Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Fear in the cloud – the loss of trust in online business

    Fear in the cloud – the loss of trust in online business

    Today I spoke about online safety to the Australian Seniors’ Computer Clubs Association about staying safe online.

    Hopefully I’ll have a copy of the presentation up tomorrow but what was notable about the morning was the concern among the audience about security and safety of cloud services.

    The ASCCA membership are a computer savvy bunch – anyone who disparages older peoples’ technology nous would be quickly put in their place by these folk – but it was notable just how concerned they are about online privacy. They are not happy.

    Another troubling aspect were my answers to the questions, invariably I had to fall back on the lines “only do what you’re comfortable with”  and “it all comes down to a question of trust.”

    The problem with the latter line is that it’s difficult to trust many online companies, particularly when their business models relies upon trading users’ data.

    Resolving this trust issue is going to be difficult and it’s hard to see how some social media platforms and online businesses can survive should users flee or governments enact stringent privacy laws.

    It may well be we’re seeing another transition effect happening in the online economy.

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  • Burying Google Plus

    Burying Google Plus

    The announcement that Vic Gundotra, the executive responsible for Google+ at the search engine giant, is leaving the company has lead to the widespread assumption that the troubled social media platform is dead.

    It’s not an unreasonable assumption that Google Plus is dead; the company’s trait of corporate attention deficit disorder means the project is likely to die of neglect without a top level executive supporting it.

    Should Google Plus be dying, this won’t be bad news for some of the company’s other products, the enforced integration with the social media service irritated users, –particularly on YouTube — while reducing functionality for platforms like Google Places.

    Google Places, or Google Plus for Business as it was clumsily renamed as part of the integration, could be the great beneficiary of removing the distraction of the social media service with renewed focus on local search.

    Regaining focus

    Losing focus on local and mobile search has been the most damaging effect from the Google Plus experience and renewed efforts in those fields will take on Facebook while filling a gap in the market.

    It’s also unlikely that the entire ‘identity service’ will live on with those features permeating through the company’s products.

    Of course, it could be that Google Plus isn’t dead at all; we’ll have a better idea of where it’s going to go when we see the level of commitment from senior management towards the product, although the appointment of a relatively junior executive doesn’t seem to be good news for the platform.

    Moving on from Google Plus is an opportunity for the company to refocus on neglected niches, it could be a good result for the company’s shareholders.

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  • Do you like your rights?

    Do you like your rights?

    Could liking a brand’s Facebook page cost you your right to sue?

    The New York Times has a story on how corporations are subtly changing the wordings on websites and social media pages in an effort to make it harder for customers to challenge the business in court.

    It’s quite cheeky attempting to strip people who ‘like’ a Facebook page of their rights to take action against a company, it even strikes at the heart of building an online community around a brand.

    The whole point of accumulating real life followers behind a brand’s social media presence is to create a band of fans; by creating suspicion, business destroy the goodwill behind that exercise and possibly render it useless.

    It will be interesting to see how Facebook react to this behaviour as intimidating users and discouraging them from liking brands is a direct threat to their business model, it’s hard to see them not changing their own terms to make this corporate behaviour a breach of their own terms of service.

    For consumers though it’s a reminder that corporations, at least those who operate on twentieth-century mass market principles, aren’t really their friends.

    Update: Since posting this piece, General Mills has backed down on its policy but the point still remains that unfair and over legalistic terms and conditions threaten social media platforms.

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  • No country for small business

    No country for small business

    Facebook’s latest changes to its layout creates more problems for small business using social media as the real estate available on its site for eyeballs gets smaller.

    The social media giant has been catching criticism recently for changes to its algorithm that make it harder for businesses to be seen online.

    In the hospitality industry, discontent was articulated by the Eat 24 website which closed its Facebook Page down after finding the problems too hard.

    With the changes to the online advertising feed, it makes it even harder for small business to be seen on the platform as reduced space means higher prices for the space that remains available.

    It’s hard to see small businesses getting much traction with the changes when they’re up against big brands with large budgets.

    On the other hand for the big brands, the importance of proper targeting becomes even greater as wasting

    A challenge for small business

    The big problem now for small business is where do you advertise where the customers are?

    A decade or so ago, this was a no-brainer – the local service or retail business advertised in the local newspaper or Yellow Pages. Customers went there and, despite their chronic inefficiencies, they worked.

    Now with Facebook’s changes, it’s harder for customers to follow small business and this is a particular problem for hospitality where updates are hard.

    The failure of Google

    Google should have owned this market with Google Places however the service has been neglected as the company folded the business listing service into the Plus social media platform.

    Today it’s hard to see where small business is going to achieve organic reach – unpaid appearances in social media and search – or paid reach as the competition with deep pocketed big brands is fierce.

    Services like Yelp! were for a while a possible alternative but increasingly the deals they are stitching up deals with companies like Yahoo! and Australia’s Sensis are marginalising small business.

    So the online world is getting harder for small business to get their message out onto online channels.

    For the moment that’s a problem although it’s an interesting opportunity for an entrepreneur – possibly even a media company – to exploit.

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  • Shoehorning the advertising model

    Shoehorning the advertising model

    According to AdAge, Instagram has no advertising rate card but if you have a spare million hanging around the photo sharing service will speak to you.

    Dropping a million dollars on a social media campaign isn’t a massive amount for a global brand, but is it a worthwhile investment?

    As Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray told Decoding the New Economy earlier this week, the social media services were never invented to be business to consumer advertising platforms.

    “I think that every social media platform that’s been developed had such a strong emphasis on consumer to consumer interaction that they’ve left the business behind, despite thinking that business will pay the bills.”

    “As a result almost every single business application that’s come from these social media companies has met with hiccups. That’s because it wasn’t part of the original plan.”

    With Instagram it’s not clear exactly what those companies are getting for their million dollars a month with its consumer focus, it could well be its the cost of experimenting with the new medium.

    In the early days of radio it took nearly two decades to figure out how to make money from the broadcast model — it may take a similar period to understand how to make social media pay.

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