Growing the digital economy, one small business at a time

Today at CeBIT Sydney, Minister Stephen Conroy outlined the government’s plan for making Australia a leading global digital economy by 2020. Having this sort of vision -- and the investment behind it -- is crucial for Australia.

We’ve been seeing the digital economy come to life, one small business at a time, through the Getting Aussie Business Online program from Google and MYOB. The digital economy isn’t just something that benefits big companies or people who were born with a special technology gene. For small businesses it opens up opportunities to reach new customers. And it makes it easy for all of us to find the services we rely on in our daily lives.

Fiona Carver from Goolwa, SA, is one face of the Australian digital economy. Fiona runs Ezyassist, a small business that specialises in bookkeeping and financial advisory services for wine makers in the Barossa Valley. She set up her new website through the Getting Aussie Business Online program and created a simple online advertising campaign. She has had more than 80,000 views to her web page and has converted some of those visitors into paying customers -- customers she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been online.

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that “small and medium businesses heavily using web technologies grow and export 2x as much as others.” Yet according to the MYOB Business Monitor, two-thirds of Aussie small businesses don’t even have a website. Getting Aussie Business Online is starting to close this gap; since its launch in March, the campaign has helped set up over 12,000 new websites. Interesting fact: Western Australian businesses are punching above their weight and getting online at a faster rate than other states and territories; we’ve seen nearly 1,400 businesses there sign up.

Posted by Iarla Flynn, Head of Policy, Google Australia