Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: marketing

  • Building business communities

    Building business communities

    Industrial designers and engineers are probably the last thing most of us think of when discussing online communities.

    Last week two very different events illustrated just how successful businesses benefit from building communities around their products and services.

    Over lunch at a nice restaurant overlooking Sydney Harbour Dassault Systemes launched their their latest Solidworks 3D design software where they described the two million members of their global user community as being key competitive advantage in the industrial design market.

    In the business sector, having that ecosystem of users is the key success as shown by businesses ranging from AutoCAD to Photoshop. Almost every industry has some software package that dominates the sector because ‘everyone uses it’.

    Building social media communities

    At the other end of the scale earlier in the day PayPal Australia launched their latest Driving Business Online campaign showcasing online commerce tools for the small to medium business sector.

    One of the companies they profiled was Brisbane fashion company Black Milk Clothing, a Brisbane based business that has grown from a startup to employing 150 staff in four years entirely through its 560,000 strong Facebook community and 655,000 Instagram followers.

    While there’s risks with relying on social media platforms as a primary marketing channel, Black Milk is a good example of what a retail business can do with building an online community.

    Older examples

    None of this is really new, Apple are probably the best example of a tech community with millions of adoring fans prepared to queue around the block for the latest iPhone.

    Microsoft’s continued profitability despite being in a declining market comes from its army of developers, system admins and IT support services who are deeply committed to the company’s products.

    At it’s most basic, every business needs a core of dedicated customers, committed staff and enthusiastic evangelists — with today’s tools companies like Black Milk are able to build a global brand.

    Not every business can build a global brand out of their communities of enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees but the goodwill in those groups are quite possibly the biggest asset any organisation has.

    With today’s online collaborative tools and social media services there’s no excuse for a business not be nurturing and growing their communities.

    Similar posts:

  • Steve Jobs’ golden path

    Steve Jobs’ golden path

    “Today Apple reinvents the smartphone.” Steve Jobs announced at the 2007 Macworld Conference when he showed off the new Apple iPhone.

    As with most of Jobs’ speeches, the iPhone launch was an impressive display combining the man’s talents, vision and technology to rally Apple’s adoring masses.

    Last week the New York Times magazine had an excellent feature on the story behind the landmark launch of the iPhone. It’s worthwhile reading to understand the theatre that goes behind a major tech company’s launch event.

    In the case of the iPhone, a myriad of tricks had to be performed to make sure the still being developed device didn’t fail in Steve Jobs’ hands during the launch – one can be sure the Apple founder wouldn’t have been as relaxed as Bill Gates when a Windows 98 system crashed onstage a decade earlier.

    A key part of Jobs’ presentation was the ‘Golden Path’, a script that would showcase the iPhone’s features while avoiding known problems.

    Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

    Much to the relief of Jobs’ staff, the demonstration worked flawlessly and Jobs’ polished presentation showed why he was one of the most admired, if flawed, business leaders of his generation.

    While most tech CEOs could never dream of emulating Steve Jobs, almost every one has a ‘golden path’ to show off their product in a new light.

    Something we should remember when watching these demonstrations and the press coverage that follows is that most of them are carefully staged theatre and we should hang onto our wallets until well after these devices are on the shop shelves.

    As it turned out, the iPhone was a spectacular success and did re-invent the smartphone industry. Along with being able to deliver a killer presentation, Steve Jobs was also good at driving teams to deliver his vision.

    Steve Jobs image courtesy of Wikimedia.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Understanding the social media whispers

    Understanding the social media whispers

    What do you do when paying customers tell you they would rather your product be different to what you were offering? This is the predicament that faced Jonathan Barouch when he discovered the real market for his Roamz service was in social media business intelligence.

    How Jonathan dealt with this was the classic business pivot, where the original idea of Roamz evolved into Local Measure.

    Originally Roamz was set up to consolidate social services like Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. If you wanted to find a restaurant, bar or hotel in your neighbourhood, Roamz would pick the most relevant reviews from the various services to show you what was in your neighbourhood.

    The idea for Roamz came from when Jonathan was looking for places to take his new baby, jugging several different location services to find local cafes, shops or playground is hard work when you have a little one to deal with.

    A notable feature of Roamz was the use of geotags to determine relevance. Even if the social media user doesn’t mention the business, Roamz would use the attached location information to determine what outlet was being discussed.

    Enter Local Measure

    While Roamz was doing well it wasn’t making money and, in Jonathan’s words, it was a “slower burn, longer term play”. On the other hand businesses were telling him and his sales team that they would pay immediately to use the service to monitor what people were saying about them on social media.

    “People said, ‘hey this is cool, we want to pay for this.” Jonathan said of the decision to pivot Roamz into Local Measure.

    “I want to say it was a really difficult decision but it wasn’t because we had people saying ‘we want to pay you if you continue with this product.’”

    Local Measure is built on the Roamz platform but instead of helping consumers find local venues, the service now gives businesses a tool to monitor what people are saying about them on social media services.

    The difference with the larger social media monitoring tools like Radian6 is Local Measure gives an intimate view of individual posts and users. The idea being a business can directly monitor what people are saying are saying about a store or a product.

    For dispersed companies, particularly franchise chains and service businesses, it gives local managers and franchisees the ability to know what’s happening with their outlet rather than having to rely on a social media team at head office.

    The most immediate benefit of Local Measure is in identifying loyal users and influencers. Managers can see who is tweeting, checking in or updating their status in their store.

    Armed with that intelligence, the local store owner, franchisee or manager can engage with the shop’s most enthusiastic customers.

    Customer service is one of the big undervalued areas of social media and Jonathan believes Local Measure can help businesses improve how they help customers.

    “It makes invisible customers visibile to management,” says Jonathan.

    An example Jonathan gives is of a cinema where the concession’s frozen drink machine wasn’t set currently. While the staff were oblivious to the issue, customers were complaining on various social media channels. Once the theatre manager saw the feedback he was able to quickly fix the problem.

    Employee behaviour online is also an important concern for modern managers, if employees are posting inappropriate material on social media then the risks to a business are substantial.

    “From an operational point perspective we’ve picked up really weird and wonderful things that the business doesn’t know,” says Jonathon. “Staff putting things in the public domain that is really damaging to brands.”

    “We’ve had two or three cases of behaviour that you shudder at. I’ve been presenting and it has popped up and the clients have said ‘delete that, we don’t want that up’ and I say ‘that’s the whole point – it’s out there.’”

    That’s a lesson that Domino’s Pizza learned in the US when staff posted YouTube videos of each other putting toppings up their noses. Once unruly employees post these things, it’s hard work undoing the brand damage and for smaller businesses or franchise outlets the bad publicity could be fatal.

    Local Measure is a good example of a business pivot, it’s also shows how concepts like Big Data, social media and geolocation come together to help businesses.

    Being able to listen to customers also shows how marketing and customer service are merging in an age where the punters are no longer happy to be seen and not heard.

    It’s the business who grab tools like Local Measure who are going to be the success stories of the next decade, the older businesses who ignore the changes in customer service, marketing and communications are going to be a memory.

    Similar posts:

  • Trolls never sleep – Social media and the twenty four hour business

    Trolls never sleep – Social media and the twenty four hour business

    One of the truths of social media is it gives idiots an opportunity to expose themselves for what they are.

    For businesses using social media idiots posting stupid or offensive content on the company’s site or Facebook page can do a lot of damage to their brand and reputation.

    This is the problem Australian airline Qantas faced last week when some fool posted a pornographic image to one of the company’s promotions pages.

    As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the father of an eight year old reported an inappropriate post to the airline after his son found the image while visiting the Qantas Wallabies page. He was allegedly told by the company’s social media staff “there was nothing we can do about it.”

    The father points out correctly that both the airline and Facebook are 24 hour operations so claiming a post that is put up at midnight – one assumes Eastern Australian time – is out of hours seems to be disingenuous.

    Until recently, businesses had given social media responsibilities over to the intern or the youngest person in the office. While organisations like Qantas have moved on from that, they largely leave these tasks with the marketing department.

    While marketing is a valid place for social media responsibility – it’s probably the most obvious area to establish a return on the functions – it leaves organisations vulnerable to out of hours customer service and public relations problems.

    Social media doesn’t knock off at 5pm and spend the evening a bar like the marketing department, it’s on all the time and customers are using it to complain about problems while twits and trolls are gleefully posting things to embarrass businesses.

    For those businesses who do operate on a 24 hour basis, and probably all big corporations, it’s no longer good enough for the social media team to just operate during office hours.

    Smaller businesses have a different problem – most don’t have the resources to keep a 24 hour watch on their Facebook page but the effects of a social media disaster could be proportionally far greater – so they shouldn’t be overlooking regular checks on what people have posted to their business sites.

    What’s happening in social media is part of a broader trend in the global economy that’s been going on for thirty years as the pace of business has accelerated. It’s something that all managers, entrepreneurs and company owners need to understand.

    Similar posts:

  • Innovations customers don’t need

    Innovations customers don’t need

    The news that ESPN is closing down its 3D sports channel is the beginning of the end for an innovation that nobody really wanted.

    In the 1980s, telephone companies rolled out digital services under the name ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Networks – which were expensive and appealed to few businesses, gaving them the nickname Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need.

    3D TV fits that description of an innovation which customers never wanted. While the technology was seen being the great hope of stimulating sales in a moribund consumer electronics market, consumers were never really convinced.

    The 3D TV push of the last two years is typical of many technology products in that there isn’t an immediate need for them but manufacturers and retailers hope that they can hype a market into existence.

    Usually that model fails, but not always.

    Sometimes though, these technologies are subject to their own hype cycle and over time they come back in ways we don’t quite expect.

    It’s difficult to see how 3D TVs can make a comeback but who knows? What we do know though is they were expensive toys for the few who bought the hype.

    Similar posts: