Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Preparing for the industries that don’t yet exist

just as today’s kids are being educated for industries that don’t exist, business too have to prepare for those future sectors.

In 1999, the then Clinton administration Education Secretary, Richard Riley, said “We are currently preparing children for jobs that don’t yet exist…”

Last week’s COSBOA conference in Brisbane showed another aspect to that statement; in the next decade most businesses will be operating in industries that don’t yet exist and all organisations will using technologies yet to be thought of.

The day’s conference sessions reflected this with the topics consistentently coming back to technology; for instance, discussions on taxation coming around to e-tax and marketing covering e-commerce and social media.

In many ways, the emphasis on social media is a bit unfortunate because these tools are really yesterday’s news; Twitter has been available for three years, Facebook for six and blogs since the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1993.

The mobile Internet, location based services and augmented reality are the current frontier as described by Ben White, Optus’ Director of Strategy and Corporate Development in his keynote to the conference.

Darren Alexander of Launceston based company Autech emphasised this change later in a later forum by describing how his business has evolved over ten years and where technology was taking regional businesses. If you doubt the value of the National Broadband Network, have a chat to Darren sometime.

Also on that technology panel Mike O’hagan of mini movers described how outsourcing and crowdsourcing has changed his, and others, businesses. This is something we’ve covered previously and discussed how this presents challenges to many established businesses.

While this means we’re in a great era of great opportunity, it’s also a time where the slow movers will fall by the wayside. When nearly 50% of businesses don’t have a website and where retailers are ignoring their customers moving online, you can’t help but think many of these enterprises are heralding their own doom.

On a national level this is clear as well. While I’ll leave the commentary on the politicians’ promises to small business at COSBOA to others, it should be pointed out that accelerated depreciation and small business ministers in cabinet are nice, but without an overhaul of the tax system that puts investment in Australian businesses and innovation on the same footing as passive investments like housing and shares then Australia’s investment structure is going to remain unbalanced and much of our business and intellectual potential is going to go untapped.

Australia’s national obsession with property and our dependence on raw commodity exports to finance a private debt habit put us in the same position as the business without a website. We need to be thinking properly about the future and equipping ourselves with the skills to deal with tomorrow’s technologies and the 21st Century world economy.

While in our own lives and businesses we can’t change national policy, we can prepare for the changes by being aware of the trends, experimenting with them and making the financial and management investment in today’s tools that are creating tomorrow’s industries.

Are you prepared to be part of the future?

Is digital different?

Does the digital society mean a new elite has developed with a different philosophy and ethical standards?

Two recent columns, Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times and Stilgherrian on ABC Unleashed explored the idea that the digital world is different. But are things really different online?

Stilgherrian argued that Australia’s “digital elites” are politically naive in the way they are opposing their government’s proposed Internet filter. While it may well be true Australia’s tech communities are politically naive, but the real question is do these folk qualify as an “elite” or even as a separate group from the general community at all?

Are the digital elites the coolest, smartest kids in the room? Does being able to setup a Twitter account or use an iPhone make you superior to the bulk of the population?

Surely the whole notion of a “digital elite” is flawed when the bulk of jobs and households are now, to varying degrees, reliant on digital technologies — we’re all digital.

On a similar vein, Anand asks if we need a digital philosophy to deal with the unique issues of an online, connected world. This assumes the issues are unique and societies haven’t had to deal with worlds where privacy is difficult is difficult to find, think of a mediaeval village where no secret would be safe.

Does being able to tweet across the planet 24/7 mean you are excused from the general standards of behaviour? Or does it hold you to a higher level of accountability? Perhaps it’s the latter.

It could be we returning to older standards of behaviour where we were accountable to our immediate community. That immediate community could now as easily be on the other side of the world as much as across the street.

One feature of Post World War II Western life has been our ability to insulate ourselves from the outside world as we became more materially affluent and isolated in our suburban, car dependent, households. To make our isolation complete we relied on the distorted prism of the mass media for our information on what was happening in our society.

The digital media is changing that, suddenly we find we find we are accountable to our peers and the old rules of responsibility are reasserting themselves, just as they did in the pre suburban communities.

Could it be that being far from an elite, as we become more connected we also become more accountable? Does this mean older standards of responsibility and ethical rules will start to reassert themselves?

Perhaps we may learn much about the future from the experiences of our great grandparents.

The downside of social media marketing

Social media is a great business marketing tool, but it has downsides as a Sydney jeweller learned

Until last Sunday, Facebook was working well for jeweller Victoria Buckley; the page for her store in Sydney’s upmarket Strand Arcade was generating sales and had a rapidly growing fan base from around the world.

One of the key parts of her marketing campaigns are porcelain dolls made by the Canadian designer Marina Bychkova. Her classic doll Ophelia features in the window displays, on posters in the store and on the shop’s Facebook page.

Ophelia is a little bit different to most dolls in that she’s naked and anatomically correct — she has nipples.

Last weekend Victoria received six warnings from Facebook about “inappropriate content” on her page. There was no indication of which images or text broke the rules or what would happen to her page if she took no action.

“The frustrating thing is I can’t pinpoint which images” says Victoria, who goes on to point out that over the year she’s used Ophelia in her marketing, including two large banners in the busy shopping precinct, she’s received no complaints.

“It’s all a bit arbitrary”, says Victoria “it only takes one anonymous person to click on the flag content button and there’s a problem”. Earlier this year her Flickr account was set to restricted because of Ophelia’s nudity.

To avoid problems, Victoria has blacked out any potentially inappropriate parts of Ophelia on the store’s Facebook profile and started a “Save Ophelia- exquisite doll censored by Facebook” group until she can resolve the issue.

But here lies another problem; she can’t find a way to contact Facebook. “It’s become an increasingly important part of the business” Victoria says of the Facebook page and “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the site”.

Right now Victoria has no idea what is going to happen to her business’s profile. As she can’t talk to Facebook, she’s uncertain of the page’s future.

This uncertainty illustrates an overlooked issue with social media sites. All these services are proprietary, run by private organizations to their own rules and business objectives.

In many ways, they are like private mall owners. They are perfectly entitled to dictate what merchants and customers can do on their premises. If you don’t like it, you have no recourse but to take your business elsewhere.

As consequence these sites have a great deal of control over your online business, a lesson that’s been hard learned by many eBay and PayPal dependent Internet retailers.

A good example of what can go wrong are the Geocities websites. Ten years ago Geocities was a popular free hosting site used by many micro businesses and hobbyists. Just over a year ago the now parent company Yahoo! shut them down and all the data on them has been lost.

By relying another company’s Internet platform, you are effectively making them a partner in your business. That’s great while things go well, but you have to remember their business objectives and moral values are different to yours.

This is why a business website is essential; your traffic and all your intellectual property is too important to sit on another businesses’ website with all the risks that go along with that.

The lesson is that while using Facebook, Twitter and other Internet services are an important part of the business marketing mix, your business needs the security of its own website and all your marketing channels, both online and offline, should point to it.

Fortunately Victoria’s across that, she’s pointing her Facebook fans to her website telling them, “You can join my independent mailing list at this link, in case they get really stupid and close this group.”

ABC Nightlife: The consumer’s revenge. 22 July 2010

Could the Internet and networking websites be the ultimate consumers revenge?

We’ve been told how Internet companies like Facebook and Google are a marketer’s dream as they collect data on our lives. But it could be the shoe is really on the other foot as people use the Internet to get back at organisations that don’t deliver?

Join Tony Delroy, Paul Wallbank, and digital business advisor Fi Bendall to discuss how the Internet is moving the power back from the marketers to the customer.

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

The collaborative economy

Should you help someone with a business idea even if they could become a competitor?

“I couldn’t help her, she might become a competitor!” said Nick* when I asked if he’d been able to help Angela* with a business idea.

That response, and the murmured agreement of everyone around us, broke my heart as Angela’s business experience could have helped Nick’s struggling operation.

Nick had taken the short term, narrow and reflexive view rather than listen and think through the opportunities presented by collaborating with Angela, a successful businesswoman who had recently sold her previous venture and was exploring new ideas.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, most business is now global. Instead of worrying about the guy up the street, most enterprises have to worry about what’s happening in the rest of the world. Business is now bigger than petty neighbourhood turf wars.

In many cases, identifying your business’s weaknesses and finding partners who have complimentary skills can grow everybody’s ventures and the overall market. This is particularly true in regional areas where locals are having to look outside their districts for the right skills and products.

To be honest, this issue is personal; one of my IT businesses was constantly hamstrung because I couldn’t establish relationships with other tech support companies. The companies I approached were happy for us to refer work to them but the idea of referring work back or, God Forbid, working together when we had complimentary skills was untenable.

As a consequence none of the businesses grew and everybody was a loser. That reluctance to collaborate between parties is one reason why the IT support sector is such a dog’s breakfast.

Nick’s reluctance to help and engage with other players may not kill his business but he’s lost a valuable resource that could have made his company’s growth easier. It’s a loss for everyone.

If your neighbours or friends have an idea, embrace them even if they could be a competitor, they may be the best allies you ever had.

ABC Weekend Computers, July 11 2010: Setting up a new computer

Join Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank for tips and hints on how to make your next computer purchase easy and quick to set up.

Setting up a computer should be easy. But with security, updates, setting up printers and installing your favourite programs it can be a long process. Join Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank for tips and hints on how to make your next computer purchase easy and quick to set up.

Join us from 10am, March 28 on ABC 702 Sydney or online at www.abc.net.au/sydney. We love listeners’ comments so call in on 1-800-800-702 if you have a question or would like to add to the discussion.

Nine steps to choosing a consultant

A good consultant can help your business, but choosing the right one takes a bit of time and research

As much as we’d like to think we can do everything, the truth is we can’t. Even the biggest organisations don’t always have the right skills for a task that needs to be done. Enter the consultant.

Consultants have had bad press in recent years due to a combination of misunderstandings and misuse by big and small organisations. Ideally the consulting company will bring a fresh set of eyes and skills to projects that are not central to the daily running of your business. So how do we go about choosing a consultant?

1. Do they show up on time?

If a consultant is unreliable when they are chasing your work, what makes you think they will be any better when you hire them? If you’re hounding them for quotes and proposals then you have to wonder if they are really capable of doing the job. The time required to reply to an enquiry is a good way to whittle down the short list.

2. The internet is your friend

An experienced consultant will have a digital footprint with articles, white papers, blogs and a website. These are a good guide to the areas the consultant is an expert in. For consulting firms, those white papers can be powerful marketing tools to show off their expertise.

3. Read their public utterances

Reading into articles will dig up that consultant’s or their staff’s views on the market and different solutions. Comments on other peoples’ sites by the firm’s principles and employees is a great way how deep their expertise is and how they are regarded in the industry, this is also a good check that their values align with yours.

Something that catches out a lot of the self-proclaimed “social media experts” and marketing people is they often show their talk of trust and openness is little more than talk. If a consultant’s tweets, comments or Facebook wall posts are at odds with what they are telling you, then that should be a danger sign.

4. Check references

The consultant’s website will cite the clients they have worked for. Pick up the phone and talk to them, did the consultant really do this work? How effective were they?

If your consultant is an individual, part of that digital footprint is social media. Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook help in checking references as well.

LinkedIn in particular has a recommendations section that is handy quick reference checker. Don’t be shy to contact those people to check the veracity of their recommendations.

5. Understand their biases

We all have biases towards certain solutions. As the US industrial psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail”. In technology this is particularly pronounced as consulting firms small and big have made a substantial investment on one platform or another. This isn’t a bad thing but keep their biases in mind and ask questions why they are proposing a certain course of action over alternatives.

6. Know their expertise

The whole point of hiring a consultant is to do a task you aren’t familiar with. If you ask the consultant to do something outside of their immediate area of expertise then your fees are paying them to train in a new area. Good for them but not for you.

7. Are they too agreeable?

If the consultant agrees with you all the time, then there’s little point in hiring them except for self-validation. A good consultant will be prepared to gently steer you away from silly decisions. On the other hand one who screams at you or puts your staff’s views down is best let go.

8. Trust your instincts

If something doesn’t work for you about a particular proposal, individual or organisation then look elsewhere. If you’re uncomfortable before signing an agreement, imagine how you’ll be when the invoices start arriving.

9. Price should not be the factor

Choosing a consultant purely on cost is risky. As I addressed in a recent blog on the crowdsourcing revolution there are real traps in going for the cheapest option. Invariably, the cheaper and inexperienced consultants will require more handholding and demands on your management time.

A good consultant is worth their weight in gold and finding one is a great help for your business. A little due diligence through the hiring process makes sure you get the person right for your needs.

The coming global race for talent

Assuming immigration can grow the nation and fill skill shortages might be flawed.

Yuan Yandong is a Guanzhou factory worker who is saving to open a hotel management company. The New York Times recently followed him through a night on the Foxconn hard drive assembly lines.

The New York Times article asked “is an unlimited supply of Chinese workers waiting to migrate from the poorer provinces”? Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, points out this isn’t the case and China has a demographic hump far bigger than our own baby boomers.

Recognising their workforce problems, China is beginning to move up the value chain as we see with Yuan’s ambitions and the recent strikes in Guangdong factories challenges our assumptions that China will just be the world’s centre for cheap T-shirts and electronics. These changes in countries like China and India were among the topics discussed by the speakers and attendees at last weekend’s X Media Lab in Sydney, in fact X Media Lab itself relocated from Sydney to Shanghai a few years ago.

China’s aging population though is tomorrow’s problem; Japan has this problem today and Western Europe isn’t far behind which means it’s going to get far harder to find workers anywhere in the near future.

For Australian businesses, this means we can’t rely on importing young workers to overcome skill shortages as we have since World War II. The Big Australia idea of using immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to fix our workforce shortages ignores the competition we’re going to be in with other nations and regions facing much bigger challenges than ours.

In that competition, we don’t offer a great package; traditionally we’ve ignored all non-British qualifications and expected new immigrants to drive our taxis regardless of their skills. Unless we recognise the contributions professional arrivals bring, we’ll struggle to attract those workers.

As businesses, this means we need to be investing and training and making sure our own workplaces and the nation’s workforce are as productive as possible. The first step on an individual business level is to understand what is happening in your sector and how technology is changing it. Regardless of what your industry is, technology is changing your supply chain, customer and supplier behaviour and you need to be understand those changes and how you can profit from them.

Your competition is no longer down the street, it’s around the world and there are millions of young, hard working people like Yuan Yandong looking at your industry right now and thinking how they can do it better. How is your business going to deal with competition like that?

X Media Lab: Global Media Ideas

How are the creative and media industries adapting to a changing world?

As part of the Vivid Festival, X Media Lab returned to Sydney in June 2010 to look at how the creative and media industries are adapting to a changing world where societies very different to the existing dominant cultures are rising and asserting their place in the global economy.

X Media Lab’s Global Media Ideas conference day was billed as exploring “cultural and commercial content in a global world; creative ideas and innovation in media and technology; international media business opportunities; new media and new geographies; and new platforms, applications, and content.” It didn’t disappoint.

The great thing about X Media Labs is how it brings disparate ideas together and exposes the audience to worldwide trends and developments. The June 2010 Sydney X Media Lab was no exception with a great range of diverse speakers. Here’s a brief rundown of their themes, more comprehensive coverage can be found at Brad Howarth’s Lagrange Point blog;

Ralph Simon
Dubbed “the father of the ring tone”, Ralph Simon took us on a tour of innovation that started with the Sex Pistols, through applications like Red Lazer and sites like TuneWiki, which uses crowdsourcing to translate music lyrics, to end with mHealth applications where diabetic children use their mobile phone games to test their blood sugar levels. A broad and exciting view of where the mobile Internet and gaming platforms are going.

Dana Al Salem
The founder of Fanshake, Dana showed us how her site is used to connect bands with their fans. Her view is that today’s Gen Ys are just like their hippy grandparents except today’s groovers are wealthier have more technology. An interesting take on “the more things change, the more they stay the same“.

Gotham Chopra
Gotham described his journey of setting up superhero cartoons for young Indians and intertwined it with a story of his travels through Pakistan as a journalist. His hope is to replace the influence people like Osama Bin Laden have on the youth of South Asia with more positive role models.

Parmesh Shahani
The divide between the richer cities and poorer rural areas in developing nations is often just characterised as a migration story as millions of poor agricultural workers migrate to the cities. Parmesh gave us a broader perspective on what is happening in India including some fascinating case studies of how comparatively older technologies such as satellite TV and SMS mobile messaging are changing rural India.

Joy Mountford
Among the geeks and developers, Joy was probably the most anticipated of the speakers having being a designer with Apple and vice president of design innovation at Yahoo! Joy showed us how designers are moving from the “look” of computer programs to “feel”. She also showed us how crowdsourcing has worked for other projects including the fantastic Johnny Cash Project which reworks his Ain’t No Grave into a group video.

Wayne Borg
The Chief Operating Officer of twofour54, a content creation hub in Abu Dhabi, Wayne took us through the opportunities of 340 million Arabic Speakers covering diverse cultures and where 200 million are under the age of 25. His presentation showed us much of the development plans of the United Arab Emirates and how the kingdoms are seeking to be the Arab world’s creative centre.

Nick Yang
The entrepreneur label is often too easily given away, but no-one could begrudge Nick Yang, founder of KongZhong, ChinaRen.com and Wukong.com for using the title. Nick walked us through his journey of being a young student of Stanford, his return to China and both his and China’s growth over the last decade. He also showed us how his latest venture, Wukong.com, aims to change how search engines work.

Rob Mason and Scott Halcom
Local flavour was provided by Rob Manson from Sydney’s MOB Innovation Lab and Scott Halcomb from from SystemK in Japan, who walked us through the worlds of augmented reality. Rob concluded their joint presentation with the view that object recognition is going to change the way we see the world.

Haidong Pan
Like Nick Yang, Haidong is the founder of a Chinese Internet service, this time Hudong.com which is a “knowledge media” run along the lines of wikipedia that acts as a news and fact service. His presentation on how social knowledge changes the world was thought provoking in how societies are reclaiming their culture and history back from mass media.

Anand Giridharadas
Technology Columnist with The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, Anand challenged us to think about the ethics of the digital world and how foreign cultures are now beginning to colonise the dominant anglo-US culture. Personally I struggled with some of Ananda points as our online ethics should be no different to our off line standards and the US domination of global media stems from it being the richest nation, as other countries catch up with US living standards their cultures will reassert themselves.

John Penny
Like Anand, John forced the audience to think; he invited us to consider the problem of the television producer where audience fragmentation has meant we’re approaching the point where the only profitable TV productions will be reality shows and advertorials. John as an Executive Vice President of Starz Entertainment was well placed to walk us through this dilemma. John finished with a call to consider how dis-intermediation will help rebuild the fortunes of those who want to provide well written screen productions.

Amin Zoufonoun
As corporate development manager at Google, Amin was probably almost as highly anticipated as Joy Mountford had been earlier. Unfortunately his speech on the development of technologies from the Internet’s “Big Bang” fell flat, largely because the audience know this topic. The talk probably would have worked better with an audience of financiers or CEOs who don’t live this topic the way the X Media Lab audience do.

Robert Tercek
To finish a long, stimulating and challenging day Robert Tercek walked us through why great minds like Lord Kelvin, Edison and Einstein had missed emerging technologies in their times and how we can avoid it. Robert sees great opportunities for innovators as successful, large companies entering new markets don’t know more than anyone else and in many cases are blind to the potential of these sectors.

Overall, X Media Labs was another stimulating and fascinating day. The entrepreneurs and artists who had the opportunity to be mentored over the next two days by the speakers were very lucky to be exposed to this sort of talent.

The key message from this X Media Labs came from Parmesh Shahani when he said “don’t just look at India as a market, look at it as a source of innovation and inspiration”. We shouldn’t be just looking for the obvious, easy markets but watching the bigger trends that are developing around us.

The bedrock of trust

Trust is the foundation of business; without trust you have no business

An article in last weekend’s New York Times described the problems of AXA Rosenberg; a quantitative funds manager owned by the French financial giant AXA. The role of quant funds is to use sophisticated share trading programs that maximise returns to large investors.

Sometime in mid 2009 an error was discovered in the software AXA Rosenberg used to trade on behalf of its clients. They didn’t tell their clients until April 2010, at least ten months later.

As a consequence, AXA Rosenberg are finding clients are fleeing them. This illustrates just how important trust is in business.

You don’t have to be a big corporation to fess up to mistakes; we all make them and the sooner we admit them the easier it is to rebuild or keep the trust of those around us.

Trust is the bedrock of business, as AXA Rosenberg has found without trust you have no business.

Choosing a content management system

There’s no such thing as a straight answer in technology, so you need to ask the right questions.

Last week I was asked by a business owner what is the best open source Content Management System for their website. Like many questions in technology, the answer was “it depends”.

Discussing open source and CMS in the one sentence is dangerous as you enter a world of religious geek wars were relationships and reputations are ruined over arguments concerning which product is best; think of the Mac versus PC war fought on a thousand fronts.

There’s also the danger of business owners misunderstanding what “open source” means; to many it means “free” because they don’t realise most of the implementation cost of technology is in the labour time of setting the systems up, not the initial purchase cost. Another risk lies in being blinded by the word “free” results in the business being locked into an inappropriate and ultimately more expensive solution.

This isn’t say the same thing can’t happen with a proprietary system either and often you’ll find being locked into one software vendor means you’re forced into expensive upgrades whenever it suits the vendor’s marketing plan.

Software licenses themselves are a source of risk, in the case of one major technology company I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half their customers are in breach of their user agreements due to some obscure, arcane and contradictory clause buried deep in the legalese. Not that the software company itself would know, being just as befuddled by their own license conditions as their long suffering customers.

Of the open source Content Management Systems, three options stand out from a crowded field; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each one has it’s own benefits;

WordPress

One of the features that marks WordPress out as the leader in the blogging world is its CMS functions. For most websites and business, WordPress combines ease of use with a vast range of plugins, templates and features. Because of its popularity, there’s an army of consultants and webmasters who can get a professional, corporate looking WordPress based website up and running.

Joomla

Coming from website development roots, Joomla based sites don’t have a habit of looking like blogs that WordPress based sites sometimes do. Like WordPress, Joomla has a large base of developers and supporters and offers access to a wide range of extensions and templates. It offers more flexibility than WordPress if you want to customise your site’s look or feel.

Drupal

Drupal is the best if you want a technical solution. While it’s more expensive and time consuming to set up, it offers more flexibility and power for the business. Drupal is probably the best choice if you have a high traffic site with lots of often changing content.

The ultimate solution comes down to what is right for your business so it’s best to get an expert in to have a look at what your current needs and future plans are for your website. Both Smartcompany’s Aunty B and Craig Reardon have previously looked at how to find the right experts.

One thing to keep in mind when asking experts is that religious aspect; many websites designers are evangelists for one platform or another, so ask widely and remember to be firm about your budgets.

I’d be interested to hear from business owners what their experiences have been with the different platforms and in seeking advice, so please comment below on what you’ve found when shopping for a CMS. Religious geek flamewars on the topic are welcome as well.

Every business is a people business

Our businesses are all about people regardless of what we sell.

Facebook’s problems with privacy shows how all business are about people. When managers and business owners forget, their businesses are heading for trouble.

When you’re running a web based service, it’s easy to forget those valuable views and clicks are people. Facebook’s current problems are a reminder that it’s people that sit at the core of every business; as staff, management and customers.

Facebook satisfies a basic urge; our desire to share our experiences, like party and baby photos, with our friends and relatives. We don’t want to share them with some sleazy tooth whitening advertiser and certainly don’t want them shown to the entire world.

Each time Facebook makes a change that opens more data to the world, it loses a little more of their customer’s trust and while the recent Quit Facebook Day only saw a tiny fraction of users leave the service there will be a point where most people stop trusting Facebook and look elsewhere.

It’s a classic case of a technology business not understanding the people aspect of their market.

There’s a wonderful scene in the Mad Men TV series where Kodak have a problem selling their new rotating slide projector, the advertising people fix it by telling the human story behind slide shows, that the pictures are about memory and belonging.

In a funny way Facebook is the modern slide night.

Even if you aren’t in technology, it’s easy to forget the human side of the business. For instance the excellent plumber who walks his dirty boots through the customer’s house doesn’t get invited back.

Mix technology with business and things get worse. We get so tied up in the shiny bells and cute whistles of our toys that we forget our staff don’t know how to use those tools and our customers don’t understand them.

Big businesses are probably the worst for this; over the weekend I came across one of the big telcos using an artificial intelligence web bot to bounce sales enquires between their equally uninformative website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. They were actually messing around potential customers who were looking to spend money.

Those managers responsible in that organisation probably think the system is working fine. Because they’ve been dazzled by the tech they’ve forgotten the whole point is to engage their customers and get them to buy something, not get them stuck in a continuous loop whichadds little value to the business or the client.

Understanding the human aspect of the technology you deploy gives you the advantage over those big telcos and the hottest Silicon Valley stars. So how are you dealing with the human side of your business?