Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Eroding business silos

Knowledge is power, and the businesses who can share it are those who will define the 21st Century.

During our ABC radio discussion on politics and social media with Jeff Jarvis, we inevitably came around to the issue of sharing information.

We’ve covered the risks of personal sharing extensively and Jeff’s view is that our perceptions of privacy are evolving as we explore what is acceptable or tolerable in an information rich world.

Overlooked in this discussion is just how important sharing is for businesses – particularly in breaking down silos within an organisation.

As organisations grow, silos develop as various groups or departments grow to address specific functions. It’s a natural process.

However silos can damage businesses as valuable business knowledge is kept within the group rather than shared with the entire organisation.

This is the opportunity we see now in the various cloud computing, social media and big data tools that have developed to help people, gather, curate and share information.

Today there is no excuse for critical customer information sitting in the call centre logs not being available to marketing, sales or management teams. That is just one example of thousands.

Over time we’ll see businesses owners and managers develop the skills and tools to use data more effectively. This is already happening as many IT people move from Information Technology to Knowledge Management.

Business silos won’t ever be fully eliminated; in many ways they are necessary as you can’t expect the company accountant to know everything the customer service or sales staff do.

Those businesses who are successful will be those who overcome internal politics and resist the managerial urge to build little empires, information is too important to be hoarded by middle management princelings.

In the 19th Century power came in the form of steam engines, today it comes in knowledge. How well are you harnessing the power in your business?

Links of the day, 17 May 2012

The rise of Europe’s private internet police and how many friends can you buy on Facebook?

Foreign Policy magazine on The Rise of Europe’s Internet Police

Why a Japanese e-commerce giant is the lead investor in Pinterest.

Fast Company’s list of the most creative businesspeople in 2012.

Some interesting perspectives from the New York Times Magazine on Making Choices in the Age of Information Overload.

Buying friends on the Internet? $75 buys you a thousand on Facebook.

Join Facebook, get expelled

How can schools and parents deal with children wanting to get onto social media

Facebook is problematic for schools. On one hand it’s a great tools for kids to connect with their peers and relatives while it also can amplify problems for children who don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with online issues.

A common aspect of Facebook and many of the other social media services is that the minimum age for sign ups is thirteen years old and the consensus among online safety experts is children younger than that shouldn’t be encouraged to break the rules.

Given the issues involved with younger children using Facebook it’s not surprising that teachers and school principals try to discourage younger children from signing up.

One Queensland school principal has now ordered that any of her students breaching Facebook’s terms by signing up when under 13 will be expelled.

That’s pretty draconian although one can sympathise with the teachers, particularly given many parents allow children to sign up despite knowing they are breaking Facebook’s terms.

How the parents have reacted is interesting too, with online safety expert Susan McLean saying “”You could not print the response to the principal that some of the mothers wrote on Facebook”. None of this is surprising as some see their rights, and those of their children, as being paramount.

Facebook and other social media services are tough for parents as younger kids see their old siblings online and want to be there too. Given many teenagers build their social lives around the service, you can understand the pressure children put on mum and dad to sign them up.

As kids are going to eventually sign up to Facebook, and are probably already on services like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin, they are going to have to deal with the issues all of us encounter online. So at least if parents are supervising usage, harm can be limited.

One area that seems to be misunderstood is why Facebook has a “no under 13s” policy. It isn’t, as child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes, because Facebook care about emotionally immature children, it is due to the US COPPA law.

COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act – was passed in the late 1990s to prevent inappropriate data being collected on minors. For US based social media services it’s easier to exclude children rather than set up systems that comply with the law.

There’s many good reasons why children should be allowed to use online services, but respecting the terms of conditions of these sites is important too.

While expelling children from school may be taking things too far, it’s not good to be encouraging twelve year old kids to lie about their ages – they’ll be doing that soon enough in their late teens.

Forget Plastics, today it’s Big Data

Big Data is the IT industry’s latest buzzword but it’s been sitting on our desktop all along

“Plastics” was the career advice to uni students in the 1967 movie The Graduate. Today the same advice to a smart young entrepreneur would be “big data”.

Big data is the current buzzword for the IT industry, we’re seeing start-ups with cool tools popping up and whole new job descriptions to manage it, while big and small businesses ponder how to use another technology in their operations.

At the end of the month, the third of the City of Sydney’s 2012 Let’s Talk Business series will see SmartCompany’s James Thomson among others discussing how data drives business.

How we use data in our business is something we’ve had to come to grips with for ages, but many of us haven’t really started to find those nuggets of value in our databases.

We’ve actually been in the era of big data for decades since computers were introduced in the workplace. One thing that PCs do very well is gather and store information.

Today computerised point-of-sales systems, database software, loyalty programs and web-tracking tools mean we have a massive amount of data about our clients at our fingertips.

As computers get more powerful and cloud-based services start making detailed data analysis more available, we’re going to see even more data pouring into our businesses.

Social media services add to the data deluge as they gather, giving even more intelligence about our markets, individual customers and the performance of our businesses.

The problem is that many of us are already overwhelmed by what we have. The thought of even more data we can’t use causes many managers and business owners to hide under their desks and weep.

An article in the MIT’s Technology Review about Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania looked at this problem.

Professor’s Fader’s view is that most businesses have enough data – the problem is managing what we have, along with the risk of trying to extrapolate too much from historical information.

To deal with this overload we’re seeing companies like Kaggle starting-up to help us mine this data and get useful information about our businesses and customers.

What these data-mining companies are promising is the ability to see the patterns in what appears to be just a mass of confusing data.

Already we’re seeing businesses that can connect the dots get a head start on their slower competitors who don’t appreciate the value locked in their databases and CRMs.

Making sense of the data we’re accumulating is the real challenge. If we’re not paying attention to what we already have then there’s little point in gathering more.

Tickets for How Your Customer Data Can Drive New Business at the Sydney Town Hall on May 29 are still available.

Links of the day 16 May 2012

China, London’s Olympic bid and quit Facebook or else.

Today’s notable links are a great read with Letters of Note’s stunning letter from Ronald Reagan to his newly engaged son, worrying developments in China and an excellent read on London’s Olympic bid.

Vanity Fair on London’s convoluted, difficult and expensive Olympic bid. This was the basis of today’s blog post.

China’s currency exodus accelerates. Watch how this story affects James Packer and the Macau casino boom.

A stunning letter from Ronald Reagan congratulating his newly engaged son. This is well worth a read.

Entitled apparatchiks never learn. Dominique Strauss-Kahn sues his accuser.

China starts to crack down on foreign workers. Is this part of a bigger trend?

Quit Facebook or be expelled says a Queensland primary school principal.

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at politicians and online media as well as the age of Facebook users. Be sure to join us tomorrow night on ABC Nightlife.

ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

How politicians are using the web and social media to push their message

Politicians around the world have discovered social media and the web. Australia’s political parties are gearing up to copy Barak Obama’s 2008 online campaigns.

Paul, Tony Delroy and Jeff Jarvis – Associate Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York and the author of “Public Parts: How sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live” discussed how politicians are using social media to get into your inbox.

The program is available from the ABC Nightlife website. If you’d still like to make comments or ask questions, feel free to have your say below.

To show what politicians are doing with online media, here are some examples from the Obama 2008 US Presidential campaign.

The Art of The Possible – An overview of the Obama – Biden 2008 campaign that defined modern digital political campaigns.
One of the most interesting phenomenons in the 2008 Obama campaign was The Great Schlep (language warning). Can you imagine a campaign like this in Australia?
Blue State Digital tools were developed for the campaign. These are now being used in Australia.

Some of the topics we looked at include;

Australian politicians don’t seem to have used the web very well. Why is that?
What are the ways overseas politicians using social media?
How do these integrate with the political parties’ existing databases?
Does this fit into the term Big Data we’re hearing about businesses?
Doesn’t this all create opportunities for false identities and campaigns?
Can you keep the parties off your computer?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Are the Olympics a curse for the host city?

Do the Olympics damage the hosting country’s businesses and economy?

With just over two months until the start of the London Olympics, the inevitable cold feet about the wisdom of the project have started. Vanity Fair details the convoluted bidding process while Business Insider gives the 32 reasons why they think the 2012 Olympics will be a disaster.

Conventional wisdom is the Olympics leaves the host city – and often the nation – in a collective emotional, if not economic, depression.

In the case of Athens it may even be an economic depression, although it would be drawing a long bow to suggest the 2004 Olympics are responsible for the economic predicament Greece finds itself in today.

But is true that the Olympics are “cursed”? Or is the truth more complex than that?

For cities hosting the Olympics, the core problem is the size of the event with the 2012 games expecting 10,000 athletes from 182 countries in over 300 competitions. The Olympics are several orders of magnitude bigger than any other comparable sporting event such as the FIFA World Cup.

Given the size, it’s not surprising host cities suffer an Olympic hangover – there is no way any country, even China, can sustain the frantic hyperactivity a host city goes through in the years of preparation.

China is a good example of an economy that didn’t suffer after the Olympics and the event was more a proclamation that the country had arrived as a global power.

This is common with successful Olympics – Spain in 1992, South Korea in 1988, Japan in 1960 and arguably Australia in 1956 – were all turning points for those countries and the games announced their new position in the world.

Australia though is an interesting case with the two Olymipcs they have hosted,while the 1956 Olympics did change Melbourne, and Australia’s, self image the story is different for the 2000 Sydney event.

In the run up to the 2000 Olympics Sydneysiders, like myself, were sceptical. The city couldn’t run a decent railway for crying out loud, so how could we expect to run a decent Olympic games?

All the scepticism vanished on the weekend of 20th August, 2000 when the blue line marking the marathon route appeared across the city. It was as if a switch had been flipped; the few remaining doubters skipped town and everyone else had a party.

The optimism in Sydney and Australia at the end of the games was clear; the country could pull off the world’s biggest event and the opportunities were boundless.

But Sydney and Australia squibbed it – rather than building on the Olympic success and the preceding decade of reform, the nation looked inwards, decided to invest in new kitchens and today the country is more dependent on mineral exports than any time since the 1850s gold rush.

Much of the blame for this can be put on Australia’s political establishment, specifically two men – Prime Minister John Howard and NSW Premier Bob Carr.

Both men were, or are, very effective tactical politicians who were good at winning elections but were by no means visionaries or nation builders was not their thing. So the opportunities presented to Australia in the early 2000s were squandered on Carr’s short term opportunism and Howard building his middle class welfare state.

There’s no reason why there should be an Olympic curse, for some cities it’s a timing issue. For Athens the economic cycle was against them while politics damaged the Olympics of the 1970s and 80s.

On the other hand for cities like Seoul, Tokyo and Barcelona the Olympics were a coming of age for a growing country.

The challenge for Boris Johnson and David Cameron is to translate London’s Olympics into building Britain’s confidence. While the economic tide seems to be against them, much of their political legacy will be judged against on how well they do.

Links of the day 15 May 2012

Today’s links are another diverse bunch ranging from how Nokia can save itself, the compelling story of a US execution and how a Unicorn harpooned a whale.

Russia Today’s Capital Account on JP Morgan’s “Unicorn Hedge” Fairytale Harpoons the London Whale.

A powerful story from Al-Jazeera – An Anatomy of an American Execution.

Giga Om looks at a cute way some online services are arbitraging how Facebook acts as a gatekeeper in displaying news. Only read this if you’re a serious search or social media geek.

You know an online sensation is well past its peak when big business starts piling in – Amex sets up a Groupon competitor.

Nokia’s Last Stand. Wired UK looks at how the former mobile phone giant can fight its way back to market leadership.

Ad Age on why YouTube is deliberately reducing web page views.

Canon Australia to stop publishing Recommended Retail Prices on their products. Is this an admission of an open market, or an effort to further muddy the retail waters?

Twitter starts sending out summary emails of friends’ postings. Will this work to drive engagement and create much needed revenue for the sharing platform?

Tomorrow, the blog will look at whether the London Olympics will really be a disaster and whether British business can capitalise on the event.

Could Australia follow the Greek path?

Is Australia really different from Greece?

Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen today describes how Australia has caught the Greek disease of low productivity and an overvalued currency.

This is interesting as just last week Robert was bleating on behalf of Australia’s middle class welfare state.

Australia’s productivity has stagnated over the last 15 years, but unlike Greece the ten years before that was a period of massive reform to both employment practices and government spending.

The structure of the Australian economy is very different, not least in its openness, to that of Greece.

What’s more Australia has a floating currency which will eventually correct itself unlike the Euro that Greece finds itself trapped in.

That’s not to say Australians won’t be hurt when that currency correction happens. The failure of the nation’s political, business and media elites in failing to recognise and plan for this is an indictment on all of them – including Robert Gottliebsen.

Australia’s real similarity with Greece is the entitlement culture that both nations have developed.

Over those last 15 years of poor productivity growth, Australia has seen a massive explosion of middle class welfare under the Howard Liberal government which has been institutionalised by the subsequent Rudd and Gillard Labor governments.

Today middle class Australians believe they have a right to generous government benefits subsidising their superannuation, school fees and self funded retirements.

For all the sneering of Australian triumphalists about Greek hairdressers getting lavish government benefits, Australia isn’t far behind Greece in believing these entitlements are a birthright.

A middle class entitlement culture is the real similarity between Australia and Greece. It’s unsustainable in every country that harbours these illusions.

Unlike Greece, Australia doesn’t have sugar daddies in Brussels, Paris and Berlin desperate to prop up the illusion of the European Union. Australia is own its own when the consequences of magic pudding economics become apparent.

Australia’s day of reckoning may arrive much quicker than that of Greece. Then we’ll see the test of how Australians and their politicians are different from our Greek friends.

Links of the day 14 May 2012

Some great links over the weekend ranging from the future of media and big box stores to a great, quirky clip promoting Scandanavia as a place to do business.

22 Michaels on an amazing presentation on why you should do business in Stockholm. It’s a shame more government agencies can’t do shows like this.

MIT’s Center for Civic Media writes up a discussion by the boss of Google News. I give this more of a write up in Grappling with Online Media.

Scamworld. Not only is The Verge’s expose of the online get rich quick community a great read, it’s also shows one of the future media models.

Business Insider has the real story why the tale of LinkedIn buying employment site Monster was made up. This is great example of how merchant banks try to create a market for flogging client assets. The managers of Football players do exactly the same thing.

Is there money in Big Data? MIT’s Technology Review doesn’t seem to think so.

Ending the era of the megastore. The Fiscal Times on how Wal-Mart is re-inventing itself.

Tomorrow’s blog looks at phishing scams and how social media is helping the more targeted “spear phishing”.

Grappling with the online news beast

Old media organisations are struggling with the web. Is the news industry dead or evolving?

The head of Google News, Richard Gingras, last week discussed how the news industry is evolving at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

Much of Richard’s discussion centred around disruption – the newspaper industry was disrupted in the 1950s by television and by the 1980s most print markets had seen several mastheads reduced to one or two.

The remaining outlets were able to book fat profits from their monopoly or duopoly position in display and classified advertising.

By 2000, the web had killed that business model and the newspaper industry was in a decline that continues today as aggregator sites like Huffington Post steal page views and Google News further changes the distribution model.

One of the problems for the news industry is how different the online mediums are from print, radio or television broadcast. The struggles of media startup The Global Mail is a good example of this.

In the middle of last year news started trickling out that one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s top journalists, Monica Attard, had left the broadcaster to set up The Global Mail, an online news site funded by Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

The site launched on schedule in February 2012 and underwhelmed readers with pedestrian content and a confusing layout. By May, Monica Attard announced she was leaving the organisation she’d founded.

Tim Burrowes of the media site Mumbrella examined why the Global Mail is struggling, his Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience details how the site doesn’t use online media effectively.

At heart is a fundamental mismatch between the methods of journalists raised in the “glory days” of print and broadcast journalism against those of the online world, not least the much harsher financial imperatives of those publishing on the web.

One key problem it the TL;DR factor – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Where online readers tend to leave stories after around four hundred words.

Richard Gringas is quoted as encountering this problem when he worked at online magazine, Salon.

At Salon, articles were paginated, but only 27% of readers made it to the end of the four-page articles. Compared to competitors, Richard was told, this was a good benchmark. But with fresh eyes, he was astounded that a product was being produced with the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience would not consume the entire piece. Richard loves the long form, but if the objective is to convey information, we need to think about the right form for the right medium at the right time.

So “long form” journalism has to be written the right way and it has to be backed up with good visual components and have “short form” versions suited to the more impatient readers who make up the bulk of the web audience.

The New York Times made a step in this direction with their iEconomy series on how the US middle classes have been displaced with manufacturing’s move to China.

An even better example of journalists using the web well is The Verge’s Scamworld where an online expose of Internet get rich quick schemes and the conmen behind them.

Scamworld shows us what skilled journalists can do online. The amazing thing is the site’s new steam is tiny compared to those of established outlets like the New York Times, Guardian, Fairfax or those of News Corporation.

This failure to execute by incumbent news organisations isn’t because they are lacking talent – every young, and not so young, journalist has been required to have multimedia skills and the ability to file stories in multiple formats for at least a decade.

Old Media’s problems lies in the mindsets of senior journalists, editors and their managements who are locked into a 1950s way of thinking where fat advertising revenues funded the adventures and expense accounts of roving reporters who tough as nails editors occasionally bullied into filing stories.

That model started to die in the 1980s and the Internet gave it the last rites.

Richard Gringas’ discussion at Harvard shows news and journalism isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Just like many other disrupted industries, the news media has to adapt to a changed world.

Digital roadkill

Is your business the fluffy bunny sitting in the Internet’s fast lane?

Digital Roadkill first appeared in Smart Company on 10 May 2012

Just over thirteen years a group of Silicon Valley technologists wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto detailing what they saw as being the new rules of business in a connected world.

Cluetrain was mandatory reading when terms like “information superhighway” were fashionable and Yahoo! was the dominant web portal. It’s somewhat fallen out of fashion today.

Like most manifestos Cluetrain was partially unreadable and heavy on dramatics but it did lay down the principles that are now largely accepted in both the online and mainstream business worlds.

I was reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto earlier this week at a suburban marketing event run by one of the country’s biggest media organisations. The lessons of the last thirteen years seemed to have passed by almost every business in the room.

Most of these businesses were operating they way they did in the 1990s. While some of them had a website and a couple had Facebook pages, their businesses had barely changed in the last twenty years.

These businesses are digital roadkill. Many of them have no idea what’s about to hit them as they sit paralysed wondering what the bright lights baring down on them are.

In this respect they aren’t dissimilar to the big department stores or electrical chains that are working to a model that’s ticked along nicely for decades and don’t realise how the fundamentals of the economy have shifted in the last five years.

Many of these small traders are still taking orders by fax and some of them still keep their cheque book ready to pay their suppliers bills. It’s that bad.

The idea of selling over the net is completely beyond them, only big overseas companies dodging GST do that sort of thing.

Even in the marketing field, these businesses have ignored the obvious for years with many still advertising in their local Yellow Pages and freebie community newspaper, despite barely making a sale from either in five years. But these channels worked for them once.

Few of them have up to date websites, are doing the bare minimum search engine or mobile optimisation and almost every single one hasn’t bothered to claim their local business listings.

To be fair to the little guys the host organisation was no better, this large media organisation has a good online product – they even own one of the major online local business listing services – but their sales people on the night didn’t mention it as they are too locked into selling their traditional local newspaper advertising products.

At least that company is wealthy and has other profitable arms that can prop up its dying local newspaper arms which can at least appear profitable while there are costs to be stripped from the operation.

Unlike those big media companies and retailers, the small local business doesn’t have big cash reserves or deep pocketed investors allowing them to survive for years in a declining market.

These small businesses are just going to drag their owners into poverty.

Not only have the old rules of business gone, but the value of businesses which choose to live in the past has evaporated. Few people are going to buy a business with an old, declining customer base.

“Roadkill” is an apt term for a business that probably won’t be around in two years.

Today the Cluetrain is big lumbering road train carrying ecommerce goods down the fast lane of the information superhighway with a driver that has no intention of stopping.

Make sure your business isn’t the cute fluffy rodent sitting in its path.