Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: marketing

  • The Free Myth

    The Free Myth

    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.

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  • Killing credibility

    Killing credibility

    Microsoft’s Smoked by Windows Phone Challenge aims to show their mobile phones are the fastest on the market.

    Unfortunately if you beat them, it appears you might not win the prize as Sahas Katta discovered.

    Going back on a prize in a competition that already looks somewhat biased doesn’t just hurt Windows Phone’s credibility but it hurts the whole company’s – it looks cheap, lame and petty.

    Realising the damage this does Microsoft’s brand, evangelist Ben Randolph offered Sahas a laptop and phone, although already the botched promotion has probably already hurt the product.

    Windows Phone is a “must succeed” for Microsoft and that company would stage poorly thought out stunts with high chance of backfiring is disappointing given what is at stake for them.

    Trust and reputation and the hardest things to earn and the easiest to squander, Microsoft’s management needs to be careful with this.

    Hopefully Microsoft will show us some compelling reasons to buy an alternative to an iPhone or Android handset beyond dodgy marketing stunts.

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  • Overstuffing the social media goose

    Overstuffing the social media goose

    “Small business has to get on Pinterest” urges the social media advisor.

    “Oh no, not another of these social media thingummies” thinks the business owner or marketing manager.

    Pinterest is just the latest of a dozen online services that businesses have been urged to join in recent years. An incomplete list would include the following;

    • Pinterest
    • Google Plus
    • Facebook
    • Facebook Timeline
    • Quora
    • Color
    • Yelp
    • Tumblr
    • Google Places
    • True Local
    • Blogging
    • LinkedIn
    • LinkedIn Groups
    • Twitter

    The question for the time poor business owner or under resourced manager is “where do I find the hours for all this?”

    It’s not just smaller businesses either – most corporations don’t have the resources to dedicate to all of these services, let alone provide the 24×7 coverage many are beginning to expect.

    When it comes to online services and social media businesses owners and managers are like geese being stuffed for foie gras, they’ve had so much stuffed down their necks they can barely move.

    Like the foie gras ducks, businesses have become glassy eyed – when someone tells them they have to sign up to another online service they just switch off.

    We’ve reached the point where are too many networks for event the most underemployed social media expert to handle.

    For those advocating social networking or other online services for business, it’s time to start acknowledging the time poor reality of most businesses and consider exactly which services are best suited for the organisation.

    In businesss it’s not time to switch off, that could be the worst thing to do as so many new ways of talking with customers are developing.

    Instead of feeling overwhelmed, it’s time to start carefully considering which services will work best with your markets, products and staff and choose carefully.

    The days of just charging into the latest social media sensation are over, these services are growing up and they have to prove its worthwhile for businesses – or individuals – to invest their time.

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  • Overselling technology

    Overselling technology

    “We’d like to allow remote band members – say a violinist in the Australian outback – be able to participate in an orchestra as if they were there. We hope the NBN will be able to do this.”

    When the band organiser said this at a business roundtable all the technologists, myself included, choked.

    There are many things the Australian National Broadband Network will deliver but the ability to teleport a violinist from the outback to downtown Sydney or Melbourne isn’t one of them.

    One of the problems with technology is we tend to oversell the immediate effects; as Bill Gates famously said “The impact of all new technologies is overestimated in the short term but under estimated in the long term.”

    Because we tend to sell the immediate sizzle, customers are disappointed when our promises don’t eventuate. In the decade it takes to win them back, those initial benefits we didn’t deliver in six months have become commonplace.

    This is probably one of the reasons why businesses are reluctant to invest in new technology or online services; they’ve heard the promises before and they don’t trust what they can hear.

    In the late 1990s businesses spent tens of thousands – sometimes millions – establishing websites that didn’t work. Those financial scars still hurt when they hear talk, some of them are still paying off those sites. So it’s barely surprising they are reluctant to return to a sector that has now matured.

    Perhaps it’s best to underpromise; instead of cloud computer vendors committing themselves to 80% savings and social media experts promising millions of customers from their new viral video, it may be better to be more realistic with the expectations.

    Customers have become deaf to wonderful promises, they are expecting us to deliver. Promising the world is no longer a business strategy.

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  • Knowledge and power

    Knowledge and power

    In the 16th Century English courtier Sir Francis Bacon declared “Knowledge is Power”, something certainly true during the conspiracy prone reign of Elizabeth I.

    Today the data available about ourselves and our communities is exploding along with the computer power to process that information to turn it into knowledge.

    We see that knowledge being used in interesting ways – US shopping chain Target recently described how they used data mining to determine, with 87% accuracy, to figure out if a shopper is pregnant.

    That 87% is important, it says the algorithm isn’t perfect and bombarding a false positive with baby wear advertising could prove embarrassing, or in some families and societies even fatal.

    A good example of data misuse are the two unfortunate Brummies (alright, one’s from Coventry) who were deported from the US for tweeting they were “going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe”

    For the US immigration and homeland security agents, they ready the jokey tweets by the Birmingham bar manager through their own filter and came to the wrong conclusion, although it’s likely their performance indicators rewarded them for doing this.
    This is the Achilles heel in big data – used selectively, information can be used to confirm our own prejudices, ideologies and biases.
    In 2003 we saw this in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq with cherry picking of information used to build the false case that the ruling regime had weapons of mass destruction that could attack Europe in 45 minutes.
    For businesses, we can be sure data showing the CEO is wrong or the big advisory firm has made the wrong recommendations will be overlooked in most cases.

    Despite the Pollyanna view of a world of transparency and openness driven by social media and online publishing tools, the information is asymmetric; governments and big business know more about individuals or those without power than the other way round.

    In a world where politicians, business people and journalists trade on their insider knowledge rather than competing in the open, free market we have to understand that filtering this data is essential to retaining  powers and privileges.

    Usually when the data threatens the existing power structures it is repressed in the same way a dissenting taxpayer, citizen, employee or shareholder is discredited and isolated.

    At present there’s lots of data threatening existing commercial duopolies, political parties and cosy ways of doing business.

    The fact many of those in power don’t want to see what their own systems are telling them is where the real opportunities lie.

    Entrepreneurs, community groups and activists have access to much of this data being ignored by incumbents, it will be interesting to see how it’s used.

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