BusinessWings: Which part of your field are you most passionate about?
AB: From a day job point of view, the organisations being created. The beauty of the world that we now operate in, with the internet, web hosting and cloud computing, is that somebody with a good idea can enter the market with just tens of pounds or hundreds of pounds and build it into a multimillion pound empire with all the infrastructure and resources needed to give them the capability to grow.
That’s the thing I’m passionate about – getting people to bring their ideas to market because there are no financial barriers to entry. The key issue is getting people over the hurdle of understanding how providing access to your business online helps their business overall.
I’m keen to get people thinking about their web presence and social media strategy as the way in which the modern world communicates and collaborates. I think it’s an essential element in any new business’s tool kit nowadays, whereas in years gone by the idea was the key issue, not necessarily exploiting the route to market.
Understanding that change in consumer behaviour is leading to the consumerisation of technology, where large organisations are looking to reflect what we do in our private lives, the way in which we interact with business systems in the real world
BW: Why was the idea hitherto more important than the route to market? What’s changed?
AB: A lot of our behaviours as human beings are impacted now by our online experience, so as consumers we use the internet for banking, send emails, go on comparison sites, connect with business people and connect with personal friends and family. If we’ve got an opinion we shout about it through Twitter.
We have different ways of interacting with the world that are no longer physical and proximate. They relate to the ability to reach a mass market at almost zero cost and therefore the world of opportunity being created is exponentially larger.
But understanding that change in consumer behaviour is leading to the consumerisation of technology, where large organisations are looking to reflect what we do in our private lives, the way in which we interact with business systems in the real world. And that’s all about the devices we use – the drag-and-drop capability, rich media and the use of video, interactive tools to collaborate with people and files, etc. It’s changing the way that we operate as a nation.
BW: Social media is increasingly influential...
AB: When we see Facebook campaigns successfully stop Simon Cowell getting his artist to number one at Christmas it just shows the power of the internet as a force for public opinion. You can reach a community with your message, raise your profile and whatever it is you’re about very successfully and very quickly.
But you have to move from tactical behaviour to understanding how to build a strategy, with an idea, product or service and intellectual understanding of what it is you’re providing as a value proposition. More than ever, knowing how to leverage social media to reach the consumer or business user is crucial, because some of the best ideas in the world may not get seen if you don’t know how to get your message across.
People not only have to be good at innovation, they have to be good at leveraging communication in a world that offers so much possibility, and people can’t just have a scattergun approach to communication.
Email has been such a tremendous enabler to us over the last 15 or so years, but in a sense EDM [Electronic Direct Mail] has probably become a negative force because of the flood of spam and malware. People become frustrated and cautious if they get an inbox full of unwanted messages, so emails you send can easily be ignored.
So email is actually on the wane and social media is starting to occupy the spotlight. SEO is an important science in its own right and keeps changing depending on the changing demands of the search engines.
BW: Would you say that social media is becoming more indispensable to modern organisations?
AB: People are increasingly overlooking traditional methods of gaining airtime. Because they can bring ideas to market easily they think less about how they communicate and more about the idea itself. And people are less phobic about moving online.
But there is a bit of a generational issue. Under the age of 25 it’s quite natural for people, but more senior business people tend to have more caution because they didn’t have the exposure earlier in their lives.
There are still plenty of good business ideas out there which aren’t seeing the light of day because people aren’t embracing the opportunity afforded by the new technology.
That’s why at the Cloud Industry Forum we’re trying to help organisations adopt cloud services and address their fears about it, because at the end of the day it’s shaping the way this generation communicates, transacts and so on.
BW: Done right, social media can be an incredibly cheap way of reaching your market – but it can easily be done badly too...
AB: They can, and in two different ways: they can either backfire on you because it’s a negatively perceived message, or simply have no impact because you are relying on communication to an unknown community – ie, you’re not known to them in the first place.
It’s about standing out from the crowd and getting the right message in front of the right audience in a relevant form. Some traditional forms, like shop fronts and trade shows, still have a place but the audience you reach is much smaller.
