Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

The end of the troll

Is it time we stopped Internet anonymity?

Australian union leader Paul Howes today claimed in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph that New Media is denigrating politicians. His point being anonymous users on newspaper websites (such as the one he writes for) and online services like Twitter encourage abuse and slander which is degenerating politics and media discussion.

The rough and tumble of the Internet was raised during the Canberra Media140 conference last September where conversation turned around Liberal politician Joe Hockey’s comment that anonymous, banal tweets was causing him to lose faith in online services like Twitter.

Media140 provided more discussion about anonymity when The Australian decided to out the anonymous blogger Grogs Gamut, aka Greg Jericho. Greg wasn’t being abusive however his commentary had clearly found its way under the skin of some members of the Canberra political classes.

But does anonymity matter? We are kidding ourselves if we believe we are truly anonymous on the Internet. Few of us have the skills or diligence to fully hide our tracks from people we offend or upset.

Anonymity also discredits much of a person’s statements – as both Paul and Joe have pointed out, if you aren’t prepared to put your name to your views then there is a good argument that your opinions are really worthless.

However that argument ignores the power imbalance between the ordinary citizen who may find their career at risk by stating their views, as Greg Jericho found, and politicians and those working for political parties or allied organisations, like Joe and Paul who are protected by powerful and often tribally loyal party structures, PR machines and compliant journalists.

Probably the part that’s most disingenuous though about Paul Howes’ article is that anonymous Internet commenters are dragging politicians down. Sadly our politicians did that job themselves long before social media or web2.0 based websites came on the scene.

Today’s politicians are only reaping what they have sown themselves. Paul and Joe’s mentors – people like Graham Richardson, John Howard and Bob Carr – went out of their way to pander to and encourage the shrill, anonymous harridans of talkback radio.

Unfortunately for today’s politicians, the Internet doesn’t have the same gatekeepers in the form of friendly announcers, producers and editors to save them from the public’s genuine, unfiltered opinions.

The fact many of those anonymous comments – whether online or in more traditional media channels – may be true is another thing to consider; that people genuinely believe these politicians are doing the wrong thing. Rightly or wrongly, is that the fault of the Internet, or the fault of those politicians and their advisors who claim to have wonderful communication skills?

Internet anonymity is not perfect, and often not right, but the privilege of being able to make an anonymous statement is a fundamental part of a working democracy.

It’s not surprising our current generation of spin-doctored, on-message politicians feel threatened by a medium they struggle to understand or control, but that isn’t the fault of the anonymous online troll who could turn out to be what ultimately saves our democracy.

Choosing a mobile phone plan

How to avoid mobile phone bill shock

What’s your budget?

This is the most important point. What can you afford?

Be careful though as plans can be deceptive with a number of traps.

Understand your usage

Have a read of your bill and understand how you use your phone. Total up the number of calls you make and who make them to. Many providers allow you to download an electronic copy of your bill which you can then analyse your bill with.

If you do that, look at the total number of calls you make each month and the average time of those calls. You’ll find this is important as various plans have different billing periods and flagfall requirements.

Call rates

This is one of the trickiest areas to deal with on phone plans. Keep in mind each plan has unique tricks like minimum charges and flagfalls. So one provider offering 50c per 30 seconds call with a 35c connection fee may be cheaper for many of your calls than a provider offering 90c per 60 seconds with a 40c connection fee. This is why it’s important to check the average call costs.

Friends deals

Many providers have plans where calls between people on the same network are free, or you can nominate friends for a discount rate. If there’s a small group of friends you call a lot, it’s worthwhile looking to see if you can save money that way.

Don’t ignore data

In the age of the smartphone, data is now a major revenue generator for mobile phone companies. Have a close look at your data usage and keep in mind everytime you check your email, look up a bus timetable or find a restaurant you’ll be downloading data. This can add up and if you are going to be a regular user of online services you shouldn’t choose a plan with less than 1Gb download.

Coverage

It’s important to remember that the phone and the plan are pointless if you can’t get a signal. Check with the store before buying that your home and work can get a reliable connection. Also, if you’re going to be on the road a lot you’ll need to choose the provider who covers those areas well.

The best way of finding out is to ask your friends and colleagues how they find their connections. They’ll have the best feedback on which providers have the most reliable service.

Roaming

If you travel overseas you’ll find international charges can be a killer, so check carefully what you’re up for when you’re travelling.

Locked phones

When entering a plan, you may find the “free” handset included is locked to the network you’ve signed up to. If you want to “unlock” it, there’s usually a fee of several hundred dollars to release your phone from captivity.

Watch your bills

The danger period when entering a new plan is the first few bills. This is when any hidden traps can bite you. Check those first couple of bills carefully to make sure there are no surprises.

If you find any bill shocks, take a deep breath and call your provider. Should it turn out the plan doesn’t cover something, the phone companies will usually move you to the next plan up that will keep you within your budget.

Mobile phone plans

Learning from the past

Armistice Day reminds us of why we need to learn and adapt

Today being Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the First World War’s end, it’s fitting to not just to remember those who fell in that costly war but also learn the lessons from the mistakes that ended up wasting so many lives.

Undoubtedly the biggest tragedy of the war was the sheer cost in soldiers’ lives which was due to the commanding generals’ refusal to accept the era of the cavalryman was over as the machine gun, supported by heavy artillery and the airplane, became the main battlefield weapon.

This wilful blindness to technology is even more galling when one considers the machine gun was an invention of the US civil war fifty years earlier and had been extensively used by the European powers in conquering and subduing native populations in their colonies.

Those commanders such as Haig, Gough, Ludendorff and Kaiser Whilhelm — the “donkeys leading lions” — ignored the technological changes that had changed their industry.

Worse, they wouldn’t listen; Haig rarely visited the front or spoke to his junior officers and men and the Kaiser was forced to abdicate and live out his days in exile because he ignored the discontent in his own country.

In times of great change, we need to listen, learn and adapt. As we saw in the 1914-18 war, the costs of not doing so can be great.

The listening game

Our customers are talking about us, we need to listen

Last week’s Qantas A380 problem illustrates the power the Internet has and how businesses can’t ignore what’s being said on the various online channels.

Thankfully most of us will never have a morning where the world is told we have lost over four hundred of our staff and customers in a fiery accident as Qantas did last week.

While not a Qantas customer, I had a lot of sympathy and respect for their management and staff who had to deal with conflicting accounts while balancing their obligations to regulators, shareholders and, most importantly, the loved ones of those aboard QF32.

The initial story that went out on the media was a Reuters’ report that a Qantas A380 had crashed on taking off from Singapore. While Qantas were able to quickly deny that, they found their other assurances that no debris had fallen from the plane were quickly contradicted by online photos of the pieces in a nearby Indonesian town.

Luckily, Qantas’ communications teams appeared to be listening to these comments so were quickly able to verify their accuracy and amend the company’s position before they were embarrassed.

Today’s connected consumers armed with camera equipped, Internet enabled smart phones and can post images contradicting or confirming your message or understanding of the situation quickly. Which is exactly what happened in this instance with passengers and witnesses quickly uploading their views of the incident.

In one respect this is a threat to traditional management where controlling the message is everything, to the modern manager this is a fantastic opportunity to react quickly and positively to changing situations.

One of my favourite stories comes from the Virgin Blue checking problems in late September where staff, alerted by complaints on Twitter, were able to get water bottles out to thirsty passengers stuck in queues. It didn’t rescue Virgin from the PR battering they took, but it helped a few of their customers and just maybe won a few of them back.

This isn’t to say the Internet is infallible, far from it — the Internet is mankind’s gift to the ill informed ratbag and the mischevious troll — what you read on Twitter and Facebook needs to be treated with the same suspicion as what you see on Reuters and CNN.

Even when the information is downright wrong, you at least have an early warning there’s a perception problem in the community which you can quickly work upon. The key is to evaluate and recognise the credible from the silly and then be able to act on the credible while countering the silly stuff.

One big lesson from both Qantas’ problems last week and Virgin’s in September is how important it is to point all of your communications channels, including call centres to the organisation’s web site where up to date, verified information is available for the public, staff and customers.

While the net represents great challenges to business owners and managers of all organisations, it’s also a fantastic resource for getting your facts right and reacting to fast moving changes. Make sure you have the tools and the team to deal with the opportunities and threats our connected economy will throw at us.

Core competencies

Outsourcing done badly can damage a brand

Outsourcing is a good idea for most households and organisations. Asking someone else to do a task you’re not particularly good at or interested in makes sense and most of the service industries are based on the desire to get others to do the work you can’s or won’t do.

Take outsourcing too far and we lose touch. Just like the parents who outsource all their childrens’ upbringing to nannies, managers overdoing this can lose contact with the very reason their business exists.

Two stories in the last few days illustrate this; Silicon Alley Insider’s story on the dangers of outsourcing social media and an HP contractor’s employment practices in Western Sydney.

Hewlett Packard’s story is very instructive, like most of their world wide operations they outsource their Australian assembly operations to a contractor who then engages a labour hire company to engage hourly rate casuals to fulfil their orders.

This gives the big corporation plausible deniability on their employment practices and saves a few dollars on completing orders — it also means a loss of control of their brand and product.

HPs customers don’t care if poor work was the responsibility of Foxteq, the assembly company, or Weststaff, the labour hire company. They bought a product with an Hewlett Packard sticker and it’s HPs problem.

Outsourcing makes sense when it isn’t your key competency, but in the case of HP, hardware and support are key competencies. Over the years they’ve outsourced these to the degree they no longer have control of their own product.

Unfortunately HP aren’t alone as most of the IT industry decided long ago that IT wasn’t their core business; they were “virtual corporations” where management can sit back and count the pennies while brand consultants look after the products name and outsourced manufacturers, assemblers and couriers can look after the production, support and logistics.

All this works well for a while but eventually it catches up with the business, as Dell found with the Dell Hell debacle. While Jeff Jarvis articulated it, many of Dell’s former customers had experienced the poor product quality and awful after sales support first hand.

Twenty years ago Dell could have bought time by engaging in massive advertising campaigns to hide their poor quality offering but today where everyone has a voice they are quickly caught out.

Silicon Alley Insider nails that problem for the social media PR channels, rightly saying a company’s voice is too valuable to be outsourced. Today our logistics, sales and support are just as an import part of an organisation’s voice as the PR team.

Outsourcing everything to save pennies is fine for companies that are run simply to deliver privileges to a pampered cadre of overpaid and unaccountable executives, but for most organisations outsourcing has to be done carefully and with the recognition those contractors are as much an ambassador for your brand as anything else you do.

Tools for the New Economy workshop

How can your organisation benefit from the Internet?

We’re in a time of great change as technological, demographic and economic forces are reshaping our economies, societies and the way we do business.

Tools for the New Economy examines the technology and thinking that’s required to grow your organisation and identify opportunity in these interesting times.

This workshop is customised for your audience and the industry they operate in. We look at cloud computing, collaborative working and social media with real examples of how organisations are using these tools.

During the workshop participants will learn how the online economy is changing their industry and how their organisations can use online tools to benefit from the changes.

Participants cover;

Opportunities in the new economy
The new economic forces
Collaboration tools
Cloud computing explained
Competing with free
Understanding social media
Being part of online communities
Fast response strategies
Identifying new opportunities
Dealing with threats
Fostering an online culture

Who should attend?
Tools For The New Economy is designed for managers, supervisors and business owners seeking to identify where opportunities lie in the new economy and the tools available to them.

Workshop duration
This workshop can be run as a group or individual training session. For individuals, we recommend the program be structured as three 90 minute sessions. Group courses can be run up to two days. This workshop will be custom designed to your organisation’s needs.

More details
Contact us for more details on this workshop and how we can help your business, organisation or community group identify and deal with challenges of our exciting era.

The free trap

Is giving stuff away killing your business?

There’s a number of good reasons for offering a free service or product, you could be trying to build a customer base, position yourself in the market, gain experience in a new field or simply want to give something back to your community.

But in this age of Google and Bing where knowledge is free and skills a cheap commodity how sustainable are the free models of doing business?

The Cooks Source plagiarism story and Gavin Heaton’s recent post on Why Social Media Consultants Are Broke illustrate the problems many knowledge workers are having in the new economy.

Gavin quotes Jessica Gottlieb on her Stop Working For Free You Tube clip. With Gavin’s point being that most social media people work for the love of what they do, not for money. Jessica’s views are a splash of cold water in the faces of those who write for at best a few pennies in the hope it will lead to something bigger.

While both Gavin and Jessica are right, there’s a bigger issue at work — that there’s no market for this work. There may be a need for it, but there is no one prepared to pay for it and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people prepared to work for nothing.

The plagiarism carried out by the Cooks Source magazine is a good example of the free trap where Judith Griggs, the editor, not only believes she is doing the right thing stealing someone’s work but that she actually does the writer a favour.

It’s the idea you’re actually doing a writer a favour by ripping off their work that’s probably irritated most people criticising Judith. It wouldn’t be so bad if Judith did actually do anything to help the writers beyond cutting and pasting their text.

Sadly Judith isn’t alone in this and once you’re taken advantage of by her and the millions of others with these attitudes, you’ll find the demands for free escalate. All of a sudden you’re travelling around the country, taking support calls and being pestered to do all manner of further free stuff.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had to deal with a culture of free. Bill Gates dealt with in the same problem in 1976 where Micro-Soft’s Altair computer programs were being copied. His Homebrew Computer Club letter has become a sort of computer industry equivalent of Luther’s 95 thesis.

Gates’ letter though was written before the Internet where a culture of free has developed, driven often by corporations giving stuff away because capital has been cheap and labour often free. This developed in the dot com boom and has continued every since.

We’re now seeing the capital dry up and the question is how long the labour can afford giving things away. It may be the US and European recessions prolong that free supply as desperate people seek opportunities.

As The Joker said in the Dark Knight movie; “if you’re good at something, why give it away for free?” If you’re doing something for free, identify why and set some goals on what you want that free work to achieve.

The new Pantopticon

Are we entering a new age of conformity?

There’s a rule in broadcasting that any microphone should be treated as loaded. Regardless of whether you think it’s on or not, you shouldn’t say anything untoward near a microphone that you wouldn’t want to go to air.

It’s a lesson many politicians have learned, sometimes to their great embarrassment and sometimes with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Today, in an age where almost everyone has a recording device in their pocket, we all have to be careful. The travails of an Australian Rugby League player, photographed by a friend doing something obscene while drunk on an end of season party, illustrates just how pervasive this surveillance can be.

In one respect this is good, as we saw with the Qantas A380 mishap in Singapore, a connected public allows the truth to get out despite the hysterical headlines of the media and the spin obsessed control of modern governments or big business. The fact almost everyone has a camera makes officials more accountable for their actions.

But there is a darker side, this constant monitoring can also be tool for conformity. Should you decide to dissent from the corporate, government or society norm, there is now plenty of material to discredit you – be it a drunken stunt with a dog, a silly Facebook post when you were 17 or a photo of you picking your nose while waiting at a traffic light.

There’s no shortage of ‘concerned citizens’ who will photograph or record us carrying out actions they believe don’t conform with their ideas what is normal and acceptable.

Our definition of ‘normal and acceptable’ is becoming more narrowed as well, as a myriad of communications channels allows us to watch only what fits into our view of the world and the rise of social media that lets us filter out those voices we don’t like.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the connected society develops over the next few year, will we become more insular and conformist or will we use these tools to broaden our horizons?

Misunderstanding crowdsourcing

We need to understand the differences between outsourcing and crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the idea that the wisdom of crowds can solve complex and expensive problems, with the rise of the Internet it’s become possible for groups to coalesce around a problem and resolve it.

Some good examples of crowdsourcing are The Guardian’s investigation into British MPs expense claims where dozens of the newspapers readers examined the mass of paperwork for irregularities, a task beyond the resources of the paper itself, and Wikipedia where thousands of volunteers work to compile an online encyclopaedia.

The Future of Crowdsourcing Summit recently looked at the issues and opportunities this offers for businesses. IT industry journal Computer Reseller News has an excellent summary of the day, although the emphasis on massive cost savings is probably misguided.

What sticks out in CRN’s account is many businesses are confusing crowdsourcing with outsourcing — online bidding sites such as Freelancer.com and competition sites like 99Designs are not crowdsourcers, they are outsourcing services.

Sites like Freelancer and 99 Designs are making outsourcing, which was until recently the province of large corporations, accessible to small and start up businesses. They’re revolutionising business by reducing entry barriers to entry for new enterprises and industries by allowing entrepreneurs to access skilled workers with little more than a credit card and Internet connection.

That emphasis on cost needs to be treated carefully as well. As I’ve argued about cloud computing, it’s risky to overstate savings in a new industry as there’s a risk of commoditising the market prematurely.

Larger outsourcers found in the previous decade that assuming labour rates at 10% of home market wages equate to 90% cost savings is usually flawed as there’s a number of hidden costs that come to surface when you take services off shore. Almost certainly the users of bidding sites will have the same experience.

Probably the biggest barrier to smaller businesses adopting outsourcing or crowdsourcing is that both processes require project management skills which are often undervalued in business.

We need to acknowledge the changes outsourcing and bidding services mean to our industries and society, but we shouldn’t confuse the concepts. Both are too valuable to business to be misunderstood and devalued.

New Media in the Boardroom workshop

How do directors and executives deal with the new online tools?

The Internet is changing our businesses and markets. The New Media in the Boardroom workshops are an executive briefing on how your organisation can meet the challenges of the new economy.

Online tools like social media and cloud computing offer opportunities along with a range of reputational, legal and compliance risks to corporations and large organisations.

New Media in the boardroom explains the various technologies, their usage and how they fit into business and professional objectives with hands-on instruction on setting up and using these tools.

This workshop is designed for all business people concerned about managing staff who are using social media tools inside and outside the workplace.

During the workshop participants will learn about the different new media tools in use at present, how workplaces are affected by them, developing Internet trends and discover whether these programs are useful to their professional activities.

Customised for your business

The new media in the boardroom workshop is customised for the attendees. All case studies and tools are selected to be specifically relevant to the client’s industry and business objectives.

Participants cover;

The new media tools
Why do people use them
Opportunities in the new economy
Enhancing your online repuation
Managing risks
Executive use strategies
Legal tricks and traps
Social media policies
Employment issues
Case studies

Who should attend?
New Media in the Boardroom is designed for business owners, executives and senior management wanting to understand how the web and social media is affecting their business.

Workshop duration
This workshop can be run as a group or an individual executive training session. For individuals, we recommend the program be structured as three 90 minute sessions. Group courses can be run up between two hours and three days depending upon requirements.

More details
Contact us for more details on this workshop and how we can help your business, organisation or community group identify and deal with challenges of our exciting era.

5 ways to guarantee postive online reviews

how do we ensure people say nice things about us on the web?

The last week has been an interesting time in the online travel review world with some serious questions about the reliability and honesty of customer reviews being raised.

First an English hotelier threatened to sue the hotel review site Tripadvisor over a negative review and then the same site sanctioned an Irish hotel for obvious fake positive reviews. Today, the travel site Orbitz has announced they’ll allow user reviews from people who’ve never actually used the service.

There’s no doubt these sites are important to businesses. In hospitality, customers check the online reviews of cafes, restaurants and hotels before planning meals or holidays. Smartcompany has previously listed a range of sites where customers review businesses in other sectors.

So given the value of positive reviews on these sites, how do we ensure our businesses get positive coverage?

Sue the critics
You can always lawyer up and threaten the bad guys. If you can identify the malicious reviewers, a “nastygram” from a your solicitor may shut them down. This is expensive though and high risk if the bad reviewers goes public with your threats.

Also, experience shows that restaurants who succeed in the courts usually don’t do well in the marketplace. Most litigious proprietors find their establishments out of business long before the judge or jury vindicates them.

Bribe your customers
Quite a few businesses do this by offering freebies and discounts to customers who write nice reviews. This can work well but be careful you don’t put these offers in writing as the sites themselves frown on this behaviour.

Write your own reviews
As politicians and spin doctors know, the best way of controlling the message is to create your own narrative. You’ll need to be anonymous and you have to establish credibility by having more than just a single gushing review of your own establishment. So it’s worthwhile visiting your competitors and writing mildly complimentary reviews about them before submitting the sparkling review of your premises.

Listen to your customers
Even the best establishments have the odd crook day and if even yours doesn’t there will be some customers who are never happy. Use the ‘social’ part of “social media” and engage with them. If you are honest and upfront you’ll find a polite reply will actually win customers from a bad review.

Online review sites can also be thought of as a free customer feedback service. Consistent poor reviews on a specific area such as food or stroppy staff are sending you a message that something needs to be fixed. The Clare Hotel, the Irish establishment referred to above, clearly has a problem which all the rigged reviews in the world aren’t going to fix.

Deliver a great service
Ultimately these review sites are about lifting the game for all businesses. It means we have to all have to make sure we’re delivering our best product because people are talking about us and sharing their experiences. If we do a great job, that will be reflected in the majority of our reviews.

Review sites are important and they are changing the way our customers find us. But in many ways there’s nothing new about these services, they’re a modern variation on word of mouth marketing which is the most basic and fundamental way of attracting clients.

We need to keep in mind that ultimately the flashiness of our websites, the slickness of our marketing or the bling of our fitouts really don’t matter – it’s the quality of our product that matters.