Half of Australia’s small businesses now benefit from the digital economy

What do a bicycle shop in Newcastle, a coffee roaster near Melbourne and an eyelash extension salon in Brisbane have in common?

For one, they’re all Aussie-owned small businesses. And second, you can find all of them online--something that wasn’t true one year ago.

Business owners Brian Birrell, Dean Scholes, and Amy Asperios are part of a growing tide of small businesses making the move online. We just learned how large this tide is: in a recent survey of small business owners, we found that 52% had a website. That represents growth of 50% year over year; a study conducted in 2011 by MYOB put that number at 35%.

The research is timely, given it’s been 1 year since Google and MYOB launched the “Getting Aussie Business Online” program to help SMBs make the move online. Our goal is to help businesses throughout the nation realize all the benefits that an online presence brings: the chance to reach new customers, make more sales, and save money and time. Over the past year, more than 30,000 businesses have created free websites through the program.

So who are these businesses and where are they? We took a look at the numbers and here’s what we found:

• Tempting tourists: Queensland may be top of mind when it comes to holidays, but Tasmania claimed the highest proportion of tourism sites created. 9% of all Getting Aussie Business Online sites in Tassie are tourism-related, which is nearly 3 times the national average. It also took top prize in retail--nearly 1 in 4 websites created in Tasmania came from retailers, a rate roughly 25% higher than the national average.
• Swinging the hammer: Western Australia leads the rest of the country in websites created in the construction and trades category, which represented nearly 1 in 4 websites created there.
• Country mouse, city mouse: Two-thirds of businesses who’ve taken advantage of Getting Aussie Business Online hail from areas outside of major cities. Queensland had the highest percentage of websites created outside the capital city (84%). South Australia had the lowest at 49%.

Coffee roaster Dean can attest to the difference a website can make to a small business. Before he got his site up and running with Getting Aussie Business Online, his business was strictly local; there was no way for him to reach people outside of Melbourne. “The response has been phenomenal; starting my own website has allowed me to get my name out to potential customers all over Australia,” he says. Amy Asperios, owner of Glamm Lash eyelash extension salon, uses her web presence as a free marketing tool, adding “There has been an increase in clients coming through since I started my website; the ‘contact us’ option has proved to be a great tool and I get a steady flow of enquiries from it.”

Posted by Claire Hatton, Head of Local Business, Google Australia

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The possibilities of an Australian Digital Economy

I read an article recently about an Australian livestock auction site, AuctionsPlus, which allows farmers to view, bid on, and transport livestock with the click of a mouse.

It’s a unique kind of online shopping, but one that I can imagine in a country as big as this one, makes a big difference to farmers, who can now buy stock from their smartphones in the back paddock and avoid a three or four day round trip to the stockyards.

The digital economy can be a nebulous concept and while there’s lots of talk about it - much of this is in future tense. What makes the sheep auction site fascinating to me is that it epitomises beautifully the digital economy.

It’s using the Internet as a platform for industry. It’s innovating. And it’s happening now.

The digital economy is a platform for growth for the entire Australian economy. Industries old and new are moving online, and finding new ways to do business. This is true for tech companies -- Australian start-ups like Atlassian are growing up -- but it is equally true for companies working in more traditional industry sectors, too. From health and education, to tourism and manufacturing, to resources and energy, and for businesses large and small, companies who are moving into this space are statistically more successful: recent UK research reported that small businesses who leverage the internet report sales growth four times greater than those who don’t.

The digital economy connects Australia to the global movement online; but it’s also specifically valuable for Australia. It allows Australia to confront the challenges of the tyranny of distance by connecting us to the rest of the world in real-time. And it takes advantage of our strengths -- particularly our highly skilled, net-savvy and innovative population -- and keeps them at home, rather than shipping them overseas. Over twenty years ago I left Australia to work in Japan and then in Silicon Valley in the US: young engineers at Google can now work on global platforms while looking out the window at the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

If you’ll permit me to labour my agricultural analogy for a minute, consider the digital economy as the farm of the future. Generations of Australian farmers have worked the land to build an agricultural sector that more than a century on is still a significant economic contributor. The digital economy is a platform that can support this and other sectors of our economy to grow into the future -- it’s a platform for future-proofing our economy. But like the land, we can keep planting but we need all of the elements to work together for a bumper crop.

1. We need to improve the soil quality

If any country knows about the importance of soil quality, Australia does. You need healthy soil for a garden to grow, and we need world-class infrastructure to anchor our digital economy. The ubiquitous, high-speed broadband of the National Broadband Network will position Australia well to grow the digital economy and to enable a range of innovations and opportunities which would be limited by out-dated infrastructure.

2. We need to water the crop

In the same way that we fund scientists to research new medicines and treatments, we need to support new ideas and new innovations in the digital space with finance, in the form of venture capital and private sector investment. There’s an absence of ‘smart money’ in Australia to support new start-ups here -- ‘smart money’ is venture capital that comes with the added value of advice, experience and contacts. Funding isn’t the only thing a start-up needs to succeed, but it’s critical to getting a good idea off the ground.

3. We need to feed our crop

You can fund all the good ideas in the world, but you need people to have the good ideas in the first place. Strong universities capable of effectively partnering with industry are critical to a vibrant ecosystem. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has calculated that their alumni have founded more than 25,000 companies with a combined annual revenue of more than USD2 trillion. Australia has some excellent universities but we can do much more to develop the relationships between the university sector and industry to support the commercialisation of ideas developed in universities -- from classroom to customer -- and we must continue to support and inspire students pursuing education in the fields of science and maths.

4. We need to refresh our seed stock

The interchange of people and ideas stimulates innovation. Large companies need start-ups to partner with, and conversely small companies need larger companies to reach customers, and to grow with. Large international companies should also be encouraged to invest in the digital economy here, in skills and in research, to further seed new ideas and new collaborations.

5. It needs oxygen to grow

And we need keep the Internet open. The Internet thrived because it is open -- with engineers being able to build on each other's work, each iteration improving, and driving the web forward as a whole. To flourish, the web needs oxygen; online, oxygen is openness. As Tim Berners-Lee said recently, the whole idea behind the internet was that ‘any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.’ Online, the fastest way to move things forward is to share and iterate -- again, and again. Closed systems are all or nothing bets -- but in contrast, an open web is constantly being improved upon by the entire community. It gives oxygen to innovation.

6. We need to tend the crop

The lines in the middle of the road weren’t necessary when we travelled on horseback, but when we started driving cars we adapted. We came up with a simple and practical solution which greatly improved road safety: the road line. Online, we need to adapt to the changed environment; we need to evolve the rules of the road. We need to ensure privacy, safety and security are respected in this new environment, but we should look for the best ways to do this that fit the environment. We need to empower people with the skills and knowledge to be safe, smart and responsible when they’re online, so everyone can navigate the information super-highway with safety.

Our digital economy crop is growing well, but it’s early in the season. If we create the right conditions for growth, Australia’s digital economy can look forward to many bumper crops to come."

Alan Noble, Director of Engineering, Google Australia & New Zealand.

Originally posted at ITNews. Cartoon courtesy of ITNews.

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