Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Small business’ essential online ingredient

    Small business’ essential online ingredient

    A Virginian restaurant, the Serbian Lion, went out of business because its Google Places listing was hacked, reports Wired.

    The proprietor of the Serbian Lion, Rene Bertagna, wasn’t aware his online listing showed the restaurant as being closed on weekends and as a result customers stopped showing up, he alleges in a law suit against Google.

    As a result of result of the drop in earnings, the restaurant entered a death spiral of falling service standards, declining customers and further cuts until the place closed down.

    While it’s difficult to judge how true Bertagna’s claim is – it’s quite possible the listing was a mistake by Google’s data scrapers or an oversight by a customer putting the data into the services – the story does illustrate how important getting the correct information into online services like Google Places, Microsoft Bing and Yelp.

    Bertagna himself appears to be a classic case of roadkill on the information superhighway with his claims not to be a computer or internet user.

    Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn’t own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither. Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere. Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.

    The sad tale of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates just how important it is for operators in the hospitality industry to be on top of their listings and online presence. This is where the customers are.

    Sadly, this story isn’t news – that customers are using the web to find local businesses and read reviews of neighbourhood establishments has been the case for a decade, the move to mobile has been obvious for over five years.

    For all local businesses, it’s a core responsibility to make sure online listings are correct along with having an up to date website. If you don’t, you only have yourself to blame if the customers don’t show up.

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  • Satya Nadella’s grand vision

    Satya Nadella’s grand vision

    From a PC on every desktop to a services and devices company and now “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s long missive lays out where he’s taking the company.

    It’s a radical shift from the company of the Gates and Ballmer years.

    In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market.

    This describes a very different company from five years ago; it implies an end to bureaucracy and management conveniences like stack ranking; if Microsoft is really going to be more nimble, then it means a smaller, more focused management.

    In 1995, Bill Gates turned Microsoft around in a few months when he realised the strategic mistake he’d made in underestimating the impact of the Internet, so the company has adapted quickly to dramatically changed times in the past.

    Whether Microsoft can adapt and maintain its position in a computing world very different to the one it once dominated will be among the great business studies of our time.

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  • Peg Fitzpatrick and social media

    The latest video on Decoding the New Economy features Canva’s Social Strategist Peg Fitzpatrick explaining how businesses can use social media.

     

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  • Living in the 1970s – Australia looks backwards

    Living in the 1970s – Australia looks backwards

    An interesting observation about life in Australia over the last twenty years is how the nation decided to look backwards and become insular in many fields.

    One of the manifestations of this insularity is the sensitivity towards outside criticism by many of the nation’s business and political leaders.

    Today saw an example with two Members of Parliament on the ABC’s The World Today program responding to criticism from a former Thatcher government minister, Lord Deben, over the government’s climate change policies.

    GEORGE CHRISTENSEN STATEMENT (voiceover): The last time I checked, the House of Lords, that undemocratic anachronism in a modern British democracy, and its Privy Council, had no jurisdiction over Australia, thank God.

    Yet Lord Deben has waded into Australian affairs, whingeing about what we are doing regarding climate change when we contribute less than 2 per cent to total global carbon dioxide emissions.

    …

    If this whingeing pom thinks the carbon tax was actually doing something for the planet, can he please advise us lowly commoners how many degrees the Earth would have cooled to because of the carbon tax?

    …

    IAN MACDONALD: I think the Australian Government and Australian policy should be run by Australians not by some retired English Lord.

    MacDonald’s and Christensen’s sensitivity towards criticism from a ‘whingeing pom’ is notable – as is their contempt for the British House of Lords despite being members of a political party that supports the English Queen as Australia’s head of state.

    On their own, the ramblings of a pair of insular rural apparatchiks doesn’t count for much but the same hostility towards educated outsiders was on show two days earlier when US economist Joseph Stiglitz appeared on ABC Television’s Q&A program.

    An early audience question to Stiglitz set the scene;

    Thank you for taking my question. My question is for Professor. Sorry, excuse me. What gives you the right, as an American, to come to Australia and criticise our budget, especially the $7 co-contribution payment, which is capped at $70 per year?

    The ‘what gives you a right as an American?’ theme was gleefully picked up by Professor Judith Sloan, the token government apologist on the panel – faux news balance beings as alive and well in Australia as much as anywhere else in the world – who dismissed many of Stiglitz’s observations on the Australian economy as being the misguided views of an ill informed outsider.

    Dismissing the whingeing poms and arrogant yanks harks back to an earlier time in Australia’s development. It may well be the nation has gone back to the days of Barry Mckenzie where Down Under is the working man’s paradise that the rest of the world desperately wants to be part of.

    Strangely, the immigration officials in that 1972 movie could well pass for today’s Australian politicians.

    As it turned out, the 1970s were a tough decade for Australia as it looked like the luck had run out. It may well turn out the Twenty-First Century is a lot tougher for the Lucky Country.

     

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  • Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

    Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

    “My job is to spread good news,” says Guy Kawasaki of his role as Canva’s Chief Evangelist.

    Kawasaki was speaking to Decoding the New Economy about his role in popularising the online design tool which he sees as democratising force in the same way that Apple was to computers and Google to search.

    Democratisation is a theme consistently raised by startups and businesses disrupting existing industries and Kawasaki continues this theme.

    “The world is becoming a meritocracy; it’s not about your pedigree, it’s about your competence,” states Kawasaki.

    Falling barriers to entry

    What excites Kawasaki about the present business climate are the falling barriers to starting a venture. “Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, in technology you had to buy a room full of servers, have IT staff in multiple cities. Today you call Amazon or Rackspace and host it in the sky.”

    “Before you had to buy advertising for a concert, now if you’re adept at using social media – with Google Plus, Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram – you have a marketing platform that fast, ubiquitous and cheap.”

    “What excites me is there are going to be more technologies, more products and more services because the barriers are so low.”

    Creating a valued and viable product

    For those businesses starting into this new environment, Kawasaki believes the most important thing a startup should focus on is getting a prototype to market; “at that point you will know you’re truly onto something.”

    “If you build a prototype that works you may never have to write a business plan,” says Kawasaki. “You’d never have to make a Powerpoint, you may never have to raise money as you could probably bootstrap.”

    Kawasaki view is the MVP – Minimum Viable Product – model of lean product development should have another two ‘V’s added for ‘Valuable’ and “Validated’.

    “You can create a product that’s viable, ie you could make money, but is it valuable in that it changes the world?”

    “Is your first product going to validate your vision? If it’s not then why are doing it?”

    The story Kawasaki tells is the tools to deliver valued and viable products are more accessible than ever before; that’s good news for entrepreneurs and consumers but bad for stodgy incumbents.

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