Decoding the new economy

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.

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

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

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

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

Nothing. Nyet. Zip. No brunch for you.

Yahoo!7

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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Shut up and listen

It’s about community

What’s your objective?

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Why rules can be a problem

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Instant Messaging

Social media

Wikis

Collaborative tools

External risks

Discovery

Outside parties

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Looking for brunch in Neutral Bay, NSW

Yelp

True Local

Google Places

Facebook Places

Yahoo!7

Bing/NineMSN

Citysearch/Sensis

Eatability

Urbanspoon

Word of Mouth Online

Foursquare

Sensis/Yellow Pages

Redoing the search

Conclusions

Search is still young

You have to be there

There’s a lot of opportunity

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