Decoding the new economy

a lousy little sixpence

If you are going to sell yourself online, at least get a good price

A man walks into a bar and shouts “hi, I’m entering Big Phil’s Italian restaurant competition to win a free a pizza in exchange for irritating you fine folk”

Would you drink with that guy? Or for that matter buy a pizza from Big Phil?

Yet thousands of people are prepared to give away their online reputations in return for the chance of winning a pizza, getting a free mobile phone or getting the tab picked up at an expensive restaurant. It’s a great testament to the power of freebies.

It’s a rather quaint that as many bloggers and Twitterarti are prepared to give the last rites to the traditional media channels, some are picking old media’s worst habits of payola and thinly veiled cash, or favours, for comment.

The worst area for this is in the food blogs where a number of successful bloggers now post more reviews of PR driven freebies than another posts as the big, well funded restaurateurs find these blogs are good alternatives to the crowded review pages in the major newspapers.

It isn’t just food bloggers though, we see this in the tech, fashion, travel and even the “mommy bloggers” field as enthusiastic PR agencies convince their clients, correctly, that these sites offer motivated and loyal readerships to their clients.

The really sad thing is that the bloggers don’t need to selling out so totally, not writing about every freebie they’re offered actually increases the value of those they do write about.

Another point of course is few bloggers live on freebies and in the case of the food bloggers, partaking in the town’s best eateries a couple of times a week is probably going to leave you dead, or at least with a severe case of gout, by 40 anyway.

So what’s the problem? If a company wants to give something away to someone who is happy to talk about it, isn’t it a win for everybody?

Maybe, but when you’re regularly taking freebies, the question becomes how many other things you talk about are freebies. More importantly, your reputation is now tied up with the products you are touting. Even worse, your brand becomes tied up with the agendas of public relations agencies in exactly the same way the old mainstream media has been.

There’s a power inbalance here as well as the old media has it’s mastheads to stand behind. Should there be a falling out between the media outlet and the agencies or their clients, it’s rarely the newspaper, radio or TV station that loses if someone makes a fuss.

A travel, tech or restaurant reviewer for a major newspaper or magazine can hide behind their employer’s good name and if a corrupt journalist moves on, their name will be quickly forgotten.

There’s no such luxury for an individual blogger as their site’s credibility is their only asset and their online credibility is entwined with their offline, professional reputation.

This isn’t to say bloggers or anyone else should take freebies, I’d be an unrealistic hypocrite to suggest that. Free samples and meals go with the territory of having an influential outlet or a big, enthusiastic audience.

But perhaps it’s time for people to say “no’ to these online competitions that ask you to spam your friends and followers and for successful bloggers, maybe suggesting to some of these PR agencies that their clients would be better served buying advertising space on the sites rather than offering a free meal to later be dressed up as a review.

Having a big, enthusiastic audience is a fantastic asset and a great achievement to those who’ve built those tribes of followers to their websites and twitter feeds. It’s an asset worth guarding and respecting.

Providing substance

a successful business is more than a facade

Businesses are told they have to tweet, set up a Facebook page and update a blog on a regular basis. But this doesn’t matter if the venture doesn’t deliver what it promises.

A good case of this was a business I recently visited that’s prominent in various social media channels. The owners do everything right by the new media textbook and have been featured in a number of articles for their use of new media tools.

But they have a problem; their product was poor. Thinking I might have caught them on a bad day, I even went back the following week and found it was still disappointing.

It wasn’t so bad I’d complain, but I left feeling I could get better quality and value for many at other places. There simply wasn’t a reason to go back.

As business owners we need to keep focussed on our core product; the coffee in a coffee shop, the sales team at a real estate agency, the shoes in a shoe shop or whatever goods and services it is we actually sell.

If the underlying product doesn’t deliver on your customer’s expectations, then marketing or any other tools won’t save the business.

So by all means play with the new tools and explore the opportunities, but don’t lose sight of the core reason why customers will come to you.

The collapsing barriers to opportunity

The walls preventing us seizing opportunities are falling

Last week I had the privilege of holding a business Internet marketing workshop for 50 people with fellow Smart Company blogger Lara Solomon and Marketing Angels’ Michelle Gamble in Sydney. The day showed just how comprehensively business barriers have fallen as cheap or free online services have giving fast moving companies a huge competitive advantage.

This is true in marketing as Michelle showed in her discussion about the overall branding of the business and Lara in covering the social media tools essential to an organisation seeking to get their message to the world. Tools and techniques that were once only available to the biggest corporations are now available to the small business.

Intellectual property is one of those areas where not too long ago few small businesses bothered to register a trade mark today it’s one of the first things a new start up does. Which was one of the things I discussed in my part of the presentation where I also covered on Smart Company a couple of years ago in The Rules of the Name Game.

The big change though is in capital expenditure — not so long ago the biggest line items on a start ups costs spreadsheet were the servers, desktops and network infrastructure.

Today, those costs have almost disappeared as the founders and early staff use their own computers or the company picks up some cheap notebook or tablets and runs all of these services off the cloud. As long as the devices can handle a modern web browser, everything else is unnecessary cost.

Web hosting and Internet plans too have become far cheaper. With most businesses being able to get a connection and an excellent hosting service for under $200 a month, many can do it for far less than that.

It’s a great time of opportunity for businesses, with an organisation’s web site becoming the cornerstone of their operations and marketing, the barriers to smart people are falling rapidly. It’s time to get your ideas out there.

Thoughts on Media140

How is real time and social media changing politics?

This post was part of the Media 140 Australian Politics of which I was kindly invited as a guest blogger. The focus on the afternoon panel is because this was the specific session I was asked to cover by the organiser, Julie Posetti.

After an election what panelist and political cartoonist First Dog on the Moon
described as “three months of despair” a review from a panel of cartoonists,
photographers and other outliers of the Australian political journalism was always
going to be well received.

First Dog’s comments showed the general despair by the electorate at large towards
a bland performance by both major political parties, particularly in their use of new
media tools.

The rest of the afternoon panel on “alternative views on political news” shared First
Dog’s general attitude, but luckily they made up for that despair with an entertaining
and funny take on the election and pricking some of the pomposity that can surround
the social media communities.

Malcolm Farnsworth (@mfarnsworth) put this best when he described much of
Twitter as “ego, brown nosery and wankery”. Surprisingly this was taken well by the
room.

His point is valid though, we need to keep in mind that one of the attractions of social
media is we can choose our own friends, particularly in Twitter where we can restrict
our social circle to those we like and agree with.

A few of the questions from the floor recognised this as did Julian Morrow
(@moreoj) with a shameless plug for The Chaser’s iPhone App. In an earlier session
Claire Wardell had shown how new media isn’t just Twitter and tools like apps and
clever websites can drive the political discourse just as well as a witty tweet.

Julian also showed how The Chaser crew were ahead of the curve with taking a
failed newspaper empire online in the late 1990s. Although his line about Twitter giving “the monkeys the typewriters” also betrayed a Rupert Murdoch style bitterness towards
new media.

To further move the issue from social media, Peter Bowers (@mpbowers) raised
the issues of photographers’ rights and payments, citing the Hudson River plane
crash as a good example where an agency snapper would have received some
large rights payments for the early photos of the aircraft floating down the river.

Peter moved into another aspect of social media and the perils for photographers
when talking about Parliamentarians taking photos from the floor of the house. In
the Australian Parliament, there are strict rules about the use of images and he had
once been bought before the Privileges Committee for breaching the rules with the
possibility of gaol time for contempt of Parliament.

What this illustrated in Peter’s opinion was how laws haven’t kept up to date with
technology. We could also say it’s another example of how people don’t understand
the real time consequences of seemingly trivial online actions.

As one of the final sessions for the day, the session was good opportunity to liven up the room with some funny, out of the box and thinking that shot down the thought that the day would be a Twitter love-in.

Overall, Media140 was a success in examining how the new online tools are changing
politics and the reporting of it. Having Claire Wardell’s UK perspective and Jeffrey

Bleich’s view from the Obama campaign showed just how far Australia has to go with
these tools.

Probably the biggest message was from the journalist participants – it’s clear many are
uncomfortable with the public being able to work around the gatekeepers and some
are downright scared of the abuse they think they receive from the community.

“It’s all about getting paid” one journalist said. You can’t help but think that was the
same thing bleated by the loom weavers of 200 years ago.

What we saw from the OzPolitics Media140 is a community and society in great
change: The political parties, media and the electorate are working through how these
tools are going to change the way we vote and how our governments work.

The power of delegation

Why organisations need to learn Steve Jobs’ lessons

Randall Stross of The New York Times looked at Steve Jobs’ years in the wilderness running NeXT Computers and concluded the lessons he learned were essential to making Apple the success it is today.

While leading NeXT Jobs obsessed about detail, famously leaving his key customers waiting while he discussed the layout of sprinklers in the landscaped gardens.

On returning to Apple, Stross points out Apple’s management team has been remarkably stable and this stability, borne out of Jobs trusting his key staff to make the right decisions, is one of the reasons for the company’s success.

As we move into an era where information becomes a commodity and the old style of manager guarding their sources of knowledge becomes irrelevant, the trust based organisation is going to replace the command and control models of the past.

This is going to challenge to a lot of managers in private and public organisations. It will be interesting to see how enterprises, government agencies and political parties around the world manage those challenges.

The style of leader raising today is very different from those of the past.

The strange story of the Stuxnet worm

A virus crippling the Iranian nuclear program could affect your business

The tale of the virus infecting Iran’s nuclear program is one of the fascinating stories of the computer world.

Whoever wrote the Stuxnet worm did a spectacular job in bringing together a number of security problems and then using two weak links — unpatched Windows servers and poorly designed programmable logic controller software — to create a mighty mess in the target organisation.

The scary thing with a rootkit like Stuxnet is that once it has got into the system, you can never be sure whether you’ve properly got rid of it.

What’s worse, this program will be writing to the Programmable Logic Controllers the infected computers supervise so plant operators will never know exactly what changes might have carried out on the devices essential to a plant’s operations and safety.

Damaging Iranian nuclear plants

A report on the Make The World A Better Place websites over the weekend indicates the Stuxnet Worm may have damaged the Iranian nuclear reactor program.

The story behind the Suxnet worm is remarkable. It appears this little beast is a sophisticated act of sabotage involving using a number of weaknesses in computer systems as detailed by Computer World in their Stuxnet Worm hits Industrial Systems and is Stuxnet the best Malware Ever articles.

The risk of unpatched systems

One of the things that leaps out is how servers running unpatched systems are an important part of the infection process. The Stuxnet worm partly relies on a security hole that was patched by Microsoft two years ago so obviously the Iranian servers were running an unpatched, older version of Windows.

This is fairly common in the automation industries. I’ve personally seen outdated, unpatched Windows servers running CCTV, security, home automation and dispatch systems. They are in that state because the equipment vendors have supplied the equipment and then failed to maintain them.

These companies deserve real criticism for using off the shelf, commercial software to run mission critical systems that it was never designed to do.

Commercial programs like the various Windows, Mac and other mass market operating systems are designed for general use, they come with a whole range of service and features that industrial control systems don’t need. In fact, the Stuxnet worm uses one of those services, the printer spooler, to give itself control of the system.

Securing industrial systems

These industrial systems require far more basic and secure control programs, a cheap option would be a customised Linux version with all the unnecessary features stripped out. In the case of Siemens, the providers of the PLCs supplied to the Iranian government, it’s disappointing such a big organisation couldn’t build its own software to control these systems.

Business owners, and anyone who has computer controlled equipment in the premises, need to ask some hard questions to their suppliers about how secure supplied computer equipment is in this age of networked services and Internet worms.

Author: Paul Wallbank

Providing substance

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