Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: online

Ending the era of the computer password
Earlier this year, Wired Magazine writer Mat Honan had his entire digital identity stolen from him when hackers cracked his email password and then systemically took over all of his cloud and social media accounts.

Matt writes of his experience on Wired and proposes it’s time to kill the password.

The problem with Mat’s proposal is that he doesn’t suggest an alternative.

The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place.

Every alternative authentication method to passwords has flaws just as serious, if not worse. Many are plainly impractical.

All of them, including passwords, have the common weakness that those holding the information can’t be trusted either – one of the greatest ways for passwords to get into the wild is when incompetents like Sony give them away.

Security is evolving, in the meantime we need to keep in mind some basic rules.
- Use different passwords for different accounts
- Only access accounts from trusted and up-to-date computers
- Create strong passwords for accounts that matter, like online banking and email
- Strong passwords are multiword phrases
- Use two-factor authentication if its available
- Don’t link unnecessary social media and cloud accounts together
- Be very careful
We should also remember that a skilled, motivated hacker will probably break into your account regardless of your computer security. In this respect it’s no different to the physical world where a determined criminal will get you regardless of the locks and alarms on your house.

It’s also important to remember that security is more than just evil hackers; data can be damaged or given away by a whole range of means and people breaking into systems is only one risk of many.

Computer security is an evolving field and while it might be premature to declare the password dead, we’re going to see big changes as we try to lock down our valuable digital assets.

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November 18, 2012
What business are newspapers in?
The problems of The Guardian and other newspaper groups around the world raises the question of what business they are actually in – news or advertising?

“Going digital only is not an option” was an agenda item for a meeting of Guardian executives claims the Financial Times.

Digital only however is the option most of the readers are taking with the Guardian’s online channels attracting 9.5 million UK readers a month compared to a print circulation of 6.5 million. The Guardian’s total global online audience is 65 million, ten times the size of the print edition.

Making matters worse is the trend, according to the UK Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), newspaper sales are declining at 16% per year while online readership is growing 14%.

As the Guardian readership figures show, the number of readers isn’t the problem and the same is true for the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. More people are reading these publications than ever before, but the advertising has gone elsewhere.

Essentially a newspaper was an advertising platform, the cover price barely covered the costs of printing and distribution while the classified and display advertising provided the “rivers of gold” that made the business so lucrative through most of the Twentieth Century.

Most of those rivers have been diverted as dedicated employment, real estate, travel and motoring websites have stolen much of the advertising revenue that sustained newspapers.

As classified advertising platforms, newspapers have reached their use by date and now they have to build a model that is more focused on online display advertising and getting readers to pay for content.

Getting readers to pay is difficult when the market has been trained to expect news for free or pennies a day, a problem not helped by some newspapers chasing online eyeballs with low quality content.

Equally difficult is training sales teams to sell digital advertising, too many sales teams have grown fat and complacent over decades of flogging lucrative and easy real estate print ads.

The challenge for newspaper managements around the world is figuring out how to get the advertisers onto their online platforms and providing a product which readers value and are prepared to pay for.

It may well be that The Guardian’s management are right, that print does have a role in the newspaper’s future but first they are going to have to define what their company is and what it does.

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November 6, 2012
What are businesses thinking about?
Last night the Sydney Business Awards honoured the city’s best enterprises at a gala dinner where a whole group of great businesses were acknowledged for their great work.

The awards were the result of a three month process where the public voted on several hundred businesses to determine ten finalists in each category. The finalists were then evaluated by judges for each category. I judged the Online Business group.

The Events Agency who organized the awards today sent me a word cloud taken from the winners’ entry forms. This illustrates what the entrants were talking about in their submissions.

The word cloud of the Sydney Business Awards winners’ entries.

Staff is the biggest issue for businesses, followed by the two instances of ‘increase’ caused by one having a capital and the other not. If we combined the two instances ‘increase’ would probably be the biggest word.

Given training is one of the other big words we can see the real challenge is training up staff. Marketing and funding also figure prominently.

While basic and from a very narrow survey base, that word cloud gives us some ideas of what worries business owners and a base to start answering those challenges.

The word cloud also explains why education, training and industrial relations are such important issues to the business community which is something both politicians and the media should consider.

Overall the quality of the businesses entered into this year’s awards was terrific. In the online section I really struggled to separate the great finalists and there was very little between Appliances Online who won the category and the two runners up.

What’s also interesting is how many of the finalists in other categories had strong online presences, illustrating how the web is important for all businesses.

Congratulations to all the entrants and particularly Climate Friendly who not only won the main Business Award but also the Sustainability and Environmental awards. Glebe Medical Centre was the winner of the Small Business Award and the Healthcare and Fitness category.

For those who didn’t win this year, it’s worth entering next year as good businesses only get better with time. Hopefully we’ll see your business or vote next year.

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October 11, 2012
A website can’t save a dying business
The last week has seen some interesting changes in the local online business community.

Embattled department store David Jones’ announced they are following Harvey Norman into an “omni channel strategy”.

Harvey Norman chief executive in turn appeared on national television to state the “internet drives no sales.”

In the political field, it was reported the Australian Labor Party are looking at using Blue State Digital tools to counter voter and member apathy.

Each one in it’s own way illustrates how organisations can be distracted by shiny new technology while ignoring much deeper problems.

In the case of David Jones, the department store ignored their core competencies and tried to ape their down market competitors in milking the financial services cow.

This worked fine while they could offer 24 and 36 month interest free deals and as soon as their partners American Express started charging a monthly “Administration Fee” that business evaporated.

One of DJ’s down market competitors is Harvey Norman, co-founder Gerry Harvey has spent his life building a fortune based upon providing cheap credit to consumers.

It was always going to be a mistake for DJs to compete with Harvey’s as Gerry is far better at the business than the well connected, genteel board of David Jones and their snappily dressed friends in the store’s executive suite.

Worse for DJs, the whole strategy alienated their core markets and while management focused on financial services customers went elsewhere to find the quality goods and services that the upmarket department store should be providing.

For both though, the financial services business model is now fading as the 20th Century debt supercycle comes to an end; consumers no longer want to load up on “buy now, pay later” schemes.

So all the talk of “omni-channel strategies” really doesn’t address the underlying weaknesses in both business.

This disconnect with reality is true in politics as well where the ALP is reported to be considering using the Red State Digital tools that Barak Obama used so well in his 2008 US Presidential campaign.

While the tools are impressive, they don’t address the problem that the electorate – and the member bases of the major political parties – have become rightly disillusioned and disconnected from the political processes that exclude everyone except an increasingly smaller circle of cronies and insiders.

The only good thing that will come of using US political communications tools in the spectacular eruption the first time one of the ALP’s factional warlords encounters a grass roots online campaign like The Great Schlep.

Heck, the resulting furore might even see some of the apparatchiks distracted from partying and whoring on their union credit cards for a day or two.

All the frivolity aside, the reality for the Australian Labor Party, David Jones and Harvey Norman is their problems are far deeper than a well designed website and impeccably executed social media strategy can fix. These organisations need major rethinks about how and why they exist.

It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the web or how effective your social media strategy is – if the foundations of a business are shaky then a nice “omni-channel strategy” aren’t going to fix things.

For some of organisations, a failure to embrace the online world may be one of the causes for their problems, for many though there are far more basic issues they need to address.

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March 24, 2012
Omni Channel Buzzwords
Retailer entrepreneur Gerry Harvey yesterday unveiled his strategy to arrest the declines in his home goods chain’s sales.

One of the key points in his investor presentation was “continued investment in strengthening our Omni channel strategy”.

When asked exactly what an “omni channel strategy” is, Gerry reportedly admitted that until last week he had no idea what it was.

For an entrepreneur whose business model is suffering badly in the face of changed markets, Gerry seems to be remarkably flippant about how he and his team are going to react to the challenges.

Gerry lack of understanding is bad news for his team, because appears there is no management commitment to the major changes Harvey Norman, and many other incumbent retailers, are going to have to make in order to recover the sales and margins they have long been used to.

The “omni channel strategy” is an interesting beast, which was described by Myers CEO Bernie Brooks last April on ABC’s Inside Business.

We’re building our own omni-channel approach, which will include everything from kiosks in store right the way through to being able to provide very good office online up to 250,000 items, free delivery.

What’s interesting with the retailers’ talk of “omni-channel” is the talk of service. Both Myer and Harvey Norman claim customer service is the centre of their strategy but their emphasis in the past has been to reduce customer service.

The reduced emphasis on service has been part of the decline of the both chains; Harvey Norman could get away while consumers were happy committing to “no-interest for 72 months” finance plans, while Myer steadily declined as their key difference with discount chains like K-Mart and Target was eroded.

Hopefully both Gerry Harvey and Bernie Brooks will get their omni channel strategy strategies working, though it will be interesting whether both can get their management teams to re-discover the meaning of “customer service”.

Without getting the service right, their “omni channel strategies” will just appear to be another management buzzword in a declining business.

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March 1, 2012