Small businesses and limitless technological growth ' a daily struggle
It is often said small businesses are the lifeblood of economies, that they hold the key to financial recovery worldwide, that they drive innovation, and create jobs.
These figures published by Forbes in 2012 certainly seem to support these notions:
Recent technological developments have indeed made starting a business a much less costlier endeavour for many. We are often told that small businesses are looking to technology to provide the tools they need to meet growing needs and greater demands, that they have the agility to respond to new situations quickly and that they are close to their customers. We are told that communication technologies have leveled the playing field for small businesses to compete effectively in the marketplace with essentially the same tools available to their larger competitors and that these technologies provide unique opportunities to leverage the small business's ability to innovate and adjust quickly to conditions in the marketplace. We are also told that thanks to the new technologies and infrastructure, businesses can be scaled up and replicated in other places much more easily than ever before.
Those are all extremely positive developments but do not paint a realistic picture of countries outside the Western stage.
If we think back to earlier sections of this book, we explained the difficulties most people in less advantaged regions of the planet have to
a} Gain access to education,
b} Gain access to useful technology that helps them achieve their objectives faster and more efficiently,
You'll understand why I believe there is reason to be skeptical and concerned at figures like those quoted by Forbes in relation to:
Business owners in more privileged regions are able to set up new businesses and meet growing demands thanks to the ability to connect to market information in real time, to participate with customers virtually, and to sell their products and services directly over the Internet.
And yet we have seen that the reality of connectivity and literacy is quite crippling in less than privileged countries.
So, this warrants the questions:
Can small businesses in these countries really compete worldwide?
Can those citizens in less advantaged countries who plan to start a new business sustain steady growth without the basic technological infrastructure?
Innovation in the context of developing countries is about overcoming the challenge of facilitating the first use of new technology in the domestic context and this generally requires literacy as well as specialised training.
Also, beyond education, new technology demands access to complementary inputs and supporting industries, and access to finance for new equipment and new technology licenses. When starting a new business, it is also important to have a supportive regulatory environment, one without excessive red tape, but which at the same time has a strong rule of law, respects private property, and facilitates the enforcement of contracts (if ever there was one!}. Not to mention macroeconomic stability and good governance.
All these conditions are generally not met in most developing countries.
Beyond that, there are other factors that are generally overlooked by analysts:
1. Digital Reputation
Years of scam emails have instilled a strong wariness in most people in Western countries about wiring money to far-flung locations. That means emerging start-ups from less-developed countries often have to overcome a high reputational hurdle.
A company's ability to trade globally has a lot to do with visibility and trust. Certainly, for the first time in history, commercial and social platforms such as Facebook, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, and Yelp; business rankings from groups such as Inc. and AllWorld; and online communities that flow from message boards and blogs, facilitate millions of economic transactions by generating visibility and permitting companies and entrepreneurs to build global reputations.
But be honest to yourself and think about this:
If you had to choose between closing a transaction with a supplier from a poor African nation or another from Australia or Sweden, which would you be more comfortable with?
Global success in the digital age requires a visibility strategy, particularly for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Leveraging social and business platforms and digital networks can dramatically bolster global prospects for startups. However, not only are the number of small businesses capable of taking advantage of these resources very limited, but also, their inexperience in these fields can backfire for them. Making a mistake online can be extremely costly these days and can ruin someone's reputation for good.
Anything said about a brand - good or bad -in social networks and forums can cause a reaction in real time. As we all know, customers' responses to a product or service can go either way - comments may either improve or seriously jeopardise a brand's reputation. The majority of small businesses in developing nations will probably be taken off guard by the massive influx of responses social media can generate and they will normally not have the means or knowledge to manage their business' reputation. Even companies that spend top money in developing response protocols for identifying reviews from dissatisfied customers, addressing their concerns and delivering service corrections, cannot stop customers who see one single negative review from turning around and looking elsewhere for similar products or services.
And although there are a number of ways these small business owners might be able to redress their tarnished digital reputation like creating new content that boost their positive image, sharing their expertise in forums, blogs and social network sites, being proactive about responding to negative consumer comments, etc., most of these small business owners will not have the tools or expertise available to them to deal with the flow of condemnation coming their way.
In addition, the endless flow of information navigating through the millions of mobile platforms means comments can now be published in real time a lot more easily as consumers have access to even faster instruments in their hands to vent their comments about the varying degrees of professionalism or lack thereof.
2. Language and Cultural Limitations
The three-layer pie chart below shows the spread of languages on the web in 2000, 2005, and 2011. In the past decade, English has gone from being the language used in 39 percent of all Internet content down to just 27 percent at the end of 2011. It currently leads minimally over the Chinese language - labelled as ZH which, is short for Zhong Wen - by just 3 percent:
Figure 9 From http://www.techinasia.com/dominant-Ianguages-on-internet-engIish-chinese/
At its current rate of growth, Chinese could overtake English as the Internet language as soon as mid this year (2014}. Its growth has been stellar in the past 11 years, when most other languages have been static and today it's still a fairly long way from its saturation point.
Other languages are getting proportionally squeezed, such as the drop in the global share of Japanese, which is now at 8 percent and has been static since 2005. However, when it comes to the languages used on global social media such as Twitter or Facebook and Facebook-look alike, there is a greater prevalence of Japanese, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia.
What does this re-adjustment of language dominance mean for the average small business in English, but particularly in non-English speaking countries?
It means that:
a} A more multilingual approach to the web is required. And while I believe this to be extremely positive, in practical terms it calls for a higher investment on multilingual content and/or multilingual social media management.
b} While English might soon relinquish its crown as the dominant language of communication on the Net only to have Chinese crowned as the new monarch, other languages are decreasing their influence rather than widening it. This means that English language copy and content still remains crucial for non- English speakers and businesses wanting to attract international audiences.
c} Chinese is a complex language which, as I have already explained in an earlier blog post, is accompanied by an intricate set of social, cultural and legal rules. Being the second, soon-to-be first most used language on the Internet, this inherent difficulty of the language multiplies the level of investment required by those wanting to achieve an efficient localization.
The changes in language dominance and distribution we've noticed above have taken place in the span of over a decade. We fear at this rate, small businesses in the wrong side of the digital divide will not have the sufficient time to catch up and adjust to the demands of communicating in different languages appropriately. Besides, the nature of Internet is such that most users often leave pages within the first 10-20 seconds upon arrival, particularly if the content is not engaging or if it is full of errors.
Pages with a clear value proposition, on the other hand, that display attractive, well written content can hold people's attention for much longer. Realistically, many small businesses do not have the capabilities, the luxury of time or the cash to invest in expensive copywriters to leave their website in the precise form required to seduce clients in 10 or 20 seconds.
3. The ever-changing SEO rules
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500-600 times. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a "major" algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways. In the last three years alone, we've seen Google SEC changes in SEC algorithms, keyword usage, page optimisation and backlinks. As a result, SEO strategies that seemed to worked earlier, suddenly stopped being effective.
Previously, Google's SEC algorithms relied on web crawlers to rank a website. This implied lots of pages with many keywords were needed to attract these web crawlers. But Google's Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012 respectively changed all that. Now quality, timely content is the key to obtaining high page rankings. But who knows what would tomorrow bring?
Small business owners need to run small businesses.
Not everyone has the time to keep up with the constantly changing rules of SEO or how to use or avoid certain techniques like keyword stuffing, doorway pages, or invisible text to get higher search rankings. Many business people on the other side of the digital divide are still working out what are the best general keywords they can use to promote their business without being aware that today, Google expects natural keywords that are topic-specific rather than broad in nature.
Further, exposing a website to international audiences requires knowledge and understanding of the SEO principles of each of the local search engines in specific countries (I have earlier dealt with some of these differences in our blog, Oigital Cultures and Translation. Please visit the following links for information on SEO practices in China, Korea and Russia}.
For instance, in Korea, Google and Yahoo! have a market share of about 10%. In 2010 local search engine Naver led with a 62% share while Daum was number two at 21%. In third place came newcomer Nate, launched in 2009 by the popular Korean social network Cyworld.
Besides, while South Koreans have very successfully integrated the Internet into their daily lives in many ways, their expectations of what search engines should do for them are fairly complex for international newcomers - South Koreans want search engines to solve their problems for them and so the task of these providers is a lot more complex than simply producing a choice of links to click through.
Not only that, Korean search engines favour Korean content over international content.
So, small businesses trying to penetrate the Korean digital market, for instance, require a very clear understanding of the rules of the SEO game in Korea, something that will not come easily without time, money and commitment. The same applies to Korean businesses wanting to broaden their digital horizons elsewhere.
4. Online marketing
With SEO comes online marketing and its many and increasingly complex formats.
Promoting a business to local or international audiences these days requires at least a familiarisation with the basic rules of online marketing, mostly content and social media marketing. "Content is king"! we are constantly reminded and because of its ruthless despotism we need to pump out good content to make our mark on the net, we need to be responsible for marketing our own products to the world by producing quality content and developing meaningful conversations.
Brendan Gahan, a long time agency strategist who has crafted (social} media campaigns for some of the biggest brands and media companies in the world including Pepsi, GE, and Virgin, explains that today, "whether you're a singer and you have a new album, a photographer trying to generate customers or a theater and you have a new show coming up, […] regardless of what type of creator you are, you're a marketer",
Very well, we are all online marketers.
But it's hard to play the content game when you start with a big (financial, technological, educational, etc.} handicap.
Besides, as shown by the hard cold data published by OG MediaMind we have to face the same old hurdle we face always - Rapidly Increasing Complexity.
DG MediaMind's new "Complexity" study shows that advertisers' online ad campaigns have become nearly six times as complex as the average and that the use of tags and sophisticated targeting and analytics is booming, especially among the top-10% of advertisers.
Marketers are "increasingly interested in very complex targeting scenarios," said Nick Talbert, director of product marketing at OG MediaMind. The number of digital campaign analytics technologies has blossomed, and their tags are proliferating. The number of ads with two or more third party tags which, help track ad interactions, brand impact, and measure for campaign optimisation rose 267% from 2011 to 2013. Today, almost a third of digital ads employ more than one tag, up from around 25% in 2011.
The number of conversion tags, which track whether people complete an action via an ad, such as signing up to download a white paper or purchasing an item, is way up, along with the number of events they track. The number of tags used by the top 10% of advertisers rose 49% since 2010, and events tracked leapt 460%.
However, he cautioned about the increased setup time and costs associated with additional tags and technology layers, suggesting there is a point of diminishing returns, and tag-hungry advertisers could be reaching the brink. "At some point the overhead becomes more daunting than the results," he comments.
Conversion tags and geo-targeting methods are all excellent tools, but how many MMEs or sole traders can afford to go down that path? How many of them know that such a path even exists?
Frank Ree, managing editor for Marketing Pilgrim, the Internet and social media marketing news blog, clearly illustrates this point. Speaking once in front of a group of 70 non-profit organisations in Norfolk, VA, Frank asked them how many of these organisations had verified their Google Place Page. Only five raised their hands. The other 65 tilted their heads in a "What is he talking about?" fashion. Frank explained that through the (now already obsolete} Google Places, searchers will be able to look for specific places or browse through various categories of listings such as restaurants, museums, clothing stores, etc. So for businesses with a clear local focus, it could be an important tool to have.
Good news for the 65 NGOs who had no clue what Frank was talking about. Now that they found out, they would be able to open the door to real local online marketing success.
Most probably not. Because once you enter the doors of Google Places or the current Google+ Local Tap, it gets pretty hairy pretty fast. It all starts snowballing from the minute they want to verify your business. As Frank describes, you'll go from "What is a place page?" to
Why don't I have any reviews and how do I get them?
Hey, I had all these reviews and now they are gone! How do I get them back?
What is a Rich Snippet?
What is hReview markup?
What is Google Hotpot?
Are Hotpot and Google Latitude the same thing? If not how do they work together (if at all)?
Why do I keep getting multiple listings?
Why do my competitors show up in the search results ahead of me when I have followed all the rules and they haven't?
Why isn't there any real support from Google?
What are Tags? What is Boost?
The list of potential questions raised is extremely lengthy and if you multiply it by a factor of N number of platforms - Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare, etc. - it just becomes immeasurable and totally unattainable for most.
And when you thought you had it all under control someone comes along and invents something totally different. And you need to familiarise yourself with this new method right from the start at a time when the creators themselves are still resolving bugs and dealing with their Beta teething problems. New platforms emerge that demand you become a:
The level of complexity reached in online marketing practices has turned small business' promotional activities into a full time job. A marketing methodology that could have simplified the always challenging task of engaging with potential customers and keeping them interested long-term is now becoming an entangled web of skills and tools impossible for most to understand or practice.