social media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Social media’s free ride comes to an end

Facebook’s Sponsored Stories have ended the free ride for businesses on social media services and now companies are looking at alternatives

One of the mystifying things about the ways businesses use social media is the willingness of companies – big and small – to give their customer lists away to social media sites.

The best example of this is Facebook, when your customers like you or comment on a post they are added to the service’s database. Facebook gets to ‘own’ your customers and generally Facebook gets to know your customers better than you do.

With the arrival of Sponsored Stories on Facebook we see the next step which monetizing their business functions. Now when a business puts a post up on Facebook, it only appears in 15% of their followers’ feeds. To get to the rest of them a business has to buy a sponsored story.

Not only has Facebook taken ownership of thousands of businesses’ customers, it now charges those business to talk to their own clients.

Should the business decide not to pay for sponsored stories then they find traffic from Facebook drops off. Some businesses report traffic dropping from 30,000 views a day to 5,000.

To counter this one website stumped up the money for a sponsored story that advises their Facebook fans to follow them on Twitter and Google+ instead.

Facebook’s move on this isn’t surprising as they desperately search for revenue streams to justify their huge stockmarket valuation.

What also isn’t surprising is that the free ride for businesses on social media platforms is over.

All too often we’ve heard marketing gurus tell us Facebook and other social media services were free advertising channels.

That view overlooked the time and patience required for executing an effective social media campaign along with the reality that social media services were only free for as long as the investors underwriting the enterprise were prepared to accept losses.

We understand that advertising on TV, radio or print costs money and now we’re having to accept that social media marketing costs as well.

How well Facebook goes with sponsored stories remains to be seen, but the message for businesses is clear – the social media free lunch is well and truly over.

Rethinking customer support

As the computer power at our fingertips gets more powerful, the tools to help customers are getting smarter and better.

One of weaknesses in most organisations is getting customer service right, good support takes time which costs money and leads many big and small companies to scrimp on support to save a few costs.

In a conversation with BMC Software’s Suhas Kelkar about customer support – Remedy, one of the biggest helpdesk software packages is a BMC product – the discussion turned to how the process has changed in recent years.

Not too long ago we reached for manuals, but those vanished as CDs and then downloads became common. Then we’d call the manufacturer’s helpline or our unfortunate store who sold us the item.

Today we Google a problem to see if we can find a quick solution and if that fails we reach out to our social networks by posting the question on Twitter or Facebook. We may even post the problem to a support forum to see if anyone has an answer.

Only if can’t find the solution anywhere else do we call the support line, for most of us it is the last resort.

In some ways this is a success for corporate cost cutting as most of us call a “helpline” only in desperation as we’ve trained to expect long waits, confusing menus and poorly trained operators.

That model developed in the 1980s – in order to pay rockstar salaries to executives it was necessary to cut staff wages and training costs with after sales support often being the first business area to suffer cuts.

Eventually this started to backfire and the Dell Hell saga as one of the leading examples where the computer manufacturer’s lousy support became industry legend. It’s fair to argue that Dell has never quite recovered from the damage the period of poorly outsourced support did to their brand.

To repair the damage to their brand, Dell adopted a crowdsourced support model where company forums were available for customers to ask about problems with the hope other customers could answer before expensive staff became involved. Eventually other companies adopted this system.

Social media has created a doubled-edged sword for businesses, it’s easier for people to ask their friends for help but it also increases the risk of brand damage if online posts aren’t monitored and responded to.

All of this is forcing a rethink of how customer support works. For businesses big and small, social media and crowdsourcing tools are changing the way we talk to customers and how they can talk about us.

The big data push is also changing customer support as businesses now have the computing power available to mine knowledge bases, issue registers and call logs to identify market trends and weaknesses in their products or sales teams.

For business owners and managers stuck in the 1980s ways of customer support, they are in for a wretched time over the next few years.

Amazon and the Soviet customer service model

We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents?

The story of Linn, a Norwegian lady who had her account terminated by Amazon, demonstrates the dangers of being locked into one Internet company’s empire. Get cut off and you lose everything related to them.

A little understood part of the cloud computing and app world is that you, the customer or user – which isn’t necessarily the same thing – don’t really own anything. The money you spend on ebooks, mobile apps or web storage are for licenses to use the services, not the products themselves.

Should the supplier decide they no longer want to provide you with their service, then you lose your account and everything with it.

This is what happened to Linn when Amazon’s algorithm decided her account was in some way breaching their terms and conditions.

We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled.

Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion.

“At their sole discretion” is the key point here. This is a standard term in most online contracts and reflects the legal realities of the physical world where a shopping mall manager or bar owner can ask you to leave their property without having to tell you why.

When you use a virtual service, which includes e-books and cloud computing software, you are on someone’s virtual property and they can ask you to leave any time they feel.

Of course those rights are subject to any contract you might have with that e-book seller, cloud computing service or shopping centre but you have to be in a position to enforce them – not an easy task when you’re in Norway and their lawyers are in Connecticut.

Even if you want to enforce the agreement you believe these services have entered into, the grossly biased contracts attempt to put all obligations on users or customers while freeing the vendor of the distraction of being responsible for anything.

The real problem though is the lack of notice and fairness – this blog’s previously looked at how PayPal, Facebook and Google will shut down business sites without any warning or due process.

It’s one thing to get thrown out of a shopping mall but it’s another matter when your car and week’s groceries are still in there.

Even more worrying in Linn’s case is how ebooks and music purchased with Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls can be erased by companies like Amazon. Which is like walking home from the shopping mall you’ve been banned from to find the manager has called by to confiscate the toaster and TV you bought last week.

What’s particularly notable in all of these stories though is the Soviet customer service model, the Amazon”Executive Customer Relations” representative Linn dealt with refused to tell her what she’d done wrong or what rules she broke.

The only thing “Michael Murphy” would tell her was she was effectively banned for being linked to a blocked account and stated;

“Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action.”

No notice, no appeal, no rights. The computer says no and the bureaucrat cannot help you further.

Trust lies at the core of all business and this is even more true when buying services like e-books and cloud computing products. If you can’t trust a vendor to provide a service, or to act openly and honest with you when a problem occurs, then it’s unlikely you’ll use that service.

A lack of trust is what web 2.0 companies like Amazon and eBay risk with hostile, Soviet style customer service. This is the weak point of the entire online business model.

For individuals and businesses it’s important to understand that those e-book, cloud storage or social media services may appear to be a bargain, but there are risks lurking in the fine print.

The new Soviets might be doing well at the moment, but their days are numbered just as the USSR’s were.

ABC Nightlife: Apps down the farm

For the October ABC Nightlife spot we’ll be looking at how the agriculture sector is using smartphone and tablet computer apps

If you missed this program where we covered a wide range of subjects, you can listen to the ABC Nightlife podcast of the show.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

This week we’re talking about how the agricultural industry are using smartphone apps and the web. A list of apps for farmers is available from the NSW Department of Primary Industry website.

We’ll also be looking at how machines are talking – in agriculture, the next generation of farm equipment will be sending data straight to the farmers’ tablet or laptop computer using the technologies we’re seeing in jet engines and other high tech equipment.

Connecting everything does come with risks. A US report found that networked medical equipment is rife with malware and the Defense Signals Directorate points out that out-of-date computer systems are one of the main causes of data breaches.

One of the things driving the apps world is cloud computing and Google have given a rare glimpse into the data centres that run their services.

Social media is one of the things that are driving cloud computing, but there’s traps for businesses in posting information about customers and staff. We’ll be looking at those as well.

We’d love to hear your views and comments so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Posting without permissions

Facebook’s groups feature can be dangerous if you don’t check before adding people.

A client of mine once had a angry worker scream at him when she found out he’d posted photographs of all his staff on the company’s website.

“My ex is a psycho, he doesn’t know where I live or work. If he finds this, he might come around here and kill us all,” she cried.

The photos went down immediately and Kevin made sure he got explicit consent before he posted any details of his staff onto the website.

It was a valuable lesson on why you shouldn’t just post people’s details online without first asking them. We all have reasons why we’d like to keep certain facts out of the public light.

A Texan gay choir’s organiser posting the details of members onto Facebook is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to put someone else’s details online without asking them first.

For two members of the Queer Chorus at the University of Texas, having their sexual orientation pasted on their Facebook feeds caused terrible damage with their families and it should serve as lesson to every manager, business owner or community group leader that this stuff matters.

One of the worrying features with Facebook is how other people can add you to groups without your permission – almost certainly a recipe for misunderstanding and mischief.

What’s even more unforgivable with Facebook’s conduct is the privacy settings for those groups overrides an individual’s own privacy settings.

As one of the victims said in the Wall Street Journal of when his father saw the status update, “I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,” she said. “He saw it.”

So even though both the individuals had chosen to lock their profiles away from public view, Facebook and the organiser of the group decided they knew better.

We shouldn’t let the administrator of the Facebook off the hook on this lapse, Christopher Acosta decided to make the group open and public. “I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,” he’s quoted as saying.

That’s nice when you have a tolerant family and you’re from a liberal community but for others that ‘transparency’ can lead to damaging family relations for years, if not lifetimes. In some communities the consequences could be far worse.

“I do take some responsibility,” says Mr Acosta. Which is a nice way of accepting you might have screwed somebody’s life up by doing something you didn’t understand.

Ultimately responsibility lies with the person who presses the button which causes the email or status post to be published. In this case Christopher Acosta was responsible.

To be fair to Mr Acosta, the ability to add people to Facebook groups without their permission is a deeply flawed as are those groups’ setting overriding an individual’s privacy preferences.

Facebook have to understand there are real life consequences to ‘transparency’ which can ruin careers and even cost the lives of people. The damage to families and communities can be immense.

Coming from a secure upper middle class white background, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t quite understand the risks his company’s policies pose to people in vulnerable situations, hopefully some of his older and wiser advisers will explain why ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ are not always a good idea.

Playing in the big boys’ sandpits

Businesses using social media, cloud computing and web 2.0 services need to be careful of being shutdown without notice.

The Cool Hunter is a site whose mission is to “select and celebrate what is beautiful and enduring from all that is sought-after in architecture, design, gadgets, lifestyle, urban living, fashion, travel and pop culture.”

In posting cool stuff they find on the web, Cool Hunter always runs the risk of copyright infringement complaints as people have the unfortunate habit of slapping images up onto the Internet without permission from the rights holders.

Last August Cool Hunter’s founder Bill Tikos found the site’s Facebook account had been wiped for ‘repeat copyright infringements’ without warning or recourse.

Anybody following this site won’t be surprised to read this – an exposed nipple can get you thrown off Facebook faster than you can say “New Yorker cartoon” or “it’s only a porcelain doll, for chrissake!” – so one can only imagine the paroxysms of rage that alleged copyright infringement sends Facebook’s puritan bureaucrats into.

It’s not just nipples at Facebook though, thousands of small traders have seen their accounts arbitrarily suspended on sites like eBay and PayPal.

Google too are quick to suspend businesses from their local and search services without warning or recourse. Usually business owners only notice they’ve been locked out when they log into their control panels only to find a terse message that their account has been suspended.

What usually follows is a Kafkaesque tale of trying to understand exactly what they’ve done wrong and how to get their accounts reinstated. In some cases the businesses get cryptic messages saying their accounts are still in breach while others get no response at all. In a few examples, the offending page goes back online only to be shut down again a few days later.

Rarely does someone in this situation find a calm, helpful voice to explain exactly what they have done wrong and how to fix it.

This hostile attitude is a result of the “hands off customer service” model of web 2.0 companies and it’s their biggest achilles heel as, paradoxically, customers and users take to social media to complain about bizarre and arbitrary account suspensions.

For some, like Cool Hunter, it’s a monumental pain and loss of a valuable platform while many of those small eBay and PayPal traders may have thousands of dollars tied up in suspended accounts they can’t access.

Unfortunately this uncertainty is the cost of doing business on social media sites and it’s one of the reasons why owning your own business website is essential.

When you choose to use one of these service, understand you’re playing in the big fat kid’s sandpit and you risk him throwing a tantrum and chucking your toys out of the playpen.

Simply put, don’t base your business on Facebook, don’t keep all your money in PayPal and always have a plan B.

Are you a worthy customer?

Some businesses aren’t worth worrying about as customers.

“Those companies are not going to be winners in the long term. We’re very happy to work with the fastest growing companies in the world; the companies who understand that people are core to who they are,” says Daniel Debow, Vice President of Salesforce’s Work.com at the recent Dreamforce conference.

Debow was talking about companies that aren’t interested in social software, or those who don’t have the infrastructure or management culture to implement changes which reflect the modern workplace.

When writing about social and cloud services one thing that jumps out is just how unprepared many businesses, big and small, are for changes that are happening in both the workplace and the market.

The story of Work.com reflects those changes – the idea behind Rypple and Work.com, which was born out of Salesforce’s 2011 acquisiton of Rypple, is that workplaces are inherently social.

“We spend as much more time with the people we work than with our families. It matters to us what our workmates think” says Daniel so Work.com gathers the social intelligence within the business to give people real time feedback on their performance.

The Rypple idea lies in the inadequacy of existing HR software and management practices. Daniel says, “today this model we have it’s totally not reflective of the reality of how people work; people are more connected, they’re collaborative, more realtime.”

This collaborative and realtime way of doing business challenges the structures in many businesses and the methods of a lot of managers. Many are ill-equipped to deal with a more open and transparent way of managing their teams.

In fact, software like work.com and its competitor Workday make some of those older style managers redundant, particularly those whose roles involve little more than box ticking and following the strictures of the company’s procedure manual as this can be done better by a computer program.

The problem for many organisations, both private and public, is they have become more focused on cossetting and protecting the box ticking bureaucrats of middle and upper management rather than delivering service to their customers and supporting their staff responsible for keeping clients happy.

Something that jumps out when you talk to entrepreneurs like Daniel Debow and others building new social and cloud companies is their lack of interest in selling to those organisations, their view is the old school companies are dinosaurs on the path to extinction.

Dinosaurs though lasted a lot longer than we often think and the same is true of the current generation of zombie companies being kept alive by government or investors too scared to book the losses which the failure of these enterprises would entail.

While those dinosaurs are going to be a drag on our economies for the next decade or two, the real opportunities – and rewarding work – is with those businesses who want to change and aren’t run for the administrative convenience of their managers.

The question for many business owners and managers is whether companies like Rypple or Workday could be bothered selling to you. If you’re not, it’s time to consider your exit strategy – or lobby your local politician for some subsidies.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce courtesy of Salesforce.com

Today’s business Neanderthals

Many businesses are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with today’s realities and are doomed to extinction

“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.

In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.

Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.

With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.

Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.

So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.

This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electric, ski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.

What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.

The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.

From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.

In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.

Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.

Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.

If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com

Towards the social media enabled jet engine

General Electric’s GEnx engine illustrates how social media is changing business

“What if my jet engine could talk to me and what would it say?” Asked Beth Comstock, General Electric’s Chief Marketing Officer, at the Dreamforce 2012 conference.

The idea of social media connected jet engine is strange, but the idea that a key piece of technology can talk to engineers, pilots, salespeople and management makes sense.

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com were showing how their Chatter social communications tool can be applied to more than just salesteams, in GE’s case by giving their new GEnx engine the opportunity to talk to its support teams.

In flight telemetry is nothing new to the aviation industry, ACARS – Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems – have allowed airlines to monitor the performance of their aircraft over high frequency radio or satellite links during flight since 1978.

The difference today is the sheer amount of data that can be collected and who it can be shared with. If relevant data is being shared with the right people it makes managing these complex systems far easier.

More importantly, it helps teams collaborate. The GEnx engine is a new design that’s fitted to Boeing’s latest airlines including the troubled and late Dreamliner 787 so streamlining the design process of a new, high performance piece of technology pays dividends quickly.

Although things can still go wrong – one wonders what the final tweet from this engine would have been.

We’ve been talking for a long time about how social media and cloud computing services improve collaboration in a work place, the GEnx jet engine illustrates just how fundamental the changes these technologies are bringing to organisations.

If an industrial jet engine can be using social media it begs the question why service based companies and workforces aren’t. It’s where the customers and staff are.

These tools are radically changing the way we work right now – the question is are we, and the organisations we work for, prepared for these changes?

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2012 courtesy of Salesforce.com

Live Blogging from the Dreamforce keynote

A live commentary of the Dreamforce keynote session

[liveblog]

Redefining the social business

Salesforce.com announce a range of new products at Dreamforce 2012

Over the last two years Salesforce.com have been one of the more aggressive buyers of cloud computing and social media startups with acquistions of companies like Rypple, Desk.com, Buddy Media and Radian6.

Today, ahead of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com announced a revamped product range that brings together the social media and big data tools from these acquisitions along with some in house innovations.

Salesforce expect nearly a hundred million enterprise tablet computer users and smartphones by 2016, so like all web based services, they have to make their platform available as an app. Salesforce’s new Touch iOS App allows users to use Salesforce.com as an app on the iPhone.

Despite Mark Zuckerburg’s disavowal of HTML5 last week, Salesforce remains committed to the standard despite developing an app for the iPhone.

“Initially we’re rolling out Touch in a way we’ve made sure works the way people want it to work on an iPad,” Peter Coffee, Vice President of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, says.

“We are reiterating our commitment to HTML 5 as a device and platform neutral cluster of standards.

“As HTML5 begins to clearly coalesce we’re making a major commitment to that and we’re going to lead the way while the opposition is still trying to work on one browser.”

Salesforce continues their focus on social media with their Chatter service becoming a key part of their Force.com cloud applications platform. Chatter itself is being extended with a new feature to enable companies to create their own branded communities.

That social integration continues as the company rolls out Social Key, an application which, as Andy MacMillan, senior vice president and general manager of Data.com says “will empower companies to derive value from social data for the first time.”

If Social Key does achieve a real measure of value from retweets and Facebook posts it may well mean many social media experts will have to return to multi-level marketing or real estate sales. This in itself is not a bad thing.

The new Salescloud platform uses Chatter to build business intelligence on customers, bringing data across a business to help sales teams target their efforts more effectively.

While sales is by definition the focus of Salesforce they are also launching a similar Chatter service for support teams. This compliments the acquisition of Assist.ly at the beginning of the year.

Marketing too is being targeted by Salesforce with the launch of Marketing Cloud that combines the Buddy Media Facebook marketing service and the Radian6 social media monitoring platform.

While already the leader in business cloud applications, Salesforce are making a strong bid to dominate the sector in a way that Microsoft did in the desktop computer industry twenty years ago.

Browsing through the 400 partner stands at the Dreamforce Expo shows Cloudforce are building a deep ecosystem around their products that will make it hard for competitors to break into the space.

Whether Salesforce achieve this dominance remains to be seen, but they are certainly giving a new set of tools for businesses to understand their customers.

Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Touch is generally available today on iOS devices, and included in all Salesforce editions.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in Fall 2012.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Data.com Social Key is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Pricing of Sales Cloud Partner Communities and Data.com Social Key will be announced at general availability.