Decoding the new economy

Growing your business with Tweetups

Like most social media meetings in any big town these days, people from all walks of life gathered to meet and become more than just a Twitter handle or obscure forum name.

It’s hard to resist the offer of a free sandwich in Sydney’s Hyde Park on a beautiful spring day, so a“tweet up” offering was always going to be successful.

Like most social media meetings in any big town these days, people from all walks of life gathered to meet and become more than just a Twitter handle or obscure forum name.

Any idea that your average internet user is a pasty, overweight, underemployed 20-something is quickly dispelled as you meet all sorts of interesting people who are doing interesting things.

The hundreds of “tweet ups”, coffee mornings and social media dinners across the land are creating new networks which are changing business and society.

This is opposite of the stereotype being used to reinforce the mindset that blames the internet and social networking sites for everything from schoolyard bullying through to street riots and arrested brain development.

Over the last few days we’ve been treated to stream of stories about the views of professors and researchers detailing how the world and our minds are being destroyed by the internet.

My favourite is an English professor currently visiting Australia who claims computer game addled 20-something market traders may be responsible for the global financial crisis.

Perish the thought that good old-fashioned greed and hubris, the cause of every market crash since the Bronze Age, may have had something to do with the GFC.

The weekend press mentioned the professor applying for a study grant from an American university to prove her theory.

If that is true, it’s a shame the she didn’t take the time to check out the Twitter hashtag to join us for a sandwich in Hyde Park.

Had she done that she’d have had a nice sandwich, caught some sun and seen her theory disproved.

She would have met a far more diverse group than a bunch of stuffed shirts huddling in a cosy lunch club, desperately trying to validate their deliberate ignorance of the changing world outside.

It’s those stuffed shirts, along with their newspaper columnist friends, who are isolated. By choosing to demonise the internet and ignore the opportunities social media tools present, they are being left behind in a fast changing world.

The options for entrepreneurs and business owners are clear – you can lock yourself up with the stuffed shirts and rage about your dying business or you can use the net to help your business grow. The choice is yours.

Cannes Lions: Day Two

Day two of Cannes Lions continued the theme of dealing with new channels with a big focus on digital and Internet possiblilites.

One old channel using new technologies is the movies.

The future of Cinema with SAWA was an entertaining session that showed how movie theatres are going to bring together various technologies to enhance the audience’s experience.

These new experiences offer great opportunities for producers, studios and marketers and while naturally the audience were more interested in the marketing angles, it’s clear that everyone involved in movies will be focussed on how they can make these features work for them.

Jimmy Mayman from Go Viral showed some of the successes in viral marketing, including T-Mobile’s Dance and Sing clips.

I have to admit I was left cold by these examples. I’m not contrived flash mobbing events are even truly viral marketing as such.

Monday’s highlight was one of Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone, discussing the future of Twitter to a full auditorium.

The big news from the session was how Biz hopes to have a revenue based on advanced API functions for commercial users.

This is an innovative twist on the “freemium” business model. Where individual users are subsidised by the sale of aggregated data to businesses.

It will be interesting to see how Biz and his team deal with the inevitable privacy concerns that will be raised.

While the session was promoted as a tweet-up, it was limited by the lousy Wi-Fi access in the venue. In fact it’s surprising how little a role Twitter’s playing in the event given how it’s being used at Australian events like the Future Summit and CeBIT.

Wi-Fi problems illustrate just how event organisers are struggling with the demands of a modern market. It’s a theme we’re going to see continue.

Cannes Lions: Day One

The first day of the Cannes Lions illustrated how the advertising and marketing industries are not alone in being challenged by the rise of always on consumers and employees.

Day one of what’s going to be an extremely busy week at Cannes showed how digital technologies and the Internet are changing not just the advertising industry but all sectors of industry.

Schematic’s Dale Herigstad showed, among other things, where Microsoft’s Project Natal is pointing the direction of where computer controls are going.

Being able to remotely control equipment with body movements and facial expressions is going to be a massive change for entertainment, communications and many other sectors.

This theme was expanded upon by Andy Pimental of Razorfish who demonstrated his vision of where television is going.

In Andy’s future, the game controller and console are doomed. Movement recognition like Project Natal coupled with games being on the cloud means the game industry is going to be very different in a few years time.

An interesting aspect with Andy’s presentation is that most of the technology is already available to achieve his vision, as he put it “it’s the business constraints, not technology, that limits us”.

From a presenter’s point of view, the use of mock Tweets to illustrate points was a nice touch, too.

Kevin Eyres of LinkedIn probably had the most impact. While much of the presentation focused on how LinkedIn can be used as a marketing tool, Kevin’s comments at the beginning about every individual is now entreprenuer thanks to reduced job tenure and security really illustrated the challenges businesses and governments are going to face in the connected world.

There’s some interesting challenges for all businesses ahead, not just the advertising industry. There’s a lot more to come.

Dangerous Game

Associated Press have warned they will start taking action against news aggregrators like Google. Rupert Murdoch made similar noises last week.

As Fred Wilson has pointed out, the problem for AP and News is the web is now the newstand and taking publications off the shelves is not good business sense.

We see that with the Australian Financial Review. Its position as an Australian journal of record has been diminished by Fairfax’s incompetent obsession with protecting content.

As result, other channels such as The Australian, Business Spectator and blogs have stepped into the vaccuum and eroded the AFR’s online authority.

Following the RIAA path and suing Google, the Huffington Post and any blog that dares link to their sites will backfire on the news industry just as it did on the record industry.

In many ways newspapers are even more vulnerable as journalists employed by organisations like News and AP are quick to rip stories off from blogs, web forums or MySpace and Facebook pages with little regard for permission or attribution.

I suspect it’s one legal quagmire Associated Press or Rupert Murdoch might rue becoming bogged down in at the very time their business models are challenged by both economic and technological change.

Does your business need a blog?

It’s fashionable to tell business owners they need to embrace every aspect of the web. But do you really need a blog in your small business?

There’s no doubt a blog is worthwhile for many. It can give another perspective to the business and enhances their story. It can help smaller businesses cut through the noise to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

A good example is Mark Fletcher’s Newsagency Blog which has publicised Mark’s software company and his associated newsagencies while establishing him as a leader in the industry.

Not all businesses have Mark’s energy or some simply don’t have the time. For others, their markets don’t really care about blogs.

Also a blog is not an end in itself. A newsagent with an interesting blog is still going to fail if they don’t deliver service to their customers and the same applies for PR agencies, marketers and management consultants.

If blog is going to distract you from your core business, then maybe it isn’t a good idea.

Every business is unique and what works for one enterprise is not necessarily right for another. A blog is a business tool, just like every other aspect of the Internet, and you need to choose the right tools for your business.

Should you drop the Yellow Pages?

yellow-pages Today’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.

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.

Category: new media

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