Month: May 2009 | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

ABC Nightlife, 28 May 2009

abcbanner_local I’ll be doing the May Nightlife with Tony Delroy and Laurel Papworth to discuss the business uses of Social Media.

Some of the topics we’ll cover are;

how do we make sure that our photos, videos and jokes are seen only by our friends and not by the boss or our mum?
If you do lose your job, how can you use social media to get another one?
how can businesses use social networks to find staff?
explain how business and people can get loans through social networks
why workplaces don’t trust these tools and ban them
what downsides are there of social media? What are the legal traps and risks to your reputation?

We’ll be live across Australia on ABC Local Radio. The show starts at 10pm and we’ll be taking questions from around 10.30. Call in early on 1300800222 in Australia or +61 28333 1000 for international callers.

Tune in through your local ABC station or stream online through the Nightlife website.

The Australian Future Summit

The Future Summit 2009 was two days of discussion on Australia’s future challenges and opportunies by the Australian Davos Foundation.

The idea is terrific – all too often Australia’s political, business and economic discussion is bogged down in soundbites and opportunism. So an event that gets people thinking beyond the next opinion poll or financial report is welcome.

While it did spark thinking, it was probably not in the way many attendees hoped.

Twitterer IRLDexter asked Suits,suits,suits… Does the style and conformity reflect the thinking?.

Sadly, the answer was “yes”.

The Future Summit showed the Australian establishment is pretty well homogeneous. There’s not a great deal of dissent among the nation’s political, public service, academic or business elites.

Probably the clearest example of groupthink was in the economic discussions. The various panels’ opinion of the future can be summarised with “Australia’s right mate; once the Chinese get their act together we’ll be back on track to a self funded, negatively geared retirement, powered by nuclear energy and clean coal”.

That’s nice, but that view really lacks vigour at the very least it’s a lazy view of Australia’s future direction. We need more heretics and more new ideas.

On the economics front a few heretics, say a Steve Keen, might have pointed we need a plan B just in case the Chinese economy doesn’t come to our rescue.

The Future Summit is a great idea and hopefully its going to continue into the future, but to provide some real forward thinking and debate, we’re going to need more outsiders to upset the Australian establishment’s narrow view.

I look forward to next years summit. Hopefully we’ll have some heretics, entrepreneurs and younger voices to balance the establishment’s complacent conformity.

Computer hostility

While at the Sydney CeBIT last week, a speaker made a comment about how getting managers to accept social media is a big step given many proudly complain they know nothing about computers and care even less.

A few days later when flying down to Melbourne for the Future Summit, I read an article by Glenn Wheeler telling how he smashed his computer after getting a virus, an act he said “sent a warm feeling through my body.”

Bizarre.

I’ve long lost count of the people who tell me they are proud to know nothing about computers but I still get rattled by people who are openly and proudly hostile to technology.

The problem for these people is they are being left behind, just like the Luddites they are well on their way to becoming a historical curiousity.

That’s fine for Glenn and other individuals, it’s good not to know anything about anything if you wish to be ignorant. But a business that chooses to ignore technology is quickly losing ground to smarter competitors.

Ignorance isn’t a good look at any time, but it’s even worse when it’s killing your business.

Why networking is essential

I met a business owner last week who complained other business at his local chamber of commerce meetings spent most of their exchanging business cards.

He couldn’t see this was the point of a local chamber of commerce; to meet and get to know the other businesses in your community.

Community is what business is about. Every business, big and small, is part of a community. Put those communities together and we have a society.

Running a business is a social endeavour above everything else and networking is one a required skill. Some of us do it well while many of us do it poorly.

But you still have to do it.

If you have a problem networking, or you don’t like exchanging business cards, then you need to hire or partner with someone who does.

ABC Weekend computers

The next ABC spot is this Sunday at 10am on 702 Sydney.

Join Paul Wallbank and Simon Marnie to discuss what you should be looking for in new computers and end of financial year technology shopping.

Your comments and questions are welcome so call in on 1300 222 702 or SMS on 19922702.

If you aren’t in the 702 Sydney area, you can listen online through the 702 website.

Weekend computers on LinkedIn events
Weekend Computers on Facebook events

A failure of trust and communication

Webcentral’s much publicised e-mail failure left thousands of small business owners without email last week.

The most breathtaking aspect of this saga is the total lack of communication by WebCentral. They failed on every level to keep their customers informed.

A simple, short message stating there was an outage on the front page of their website and on their support lines would have saved many of their customers hours of troubleshoting and stress.

The amazing thing is after this embarrassment, WebCentral still launched their new online backup service.

The success of software as a service depends upon trust and Webcentral has shown they cannot be trusted with their client’s critical systems.

The joke is Webcentral’s parent company, Melbourne IT, uses the slogan “trusted for online success”. Webcentral has shown they cannot be trusted.