Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Social Media’s difficult adolescence

Social media is struggling with its identity as it enters adolescence.

Like teenagers, social media platforms are struggling to understand their position in the world.

For the last week I’ve been dipping into the Sydney sessions of Social Media Week and what’s quite clear from the panels and keynotes is the industry and the services themselves are struggling to find how they fit into society.

Two weeks ago LinkedIn’s senior management were in Sydney describing their ambition to be a global publishing platform, something that’s at odds with the company’s success in becoming the dominant professional social network.

Compounding the feeling of confusion about what LinkedIn is, CEO Jeff Weiner followed up with a discussion of how the service had an ethical crisis over its entry into the Chinese market.

A conflict of interest

During the Social Media Week sessions panellists and the audiences agonised over their struggles to engage audiences or how social media services, particularly Facebook, were limiting their reach.

Facebook has a particular problem; its users want to know about their friends, families and interests while not really caring about brands but its advertisers – the people who pay the bills – desperately want to embed themselves into their followers’ lives.

So Facebook has to throttle back the amount of brand content and marketing material to prevent users being irritated by excessive advertising. Understandably advertisers get upset with this, although its hard to feel much sympathy for businesses and agencies who thought they had a free broadcasting channel in the social media platforms.

Twitter and every other social media platform is suffering similar problems, albeit without the revenues and stock market valuation.

An even more stark illustration of social media’s immaturity is the industry’s reaction to privacy with, at best, a shrug about concerns over the handling of users’ information – this is something that will almost certainly damage the industry in coming years.

One of the problems for the social media industry could be that its overvalued and overhyped; while there’s no doubt a valid role for the services in modern life most of the companies won’t turn out to be as valuable as they and their investors hope.

Startstruck platforms

Part of that quest to increase value results in probably the saddest adolescent aspect of social media: The need to be liked by the cool kids.

Like a lonely teenager, social media platforms are often starstruck; LinkedIn has gone through its phase of being in the thrall of high profile influencers for its publishing function, Twitter desperately courts celebrities and Google Plus in its fawning towards music stars, all of whom seemed exempt from the real name policies that caused so much grief for the company and its users a few years back.

For the social media industry, adolescence is a tough time with many struggles about its own identity similar to those of its users. It will be interesting to see how it matures.

iPhone ME — Apple risks becoming the new Microsoft

Is Apple’s current inattention to detail a worrying trend?

It’s been a tough week for Apple, after the spectacular launch of the iPhone 6 the company has had two humiliating and worrying setbacks that indicate standards may be slipping at the once untouchable giant.

The iPhone 6 Plus should have been a triumph, and for a while it was, but the news the phones bend and distort has tarnished the product.

Compounding the bendable phone problem are the claims users are being charged to replace their damaged handsets.

On its own this problem might have been manageable like the iPhone4’s antenna problems in 2010, however today’s news that the latest iOS8 has had to be withdrawn after user complaints indicates a sloppiness has crept into the company.

Both problems, or all three problems if it turns out the stories of Genius Bars charging to replace damaged phones, show Apple isn’t paying attention to detail to the degree they’ve become known for.

The botched iOS8.0.1 rollout is sloppy work while the bendable phone is very much an uncharacteristic lapse in design.

For a premium brand with a large dose of arrogance, shipping defective products is both an embarrassment and damages the company’s name.

This inattention to detail is horribly reminiscent of Microsoft’s horror days at the turn of the Century where the company repeatedly rushed incomplete products to market — Windows ME being the most notorious example.

So maybe we are seeing Apple become the new Microsoft and the iPhone 6 Plus as the Windows ME of our time.

That doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of Apple, Microsoft is still a huge corporation, but it may be the tech industry’s most iconic business is beginning to lose its edge.

Image of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates via Wikipedia

The tough determined business of building a business

It takes a special kind of grit and determination to succeed with a startup business says BlackLine founder and CEO Therese Tucker

In 2005, Therese Tucker’s company was down to its last three staff when a customer suggested a new line of business. Today BlackLine is valued at over 200 million dollars and about to list on the stock market.

A few week ago Therese described her journey from a struggling software startup to a hundred million dollar business on the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

BlacklLine’s business automates financial processes as Tucker explains, “we have the interesting job of providing software that helps companies automate all the things around accounting and the financial close that they currently do on spreadsheets.”

At the time of Tucker’s pivot, the business was supplying a wealth management system when that prescient customer asked her to develop an application to manage the ten thousand spreadsheets they were struggling with for accounts reconciliation.

BlackLine wasn’t Tucker’s first business having been involved in a series of ventures after working as an electrical engineer designing automation systems before moving into the IT industry.

“There’s a reason for the term ‘serial entrepreneur.” Tucker says, ” it’s a bug that once you catch it you really don’t want to rest until you’ve been successful at it.”

For aspiring entrepreneurs Tucker’s advice is blunt — “The best advice is ‘don’t do it’. Because if you listen to that advice you’ll never make it.”

“It’s the people that are crazy and are determined to work themselves to death and to fail and fail and fail until they don’t fail. It takes that kind of grit and determination.”

“If I tell you not to do it, then that’s great advice for you.”

Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn’s Chinese cultural struggle

LinkedIn’s move into China challenges the company’s values and its ambitions to be a content publishing platform

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner believes the company’s culture and values are one of its most important competitive advantages, however moving into China has tested those strengths he told a conference in Sydney two weeks ago.

During the fireside chat Weiner went over the company’s development, the challenges he faced taking over from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as CEO and the importance of the company’s ethical base.

“It’s important for companies to define what culture and values mean to them before they get to what the specific values and culture are,” Weiner said in an answer to an audience question.

Defining values and culture

“At LinkedIn we think culture is the collective personality of our organisation and it’s not only who we are but who we aspire to be and that aspirational component is really important,” Weiner continued.

“Oftentimes you’ll see company executives get onstage to introduce culture and values or talk about changing culture and values and it’s not necessarily something the company already does and it loses the trust of the employees and the audience when that material being presented because people know is not necessarily true.

“If you allow yourself to include this aspirational dimension when defining the culture it gives everyone an opportunity to play up to where your setting that bar and I think that’s important,” stated Weiner.

“Values are the first principles upon which we make day to day operating decisions, that’s how we make the distinction.”

Culture as a competitive advantage

“I think once an organisation has defined for itself what it means by culture and values it’s then obviously important to codify its culture and the pillars of the culture and the specific values that it operates with.

“Its not enough to codify it, we went to the trouble of defining it and then putting it in our public registration when we filed to go public and that’s a good start but all too often we see people talking the talk with regard to culture and values and not walking the walk.”

For Weiner, that commitment to the company’s culture is the company’s strength in the marketplace: “Today, I’ll tell you it’s our most important competitive advantage.”

The China Problem

LinkedIn’s culture though has been tested by its entry into the Chinese market where its aspirations of being a content publisher met the limitations of the country’s censors.

When asked by this writer about the quandary LinkedIn finds itself in the PRC, Weiner reconciled this with the company’s mission to connect the world’s professionals.

“China’s one of our largest opportunities in terms of the value we can create for members in China and for companies in China.”

“One in five knowledge workers and students reside in China so it’s a huge part of connecting the world’s professionals and to achieve that kind of scale so we can create value for people who are living in China it’s important that we’re able to do business there.”

“At times means complying with law that forces us to do things that are very challenging and difficult and we always knew the importance of operating in China and for us we wanted to be extremely thoughtful in terms of how we did that.”

Favoring freedom of expression

“Obviously we are very much against the idea of censorship and very much in favor of freedom of expression but in terms of operating there and creating economic opportunities for what could be potentially a 144 million people from time to time we may have to make some very difficult decisions. That’s the reality of doing business there.”

In being asked if this creates a struggle with the company’s culture, Weiner answered “that was one of the things we took so much time on.”

“From the time we decided we needed to be in China and how important it would be in creating the global platform and adding value for members and the time we entered into China with the local language version of the site it was of the order of 18 to 24 months.”

“Discussions took place among our executives asking some very difficult questions in terms of our culture, our values and where we would be willing to compromise and where we would draw hard and fast lines and that will continue to be an ongoing process.”

For LinkedIn and Jeff Weiner the challenge of being a trusted global publishing platform and a leader in the Chinese market raises some serious ethical questions; it’s a challenge that is going to test the company more in coming years.

This is not toy time

A podcast with Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin on payments and the hospitality industry

We’re past the time where business owners can dismiss new technologies as toys says Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin.

Ken’s Profitable Hospitality website is a must read for anybody in the industry and I was lucky enough to be the the guest of his 99th podcast where we discussed payment systems, marketing and the challenges facing restaurant and cafe operators in a changing marketplace.

In the podcast we discuss PayPal’s plans for the retail sector along with how startups like Stripe look to disrupt the sector and what Apple’s announcements last week will mean to the payments industry.

The key message from the podcast is the entire sector is facing massive changes both from technology and changing consumer behaviour.

Like many other industries, the successful restaurant and cafe businesses over the next decade will be those who have the flexibility to adapt to a very different world.

The decline of Forbes magazine

The tale of Forbes Magazine’s downfall is a lesson to all publishers, both in the new and old media

A great piece by Michael Wolff in Town and Country describes how the Forbes family struggled with making their magazine work in the digital economy.

For the Forbes family, it was always going to be hard stepping into the shoes of the late Malcolm after he unexpectedly passed away in 1990 and unfortunately for them that happened to coincide with the end of the great era of publishing wealth.

Twenty five years later the family are largely removed from the publication which is a shadow of its former self with its best hope for survival lying with Asian investors who still see some value in the brand.

What’s particularly poignant about Wolff’s story is the Forbes family did nothing wrong — they embraced the new platforms, experimented with digital and tried to find a way to make their business work in the online marketplace.

As it turned out, the old advertising and publishing model was horribly and irredeemably broken.

Forbes Magazine’s decline is an important tale for the whole publishing industry, for both the brash new entrants and for the struggling established players.

Alibaba and the rise of chinese companies

The rise of Alibaba shows Chinese companies are now major global players.

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba floated on the New York Stock Exchange and immediately rang up a 38% gain that values the company at $238 billion, behind only Microsoft, Apple and Google in tech stock valuations.

One of the major shareholders in Alibaba is Yahoo! who posted a 2.7% drop in value despite picking up a $5 billion windfall from the Chinese companies float.

For Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma, this float and the stock market’s reaction is a vindication of his business and of China’s place in the modern global economy, something we discussed with early Alibaba employee Porter Erisman last year.

Alibaba also shows that Chinese companies are now credible international businesses and companies like Haier, Lenovo and Hauwei need to be taken seriously as competitors and suppliers.

While Jack Ma and Alibaba celebrate, Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!’s management team are going to have to give some careful thought about how to use that extra five billion dollars. Time and investor patience is dwindling away for the once powerful internet giant.

It may be too soon to draw Alibaba’s success and the fall of Yahoo! as being the parallel of the rise of the Chinese economy and the decline of the US, but yesterday does give a strong signal about how the global economy is changing.

Image source: alibabagroup.com

Navigating a world of silos

Blogger Robert Scoble sees social media silos as the cost of distribution in the new media world

Having seen Robert Scoble interview dozens of startups and founders, it was fascinating to get him on the other side of the camera for a Decoding the New Economy interview.

One of areas I was keen to explore with Scoble was his experience of moving from his blogging platform to Facebook and particularly the risk of being locked in a silo, something previously discussed with Doc Searls.

“I’d rather all my content wasn’t in Facebook,” Scoble observes, “but those days are over.”

Unlike Searls, Scoble sees the social media networks — particularly Facebook — as being a useful distribution tool while accepting their limitations; “I find I get a lot more engagement and distribution on Facebook.”

“Unlike a lot of other journalists I don’t have to make my money out of advertising so I don’t care about taking my eyeballs off the blog and onto Facebook.”

“It does limit my storytelling ability because you can only use one video and I can’t do a lot of typographic stuff,” says Scoble, “people are seeing these on mobile phones anyway so they don’t want to see all of this stuff anyway.”

The mobile aspect is key to the business world going forward, we stopped midway through the interview to buy an iPhone 6 which went on pre-order right in the middle of the discussion.

For the mobile world Scoble sees the rise of various ecosystems like Google’s and Apple’s forcing people to make choices about which camp they are going to join.

Like many in the tech industry, Scoble is very cautious about looking too far ahead; “none of the people, even the investors, are looking more than five years ahead.”

The key though is miniaturization as devices get smaller and more portable, the potential for technology becomes greater.

Whether that potential is limited by the desire of vendors to lock users into silos remains to be seen.

Building inclusive cities

Barcelona’s success in the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge show the human side of smart cities.

Yesterday Barcelona won the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge — a ideas competition for European cities.

Barcelona’s winning idea was collaborative care networks for older citizens. In Barcelona’s case one in five residents is over 65 and by 2o40 seniors will make up a quarter of the city’s population.

The approach Barcelona’s council has proposed is a combination of high tech and the community working together.

Barcelona will use digital and low-tech strategies to create a network of family members, friends, neighbors, social workers, and volunteers who together make up a “trust network” for each at-risk elderly resident.

Last year I had the opportunity to interview the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Vives, on how the city was using the internet of things to improve citizens’ lives.

In that interview Vives spoke on how important was that these technologies improved the lives of all citizens, not just the young and the rich. Today’s prize illustrates how the city is applying that philosophy.

For technologists, one of the tasks ahead is to show how today’s inventions are more than the toys of rich men, but are things that genuinely improve society’s well being.

Time to strike deals

It’s time to strike deals as banks and other big businesses start to feel the effects of global competition

It didn’t take long for the competition in the payments market to heat up after the announcement of Apple Pay last week as PayPal launched a campaign asking if you’d trust your financials to a business who can’t protect your selfies.

While PayPal pokes fun at Apple, there are more serious competitive pressures developing as the companies start negotiating with credit card providers and banks to reduce their rates. This is something that will be an immediate benefit for businesses of all sizes who are prepared to renegotiate their contracts.

Most businesses, big and small, are poor at monitoring what they pay for a service; while they’ll shop around and negotiate when they’re looking for provider, they’ll let often these contracts go for years without reviewing them – something that utilities like banks, telcos and power companies take advantage of.

I was reminded of this earlier this week at a lunch with some senior Qantas accountants who were quite open about how every supplier’s contract was constantly reviewed and discounts were aggressively pursued. It’s a tough life for the airline’s subcontractors.

Times are tough for Qantas though, having sustained a 2.8 billion Aussie dollar loss last year along with constant declines in market share and stock prices. So it’s not surprising they have an aggressive cost cutting strategy in place.

Many other industries are now looking at the same problem as the global economy is now in a phase of at best anemic growth for the foreseeable future, which makes it essential for all businesses to start reviewing their costs.

With the banking sector now being disrupted by companies like PayPal and Apple, it might be time for all businesses to ask some hard questions of their banks and payment providers. The time is right to strike a deal.

The business or your sanity

Minecraft founder Markus Persson gives other tech leaders a lesson in humility

Yesterday Microsoft confirmed the rumours that it would buy Minecraft developer Mojang for 2.5 billion dollars.

Following the announcement, Mojang founder Markus Persson — aka Notch — wrote a touching blog post on his leaving the company he founded.

The business had become too big and the demands of Minecraft’s legion of fans were taking their toll; it was time for Persson to move on to keep his sanity.

“If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”

For all the hubris we hear from technology company founders and CEOs, it’s those like Persson who probably will end up making the most difference to the world.

Activating main street

PayPal lays out its vision of the future of retail

The future of retail is being fought out on three fronts believes eBay’s Michael Camplin — global, local, mobile and data.

At eBay’s Commerce Innovation Showcase at its San Jose head office Champlin shows visiting partners, media and government officials part of the payments giant’s vision for that future.

“It’s about connecting buyers and sellers across the globe,” says Champlin. “Local is important for us because even with the growth of the online ecommerce revolution that we’re in the middle of right now we still see 75% of commerce happens within fifty miles of the customer and 90% of that happens in bricks-and-mortar stores.”

“So to be able to connect buyers and sellers in those local stores is a major push we have at eBay.”

The first presentation in the tour demonstrates a day in the life of an eBay customer from the bedroom of a fictional customer, Reese McLaren, a funky young guy shopping for new equipment ahead of a camping trip. Champlin illustrates how Reese can order, pay and collect through a store’s integrated online service from his home.

On the other side of the transactions, store employees use the PayPal apps like Red Lazer and Braintree to complete the order. A key part of that is using beacon technologies to log a customer into the store to alert staff that a customer has arrived to collect an order.

At the next stage of the tour, we visit some demonstration stores; first we start with the Burger Bistro where eBay’s Eric Armstrong shows how restaurant’s point of sale system is integrated with PayPal services, showing waitstaff who is logged in through the company’s app.

Integrating PayPal’s services into the establishment’s point of sale system means customers can order through the PayPal Wallet service and waitstaff know if a customer has paid through the app.

The app also speeds up settling customers’ bills as diners can pay the check through their phone and not bother with using cash or swiping credit cards.

One key point with PayPal Wallet is that users can enter any payment form that suits them and choose whichever option suits them at the time including direct bank transfers and credit cards.

Another area that PayPal are pushing out are coupon offers. At present the company is subsidising them as they test how the services work. The objective is to offer a digital equivalent of everything people currently have in their wallets.

For staff, eBay are offering the ability to bring your own device for point of sale systems with cloud base apps turning staffs’ tablets and smartphones into POS terminals.

Tying into the Point of Sale capability is the PayPal Now service that allows establishments to swipe credit cards directly into the app through a dongle that reads the chip or stripe. Despite the rise of online payment services, swiping credit cards is still the main way US customers pay their bills.

Despite the continued popularity of credit cards, eBay are hoping to move customers over to the online services through ease of service; the one stop authentication service means customers are logged into the payment platform as soon as they check into a location.

One area PayPal sees great opportunity in stadiums and major events where attendees automatically check in and can then access food and souvenir stands without having to re-authenticate or authorise each purchase they make.

A key part of eBay’s retail strategy is the use of beacons to monitor customers entering establishments. The one illustrated is the PayPal beacon that was a limited release earlier this year. The device doesn’t have its own battery, instead relying on a USB socket for power.

Two weeks after this tour Apple launched its Pay service with its range of integrated APIs to offer many of things shown in this showcase. eBay and its Braintree subsidiary was conspicuously missing from the listed partners.

For PayPal and eBay the field has suddenly become more competitive, this is a sector that is now at the forefront of the battle between today’s internet empires.