Three Steps to Your Social Media Strategy

Originally posted on MyBusiness.

In four short years social media has gone from relative obscurity to becoming an integral part of how Australians live their daily lives. Over 60% of Australians over 15 years old are active users of Facebook, and they use the site for over eight hours a day. Twitter has over 100 million active users worldwide; that’s over four times the entire population of Australia. From sharing photos, checking into venues, catching up on the news or reading reviews about a business, social media has forever changed the way we live our lives.

The rise of social media has given rise to the ‘social consumer’. This is the internet-savvy generation that learn about your company through social channels and who expect you to listen and engage with them when they need you. They have increased expectations of how much you already know of them, and they have little problem doing their best to damage your reputation if they’re not happy with the level of service they are receiving.
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How Apple Creates Long-Term Shareholder Value

Steve Jobs was unique, cut from a different cloth, on a different plane of thinking that set him apart from other CEOs and leaders. Over the past ten years Apple has gone from strength to strength because of his vision, but now that Steve Jobs is gone, can Apple keep it up? I think they can, and I think it’s because the Apple Board knows what drives long-term shareholder value. And you only need to look at the extreme remuneration package that the new CEO Tim Cook has signed up to as proof.

When you look at companies that are delivering great results globally, it’s hard to ignore that many of them are run by the guys that started them. Apple of course, Google, Facebook… all of these are run by the founders. These companies appear driven by the legacy that the founders want to leave behind, and their entire business and decision making process revolves around that, not the current years financial numbers. In short, they are hard-wired to create sustainable value for their business.
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Why does Woolworths spend money advertising Apple’s iPhone?

It’s great to see that Woolworths has finally released an Android App to complement their iPhone App. What I can’t understand is why they’ve already spent a mountain of money advertising the iPhone App when the Android App wasn’t ready. They had Amanda Keller advertising the App on TV as well as bus-shelter billboards and they plastered all their stores with the iPhone only message.

Why spend so much money doing blanket advertising for a product that only iPhone users can access? Steve Jobs must be wringing his hands in glee at the free plug their product is getting.

In my experience I’ve learnt that if you push your iPhone App to all users (not just iPhone users) you actually alienate non-iPhone users, who start getting angry about your brand. A much better solution, is to have iPhone, Android and a basic web app sorted, then go with a broader message about how your product is “available on your smartphone now”. Any other approach is wasteful and in fact, damaging to your brand. If I was on the Woolie’s Board I’d be asking for the Marketing Budget to be cut.

In the meantime, congrats on the App Woolies, it’s actually pretty good.

Google+ Starting to Make Sense

I’m finally starting to see where Google are going with Google+ with the annoucement that they now allow search functionality. It’s all starting to make sense. At the moment when you search or something using Google’s traditional search engine, there is practically no social integration. That’s a gap that Google+ will fill. So if you want to find a plumber that your friends might have talked about positively in the past, you might use Google+ as the search engine, not traditional Google. It now seems obvious that Google are envisioning a time when a subset of searches are no longer done by users at Google.com, but rather at plus.google.com.

Great strategy, but only useful if you can get people to sign up to Google+ in the first place, and that looks like a tough nut to crack when it’s offering the same things that Facebook already does.

And I’m certain Facebook are already working on easier ways to search your friends history.

Small Businesses should be wary of Facebook and Mobile Apps

Small Businesses Beware

I presented at a Yellow Pages ‘Driving Your Digital Business’ Seminar this week in Mornington and Geelong. The audience was Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) who wanted to know what they should be doing to drive leads in a digital world. I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions, meeting SMBs who have real life issues about how to effectively harness the power of the internet for their business. I answered a range of questions across both sessions, but there were two key themes that came through strongly in both sessions that interested me.
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