Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: media

  • Should you drop the Yellow Pages?

    yellow-pagesToday’s Australian reports Sensis’ Yellow Pages revenue is up 5% and White Pages over 11%. That’s an interesting result as it bucks the evidence that online advertising is hurting them.

    At business events I’m finding many owners and managers are telling me they are dropping their Yellow Pages ads as they find they aren’t getting the returns they were hoping for and think online offers more return for their advertising dollar.

    There’s a lot of people who agree with that idea and even Sensis’ e-business report showed 89% of consumers are using the net to research purchases.

    So there is a pretty good argument for businesses to move their advertising online, but before doing so you need to look at what channels your market is using to find you.

    For some businesses the Yellow Pages is still an important channel. For instance, the local plumber cannot afford to be without a Yellow listing.

    But other businesses, say an online auction site, don’t need to worry about an expensive Yellow Pages display ad although a listing in the White Pages would probably help their credibility with some customers.

    In the end, it depends upon your business and the customers you want to reach. If your business is a service business that generates work from emergency calls, such as the plumber, dentist, vet or a computer technician, then you will need some presence. 

    Even if your business doesn’t cater to those markets, the online Sensis listings are still useful as this plugs your business into the directory enquiries, 1234 and web based services, although these may not be as useful as Google or Yahoo!.

    Marketing’s all about telling your story to the right people. While many of those people are now surfing the web, it may suit your business to still spend something for those people who insist on using the Yellow Pages.

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  • Social networking and old media

    I’m currently attending the Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World Conference.

    There’s some interesting perspectives on where social networking is going and how people are going to make money from it.

    Personally, I think too many of the big players like Bebo and MySpace are too fixated on the old broadcast media model of top down content where they control everything.

    Particularly fascinating is how dismissive many of the attendees are of YouTube and Facebook. The funny thing is there were five people around me with laptops on and all of them visited their Facebook pages during the morning seminar.

    The icing on the cake was on the bus home. The girl in front of me had her MacBook open and she was editing her Facebook page.

    It seems to me the big established media companies are struggling with their investments in the social media space. 

    More on this later.

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  • TIO annual report

    The Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman’s 2007 annual report is a less than proud moment for the Internet industry.

    The headline is an 84% increase in complaints about ISP behaviour. But this is only part of the story, the details are even more disturbing.

    The most notable jump was in complaints about excess data charges. This is only going to get worse as more people start using VoIP and downloading videos. It’s exacerbated by the swing towards ISPs counting uploads and downloads towards their download limits.

    One item that jumps out of the report is the confirmation ISPs don’t keep proper records of conversations with customers. While the TIO points at smaller providers our experience is the bigger providers are not better.

    The biggest increase was complaints about debt collection procedures where customers have been listed as defaulting on an Internet bill without any notice from the ISP. This probably relates to a couple of sizable and incompetent ISPs going broke late last year.

    As we saw with the One.Tel liquidation, the record keeping of these companies is disgraceful and it’s highly unlikely they can prove any debt when challenged. Not that this stops them trying to recover what they claim is owed.

    In the category of customer service, ISPs were by far the worst performer. The biggest category of complaint was inadequate or incorrect advice. This is barely surprising

    Direct debit problems continue. Part of the problem here is with the banks who consider direct debit requests to be more important than their customers. The TIO points out this a breach of banking code of conduct.

    Given ISPs can’t get their billing right and don’t give records it does appear that giving a direct debit authorisation to them is a risky thing to do.

    This report is a wake up call to ISP and the entire IT industry. Things have to improve. Some of the areas we need to look at are;

    • better training
    • improved record keeping
    • proper QA and procedures, especially for escalating customer complaints
    • clearer and more concise bills

    The silly thing is all of these would have positive return for ISPs. By providing better information to customers and staff, they will reduce costs and probably improve sales.

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  • Why you should be careful of IT articles.

    Trevor Cook raises an interesting point about IT journalism in his Corporate Engagement blog.

    While he’s been a bit provocative with his description of the IT media being “low end” he does flag an important issue that Australian IT users should be aware of; that many reviews and articles are barely warmed over press releases.

    In fact some technology journalists and publications are notorious for going the next step and just slightly rewriting overseas articles.

    When you are reading an article on the latest and greatest IT products keep this in mind. If it appears the writer hasn’t used the product and is merely parroting some media release then you should be careful. Many of the articles have been ripped straight off the wire.

    It should be emphasised that this isn’t usually the journalists fault, it’s usually because the publication is under resourced and simply can’t generate original content. Reprinting press releases is an easy and cheap way to pad out content.

    Personally, I like publications like Australian Personal Computer that does take the time to properly review products and cast a skeptical eye over the often inflated claims of IT vendors.

    When making decisions on buying technology, don’t just rely on what you read in the paper.

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  • Fourth Estate Domain, 2 October 2007

    This month’s Sydney FED featured Richard Webb, CEO of Blue Freeway. As usual it was well attended night and we should thank Sally Mills for organising these valuable events.

    Blue Freeway’s an interesting beast. They have pulled together a number of disparate companies with the aim of offering a “one stop shop” for interactive and digital marketing.

    It’s certainly an attractive model and a number of others are looking doing likewise.

    The problem I see with this model is that it becomes a jack of all trades and struggles to do any of them well. The alternative is you end up with the dreaded “siloing” where each business unit doesn’t communicate with the others.

    Richard addressed this in his discussion. His solution is strong branding, my suspicion is that it will need some very strong management as well.

    There were many other issues raised but I’ll have to wait for the podcast as I didn’t take notes and things started getting hazy later (thanks to Sally and Hazel for the drinks).

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