Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: reputation

  • Killing credibility

    Killing credibility

    Microsoft’s Smoked by Windows Phone Challenge aims to show their mobile phones are the fastest on the market.

    Unfortunately if you beat them, it appears you might not win the prize as Sahas Katta discovered.

    Going back on a prize in a competition that already looks somewhat biased doesn’t just hurt Windows Phone’s credibility but it hurts the whole company’s – it looks cheap, lame and petty.

    Realising the damage this does Microsoft’s brand, evangelist Ben Randolph offered Sahas a laptop and phone, although already the botched promotion has probably already hurt the product.

    Windows Phone is a “must succeed” for Microsoft and that company would stage poorly thought out stunts with high chance of backfiring is disappointing given what is at stake for them.

    Trust and reputation and the hardest things to earn and the easiest to squander, Microsoft’s management needs to be careful with this.

    Hopefully Microsoft will show us some compelling reasons to buy an alternative to an iPhone or Android handset beyond dodgy marketing stunts.

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  • Reputation’s long tail

    Reputation’s long tail

    When you decide customer support is an unnecessary cost, you make a statement that defines your position in the market place. Dell are reaping the consequences of this now.

    Micheal Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computers, hopes to grab some of the tablet computer market from Apple with the release of Microsoft Windows 8.

    It’s a big goal – Apple have owned the tablet computer market since launching the iPad.

    Dell, along with most of the other PC manufacturers, squandered the decade’s head start they had in tablet computers with poorly designed and overpriced tablet PCs which were based around a clunky version of Microsoft Windows using styluses.

    Part of the problem was Windows itself; the operating system was designed for desktop users and to make it work on tablet computers it required a clunky workaround. Being designed for smart phones and tables mean Windows 8 may overcome previous limitations.

    But Dell have a problem; they are perceived as a low price, low quality supplier and have a competitor in Apple that has locked in the supply chain for the product.

    So Dell will struggle to beat Apple on price while customers believe the Dell system is inferior.

    Even more difficult for Dell is their support reputation, a quick look at the comments to the Bloomberg story illustrates the problem.

    Of the the sixteen reader comments, admittedly not a scientific sample, three business owners claim they will never buy Dell again after customer support issues.

    This is the critical mistake Dell’s management made in the 2000s – in order to cut costs so they could be profitable at lower price points they trashed their support.

    Eventually this culminated in the Dell Hell debacle where Jeff Jarvis’ experience summed up the frustrations of thousands of Dell’s disillusioned customers.

    Apple on the other hand chose not to go down the rabbit hole of cheap and nasty systems. Today they can offer free, and skilled, support in their genius bars as their fat margins allow them to provide constructive and helpful assistance to their customers.

    Now Dell has the reputation for at best indifferent after sales service which means they are locked into competing on price and ever declining margins.

    It’s not a good place to be for Dell but that’s what you get for treating your customers like an unnecessary nuisance while fixating on headline prices.

    We often talk about the Internet’s long tail; our online reputations could be the longest tail of all.

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  • When history bites

    When history bites

    In a strange way Peter Watson, the Australian Labor Party election candidate disendorsed and expelled for his homophobic views, is a trend setter for his generation.

    Mr Watson was caught out by the unsavoury views he’d posted on Facebook and other online forums. That he defended what he had written “when I was like 14, 15 years old, so we’re talking about four, five years ago” made matters worse.

    Our digital footprints – material about us on the web or in social media sites – sometimes show we’ve strayed into places we’d rather admit to.

    There’s plenty of others who have posted things that will bite them later when they apply of jobs or seek political office.

    It will be interesting to see how society and the media adapt to our histories and the dumb stuff we did as teenagers being freely available, Mr Watson is an early casualty of that adjustment process.

    One of the more disturbing aspects of the Peter Watson case is his political party’s failure to do the most basic of checks on their candidate’s background. Something that again illustrates just how out of touch the nation’s political structures are with modern society.

    When we talk about disruption, we often focus on the jobs, business and social aspects of that change. One thing we often forget is that social upheaval directly affects political parties.

    Political parties who fail to adapt to the needs of their society become irrelevant and fail.

    So maybe Peter Watson has, through sheer dumb luck, found himself on the right side of history in being expelled from a political party that doesn’t know how to use Google search.

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  • I don’t think I’ll write that

    I don’t think I’ll write that

    A media release popped into my inbox from an old client recently. It was, to put it nicely, a total load of corporate tosh from an organisation that has been captured by its time serving management.

    Having dwelt on this for a while, I went to write something about how this company had blown wonderful opportunities competing against a stodgy incumbent which had been given the opportunity to re-invent itself partly because of a new generation of smart, dynamic managers.

    Then a little voice said “no, they’ll never invite you back; the mark of epically incompetent management is holding permanent grudges for pointing out their failures.”

    So I didn’t write it.

    In one way it doesn’t matter; much of what ails the Western world’s business communities is how a culture of managerial incompetence has been allowed to develop.

    Almost everyone knows individuals who waddle from corporate disaster to debacle yet, despite causing the destruction of great slabs of shareholder value, move onto to higher positions and better paid jobs.

    Some even get invited back to companies they’ve previously trashed.

    We know who those people are; boards and big shareholders know who they are, yet they’ll still get hired.

    Which is why its best not to upset them too much. For the moment, history is on their side.

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  • Tony Delroy’s Nightlife: Our digital reputation

    Tony Delroy’s Nightlife: Our digital reputation

    December’s Tony Delroy’s Nightlife looked at the risks of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Along with being a great way to communicate with family, friends and colleagues using online services can have some unexpected effects.

    Program podcast

    A recording of the program is available from the ABC’s Tony Delroy’s Nightlife webpage. You can listen to it through the site or download it and listen to it as a podcast.

    Topics covered

    Tony and Paul covered a range of topics including the following questions;

    • Are we living in the social media age?
    • What is social media is?
    • Why people use social media?
    • How some folk have come unstuck using social websites?
    • Can doing the wrong thing hurt your reputation or career?
    • What the risks are during the christmas party season?
    • Are there too many social media services?
    • How businesses can really use them?
    • Where will these services go next?

    Listeners’ questions

    We had a great range of questions and comments from listeners and those we promised to get back to included how to shut down your Facebook account and the link to report abuse on the service.

    Reporting Facebook abuse

    If you’re being harassed on Facebook, you can report misuse at Facebook’s Help Centre. Their page includes instructions on dobbing in underage users, blocking irritating people and how to use their privacy settings.

    Deleting a Facebook profile

    Leaving Facebook is not easy, so on the Netsmarts website we have the detailed instructions on deleting your Facebook account.

    Note with these instructions that you need to disable any applications you may have installed on Facebook before deleting the account. When you go to the Applications page you may be shocked at how many things are connecting to your page.

    Do we have too many social media services?

    Tony asked if we have too many social media platforms.

    This is a topic we’ve covered previously on the website and while there’s no doubt many of the services around today won’t survive, some will become increasingly become important.

    Next Nightlife tech program

    Our next program will be on February 9 next year. We will probably have some spots over the summer break and we’ll let newsletter subscribers know about them as soon as we do.

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