I love to talk about social media with enthusiasts of the game. How they’re practising it, where they see the benefits, where will it be in a year or so’s time. But I see more and more so-called specialists coming into the market where they sell their (apparent) expertise to businesses that either don’t have the time or the wherewithal to handle social media themselves.

I’m certainly not criticising SMEs sourcing some talented help, I’m saying be careful what help you’re canvassing. Too may of these marketing experts are one-trick ponies. They sell digital, or marketing but it’s often just social media and nowt much else.

One of my favourite quotes about social media is from Avinash Kaushik, and goes, “Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better.”

As a consultant, just going on and on about Facebook or Twitter to a small business that needs marketing, wider business support and outside intuition is like telling a restaurateur that they need to focus, focus and focus yet more on dessert. Okay, it’s fair dinkum for a restaurant manager/owner to spend time and resource on desserts. Yet she also needs to look at the HR side of the business, of finance and infrastructure, of supply and sales, of quality and of appearance. The amount of various business tasks and facets mean dessert is probably less than 2% of their agenda, even if you are a Heston Blumenthal.

So it becomes a question of resources (isn’t it always in business). Yes, I’ll invest in dessert but the myriad of other draws will also get their deserved piece of business attention.

If you’re a Facebook or Twitter coach/marketer/consultant I’d argue you could widen your remit and envelop marketing – at least in a digital context. The alternative leaves a pretty narrow menu (unless you can live off dessert).

Photo credit: Corsi

Google’s free websites are great for the micro business out there who’s not online at all.

They’re going to hurt those digital firms who’ve built a consultancy around helping getting such SMEs online. Well, putting a positive spin on it, perhaps it’ll just put more fish in the digital pond and those newbies may get the tech for free but they’ll still need some advice. So perhaps it’s win-win there.

Regardless of the consultants’ living, anything that presses the reverse thrusters on the black hole of data that’s eking itself into Facebook is a good thing. Surely we want to keep the web as a web, not the web or Facebook’s version. Why so many brands are desperate to house themselves in this ecosystem is beyond me. Yes, they may increase the rate of ‘likes’ but, really, is it worth the wholehearted subjugation to FB to do so?

It’s neutering the offering. Its like selling your house and instead of creating a website or listing a dozen photos and descriptions with your local estate agents, you follow the (theoretical) trend of printing 100,000 flyers in A5. Handing those out on a busy high street means you’ve arguably touched more prospective buyers, but your quality, relevancy, flexibility and depth of content has plummeted.

If you’re a one-man-band-come-micro-business then by all means jump on Twitter and yes, get yourself a Facebook page. But get yourself a website too: it’ll be your hub, your touchstone for everything online. You own and control that completely. Your social media efforts can then compliment that – they DON’T replace it.

So if you’re starting from zero, get yourself over to Google’s free offering and you’ll be in the world of publishing your own content in no time.

The modern business model from Silicon Valley is build. Don’t just make a computer, make digital products (as Steve Jobs said by launching a music player, then a music store, then a phone). Build and build again is what the dominant players are showing us to be the winning formula.

Google was just a search engine, Apple was just about consumer electronics, Amazon was just a bookstore and Facebook was just a social network. No more.

These four colossal companies all appear to want to channel us down their particular funnels and have you ride their own track as you consume all things digital. To paraphrase the eloquent John Battelle, Google used to equal search, now they equal Chrome, YouTube, Android, Docs, Gmail, Maps, Places, Voices, self-driving cars, energy research, Adwords, Google+ and Motorola. And let’s not forget possibly their biggest opportunity for a true golden goose: Google TV.

This Fab Four will make the scale of Murdoch’s empire look about as impressive as a Lego village. Their dominance of technology, media and data over our lives will be insurmountable. Google is expected to bring in more than $30 billion this year. Analysts expect Amazon to reach $100 billion in revenue by 2015, faster than any other company. You need to stand up when you hear Apple’s annual growth numbers: net profit up 85% to $25.9 billion (£16.5 billion). In just Q3 of this year (obviously not their largest without Christmas sales), Apple turned over $28,571,000,000*. Read that number again – it’s genuinely staggering. They sold over 17 million iPhones in their financial Q4!

Such is the significance of the Fab Four, that we barely even think of Microsoft in the same vein. Arguably the largest of them all and the business choice of the world, Microsoft simply isn’t in the running for our hearts and minds like these guys are. They’re in their own cold war with each other, leveraging the juxtaposition of the web in that the low barrier of entry shouldn’t allow such monopolistic companies to exist. Yet again, what shouldn’t be possible, actually proves true online.

Each of the Fab Four want to build an ecosystem. Think about smartphones, tablets, apps, cloud storage, social networking, gaming, music, TV, or movies and all fit into their strategic map of web’s future – their own corner of the web.

I can’t help but think this is taking the open web and making silos for the user. Amazons new tablet, the Fire, doesn’t like you to browse around the web too easily, but if you want to download a movie from Amazon or buy shoes from their marketplace, then that’ll be a piece of cake.

There’s an element of lock in. I don’t necessarily mind that it’ll be a bit stifling, but the decision you make with your hardware may well dictate how easily you can consume software and content in the future.

It’s a bit like choosing to buy a car having the knowledge of exactly where and how you’ll drive it in the future. Suddenly what you buy becomes far more than we’ve traditionally dealt with when buying a laptop or a PC i.e. size, speed and storage.

It’s like buying a new BMW. Not happy just with selling you the metal, plastic and rubber, BMW build a bunch of roads and would very much prefer it if you drove only on them. And they’d like you to use their fuel stations as they’ll hook up with your car far easier than any other (perhaps auto payments through number plate recognition). And BMW have plans afoot to offer you destinations too that will stop you going to the beach or Center Parcs or the shopping centre – the BMW equivalent will be better, more secure and more ‘holistic’ to your vehicle.

It’s hugely exciting to see these guys slug it out on the global scale and change our lives through innovation. It’s a shame none of them are British. Who are you backing to be the winner or can they coexist?

*The numbers and much of the facts came from an excellent post by Farhad Manjoo.

Evan Davis on the brilliant Bottom Line asked his guests what the business world will look like in 2020. Justin King of Sainsbury’s commented that it’s difficult enough looking at 2013 and 2020 is impossible. Laura Tenison of JoJo Maman Bebe claimed M-commerce would be commonplace, and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo said connectivity to the cloud would be the biggest difference.

Such forecasting always reminds me of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World show where their predictions of robots in every home and self-replenishing fridges proved unrealistic, but here’s my take on the question:

Curators – there’s far too much data content now as people play with media as much as they consume it. Flipboard, Twitter lists and Google+ Circles are starting points but they’re nowhere near what we need to successfully plug in this fire hose. Some uber-smart MIT dropout will leap this forward soon.

Social commerce – some would argue all commerce is social as people often tell friends about their latest purchases; I don’t fully agree. But following trends will be much easier and integrating recommendations, likes and opinions of friends and peers will influence decisions like never before.

One click buying – as you read about an item in a social network or an article, a right click and ‘Buy Now’ will apply your normal shopping preferences (vendor preferences, sizing, card and delivery details) without anything like a mundane checkout process.

M-commerce – this is surely the tsunami that won’t be held back. I think conversion on tablets will outclass phones in most categories but phones will be great for repetitive purchases (e.g. simply scanning at the tube station), micropayments and voucher delivery.

Phones – data married with location is a winning formula. Searching will provide different results based on your geography. “Cross-channel retail,” will be commonplace as customers in store actually research online via their smartphones. Shopping searches will point you to the local retailer who told Google they have it in stock, not the guy around the corner who is simply listing the catalogue. Your phone’s camera will be able to populate the search, rather than the keyboard (upload a photo of a mate’s watch rather than type Casio G-shock, Google/eBay/Amazon finds it).

Multichannel – retailers are hungrier than ever for sales and they’ll take them any way they can get them. All and sundry will look to improve their transactional websites to compliment their physical stores. Pureplay retailers will encroach on the high street and the smartest will hook paper, web and bricks and motor into a seamless integrated purchasing system (tri-tail, even). Argos and Ikea probably lead this fight in 2011.

Marketplace – this will be the buzzword as the bigger sites aim to carve ever larger slices of retailing web. Amazon don’t just want to sell to you, they’re happy for you to list items on their site and take a percentage as you sell them to me. Why? Proximity: the more items they get next to themselves, the better. If we’re all on there selling cheaper than each other, the site wins as it gets more customers. If the site wins, Amazon win through commissions. There’ll be half a dozen big name players that dominate this next year.

Customisation – thanks to my surfing history and click rates, as well as my stated preferences, sites will know what content to serve me. My Times Online homepage will differ from yours. Ditto for Play.com and the like. Amazon do this very well now. Soon, the level of intuition will be mind blowing.

Cloud computing – we’re currently thinking about storage and remote access as data and photos are backed up online. But more than that, you’ll hook up many, many things to the net: cars (for servicing and sharing), houses (to monitor and trade energy supplies), even pets. Your dog or cat will have a chip that pings the web and checks their health, their dietary requirements, how far they’ve walked etc. Think Nike+, meets Crufts, meets Bupa.

Direct retail – supply chains are shortening. Wrangler has just opened its first store in the US. They’re very late to the party as big name brands want to showcase their wares without the middleman and follow the over-used, but absolutely true example of Apple. There’s an obvious knock-on here for small retailers who carry those brands and helped establish the business.

Regardless of the specifics of the cloud, or what car you’ll be driving in ten years, if our technology is going to reach anything like its potential, we need much better wi-fi access. This isn’t Korea and ubiquitous and free are unrealistic in the UK, but better pricing policies, simpler access and more connectivity are surely overdue/the starting points.

I was asked to call out some examples of those using digital innovation well. It’s very easy to say Dell are making money via Twitter and the new Old Spice videos are viral winners but here’s half a dozen less-heralded examples that might tickle your marketing fancy:

Company: Disney

Category: Social Media promotions

What: Toy Story 3 created the world’s first promoted trend on Twitter along with a Facebook app that allowed visitors to pre-order tickets and then share info with friends to arrange group viewings.

Result: increased the likelihood of impulse purchases and the social aspect made group planning that much easier. Was the highest grossing movie of 2010.

Company: Orabrush (a tongue cleaner that solves bad breath)

Category: Online video (direct selling)

What: Marketing started with a video shot at a pool hall for about $500 getting over 13 million views. There’s now a weekly installment for Orabrush’s YouTube channel, Curebadbreath.

Result: sold $1 million worth of brushes (at $5 a time) through YouTube. Four pharmacy chains, including Boots will be carrying the product.

Almost 40,000 people have subscribed to get e-mail updates every time Orabrush posts a new video, making it the seventh most-subscribed channel on YouTube.

Company: Daily Candy

Category: Location-based mobile marketing

What: DailyCandy Stylish Alerts uses geofencing technology to notify application users when they approach locations recently written about by the DailyCandy editorial team.

Result: news on events, gatherings and style as you walk around NY. First to market with such innovation.

Company: Gatorade’s Mission Control

Category: Social Media

What: Tweets of encouragement to high-school athletes before big games and responses to Facebook queries.

Mission Control aggregates and weighs real-time opinions. It gives more importance to mentions made by loyal fans, people with a lot of followers, or people whose opinions tend to get picked up.

Result: Pepsi’s cash cow became ubiquitous (and uncool). Mission control was set to reverse the sales’ slide. Gatorade sales rose 7% in the second quarter and 2.4% for the first half of the year.

Company: Kogi Korean BBQ

Category: Mobile marketing on Twitter

What: Korean take out food that moves around LA. The places are announced on Twitter @kogibbq and the chef is now winning awards.

Result: Business grown to five trucks inside two years. A gaggle of great PR including Time magazine. 90,000+ Twitter followers looking for Korean food.

Company: BMW

Category: Mobile marketing via MMS

What: the campaign was timed, targeted to individual consumers, and highly personalised to recent BMW purchases who would need winter tyres fitted.

They sent the MMS on the first snow day of winter with an image of the users model, in their colour with their rims and the recommended tyre for winter use. They also included a link to a mobile site allowing customers to experiment with the tyre simulator before making a purchase.

Result: 30% conversion from message to purchase and $45 million in new business.

I attended Doug Richard’s School for Startups recently. The title is a bit of a misnomer as the day had nothing specifically to do with starting a business, but it did have plenty of action points for marketing.

The day was fast-paced with lecture-style talks from Mr Richard and three colleagues. Let’s be honest, you go to see the formidable Doug Richard in action and he opened the sessions with a broad talk about business and how little we actually control. See him in action here.

I was immediately stunned about how intelligent this [former] Dragon is. He reminded me of an economics lecturer I had who could tell what day of the week you were born on within about three seconds of knowing your date of birth (he’d run a cunning formula in his head).

The 120 or so business folk were scared to answer DR’s open questions for fear of engaging this razor sharp mind. You really do need your A game if you’re going to talk business with this guy, even your own business. A chap in the audience volunteered to describe his own organisation. Big mistake. DR took his ‘elevator pitch,’ highlighted several inadequacies and spat it back at the business owner with such flare that everyone else was writing it down thinking they’d plagiarise it for themselves.

But Richard’s cohort found that uber-sharp standard a tough act to follow. They gave us a social media-is-great talk with the obligatory Will it Blend video. We had a pay per click is-the-quickest-win talk complete with incomprehensibly small screen shots. Finally we had an ecommerce-is-the-place-to-be talk from an ex-Amazon exec.

I’m sure these chaps are great in their own right, but they’d been asked to cut their usual one day training sessions down to an hour or so and you felt they’d done it on the train that morning. Then again, it was government funded social enterprise (free entry) so I certainly couldn’t say I’d overpaid.

They had 120 or so small and micro businesses in the room and they broad stroked most areas. Granted, there is never going to be time in such bootcamps for massive details, but not one of the team had researched a company in attendance and come with examples of how they could improve what they were already doing online.

For me, social media is about authenticity and credibility and I don’t think SMEs new to the arena would’ve heard that message. They could’ve demonstrated more of the beauty of listening; of how to monitor the conversation and engage without stalking.

They could’ve run us through existing clients and demonstrated how their real-world social, PPC and on-page ecommerce work had resulted in X% growth this year for their architect, or bakery, or gym (you get the idea).

The standard for these online training sessions/bootcamps is rarely going to catapult your marketing endeavours, but I have to say these guys did let out several nuggets amongst some pretty awful PowerPoint.

Bravo to Doug Richard for undertaking this philanthropic project. Bravo to his team for willing to give away insight (without charge). And bravo to the local authorities for saying yes.

If you get the chance, please do go – I promise seeing DR’s business mind in action is as an inspiring an afternoon as you can get without involving an Olympic athlete or a war hero.

News Corp’s readership numbers are on the up since they introduced their paywall last July. Surely that’s all good news?

The Times and The Sunday Times has grown from 50,000 monthly digital subscribers in October to 79,000 at the end of February. They seem to have brushed under the carpet the fact that the growth rate is slowing. They also lost 90% of visits the moment the paywall was cemented but that was expected by all.

However, volume isn’t the same as value because revenues are less online per customer due to their aggressive pricing strategy and smaller variable costs (another 1,000 iPad subs cost virtually zero to deliver, greatly less than a 1,000 physical papers).

It’s a bit disappointing that these figures aren’t broken down across all platforms but the papers say digital is digital regardless of your hardware so we can’t glean who’s using on Kindle, iPhone etc.

But the most surprising and impressive number is that churn is just 1%. 99% of subscribers in month one, stayed and paid for month two. Wow, talk about sticky.

This is interesting stuff. Tablets are having their 15 minutes of fame and The Times et al will only help reinforce that. Horse versus car; email versus letter; telephone versus telegram; paper versus digital news. All have an obvious ending but the sting in the tail sees all these publishers frantically trying to work out how to monetise their digital content. The world is watching.

Read the Guardian for a (free) great take on the numbers. You’ve got a savvy business mind, what do you think is the correct model?

Linked In added the Signal this week. It’s a new product that, “gives you a whole new way to consume information and news that’s most relevant to you as a professional.” Hmm…

The trouble is, I fervently disagree with those who hook up their Twitter feed to Linked In. It’s failing to understand that different media responds best to different inputs. Facebook expects some silly photos from Saturday night. Myspace expects music choices. Twitter expects inspiration, updates and whimsical thoughts. Linked In expects business. They can cross-pollinate one another, but they’re much better if treated as silos.

Sending one feed through all your social networks is like wearing the same clothes to a rugby match, to a dinner party, to a nightclub and to the office i.e. lacking in thought and effort.

That said, I completely understand that Linked In needs to evolve. Its recent IPO shows a clear hunger (or should that be need?) for growth. But is Signal pandering to the world’s over sharers, or an innovative addition to business networking. My fear is that I’m welcomed by dross like this when I log in:
I’m not sure repeating every BBC news article you’ve read is worthy of showing anyone in Twitter, let alone why on earth you’d bore your business connections with them. What possible added value can it create for either party?

The undeniable truth is The Web now has a pulse. We’ve got to hope that those with the stethoscopes ensure we skim the cream off the milk, not drown us with the Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga drivel that threatens us from all angles of our browsers.

If Linked In can be that authoritative filter, then I’m all ears. I guess that’s what digital arbitration looks like.

If an online company can act as a business lens to the Internet then who would you like it to be? Whose opinion and authority would you like to vet the world of the web?

Answers.com sold this week for $127m. This coupled with the growing buzz around Quora, highlights the fact that Q&A sites are the poster-boy targets on the web. Added to that firestorm is Mahalo giving up on human powered search and pivoting to answers. Although it looks like they’re going for ‘how to’ queries more than actual answers to live questions.

We’ve seen plenty of mediocrity from Yahoo! Answers but are question sites about to get good answers? Aardvark, Stack Overflow and others argue that quality is possible if you ask the right community. A specialist community. But doesn’t that take us down a narrow forum-type road rather than the broad majority who only use the top search engines?

Monetising Q&A doesn’t look overly simple – banner ads would likely score awful click through rates. And I can’t help but feel it’s a bit like fighting over the crumbs left over from Google’s table. What happens when Google wants to clear house? That’s my question.

A website isn’t a necessity for every single business in existence but few would argue it’s a massive opportunity.

When business people ask my opinion about website designers or what type of site they should employ, I say 90% should use a blog. This will usually cause a lifted eyebrow or two as the word blog invokes thoughts of lunch diaries and public letters to mummy. The truth is they make a brilliant platform on which to build your digital presence but they do need some technical skill to make them look more like a modern website than a free blog.

But Getting British Business Online is my new recommendation. It’s a free website and a free URL (i.e. website address or name, which doesn’t necessarily have to be your business name) thanks to a joint initiative between BT, Google, e-skills UK and Enterprise UK.

To quote their site “It’s simple:
1.    Choose a website address
2.    Select and customise a template
3.    Publish your website”

Point any new website starters you know here – Christmas is sticking around for a while longer.