Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: entrepreneurs

  • And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

    And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

    Sitting in on the Storytelling and Business panel of the Sydney Writers’ Festival it occurred to me how well Silicon Valley and the tech startup community have crafted an image for their times.

    Author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman focused on the need of businesses to articulate the organisation’s sense of purpose. While this begs the question of what’s the message if the business’ purpose is to enrich their senior management, it is an a good point.

    What is a business’ purpose and how do you articulate it? More so, what is the purpose of your industry?

    One group of businesses that has done very well in articulating their message is the Silicon Valley tech community who’ve portrayed themselves – regardless of the reality – as being driven by the altruistic aim of changing the world.

    Steve Jobs was one of the leaders of this and, while we shouldn’t overlook his talents, he was a ruthless, driven businessman.

    On the panel advertising industry elder Neil Lawrence raised Jobs’ ability to articulate Apple’s mission, telling the story of when the Apple CEO was challenged on the ‘Thing Different’ slogan not being good English, he replied “it’s Californian.”

    Apple’s success in branding itself as a visionary, creative company – and Google’s image of ‘Don’t Do Evil’ – show how it’s possible to create an image for an organisation, an industry or even an entire industry.

    In reality, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are as full of snake oil salesmen, mercanaries and paper clip counting corporate bureaucrats as any other sector, but legends have been built, and continue to be built, on the myth of  selfless entrepreneurs sacrifice all to make the world a better place.

    Contrasting Silicon Valley’s success with the Australian experience was interesting, Botsman was scathing about the ability of Aussie managers in telling the story about their businesses finding most of them have lost her by the second slide of their Powerpoint presentation.

    We shouldn’t get too hung up though about the nobility of telling a business’ story, Shehan Karunatilaka, former copy writer and author made the major point about business communications “story telling in business is about shifting product.”

    He went on to describe the tragic career path of the advertising copy writer who comes into the ad industry believing they are a world changing artist and ends up being burned out.

    “you are not an artist – you are a mouthpiece for businesses” said Shehan.

    The truth is most of us in business are not artists, some parts of our work may involve creative skills – like copy writing, design or financial engineering – in reality most of us are there to make a decent living, if not a fortune.

    Silicon Valley’s mythmaking shows how you can cover the mundane truth with a noble, a constant narrative which has  allowed ruthless businessmen like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to portray themselves as selfless visionaries rather than the modern equivalents of  John Rockerfeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and other 19th Century robber barons.

    This is possibly the greatest message of all in business communications – history is written by the victors.

    When you’re winning in your industry, you get to write the story.

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  • You can’t buy cool

    You can’t buy cool

    In many ways it was Yahoo! who pioneered Silicon Valley’s Greater Fool Business Model during the dot com boom of the late 1990s.

    The Greater Fool model involves hyping a website, online service or new technology in the hope a hapless corporation dazzled by the spin will buy the business for an improbably large amount.

    Fifteen years later many of those services are closed down or languishing and the founders who were gifted millions of dollars by gullible boards and shareholders have moved on to other pursuits.

    The news that Yahoo! has sealed a deal to buy blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion dollars shows the company’s urge to buy in success remains under new CEO Marissa Mayer.

    It’s difficult to see exactly what Tumblr adds to Yahoo!’s wide range of online properties except a young audience – exactly the reasoning that saw News Corporation’s disastrous investment in MySpace.

    What’s particularly concerning is a comment made by Yahoo!’s CFO Ken Goldman at JP Morgan’s Global Technology Conference last week.

    “So we’re working hard to get some of the younger folks,” Goldman said on a webcast from the J.P. Morgan Global Technology conference in Boston.

    It’s all about trying to “make us cool again,” he said, adding that Yahoo will focus on content that’s “more relevant to that age bracket.”

    So they are spending a billion dollars to “make us cool again” – it’s disappointing Marissa Mayer has allowed middle aged male executives to run free with the shareholders’ chequebook in a quest to rediscover their youth.

    Like most middle aged life crises, it’s unlikely to end well.

    For Tumblr’s founders and investors things have ended well. It’s time to buy those yachts and fast cars those middle aged execs covet.

    In the meantime the quest for internet ‘cool’ – whatever that is – will move onto whatever online service teenagers and twenty somethings are using.

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  • Silicon Valley’s network effect

    Silicon Valley’s network effect

    Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and various others startups has an interesting take on why San Francisco and Silicon Valley are the centres of the tech startup world.

    He puts the region’s success down to the network effect where like minded groups share knowledge and encourage each other.

    If you want to create a vibrant start-up ecosystem somewhere else that is competitive with San Francisco and Silicon Valley (and this is starting to happen right now in places such as Boulder and Austin), you want to do two things: You want to pack the people working together into as dense an area as possible, with public areas and co-working venues where they will see each other constantly, even when they aren’t working in the same company. And then you want to encourage them to let down their guard and be as open as possible about what they are doing.

    Of course the network effect doesn’t just apply to the Silicon Valley tech startup model, it’s just as true for China’s manufacturing hubs, South Korean shipbuilding or historical centres like Detroit’s motor industry and the English Midlands during the industrial revolution.

    We shouldn’t forget that fifty years ago governments sought to to emulate Detroit’s success and a century ago cities strived to be like Birmingham.

    That’s something we should keep in mind when looking at ways to emulate Silicon Valley – in trying to copy today’s successes, we may be mimicking a model that has already peaked while overlooking our own unique advantages and the opportunities in new industries.

    For cities striving to become world centres of industry, it might be best to first figure out what they do well and then find a way of attracting the smartest people in that field to move there.

    Then again, it may just be that most industrial hubs are accidents of history and the best we can do is try to attract smart people to our communities.

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  • Discovering an online media model

    Discovering an online media model

    Peter Kafka of the Wall Street Journal’s All Thing D blog has been closely following Google’s attempts to position YouTube as a successor to television.

    Key to that success is getting advertisers on board to spend as much money with online channels as they do on broadcast TV.

    To date that’s failed and most of the online ad spend has come at the expense of print media – the money advertisers spent on magazines and newspapers has moved onto the web, but TV’s share of the pie is barely changing and may even be increasing.

    The challenges facing web advertising is discovering what works on the new mediums.

    McDonalds Canada Behind The Scenes campaign is touted as one of the success stories of YouTube advertising, although Kafka isn’t fully convinced.

    McDonald’s modest ad tells a story, flatters viewers by telling them they’re smart enough to go backstage, and still ends up pushing pretty images of hamburgers in front of them. That’s pretty clever advertising sort-of masquerading as something else but not really.

    We’re trying to apply old ways of working to a new technology something we do every time a new technology appears.

    Moving from silent movies

    Probably the best example of this is the movie industry – if you look at the early silent movies they were staged like theatrical productions. It took the best part of two decades for movie directors to figure out the advantages of the silver screen.

    Shortly after movie directors figured out what worked on the big screen, the talkies came along and changed the rules again. Then came colour, then television, then the net and now mobile. Each time the movie industry has had to adapt.

    It isn’t just the movie and advertising industries facing this problem; publishers, writers and journalists are struggling with exactly the same issues.

    Most of what you read online, including this blog, is just old style print writing or journalism being published on a digital platform. Few of us, including me, are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do.

    Waiting for Sarnoff

    David Sarnoff figured out how to make money from broadcast radio and television in the 1930s with a model that was very different from what the movie industry was doing at the time.

    Sarnoff built Radio Corporation of America into the world’s leading broadcaster and the modern advertising industry grew out of RCA’s successful model.

    Today both the broadcasting and advertising industries are applying Sarnoff’s innovations of the 1930s to the web with limited success. Just like movie producers struggled with theatrical techniques at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

    Figuring out what works online is today’s great challenge. Google are throwing billions at the problem through YouTube but there’s no guarantee they will be the RCA of the internet.

    We may well find that a young coder in Suzhou or a video producer in Sao Paolo has the answer and becomes the Randolph Hearst or David Sarnoff of our time.

    The future is open and it’s there for the taking.

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  • Building tech cities

    Building tech cities

    With the apparent success of the Silicon Valley business model, every city seems to want to emulate it. One region that’s probably gone further than most is supporting their local tech sector is London with its Tech City program.

    But is it succeeding? The Guardian did an audit on the Tech City project and came away with some findings that aren’t particularly different from other cities.

    What I personally find interesting is how the Digital Sydney project which I was involved in setting up during 2009-10 shares the flaws The Guardian has identified in the London initiative.

    Identifying tech

    One key criticism The Guardian has is that too many businesses are identified as being in the technology sector;

    of the 1,340 companies, 137 are tech companies, 700 are PR or design agencies and 482 are “miscellaneous” – which includes charities, pubs, cafes and fashion boutiques. The remaining 21 companies were either entered more than once or entries with no information or link to an external site. So just 10% of companies in Tech City actually do technology, 53% are PR or design agencies, and 37% are “miscellaneous”.

    This was true of identifying Sydney’s ‘digital hub’ – the vast majority of business surveyed were not actually tech businesses but movie post production, graphic designers and publishers. The technology sector was only a small group and the bulk of employment and investment came from large multinational corporations like IBM and Google.

    Now it is possible to argue that businesses like post-production, publishing and broadcast media are ‘tech’, but then almost every industry could be thought of as ‘tech’ if you cast the net wide enough.

    The problem is counting those businesses as being tech just on the basis they are heavy users of IT skews the numbers and gives an inflated view of how big the sector really is.

    A capital city focus

    One of the biggest criticisms of the Tech City initiative is that it is too London centric and The Guardian makes a good case about this, looking at cities like Brighton, Cambridge, Newcastle and Manchester.

    A similar criticism could quite rightly be made about Sydney’s project, which focuses on the inner city enclaves of Surry Hills and Ultimo while ignoring most of the city or any of the state’s regional centres.

    When I started at the New South Wales government I was warned by one old hand that “to these jokers NSW stands for North Sydney to Woolloomooloo.”

    And so it proved to be.

    Focusing on London’s Silicon Roundabout or Sydney’s Surry Hills also smacks of a ‘people like us’ syndrome where the support goes to nice middle class white folk – just like the politicians, public servants and captains of industry who run these programs.

    Overemphasising tech

    Another problem, not mentioned in The Guardian story, is the over emphasis on technology startups.

    Projects like Tech City and Digital Sydney focus on last decade’s opportunities which Silicon Valley dominated. Governments look at California’s success and think we need to copy that when what we’re seeing is actually the fruits of the previous wave of opportunity.

    It may well be that we’re repeating the mistakes of the 1950s and 60s where countries around the world imitated Detroit hoping to replicate the US’ success with the motor industry.

    The costs of that error are still a millstone around taxpayers’ necks two generations later.

    To be fair to those setting up projects like Tech City or Digital Sydney, they are attempts to harness the energy in their own cities but it may just be that government programs aren’t the best ways to bring entrepreneurs and inventors together.

    Hopefully though their efforts will succeed although it’s more likely the next Silicon Valley will be just as much the result of a series of coincidences as today’s is.

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