Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Social Media’s difficult adolescence

    Social Media’s difficult adolescence

    Like teenagers, social media platforms are struggling to understand their position in the world.

    For the last week I’ve been dipping into the Sydney sessions of Social Media Week and what’s quite clear from the panels and keynotes is the industry and the services themselves are struggling to find how they fit into society.

    Two weeks ago LinkedIn’s senior management were in Sydney describing their ambition to be a global publishing platform, something that’s at odds with the company’s success in becoming the dominant professional social network.

    Compounding the feeling of confusion about what LinkedIn is, CEO Jeff Weiner followed up with a discussion of how the service had an ethical crisis over its entry into the Chinese market.

    A conflict of interest

    During the Social Media Week sessions panellists and the audiences agonised over their struggles to engage audiences or how social media services, particularly Facebook, were limiting their reach.

    Facebook has a particular problem; its users want to know about their friends, families and interests while not really caring about brands but its advertisers – the people who pay the bills – desperately want to embed themselves into their followers’ lives.

    So Facebook has to throttle back the amount of brand content and marketing material to prevent users being irritated by excessive advertising. Understandably advertisers get upset with this, although its hard to feel much sympathy for businesses and agencies who thought they had a free broadcasting channel in the social media platforms.

    Twitter and every other social media platform is suffering similar problems, albeit without the revenues and stock market valuation.

    An even more stark illustration of social media’s immaturity is the industry’s reaction to privacy with, at best, a shrug about concerns over the handling of users’ information – this is something that will almost certainly damage the industry in coming years.

    One of the problems for the social media industry could be that its overvalued and overhyped; while there’s no doubt a valid role for the services in modern life most of the companies won’t turn out to be as valuable as they and their investors hope.

    Startstruck platforms

    Part of that quest to increase value results in probably the saddest adolescent aspect of social media: The need to be liked by the cool kids.

    Like a lonely teenager, social media platforms are often starstruck; LinkedIn has gone through its phase of being in the thrall of high profile influencers for its publishing function, Twitter desperately courts celebrities and Google Plus in its fawning towards music stars, all of whom seemed exempt from the  real name policies that caused so much grief for the company and its users a few years back.

    For the social media industry, adolescence is a tough time with many struggles about its own identity similar to those of its users. It will be interesting to see how it matures.

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  • Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn’s Chinese cultural struggle

    Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn’s Chinese cultural struggle

    LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner believes the company’s culture and values are one of its most important competitive advantages, however moving into China has tested those strengths he told a conference in Sydney two weeks ago.

    During the fireside chat Weiner went over the company’s development, the challenges he faced taking over from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as CEO and the importance of the company’s ethical base.

    “It’s important for companies to define what culture and values mean to them before they get to what the specific values and culture are,” Weiner said in an answer to an audience question.

    Defining values and culture

    “At LinkedIn we think culture is the collective personality of our organisation and it’s not only who we are but who we aspire to be and that aspirational component is really important,” Weiner continued.

    “Oftentimes you’ll see company executives get onstage to introduce culture and values or talk about changing  culture and values and it’s not necessarily something the company already does and it loses the trust of the employees and the audience when that material being presented because people know is not necessarily true.

    “If you allow yourself to include this aspirational dimension when defining the culture it gives everyone an opportunity to play up to where your setting that bar and I think that’s important,” stated Weiner.

    “Values are the first principles upon which we make day to day operating decisions, that’s how we make the distinction.”

    Culture as a competitive advantage

    “I think once an organisation has defined for itself what it means by culture and values it’s then obviously important to codify its culture and the pillars of the culture and the specific values that it operates with.

    “Its not enough to codify it, we went to the trouble of defining it and then putting it in our public registration when we filed to go public and that’s a good start but all too often we see people talking the talk with regard to culture and values and not walking the walk.”

    For Weiner, that commitment to the company’s culture is the company’s strength in the marketplace: “Today, I’ll tell you it’s our most important competitive advantage.”

    The China Problem

    LinkedIn’s culture though has been tested by its entry into the Chinese market where its aspirations of being a content publisher met the limitations of the country’s censors.

    When asked by this writer about the quandary LinkedIn finds itself in the PRC, Weiner reconciled this with the company’s mission to connect the world’s professionals.

    “China’s one of our largest opportunities in terms of the value we can create for members in China and for companies in China.”

    “One in five knowledge workers and students reside in China so it’s a huge part of connecting the world’s professionals and to achieve that kind of scale so we can create value for people who are living in China it’s important that we’re able to do business there.”

    “At times means complying with law that forces us to do things that are very challenging and difficult and we always knew the importance of operating in China and for us we wanted to be extremely thoughtful in terms of how we did that.”

    Favoring freedom of expression

    “Obviously we are very much against the idea of censorship and very much in favor of freedom of expression but in terms of operating there and creating economic opportunities for what could be potentially a 144 million people from time to time we may have to make some very difficult decisions. That’s the reality of doing business there.”

    In being asked if this creates a struggle with the company’s culture, Weiner answered “that was one of the things we took so much time on.”

    “From the time we decided we needed to be in China and how important it would be in creating the global platform and adding value for members and the time we entered into China with the local language version of the site it was of the order of 18 to 24 months.”

    “Discussions took place among our executives asking some very difficult questions in terms of our culture, our values and where we would be willing to compromise and where we would draw hard and fast lines and that will continue to be an ongoing process.”

    For LinkedIn and Jeff Weiner the challenge of being a trusted global publishing platform and a leader in the Chinese market raises some serious ethical questions; it’s a challenge that is going to test the company more in coming years.

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  • Navigating a world of silos

    Navigating a world of silos

    Having seen Robert Scoble interview dozens of startups and founders, it was fascinating to get him on the other side of the camera for a Decoding the New Economy interview.

    One of areas I was keen to explore with Scoble was his experience of moving from his blogging platform to Facebook and particularly the risk of being locked in a silo, something previously discussed with Doc Searls.

    “I’d rather all my content wasn’t in Facebook,” Scoble observes, “but those days are over.”

    Unlike Searls, Scoble sees the social media networks — particularly Facebook — as being a useful distribution tool while accepting their limitations; “I find I get a lot more engagement and distribution on Facebook.”

    “Unlike a lot of other journalists I don’t have to make my money out of advertising so I don’t care about taking my eyeballs off the blog and onto Facebook.”

    “It does limit my storytelling ability because you can only use one video and I can’t do a lot of typographic stuff,” says Scoble, “people are seeing these on mobile phones anyway so they don’t want to see all of this stuff anyway.”

    The mobile aspect is key to the business world going forward, we stopped midway through the interview to buy an iPhone 6 which went on pre-order right in the middle of the discussion.

    For the mobile world Scoble sees the rise of various ecosystems like Google’s and Apple’s forcing people to make choices about which camp they are going to join.

    Like many in the tech industry, Scoble is very cautious about looking too far ahead; “none of the people, even the investors, are looking more than five years ahead.”

    The key though is miniaturization as devices get smaller and more portable, the potential for technology becomes greater.

    Whether that potential is limited by the desire of vendors to lock users into silos remains to be seen.

     

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  • A unicorn in the wine industry

    A unicorn in the wine industry

    “I was a closet tech guy until the 2000s,” says Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray in describing how digital technologies are changing the wine industry to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

    We’d spoken to Paul before about the forces changing the wine industry and visiting him in the Napa Valley gives some perspective on the opportunity the sector has in capturing the enthusiastic US wine market.

    Paul’s first venture into wine technology was with Inertia Beverage Group in 2002, “when I started Inertia I said ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet’”, Mabray recalls. “They said ‘hey Paul you’re so cute, the internet won’t be around in a couple of years.’”

    The internet being a fad turned out not to be the case and Vintank evolved out of the rising importance of social media to industries like wineries.

    “Vintank is the mission control of social media, the one stop engagement platform for the wine industry,” says Paul of his social media listening service which he and co-founder James Jory established in 2009.

    Wine is lagging other industries in adopting social media and other digital technologies because it’s avoided many of the disruptions other sectors have had to deal with.

    “The wine industry is the last industry that hasn’t been changed by the internet,” Mabray says. “If you look at hotels with expedia.com or restaurants with Yelp or Open Table, that hasn’t happened yet.”

    A key facet of Vintank is its use of the freemium business model in offering a basic service for free; a common practice in the consumer (B2C) market but fairly rare in business (B2C) software services.

    “It’s a very different way to do freemium in B2B. Freemium in B2C you do mass adoption — that tiny fraction that pay makes it profitable because so many people have it.”

    “In the B2B freemium model what you have to do is distribute it for free and then you measure the usage; who is using it the most is where you send the sales team in.”

    For Mabray, we’re in early days of using digital media and the wine industry is one of the sectors that needs to adopt the technologies quickly: “The driver for me is this horribly complex problem that needs to be solved — the wine industry needs digital to survive.”

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  • The dreams of social media services

    The dreams of social media services

    “LinkedIn is the world’s biggest publishing platform,” states Olivier Legrand.

    Legrand, LinkedIn’s Head of Marketing Solutions for Asia Pacific & Japan, was speaking at the company’s Connectin Sydney conference where the service was demonstrating its credentials as a marketing and advertising service to Australia’s largest corporations.

    The view that LinkedIn is a publishing platform is problematic for content creators — it creates a conflict for those using the service to distribute or publicise their work and again it shows social media services are not your friends.

    It’s understandable LinkedIn wants to get corporate advertisers on board seeing the business’ stock currently trades at eighty-four times revenue, however a focus on becoming an advertising driven media company at a time when advertising driven media companies are heading the way of the wooly mammoth seems to be a risky strategy.

    Another risk for LinkedIn as a publishing platform is that user generated services can, and will be, gamed resulting in a dramatic decline in quality and value in the site.

    Every social media service now sees itself as a media company and it may turn out they are correct, however that future of publishing will be very different from last century’s newspaper and broadcast models they are trying to emulate.

    Even if the dreams of social media services do come true, the advertising driven media industry, an the publishing world, will be very different to the world they hope to be part of.

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