Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: consumer

  • Apple after Steve Jobs: ABC Weekend computers

    Apple after Steve Jobs: ABC Weekend computers

    The September 11 ABC 702 Sydney Weekends segment discussed what Steve Jobs’ stepping down as Apple CEO means for Mac users.

    Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank looked at why Steve Jobs was important to Apple, who will be taking over and whether this affects whether you should buy an Mac computer, iPhone or iPad.

    Listeners’ Questions

    As usual, we had plenty of great questions from listeners and some of them we promised to get back to, these included the following.

    Removing Mackeeper

    Cheryl called about MacKeeper warnings that keep popping up on her Apple computer.

    MacKeeper, and other variants like MacProtector and MacSecurity, are known as malware – software designed for malicious reasons – which has been the bane of Windows computer users for years.

    Removing Mackeeper is relatively easy and Apple has released a security patch to fix it. Details and download are available at the Apple Support website.

    Wiping an old computer

    The most valuable thing on a computer is the data, so it’s important to wipe any system before disposing of it. Deborah asked how to wipe her old Mac system before she left it out for her council’s e-waste collection.

    If you have an OS X or OS 9 disk, you can completely wipe and “zero” the disk to make it extremely difficult for someone to recover any data from the old computer. Apple have detailed instructions on this at their How To Zero All Data On A Disk page.

    Warning! Before following these instructions, make sure you have backed up all important and valuable data.

    How to disable automatic Windows Updates

    Updating your computer, whether you have a Windows or Mac computer, is very important as new security bugs are found all the time. Gary though was finding his system automatically installing Windows Updates often disrupts his work.

    It isn’t a good idea to totally disable the Windows Update service as those updates and patches are important, but you can change the settings so they are downloaded but not installed until you choose to do so.

    Microsoft’s Knowledge Base describes how to change the Windows Update Settings, we recommend the download updates but let me choose when to install them option.

    Next 702 Weekends tech spot

    Our next Weekends spot is scheduled for 23rd October when we’ll be discussing how to backup your valuable data. Check the Events Page or subscribe to our newsletter for any changes to the 702 Sydney programs and any other upcoming radio shows.

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  • The online review challenge

    The online review challenge

    Last Christmas a group of office workers gathered at a city hotel to celebrate the year’s end. The meal was a disaster as slow, surly staff made mistakes and delivered poorly cooked food.

    Within an hour of the workers returning from lunch, negative reviews of the hotel started appearing on the Eatability and Urbanspoon websites. By the time Christmas Day rolled around, the reputation of the establishment was throughly trashed.

    The rise of online review sites along with social media services like Facebook challenges many businesses, particularly those in the hospitality industry as café owners, restaurateurs and hotel managers struggle with unfavourable comments about their establishments.

    Customers now research on the web before deciding to dine out or make a purchase, so online reviews can make or break an establishment. How does a business make sure their online reputation is safe.

    Pay attention

    The most important part is to pay attention to what people are saying about your business.

    Big corporations will have their own social media staff and community managers to handle much of this, Telstra last week announced their online team will now be on the web 24/7.

    Larger organisations will also subscribe to online monitoring services like BuzzNumbers and PeopleBrowsr to report what’s being said about them.

    For smaller businesses it falls on the owner and staff to keep an eye on the popular review sites and to monitor the business’ Facebook page for negative comments.

    Engage the critics

    No matter how good your business is, you will get the odd unhappy customer. When that happens you need to contact them, preferably through the same public forum they have complained about you.

    Once you’ve established contact, take the discussion offline onto email, phone or even face to face meetings. If the resolution is positive, try to publicise the result in the original channel the complaint was made.

    Fix the problem

    Despite many in the hotel industry believing that most online complaints are deliberate campaigns against them, regular complaints are usually legitimate and indicate an underlying systemic problem in the business.

    If customers are complaining about service, you need to let your staff know customers are talking about them. Should there be regular criticisms of your food, then you need to talk to your kitchen staff or suppliers.

    Don’t get defensive

    Complaints happen. Even the best business in the world has a bad day or encounters a customer who woke up on the wrong side of bed.

    If you think the criticism is unfair or even defamatory, don’t get angry and certainly do not make threats as you’ll only inflame the situation more.

    Should the customer turn out to be unreasonable, at least by having publicly engaged them you’ll have shown the public you’re calm, professional and trustworthy.

    Don’t Lie

    The web is as great at exposing falsehoods as it is at spreading them. If you’re clearly not telling the truth, you’ll make your critics angrier and more determined to damage your reputation.

    A common way many businesses cheat online is with false reviews. Despite industry claims that organised damaging comments are widespread, the reality is the opposite as many hoteliers and restaurateurs frequently post clumsy and obviously fake glowing reviews of their establishments. It’s a bad look and the establishment often ends up looking foolish.

    Get your website right

    Many businesses, particularly in hospitality, have lousy websites or a site that has no Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so when someone searches for a hotel or restaurant their page comes up way below those for review sites or critical blog posts.

    Regularly review how your site is doing and talk to your web designer or SEO consultant on making sure it’s coming up well when customers search for your type of business.

    It’s important not to overlook local search services so ensure your business has been listed on Google Places and has a Facebook Local Business Page otherwise local searches will go to the online review sites or your competitors.

    Ultimately, the best way to deal with negative online reviews is to minimise them by running a good business. The biggest effect the web is having on business is that it is making us accountable to our customers.

    As big corporations are finding, the days of covering up poor goods and indifferent customer service with marketing is over – if your product doesn’t match the promise you make to your customers they will tell the world.

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  • The Privacy Processors: How social media is re-manufacturing our identities

    The Privacy Processors: How social media is re-manufacturing our identities

    Most of us accept that things we don’t pay for – such as broadcast TV and Internet sites – are supported by advertising or have some sort of catch in order to pay their bills.

    Social media sites have been a great example of this, millions of users on services like Facebook and LinkedIn have accepted targeted advertising and the associated privacy trade offs as the cost of getting a free online service.

    The price of “free” though is escalating, the social networks have moved on from just using our data for displaying advertisements to processing our private information and distributing it in ways we may have never expected.

    Professional networking site LinkedIn caused an uproar last week when their social advertising feature started adding what appeared to be users’ personal endorsements to adverts for products, businesses and websites based on behaviour monitored by the site’s tracking software.

    Facebook, the leading social networking site, also had a recent privacy scare when users discovered the services’ Phonebook feature gleefully displays all the mobile phone numbers of their online contacts and, given the right settings, merges them with those from a mobile phone.

    The recently launched Google Plus takes these risks even further as the search engine giant requires a personal profile before you can use the service which can then be integrated into your search and email histories.

    What we’ve ‘Liked’ or ‘Followed’ online – or even just looked at – is now being processed, regurgitated and delivered to our friends and the public as endorsements and recommendations just like a retired sportsman selling air conditioners or hair restoration products.

    At least the retired cricketer flogging hair products or long past it soap opera star promoting washing powder gets a paycheck, all a social media user gets from the transaction the privilege of sharing their private information along with personal and professional relationships with a multinational advertising platform.

    In some ways the social advertising functions are worse for the user than the celebrity endorsement; most people know the retired sportsman or actress is doing it for a paycheck, the social network advertising clearly implies your friends like that product or company.

    We should also remember it’s not just the sites themselves, one of the reasons for Facebook’s popularity has been the games and applications people can use. Every one of these features has some access to your data and most have a business model for using it to make a buck.

    It’s become common for online applications to send out messages on new users’ accounts, pretending to be a personal message from them. Just this week a new service invoked the ire of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for doing exactly this.

    This processing of our own data and services is a logical step for social media services desperate to justify billion dollar valuations of their business but few people signed up to these sites to endorse random products or allow someone else to send advertising on their behalf.

    Privacy is no longer the issue with social media services, we’ve now moved into the corporate ownership of our identities. What a corporate algorithm decides are our likes is now being processed and publicly displayed as our endorsements, our tastes and dislikes.

    What interests us, what we enjoy and what we like forms the core of our identities, friendships and personalities. That social media sites seek to take this from us should be our greatest concern with these platforms.

    We need to be careful with what, and whom, we share, like and connect with online.

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  • The web’s big weakness

    The web’s big weakness

    There’s a fundamental flaw in the way the tech industry does business, that weakness could be what ultimately kills many of today’s new media, web and social media services.

    AirBnB, an online home share service, is one of the darlings of the booming Silicon Valley start up sector, having recently being valued at $1.2 billion after a successful capital raising.

    Like most Web 2.0 and social media businesses, AirBnB’s advantage is in the low operating costs where customer support is left to the service’s peer review and social media communities while AirBnB pockets a commission for simply making the connection between the landlord and tenant.

    The flaws in this “all care, no responsibility” model became apparent last month when a lady posted a description of her house being ransacked by an errant housesitter she found through AirBnB.

    AirBnB’s management responded to the article with assurances they were helping and working with their affected customer, claims which were promptly contradicted by the original victim.

    To make matters worse, certain prominent members of the Silicon Valley investment and blogging communities alluded she was lying or was “batshit crazy.” Now that other stories of bad AirBnB tenants are appearing, the view this is simply the untrustworthy word of a deranged customer affected by their first such incident is looking hollow.

    Failing to deal with customer problems is not unique to AirBnB, hiding behind impenetrable layers of “support” backed up by user hostile terms and conditions is familiar to anyone who has had to deal with an online service gone wrong.

    Last month Thomas Monopoly found he was locked out of his Google account and had it not been for the intervention of a senior Google employee, Thomas’ problem would probably still be stuck in an endless feedback loop.

    Exactly the same problem has been encountered thousands of times by other users of web mail, social media, online auction and matchmaking sites.

    Many of the people running these services retort their products are free so users get the support the support they pay for – an argument conveniently overlooking that most “free” web services are based around selling customer data – but even this does not justify delivering the basic services users have been lead to expect, regardless of what a 5,000 word user agreement states.

    Today’s tech startups, and many of their big established cousins in the IT industry, have the idea that customer support is an optional extra and an expense to minimised or outsourced.

    In this respect they are not too far removed from dinosaur car manufacturers or some of today’s less dynamic retailers offering little in the way of customer service or after sales support.

    That way of working has died as consumers have been able to go online to vent their dissatisfaction, strangely today’s hot tech start ups seem to have missed this aspect of the revolution they have helped start.

    Ignoring consumer problems is exactly what’s bringing traditional businesses unstuck in the online world. The funny thing is it might bring many of the online business undone as well.

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  • A question of respect

    A question of respect

    All too often a discussion of business leadership descends into a series of homilies and recycled stories equating corporate warriors to ancient Chinese generals.

    In a time where we’re obsessed with the shiny toys of technology, we often forget that all business is social and leadership and respect are the keys to growing a successful enterprise.

    Last week’s final session of the 2011 Let’s Talk Business series was refreshingly different with David James of Sydney’s Brasserie Bread, Mike Cannon-Brookes of software company Atlassian and business mentor Chris Witt telling their stories of leading growing enterprises.

    Mike and David showed how real business leadership is about entrenching values within in an organisation that fosters consistently good service and great products.

    David told how Brasserie Bread treat their retail partners with generous commissions and services that encourage cross selling illustrated the key difference between smaller businesses taking the long view and the short term views taken by corporate managers.

    The cross selling and commission models work well for Brasserie Bread’s retailers, the customer comes into a shop to pick up their bread order, buys a coffee while they are there and – as they discover more about the business – they become a regular.

    While there’s a great difference between a bakery and software company, Mike Cannon-Brookes had a similar view about values, telling how Atlassian has the “beer test” where they ask if a prospective employee would be interesting when talking over an after work drink.

    Atlassian’s main mantra though is “don’t f*** the customer”, which is notable in a business world largely dominated by the belief you give the customer the minimum you can get away with.

    Both Brasserie Bread’s and Atlassian’s philosophies can be boiled down to one word: Respect.

    Respecting customers, suppliers, staff and resellers is something that’s forgotten by many larger businesses obsessed with short term gains at the expense of anyone foolish or unfortunate enough to do business with them.

    The current problems of big retailers can be put down to that lack of respect; for suppliers as they screwed the last cent out of their supply chains, for staff as they crudely cut numbers to achieve their performance targets and for customers who found service had become a word with little meaning in their stores.

    It would be unfair to pick on the retailers though as most large organisations share that attitude of disrespecting everyone who doesn’t sit on the same floor as the CEO.

    Much of these beliefs on blindly cutting costs, outsourcing service and focusing on short term KPIs came out of 1980s thinking at consulting firms and management schools.

    Although the schools and consultants have updated their thinking, many business leaders are stuck in that short term model which worked well during the two decades of easy credit we’ve went through up to 2008.

    Chris Witt summed this short term thinking up well with his closing comment; “Neanderthal man’s survival strategy was short term, it didn’t do him much good.”

    Respecting your business relationships is the key to long term survival in these uncertain times, we need to be insuring we show the respect to our staff, supplier, customers and partners we hope they would give us.

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