FreshNetworks Blog

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments with social media is that it allows anybody, from a large global consumer brand to an individual to build their personal brand online. To some extent some of the same rules apply – decide what you want to do and why you are using social media and then make sure you are using it in a way that helps you to achieve this. For individuals, of course, the most important thing is acknowledge in the first place that by using social media you are building your own brand, whether you intend it or not. The main advice is that only you can be in charge of your brand online and in social media, and so you should take control of it.

This is important – especially for job-hunters. I recorded a podcast for Guardian Careers last week talking about the importance of owning your personal brand and building your network online in social media. We also discuss:

• what a social media agency is and what it does
• why it’s best if a brand manages its own presence online (but why it usually needs expert help to do this)
• how you can network and build your connections online
• the best use of LinkedIn (and how this is different from Facebook)
• why you need to be aware that people are able to find information out about you even if you haven’t told them
• that you should take control of your own brand and use privacy settings sensibly to help you do this

Oh and you’ll also find out how I got from a degree in French and Russian at Cambridge to be where I am today.

You can listen to the podcast on the Guardian website: Careers Talk: Job hunting using social media

The podcast is also on iTunes

Social Media Week in London saw a great set of events, thinking and presentations for all things social media. One of my favourite presentations from the week came from an event I wasn’t able to attend: Steve Bridger’s keynote from the Media140 Third Sector and the Real-time Web event.

Steve’s presentation is based on his experience of working with charities and not-for-profits and highlights the importance of the internal change that must take place in any organisation if they are to make the most of using social media:

1. Social media is disruptive to an organisation. It changes the way you do things, whether you intend it to or not. We see this a lot with organisations we work with at FreshNetworks. Marketing communities often produce customer service queries or ideas; research communities often result in word of mouth about the brand. Customers are not siloed in how they think about your brand or organisation and they way you interact with them in social media cannot be siloed either.
2. Social media is about relationships. It is not about technology but about what you do with it and how you interact with people online.

These observations are as true for corporates as they are for not-for-profits. Social media is not a silo because it is about relationships. It is about how you engage and interact with people on an ongoing basis.

Steve’s full presentation is below and is our Required Reading this week. You can also hear Steve talk at the FreshNetworks Breakfast Briefing on Thursday 18th February: Strengthen your membership strategy with social media.

I’ve always supported Liverpool. And I’m like many modern fans – I watch the game on TV, I follow it online, and I’ve blogged about it on and off for a few years.

However, after a particularly ignominious defeat my girlfriend jokily suggested that I should offer my services as a fan to other teams. Never jokily suggest things like that to me, because I’m stubborn, and an attention seeker. So I did it. What happened next taught me a lot about the reach of social media, and the meaning of being a football fan.

Deciding that I couldn’t possibly follow another football team, I compiled a list of teams in other sports, and in many cases, in other countries. These included:
•    UK basketball, ice hockey, rugby and cricket
•    US basketball, NFL, ice hockey and baseball
•    Aussie Rules

After sourcing email addresses for various different teams, I sent them the following message:

Greetings,

My name is Richie, and I humbly offer my services as your newest diehard fan.

Allow me to explain. I have been a fan of Liverpool Football Club since I was old enough to know what football was. I have loved the team and the club every day since. Until now. I have been concerned for some time about the takeover of the club by Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and the declining performances of the team under manager Rafael Benitez. This week, in the wake of an abusive email to a fellow supporter by Tom Hicks Jr, a member of the board, and the extra time capitulation to Reading in the FA Cup, I’ve finally given up on Liverpool FC, and am hereby tendering my resignation as a fan. While some part of me will always love LFC, I resent being seen as a cash cow by the club, who have loaded LFC with debt, to the detriment of the team.

Therefore, being done with both LFC and football, I am on the lookout for another team to love – and you could be it. I have many good qualities:

•    I’m loyal (provided you don’t sell out to a bunch of cowboys and consistently trample on my dreams with scorn and impunity).
•    I’m articulate – I prefer to rebuff opposition fans through wit, and therefore defuse trouble, rather than cause it, and act as a sophisticated representative of the team.
•    I’m keen – I bring much enthusiasm to my role as fan.
•    I buy lots of merchandise, no matter how gaudy (I have both the ecru and canary yellow LFC away strips – that’s loyalty).
•    I’m on the rebound.

So what do you say? I’m casting my net wide, so why should I be your new biggest fan? Think about it – you won’t regret having a fan like me.

All the best
Richie

I started getting replies – Worcester Wolves basketball first, then Buffalo Bills and Houston Texans in the NFL, then loads of other teams all wanting me to be their fan. So I replied to some and also decided to start a blog called “Your New Diehard Fan”, with a sense of irony that got a little lost in the social media ether. I thought it would be clear that I was partly joking about quitting Liverpool, but apparently not. I just hadn’t considered the power of the internet and using social media for anything football related….

After blogging my responses for a while, I decided to boost traffic by emailing the Guardian’s Fiver – a daily satirical football mailout that gets sent out at 5pm every day. And, surprisingly, they decided to print my letter and a link to my blog.

At 16.59 that day, my blog had received 15 hits. By 17.30, it had reached 1,500 hits. My traffic for that day would end up being near 3,000 unique users. This continued for days, with word-of-mouth spreading like crazy.

I was contacted by an online ad agency that wanted to advertise on my blog. Comments were pouring in from around the world, recommending teams and sports. It was fun.

But while the Guardian was the main source of traffic to my blog, there was another site that was sending nearly as much traffic my way – an influential Liverpool FC fansite. And it was not complimentary. There was some serious verbal abuse – I was pilloried for abandoning my team and vilified for blogging about it. Even when I posted a reply laying out the jokey nature of the endeavour, I continued to be attacked.

The whole episode taught me something about football, social media and the internet. All human life is there on the internet, and social media has enabled one bored idiot to both engage and enrage thousands of people.

There were so many lovely comments from the teams themselves, and from people commenting on the blog, many of whom would leave their email address and twitters – in short, they connected their comments to themselves in a more concrete way via social media. It was heartwarming. But it also showed me how many people hide behind the anonymity of the internet to say things and espouse opinions that they would not dare to say in person. Maybe that anonymity is liberating, but I couldn’t help but think that the reaction of some of the fans was excessive. What it does show is that if you want to succeed in the social media sphere, you need to know your stuff.

Sometimes it seems that the internet is full of people who talk a lot, with nothing to say, and that messages can get lost and ignored. It was interesting to see how something which started out on a whim could get noticed with so little effort. But I might keep my head down for a while…

Guest post by Richie Jones from FreshMinds Research

It’s been an interesting afternoon for Vodafone. Their VodafoneUK Twitter account has attracted a lot of attention after one Tweet in particular stood out from their usual customer service conversations online. In between the Tweets resolving network coverage and other queries one stood out. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

The official response from Vodafone (as you can see from almost every message they have sent since on Twitter) is that it was a breach of rules by an internal member of staff and that they are dealing with it internally. This is the kind of PR that any company doesn’t want, and as it was done through Twitter it will no doubt be held up by some as one of the downsides of social media and of engaging with customers online in this way.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone today. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

Managing your brand in social media

We’ve posted before about how to write your firm’s social media policy and, perhaps more importantly, what to do once your firm’s social media policy is written. The basic principal is that it is the quality of your staff and the relationships they make with customers that will make all the difference. Not the technology you use or any technological solutions you put in place. The general principal is that if you trust your staff to represent your brand in traditional media, then you should be able to trust them in social media.

Of course, Vodafone may not today be able to empathise with this and there are some differences. Notably that anybody with access to a Twitter account will be able to say something that is immediately and directly communicated to customers. This is a huge responsibility and one that people should not take lightly. But it is a responsibility that brands should give to their staff and one that is most important when building your brand online and in social media. Whilst there are many agencies out there who can help to manage your brand online for you, with the appropriate training and support (which may need to come from a specialist social media agency) the best person to represent your brand online are your own employees.

The key things here are:

1. Have a culture where social media is acceptable. Encourage your staff to use social media so that they become comfortable with it and that is becomes part of your culture. This is a big shift for many organisations and one they are often nervous of.
2. Have ongoing social media training across the business. Things change and they change quickly in social media. A firm that wants to position itself best online needs a regular and ongoing set of training and ideas and knowledge share. Try things out and share what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
3. Trust people but have a very clear policy in place. You should trust people to interact with your customers online but be aware of what they are doing. It is not one-to-one communications, nor is it always one-to-many. You are talking to one person but in a very public environment. Recognise this and have policies and processes in place for this new way of communicating. But make these policies simple and clear to understand.

And whatever happens you need to be aware of the risks and have processes for dealing with them. Social media is growing and changing rapidly and as such can be a very forgiving place if you approach things in the right way. Everybody is experimenting and will often forgive you if things go wrong and you handle them in the right way. For me this is what Vodafone got right.

What we can learn from Vodafone’s response

When things go wrong the way to respond to it can be simple. Vodafone did two things that all brands can learn from. Whilst there will be discussions, debate and probably some negativity about what was said this afternoon for sometime, fundamentally, Vodafone should not suffer too much damage, because:

1. They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.
2. They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

So lots that we can learn and lots that they got right. But no doubt a challenging day for Vodafone today.

Some more reading

• Vodafone suspends employee after obscene tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Top five Twitter gaffes (guardian.co.uk)
• Vodafone suspends employee over obscene Twitter update (telegraph.co.uk)

Many people will have woken up this morning to another change to the Facebook user interface. You can read more about the redesign over on Mashable, but in summary the social network has:

• Improved its use of the main panel across the site, but especially for displaying photos. These are now displayed larger and more prominently
• Made messaging easier – taking it from being on a separate page to being a drop-down on any page. Giving the user immediate and convenient access to their inbox
• Put all notifications in one place in the top navigation – messages, updates and alerts now all show together in the top navigation
• Made the search box much more prominent

This last change is, perhaps, the most significant. It is much more than just moving and making the search box larger. It shows the importance of search to Facebook, and indeed to all social networks.

Why search is important in social networks

Social networks and online communities generate a lot of content. In online communities, people are there because they share similar interests, experiences or concerns. They are connected by content and so this content tends to be focused on a set of topics, subjects or questions of interest. In social networks, people are there because they are connected to each other because they know each other, have worked at or been to the same place, live near each other or have some other connection other than just the content. In these places, content will be about a range of disparate subjects, discussed by different people at different times and for different reasons.

The approach to findability in these two environments differs. In online communities search is important, but of equal importance is the way you structure the site, and the way you use taxonomies to arrange and sort content. In an online community for people interested in organic food, for example, you might organise your content so that all your recipes are together, and so that you can easily find all content about sweet potatoes. In a social network it is less easy to organise and then find all the content in this way. So it is less about structure and taxonomies and more about very good search.

Facebook is a great example of a social network where good search would make a huge difference to how much use it can make of, and how much value it can get from, all the content added to it every day. The company’s own statistics claim that 3.5 billion pieces of content are added to the social network every day. If I want to find all the content about, for example, one topic or issue it is currently very difficult for me to do so. Search should be the answer to this. If I search for ‘Holborn’, I want to find events in that area of London, public conversations about it, photos with that place in the description, pages talking abotu Holborn and so forth. Maximising the benefit of all this content will make a huge difference in the way people use the site and the way Facebook can use this content.

Facebook’s more prominent search box is much more than just a design change. It reflects the absolute importance of search in social networks. They are different to online communities where structure and taxonomies can help people to find content across the site. Facebook is huge, but to many of us feels very small. We mainly access content through feeds, messages and notifications. Training us as users to make search an integral part of our Facebook experience will make it a much bigger and more useful tool for us all.

Both not-for-profit and membership organisations rely on their members.  There’s just no getting away from that fact. And in order to increase their membership base both nfp and membership organisations need to interact with the public to gain support.

Several charities have already turned to social media as a way of engaging people. A  recent article from Third Sector reported that charities are using blogs, forums and other social media tools to highlight their key aims and encourage word-of-mouth . Large charities like Cancer Research, Amnesty International and ActionAid are all using social media, in particular, blogging, to increase their online presence. But are they using social media to actively strengthen their membership base or is it just another communication tool?

And what about membership organisations? Membership organisations are traditionally viewed as a source of specialist information and advice. They also provide an arena for networking with people who have a similar interest, profession or background.  Today, however,  many of these services are offered elsewhere for free. Search engines give people the ability to look up detailed information on the web.  Social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, allow people to reach out and communicate with people “like them”, giving them the opportunity to seek advice and to interact with each other without the need of a third party.

So as more and more people use social media tools to interact and connect with like-minded people, membership organisations need to develop a social media strategy to harness and utilise these connections.  Membership organisations need to join the online conversation. They need to use social media to engage with the people who would be interested in joining their group – and often these people are already talking to eachother, so this should be easy to do.

With this in mind, we’re running a free breakfast seminar for nfp and membership organisations on how to strengthen membership strategy with social media.  The event starts at 8.30am on Thursday 18th February and will include useful tips, advice and case studies from the likes of  Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services at Breast Cancer Care, and Steve Bridger, Social Media Consultant for nfp and membership organisations.

If you’re an nfp or membership organisation and you want to find out how you can strengthen your membership strategy with social media you can register below for the event.

Strengthen your membership strategy with social media

• Location: FreshNetworks, 229 High Holborn, WC1V 7DA,  London (map)
• Date and time: Thursday February 18, 2010, 08:30-10:30

We’ve had a new look to the blog at FreshNetworks this month, but our aim is still the same. To bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in January.

1. Why the retweet is a powerful engagement tool

The retweet on Twitter, and Facebook’s new ‘via’ feature are very powerful tools in these social networks. In any online community or social network, some people are more active than others. In fact, in a natural online community we would expect that out of every 100 users, only one will originate new content. The retweet provides a way for these other users to express their opinion. Say that they agree with something that others have said or just promote content.

Social media is about more than just generating new content, people play many different roles and the retweet is a way to let people do this.

2. Social media as a crisis management tool

When crisis happens, you will typically see a lot of people discussing, debating, and complaining about your brand online. Many of these discussions will be factually inaccurate, and many will be from customers who have had bad experiences. These are the types of discussions that should be responded to, and should be responded to in the right manner.

In this post we looked at a how brands can use social media when a crisis hits, but perhaps more importantly why they should be engaging people in social media before the crisis.

3. The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

4. Social Media Case study: Vitamin Water’s newest flavour created by Facebook fans

Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product. In this post we look at what Vitamin Water did and how they used social media to help to test and develop a new flavour.

5. Essential reading for online community managers

There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point). In this short post, we look specifically at things that help managing and growing communities online. There are many great books, articles and blogs out there and we’d love you to share your favourites in the comments below the post. But this is a good starting point and we would consider them essential reading for online community managers.

For those of you who don’t already know, this week is Social Media Week. A week of social media conferences, meetups and events taking place in multiple cities around the world, including New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and Sao Paulo.

The aim of social media week is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and not-for-profit sectors. So to do our bit for the cause we’re holding “Doughnuts for Drupal” – a free, informal breakfast discussion about using Drupal as a social media platform.

If you’re a Drupal programmer, developer or blogger (or a “Drupalite” as we like to say) then pop along and join in the Drupal fun. Free coffee and doughnuts will be served from 8.30am on Friday 5th February at our offices in High Holborn, London.

Charlie Osmond, our MD, will give a quick introduction to the session at 9.00am followed by an open discussion about  Drupal.  James Andre and Marcus Deglos, our very own “Drupalites”, will also be on hand to answer questions.

The gathering is also the unofficial launch of the London Drupal Hub. With several Drupalites on board already, we have the basis for a hub of Drupal activity, knowledge sharing and best practice right here in our central London offices.

To register your interest, or for more information about the meetup please email jo.stratmann@freshnetworks.com or call us on 0207 692 4376.

Address: Kingsbourne House, 229 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7DA

Trojan Horse from shutterstock

A post on the econsultancy blog this week told the story of Jason Calacanis’ iPad hoax. This is the most recent example of social media spreading lies at pace.

The viral potential of social media makes it a powerful tool for seeding and rapidly diseminating information. Sometimes that information is accurate and sometimes inaccurate. And it’s a sad indictment of human gullibility that messages originating from a seemingly respected source are too often believed first and questioned second.

There are also numerous examples which show that well-packaged information, shared on social networks, can make patently false statistics seem plausible.

Below are two videos that did the rounds last year. Thanks to good production skills, the videos appear to be professional and as a result they were believed by far too many people. The first video is pretty harmless – a riff on the Did You Know video mixed in with a little Social Media Evolution.

Did You Know 4.0

The second video is more worrying. It’s a politically motivated anti-muslim film that masquerades as balanced (it was apparently uploaded by “firendsofmuslim”). However it is highly charged and many of the key statistics are false.
Muslim Demographics

Sure, it’s the message, not the medium that is the real issue here. And social media ought to be capable of quashing the incorrect information, fallicies and hoaxes just as it lets them propagate in the first place. The online community from Snopes is a great example of social-media-driven crowdsourced fact checking.

And, I’m glad to say there were a few responses to the Muslim Demographics video that tried to set the record straight. For example, BBC Radio4’s More or Less team probed (as they always do) the claims in more detail and posted the following response to clarify inaccuracies.

Muslim Demographics: the truth

Yet there is still reason for concern. Over 11million people watched the sensationalist version and only a few thousand saw the responses. I think the makers of this video have achieved their aim. They successfully used social media marketing to spread anti-muslim feeling and distrust.

Traditional v’s Social Media
But we live in a world of dodgy dossiers. Just because social media can spread lies, does that mean we’d have been better off sticking with traditional media?

Traditional mass media does have a reputation to protect: newspapers may have built up their brand equity over decades, they face a higher risk of lawsuits and have to answer to ombudsmen, shareholders and advertiser pressure.  Compare that to an upstart video-jockey with a good idea for making a splash and you can see that there is a lot less to lose.

The Economist on social networking - world of connections

What joy. This week,  The Economist, every Capitalist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking.

A World of Connections, provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out my summary of key highlights below.

Introduction: A world of connections

1. “Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play”
2. Facebook users post over 55m updates a day. 70% of users live outside the US.
3. Social networks are superb tools for mass communication [NB the report is a bit light on their strategic use as a driver of 1-to-1 customer-to-company communication]
4. “the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy”
5. Social Networks have “become important vehicles for news and channels of influence”. Indeed, they “played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama”
6. To sceptics all the “talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making“. Social networks still “need to prove to the world that they are here to stay”

“This special report … will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think … and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.”

Facebook’s growth: Why social networks have grown so fast—and how Facebook has become so dominant

1. How the network-effect can drive lightning fast growth on a relatively modest marketing budget.
2. An openness to external developers helped create thousands of apps. These apps provide part of the service and additional reasons to spend time on Facebook.
3. Social networks have been beneficiaries of a fall in the cost of data storage and have also been “able to use free, open-source software to build systems that scale quickly and easily”
4. In a feat of technical wizardry, Facebook’s engineers “quintupled the performance of an open-source memory system called memcached, which allows frequently used data to be retrieved faster than if stored in a database.
5. Facebook Connect is one of the firm’s most important innovations as it allows members to take their social graph wherever they go on the web.

Twitter’s transmitters: The magic of 140 characters

1. A key difference between Facebook and Twitter comes from the nature of relationships that underlie them. “On Facebook, users can communicate directly only if one of them has agreed to be a “friend” of the other. On Twitter, people can sign up to follow any public tweets they like”
2. The most prolific 10% of Tweeters account for 90% of all tweets
3. Another big difference between Twitter and Facebook is in the kind of content that gets sent over their networks. Facebook allows people to exchange videos, photos and other material, whereas Twitter is part-blog, part e-mail [I disagree with this. On the surface Twitter looks like a text tool, but many tweets link to videos, photos or other media].

Social Networks making money: Profiting from friendship

1. When it comes to turning users into profits, social networks face two issues. Firstly, users are taking part to spend time with friends, so they do not pay attention to ads. Secondly, brands are nervous about appearing alongside unregulated comments and other content.
2. Click-through rates are low, but the amount spent on adverts is increasing despite the recession.
3. In part this may be because Marketers recognise the value that personal recommendations can have on buying behaviour. And social networks provide an opportunity for viral marketing.
4. During 2009, Facebook turned cash-flow positive on revenues thought to be in the region of $500m.
5. Games, virtual gifts, premium services and search rights are becoming an important part of some social networks’ revenue streams

Social Media for Small Business: A peach of an opportunity

1. They cover the well known Kogi BBQ social media success story and mention that according to Razorfish 44% of people follow brands on Twitter  for deals [NB the methodology used in this research was rightly brought into question by Susan Braton in a recent DishyMix podcast]
2. Social networks can provide a great launchpad for startups thanks to their reach.
3. This article then randomly veers off into social gaming. A subject that deserves it’s own dedicated piece. But you can’t have everything.

Internal social networks: Yammering away at the office

1. Social networks are being used to break down internal barriers in the corporate world.
2. Informal conversations they allow can be a catalyst for creativity and new ideas.
3. “The networks are also a great way to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organisation”

Recruitment in a social world: Social Contracts: the smart way to hire workers

1. Social networks, such as Linkedin and Xing help firms cut search costs
2. Business social networks help improve the efficiency of the labour market
3. They have also made recruitment more transparent as recruiters go onto social networks to check up on candidates ahead of making an hire

As an aside, if you’re interested in social media for recruitment here are a few relevant posts from our sister company, FreshMinds Talent:

How to use Web2.0 for recruitment
Social Media and the forefront of the job market
How to imporve your Linkedin profile

Privacy in social media: Privacy 2.0

1. Privacy could be the Achilles heel of social networks. Users could decide to start reducing what they are prepared to share with the world online.
2. Social networks have been developing privacy controls that give users the ability to edit what can and cannot be seen. However these are often hidden away within sites and social networks are making blatant attempts to encourage more sharing of data not less.

The Future of Social Media Towards a socialised state

1. Social connectivity could become ubiquitous
2. Mobile adoption will fuel future growth in social networking
3. Facebook says that mobile users of the site are almost 50% more active than regular users
4. Geo-networking apps may be the next big thing [unsurprisingly, the Economist can't resist a fleeting mention of Foursquare, the social network tipped for big things in 2010]

Conclusion

It’s great to see social media and social networking getting reported in such depth by mainstream media. This Economist report is not exactly cutting edge when it comes to social media insight or analysis. However it does provide a great base level for the 99% of the business world who do not spend their days glued to Tweetdeck.

Even if the above is not new to you, I recommend you read the report purely for a lesson in good business writing. As ever, The Economist delivers on elegant prose that neatly and efficiently flows from point to point.

Was there anything in the report that leapt out at you?