Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: future

  • Building business communities

    Building business communities

    Last night the NSW Government launched Digital Sydney, an initiative to bring together the various groups that make up the digital media and IT industries while raising the city’s profile as a global digital centre.

    This project was something close to me as I’d been involved in developing the concept through 2009 when working with the then NSW department of Industry and Investment.

    Originally the idea had been to create a digital hub around the Australian Technology Park to the south of the city. Over the decade of its operation, the ATP had attracted some high profile tenants and various high tech business start ups but there was a feeling it could be a more dynamic centre of the Sydney tech sector.

    Digital hub failures

    The setting up of “digital hubs” around the world has not been a great success – in Ireland an attempt to set one up in central Dublin’s disused Guinness brewery cost the European Union well over 100 million euro and subsequently collapsed amid acrimony between the various governments and businesses involved.

    Even if there was a track record of success it’s unlikely any Australian government, state or Federal, would be prepared to spend money on the European scale. So the idea of building a “hub” had to be kept within industry, particularly the IT and digital media sectors.

    Existing industry hubs

    In talking to the industry, it became apparent that Sydney already a digital hub spreading across the suburbs immediately to the south and west of the city centre and centred around Surry Hills with an vibrant community of developers, designers and entrepreneurs occupying the old factories and warehouses being vacated by the city’s rag trade.

    The proximity of competitors, clients and suppliers was why the hub had developed; exactly the reason why the fashion industry had previously concentrated around that district.

    This is consistent with history; the great industrial hubs such as the English midlands of the 18th Century, the US mid west of the 19th Century along with today’s Chinese coastal manufacturing centres and event Silicon Valley happened with little government forethought.

    Like-minded businesses clustered together because they could find the essential resources for their industry such as raw materials, labour, transport, markets and capital.

    A shortage of capital

    The access to capital is a problem for all smaller and innovative businesses in Australia, not just those trying to build digital businesses or hubs. Start up enterprises have been starved for capital and a few late stage Venture Capital investments like the recent ones in Atlassian or 99Designs are not on their own enough to build vibrant businesses of the future.

    In Australia, it’s difficult to see any government in the near future changing the tax and legal regimes which favour property and stock market speculation over investment in new businesses and technology so the best hope is initiatives like Digital Sydney, along with the profiles of similar industry hubs in Brisbane and Melbourne, can encourage investors to look at the start up and innovation sectors.

    Why big cities?

    The real question is though is why is this just the major cities? Why can’t we have hubs in Renmark, Esperance or Hobart?

    Access to skills and talent are the driving forces behind the local hubs and in that respect some smaller towns and regions do have the skilled workforces and businesses capable of building industrial centres and we’ve seen some regional hubs develop like the wine industry in various places.

    So it’s worthwhile considering where your business is located, maybe it would be better to set up next door to your competitor? For many organisations, being part of vibrant industry hub is part of their success.

    postscript;

    Joe Kelly, former Commercial Director of the Dublin Digital Hub Development Agency, takes me to task on the claim the Dublin Hub collapsed. His comment is as follows:

    As the former Director of Commercial Operations at The Digital Hub Development Agency, I felt compelled to correct you on your assertion that the Digital Hub in Dublin collapsed. That is incorrect. Media Lab Europe, an entirely seperate entity collapsed at a cost of over 100 million euro. The Digital Hub continues to thrive with over 100 companies located there. Please refer to www.thedigitalhub.com for further information.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • The learning curve

    The learning curve

    When new technologies appear it’s interesting how people experiment and adapt to them, we’re seeing this right now as businesses grapple with social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and discover where the benefits lie.

    The second edition of the Social Media Benchmarking Study, a joint release by Sydney online consultants Community Engine and the research company Nielson, illustrated how things have changed over the last two years.

    One of the clear conclusions from the study is how businesses are developing the ways to determine benefits of their social media activity with near halving of the number of organisations citing lack of measurable return on investment as a reason for not engaging online.

    A barrier that is increasing is the perception that businesses don’t have the time or resources required for which is probably business owners and managers realising that maintaining a Facebook Page, Twitter account or blog isn’t easy.

    Time is the scarcest asset for any business that gets more precious with smaller organisation. Even large corporates and government departments struggle with finding the resources necessary to run effective online presences.

    One of the tragedies of social media is how it’s been identified as a marketing tool and in this survey with over half the respondents stated they are going primarily use the tools as a marketing channel rather than in customer support, recruitment, research or product development.

    This is probably why the perception that social media is a time sink comes from. As purely marketing tools social media is time consuming and difficult. A challenge made greater by the fact we’re all still figuring out how to effectively connect with customers in what is a hostile place to more traditional broadcast based marketing methods.

    Given social media is being used primarily as a marketing tool by business, it’s no surprise that the survey found larger corporations are the biggest users as they have the marketing budgets to allocate.

    An interesting aspect with big business’ social media investment is how much it’s focused on Facebook. On one level this is understandable as a Facebook “like” is easy to set up and becomes a very simple measurement to follow, although the challenge still lies in converting a low friction click on a Like button into a useful customer or advocate.

    What is surprising with corporate Australia’s adoption of Facebook is the apparent lack of understanding of the platform’s terms and conditions and the business risks involved. Again this is probably part of the collective learning curve.

    Possibly because of those risks, public sector use is static. We can expect this given as social media is being pushed as a marketing tool which isn’t a priority many government agencies, are you going to skip registering your car because the motor registry doesn’t have a “like” button on their web page?

    This liberation from being obsessed with marketing and sales is probably why the public sector is using social media a more creatively as collaborative and research tools where many of these services do an extremely good job.

    Many businesses, particularly smaller organizations, believe social media doesn’t fit their objectives. A terrific quote from an SME accountant is “I run a business, not a chat show”.

    That attitude’s fine as social media – like pretty well everything else in the business world – is a tool to be used the best way you see fit, just because some businesses don’t need a hammer but that doesn’t mean hammers aren’t useful.

    Although when that tool is fairly new, as social media is, it’s probably best to have a play with it and see where if can help your business.

    The Social Media Benchmarking Study is a useful survey that shows where businesses are using these tools and how effective they are finding them. It’s going to be interesting to see the field evolves as we all get to understand social media as both consumers and business owners.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Trust is the currency of the web

    Trust is the currency of the web

    “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” says Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon. All of us who want to be taken seriously on the web have to prove we’re not dogs – or trolls, shills or just those who regurgitate cheap, nasty and unreliable content.

    This is particularly true when you want to be a trusted news source; your audience has to be assured an article’s facts are true and the conclusions can be relied upon. That assurance is found in references to source material, the writer’s identity and the basic facts for the reader to decide how accurate the story is.

    An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on Voice over IP security illustrates just how even mainstream, established media can get things wrong. This article tells us nothing; we don’t know who the writer is, it doesn’t link to source material and, unforgivably, the story leaves it to the reader to guess what the security problem was.

    Because of Fairfax’s silly and inconsistent rules on external links I normally don’t link to Fairfax news articles. A good example of this silliness is illustrated in the above article where the reader has to copy and paste into a web browser the bit.ly reference to MyNetFone’s security advice which the writer has managed to sneak into the copy.

    It would be nice to congratulate the writer on this little bit of subterfuge but the article doesn’t have a byline, the credit at the bottom simply says “Livewire” which probably refers to the long defunct IT section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald’s sister publication.

    That the article also refers to Bleeding Edge, a long running Age technology column by Charles Wright which was discontinued some time in early 2006 and which Charles later tried to morph Bleeding Edge into an independent blog. It’s not good enough that we have to guess who the writer is.

    Having a semi-anonymous writer, no byline and no links to supporting information might be all forgivable if the article actually told us what the problem had been with the phone account; did the evil Hong Based criminal mastermind hack the providers’ network, was it a security lapse on the writer’s network or had the user’s password been weak and compromised?

    I suspect it’s the latter, but like most things about this article the reader is forced to guess. If the reader doesn’t have some level of computer expertise they’d be totally lost.

    For organisations like Fairfax, the publishers of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, the challenge in a society where the traditional newspaper model is rapidly dying is to build their online brand so they can bring advertisers across to it.

    The only way they will succeed in this difficult task is to be trusted as a source of reliable information, and right now poor editing coupled with silly policies such as the one on linking out to other trusted sites are damaging readers’ trust in their brand.

    Rather than sacking editors, publishers should be preserving them and making their online content more trustworthy than the bulk of the web with its dozens of content farms and millions of inconsistent blogs (like this one).

    It’s only by having high standards that today’s media empires will survive the changes the Internet has bought, going cheap and losing the trust and respect of the audience is not an option.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Happy birthday, iPad

    Happy birthday, iPad

    Last week the iPad’s first birthday quietly passed, lost among the hoopla of the release of the tablet computing leader’s second version. It’s a difficult to think of another product that’s changed an industry so radically and so quickly.

    All of Apple’s successes in the last decade have been in areas with many already established players; the iMac entered a crowded PC market, the iPod was just another MP3 player and the iPhone plunged into a sector sated with hundreds of mobile devices.

    With each product Apple redefined their segment of the market place and established a secure, and profitable, niche.

    The iPad was somewhat different to the other products; with it Apple redefined the entire market and now leads the tablet computing sector. Yesterday industry analysts Gartner put out figures claiming Apple has over two-thirds of today’s market and will still hold half in 2015 despite the rise of the cheaper Google Android devices.

    Notable in Gartner’s predictions is the absence of Microsoft Windows based systems and that’s the clue for the iPad’s success as industries like healthcare, retail and logistics had been begging for affordable and usable tablet computers for a decade which the clunky Windows based systems had consistently failed to deliver.

    Another factor in Apple’s favour has been the rise of cloud computing, which has freed devices from relying on heavy and power hungry internal hard drives and made them more flexible. One of the most popular business iPad applications has been Evernote, a note taking program which has proved indispensable for business executives.

    Most of those executives work for corporations where the IT departments had blocked the introduction of cloud services and Apple products on compatibility and security grounds.

    Senior management’s adoption of Apple products and cloud services has broken down that enterprise barrier, which is one of the reasons why competing companies that made their fortunes selling desktop and server products are now desperately trying to find other selling points.

    In many ways, the adoption of Apple and the cloud is similar to how personal computers entered business. In the 1980’s computing departments resisted the introduction of PCs for almost the same reasons as IT managers today object to social media, cloud computing and Mac desktops in the office.

    The difference is the PC revolution was initially driven by the office accountants, sales teams and secretaries who found desktop applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect made their jobs more effective. This time, being different, it’s their managers driving the change.

    For smaller businesses and entrepreneurs Apple’s successes open a whole range of opportunities in the applications and services markets to support these devices.

    Those applications also help upstarts disrupt existing industries; the lower cost of entry is reducing barriers and speeding up lead times making slower incumbents more vulnerable to change.

    Disruption is probably the greatest lesson that Apple and Steve Jobs have taught us with the iPad, you can enter an already crowded market with a product different from the existing players and own a substantial part of it.

    All businesses, regardless of the sectors we work in, can learn from the iPad whether it’s how we can use tablets and the cloud in our operations or how we can apply Apple’s disruptive business model to secure a profitable industry niche. It’s a good time to be being open to new ideas.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Planning for today

    Planning for today

    Last week the Communications Day Summit was told of the bizarre situation where owners corporations and building managers were actively preventing their properties from being connected to high speed Internet.

    This short sightedness shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s had to argue with architects about allowing sufficient data raisers in commercial buildings or has despaired at stingy developers condemning their projects’ future occupants to years of living in powerboard infested firetraps by only installing one or two power outlets per room – something that’s common in even high priced complexes.

    As well as being firetraps, these properties are limiting their potential future value as owners and tenants find it hard to connect the devices most businesses and family find are essential to modern living. This situation is going to get worse as we start to rely even more on the web and we find we our incomes and livelihoods are tied to the reliability and speed of our connections.

    This failure to plan for the connected economy by Australian businesses is a familiar story, last year one of the state governments asked the tech industry what they were planning around the high speed Internet access the National Broadband Network planned to deliver. The overwhelming response was “dunno, I guess we’ll wait and see.”

    Last week Geof Heydon of telecommunications company Alcatel Lucent told an almost identical story of cluelessness where one of the big four banks asked its suppliers how the NBN would affect the provision of their products.

    The frightening thing is the availability of reliable and fast Internet is already here for most of the population and yet the majority of the business community, not just the retailer sector, seems to be ignoring these fundamental changes to our marketplaces.

    Even if you don’t like the NBN, or last week’s news of cancelled tenders only confirms suspicions Canberra has their sums on the project hopelessly wrong, cancelling it is going to strand large chunks of regional and outer suburban Australia without access to the newer services.

    We all have to ensure our business plans have provision for the changes that are happening as our customers, staff and suppliers adopt high speed and mobile Internet. Failing to do so is going to leave your business or investment stranded, just a community without roads or high speed broadband would be.

     

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts