Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

  • The downside of social media marketing

    The downside of social media marketing

    Until last Sunday, Facebook was working well for jeweller Victoria Buckley; the page for her store in Sydney’s upmarket Strand Arcade was generating sales and had a rapidly growing fan base from around the world.

    One of the key parts of her marketing campaigns are porcelain dolls made by the Canadian designer Marina Bychkova. Her classic doll Ophelia features in the window displays, on posters in the store and on the shop’s Facebook page.

    Ophelia is a little bit different to most dolls in that she’s naked and anatomically correct — she has nipples.

    Last weekend Victoria received six warnings from Facebook about “inappropriate content” on her page. There was no indication of which images or text broke the rules or what would happen to her page if she took no action.

    “The frustrating thing is I can’t pinpoint which images” says Victoria, who goes on to point out that over the year she’s used Ophelia in her marketing, including two large banners in the busy shopping precinct, she’s received no complaints.

    “It’s all a bit arbitrary”, says Victoria “it only takes one anonymous person to click on the flag content button and there’s a problem”. Earlier this year her Flickr account was set to restricted because of Ophelia’s nudity.

    To avoid problems, Victoria has blacked out any potentially inappropriate parts of Ophelia on the store’s Facebook profile and started a “Save Ophelia- exquisite doll censored by Facebook” group until she can resolve the issue.

    But here lies another problem; she can’t find a way to contact Facebook. “It’s become an increasingly important part of the business” Victoria says of the Facebook page and “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the site”.

    Right now Victoria has no idea what is going to happen to her business’s profile. As she can’t talk to Facebook, she’s uncertain of the page’s future.

    This uncertainty illustrates an overlooked issue with social media sites. All these services are proprietary, run by private organizations to their own rules and business objectives.

    In many ways, they are like private mall owners. They are perfectly entitled to dictate what merchants and customers can do on their premises. If you don’t like it, you have no recourse but to take your business elsewhere.

    As consequence these sites have a great deal of control over your online business, a lesson that’s been hard learned by many eBay and PayPal dependent Internet retailers.

    A good example of what can go wrong are the Geocities websites. Ten years ago Geocities was a popular free hosting site used by many micro businesses and hobbyists. Just over a year ago the now parent company Yahoo! shut them down and all the data on them has been lost.

    By relying another company’s Internet platform, you are effectively making them a partner in your business. That’s great while things go well, but you have to remember their business objectives and moral values are different to yours.

    This is why a business website is essential; your traffic and all your intellectual property is too important to sit on another businesses’ website with all the risks that go along with that.

    The lesson is that while using Facebook, Twitter and other Internet services are an important part of the business marketing mix, your business needs the security of its own website and all your marketing channels, both online and offline, should point to it.

    Fortunately Victoria’s across that, she’s pointing her Facebook fans to her website telling them, “You can join my independent mailing list at this link, in case they get really stupid and close this group.”

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  • The collaborative economy

    “I couldn’t help her, she might become a competitor!” said Nick* when I asked if he’d been able to help Angela* with a business idea.

    That response, and the murmured agreement of everyone around us, broke my heart as Angela’s business experience could have helped Nick’s struggling operation.

    Nick had taken the short term, narrow and reflexive view rather than listen and think through the opportunities presented by collaborating with Angela, a successful businesswoman who had recently sold her previous venture and was exploring new ideas.

    As we discussed a few weeks ago, most business is now global. Instead of worrying about the guy up the street, most enterprises have to worry about what’s happening in the rest of the world. Business is now bigger than petty neighbourhood turf wars.

    In many cases, identifying your business’s weaknesses and finding partners who have complimentary skills can grow everybody’s ventures and the overall market. This is particularly true in regional areas where locals are having to look outside their districts for the right skills and products.

    To be honest, this issue is personal; one of my IT businesses was constantly hamstrung because I couldn’t establish relationships with other tech support companies. The companies I approached were happy for us to refer work to them but the idea of referring work back or, God Forbid, working together when we had complimentary skills was untenable.

    As a consequence none of the businesses grew and everybody was a loser. That reluctance to collaborate between parties is one reason why the IT support sector is such a dog’s breakfast.

    Nick’s reluctance to help and engage with other players may not kill his business but he’s lost a valuable resource that could have made his company’s growth easier. It’s a loss for everyone.

    If your neighbours or friends have an idea, embrace them even if they could be a competitor, they may be the best allies you ever had.

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  • Nine steps to choosing a consultant

    As much as we’d like to think we can do everything, the truth is we can’t. Even the biggest organisations don’t always have the right skills for a task that needs to be done. Enter the consultant.

    Consultants have had bad press in recent years due to a combination of misunderstandings and misuse by big and small organisations. Ideally the consulting company will bring a fresh set of eyes and skills to projects that are not central to the daily running of your business. So how do we go about choosing a consultant?

    1. Do they show up on time?

    If a consultant is unreliable when they are chasing your work, what makes you think they will be any better when you hire them? If you’re hounding them for quotes and proposals then you have to wonder if they are really capable of doing the job. The time required to reply to an enquiry is a good way to whittle down the short list.

    2. The internet is your friend

    An experienced consultant will have a digital footprint with articles, white papers, blogs and a website. These are a good guide to the areas the consultant is an expert in. For consulting firms, those white papers can be powerful marketing tools to show off their expertise.

    3. Read their public utterances

    Reading into articles will dig up that consultant’s or their staff’s views on the market and different solutions. Comments on other peoples’ sites by the firm’s principles and employees is a great way how deep their expertise is and how they are regarded in the industry, this is also a good check that their values align with yours.

    Something that catches out a lot of the self-proclaimed “social media experts” and marketing people is they often show their talk of trust and openness is little more than talk. If a consultant’s tweets, comments or Facebook wall posts are at odds with what they are telling you, then that should be a danger sign.

    4. Check references

    The consultant’s website will cite the clients they have worked for. Pick up the phone and talk to them, did the consultant really do this work? How effective were they?

    If your consultant is an individual, part of that digital footprint is social media. Tools like LinkedIn and Facebook help in checking references as well.

    LinkedIn in particular has a recommendations section that is handy quick reference checker. Don’t be shy to contact those people to check the veracity of their recommendations.

    5. Understand their biases

    We all have biases towards certain solutions. As the US industrial psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail”. In technology this is particularly pronounced as consulting firms small and big have made a substantial investment on one platform or another. This isn’t a bad thing but keep their biases in mind and ask questions why they are proposing a certain course of action over alternatives.

    6. Know their expertise

    The whole point of hiring a consultant is to do a task you aren’t familiar with. If you ask the consultant to do something outside of their immediate area of expertise then your fees are paying them to train in a new area. Good for them but not for you.

    7. Are they too agreeable?

    If the consultant agrees with you all the time, then there’s little point in hiring them except for self-validation. A good consultant will be prepared to gently steer you away from silly decisions. On the other hand one who screams at you or puts your staff’s views down is best let go.

    8. Trust your instincts

    If something doesn’t work for you about a particular proposal, individual or organisation then look elsewhere. If you’re uncomfortable before signing an agreement, imagine how you’ll be when the invoices start arriving.

    9. Price should not be the factor

    Choosing a consultant purely on cost is risky. As I addressed in a recent blog on the crowdsourcing revolution there are real traps in going for the cheapest option. Invariably, the cheaper and inexperienced consultants will require more handholding and demands on your management time.

    A good consultant is worth their weight in gold and finding one is a great help for your business. A little due diligence through the hiring process makes sure you get the person right for your needs.

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  • The coming global race for talent

    The coming global race for talent

    Yuan Yandong is a Guanzhou factory worker who is saving to open a hotel management company. The New York Times recently followed him through a night on the Foxconn hard drive assembly lines.

    The New York Times article asked “is an unlimited supply of Chinese workers waiting to migrate from the poorer provinces”? Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, points out this isn’t the case and China has a demographic hump far bigger than our own baby boomers.

    Recognising their workforce problems, China is beginning to move up the value chain as we see with Yuan’s ambitions and the recent strikes in Guangdong factories challenges our assumptions that China will just be the world’s centre for cheap T-shirts and electronics. These changes in countries like China and India were among the topics discussed by the speakers and attendees at last weekend’s X Media Lab in Sydney, in fact X Media Lab itself relocated from Sydney to Shanghai a few years ago.

    China’s aging population though is tomorrow’s problem; Japan has this problem today and Western Europe isn’t far behind which means it’s going to get far harder to find workers anywhere in the near future.

    For Australian businesses, this means we can’t rely on importing young workers to overcome skill shortages as we have since World War II. The Big Australia idea of using immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to fix our workforce shortages ignores the competition we’re going to be in with other nations and regions facing much bigger challenges than ours.

    In that competition, we don’t offer a great package; traditionally we’ve ignored all non-British qualifications and expected new immigrants to drive our taxis regardless of their skills. Unless we recognise the contributions professional arrivals bring, we’ll struggle to attract those workers.

    As businesses, this means we need to be investing and training and making sure our own workplaces and the nation’s workforce are as productive as possible. The first step on an individual business level is to understand what is happening in your sector and how technology is changing it. Regardless of what your industry is, technology is changing your supply chain, customer and supplier behaviour and you need to be understand those changes and how you can profit from them.

    Your competition is no longer down the street, it’s around the world and there are millions of young, hard working people like Yuan Yandong looking at your industry right now and thinking how they can do it better. How is your business going to deal with competition like that?

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  • The bedrock of trust

    An article in last weekend’s New York Times described the problems of AXA Rosenberg; a quantitative funds manager owned by the French financial giant AXA. The role of quant funds is to use sophisticated share trading programs that maximise returns to large investors.

    Sometime in mid 2009 an error was discovered in the software AXA Rosenberg used to trade on behalf of its clients. They didn’t tell their clients until April 2010, at least ten months later.

    As a consequence, AXA Rosenberg are finding clients are fleeing them. This illustrates just how important trust is in business.

    You don’t have to be a big corporation to fess up to mistakes; we all make them and the sooner we admit them the easier it is to rebuild or keep the trust of those around us.

    Trust is the bedrock of business, as AXA Rosenberg has found without trust you have no business.

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