Just been watching the Netflix mini-series ‘Dirty Money’. Wow I was astounded how many so called legal crooks steal money from us.
Of course most of it covers companies in the USA, but Britain didn’t come off scot-free with the HSBC money laundering on behalf of Mexican drug cartels and terrorist organisations. They only got a $2 billion fine and nobody went to jail, despite the fact that thousands of innocent people died, either by being killed or died because of drugs.
Each episode basically told the same story, which is our greed for money.
Millions and Billions of dollars are changing hands on this planet illegally and most of us are the victims. In essence if we are kept poor and needy, sick and in fear, we won’t make any noise. This is exactly where governments want us.
So ensure that companies always need to strive for growth, which means they have to continue to sell to us consumers, who need to keep buying and stay in debt. That way they can continue to exercise control over us.
So where am I seeing AI in my day to day dealings on the web?
Well I use LinkedIn and here is why I have experienced the most. Actually LinkedIn promised us a very long time ago that they would be introducing AI (Artificial Intelligence) in their messaging system. It’s only just being put into practice now at the kind of level I had anticipated at the start.
Obviously they needed to work on this for a while. I’m noticing that they are quite accurately suggesting ‘one tap’ responses to messages in my inbox. At first they used to have just very limited suggested responses, like ‘thanks’ and now the suggested responses are becoming far more sophisticated.
The other place where I’ve noticed AI is Facebook. Not in their messenger but in the fact that I’ve been less active there and they’ve started emailing me with a trick email, suggesting that I had been trying to log-in to their platform and they noticed ai was having problems, supplying me with a one click button to log back in.
They obviously noticed that I had not been active and they need to uphold their active users figure, so giving me a one-button login on my email means that when I click that, I get straight back in and boom I’m included in the active users figure for that day/week/month.
So now all my excitement about AI has just been delivered a terrible blow.
It’s that time of year when the award ceremonies are taking place in the world of celebrities. The Baftas, The Grammys, The Oscars etc.
But we also have awards closer to home. Business awards, County awards, Industry awards in every single industry sector and of course then there are personal awards, awards given out by The Queen.
And really what does it actually all mean?
Does your popularity rise?
Do you earn more money?
Are you able to get a table faster at your favourite restaurant?
Will you be admired by your peers, who may aspire to be like you instead of themselves?
And what about the losers? The ones that were nominated to keep the suspense alive, but missed out on the night. What about them? Are they any less worthy?
I have been invited to many award ceremonies in Birmingham, I’ve even been given free tickets and apart from when something genuinely came up, I have avoided them all. I was even nominated for one and still didn’t go.
I feel that it creates a divide in society, it shows us that some in society are actually better than you, have achieved more than you. It doesn’t mean that the awarded individual or organisation is bad, of course they are not, but do they really need the award to make them feel better about themselves?
Is it proof that they are more worthy of recognition compared to the ones who were nominated but lost out? We never remember those that were nominated and still some of those will include this statistic on their profiles, their websites and in their bios.
‘Nominated for blogger of the year’.
Nominated means you lost, so why even promote it! Well, you were in the running so that’s also special. It means your peers who were never in the running are the real losers. They might as well pack up and go home, because they never stood a chance anyway.
I often hear people at networking events suggest that there’s no substitute for having a proper discussion.
So my question today is, why are we having so many micro-moments on social media that are not proper discussions at all, they are just sound bites, that interrupt people’s thinking and their ability to focus on the very topic you want them to focus on.
We are just interested in either liking and moving on or we may if we know the person well, feel compelled to write something that has flown into our brain in response to a quote, a video message, an article, a controversial point or comment.
We’re not entering into any discussion at all actually, we may feel as if our readers are, but they rarely are discussing our message.
They just haven’t got the time. We’re all too busy writing our own stuff instead of discussing other people’s stuff.
So what about a new platform, which is just audio only. The article is audio and the responses are audio too. I think Medium might be moving in that direction actually. They already have audio articles, so the natural extension of that would be audio responses? Well for me it would be and I believe it would add more value to the discussion and the ability to hear people’s views by hearing their voices is more powerful right?
The latest algorithm scam is running riot on Facebook at the moment.
If you are asking your connections to like or comment on your post, you are obviously ensuring that they will see more of your posts in their newsfeed. The more you engage with someone’s content the more, in theory, content of theirs you will see.
I appreciate you know and understand this, so when you are posting messages like the one below, you are a scammer. You are trying to dupe your connections in believing that more of their content will be visible to you. That’s a massive untruth!
Latest Facebook scam text:
So this would explain why I now rarely see posts from so many close buddies… Not that I don’t totally love ‘the same 25 people (I do see) over and over,’ but I miss seeing everyone else too… So please please please can I ask you to do as the message below suggests (which I’ve just copied and pasted), so then hopefully we can see more of each other and I will remain smiley 😬💗.
Some wonder why our news feed seems so different recently: we only see posts from the same 25 people over and over. We only see 10 % at all. Yes, Facebook has a new algorithm! So, I’m asking you, could you do me a quick favour? If you read this post, leave me a quick “hi”, like, leave a comment, so more friends will be posted in my news feed. Otherwise Facebook chooses who I see and I don’t need FB to choose my friends! Don’t hesitate to copy and paste this message on your wall so you can have more interaction with your friends too! Please do this I want to see what you’re up to!
Either you are being duped by your connections, following their actions like a sheep 🐑 or you are scamming on purpose, which is it going to be?
More and more I am realising that my only focus should be on myself. When I focus on others, whether it’s judging them, observing them, wanting them to change, I go backwards. I go backwards in my goals, in my health and my general wellbeing.
It really is not difficult to focus on just yourself. I am not talking here about being selfish, more about noticing what you’re doing, what you’re thinking and how you’re showing up for yourself.
I know it is an overused analogy, but it’s the easiest one to relate to. If there’s an emergency on an airplane and you’re with a young child, who should you place the oxygen mask on first? Yourself, correct!
Well, when we look after ourselves first, we will be so much better placed to look after our family, our friends and colleagues.
I know the answers, I’ve known them for over 14 years, but it’s harder to tell yourself, so whilst being treated by an accupuncturist for some eczema on my lower legs that have been there for nearly 12 months, she shared with me some wisdom that I already knew but I wasn’t able to hear myself speak. It’s as if the brain doesn’t process it unless you hear someone tell you what needs to be done.
I believe I now know what I need to do, it’s not difficult I have done it before.
Over-egging means trying too hard to improve something and thereby spoiling it. The meaning has been derived from over-egging the pudding. Trying to improve the pudding by using too many eggs I guess?
It also means embellishing or exaggerating.
For me this is the meaning that I understand it to be, especially the embellishing part.
We all know that we are guilty of doing this, whether it is on CV’s (Resumés) or on our LinkedIn profiles. #OMG, I see so many LinkedIn profiles these days that are so obviously over-egged.
I just wonder why? Are we also desperate for approval, fear of not being accepted, we are trying to come across as more experienced, more established, more impressive compared to our neighbours on LinkedIn? It looks so obvious, I’m so surprised folks do not recognise this phenomena in themselves.
You know if they taught this stuff in schools, maybe we would have better looking profiles on LinkedIn, instead of all those lookalike profiles that sound the same and have no distinctive features whatsoever.
It could be of course that most of us are suffering from that good old ‘limiting beliefs syndrome’, something that I am noticing in my network more and more. Our parents and teachers do have a lot to answer for.
Another celebrity version of reality show Big Brother, here in the UK, has finished. Phew, I’m glad that’s over. I always wonder how I would fair being locked up in a house for a month with complete strangers who would eventually get on my nerves.
I guess it’s no different to working with your colleagues, who are at the end of the day complete strangers and usually when you work in an office together you have to find a way to get on.
They say you spend more time with your work colleagues then you do with your family, that is if you work in an office and not from home of course.
But very few companies invest in getting strangers who are thrown together to perform well together.
I was part of a team building exercise, doing some freelancing. All I had to do was facilitate some in-door team building games.
Within seconds I would witness how participants would forget about all their inhibitions and start accusing colleagues for not playing the game correctly. When the going gets tough we return to type and think of our own survival.
Whether it’s Big Brother or working in teams, we can all be a little more considerate of working with and interacting with others who are not family.
So Facebook have changed their algorithm again and the world is up in arms. Regular users are raising their arms in celebration and those with business pages are raising their arms in anger.
All of us who have business pages were promised a free business page to promote our business to followers for free.
And then things slowly changed for the worst.
Slowly our business posts stopped appearing on our followers newsfeeds. But all the trainers out there suggested that as followers rarely will go back to the business page, we must keep active and post at least once per day.
What a crock of s..t, that turned out to be.
My motto with Social Media is ‘expect the unexpected’, the fake news debate has given Facebook the best excuse ever.
Right, they said, let’s reduce the amount of business page posts to newsfeeds in case it contains fake news and that way we can tell owners of business pages that the only way they can have visibility is to pay for our bargain basement adverts.
Let’s change the forecast for Facebook ad revenue by 2020, which was $60 billion, just mobile ads by the way, to $90 billion.
The only winner for this change of algorithm is Facebook.
DUH, who else did you think was going to benefit, you?
I am not sure we all really know what’s contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I don’t remember being taught this at school, do you?
And as a human walking on this planet, I should know right? It should be part of my education to understand this declaration and know what my rights are, indeed the rights of my fellow human being too.
In fact I believe it is fundamentally the most important document we should all have in our possession and we don’t!
How can this be correct? Is it only the domain of lawyers, judges and maybe governments who should understand this?
I would suggest that governments do not. I never hear anyone speaking about it, our locally elected member of parliament doesn’t speak about it, surely anyone in government should take an oath to say that they will abide by it?
Growing a following? Posting content? Getting likes, hearts, shares? Being popular?
Nope, none of the above.
Being on Social should have only one outcome and that’s to receive calls.
There really is no other outcome!
Calls can arrive through the phone or via a form. The only measure therefore should be how many calls are you getting.
Social should drive your audience to your website and then your website should convert them to calls. You need the right detail, the right call to action and the right form and all above ‘the fold’.
Once you receive or make calls you have an opportunity to convert.
If anyone is busily trying to increase a following or measure the amount of likes and hearts, please assure them that it’s the wrong measure.
He mentioned some studies that analysed words from a large set of date using LIWC. The way that the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program works is fairly simple. Basically, it reads a given text and counts the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns, and even parts of speech.
One of those studies they analysed 500 million tweets over 2.4 million users in 84 countries to learn about their emotional content. What was very evident that the mood of the tweets vary across the time of day. Better at the start, then it dipped (the trough) and then recovered by the end of the day.
His premise after a number of other studies, like investor earning calls, students pass rates at exams, is that we all perform differently depending the time of day.
He suggest we can all work out our chronotype by calculating when we go to bed and when we get up during a non-working day, he calls it ‘free day’. Determine the mid point of the no of hours sleep and if it’s before 3.30am we are a lark and after 5.30am we are an owl. Anything else, we are a 3rd bird.
Do your deep thinking work at your best time, your admin in the trough and have insights late in the evening.
Guess what time I’m writing this on a train back from Birmingham? 10pm! It’s remarkable easy to write at this time.
Not sure if you have noticed, there’s a new fashion trend for men. Leather shoes and no socks, well none noticeable as such. They may wear those tiny foot socks, but you can’t see them.
I would understand if the UK was located near the equator but we’re not and as such it looks totally ridiculous.
Who ever came up with the idea that men’s ankles are actually sexy or even attractive?
What is even more astounding is the fact that skinny jeans or formal trousers (pants) that seem to accompany this crazy new trend are even cut off higher so that men are making sure they expose their trendy look, yuk.
I used to work in the fashion industry, albeit the non-sexy manufacturing end and have witnessed some bizarre trends but nothing as bizarre and ridiculous as this one.
I see so many business people, whether they work in small businesses or large corporates deliver the most appalling signature/elevator speeches at networking events.
The only reason they are so appalling is because business people haven’t invested the time to create something with structure and discipline.
Michael-Don’s quote was; ‘Structure is your friend and discipline gives you freedom’.
He showed us a number of ways to examine our signature speech and give it structure and discipline.
By having us practice it in front of the group several times it allowed us not only to improve our delivery, it placed us outside of our comfort zone, where really all the learning took place.
I sincerely wish more business people in the U.K. invested a small amount of time and money in themselves in order to improve not just their speaking skills but also their signature/elevator speech to help them feel more confident in front of strangers at networking events.
Not sure about you but I’ve noticed an increasing amount of posts on LinkedIn with video clips showing us up and coming technology advances with all sorts of supposedly break-through technologies, machines, robots, rockets and other machines, stuff!
Now, I’ve been a technology fanboy for many decades a tiny futurist hoping for the world to become a better place with technology.
I was a huge fan of a British TV series, Tomorrow’s World. Many of the technology ideas presented and showcased there very rarely became reality but some did.
I worked without computers for many years, we wrote on pads, delivered hand-written memos to pigeon holes, which got lost when the recipient said they never got it (I always suspected it was in their in-tray somewhere, buried underneath all the other papers), delivered hand written pieces of paper to the telex-room or if they had to see an exact copy of the document stood next to the upright fax machine (the size of a medium size printer) for 20 minutes whilst the phone gurgled.
I was amazed and excited when I saw the first lotus notes spreadsheet, it was the biggest technology breakthrough for me who had been writing figures on graph paper for years.
My only worry is that it keeps us in a place of wanting more technology advancement all the time and when we see something new, we go oh look that would be great and our mind goes longing for that thing, the new stuff to replace the stuff we thought was cool just a few hours ago.
Of course technology is great and the futurists in Davos in January 2018 were even suggesting that because of technology we will eliminate cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes, hospitals will disappear with the exception of emergency rooms and living until 120 will be common place.
Life will pass us by if we don’t stay in the moment and be grateful for what we have in this moment.
We’ve all been labelled by society in one way or another depending on which decade or range of decades we were born in.
Even the decades that describe Millennials have been disputed and some have even decided different ranges. The USA Census Bureau believe it to be 1982–2000, basically the decades of the 80’s and the 90's.
So a Millennial born in ’82 is going to be 36 this year!
Wow and I thought Millennials were just folks in their 20's.
Both my stepsons are millennials and don’t I know it. They appear to have been born with mobile phones in their hands. It’s not my intention to judge either of them and I’m not going into detail on both of them except to say that I will be fascinated to see what long term jobs they end up in. Of course there’s no such thing as long term job any longer in fact it wasn’t even when I was working.
As I ponder how Millennials may impact the place of work, I’m seeing gaming rooms instead of table tennis tables, I’m seeing working hours stretched and redefined, home working for parents becoming common place and values/coolness being the biggest reasons why they may decide to join your company.
More insights on Millennials can be found on Wikipedia and I have to say it’s frighteningly accurate especially the Peter Pan concept, because of the members’ perceived tendency for delaying some rites of passage into adulthood for longer periods than most generations before them.
By 2020, potentially 50% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials. We better have flexible working practices in place to get the most out of them.
I’m so astounded that my fellow men have let us down and yet again scandal has landed across the headlines with men behaving badly in the UK.
Put men on their own together, add some alcohol and rich food and the blood rushes down.
I can’t think of anything worse, an ‘Only Men’ dinner!
Who wants to go to that?
When I was employed I had to attend, back in the 90’s, a so-called sports dinner, yep, you guessed right, men only! I’ve never played rugby or football, so basically the discussion ended up being about work and the weather. I’ve never been so bored. Usually they have a comedian whose stand-up routine is very blue too.
This latest scandal reminds me of the hit series on Netflix, The Crown, where Prince Phillip attended a men’s only club, called The Thursday Club and the goings on that resulted. He had to sack his personal secretary for inappropriate behaviour that resulted in his wife divorcing him. This was in the 1950's.
Here is a quote from an article in the Independent newspaper on 16th January, 1996, written by Miles Kington who obviously attended the club.
“I think I am probably one of the last surviving members of the old Thursday Club, the gang of cronies that the Duke of Edinburgh used to gather round him in the 1950s to have a bit of fun away from his serious life at Buckingham Palace. The club was strictly all-male, but that does not mean there were not women at these gatherings. After all, as Arthur Koestler once said to me, “The extraordinary thing about men at all-male gatherings is that they talk about women non-stop, whereas at mixed functions the men talk only about male hobbies such as sport, politics and cars — never about women, even though there are many women present.”
It is ironic that nearly 60 years later a similar club still existed, The Presidents Club.
I am not doubting the huge amount of good they have done as a charity, but now they have caused the charity to close down with the inevitable result of job losses and the good causes losing out too.
I’m no author. I’d like to think I’m a storyteller but I’m more like a story facilitator, helping you to craft your best story and allowing your digital community to have a closer connection with you.
By far the biggest mistake I see people make is that they write profile summaries in the 3rd person, like they are a big celebrity and their agent has written a bio page for them. Maybe you’re a speaker and your agent writes it for you?
It creates such a distance between your reader, your audience and yourself, because it’s not personal and definitely does not create any sense of intimacy.
When you write a profile, bio or summary page about yourself, write as if you are sitting opposite someone, explaining your story. Of course share what you do in business, cool, but make it more personal because that’s the most interesting part of who you are.
Write WHY you do what you do, what circumstances, opportunities got you into what you are doing today or if you haven’t found what you wish to do yet, what is grabbing your interest the most, what aspirations do you have?
Share something personal about your life too, maybe how you have moved around, how that enabled you to see the world in a different light, what effect did it have on you?
Always write in the first person, ‘I’ instead of ‘She/He’.
Social Media has managed to infiltrate every part of humanity, whether it be exposing our own personal lives or real time comments from the US President, it has become part of the fabric of society.
There are many good things that have been derived from Social Media and one of those has been the way that people from all over the world have connected to each other, families have become closer or have they?
Parents and grandparents are snooping on kids and grandchildren, or maybe they are just curious and feel closer to what they are doing in their lives?
There was a time when Social first came out that a lot of folks were saying things like ‘Why do I want to know what they’ve had for lunch?’ or ‘I have no interest in knowing every part of what they are doing in their lives!’.
Actually we’ve all become incredibly curious (nosey) about our connections and what they’re up to, to the point that we are thumbing through feeds with lightening speed, trying to catch a glimpse of news that may satisfy our curiosity and interest.
The truth is our curiosity will never ever be satisfied, we never say, oh good that post I just liked or commented on is enough for today, that will keep me going until tomorrow. We instantly look for the next post, image or video to satisfy or need.
Sad but true.
We are driving ourselves into Social Oblivion to a place where we eventually may need help to rid ourselves of our addiction to Social Media.
A few worrying statistics on Facebook. As of the third quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.07 billion monthly active users. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users had surpassed 1 billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active users are those which have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days.
You may wish to consider deleting the Facebook app from your smartphone, it will give you at least an extra hour per day, if not more. I’m not suggesting removing yourself as Social Media these days is now an essential part of your identity.
The first ENGLISH newspaper was first published in The Netherlands.
I know that might sound like a fake news story, but it is actually true. In fact they published newspapers for Italy and Germany before they published their own.
Well it all depends whether you’re Dutch like me and then you will convince yourself that indeed it is true. Or if you are a different nationality then you will read that your nation was the first one to publish newspapers, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t in English, correct?
Either way the press have been around for 400 years and news stories are being published every single second of the day at lightening speed. Because it is news, we have a built-in program, conditioned over centuries that whatever has been published by the press is actually true. After all it’s there in black and white and surely nobody would allow the journalists to write a fake news story and actually publish it?
Roll on the internet and now we find ourselves in the wild Wild West. Basically anything goes. But our brains are still conditioned to believe what has been written by the so called press must be the truth.
I have one great example to share with you, a story that reports on bad weather. Here in the UK we are obsessed with the weather and the press know this, so it’s always an excellent opportunity to publish an article about forthcoming weather events in the UK, especially snow and wind, they make a lethal combination to get our attention.
However reporters like to bend the truth in their headlines to pull you in to their story. Have a look at the screenshot below of a headline that caught my attention. Now you may suggest to me that it’s just a coincidence, but I’ve been studying news headlines all through 2017 and have noticed patterns, especially about outlandish weather headlines that hardly ever were true.
The first part of the headline suggests that hundreds of people are stranded in heavy snow. The second part is confirming a forecast 70 mph winds set to batter London and Southeast.
The headline starts off by saying that the news is Live, so it can be misunderstood to say that at the time of that story being published, people are stranded in London and the Southeast with 70 mph winds. It’s ever so subtle but it attempts to get you to click through, which of course I did.
We don’t read properly on the web, we scan and journalists know this, you’re even scanning when you reading this article.
Can you see what I mean with misleading and outlandish headlines? The next day there were even more headlines along the same lines. I’m guessing that weather stories are clickbait for the press to get us to their sites. Makes you wonder doesn’t?
