Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • A land of grace and favors

    A land of grace and favors

    Yesterday the Search Engine Land website broke the news that Google Authorship is dead.

    The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

    Google Authorship was a subset of the company’s Google Plus service that let writers and journalist claim their work.

    For authors Google Authorship was a useful tool in the battle against the verminous ‘content scrapers’ whose business lies in stealing other peoples’work. It was also a good way of building an online portfolio.

    Google benefited from a huge improvement in the quality of its data as its algorithms authorship made it easier for the algorithm to identify original sources.

    Using Google’s Authorship tool wasn’t easy, like many of the company’s services it was cumbersome to setup, opaque and subject to arbitrary rules.

    Many journalists, bloggers and writers went through the process however as they saw the benefits and trusted Google to maintain the service.

    Trusting Google to maintain any service is risky with the company’s well deserved reputation of axing services the moment management’s attention turns to the next shiny thing.

    Which is exactly what’s happened to those who’ve invested their time in Google Authorship and they join the disillusioned masses who’ve been burned by the company previously with services like Google Wave.

    The lessons from Google’s dropping of Authorship shouldn’t be lost on those working hard to build Google Plus profiles.

    Right now, despite the propaganda for those with a lot invested in the service, Google Plus is not travelling well and it’s in a dangerous zone within the company with the departure of its internal management champion Vic Gundotra earlier this year.

    The risk of investing too much time on Google Plus is clear, however it would be unfair to single Google out as being alone in presenting this risk.

    Every social media service and publishing platform carries the same risk.

    Those spending hours creating Facebook communities or carefully crafting LinkedIn or Medium posts need to remember they are only their by the grace and favor of the service.

    Nothing replaces your own website as an online property. Your mission is to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Social media platforms can help you do this, but they are not your friends or business partners.

    Don’t forget this.

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  • Facebook incurs the users’ revenge

    Facebook incurs the users’ revenge

    On the web, no-one likes being forced into downloading a new app. That could be the main lesson from Facebook’s splitting messenger into a new app.

    Users aren’t happy and it shows in the product reviews as Mashable reports. Across the world the new Facebook Messenger app is getting the thumbs down in App Store reviews.

    Which goes to show how the public now have the power to strike back when they believe a corporation isn’t behaving fairly.

    The ball’s now in Facebook’s court to win back trust with an app that delights users. If they don’t, there’s always another disrupter on the horizon.

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  • Splitting apps

    Splitting apps

    Much to the irritation of many users both Foursquare and Facebook have split their apps into separate tools.

    Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of the investors in Foursquare, explains the reason for this are that different patterns meant the service had to cater for privacy models which threatened to confuse users.

    The risk for both Facebook and Foursquare is that irritated users might give up on the service, it’s a tough balancing act.

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  • Reinventing management communications

    Reinventing management communications

    This blog has been particularly interested in how social media tools  are changing management.

    Last year we had an interview with Yammer’s founder Pisoni on how fast communications are breaking down business silos.

    Matt Honan has an interview in Wired magazine with the founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield.

    Slack is a corporate communications tool and Butterfield sees the company as being  the next Microsoft.

    While that’s a big call, Butterfield shouldn’t be taken lightly having founded Flickr and following the company into its being absorbed by Yahoo!. Butterfield’s resignation letter after several years is an entertaining read.

    Whether Slack becomes the next Microsoft or not, the changes to business communications with services like this are profound.

    Dealing with the new ways of communicating within a business is going to be one of the greatest challenges to company managers over the next decade.

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  • Everyone is a critic on the internet

    Everyone is a critic on the internet

    “Everyone’s a critic” is the old saying. Today this is truer than ever as anyone can post a review online.

    One of the notable things about business in the internet age is how sensitive people are to criticism.

    A good example of this is a story going around the web this week of a Dallas chef, John Tesar, who had a magnificent breakdown over a review of his restaurant in the local newspaper.

    This set off a chain of claims and counterclaims including some truly bizarre pieces on various blogs about ‘chefs winning the war against critics.’

    Probably the strangest thing with this whole debacle is the review by Leslie Brenner in the Dallas Morning News is actually quite constructive and certainly no AA Gill style demolition of the establishment.

    This silly little spat illustrates how business people, not just temperamental chefs, have glass jaws. Another story going around the web this week is of Union Street Guest House in Hudson, New York, that fines guests for bad reviews

    Tesar’s response is pretty typical of many business owners – attack the critic instead of addressing the problems. Given Tesar threw the Twenty Rules of Social Media – which apply to businesses as much as social media – out the window, he was lucky not to find his reaction backfiring horribly on him.

    What business owners have to understand is that you will get criticism, unfortunately most of it you will never know about as unhappy customers tell their friends and relatives.

    If you get the opportunity to hear that criticism, then you have the opportunity to fix the problem.

    This is something business owners need to understand about review sites and social media; it’s an opportunity to get some honest feedback about how things are going.

    So start listening to what your customers are saying online and stop being so defensive.

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