Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

  • What’s a Twitterer worth?

    What’s a Twitterer worth?

    $2.50 per month is what Phone Dog think a Twitter follower is worth in their lawsuit against a former employee.

    As nebulous and ambiguous as Phone Dog’s claim seems to be it appears some price is being created on the business value of social media users.

    To date we’ve seen services like Empire Avenue, Klout and Kred try to measure social media users’ real influence on the different web platforms which in turn allows businesses to allocate some sort of value.

    As social media and the web mature, we’ll see businesses spend more time understand where the value lies online.

    Each platform is going to have a different value to a business. Depending on the market, one person may be worth more on Twitter than on Facebook and similarly a business may put more value on members of a specific LinkedIn group or industry forum.

    What we shouldn’t confuse “value” with is how the services themselves make money. For Facebook, the value comes from the marketing opportunities presented by people sharing their lives while for LinkedIn it’s largely coming from employment related advertising and search.

    Other social media platforms are finding other ways to make money and each will have a different attraction to users, businesses and advertisers. All of which will affect their perceived value.

    That perceived value is the most important part of social media. If users don’t think a site adds something to their lives, then that service has no value to anyone.

    It’s tempting to think that people will object to having a “value” placed on their heads as users, but most folk understand the commercial TV and radio that does pretty much the same thing.

    The real question of how much people are prepared to share online will come when they understand the value of the data they are giving the social media platforms. When users start to understand this, they may ask for more service from these companies.

    What a Twitter user is worth right now is probably different to what they will be worth this time next year, but there’s no doubt we’ll all have a better idea.

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  • The social maze

    The social maze

    Towards the end of 2011 we saw a surge of stories about companies and employees fighting over the ownership of corporate social media accounts like LinkedIn contacts and Twitter feeds.

    For the social media community this is encouraging as it shows that businesses are beginning understand there the value in online networks. It also illustrates the risks for both businesses and employees when these tools aren’t properly understood in the workplace.

    The employer’s risks

    As social media sites are one of ways businesses communicate with the public, managers have to understand these services are an asset too important to be left to the intern or youngest staff member in the office.

    Should that intern move on – possibly at the next college semester – the business may find they are locked out of the account or it is even deleted.

    Business pages and accounts should be set up in the name of senior people in the organisation and, where possible, administration should be shared by the relevant unit in the organisation (customer support, marketing or whatever).

    The nominal owner and administrators should understand that the account is the property of the business and all posts on it will be work related and not personal.

    When one of the administrators or owners leave the organisation, login details should be handed over and passwords need to be changed. Where possible, the ownership should be changed to another employee – this is one of the current problems with Google+ accounts at the moment.

    Employers need to understand that the professional contacts individuals make during the course of their work isn’t their property, so trying to claim the personal LinkedIn contacts and Twitter followers of an employee’s private account probably will not be successful.

    Similarly social media services like LinkedIn are not Customer Relationship Management programs (CRMs) and using them that way, as a company called Edcomm did, will almost certainly end up with problems and a possible dispute.

    Traps for employees

    When given a work social media account to maintain, it’s best to consider it as being like your work email – it’s best to use it for business related purposes only and you’ll have to give it up when you leave the organisation.

    If you’re being held out as a representative of the business, as we see in the Phonedog_Noah dispute over a business Twitter account, then it’s best to set up a private account for your own use and not use the business account after leaving the organisation, even if they don’t ask for it when you leave.

    On sites like LinkedIn and Facebook you should change your employment status as soon as you leave an organisation to make it clear you’re no longer working there. If you’ve left on bad terms, resist the temptation to insult your former employer when you change your details.

    Staff using social media have to be aware that can be held accountable in the workplace for things they do on their personal online accounts; sexual harassment, abusing customers and workplace bullying through a Facebook or Twitter account can all result in disciplinary action.

    In many ways the disputes we’re seeing on social media services reflect what we’ve seen in many other fields over the years – the ownership of intellectual property, professional contacts and even access to websites have all been thoroughly covered by the courts over the years and there’s little in these disagreements that would surprise a good lawyer.

    With all business disputes though, it’s best to resolve them before lawyers and writs start being involved. Clearly defining and understanding what is expected of both employers and staff can save a lot of cost and stress.

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  • It’s you, not them

    It’s you, not them

    An article in Bloomberg on The Three Types of People To Fire Immediately is a classic example of mistaking symptoms for the cause of an organisation’s problems.

    G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón write that the biggest blockers to innovation in a business are the employees who can be roughly divided into four groups; the ones who welcome innovation and the three groups who block it – “the victims”, “the non-believers” and “the know it alls.”

    Vitón’s and Maddock’s advice is to sack those in the three groups of blockers.

    If anything sacking the “know it alls” means you will lose valuable corporate memory, the “non-believers” maybe the dissenters who are critical in keeping visions in contact with reality and the “victims” may actually be the most passionate people in your organisation.

    Those “victims” are often the people who’ve tried to make a difference early in their careers, their attempts failed and they found themselves sidelined and embittered within the organisation.

    I came across many of these when I was working with the state government, they’d had good ideas and continuously found themselves belittled when they’d tried to implement them.

    To add insult to injury, many of those ideas would be adopted some years later to great fanfare with credit given to the same managers who’d stifled the earlier suggestio

    Rather than giving those “victims” a pink slip, it might be worthwhile talking to those staff and finding why they are negative and where the system can be improved.

    If you have a workplace full of negativity then the blame for a dysfunctional culture usually lies in the management suite.

    Perhaps it’s the managers who need to be fired for creating a nay-sayer business culture of victims and non-believers.

    My concern with Vitón’s and Maddock’s advice is that it seems to play to the conceit of executives who think they, and their organisations, are something they are not. That’s nice for management consultants stoking corporate egos but a lousy deal for shareholders, staff and customers.

    Sometimes it’s better to understand what your business is and where the organisation’s strengths lie  – both in management in and staff – before jumping on the innovation bandwagon.

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  • Channel Conflict

    Channel Conflict

    I first became aware of the term “Channel Conflict” in the late 1990s when running an IT business that was a Microsoft reseller.

    A channel conflict is where a supplier starts competing with the merchants they supply, or promoting one group of their customers against another. A good example is Google’s Travel Search that is upsetting many of Google’s own advertising customers.

    As a local IT support business my channel conflict came from Microsoft advertising their own direct sales and consulting services as well as promoting their premium “gold” partners.

    Conflict with such a big channel partner was frustrating and unavoidable given Microsoft’s position in the market. We couldn’t do anything about it except work towards Gold Partner status and differentiate ourselves from the competitors who had the advantages of Microsoft’s marketing.

    The web – in particular online commerce – is increasing these channel conflicts as the Internet sweeps away existing middlemen and allows others to develop.

    A good example of how e-commerce is changing things was a tweet from Australian business broadcaster Brooke Corte where she found a swimsuits retailer’s prices were 40% cheaper through her shopping mall’s website.

    Essentially the swimsuit retailer is being undercut by their own landlord’s e-commerce service – an incredibly difficult channel conflict.

    For the retailer, they are up against Westfield; a big, multinational player with substantial market share and deep pockets who also happens to be their landlord in many high traffic locations.

    It isn’t all bad news for the small retailer facing a channel conflict; Seth Godin has a good perspective of what happens when the big boys decide to play in your sandpit.

    Seth’s situation was in 2008 Google launched a competitor – Knol – to his Squidoo businesses. This appeared to be the death knell, or Knol, for Squidoo.

    Three years later, Google killed Knol.

    In many cases channel conflict turns out not to be such a problem for the specialist retailer – big companies like Google, Microsoft and Westfield are good at what they do and dealing with the minutiae of retailing is not necessarily one of them.

    Small businesses also have an advantage in the very online tools that are disrupting retail and other fields. TechCrunch recently looked at some of the mobile and price comparison tools and how local retailers can use them to compete with Amazon.

    Coupling technology with service and focus – two factors that large companies usually struggle with – can define the battlefield for smaller businesses struggling with channel conflict.

    As declining margins and new technologies tempt big suppliers into dabbling in areas they previously avoided channel conflict is only going to increase, though for the creative and confident businesses it isn’t the threat it first seems to be.

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  • The death of the netbook

    The death of the netbook

    “You don’t want to buy one of those of things,” said the electronics store assistant, “they don’t have much memory and the CPUs in the notebooks and ultra books are better.”

    I was shopping for a cheap netbook for the kids, each of which had been saving up to buy one as they are sick of me yelling at them for playing Minecraft on my work system, and the consensus from the store staff was to do everything to steer folk away from the cheap systems.

    This is understandable as most electronic store staff are on commissions, and these are lean on cheap computers. It’s much better to sell a thousand dollar unit – with upgraded warranties and accessories – than a low margin, one off unit.

    For manufacturers, similar problems exists; these cheap unit cannibilised their higher priced products with better margins. Dell recently announced they are getting out the netbook market and others are following.

    Netbooks themselves are in trouble as the market they addressed for cheap, portable, Internet connected devices is now largely covered by smart phones and tablets which offer better battery life and usability.

    Interestingly, the battery life argument was even used by the computer store salesfolk who pointed out – correctly – that the newer laptops have better power management than their cheaper netbook cousins.

    While the netbook as a category is dead; the concept itself isn’t. As the uptake of tablet computers like the iPad show, Internet connected portable devices are becoming the computer of choice for many people and the advantages of a laptop form factor; a proper tactile keyboard, USB ports and other external connectors are still attractive.

    Probably the worse thing for the manufacturers and retailers is the price points are now established in customers’ minds – $400 is what people want to pay for laptops, which doesn’t bode well for those higher priced systems.

    Those manufacturers can’t even get into the tablet computer market as Apple now own that sector that the PC vendors and Microsoft squandered a decade’s lead with substandard equipment and badly designed software.

    Despite the best efforts of the electronic store’s salesfolk, my kids ended up buying cheap, low specced netbooks out of their savings and those systems run Minecraft quite nicely. Which is another problem for shops and manufacturers stuck with a 1990s business model.

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