Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

  • Facebook’s war on nipples continues

    Facebook’s war on nipples continues

    Mike Stevens, a cartoonist with the New Yorker magazine, found himself the latest victim of Facebook’s War On Nipples when his cartoon depicting Adam and Eve caused the magazine’s Facebook page to be shut down.

    This is the latest shot in Facebook’s War On Nipples. Two years ago a Sydney jeweller found her page shut down for using a naked doll as a model and breast feeding mothers waged a long campaign against the site taking down pictures of babies being fed.

    If you live outside the US, it’s amusing to observe Americans’ bipolar attitude towards women’s breasts — on one hand they are celebrated though Pamela Anderson, breast enhancement and Hooters while the merest flash of nipple sends the nation into purient overdrive.

    So Mark Zuckerberg’s ban on female nipples is understandable in that context as is the reaction to that ban by people who don’t see much wrong with breast feeding mums or harmless cartoons.

    What we should remember though is Facebook have the right to run their site whatever way they like — if Mark Zuckerberg decides he doesn’t like plaid shirts or broccoli he’s within his rights to ban pictures those as well.

    This is the risk if you’re basing marketing strategies around social media services. If you want to play on Facebook, you have to play by Facebook rules.

    So take your nipples elsewhere.

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  • Nightlife Computers: Sockpuppets, trolls and fakes

    Nightlife Computers: Sockpuppets, trolls and fakes

    Paul Wallbank joined Tony Delroy for the 6 September 2012 ABC Nightlife technology spot to discuss sock puppets, what they mean on review sites and what this means for businesses using social media as a marketing tool.

    If you missed the program, you can listen to the podcast from the Tony Delroy’s Nightlife page.

    This week’s sock puppet scandal puts the light on authors’ book reviews on sites like Amazon while other review services like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Urbanspoon continue to struggle with figuring out which reviews are real.

    Businesses also have to worry about what people are posting in light of the recent Advertising Standards and ACCC rulings making businesses more accountable with what’s posted on Facebook.

    Some of the questions we’ll look at include;

    Join us from 10pm, Australian Eastern Time on Thursday September 5 on your local ABC radio station or listen online through their streaming service at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    We’d love to hear your views 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.

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

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  • Finding the perfect customer

    Finding the perfect customer

    With the rise of social media we’ve spoken a lot about customers’ ability to rate businesses and overlooked that companies have been rating their clients for a lot longer. The same technologies that are helping consumers are also assisting companies to find their best prospects.

    A business truism is that Pareto’s Rule applies in all organisations – 20% of customers will generate 80% of a company’s profits. Equally a different 20% of clients will create 80% of the hassles. The Holy Grail in customer service is to identify both groups as early as possible in the sales cycle.

    Earlier this week The New York Times profiled the new breed of ratings tools known as consumer valuation or buying-power scores. These promise to help businesses find the good customers early.

    While rating customers according to their credit worthiness has been common for decades, measuring a client’s likely value to a business hasn’t been so widespread and most companies have relied on the gut feeling of their salespeople or managers. The customer valuation tools change this.

    One of the companies the NYT looked at was eBureau, a Minnesota-based company that analyses customers’ likely behaviour. eBureau’s founder Gordy Meyer tells how 30 years ago he worked for Fingerhut, a mailorder catalogue company that used some basic ways of figuring out who would be a good customer.

    Some of the indicators Fingerhut used to figure if a client was worthwhile included whether an application form was filled in by pen, if the customer had a working telephone number or if the buyer used their middle initial – apparently the latter indicates someone is a good credit risk.

    Many businesses are still using measures like that to decide whether a customer will be a pain or a gain. One reliable signal is those that complain about previous companies they’ve dealt with; it’s a sure-fire indicator they’ll complain about you as well.

    What we’re seeing with services like eBureau is the bringing together of Big Data and cloud computing. A generation ago even if we could have collected the data these services collate, there was no way we could process the information to make any sense to our business.

    Today we have these services at our fingertips and coupled with lead generators and the insights social media gives us into the likes and dislikes of our customers these tools suddenly become very powerful.

    While we’ll never get rid of bad customers – credit rating services didn’t mean the end of bad debts – customer valuation tools are another example of how canny users of technology can get an advantage over their competitors along with saving time in chasing the wrong clients.

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  • How much server space do Internet companies need to run their sites?

    How much server space do Internet companies need to run their sites?

    “How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, or YouTube, or for that matter Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?” is the question I’ve been asked to answer on ABC Radio National Drive this evening.

    This isn’t a simple question to answer as the details of data storage are kept secret by most online services.

    Figuring out how much data is saved in computer systems is a daunting task in itself and in 2011 scientists estimated there were 295 exabytes stored on the Internet, desktop hard drives, tape backup and other systems in 2007.

    An exabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 years worth of DVD video, a typical new computer comes with a terabyte hard drive so one exabyte is the equivalent of a million new computers.

    The numbers when looking at this topic are so great that petabytes are probably the best way of measuring data, a thousand of these make up an exabyte. A petabyte is the equivalent to filling up the hard drives of a thousand new computers.

    Given cloud computing and data centres have grown exponentially since 2007, it’s possible that number has doubled in the last five years.

    In 2009 it was reported Google was planning to have ten million servers and an exabyte of information. It’s almost certain that point has been passed, particularly given the volume of data being uploaded to YouTube which alone has 72 hours worth of video uploaded every minute.

    Facebook is struggling with similar growth and it’s reported that the social media service is having to rewrite its database. Last year it was reported Facebook users were uploading six billion photos a month and at the time of the float on the US stock market the company claimed to have over a 100 petabytes of photos and video.

    According to one of Microsoft’s blogs, Hotmail has over a billion mailboxes and “hundreds of petabytes of data”.

    For Amazon details are harder to find, in June 2012 Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos announced their S3 cloud storage service was now hosting a billion ‘objects’. If we assume the ‘objects’ – which could be anything from a picture to a database running on Amazon’s service – have an average size of a megabyte then that’s a exabyte of storage.

    The amount of storage is only one part of the equation, we have to be able to do something with the data we’ve collected so we also have to look at processing power. This comes down to the number of computer chips or CPUs – Central Processing Units – being used to crunch the information.

    Probably the most impressive data cruncher of all is the Google search engine that processes phenomenal amounts of data every time somebody does a search on the web. Google have put together an infographic that illustrates how they manage to answer over a billion queries a day in an average time of less than quarter of a second.

    Google is reported to own 2% of the world’s servers and they are very secretive about the numbers, estimates based on power usage in 2011 put the number of servers the company uses at around 900,000. Given Google invests about 2.5 billion US dollars a year on new data centres, it’s safe to say they have probably passed the one million mark.

    How much electricity all of this equipment uses is a valid question. According to Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, US data centres use around 2% of the nation’s power supply and globally these facilities use around 1.5%.

    The numbers involved in answering the question of how much data is stored by web services are mind boggling and they are growing exponentially. One of the problems with researching a topic like this is how quickly the source data becomes outdated.

    It’s easy to overlook the complexity and size of the technologies that run social media, cloud computing or web searches. Asking questions on how these services work is essential to understanding the things we now take for granted.

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  • Beating the first mover advantage

    Beating the first mover advantage

    Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams can’t be accused of standing still, along with having founded the Blogger service that made creating websites easy which they sold to Google, their company Obvious Corporation has been working on various new projects.

    Branch and Medium are their two latest releases.

    At first glance Branch is similar to the Quora service where people ask questions and followers. While Quora is reasonably successful, it hasn’t gained traction outside of the tech community.

    Medium is a new blogging service, which superficially appears similar to Tumblr or even the Blogger service Ev and Biz founded in 1999.

    It’s tempting to dismiss both Branch and Medium as they aren’t doing things that are new. both are iterations of older services but that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed. When Facebook was launched there was plenty of competition in services like Friendster and MySpace, the upstart blew them both away.

    The same is true of the iPod, Windows and Google – all entered markets that were already crowded and well catered for. All of them succeeded because they were better than what was on the market.

    In the tech industry is that the first mover advantage is illusionary at best, unless you have a compelling position in the marketplace your product is vulnerable to a smarter, slicker upstart. This is particularly true if the existing services have serious flaws.

    Should Branch avoid falling into Quora’s trap of silly policies and overzealous administrators – the same trap that doomed the open source directory DMOZ and threatens Wikipedia – then it may well succeed.

    Medium could also disrupt the blogging industry, Blogger is being neglected by Google while WordPress is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to use. The success of services like Tumblr, Instagram and Posterous shows people want an easy way to publish their ideas or what they are doing onto the web.

    While it’s too early to say if Branch or Medium will be a success remains to be seen, but writing them off as being unoriginal would be a mistake.

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