background it now considers uninteresting!

I have put on an info dot to track any missuse of this photo. Pleas PM me before you copy this image for use.

Final with Crop

I like to crop! Here I could have used GIMP to "clone" out the light cabel/switch into to the beige wall in order to have a really clean image.

Note also: the fine detail on the LHS girls hair is not actually cut to a very fine mask detail: the eye/brain make the detail stand out more from the background now the rest is blurred but if when this is enlarged, the rough work shows in the hair and on a slight halo round the man's head.

Original cropped for comparison

All images (c) 2010 author. All text not quoted from GIMP GURU is original (c)2010 author

Hard Work! Repeat ! Work Hard"

Now I note that it is time for a new intake of masters students to the 2011 MSc Marketing course.

Firstly congratulations on landing a place on a course which will give you a head start in your career in marketing or business otherwise, in providing you with knowledge, skills and not the least attitudes to suceed.

In terms of your career, marketing is not for the faint hearted. It requires a lot of percieverance just to get a career started, even to get interviews or work experience to get half way up to the first rung on the ladder. You have to be very tough or very lucky to get on and in my experience all too many Msc graduates have vaguely wandered into marketing because it sounds interesting, without knowing that it is very, very hard to get into once you finish.

The freddy blog seems to have been read a lot by previous graduates and I will stress again upon the new students, that marketing is a very, very, propostorously competitive profession to get into and then progress within. Please read back over my previous blogs on job hunting and how to get on: your job hunt preparation begins now and will start in earnest in October if you want to make the best possible head way against the larger brand companies.


Marketing is so extremely tough to get into because so many people want to work in it, not just qualified marketeers. Many of those general business graduates want in, many sales people want to move in(degree or no degree) and then you also have all and sundry BA, BSc, for example many psychology graduates, wanting a piece of the action. Then of course, there is the whole oxbridge bunch of medieval historians or theoretical economics who seem to be able to slide into plumb jobs. They have a head start because so many previous brand managers came from the UK's own "ivy league" and follow the "model for success" by recruting back from Oxbridge, Durham and so on.

You will need your luck, but the harder you try in your studies, job hunt and network building, the luckier you will get.. My career languised until one day I took a call and it was the golden opportunity to get a real start. I seized it, although it was pretty mediocre pay, and worked darn hard to learn the practical aspects of marketing on the shop floor of a "through the line" ad agency. After two years, the world so to speak was actually my oyster because the big agencies had stopped training new graduates and prefered experienced people from even much smaller agencies. I moved on to a decent wage and company car and later had the option to move "client side" for fewer working hours.

Read back through my advice and take it as highly opinionated, personal stuff, but remember it is based on the realities of job hunting and building a career. I have worked for 15 years with internet marketing for example, so new technology does not take over from the human hum-drum of pressing flesh and getting yourself a job these days.

Get Some Ink

Ink is fast becoming a thing of the past: even my local book handlers have a range of computer peripherals, GPSs, digital charts, software and interactive CD/DVD ROMs...and I live in the back end of the sticks.

However there will always be a market for books, magazines and stuff to hang on your wall without any power supply!

In the olden days, photo print qaulity was determined by ISO and resulting grain of the image, with even some 200 ASA transparancies being good enough for enlargements of several feet on photographic paper. If you didn't like the grain, then like being in the Louvre, take a step back and be impressed.

Boots the chemist or Jessops aside, there was also a certain directness when dealing with "ink" printers and the whole colour process: I came into advertising at the very end of the era of direct lithographic printing, "analogue" if you like, where each stage of printing had a different print prep or finishing company. Plates were produced one place often to get the best quality to a price, and the proofs, the large negatives of each colour litho process, were kept by us in a most guarded way! You felt a certain tactile and direct connection to what you could hold in your hand when compared to the mouse jockey world of photoshop which came in soon after.

HOW MANY PIXELS DID YOU SAY ??????????????

Today though, what quality can you expect and what should you deliver for home use?

Take my own Olympus DSLR: 10 Megapixel camera


===========
Largest Image = 3648 x 2736 pixels
===========


::
This is actually 9.8 mpx and is a ratio of 1.33 height to width: four thirds !

large size : fine means best jpeg compression on the display.

If we have a very high quality black and white print at 330dpi then we can utilise all those pixels to give a size in inches thus:

11 x 8 1/4 inches at 330dpi: in other words an A4 side! 210x270mm

We would then want to print this on a 600dpi home or shop printer to get the absolute best tonal range and depth in B/W for a delivered 330 ppi (pixels per inch). Alternatively, if it was a once-in-a-life time photo, you could either get it printed to silver-chemistry ie photographic paper at 1000-2000 dpi or if you wanted to sell it, go to a photo lithographers and get it done on a plate of maybe 660 dpi or higher.

To have an absolutely best qaulity print in colour though, the size would be one quarter this, because each dot on older printers can only have one colour in "dots per inch" so three or four dots are needed to reproduce each pixel to a degree of highly accurate hue (tonal / colour range) and tonal depth (brightness/saturation).

However, printer technology cheats: the high quality 330 dpi - 600 dpi home printer is available to reproduce large PPI quite well to an acceptable quality. The printer driver compiles the pixels into a best colour match for it's hue, saturationand tonal depth and recreates this as points composed of many dots, utilising a best compression and half tone ink saturation to process the image to a best appearance.

The Practice of Relativity


Relative Size:

An A4 sheet is 210 by 280 mm, that will say 21cm by 28cm or 8.25 x 11inches by

A HD screen for now, has 1920 x 1080 pixels, so most digital cameras now can fill at least twice that size with an image without any "pixelation" ie a very good image!

A good quality print can be achieved at relatively low dpi, as to be seen at http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-quality. Here an image is printed out to a large size to convince photographers that the eye actually does not percieve more than 80 dpi as poor, quite the opposite. PC screens are 72dpi, while macs used to be at least, 100dpi or lines equivalent. Another reason MACs were better for graphic work.


The image shown, a racing car, lends itself to an easy reproduction though: it has good contrast, sharp details but no very thin lines or patterns, a thrown background and bright colours. It is printed at 80dpi on a large format just to show how good you can get from precieved lower than usual print quality.

So for a colour print you may expect to be able to get a perceptably high quality at 200 PPI priting out at max resolution for the printer 300 dpi or so. This means that :

18.25 x 13.66 inches

When we say high quality in this instance it means for print material seen from a normal reading distance, not under special scrutiny.

For a potrait to be hung on a wall and viewed from a greater distance then a far lower DPI may be acceptable: even 72ppi or normal screen resolution may be practical for printing:

Thus:

50 x 38 inches @72dpi

Professional Printing
________________________

Printers use either lithographic plates or screen print by in large : ink jet printing is still not cost effective enough for publishing and laser -toner printers are not there yet either.

Lithographic means the process of chemical etching the colour separations from the original negative : in the old days when I worked with printers, these were best achieved from wide format camera negatives or positive transparencies (slide film) using a series of different filters to create the plate for each colour ink.

Chemicals were used to mask and etch from exposing the plate to light,
and plates for say A4 book printing at 4 sides a plate plus "bleed area" were between £300 and £1000 per set.

The print plates are then loaded up on the press and in use, coated with ink and pressed to the paper which is moved very accurately through the different parts of the print line. Hence the registration is very good as time is taken to ensure problems are eliminated by good preparation or stopping the press asap.

A usual "screen" or lines per inch equated to 330dpi and images in photoshop were handled at that level of ppi, with some leewaywith a "positional" associated to the quark express file such that the printer could use their expertise in preparing : often delivered up to 20% larger than needed to a quality printer image before and during the production of colour separations.

Litho' as it was affectionately called, was at one time too expensive for reproducing ordinary print. Books as late as the 1970s when I was a nipper, often had sections of colour "plates" bound in at convenient points in the book : these were often a pain to refer to from the story or reference as the convenience was only for the printer to sew in the better quality paper such that each insert spanned four pages.

You can still see this today in many biographies in paper back, where images of exploits in the SAS or whatever are collected in the centre or at two points in the book. Paperbacks, like newpapers and most large catalogues are screen printed.

Screen print works by having a mesh screen over a drum with ink being rolled on continuosly and another drum compressing the paper roll onto the print area. The paper like a gigantic toilet roll. Thus it is continuous for huge quantities of thin and therefore cheaper paper than could be used in plate presses.

Originally screen was just in black and white with maybe an extra colour, red most often, for the banner line being used. This is where "half tone" and other screen adjustments came into use to produce reasonable quality black and white photo reproduction by creating a better tonal depth and contrast in a print image than the dpi or Lpi as they call it, would permit. However colour separations came into use in the 1980s: some seem to use RGB for colour areas with a usual black screen being used in both images and text, others CYMK.

The great advantage of screen printing is the huge volume of paper that can be printed in a short time: however it is limited in dpi and also is prone to poor registration: the fuzzy or double images you often see in colour images or graphics. It is very expensive to reset a whole print run if this arises or even to scrap a minutes production, so these are sent out anyway for sale at newsagents etc. Usually you would need to travel to another newsagent chain or even town to get part of the run which was okay!

To save on costs and reduce issues with registration in colour screen printing, many catalogues are printed in three colours : black and two special corporate or style pan tone matched inks. Even some high qaulity art books and magazines use just one colour in addition to black : this can be very dramatic in landscapes with say only the blue or green being there on top of the grey tones.

Today, I would say that all plates on litho and screen is done with laser etching : the image is either purely digital in jpeg format or scanned from a negative or transparency by coloured lasers : the separations are then produced in digital format directly from the latter and by computation from jpegs. The famous "heidelberg" machine for A4 x 4 print plate laser-etching fits nicely in half a squash court with room to walk around it!

Even in 1999 when I was up for moving back to the Ad' industry in Scotland, I went to a printer who still used the grand daddy of them all: type set printing which has it's roots in the wood cut presses used to produce the first printed paper money, and the Lutherin bible in German and English.

The university printers a decade before still used these presses and the prepared litho plates for BW logos, drawing or other images. These lacked any real grey tones!

To cut you data nuts down to size in a little Luddite fashion, the term "upper case" refers to the case containing capital lead letters the type setter would reach into when required in assembling scentences onto the type face for printing!!

COLOURs

The CYMK was industry standard but by the mid nineties all printers I knew could have atleast a fith colour or technical process, like a UV spot filter or spot varnish. K was used for black : to do with not being confused with
"Blue" which was used before cyan was the colour chosen.

The trouble with CYMK is that it does not produce all colours equally well, eg orange, and where printers used to mix specific inks to match hues in a book say on birds by James Bond with colour plates in the 1950s, that art is no longer seen as cost effective. Blue skies often have a purpely appearance with notable red dots and this is due to the clash between the cyan and the magenta fighting to make a blue which is near cyan but not near enough.

Orange is never well reproduced as it is a mix of yellow and red: magenta is not red enough and some cyan comes in the litho process or digital separation: thus orange on any CYMK standard pallette if you like, is a mucky brownish orange.

Correspondingly, Orange telecom in the UK were the first company I heard of who stipulated a fifth colour process with of course, the proper corporate pan tone orange for their block logo and fonts.

The extra processes, colour or treatment, use the same basic component parts of the four colour process; a machine unit which very accurately places the paper from the last print onto the next plate. Thus software skills, investment and pure physical factory area are the external limiting factors, while there are limits to how much ink a paper will take.


Even in CYMK, when printing black areas with photos supposed to be frameless, mysterious "chinese window frames" would appear where a positional frame around the image became "super saturated" and shiny with layers or ink.


Many of the top printers for corporate material went over to seven colour process print lines for litho printing, which may seem a bit like "being the last to make buggy whips: darn good buggy whips" while everyone goes new media.

Colour; future:

On the topic of new media, jpeg is in RGB which suits of course LCD monitors very well. However now four colour TV Flat screens are available with a yellow which gives a more pleasing and realistic colour than RGB. Although this may take some time to come to the general market for computers, the technical challenge of "re-separating" an RGB signal to a fourth colour is now practical for better reproduction!

Technically RGB in an LED screen should be perfect colour reproduction as the transmitted, addative colours are bright enough to give hue, saturation and BW tonal depth is better due to the "black ness" of the LEDs which are not transmitting.

A pixel contains a given value for both the hue and the tonal depth: the shade if you like. The LAB set up is actually far better at handling images for print and absolute quality (even when considering CYMK as final out put) but because RGB is the standard for monitors then this is the prefered handling.

I would expect , or wishfully think, a move over to image production using the LAB system where the BW is it's own separation: red green and blue yellow are the other two separations so the fourth colour would be a yellow, making probably for better judgements from eye to screen in what is a good colour adjustment in the "ring" of images shown in most software packages.

I would look to Mr. Jobs' job when that frickin iPaddy makes the stock fall and they move back to their home land of graphic arts.


Picture Content

The requirement to produce a better quality image nearing the ppi x 4 required is driven in part by the content of the image.

Obviously if the subject of the image contains a lot of fine detail or pattern which the eye is lead to, then a high dpi will produce the best results.


Conversely, lack of detail and contrast can require experimentation for best print outs.

Both high light and low light images have subtle tonal differences in BW alone, and any noise from the CYMK compression / conversion detracts from the qaulity: Also the tonal depth will need to be enhanced due to this subtle changes over areas of the picture such that they don't appear "posterised" with harder changes between areas appearing as bands or lines not present in the original.

Hence you need to have four colours per pixel to make an acceptable print quality and thus on a 330 dpi printer you need to divide your megapixel size by 1320 to get how many inches would be absolute best.

Best Fit ; ppi: dpi and image scaling

Practically it would be quicker to use some trial and error, by first printing out a small scale size at 330dpi in colour, or lower quality like 100dpi to see the areas which may be problematic in percieved image qaulity.

Then take a crop of these potentially troublesome areas and vary the size of the image output, writing a text comment with their details so you can keep track of them after printing : view then from a distance and determine which size is acceptable. Calculate out your total size achievable: it will probably be bigger than your printer's width and height!

A picture with less tonal depth and more primary colour composition, more contrast and stronger colours in other words, would maybe be a direct conversion to 330 ppi to dpi or lower upon some scrutiny.

At this stage it would be far easier to move away from using ppi and the whole pixel thing, and use PS's, or light room or Corel's etc etc, image scaling function which gives you dpi and actual inches size or metric E-Qs.
==========================================================================


Notes on sizes

For printing:


YSF YF YN YB
X (Middle)
3200 x 2400
2560 x 1920 XSF XF XN XB

1600 x 1200
W (Small)
1280 x 960

WSF WF WN WB
1024 x 768

For
small-sized
prints and use
on a web site
640 x 480

Social Media Monitoring Goes Bust

A Brief History

To start with a brief history of social media: from cloudy beginings in nerd talk and security services personal info boards, social media came to the public internet in the late eighties and early nineties as the newsgroup: a simple text based repository for messages and early blogs, with circulation by e-mail subscription or internet boards.....and these were indeed monitored then, mainly by police in connection with the pædo rings and other unsavoury comms.

Newsgroups quickly went HTML on the World Wide Web and evolved into the forum, which is still the best repository for accessible, high value and trackable information on the web. This is where most consumer involvement with products and brands takes place. Although the micro blogging / glue services like Twitter are rapidly becoming a larger, faster resource they are still less useful for examining consumer attittudes over months of time or in detail.

Little Brother is Watching You

Now there are a host of agencies offering "social media monitoring" and these currently run the risk of creating a bubble soft and venture capital will feel the implosion of. Currently the most advanced indexing tools are not much better than stringing together several specialist hot shop functions, a core data depository and crawler and monitor and "deck" resourcest which are free on the internet. The larger agencies, like Meltwater are able to attract the larger brands while the major players of Trad' market research are still testing the water and holding off on acquisitions.

Why is Social Media Monitoring Going Bust?

The whole market for social media analytics, is in peril of undervaluing it's core pricing. Put simply, the barriers to entry are rather low given that comp'sci' students are often given crawler-indexer or deck meta data projects in undergrad years. Most of the new emerging agencies are student shops: comp sci and MBAers slung together to play at business. Problem being that they want to set experience before value and are cutting each others throats by going into brand names on "loss leaders".

Another key issue is the propagation of free services: "amsterdam hooker windows" as one software engineer called them in another area. The problem here is that you can begin to string together enough free services to make a picture of your brands' position in SM and then just go into the key forums and twitter yourself with your short-suffering marketing interns. The initial "Brand X status in CGM" is devalued as are tha later tracker reports: the key value for agencies is in presenting the statistics and sentiment mapping, but this is so relative and subject to the media surface changing itself that you really have to question the value of it for brands with less than 2000 hits per month in SM.

Scalability ....lack of it.

Although a few of the new starts may have strong crawler-indexer technology, one major problem is that the technology has to monitor a diverse range of sources out there on the internet, and those sources are not always too keen on being crawled. Programmer time is used in not just attaining sources, but retaining them. Also indexing for relevance and speed takes programmer time,and unfortunetly a new arena for a new brand may not be as fast or inclusive/exhaustive as the last indexing which had been optmised.

Put on top of this the awful costs of account management and new business development in acquiring and maintaining brand name clients and the issue of scalability just in this one area, is the one which will kill off most of the new starts.

Lumpy Custard

This economics of SM monitor agencies is actually nothing new: most small 1970s-80s advertising agencies failed because they tried to scale and could not make the leap from the core owner-manager team to an expanding, system driven agency.

Most of all in marketing services, it is horrible risky business with huge over reliance on a small number of customers ( clients in agency land) . "lumpy custard" as I used to describe it. In the 1980s the expression "lose a client, lose your job" was the mantra of account directors, while today it is more likely to be "lose a client, lose your VC funding".

To give some detail on this, when a new project is taken on then it inevitably comes with new sources or indexing demands. Also it comes with a new set of expectatons and because Market Research is still cinderella to the communications side of on line marketing, then new demands of the clients are usually out of line with charging the baseline 85€ per man hour to even break even in business services.

Winners and Losers

The largest, most comprehensive indexers will probably win over and then get the third level funding or even IPO / alternative exchange floatations. I'd expect these technology and brand become acquisition hungry and buy up the hot shops with key expertise in delivering more from fewer man hours. They in turn will want to either exit from VC or the stock exchange, by being eaten by the MB/TNC or Frosts of the world.

This would be the current exit model for the numerous university spawned start ups in SMM.

However, another huge issue they have is in defending their IPR: outside the US very litte will be patentable and a copyright can either be worked around or be somewhat irrelevant in a David-Goliath situation. So rounds of acquisition will come down to " can we get there cheaper ourselves? Do we head hunt out the key techies? What value do they really add ? How will they integrate technically and cutlurally to us?" for the potential bigger fish.

Acquisitions rounds will become window shopping with all the above questions firmly in mind once they get a look behind the scenes. Small companies would be wise to limit their exposure in terms of their "black box" code and indeed the identities of their staff.

These days you are open to headhunting through facebook and linked-in, so Social Media monitors may be eaten up by their own poison.

On the Road To Damascus

I met with a personnel consultant this week, who turned out to be a former priest.

He advised me to both jack myself down ( as they say here, by the chin) a lot , become modest and more honest maybe about how it has gone on the troubled road here: things haven't suited me., we have tried different places and jobs, I have been too "larry ;: was I too big" yes I was too big!

He told me about the town constables of the middel and pre renaissance period, around the black death here in Norway to make his point about

They would hold wathc outside the towns and at the gates with a spike adorned stave. WHen someone would have access to the town, they would always ask how things had been in the last place. If the arrival said, "yeas there was a lot of okay things and I got along but would like something new" then they would maybe let them in, When the person replied " oh, full of terrible people. It was no goo d for me and I am glad to be shot of the dump" The watcher would always reply " well my friend I am afraid to say it is just the same here and you would be better to move on to another place"

We know the road to damascus is a way upon which we come to some realisation, but really it is more a fundamental. What happens when you take that road is a major shift in the philospophy your life is run by.



According to the interweb, the Road to Damascus is the conversion of actually an arch enemy of one belief to another thought system. Saul, aka Paul of Jerusalem, was sent out by the Rabbis to persecute Christians in Damascus and return some for torture,test-trial and death in Jerusalem under Judiast law for blaspheming . All this by some charter with Arabia he should execute this persecution beyond the realms of Israel. However on the way, without any human interferance, Jesus spoke to him in a blinding light. Upon arrival in damascus he was healed for this blindness by perhaps christians and converted.

Hence the road is to travel out of the usual daily work or family life towards something new yet with the full faith of your previous convictions owning your soul. You expect to carry on in your ways, but the journey is turbulent and you are confronted by a forces which make you blind to your past and acceptant of the new philosophy you will live your life by.

I feel I have been on the road for six years now. God, four years should have been enough time to make it here to at least some semblemce of stability with jobs. But we are here due to chance and it is not for me. I get some small , wee life here while to my kids it is there WORLD.

IF this relates to anything in my career and maybe yours, then it is to maybe working in purcahsing instead of sales and marketing. Shopping is cooler than selling

New Paradigm Career Making jobs

The new paradigm of the post recession world: it will be hard to get full time marketing work and growth will be slower in the economy. To get the head start on your career, or like me on the next phase then you need to consider the new paradigms, which I will blogg about a few times in the forthcoming weeks:

1) forget job, think project, think task, think opportunity in the box
2) forget work place: think availability for the key calls and key pressing of flesh
3) forget "administration": move away from positions which have a lot of filler: concentrate on the higher value mental and personality oriented activities

When I say "forget job" I don't mean you should lose your concept of working for a brand-name, blue chip employer to get it on your CV. In fact if you eventually do want to forget being a delivery bitch at a company and go self employed, then you almost MUST have some decent employers on your CV. What I mean by this is that you should think about what the opportunity is for you and the company to engage in work of higher intellectual value.

Now this means examining the position you are in or being interviewed for or alternatively, identifying opportunities for virtual promotion within the company or value chain "nodes" you are dealing with on a totally pre-emptive basis. You want to avoid being a delivery bitch for long, not that you ever stop needing to do some hard, boring work until you become an MBA God at a firm, but that you need to reduce, avoid and displace menial tasks off your desk and out of your job description.

In outset for you as an MSc Marketing graduate, this means being wary of job offers with vague "marketing executive" titles and enough of a mix of low level BS that you wonder what you will end up doing. This could be sales work, or menial database work etc. If the job is at a lesser B2B brand or whatever, then this is worse: brands sell product, and sales people just work out the discount-volume and what dinner / golf tour the buyers want to "seal" the deal. PWC is a brand, Ernst and Young, McCanns, Blackberry, Zantac, Viagra, Oracle etc etc. Little plucky clever unbranded company does not need an MSc marketing graduate as canon fodder sales material.

It is more important for you, and funnily enough for me now, to define what tasks are high qaulity in a potential job and to try and work around that in discussions with employers. You want to persuade and jagole the employer into giving you responsibility for projects and tasks of higher value, while they also declare how much of the job is menial. Then think opportunity- reduce the job to it's elementary core added intellectual value: marketing strategy.

You may not formulate a marketing strategy yourself, but contributing to NPI, market research, acquisitions, investor relations and so on adds value to your CV rather than monkeys on your back in a low level job.

So dare to push the employer to identify these tasks. Take a week or two's work trial with them if you get an offer. This is thoroughly recommended for any entry level job with a diverse list of tasks. If you don't like the job don't worry: just say it sucks! They aren't going to grass you up to the dole. Be direct and tell them it is boring for you after the two weeks are underway, and tell them what you would rather work with. Look out for opportunities: points of touch, e-business, marketing purchasing, new markets & customer segments, new products/e-marketing ( social media strategy anyone?)


I am back in this position actually because of the recession and the general miss mix of my bloody minded, male and pompous attitudes ! Had I been in touch with my female side (Ha!) then I could have thrived in doing the manual tasks and sucking up to my aggressive bosses.

I need to assert my space in a job now, and so do you because it is really important to get a "career making" job within 2 or 3 years of finishing your MSc, otherwise you need to seriously consider working in another area or getting new skills, like I did when I got some IKT skills : perfect timing! HTML programming in 1995. I never really did much, but it gave me the edge in interview and also performance in some jobs.

I digress: you need to assert your space in the job and this is absolutely best before you start because otherwise you are on the back foot as a would-be-eager-bunny. ( I am SOOO NOT an eager bunny in new jobs with BS to do. I mean maybe a week or two before my nose is out of joint and I am all anarchic again.) In the interview phase you have leverage and they are on the back foot having chosen you. If they really push you though, and won't allow you to actually come in for even a couple of days and look at the tasks you will be doing, then check the work contract and it may have only a weeks notice which will make it very easy for you to move or threaten to move.

Salary is actually a lot less important for you guys luckily, and this is why you can afford to do a two week work trial, or to turn down a 100% position with "blah blah, 9 to 5" and take a part time job where you focus only on those higher value activities: or at least those which are bone fide marketing.


Some administration is however actually sufficiently high value for you to put your back into: Some high value admin will give you the edge in getting a better job, becoming manager for someone replacing you or if the axe falls, you have a "business critical" admin set to do: for example product administration through ISO and accounts and logistics systems.

As against, cleaning databases with calls, telesales itself, sales support admin.

The reverse situation is more dangerous - I know I have been there- you take a job which is "marketing" in title only or very low grade and bang your head off the wall to try and get a year's work experience on your CV. DON'T DO THIS! AAAAAH! Negotiate tasks worthy of you, and accept a part time job if that is all the time it will take, or just a project based job.

I can hear the cogs turning now, some of you are sceptical to becoming "perpetual projecteers" without ever a taste for operational management. Yes this is a danger! But MSc students are overlooked for the majority of blue-chip APM roles or top 3 agency Account Exec roles so you need to be able to add value to yourself with the smaller brands. Small brand with big strategic impact you made is really where it is going to be at over the next few years of recovery, with new small brands becoming the next FaceBooks or Kindles. (I say brands rather than company because if you are at a company with no brand other than flesh-pressing then forget a career in marketing with them!)


I'll blog again on this area, but I hope you leave with the ideas of being more assertive in defining what you do with your valuable time while you are young enough to work hard and work smart!

Mointoring Consumer Generated Media- The new King

The other day there was a programme on the idiot box about measuring IQ: Kalahari bushmen have been measured as the lowest IQ of any homosapien. 61 or the like. POS that IQ tests are for measuring actual ability to learn, perfect crafts, hunt and so on. THis was driven by a fairly racist appearing "researcher" who had done some "convenience samples" and some meta analyses to draw up these intelligence quotients for different ethnic groups.

Another researcher pointed out the validity of IQ tests as they stand: to get by in the modern world and use your brain to forward your well being and reproduce, you need to be able to relate to the westernised IQ test! There is little point in being a hunter gatherer in the 21st century, you are on to a loser.

Now this may seem a bit removed from doing social media monitoring: but in future will consumer opinions and groups who DO NOT make CGM about brands not become largely irrelevant?

I think that market research will become completely web and IP telephony based. And we will use anonymsed IP MPEG streaming to sample into street level consumer behaviour, and into those social strata who don't do CGM yet are important enough to some brands of sports clothing .....yeah the underclass buying their bling rags....

Interviewing your Prospective employer

Now I have to come back to two points about careers and making the right choices, because I am painfully remined of how bad things can go with a company in the "patient capital" late start up ( F-up) phase. They are running out of cash and I am bailing out, having noted that they have actually a pretty inefficient core "technology" from which it wil be hard to compete while making any decent gross margin.

1) You are interviewing the firm as much and more than they are you!

People forget this: we are nervous and want to match our best abilities against the job decscription AND offer some more, often superfluous info to them. We then get given a standard corporate blurb back at us an in the end of the day, none of us is all that much wiser about the possible exchange of values. We both know it will happen though, and given you are the least bad candidate you will get the offer.

Now, you actually have learnt rather little about the job and they have learnt just enough to know you will be able to function at the hands of the politics and flagrant lack of trianing you will get.

When I was a self respecting masters graduate, I considered a two week work trial ( as supported by the dole office, BA or whatever they are called now) as being a total sell out of my skills and abilities. Now I see it, even at first job level, as a really powerful means to gather info, understand the job and lay down some assertions about what you actually want to do.

In a two week period you will get the core tasks of an entry level graduate job and get to work ( or maybe only fleetingly) with your manager. Thus you will get a real insight into the job and if it is at Aardvark Galactica selling widgets to nobody's then you get the chance to say no.

A MUCH BETTER situation than I have now: the company's technology takes too much manual time to produce results and is therefore destined to be over run by faster, leaner competitors who are more customer quick-win oriented. I knew this within two weeks and that my bosses were aresholes but I perciveered because CGM monitoring is pretty trendy and I need a lift. So I coulkd have spent two weeks with them, as I suggested actually come to think of it, and turned round and said the job was far too junior and played to only weaknesses in attention to detail and motivations. Instead I am six months in, they are going belly up and I am stressed to hell.

So a two week trial is pretty good actually.

2) You need to get the RIGHT first job or know you need to move to the next RIGHT job asap!

I have been in the wrong jobs for all the right reasons, and had maybe two trials or . contracts both of which lead to jobs. The trouble for MSc-ers is that you have no real networking route or trail blazed into the big FMCG brands and you must languish in 2nd rate public service and SME marketing in Scotland if you will not move. In this market it is very, very easy to get a marketing job which turns into a nightmare of doing either sales donkey work or having all the monkeys in the department put on your back: ie all the shit no one else wants to do gets queued for your desk from day 1!

The MSc is a double edged sword because really it prepares you for MBA graduate jobs, while people do not respect it as much. So while being qualified to do strategy work you are actually too sharp for the jobs often on offer and cannot compete with "full MBAers" for those jobs you should aim for. I mean I worked with some prick recently who kept on refering to "fluffy" in the marketing department, AS the marketing department actually: market strategy being too important for the likes of marketers to touch !

A work trial of two weeks can allow you to swing in, get a grip on the company's failures and possibilities and then present yourself as a more strategic analyst and planner than the original "marketing exec' " role was specified as.

More often though, you will be able to see if the job is really just a sales admin type job or if it has very little of interest. You may be able to then play anouther card, often played actually, taking a part time position to cover only those functions you feel are relevant to your qualifications. This is really cunning because it buys you the RIGHT experience to shine in AND TIME to look for other jobs, start your own consultancy or take a convenient second job in.

DIY Reports in Consumer Generated Media

I wrote a bit of a philosophical rant on why and how you could DIY CGM (social media/consumer generated medi) research and longditudinal analyses.

The key tool within this is to develop good enough search strings ( list of keywords in a boolean expression) and I will get back to a very simple, artithmentically based emprical method which will make you efficient in "cutting to the quick" of any topic or brand-tracker in CGM.


1) follow the path of least resistance: everyone has trodden there!

- If you get your search strings sorted in your preliminary build, then you will follow a route which all the sheep do, and therefore come upon the forums and bloggs which have the highest postings and the highest reads for your topic or brand.

Forums are for the moment, still the best source of consumer insight for many areas. Remember that google/yahoo etc only index about 15% of the web and probably less of total "live" content so far, heavily biased to some forums in some topic areas. This means you will follow the heard, but remember to go and look at the forum indexes once you identify which are the most ranked in google.

2) Once in the place, read the biggest threads:

subscribe to those which have not become off topic rants. Use the forum search functions, advanced if possible, on your topic of interest. ( go back to your snowballing query build - coming soon on a blogg from DF!)

3) Small can be beautifully ugly!

When looking for say, NPI problems, you want to do the opposite: find small threads or recent ones near a launch date for example, and then see if this has propagated out on bloggs, forums and twitter searches. If you see a smattering of discontent, then this can point to a failure in QA or just a bad product.

4) Follow the opinion leaders: the forum matadors.

Often you can find all posts by an author who seems to be an opinion leader, early adopter or influencer and follow your topic using this route. This is often valuable insight, and also you have a weigthing for importance based on them replying in threads.


5) Use "5 bar gate" counting on hits
-
for various opinions, co-mentions / brand comparisons and opinion polling: often called sentiment rating. Look for ratings for posts and any polls which appear in the area. Also make a note of "reads" on forums and bloggs. All these are useful stats and you are adding a quality filter which computers cant!

6) Too many results! ??

use an nth page technique: however, for a given date range or from the latest listings, read the first few pages to see if the same threads are getting multiple listings, or bloggs are getting extended replies. An nth page sampling strategy plus using quick hit counts onto a sticky note is just as good as a computer doing a census. For 100 pages, an every tenth page would be adequate, or every 5th if the results are often not in true CGM .

Use this also within huge threads- read the first few pages completely, then do every say 5th before moving up to every 10th until the latest 5 or first posted five (depending on rank order by date ascending/descending is default) thoroughly. Then you know the "currency" and "providence" of the thread and can rate it's value.

7) Linky?
Follow links to other forums and other CGMs from your top relevant forum postings. In this way you snowball out and can gain a picture of the prominence on the different SM platforms, and the interconnectivity- itself an interesting meta-metric to consider.


For example there may be a youtube video or a discussion on a related article on the BBC or CNN or so on, which means the prominence in "views" is really very high for a brand, product or topic.

8) Issue tracking:

now of course you can subscribe to a thread, but you can also do a bit of detective work: look back over time and follow external links. Expand your search strings to include.


9) Running statistics:

this is a little bit tediouos but can be done using repetitive searches on advanced SE forms over different date periods, or using five bar counts. Once again for very long results lists you can sample nth pages and get an idea of date-distribution.

A short cut is to know results per page / total pages and when you are in threads, the same for posts per page. It can be a little tedious to get to the last page for the count if there is no "skip to last" button.

10) summarise your stats and findings: priorities around the more prominent media spaces, BBC, CNN; the biggest forums while also pointing to those specialist forums which maybe have the highest QUALITY of insight - early adopters, beta testers, industry insiders, and innovators who are taking your product to bits. From your bar counts you can do a rough guide to opinion ratings for products and illustrate this with quotes and whole conversatipns. You may want to make a couple of case study threads on inlfuence by opinion leaders or on how prominent a single thread has actually been and how "linky" and " tweety" a page is. You also want to include the prominent blogs and the prominent Facebook groups, applications and fanclubs. From all this you could produce a very insightful report on a brand, an NPI issue or on a developing consumer need and this report would likely be of high quality compared to the big hit counter type products.

Show me the Money! Job offers in the Credit Crunch

...or the importance of getting a good deal before you accept the job offer

I haev ignored this three times in the last ten years and it is well worth your effort in NOT accepting a low offer despite your circumstances. Look the gift horse in the mouth! Make an informed decision and play some poker!

I cannot stress enough, I will not say too many times and I dare not shout too low that you must get what you need from a first (or second ) job before you accept the offer. Usually this boils down to money, and YOU MUST be happy with the balance between training, projects and salary, because that is all you are going to get while in the job.

Work experience per se is meanginless if you accept a "marketing assistant" job blindly or the nice tasks are only 10% of the time and maybe telesales, database admin, photocopying etc are 90% of the actual job. I wasted a crucial year in such a job! I managed to play catch up with a heck of a lot of hard work in my next job though. It is in fact much better to be paid virtually nothing on a 2 month work experience project where you actually conduct quality marketing tasks than the department GOFER for 12 months.

You need to avoid this by negotiating before you start. Negotiating is always a subtle play of information, and probing for a little bit more and then using it as a little bit more lever, while giving only a little bit out which gives a poorer lever to the other side. This is how you win, you subtlely win tip the balance in your favour while accepting some sort of concession compromise: a few prawns fall but you put them in check-mate.

But firstly, back to green-backs: Companies will palm you off with " we can't afford" or " we have current wage frameworks". This is rubbish, they want to screw you especially in a recession. " If you want people to work harder, pay them less" ...this is true in bum jobs or non graduate jobs......but how effective this stressed, undervalued work period is for both parties is quesitonable. The cost between a market going rate ( admittedly low -I know in the credit crunch hangover period) and a lower offer boils down to a few hundred pounds per month, maybe £70 quid per week for you as a graduate. Can't afford? they could save this by using a better travel agent for business flights, or missing one useless client dinner a month.

Facts are bosses like to screw you over and say they got you cheap, it makes them look good.

So what is on the table to get your information war going in your favour
1) salary
2) training
3) projects and defined responsibilities
4) relocation expenses
5) a 50 to 80% job so you get time to look for something better
6) promotion prospects and turn over in the firm/sector
7) external prospects when you have a year experience
8) the company brand name for your CV ( or client brand names !)
9) start date
7) legnth of trial period
8) Legnth or termination period
9) possible contract engagement only

How can you bargain? Well your only chip is to withdraw your offer of labour. If you are on benefits, this is high risk - you can get them stopped for refusing a job. But given the job is high risk and has financial implications ( expense of rented property). But it is still a poker game and you can't show your hand too soon

How do you bet this chip then, play this card?

Well first of all, you should from outset know what the "wage framework" would be for this position, and know that you as an MSc Marketer have five years of uni to offer and a very good marketing masters under you belt. This should NOT be turned back on to your expectation: some jobs have been 18K outside london for a while. Play dumb, say you have only started looking for work and have expectations to work hard and get on over money: what would they suggest as for me in this job? Don't push too hard, but do revisit the wage BEFORE you bother to go to final interview. Also don't go to employers who dont refund expenses and prefably choose those who book everything for you: if they do this, then put on a bloody good show as they will look after you as an employee!

Now when you get a disappointing offer in an interview, you need to not look too disappointed. It is more likely you will get this on the phone, same here , move quickly on from the money to the responsibilities. Now between this and the eventual decision you must buy time and get concrete DECISIONS not just information, but agreements on tasks, training and projects you will get. You need this in writing to refer to if y our job starts going down the pan soon in.

The important thing with a low offer and poorly defined work responsibilities is to stall in an assertive, positive looking way. Comms mus tbe very positive but not fully committed.

The pieces then come in the list come to play: low pay versus excellent experience or low pay because it is a crap job a graduate in medieval history could do. What tasks, repsonsibilities are up for grabs? Remember you have an MSc, they have not made their minds quite up, so help point them away from the photocopier and mail list towards the high valuie customer satisfaction survey, the social media PR campaign, monitoring competitors, the effective review of the marketing budget and so on....What training courses are internal, who will be your mentor, what courses do they offer externally, will they support your time and materials in doing the CIM courses?

The next thing is of course relocation expenses. These were , a while ago, tax deductable for employers but funnily enough NOT employee personal tax. Employers will put new senior managers up in penthouse suites with hired 4x4 executive wheels! But they will try it on with you as a new graduate in need of work experience. Don't let them if the salary stinks. If it just an average salary, negotiate even a lower salary for the first six months relocation on the back that they find you afirst a hotel and then pay rented accomodation. I have not done this on one notable occiasion and really got stung for the outlay when the job didn't work out ( they put a directors daughter in my job) As a graduate you will have enough debts.

So now you have the balance of information: if the job now sounds poorly paid, poorly trained, low level tasks without relocation, then you may as well ask for say 20k and tell the m you have an offer at that level: never tell them where ( esp recruitment consultants, they are desperate for leads and to close deals! )

Now given the pay is low, but there is relocation and training, you need to find out more about career prospects. Suggest a day's visit to meet the team and finalise the contract. This is a positive thing for the employer. Ask other employees how often people leave - is there a turn over- ask why the job is vacant from your prospective coworkers . Ask how your coworkers started out in the firm. Ask what they studied.

One thing too, what type of cars are in the car park? This is a very clear indication of salary prospects later. Audis, beamers, volvos, 4x4s good...., old fords and citroens very bad...a subsidised canteen is nothing much really as a benefit but a gymn, studio , pool? .

Now you have enough information to make a decision: take it only with more pay, reject it outright, ask for silly money as above or there is another option: shape something new based upon your own needs: a more focused project 3 days a week or for just three months on say expenses only as a work trial. Or a 60% position covering only relevant, higher value marketing tasks. Or they pay for your CIM proffessional development and two triaing courses of your choice within industry average cost of courses.

In negotiating you need to push them to the wire: stall as long as you possibly can if the wage is low: get as much information out of them while remaining positive, but non committal verbally amnd on paper. Then if you have managed say two weeks stalling for a job where there are lots of questiona and a final visit to meet the team, then you can pull your card out and say the offer is not attractive enough and thank you but no thanks

Then you can let them do the talking and you should not let them bully you, just repeat the pay is very low, you have a better offer, or you have interviews for better paid jobs.

If you have been looking for a job or working temp for a long time, up to 8 months say, and you feel forced into accepting a job, then a final end game is to stall and ask for a later starting date. Use the time and security of something to do anyway to look hard for other jobs. The fall-back and interview-offer experience will be good. When you get a better offer you will only have a months termination, which may be even before your start date or you can turn up to work with an offer, see what tasks and training you will actually get and then demand them or you will just call it all off.

Once again you could ask for a 60% position focusing on the real marketing tasks and thus avoiding being given rubbish to do. You could probably expand it to 100% if it goes well or at least have two days a week to look for other work.