Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Building business communities

    Building business communities

    Industrial designers and engineers are probably the last thing most of us think of when discussing online communities.

    Last week two very different events illustrated just how successful businesses benefit from building communities around their products and services.

    Over lunch at a nice restaurant overlooking Sydney Harbour Dassault Systemes launched their their latest Solidworks 3D design software where they described the two million members of their global user community as being key competitive advantage in the industrial design market.

    In the business sector, having that ecosystem of users is the key success as shown by businesses ranging from AutoCAD to Photoshop. Almost every industry has some software package that dominates the sector because ‘everyone uses it’.

    Building social media communities

    At the other end of the scale earlier in the day PayPal Australia launched their latest Driving Business Online campaign showcasing online commerce tools for the small to medium business sector.

    One of the companies they profiled was Brisbane fashion company Black Milk Clothing, a Brisbane based business that has grown from a startup to employing 150 staff in four years entirely through its 560,000 strong Facebook community and 655,000 Instagram followers.

    While there’s risks with relying on social media platforms as a primary marketing channel, Black Milk is a good example of what a retail business can do with building an online community.

    Older examples

    None of this is really new, Apple are probably the best example of a tech community with millions of adoring fans prepared to queue around the block for the latest iPhone.

    Microsoft’s continued profitability despite being in a declining market comes from its army of developers, system admins and IT support services who are deeply committed to the company’s products.

    At it’s most basic, every business needs a core of dedicated customers, committed staff and enthusiastic evangelists — with today’s tools companies like Black Milk are able to build a global brand.

    Not every business can build a global brand out of their communities of enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees but the goodwill in those groups are quite possibly the biggest asset any organisation has.

    With today’s online collaborative tools and social media services there’s no excuse for a business not be nurturing and growing their communities.

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  • Valuing Twitter

    Valuing Twitter

    Now microblogging service Twitter has released documents ahead of a stock market float, it’s possible to start looking at the viability and stock market valuation of the company.

    When Facebook’s float was first mooted in early 2011, we looked at how the social media service stacked up against Google a decade earlier. The question was ‘is Facebook worth $50 billion?’

    The stockmarket answer was resounding ‘yes’ despite an initial fall that saw investors face a 50% loss in the early days of Facebook being a public company. Today the stock has a market valuation of $122 billion, with an eye popping price/earnings ratio of 122.

    So how does Twitter stack up at the valuations being discussed? Quite well it appears when we put it against Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

    Company Google Facebook LinkedIn Twitter
    Market Cap 288 123 27 13
    P/E 25 288 901 29

    For Twitter, the real challenge is making money from the service and their latest idea is marketing the service as an essential companion to watching TV.

    The discussion over how Twitter makes money exposes another problem for the service in it has no obvious revenue stream which makes comparing the platform to Facebook or LinkedIn rather problematic.

    Facebook has advertising while LinkedIn has premium subscriber services both of which are problematic.

    Not having an obvious revenue model may not turn out to be a problem – as LinkedIn’s P/E shows – and Twitter’s founders are probably more likely than anyway to be the digital media industry’s David Sarnoff.

    It may be Twitter makes its money from giving advertisers, marketers and others access to the massive stores of data the company is accumulating.

    Whatever way it turns out, Twitter’s going to be the hot IPO news for the tech industry for the rest of the year. At current prices, the investors will be lining up to buy the stock.

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  • The truth is in the data

    The truth is in the data

    Emma LoRusso founder of Sydney based social analytics service Digivizer believes the truth in a company’s data will challenge many managment and marketing beliefs.

    In a somewhat poorly recorded interview as part of the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel, Emma described how analysing social media trends and tying them into an organisation’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform can help improve a business’ marketing and customer satisfaction.

    The Truth is in the data

    “A lot of marketing in the past has not been data driven,” says Emma. “There’s still this gap between people saying ‘this is what we think’, ‘this is what we’ve always done’ and ‘this is what they’ve found’ – we’ll come behind that and say ‘let’s let the data tell the truth.’”

    That data is powerful due to the context Emma believes Digivizer adds, “because we can map people to the social web based on their profiles – who are they, what they talk about, who they are engaged with and what’s important to them.”

    “We let data become the truth and we push back on the hypothesis that might have been unsubstantiated previously in the organisation,” Emma says.

    Fighting the average

    For some organisations, this truth can be challenging. “The ones who resist it are those with a fixed position who have built a career of playing to the averages,” states Emma. “We get massive returns, say 39 to one, whereas they were getting maybe seven to one or twelve to one.”

    “Again, data can be the truth in this story.”

    One advantage of real time social media monitoring is marketers can now track how consumers changing lives unfold are affecting their buying habits and desires as people get married, become single, have children, move houses or just simply change tastes.

    Hearing the consumer

    A key part of modern marketing is letting customers know their voices have been heard, as modern consumers know they have a voice and expect companies to acknowledge what they’re saying.

    Emma sees a lot of lip service has been paid in companies to the ‘single customer view’ where businesses need to know their customers better.

    “I actually think it’s customers that are driving that,” says Emma. “Their expectation is ‘I’ve interacted with you a lot of times, you’re asking me to engage with you digitally and now I expect you to serve me better.’”

    “Now if you plug that data into organisations you can start to offer more meaningful – the right message at the right time.”

    Emma believes that makes customers happier as they now feel they’ve been heard and understood. “That’s the beauty in the data,” she says.

    One of the big challenges facing all organisation is using Big Data to understand their customers better, Emma LoRusso and Digivizer are part of the new wage of businesses and entrepreneurs providing the tools to help managers make better decisions.

    While there’s some risks with paying close attention to customers’ online behaviour – as we saw with the famous Target pregnant girl mailout – the benefits for businesses listening to their clients is obvious. It’s another example of how the slow to adapt businesses will be crushed in the changing economy.

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  • Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

    Privacy’s still beating heart and the social media challenge

    “I’m not a very public person,” twenty-two year old Walter Woodman tells the New Yorker in How A Relationship Dies on Facebook.

    One of the assumptions of the social media industry is that digital natives, those born after 1990, have little if any expectations of privacy. The New Yorker story challenges that idea.

    Much of the New Yorker’s background is taken from the Pew Centre’s May 2013 report Teens, Social Media and Privacy which interviewed 802 US teens and their parents to identify young adults’ attitudes towards privacy.

    As the Pew Centre’s Mary Madden wrote in a follow up post to that report, US teenagers aren’t about to about to abandon Facebook yet but they are concerned about privacy and the work involved in managing an online persona.

    While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much.

    This suggests a far more mature, and complex, understanding of privacy by teenagers than many of the social media boosters assumed when declaring that privacy is irrelevant in the Facebook era.

    Like their parents, teenagers and young adults know there are consequences for sharing too much online which challenges the social media platforms that have built their businesses around users spilling everything about themselves into the big data pot.

    It turns out digital natives are just as conscious of the risks as their parents, although how they handle it may manifest in different ways, and the assumptions of many social media businesses aren’t quite as robust as they appeared not so long ago.

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  • Bringing social networking to life

    Bringing social networking to life

    One of the highlights of the 2013 Australian Microsoft TechEd was a startup panel featuring local startups CoOpRating, Project Tripod and Nubis.

    All three startups are interesting projects and Nubis in particular illustrated how various internet and smartphone technologies which are coming together.

    Nubis is an Augmented Reality platform that projects social media onto the viewer of a smartphone’s camera. By pointing the camera at someone, the idea is a user can bring up details about a person.

    “We’re bringing social networking to life,” says founder Uzi Bar-On.

    As part of their Alphega project, Nubis has teamed with Glass Up, an Italian startup attempting to create a Google Glass competitor, the aim is to create a wearable computer that feeds social media information to the wearer.

    While it’s not clear what the benefits will be of that – or whether Glass Up, Nubis or Alphega will be successful – the project is interesting as it brings together Augmented Reality, geolocation, wearable technologies and social media.

    Over the next few years we’ll be seeing more products like Alphega tying together different technologies and using the Internet of Everything to talk to each other.

    It’s these sort of projects that will show us how our businesses and lives are going to change over the next decade as smart people figure out the ways to mash together these technologies.

    Paul travelled to Microsoft TechEd 2013 courtesy of Microsoft Australia

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