Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social media

  • Password blues

    Password blues

    “Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

    If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

    Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

    The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

    It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

    Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

    Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

    In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

    When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

    Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

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  • Scam 2.0

    Scam 2.0

    Invoice scams are as old as business itself, no doubt opportunistic cavemen tried to scam other hunters over made up debts and Phoenician traders had to deal with suppliers claiming they’d delivered an extra few hundred Shekels of chickpeas.

    Today we see these scams in all forms – imaginary invoices for web registrations, directory inclusions and local listings are just a few we’ve seen. As the web evolves, we’re seeing a new breed of tricks developing.

    Online scams can range from things like letters from deposed African presidents promising riches through to aggressive sales folk promising services they can’t deliver. The latter are part of the new breed.

    In 2009 Oakland’s East Bay Express alleged the review site Yelp’s sales teams were threatening business with bad reviews if they didn’t pay an advertiser fee. Four years later businesses are claiming this is still happening.

    Regardless of the truth of these allegations with Yelp these distatesful sales tactics from online companies are becoming more widespread.

    As social media services investors start demanding revenue to back their businesses and group buying sites reach the limits of their growth the sales teams of these organisations are desperately try to find new ways to meet higher targets.

    Small and local businesses are the obvious targets of the sales teams, as the web 2.0 business model has trained consumers into expecting not to pay for online services.

    Recently a fitness trainer told me how she was hounded into placing a group buying deal with one of the bigger sites; they convinced her that she should offer an 85% discount with the service taking the remaining 15%.

    She provided the service for free.

    Naturally the 85% off deal was successful, she was rushed off her feet and found herself working for nothing over the next month. Even had the cheap offer resulted in all the customers coming back, it would have taken her a year to recover her losses.

    Clearly she should have known better and investigated how group buying sites work and the strategies for using them effectively, but she was subject to high pressure sales techniques that took advantage of her ignorance.

    Many online businesses have been giving services away for free as they try to exploit the Silicon Valley greater fool business model. When the venture capital funds dry up they have to find to new ways of paying for their trendy offices with foosball tables and free organic staff meals.

    This means more cold calls to business owners promising “marketing opportunities”, “getting to the top of Google” and “getting positive online reviews”.

    Over time these sales calls will morph into fake negative reviews and bills for imaginary services rendered as these businesses attract desperate and unscrupulous operators.

    For businesses, this means it’s a time to be on guard by making sure any invoices received are properly checked before they are paid and any sales person’s claims are thoroughly checked out before you agree to go ahead with a service.

    If you hear of dodgy dealing like what Yelp has been accused of, then try to get the promises in writing and complain to your state’s fair trading department or complain to business agencies. In Australia, the ACCC is the first point of call.

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  • Has Google peaked?

    Has Google peaked?

    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.

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  • What Rupert did wrong

    What Rupert did wrong

    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.

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  • Pretty shells and shiny toys

    Pretty shells and shiny toys

    “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.

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