But when you start putting names to the businesses that were in those buildings, suddenly the extent of the damage becomes very real.

These are the building that will be either demolished (or have already been demolished), will be partially demolished or will need extensive work to make them safe.

The table from canterburyearthquake.org.nz shows their address, the name of the business or building, the extent of the damage and whether or not the building is listed as a heritage building.

Unlike the official list, I’ve sorted these by street name to make them easier to locate:

Many of these businesses will mean something to the people of Christchurch. I was particularly saddened to see names such as the Press Building, the former Civic buildings, C4 Coffee, Mckenzie and Willis … actually forget that, every building on the list is a sad story.

Update: Looks like Diamond Harbour’s Godley House is also to be demolished according to this article on the Christchurch City Council website. Sucks. I used to love heading out that way on my friend’s motorbike on a sunny day. Good times.

You can view the official list and find links to download it in spreadsheet format or view a full map of the buildings on the Canterbury Earthquake website.

Christchurch builders, Carl and Maria McHaffie of McHaffie Homes, are running around the city right now taking care of earthquake damaged homes and workplaces.

One of their key specialities right now appears to be chimney removal! I joined them this morning to take down a friend’s chimney that looked like it was about to fall. We removed the bricks layer by layer from the top down using a mallet and chisel. By the time we got to the last 4 or 5 levels, we no longer needed the mallet as the mortar had crumbled and the bricks were completely loose following the earthquake. Another good aftershock and the whole thing would have collapsed and gone through the neighbour’s window.

If you have a chimney, wall, ceiling or anything else that needs a professional builder’s attention in Christchurch, give Carl and Maria a call on 021 406 112 or at the office (03) 351 5382 (although they’ll be better on the cellphone as they’ll probably be on the road). Tell them I sent you!

Update: I’ve spent a lot of time on roofs myself over the past few days since the 22nd February earthquake (or aftershock). Check out my how-to guide on short term roof repairs on the new blog post ‘Earthquake Roof Repairs‘.

Note that the title of this blog post could also be “Sucking up to corporates sometimes pays off”.

Less than a year ago, I bought a touch screen LG KP500 mobile phone and inserted my Vodafone SIM card. “Look at me,” I would sing in the streets, “I’ve got a flashy phone and it’s way cheaper than your iPhone”. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the display recently broke.

I contacted the supplier and they cheerfully pointed out that screens aren’t covered in the warranty and that repairing it would cost about the same as a new phone.

Not having a great deal of money (for God’s sake, I’m writing a blog and it has ads on it. Why am I not rich yet? Damn you), I decided to try an alternative method of funding a new phone.

Caution: if throwing away all self respect and dignity while begging for money from big companies is the kind of thing that makes you cringe, why not read that blog post where I made a funny Twitter picture instead?

So anyway, I decided to write to Vodafone. I dug out their customer support email address, licked the end of my virtual biro and began to type. I won’t put the whole email in here but here are some typical extracts:

Dear Vodafone,

First off, I’d like to apologise for not buying my cell phone through one of your fine stores – so much finer than the stores of those “other” two phone networks (spits).

Not surprisingly, the screen on my cellphone broke recently. Clearly, non-Vodafone phones are not built up to Vodafone’s high standards …

after some more shameless groveling and general ass-kissing, I went straight to the point …

So now to the reason of my contact. If you, oh mighty Vodafone, were to accidentally slip $150 or so as credit onto my Vodafone account, I would go right round to the Vodafone store on Colombo Street (Chch) and purchase a new Vodafone cellphone. Everybody wins!

I shall then go to my blog (sorry, readership numbers are pretty crap. Let’s just say you wouldn’t call me an “influencer”) and I will wax lyrical about how mightily fine Vodafone are.

Good plan yes?

Yours Hopingly,

Mark
>cellphone number<
P.S. don’t call me on this number – the screen’s broken.

After just a few days, I received a response. To my surprise, it wasn’t “Hi. Vodafone have received your contact. Thank you for your contact. We will not be contacting you again.” It was in fact:

Hi Mark,

I am sorry to hear of the issues surrounding your mobile phone.

After further consideration of the circumstances although we cannot offer a credit of $150 what I would be happy to offer is a handset voucher to the value of $65. This can be used as a part purchase of a new mobile phone at participating retail stores. If you’re keen let me know and I’ll get a voucher organised for you.

Result! I quickly responded and received a reply straight back with:

Glad to hear you have accepted the offer. The voucher has been sent via email. Hopefully you can find a new phone to your liking.

Have an awesome week.

How cool is that? So I headed down to Dick Smith – they couldn’t take the voucher at their store, Harvey Norman – they didn’t even get to look at the voucher as they’d advertised completely the wrong price on their website for the phone I was after (after 3 staff told me they didn’t even know what their website address is. It’s harveynorman.co.nz), Bond and Bond – they had no idea how to process the voucher and called 4 other stores including Noel Leeming without any success … and so I finally headed to the Vodafone store itself. They were great.

Voucher accepted, phone purchased and now, blog written. My side of the deal is complete!

To top it all off, Vodafone have been great on Twitter. They’re a great example of how a large corporation is using Twitter to interact with their client base. I even told everyone how awesome they were and that I’d be announcing why soon (this is the announcement) and they responded straight away, showing how keen they were to hear from an influencer such as myself …

Good on ya Vodafone and cheers for the voucher.

P.S. I believe you too can try and sponge free stuff from Vodafone by sucking up to @VodafoneTreats. Good luck!

Quite an interesting experience. It’s strange to walk into a cafe and up to a group of strangers sitting around a table and say “So … are you the people from Twitter because if not you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about right now”. It’s also one of the few occasions where people have had to introduce themselves twice; once with their real name and once with their Twitter ID. I had it pretty easy as my Twitter ID is my name: www.twitter.com/marklincoln kinda boring really!

The event was quite a good experience though. It’s great to put a face to the Twitter ID and meet a lot of great business people from Christchurch’s relatively small community. I look forward to the next #chchtweetup!

Whenever I get an inquiry from a prospect I haven’t heard of, or I want to find info on an industry colleague or a competitor, I always Google their name.

If they have a unique name, you’re bound to track them down.

However, it’s always been difficult if you have a common name like mine, Mark Lincoln, which is also a model name of an American car (see pic).

So today I set up a Google profile. These profiles then appear at the bottom of the first page of results for Google name searches in order to help people find you.

Really it’s just another excuse to build your online presence, but it does help correlate all your personal online sites into one easy to find profile.

This profile links directly with my blogspot (which you happen to be reading), my YouTube (set up with my Google account), my Gmail account (Google mail) as well as others such as Twitter, Flickr etc.

Is Google taking over the world? Probably. Vote for Google! (I can see it now. A Google world like in those sci-fi movies where one corporation runs the planet)

Would you walk up to a stranger in the street, hand them your favourite photographs and say, “you’re free to use these for anything you like”?

No? Well, if you have ever posted a photo to a social site such as Facebook, this is exactly what you are doing. And you’re not just handing them to anyone. You’re giving them to a company that currently has a vested interest in finding new ways to produce more cash flow for itself.

Giving up your rights

More and more individuals and companies are using social media methods to broadcast their brand. But exactly what are you giving up when you post images on social sites?

Concerning user uploaded content, Facebook’s policy states:

“By posting user content to any part of the site, you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence … to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such user content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise. … Facebook does not assert any ownership over your user content.”

While arguably it is written this way so that Facebook can use content in promotional ways without fear of liability, the clause is written in such a way that Facebook could use the images as a stock photo library if it wanted. Facebook are telling you they can do pretty much anything they like with your images and videos, although ownership technically remains with you.

This isn’t just for images and photos. If you’re posting a series of blog articles or “wall” posts that are attracting a lot of attention, Facebook have the right to correlate these and make their own book! You may delete this content but Facebook retain the right to make copies of the content you have uploaded, and these copies will remain.

The really scary thing is that Facebook “reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice”. Blimey! Would you go into any other contract in business knowing that at any point, the other party could completely change their terms and conditions?? Any section that details whatever rights you may have left … could be deleted in a heartbeat without your consultation.

Some users have already taken Facebook to court over use of images. Facebook photos of people who have been in the news have appeared in newspapers with “Photos courtesy of Facebook” underneath.

Not on Facebook? Your photos may be.

Many people are unaware their images are hosted by Facebook. Some blogs allow you to upload photos but use Facebook’s hosting service on Facebook’s terms. You can tell if your photo is hosted on Facebook by right clicking the image and checking for the domain names of “photos-d.ak.facebook.com”, or “photos-921.ll.facebook.com”, etc.

Be aware that sites like Facebook are not free services. You are paying for their services with your personal information and content. Facebook are currently dreaming up new ways to exploit this information in order to make them money. And remember that the terms and conditions that exist when you first sign up may well change at any point without your direct notification.

What can be done?

Really, nothing can be done if you’re using Facebook. By using their service, you are agreeing to their terms. In this relationship, they are the big guys, you are the little guy. If you want to continue to use Facebook, you can try contacting them to voice your concerns.

For the rest of us, there are sites that specialise in photo sharing for professionals and so make their range of privacy options well known, easy to understand and easy to change. Flickr have an extensive range of privacy options and take care to protect the rights of their members. Try right-click-saving an image posted by a user who has fully reserved rights. You’ll simply download a “spaceball.gif” image of nothingness.

To cope with new technology and increased access to online imagery, Flickr have partnered with Creative Commons to create a license specifically for those who want to share their work with people for non-commercial use only. The sandy image on this page was taken by me, Mark Lincoln, and uploaded to Flickr using the Creative Commons license. This gives people the use to show this image for non-commercial means only, and they must credit the image to myself.

Either way, when signing up to any online service, be sure to check the terms and conditions to ensure your rights are protected … before you click “I agree”!

This reminded me about a phone call I received last week from a popular cell-phone network. The salesman, let’s call him Bob, promptly ran into a speech offering me a free cell phone and all sorts of amazing bonuses in a call plan for my business and began the usual line of questioning resulting in “yes” answers to hook me into the conversation.

Something along the lines of …

“Would you like a top of the range cell-phone for free? Would you like 30 minutes of free call time?”

I was very busy at the time but I always feel for these telemarketers as we’ve all had to make cold calls at some point. Particularly as I once answered “No” to the first question and completely stumped the unfortunate caller.

Wanting to cut to the chase, I asked a number of times what would be involved for me to get this amazing deal and the answer each time took us back to the beginning of the conversation:

“Well … you get a free cell phone and 30 minutes of call time”

After much banging the receiver against my head, I finally extracted the keystone of the entire conversation: I would have to sign up to a call plan that would cost $45 a month.

Had Bob answered my obviously impatient “let me get back to work” flavoured question at the beginning of the conversation, he would have discovered I only have a pre-pay cell phone which I rarely use for calls, with a total bill of $5 per month. Mostly spent replying to my fiancé’s numerous texts.

Bob the cell-phone man and Tim the real estate guy both tried to hide the truth in order to gain interest and land a sale. The problem is, once the deception has been exposed, who’s going to trust the company enough to do business with them? Not me.

Two more topical examples of deception are the Telecom advertising series that uses actors to portray made-up Telecom clients, and the safety campaign for side air-bags that uses an actor rather than a genuine accident victim. Both of these examples have arguments for and against their deception.

However, I am a firm believer that honesty and business can still walk hand in hand down the happy path of success.

So here’s to the Campaign for Honesty in Business! Let’s treat people like the intelligent professionals they are and generate some genuine trust in our business dealings.