This year was no different. Amongst all the speakers a few really stood out and definitely got me inspired to get out the old pencil and paper, or wacom and photoshop these days.

Frankie Magazine
http://www.frankie.com.au/
Although not exactly my sort of magazine, it was wonderful to hear from the editor Louise on how a small idea she had with friend/collague Lara turned into a hugely successful magazine. How they disregarded certain magazine rules (like never use green on the cover?) and the journey the magazine has taken and how it has still kept strong to their original idea. They even had the cutest little cook book “Afternoon Tea” plus a new version “Sweet Treats”. Beautiful work.

Travis Millard & Mel Kadel
http://www.fudgefactorycomics.com/, http://www.melkadel.com/
Absolute classics! Funniest speakers on the Friday. When one of the speakers starts by snapping open a six-pack of beers you know you are in for something interesting. This couple from LA are well known artists who talked about their love of drawing from an early age and how over the years found themselves always drawn back to illustration and were able to find a market for their passion. From a personal point, I loved the studio they had set up at their home, it seems all they do is draw all day and they have paper and art supplies strewn all over their house (or treehouse as they called it).

Ashley Gilbertson
http://www.ashleygilbertson.com/
The final speaker on the Friday and what a way to end off. A photo-journalist who has focused on the war in Iraq since 2002. From the way he spoke about his time there you could see how much it had affected him and how much emotion and passion he had invested into his work. He mentioned a story of one soldier who had given his life to save his whilst on assignment which is something that is really hard to grasp when you spend each day in an air-conditioned office. He spoke of the soldiers he met and worked with in the highest regard and felt that the general public doesn’t understand or respect the sacrifices these young man and women face and it was this that lead him to do a series of work detailing the rooms of dead soldiers back home. From each photo you could pick up so much about each soldier’s life and the collection was extremely emotional. Truly inspiring work.

Although all the speakers had their own style of presentation, one thing was clear. They all have a huge passion for what they do and even if the work was not to your taste it was hard not to walk out of there inspired. Unfortunately I couldn’t make Saturday, but heard from others that it was well worth going(there was free t-shirts, DAMM!).

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and start setting up my new studio

‘Of the frequent blog readers around 52% said that blogs played a role in deciding a purchase; 21% claim that blog content has influenced on buying a product or service and around 40% have acted upon the ads in blogs.

I think the desire for ambient awareness is what has driven the popularity of Facebook, which through it’s provision of the news feed feature, is supplying a stream of up to the minute updates on what your friends are doing. In many cases this feed substitutes the need for email.  Twitter is another service which streams snippets of thoughts into a single stream.

Whilst the craving for ambient awareness of our social graph (or friends list) might be strong, it is surprising to me that the use of RSS feedreaders to supply a personalised interest based news feed is still quite low.

Feedreaders such as Feed Demon, Newsgator are free and relatively easy to setup and establish a personalised “Interest based ambient awareness channel”.
Whilst adoption of these services is growing, their usage is still mostly contained to the early adopters.  Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion points points to Forrester research that suggests that feedreader adoption is at 11% up only 2% on what it was 3 years ago.

This has always been surprising to me, and led me to consider some possible reasons.

1. Apathy.  Much like programming the VCR, setting up a personalised RSS folder is one of those things that people just can’t be bothered setting up.

2. Ignorance. Many people are not aware of the benefits that can be gained from doing this, which include a faster and deeper knowledge acquisition of your interest area, perhaps at the expense of general media consumption.

3. Trainers. It takes less than an hour for most people to acquire the skills needed to do an initial setup and learn how to maintain an “interest based ambient awareness” channel. However there is a lack of resources who have the knowledge and inclination to spread this around.

So what needs to happen to bring these services into the mainstream?

1. Mainstream publishers will start to provide “niche ambient awareness” channels.  News.com.au in Australia recently launched a new format which allows some degree of personalisation, and yet it falls short of what can be done with a feedreader.  Personalised start pages such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and iGoogle also provide simple tools which will drive the use of “one click” niche interest feeds. Facebook and other social networks will continue to expand their deployment of “interest based ambient awareness” channels via groups and discovery tools.  Take a look at Radus for a new example that fits this description.

2. Emergence of the RSS salesperson. Too many of the RSS early adopters are what Malcolm Gladwell would refer to as “Mavens”, immersed in a deep knowledge of a certain area, and without the inclination to evangelise their discoveries to the world. I have seen the adoption of personalised feeds spread quickly when a connected salesperson evangelises the benefits.

3. Increased demand for customised social Media monitoring. Working in this area, I am seeing first hand the continued demand to unlock insights that are often hidden from mainstream media services. One of the main tools that I use for this is my feedreader. As the demand increases, I think this will encourage the training of resources in the creation and use of “interest based ambient awareness” channels.

We all have a passion or interest. I would challenge you to discover for yourself firsthand the benefits of getting more deeply engaged through the creation of an “Interest based ambient awareness” channel.

The continued growth of Social media has resulted in a massive power shift to the consumer. The ability for consumers to voice their opinions is unprecedented in the history of media and the ability to effectively interpret and engage with this channel is often ignored.

Social media cannot be controlled; ignoring it just eliminates you from the conversations. Due to the global scale and the sheer volume of online conversations taking place, knowing how to respond to social media can be a little daunting.

In this article I’ll outline a 3 step action plan that will assist you to understand and respond to social media. It will also help you to establish an accurate online brand identity and provide you with the ability to influence conversations, a real competitive advantage for any organisation

I define Social Media as “Open conversations that encourage participation and connect people”.

Listen – Engage – Influence

Step 1. Listen

Listen involves the development of a process to both understand the conversations that are present, as well as the implementation of a process to action the insights.

Listening to social media conversations requires a combination of skills.

Online research techniques should be combined with business and marketing acumen, to collate and produce information in a manner that can easily be digested, allowing ongoing insights to be deduced and actioned.

Identifying influential conversations where your organisations should potentially have a voice, is one of the most challenging outcomes of this step. Consideration needs to be made of the author’s reputation, as well as the website reach and volume of conversation.

Valuable insights are also discovered through the provision of opinions in real time, listening will also identify potential gaps or bias in points of view which your business can address.

Early warning of potential risks is another benefit which stems from a social media listening process.

A social media audit is a good first step which involves a broad brush search of the categories where your organisation competes. There are a number of specialist blog search engines such as http://www.technorati.com which can provide a quick list of recent blog mentions for a given search string.

Setting up Google alerts http://www.google.com/alerts for various keywords of importance is another step that will help gauge the quantity and types of conversations related to one or more search strings.

Once you are listening to conversations, it gives you permission to engage with them.

Step 2. Engage

The creation of a social media participation framework is an important and ongoing process that acts to steer the location, resources and communication style for social media engagement.

Effective social media engagement provides a valuable feedback channel, offering the ability to improve customer service, exhibit leadership and create an innovation stream. Another benefit to social media engagement, which often emerges for organisations and brands, is a deeper self awareness of your positioning.

Leveraging this opportunity requires careful planning and consideration of appropriate outcomes and risks. However, it is important for companies to instil some basic “Rules of Engagement” so that employees know how to engage with social media.

The development of a social media policy should include the following principles:-

· Engagement etiquette
Social media is more immediate, more interment and therefore a more casual style is called for. No matter what tone or engagement area, basic communication etiquette should be followed.

· Transparency
The most common error organisations and their agencies make is the lack of transparency in their engagement. Companies misrepresenting the truth are regularly found out, with the results being broadcast for all to see. This can cause challenging issues, as happened when the NAB’s PR agency engaged with social media to advertise a promotion without declaring their relationship to NAB.

· Horses for Courses
Identifying where to engage is a critical step in the engagement process and the broad nature of social media requires that different resources from different departments are required to manage this engagement. For example, engaging in a technical forum is best achieved using technical resources.

· Incentivise contribution
Employees are often your best source of information, but many companies fail to incentivise them for their engagement contributions.

· Responsiveness
The ability to provide timely engagement is critical to the effectiveness of organisations ability to join the conversations. A good rule of thumb is that engagement should occur within 48 hours.

· Integration
Wherever possible, online participation should be aligned with offline communication as it amplifies the message and demonstrates consistency.

· Communication of the policy
Many corporations have created a policy and yet their employees have not been informed or are not aware of it. Social media engagement policies should be integrated with induction processes and also updated regularly.

Participation, participation, participation is the new Location, location, location.

Making it easy for people to discover and spread your goodwill is the primary principle behind social media marketing.

Most companies have marketing budgets which are used to communicate messages to their consumers, but using those budgets effectively for influencing conversations is often an afterthought.

Influencing consumer behaviour has always been an objective of marketing agencies, but with the growth of social media, a number of principles should be employed.

· Measurement
Investment in social media influence programs provides a unique opportunity to measure the effectiveness of all forms of marketing. As social media grows, so does the ability to establish social media metrics for marketing spend. So listen to social media to measure the effectiveness of your marketing spend.

· Building loyalty
Identifying influencers and lead consumers provides a foundation for the creation of ongoing loyalty programs. It also identifies collaboration opportunities that may be useful for expanding the awareness of your product or service through word of mouse!

Influence is all about measuring the impact on social media of your campaigns and using that insight to create and stimulate conversations.

Social media is an exciting new medium, and the 3 step action plan should help you to understand the insights, navigate your engagement, and leverage your marketing spend.

Ian Farmer – Senior Brand Strategist
E Ian.farmer@bullseye.com.au
M 0417 460 518

Yes is true, there’s still creative’s out there still behaving badly even under the current global meltdown but last Tuesday wasn’t one of those nights,  this was the Iab Creative Social monthly gathering of creative’s from around Sydney shin dig. This time though, it was all very different yes there was beer and for a tart like me a nice glass of wine there was the usual selection of nibbles (thank you to the team at New Dialogue) but this time, we were asked to lay ourselves bare and show some of the work we had recently done.

Seven brave souls stepped to the plate and showcased their wares some lovely work from the likes of Deepend, Soap and Lowe Rivet to name but a few and to be honest all the work was of a high quality. What I really liked about the night wasn’t so much about the work but the warts and all of how the work got out there from all the presenters, Ash from Soap, I loved your honesty regarding agency websites and that as a rule of thumb we all struggle to update and showcase our work (at this point there were lots of nodding heads) I thought it might be the drink but no, we were all in agreement on that front.

I didn’t have a presentation prepared as I thought pitching to a group of CD’s… ohhh very dangerous as these boy’s and girl’s all know the tricks of the trade.

One slight problem! they hadn’t the link I’d sent over so with a quick SMS to our man in the house Ian Farmer (and for those who haven’t met him you should, one of the best brains in the business and knows the digital space better than anyone out there) anyway, I needed a link which I’d forgotten from a piece I had written two weeks earlier, with running, swimming (Yes I’ve now taken up swimming) and three kid’s screaming and having paint fights my mind sometimes forgets these minor things, so a quick text back I was ready to go.

I chose this years Blackmore’s Sydney Running Festival everything from the videos to the personalised training programs was shown, and after about 10 minutes it was all over, a great way to share our work and if you believe in the work then it’s easy to stand up and talk about it.

I look forward to the next instalment, chin chin.