Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • Do you have customers or just users?

    Do you have customers or just users?

    “I was on your mailing list for general info, for spams and scams etc which were helpful. Suddenly it changed and now the business format is not useful to me” said an lady when unsubscribing from one of my newsletter mailing lists.

    The lady concerned had been on one of the mailing lists for over ten years and, once upon a time, had been a paying customer for my old business, PC Rescue. Although we’d only earned a $100 off her and that was seven years ago.

    While it’s sad to lose a subscriber – you don’t run a service business for twelve years without caring about those who use your services – the question is was the lady really a customer?

    This is an important distinction where many of us are giving away much of our knowledge for free; are our users really customers?

    For the social media and web2.0 sites, this is easy; users are the raw material for their aggregated and segmented data feeds and audience, the customers are the advertisers. This is just a modern twist on the broadcast model that sustained the radio and TV industries for most of the 20th Century.

    Many of those social media platforms aren’t making much money from that data and there’s a good argument those who are have been wildly overvalued by investors.

    The value of user data, whether it’s aggregated or identifiable appears to be nowhere as high as most of us think, unless you intend to rob your users’ bank accounts.

    Overvaluation of your customer, or user, database is a common problem for smaller businesses too. If you’re the local plumber, computer repair guy or coffee shop then the value of any mailing list is probably way overstated – the only metric that ultimately matters to the business is how much money you’re making from the customer.

    If you care about the people that you deal with, this may be a hard reality to face but those who visit your shop, subscribe to your newsletter or download your free e-book aren’t your customers, only those who are prepared to pay are.

    This is something we have to understand in this era of abundant free information and online services. The challenge for most of us is how many users we can convert from being window shoppers and freebie seekers into customers.

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  • ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

    ABC Nightlife Computers: The Internet Name Wars

    The online empires want our names and identities, are the real costs of social media now being exposed? Our September ABC Nightlife spot on September 22 from 10pm looked at these issues and more.

    Paul and Tony discussed how Google’s “Name Wars” or “nymwars” came about, why social media sites like Facebook and search engines want you to use to use your real names.

    The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, more details of Tony’s programs can be found there as well.

    Is this a good thing or are there costs we should consider before handing over our intimate details to a social media or free cloud computing service?

    Some of the topics we covered included;

    • What are the “name wars’?
    • Why do companies like Google and Facebook want us to use our ‘real’ identities?
    • How can they use the information they gather?
    • What problems does that cause for Internet users?
    • Can these problems spill into real life?
    • Are all web services doing this?
    • What are the risks to businesses using social media?
    • Is this the real cost of social media?

    Some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

    The cost of lunch: Google and Information Revenue
    Google’s real names policy explained
    Google’s Eric Schmidt on being an “identity service”, not a social network
    Google’s company philosophy (note item two)
    Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is

    We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 20 October and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

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  • Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

    Cloud computing and Small Business September Digital Day

    As part of the NSW state government’s Small Business September Digital Day for Startups and Growth Businesses, we’ll be looking at exactly what cloud computing is and how it can help businesses.

    Some of the services we discuss in the presentation are listed in the Netsmart’s web post on the 5 essential cloud computing tools for business. Although there’s many more we’ll mention that can help organisations of all sizes.

    Given the time constraints and the event’s focus is on the specific social media and cloud computing tools available to small business, much of the background information to the Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business session is available in the previous series of posts about cloud computing previously done for the 2011 City of Sydney Let’s Talk Business series.

    Detailed information from that presentation can be found on the following pages;

    The networked business Part 1: What is cloud computing?
    The networked business Part 2: The benefits of cloud computing
    The networked business Part 3: Managing risk in the cloud
    The networked business Part 4: The business case for cloud computing

    All of the tools discussed in the Small Business September presentations are available in our ebook, Online Business Essentials which is available for all subscribers to our newsletter.

    If you’d like to see the presentations themselves, both The Networked Business and Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business are available through the Slideshare service.

    Seats are still available for both of the Digital Day presentations at the Telstra Experience Centre, Level 4, 300 George Street, Sydney. The Start Up session begins at 8.00am and the presentations for growth businesses begins at 1.00pm.

    Come along if you’d like to learn how social media and cloud computing can help your business improve productivity while building an online brand.

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  • The quiet revolution

    The quiet revolution

    Earlier this weekPricewaterhouseCoopers released their Productivity Scorecard, which showed Australia’s business efficiency isn’t improving as fast at it once was and the country’s relative performance is steadily slipping down international tables.

    One of the notable things in the PwC report is the massive growth of productivity in the 1990s, a point emphasised by the accompanying paper on business productivity in a presentation by economist Saul Eslake last month to the Reserve Bank of Australia.

    Economists attribute most of this late 20th Century growth to deregulation and privatisation by governments in the 1980s and 90s but the driving force was really computerisation that allowed most businesses to do much more with less.

    Immediately noticeable for an Australian walking into a British, European or Japanese office during the early 1990s was the lack of desktop computers.

    Australian businesses adopted technology a lot quicker than their counterparts outside of North America and this alone was probably responsible for the country’s relatively good productivity growth in that decade.

    The arrival of computers – followed by desktop printers and Internet access – suddenly gave small businesses access the means to do jobs that even the biggest corporations had struggled to do previously and drove a rapid reorganisation of most offices.

    Everybody from secretaries to architects and graphic designers to lawyers – even economists – suddenly found they had the tools at their fingertips to do work they could have only dreamed of prior to 1990. This drove massive productivity gains in businesses of all sizes.

    From 2000 onwards, things became tougher as the easy gains had been made and the incremental improvements in technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and web publishing didn’t have the same substantive effect the early PCs delivered with spreadsheets, word processing and desktop publishing.

    The real challenge we now face in business – and government – is to start harnessing cloud computing driven online services that promise to deliver similar productivity gains to what we saw twenty years ago.

    We have the tools; online office apps, Customer Relation Management services (CRM) and sharing platforms all deliver major improvements in the way we work within our businesses and with external partners like contractors, suppliers and event clients.

    One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing services is reduced capital cost meaning reduced barriers to entry into markets we previously may have thought were safe.

    This easy access into established sectors is one of reasons the retail industry’s giants are now struggling as online competitors can setup cheaply and quickly while offering better prices and service.

    Retail is only one of the more obvious sectors being changed by these technologies and as the decade continues we’re going to close to every industry be radically changed by low cost computers accessing the Internet.

    As business owners and managers we need to look at our own processes and systems with an eye on how we can improve workflows and customer service within our organisations.

    Those of us who manage to get these new technologies are going to reap the benefit of the next productivity wave, those who don’t are going to go the way that many uncompetitive and slow to respond industries did in the 1980s.

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  • How Google’s identity obsession hurts

    How Google’s identity obsession hurts

    Imagine giving a presentation at a conference where you fire up a live demonstration of a product you’ve been urging the audience to use and the audience start giggling.

    You turn around to find a bright red message at the top of the screen stating your account has been suspended. It wasn’t there the night before and you certainly didn’t receive an email warning you this had happened.

    Embarrassing or what?

    That happened to me with Google Local earlier this and the many stories like it illustrates a serious management problem within the world’s biggest search engine company.

    Local search – where businesses can be found online based on their location – is one of the main web battlefields with Google and Facebook, along with outliers like News Limited and Microsoft, are competing to get business of all sizes to sign up.

    Recently though Google seems to be going out of its way to squander the massive opportunity they have in this sector despite the CEO, Larry Page, identifying local services as one of their priorities.

    Despite Google’s intention to promote Places – as their, and Facebook’s, local search platforms are called – many businesses are finding the company’s arbitrary and often incorrect application of its own rules and Terms of Service difficult to understand and use.

    “I have found that with the ‘moving target’ Google is presenting to businesses” said Bob, a commenter on one of my blogs, “is paralyzing them from doing exactly what Google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages.”

    In many ways, this is a small front on the “nymwars” that has broken out since Google introduced their Plus social media service and started enforcing their “rules” on “real names”.

    Unfortunately their real names “policy” – and I use inverted commas deliberately – is vague and arbitrary with users finding their accounts suspended despite signing up with “the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you” as required by Google.

    Account suspensions are wide and varied; some people, quite legally, have a name without a surname, others have a combination of languages such as Chinese or Arabic, while others have simply fallen foul of the computer and Google’s secretive bureaucratic culture.

    This secretive bureaucracy would be funny if it wasn’t so downright hypocritical. Any correspondence with Google about account suspensions either on Places or Plus is signed off by an anonymous functionary from “no-reply” email address. So it appears real identities, and accountability, don’t extend to the company itself.

    Last week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, announced Plus is not a social media platform, but an “identity service”. Good luck with that, Eric as your staff’s arbitrary and often incorrect interpretation of the company’s own rules doesn’t engender confidence in any identity verified by Google.

    That announcement by Google’s chairman should worry investors, as this is a company that is first and foremost an advertising company powered by the best web search technology.

    Management distractions such as becoming an “identity service” or buying a handset manufacturer distract focus from the core business and result in the mess we’re seeing around business and private accounts.

    For the moment, Google Places remains a service that businesses must list on given the visibility the results have when customers search the web for local services and products.

    If you aren’t already on Google Places, do sign up but make sure you get your listing right first time as editing your profile once it’s up risks your account being suspended or cast into “pending” purgatory.

    Should you have already an account, leave it alone as any change risks coming the attention of Google’s anonymous bureaucrats.

    Hopefully, this madness will pass and Google will clarify their policies, ground them in the real world then enforce their terms fairly and consistently. Until then, you can’t afford to rely on your personal and business Google accounts.

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