Category: social media

ABC Nightlife Computers: The politicians on your homepage

How politicians are using the web and social media to push their message

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.

Similar posts:

Monetizing the Masses

How do social media services make a profit?

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.

Similar posts:

Customer service gods

After years of neglect, customer service now matters again.

“Treat your customer service people like gods,” says online business advisor Todd Alexander.

One of the conceits of the 1980s business model was that customer service, like training and capital investment, is an expense that should be driven down at all costs.

In corporations, government departments and politics those who dealt directly with the customers, taxpayers or voters were seen to be the low level, low status employees who could be outsourced at the first possible opportunity.

That was great when markets were growing and there was an abundance of low hanging fruit to be plucked from the marketplace.

Now that customers are cash strapped and margins are falling, keeping customers happy becomes more important.

A statistic often quoted is that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one, that difference may be exaggerated but it’s not far from the truth.

Those departing customers can do great damage to the business as well.

In the 1980s customers had little recourse apart from taking their business elsewhere. Often they didn’t have that choice in sectors where duopolies reign.

Now customers can vent their frustrations to the world on the web or through social media and there’s no hiding from the loss of reputation.

What’s more, many of the businesses that relied upon picking the low hanging fruit of a growing economy, high immigration or increasing consumer debt to find more customers through the last thirty years now find the rules of changed.

Customer service now matters.

Any management that considers customer service to be low status is a dinosaur and will soon be following them.

It’s a good time to be disrupting comfortable business models.

Similar posts:

The Free Myth

Free services often come at a cost of your time.

One of the biggest dangers to businesses is the belief that something is “free”.

As we all know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. When another business gives you something for free it’s safe to say there is a cost somewhere.

One of the speakers at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business social media event stated this when talking about social media saying “I can’t believe all businesses aren’t on Facebook – it’s free.”

Social media isn’t free. We all know the value services like Facebook are mining are the tastes, habits and opinions of their users.

For businesses, engaging heavily in Facebook or any other social media service hands over far more information about their customers to a third party than they themselves would be able to collect.

All of that information handed over to a service like Google or Facebook can come back to bite the business, particularly if a well cashed up competitor decides to advertise at the demographic the business caters to.

The core fallacy though is that these service are “free”. They aren’t.

Every single service comes with a time cost. Every social media expert advises the same thing, businesses have to post to their preferred service of choice at least three times a week and those posts should be strategically thought out.

That advice is right, but it costs time.

For a business owner, freelancer or entrepreneur time is their scarcest asset. You can always rebuild your bank account but you can never recover time.

Big businesses face the same problem, but they overcome this with money by hiring people for their time. In smaller businesses, this time comes out of the proprietor’s twenty-four crowded hours each day.

The computer and internet industries are good at giving away stuff for free, in doing so they burn investors’ money and the time of their users. The social media business model hopes to pay a return to investors by trading the data users contribute in their time.

While businesses can benefit from using social media services, they have to be careful they aren’t wasting too much of their valuable time while giving away their customers to a third party.

Often when somebody looks back on their life they say “I wish I had more time.” They’ve learned too late that asset has been wasted.

Wasting that unreplaceable asset on building someone else’s database would be a tragedy.

Similar posts:

Undermining the cloud

Google’s broad claim on users’ data risks the viability of their services

Whenever I do a presentation on cloud computing and social media for business, I focus on one important area – The Terms Of Service.

Google’s relaunch of their Cloud Drive product has reminded us of the risks that hide in these terms, particularly with the one clause;

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

This is an almost identical clause to that introduced – and quickly dropped by file sharing Dropbox – last year. It’s also pretty well standard in the social media services including Facebook.

Basically it means that while you retain ownership of anything you post to Google Drive, or most of other Google’s services including Google Docs you’re giving the corporation the rights to use the data in any way they choose.

While the offending clause does go onto say this term is “for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones” there is no definition of what operating, promoting or improving their services actually means.

Not that it matters anyway, as one of the later terms says they reserve the right to change any clause at any time they choose. So if Google decided that selling your client spreadsheets to the highest bidder will improve the service for their shareholders, then so be it.

If you’re a photographer then the pictures you upload to Facebook or Google+ now are licensed to these organisations as are all the documents stored on Cloud Drive.

To be fair this is not just a Google issue, Facebook has similar terms as do many others. Surprisingly just as many premium, paid for services have these conditions as free ones.

Because these Terms Of Service are about establishing a power relationship, there’s usually an over-reach by large companies with these terms.

While an over-reach is understandable, its not healthy where the customer has to trust that the big corporation will do the right thing.

Right now, if you’re using a cloud or social media service for important business information you may want to check that service doesn’t have terms that grant them a license to your intellectual property.

Similar posts:

Inflating titles, inflated apirations

How job title inflation can affect an organisation

This story first appeared in Smart Company on 19 April 2012.

“She listed her job on LinkedIn as my ghostwriter,” reflected the journalist about his publishing business’ Gen-Y staff member.

The journalist’s lament reflects an unexpected corporate risk in social media; that of employees giving themselves grandiose and sometimes damaging job profiles.

Over the last 20 years, title inflation has been rife in the business world as corporations and government agencies doled out grandiose titles to soothe the egos of fragile management egos.

So it isn’t surprising that many of us succumb to the temptation to give ourselves a grand title online.

In the journo’s case a young graduate working as an editor in his publishing business listed herself as his ghostwriter, risking a huge dent to his credibility among other the lizards at the pub or the Quill Awards.

That business journalist is not alone, in the connected economy what would have been a quaint title on a business card or nameplate is now being advertised to the world.

Making matters worse, we now have tools like LinkedIn and other social media sites to check out a business’ background and who are the key contacts in an organisation.

So what your staff call themselves is now important. It can confuse customers, cause internal staff problems (“how come he’s an Executive Group General Manager?”), damage business reputations and quite often put an unexpected workload on a relatively junior employee.

In your social media policy – which is now essential in any business that employs staff – you need to clarify what titles your people can bestow upon themselves.

As well as making this clear to new staff, a regular web search on your business that includes all of the popular social media sites should be a regular task.

Just as economic inflation can hurt your business, so too can uncontrolled title inflation. Watch it isn’t affecting your operations.

Similar posts:

You hold us harmless

How the terms of social media sites risk your assets and their business

Social media site Pinterest was recently caught in one of the ongoing quandaries of social media – the ownership of content.

The subject is tricky; social media sites rely on a vibrant community of users posting news and interesting things for their online friends.

Unfortunately many of things social media users post are someone else’s property, so almost every service has a boilerplate legal indemnity term like Pinterest’s.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.

Facebook have similar terms (clause 15.1) as do LinkedIn (clause 2.E) and Tumblr (clause 15). Interestingly, Google’s master terms of service only holds businesses liable for the company’s legal costs, not individuals.

Boilerplate terms like these are necessary to provide at least an illusion of legal protections for investors – those venture capital investors, greater fool buyers or punters jumping into the latest hot technology stock offering need a fig leaf that covers the real risk of being sued for copyright infringement by one of their users.

The risk in these terms shouldn’t be understated; by agreeing to them a user assumes the liability of any costs the service incurs from the user’s posts. Those costs don’t have to be a successful lawsuit against the service, it could be something as minor as responding to a lawyer’s nastygram or DMCA takedown notice.

Of course, none of the major social media platforms have any intention of using these indemnity terms; they know that the first time they go after a user all trust in the service will evaporate and their business collapse.

Somewhere among the thousands of social media services though there is going to be one that will pull this stunt. Strapped for cash and slapped with an outrageous claim for copyright damages, the company’s board will settle then send out their own demands to the users responsible.

Those “responsible” users – probably white, middle class folk sitting in somewhere in the US Midwest, South East England or North Island of New Zealand – will be baffled by the legal demand that requires them to file a defense somewhere obscure in California or Texas and will go to their lawyer friends.

When the lawyers tell them what it means their next step will be to their local news outlet.

The moment the story of a middle class person facing losing all their assets hits the wires is the moment the entire social media business model starts to wobble.

In many ways what the social media sites are trying to do is offset risk.

Risk though is like toothpaste. Squeeze the tube in one place and the pressure moves elsewhere.

By laying off a real risk by using legal terms the social media sites create new, even bigger risks elsewhere in their business.

The dumb thing is these terms really don’t protect the services anyway – it’s unlikely the typical social media user will have anything like the assets to cover the costs of a major copyright action by a rich, determined plaintiff.

It’s going to be interesting to see how many services still have these indemnity clauses in 12 months.

For the industry’s sake, the big players will need to have ditched these terms before that first dumb attempt to claim damages from users hits the wires.

Similar posts: