Tag: social media

Password blues

Sharing passwords is like giving away the keys to your car, be careful.

“Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

Scam 2.0

We’re about to see a new wave of business scams

Invoice scams are as old as business itself, no doubt opportunistic cavemen tried to scam other hunters over made up debts and Phoenician traders had to deal with suppliers claiming they’d delivered an extra few hundred Shekels of chickpeas.

Today we see these scams in all forms – imaginary invoices for web registrations, directory inclusions and local listings are just a few we’ve seen. As the web evolves, we’re seeing a new breed of tricks developing.

Online scams can range from things like letters from deposed African presidents promising riches through to aggressive sales folk promising services they can’t deliver. The latter are part of the new breed.

In 2009 Oakland’s East Bay Express alleged the review site Yelp’s sales teams were threatening business with bad reviews if they didn’t pay an advertiser fee. Four years later businesses are claiming this is still happening.

Regardless of the truth of these allegations with Yelp these distatesful sales tactics from online companies are becoming more widespread.

As social media services investors start demanding revenue to back their businesses and group buying sites reach the limits of their growth the sales teams of these organisations are desperately try to find new ways to meet higher targets.

Small and local businesses are the obvious targets of the sales teams, as the web 2.0 business model has trained consumers into expecting not to pay for online services.

Recently a fitness trainer told me how she was hounded into placing a group buying deal with one of the bigger sites; they convinced her that she should offer an 85% discount with the service taking the remaining 15%.

She provided the service for free.

Naturally the 85% off deal was successful, she was rushed off her feet and found herself working for nothing over the next month. Even had the cheap offer resulted in all the customers coming back, it would have taken her a year to recover her losses.

Clearly she should have known better and investigated how group buying sites work and the strategies for using them effectively, but she was subject to high pressure sales techniques that took advantage of her ignorance.

Many online businesses have been giving services away for free as they try to exploit the Silicon Valley greater fool business model. When the venture capital funds dry up they have to find to new ways of paying for their trendy offices with foosball tables and free organic staff meals.

This means more cold calls to business owners promising “marketing opportunities”, “getting to the top of Google” and “getting positive online reviews”.

Over time these sales calls will morph into fake negative reviews and bills for imaginary services rendered as these businesses attract desperate and unscrupulous operators.

For businesses, this means it’s a time to be on guard by making sure any invoices received are properly checked before they are paid and any sales person’s claims are thoroughly checked out before you agree to go ahead with a service.

If you hear of dodgy dealing like what Yelp has been accused of, then try to get the promises in writing and complain to your state’s fair trading department or complain to business agencies. In Australia, the ACCC is the first point of call.

Has Google peaked?

Does altering a business’ core product destroy trust in a business?

This article originally appeared in Technology Spectator as Google’s Wavering Trust Presumption.

Google revolutionised the Internet when the service appeared just over a decade ago, the search engine’s clean and reliable results saw it quickly capture two thirds of the market from then competitors like Altavista and Yahoo!.

One of the keys to that success was trust – Google’s users had a fair degree of confidence that the service’s results would be an accurate representation of whatever they were looking for on the web.

With the continuing integration of social media services, local search, paid advertising and travel services into those search results, it’s time to ask whether we can continue to trust what Google delivers us.

Google’s attempt to become a social media service is seeing results being skewed with by Google Plus profiles. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan yesterday illustrated how Google+ profiles are changing Google’s search results.

One thing that notable in these searches – and Google’s behaviour in enforcing “real names” on its Plus social media service – is the importance of brands and celebrities.

It’s no coincidence in the example Danny Sullivan shows above that typing “Brit” into a Google search comes up with the instant suggestions of Brittany Spears and British Airways.

More troubling is Google’s foray into travel with the purchase of  travel software company ITA. The travel industry site Tnooz recently looked at how searches for flights is now returning results from Google’s own service before the airlines or other travel websites.

Another of Google’s search strengths was the clean interface. When advertising was introduced, most users accepted this was the cost of a free service. Today a search result on Google is cluttered with Google+ suggestions, local business locations, travel results along with the ubiquitious advertising.

Suddenly Google’s search results aren’t looking so good and when you do find them, you can’t be sure they haven’t been skewed by the search engine’s determination to kill Google, Facebook or the online travel industry.

If it were only search and online advertising that Google was tinkering with, we could excuse this as being an innovative company experimenting with new business models in a developing industry, but a bigger problem lies outside its core business.

The purchase of Motorola Mobility – which is still subject to US government approval – changes the game for Google. Motorola Mobility employs 19,000 staff, increasing Google’s headcount by 60%.

Even if Google has only bought Motorola for the patents, closing down or divesting the operations and laying off nearly twenty thousand staff would be a big enough management distraction but there is real possibility though that Google want to make phones.

Google as a phone manufacturer, their previous attempt with the Nexus One wasn’t a great success, creates the problem of channel conflict with its partners who sell mobile phones with the Android operating system installed.

Right now those partners are having great success selling phones through mobile telcommunications companies who desperately want an alternative to the iPhone given they perceive, quite correctly, that Apple is taking their customers and the associated profits.

Apart from Apple the incumbents of the mobile phone industry are failing as Motorola have given up and are selling themselves to Google while Nokia are desperately seeking salvation in the arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s failure to take advantage of Google’s missteps is also instructive. Microsoft seem to be unable to capitalise on the conflicts in the mobile handset industry with Windows Phone while their competing search engine, Bing, seems to following Google’s cluttered inferface and anti-competitive practices.

With Microsoft largely out of the way with as an innovative competitor, it has fallen on newer business to challenge Google.

In social media we clearly have Facebook and Twitter while in phones Apple is by far the biggest and most profitable opponent, something emphasised by Google giving Android away for free.

The biggest question though is who can replace Google in web search, while there are worthy attempts like DuckDuckGo, Blekko and even Microsoft Bing, it’s difficult to see one of these displacing the dominant player right now.

Which isn’t to say it can’t happen; as we see with the examples of Nokia, Motorola and possibly Microsoft, the speed of change in modern business means empires fall quickly.

For Google, the lack of management focus on their core businesses may well cost them dearly in the next few years if web users stop trusting the company’s search results.

What Rupert did wrong

Listening is the most important thing a new Twitter user can do.

A small step in the evolution of social media happened over the new year when Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter and almost immediately, and predictably, his tweets attracted criticism.

While there’s still a nagging doubt as to whether the @rupertmurdoch account is real, despite the assurances of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, there’s a few lessons other new users can draw from Rupert’s experience.

Shut up and listen

One of the unfortunate things about social media is how everybody assumes their voice has to be heard. It’s a mistake we all make when we first join theses services.

Like social contexts, it’s best to be quiet when you first join until you’ve figured out the protocols, manners and dynamics of the group.

Just stumbling in and blasting your opinions out doesn’t usually work well whether we’re at the pub, mothers’ group, updating Facebook or posting on Twitter. The key is to understand why you are there.

It’s about community

The first word in social media is “social”, these online services are a society and just restricting your circle to a select few isn’t go to give you a great deal of benefit.

Rupert Murdoch’s account is a good example of how many people restrict themselves; at the time of writing he’s following five users. If it really is Rupert Murdoch behind the account, he’s missing some good and relevant stuff.

If the person behind the account is really a new user, then they are probably wondering what all the fuss is about as two of the five accounts they are following haven’t been updated in months.

What’s your objective?

Why are you here is a good question. Have you come to listen to customers, learn from industry leaders, spruik a product, find a job, catch up with the folks or be one of the online hipsters?

All of these and any other zillion objectives are perfectly valid reasons for joining a social media service. So listening and posting in ways that help your objectives makes sense, as does following the right people.

The whole point of using social media services – be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the other hundreds of online networking platforms – is to listen, learn and talk with your peers and the leaders of the areas you’re interested in. Perhaps you’ll even be considered a leader, as Rupert Murdoch certainly is.

Starting by listening and understanding how a social media service works and where it adds value for you will make using the site a far better investment of your time.

Pretty shells and shiny toys

Are we obsessing on the wrong things in technology?

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

“We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” – Eric Shmidt

Newton’s famous quote is one of the things that jumps out on reading the opening of Jeff Jarvis’ Private Parts, is how we live in an era of pretty shells that catch our attention and obsess some of us.

While we play with those pretty shells, we ignore much of what is happening around us. Those glittering social media and cloud computing tools are fun to play with, but what do they really mean?

The winners from the early stages of the industrial revolution were people like Josian Wedgwood and Robert Stephenson who saw how to apply the inventions of the time to create new products and markets, later they were followed by people like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford who developed the industries of the 20th Century.

Right now, we’re making shiny trinkets out of our technology tools, Business Week’s It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley makes this case well and Eric Schmidt’s bubble quotation above comes from that.

We see lots of applications for finding coffee roasters, sharing music files and plugging into the social media platform of the day; all of which are the concerns of middle class white people trying to maintain last century’s consumer society.

Somehow we’re missing the bigger picture, but gee those sea shells are pretty.

Rules

Too many rules can kill your business

Three recent examples of rules from web based organisations.

Example 1

“Your article does not adhere to the following Editorial Guidelines:

Issue 1 (Section 3.f.i.c)
http://EzineArticles.com/editorial-guidelines/guideline/3f#i-c

Issue 2 (Section 3.f.i.a)
http://EzineArticles.com/editorial-guidelines/guideline/3f#i-a

Example 2

Hi,

Please don’t include a URL in the question text. Links should go in question details, preferably labelled.

Quora content team

Example 3

Account suspended. Make sure your listings meet the quality guidelines.

Why rules can be a problem

Rules are necessary in any society though if you’re trying to build a community one sure way of killing it is to welcome new users with a wall of rules and a bunch of “leaders” inflexibly enforcing them.

An interesting thing all three of the above services – Quora, eZineArticles and Google Places – have in common is they need free content from contributors to build their communities and realise their business plans.

It’s one thing to give power hungry moderators and administrators control when you’re in a position of power, but it’s silly when you need people more than they need you.

Quitting our email addiction

What can we do to reduce the size of our electronic inboxes?

This post originally appeared in the Xero Accounting Blog on December 9, 2011.

With 74,000 staff, you’d expect the CEO of French technology company Atos to be buried in email, but Thierry Breton hasn’t sent an electronic mail message for three years.

As the US ABC news service reports, Atos and Breton are implementing a zero email policy for their employees, steering them to use instant messaging and collaboration tools that reduce the need to send attachment heavy messages.

Breton claims only one in ten of the 200 messages his employees receive each day are useful and 18 percent is spam which – given some security companies estimate over 90% of world email traffic is unsolicited messages – shows Atos has a pretty good spam filter.

Email has been one of the main applications of business technology for the last twenty years, so how feasible is it really to move away from the inbox as being the first and last thing you check each day?

Instant Messaging

The ability to send quick messages between computers has been around since they were first networked in the 1950s but consumers and business largely ignored these clunky features until they were made popular in the late 1990s by the web based AOL and MSN Messenger services.

Most business communications platforms like Microsoft Office, Google Apps and  Novell Groupwise have an Instant Messaging (IM) tool built in which can be easily turned on.

None of this is new technology and it’s probably one of the most used business features in the Skype Internet telephone service.

A downside with IMs is they generally demand immediate attention and can distract someone from their work. They also leave detailed logs so don’t for a minute think your rant about a customer or staff member hasn’t been recorded.

Social media

Many of the social media tools have their own built in instant messaging with LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ having their own services with Google’s service offering the Hangouts feature to create impromptu video conferences.

By definition Twitter is an instant messaging service offering both public and private channels. The Yammer platform is a grown up corporate tool that offers all the social media functions for a business environment.

The downside with using social media platforms as mission critical business tools is their reliance on the best efforts of external providers that can raise security and reliability issues.

Wikis

Atos makes specific mention of their company wiki. Simply put, a wiki is a website that can be easily updated by anyone with permission to do so.

It’s possible to lock wikis, restrict access or to undo any changes that aren’t suitable so all the information is controlled and subject to review. These can be run on your own office server or hosted on an outside cloud service.

Wikis are a fantastic tool for building a corporate memory and developing standardised procedures and policies across an organisation.

Collaborative tools

One of the big changes in the modern office is the rise of cloud office software services like Google Docs, Basecamp and – of course –Xero Accounting that allow people to work together on the same files at the same time.

In the past, office software has locked individual documents while one person used them and that aspect alone has probably been responsible for many of the emails spinning around corporate offices.

Another benefit of the new breed of collaborative tools is they make it easy to control documents as all team members are working only one version of a file, meaning there’s no uncertainty of who has the latest version.

External risks

There are some outside risks with some of these services as they are cloud based so Internet access is important and there can be some questions of security and reliability with trusting processes to outside providers.

Email itself is evolving into a cloud based commodity as many businesses move to Gmail or hosted solutions rather than running their own email servers.

If those external risks are a concern, then it is possible to run these services on your own networks although most businesses are comfortable with outsourcing their technology.

Discovery

One of the first things that jumps to mind from a business IT point of view is that moving to a non-email environment reduces the risk of having to provide masses of data in the event of a legal dispute.

Many organisations have been caught out by a “smoking gun” message hidden within the pile of emails sent within an organisation every day.

The reality is that instant messaging, wikis and collaborative tools all leave their own “digital fingerprints” and if anything the non-email platforms may make it harder to hide evidence from a determined investigator.

Outside parties

Atos aren’t banning electronic mail with outside parties though, with a company spokesman quoted saying their goal is focused on internal emails rather than those from outside the company.

This makes sense as email is still a key business communication tool and not using it to talk to suppliers and customers wouldn’t make sense. For most organisations such a ban would make it impossible to send invoices.

Email is a key part of business and probably will continue to be, what we are seeing though is an evolution of how it is used in the workplace as new tools are developed.

The last word goes to Thierry Breton who said when announcing the policy, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives”. He has a point.

How are you managing your business email and would you abolish it if you could?

The online business playground

This article originally appeared as The Business Playground on Smart Company.

Last week, I was lucky to be invited to talk about digital citizenship with school kids and their parents in the Griffith area.

The concept of “digital citizenship” is pretty simple – your behaviour online should be no different from how you’re expected to conduct yourself in the playground or business world.

When talking to some of the parents about the issues their kids face, it stuck me just how seriously most of the concepts like being accountable for your behaviour, safe computing and avoiding bullying are as applicable as much to business as the schoolyard.

Bullying in the workplace is pretty common and – as the tragic case of a young waitress who killed herself after being bullied at a Melbourne café shows – employers are directly responsible if they don’t control it.

While the Melbourne case didn’t have a digital aspect, what employees put up about their co-workers on social media sites or on blogs or in emails can be bullying as well.

Making things worse when social media or the web is involved is that most of the evidence is in writing and difficult to erase.

Safe computing, such as creating strong passwords and not sharing them, is one important part of being safe online.

Just as kids get into trouble by sharing their passwords with their friends, so too do businesses that common login details for their key systems and services.

Some weeks ago there was the story of a Texas waterworks that was hacked because their systems had a simple password.

No doubt the login was kept simple to make things easy for staff and management, just like a 12-year-old sharing their Minecraft or Moshi Monster accounts with their big brother or best friend.

Being accountable for your behaviour is probably something both kids and business people struggle with; just as kids don’t understand that taunting their friends through a Facebook page has real life consequences, many managers and entrepreneurs forget that laws and professional standards apply online as much as they do in any other area.

Of course in business, it’s not just ourselves that can cause problems – our staff can get us in trouble too. Employees need to know that upsetting co-workers, customers, suppliers and competitors is unprofessional and can cost them their jobs.

Having a staff acceptable computer use policy makes it clear employees are responsible for work related comments they make even on their personal accounts outside of working hours is now essential for all enterprises.

In many ways, business is just like being in the playground. It’s usually fun, but when things go wrong it can be painful in many ways.

Just as schools are on the look out for digital trouble among students, watch out for similar pain points among your staff.

Comparing local review and search sites

How do the local search services compare?

With the Australian launch of local search and recommendation site Yelp, it’s worthwhile comparing the different sites to see how well they worked.

The sites work in different ways, some – like Sensis Yellow Pages and True Local – are online directories that search just the title and description of business.

Yelp, Foursquare and Word Of Mouth Online, are socially based and derive their searches on the content and number of community reviews. Their algorithms, the formulas to figure out what customers are looking for, are more complex than the basic online directories.

Most complex of all are the hybrid searches, notably Google Places and Facebook Places, that build local upon their search and social media data.

Each model has it’s own strengths and weaknesses which shows when we do a search. Due to time restrictions we only did two.

Looking for brunch in Neutral Bay, NSW

The first search was using what somebody might be expected to search for on a casual weekend or holiday morning. Neutral Bay and surrounding suburbs have plenty of cafes catering to the brunch crowd so it should be expected to return plenty of hits.

Yelp

search results for neutral bay brunch on yelp

The new contender only found one local result and the rest being on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, including one at Bondi Beach which may as well be in the Upper Amazon to the average Sydney North Shore dweller.

Interestingly, entering neighbouring suburbs changes the first two or three results to that suburb but the subsequent listings are the same remote locations as for the Neutral Bay query. This might indicate popularity with the current Yelp users or may be part of the package merchants get when they pay for a listing.

True Local

a search on true local for brunch in neutral bay

News Limited’s True Local disappointed one cafe in the district was identified and the number one result was in the city.

This poor results are probably due to the word “brunch” not appearing in the local cafes’ descriptions or titles, but this is a serious weakness for True Local, particularly in a district where they dominate the local news media.

Google Places

brunch local search results for google places

Surprisingly, Google Places returned an extremely poor result with no local businesses found.

Again, this is probably due to the failure of business owners to ensure keywords are entered in their business description and it illustrates how Google is allowing an opportunity to pass them by.

Facebook Places

Facebook Places results from Neutral Bay brunch searchNothing. Nyet. Zip. No brunch for you.

Yahoo!7

yahoo local search results

Another poor result that has just scraped information off the web. It shows the weakness of the Yahoo! and Channel Seven joint venture which, like News Limited, is letting opportunities pass.

Bing/NineMSN

Local search results on NineMSN for Neutral Bay Lunch

Probably the most disgraceful of the results, NineMSN returned two cafes for the whole of Sydney, a city of four million people.

The second result entailed, according to Bing’s directions, a 38km drive timed at an optimistic 23 minutes involving $9 in tolls and an illegal u-turn.

NineMSN’s performance shows just how irrelevant Microsoft has become in the online space and their Australian joint venture partner is more interested in selling big integrated campaigns to advertising agencies.

Given NineMSN and Bing are the default browser and search engine on nearly two million computers sold in Australia each year, not having a local business strategy is squandering a massive opportunity.

Citysearch/Sensis

brunch local search on Citysearch for Neutral Bay

Founded by Fairfax, Citysearch could have been a great success combining the assets and readership of Fairfax’s metropolitan and local newspapers coupled with their experienced sales teams selling advertising space and subscriptions. Good management could have done this.

Sadly Fairfax was being run by Professor Fred Hilmer and his army of power suited McKinsey consultants and Citysearch was eventually sold for a pittance to Sensis, who have allowed it to shrivel away as the zero result for our search shows.

Eatability

local search on eatability for neutral bay brunch

Eatability was a genuine surprise, returning no brunch establishments in the area. The only thought is that no cafe in the neighbourhood has the word “brunch” in their keywords. Still a very poor result.

Urbanspoon

local search for brunch at neutral bay on urbanspoon

The web version of Urbanspoon returned the most bizarre result, correctly finding one local cafe but misinterpreting the address as being in Bankstown on the other side of Sydney.

Urbanspoon’s iPhone app returned a far better range of results in surrounding suburbs although it only found one cafe actually in Neutral Bay which wasn’t the one incorrectly found on their web app, which didn’t appear at all.

Word of Mouth Online

word of mouth online local search for brunch in neutral bay

Word Of Mouth Online delivered the best result of the web pages with two of the first three results being relevant. Of the other seven, they met the criteria of being within a 5km radius of the location which in Sydney can be a 12km drive.

The results would have been better with more local establishments but it appears the keyword “brunch” hasn’t been used by many of the WOMO reviewers.

Note: After the review I was contacted by the founder of WOMO, Fiona Adler, it appears some of the reviews have have been updated in the meantime. I’ve changed the results below, but the left the one above as it was correct at the time of the review.

Foursquare

neutral bay local brunch search on four square

Like Yelp, Foursquare relies heavily on users’ contributions and this shows in the flaky, almost useless results for our search terms on a web based search.

Foursquare’s iPhone app was far more efficient, identifying a range of good venues in the area which were ranked according to friends’ recommendations.

Sensis/Yellow Pages

search for brunch on yellow pages for local brunch in neutral bay

Again, “no brunch for you.” It’s almost scandalous that Yellow Pages has no entries at all for “brunch” for an inner Sydney suburb.

Redoing the search

Clearly the term “brunch” is problematic in all the services, so as a check here’s the relevant first page results for other search terms on each of the services;

Service Café Neutral Bay Breakfast Neutral Bay Lunch Neutral Bay
Yelp 7/10 2/10 7/10
True Local 9/30 0/30 0/30
Google Place 10/10 0/10 10/10
Yahoo!7 not relevant
Bing/MSN 3/10 0/10 0/10
Citysearch 6/10 3/6 4/4
Eatability 40/50 8/8 23/31
Urban spoon 3/3 0/0 0/0
foursquare 3/20 1/20 1/20
WOMO 8/10 2/10 5/10
Sensis 7/10 0/10 0/10

As we found with the earlier search, Yelp was somewhat inconsistent and no doubt the social aspects will see it improve as more users come on board, the results are highly dependent on the terms used by reviewers and this will affect the search results.

True Local’s score was surprisingly bad, the search for “cafe” found 12 places but three are long closed. “Breakfast” listed B&B accomodation and “lunch” found outlets in the city and Eastern Suburbs.

Google Places also disappointed on “breakfast”, picking up some B&B establishments along with some city cafes. This is almost certainly due to keywords missing in descriptions.

Yahoo!7 doesn’t get a rating as all it does is scrape other sites and often refers you to other search services. They are just going through the motions.

Microsoft and NineMSN’s service again failed dismally; the “cafe” result was poor, “breakfast” looked for B&Bs and “lunch” amazingly didn’t find a thing in Neutral Bay.

Citysearch’s results for “cafe” found nine places, three of which are long closed which indicates the lack of maintenance their database receives. Encouragingly, Citysearch was one of the best performers for lunch and dinner, albeit only on four and six places found.

Eatability had by far the most impressive number of results, however a large proportion of the places have closed and are not flagged as such. This probably indicates a lack of maintenance by the owners.

WOMO was good and like Yelp their results are highly dependent on the words used by reviewers, so key words could be missed simply because reviewers didn’t use them.

Sensis performed well on “cafes” except that three of the ten listed were closed. The lack of results on “breakfast” and “lunch” is due to no places having those words in their name.

Conclusions

This comparison is not scientific, being based on a narrow search and small sample size, but there’s a few things we can take away from the experiment.

Search is still young

Right now, search is still a crude tool.

From the results, we can see that the keywords used by reviewers and businesses matter. If the public are looking for “brunch” and that isn’t on your cafe’s website and online listings, then you won’t appear.

Over time that will change as the web and search engines get smarter but right now search is still at a basic stage in its development.

You have to be there

Customers are using these tools to find what they need and if a business isn’t listed, then they can’t be found. Setting up a profile and getting some favourable reviews is important.

The business who are being pro-active are the ones who are succeeding.

There’s a lot of opportunity

It’s no surprise that older organisations like Fairfax, Sensis and Microsoft are failing to understand local search. What is suprising is how poorly the newer players like Google and Facebook are doing.

This opens up a lot of opportunity for services like Yelp and Foursquare in adding value to the data already available through services like Google, Facebook and Sensis.

Yelp’s tie up with Sensis makes a lot of sense from the US company’s point of view; they get to ride on Sensis’ sales team, maybe some licensing fees and – most importantly – they can access the richest, albeit not always accurate, database of Australian businesses.

For small, local business there’s a lot of opportunity as well. By getting online and registered on these services, it’s possible to become more visible and improve your competitive position.

The market’s young and there’s a lot of potential for disruptive players. It will be interesting to see how incumbents deal with the threat.

Tony Delroy’s Nightlife: Our digital reputation

How important is our online footprint?

December’s Tony Delroy’s Nightlife looked at the risks of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Along with being a great way to communicate with family, friends and colleagues using online services can have some unexpected effects.

Program podcast

A recording of the program is available from the ABC’s Tony Delroy’s Nightlife webpage. You can listen to it through the site or download it and listen to it as a podcast.

Topics covered

Tony and Paul covered a range of topics including the following questions;

  • Are we living in the social media age?
  • What is social media is?
  • Why people use social media?
  • How some folk have come unstuck using social websites?
  • Can doing the wrong thing hurt your reputation or career?
  • What the risks are during the christmas party season?
  • Are there too many social media services?
  • How businesses can really use them?
  • Where will these services go next?

Listeners’ questions

We had a great range of questions and comments from listeners and those we promised to get back to included how to shut down your Facebook account and the link to report abuse on the service.

Reporting Facebook abuse

If you’re being harassed on Facebook, you can report misuse at Facebook’s Help Centre. Their page includes instructions on dobbing in underage users, blocking irritating people and how to use their privacy settings.

Deleting a Facebook profile

Leaving Facebook is not easy, so on the Netsmarts website we have the detailed instructions on deleting your Facebook account.

Note with these instructions that you need to disable any applications you may have installed on Facebook before deleting the account. When you go to the Applications page you may be shocked at how many things are connecting to your page.

Do we have too many social media services?

Tony asked if we have too many social media platforms.

This is a topic we’ve covered previously on the website and while there’s no doubt many of the services around today won’t survive, some will become increasingly become important.

Next Nightlife tech program

Our next program will be on February 9 next year. We will probably have some spots over the summer break and we’ll let newsletter subscribers know about them as soon as we do.

Facebook timelines and the long tail

Can the Internet’s long tail work for small business?

The Financial Times’ Tech Hub blog reports how Facebook’s Timeline function is driving views to old newspaper articles to unexpected stories.

On one level, this is a vindication of Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory of the value of older inventory; that older assets and data become more valuable in an age of unlimited choice.

The question remains though just have valuable old news really is, does the digital equivalent of fish and chip wrapping really have any intrinsic value.

It will probably turn out that information consumers will pay for unique, timely content while leaving the lolcats and funny videos to ad supported content farms.

The long tail model is the digital equivalent of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods business model, just as a big supermarket only makes pennies from each can of baked beans or milk they sell, they make big profits due to the volume they move.

As business writer Seth Godin has put it, the long tail is good for organisations that own big warehouses, and newspapers have the news equivalent of that.

For small businesses, the long tail is not where we need to be, our economics mean margin, not volume.

Reaching connected communites

How do associations and clubs make sure they are visible on the web.

As our homes and communities become more connected, people are expecting to find all their information online. How do associations and clubs make sure they are visible on the web.

This is the transcript of the opening keynote to the Australian Seniors Computer Clubs Association’s 2011 conference. The accompanying slideshow is available on Slideshare.

Reaching Connected Communities

Thank you very much for the kind introduction and the opportunity to open Australian Seniors Computer Clubs Association’s 2011 conference.

We’re in a time of history where all of us have the planet’s information at our fingertips and the ability to broadcast our own views and beliefs to the world.

Increasingly our roles as productive members of society are determined by our access to that information and our ability to use it.

Seniors computer clubs have a critical role in ensuring older generations have the opportunity to contribute to the connected society of the 21st Century.

The problem for clubs is that all of us struggle to be heard through the noise of the online world. This morning we’ll have a look at what tools computer clubs can use to stake their claim on the Internet and be found on the web.

It isn’t just clubs affected by this, many of the traditional models of media and business are struggling with these changes and this presents opportunities for computer clubs and community organisations.

Underlying the use of these tools there are the principles that I call the four C’s –community, collaboration, conversations and communications.

Communications

Of the four, communications is the most traditional area. We need to be talking to those who need our assistance.

We have to be telling people how we can help them, what our services are and of course when and where the clubs meet.

In a traditional way, we advertised, or had articles put into the local papers and other publications. These channels are evolving in the digital era and are important to clubs as the people you want to reach out to are those who aren’t using the web effectively.

We also have newer communications platforms in local search, mobile apps and social media.

All of these channels complement each other and allow us to post relevant and timely messages that keep members and the public up to date with key issues.

With search engines and social media now the main ways that people research and find information, it is more important than ever that clubs have a legitimate online presence.

Communications isn’t just about getting the message across, it’s also about working together and many of the cloud and social media tools like Google+, GoToWebinar and Webex allow us to have conversations with the housebound and dispersed groups.

Conversations

Traditional broadcast methods of communicating do not encourage conversations. If you want to have your voice heard in the local paper you have to write a letter to the editor which may take weeks to be published, if at all.

In reality there was no conversation. The owner of the printing press or broadcasting licence controlled the message and who was allowed in the discussion.

Today’s online tools today allow us to talk to our audience. This is a great advantage for community and volunteer groups.

This is something that big companies and governments, with respect to the minister, struggle with and it is where computer clubs and other community organisations will increasingly carry out an important role.

Collaboration

One of the traditional problems with volunteer groups is that much of the work fell on one or two individuals. The cloud computing tools of today mean groups can collaborate far better and take the load off key members.

Tools like Google Docs, Dropbox and WordPress mean that the load can be shared among a group and no longer has to rely on one person to update the website or complete meeting minutes.

These cloud computing tools allow clubs to work together better internally, improve efficiency and engage more effectively with their communities.

Community

The most important part of clubs is communities.

One of the problems we’ve seen in the 20th Century is that the rise of the motor car and broadcast media fragmented our communities.

Online tools, particularly social media, will work to bring communities back together, a process that’s going to accelerate as the era of cheap credit ends and the limitations of government are going to become apparent.

The tools

So what are the tools we can use for our clubs. I’m going to run through some basic ones. This is by no means a definitive list and you may find alternative tools that suit your organisation’s needs better.

These are listed on my website and at the end of my presentation I’ll give the web addresses to this presentation online so you don’t have to write down the scripts.

We’ll look at social media platforms, web publishing services and local search. First let’s look at the collaboration tools that help clubs deliver a better message to the community.

Google Apps

Google Apps, which is free for organisations with less than ten users, is a really handy service that offers basic word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software.

Its great strength is the ability to share those documents, spreadsheets and presentation with other users who can all work on them at the same time.

Google Docs also has a form feature which allows you to setup quick and ready surveys, feedback and booking forms.

Other similar tools are Zoho and Office365 which both offer collaboration and sharing features.

Dropbox

Dropbox, and its competitors Box.net and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, are great tools for sharing files between computers and collaborative teams.

These services allow you to create folders on an Internet service that you can then securely share with other people. It makes working on projects very easy and eliminates the shuffle of email attachments around groups.

If you are using these tools you don’t need to be converted about them.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the sanity saviour of small businesses and community organisations wanting to get newsletters out.

Managing a mailing list is hard work and these services take the hard work out of them as well as make sure your organisation complies with the spam act.

The service offers templates and sophisticated management tools so you can see who is opening your newsletters and what links they are clicking.

Survey Monkey

Survey monkey helps organisations keep in touch with their members and understand their needs. It’s a great tool for measuring customer satisfaction and feedback.

Google Apps has a more basic survey function built into it as well.

Both are excellent ways of keeping your membership in the loop when it comes to agreeing on new ideas.

Local Search

Local search is changing the way we do business.

Consumers using local as they abandon phone directories and classified ads as the net is a quicker more effective way of searching.

These local search results not only appear at the top of the page but they also feed into the popular social media services.

All organisations, local or otherwise should be listing on these not just to improve their search results but to also appear on other services and on devices like GPS systems.

If you have a relative or friend running a business I’d urge them to list on all of these services as this is an area that is seriously changing the business landscape.

Google Places

It is essential to be listed on Google Places as this will appear at the top of a local search and feeds into other social media and services like street directories and GPS navigators.

Ensure you fill in as many fields as possible, especially the times and days you are open and contact details.

Use the custom fields to improve your keywords and give a richer description of who you are.

You can also upload photos and videos which will improve your search results along with give visitors more information about what you do.

True Local

News Limited’s answer to Google Local ties into News’ local newspaper network.

True Local charges for some functions that are free in Google Places and offers additional free services like the ability to upload Word and PDF documents.

Sensis

Sensis is digital roadkill, the most common complaint with the print edition now is that it’s too small to read and the phone book doesn’t make a good monitor stand anymore.

However, Sensis’ free listing is important as it feeds into NineMSN’s search which is the default on Windows computers.

You’ll also receive a free listing in the printed Yellow Pages for what it’s worth, which to be fair is probably where the most digitally challenged folk will find you.

Social Media

In recent years we’ve been lead to believe that social media is something bigger than the industrial revolution that will cure various tropical diseases, rescue broken business models and make a cup of tea for you in the morning.

The reality is social media is changing the way communities and markets communicate. It’s the 21st Century’s town square or village tavern.

Social media services are great for driving traffic to your site and excellent for listening to trends, monitoring news and talking to your community. They are also the greatest driver for people getting online.

Facebook

Contrary to stereotypes, the fastest growing group among Facebook’s 800 million users are seniors.

This is the biggest opportunity for clubs as the late adopters – the sceptics who’ve resisted going online are now doing so, if only to talk to their grandkids.

There’s a view that Facebook, and most other social media services, are for teenagers putting up pictures of cats and talking about what they did last weekend. That’s wrong on many levels as the service cuts across all demographics and groups.

Facebook Pages

Like a Google Places page, a Facebook Page is free and vital to clubs and businesses. If you have relatives running a business, they should also sign up for a free site.

Increasingly this is where the public goes to online and we have to be there. You can also add events and publicise them through these pages. Your community can contribute and share to your page.

Get 25 members to like your page and you can claim the full name as well.

Google+

Like Facebook, Google+ has a free pages function for community groups and pages. However it remains to be seen how much traction Google+ will get as the service develops.

Google itself seems to be confused about what Google+ actually is, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, calls it an identity service rather than a social media platform. This confusion of what Google Plus actually is doesn’t fill me with optimism on the service’s future.

Apart from the social aspect, Google+ has some interesting collaboration tools such as Hangouts, that allow ten people to work together. If you have a webcam installed, and most new systems come with one, you can set up a group for training or collaboration.

Along with Google+ there are other webinar programs such as GoToWebinar or Webex and Skype’s conferencing feature does a very job at this as well.

Twitter

As a conversational and listening tool Twitter is excellent, although it has been largely mis-sold by the social media business community as a marketing and PR tool.

Twitter allows you to be ahead of the news cycle as most journalists use it to find stories. My own use of Twitter is as a news source.

It’s a good way of keeping up to date on what is happening in communities and with connecting with individual journalists and opinion makers.

Own your platform

The website is your site and your property. Overlooked the dangers of not owning the space you are publishing on.

Websites have become easier to use and build. It you’re using a service like Blogger or WordPress you can get a site running for as little as seven dollars a year and you can be delegating access to various members of the group.

Your website is the centre of your online presence and your home base in the digital economy.

Blogger

Blogger – Google’s free blogging service – is a great tool for getting a website running.

Easy to use, with dozens of templates and plugins for services like e-commerce, newsletters, social media and events it’s an effective and quick way to get a website running.

You can also use your own business domain name for free. Which means you can get online for under $50 a year.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular web content management system. Offering a vast number of templates and plug ins with the advantage of a big community of developers to support the product.

The software also allows an easy upgrade path to other services like Drupal.

Not business as usual

This is not business as usual.

Many of our business and political users are locked into 1980s ideologies and business models that are rapidly being challenged.

In the media we have a whole generation of journalists who are seeing their careers being twisted out of shape by forces they don’t recognise, something that has already happened to the record industry that thought it could use the old business model of developing new technologies that would extend their playlists in the way the LP had in the 1970s and CD in the 1980s.

We see this in the consumer goods industries where old business models are being challenged.

Earlier this year Bernie Brooks, the chief executive of Myer, signed a deal with one of China’s biggest contract manufacturers to make Myer’s homebrand clothes.

The problem with this is it’s the 1980s model. Today consumers can research these things and they will quickly figure out that Myer’s $200 branded shoes are made in the same factory and little different from those you can by for $50 at Target or Lowes.

This mindset illustrates the problems of established businesses and it’s no problem that Coles and Harvey Norman are campaiging to obstruct online shopping in an environment where the informed consumer is able to circumvent the old distribution and retail models.

In many ways these are modern equivalents of the stagecoach operators and it’s no co-incidence that a hundred years ago this year that Cobb & Co went broke. This is risk that any business runs when it is unfortunate to have managers who ignore trends.

Addressing the digital divide

Seniors computer clubs have an important part in today’s society.

The real digital divide is not across age, it is not between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”, the real divide is between those who are prepared to understand and use these online tools and those who won’t.

Those who won’t are going to be increasingly isolated from a world that is going online. At a time where we’re seeing the NBN rolled out, the launch of 4G networks and increasing use of the web by business and government agencies it’s going to be essential to have some knowledge of the online world and the tools to use it.

Being on the wrong side of the divide will make it increasingly hard to access services and information.

The role of groups like the local seniors’ computer group is to help people remain valued and productive members of our community in today’s connected society.

Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas this morning on how to carry out the important role you have in this decade of great change.