Social media is a concentrated network of resources, people and information using the web, and web-based technologies (blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook etc.) to create social dialogue across many channels.

Social media transforms ‘people from content consumers into content producers‘.

Unique to Social Media, and in striking contrast to conventional media channels such as newspapers or television - is its capability of allowing a single voice with relatively no resources to publish information with significant volume and sentiment.

What used to be “word of mouth” is now “world of mouth” - Eric Qualman (Socialnomics)
Watch the Social Media Revolution (YouTube)

The key to Social Media is ‘genuine dialogue’
When considering social media strategies or campaigns, provide your audience a genuine reason to participate.

• Ensure your idea has resonance
• Provide a genuine incentive to participate
• Ensure the message has relevance (to your intended audience)
• Establish a meaningful exchange for you, and your audience
• Ensure your message is fresh
• Establish trust and ensure you maintain it

Tip: Ensure your approach is sustainable with your available resources.

Ramblings, references and recommendations…

• Historically, brands and business are used to having their conventional armory of communication lined up in a row ready to push information out and hope it works. Now brands need to participate.
• Ironically, human connection is the primary reason people venture onto social media sites - though contribution to content eg. blogs and product consumption is frequent (Razorfish)
• Social media, is an opportunity for brands and consumers to equally benefit from relationships.
• People influence others online = Social Influence Marketing. Ironically, human connection is the primary reason people venture onto social media sites - though contribution to content (eg Blogs) and product consumption is frequent (Razorfish)
• Acknowledge, accept and employ social media as a powerful and viable channel to marketing
• There are many indexes and methods for measuring success of social marketing. For easy understanding, Social Media measurement is a metric of volume and sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) around user-generated content.

Tools for enabling social marketing
Enable social media into your website to encourage social interaction, community support and make content more shareable.
There’s many ways and means, here’s a few handy tools as reference.

TweetMeme: The TweetMeme re-tweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on Twitter.
AddThis: Boost traffic back to your websites by making it easier for visitors to share your content.
Delicious Collaboratively manage bookmarks for handy online resources tailored to customer segments
SlideShare: Upload and share presentations, Word documents and PDFs. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.
Survey Monkey: Survey your community at the start, middle or end of a campaign.

References:
There’s literally thousands of websites, blogs, business and evangelists out there, here’s a good start to learning more…
Social Nomics
Disruptology
WoorkUp
Mashable
Going Social Now by Shiv Singh
MediaPost
Social Media Examiner

Big kids at play: Pepsi V Coca-Cola
If you’re not yet convinced social media is here to stay, Pepsi have dropped their established NFL Superbowl ad placement for a social media campaign; Pepsi Refresh Project valued at US$20M. It’s no small gamble, though if successful they stand to gain a full year of audience sentiment, rather than a fleeting 30 seconds. Coke stayed with their Superbowl placement, though not to be out-done, countered Pepsi with a socially minded response through Facebook called Live Positively.  Read More.

In those famous words of Coke’s early 2000 campaign… “Enjoy!”

A week later it dawned on me - “If we give ‘em nothing, it’ll mean everything. The goat idea has legs!”

Combining our panache for beautifully designed, functional websites and the clear headedness of a week on Queensland’s far-north coast - things really took shape and Give Up Your Goat was born.

I expanded the idea to include charities close to our hearts, refined the copy, finessed the creative… and importantly scouring the aisles of toy stores in Cairns for mini goats to photograph on the beach house floor.

Arrrgghhhh this holiday is turning into a deadline!

Arriving back at the studio, we finessed the detail as a team and brainstormed how best to integrate social media streams into the campaign. By linking the re-gifting form to Twitter, we automatically published a tweet of who re-gifted and their nominated charity.

Anyone following SCT on Twitter could then discover Give Up Your Goat and join our flock of re-gifters and nominate a chairty close their heart.

Into production we go.
Rob… quick, code the templates.
Holly… source 100 mini goats… (a touch harder than you would think).
Black cube gift boxes… 100
Candy canes, ribbon to match
Swing tags…
Printing…
Hay…

Every detail is crucial.

The goodies arrived including the goats … now affectionately nicknamed Chev. Go go, go for assembly.

Chev & co. in the production line.

Holly madly herded goats into their boxes (strategically chosen black to match SCTs logo) and applied the finishing touches with matching candy stripe ribbon.

The boxes beginning to stack up...

The charities we selected are close to our hearts, close to our world or close to the people we do business with. We’ve allocated a total gift donation of $2,000.00 - which is distribute across the charities according to how people re-gifted.

Chev. King of the flock and ready to be re-gifted.

Thanks to all our clients, suppliers and friends who have re-gifted. Your responses have been incredible and the ‘baaaaaaa’ is certainly set for Christmas 2010.

If anyone would like to ‘Steal The Goat‘ and use the idea for their own philanthropic endeavours then drop us an email and we’ll work together in making it happen.

Cheers, Brad

A handy glossary to help decipher the lexicon of Twitter.

Tweet: A short post or update of 140 characters or less, which is published to your Twitter page. Generally they answer the question asked by Twitter; “What are you doing now?” but you can write whatever takes your fancy. Post links, share your opinion or ask questions.

Follow / Followers: To follow someone is to add his or her “tweets” to your real-time news feed. They do not have to follow you in return, but you may find they will. Your followers are all the Twitter users following your tweets.

@ + username: When the @ symbol is placed directly in front of a Twitter username, that username then becomes a red link to the user’s page. @ + username can be divided into two categories: replies and mentions.
@username(reply): By clicking the arrow in the right bottom hand corner of someone’s tweet, you can reply to the tweet they posted. Otherwise, typing @ + username into your tweet box, followed by your message, will direct your message at that user.
EG:
Alyssia: Has anyone stayed at the new Tyrian Apartments in Fitzroy?
Simone: @Alyssia Yep… I have, I really liked it - worth considering for your next melbourne trip!

@username (mention): A mention is simply placing an @ symbol before a username that you are discussing. Either you are talking about them, or wanting to include them in the conversation.

David: Have you checked out the awesome work of surf, fashion and adventure photographer @tedgrambeau
Graeme: As an art director @tedgrambeau is a pedigree photog. His website was designed by @sctmelbourne - you should check their work out too.

NOTE: You can view your @replies and mentions in the right hand side tool bar on your Twitter home page. Click the @’your username’ to view all of them.

Direct Messages (DM): These are like an ‘inbox’ for your Twitter account. They are private messages that the public will not see, as they will not show up on your page. To send a user a direct message, they have to be following you.

# symbol: “Hash tags” are used to group tweets into categories relating to keywords they have tagged with the # symbol. They can also become conversational topics for all users to get involved in, such as ‘#bestfeeling’.  These can become quite popular and often show in the top ten trending topics on Twitter search.
Hashtags also become red links, and clicking on a hashtag will search all other tweets containing the same hashtag.
EG. #iraqelection #haiku  (often hashtagged after users tweet their haiku poems) #favouritesong

Lists: One of the newest features to Twitter, lists are a way to organise your followers into groups. You can group followers according to what they generally ‘tweet’ about, location, co-workers, family, anything you like!

RT: to re-post (called retweeting) something posted by another user - preceed it with “RT” and “@username” to give credit to original poster.

Get tweeting!

Want to follow SCT on Twitter? ]]> http://blog.sct.com.au/2009/11/twitter-lexicon/feed/ http://blog.sct.com.au/2009/10/5-minutes-with-kath-cashion-scts-accounts-manager/ http://blog.sct.com.au/2009/10/5-minutes-with-kath-cashion-scts-accounts-manager/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:39:27 +0000 Holly http://blog.sct.com.au/?p=382 We managed to grab Kath long enough between phone calls with clients and meetings with the team to find out a little more about her..

What do you do at SCT?

Herd cats.

Project management, quality assurance, client happiness management, web analytics advocate and search engine optimiser.  Basically I try to keep work coming in and going out with maximum efficiency and all round satisfaction.

Describe an average day?

Is there any such thing?

Ride before work, then chew the fat on the challenges building software with my technical cycling buddies over breakfast.  Cringe at SCT’s shower - who decided to put it in a cupboard?  (There are generally at least 5 bicycles in the office - surely a good shower is in order?)

3 mornings a week we have a stand up meeting to check how everyone is tracking against the schedule for the week.

And the rest of the time - scoping new projects, reviewing work and discussing directions for current projects.

What was your previous job?

I was on the founding team for a start-up (redbubble.com) launching an online art gallery and community site - learning 1st hand the challenges of social media as we went from 0 to 30,000 members in 12 months!  Talk about herding cats.

What’s your passion?

Bikes and traveling.  Everything from a 24 hr mountain bike race to some of the European alp’s highest mountain passes. I’ve worked in Canada, studied in Milan, ridden my bike around New Delhi, and walked along the Andes.

What’s your best work moment?

The best moments are working on a project when the client is wanting to push the boundaries a bit.  Either the design something really special, or perhaps challenging from a usability perspective.

Coffee or tea?

I save coffee for really serious moments - like when I’ve ridden a long way from home and need to get back somehow.  So day to day it’s definitely tea - at the moment I’m drinking Ceylon, strong, with a large dash of full cream milk.

Favorite website?

Etsy.com   - like Ebay for handmade things.  It’s got lots of great ways to browse, like by colour.

Marketing Magazine Interview

Every two weeks marketingmag.com.au feature a new case study on organisations displaying successful business and marketing strategy and implementation, with a focus on measurable results.

With our fantastic results with Mirvac surpassing expectations, SCT thought our work with Mirvac would be a great case study example.

You can read the article here.

It’s fantastic to see our successes being recognised by well renowned media such as Marketing Magazine!

Visit the BlocksGlobal website.

Since March 2009, Google has offered online courses in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools, with the option of taking an online test at the completion of the course, or by itself.

The City of Melbourne Business Development Fund is Council’s major program of direct support to the economic and business development of Melbourne as a Thriving and Sustainable Knowledge City.Council’s ‘City Plan 2010′ document identifies four themes that provide the framework for the future strategic direction for the City of Melbourne that will enable the achievement of this vision.

These themes are:

• Connection and accessibility
• Innovation and business vitality
• Inclusiveness and engagement
• Environmental responsibility

The Fund is particularly relevant to the themes of ‘Connected and Accessible City’ and ‘Innovative and Vital Business City’ and contributes to the related major strategic directions, some of which include:

• ensuring information and communication infrastructure and capacity meets world standards, is competitive and serves community and City needs;
• enhancing connections at the local through to international levels to achieve the City vision;
• growing Melbourne’s competencies as a globally-recognised, entrepreneurial and competitive ‘Knowledge City’;
• fostering a civic and business culture that encourages and supports innovation in the pursuit of opportunity;
• promoting and extending the City’s role as Victoria’s principal centre for commerce, professional, business and financial services;
• developing and sustaining a world class retail experience within the City core;
• enhancing the City’s reputation as a ‘start-up city’ by supporting the establishment and growth of small to medium sized businesses; and
• developing sustainable industrial clusters in advanced manufacturing and logistics