Tag: Facebook

Facebook and your Family: 702 Sydney Weekend computers

How should you use Facebook in your house?

Tune into ABC 702 Sydney this Sunday, February 5 from 10.15am to join Paul Wallbank and Simon Marnie discussing how to use Facebook in your family.

Some of the topics we’ll be looking at include;

  • What are the minimum ages for using Facebook
  • How should parents monitor usage
  • Setting up privacy settings
  • Being careful about sharing
  • Deciding what applications should you allow
  • How do other social networks affect your family

We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 19922702. If you’re on Twitter you can tweet 702 Sydney on @702sydney and Paul at @paulwallbank.

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The Internet’s cold war

Should we align our businesses with the online empires?

“We’re designing exclusively for Android devices,” the software developer confided over a beer, “we don’t like the idea of giving Apple 30% of our income.”

That one business owner is making a choice that software developers, newpaper chains, school text book publishers and many other fields are going to have to make in the next year – which camp are they going to join in the Internet’s cold war.

As the web matures, we’re seeing four big empires develop – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon which are going to demand organisations and consumers make a choice on who they will align with.

That decision is going to be painful for a lot of business; each empire is going to take a cut in one way or another with Apple’s iStore charges being the most obvious.

For those who choose to go the non-aligned path – develop in HTML5 and other open web standards things will be rocky and sometimes tough. At least those on the open net won’t have to contend with a “business partner” whose objectives may often be different to their own.

Over time, we’ll see the winners and losers but for the moment businesses, particularly big corporations and publishers should have no doubt that the choices they make today on things as seemingly trivial things like reader comments may have serious ramifications in a few years time.

Consumers aren’t immune from this either; those purchases through iTunes, Amazon or Google are often locked to that service for a reason.

Probably the development that we should watch closest right now is Apple’s push into education publishing; those governments, universities and schools that lock into the iPad platform are making a commitment on behalf of tax payers, faculty and students that will affect all of them for many years.

For many, it might be worthwhile hedging the bets and sticking to open standards. A decision to join one or two of the big Internet empires is something that shouldn’t be made lightly.

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The importance of transparency

The US Federal Reserve has announced they will release more details from the information they use on determining official interest rates. On the same day the social networking site Twitter is embarrassed when its opaque verified account policy fails.

Being open and honest is the key component in trust and in turn trust is the bedrock of society. If you can’t trust your neighbour, the local cop or the grocer at the shops then society quickly starts breaking down.

Many big businesses, particularly those in markets where they are one of a small group of incumbents get away with abusing your trust; they tell an illegal surcharge can’t be waived because “that’s their policy, you can’t change an account because of the “terms and conditions” and that the call centre’s operators name is Janet even though it’s Rajiv and you know that when you call back asking for “Janet” you’ll be told”there’s 35 Janets working in the department right now”.

All of this we’ve come to expect from big bureaucratic organisations like the phone company, the bank and the tax office. The interesting thing is how many new businesses that are adopting this anti-customer model of operating.

Rules and policies are fine – as long as everyone knows them, they aren’t too onerous and they are applied fairly and consistently.

The challenge for all businesses – particularly those taking on incumbents – is they have to show they are more trustworthy than the existing operators. If you can’t show that, then maybe it’s time to think about how you operate.

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What’s a Twitterer worth?

How business can put a value on social media

$2.50 per month is what Phone Dog think a Twitter follower is worth in their lawsuit against a former employee.

As nebulous and ambiguous as Phone Dog’s claim seems to be it appears some price is being created on the business value of social media users.

To date we’ve seen services like Empire Avenue, Klout and Kred try to measure social media users’ real influence on the different web platforms which in turn allows businesses to allocate some sort of value.

As social media and the web mature, we’ll see businesses spend more time understand where the value lies online.

Each platform is going to have a different value to a business. Depending on the market, one person may be worth more on Twitter than on Facebook and similarly a business may put more value on members of a specific LinkedIn group or industry forum.

What we shouldn’t confuse “value” with is how the services themselves make money. For Facebook, the value comes from the marketing opportunities presented by people sharing their lives while for LinkedIn it’s largely coming from employment related advertising and search.

Other social media platforms are finding other ways to make money and each will have a different attraction to users, businesses and advertisers. All of which will affect their perceived value.

That perceived value is the most important part of social media. If users don’t think a site adds something to their lives, then that service has no value to anyone.

It’s tempting to think that people will object to having a “value” placed on their heads as users, but most folk understand the commercial TV and radio that does pretty much the same thing.

The real question of how much people are prepared to share online will come when they understand the value of the data they are giving the social media platforms. When users start to understand this, they may ask for more service from these companies.

What a Twitter user is worth right now is probably different to what they will be worth this time next year, but there’s no doubt we’ll all have a better idea.

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The social maze

What are the risks in business social media?

Towards the end of 2011 we saw a surge of stories about companies and employees fighting over the ownership of corporate social media accounts like LinkedIn contacts and Twitter feeds.

For the social media community this is encouraging as it shows that businesses are beginning understand there the value in online networks. It also illustrates the risks for both businesses and employees when these tools aren’t properly understood in the workplace.

The employer’s risks

As social media sites are one of ways businesses communicate with the public, managers have to understand these services are an asset too important to be left to the intern or youngest staff member in the office.

Should that intern move on – possibly at the next college semester – the business may find they are locked out of the account or it is even deleted.

Business pages and accounts should be set up in the name of senior people in the organisation and, where possible, administration should be shared by the relevant unit in the organisation (customer support, marketing or whatever).

The nominal owner and administrators should understand that the account is the property of the business and all posts on it will be work related and not personal.

When one of the administrators or owners leave the organisation, login details should be handed over and passwords need to be changed. Where possible, the ownership should be changed to another employee – this is one of the current problems with Google+ accounts at the moment.

Employers need to understand that the professional contacts individuals make during the course of their work isn’t their property, so trying to claim the personal LinkedIn contacts and Twitter followers of an employee’s private account probably will not be successful.

Similarly social media services like LinkedIn are not Customer Relationship Management programs (CRMs) and using them that way, as a company called Edcomm did, will almost certainly end up with problems and a possible dispute.

Traps for employees

When given a work social media account to maintain, it’s best to consider it as being like your work email – it’s best to use it for business related purposes only and you’ll have to give it up when you leave the organisation.

If you’re being held out as a representative of the business, as we see in the Phonedog_Noah dispute over a business Twitter account, then it’s best to set up a private account for your own use and not use the business account after leaving the organisation, even if they don’t ask for it when you leave.

On sites like LinkedIn and Facebook you should change your employment status as soon as you leave an organisation to make it clear you’re no longer working there. If you’ve left on bad terms, resist the temptation to insult your former employer when you change your details.

Staff using social media have to be aware that can be held accountable in the workplace for things they do on their personal online accounts; sexual harassment, abusing customers and workplace bullying through a Facebook or Twitter account can all result in disciplinary action.

In many ways the disputes we’re seeing on social media services reflect what we’ve seen in many other fields over the years – the ownership of intellectual property, professional contacts and even access to websites have all been thoroughly covered by the courts over the years and there’s little in these disagreements that would surprise a good lawyer.

With all business disputes though, it’s best to resolve them before lawyers and writs start being involved. Clearly defining and understanding what is expected of both employers and staff can save a lot of cost and stress.

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The dying Yelp of Sensis

Can a social review site save a fading directory company?

This story originally appeared on Technology Spectator

Fifteen years ago Sensis, the directories arm of Telstra, was untouchable. A listing in the Yellow and White Pages was essential for every business and Sensis’ monopoly was a true river of gold.

Sensis’ launch this week of an Australian partnership with the US based review site Yelp is Telstra’s desperate throw of the dice to survive in a market where its directories business has become irrelevant.

Attempts to stay relevent

There have been many attempts by Sensis to overcome this erosion of its core maket including purchasing an IT services business and unsuccessful forays into publishing and online search with Trading Post and CitySearch.

Probably Sensis’ lowest point was the squandered millions of dollars and years of management time wasted in trying to compete against Google after Telstra CEO Sol Trujilo made the sneering comment of “Google Schmoogle”.

Declining values

At the time of Trujillo’s comment in 2005 Sensis was valued at $10 billion as a stand alone company. After last week’s disappointing results that saw revenue drop 18 per cent for the year, the value of the division is an optimistic $5 billion.

Yelp itself is unlikely to help Sensis’ revenue woes. Despite filing for a $100 billion public offering, Yelp has never made a profit in its seven years of operation. Although licensing their service to failing directory companies around the world might prove to be a handy revenue stream.

That lack of profit – on North American revenues that are tiny compared to Sensis’ Australian cashflow ­– shows the fallacy in the social media business model that many of the popular online services are faced with.

Users of social media services like Yelp are looking for a community of trustworthy and relevant referrals. The directory sale model is based on displaying the biggest advertisers prominently, which is exactly what social media users don’t want.

Yelp also comes into a marketplace already crowded with competing, established services like Word Of Mouth Online, Eatability, and the faster moving social media platforms like Foursquare.

Competitors’ Missed Opportunities

In many ways Sensis has been lucky in that most of the competition has been from smaller upstarts while their bigger competitors haven’t capitalised on the market opportunities.

Google Places, the biggest competitor to the world’s Yellow Pages directories, is mired in bureaucracy and isn’t doing a good job in telling business its story while Facebook’s local search function isn’t getting much traction either.

Of the local Australian incumbents, ninemsn isn’t interested in local business with its international partner Microsoft not offering an Australian product and the local team preferring to deal with big spending advertising agencies, while Fairfax squandered its early advantage and eventually sold the CitySearch service to Sensis.

News Limited’s True Local is having limited success while it struggles with the transition from print to online. At News’ recent launch of its new digital platform, the company’s executives stated they expected journalists to develop a “digital mind”.

Lacking a Digital Mindset

That “digital mindset” is the key to the problem at companies like News Limited, Fairfax and Sensis. In a marketplace where customers, advertising and readers have moved online it requires management, not just the lower workers, to “think digital”.

Sensis’ key problem is its management structures – and more importantly its sales teams’ commissions and KPIs – which are still based around its traditional business models that will make selling services like Yelp difficult.

The phone directory business model is a product of the 1920s and in many ways Telstra and the other Yellow Pages franchisees around the world should be grateful it has lasted so long.

Whether the phone directories that have been so profitable for phone companies can make it to their one hundredth birthday is an open question. One thing is for sure, bolting on an unprofitable and late to market social media service isn’t the answer.

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Leaving Facebook

Shutting down an account with the popular social media service isn’t easy but can be done.

In our social media segment for December 2011’s ABC Nightlife a listener asked about closing down their Facebook account.

Leaving Facebook isn’t easy, but it can be done and we’ve covered closing down a Facebook profile on the Netsmarts website.

The December Nightlife spot looked at a lot of social media issues and answered other listener’s questions about some of the challenges online. Some of those questions are listed on the page and the program

December’s spot was the last for 2011 and next scheduled Nightlife spot will be on February 9 however we will probably have some segments over the Christmas period and we’ll let newsletter subscribers know as we find out.

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