Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

Links of the day 15 May 2012
Today’s links are another diverse bunch ranging from how Nokia can save itself, the compelling story of a US execution and how a Unicorn harpooned a whale.

Russia Today’s Capital Account on JP Morgan’s “Unicorn Hedge” Fairytale Harpoons the London Whale.

A powerful story from Al-Jazeera – An Anatomy of an American Execution.

Giga Om looks at a cute way some online services are arbitraging how Facebook acts as a gatekeeper in displaying news. Only read this if you’re a serious search or social media geek.

You know an online sensation is well past its peak when big business starts piling in – Amex sets up a Groupon competitor.

Nokia’s Last Stand. Wired UK looks at how the former mobile phone giant can fight its way back to market leadership.

Ad Age on why YouTube is deliberately reducing web page views.

Canon Australia to stop publishing Recommended Retail Prices on their products. Is this an admission of an open market, or an effort to further muddy the retail waters?

Twitter starts sending out summary emails of friends’ postings. Will this work to drive engagement and create much needed revenue for the sharing platform?

Tomorrow, the blog will look at whether the London Olympics will really be a disaster and whether British business can capitalise on the event.

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May 15, 2012
Could Australia follow the Greek path?
Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen today describes how Australia has caught the Greek disease of low productivity and an overvalued currency.

This is interesting as just last week Robert was bleating on behalf of Australia’s middle class welfare state.

Australia’s productivity has stagnated over the last 15 years, but unlike Greece the ten years before that was a period of massive reform to both employment practices and government spending.

The structure of the Australian economy is very different, not least in its openness, to that of Greece.

What’s more Australia has a floating currency which will eventually correct itself unlike the Euro that Greece finds itself trapped in.

That’s not to say Australians won’t be hurt when that currency correction happens. The failure of the nation’s political, business and media elites in failing to recognise and plan for this is an indictment on all of them – including Robert Gottliebsen.

Australia’s real similarity with Greece is the entitlement culture that both nations have developed.

Over those last 15 years of poor productivity growth, Australia has seen a massive explosion of middle class welfare under the Howard Liberal government which has been institutionalised by the subsequent Rudd and Gillard Labor governments.

Today middle class Australians believe they have a right to generous government benefits subsidising their superannuation, school fees and self funded retirements.

For all the sneering of Australian triumphalists about Greek hairdressers getting lavish government benefits, Australia isn’t far behind Greece in believing these entitlements are a birthright.

A middle class entitlement culture is the real similarity between Australia and Greece. It’s unsustainable in every country that harbours these illusions.

Unlike Greece, Australia doesn’t have sugar daddies in Brussels, Paris and Berlin desperate to prop up the illusion of the European Union. Australia is own its own when the consequences of magic pudding economics become apparent.

Australia’s day of reckoning may arrive much quicker than that of Greece. Then we’ll see the test of how Australians and their politicians are different from our Greek friends.

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May 15, 2012
Links of the day 14 May 2012
Some great links over the weekend ranging from the future of media and big box stores to a great, quirky clip promoting Scandanavia as a place to do business.

22 Michaels on an amazing presentation on why you should do business in Stockholm. It’s a shame more government agencies can’t do shows like this.

MIT’s Center for Civic Media writes up a discussion by the boss of Google News. I give this more of a write up in Grappling with Online Media.

Scamworld. Not only is The Verge’s expose of the online get rich quick community a great read, it’s also shows one of the future media models.

Business Insider has the real story why the tale of LinkedIn buying employment site Monster was made up. This is great example of how merchant banks try to create a market for flogging client assets. The managers of Football players do exactly the same thing.

Is there money in Big Data? MIT’s Technology Review doesn’t seem to think so.

Ending the era of the megastore. The Fiscal Times on how Wal-Mart is re-inventing itself.

Tomorrow’s blog looks at phishing scams and how social media is helping the more targeted “spear phishing”.

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May 14, 2012
Grappling with the online news beast
The head of Google News, Richard Gingras, last week discussed how the news industry is evolving at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

Much of Richard’s discussion centred around disruption – the newspaper industry was disrupted in the 1950s by television and by the 1980s most print markets had seen several mastheads reduced to one or two.

The remaining outlets were able to book fat profits from their monopoly or duopoly position in display and classified advertising.

By 2000, the web had killed that business model and the newspaper industry was in a decline that continues today as aggregator sites like Huffington Post steal page views and Google News further changes the distribution model.

One of the problems for the news industry is how different the online mediums are from print, radio or television broadcast. The struggles of media startup The Global Mail is a good example of this.

In the middle of last year news started trickling out that one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s top journalists, Monica Attard, had left the broadcaster to set up The Global Mail, an online news site funded by Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

The site launched on schedule in February 2012 and underwhelmed readers with pedestrian content and a confusing layout. By May, Monica Attard announced she was leaving the organisation she’d founded.

Tim Burrowes of the media site Mumbrella examined why the Global Mail is struggling, his Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience details how the site doesn’t use online media effectively.

At heart is a fundamental mismatch between the methods of journalists raised in the “glory days” of print and broadcast journalism against those of the online world, not least the much harsher financial imperatives of those publishing on the web.

One key problem it the TL;DR factor – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Where online readers tend to leave stories after around four hundred words.

Richard Gringas is quoted as encountering this problem when he worked at online magazine, Salon.

At Salon, articles were paginated, but only 27% of readers made it to the end of the four-page articles. Compared to competitors, Richard was told, this was a good benchmark. But with fresh eyes, he was astounded that a product was being produced with the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience would not consume the entire piece. Richard loves the long form, but if the objective is to convey information, we need to think about the right form for the right medium at the right time.

So “long form” journalism has to be written the right way and it has to be backed up with good visual components and have “short form” versions suited to the more impatient readers who make up the bulk of the web audience.

The New York Times made a step in this direction with their iEconomy series on how the US middle classes have been displaced with manufacturing’s move to China.

An even better example of journalists using the web well is The Verge’s Scamworld where an online expose of Internet get rich quick schemes and the conmen behind them.

Scamworld shows us what skilled journalists can do online. The amazing thing is the site’s new steam is tiny compared to those of established outlets like the New York Times, Guardian, Fairfax or those of News Corporation.

This failure to execute by incumbent news organisations isn’t because they are lacking talent – every young, and not so young, journalist has been required to have multimedia skills and the ability to file stories in multiple formats for at least a decade.

Old Media’s problems lies in the mindsets of senior journalists, editors and their managements who are locked into a 1950s way of thinking where fat advertising revenues funded the adventures and expense accounts of roving reporters who tough as nails editors occasionally bullied into filing stories.

That model started to die in the 1980s and the Internet gave it the last rites.

Richard Gringas’ discussion at Harvard shows news and journalism isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Just like many other disrupted industries, the news media has to adapt to a changed world.

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May 14, 2012
Digital roadkill
Digital Roadkill first appeared in Smart Company on 10 May 2012

Just over thirteen years a group of Silicon Valley technologists wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto detailing what they saw as being the new rules of business in a connected world.

Cluetrain was mandatory reading when terms like “information superhighway” were fashionable and Yahoo! was the dominant web portal. It’s somewhat fallen out of fashion today.

Like most manifestos Cluetrain was partially unreadable and heavy on dramatics but it did lay down the principles that are now largely accepted in both the online and mainstream business worlds.

I was reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto earlier this week at a suburban marketing event run by one of the country’s biggest media organisations. The lessons of the last thirteen years seemed to have passed by almost every business in the room.

Most of these businesses were operating they way they did in the 1990s. While some of them had a website and a couple had Facebook pages, their businesses had barely changed in the last twenty years.

These businesses are digital roadkill. Many of them have no idea what’s about to hit them as they sit paralysed wondering what the bright lights baring down on them are.

In this respect they aren’t dissimilar to the big department stores or electrical chains that are working to a model that’s ticked along nicely for decades and don’t realise how the fundamentals of the economy have shifted in the last five years.

Many of these small traders are still taking orders by fax and some of them still keep their cheque book ready to pay their suppliers bills. It’s that bad.

The idea of selling over the net is completely beyond them, only big overseas companies dodging GST do that sort of thing.

Even in the marketing field, these businesses have ignored the obvious for years with many still advertising in their local Yellow Pages and freebie community newspaper, despite barely making a sale from either in five years. But these channels worked for them once.

Few of them have up to date websites, are doing the bare minimum search engine or mobile optimisation and almost every single one hasn’t bothered to claim their local business listings.

To be fair to the little guys the host organisation was no better, this large media organisation has a good online product – they even own one of the major online local business listing services – but their sales people on the night didn’t mention it as they are too locked into selling their traditional local newspaper advertising products.

At least that company is wealthy and has other profitable arms that can prop up its dying local newspaper arms which can at least appear profitable while there are costs to be stripped from the operation.

Unlike those big media companies and retailers, the small local business doesn’t have big cash reserves or deep pocketed investors allowing them to survive for years in a declining market.

These small businesses are just going to drag their owners into poverty.

Not only have the old rules of business gone, but the value of businesses which choose to live in the past has evaporated. Few people are going to buy a business with an old, declining customer base.

“Roadkill” is an apt term for a business that probably won’t be around in two years.

Today the Cluetrain is big lumbering road train carrying ecommerce goods down the fast lane of the information superhighway with a driver that has no intention of stopping.

Make sure your business isn’t the cute fluffy rodent sitting in its path.

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May 13, 2012