Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • You’re doing it wrong

    You’re doing it wrong

    Earlier this week Smartcompany released the results of their 2012 business technology survey. One of the things that stood out was less than 30% of businesses are happy with their online results.

    Almost certainly this is because most businesses diving into social media are doing it for marketing or advertising reasons – so they expect to make sales shortly after they start posting updates.

    While social media can be a good marketing tool, it’s almost always time intensive and often it doesn’t work at all.

    For most businesses social media is much more useful as a market intelligence tool or a communications channel.

    Talking to your customers and helping them with their problems is probably the thing social media does best.

    While it can be argued that good customer support is the best way to build a brand and market a business, that’s a major change in thinking for many organisations.

    If you think social media is all about marketing – or customer support isn’t about your business brand – then you’re doing it wrong.

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  • Eroding business silos

    Eroding business silos

    During our ABC radio discussion on politics and social media with Jeff Jarvis, we inevitably came around to the issue of sharing information.

    We’ve covered the risks of personal sharing extensively and Jeff’s view is that our perceptions of privacy are evolving as we explore what is acceptable or tolerable in an information rich world.

    Overlooked in this discussion is just how important sharing is for businesses – particularly in breaking down silos within an organisation.

    As organisations grow, silos develop as various groups or departments grow to address specific functions. It’s a natural process.

    However silos can damage businesses as valuable business knowledge is kept within the group rather than shared with the entire organisation.

    This is the opportunity we see now in the various cloud computing, social media and big data tools that have developed to help people, gather, curate and share information.

    Today there is no excuse for critical customer information sitting in the call centre logs not being available to marketing, sales or management teams. That is just one example of thousands.

    Over time we’ll see businesses owners and managers develop the skills and tools to use data more effectively. This is already happening as many IT people move from Information Technology to Knowledge Management.

    Business silos won’t ever be fully eliminated; in many ways they are necessary as you can’t expect the company accountant to know everything the customer service or sales staff do.

    Those businesses who are successful will be those who overcome internal politics and resist the managerial urge to build little empires, information is too important to be hoarded by middle management princelings.

    In the 19th Century power came in the form of steam engines, today it comes in knowledge. How well are you harnessing the power in your business?

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  • Join Facebook, get expelled

    Join Facebook, get expelled

    Facebook is problematic for schools. On one hand it’s a great tools for kids to connect with their peers and relatives while it also can amplify problems for children who don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with online issues.

    A common aspect of Facebook and many of the other social media services is that the minimum age for sign ups is thirteen years old and the consensus among online safety experts is children younger than that shouldn’t be encouraged to break the rules.

    Given the issues involved with younger children using Facebook it’s not surprising that teachers and school principals try to discourage younger children from signing up.

    One Queensland school principal has now ordered that any of her students breaching Facebook’s terms by signing up when under 13 will be expelled.

    That’s pretty draconian although one can sympathise with the teachers, particularly given many parents allow children to sign up despite knowing they are breaking Facebook’s terms.

    How the parents have reacted is interesting too, with online safety expert Susan McLean saying “”You could not print the response to the principal that some of the mothers wrote on Facebook”. None of this is surprising as some see their rights, and those of their children, as being paramount.

    Facebook and other social media services are tough for parents as younger kids see their old siblings online and want to be there too. Given many teenagers build their social lives around the service, you can understand the pressure children put on mum and dad to sign them up.

    As kids are going to eventually sign up to Facebook, and are probably already on services like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin, they are going to have to deal with the issues all of us encounter online. So at least if parents are supervising usage, harm can be limited.

    One area that seems to be misunderstood is why Facebook has a “no under 13s” policy. It isn’t, as child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes, because Facebook care about emotionally immature children, it is due to the US COPPA law.

    COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act – was passed in the late 1990s to prevent inappropriate data being collected on minors. For US based social media services it’s easier to exclude children rather than set up systems that comply with the law.

    There’s many good reasons why children should be allowed to use online services, but respecting the terms of conditions of these sites is important too.

    While expelling children from school may be taking things too far, it’s not good to be encouraging twelve year old kids to lie about their ages – they’ll be doing that soon enough in their late teens.

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  • ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

    ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

    Politicians around the world have discovered social media and the web. Australia’s political parties are gearing up to copy Barak Obama’s 2008 online campaigns.

    Paul, Tony Delroy and Jeff Jarvis – Associate Professor and Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York and the author of “Public Parts: How sharing in the digital age improves the way we work and live” discussed how politicians are using social media to get into your inbox.

    The program is available from the ABC Nightlife website. If you’d still like to make comments or ask questions, feel free to have your say below.

    To show what politicians are doing with online media, here are some examples from the Obama 2008 US Presidential campaign.

    • The Art of The Possible – An overview of the Obama – Biden 2008 campaign that defined modern digital political campaigns.
    • One of the most interesting phenomenons in the 2008 Obama campaign was The Great Schlep (language warning). Can you imagine a campaign like this in Australia?
    • Blue State Digital tools were developed for the campaign. These are now being used in Australia.

    Some of the topics we looked at include;

    • Australian politicians don’t seem to have used the web very well. Why is that?
    • What are the ways overseas politicians using social media?
    • How do these integrate with the political parties’ existing databases?
    • Does this fit into the term Big Data we’re hearing about businesses?
    • Doesn’t this all create opportunities for false identities and campaigns?
    • Can you keep the parties off your computer?

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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  • Monetizing the Masses

    Monetizing the Masses

    Monetization is a horrible word.

    The term is necessary though as many online business models are based upon giving away a service or information for free. For those businesses to survive, they have to find a way to “monetize” their user base.

    When Google were floated in 2003, the question was how could a free search engine “monetize” their users. The answer was in advertising and Google today are the world’s biggest advertising platform.

    Facebook’s Inital Public Offering (IPO) announcement raises the same question; how does a company valued 99 times earnings find a way to justify the faith of its investors?

    Advertising is the obvious answer but that seems to flattening out as the company’s revenue growth is slowing in that space. The AdWords solution tends to favour Google more than publishers as most advertising supported websites have found.

    Partnering with application developers like the game publisher Zynga is another solution. Again though this appears to be limited in revenue and Zynga itself seems to be having trouble growing its Facebook user numbers.

    So the question for Facebook is “where will the profits come from?”

    There’s no doubt the data store Facebook has accumulated is valuable but how the social media service can “monetize” this asset without upsetting their users is open to question.

    For Facebook the stakes are high as the comparisons with Friendster and MySpace are already being drawn.

    We’ll see more partnerships like the Facebook Anti-virus marketplace, but these seem to be marginal at best.

    In the next few months things will get interesting as Facebook’s managers and investors strive to find ways to make a buck out of a billion users who don’t pay for the service.

    While “monetization” is an ugly word, it is one that every online company thinks about.

    Every web based businesses will be watching how Facebook manage their monetization strategy closely as the entire industry struggles with the faulty economics of providing services for free.

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