The rapid pace of change is opening up opportunities for whole industries to be transformed, for individual businesses to completely change their competitive focus and for new products and services to emerge. This is happening around us and it is happening with our region. These opportunities need to be harnessed as a region to ensure our economy and our community is enhanced by staying collectively competitive with other regions and engaged with the global digital economy.

The future economic success of the Hunter Region relies on our collective ability to attract and retain a talented workforce, new business investment, a sustainable environment and a connected and inclusive community. It is about jobs, financial security, maintaining our spectacular quality of life, and our sense of community.

How can digital technologies make a better region? By providing business with opportunities. Providing businesses with education and capabilities to excel with the talent of their staff, opportunities to share and develop new ideas and innovations, opportunities to create and find uncontested market space and disrupt established industries in order to improve the social, economic, and environmental well being of our community.

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Dive into the Blue Ocean of opportunity in Newcastle - photo by Kim Vacy (@kimvacy)

Businesses need to be alert to the benefits of high capacity broadband and how to take advantage of the opportunities it will bring before their more digitally aware competitors leave them behind. I fear this technological latency will be prolific in Newcastle & the Hunter Region. So I thought I would share my views on the current environment of business and technologyand the future opportunities that businesses need to be thinking about.

These opportunities for the most part fall into three categories: e-marketing, e-operations, and e-services. For competitive advantage, business will now need to be looking to not only capitalise on the three ‘e-opportunities’ but to do so in a way that creates an uncontested market-space and disrupt their industry to form new markets, new business models, and new industries.

Your business will have a position on a line of digital adoption on the scale of improving your existing marketing, operations & services to transforming your marketing, operations, and services toward redefining your e-opportunties.

Hopefully most businesses are aware of their place in the improvement stage. The digital age provides opportunities to increase your marketing reach, exploit new sales channels, reduce costs of delivery, reduce the production cycle time, improve your customer service, increase speed of brand awareness, increase customisation of products and services, and enhance direct advertising opportunities.

These opportunities are available now with the current technology available in Newcastle & the Hunter Region, however with the coming of the NBN and super fast broadband, these opportunities will be accelerated, more available, and the ability to maintain any competitive advantage in any areas of e-opportunity will be diminished due to an increase in the speed of adoption to match.

In the transformation stage, we have seen the likes of Amazon, eBay, iTunes, transform the way products are accessed by digitalising previously physical products and providing global marketplaces for the exchange of goods & services creating a Consumer2Consumer marketplace. The digital age requires businesses to learn and adapt quickly to new technologies. This is already happening in NBN activated regions, it will be extremely important that Newcastle & Hunter businesses do not stand flat footed while their competitors in other regions take advantage of their markets using technology enabled supply chains. New products, new services, and new business models arise from this stage, the economic benefits to a region from having their businesses participate in this pre-disruptive stage are enormous, results are the creation of new jobs, an increase in income and local investment supporting the traditional business base as well as leveraging the new digital business base.

The last stage is redefining organisations, I am been reading Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne which is as relevant now to our region as it was when it was published 7 years ago! Where new and improved product capabilities, goods and services we can not yet imagine can be created when a business looks beyond competitive advantage and toward the creation of their own uncontested market where competition does not exist. What is physical that could be digital? What supply method can be improved by high capacity broadband, how can high definition video improve your service delivery, where are areas that can be sources of data analysis. Innovation is key here, as is a focus toward the increasing customer value and decreasing costs of production.

Entire industries will be transformed, think of the stock exchange where the industry of traditional human stock brokers has been disrupted by online trading. The increasing availability of information and the ability to directly distribute it will lead to new business models.

Here is the goal for your business in the digital age, to look within your business, to look to your competitors, and your industry to see what can be improved, transformed, and further created to create value to a particular market and decrease your operating costs. Innovation approached in this way leads to a sustainable disruption to an industry and long-term business growth.

If you are interested in the activities of Digital Newcastle, get in touch with Gordon. If you have a business who needs assistance in planning or strategy for the digital age, please contact me, Brendan Brooks, on 0414 362 557.

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Businesses need to be looking at the agility, their ability to respond quickly to challenges and opportunities that arise from this new dynamic environment. The pace of change, the louder, more frequent, and more numerous consumer voices, and the increase in uncertainty in the business environment means that business will be under the pump if they want to keep ahead of their competition. Staying in front today means producing more products (in quantity & diversity), with fewer resources and in less time to meet new or increased demand.

A Business Environment Impact Model is useful in demonstrating how the business environmental stimuli contributes to the impacts on the business in the form of pressures, problems, and opportunities. Together with the business missions, goals, strategies, and plans, the business environment impacts are dealt with using existing processes with core competencies via determined response activities. These response activities take the form of problem solving, risk assessment, managing constraints, and gearing the team to take advantage of opportunities.

An agile business that is able to mobilise their core competencies in response to particular impacts, is one that can produce measurable improvements in performance, solutions to problems toward a goal of competitive advantage. Learning from the experience will provide data that can be fed into the business mission, goals, and strategies, closing the loop.

The foundation of this capability, as seen in the above model, is eBusiness & IT infrastructure. The effective use of a mix of softwares and devices is required to effectively manage the maelstrom of stimuli and business objectives. The digital age is bringing to business a larger range of tools and technologies, and at a much lower cost than ever before.

The business that can utilise cloud based storage and eBusiness applications, increase the ability of their staff to operate from remote and mobile locations, and that can leverage media that enables direct conversations with the consumers, suppliers, competitors and peers, is one that is best positioned to respond quickly to business environmental impacts. The more agile the business the faster it can turn a pressure into an opportunity, and carve a clear path through the jungle to competitive advantage.

It is a good idea to invest in some assistance with eBusiness strategy and management, HyperWeb Communications is available to work with business through the steps of improving your eBusiness and IT infrastructure. Managing Director, Brendan Brooks, has a Master of Business & Technology and 11 years experience in the small to medium enterprise sector and can apply the knowledge and experience gained in the eBusiness sphere to help your business navigate the digital landscape and plot the most effective path for your business to achieve its goals.

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Business also need to think about the delivery of content. This is an information age, and businesses need to position themselves as custodians and sharers of information around their field of expertise. Blogging will have to come in to play for every business, as part of what they do. Not only will businesses be focussed on producing widgets, they should also be active in producing and delivering content as both a service to their customers, and a service to themselves.

A Digital Strategy is required to manage the tools, their use and intentions so that it becomes integrated into the being of the business. Smart businesses are already aware of this and have been planning their eBusiness strategy each year, but the time has come when all businesses need to use a suite of digital tools to manage and market their business. One way of approaching developing a digital strategy for your business is to treat it as AGAME. AGAME is an acronym that I have come with for the following steps: Awareness, Goals, Action, Monitor, Evaluate.

Awareness requires an external and an internal view of the business. Have a fresh think about what you do, who is your team, what are your processes & systems, who are your customers, how do you communicate with your team and with your suppliers and customers. External awareness takes into account what is available to assist your business. These are being aware of the tools and techniques that are available that can improve your business. The may also be some major cost savings and improvements possible in finding out what’s new in terms of the tools of trade already in use for the production of your goods and services.

The Goal of your digital strategy should not be different from the goals of your business. a digital strategy will enhance your ability to achieve your business goals, business goals should not shift in regard to focus in response to integrating more digital tools into the business. Your business goal is likely to be something along the lines of either selling more or growing to increase your capacity to sell more. This stage of a digital strategy is not to develop a new goal but it is to look at your current goals and think about how the awareness in the previous step can lead to designing improvements in your business.

An Action Plan is the next step. You will have decided what to use, now plan to implement the tools of choice. The choices will have been made based on awareness and your business goals, so the chances of going wrong are now more slim. What can go wrong? If the tool takes too much time or doesn’t embed into your system. An action plan can be categorised into the following categories: customers, workflow, intelligence, people, and positioning.

• Customers: how do you get more? Marketing reach, implement the use of some social media tools to reach existing and new customers, better service to existing customers, encourage positive word of mouth, participate in the conversation already happening around your product or service.
• Workflow: how can we improve? what project management tools, time sheeting, rostering, data storage, backup, disaster recovery, business continuity plans, need to be put into place to improve workflow efficiencies.
• Intelligence: what data is available on the performance of the business. Google Analytics, productivity metrics.
• People: communication tools, social networking, HRware, voice & data accounts
• Positioning: content creation, blogging, SEO, sharing and networking.

Decide what tools and techniques fit into these areas and write an action plan detailing what you will implement, when and how. Seek advice about what tools integrate with others to further improve your system, e.g., your website should contain a blogging capability linked to social media channels for auto-posting of content.

Monitoring is very important. Tools should be used to achieve an efficiency, not to use for the tool’s sake. If it isn’t working, and you have given it enough time, stop or review your use. Time is also noteworthy though, some implementation and embedding can take a few years of continued use to pay off.

Evaluate the strategy and record improvements in your business, look again at your system and begin the process again by making AGAME of it.

It is a good idea to invest in some assistance with a digital strategy, HyperWeb Communications is available to work with business through the steps of developing a digital strategy. Managing Director, Brendan Brooks, has a Master of Business & Technology and 11 years experience in the small to medium enterprise sector and can apply the knowledge and experience gained in the eBusiness sphere to help your business navigate the digital landscape and plot the most effective path for your business to achieve its goals.

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However, if businesses want to capitalise on the ubiquitousness that is Facebook in the lives of a significant market, then the risks that exist in consumer created content needs to tackled head on. Peer recommendation is powerful for Australian business. Nothing quite influences a purchasing decision like social proof that value is present in a product or service. Potential customers become purchasers when they are confident their investment is not misplaced and their confidence is reinforced by the recommendation of a friend/s or relative/s.

The fear of negative comments is stopping many business from engaging in social media and two-way conversation that it facilitates. To counter this fear (as many business believe they cannot control negative comments) I categorise negative comments as being either constructive criticism, which is an opportunity, or vandalism (which should be removed). It is important that businesses are authentic with their customer engagement and deleting anything that contains a negative can be perceived as hiding from issues in the business and censoring legitimate feedback.

I believe it is fine for business to simply delete blatant vandalism, if the comments contain swearing, are irrational or aggressive, it is likely that there is no real or legitimate criticism. It may even be a case of competitor sabotage or personal vendetta! If there is offensive graffiti on the front window of your business, the first thing you do is wash it off right? I see no difference in deleting irrational sledging comments from your blog or Facebook wall. Your audience will appreciate it rather than be critical, and the experience of engaging with your business is enhanced.

Not all comments are irrational sledges however, some are legitimate comments from an unfortunate experience. I call these an opportunity as it gives the business a chance to demonstrate how it deals with the occasional criticism on their product or service. The business can show their audience that they are real and prepared to accept criticism and provide a response that shows the criticism is being dealt with. This enforces the authenticity of the conversation and provides the opportunity for effective customer service to be on display for fans to see, turning a negative into a positive.

Negative comments are rare, but inevitable. It is important to make an assessment on the kind of feedback it is before deciding on the course of response to take as deleting or ignoring it might be forgoing a real opportunity to enhance your brand.

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Take a look at: http://www.level7advertising.com.au

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Check it out: http://www.eastcoastpedicabs.com.au

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Logo was developed for the new site and included in the project.

I particularly enjoyed a glass of the Jorgensen Hill Cabernet Sauvignon to celebrated sending this one live, a delicious red indeed.

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