Gringoes: why would you live in Brazil?

I’m a regular reader of the Gringoes.com website. It’s a magazine for foreigners living and working in Brazil and the downsides of being in Brazil are a regular theme of articles and discussion, particularly in the associated Facebook group where readers can vent their opinion openly without the need for an editor to approve what they submit to the magazine.

In the past day there has been an enormous argument raging on the Facebook group because one foreigner wrote a list of dozens and dozens of reasons why he hates living in Brazil.

Every foreign person living far from home has some reason to miss home, but for someone to sit and write a list of 66 – yes 66 – reasons he hates being in Brazil leaves me feeling rather incredulous. This is surely a hatred bordering on obsession?

It is easy to leave. Even if his wife has a good job. Or she wants to be close to her family. He could just leave, return to the USA and swallow the cost of visiting regularly as being better than having to endure a life in Brazil.

But comparing things to home is normal. I knew a British guy who has now left Brazil and he would lament about the quality of shops like Boots. I actually think that the drug stores in São Paulo are pretty good – even if the generic drugs are too expensive.

I spent some time living in the USA teaching kids when I was younger. I had a health-plan provided by my employer and I never needed to use it, but now I am self-employed, I think that finding over $1,000 a month to ensure I can see a doctor when I need one would seriously put me off ever living in the USA – but it’s a place I love visiting.

I spent a lot of time in India and Singapore when I was working for a bank and I had all kinds of comments and thoughts about those places. Singapore is clean and safe and well ordered, but nobody has any real ability to criticise the government – then you end up wondering how much that right is worth if the streets are clean and you have no fear of getting mugged?

In India the poverty is oppressive, even in cities like Mumbai where billionaires and film stars frequent the beaches and luxury hotels. All my foreign friends living there had to be in gated communities, sealed off from the ‘normal’ people – is that really what life in India is about?

And so what about Brazil? It’s true that the country is saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and it appears there is no desire to streamline any of it – just dealing with the cartorios (notary offices) alone by using biometric identity would sweep away an enormous amount of time checking and stamping forms – often for no other reason than confirming a signature is genuine. But there are probably millions of people working in these offices so the government would give efficiency with one hand and wipe out jobs with the other.

Brazilian drivers are very aggressive. I don’t mind most of the time, but when someone pulls a stunt like overtaking me on a sweeping corner (it happens a lot more often than you might think) and their stupidity is endangering me and my family then I get angry – and there should be no need to.

It is tough to negotiate life in Brazil sometimes. I’m grateful that I’ve got a fantastic wife who can steer me through a lot of the things that would give a foreigner an entirely negative view of the place. I know a British guy who was robbed at gunpoint in São Paulo in his own home, but his Brazilian wife chose a crappy neighbourhood for them to live in where he would obviously stand out – so who is to blame?

I’ve also been lucky to get great professional advice. The accountant for my business had never handled a company like ours before – lots of foreign clients, money coming from all over the world, only really dealing in intellectual property  rather than tangible assets. She studied all the relevant rules to handle our company and has been doing a great job – and it’s needed because even a small company here has to file a tax or regulatory report AT LEAST ONCE A DAY… I did mention there is a lot of bureaucracy here.

Foreigners on the Gringoes website complain of being ripped off – try catching a taxi in India then and asking the driver to use the meter. It won’t happen. They complain of the ‘culture’ in Brazil not being like back home. They complain about how they can’t complain without being ignored.

I have even seen foreigners on the forums talking about how Brazilian music is just not as good as it is back at home. Are they kidding? Have you been out in São Paulo recently? It is packed with live gigs going on every night of the week. I admit, seeing the big international rock acts is expensive, but there is a thriving art, music, and culture scene in Brazil.

And then, when Brazilians respond with a list of all the great things about Brazil it just so often seems to be full of clichés… is feijoada really one of the reasons why people choose to live in Brazil?

The reality is that you can’t define a place with a single broad stroke. There is no Brazil this or that in the same way that living in Louisiana is very different to California or New York. Living far from home is affected firstly by the place you have chosen to be and the people you are with.

For example, if you are used to life in central New York or London then life on a beach up in the rural north east of Brazil might seem idyllic when you first arrive. The sun, the beach, the endless opportunity to live next to the barbecue. After a while though you might start wondering when you are going to next visit the cinema, a theatre, see a rock concert, or meet a friend who has read the books of Anthony Burgess. Living an idyllic life by the beach can have downsides too.

And the people are important. Moving anywhere can be improved by having a partner from that country, but people are people. I’ve met many Brazilian people from São Paulo who don’t even know how to get around their own city. In my short time here I’ve learned more about the public transport infrastructure and different neighbourhoods than they have in a lifetime. And I’ve also seen locals setting up home with their foreign partners in completely inappropriate locations – as I already mentioned.

I’m not suggesting that a foreigner moving to São Paulo has to live in a ghetto of foreigners. It actually annoys me when I meet ex-pats living in the city and they all gravitate to Jardins, Moema, or Brooklin. They are not really the most interesting parts of the city at all, but are considered ‘safe’ so foreigner-ghettos are created and then the cycle is reinforced – these are good places for foreigners to live because others are already there.

So the type of place, the location, the people you are with – these are all factors in creating your personal experience. The cultural complaints I read on Gringoes are all influenced by this – we are all in different places with different people so we cannot just assume the same about Brazil. The Brazil one person experiences can be entirely different to that experienced by another.

When I see the complaints about foreigners being treated differently, getting ripped off, I remember when I was living in São Paulo and every shop owner in my street would wave and say hello as I walked my dog down the street. I had a set of spare house keys in my local bar, in case I ever lost my keys. The taxi drivers at my local cab rank all said hello and were happy to do short or long runs at short notice. I never found any of the negativity I can see expressed on the discussion forums.

I was never burgled or mugged or witnessed any crime during my time in São Paulo, despite the statistics painting an image of the city as one step away from Gomorrah.

Now I live in a smaller town this has only become more accentuated. The paranoid may fear that standing out as the only English person in town might lead to being targeted by burglars or worse, but what have I found? Just a sincere welcome everywhere I go from the barber to the bakery to the bar to the local government – who are all excited about having a real English person help them with some music and culture related to the UK.

In fact, what have I found out about Brazil in short?

• Business; running a business is bureaucratic. I cannot even personally deal with the number of regulatory and tax reports I need to file – it is more than one report a day. But my accountant does it all efficiently at a reasonable price and the corporation tax on my company is lower than in the UK. It takes a bit of effort to run the firm, but in short, the tax bill is lower than it would be in the US or UK so that can only be a good thing. I am better off that I would be back in the UK and I’m staying on the right law of the law and paying my taxes.
• World focus; talking of business, I am busier than ever. Brazil is a great place to be as it has survived the global economic downturn and with the next World Cup and Olympic games coming here everyone is looking to do business in Brazil in this decade.
• Home; I now live in a lovely spa town of about 30,000 people packed full of mineral water springs. I open the window in the morning and see mountains in front of me as the sun rises. I’ve got a pool and sauna at home and space to entertain friends when they come over. I can’t imagine having all this back in London – my last home in the UK was a small flat.
• Nature; I’m surrounded by the most incredible countryside and real live toucans and parrots fly past – they are not just things you see on postcards from Brazil.
• People; I’ve met so many fantastic people since I moved to Brazil – some locals and some foreigners living here. There is something about living away from your home country that encourages you to get out to meet more people than if you were back on familiar territory and this can be a wonderfully positive experience. I have even ended up working with the British embassy to promote the UK for business and tourism.
• Weather; Brazil is an enormous country with searing heat in the north to snow in the south. Where I am living now will be dry until about September and I work outside in the sun almost every day. I’m pretty happy about that – would you prefer a balcony with a mountain view or a dull basement office?

In short, I have personally had a fantastic time since moving to Brazil and I have found opportunities and experiences that would just have never happened had I stayed in London.

There are things I would like to improve in Brazil. Maybe my voice and opinion can help to influence a few changes, but I see so many more positives than negatives. I think that the foreigners who endlessly whine about the problems of Brazil are living in the wrong place.

The foreigners may even be right. They might have a valid point, but if you want to while away your days complaining and dreaming of when you can move someplace else then why not just remember the words of John Lennon:

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.“

Greater UK ‘Soft Power’ Thanks to Iron Maiden?

I was recently invited to attend a Wilton Park round-table discussion titled “Applying soft power: the Brazilian and British perspectives” in São Paulo. Wilton Park is a think tank funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to explore policy issues that affect the UK in various ways.

My own contribution focused on how social media and popular culture – such as music – can have influence as a diplomatic tool. Or to put it another way, can Facebook and British pop hits from the 80s help the FCO diplomats?

Diplomacy is at the top of the news agenda at present. With North Korea openly talking about nuclear Armageddon diplomats will be working in smoke-filled rooms brokering solutions to the crisis.

But international diplomacy is not just an activity that takes place when politicians are trying to avert military action; it is a process that takes place twenty-four hours a day. Often people who do not possess any formal government role undertake this soft form of diplomacy.

I’m talking about soft power. This is the ability of a nation to broadcast their opinion and values without dictating them by force. Hollywood is possibly the best example. American movies have reached every corner of the world, giving an insight into American life – as the movies describe it – to people from Addis Ababa to Zimbabwe.

Some movies are good and some are bad, but the sheer volume of movies being produced in America and distributed globally give people across the world a sense of American values without ever reading the US constitution or listening to a single speech in Congress.

And the UK is also very good at soft power, probably second only to the US globally. In part this is because of the power of the English language as the global lingua franca of business. I have personally had jobs, based in London, for German and French companies where employees working in those countries had to speak English to get a job – can you imagine the uproar if French was required as standard to get a job in London?

The BBC is a beacon of soft power with influence far beyond the UK – and not just because of the international popularity of Top Gear. BBC World News has a global audience of 239m a week and the BBC World Service reaches over 180m a week.

The British Council estimates that over one billion people are always in the process of learning English and they are regularly training over 130,000 people at any one time with their own courses. The British Council has a rich set of free English courses available with support across various social networks allowing students to essentially learn for free, just paying if they want to take an official IELTS test.

But soft power doesn’t have to mean just English courses or the BBC News. Is it possible to quantify just how many people have visited the UK from all over the world just because they love the music of the Beatles, or The Smiths, or David Bowie, or Pink Floyd?

Do you remember the music section from Danny Boyle’s spectacular London Olympic opening ceremony last year? Global hit after hit rang out from the stadium and all these songs have been sung in showers the world over for decades.

When I moved recently from São Paulo to Serra Negra – a move from one of the largest cities in the world to a small mountain city about the same size as Buxton and also famous for the local mineral water – the first place my neighbours invited me to go was the English club. Serra Negra has a club for people who want to speak English and they had never had a person from England in the club, so I was especially welcomed.

At the last meeting I taught the group how Cockney slang works and now I’m arranging a screening of ‘Only Fools and Horses‘ with flashcards. I’m expecting to create a group of Brazilians who know that when Rodders asks Del Boy for a pony he doesn’t mean a young horse.

British music, art, and culture in general has reached every corner of the world and this does create a favourable impression of the nation – useful for business and politics in addition to just feeling a bit more welcomed when visiting a new place as a tourist.

Last week I was in the audience in São Paulo as The Cure played their hits to around 35,000 people. People who could sing every word, even if they feel too shy to speak using English.

The British diplomatic mission in Brazil launched a public diplomacy initiative last year that focused on how to leverage some of this goodwill from artists, sportspeople, and other highly visible British celebrities because there are opportunities in abundance for the British to be visible here in Brazil.

The England football team will play Brazil in June at the reopening of the famous Maracanã stadium in Rio – the stadium where the World Cup final will be played next year. The enormous Rock in Rio music festival in September features an entire stage just focused on British and Irish music – with some special surprise acts planned for the fans.

All these events may seem frivolous in political or business terms, but this misses an important point. Music, culture, art, the output of the BBC, and a desire to take lessons in English all shape how people see the UK from outside the country.

The Rock in Rio music festival runs for a week and is screened daily on national TV in Brazil. Muse and Iron Maiden might not feel they are explicitly selling UK plc when they get up and perform, but you can guarantee that some fans are going to book a trip to Britain because of the shows. Some business leaders are going to choose to invest in the UK because they can speak English as a second language. And some politicians are going to be more disposed to try striking a deal with their British counterparts for all the reasons above.

Soft power is critically important as the world becomes more interdependent and connected. If I were a British diplomat walking into an important trade deal and I knew that my foreign counterpart’s favourite band was British (maybe I sneaked a look at his iPod) then I know I would feel confident of striking a great deal before the conversation even begins. Run to the hills? More like Follow Me…

Photo by Doctor Grondo licensed under Creative Commons

When Did You Last Switch Off Your Smartphone?

How often each day are you truly disconnected from the internet? If you have a smartphone then it’s probably not very often at all.

If you take a flight then it’s likely you might have to endure several hours without social network updates – though many airlines are now offering wifi access on board leading to many inane Facebook updates saying little more than “I’m on the plane…”

London commuters know that the Tube is a refuge from phone calls and Internet access, but the recent addition of wifi at station platforms means that it is possible to quickly grab a few updates from Twitter each time the train stops.

My wife told me off at a restaurant last night because I was uploading a photo of the place to Instagram. She was checking the menu and I was uploading a photo of the menu. She had a point and I laid down my phone for the rest of the meal.

I was thinking while I was out running this morning that my time pounding the streets is probably the only time I never carry my phone. But then have you tried running with an iPhone in your pocket?

I use all the major social networks and I update them regularly, but I can switch off quite easily – I still read “real” books rather than just Twitter updates. My Twitter use at the weekend is mostly just photographs or the odd news story shared for friends. I have a good reason to share what I’m up to because I live a long way from my family – it’s great being able to show them what I am up to and what Brazil looks like.

But I’ve seen what borders on addiction in some friends. Addiction to the point that they can’t stop sharing all those ‘amusing’ images on Facebook and endlessly checking to see if anyone has commented or responded – even just with a ‘like’. And addiction to the point that they are endlessly appealing for interaction – leaving angst-filled notes online about their lack of purpose or disappointment with life in general.

What addiction has this displaced? Perhaps it was the endless consumption of daytime TV? Why would anyone sit passively all day consuming trash TV when they can do they same online and be rewarded by people giving them a thumbs up?

Technology is converging and creating a perfect storm that will stunt attention spans and rob us of lazy free time to think. When was the last time you actually did nothing at all and just sat thinking about a place you want to visit, a film you could direct better than Tarantino, or a story you could write that would sell more than the Fifty Shades trilogy?

With every free moment now spread evenly between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, how will creativity work in future? I recently heard a Stanford professor on the BBC talking about pedagogical changes in university education – how lectures are no longer seen as important when they can all be grabbed from the website as a video or podcast. And even those students attending lectures do so with an iPad constantly connected to Facebook.

The use of location-aware smartphones combined with venue services such as Facebook Places or Foursquare creates new possibilities for advertising that make recent science fiction movies look archaic. Right now a brand, such as Marks & Spencer, knows if I like their brand or not, and they know if I’m inside or near to a store. The only reason our phones are not being bombarded with location-aware advertising is because the social networks know how questions over privacy are the one thing that could derail their endless dominance over our spare time.

But I love social networks. I couldn’t stay in touch with my friends and family all over the world as easily as I do without them – my dad is always on Facebook these days and I could never have imagined that a few years ago. My company is focused on content used for blogs and social networks. I think this ability for every person to shape their Internet use is about to blossom into a new type of experience, making our present use of social networks soon look as primitive as a 1994 web browser.

But when I go out running, I run without my phone and I think about the stories I want to write, the musicians and artists I want to work with, and how proud I am that I’ve got friends doing stuff like writing movies and selling out Bafta for a premiere or planning their new album launch.

If all we ever did were update Facebook with motivational quotes, none of this wonderful creativity would ever have a life. Hopefully the teens now getting addicted to a life lived online figure out a way through the temptation. When I was a kid, the perceived danger was that we would fritter our lives away playing video games, yet that turned into an entertainment industry bigger than cinema – the kids addicted to games as teens back then are now running giant entertainment corporations.

I’m hoping the same happens again. It might appear to be quite a stretch to imagine an entertainment industry based on LOLCats, but then who could have predicted that some hacking around in a Harvard dorm would now be changing every major industry worth mentioning – the world over?

Photo by Greg McMullin licensed under Creative Commons

Raspberry Pi comes to Brazil

Earlier this month Pete Lomas, the man who designed the Raspberry Pi computer, was in São Paulo giving a keynote lecture at Campus Party about the story behind the creation of the Raspberry Pi.

Pete was speaking at Campus Party in Brazil as part of the UK Brasil Season, a series of events following on from the London 2012 Olympic Games.

While Pete was at Campus Party, IT Decisions arranged for Luciana Gimenes, a high-school student at ETEC Lauro Gomes, São Bernardo do Campo, to meet and interview him. Luciana has been using the Raspberry Pi at her school so she was keen to meet and question the designer of this British technology.

Click the video link above this post to watch the interview.

IT Decisions at Campus Party 2013

I was delighted to speak at the sixth Campus Party in São Paulo today. My talk this afternoon focused on how companies can use social media with a focus on describing step-by-step the planning process for using these tools.

My talk was a part of the UKBrasil Season of events, a six month programme of events building a legacy from the London 2012 Olympic games. I will also be hosting a UKBrasil event next week in São Paulo – please come and join us if you can!

How Twitter Saved Bletchley Park

Dr Sue Black is an internationally-known computer scientist. She is is a Senior Research Associate in the Software Systems Engineering group in the the Department of Computer Science at University College London and a Senior Consultant with Cornerstone Global Associates.

Dr Black visited Brazil recently and toured the country lecturing on Bletchley Park and Alan Turing – 2012 being the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Turing. The lecture series was organised as a part of the UKBrasil season, a series of events focused on enhancing the relationship between the UK and Brazil.

I caught up with Dr Black at her lecture in São Paulo and asked her about her visit to South America and the significance of the Turing anniversary.

MH: You visited several locations in Brazil – was there anything in particular that you noticed as memorable or unusual, this being your first time in the country?

SB: I LOVED Brazil! The most memorable things were:

• The trees and plants were incredible, I didn’t recognise any of them. I walked around outside with my mouth open amazed at how beautiful they were :)) I particularly loved the Ipe trees and the bougainvillea. Gorgeous.
• The fresh fruit. Wow, I’ve never eaten fresh papaya or pineapple before, it was a fabulous experience, so fresh and tasty.
• The people were very friendly, relaxed and happy compared to me and I think most people around me in the UK.
• Sao Paulo seemed to be buzzing with activity around the tech scene, major companies moving in and lots going on.
• Most of my impression was extremely positive, on the negative side though, seeing armed guards escorting trucks on the main roads and the poverty of the favelas was worrying.

MH: Your talk in São Paulo was all about how social media saved Bletchley Park and the importance of remembering people like Alan Turing. The UK was clearly a major power in computing once with arguably the first computers and programmers. Is that innovative spirit still there?

SB: Yes! I think the UK has produced some great innovators like Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers and Steve Shirley to name a few and the innovative spirit is definitely still here. The most exciting innovation that I’ve seen lately is the Raspberry Pi computer, a credit card size computer that costs only £25. Incredible, and because of the price, accessible to most people.

MH: Do you think some form of computer science should be taught to very young children in the same way as basic maths and English? Do we need computer literacy in a developed society?

SB: Absolutely. Technology is the language of the future, if we don’t understand it we will be left behind. I think that children should be taught computer science in an age appropriate way from the time they start school. That doesn’t mean that we should be necessarily teaching kids coding at five, but why not teach them programming concepts and get them familiar with computer hardware and interface design?

MH: A decade ago tech globalisation was all about cheap offshore programming, but tech globalisation has become far more complex with countries such as the UK and Brazil offering far more to foreign partners than just low cost IT labour. What do you think makes the UK tech industry stand out compared to other countries you have been to or researched?

SB: We have a great history of creativity and innovation in the UK. I think we stand out because we use our creativity to innovate in many spaces, technology being one of them. We also lead in Ecommerce…so I guess we are still a ‘nation of shopkeepers!’

MH: What are you up to once you return to the UK?

SB: I’m busy writing a book about the various campaigns to save Bletchley Park, including the one that I started which really took off in 2009 after we started using social media, Twitter in particular. I’m also working hard setting up a non-profit organisation The Foundation which aims to get the general public a bit more tech savvy and hands on with technology. I believe that understanding of and familiarity with technology is critical for any country wanting to have a vibrant economy in the future. I’m very excited about lots of things that I saw and heard recently in Brazil and the USA. I’ve had an idea for a business that I’ve started talking to people about in the women/tech space. I’m very excited about it, i think it could be gamechanging and very successful, watch this space for more details!

Photo by Documentally licensed under Creative Commons

Who Moved My Job?

If you have dug around in my past then you will be aware of a book I wrote back in 2008 called Who Moved My Job? Perhaps you even bought a copy or borrowed it from a friend — if you did then thank you.

The book was short and to the point. It was a story of three English sheepdogs who found their place on the farm usurped by foreign breeds of dog who could not only do their job better, they didn’t cost the farmer as much to keep.

The book was a story about offshore outsourcing and within the confines of allegory it explored how the world of work was changing fast in the past decade thanks to globalisation allowing companies to send work halfway across the world.

The book was originally published just before the financial crash of 2008 and so it doesn’t reflect the way the world has changed in the past four years. I am planning a new 2012 post-crash edition of the book that will retain the original story, but enhance it with an essay on what has changed since 2008.

And I need your help.

One of the enormous changes in the past four years has been the growth in the use of social media. From 100m Facebook users in 2008 to almost a billion now, there has never been a better time for someone in my position to tell my audience that I’m about to update an old book and to see what the online community thinks before I commit my own thoughts to the word processor.

I can summarize the areas I am thinking of, but I am sure you will have other ideas that drill down further or just open up entirely new avenues:

• Recession; the recessions in Europe, and the USA in particular, initially halted many offshore outsourcing programmes — due to the up-front investment needed — but have now made it a more attractive proposition to invest at home.

• Cost; the cost of doing business in a place like India has soared. As the differential between a low-cost region of your home nation and places where the costs are rising fast reduces there is much less of a cost advantage now.

• Risk; the risk of project failure is usually lower if the actors are closer so a manager does not need to be endlessly flying around the world. Attitudes to this risk have been revised extensively since 2008.

• Public perception; outsourcing (particularly offshore) never had a great public image, but in the past four years it has only got worse to the point that companies offshoring in the middle of a recession are seen as positively unpatriotic.

• Unemployment; particularly youth unemployment is jarring. Countries such as Spain are witnessing half of all under 24s out of work. In this kind of environment, how can any local firm justify sending work offshore?

• Automation; potentially a bigger issue than the offshoring itself. More and more tasks are being automated and this will create enormous unemployment anyway.

• Scope expansion; we used to talk about computer programmers in India, now pretty much any intellectual taks that can be delivered online can be done offshore, from marketing to accounting.

• Global market; as alluded to in the last bullet, the market for jobs has atomized down to the skills you have as an individual. If you can offer something on a service like oDesk then you can make a living from anywhere. This potentially changes entire industries, graphic design being one obvious example.

This summarizes the changes I am exploring for the new version of the book. It will include the original story, but will be expanded with an essay that explores the themes listed here in this article.

I’d like your views here as comments on this article or you can reach me by email. Any great points that end up illustrating the new version of the book will certainly be credited so what do you think has changed since 2008?

Photo by Sunil Keezhangattu licensed under Creative Commons

Embracing the Shifting Challenges of Retail

The world of retail is changing fast as we have seen this month with the opening of a new flagship Marks & Spencer store in Ellesmere Port. The new store features online hubs, sales assistants with iPads, and free wifi throughout. These innovations allow the staff to offer better information to customers, customers can check price comparison sites using their phones as they shop, and they can also place orders in-store for delivery direct to the home.

It is a complete blend of the High Street store and online ecommerce, but this blended offer is not how we expected retail to turn out — until recently. Go back just over a decade and ecommerce sites like Amazon were going to kill off their High Street competitors completely.

So what happened?

British law firm Thomas Eggar has just released a new research report titled ‘Multichannel and the nimble retailer’ that aims to explore many of these questions, by talking to the people who make all these decisions inside the retailers — I had a look at the report on the day of publication.

Simon Russell, Director of Retail Operations Development at John Lewis, explains the changing view of the consumer: “Our expectation is very clear that customers now, and in future, will use multiple channels at every part of the customer journey. People used to talk about researching in one channel e.g. online and then buying in another e.g. a shop. But now people will use mobile, shops, and the net together at each part of the journey, i.e. researching.”

This change is great news for the customer. More consumers have smart phones today so research and price comparison is not limited to the home – customers can be in one store comparing the price another is offering, but as customer use of technology has taken a quantum leap since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, some retailers are struggling to keep up.

But the customer doesn’t usually care how the technology works, they just want to be treated well in-store and on the retailer’s website. Bob Cell, CEO of MyBuys, believes that there are basics that should not be forgotten: “A consumer doesn’t want to be treated well and then forgotten. Consumers want personalisation and they now expect it. For example, when you give a company your credit card, you usually want the company to remember that information so the next purchase is easier.”

Not unusually, many stores present only edited highlights of everything the company offers – often with the in-store items being less price sensitive. Items that would only ever be compared on price, rather than service, are all available, but only on the website.

But how can the sales team benefit from sending customers to the website? If a customer values the help and advice of the in-store staff, how does that staff member get a bonus when the customer leaves the store and just places an order online? It’s a tricky problem and nobody seems to have the answer — yet.

Matt Stead, Multichannel Director at Pets at Home, has a simple solution that ensures his in-store team do earn bonuses for online sales. He applies the sales bonus for each online purchase to the nearest physical store, based on postcode, where Pets at Home colleagues share the bounty.

“Every single colleague has an opportunity for sales by postcode so that breaks down all the traditional barriers for promoting sales on the web. Our colleagues in-store are interested in helping people shop online because they can also earn from it, i.e. they are incentivised at store level, not on a personal basis.

And of course, the web is a useful tool. When we launched click and collect, people in the business could see web users spending more than twice as much as an in-store customer,” Stead explains.

But one of the greatest changes in the retail environment today has emerged in literally the past couple of years — the use of social media as a customer service and experience channel.

Jamie McRonald, Online and Web Manager at Pret a Manger, believes that the changes needed are greater than just an improvement in marketing, this intimate communication channel with customers is now influencing high-level decisions.

“Customers now have as big an influence on business decisions as the executives. For many senior executives in business today it can be hard to accept that the customers are as important in setting strategy as they are. The nature in which customers give feedback today is so open and transparent, it cannot be ignored,” he said.

In summary, multichannel retail is a beast with many heads. Retailers are finding social media a useful way to build communities of fans and to encourage genuine engagement with their customers. Customers are also becoming familiar with price comparison and services such as click and collect and major retailers are offering a blended multichannel offer that helps to boost their brand value – especially where the products are easily compared and ordered online.

Retailers need to offer more than price alone to thrive in an environment where every consumer has all the information, recommendations, and reviews they can handle.

Photo by Mr T in DC licensed under Creative Commons

How Will You Be Watching the Rio Olympic Games?

How did you watch the London Olympic and Paralympic games? Did you follow the coverage on TV offered by the BBC and Channel 4 or were you watching on a phone or iPad, catching video clips offered up from various social networks?

London 2012 was the first Olympic games where social media and mobile devices played a big part in the experience. Don’t forget that the iPhone was only launched in 2007, just a year before Beijing 2008, and the growth in people using tools such as Facebook and Twitter has been enormous in the last four years. In 2008 Facebook had 100m users – now they are nudging close to their first billion.

The traditional broadcasters acknowledged this to a degree. Channel 4 is covering the Paralympic games in the UK and all their presenters seem to be broadcasting as much information on Twitter as they are presenting on TV. The BBC were talking about hashtags and athletes worth following – stimulating a backchannel of live discussion online, where those on the social networks were also following the TV broadcast. And the BBC Olympics app was widely praised as an innovative way for a traditional broadcaster to be feeding sports news to fans.

But out of the almost 200 international broadcasters who covered the Olympic games, just one was broadcasting content to the Internet alone. Terra from Brazil was at the games, with a studio in the Olympic park allowing them to interview athletes from across the Latin America region in Portuguese and Spanish. No single broadcaster can have enough cameras to cover all of the games so live coverage is pooled and distributed by the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), allowing broadcasters access to everything that is happening live. Terra were taking their OBS feeds and pumping them straight out to their website – allowing the viewer to be the editor because everything was available all the time.

This was the first time a digital-only broadcaster had undertaken such a major broadcasting challenge. Terra did cover the games in Beijing, but their application to broadcast only on the Internet was considered a bit strange back in 2004 and they were only accredited a few weeks before the games, not leaving enough time to mount a serious broadcast operation.

Let’s spin forward four more years and consider how we will be consuming the action from Rio 2016. It won’t be unusual to be consuming mobile video content from the Internet by then and it’s unlikely that Terra will be the only Internet-only broadcaster in 2016.

There will be a lot more smart phones in the world by 2016 – even in Brazil sales of smart phones with Internet connectivity are doubling each year. More people are going to want more information pumped direct to their handset rather than waiting for the evening roundup on TV.

I believe it is likely that a majority of fans will be consuming the Rio Olympic coverage on their phones. If you remember how the BBC Olympic app worked, allowing sports fans to select news about their team only or even a particular athlete – now overlay this with the ability to get a live feed from all sports all the time and that is probably what normal will look like in 2016.

Of course some of the more traditional broadcast methods will survive. The BBC picked some great presenters for London 2012 and created a friendly collegiate atmosphere – tuning in to the late-night summary of the day with Gabby Logan was part of my whole 2012 experience – but by 2016 people will expect to be able to edit the show themselves.

Dinosaurs of the industry like NBC showed just how badly wrong broadcasters can get the coverage of major international events – even with decades of experience. When they chose to record the opening ceremony and play it back later, editing out all the bits that might not be understood in the USA, they just took another step on the road to irrelevance.

It will be innovators like Terra – and their future rivals in digital-only broadcast – who succeed at Rio 2016. And being on their home turf in Brazil I know whose app I’ll have on my phone four years from now.

Photo by Ed Yourdon licensed under Creative Commons

Is the Customer Always Right?

The customer is always right. So says the old expression relied on for years to indicate that when it comes to customer service, customer demands should always be met, no matter how unreasonable.

But things don’t always go to plan and when customers feel let down they have always wanted to express their disappointment. This has now become easier with the advent of social media.

Previously an upset customer would tell their friends and family about poor service; now they can write a blog and publicize the blog on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Their friends can republish the complaint and in minutes thousands can see the complaint — possibly even more if a friend with a large online following also passes on the message.

You have probably tried this yourself. I know I have commented on service from hotels, airlines, and restaurants and almost always had a response. Times are changing.

But there is an even more important aspect to good service than avoiding complaints. Recent research by Accenture found that 55 percent of consumers who receive poor service from their insurance company are more inclined to commit insurance fraud against that company — as if the poor service means they deserve it.

The Huffington Post even collected together ten recent customer service disasters where customers retaliated in various ways — all spurred on by poor service.

What is clear from these examples and from scanning the social web is that customers are becoming more vocal than ever. They have a platform to complain and with tools like Tripadvisor now informing many buying decisions, that voice is more powerful than ever.

Photo by Juan González licensed under Creative Commons