Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

Trolls never sleep – Social media and the twenty four hour business
One of the truths of social media is it gives idiots an opportunity to expose themselves for what they are.

For businesses using social media idiots posting stupid or offensive content on the company’s site or Facebook page can do a lot of damage to their brand and reputation.

This is the problem Australian airline Qantas faced last week when some fool posted a pornographic image to one of the company’s promotions pages.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the father of an eight year old reported an inappropriate post to the airline after his son found the image while visiting the Qantas Wallabies page. He was allegedly told by the company’s social media staff “there was nothing we can do about it.”

The father points out correctly that both the airline and Facebook are 24 hour operations so claiming a post that is put up at midnight – one assumes Eastern Australian time – is out of hours seems to be disingenuous.

Until recently, businesses had given social media responsibilities over to the intern or the youngest person in the office. While organisations like Qantas have moved on from that, they largely leave these tasks with the marketing department.

While marketing is a valid place for social media responsibility – it’s probably the most obvious area to establish a return on the functions – it leaves organisations vulnerable to out of hours customer service and public relations problems.

Social media doesn’t knock off at 5pm and spend the evening a bar like the marketing department, it’s on all the time and customers are using it to complain about problems while twits and trolls are gleefully posting things to embarrass businesses.

For those businesses who do operate on a 24 hour basis, and probably all big corporations, it’s no longer good enough for the social media team to just operate during office hours.

Smaller businesses have a different problem – most don’t have the resources to keep a 24 hour watch on their Facebook page but the effects of a social media disaster could be proportionally far greater – so they shouldn’t be overlooking regular checks on what people have posted to their business sites.

What’s happening in social media is part of a broader trend in the global economy that’s been going on for thirty years as the pace of business has accelerated. It’s something that all managers, entrepreneurs and company owners need to understand.

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July 8, 2013
The myth of the baby boomer
Yesterday I was at the release of Deloitte’s State of Media Democracy report when something that’s been bugging me for a while became clear – have we got our definitions of baby boomers wrong?

In the report’s demographic breakup was the usual breakdown of age groups with the interesting twist of separating ‘leading Millennials’ and ‘trailing Millennials’.

Such separation makes sense, how a sixteen year old uses the media is very different from that of a 26 year old, however there’s a good argument breaking up the baby boomer group the same way.

While there’s no denying the post World War II baby boom in most Western countries that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1965, lumping the entire group into one demographic bubble with the same economic characteristics seems mistaken.

If nothing else, the baby boomers should be broken into two groups – those born before 1955 and those afterwards.

Those born between 1945 and 55 had the benefit of being born into the a world rebuilding from the second world war and the massive improvement in living standards that accompanied the reconstruction.

For those born after 1955 their work experience was very different; the 1973 oil shock marked the end of the post war economic certainties and also saw the beginning of increased casualisation of the workforce through the deregulations that accelerated under the Reagan, Thatcher and other Western governments in the 1970s and 80s.

In many ways, the 1955-65 cohort of baby boomers have more in common with the generation who followed them – the Generation Xers, the term coined by the author Douglas Coupland who was born in 1961.

Equally, the earlier half of the baby boomers have much more in common with those born between 1935 and 45, the ‘war babies’ were too young to fight in World War II and they benefited greatest of all from the post war economic boom.

So perhaps we should be talking of the ‘Lucky Generation’ – those born between 1935 and 55 – and redefining ‘Generation X’ as those born 1955 and 80.

While it’s easy to say “who cares”, there’s an important aspect to this. Much of our discussion about the aging population revolves around the boomers retiring and the load this puts on the community.

Not to mention the foibles, beliefs and voting patterns of the boomers which again differ markedly between the ‘early boomers’ and ‘late boomers’.

If we accept that the tipping point wasn’t in 2010 when the first baby boomers reached retirement, but in 2000 when the ‘lucky generation’ started retiring then this discussion about how we service a growing – and demanding – group of retirees becomes even more pressing.

As in many things, life is a lot more complex than the lazy assumptions of demographers and economists would have us believe.

The myth that the baby boomers are one big fat group with equal demands, needs and assets is something may turn out to fool many of our business and political leaders.

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June 14, 2013
First we kill email, then Powerpoint
Two years ago French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time,

We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

Eighteen months on, the Financial Times reports Thierry is well on the way to eliminate the office pollution that is email. Lee Timmons, one of Atos’ Vice Presidents, tells the paper,

“At the 2012 London Olympics, we were able to zero-email certify some processes – a first – and (we) look set to be email-free internally by the end of 2013,”

Now Atos is looking at eliminating other business distractions, notably Powerpoint presentations and meetings.

Eliminating inboxes, Powerpoint and meetings from the workplace seems a noble cause. Few organisations would be prepared to even consider this.

For many staff and managers, spending hours sorting email, attending pointless meetings and futzing around with over-elaborate Powerpoint presentations is how they justify their time.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Atos goes with thier objective of streamlining the workplace and how many other companies are prepared to copy them.

Man sending an email image courtesy of Bruno-Free at SXC.hu

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March 13, 2013
Facebook’s struggle to stay relevant
Are we getting sick of Facebook? Tech magazine CNet stirred up the interwebs on the weekend with the claim that Teenagers are Tiring of Facebook a meme was pushed by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton dissecting his experience with the service.

It’s not just teenagers moving away from social media sites though, many adults are getting sick of intrusive adverts and promoted posts getting in the way of the news about family and friends.

As an example, here are the ads taken off the page of one fifty year old woman’s feed.

“I find these offensive” she says, “I’ve been posting my results from a fitness program and now my Facebook page is plastered with ugly weight loss advertisements.”

Clearly the targeted advertisements are working too well and clumsy marketers are destroying the user experience with ugly and offensive ads.

Not that those ads are working as Nick Bilton found when he decided to promote a post to his 400,000 followers.

From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.

When he decided to advertise, his engagement went up by ten times. Leading Nick to conclude that Facebook were suppressing his unpaid posts while pushing the one’s he pays to promote.

Even for advertisers, a few hundred likes doesn’t translate into much of a return.

That suppression of useful posts is one of the reasons teenagers are moving, one 17 year old I asked about why he’s moved from Facebook said the ads cluttered up his feed.

Which leads us to the reason why people use Facebook – they use it to talk to friends and relatives; not to watch ads.

It took commercial radio and television a decade to figure out the right mix of advertisements and contents, a balance that is still tested today. Social media sites are going to have to get that mix right soon.

Facebook has the most at stake and their time is running out.

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March 4, 2013
Social media and the Gartner hype cycle
“Social media has become a tiresome hobby” complained a social media expert over coffee, “my heart is no longer in it.”

There’s been much hype about social media, if you listen to some people services like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were going to revolutionise marketing and fundamentally change business.

Now the hype seems to be escaping from the social media industry as its practitioners, and the businesses who’ve embraced it, become exhausted with the long, hard grind of fighting a revolution.

This exuberance followed by exhaustion is fairly typical in the technology industry, consulting company Gartner describes it in their Hype Cycle, which shows how a new product goes a period of excitement, peaks and then tumbles into a trough of disillusionment.

It could be that social media is approaching that peak.

That’s not all bad news for social media, after a product falls into the trough of disillusionment, the technology matures and industry figures out how to best use the product.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates put it well when he said “in the short run we over-estimate the effects of technology, and in the long term we under-estimate the effects.”

Probably the best example of this process is the World Wide Web itself, the irrational exuberance drove the dot com boom which peaked at the turn of the century and then plummeted into the trough of disillusionment.

Companies like Amazon and Google who stayed the course through the dark days of 2002 and 2003 were richly rewarded when the market came good.

For the social media people who can stay the course through that dismal period they may not become as successful as Amazon and Google, but there’s good opportunities for those who survive.

In some ways, passing the peak of inflated expectations is good news. It means the hard work and adding value is just beginning.

Image from Gastonmag via sxc.hu

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February 9, 2013