Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Why hung Parliaments are good for business

A government answering to independents is the best result for businesses

Heather Ridout, the Australian Industry Group chief executive, is quoted that Independent control of Parliament will result in “instability, uncertainty and short-termism in policy development” which is an interesting view, given these are exactly the reasons voters have punished the major parties.

Indeed Heather has seen this first hand as a member of the Henry Tax Review Panel, where the final report was hidden for six months, then the bulk of the recommendations were ignored and the few accepted were mutilated and taken out of context.

All of this with no debate or consultation with the community in a review that would “position us to deal with the demographic, social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

So much for the vision of the big parties.

Leadership isn’t delivered by risk adverse, focus group obsessed political managers doing deals with big corporations and lobbyists; it’s delivered by leaders who are capable of stating their case and steering their views, visions and policies through fair and robust debate, not hiding behind well crafted communications strategies and sound bites.

We need leadership in both business and politics to face those 21st Century challenges the Treasurer identified when he announced the Henry Tax Review.

A hung Parliament is a once in a generation opportunity to rebuild leadership and confidence in our governments. It’s one we shouldn’t squander.

The new accountability

What business can learn from the Australian election

The distrust and disengagement of voters in last weekend’s election holds valuable lessons for business.

As the politicians have found, the days of empty slogans are over. If you say “people are your most important asset”, “service with a smile” or “no question refunds” then you have to be sure you value those smiling employees as they cheerfully refund money. Otherwise your disgruntled staff and customers will be letting the world know the truth quickly.

We’re in an era of accountability. The connected society means all of us — in our professional, political and personal lives are more accountable than we have been for several generations. This is even more true of our businesses.

A good example of this is restaurants; where twenty years ago few eating places were reviewed by newspapers or magazines while most scored a paragraph in an annual guide, which could have been up to two years out of date by the time it was in the bookstores.

Today dozens of rating sites give customers the opportunity to report their experiences and customers are reading those reviews before they choose where to dine.

The same process is happening in all industries, your business is being reviewed and discussed online in forums, blogs and various social media channels. You have to deliver on your promises and you will be caught out if you don’t.

For society, the Internet and the new communications tools that run on it are changing how we deal with our peers, customers, employers and staff. We have more power and we have more responsibility.

It’s interesting this point was missed by the political parties that ran campaigns that relied almost exclusively on TV, radio and print. Although it isn’t surprising seeing that both parties’ 2010 campaigns seem to operate in a 1960s time warp where cheap fuel, plentiful credit and unlimited mineral exports were the nation’s boundless future.

This sort of complacency is understandable when you have a duopoly. As we know in the business world, a comfortable duopoly breeds cosy, risk adverse managers who spend more time squabbling over who should have the keys to the executive toilets than worrying about minor things like staff, new products or customer satisfaction.

Which is what’s happened to our political parties; winning the privileges of power is all that matters to the factional warlords and their supporting ranks of scheming apparatchiks; just like second rate managers in a cosy, protected industry.

The underlying beliefs of the major parties — free enterprise, a strong regional Australia or a fair go for the Australian worker have all became empty slogans and their markets, the voters, are now holding them to account.

In many ways the three or four independents who will hold the balance of power are like upstart business that disrupt cosy markets, they are reminding the incumbents of the business they have chosen to be in.

That’s the biggest business lesson from last weekend’s election; that in the new global economy the barriers to entry have fallen and new businesses are waiting to grab the customers you’re neglecting. Markets are moving quicker than ever and you need the tools and the teams to take advantage of the opportunities.

Unlike the political world, today’s business environment has no place for the safe, comfortable incumbent. It’s a great time to be a genuinely smart company.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment. But what does it really mean?

Cloud computing is about using other people’s computers to do the work for you.

Rather than having programs running on your computer and saving information to the hard drive, a cloud service connects to your system and you access both the program and your data through a web browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.

That service could be free such as Hotmail and Flickr or it could be paid for like Salesforce or Google Apps. Either way, they use a “cloud” of computers to provide the application and store their customer’s data.

Having your applications and data saved on someone else’s servers brings a number of advantages in security, cost and flexibility.

For businesses, that flexibility comes out of not having to buy complex software licences for their networks, instead they only pay for what they use. For home users it means not having to install software that often slows down machines and sometimes conflicts with other programs.

As we use the Internet more on our phones or with mobile devices like the iPad, having the advantage of not needing different software versions for each device makes it easier for us to access and use the information that used to be locked in our personal computers or office servers.

Cost too is an important factor, while many programs such as Yahoo! Mail and WordPress are free, even the paid for programs like Sassu and Basecamp offer considerable savings over their traditional competitors that require you to buy a disk and install the tool on your system.

One of the reasons for those reduced costs is the cloud services are sharing the resources between many users. That reduces the supplier’s distribution and support costs while making it easier for them to update their program when new features or security problems appear.

Security is probably the most misunderstood part of cloud computing. While cloud services do require a degree of trust in the supplier, most providers are providing a much more secure and trustworthy computer environment than most homes and businesses.

There are downsides however; you do need to have a reliable Internet connection and you do have to trust that your supplier will not only keep a secure environment but also won’t share your data with others and won’t go broke.

While some of those disadvantages with cloud computing mean that some businesses — particularly those in the medical and banking industries — have to be careful about using online services, for most homes and enterprises the cost and flexibility benefits outweigh the risks.

Over the next few years we’ll see many, if not most, computer programs move onto the cloud as reliable Internet becomes commonplace. It is the way the IT industry is heading and where we will all be doing our computing in the next few years.

702 Sydney Weekend computers: Free and easy ways to start a website.

Join Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank to look at some free and simple ways to get your organisation online.

Setting up a website for your small business or community group isn’t difficult and it’s a great way to keep in touch with your customers and members.

Join 702 Sydney’s Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank from 10am on Sunday, August 15 to look at some free and simple ways to get your organisation online with cheap or free websites and social media tools.

Further information on developing web sites and social media strategies for business and community groups can be found on our page at Five Free and Easy Online Business Marketing Tools.

Tune into ABC 702 Sydney from 10am or listen online through the ABC Sydney webpage. We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 19922702. If you’re on Twitter you can tweet paul at @paulwallbank and 702 Sydney on @702sydney.

Head in the clouds: ABC Nightlife

What does cloud computing mean to businesses and households

What is cloud computing and why does it matter to most homes and businesses?

Join Tony Delroy and Paul Wallbank to discuss cloud computing and what it means to the ordinary business and household on ABC Local Radio across Australia from 10pm on August 19.

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

If you’d like to join the conversation with your questions or comments phone 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702 or twitter @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag

Failing Fast: Google Wave’s real business lesson

The fail fast philosophy is changing how businesses in all industries are operating.

A key philosophy underlying much of Silicon Valley’s successful companies is the “fail fast” concept where a business releases a rough version of a new idea and asks the world what it thinks. Should people like the idea, it gets developed and if they don’t, it gets dropped and everybody moves on to the next brainwave.

The “fail fast” philosophy was behind Google Wave’s dropping last week, as CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Techonomy Conference on the day it was announced; “….we release it and see what happens. It works, you announce product, you ship it…”

Until recently, “failing fast” was restricted to hot shot Internet businesses but as the cost of product development falls due to better collaboration tools, testing methods and global outsourcing, it’s become easier for all businesses to experiment without risking an organisation’s future.

This is very different from the old style of doing business, a good example of how things used to work was Boeing’s development of the 747 Jumbo Jet which was a $2 billion dollar bet, $14bn in 2010 dollars, on a big lumbering subsonic jet in the mid 1960s when the future of aviation seemed to be with sleek supersonic aircraft like the Concorde.

While Boeing’s bet paid off, it took 15 years and nearly sent the company broke.

Most of today’s businesses aren’t locked into 14 billion dollar and 15 year investment cycles as we can test products with simulation tools, computer aided design programs, fast prototyping and oursourcing services like o-desk for labour and alibaba.com for manufacturing without risking the farm.

For most businesses, it’s not even a matter of spending time and money actually developing ideas, usually it’s something as simple as testing a new idea by buying a domain name and setting up a low cost website on a cheap hosting service for under $200. If the idea flies then you start looking at spending real money on making the product ready for the broader market.

Failing fast presents a great challenge to the traditional organisation where the slightest failure is a stigma. In the new economy, a risk adverse culture is going to be punished by competitors who accept that not every idea is right for its time and learn lessons rather than punish those associated with the unsuccessful project.

While this is bad news for large organisations run by risk adverse managers it is one of the great opportunities for nimble and smart companies. If your business is prepared to take small risks, learn from the misses and celebrate the wins then your business could well be on the way to being the next Google.

Asking the tough questions

Being well informed is the key to getting real results from a technology investment

Last week saw three challenging questions cross my desk — “What on earth is cloud computing?” “Can you explain the National Broadband Network?” and “Why does the Internet matter?”

All the questions ended up being rolled into an article that was picked up by radio and television. Which in itself is an interesting study on how Twitter and blogs drive other media channels.

That these three questions had to be asked shows how poor those of us in the technology sector have been in explaining the great opportunities the digital era offers businesses and communities

For too long we technologists have been locked into talking about gigabytes and megabits, HTML and XML while not explaining what these tools deliver

In most of the tech industries, it’s assumed that if something is shinier and has more features then it’s better for the customers.

This is best seen in the social media circles, where most experts are blinded by the fun of using Twitter or Facebook and struggle to explain what they can deliver to business.

Bizarrely this has resulted in a whole tribe of social media experts who claim there is no way we can apply business measures to their blind recommendations that your organisation should be tweeting out status updates every hour.

A blind acceptance that newer or cheaper is better has locked many big and small customers into at best dysfunctional deals. Worse still, is the “we’ll save a fortune with this new widget” mentality we discussed in last week’s column that is nothing but a trap for people who should know better.

Promising cheap, new and shiny has allowed many technology vendors to lock ill informed buyers into upgrade cycles that have delivered increased costs for little benefit. Internet providers, telephone companies and outsourcing multinationals have exploited customer ignorance to deliver massive profits over the years.

This isn’t to say there aren’t cost savings to be had by adopting new methods and technology, there clearly are. But it relies on the customer, in this case your business, to understand how the new ideas will benefit their workplace.

It comes down to the user to ask the tough questions, if you don’t understand what the computer tech, web designer or social media expert is talking about, stop them and ask.

Tough questions are good for the experts and gurus. It forces the good ones to think about the solutions they recommend and gives the poor ones the hint that other industries might offer better prospects for selling snake oil.

Most importantly, it’s about allowing you to understand what’s going on without jargon and verbiage. Having a clear, concise view allows you to make better, informed choices.

With a changing business environment, it’s too important to be bluffed or ignorant about what these tools mean for you and your industry. Ask the hard questions so you can make the right decisions.

The freeways of the future

How the Internet is changing Maggie’s life

“I don’t see why the Internet is important to me” said Maggie, the first caller to our “is the Internet the ultimate consumer’s revenge “ radio program.

Maggie’s question is a very good one at a time when governments, businesses and households are investing heavily in Internet technology. Just a few hours before the radio show I’d been invited by television program A Current Affair, to discuss if Australia’s 43 billion dollar investment in a National Broadband Network is worthwhile.

For Maggie and ACA’s viewers, the answer is “yes, it is very important” — the Internet today is what the motor car was to the early 20^th Century and railways were to the 19^th Century. Communities that aren’t connected will miss the benefits of the 21st Century economy.

To illustrate how important it will be, let’s have a look at Maggie’s life. We’ll assume she’s an older person living in a regional Australian town or one of the fast growing fringe suburbs of a big city.

Probably the most immediate change the Internet delivers for Maggie is how it is giving her a stronger voice as a consumer and citizen. This is what we discussed on the ABC program, how Internet tools like social media are giving customers and voters their voices back.

With reliable broadband Maggie can be researching products and voicing her dissatisfaction with government and private organisations to the world in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago.

Those Internet tools also growing communities around her as like minded people across the world and in her own district are connecting online then meeting in real life at events like Coffee Mornings.

Not only does the Internet connect communities, it connects families — one lady recently described to me how she speaks more to her daughter living in Brazil through Skype than she did when they lived nearby. The net brings friends and families back together and helps overcome social isolation.

Exclusion in education has always been a pressing issue, once upon a time you had to be in Cambridge or Oxford to access the world’s great minds. With a fast reliable Internet connection, the kids in Maggie’s neighbourhood can listen to a Harvard or MIT professor’s lecture without leaving their hometown.

Bringing knowledge to local communities will also help Maggie should she have to have to go to the local hospital, the local doctors will be able to consult specialists without Maggie having to travel long distances to get specialist advice.

Importantly for Maggie and her local hospital, the access to online training resources mean the local staff will be up to date with their professional development and across new trends, ensuring Maggie’s standard of care will be equal to the big city teaching hospitals.

Solving staff training issues also delivers benefits for the local business community. It means the Maggie’s son Tim, the owner of a local plumbing business, doesn’t have to pay for expensive training courses or to travel into town to attend business conferences.

The net also means Tim can access the world’s best business minds without leaving his office. Which gives him benefit of running his business more efficiently and profitably.

For Tim’s kids, it also means they aren’t excluded from the entertainment world. They can stream and download the latest things happening and share equally on social networking sites. They may be in a small town, but they can play in the big world.

Having these education, business, training and entertainment resources strengthens communities. It means kids and entrepreneurs can live in their home towns and still participate in the global economy. It means Maggie is a valued and important citizen of her country and the world.

Fast accessible Internet is more than important, it’s vital just in the ways roads, railways, canals and the telegraph were in their eras. The investment in these freeways of the future is necessary to grow strong and dynamic communities.

Five free, easy and essential online business marketing tools

Your customers are now online. Here’s 5 free and easy to use tools to help reach them.

The web has become the shopping strip of the modern economy, where potential customers see what every business has to offer without leaving their home or office. According to the the Sensis e-business report over 90% of businesses and 70% of consumers now do an online search before buying a product or service.

So every opportunity to promote your business online has to be grabbed, even if you don’t have a website. Luckily there’s a range of free and easy to use services to help your business be seen online.

Five of the easiest and most important free services are listed here and it’s best to use all five to help you get the most online visibility for your business.

Google Places

The first and most essential service every business needs is Google Places. Having a Places listing puts a business in the Google search results directly below the paid spots at the top of the page.

It’s a pretty powerful location on the web real estate map and, being free, it’s hard to refuse. Given how Google is by far the most used search engine, a Places listing is essential even if you already have an extensive web site.

Google Places allows you to upload logos, pictures, descriptions, and other details which makes it an even greater opportunity to get the message out to your customers. For many smaller business, particularly those in the trades, a Google Places page may be all the web presence they need.

Facebook Pages

The marketer’s social media tool of choice, Facebook recently celebrated reaching 500 million users. For businesses, Facebook offers the Pages service which allows you to set up a page for your business.

Facebook’s greatest advantage is it lets your customers talk directly to you and to each other. It’s an excellent way to bring your fans together and keep track of what’s happening in the marketplace.

While setting up the page is simple, there are some sophisticated ways you can improve your Facebook presence. Facebook themselves have good tutorials and sites like SEO Moz have good examples of how to get the most from Facebook pages.

Blogging platforms

Until recently blogs were used as online diaries, today they have become a flexible, free and easy way to set up a web presence.

The two biggest free blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger. WordPress is the more flexible of the two while Blogger is quicker and easier to setup.

An advantage with using a blogging platform is they are very easy to update and offer far more flexibility and customisation than the other free tools. Keep in mind you can use WordPress on your own website or take up the paid option to use your own domain.

True Local

News Limited’s online listing tool is important for Australian businesses not just because it connects with News’ online and offline publishing networks but also for their content sharing agreements with Google, Navman, Yahoo!7 and some of the mobile phone companies. This means a listing on True Local goes onto all of these services.

True Local offers a number of listing levels ranging from free to $220 a year. Interestingly, News’ Premium service charges for much of what Google Places offers for free, which is one reason why Google is the preferred free site. True Local’s reach in both search, partner sites and offline channels makes it important for business to be listed on the service.

Sensis Listings

Telstra’s directory service, Sensis, offers a free Yellow Pages listing which appears in both their online and printed versions as well as Telstra’s online and mobile services. While listing here will mean you’ll get a polite but anxious call from a Sensis sales representative offering you a deal on a Yellow Pages paid ad, it’s still a very important channel given Telstra’s market share.

As Ken in the comments has noted, Sensis don’t allow you to add a website address to the free listing. While this reduces the effectiveness of a Sensis online listing, it still means your business will appear in Telstra’s online and mobile searches, so it is an important channel to be listed on.

These five tools are a great help for all businesses, regardless of their size or web presence, and each can be set up within in a hour. You could have all five working for you within a day.

Get these free tools working for your business so customers can find you on the web.

Why cloud computing isn’t just about savings

Looking for massive cost savings should not the sole reason for choosing a new product.

“Billions of IT savings in the Clouds” trumpeted the Australian Financial Review last week in a front page article on cloud computing that claimed moving services online could “slash technology costs by up to 80 percent”.

If nothing else, those lines lead any IT industry veteran to rise a wry eyebrow; a business that adopts a new platform, technology or vendor solely on the claim of massive cost savings is in for a world of pain, disappointment and heartbreak.

There’s no doubt that cloud computing and software as a service are the IT industry’s growth areas and there are many benefits for the businesses that adopt these technologies. Reduced costs is one of the attractions, but it isn’t the only factor a businesses should consider.

Other aspects are the flexibility of not locking yourself into specific hardware and technology platforms, reduced capital and labour commitments along with improved security, reliability and data protection.

This last point is probably the killer reason why you shouldn’t be looking for 80 percent cost savings with any product. As we discussed a while back, to go onto the cloud you have to trust your supplier has the utmost competence and integrity. A provider who offers nothing but slashed costs will struggle to provide peace of mind.

It’s likely in a few years time only the biggest of the biggest companies will have inhouse IT staff and servers as most business IT operations will run over the internet and through web browsers. Most businesses will think having IT staff on the payroll is as unusual as employing a full time plumber or electrician in the office.

Although we probably won’t get to bank those savings — as we’ve found with the roll out of IT services in the last 20 years, new industries will develop that will soak up the labour and create new cost centres. While today’s services may be 80% percent cheaper, just as today’s computers and mobile phone are 80% cheaper than those of 20 years ago, we’ll be using other services and the price of those will soak up a lot of those savings.

A bigger concern is for the cloud and software as a service industries themselves. If online services are identified as merely a cost cutting product, then these markets are going to be rapidly commoditised with a race to the bottom not dissimilar to what we’ve seen in the PC industry. Which will perversely mean security and reliability conscious businesses will keep their IT in house rather than risk it to a cheap charlie data service.

History’s shown that selling and buying cheap in technology is a mug’s game. So don’t get seduced by claims of ridiculous savings with any technology; be it cloud computing, telecoms services or any other line item. All too often that cheap price or massive saving hides some nasty traps.

Because of the compelling benefits cloud computing is the way businesses will go over the next few years but those who choose a platform simply because it appears 80% cheaper probably won’t be around to tell us about it.

Does innovation scare customers?

US consumers ranked Facebook with airlines and cable companies in satisfaction. Is this because of innovation?

Read Write Web reports the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index found Facebook in the bottom 5% of trusted US companies. The article goes on to quote Larry Freed, CEO of ForSee Results, as saying “it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution”.

There’s no doubt Facebook’s many user interface and privacy changes have upset consumers however can this be blamed on “innovation”?

Perhaps Facebook’s problems were because those “innovations” largely didn’t benefit the site’s users and the few that did were poorly communicated.

For innovations to be accepted by the market they have to provide some benefit; generally people don’t like change and the old saw “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies. If something is working fine, then why make a change that isn’t going to benefit the people who use it?

An overlooked angle with social media platforms like LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook is how their business model is more like a free to air commercial TV station where the users, or viewers, are not the customers; the advertisers are.

So to put Facebook’s recent mistakes in context perhaps we should be looking at how their innovations were aimed at improving things for their customers, the advertisers, but had the unfortunate effect of upsetting users who are the reason advertisers buy space on the site.

Perhaps Facebook’s changes didn’t upset their customers and, given users have stuck with Facebook despite their fall in reputation, it shows their innovations have actually delivered.

How the iPhone 4 could become Apple’s Vista

Apple’s real iPhone 4 problem is the company’s perceived failure to listen

Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, suggested at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference that the iPhone 4 could become Apple’s Vista.

That’s a pretty cruel jibe coming from Microsoft, given that Vista was so bad even Microsoft’s own executives struggled with the product and while the iPhone may have problems, they certainly aren’t of the scale faced by Vista users.

Despite Vista’s flaws, Microsoft’s biggest blunder was pretending there was no problem. For months Microsoft maintained the fiction there was nothing wrong with Vista while customer complaints mounted.

This is the risk that Apple are now running. Every day they remain silent on the iPhone’s signal problems makes the resolution more damaging and expensive. Some analysts are claiming each week of delay by Apple could cost them $200 million in lost sales.

Apple need to show they are listening to upset customers and get a fix out now, the simplest and quickest resolution is to admit there can be problems with the antenna and give away free perimeter bumpers, according to Infoworld’s Robert X. Cringely this would cost around $45 million.

The real damage is being seen as not listening. In today’s economy, not listening to your customers and critics is probably the most damaging thing any business can do.