Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

Megaupload, cloud computing and trust
The closing down of file sharing site Megaupload has raised the question of trust in the cloud; “It has made cloud services look that much less legitimate” one daily paper quotes futurist Mark Pesce as saying.

For those of us advocating cloud services and advising businesses on using them, this trust issue isn’t anything new. All of us have to be careful about who we trust with our data and Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, doesn’t come to mind as someone who would stand a great deal of due diligence.

Like investments – another area where trust is essential – we have to spread our risk around. Saving copies of data to your own computer and making sure the information you save on the cloud is in a form easily read by different systems is important, as is not trusting any one service for critical services.

The taking down of Megaupload also raises other questions – as privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein points out;

“But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused — not yet convicted — of engaging in a crime.

What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

They are — to use the vernacular — screwed.”

It’s this over-reaction by government agencies which is the real concern and the co-operation of large corporations in shutting down services – as we saw with the shutting down of Wikileaks – probably does more to damage trust in all online services, not just cloud computing.

Cloud services are no less trustworthy than our computer systems, all of which can breakdown, catch viruses or be compromised by staff making mistakes. We have to understand that all technologies carry some degree of risk.

For businesses and home users, we need to spread the risks around – don’t just trust one service or technology to deliver your products or services and have a fall back plan if things go wrong.

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January 23, 2012
Closed for business
This post originally appeared in Smart Company.

Many industries hoped this Christmas was going to be their saviour – across the country businesses in the retail, tourism, real estate and many other service sectors hoped they’d see an upbeat end to a tough year.

When you’re doing it tough you don’t turn customers away, yet thousands of businesses did that over the Christmas and New Year break by not updating their website to reflect their holiday trading hours.

Almost every business I encountered over the break had little – if any – information about their Christmas trading hours. In holiday towns where visitors are unfamiliar with the local businesses many cafes, restaurants and service businesses didn’t have a website or a local listing despite customers searching for them on iPads and smartphones.

Smart Company’s sister site Property Observer discussed this problem in the real estate industry where tenants were being left with problems over Christmas because there are no emergency contact numbers shown on websites.

What’s even more amazing about real estate agents in holiday areas is many pack up for a week or two and miss possible vacation rentals or even sales to enthusiastic out of towners. Who would have thought real estate agents would let commissions pass them by?

For me, I found information lacking on sites for both small and big businesses. To check the opening hours of Myer stores for instance required downloading a PDF file, Australia’s biggest retailer surely can spare a few hours of a junior’s time to updating the opening hours in their already inadequate store finder.

Similarly the City of Sydney fell down on their swimming pools, with their fabulous Victoria Park and Boy Charlton complexes both showing the wrong opening hours. This customer took his business to Leichhardt and North Sydney instead.

Most of the local shops did poorly as well – few had any mention of opening hours at all let alone Christmas trading times. Those who did open probably missed business because people assumed they were closed or found another place online.

Not updating a website would have made sense ten years ago when even the smallest change meant a fat bill from your web designer. Today online publishing tools like WordPress and Drupal mean there is no reason for you or your staff not to log on and make minor changes like revised hours or holiday specials.

If you still fear a fat bill each time you ask for a change to the website then it’s time to sit your designer down and discuss making some changes to the way your site works – not to mention some strong words about your billing arrangements.

Having up to date content isn’t just good for helping your customers, it also adds credibility to search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing which like sites that are regularly updated.

Almost every business has something to say during the year, whether it’s a new product line, welcoming a new staff member or having a special offer. There are also seasonal factors like Christmas, back-to-school, end of financial year and whole range of annual events that affect your industry.

The beauty of the web right now is that we aren’t constrained in what we want to say about our businesses, so next Christmas let your customers know great you are and which days and times you open.

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January 22, 2012
Successful Sources Will Not Be Paid
The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.

Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.

This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.

Yet every day there’s more callouts for free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.

And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.

Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.

Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.

Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.

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January 21, 2012
Password blues
“Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

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January 20, 2012
Scam 2.0
Invoice scams are as old as business itself, no doubt opportunistic cavemen tried to scam other hunters over made up debts and Phoenician traders had to deal with suppliers claiming they’d delivered an extra few hundred Shekels of chickpeas.

Today we see these scams in all forms – imaginary invoices for web registrations, directory inclusions and local listings are just a few we’ve seen. As the web evolves, we’re seeing a new breed of tricks developing.

Online scams can range from things like letters from deposed African presidents promising riches through to aggressive sales folk promising services they can’t deliver. The latter are part of the new breed.

In 2009 Oakland’s East Bay Express alleged the review site Yelp’s sales teams were threatening business with bad reviews if they didn’t pay an advertiser fee. Four years later businesses are claiming this is still happening.

Regardless of the truth of these allegations with Yelp these distatesful sales tactics from online companies are becoming more widespread.

As social media services investors start demanding revenue to back their businesses and group buying sites reach the limits of their growth the sales teams of these organisations are desperately try to find new ways to meet higher targets.

Small and local businesses are the obvious targets of the sales teams, as the web 2.0 business model has trained consumers into expecting not to pay for online services.

Recently a fitness trainer told me how she was hounded into placing a group buying deal with one of the bigger sites; they convinced her that she should offer an 85% discount with the service taking the remaining 15%.

She provided the service for free.

Naturally the 85% off deal was successful, she was rushed off her feet and found herself working for nothing over the next month. Even had the cheap offer resulted in all the customers coming back, it would have taken her a year to recover her losses.

Clearly she should have known better and investigated how group buying sites work and the strategies for using them effectively, but she was subject to high pressure sales techniques that took advantage of her ignorance.

Many online businesses have been giving services away for free as they try to exploit the Silicon Valley greater fool business model. When the venture capital funds dry up they have to find to new ways of paying for their trendy offices with foosball tables and free organic staff meals.

This means more cold calls to business owners promising “marketing opportunities”, “getting to the top of Google” and “getting positive online reviews”.

Over time these sales calls will morph into fake negative reviews and bills for imaginary services rendered as these businesses attract desperate and unscrupulous operators.

For businesses, this means it’s a time to be on guard by making sure any invoices received are properly checked before they are paid and any sales person’s claims are thoroughly checked out before you agree to go ahead with a service.

If you hear of dodgy dealing like what Yelp has been accused of, then try to get the promises in writing and complain to your state’s fair trading department or complain to business agencies. In Australia, the ACCC is the first point of call.

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January 19, 2012