Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • Other peoples’ platforms

    Other peoples’ platforms

    “We have successfully established an online business, but we have run into problems with Ebay (indefinite suspension – unfairly I might add)” wrote Ralph*, an old client.

    “We are pretty desperate, as this is now our sole business and we are now without an income.”

    The Privately Owned Web

    Ralph’s problem is typical of thousands of businesses that rely on one Internet service. Some months back we looked at “Nipplegate”, the story of a Sydney jeweller who had her Facebook page closed down because of her anatomically correct dolls.

    All of these services are privately owned with their own terms and conditions along with their own corporate objectives. If you choose to use their product, you have to follow their rules – just like a shopping mall management can order you off their premises because they don’t like the colour of your socks.

    The most glaring example of this is Wikileaks where Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard and Visa all threw the whistleblower site off their services for allegedly breaching their terms of services in various obscure ways.

    The Terms of Service Trap

    A business’ Terms of Service usually feature clauses wide enough to catch even the most honest and diligent business, this is by design as it gives management the excuse to throw anyone who makes their lives difficult, which is exactly what has happened with Wikileaks.

    While Ralph’s problem is nothing like the scale of Julian Assange’s, all of these stories illustrate the dangers of relying on one service for your livelihood. Should that service change the way it operates, then any business that relies on that could be broke in hours, as many businesses that rely on Google search results have found.

    Most of the Internet is not a public space, almost all of it is privately run along similar lines to that shopping mall or a walled estate.

    Ralph and Julian Assange have shown us the limitations and risks of the privately operated web. As citizens and business owners we have to understand these corporations’ objectives are not always the same as ours and make judgements on how we live with the risk of finding ourselves in breach of a Term of Service in our business or personal lives.

    We’re still in relatively early days of the net and all of us are still learning. One lesson is clear though, we can’t allow our livelihoods to be held hostage by a small number of big technology companies. Make sure you have alternatives to your online channels.

    *Ralph is not his real name

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  • Why competition is great for Google

    We often talk about competition being good for consumers and, ultimately, businesses. The technology industry is a good case study.

    Microsoft shows how competition forces a business to raise their game; when they won the browser wars by dispatching Netscape early in the Internet era, they let Internet Explorer stagnate until the Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Apple Safari web browsers came along.

    Similarly, they allowed their flagship product Microsoft Office drift once they dominated the productivity software market. The arrival of Google Docs and some other new players forced them to refresh and redesign the Office package.

    Today Google find themselves in the same position – Facebook, Microsoft’s Bing and various other search engines are reminding the leader that their position is not safe.

    The Business Insider website recently took a critical look at Demand Media’s business model, a service that publishes low quality articles that tend to rank high with the aid of clever Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). As a result of Demand’s high rankings on Google searches these articles tend to attract advertisers.

    In a search engine market where Google is the only noteworthy game in town, this situation would suit Google and Demand Media as both would have a nice predictable stream of advertising and neither party would have any great incentive to change things and for a while it appeared that might be the case.

    With the arrival of real competition to Google such as Microsoft Bing and Facebook, all things change as now search engine results matter – the whole reason Google beat out competitors was because their search results were better than anyone else’s – if Google’s results aren’t as good then users will switch.

    So Google’s been changing their algorithm, the formula they use for searches, in order to improve the results of queries on their system. So much so that my fellow Smartcompany blogger, Chris Thomas, accuses them of Attention Deficit Disorder.

    This is good news for Google’s users who now get better quality search results and great news for Google’s advertisers who get better quality pages where potential buyers are likely to stay longer and click more.

    Google though is the biggest winner as the better results they deliver, the more profitable and long lasting their core advertising business will be.

    For Demand Media, things aren’t so good as there’s no shortage of poorly written tripe on the Internet and if they can’t get Google ranking goodness then their business model dies.

    Which may show that in the new economy, bad soap doesn’t necessarily replace good soap.

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  • The listening game

    Last week’s Qantas A380 problem illustrates the power the Internet has and how businesses can’t ignore what’s being said on the various online channels.

    Thankfully most of us will never have a morning where the world is told we have lost over four hundred of our staff and customers in a fiery accident as Qantas did last week.

    While not a Qantas customer, I had a lot of sympathy and respect for their management and staff who had to deal with conflicting accounts while balancing their obligations to regulators, shareholders and, most importantly, the loved ones of those aboard QF32.

    The initial story that went out on the media was a Reuters’ report that a Qantas A380 had crashed on taking off from Singapore. While Qantas were able to quickly deny that, they found their other assurances that no debris had fallen from the plane were quickly contradicted by online photos of the pieces in a nearby Indonesian town.

    Luckily, Qantas’ communications teams appeared to be listening to these comments so were quickly able to verify their accuracy and amend the company’s position before they were embarrassed.

    Today’s connected consumers armed with camera equipped, Internet enabled smart phones and can post images contradicting or confirming your message or understanding of the situation quickly. Which is exactly what happened in this instance with passengers and witnesses quickly uploading their views of the incident.

    In one respect this is a threat to traditional management where controlling the message is everything, to the modern manager this is a fantastic opportunity to react quickly and positively to changing situations.

    One of my favourite stories comes from the Virgin Blue checking problems in late September where staff, alerted by complaints on Twitter, were able to get water bottles out to thirsty passengers stuck in queues. It didn’t rescue Virgin from the PR battering they took, but it helped a few of their customers and just maybe won a few of them back.

    This isn’t to say the Internet is infallible, far from it — the Internet is mankind’s gift to the ill informed ratbag and the mischevious troll — what you read on Twitter and Facebook needs to be treated with the same suspicion as what you see on Reuters and CNN.

    Even when the information is downright wrong, you at least have an early warning there’s a perception problem in the community which you can quickly work upon. The key is to evaluate and recognise the credible from the silly and then be able to act on the credible while countering the silly stuff.

    One big lesson from both Qantas’ problems last week and Virgin’s in September is how important it is to point all of your communications channels, including call centres to the organisation’s web site where up to date, verified information is available for the public, staff and customers.

    While the net represents great challenges to business owners and managers of all organisations, it’s also a fantastic resource for getting your facts right and reacting to fast moving changes. Make sure you have the tools and the team to deal with the opportunities and threats our connected economy will throw at us.

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  • They’re Talking About You workshop

    “They’re Talking About You” is a four hour workshop designed for business owners and managers responsible for protecting and enhancing their organisation’s reputation in an often hostile online world.

    In association with Reputation Australia we’ll be holding a morning workshop in North Sydney on Friday, November 26. Contact us for pricing and venue details.

    During the workshop participants will learn how to monitor what is being said about their products, deal with criticism and make use the new media channels as effective branding tools.
    At the end of the workshop, participants will have an understanding of the benefits and limitations of the major online communications mediums.

    Participants cover;

    • the major online media channels
    • identifying which platforms are appropriate
    • monitoring the chatter
    • dealing with problems
    • disarming the critics
    • effective use of online marketing methods
    • using online media as a recruitment tool
    • being a credible online authority.

    Who should attend?
    They’re Talking About You is suitable for communications professionals, managers or business proprietors wanting to maximize the use of online media and avoid unnecessary mistakes in the virtual marketplace.

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  • Misunderstanding crowdsourcing

    Crowdsourcing is the idea that the wisdom of crowds can solve complex and expensive problems, with the rise of the Internet it’s become possible for groups to coalesce around a problem and resolve it.

    Some good examples of crowdsourcing are The Guardian’s investigation into British MPs expense claims where dozens of the newspapers readers examined the mass of paperwork for irregularities, a task beyond the resources of the paper itself, and Wikipedia where thousands of volunteers work to compile an online encyclopaedia.

    The Future of Crowdsourcing Summit recently looked at the issues and opportunities this offers for businesses. IT industry journal Computer Reseller News has an excellent summary of the day, although the emphasis on massive cost savings is probably misguided.

    What sticks out in CRN’s account is many businesses are confusing crowdsourcing with outsourcing — online bidding sites such as Freelancer.com and competition sites like 99Designs are not crowdsourcers, they are outsourcing services.

    Sites like Freelancer and 99 Designs are making outsourcing, which was until recently the province of large corporations, accessible to small and start up businesses. They’re revolutionising business by reducing entry barriers to entry for new enterprises and industries by allowing entrepreneurs to access skilled workers with little more than a credit card and Internet connection.

    That emphasis on cost needs to be treated carefully as well. As I’ve argued about cloud computing, it’s risky to overstate savings in a new industry as there’s a risk of commoditising the market prematurely.

    Larger outsourcers found in the previous decade that assuming labour rates at 10% of home market wages equate to 90% cost savings is usually flawed as there’s a number of hidden costs that come to surface when you take services off shore. Almost certainly the users of bidding sites will have the same experience.

    Probably the biggest barrier to smaller businesses adopting outsourcing or crowdsourcing is that both processes require project management skills which are often undervalued in business.

    We need to acknowledge the changes outsourcing and bidding services mean to our industries and society, but we shouldn’t confuse the concepts. Both are too valuable to business to be misunderstood and devalued.

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