new media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Successful Sources Will Not Be Paid

The free myth is biting us in many ways

The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.

Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.

This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.

Yet every day there’s more callouts for free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.

And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.

Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.

Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.

Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.

What’s a Twitterer worth?

How business can put a value on social media

$2.50 per month is what Phone Dog think a Twitter follower is worth in their lawsuit against a former employee.

As nebulous and ambiguous as Phone Dog’s claim seems to be it appears some price is being created on the business value of social media users.

To date we’ve seen services like Empire Avenue, Klout and Kred try to measure social media users’ real influence on the different web platforms which in turn allows businesses to allocate some sort of value.

As social media and the web mature, we’ll see businesses spend more time understand where the value lies online.

Each platform is going to have a different value to a business. Depending on the market, one person may be worth more on Twitter than on Facebook and similarly a business may put more value on members of a specific LinkedIn group or industry forum.

What we shouldn’t confuse “value” with is how the services themselves make money. For Facebook, the value comes from the marketing opportunities presented by people sharing their lives while for LinkedIn it’s largely coming from employment related advertising and search.

Other social media platforms are finding other ways to make money and each will have a different attraction to users, businesses and advertisers. All of which will affect their perceived value.

That perceived value is the most important part of social media. If users don’t think a site adds something to their lives, then that service has no value to anyone.

It’s tempting to think that people will object to having a “value” placed on their heads as users, but most folk understand the commercial TV and radio that does pretty much the same thing.

The real question of how much people are prepared to share online will come when they understand the value of the data they are giving the social media platforms. When users start to understand this, they may ask for more service from these companies.

What a Twitter user is worth right now is probably different to what they will be worth this time next year, but there’s no doubt we’ll all have a better idea.

The learning curve

We’re still on training wheels when it comes to using social media

When new technologies appear it’s interesting how people experiment and adapt to them, we’re seeing this right now as businesses grapple with social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and discover where the benefits lie.

The second edition of the Social Media Benchmarking Study, a joint release by Sydney online consultants Community Engine and the research company Nielson, illustrated how things have changed over the last two years.

One of the clear conclusions from the study is how businesses are developing the ways to determine benefits of their social media activity with near halving of the number of organisations citing lack of measurable return on investment as a reason for not engaging online.

A barrier that is increasing is the perception that businesses don’t have the time or resources required for which is probably business owners and managers realising that maintaining a Facebook Page, Twitter account or blog isn’t easy.

Time is the scarcest asset for any business that gets more precious with smaller organisation. Even large corporates and government departments struggle with finding the resources necessary to run effective online presences.

One of the tragedies of social media is how it’s been identified as a marketing tool and in this survey with over half the respondents stated they are going primarily use the tools as a marketing channel rather than in customer support, recruitment, research or product development.

This is probably why the perception that social media is a time sink comes from. As purely marketing tools social media is time consuming and difficult. A challenge made greater by the fact we’re all still figuring out how to effectively connect with customers in what is a hostile place to more traditional broadcast based marketing methods.

Given social media is being used primarily as a marketing tool by business, it’s no surprise that the survey found larger corporations are the biggest users as they have the marketing budgets to allocate.

An interesting aspect with big business’ social media investment is how much it’s focused on Facebook. On one level this is understandable as a Facebook “like” is easy to set up and becomes a very simple measurement to follow, although the challenge still lies in converting a low friction click on a Like button into a useful customer or advocate.

What is surprising with corporate Australia’s adoption of Facebook is the apparent lack of understanding of the platform’s terms and conditions and the business risks involved. Again this is probably part of the collective learning curve.

Possibly because of those risks, public sector use is static. We can expect this given as social media is being pushed as a marketing tool which isn’t a priority many government agencies, are you going to skip registering your car because the motor registry doesn’t have a “like” button on their web page?

This liberation from being obsessed with marketing and sales is probably why the public sector is using social media a more creatively as collaborative and research tools where many of these services do an extremely good job.

Many businesses, particularly smaller organizations, believe social media doesn’t fit their objectives. A terrific quote from an SME accountant is “I run a business, not a chat show”.

That attitude’s fine as social media – like pretty well everything else in the business world – is a tool to be used the best way you see fit, just because some businesses don’t need a hammer but that doesn’t mean hammers aren’t useful.

Although when that tool is fairly new, as social media is, it’s probably best to have a play with it and see where if can help your business.

The Social Media Benchmarking Study is a useful survey that shows where businesses are using these tools and how effective they are finding them. It’s going to be interesting to see the field evolves as we all get to understand social media as both consumers and business owners.

The listening business

What a crook can teach us about paying attention to customers

Some years back a crook computer repairer did the rounds of Sydney and regional NSW. For all his sins Joe, as we’ll call him, always stood out as an example of a business that effectively listened to the customer.

Joe would advertise in local papers and you could spot his ads by the line “all our technicians are qualified computer programmers”, which is a nonsense slogan like a landscape gardener claiming all her labourers are civil engineering graduates, but it was an effective catchphrase in a market that didn’t know better.

After a while the local community would start wise up to Joe and his “computer programmers” and when the complaints and fair trading investigations mounted, he’d change his business name, move to another suburb or town and the cycle would start again.

I was reminded of Joe at the City of Sydney’s discussion on the connected consumer at the latest Lets Talk Business seminar last week and wondered how he’d survive in today’s markets where people are quick to go online and criticize.

Dealing with criticism has always been big businesses’ Achilles heel; bureaucracies have a tendency to protect themselves and when there’s managerial or team bonuses at stake there’s strong incentive to ignore the concerns of customers.

A good example of this Vodafone where the chief executive, Nigel Dews, has been open in admitting the company failed to listen to their customers as their network failed to meet the demands placed upon it.

While the network itself was buckling under the strain, the company spent millions on sponsorship and advertising effectively trying to drown the criticism under a wave of tightly controlled good news stories, promotions and competitions.

It didn’t work, just as Facebook’s PR agency Burson-Marsteller failed dismally in planting an anti-Google story, which saw the two organisations not only busted but also descend into an unseemly argument with their client while frantically deleting Facebook posts.

All of these actions – deleting social media comments, ignoring customer complaints and attempting to distract critics with pictures of pretty girls and racing cars – smack of the old way of doing business in an era where tightly controlled mass media was the only channel complaints could be heard. Those times ended with the arrival of the Internet.

At the Lets Talk Business event one of the panellists, Jody Fox of Sydney’s Shoes of Prey described how her business is engaging with customers online and discussing any concerns openly on the Facebook page, not deleting them.

This is the new reality of business, if you don’t listen and engage with upset clients or – even worse – try to control their comments on your sites, you’ll only get them angrier and they’ll go elsewhere to tell their stories.

Another striking difference between the new and old business was Jody’s point was that shoes of Prey treats customer service as a marketing expense, not a separate cost centre. In most large organisations helping paying customers is treated as an unnecessary expense that should be outsourced and minimised as much as possible.

This sort of works when you have a licensed oligopoly like telecoms or banks but fails dismally in competitive industries. Without purchasers there are no shareholder returns and eventually no executive bonuses.

Ignoring customers worked nicely in the era of mass media when it was difficult for upset clients to be heard above an expensive marketing campaign; Vodafone, Burson-Marsteller and even governments are finding it doesn’t work today.

Joe the computer technician would have understood this, if he’s still doing dodgy IT support then he’ll be watching the Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and blogs for bad news.

Somehow though I suspect he’s no longer in computer repairs though, my guess he’s making a lot more money in social media or search engine optimisation these days.

Destroying your brand

How your online presence can hurt your reputation.

One of the constant business tips in the last few years is that be competitive in the new economy an enterprise – big or small – has to blog, tweet and have a credible online presence. But there is a downside to this, a business or individual that lets too much hang out runs the risk of trashing their brand.

Two recent examples of this are a PC Repair business on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and a bar on the Gold Coast, there’s no links to the businesses in this post as the intention isn’t to trash their brands any further.

Customer service is always a tough business and the Gold Coast bar their blogger, who bills themselves a “jaded bar worker” and is obviously one of the younger members of the staff, recently wrote a post on customer “whining”. Some of the whines include;

asking to change the music
wanting a drink in a different glass, or with less ice
preferring a decent head on a beer (referred to as “foam” in the post)
asking for a table to be cleared
complaining about a wobbly table

While all of those customer requests can be irritating, and sometimes unreasonable, there’d be little sympathy for the bar staff dealing with these complaints from any hospitality professional or a customer expecting any standard of service.

It appears the blog’s intent is to be a local, chatty version of the successful Waiterrant blog whose author, Steve Dublanica, chronicled the adventures of New York waiter. Waiterrant was good for Steve’s brand, but would have been disastrous for some of the restaurants he worked at.

Steve got around this problem by remaining anonymous until he landed a book deal – always a bad sign for a blogger – along with never identifying the establishments he served at.

While whining about customers is a necessary pressure relief for anyone serving the public, it’s not a good idea to do it publicly unless a particular patron has done something spectacularly rude or stupid. Asking to clear a table or for less ice in their drink does not qualify as even being unreasonable.

By just moaning about the typical day to day work that most of us have to deal with, this blog is not helping the bar’s brand. They might want to consider shutting it down or getting a more senior person to write or edit it.

A little further North on the Sunshine Coast, a local computer tech has built a successful YouTube channel with 20,000 subscribers based around his rough, Aussie larrikin persona featuring some very, very robust language and views.

With eight million views, the YouTube channel is doing well, but as an advert for the business it doesn’t portray his outlet in a particularly positive way and as the video clips become more popular, the damage to the shop’s brand becomes greater – along with the risks given he’s already had one legal threat against him .

Online channels give us the opportunity to get our businesses before the world but with every opportunity comes a risk. When we post a blog, video or tweet online the entire world can see what we’ve said.

Understand those risks – and they are very real – and be careful with what you post and which staff members you trust to post on your business’ behalf. What might have once just upset a few people can now turn the market against you.

Is Groupon the small business saviour?

Does the deal of the day change the way we do business?

Since Google’s rejected offer of $6 billion dollars to buy deal of the day website Groupon, there’s been a lot of discussion of just what Groupon and the hundreds of similar services mean to online commerce and small business.

Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason, even went as far as to declare his organisation the “saviour of small business” on the Charlie Rose show.

John Battelle, founder of The Industry Standard and co-founding editor of Wired, examines Groupon’s business model on his Searchblog and concludes it will be the small business platform for the mobile Internet just as Google are to the web and Yellow Pages were to the telephone.

The problem with these ideas is scale. If every small business had the capacity and wanted to be on Groupon, the service simply couldn’t cope and the model breaks down.

In my area there are, according to the Yellow Pages, 115 hairdressers in my district. Even if Groupon were able to geographically target me to my neighbourhood, they’d need a third of the year just to cover hair stylists which is tough luck for the lawn mowing services, plumbers, patisseries and other small businesses that may also want to advertise on Groupon.

Which takes us to customer motivation, when I’m looking for a haircut, hedge clipping, cleared drain or chocolate gateaux I’m not particular driven by finding a bargain – if I do that’s great – but it’s not my motivation to buy.

Groupon, and the other deal of the day sites, are driven by customers looking for discounts, and the key to business survival – particularly in retail – is not to depend on discounts to drive your business. So business models that rely on discount hungry customers, or cashflow desperate merchants, are always going to be limited.

Groupon is a great business and it may well turn out to be worth $6 billion or even $36 billion. The barriers to entry are not so low as anyone who thinks executing an idea like this is “easy” doesn’t understand the work involved in building a local sales team like those of Groupon or Yellow Pages.

It could well be that Google wanted to buy Groupon simply for that sales team. The failure of Google to properly execute on their terrific local search product has baffled me for some time and the only explanation I can put down to it is what Silicon Alley Insider’s Ron Burk attributes to Cash Cow Disease, where companies like Google and Microsoft find themselves paralysed by the rivers of cash flowing into their businesses.

Deal of the day sites have an important role to play for businesses looking at demand management or clearing inventory and Groupon is a good business just like Clipper Magazine or Shop-A-Dockets, but to claim they are going to be the next great revolution for small business is giving too much importance to these channels.

There’s no doubt though that small businesses will be the big winner when we get local search on the web right. When we get it right we’ll probably see the hyperlocalisation model for the media start to take off as well. So it could save two industries.

Groupon though is not the small business messiah we’re looking for.

the new gatekeepers

Are four powerful online empires developing?

As the net matures, are we seeing a new phalanx of gatekeepers gathering to complement the old ones?

Four companies striving to control great parts of the Internet economy; Google in the search market, Facebook for social media, Amazon in e-commerce and Apple in mobility.

Of the four, Apple seems to be the furthest along this path as the iTunes store coupled with the market take up of iPad, iPhone and iPod combination are beginning to dominate the mobile device segment of the Internet.

This is illustrated by two stories in recent days; the first is News Corporation’s deal to develop a dedicated iPad “newspaper” and the other Robert Scoble’s description of how Application developers are increasingly focused on the Apple platform.

The telling part of Scoble’s story is where he speculates how the tech media could be being rendered irrelevant by Apple’s control of the iTunes store, he goes on to say;

“Do app developers need the press anymore?

They tell me yes, but not for the reason you might think.

What’s the reason? Well, they suspect that Apple’s team is watching the press for which apps get discussed and hyped up.”

Scoble’s article is interesting in how Apple’s dominance of the distribution chain allows them to bypass other media channels; why go to Facebook or Google, let alone your local newpaper to find out what the hottest new apps are?

Even more fascinating is how Apple’s control of its distribution channels ties in with its dominant hardware platform, this is the online equivalent to one company owning the paper mill, the presses, the trucks and the news stands then forcing every magazine and newspaper publisher to work them.

It’s instructive that despite the real risk that Apple could end dictating all terms to those who rely on iTunes as their publishing platform, newspaper publishers are locking themselves onto this world. This is despite the publishers spending the last two decades shoring up profitability by reducing margins to their news sellers and delivery agents.

Despite these risks, News Corporation isn’t holding back after Rupert Murdoch described the iPad as “a fantastic invention”, across the empire various outlets are promoting their iPad applications, including the New York Post, London Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

It will be very interesting to see how this alliance between an old and a new media empire will turn out.

Meanwhile the new empires are jostling each other where they meet, Google’s latest spat with Facebook over data is just one of many skirmishes and we can expect to see many more as the big four explore the boundaries of their businesses.

The real question for us is how do we see ourselves working with these empires. Will we reject them, or will we accept that doing business with Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon is the easiest way of getting on with our online lives?

If it’s the latter then we’ll have seen the old gatekeepers of the media, retail and communications simply replaced by new, bigger toll collectors.

the price on our heads

Are we selling our privacy too cheaply?

Over 500 million people have signed up on Facebook, trading their privacy for the ability to connect with friends and online communities. In turn, Facebook has built that massive group of people into an asset worth an estimated $41 billion dollars. But does it rely on us selling our privacy too cheaply?

A common factor in many of our communication channels in the last fifty years has been how we, as a group, have been prepared to trade something personal in return for a cheap service.

Broadcast media’s model offers us free or – in the case of newspapers, magazines and Pay TV – subsidised news, sport and entertainment in return for shrill or intrusive commercials that usually wastes our time.

Similarly with social media tools, in return for a free and easy way to find friends and relatives, we trade our privacy for targeted online advertising which can be so precise a commercial can be designed just for one individual.

The social media advertising model is on many levels a great idea, it cuts out irrelevant messages to the consumer and for the advertiser it’s more effective than the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” methods of the broadcast advertising world.

A weakness in social media advertising in that it relies on users being prepared to trade away their privacy. Until now, all of us have been fairly relaxed about this despite the evidence mounting that giving away all our privacy and access to our networks often has costs to our reputations and friendships.

That cost can be great, with the worst case seeing people lose jobs, friendships or even their liberty for something that they, or one of their friends, thought was quite innocent.

Under the old trade off, we could turn off the TV or not buy a magazine if we found the advertising too distracting or offensive. With new media we can’t recover our privacy once it’s been given away.

As we begin to understand the nature of our connected society and the values of our online reputations, we’ll expect a better price for our privacy. The challenge for platforms like Facebook and other social media tools over the next few years will be to convince us that these trade offs and potential risks are worthwhile for the benefits they offer.

Eight online tips for franchising

Is your franchise network part of the online economy, or becoming a relic of the past?

The world wide reach of the web has always been a problem for territory based franchises. As a consequence, many franchise networks have a token web presence which they use mainly as a recruitment tool for new franchisees.

An aversion to the web presents a difficulty for these franchisees as most customers are now online. By not actively using the net, those locally based franchise chains are finding themselves at a disadvantage to their non-franchised competitors.

The franchising industry’s problem was illustrated last week by Ben who called into to my ABC radio spot last week on Internet business trends to ask about how a territory based lawn mowing franchisee can use the web.

Ben’s question raised some important points that franchise holders — and anyone considering entering a franchise — should check to make sure that business is competing in today’s marketplace.

Does the franchise have an individual page for each territory?

Each franchise area should it’s own page within the chain’s site. While the contact details can redirect back to the central phone or form, the territory page should include some local testimonials and few other localised features.

Is the home page regularly updated?

A static index page that rarely changes isn’t attractive to search engines or customers. A vibrant business should be updating their page regularly. This is particularly true if there is a substantial network of franchisees.

How does the site rank?

When searching for the product or service the franchise sells, how high does the franchise’s page come up. If it doesn’t appear in the first page, then the franchise isn’t working.

Does local search work?

Type in a search for the franchise’s product and an established territory such as “lawn mowing Footscray”. If the Footscray franchise doesn’t appear in the local listings then the franchisor hasn’t listed their sites in the local search listings.

What does the site sell?

In researching this article, I found the biggest franchised lawn mowing chain appears in paid ads for “buy a lawn mowing franchise” but not for a actual lawn mowing. A site or digital strategy designed to sell franchises is good for the franchisor but doesn’t do much for the franchisee looking for customers.

Is the franchise engaging with social media?

Whether you trust social media or not, the market is talking about you on forums, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other channels. A great example of this was Oporto last weekend. A franchise needs to be engaging with customers, critics and fans.

Where are the franchisees?

Are the franchisees listing themselves? This is always a worrying sign that a franchise isn’t controlling its marketing properly. On the other hand, if their personal profiles aren’t appearing on sites like LinkedIn, it can indicate too tight a control on franchises.

What is their media strategy?

The whole point of buying a franchise is to have a ready made brand and marketing strategy. If a franchise is locked into a print mindset with only at best a token online presence then they aren’t going where the customers are. Have a look at the online versus print effort before signing up.

Many franchisors are playing by 1990s rules. Which was great for the last twenty years, but the old models are evolved as customers and potential franchisees have changed the way they shop and do business.

The web and social media are more than just a passing fad or a blunt advertising and marketing tool. They are a key part of your business identity and are being used by suppliers, recruiters, job seekers and commercial partners to figure out whether you are worth doing business with.

A franchise that doesn’t use today’s media tools is stuck in yesterday’s market.

The new accountability

What business can learn from the Australian election

The distrust and disengagement of voters in last weekend’s election holds valuable lessons for business.

As the politicians have found, the days of empty slogans are over. If you say “people are your most important asset”, “service with a smile” or “no question refunds” then you have to be sure you value those smiling employees as they cheerfully refund money. Otherwise your disgruntled staff and customers will be letting the world know the truth quickly.

We’re in an era of accountability. The connected society means all of us — in our professional, political and personal lives are more accountable than we have been for several generations. This is even more true of our businesses.

A good example of this is restaurants; where twenty years ago few eating places were reviewed by newspapers or magazines while most scored a paragraph in an annual guide, which could have been up to two years out of date by the time it was in the bookstores.

Today dozens of rating sites give customers the opportunity to report their experiences and customers are reading those reviews before they choose where to dine.

The same process is happening in all industries, your business is being reviewed and discussed online in forums, blogs and various social media channels. You have to deliver on your promises and you will be caught out if you don’t.

For society, the Internet and the new communications tools that run on it are changing how we deal with our peers, customers, employers and staff. We have more power and we have more responsibility.

It’s interesting this point was missed by the political parties that ran campaigns that relied almost exclusively on TV, radio and print. Although it isn’t surprising seeing that both parties’ 2010 campaigns seem to operate in a 1960s time warp where cheap fuel, plentiful credit and unlimited mineral exports were the nation’s boundless future.

This sort of complacency is understandable when you have a duopoly. As we know in the business world, a comfortable duopoly breeds cosy, risk adverse managers who spend more time squabbling over who should have the keys to the executive toilets than worrying about minor things like staff, new products or customer satisfaction.

Which is what’s happened to our political parties; winning the privileges of power is all that matters to the factional warlords and their supporting ranks of scheming apparatchiks; just like second rate managers in a cosy, protected industry.

The underlying beliefs of the major parties — free enterprise, a strong regional Australia or a fair go for the Australian worker have all became empty slogans and their markets, the voters, are now holding them to account.

In many ways the three or four independents who will hold the balance of power are like upstart business that disrupt cosy markets, they are reminding the incumbents of the business they have chosen to be in.

That’s the biggest business lesson from last weekend’s election; that in the new global economy the barriers to entry have fallen and new businesses are waiting to grab the customers you’re neglecting. Markets are moving quicker than ever and you need the tools and the teams to take advantage of the opportunities.

Unlike the political world, today’s business environment has no place for the safe, comfortable incumbent. It’s a great time to be a genuinely smart company.

The downside of social media marketing

Social media is a great business marketing tool, but it has downsides as a Sydney jeweller learned

Until last Sunday, Facebook was working well for jeweller Victoria Buckley; the page for her store in Sydney’s upmarket Strand Arcade was generating sales and had a rapidly growing fan base from around the world.

One of the key parts of her marketing campaigns are porcelain dolls made by the Canadian designer Marina Bychkova. Her classic doll Ophelia features in the window displays, on posters in the store and on the shop’s Facebook page.

Ophelia is a little bit different to most dolls in that she’s naked and anatomically correct — she has nipples.

Last weekend Victoria received six warnings from Facebook about “inappropriate content” on her page. There was no indication of which images or text broke the rules or what would happen to her page if she took no action.

“The frustrating thing is I can’t pinpoint which images” says Victoria, who goes on to point out that over the year she’s used Ophelia in her marketing, including two large banners in the busy shopping precinct, she’s received no complaints.

“It’s all a bit arbitrary”, says Victoria “it only takes one anonymous person to click on the flag content button and there’s a problem”. Earlier this year her Flickr account was set to restricted because of Ophelia’s nudity.

To avoid problems, Victoria has blacked out any potentially inappropriate parts of Ophelia on the store’s Facebook profile and started a “Save Ophelia- exquisite doll censored by Facebook” group until she can resolve the issue.

But here lies another problem; she can’t find a way to contact Facebook. “It’s become an increasingly important part of the business” Victoria says of the Facebook page and “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the site”.

Right now Victoria has no idea what is going to happen to her business’s profile. As she can’t talk to Facebook, she’s uncertain of the page’s future.

This uncertainty illustrates an overlooked issue with social media sites. All these services are proprietary, run by private organizations to their own rules and business objectives.

In many ways, they are like private mall owners. They are perfectly entitled to dictate what merchants and customers can do on their premises. If you don’t like it, you have no recourse but to take your business elsewhere.

As consequence these sites have a great deal of control over your online business, a lesson that’s been hard learned by many eBay and PayPal dependent Internet retailers.

A good example of what can go wrong are the Geocities websites. Ten years ago Geocities was a popular free hosting site used by many micro businesses and hobbyists. Just over a year ago the now parent company Yahoo! shut them down and all the data on them has been lost.

By relying another company’s Internet platform, you are effectively making them a partner in your business. That’s great while things go well, but you have to remember their business objectives and moral values are different to yours.

This is why a business website is essential; your traffic and all your intellectual property is too important to sit on another businesses’ website with all the risks that go along with that.

The lesson is that while using Facebook, Twitter and other Internet services are an important part of the business marketing mix, your business needs the security of its own website and all your marketing channels, both online and offline, should point to it.

Fortunately Victoria’s across that, she’s pointing her Facebook fans to her website telling them, “You can join my independent mailing list at this link, in case they get really stupid and close this group.”