Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Facebook’s advertising struggle

    Facebook’s advertising struggle

    Facebook is further restricting the reach of brands on their social media platform reports industry news site Ad Age.

    It’s not surprising that Facebook is doing this seeing their stock is currently trading at 120 times current earnings and sixty times estimated revenue. The income has to come from somewhere to justify those prices.

    The social media service is quite blunt about it’s objectives in making brands pay more to get their message out on Facebook as Ad Age reports;

    “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

    Facebook’s idea of a meaningful experience though might be very different from its users, who are showing their irritation with the service messing around with their news feed. It remains to be seen just how interested those posting on the site are in clicking on sponsored or promoted posts as opposed to finding updates from those they care about.

    For smaller businesses, Facebook’s moves make it harder to use the service as an effective marketing or engagement platform as it means stumping up substantial amounts of money to get your messages in front of your customers and friends.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out for Facebook and the social media marketing community. It may mean that social advertising is monopolised by big brands while small and local business finds other channels to get their message out.

    One thing is for sure though, the idea that social media would replace the news media is beginning to look shaky as people’s feeds start to be dominated by messages they don’t want.

    The next few years promise to be interesting for everyone in the social media industry, particularly Facebook’s shareholders and advertisers.

    For smaller businesses, it’s clear that Facebook is no longer a cheap marketing platform.

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  • As seen on TV – where are today’s trusted sources

    As seen on TV – where are today’s trusted sources

    In a local shopping centre over the weekend this business was selling massage tables using the fact they’d been mentioned on TV to enhance their reputation.

    Citing an appearance on TV in the hope of improving your credibility is very much a mid-20th Century way of doing things. In the 1960s or 70s an enthusiastic mention from a TV host was the way to get the punters beating a path to your door.

    Today, things aren’t quite the same. TV was on a decline as a trusted medium – despite the successes of talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey – long before the internet arrived. The web bought social media and now buyers can consult their friends and peers before deciding to buy.

    What was interesting about the sign was there was no indication of a social media presence or web page and that in itself showed how old school this business’ advertising was.

    For the business owner, it would have been hard work getting a mention on TV. Space isn’t cheap to buy and getting a mention on a current affairs show requires either the services of an expensive PR agency or many hours of bugging producers and not a small degree of luck.

    Then again, maybe a complete lack of online engagement didn’t matter. The shopping centre I was in would have an average customer age well over forty and, most of the market the business was aiming probably comes from the sizeable retirement village across the road.

    How this business ignores modern communication channels is instructive about the generational change in business and society, particularly on how different age groups find their trusted sources.

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  • Delighting the customer – the new business normal

    Delighting the customer – the new business normal

    Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Reserach, Peter Coffee joined the Decoding The New Economy channel at last week’s Dreamforce conference to discuss the new normal — delighting the customer.

    Coffee’s role at Salesforce is to help the company’s potential clients understand the new normals of business life. “It’s a lot of listening,” he says.

    In describing the new normal, Coffee is in tune with Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff in seeing mobile services as being one of the key parts of how business will look in the near future.

    “The fundamental statement is your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

    “Fundamentally people are mobile centric so we need to rethink our operations.”

    Continuing the social journey

    It’s not just mobile services that are changing the way we do, social media continues to be companies’ weak points in Coffee’s opinion.

    “There’s research that’s come out of places like MIT that shows traditional print and broadcast media are still valuable for creating awareness of your brand but the final step of turning someone from knowing who you are into deciding to do business with you is now made today only when a trusted network confirms it.”

    “People don’t make that final step of buying from you until they’ve consulted their trusted advisors.”

    “Another fundamental change that’s happened is that the connectivity of the customer is such that if you have a customer that’s unhappy with you for even five or ten minutes there’s a tweet or a Facebook post or a LinkedIn update just begging to leak out and damage your brand,” says Coffee.

    “The closer you can get to instantaneous resolution to the issue, the better.”

    Internet of machines

    With the internet of machines, the ability to resolve customers’ problems instantaneously becomes more more achievable in Coffee’s opinion.

    “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 productslong before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

    “You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.’”

    “Wow! That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation.”

    Delighting the customers

    All of these mobile, social and internet of things technologies will give businesses the tools to delight their customers and Coffee sees that as the great challenge in the new business normal.

    While many businesses will meet the challenges presented by mobile customers and their connected machines Coffee warns those who don’t are in for a painful time.

    “If you do not have delighted customers you have no market.” States Coffee, “the way that you delight customers is by making sure every interaction with you leaves them happier than they were before.”

    “Traditional silos of sales, service, support and marketing must be dissolved into one new entity which is proactive customer connection.”

    “Companies that neglect to adopt it will discover they have customers who are sensitive to nothing but price,” warns Coffee.

    Paul travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.

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  • News organisations and social media copyright truths

    News organisations and social media copyright truths

    One of the long running scandals of modern journalism is how media organisations have misused social media.

    Haitian photographer Daniel Moran’s victory over Agence France Press and Getty Images is a reminder to journalists and media organisations that when something is posted to social media it doesn’t mean it’s free to use.

    Since the rise of social media sites it’s become common for journalists to grab images or videos from them to illustrate stories. At best, the media organisations have credited the sites they’ve stolen the content to allay copyright concerns.

    The problem is media companies and journalists don’t have the right to do that; users don’t give away their rights when they post to Twitter or Facebook — they grant a license to the company to use those that content as they wish.

    If a photographer, writer, computer programmer or musician wants to give away their work for free then there’s a range of ways they can do it and many are happy to make their efforts available to the community without charge. It just happens posting to a social media site isn’t one of those ways.

    Hopefully journalists and media organisations will learn a lesson from Daniel Moran’s case, social media doesn’t mean open slather.

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  • The Digital Fallacy

    The Digital Fallacy

    Earlier this week Telstra held their 2013 Digital Summit in Melbourne, a curious event featuring  a bunch of US based experts to tell the locals what they should have already known about the changing business landscape.

    The reversion of Australian business to a 1950s colonial cringe is worth a blog post in itself, however more interesting was the assertion that every organisation should appoint a Chief Digital Officer.

    A Chief Digital Officer is an idea based on the flawed fallacy that digital technologies are unique and separate from other business functions.

    The Chief Electricity Officer

    Digital is simply the way business is done these days and has been since the electronic calculator appeared in the 1970s – having a Chief Digital Officer is akin to appointing a Chief Electricity Officer.

    The role of a Chief Digital Officer is an idea usually pushed by social media experts and other fringe digerati that perversely undermines the very roles they are trying to promote.

    By putting “digital” into its own organisational silo, the proponents of a Chief Digital Officer are actually advocating marginalising their own fields. It’s also counterproductive for a business that follows this advice.

    The real challenge for those pushing digital technologies is putting the business case for their particular field and in most cases, such as social media or cloud computing, the argument for adopting them is usually compelling in some part of every organisation, but it shouldn’t be overplayed.

    More than just marketing

    An aspect heavily overplayed in the commentary around the Telstra Digital Summit was the role of social media with most people focusing on branding and marketing.

    If you believe this is the extant of ‘digital business’, then you’re in for a nasty shock as supply chains become increasingly automated, Big Data makes companies smarter and the internet of machines accelerates the business cycle even more. Social media is only a small part of the ‘digital business’ story.

    Over-stating the role of individual technologies is something that’s common when people have books or seminars to spruik – which, funny enough, is exactly what Telstra’s international speakers were doing.

    It’s understandable that an author or speaker will overstate the benefits of their project, but it doesn’t mean that you should fall for the fallacies in their arguments.

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