Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: marketing

  • Ello, Ello to a frustrated social media market

    Ello, Ello to a frustrated social media market

    Over the last week new social media service Ello has been in the news as the ‘anti-Facebook’ that doesn’t collect user details or push advertising onto feeds.

    Certainly Ello has touched the zeitgeist with reports claiming the service is getting 30,000 new signups every hour. It’s clear social media users aren’t happy with the existing services.

    Part of this discontent is due to social media’s growing pains as the platforms search for the business models to justify their massive valuations, with the consequence of users finding their streams being polluted with invasive and often irrelevant advertisements.

    Social dilemmas

    For Facebook in particular this is a problem as they have to balance the service’s relevance to users against the demands of ever desperate advertisers who want to post as many ads as possible into the feeds.

    Adding to the discontent is suspicions on how the existing social media services intend to trade users’ information. While many internet mavens may claim ‘privacy is dead’, most people are concerned at how a history of their likes, friends or conversations could hurt future relationships or job prospects.

    Which ties into Ello’s manifesto.

    Your social network is owned by advertisers.

    Every post you share, every friend you make, and every link you follow is tracked, recorded, and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

    We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

    We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life.

    You are not a product.

    While Ello’s founders are right that Facebook, and to a lesser degree, Twitter are advertising platforms at present it may well be that social media’s days as a marketing tool are numbered as the business models mature.

    The evolving social media model

    Facebook’s announcement that it is going into the payments field is an indication that the businesses are maturing beyond the broadcast advertising model that worked so well for television and radio while Twitter’s struggles to shoehorn the old marketing tools into its business continue.

    The most successful social media platform to date is LinkedIn which makes less than a quarter of its revenues from advertising — down from 30% two years ago — with the company building revenues in its corporate talent finding services, something that makes LinkedIn’s ambitions to be a global content publisher somewhat strange.

    So it may well be that Ello aims to solve a problem that may not exist in the near future.

    Ello could turn out to be the ‘Facebook killer’ however the odds are stacked against it, what is clear though is the social media marketplace is telling the industry’s leaders that consumers aren’t happy. It’s something the marketers staking their future on social media need to keep in mind.

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  • Employee engagement in small business

    Employee engagement in small business

    Earlier this week I was asked what tools small business could use to increase employee engagement.

    My reply was a simple one; start a company blog and let staff contribute to it. Letting workers tell stories of why they enjoy their work not only gives them a feeling of being recognised as part of the team but also shows the human face of the business.

    That latter part is an important point as too many small businesses try to sound like Exxon-Mobil when they present their company face when in actual fact most customers are after the human touch.

    It’s a simple thing, but showing your business’ human face is not only good for staff morale but also good as a marketing tool as well.

     

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  • Business benefits from blogging

    Business benefits from blogging

    This post is the final of a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    Boring is the comment often used about business websites, however smart companies are using blogs to spice up their sites and boost marketing, customer retention and employee engagement.

    A blog can make a company’s website more dynamic and a destination for visitors, it’s an opportunity for an organisation to demonstrate its depth of expertise and the qualification of its staff.

    Best at this are the big global companies like GE, Cisco and IBM that have large pools of experts who can contribute to the company blog. These enterprise blogs are sprawling sites that cover multiple markets and industries which the companies operate across.

    More than a marketing tool

    For smaller tech companies, particularly Silicon Valley startups, their blogs have become vital marketing platforms where they often describe the company’s journey and new features being added.

    Some companies, like Uber and Nest, use the company blog as their press channels with entries acting as media releases. This is particularly useful for smaller businesses without a PR agency or in house communications people.

    At a more tactical level, blogs can be used as a weapon in a fight for marketshare. One of the toughest battles on the internet at the moment is going on between accounting software companies MYOB and Xero and their blogs are at the forefront of this fight.

    In this battle MYOB are the incumbent with over a million users in the Australian business accounting market and a small army of Certified Consultants to help clients with using the software while Xero is the well funded cloud computing service that grew its Australian customer base by nearly 50% to 147,000 so far this year.

    Small business thought leadership

    So the battle is intense with both companies using their blogs to show their thought leadership in the small business space. Both of the blogs illustrate each company’s strengths and weaknesses.

    MYOB’s blog is the longest standing and is more of a generalist overview of small business and accounting issues while Xero’s focuses on the new features being added to the product, both have fiercely passionate followers which shows in the comments fields of their blogs.

    Blogs though need not be about pure marketing or advertising functions, in fact the best small business ones are those that just tell their customers what’s on. These are particularly good for the hospitality and retail industries.

    One plus with business blogs is they help employees understand their business better, particularly when staff are invited to contribute.

    Blogging isn’t just about lonely geeks or bored mums sitting in their spare rooms. A well thought out business blog can be a great tool for engaging existing customers, motivating staff and building new markets.

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  • Googling your business

    Googling your business

    Google’s small business services have been a constant irritation of this site, with the view that local listings have been a missed opportunity for the service.

    Overnight, the search engine giant has launched their new Google My Business site to bring together the disparate services offered to local enterprises.

    At first look it’s a fairly slick way to get new businesses signed up, albeit dependent upon Google+ for the initial login. For businesses with existing Google small business accounts, the site directs you to the revamped Google Places administrator screen.

    The immediate observation is that Google+ integration is a weakness as it relies on one ‘real person’ account to administer the listing; this will create problems for business as staff leave and founders retire.

    Black Box Verification

    Another problem is the black box verification process still remains – it’s hard for businesses to keep their listings fresh and up to date when there’s a risk doing so will see their entries might be suspended for violating some vague rules.

    For local businesses it’s essential to have the search engine listing and the Google My Business site makes it easier to get it running, however the problems with Google’s local business strategy remain.

    With Google, Facebook and the other online empires neglecting small business, this market is still a great opportunity for a disruptive players.

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  • Three business lessons from the New York Times

    Three business lessons from the New York Times

    “The New York Times is winning in journalism,” starts the newspaper’s much discussed internal Innovation Report. Then in great detail it goes on to describe how the audience is being lost to upstarts like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

    Given the number of digital forests that have been felled discussing the report in the last week, it’s not worthwhile giving an in depth analysis of the study – particularly given Nieman Labs’ comprehensive dissection of the document.

    What does stand out though are a number of over-riding themes that apply to almost any business, not just struggling traditional media outlets.

    Being digital first

    A constant mantra in the NY Times report is about being ‘digital first’ – if you’re thinking about that today, then you’re probably too late in your industry.

    Every industry is now digital: If you’re designing widgets, you’re doing it on CAD system; if you’re selling real estate, you’re listing online (one of the great killers of the old metropolitan newspaper model) and if you’re selling doughnuts, you’re placing your suppliers’ order electronically and maybe 3D printing your icing patterns in the near future.

    There isn’t one industry that isn’t being radically changed by digital technology.

    Breaking down silos

    One of the areas that’s been most resistant to digital change, and yet is the most threatened, is management.

    Silos within organisations are a triumph of management power and make it difficult for a business to be dynamic when it’s necessary to negotiate with different fiefdoms just to change the colour of paperclips.

    Those silos are fine when industries are cosy and there’s little competition but when disruptors enter the market those management empires become a dangerous, and expensive, weakness.

    The New York Times study spends a great deal of its pages discussing how to break down silos within its own organisation and this is something every business owner or manager should be exploring.

    With modern communication, information management and workplace collaboration tools many management roles are no longer needed.

    For smaller businesses, this is the greatest strength when competing against larger corporations as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Business Insider  have shown in stealing the market from the New York Times.

    You need to be found

    One of the toughest conclusions from the NY Times study is that the quality of content actually doesn’t matter in the marketplace; The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed do an excellent job of taking the NYT’s work, repackaging it and redistributing it in a way readers prefer.

    That might be a transition effect – it’s hard not to think that should original content creators like the NY Times be driven out of business then Buzzfeed will have to start employing more journalists and Arianna paying her writers – however right now gloss beats quality.

    Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are attracting audiences because their stories are easy to find online and their headlines almost beg you to read them.

    For non-media businesses, the lesson is you need to be found; you may be the best restaurant, electrician or accountant in town but if you’re on the fifteenth page of Google in search results for your industry and suburb then you’re doomed.

    The New York Times faces its own unique set of challenges, as do the publishing and media industries, many of the lessons though from the NYT  Innovation paper though can be applied to many businesses.

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