Decoding the new economy

Online tools to turbocharge your business

Flying Solo’s Independents Day looked at how the web can help business productivity.

Flying Solo’s 2011 Independents Day conference featured our Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business.

We looked at some of the most popular cloud computing, social media, productivity and collaboration tools that can help a business make more money and grow faster.

Most importantly, it shows how business owners can free up some of their most valuable asset – their time.

Some of the tools we discussed include the popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and how they can be used for customer service and market intelligence on top of being marketing services.

We also looked at how collaborative and cloud computing services can help small businesses work together and improve the ways consultants can work with big business clients. In many ways, collaborative tools like Google Apps, Zoho and Dropbox help build team and deliver projects more effectively.

The Online Tools to Turbocharge Your Business presentation itself is available on Slideshare and if you subscribe to our newsletter, you’ll receive a free copy of the accompanying Online Business Essentials e-book.

Online Tools to Turbocharge your Business

View more presentations from Paul Wallbank

The online review challenge

Customers’ web reviews matter for your business. How do you handle bad online comments?

Last Christmas a group of office workers gathered at a city hotel to celebrate the year’s end. The meal was a disaster as slow, surly staff made mistakes and delivered poorly cooked food.

Within an hour of the workers returning from lunch, negative reviews of the hotel started appearing on the Eatability and Urbanspoon websites. By the time Christmas Day rolled around, the reputation of the establishment was throughly trashed.

The rise of online review sites along with social media services like Facebook challenges many businesses, particularly those in the hospitality industry as café owners, restaurateurs and hotel managers struggle with unfavourable comments about their establishments.

Customers now research on the web before deciding to dine out or make a purchase, so online reviews can make or break an establishment. How does a business make sure their online reputation is safe.

Pay attention

The most important part is to pay attention to what people are saying about your business.

Big corporations will have their own social media staff and community managers to handle much of this, Telstra last week announced their online team will now be on the web 24/7.

Larger organisations will also subscribe to online monitoring services like BuzzNumbers and PeopleBrowsr to report what’s being said about them.

For smaller businesses it falls on the owner and staff to keep an eye on the popular review sites and to monitor the business’ Facebook page for negative comments.

Engage the critics

No matter how good your business is, you will get the odd unhappy customer. When that happens you need to contact them, preferably through the same public forum they have complained about you.

Once you’ve established contact, take the discussion offline onto email, phone or even face to face meetings. If the resolution is positive, try to publicise the result in the original channel the complaint was made.

Fix the problem

Despite many in the hotel industry believing that most online complaints are deliberate campaigns against them, regular complaints are usually legitimate and indicate an underlying systemic problem in the business.

If customers are complaining about service, you need to let your staff know customers are talking about them. Should there be regular criticisms of your food, then you need to talk to your kitchen staff or suppliers.

Don’t get defensive

Complaints happen. Even the best business in the world has a bad day or encounters a customer who woke up on the wrong side of bed.

If you think the criticism is unfair or even defamatory, don’t get angry and certainly do not make threats as you’ll only inflame the situation more.

Should the customer turn out to be unreasonable, at least by having publicly engaged them you’ll have shown the public you’re calm, professional and trustworthy.

Don’t Lie

The web is as great at exposing falsehoods as it is at spreading them. If you’re clearly not telling the truth, you’ll make your critics angrier and more determined to damage your reputation.

A common way many businesses cheat online is with false reviews. Despite industry claims that organised damaging comments are widespread, the reality is the opposite as many hoteliers and restaurateurs frequently post clumsy and obviously fake glowing reviews of their establishments. It’s a bad look and the establishment often ends up looking foolish.

Get your website right

Many businesses, particularly in hospitality, have lousy websites or a site that has no Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so when someone searches for a hotel or restaurant their page comes up way below those for review sites or critical blog posts.

Regularly review how your site is doing and talk to your web designer or SEO consultant on making sure it’s coming up well when customers search for your type of business.

It’s important not to overlook local search services so ensure your business has been listed on Google Places and has a Facebook Local Business Page otherwise local searches will go to the online review sites or your competitors.

Ultimately, the best way to deal with negative online reviews is to minimise them by running a good business. The biggest effect the web is having on business is that it is making us accountable to our customers.

As big corporations are finding, the days of covering up poor goods and indifferent customer service with marketing is over – if your product doesn’t match the promise you make to your customers they will tell the world.

The corporates are getting social media and local search

Small business’ head start over corporations in using social media and local search is over, it’s time to get serious.

Shopping centre owner Westfield’s announcement this week that they’ll be offering Facebook Check-in Deals at their local malls shows the corporate sector is beginning to rise to the challenges of the social, local and mobile driven marketplace. Smaller businesses need to be taking notice.

Consumer behaviour is changing quickly as the SoLoMo revolution, a term invented by investor John Doerr, sees customers bringing together social media and local search on their mobile phones and iPads. That presents a lot of opportunities for savvy marketers and business owners.

In the early days of mobile commerce we saw the idea of local, mobile based marketing being SMS based along the lines of nearby vending machines texting you on a hot day to say “hey, I have cold drinks” on a hot day.

Thankfully for our sanity that concept never really took off and it’s taken the arrival of social media services and smartphones for this type of marketing to become feasible.

Social media services also have the advantage that messages, particularly those appearing on a user’s Facebook wall, come from trusted sources, further increasing the credibility of a message.

How the check-in deals work is a shopper checks into their local shopping mall which triggers messages there are deals available at stores in the centre. If the customer takes an offer, a “Like” appears on their Facebook wall.

All of the customer’s friends then see the hot deal and that encourages them to visit the store and shopping centre. In this respect it’s similar to the social media aspect of group buying services, another area that Facebook have entered and which will almost certainly be integrated into this the Check-In Deals program.

There are some issues with this for both the merchant and the consumer. The most obvious are the privacy and identity issues of the customer as social media sites work harder than ever to find angles on using our private information.

For businesses, there’s the risk of being held hostage by Facebook and Westfield. Both organisations are well known for their strict terms and control of tenants and users, so having your business’ long term interests may not be served by being locked onto their platforms.

Driving traffic to your website is the key objective of a social media presence, so the website has to tie into the proprietary social media, local search, group buying and whatever channels you’re using to promote your business online.

What this emphasises is the importance of smaller businesses getting their local search listings working on services like True Local, Google and Facebook Places to compete on this platform against the big boys who are now making aggressive moves into the social and local services.

The clear message from Westfield’s partnership is that corporate Australia is now beginning to understand how social media, e-commerce and online concepts like group buying fit into their businesses.

Smaller businesses had a head start with online media as the larger corporations struggled to understand the new services. Now that advantage is gone, it’s time to make sure you’re getting local services right.

What services does Google Plus really threaten?

Facebook is the obvious target of Google’s new social media platform, but it might not be the only one.

Google+, the search engine giant’s latest attempt at competing with services like Facebook and Twitter, has seen 25 million people joining the service in the month since its launch at the end of June.

Such a stellar growth rate – it took three years for Facebook to reach the same number of users – means it could be one of the most popular social media services ever. What does this new platform mean to business owners and start ups and how does it affect other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and LinkedIn?

Google+ differs from most social networks – particularly Facebook – in that you can divide your online connections into different groups called circles and restrict shared information to those segments.

This addresses the biggest problem with social media; that what we share with our friends is not necessarily what we want our family or work colleagues to see, an issue identified last year by then Google designer Paul Adams, who has not co-incidentally since moved onto Facebook.

Along with Circles, Google+ has a few other unique features such as Hangouts which allow impromptu video conferences and Sparks which are random popups of things you might be interested based upon your search history and posts.

The collaboration aspect as the ability to create Circles and Hangouts for specific projects is one of Google+’s great strengths – and probably to be expected from an Engineering organisation like Google – which may make it an alternative to corporate social media services such as Yammer and possibly even LinkedIn groups.

At the core of Google+ is the Google Profile which is shared with most Google services such as Gmail and Blogger which gives rise to quite a few privacy concerns as those you share with can get access to this information, although this is the same with most other social media services.

Marketing is one area where businesses have focused on in the social media world and the lack of broader take up is one of Google+’s drawbacks as Facebook has a much bigger diverse spread of users and so marketing reach.

At present the discussion of Google+ for marketing is moot as businesses aren’t allowed to create Google profiles which is another powerful advantage for Facebook.

The question remains on how Google is going to integrate their other services, the obvious one is to incorporate Places in a similar way to Facebook so that businesses can create profiles that can then plug into local search.

Coupling social media with local search along with Google’s Android mobile phone service pretty well touches all the bases of the SoLoMo revolution which is redefining the consumer world and is almost certainly part of the bigger game plan.

Adwords will prove to be the greatest challenge, although we’re already seeing concerns being expressed about the potential for Google to misuse their databases and profiles of users and as social media tool plugged into profiles and personal search may be a bridge too far form some.

Indeed there’s a question of how Google+ will affect other social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter. Right now it’s difficult to see either being affected by the new service however we shouldn’t underestimate the size of Google’s war chest or how compelling a service that integrates email, search, local search and applications like documents will be.

Another big advantage of Google+ is the lack of clutter as the game invites and people sending pictures of fluffy cats or their big night out aren‘t around – though this may change as the service moves from being used primarily by business geeks to the general public.

Whether Google+ supplants Facebook or any of the other social media services remains to be seen as we’re only a few years into the decade where personalised services are changing how we use the web, it would be dangerous to make any bets on who will succeed.

The stakes are quite high for Google with this product as the overwhelming amount of data at every Internet user’s fingertips is seeing people seeking out sources they trust for answers, recommendations and advice. The social aspect of the online world is going to define the web in this decade just as search did in the previous decade.

For businesses, or anybody interested in social media who wants to experiment with the new service, it’s worthwhile having a play with the program to see if it works for you but abandoning Facebook, Twitter or even your own website for Google’s service is probably making too early a call at this stage.

Anyway, the beauty of social media services are that you aren’t forced to use all or any and you may well find that other channels work better for your business regardless of Google’s success.

The learning curve

We’re still on training wheels when it comes to using social media

When new technologies appear it’s interesting how people experiment and adapt to them, we’re seeing this right now as businesses grapple with social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and discover where the benefits lie.

The second edition of the Social Media Benchmarking Study, a joint release by Sydney online consultants Community Engine and the research company Nielson, illustrated how things have changed over the last two years.

One of the clear conclusions from the study is how businesses are developing the ways to determine benefits of their social media activity with near halving of the number of organisations citing lack of measurable return on investment as a reason for not engaging online.

A barrier that is increasing is the perception that businesses don’t have the time or resources required for which is probably business owners and managers realising that maintaining a Facebook Page, Twitter account or blog isn’t easy.

Time is the scarcest asset for any business that gets more precious with smaller organisation. Even large corporates and government departments struggle with finding the resources necessary to run effective online presences.

One of the tragedies of social media is how it’s been identified as a marketing tool and in this survey with over half the respondents stated they are going primarily use the tools as a marketing channel rather than in customer support, recruitment, research or product development.

This is probably why the perception that social media is a time sink comes from. As purely marketing tools social media is time consuming and difficult. A challenge made greater by the fact we’re all still figuring out how to effectively connect with customers in what is a hostile place to more traditional broadcast based marketing methods.

Given social media is being used primarily as a marketing tool by business, it’s no surprise that the survey found larger corporations are the biggest users as they have the marketing budgets to allocate.

An interesting aspect with big business’ social media investment is how much it’s focused on Facebook. On one level this is understandable as a Facebook “like” is easy to set up and becomes a very simple measurement to follow, although the challenge still lies in converting a low friction click on a Like button into a useful customer or advocate.

What is surprising with corporate Australia’s adoption of Facebook is the apparent lack of understanding of the platform’s terms and conditions and the business risks involved. Again this is probably part of the collective learning curve.

Possibly because of those risks, public sector use is static. We can expect this given as social media is being pushed as a marketing tool which isn’t a priority many government agencies, are you going to skip registering your car because the motor registry doesn’t have a “like” button on their web page?

This liberation from being obsessed with marketing and sales is probably why the public sector is using social media a more creatively as collaborative and research tools where many of these services do an extremely good job.

Many businesses, particularly smaller organizations, believe social media doesn’t fit their objectives. A terrific quote from an SME accountant is “I run a business, not a chat show”.

That attitude’s fine as social media – like pretty well everything else in the business world – is a tool to be used the best way you see fit, just because some businesses don’t need a hammer but that doesn’t mean hammers aren’t useful.

Although when that tool is fairly new, as social media is, it’s probably best to have a play with it and see where if can help your business.

The Social Media Benchmarking Study is a useful survey that shows where businesses are using these tools and how effective they are finding them. It’s going to be interesting to see the field evolves as we all get to understand social media as both consumers and business owners.

Why manners matter online

Good manners go a long way on the Internet

Yahoo!7’s attempt to reduce bullying and offensive behaviour in their forums and comments illustrates a problem we have in the online community — that many people forget their manners when they connect to the Internet.

Manners matter online because there is no divide between your behaviour on the Internet and in the physical world. What you say and do online can affect your personal and professional life.

In previous posts I’ve looked at how this affects business people and politicians, but poor online behaviour such as bullying, offensive language and just downright poor manners can affect all members of the community, even if you aren’t online yourself.

Much of the problem lies in that people forget the Internet is a global medium, what you post from a computer in Parramatta can be seen by someone in Paris. Many also think they are anonymous online when it’s actually difficult to cover your tracks.

So here’s a few ideas on how to be a good cybercitizen;

You are what you tweet

Keep in mind everything you do online can affect your job, your family and your personal assets. All the rules and laws of the physical world apply online as well.

If you wouldn’t do or say something on the street, then you probably shouldn’t do it online either.

You are not anonymous

Okay, you signed up to a forum with a false name and setup a dummy hotmail or gmail account to confirm your identity. You are still not anonymous.

Upset enough people or seriously break the law and you will be found. Being truly anonymous on the net actually takes a lot of effort .

Show respect

We all have ideas and opinions which the Internet is a great medium for spreading, be it using social media tools life Facebook and Twitter or in forums and comments sections on websites.

Regardless of how good your idea is or how passionate and well founded your opinion is, there will be those who choose to disagree with you. Respect those views and don’t get offended when dissenters, however shallow or ill-informed appear.

Be helpful

If someone is asking a silly question or is clearly new to an online forum, be polite. Don’t put them down or call them names, just help them or direct them to where they can get assistance.

Take a deep breath

If someone has got under your skin and you’ve written a savage reply, think before pressing the “submit” button. Often, that witty riposte doesn’t look so clever when you’ve calmed down or looked at it in the cold light of morning.

Avoid foul language

Swearing online makes you look low rent, just as it does in the real world. Save the invective for when you’re with your mates in a private forum. The Internet is generally not a private forum.

Walk away

Sadly the Internet attracts trolls who enjoy upsetting people and provoking strong reactions. Don’t join them.

If you find someone is upsetting you or sucking you into a vortex of pointless arguments, just walk away from the discussion. Block them, unfollow them, defriend them.

In the worst case, if you’re finding one online venue such as a web forum or social media site attracts people who upset you, stop using it. Your life is too short to be sucked into negative, carping discussions with people who thrive on criticism of other’s hard work and ideas.

The Internet is becoming the repository for our culture while our society has a lot of negativity we’ve also done great things. So rather than be part of the negative aspect, be part of the solution — be bright, welcoming and honest but most of all show respect to your fellow online citizens.

A strong and vibrant society is built on respect and manners so let’s make our online communities how we’d like the world around us to be.

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