social media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Transparent falsehoods

Openness is more than a buzzword and organisations have to do more than shutting down bloggers.

Transparency, openness, innovation and entrepreneurialism are all popular buzzwords, but do organisations really value these attributes?

At a cloud computing conference this week I sat in on an innovation presentation. Almost everyone in the room was wearing a dark suit.

Despite their dress, most of those folk desperately wanted to be ‘innovative’ and almost all of them worked in organisations that would really benefit with a dash of genuine creative thinking.

I thought of that conference when reading of the attempted shutting down of a primary school student’s food blog by her local education authority.

The saga of the Never Seconds food blog illustrated the classic responses of managers when faced with something they can’t control – shut it down on whatever grounds you can find.

In the case of Never Seconds it was because the food service staff feared they would lose their jobs. Bless the council for caring so much about their staff.

As always in these situations, it was an opportunity missed to promote the school district and improve the services they provide.

Never Seconds is also a great place where other school students shared their school lunches. It is a great idea to promote healthy eating for kids.

Thankfully the Argyll and Bute Council relented on their ban and the Never Seconds blog is back for lunch.

Educators around the world talk about promoting children’s curiosity and creativity yet when a child expresses them in a way that threatens staff or bureaucrat power, they are quickly slapped down.

The same happens in the workplace, most organisations will treat truly innovative and original thinkers like the naughty children they probably were.

For too many organisations – businesses, political parties and even schools – words like innovation, creativity, openness and transparency are just empty buzzwords.

Feeling the currents

Customer service means listening to clients, we have the tools to do it.

Internet and marketing everyman Seth Godin makes an interesting point on his blog post Silencing The Bell Doesn’t Put Out The Fire.

Seth’s point is that satisfying vocal complainers doesn’t address underlying problems in the business and cites the Dell Hell saga of Jeff Jarvis as an example of where load complaints were a symptom of a much deeper issue within the business.

For Dell, this had been the choice to focus on the low value, high volume market segments. To compete there it meant cheap components and selling to comparatively uneducated, price sensitive consumers.

Compounding that decision was Dell’s decision to partly address the inevitable cost pressures they had put themselves under by outsourcing their support lines to truly dire, lowest price providers.

As a consequence of abandoning its service culture, Dell rapidly gained a reputation as being unreliable and unhelpful. One only has to look at the Dell Hell comments on Jeff’s original posts to see how damaged Dell’s name was.

I encountered Dell’s shocking support during that period first hand in PC Rescue, one customer asked me to troubleshoot her Dell PDA after their support line had reduced her to tears.

Very quickly I discovered why, the installation software supplied by Dell didn’t work properly – testing was obviously another victim of budget cuts – and the tech support people were working with an early version.

We managed to fix the problem without the “help” of Dell’s helpdesk and the client swore never again to buy Dell. She’s now a happy Apple customer who is a happy to pay a slightly higher sticker price for a better product and service.

The real concern was that during this period Dell’s management were oblivious to the problems they were suffering in the marketplace, they were meeting their KPIs and appeared to be growing sales while the business itself was about to go over a cliff.

Dell’s management could have recognised this had they chosen to, the company had plenty of market intelligence, customers surveys and their support logs to tell them they had a problem. It wasn’t in their interests to do so.

Today every business has those tools to monitor what customers are saying about them. Google Alerts, Facebook and – if you’re in hospitality – Tripadvisor, Yelp or Eatability.

With social media it’s easy for the bad message to get out; it’s also easy for management or owners to watch out for problems.

Dell only survived the Dell Hell experience because they were big and well capitalised, no smaller business could have survived similar damage done to their reputation.

Smaller businesses don’t have the luxury of ignoring their customers until the screams become too loud.

On being a hater

A cheap slur hides real problems with online communities and anonymous comments.

The phenomenon of the “Internet hater” has been one of the unfortunate developments of the web.

Just as entry barriers for new businesses are low, so too are the restraints on clueless and anonymous idiots posting comments like “drop ded you faggot” or “hope you get canser bitch” onto web forums and social media pages.

English comedian Isabel Fay has a great rebuttal to the haters with a clip that co-opts some of Britain’s top comics with their experiences.

These haters are sad little people as the BBCs Panorama program found when it tracked down one individual who had posted offensive comments.

We knew Darren Burton of Cardiff, aka Nimrod Severen, would be a pathetic individual. Those who post anonymous, hateful comments are rarely anyone who has anything useful to contribute to society.

Online “haters” are a real problem and cause distress to people who encounter the foul comments these creatures post. However the “haters” tag is increasingly being misused to shut down fair comment and criticism.

Legitimate critics or dissenters from the groupthink and shallow advertorials that increasingly dominate parts of the web will quickly earn the tag “hater” as well.

Every multi level marketing spiv or con merchant with a few followers will quickly throw the term out at anyone who dares criticise their behaviour in the hope of rallying their followers to shout down the dissenters. Usually it works.

If you’re prepared to think outside the group and genuinely challenge those selling old rope as new ideas, let alone expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to open and transparent while hiding their real intentions, then be prepared to wear the tag “hater”.

The only reply is to stand on your beliefs and be prepared to use your real name. The real trolls are scared, frightened creatures – just like many of the useful idiots co-opted by the spin merchants and Internet spivs.

At least “hater” is just a cheap insult and they aren’t coming for dissenters with pitchforks. Yet.

Triangulating privacy out of our lives

Social media sites will have to deal with increased government regulation.

Lost among the noise of Facebook’s rumoured plans to launch a kids’ network, there’s quiet pressures developing as consumers start to realise the value of their data – the pressure to regulate social media.

In his Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data, New York Times writer Quentin Hardy raises some of the issues about the data which is being collected about us.

One of the big areas is triangulation – building a picture of somebody based upon seemingly unrelated data. Quentin explains it in the example of somebody who might be looking for a job.

There other ways in which we can lose control of our privacy now. By triangulating different sets of data (you are suddenly asking lots of people on LinkedIn for endorsements on you as a worker, and on Foursquare you seem to be checking in at midday near a competitor’s location), people can now conclude things about you (you’re probably interviewing for a job there) that are radically different from either set of public information.

The key word of course is “conclude” – we base an assumption on what we think we know. It could turn out those LinkedIn endorsements could be part of a performance review and the competitor’s location could right next door to a hot new lunch spot.

We should also keep in mind the value of this data is asymmetric as the value of this data to a third party is low, if anything. But to the individual it could mean losing a job and other major consequences.

A good example of this is the story of how a UK hospital trust lost highly sensitive health records of thousands of patients, including those being treated for HIV.

The trust ended up being fined £325,000 but that fine is trivial compared to the massive individual cost from just one of those records being released.

Fines are a lousy way of enforcing privacy anyway, as the financial penalties are just passed onto shareholders or taxpayers.

The only meaningful sanction for failures like the Brighton General Hospital breach are holding individuals, particularly managers, personally responsible.

As we saw in the successive Sony security breaches last year, most organisations aren’t interested in holding their senior managers responsible for even the most egregious data failures.

This failure of the corporate sector to protect consumer data will almost certainly drive calls for government regulation and sanctions.

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd flags this regulation issue in Quentin Hardy’s New York Times piece, saying “Regulation is coming,” she says. “You may not like it, you may close your eyes and hold your nose, but it is coming.”

Danah also makes an important point that users – particularly kids – have developed tactics to obscure their ‘digital footprints’.

For Danah, and others trying to understand what is happening online, this causes a problem, “When I started doing my fieldwork I could tell you what people were talking about. Now I can’t.”

These tactics of creating dummy social media profiles and using euphemisms are a huge threat to the business plans of social media services and the “identity services” desired by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

As data becomes less reliable, or more difficult to triangulate, the value of it to advertisers falls.

It may well be that regulation of social media and web services ends up not being necessary as users become more net savvy. For medical and other personal data though, it’s clear we have to rethink the way we use and store it.

Facebook’s Childrens Network

Do we need social media networks for children?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is developing a childrens network to overcome the problem of kids under 13 joining the service.

Underage kids getting on the network is a major problem for the social media service with last year’s Pew Social Media and Young Adult survey finding over half of US children logging onto these sites.

The rule of under 13s joining Facebook or other social media services isn’t one born out altruism – it was born out of the US COPPA law which was enacted at the end of the 1990s to protect young children from inappropriate advertising and data mining.

For Facebook and all the other social media data mining operations the inability to gather information on or advert to minors means they haven’t been interested in investing time or money in developing childrens’ networks.

As social networks become more critical to kids’ social lives, it’s not unexpected that younger children are going online just like their older brothers and sisters and this creates risks for services like Facebook.

To mitigate those risks, it was inevitable that Facebook would have to address the problem with setting up a service aimed at younger kids.

Where the challenge lies for Facebook and parents is encouraging kids to use the younger service. It’s going to have to be compelling for the youngsters to use it in preference to the adult network.

The key there is to get the critical mass of kids onto the service – social media platforms only succeed when users know their peers will be there.

So Facebook are probably going to have to offer most of the features of the main platform, without advertising or some of the more intrusive data mining and games.

It also won’t be possible to exclude adults from the kids network as parents and other relatives want to know what their offspring are doing and being friends with the younger ones is essential so they can see posts and other activity.

Age will also be an issue, it may well turn out that a kids network is more appropriate up to say 15 year olds rather than the current thirteen mandated by COPPA.

Overall, a Facebook Kids Network will be sensible move. The worry for Facebook is that kids might just decide there is more compelling place for their friends and interests.

Towards the Zettabyte enterprise

The data explosion is here, are you ready for it?

Toward the Zettabyte Enterprise originally appeared in Smart Company on May 31, 2012

Two hundred years ago, the idea of equivalent power of hundreds of horses in a single machine was unthinkable; then steam engine arrived with what seemed unlimited power and that, followed by electricity and the motor car, changed our society and the way we do business.

Back then it was inconceivable that the average person would have the equivalent of several hundred horses of power in their household, today most of us have that sitting in our driveway.

The same thing is happening with the explosion in data, it’s changing how we work in ways as profound as the steam engine, electricity or the motor car.

A couple of surveys released this week illustrate the how business is changing. The Yellow Social Media Report 2012 and the Cisco VisualNetworking Index both show how business and our customers are adapting to having high speed internet at their fingertips.

The Cisco index illustrates the explosive growth of data across the Internet as more people in Asia and Africa connect to the net while users in developed countries like Australia increase their already heavy usage.

In Australia, Cisco see a sixfold growth in traffic between now and 2016. As the National Broadband Network is rolled out, they see speeds increasing substantially as well, with Australia moving from the back of global speed tables up to the front.

Many people are still struggling with the Megabyte or Gigabyte, but very soon we’re going to have to deal with the Zettabyte – a trillion Gigabytes.

For businesses, this means we’re going to have to deal with even more data, it’s clear our hardware and office equipment aren’t going to deal with the massive traffic increases we’re going to see in the next few years.

Even if we have that equipment, it’s another question whether we have the systems, or intellectual capacity to use it effectively.

The Sensis social media report shows consumers are expecting not just rich data but also 24/7 online services.

A worrying part of the Sensis survey is that businesses aren’t keeping up with these demands; something that jumps out with the survey is that while 79% of big businesses have a social media presence, only 27% of small businesses have bothered setting one up.

Australian small businesses have basically given the turf away to the big end of town.

The real worry with these statistics is that small business just isn’t taking advantage of the tools available to them — not only are they leaving the field open to bigger competitors, but there’s a whole new generation of lean new startups about to grab markets off slow incumbents.

While the big companies are vulnerable, it’s the smaller businesses who are the low hanging, easy to pick fruit. If you’re in a profitable niche segment this is something you’ll need to keep in mind.

In the near future we’ll be dealing with inconceivable amounts of data, the businesses that understand this will thrive while those who don’t probably won’t even understand what has hit them.

Eroding business silos

Knowledge is power, and the businesses who can share it are those who will define the 21st Century.

During our ABC radio discussion on politics and social media with Jeff Jarvis, we inevitably came around to the issue of sharing information.

We’ve covered the risks of personal sharing extensively and Jeff’s view is that our perceptions of privacy are evolving as we explore what is acceptable or tolerable in an information rich world.

Overlooked in this discussion is just how important sharing is for businesses – particularly in breaking down silos within an organisation.

As organisations grow, silos develop as various groups or departments grow to address specific functions. It’s a natural process.

However silos can damage businesses as valuable business knowledge is kept within the group rather than shared with the entire organisation.

This is the opportunity we see now in the various cloud computing, social media and big data tools that have developed to help people, gather, curate and share information.

Today there is no excuse for critical customer information sitting in the call centre logs not being available to marketing, sales or management teams. That is just one example of thousands.

Over time we’ll see businesses owners and managers develop the skills and tools to use data more effectively. This is already happening as many IT people move from Information Technology to Knowledge Management.

Business silos won’t ever be fully eliminated; in many ways they are necessary as you can’t expect the company accountant to know everything the customer service or sales staff do.

Those businesses who are successful will be those who overcome internal politics and resist the managerial urge to build little empires, information is too important to be hoarded by middle management princelings.

In the 19th Century power came in the form of steam engines, today it comes in knowledge. How well are you harnessing the power in your business?

Join Facebook, get expelled

How can schools and parents deal with children wanting to get onto social media

Facebook is problematic for schools. On one hand it’s a great tools for kids to connect with their peers and relatives while it also can amplify problems for children who don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with online issues.

A common aspect of Facebook and many of the other social media services is that the minimum age for sign ups is thirteen years old and the consensus among online safety experts is children younger than that shouldn’t be encouraged to break the rules.

Given the issues involved with younger children using Facebook it’s not surprising that teachers and school principals try to discourage younger children from signing up.

One Queensland school principal has now ordered that any of her students breaching Facebook’s terms by signing up when under 13 will be expelled.

That’s pretty draconian although one can sympathise with the teachers, particularly given many parents allow children to sign up despite knowing they are breaking Facebook’s terms.

How the parents have reacted is interesting too, with online safety expert Susan McLean saying “”You could not print the response to the principal that some of the mothers wrote on Facebook”. None of this is surprising as some see their rights, and those of their children, as being paramount.

Facebook and other social media services are tough for parents as younger kids see their old siblings online and want to be there too. Given many teenagers build their social lives around the service, you can understand the pressure children put on mum and dad to sign them up.

As kids are going to eventually sign up to Facebook, and are probably already on services like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin, they are going to have to deal with the issues all of us encounter online. So at least if parents are supervising usage, harm can be limited.

One area that seems to be misunderstood is why Facebook has a “no under 13s” policy. It isn’t, as child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes, because Facebook care about emotionally immature children, it is due to the US COPPA law.

COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act – was passed in the late 1990s to prevent inappropriate data being collected on minors. For US based social media services it’s easier to exclude children rather than set up systems that comply with the law.

There’s many good reasons why children should be allowed to use online services, but respecting the terms of conditions of these sites is important too.

While expelling children from school may be taking things too far, it’s not good to be encouraging twelve year old kids to lie about their ages – they’ll be doing that soon enough in their late teens.

ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

How politicians are using the web and social media to push their message

Politicians around the world have discovered social media and the web. Australia’s political parties are gearing up to copy Barak Obama’s 2008 online campaigns.

Paul, Tony Delroy and Jeff Jarvis – Associate Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York and the author of “Public Parts: How sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live” discussed how politicians are using social media to get into your inbox.

The program is available from the ABC Nightlife website. If you’d still like to make comments or ask questions, feel free to have your say below.

To show what politicians are doing with online media, here are some examples from the Obama 2008 US Presidential campaign.

The Art of The Possible – An overview of the Obama – Biden 2008 campaign that defined modern digital political campaigns.
One of the most interesting phenomenons in the 2008 Obama campaign was The Great Schlep (language warning). Can you imagine a campaign like this in Australia?
Blue State Digital tools were developed for the campaign. These are now being used in Australia.

Some of the topics we looked at include;

Australian politicians don’t seem to have used the web very well. Why is that?
What are the ways overseas politicians using social media?
How do these integrate with the political parties’ existing databases?
Does this fit into the term Big Data we’re hearing about businesses?
Doesn’t this all create opportunities for false identities and campaigns?
Can you keep the parties off your computer?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Monetizing the Masses

How do social media services make a profit?

Monetization is a horrible word.

The term is necessary though as many online business models are based upon giving away a service or information for free. For those businesses to survive, they have to find a way to “monetize” their user base.

When Google were floated in 2003, the question was how could a free search engine “monetize” their users. The answer was in advertising and Google today are the world’s biggest advertising platform.

Facebook’s Inital Public Offering (IPO) announcement raises the same question; how does a company valued 99 times earnings find a way to justify the faith of its investors?

Advertising is the obvious answer but that seems to flattening out as the company’s revenue growth is slowing in that space. The AdWords solution tends to favour Google more than publishers as most advertising supported websites have found.

Partnering with application developers like the game publisher Zynga is another solution. Again though this appears to be limited in revenue and Zynga itself seems to be having trouble growing its Facebook user numbers.

So the question for Facebook is “where will the profits come from?”

There’s no doubt the data store Facebook has accumulated is valuable but how the social media service can “monetize” this asset without upsetting their users is open to question.

For Facebook the stakes are high as the comparisons with Friendster and MySpace are already being drawn.

We’ll see more partnerships like the Facebook Anti-virus marketplace, but these seem to be marginal at best.

In the next few months things will get interesting as Facebook’s managers and investors strive to find ways to make a buck out of a billion users who don’t pay for the service.

While “monetization” is an ugly word, it is one that every online company thinks about.

Every web based businesses will be watching how Facebook manage their monetization strategy closely as the entire industry struggles with the faulty economics of providing services for free.

The Free Myth

Free services often come at a cost of your time.

One of the biggest dangers to businesses is the belief that something is “free”.

As we all know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. When another business gives you something for free it’s safe to say there is a cost somewhere.

One of the speakers at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business social media event stated this when talking about social media saying “I can’t believe all businesses aren’t on Facebook – it’s free.”

Social media isn’t free. We all know the value services like Facebook are mining are the tastes, habits and opinions of their users.

For businesses, engaging heavily in Facebook or any other social media service hands over far more information about their customers to a third party than they themselves would be able to collect.

All of that information handed over to a service like Google or Facebook can come back to bite the business, particularly if a well cashed up competitor decides to advertise at the demographic the business caters to.

The core fallacy though is that these service are “free”. They aren’t.

Every single service comes with a time cost. Every social media expert advises the same thing, businesses have to post to their preferred service of choice at least three times a week and those posts should be strategically thought out.

That advice is right, but it costs time.

For a business owner, freelancer or entrepreneur time is their scarcest asset. You can always rebuild your bank account but you can never recover time.

Big businesses face the same problem, but they overcome this with money by hiring people for their time. In smaller businesses, this time comes out of the proprietor’s twenty-four crowded hours each day.

The computer and internet industries are good at giving away stuff for free, in doing so they burn investors’ money and the time of their users. The social media business model hopes to pay a return to investors by trading the data users contribute in their time.

While businesses can benefit from using social media services, they have to be careful they aren’t wasting too much of their valuable time while giving away their customers to a third party.

Often when somebody looks back on their life they say “I wish I had more time.” They’ve learned too late that asset has been wasted.

Wasting that unreplaceable asset on building someone else’s database would be a tragedy.