Decoding the new economy

A land of grace and favors

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Yesterday the Search Engine Land website broke the news that Google Authorship is dead.

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Google Authorship was a subset of the company’s Google Plus service that let writers and journalist claim their work.

For authors Google Authorship was a useful tool in the battle against the verminous ‘content scrapers’ whose business lies in stealing other peoples’work. It was also a good way of building an online portfolio.

Google benefited from a huge improvement in the quality of its data as its algorithms authorship made it easier for the algorithm to identify original sources.

Using Google’s Authorship tool wasn’t easy, like many of the company’s services it was cumbersome to setup, opaque and subject to arbitrary rules.

Many journalists, bloggers and writers went through the process however as they saw the benefits and trusted Google to maintain the service.

Trusting Google to maintain any service is risky with the company’s well deserved reputation of axing services the moment management’s attention turns to the next shiny thing.

Which is exactly what’s happened to those who’ve invested their time in Google Authorship and they join the disillusioned masses who’ve been burned by the company previously with services like Google Wave.

The lessons from Google’s dropping of Authorship shouldn’t be lost on those working hard to build Google Plus profiles.

Right now, despite the propaganda for those with a lot invested in the service, Google Plus is not travelling well and it’s in a dangerous zone within the company with the departure of its internal management champion Vic Gundotra earlier this year.

The risk of investing too much time on Google Plus is clear, however it would be unfair to single Google out as being alone in presenting this risk.

Every social media service and publishing platform carries the same risk.

Those spending hours creating Facebook communities or carefully crafting LinkedIn or Medium posts need to remember they are only their by the grace and favor of the service.

Nothing replaces your own website as an online property. Your mission is to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Social media platforms can help you do this, but they are not your friends or business partners.

Don’t forget this.

Everyone is a critic on the internet

Business owners need to stop being so defensive about what their customers say on social media

“Everyone’s a critic” is the old saying. Today this is truer than ever as anyone can post a review online.

One of the notable things about business in the internet age is how sensitive people are to criticism.

A good example of this is a story going around the web this week of a Dallas chef, John Tesar, who had a magnificent breakdown over a review of his restaurant in the local newspaper.

This set off a chain of claims and counterclaims including some truly bizarre pieces on various blogs about ‘chefs winning the war against critics.’

Probably the strangest thing with this whole debacle is the review by Leslie Brenner in the Dallas Morning News is actually quite constructive and certainly no AA Gill style demolition of the establishment.

This silly little spat illustrates how business people, not just temperamental chefs, have glass jaws. Another story going around the web this week is of Union Street Guest House in Hudson, New York, that fines guests for bad reviews

Tesar’s response is pretty typical of many business owners – attack the critic instead of addressing the problems. Given Tesar threw the Twenty Rules of Social Media – which apply to businesses as much as social media – out the window, he was lucky not to find his reaction backfiring horribly on him.

What business owners have to understand is that you will get criticism, unfortunately most of it you will never know about as unhappy customers tell their friends and relatives.

If you get the opportunity to hear that criticism, then you have the opportunity to fix the problem.

This is something business owners need to understand about review sites and social media; it’s an opportunity to get some honest feedback about how things are going.

So start listening to what your customers are saying online and stop being so defensive.

Fear in the cloud – the loss of trust in online business

Should online businesses, particularly cloud services and social media platforms, begin to worry they’ve lost the trust of the community?

Today I spoke about online safety to the Australian Seniors’ Computer Clubs Association about staying safe online.

Hopefully I’ll have a copy of the presentation up tomorrow but what was notable about the morning was the concern among the audience about security and safety of cloud services.

The ASCCA membership are a computer savvy bunch – anyone who disparages older peoples’ technology nous would be quickly put in their place by these folk – but it was notable just how concerned they are about online privacy. They are not happy.

Another troubling aspect were my answers to the questions, invariably I had to fall back on the lines “only do what you’re comfortable with” and “it all comes down to a question of trust.”

The problem with the latter line is that it’s difficult to trust many online companies, particularly when their business models relies upon trading users’ data.

Resolving this trust issue is going to be difficult and it’s hard to see how some social media platforms and online businesses can survive should users flee or governments enact stringent privacy laws.

It may well be we’re seeing another transition effect happening in the online economy.

Limits of the black box business

Many of the leading tech companies hide beyond mysterious algorithms or impassive customer support. That may prove to be their weakness.

One of the paradoxes of the modern tech industry is that while its leaders preach openness and collaboration, their own businesses are mysterious unaccountable black boxes.

This website has often looked at how the Silicon Valley business model leaves users and partners exposed to arbitrary enforcement of vague policies and indifferent customer service.

A good example of the black box business model is eBay’s major security breach where it appears millions of users have had their personal and banking details compromised. Instead of informing customers immediately, the company’s management hid the problem and hoped stonewalling inquiries would make the problem go away.

Lacking accountability

In the black box business model, not being accountable is the key – we see it with Amazon’s bullying of book publishers, Google’s high handed identity policies and Facebook’s puritan censorship.

Those high handed attitudes to customers’ and users’ rights is born out of arrogance; all of these company’s managements, and the corporate bureaucrats who enforce the policies, believe their hundred billion dollar businesses are untouchable.

Such arrogance might though be ill-founded as each of these businesses is less than twenty years old and, while they themselves have deeply disrupted existing industry models, there is no reason why their own market dominance and huge cash flows can’t be usurped by new technologies or challengers.

In age where trust is the greatest currency, hiding beyond a block box of algorithms and impassive customer support may not turn out to be a successful management strategy.

Burying Google Plus

If Google+ is to be buried, it could be good news for Google’s other properties like local and mobile search

The announcement that Vic Gundotra, the executive responsible for Google+ at the search engine giant, is leaving the company has lead to the widespread assumption that the troubled social media platform is dead.

It’s not an unreasonable assumption that Google Plus is dead; the company’s trait of corporate attention deficit disorder means the project is likely to die of neglect without a top level executive supporting it.

Should Google Plus be dying, this won’t be bad news for some of the company’s other products, the enforced integration with the social media service irritated users, –particularly on YouTube — while reducing functionality for platforms like Google Places.

Google Places, or Google Plus for Business as it was clumsily renamed as part of the integration, could be the great beneficiary of removing the distraction of the social media service with renewed focus on local search.

Regaining focus

Losing focus on local and mobile search has been the most damaging effect from the Google Plus experience and renewed efforts in those fields will take on Facebook while filling a gap in the market.

It’s also unlikely that the entire ‘identity service’ will live on with those features permeating through the company’s products.

Of course, it could be that Google Plus isn’t dead at all; we’ll have a better idea of where it’s going to go when we see the level of commitment from senior management towards the product, although the appointment of a relatively junior executive doesn’t seem to be good news for the platform.

Moving on from Google Plus is an opportunity for the company to refocus on neglected niches, it could be a good result for the company’s shareholders.

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