Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet

  • The company you keep

    It’s an old but true saying that you’re judged by the company you keep and this applies online as much anywhere else in personal and professional life. Last week I was reminded of this three times.

    Early in the week I was asked if connecting with someone on LinkedIn was an endorsement. I thought that was an odd question as LinkedIn has a separate function for recommendations and so I didn’t pay it much attention.

    A few days later an industry group leader told me she’d assumed an individual was legitimate because I was a member of their LinkedIn group. While it was a compliment to think my opinion meant that much, it worried me as I didn’t really know the group’s founder and I certainly wasn’t endorsing his business.

    Finally, at the Media140 Conference in Perth last Thursday, employment branding specialist Jared Woods gave an interesting overview of how an Engineering firm deals with social media issues in the workplace.

    Jared described the company’s  basic rule was if you state that you work for the organisation then you have to act professionally and in a way that doesn’t discredit yourself or the company. Which means no more drunken photos posted on Facebook or joining bad taste causes and online groups. By all means post silly pictures, but forget mentioning who you work for.

    The killer line from Jared was social media gaffes can not only damage a business but they can also damage employee’s professional reputations. Just as the employee is part of the brand, staff have their own personal brands.

    This isn’t new, there’s dozens of true stories of how people have lost jobs through inappropriate blog or Facebook postings and ten years ago the infamous Claire Swire incident nearly cost a group of young London lawyers their jobs .

    All of these examples show just how important it is take care with everything you do online. You are not anonymous and most things you say and do on the Internet will be stored somewhere.

    So play nice and remember not to post anything you wouldn’t like to see next to your name on the six o’clock news.

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  • Why online listings are an essential business tool

    Why online listings are an essential business tool

    Online listings with the major search sites are free and effective. Even more importantly, those listings form the basis for many of the location based services that are springing up on Smart Phones. This article originally appeared on the 19 January Smart Company Business Tech Talk column.

    Since Global Positioning System (GPS) equipped smartphones arrived on the market, we’re seeing all kinds of location based phone applications springing up.

    Recently I’ve been playing with two of these services – Foursquare and Urban Spoon to find there are some lessons for businesses in how these products work.

    These services are terrific at telling you where the nearest cafes, service stations or places of interest are, although at the same time I’ve noticed how inaccurate some of the business locations can be.

    Often, particularly in the case of Foursquare, the wrong spot has found its way into the system because customers have taken a guess at the address, added the details while on the way to or from the business or just simply got the location wrong. Which can be awkward, particularly if your competitors are closer to the incorrect location.

    So it’s worthwhile getting your businesses address correct on these services. Fortunately, it isn’t as hard as having to track down every single one of these new services and spend hours plugging your details into them.

    The most important single service is the Google Local Business Centre, as many of these location based services use Google Maps. Every business should be on this already as the listing is free and the information also feeds into Google search results. If your organisation is correctly listed here, it will appear in all Google searches for your product in your neighbourhood.

    Microsoft are in this market too with their Local Listing service which feeds into Bing results in a similar way to Google’s service. Like Google Maps, it’s free and listing only takes a few minutes.

    The traditional advertising medium for most Australian small businesses has been in the Yellow Pages. Sensis also offer a free listing which will get you in their maps and directories (although to get a priority listing you’ll need to pay more).

    So check your details are correct on all these services, it only takes a few minutes and given most customers, particularly in the business-to-business markets, use the web to research potential suppliers you’ll probably pick up a few customers just by having the right details online.

    With mobile internet usage expected to overtake desktop surfing in the next few years, it’s critical your details are correct on these phone applications which customers are going to increasingly rely upon.

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  • Twitter is like CB radio and this isn’t a bad thing

    kids radioLast week’s Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show illustrates the Hype Cycle we discussed just before the Christmas break. If there’s one thing for sure, we can say tablet computers, 3D televisions and Google phone are racing to see which will be the first to the “peak of inflated expectations”.

    Funnily, we’ve been here before with mobile phones, tablet PCs and 3D entertainment so it will be interesting to see where these are in 18 months or so.

    While it’s entertaining looking at the new gadgets, the interesting action is happening on the other side of the peak where real uses for technology and gizmos are found after the hype moves on to something newer and prettier. When the bored fashionistas move on from a product that’s no longer the newest and shiniest we see if something is genuinely useful or just a pointless fad.

    Of all the predictions we can make for 2010 one good bet is social networking is approaching, if not past, the fashionable peak of the hype cycle. Particularly Twitter which we’ve seen pronounced dead by various writers over the break.

    My favourite comment was from an weekend newspaper entertainment columnist stating the Twitter hype was driven by “Boring Old Farts Suddenly Discovering Technology” and the whole thing is now dead because an MTV host declared she was over Twitter. The Luddites are crowing that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the entire Internet thingummybob can join CB radios in history’s discount bin of overhyped technology.

    Citizens Band radio is a good lesson of what happens as a product moves through the hype cycle. In the mid 1970s peak, songs were being written about it and the media was awash with spookily similar stories of how CB radio was ushering in a new era of participatory democracy. Within a couple of years, the hype had passed and those who had a use for it, such as truckies, farmers and service people, got on with their work without the kids and newbies hogging their radio channels.

    Exactly that process is happening now with the various online networking tools. The naysayers will crow they were right all along about a fad for boring old farts while unknown to them entrepreneurs will be figuring out ways to make money from these tools and smart businesses will be using them to stay ahead of their slower competitors.

    As well as the trendies moving on, the social media snake oil sellers who’ve traded on the social media hype over the last two years will also move on to the Next Big Thing or go back to selling multi level marketing schemes. The honest consultants and genuine experts who survive the shakeout will be able to genuinely add value and help their clients achieve more with the tools.

    So a product or technology passing the peak of the hype cycle is an excellent opportunity to use it do great things for your business without the fashionistas and snake oil merchants distracting you. Don’t be afraid to experiment just because the PR machines and fashion victims have moved on.

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  • It’s all about trust, baby

    Imagine losing all your contacts, emails and calendars – you know have a meeting with an important client next week but you can’t remember which day and you can’t ask the customer because their contact details are gone.

    That’s been the fate of a million Sidekick mobile phone owners in the United States over the last two weeks when the servers storing the Sidekick data went down.

    The Sidekick is an unusual mobile phone that saves all its data “on the cloud”, a big group of servers run by the device’s designer, Danger, who were bought out by Microsoft in early 2008. Unlike other phones and PDAs, the Sidekick doesn’t synch with your own computer and stored data may get wiped if it can’t find the cloud servers.

    This is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when the Sidekick cloud stopped. Owners of the Sidekick, a phone that’s never been sold in Australia, have been through a harrowing fortnight hoping their data will be recovered which Microsoft now believe can be done.

    Sidekick’s outage is a major embarrassment for Microsoft who are pitching their Azure cloud product as alternative to other cloud services provided by competitors like Amazon and Google and the failure certainly deserves to be one of the technology disasters of the decade.

    The question now is how badly this outage will affect cloud and software as a service providers. These service rely on customers trusting data and critical business applications to a third party and the Sidekick saga doesn’t inspire confidence.

    It would be a shame if this is the case, as cloud services offer a lot of advantages to smaller businesses. In many ways they offer the same advantages big business have had through outsourcing services at a fraction of the price and complexity.

    We need to remember that all technology breaks. People press the wrong buttons, unexpected software bugs appear and sometimes things just break or go wrong. Every business needs a contingency plan if things stop working.

    While a data backup regime is a critical part of a contingency plan, you still need to consider other aspects such what happens if the power grid fails and leaves your without electricity for three days, if bushfires and floods stop workers getting to the office, or what will happen if you forget to pay your phone bill and suddenly you have no Internet access for a week.

    Technology is complex and we have trust a lot of things are reliable and sometimes some of our partners aren’t as trustworthy as we’d like.

    So have fall back systems just in case your trust in technology, partners and vendors is misplaced and test them regularly.

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  • The new global businesses

    It’s old hat to point out the internet is changing business and globalisation is making the world smaller. But last Tuesday I saw three businesses that showed just how profound these changes are.

    That Tuesday morning Mark Fletcher’s Australian Newsagency Blog had a post about the Strange Light Magazine, a collection of photos around Sydney during the recent dust storm.

    Some notable points about Strange Light – it was self-published in 31 hours using HP’s Magcloud, the photos were all sourced from Flickr and Derek Powazek, the publisher/author, did everything from San Francisco.

    Publishing on demand using services like Magcloud and Amazon’s Createspace is worthy of many blog posts in themselves. Derek’s story of Strange Light on his own blog is a terrific step-by-step guide to creating a self-published magazine. Notable are his points about obtaining permissions and proof reading.

    It isn’t one-way traffic between California and Sydney, Australians are also doing business in the US without leaving home. The same day I read the Strange Light story, I had a coffee with Andrew Rogers from Sydney’s Anchor Systems, who set up a new data centre for US-based developer management system, GitHub.

    All of GitHub’s hardware is in the US and their new data centre equipment came completely bare, without operating systems or software. Andrew’s team was able to build, configure and test the systems from their Sydney office.

    The fact GitHub were prepared to accept a quote from a business 11,000km away and have full confidence the job could be done from across the world shows just how distance no longer matters to forward-thinking enterprises.

    Finally, that day I managed to catch up with an old contractor who now runs a remote support business for homes and small offices. You call him and he logs into your computer to fix the problems.

    Nothing particularly special there except he operates out of Thailand. So he gets to run an Australian business from a Phuket beach hut. He has business he enjoys without sacrificing the lifestyle he wants.

    These entrepreneurs are showing how the globalised economy is really working. Each are using freely available tools that allow individuals and small teams to offer their talents across the world.

    You might want to have a look at the tools which are revolutionising your industry, you can be sure your competitors around the corner and around the world are already doing so and might soon be offering innovative new ideas to your customers.

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