Can you afford not to Facebook?

Small business might not be able to afford sitting by while social media takes the world by storm just because they are unsure of the benefit to them. Facebook has over 500 million members, and is an invaluable marketing tool, not only for achieving a two-way interaction between retailer and consumer, but also as a market research tool. Attracting friends and followers also gives your product great word of mouth advertising, which is not only cheaper, but will go further to convince a potential consumer.

Melbourne IT has found that small businesses who are using social networking are having more success online than those who are not, and a recent survey of 3400 small businesses on how they use the internet for business, a third used social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. The executive general manager of Melbourne IT Damon Fieldgate has added that using social media gives a business another channel to communicate and interact with their consumers.

With these kind of statistics I can see the need for small businesses to get on the bandwagon; I used to think it was a bit silly businesses having Facebook accounts, thinking it was meant to be more of a personal networking site. Seeing so many businesses online now though, it has become the norm to be getting requests from businesses to 'like' their pages.


Source: Kaplan, M 2010, All that Twitters turns to gold, The Australian 27 August.
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Tablets are taking over for Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch has announced that he has the right idea by charging subscriptions for online viewing of The Times of London, and that The Australian will be following suit on the back of the iPad revolution.

Murdoch has estimated Apple will sell around 15 million iPads this year, and over 40 million by 2012, giving him the ‘perfect platform’ to launch his new ‘freemium’ model. The 'freemium' model is similar to that used by The Wall Street Journal, where users can only access premium content by subscribing to the newspaper. In the first month The Australian was available as an iPad app it saw 8500 people paying $4.99 each to subscribe, and with news that people are spending twice as long on the iPad app then on The Australian website, this number will be sure to rise.


Murdoch’s News Corporation has already had an overwhelming audience on The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and The Australian iPad apps.

While I’m still a believer that news should be free, I guess I will have to contend with free to air television instead. Murdoch believes that this is the way to go in order to recover the investment they have made in journalism, which makes perfect sense. Why should we get to access the news for free, employees have to get paid somehow.

Source: Sinclair, L 2010, 'Murdoch takes a page out of The Times' net subscription,' The Australian, 4 August.
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Google's trouble in China

It seems Google is likely to be closings its doors to the Chinese public, largely due to the company’s refusal to abide by the Chinese government’s tough censorship. Google pledged earlier this year that they would stop following these censoring requirements on Google.cn, spurring the Chinese government to consider how far they will let Google go in the future. Now it doesn’t seem far at all; if the Chinese Google site is closed, which is very possible, Google could still offer a Chinese site from offshore.

This would allow authorities to ban certain sites within their country, although that would run the risk of infuriating Google’s viewers. The government could disrupt viewing to the site by slowing it down to avoid judgment. As Google is one of the only foreign internet businesses in China, to have them leave would mean that the remaining web access would be dominated by local companies, a situation which would suit the government well, as they can more largely restrict information access of these companies.

One would think that this would be enough for the world to wonder just what it is that the Chinese government wants to hide, both by secluding itself in the first place by not allowing any foreign company to gain a direct internet-content license, and threatening to kick Google.cn out for not abiding by its tough censorship regulations.

Source: Chao, L & Worthen, B 2010, ‘Google.cn search engine close to being shut down in China,' The Australian, 15 March.

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The blogging phenonomen

It has been referred to as ‘the Great Blog War of ‘10’ (Jackson 2010, p. 32), the way in which traditional media and journalists and the new online community are competing for centre stage, and the way to go about broadcasting (Jackson 2010, p. 32). According to BlogPulse (2010) the total number of identified blogs is 149, 683, 244. 1, 944, 106 blogs were recorded by Technorati in 2004 (Garfield 2004, p. 32). That is an increase of 147, 739, 138 blogs in six years, with 57, 169 new blogs uploaded in the last 24 hours (BlogPulse 2010).

The term blog comes from web log (Blogging Phenomenon 2010) and acts as a very publicised version of a private journal, noticeboard, or photo gallery, or these aspects combined (Garfield 2004, p. 32). Indeed this is the problem of the blog for some people; that these highly personal thoughts are being put online for the world to see, instead of remaining in the private diary.  

On the other hand, there are people, and companies who find the online world of blogging fantastic. Blogging Phenomenon (2010) has compared online communication to the invention of the telephone; as a new way to share information either about their private lives or their business.  Companies have also seen this side to blogging and how useful it is to their public relations, by using this method to communicate more interactively with their customers.    

Articles: Blogging Phenomenon New kids of the blog BlogPulse As the anonymous walls of Jericho fall, the great blog war of '10 begins

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