FIR #198: Instagroan

FIR #198: Instagroan

The August 2020 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report features Neville and Shel discussing…

Twitter’s new conversation settings (which are not an assault on free speech)
Instagram’s terrible attempt to duplicate TikTok
What the coronavirus pandemic will do to our homes and offices
How the pandemic is reshaping our approach to social media
Google’s pandemic-related additions to travel searches
Amazon Web Services lets brands integrate livestreams into websites and apps
Dan York’s Tech Report covers the release of WordPress 5.5, the TikTok war, the war against app stores, merging messengers, and the demise of Flash

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Coffee Break on Zoom each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Spread the word to your communications community.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

Links from This Month’s Episode

Links from Dan York’s Report

Raw Episode Transcript (from Descript)

Communicators and Communicurious welcome. You’ve tuned into the August episode of, for immediate release, the podcast for communicators, where this month Neville Hobson. And I talk about a useful new Twitter feature and what people are saying about Instagram reels, the tick talk alternative. We take a deep dive into the changes to work that may or may not result from the Corona virus.

The way we use social media is also changing because of the pandemic. Google has added some pandemic related features that are also quite useful and live streaming. My newest interest is getting a boost from Amazon web services. And Dan York brings us his tech report talking about WordPress 5.5, the war against app stores, merging messengers and the end of flash, along with his take on the tic talk war.

All that and more is coming your way right now on for immediate release, another fine podcast for the fir podcast network. This is for immediate release the podcast for communicators.

Welcome everybody to episode number 190. Eight of four immediate release, the August episode of the Hobson and Holtz report for Monday, August 17th, 2020. This is Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

And this is Neville Hobson in Bracknell in England. And it’s good to be back with you Neville. It’s been all of, uh, I think three days, uh, or two since I saw you on the zoom chat.

It’s true and, uh, four weeks or so since the last time. And in that time we’ve gone through heat waves and all sorts of unpleasant temperatures, which are not really a bad as you get in the U S I know, but it’s been pretty miserable here. I have to say, it’s going to be 105 Fahrenheit here in Concord today, and that is a three degree drop from what it was yesterday.

O M G is one way to respond to that shell. Yeah. In fact, PG and E has notified everybody that they are in a stage two alert, which means people are using too much electricity. And if it goes to stage three, we get rolling blackouts, which I’m so looking forward to. Fun. In any case, we have a terrific show for you today.

We are talking mostly about communication related issues associated with the pandemic, uh, lots to cover, uh, but Neville, before we do that, uh, you were on a podcast that isn’t one of ours recently. That’s true yesterday. That’s a Friday, the 14th of August. When I recorded a conversation with Katie Howell, who’s the CEO of, uh, immediate future, uh, an agency here in the UK.

That’s one of the originals in those very early days of social media. You know, that, that time it was just blogs. We talked about and I met Katie back in 2005 and we’ve been connected ever since. So she invited me to. Chat with her on this particular podcast. It’s coming up, I think in a week or so, it’ll be published.

It’s video and audio. And we talked a wide range of topics of social media brands, trust where it’s all going. We touched on some very interesting topics. I know some of these are close to your heart shell employees as advocates, AR VR, mr. Those lovely three twin acronyms. A tick, tock and reels. So we touched on all of that.

So this is coming up soon. Um, the, uh, media future publishes a series of podcasts, which are worth a listen to a media, future.co.uk/podcasts. I’ll definitely give it a listen. She’s not the only Katie in the UK podcasting a couple of months ago. I was on Katie McCauley’s internal communications podcast.

Okay, cool. Okay. Katie’s are big in the UK. Yeah, I guess it is well before or we jump into our content as usual. I want to thank our sponsor polite mail and they were in the news this past week for the third straight year, they made the inc 5,000 list. Uh, they had three year revenue growth of 154%.

Remember the inc list. Isn’t the biggest companies. That’s a fortune, uh, inc is the fastest growing. And their growth hasn’t been hurt by the pandemic. Uh, I want to read a quote from their founder and managing director, Michael , who said, as the workplace continues to evolve, internal email communications have taken a more vital role than ever before.

Over the last five months in particular, we’ve witnessed internal communications become a lifeline between employers and employees as such large organizations are increasingly turning to polite mails, broadcast measurement tools. To make more informed decisions about the emails they’re sending to employees and overall, uh, this year’s inc 5,000 represented median growth of 165% total revenue of 290.7 billion and more than 582,000 jobs added.

Uh, he also wrote a good piece for Forbes talking about the importance of using narratives when telling data stories, which is something I really believe in. Uh, but what you should do dear listener is visit www polite mail.com, where you can learn more about this enterprise and email intelligence platform for outlook and office three 65, which helps communicators and HR teams measure and improve employee engagement.

And we thank polite mail for their ongoing support of, for immediate release. So that takes us into quite nicely, actually into our first topic, which is I found this quite interesting shell, the news from Twitter earlier this week, uh, that they have. Tweaked what you can do, uh, with your tweets, uh, which looks interesting to me.

Um, now they’re going to let you limit replies who can reply. You can actually connect, troll that flow of a conversation on Twitter. If you want to a Twitter, it says that this is designed to increase the amount of quote, meaningful conversations on quote that take place on Twitter. And to help people weed out abuse and spam in their replies.

There’s rolling out this feature, where you as a user can limit who replies to it has been in beta testing for awhile, and it’s narrowing out to a users of the mobile app on iOS and Android systems, as well as twitter.com on the web. So tweet deck isn’t yet supported. I would note I use tweet deck, so it’ll be handy.

Uh, when it comes to that platform, uh, how does it work? Well, what you notice when you, uh, when you click or tap the little icon to open a new window, to write a text message, you get a small globe icon, which will appear at the bottom of your tweet. And if you do nothing, everyone will still be able to apply.

Indeed. It says everyone can reply. This is the default, or you can tap it. And limit replies just to those who follow you or those who you tag in the tweet itself. So you can have all your followers replying to it if they want to, or just the one or two or three or however many people you mentioned in the tweet itself.

So an interesting aspect of this, which is like a work around that, that kind of is there. I found this interesting if you pick, uh, the third one, uh, so just those who tag in the tweet itself and don’t tag anyone. You can then broadcast the tweet with no one being able to reply to it. So that’s kind of literally like a broadcast message only, uh, which could be of use to some people.

And then we will probably chat about that show. Cause I know you’ve got some thoughts on the value of something like that. So, uh, I found it interesting in the explanations. Twitter’s posted about why they’re doing all of this as well. So setting parameters around those who can reply can help the original poster, cattail, abusive, or trolling replies, or to limit replies to keep the conversation on track.

A beta test feedback has been positive. Twitter said those using the feature. So they felt more comfortable and protected from spam and abuse. People who are limited from replying. So if you can’t, for instance, you can still retweet with a comment and still inject whatever you want to say into that conversation.

But that requires a bit of work and probably most people aren’t going to do that unless they really want to. Some people are criticizing this as you’d expect saying that it implies a curtailing of free speech and free expression where you’re not permitting anyone to respond to these kinds of things.

So you’re bound to get that kind of comment to it, uh, that it might give a stronger voice to those who are actually using Twitter to disseminate abusive information of the cells. By limiting how people can respond. Uh, there are a couple of counter arguments to that though. One is that people can still see and retweet what someone says.

As I mentioned earlier, one way of responding or retreat with a comment can still be pretty powerful. Sometimes such tweets can go viral and be seen even more than the original tweets themselves. So it’s an interesting move. I think it’s really good. I’ve not yet used it. Uh, I’m conscious now, if I’m tweeting on the platform or the mobile app, I see that little globe with everyone can tweet as a default.

I’m kind of anxious to try just not done it yet. I’ve not found anything to do it. I’m going to find something over the next couple of days, just to see, get a sense of how it works. So I think there’s a good move. Uh it’s it’s a. Net positive for the platform. Um, and it’s a good step forward in, in, uh, improving, uh, how you use Twitter overall.

I think what, what’s your take on that show over a little? Um, my first reaction was not about a curtailing of free speech. I think that’s an absurd argument. You can still say whatever you want on Twitter. Uh, well, not whatever you want. Right. But some people are out there big time saying, Oh, this is a it’s salt on freedom of expression.

It’s not because you can still tweet. Uh, there’s lots of ways you can tweet about what somebody else is tweeting. The fact that you can’t comment on a tweet itself is not a curtailing of free speech. I did, you know, my first knee jerk reaction was that it’s not very social for a social media. Platform, but the more thought I gave it, the more use cases I came up with for it.

And the blog post from Twitter also helped me. Conceive of, of, of these potential uses. One of them is essentially a panel discussion. If you want to have a panel discussion, uh, then you can just include the names of the, yeah. The tweet handles the Twitter handles of the three people on the panel with you.

And then they’re the only ones who can reply. And now you can have a conversation that you have. Promoted that you’re going to be having at a certain time for 30 or 60 minutes on a, on a dedicated topic. You want people to be able to comment on that, do what we do on the circle of fellows broadcast, which is give people a hashtag and let them use their own Twitter accounts with that hashtag and monitor it.

So you can go back to your panel and say, Hey, so-and-so just asked this question. What do you think? And the panel can go ahead and respond. I think that’s. A really effective use of this feature. I used it for the first time this morning, not for a panel discussion. I just wanted to limit this to people who follow me.

It was political in nature. It was related to the upcoming presidential election. And I just didn’t want to hear from the trolls. Uh, so, uh, I’ve already seen one person, uh, retweet it. Uh, so yeah, I think my one. A bit of skepticism is that most people probably won’t avail themselves. I love it because it’s an extra step and people are pretty lazy on social media.

They just type and click. Uh, and even if they’re aware this feature exists, they’re not going to think of it. Just like. On Facebook, where you can choose who sees your post, if I’ve set it to public for something, I don’t think to set it back to not public or just friends when I send my next one. And then I go, Ooh, I didn’t want everyone to see that, but it’s just post and click.

So I’m not sure that most people will take advantage of it, but for those who do, I think it’s going to be a useful feature. Yeah. I agree with you. By the way you mentioned it’s not available on tweet deck. It’s also not available on Hootsuite, which is what I use at work. Uh, so I doubt that it’s available on any of the other social media management tools out there.

Um, that could be a limited. Yep. Uh, it could be that it’s just new enough that they haven’t incorporated it yet. Uh, but it could be that they’re not making it available through their API. So. Well, one of the big social media stories in the U S for the last several weeks is president Trump’s announcement that the video sharing app tick-tock has 90 days to sell off its American assets.

Along with any data that is collected in the U S he’s claiming the tick talks parent company that Chinese from bite dance is a threat to national security. Uh, I’ve seen. Reports of a lot of things that tick talk is doing with data that is dodgy, uh, that is a threat to individual products to see that we also face from services like Facebook, which is right here in the U S uh, I think the national security, uh, allegation is, uh, A bit of a stretch.

Uh, but the official order was made just Friday evening. Uh, and this has led some advertisers to hold off on advertising and tick tock, which is going to affect their revenues. Although I did read that the New York Yankees, the baseball team went ahead and launched an ad campaign on tech talk, but you know, baseball won’t be playing in 90 days.

So I think they’re relatively safe. More interesting though, is that it has. People who are posting to tech talk, particularly the, the growing cohort of TechTalk influencers. They’re rushing to alternatives and they’ve got lots of alternatives to turn to the question is, are they any good? And the alternative that made the biggest splash was Instagram.

Uh, they introduced reels as a tech talk alternative, according to a survey 75% of tick tock creators said they’re not moving their content to reels because the algorithm isn’t as good. And there’s no for you page. And if you’ve looked at the, for you page on TechTalk, this is what drives people to share stuff.

Uh it’s where tectonic content. Is launched on to their viral paths. Uh, so this is not available, uh, on reels. There’s nothing like it. And so these influencers are staying put for now, but the worst news about reels came from the New York times. Uh, they ran a story with the headline. We tested Instagram reels, the tick-tock clone, what a dud.

Um, one problem is that tech talk is a standalone app. Reels is a feature inside Instagram. It’s published to the explore tab lab. Uh, one of the coauthors of this piece, Brian Chen said the exploration have is a mishmash of photos, sponsored posts and long form videos. A reels also lacks ticket talks, editing features like song recommendations, automatic clip trimming, which uses AI to speed up video creation.

Uh, the New York times. Internet culture writer. Taylor Lauren said, reels is the worst feature she’s ever used. I want to read just a couple of the statements she made in this article. She said, and, um, you know, pulling no punches here. It’s horrible. Not only does reels fail in every way as a tick tock clone, but it’s confusing, frustrating, and impossible to navigate.

It’s like Instagram took all the current functionality on stories, a tool to publish montages of photos and videos with editors. Filters text and music clips and jam them into a second new complicated interface for no reason. To me, it’s really unclear whom this feature is for tic talk is better in a million ways.

The main one being the tectonics, he moves all of the friction that normally comes with trying to make a good video. On tick, tick, tick talk. You can just a ton of videos like hit select on 17 different videos of all different links. Dump them all into the app and hit a button. Tick tock will automatically select highlights from your videos and edit them in a way to match the beat of whatever sound you choose.

That makes it easy. That makes it Oh, easy to create a really engaging, smooth video in under 10 seconds from a ton of footage. And this isn’t just one opinion from the New York times, Sarah fryer on Bloomberg said Instagram has officially become too complicated, even more complicated than Facebook when it comes to deciding where and how to post.

All right. Now, if you search for tick tock alternatives, you’re going to find a lot of people who are publishing lists. One blogger ranked four of them putting byte on top byte is the new video sharing service from the one of the co-creators of vine. Uh, followed by Triller and Dubsmash reels is at the very bottom.

Here’s my prediction. If tick tock doesn’t divest in time and Trump does ban it, none of these alternatives will become a full blown replacement and the format will recede from its current prominence. And that’ll be a shame. Uh, and by the way, we’re not done talking about tick tock, Dan York folks. This is on Tech-Talk, uh, in his.

Report, which is coming up in just a little bit. Yeah, it is interesting. Shall. I mean, I, I’ve not tried real to myself. Um, I, I use tick tock mostly to listen. I have published some stuff, but I don’t spend enough time in the platform. Uh, and indeed, one of the issues I find with tech talk is so addictive. I mean, I can spend Sunday I’m 20 minutes just watching.

It’s not very healthy. So. Anyway. So, uh, um, I did read a briefly passed across on my RSS, feeds a piece in Digiday the other day. Great headline. There’s no revenue in it. Why publishers aren’t prioritizing Instagram reels. That’s an interesting take. So if that’s picture added to everything else you just said, then this does not bode well for the future of reels at all.

So, uh it’s I thought the New York times piece was. No punches pulled at all very, very clear review. Didn’t come across as snarky or anything. This was factual and yeah, I agree with them not having tried it, but it’s a dud by the way, I have tried it. Uh, and once you get there and start scrolling, they look a little like.

Tick tock videos. Uh, some people clearly are, are either crossposting or opting to go for reels in preparation for the band. And, uh, but yeah, essentially it’s still the vertical swiping instead of the horizontal swiping. Uh, but. You know, on that for you tab on talk. What I find is stuff that I want to look at, and that’s based on that algorithm.

It’s the fact that they look at what you stop and look at and give you more stuff like that. I tend to stop and look at a lot of the cooking. Tech talk videos, these these 15, the second or however long, they are a quick lessons on how to make something. And I’ve done several of those. Uh, so suddenly I’m seeing more of those and this is great.

They have managed to fill that up with stuff that I want to look at. And like you, I can spend 20, 30 minutes going through that. Uh, and look up at the clock and go, Oh my God, have I really been spending this much time? I’m on Tech-Talk I don’t get that unreal. All, it’s just this hodgepodge of whatever people have posted.

Uh, and I spend about two or three minutes there and I go and. Shut it off. Yeah. So, well, it’s interesting. I mean, the, the digital piece mentioned it makes reference in date to the fact that many people who use tech talk are repurposing content and sticking it on rails. And I read that as kind of like.

Testing it out trying it out, but there’s no whole scale shift or anything we’re seeing that is exciting from a, from big brands. Certainly. Uh, so it’s interesting. And if things do pan out, such as that picture, you painted with Trump, et cetera, then yeah. It, it, it, it. It will upset, uh, an embryonic, uh, new ecosystem in process.

It seems to me led by tech talk in the United States, certainly. And that will undoubtedly have repercussions elsewhere, too. Sure. And, you know, interestingly tick tock has also moved well beyond what it started as which was people, lip sinking and dancing and, uh, things like that. Uh, there’s speculation that one of the reasons that Trump is, uh, on its case, Is that, uh, young people used tic talk to spread the word that they should snatch up tickets for Trump’s rally in, uh, Tulsa a few weeks back, which is why it was half empty.

Uh, and it’s actually his fury over that that is leading to his focus on a ban. Uh, claiming that there are national security issues, but we’ll talk more about that later. The idea that these, these social media platforms are being used for something a little new and different these days. Good. So this takes us to a topic which might occupy a lot of our attention this episode.

It’s, it’s, it’s a fascinating one. Um, I’m going to kick it off with a kind of, a little bit of scene setting here it’s to do with, uh, the changes that are happening as a result of, uh, of, of the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19 the, the, the actual disease. Um, uh, and it was, uh, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since I saw it the other day.

Uh, on the BBC website and I love the way they told the story, the way they presented it in a pretty interactive way on the website. So, uh, it’s a scenario that, that paint a picture of that painting, which I think is extremely plausible. This scenario. It’s a bit like if you cast your mind back two or three episodes shell, when we talked about, um, uh, the kind of scenario of a year ahead from.

Now, uh, whether the writer wrote this picture of going to work, uh, post pandemic a year on how things were different. And that had a lot of credibility too, in the picture. It was painting this one too, I think does that job. So let me kick this off with a little bit from the piece that BBC wrote. So meet Layla it’s 2025 and she works from home four days a week.

It’s been that way. It’s a 20, 20 lockdown. It’s 6:30 AM. And she’s on her way to work. Laila arrives at her office building at 7:00 AM. Start times at the company where she works a staggered to minimize the number of people arriving at the same time. Her office days are mainly for meetings gone are the days when she’d head into the office to work at a screen.

She can do that at home. Lame employer used to share a much larger office building with several other companies. Now they’re in smaller, newly refurbished premises, all to themselves on the ground floor. Layla pauses in front of a thermal body scan to check a temperature is normal. Yes. 36.5 degrees Celsius.

She passes a camera used for facial recognition, identifies her as a staff member and the security barrier opens at no point. Does she touch anything? Laila is on a contactless pathway. The lift to her office on the fourth floor is voice activated. Touchless technology has replaced grubby buttons. The maximum occupancy is two on the fourth floor.

She walks down a corridor and through the doors, both are wider than before made that way to keep staff further apart and reduce the chances of a virus being transmitted at the door. Lailey uses a hand sanitizer she’s so used to it now that she doesn’t even think about it. She sits down at the desk.

Most of the furniture as well as wall panels and facades is made from anti-microbial material. It’s easier to clean and harder for bacteria to stick to Laila Mexico coffee in the kitchen area where the worktops are also anti-microbial the handles on the drawers and cupboards are made of copper. It’s a costly, but naturally micro propellant material.

The air conditioning system uses UV light to kill pathogens. It also reduces the humidity. To help prevent germs, multiplying, responding to a stream of data from census fixed around the building and wearable sensors used by staff labor’s office used to be completely open plan. Now she’s partitioned off to her left.

There was a clear plastic screen so that you can at least see her colleagues. The screens are removable bolted into fixtures in the floor. They go up if there’s a threat of an outbreak, but come out. If the threats of sights in front of Linda’s desk, the separation has done with plants. The staff got fed up with plastic everywhere.

A couple of years ago, they said it made the office feel like a hospital. Layla prefers the plants. The story goes on into a lot of detail on the routine of her day, but that sets a scene that I would argue is likely to be very common indeed in big urban areas. And of course this picture is set in London, really.

Uh, and, uh, it’s to me it reads, uh, it feels extremely, yeah, plausible. Now of course, there are lots of questions related to this, not the least of which being that this will have a huge, huge effect in impact even, uh, on, on how people, um, travel, how they work, uh, what they do in the offices that are built for hundreds of people.

If not thousands that now have, you know, Double figures, max, probably a people. So what will it do to, um, two offices and other buildings? What will it do if you’re working at home all the time to the suburbs and the rural areas where people are now congregating, what about the future of. Uh, cities and urban environments, uh, travel, uh, the whole big picture.

We touched on pieces that I see increasingly subject to this kind of analytical treatment. So that sets a scene, I think is very, very likely this will. Be a common feature in many places, not necessarily a uniform and universal, uh, but it’s, uh, it, I find it exciting more than alarming shell. I don’t know your view on it, but to me, this is very plausible.

Oh, I am all over the place on this. I do want to share one article. I read in business insider about David Clark, he’s Pricewaterhouse, Coopers, principal, digital strategy and innovation leader. Who said that we can expect to see. These kinds of large scale shifts toward digital collaborate and teamwork.

Uh, even after it’s okay to go back to the office, uh, he says the pandemic has accelerated the future of work by five to 10 years, a quote from this article from him, he says it was already moving in this direction before. But the pandemic actually opened the doors for more experimentation and new ways of working people think of virtual work as a response to crisis.

But what they don’t realize is that there are a lot of good things that are happening out of virtual and remote work. Okay. Uh, now. I work for a construction company. Uh, and the picture you painted of the offices, one that would require the owner of the building to pay for a pretty substantial renovation renovation.

Our offices were renovated a year or so ago. In fact, our. Office our headquarters office in San Francisco just became the 16th office state of California to earn a well gold star certification, which is all about, you know, uh, sustainability. Uh, the idea that the company, the owner of the building would go in and renovate again, uh, to ensure that there is an elevator that only holds two people voice activated, uh, not without regulation.

Uh, I’ve got to tell you it’s it’s expensive. So I think the likelihood of this being a common future, uh, either relies on regulation or, or it doesn’t happen, uh, for a long time, it’s going to be a long period of time where people decide that they need to make the shift. I think, to interject to comment on that show.

I agree with you. Yes. This is not universal. The article doesn’t pretend it is the case even. Um, it does say that it takes place in 2025, so that’s five years away. Uh, and this particular example is a, is a company, I guess we can breed from words describing it. Yeah. Um, is, uh, you know, as a smaller, newly refurbished building or to themselves.

So that isn’t a universal picture by any means. So this will, this will appear in fits and starts. So it’s not every day, but it will appear some people will do this. Certainly the point about regulation. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. That th that’s got to be factored into it. So maybe this might not be 20, 25. It might be 20, 28, but I see it.

Definitely. Yeah. And a lot of, uh, contractors, developers and architects have really been focused on sustainability because that’s where they saw the regulation coming. Yeah. Uh, as a result of more people becoming convinced that climate change is a big deal and we have to do something about it. I mean, you know, we’ve been very active in the field of captured carbon, uh, that there’s carbon in the materials that are used to build.

Uh, and how do we reduce that footprint? Uh, we were involved in the introduction of a carbon calculator for construction, uh, and to suddenly shift. Uh, you know, to veer on a new path, uh, to be, uh, virus conscience in building. I think, I don’t know. I just think that’s going to take longer than five years. Uh, I think there’s another issue here to talk about what that, one of the things that you read out from that article.

Well, since she only comes in for meetings, which means the only people she sees are the people she’s meeting with. And the only thing they talk about. Is whatever the meeting was based on now. See, no dive ran an article that said that people are complaining about first of all, too many virtual meetings, things, uh, which this would alleviate.

If he could come have physical meetings and then go back home and sit in front of the computer, that’s fine. But what they’re also missing is the lack of casual conversations and serendipitous encounters in the hallways. Uh, CEO’s are working to find tools that will maintain culture, uh, while they’re also maintaining productivity.

But they shared a survey that found that people are struggling to say stay focused during virtual meetings, which will eventually have an impact on productivity. And, you know, those hallway conversations are important when you’re sitting at your computer in your home and you get up to get coffee, you may pass your, your spouse or your kid that you’re not going to pass somebody in the company that you don’t see very often and have conversation that might lead to an innovation.

Uh, well, to, to add a comment to that, you, you probably right, but it’s going to happen. That will happen. That there will not be those chances to do that. I’m not saying that’s universe. So here’s a good example. Why, uh, in the more of the UK newspapers today, it talked about Schroders one of the big fund managers, uh, based in the UK, but global.

That, uh, they are, uh, they communicated with all our employees worldwide yesterday, Friday that they are literally getting rid of nine to five and not requiring anyone to come into the office at all. Now, not just during the pandemic, when the pandemic end, you do not have to come into the office at all.

So they are. I’m going to allow thousands of staff to carry on working from home in a radical overhaul of its rules as the newspaper describes it. Um, the footsie 100 investment business has become the first major London institution to tell workers they will no longer be required to come into the office five days a week.

So they don’t expect a return to working life. As generations of professionals have previously known it with far more flexibility, you have aware. And when employees do their jobs, the new rules. Oh, we’re unveiled and an internal message to staff and documents on the company’s internet that I mentioned yesterday.

So that, uh, will that be universe? Who knows? I think it says to me those points you made, I don’t disagree with them at all. They are important, but, but we’ll, we will have to find new ways of doing that. So the physical going to the office and having a serendipitous encounters. If Schroeder’s is an example, that’s very unlikely to be a feature, a tool of work of the web.

Oh yeah. I did read one post. I don’t remember where it was from, but they said, you know, the typical hallway conversation in the working remote world is going to require people to find new ways to deliberately repeat the dots. Connected. The loops closed, provide the. Picture put two, two together, whatever metaphor you want to apply here.

But I did read two wall street journal articles, uh, that questioned this idea of remote work. So we’ll see how long this company keeps this up. Uh, what they say is after, you know, four or five months of this, uh, remote work, uh, cracks are starting to emerge in the work from home enthusiasm projects are taking longer.

Training is tougher hiring and integrating new employees is more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would an offices where they get to sit next to colleagues and absorb how they do their jobs.

The other article asks if company culture can survive when nobody’s at the office, more than half of the 2000 full time, us workers across many industries who responded to a survey. Conducted for Prudential in March and April says, they say they felt less connected to their organizations as remote workers.

And of course, we’re seeing all kinds of tactics to try to maintain culture, but place is an important element of culture and I’m not sure all of these tactics will be all that successful. No, I’m not sure either shell, but I see this is definitely going to pass. This will be part of the landscape, not necessarily everyone, but the nature of, of, uh, of, um, what has happened, uh, globally.

And indeed bring it down on a level. We can, we can actually identify with more in specific countries and cities, uh, is, is a change that is so fast that no one could have imagined this. So as a result of, uh, of this, uh, uh, pandemic. Uh, the deaths, the infections, the horror, the, the, the fear, all of that, uh, it has had an impact, uh, on, on Sundays.

I see lots of people. I hear, lots of people took it. I can’t wait to get back to the office. Uh, this is no good. This isn’t going to work. And then over here, there’s another group that says, no, none of this is the way it’s going to be probably something combining all of it, maybe. But if you’ve got.

Companies like this particular one, I mentioned Schroders and others that I read about who are making quite significant shifts, requiring a, literally a course, correct action in their strategic approach to how they run their operation and make them do the business. Even by. Um, enabling people to not come into an office, then you are forcing a change that has to happen.

I don’t believe for a second that the economies worldwide will collapse because of this at all. I don’t believe that, but it is a radical change and it cannot work for everyone for obvious reasons. You’re talking about the construction industry. For instance, can’t build a building, you’re building a building, a new building for God.

You can’t do it that way. So, you know, manufacturing, uh, you can’t do that, but. Financial institutions communicate its PR you all that, that could work this way. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, there is no way easy answer. It’s a complicated picture. You know, I’ve heard, I’ve heard other stories that people take how easy.

Yeah, it is to hire people in the remote work, then, then having to go through an interview process and then the traditional way. So there’s no commonality of view here. Lots of different views and surveys and it’ll filter through. I think whether it’s a, it’s it. You know, it’ll work for some and probably not for others.

Our summer intern program was problematic, uh, because of the pandemic. Um, and there are lots of industries where, I mean, you know, the meat packing industry yeah. In any factory environment, uh, yeah, I guess it’s going to be problematic, but, uh, in construction, you know, we’ve seen a reduction in that size of the labor force, uh, fewer and fewer people want to be laborers on buildings.

Uh, so there is a move toward robotics. Uh, to get a lot of the construction done. Uh, that’ll be a longterm change. It’s not going to happen overnight. I do want to share one technology I read about though, uh, that’s being touted by the company that makes it as an, as a better alternative to zoom. Uh, it is a Lifesize realtime hologram.

Uh, this, it looks like a full sized, uh, mirror, uh, where the person that you’re talking to is standing inside this machine. Like the one that you get scanned in at the airport, not the. A metal detector, but the one where you put your hands up and, uh, it’s kinda like that. And then you sitting in your room are able to look at them in the mirror as if they’re actually there in the room.

And it’s only $60,000 for one of these. Uh, so a meeting of say five people, plus you would require, uh, six of these. That’s what, uh, over a quarter million dollar investment, uh, they say that the price will drop down to 40,000. Uh, yeah, I don’t know, maybe one day, but, uh, I had to laugh when I saw this, uh, listed as a, as a zoom alternative opportunity knocks for entrepreneurs.

That seems, I mean, it could well be that it could, this. Prompt. I mean, thinking about technologies, uh, that, uh, we’ve seen in the past, that didn’t really work. Uh, not because the technology was no good. Uh, it maybe just wasn’t the time for it. I’m thinking of things like virtual worlds, like second life, for example, that I was in second life the other day.

And it struck me that, um, I I’ve been observing in recent well recent years actually that the, the experience is improving. Every time I go in. The graphics are richer. The, the features of the landscape are more natural looking. The it’s easier to create your advertise. I mean, I can remember it was seriously.

Okay. It’s doing that to get it looking halfway decent. So that could play a role somewhere in it. It may be in the AR VR, mr. Combination somewhere. So think of gaming. I mean, think of that. I mean, I’m talking about the true. The immersive online gaming competitions that we hear about. And people like for instance, that in my mind, cause I use a lot of their products, the unreal engine technology in particular, uh, that is truly eye opening.

And jaw-dropping, I mean, think of all those lovely metaphor that w it’s the immersiveness of that. Yeah. Um, present experiences and forget the fact that it’s a game, it’s the environment that, uh, would, uh, uh, present something quite compelling for some types of organizations and individuals in those organizations.

So could that be part of it, of, um, uh, of the culture? Does it mean that we’re going to see the word. Culture means something different in the coming years. So if it still means the interrelationships and, and, uh, uh, knowledge of, of, uh, engaging with other human beings in the, in the workplace, uh, all of that will mean something different.

Uh, and I think it will require a new type of, uh, of role in an organization to help people understand that environment and become accustomed to it. Uh, and so you, you, you’re going to see. I feel pretty sure of this. You’re going to see a rise of, of this kind of shift organizationally, where new roles are going to appear and people will be, uh, I think a key skill is going to be helping other employees navigate and understand the new workplace of which a huge part of it is virtualized.

For sure. And there are other forces that are going to drive changes to culture. I mean, if you look at blockchain, right. For example, the potential that smart contract max will allow you to get rid of the segment of your employee population and just. Contract with somebody who says, yeah, we can get that done.

Uh, you can check their credentials through the blockchain and then contract with them to do the work, pay them when they’re done. Uh, and you don’t need a quarter of your workforce. That’s going to have an effect. On culture. Uh, but you mentioned the fact that there are technologies that just aren’t ready yet.

Uh, when they’re first introduced, you know, QR codes, uh, would be an example of that. I remember when I was, uh, an independent consultant, I had a big consumer packaged goods company. Where we were experimenting with the idea that at their packaging plants and bottling plants, where the bulletin boards are, you could have a picture of the plant manager that you would scan with your phone, and it would bring up that week’s video, where he would talk about here’s what we achieved this past week.

Here are the issues that we need to resolve. Here’s what’s coming up the next week, a two minute video. The problem was that the people who worked at the plants didn’t have the expensive new phones that could read QR codes. Now, today, every smartphone reads QR code. So what are we using them for? Well, at web Corp, where I work reusing them.

When you go into the office to scan, to bring up the questionnaire about, you know, do you have a fever? Do you feel okay? Uh, where we maintain the logs? Uh, I go to restaurants now where we scan a QR code to get the menu so that you don’t have to touch a menu that the last. Customer touched. Everybody can use cube our coats now.

So eventually these technologies do take root. They do. Uh, and again, it makes me feel that there’ll be a need for, uh, redefining, um, roles, ships to take into account these shifts. It’s going to be well. Is it going to be difficult? I didn’t know whether it’s gonna be difficult. It’s certainly going to be challenging when we, if we pay attention to.

What many people comment on, um, the, one of the big issues with being virtual all the time is the, is the spatial difference. Uh, when you’re looking at two faces on a screen, uh, and, uh, the multiple feet faces on the screen, hearing everyone talking, uh, not altogether, but after someone says something, someone adds something than someone else.

It’s all at the same volume level. And you don’t have differentiators that, that help you, um, relate to that. Plus then there’s a flatness of the, uh, visual perception between it and you are, are, uh, seeing people with the same focal, uh, usage of your eyeballs. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, I’ve been conscious of that myself.

That adds to the fatigue of doing this. I mean, this is a genuine physical reaction to all of this. So we got to figure out how we make that work. If, because of the pandemic, it has accelerated elements of what was already in process, but suddenly it’s rapid likely Layla person at the BBC story, uh, where she’s now working in a refurbished office that’s smaller than before, but it’s got all those features.

Um, does it mean then that. Organizations, aren’t going to be able to offer that kind of a working environment. I come into the office for meetings and stuff like that in the current buildings that have elevators that takes 20 people or doorways that, uh, you know, aren’t as wide as that, or if they are, you know, 25 people go through at once.

So what does it mean to all of that? So it, to me, it’s, we’re on the cusp of something huge. That’s, that’s going to be such a mega change that will require significant expertise to help everyone survival at this. Really? Yeah. I wrote an article for our intranet on zoom fatigue, uh, and did a lot of research on it and, and learn some things, uh, that weren’t immediately evident.

One, is that looking at yourself? Uh, has you performing all the time? You’re always conscious of how you look and that’s exhausting. So I have taken to putting zoom into presenter mode. So only the person who’s talking is filling the big screen. You’ve got the film strip up at the top, but I removed myself from that.

So I don’t look at myself at all the other. And this one really intrigued me is that if you have 10 people on a zoom, Call, you’ve got 10 different backgrounds. When you’re in a meeting with 10 people in a conference room, there’s one background, you’re all sharing it, but now your brain is absorbing all these different backgrounds and perceiving it as a place where you are.

And that’s. Also exhausting. And the recommendation I saw was, you know, all these zoom backgrounds that you can get that are very rich and, and have all kinds of interesting things that don’t do that get something very plain and simple, because that will, uh, reduce the fatigue, uh, that is inherent in having that conversation that way.

Greeting shell and Evelyn, if our listeners all around the world, Dan you’re coming at you from Shelburne, Vermont. And I want to talk about the tick tock war and the war at the app store and all those things. But first the big announcement for me and the F over the third of the web currently using WordPress was the release of WordPress 5.5 on August 11th.

If you have not upgraded, I’m going to tell you, you really should. Some powerful features packed inside of there. Now I’m, there’s so much, in fact, I can’t really talk about it in this report cause there’s other stuff I want to cover. So I’m actually going to spin up, remember fir on technology with 10 York.

Well, I’m going to have a new episode of that coming out. Maybe by the time this episode is published or if not, it will be within the next couple of days. I’ve got a whole thing planned out to talk about, dive in deep and talk about what is so powerful in this release. But I would say if you haven’t upgraded do, do go and check it out.

There’s some tremendous. Speed increases both with the fact that now you have lazy loading images, but also with some improvements to the block editor, there’s now XML site maps, which you may have had before through plugins, like all in one SEO or Yoast SEO, but these allow you to use some of the default configurations in there.

The block editor caught all sorts of new capabilities, some really powerful things, including access to a block directory and much, much more so, more than I can talk about here. So watch for the Dan the fir on technology episode coming at you soon, but let’s move on. The big news. Of course, most recently has been the tick tock war.

You’ve seen this with president Donald Trump. The ticktock had to be, was not allowed to be an app stores, whatever. After 45 days there were so many more things going on. The U S actually announced something called the clean network, uh, program in order to get rid of any kind of connections to China, all sorts of things have been brewing.

As I write this right now, there was an executive order that. Bite dance. The company behind tick talk had to go and sell its assets within 90 days in order to continue having operations in the, in the U S all of these things are happening. And in all of this, in this broader context of this, this battle, With, with China really, and Ben Thompson writing over it.

Statuary wrote a great piece on July 14th, just called the tick talk war, talking about why tick talk has been so incredibly successful, why it has worked, what’s going on out there and, and, and talking about, you know, just the pieces that fit into this puzzle. You don’t quite understand what’s all happening.

Give his article a read. The link will be in the show notes. I would note. This is part of this larger kind of thing happening. And unfortunately, the United States, which has typically been a defender of the open internet is now going in a different form and saying, wait, we want a clean network that doesn’t have any connections to China.

So my organization, the internet society put out a statement around this because we have the U S now suddenly jumping in the bandwagon of. Let’s have a splinter net where every country has it’s own internet. That’s not how it should work. We have a global internet, a global network of networks, and this is where the powerful things happen is that we can have things like tech, talk that emerge out of China and become this amazing sensation and, and, you know, use by millions all around the world.

We need the global internet. So I would encourage you to read more on this. Think about this. Look at us. Of course. With ticktock having these issues, you know, the blood’s in the water for the sharks for all those circling around there. And we’re seeing this Facebook rolled out Instagram reels, which was it’s tick talk competitor.

There’s also news that Facebook is launching a new short video service in India, right within the Facebook app to do this. Snapchat is testing a tick tock style navigation, and YouTube is testing. Some features like this as well. There’s a war going on. We need to pay attention to this as communicators because this format, the tick tock format of short videos and showing in different ways is something obviously that people are enjoying.

We need to understand what’s happening there and what the space is going on. The other thing we, as communicators need to watch is what’s happening right now with Epic games and Fortnite and the app stores as a quick synopsis. Uh, if you put up an app through Apple’s, uh, Apple’s app store or Google play store, you have to give 30% of the revenue to either Apple or Google.

Well, Epic found a way to do it within their game to allow people to buy stuff. And then when Apple removed fortnight from the, uh, from the app store and Google did the same thing, they’ve then taken Epic, has taken them to court is coming up with antitrust. It’s coming up with all these different things for a long time.

We’ve talked about the consolidation of. Power into these app stores and the gatekeeping role that Apple and Google play in different forums. This is one of the first kind of direct challenges and somebody like Epic, who has such a gigantic following with Fortnite can do this. It’s something thing to watch because this is a test of the wall gardens and a push at can, can, is there a way to have them more open and not be so constrained in different ways?

Something definitely to watch because it may play out in a larger space around what our apps may be like and other things now beyond Epic and fortnight, Facebook of course, decided to jump in here too. They put up a thing where they were saying that they will let companies go and do online events that you could pay for inside are in 20 countries, businesses, the ability to charge users for access to live video streams.

So you could do this for like, they, they suggest a yoga class or a seminar webinar or whatever else. But they pointed out that Apple and Google don’t waive the 30% fee for people connecting through from the iOS or Android apps. So again, now Facebook is jumping in with, with Epic games and that same kind of space criticizing the app stores.

Lots more going to be happening in this speaking of Facebook, we’ll talk about merging. We’ve seen Facebook is now merging Instagram and messenger chats. So in some places you may find that suddenly you’re getting a message that Instagram, the messenger there, the direct messenger is now in fact messenger, apparently not all linked yet, but you can see where it’s going.

Rumors were also flying. The Google may be replacing its duo app and Android with the meet app that was formerly known as Hangouts. So all of these things, things merging together as the giants play in the playground. One final note. If you are still using flash anywhere, you should be aware. Of course, by now that it is dying as of December, it’ll be gone, Adobe will no longer supply the player and most of the browsers have removed it anyway, but there’s a great retrospective in ARS Technica talking about how this technology brought about the rise of user experience, focused design.

I’d encourage you to give it a rise or give it a read, think about it. And remember all those days of flash now gone. And with that, I’m going to go back to reading about all these Wars and you can find more of my audio and writing at Dan York dot Emmy. Thanks for listening and bye for now. Well, thanks Dan.

Great report. Uh, I know that my word press has been. Dated because the service where it’s hosted does that automatically. I have to go take a look at some of those features, but in particular, uh, Neville and I are both very excited to see the revival of fir on technology. Looking forward to that very, very much.

Yeah, good to have you take on those tech topics then. I mean, we’re press, it’s interesting. Um, Shell’s comedy in particular because I think most WordPress sites are, are, um, you know, automating in the, in the updating for security fixes and releases. And then of course, we’ve got the plugin auto. Updating that is a, I’m seeing a lot of conversations about that to be aware or not as the case might be, but it certainly is, um, a platform that is, seems to be going from strength to strength continuously.

I forgot the percentage now of how many of the world’s websites are run on WordPress, but it’s gotta be, I don’t know, at least half by now. Surely. So, um, anyway. Great, great report. Well, the pandemic, isn’t just changing how companies are working, uh, whether that’s for the longterm and the short term, it’s changing how we use social media to global web index surveyed more than 170,000 global internet users and found that the average number of social media accounts.

Per internet user has risen from 7.6 in 2017 to 8.1 today. And the amount of time we spend using social media has increased from two hours and 15 minutes to two hours and 22 minutes, even more interesting, 47% of internet users. Now turn to social, uh, even though just a 14%. See it. As a trustworthy source for news, uh, chase buckle trends manager at global web index said the increase in use for news was expected.

In fact, the increase for use of everything was expected. Given the amount of free time we have and fewer opportunities to get out and do anything but that it was startling to see how quickly and significantly the increased intensity of our social media usage has led to changes with our relationship.

With social media, uh, the study found the pandemic. Hasn’t just made changes to the consumption of news. It’s. Also helped revert social media channels back to their truly social origins. Now, the survey comes not just during the pandemic, but also at an inflection point. New digital 2020 July global stat shot report from Hootsuite.

And we are social finds it for the first time, more than half of the world’s total population. Is using social media. And a lot of these concerns that by the way, that’s 3.9, 6 billion people, a 51% of the global population, uh, and consistent with the survey. A lot of these, uh, are using social media as a source of news.

Interesting. That that’s problematic because a Pew research report found that in the U S yes. Anyway, adults who rely on social media for news are less informed and more exposed to conspiracy theories. So boy, uh, one other survey to note this one from Salesforce, which surveyed over 3,500 customers, our consumers worldwide, and found that social media is the most popular method of engaging with brands.

Uh, video content and virtual experiences were also top preferences along with how to digital guides, uh, podcasts were sort of in the middle. Of the list, but at the very bottom lower than digital newsletters and lower than printed materials were blogs, uh, the world just keeps on changing. Good. Doesn’t it just, uh, I read actually another, so it’s interesting that, um, about the shifting, shifting use of social media, there was a report by sprout social, uh, the other day that, um, uh, that I thought had some interesting.

Metrics in there from the findings of, of the folks they interview in the U S uh, consumers will reward brands that share their values on social. Uh it’s okay. When brands are forthcoming about the values and social 58%, the more likely to buy a product services from them, if they share similar beliefs, that makes sense to me, another one brands, risk losing business.

They fail to follow through. As the spotlight focuses on issues of social justice. 55% of consumers expect brands to take a stance that goes beyond corporate statements and monetary donations, such as new corporate initiatives or commitments to specific goals. These expectations are significantly higher among millennials.

So there’s lots more in this survey. You add that into all these pictures being painted and as something brands need to take a, to pay a lot of attention to, uh, as social media. Uh, gets this kind of attention, uh, from consumers. Yeah, there was an article. I hadn’t included it in the rundown, but when you brought that up, I went and found it.

This is from a and a, which is, uh, an advertising association. Uh, the headline is what brands mean by brand purpose. And the subhead says the combination of the pandemic and social unrest has spurred brands and organizations to think a new about what they truly stand for. I’ll put the link to that. In the show notes, but I found it to be a really good, interesting article that it’s, it’s more than just sharing your values.

It’s actually revisiting them at this point and saying, what do we stand for? And, and there are some organizations that are taking that to heart and, and doing a reassessment and, you know, coming out with new proclamations about what they stand for and sharing that on social media and getting good responses.

Okay. So, um, we’ve talked about all about coronavirus and COVID-19 in this episode and his, I think this is our final story on that topic, but an interesting one, nevertheless, to add to your thinking about what about finding out information about what’s going on and it comes from Google. Who are adding the reopening of a lockdown lifting basically.

And COVID-19 information to travel searches. When you search for information about a destination you’re going to, so they’ve already introduced a number of updates to help you get around during the widespread closures and travel disruptions. Now that more cities and places are beginning to open up.

Google is updating searches to make it easier to find details about travel destinations and reopenings. So with the update searches for hotels and flights will show the percentage of local hotels and rooms available. And the percentage of flights that are currently operating Googled trips will also surface statistics about the number of COVID-19 cases at travel destinations and users will be able to filter hotel search results.

Buy properties with flexible cancellation policies. Uh, Google will also continue to show details a

08/17/20 | 0 Comments | FIR #198: Instagroan

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