Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The rise and fall of a social media influencer

    The rise and fall of a social media influencer

    Jess Miller from suburban Melbourne was a social media star. Two years ago at the age of sixteen she was earning $10,000 a week as ‘Pizza’ on Tumblr.

    Miller was a classic social media influencer, with 700 thousand young followers she was popular with advertisers then along came the payday of reposting fake diet pill testimonials.

    Miller started to make serious money. She’d already been able to make a little cash: fashion companies and some small Etsy stores paid her to post pictures of clothing on her blog, with a nudge to her followers to check out their sales. She’d earned about $4000 in this way.

    But then the big one came along. Two 18-year-old American social media entrepreneurs, Zach Lilley and Jeremy Greenfield – fans and friends of Pizza – approached Jess Miller and other top-performing Tumblr bloggers in April 2014 with a proposition for a money-making scheme. It used a decidedly old-school lure: diet pills.

    Lilley, Greenfield and their associate Dennis Hegstad ran a website called Exposely, which connected brands to people with strong followings on social media. Lilley and Greenfield used their social media skills to create diet pill ads that masqueraded as Tumblr posts, essentially fake testimonials from women talking about their weight-loss journey. Miller would re-blog these posts, and get a small payment if the user clicked on the link. If the user bought the pills, Miller would get $23 and Exposely would get $26. She watched the money roll in – to her mother’s PayPal account.

     

    Eventually the breaches their terms of service, not to mention ethics, became too much for Tumblr’s management and they deleted Miller’s blog along with a group of others in the scheme.

    Miller’s story illustrates the manipulation that is a big part of the social media influencer industry with behaviour that’s almost certainly illegal and most definitely unethical. It also illustrates the risks of basing an income or business on service where you can be closed down any time.

    For Miller, she seems relieved her time of fame is over. Those building their businesses around these platforms may not be so philosophical.

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  • Industries of the future on display

    Industries of the future on display

    One of the challenges we face in looking at the economy’s future is going lies in identifying what tomorrow’s industries will be.

    I’ve spent the day at the 500Startups pitch day at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley listening to the startups on the program making their investment spiels and in many ways those businesses are a glimpse of the future economy.

    While not all of these businesses will survive, and many will pivot over time, they do indicate directions the economy is taking.

    The question though is what sectors will drive jobs growth over the next quarter century and whether those industries will pay enough for workers and their families to survive, let alone keep a consumerist economy ticking along.

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  • How cloud computing is making innovation a commodity

    How cloud computing is making innovation a commodity

    Being on the public cloud is a competitive advantage believes Xero CEO Rod Drury.

    Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a lot about cloud computing. One of the themes being pushed by many incumbent IT companies – such as Dell and EMC recently at their Las Vegas conference – is that a hybrid model of computing is developing where certain functions are given to public cloud providers while others are bought back in house.

    Rod Drury, the CEO and founder of Xero, has been one of the greatest critics of this ‘hybrid’ model of computing and during an interview with him yesterday I asked him about this view that companies are bring IT services back in house.

    “I completely disagree with that,” says Drury. “We’ve been on a two year journey moving from our own hosted environment to AWS. The reason for that is important.”

    “We have a trillion dollars worth of transactions for the last twelve months sitting on our servers, the next stage is to apply some of  the Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence type services. If you’re sitting there with your own private cloud, you have to invest in those technologies.”

    “The benefit of being on the Amazon cloud – and this is part of the big battle between Amazon, Microsoft and Google – is you really have to be on that platform to take advantage of the commodity innovation that is in those platforms.”

    “Our understanding is our incumbent competitors are still working on migrating their desktop platforms and their own data centres to cloud and haven’t made that investment where they get access to the next generation of technology.”

    “So we think we’ve built a sustainable competitive advantage by being on AWS, we see Salesforce have announced they are getting on AWS, and you really have get in there because of what’s happening.”

    That’s a clear view from Rod Drury and one that most ‘cloud native’ businesses will endorse. Despite the risks of vendor lock-in, companies like Xero are choosing the cloud vendors because of the access to tools and services.

    For Amazon’s competitors, from the small services to the major providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google, the challenge is going to be developing and offering services that can compete with AWS.

    In many respects the cloud computing world is beginning to resemble the desktop marketplace 25 years ago where Microsoft dominated and controlled the sector. Whether Amazon dominating today is in the interests of today’s cloud native companies remains to be seen, certainly though Xero’s Rod Drury seems to be happy about it.

    Drury’s point though about innovation as a commodity is important though and key for businesses like his that have to adapt to changing markets quickly. Maybe that increased flexibility is the key tradeoff when dealing with the AWS juggernaut.

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  • Diversity and startup success

    Diversity and startup success

    There are four factors that seem to be key to the success of startup business and one that doesn’t reports the Harvard Business Review.

    A survey of six hundred investments over the past decade by First Round Capital found the best predictors for success were that at least one of the founding team was a woman, one had been to an elite university, some had worked at a top tech firm and the average age of the team was under 42.

    Interestingly First Round’s successful investments weren’t dependent upon the businesses being based in the Bay Area or New York.

    Those factors may have something to do with the focus of First Capital’s investment managers but the results are food for thought.

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  • A lack of systems, process or even a working website

    A lack of systems, process or even a working website

    The first ever guest of AirBnB tells his story. At the time the site had no contact details and Amol Surve was desperate to attend the San Francisco’s Industrial Design Conference in 2007.

    He tracked down AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia to get the air mattress and the business was born.

    Which shows a good business idea doesn’t need all their processes and technology in order to prove it works. Something that anyone with a new business idea should consider.

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