Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Signing off voicemail

    Signing off voicemail

    A survey by US phone company Vonage reports cellphone users are ditching voicemail and moving to alternatives.

    Messages left on user accounts in July fell 8% while retrievals fell 14% compared to last year.

    While those figures may have something to do with the billing practices of US carriers, it shows a much bigger trend in the telecommunications sector away from products which have been very profitable over the last two decades.

    Voicemail, like SMS text messaging, has been a lucrative earner for telcos since the arrival of mobile phones.

    Users get billed for calling a number then for leaving a message – often with a few delaying menu items to make sure callers get hit with a couple of billing units. In turn the receiver is charged for being notified they have a message, billed again for retrieving it and then pays a monthly fee for the privilege for all of this.

    Five bites of the cherry for one phone call – nice work if you can get it.

    This entire revenue stream is now dwindling as customers start using Internet based services to send messages. While the telcos charge extortionate rates for mobile data it is still far cheaper per message than the alternatives.

    In many ways the profits from voicemail and SMS were a classic transition effect – a profitable window of opportunity opened for a short period when a new technology was introduced. Now those windows are closing.

    For telcos, they have to find some profitable new channels. Even if they achieve their dreams of becoming media distributors or even content creators they’ll find both of those fields are far less lucrative than the mobile phone networks of a decade ago.

    While telephone companies aren’t going to grow broke soon, today’s data networks aren’t the golden goose many people expect from telcos.

    The smart telcos will adapt and survive, the ones who think the good times of a decade ago are coming back soon are in for a miserable future.

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  • Nightlife Computers: Sockpuppets, trolls and fakes

    Nightlife Computers: Sockpuppets, trolls and fakes

    Paul Wallbank joined Tony Delroy for the 6 September 2012 ABC Nightlife technology spot to discuss sock puppets, what they mean on review sites and what this means for businesses using social media as a marketing tool.

    If you missed the program, you can listen to the podcast from the Tony Delroy’s Nightlife page.

    This week’s sock puppet scandal puts the light on authors’ book reviews on sites like Amazon while other review services like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Urbanspoon continue to struggle with figuring out which reviews are real.

    Businesses also have to worry about what people are posting in light of the recent Advertising Standards and ACCC rulings making businesses more accountable with what’s posted on Facebook.

    Some of the questions we’ll look at include;

    Join us from 10pm, Australian Eastern Time on Thursday September 5 on your local ABC radio station or listen online through their streaming service at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

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

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

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  • Freebies and rorts

    Freebies and rorts

    Something went badly wrong in Samsung’s PR department last month as their strategy of engaging bloggers turned into a series of embarrassing arguments over control.

    First, a pair of Indian bloggers found themselves stranded at Berlin’s IFA 2012 fair after arguing with Samsung then French blogger France Quiqueré told of her similar encounter with Samsung’s control freakery at the London Olympics.

    Both encounters raise the issue of what is expected when a journalist or blogger is given a free trip to a conference or event.

    Freebies are always a difficult issue, the blogger or journalist is always going to be in a conflicted position and the organisation paying the bills has an interest in what they report.

    In an ideal world, we’d all follow Sarah Lacy’s example where no-one accepts freebies. The problem with that is that most media companies, let alone bloggers, don’t have the funds to attend high priced conferences in their own cities and going to one half way across the world is out of the question if someone else doesn’t pay.

    Sarah’s journalist model works fine when you have a well funded operation like Pando Daily’s VC investors or someone prepared to work for nothing – the digital sharecropper model.

    With the collapse of newspaper revenues, most media companies long ago gave up their ethical objections to accepting paid trips to conferences – in sections like travel, tech and motoring the freebie has been well established for decades.

    Basically, if event organisers didn’t pay the bills for journalists and bloggers their conferences or product launches won’t get much media attention because most of the reporters simply couldn’t afford to attend.

    This is simple economics and where disclosure comes in. If a blogger or reporter has been given free travel or accommodation so they could attend an event then readers should be told.

    What really matters in all of this are the audience and the reporter’s ethical compass. If the readers or viewers can trust and value what reporters produce and in turn the reporters are comfortable within their own moral boundaries then everyone is a winner.

    The danger is getting the balance wrong. If readers lose trust, PR people start taking liberties (as Samsung tried to do) or bloggers and journalists are uncomfortable with what they do then it’s time to stop doing it.

    One quick way to destroy credibility is for PR managers to expect those blogger to act like performing monkeys in return for ‘winning’ a competition or believing that ferrying a journalist to an event will guarantee fawning coverage.

    Any decent journalist or blogger who respects themselves and their audiences won’t do that, if only because it will damage their brand or career prospects. This is the lesson Samsung have learned.

    For the record, I do accept freebies and disclose them at the bottom of any related blog posts. If an investor would like to bankroll a down under Pando Daily, you know where to contact me.

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  • Goodbye to the electronics store

    Goodbye to the electronics store

    “Can Electronics Stores Survive?” asks the Wall Street Journal.

    The future doesn’t look good with the liquidation of Circuit City in the United States and the exit of Australian giant Harvey Norman from the electronics markets.

    Yet Apple Stores are growing and while it’s tempting to dismiss their sales training as brainwashing the truth is their staff are among the most profitable retail employees on the planet.

    The real problem is the Big Box category killer store featuring wide product lines but poorly trained staff motivated only by commissions is a business model whose time has passed.

    Customers can now go online, research website that are far more informative and honest than the staff at the megastore then get the appliance delivered and often installed for less than the shelf price at the mall.

    The earliest industry this has affected is the computer sector – long ago companies like Dell and Gateway changed how people shopped for PCs.

    Given the economics, it’s surprising the low margin big box stores survived as long as they could and the main reason they did was because appliances were an ideal channel for pushing profitable finance plans and extended warranties.

    Often the store and sales assistant made more money out of the “interest free 72 months” deal, the three year warranty and the connector cables than they did from selling a top end laptop or plasma TV.

    Now the easy credit era is over, those add-ons aren’t so profitable and with Amazon leading an army of e-commerce retailers changing customer expectations, those businesses locked into Big Box, easy credit way of doing things have to rethink how and what they are selling.

    Harvey Norman’s founder Gerry Harvey said recently that people would still buy big items from his store. The reality is they are moving across to sites like Winning Appliances where they can choose the items, have them delivered installed and the old appliance taken off, a godsend when you’re dealing with a 50Kg washing machine or fridge.

    Apple’s success shows retail does have a future. It just doesn’t lie in the low service, Big Box model that grew out of the easy credit and cheap energy economy of the late twentieth Century.

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  • Do we really want fibre broadband?

    Do we really want fibre broadband?

    Despite the enthusiasm to be the first US city to have the high speed broadband offered by Google Fiber, it turns out interest in the Kansas City rollout is only running at half the rate expected.

    This is consistent with the Australian NBN experience, with the takeup rate so far a dismal with less than 20% of Tasmanian properties passed taking the opportunity to get connected – only 10% of accessible premises are projected to sign up in 2012 according to NBNCo’s corporate plan.

    Both the poor take up rates in the US and Australia raise the question “do we really want fibre broadband?”

    The main difficulty are the incumbent players. In Kansas City reports are that Time Warner, the incumbent cable operator, is offering deals to lock their customers into existing plans.

    A similar thing has happened in Australia with the major operators locking customers into existing ADSL and phone plans so subscribers face penalties if they churn across to an NBN service.

    Most of those subscribers don’t need to churn right now, for most users the data plans they are currently on are fine and the NBN prices aren’t substantially different to the existing ADSL charges. In Kansas City, Google’s prices are lower, but the service is some way off and Time Warner can offer a connection now.

    Another problem is demographics, neither Tasmania or Kansas City are major digital industry hubs and parts of both regions are economically distressed, which means they are less likely to take up the offer – or be able to make the investment – to get get connected.

    That latter problem is the most concerning, as regional disadvantaged areas have the most to gain from being connected to broadband.

    Just as towns lobbied in the 19th Century to get railways routed through their communities, in the 21st Century fast Internet connectivity is seen as essential to a region’s development.

    But if individuals won’t get connected then it makes the business case for setting these networks up difficult to justify for corporations like Google or Governments like Australia. In future, it will make it harder to get incumbent network operators to replace aging copper infrastructure with modern and faster fibre.

    As both projects mature, hopefully we’ll see a greater takeup, in the Australian case greater acceptance should be inevitable as the incumbent Telstra copper network is shut down and subscribers migrated across to NBN infrastructure.

    The question does remain though of just how useful homes and businesses see fibre Internet connections to their homes, if they remain unconvinced about the value of a high speed data link then it maybe our communities miss out on the vital communications tool of the 21st Century.

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