Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Ending the era of the computer password

    Ending the era of the computer password

    Earlier this year, Wired Magazine writer Mat Honan had his entire digital identity stolen from him when hackers cracked his email password and then systemically took over all of his cloud and social media accounts.

    Matt writes of his experience on Wired and proposes it’s time to kill the password.

    The problem with Mat’s proposal is that he doesn’t suggest an alternative.

    The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet. And no one has figured out what will take its place.

    Every alternative authentication method to passwords has flaws just as serious, if not worse. Many are plainly impractical.

    All of them, including passwords, have the common weakness that those holding the information can’t be trusted either – one of the greatest ways for passwords to get into the wild is when incompetents like Sony give them away.

    Security is evolving, in the meantime we need to keep in mind some basic rules.

    • Use different passwords for different accounts
    • Only access accounts from trusted and up-to-date computers
    • Create strong passwords for accounts that matter, like online banking and email
    • Strong passwords are multiword phrases
    • Use two-factor authentication if its available
    • Don’t link unnecessary social media and cloud accounts together
    • Be very careful

    We should also remember that a skilled, motivated hacker will probably break into your account regardless of your computer security. In this respect it’s no different to the physical world where a determined criminal will get you regardless of the locks and alarms on your house.

    It’s also important to remember that security is more than just evil hackers; data can be damaged or given away by a whole range of means and people breaking into systems is only one risk of many.

    Computer security is an evolving field and while it might be premature to declare the password dead, we’re going to see big changes as we try to lock down our valuable digital assets.

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  • Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    Listener’s questions – ABC Nightlife computers

    As a follow up to last night’s ABC Nightlife computer spot where we looked at who owns our online data, there were a few questions which we’d get back to listeners on.

    The entire show can be listened to online through the ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy website and includes some of the issues we’d get back to listeners on, but first an apology.

    Bruce Willis never sued Apple

    One of the callers Mark mentioned the story of Bruce Willis suing Apple over ownership of iTunes tracks.

    It turns out this never happened as Charles Arthur of the Guardian explains.

    While Charles can be a cranky bugger, he’s right in this case that the media didn’t a very poor job in regurgitating an untrue story without ever checking its veracity. Luckily it’s not one that I cited in the program.

    Protecting your Twitter Account

    One of the topics we discussed was the threat of accounts being hijacked and Twitter is one service that is constantly being compromised because of poor policies. An important part of protecting a Twitter account from being taken over is to make sure an extra level of authentication is used by clicking the “Password Reset” option in the Twitter Account settings.

    Recording online

    Des asked about recording his own message for an audio Christmas card to his friends and relatives.

    On Windows computers, Sound Recorder is the long standing built-in app while on the Mac, Garage Band is the built in application.

    There is a free third party application available for both PCs and Macs called Audacity which also allows you to record and edit on your system.

    US customer service

    One interesting thing about the conversation was how many callers criticised the “US mentality” of providing lousy service. This probably isn’t true as most American businesses provide some of the best customer service in the world.

    The lousy service from online companies is more a function of the computer engineering and venture capital background of the entrepreneurs setting up cloud computing and social media services, while the majority of these companies are from the US it wouldn’t be fair to brand this as being an American cultural issue.

    Our next Nightlife spot is on December 13 at 10pm and we’ll be looking at Windows 8 and what type of computers should people be considering. Hope you can join us.

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  • Facebook starts driving away brands

    Facebook starts driving away brands

    A few days ago we looked at how giving marketing and communications control to Facebook was a mistake for businesses.

    It seems US entrepreneur Mark Cuban agrees and he’s moving his basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, and the 70 businesses he’s invested in away from Facebook onto other social media channels like Tumblr or even MySpace.

    The final straw for Cuban was Facebook wanting to charge $3,000 to reach a million of the Maverick’s online fans.

    Facebook’s response that the sponsored post program is not just about the service’s revenue, but also to reduce noise and spam has merit

    Last week tech uber-blogger Robert Scoble complained about the noise on social media and many users agree as they find their social media services and email inbox clogged with messages.

    Reducing irrelevant noise is essential for any online service to succeed. No-one likes to spam or be spammed and many startup social media platforms have failed because they’ve killed their brand by spamming users and their contacts.

    In this respect social media is like journalism – it has to be timely, relevant and useful to its users. If it isn’t the readers will leave and the advertisers will soon follow.

    The worry for Facebook’s investors is that the service could be caught between making no money from its massive user base and getting a reputation for irrelevant spam.

    Could it be that Facebook has more in common with newspapers and other “old media” than we thought?

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  • Social media’s free ride comes to an end

    Social media’s free ride comes to an end

    One of the mystifying things about the ways businesses use social media is the willingness of companies – big and small – to give their customer lists away to social media sites.

    The best example of this is Facebook, when your customers like you or comment on a post they are added to the service’s database. Facebook gets to ‘own’ your customers and generally Facebook gets to know your customers better than you do.

    With the arrival of Sponsored Stories on Facebook we see the next step which monetizing their business functions. Now when a business puts a post up on Facebook, it only appears in 15% of their followers’ feeds. To get to the rest of them a business has to buy a sponsored story.

    Not only has Facebook taken ownership of thousands of businesses’ customers, it now charges those business to talk to their own clients.

    Should the business decide not to pay for sponsored stories then they find traffic from Facebook drops off. Some businesses report traffic dropping from 30,000 views a day to 5,000.

    To counter this one website stumped up the money for a sponsored story that advises their Facebook fans to follow them on Twitter and Google+ instead.

    Facebook’s move on this isn’t surprising as they desperately search for revenue streams to justify their huge stockmarket valuation.

    What also isn’t surprising is that the free ride for businesses on social media platforms is over.

    All too often we’ve heard marketing gurus tell us Facebook and other social media services were free advertising channels.

    That view overlooked the time and patience required for executing an effective social media campaign along with the reality that social media services were only free for as long as the investors underwriting the enterprise were prepared to accept losses.

    We understand that advertising on TV, radio or print costs money and now we’re having to accept that social media marketing costs as well.

    How well Facebook goes with sponsored stories remains to be seen, but the message for businesses is clear – the social media free lunch is well and truly over.

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  • Rethinking customer support

    Rethinking customer support

    One of weaknesses in most organisations is getting customer service right, good support takes time which costs money and leads many big and small companies  to scrimp on support to save a few costs.

    In a conversation with BMC Software’s Suhas Kelkar about customer support – Remedy, one of the biggest helpdesk software packages is a BMC product – the discussion turned to how the process has changed in recent years.

    Not too long ago we reached for manuals, but those vanished as CDs and then downloads became common. Then we’d call the manufacturer’s helpline or our unfortunate store who sold us the item.

    Today we Google a problem to see if we can find a quick solution and if that fails we reach out to our social networks by posting the question on Twitter or Facebook. We may even post the problem to a support forum to see if anyone has an answer.

    Only if can’t find the solution anywhere else do we call the support line, for most of us it is the last resort.

    In some ways this is a success for corporate cost cutting as most of us call a “helpline” only in desperation as we’ve trained to expect long waits, confusing menus and poorly trained operators.

    That model developed in the 1980s – in order to pay rockstar salaries to executives it was necessary to cut staff wages and training costs with after sales support often being the first business area to suffer cuts.

    Eventually this started to backfire and the Dell Hell saga as one of the leading examples where the computer manufacturer’s lousy support became industry legend. It’s fair to argue that Dell has never quite recovered from the damage the period of poorly outsourced support did to their brand.

    To repair the damage to their brand, Dell adopted a crowdsourced support model where company forums were available for customers to ask about problems with the hope other customers could answer before expensive staff became involved. Eventually other companies adopted this system.

    Social media has created a doubled-edged sword for businesses, it’s easier for people to ask their friends for help but it also increases the risk of brand damage if online posts aren’t monitored and responded to.

    All of this is forcing a rethink of how customer support works. For businesses big and small, social media and crowdsourcing tools are changing the way we talk to customers and how they can talk about us.

    The big data push is also changing customer support as businesses now have the computing power available to mine knowledge bases, issue registers and call logs to identify market trends and weaknesses in their products or sales teams.

    For business owners and managers stuck in the 1980s ways of customer support, they are in for a wretched time over the next few years.

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