Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Context and the digital divide

    Context and the digital divide

    “This is the most difficult time in history to be a wine maker, declares Paul Mabray, Chief Strategy Office and founder of Vintank.

    “Never has the wine industry been as competitive as it is today.”

    Update: The Wine Communicators of Australia, who sponsored Mabray’s visit, have posted Paul’s presentation that covers this post’s theme in more detail.

    Mabray’s business monitors social media for wineries and collects information on wine enthusiasts. Since Vintank’s founding in 2008 the service has collected information on over thirteen million people and their tastes in wine.

    Rewriting the rule book

    Social media, or social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM), is what Mabray sees as being part of the future of the wine industry that’s evolving from a model developed in the 1970s which started to break down with the financial crisis of 2009.

    “In the old days there was a playbook originating with Robert Mondavi in the 1970s which is create amazing wine, you get amazing reviews and you go find wholesalers who bring this wine to the market.”

    “As a result of the global proliferation of brands the increase of awareness and consumption patterns where people like wine more, those playbooks didn’t work in 2009 when the crisis started.”

    With the old marketing playbook not working, wineries had to find other methods to connect to their markets and social media has become one of the key channels.

    Now the challenge in the wine industry, like all sectors, is dealing with the massive amount of data coming in though social media and other channels.

    The cacophony of data

    “If you rewind to when social media came out, everyone had these stream based things and the noise factor was so heavy,” says Mabray.

    “For small businesses this creates an ‘analysis to paralysis’ where they’d rather not do anything.”

    Mabray sees paralysis as a problem for all organisations, particularly for big brands who are being overwhelmed by data.

    “The cacophony of data at a brand level is just too much,” he says.

    “It’s as noisy as all get go and I think the transition is to break Big Data down into small bite size pieces for businesses to digest is the future, it shouldn’t be the businesses problem, it should be the software companies’.”

    A growing digital divide

    Mabray sees a divide developing between the producers who are embracing technology and those who aren’t, “the efficiencies attributed to technology are obvious whether they’re using CRM, business intelligence or other components.”

    “The people who are doing this are recognising the growth and saying ‘hey, this stuff actually works! If I feed the horse it runs.”

    While Mabray is focused on digital media and the wine industry, similar factors are work in other industries and technology sectors; whether it’s data collected by farm sensors to posts on Instagram or Facebook.

    Facebook blues

    Mabray is less than impressed with Facebook and sees businesses concentrating on the social media service as making a mistake.

    “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.”

    Facebook in particular is problematic in his view, “it’s like setting up a kiosk in the supermall of the world.”

    The business anger towards Facebook’s recent changes is due to the effort companies have put into the platform, Mabray believes; “everyone’s angry about Facebook because we put so much into getting the data there.”

    “We said ‘go meet us on Facebook’, we spent money collecting the items and manufacturing the content to attract people and now we have to spend money to get the attention of the people we attracted to the service in the first place.”

    Despite the downsides of social media Mabray sees customer support as one of the key areas the services. “It’s easy to do in 140 characters.”

    Context is king

    “Everything come back to context. There’s this phrase that ‘content is king’,” Mabray says. “Context is king.”

    “Anyone can produce content. It’s a bull market for free content. We have content pollution – there’s so much junk to wade through.

    Mabray’s advice to business is to listen to the market: “Customers are in control more than they have ever been in human history: Google flattens the world and social media amplifies it.”

    For wineries, like most other industries, the opportunity is to deal with that flat, amplified world.

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  • Building better horseshoes

    Building better horseshoes

    Twitter is considering dropping hashtags and the @ symbol reports Business Insider.

    Such a move, which would enrage the services’ loyal user base, is aimed at trying to spark the interest of inactive users after the company reported a lower than expected active user number in last quarter’s earnings report.

    Twitter’s user number have stalled with sign ups being an anemic 4% and the vast bulk of its registered accounts are inactive — if the service is to have credibility as a competitor against Facebook then it’s going to have a lot stronger growth.

    Comparing the service though to Facebook may be a mistake though, the two platforms being very different making facile comparisons between them dangerous.

    There’s also the problem that Twitter seems to be locked into an older advertising industry model; the company is obsessed about piggy backing upon television and big sporting events.

    It’s akin to nineteenth Century blacksmiths deciding the motor car was nothing more than a good way to deliver horseshoes.

    There is always the possibility that the ways of advertising on social media isn’t as lucrative as the broadcast industry. If may be that Twitter just isn’t worth what the stockmarket thinks it is.

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  • Customer service is no longer a department

    Customer service is no longer a department

    When it comes to customer service businesses, Alex Bard calls himself a ‘career entrepreneur’, having founded four startups in the field since the mid 1990s.

    In 2011 he sold his most recent business, Assist.ly, to Salesforce and became the company’s Vice President for Service Cloud and the Desk.com customer service offerings.

    Bard tolds Decoding the New Economy last week how social media and Big Data are radically changing how organisations respond to the needs of their clients.

    “I’ve been in the industry for twenty years and I’ve never been excited as I am now,” Bard says. “The real transformational things that’s happening now are these revolutions – the social revolution, the mobile revolution, the connected revolution.”

    The philosophy of customer service

    “What they’re really driving is this idea that customer service is no longer a department, it’s a philosophy.”

    “It’s a philosophy that has to permeate throughout the organisation. Everybody in the company has a role in support. It’s not just about a call centre or a contact centre or even an engagement center which is what these things are called today.”

    “I really don’t like the word ‘centre’ because I really fundamentally believe that everbody in that company has to interact with customers, has to engage and has to the information – no matter they are – about that customer to provide context.”

    Abolishing the service visit

    With the Internet of Things, Bard sees GE’s social media connected jet engine as illustrating the future of customer service where smart machines improve customer service.

    “They’re going to capture more data in one year than in their entire 96 year history prior,” says Bard. “With that data they’ll be able to analyse and do things on behalf of that product or service that’ll reduce the number of issues.”

    “Because the best service of all is one that doesn’t have to happen.”

    In this respect, Bard is endorsing the views of his college Peter Coffee who told Decoding the New Economy last year that the internet of machines may well abolish the service visit.

    “Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

    “If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those products long before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

    For Alex Bard, the customer service evolution has followed his own entrepreneurial career having evolved from being personal computer based in the 1990s to today’s industry that relies on cloud computing, big data and social media technologies.

    As these technologies roll out across industry, businesses who adopt the customer service philosophy Bard describes are much more likely to adapt to the disruptions we’re seeing across the economy. Changing corporate cultures is one of the great tasks ahead for modern executives.

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  • Solving intractable problems

    Solving intractable problems

    Developing counter terrorism strategies is an unlikely path to founding a business that deals in organisational change, the latest Decoding The New Economy video covers exactly this in an interview with David Snowden.

    Snowden is the Chief Scientific Officer and founder of UK based consulting network Cognitive Edge that assists organisations with change and solving ‘intractable problems’.

    A failing Snowden sees with the way most businesses approach organisational change and problem solving is “the case based approach that dominates most of society.”

    “The idea is you find what other companies have done and you imitate it.” Snowden explains; “apart from the fact you can’t imitate the context, no company has succeeded other by imitating other people – they succeed by doing things differently.

    “We take what we know about how the human brain works and we help people work those problems out.”

    Safe to fail experiments

    In approaching ‘intractable problems’, Snowden believes there are two ways to approach them; one is to set up ‘safe to fail’ experiments where smaller experiments are run in parallel within the organisation to see what innovative solutions arise.

    The other approach involves using Snowden’s software based approach where staff or customers’ views are captured in real time to create a crowdsourced view of problems and their possible solutions.

    “You can’t afford, for example, in market research to spend three months commissioning something, two months gathering the data and one month interpreting it.”

    “If we create a sensor network of your customer we can give you data in real time.”

    Consumers and terrorists

    Dealing with real time data in public security are the origins of Cognitive Edge; “we started in counter terrorism where you have to deal with weak signal detection, you need fast real time feedback loops and you need to intervene very quickly.”

    “There’s no difference between a terrorist, a customer, a citizen and an employee,” says Snowden. “They all represent the same problem which is how the hell does a large authority make sense of fragmented data.”

    Developing human sensor networks

    Snowden sees ‘human sensor networks’ where groups contribute their stories to create a narrative around a topic, as being one of the strongest intelligence and communications channels.

    “Big data can tell us where you travelled, a narrative approach can tell why you travelled. If something goes wrong, I can also use that network to communicate.”

    One project Snowden is looking at brings these concepts together to create new communication channels at airports, an idea that came to him after being stuck for two days at Toronto airport in a snowstorm, “frequent fliers have smartphones, they can be activated by the airlines and used as a communication mechanism.”

    The interview with David Snowden is one of the most information and concept dense videos that I’ve done to date. It’s worthwhile listening this a few times to understand some of the fascinating fields he and Cognitive Edge are working in.

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  • Has the social media bubble popped?

    Has the social media bubble popped?

    Last week Facebook’s stock soared after the company reported better than expected earnings on its advertising services.

    It seemed that the social media sites had finally cracked the code on how to make money out of their billions of enthusiastic users.

    This week sees a different story as both Twitter and LinkedIn disappointed investors with missed revenues targets in their quarterly earnings reports.

    Twitter’s blues

    For Twitter the market reaction was merciless – the stock price dropped 24% – as a $500 million loss in it’s first quarter of trading on the stock market is not a good look.

    In Twitter’s defense, all of that loss was due to the cost of acquisitions being booked by the company. In 2013 the social media site spent over $500 million buying out various advertising, curation and and analytics services.

    The question now for Twitter is whether they can weld together a profitable platform from the collections of businesses they’ve acquired and start delivering a return to investors.

    A miss for LinkedIn

    LinkedIn has a similar bent towards acquisitions having announced its purchase of data analytics company Bright on the same day as its disappointing results, however the company’s undershooting expectations was because of lower than expected revenues.

    ‘Disappointing’ is an interesting word in the context of LinkedIn as revenues were up 47% over the previous year.

    What possibly should have been more concerning for analysts than the headline revenue number are Linkedin’s soaring costs of doing business – both sales & marketing and product development costs were up 50% year on year – which cut profits by over two thirds.

    The most worrying part of LinkedIn’s earnings miss is the company’s price to earnings ratio. Currently the stock trades at an eye-watering P/E of 1,000 which implies investors are expecting a lot more revenue into the business.

    Over-inflated expectations

    It’s hard to argue that social media stocks aren’t in a bubble with those multiples. Even Facebook trades a hefty one hundred times earnings despite its improved revenues.

    Perhaps the simple fact is we’re expecting too much from social media services; they are good businesses, but maybe they’ll never be the fantastic profit machines that Apple, Google or Microsoft have been.

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