A recent research project by Edelman and Brandtology identified Twitter as the top channel for technology brand mentions in Australia.  The Whirlpool and Overclockers forums ranked in second and third place respectively.  I believe that these findings are reflective of a mature social media environment for technology brands in Australia.

Google, Apple and Microsoft ranked as the most talked about technology brands in the study which uncovered more than 154,000 mentions of 60 major technology brands across 581 influential online channels between April and June 2010.

The survey found that 27 of the 60 technology brands researched did not have a local presence on Twitter.  This represents an ‘opportunity for brands to…become smarter about communicating through this channel,’ according to Edelman.

But is Twitter the right channel for all technology brands?  I don’t think so.

Take the enterprise tech sector as an example (the study covered: ‘Internet and Software, Consumer Electronics, Mobile and Telecommunications, Business and Consulting and IT and Technology brands).  This  sector of the IT industry is characterised by complex technology and business issues that aren’t well suited to the  open Twitter platform limited as it is to 140 character updates.

Enterprise tech brands tend to be most interested in reaching senior decision makers within medium to large organisations – individuals that are less likely to be spending time on Twitter.  These brands need to demonstrate authoritative positions on commercially sensitive and strategic issues.  Twitter just isn’t designed or suitable as a platform for this sort of discussion or engagement.

With these facts in mind, I would be inclined to recommend that enterprise tech brands seek to establish online communities where customers can engage with experts and product specialists but also – importantly – share ideas and experiences with other customers.   I would look to the social media platforms where these targets are already active, the most obvious one being Linkedin.

It’s important that organisations monitor conversations about their brands across all forms of social media, including Twitter, but the most ‘active’ channels aren’t necesarily the best places to actually engage your target audience in a meaningful way.

The campaign is asking consumers to help reinvent the Wagon Wheel with a big social media play.

The objective of the campaign seems to be to create a new more youthful audience / consumer for the Wagon Wheel.

One observation is that the retro 1970s angle seem more tightly aligned with the original consumer (now in their 30s), rather than the new. It is nostalgic, the prizes (a random selection of iconic yet low value 80s products and games – there is an $8008 ‘Random. But Right’ cash prize on offer) take us back to our childhood, more innocent days that probably featured the Wagon Wheel.

The campaign is fronted by four crusty fictional characters (the Production Innovation Team) that I don’t think  resonate, engage or amuse. In fact, they simply reinforce the perception that the product is dusty, out-dated and un-cool.

Arnotts acknowledge the passion that consumers have for the brand (in this case ‘mums’):

“It really is an incredible brand that consumers have an amazing amount of passion for. And one of the main attractions in the acquisition was the fact that it hadn’t been looked after as much as we would like to look after the brand. It hadn’t had a great deal of investment.”

But does the campaign look after the brand? The older audience for this campaign (grocery decision makers now) are asked to reinvent something that they love. They’re being asked to change something that holds a special place in their hearts (by Arnott’s own admission).

Consumers can enter the competition via the microsite, either by submitting their own design for the ‘reinvent-ion of the perfect wagon wheel’ or by combining a variety of options to create their own version. They can chose from a variety of shapes (snowman, football, triangle, flower, dinosaur etc.) and select a flavour (chicken, pizza, white choc, marmalade) and then opt for one of six coatings, including white choc, dark choc, cheese and honeycomb.

Who is this campaign aimed at – the competition entry mechanic might appeal to a young teenager but its not going to work for the community that is famliar with the Wagon Wheel.

There are some tactical errors in my opinion as well. The campaign seems to carry too many ‘labels’. We have the ‘WagonWheeler‘ Twitter profile, the ‘EatZeeWagonWheel‘ YouTube channel, the ‘WagonWheels‘ Facebook Page/ ‘Wagon Wheels‘ campaign microsite (including images, which can’t be downloaded) and ‘Random but Right’.

The integration between the various social media elements seems haphazard, there are 5 videos on the YouTube channel but only two of those are included in the Facebook Page. The Community Guidelines are very formal, they’re not presented in the voice of any member of the Product Reinvention Team. The Info Tab on the Page looks like a cut and paste, it bears no resemblance with the campaign or its messaging.

The microsite does pop up in the first page of Google Australia search results for ‘Wagon Wheel’.

The social media elements of the campaign seem to have stalled from what I can see. The Twitter following(49 followers/following 57) is not going anywhere fast and the Facebook ‘likes’ are at a similar point to my last check a few weeks back. The most popular video on YouTube has received just under 1,500 views in a week (not bad). The microsite has gained 165 Facebook ‘likes’ since its launch a few weeks back.

This is just one part of an integrated campaign for the Wagon Wheel. It may all come together in a coherent package at some point but, for me, the various dots aren’t yet lining up. It seems like someone had a lot of fun creating this but I don’t think the result is engaging or compelling for the target audience, whoever that is.

Arnotts, as an Australian brand, has huge potential to do some fun stuff in social media but this feels like a campaign that is looking for an audience.

It certainly lives up to the ‘Random’ part of its catchphrase but is it ‘Right?’

Clay Shirky presented on the topic of a ‘cognitive surplus’ for his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations. He said that approx100million hours has been invested in the creation of Wikipedia.  By contrast, there are trillions of global hours available within ’surplus’ every year.  The premise for the presentation was that humans are generous creatures and that new technology presents huge potential for altruistic, collaborative behaviour that delivers a greater good.

This idea is the basis for many aspects of the Social Web (for want of a better term, as this is broader than social media).  The notion that efficient networks without geographic boundaries will  act as the vehicle for human endeavour in the pursuit of positive economic, creative and educational outcomes has great appeal.

The idea of a cognitive surplus is also fascinating in the context of widespread budget deficits but don’t expect any major policy announcements from Gillard or Abbott on this topic just yet!

The presentation got me thinking about the question of a political culture within the realm of  the Social Web.  If Social is about sharing, co-operation and contributing to community then is it safe to assume that a left leaning political culture underpins the ‘movement’?

Is it important for the community to acknowledge in some capacity the presence of a common political ethos within the Social Web or the perhaps to acknowledge the lack of one?  Does the Social Web transcend traditional notions of political affiliation or realisation?  Are creativity and collaboration apolitical forces in 2010?

Most importantly, can our positive vision of a Social good delivered by technology and the Web be achieved without a political consensus?

Until that point, I had excelled at procrastination – I took the opportunity to avoid taking action better than anyone I knew.  My personal development, health, finances, relationships and direction had definitely suffered.

I was a world beater procrastinator.  From the relatively menial to the significant I had items that had languished on my to do list for more than 15 years !!

A rudimentary analysis of my procrastination identified a few root causes:

FEAR and LAZINESS.

One of the recommended techniques for getting focused was to incorporate mantras into my thinking.  I developed a simple mantra that has served me very well:

THINK IT – DO IT

This action oriented mantra is all about immediacy – the antithesis of procrastination.

The mistake that procrastinators make is to delay and obsfucate when it comes to taking action.  The first delay is significant; every subsequent delay and avoidance has less and less significance.  It becomes easier to procrastinate once you’ve open the door of procrastination.

‘I’ve already put this off, it won’t matter if I put it off for a bit longer’.

Procrastination breeds procrastination.

The ‘DO IT’ part of the mantra part doesn’t necesarily mean that you should stop what you’re doing to take action on the latest thought or remembered task. That would be far too intrusive – you’d never get anything done.

‘DO IT’ can be as simple as adding an item to your to do list or taking a small step that puts the task in motion.

But often ‘DO IT’ can mean exactly that – this works brilliantly with small menial tasks that you don’t really want to do.  You can significantly reduce the amount of time that you spend thinking, putting off and actioning this task by doing it there and then.

THINK IT – DO IT

These four words have served me well.  In the past two years, I have managed to get my act together in many different aspects of my life, crossed off some significant personal objectives and made great progress towards some of the specific personal goals that I set myself in the very first meeting with the life coach two years ago.

What’s your mantra for getting things done?  Do you need one?

More on David Harvey.

Julia Gillard, Australia’s new PM and the first woman to hold the top job, has a shortish to do list of big problems to fix prior to the Federal election, which is expected to be held in August of this year.

One of her biggest challenges will be deciding whether Australia needs a great big fax to track and reduce carbon emissions.

It looks as though faxes will be a hot election issue.

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/politics/prime-minister-julia-gillard-the-australian-election-and-a-great-big-fax/feed/ 0 http://justanother24hours.com/life/17-reasons-why-developing-and-managing-a-social-media-program-is-like-having-a-baby/ http://justanother24hours.com/life/17-reasons-why-developing-and-managing-a-social-media-program-is-like-having-a-baby/#comments Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:50:25 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=1181 On becoming a dad almost two weeks ago, I thought it would be appropriate for me to post here to mark the arrival of our boy Noah Thomas and to reflect on an amazing experience.

So here follows 17 reasons why managing a social media program is like having a baby.

1. Everyone is an expert
2. It takes time
3. You can’t rush things
4. You are not in control
5. Make sure you have a plan in place for the launch
6. Be prepared to be flexible
7. You’ll need to draw on extra resources to pull it off
8. It’s highly likely that you’ll experience some pain along the way
9. There will probably be some late nights
10. Your involvement does not end at the time of launch
11. Results may not be as pretty as you would like
12. You have to accept this
13. It’s a long term commitment
14. It will be challenging and rewarding
15. You’ll learn as you go and make adjustments to your strategy
16. It will require significant investment
17. ROI may be difficult to quantify

I am sure that there are many more – please add in comments.

And here is Noah.  Ain’t he gorgeous!!

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/life/17-reasons-why-developing-and-managing-a-social-media-program-is-like-having-a-baby/feed/ 7 http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/use-of-social-video-sharing-sites-by-top-brands-in-australia/ http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/use-of-social-video-sharing-sites-by-top-brands-in-australia/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:02:47 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=1167 Over the last six weeks we at Burson-Marsteller Australia have been working on a study into the use of free social video sharing sites by top brands in Australia.

There are a number of factors that would lead you to expect that brands operating in Australia would be investing heavily in social video content and leveraging the large user communities in the top sites, such as YouTube.

These factors are:

1. The simple fact that Australians are demonstrating a huge appetite for online video.  Close to a billion, yes a billion, videos were consumed by Australians in the month of January 2010. A billion in one month, or 33.3 million per day, or 23,148 per minute.
2. Video and mobile. 42% of online Australians use a smartphone, according to Nielsen.  Everything is going mobile, therefore brands need to provide content that works well on mobile devices.  The answer is video.
3. Because the average online Australian spends more than 6.52  hours per month in social media (Nielsen).
4. Video content is three times more clickable than text – this is an anecdotal fact that I hear quoted regularly. I don’t have a source for it, I’m afraid.
5. YouTube is emerging as one of the leading search engines.
6. The media landscape is shrinking, presenting fewer opportunities for brands to engage with their target audience.  Therefore, brands have to seize the initiative and begin creating their own branded content.  That content could take many forms; educational and how to guides; infotainment; news; opinion; video based campaigns and so on.

The fact is that 65 per cent of the brands that we studied did not have an official brand presence in the top social video sharing sites. That figure is a little disappointing but not tragic – the bad news is that more than (just over) 50 per cent of the corporate channels were inactive, which we generously defined as having not been updated for more than 2 months.

Now, this inactive issue is one we have encountered before.  It points to the issue of brands engaging without the necesary resources or strategy or integration in place.  We’re not saying this stuff is easy but I strongly feel that no presence is preferable than an inactive / dormant account.

Here is the full presentation and a link to the press release on our local website:

One of the challenges when conducting this research is identifying a credible list of companies that can act as the sample for the research.  In this case, we used the Nielsen Top Advertisers Report for 2009.  We worked with Nielsen to make sure that they were comfortable with our methodology for the study.  It’s important to stress that the study does not assume any direct link between media spend and social media strategy or between advertising content and social media.

It’s possible that the methodology caused us to miss video content that is being produced by these brands because it is served via their own corporate website, or a third party channel provider (such as Viocorp) or Facebook.  That could be the case but it still represents a missed opportunity.  If you’re creating video content then you may as well make it available via the most popular online video service, even if your primary video channel is hosted elsewhere.

The research is far less rigourous and detailed than anything that Nielsen would do (for obvious reasons) .  Having said that, we do feel that the research produced some interesting findings.  It can act as a benchmark for brands in Australia that want to assess their social media engagement and presence against industry as a whole.

We’ve worked on quite a few of these now.  It follows our study into the use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) by twenty top Australian brands and an evaluation of online newsrooms.  For both of these studies we drew the sample companies from the Interbrands Best Brands report.

A significant section of the media/Web commentariat has expressed its dis-satisfiaction with Facebook’s policies and management. I can’t help noticing the irony here.

Individuals who have built businesses and reputations on the basis of  the models that underpin social media and digital advertising are now outraged at the fact that Facebook wants to make money from user data.

Really?

These people have the right to express a view, and Facebook has not managed its stakeholders well.

But…

The issue here is that Facebook wants to access, use and profit from information about its members.  Shock! Horror!

The opportunity to do both of these things is why Facebook and other services like it exist in the first place!

Many seem to think that Mark Zuckerberg provides Facebook as a service out of the goodness of his heart. This sense of entitlement makes us the ‘dumb f*cks’.

Others seem to think that they can re-define the terms of their usage after they agreed to an End User License Agreement, which handed control of their content and data to Facebook.

User data underpins the business model.  What was once considered private information will become more public.

You have a choice.

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/the-facebook-irony-recent-facebook-outrage-and-privacy-debate-doesnt-ring-true/feed/ 1 http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/corporates-need-to-socialise-brand-websites/ http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/corporates-need-to-socialise-brand-websites/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:50:34 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=1152 I was delighted to have an opinion piece run in the Media & Marketing section of today’s Sydney Morning Herald.

The article makes the point that companies need to make their brand websites more social, personal, human and interactive. We’re already seeing a lot of brands moving in this direction with corporate blogs and  community content built into their branded website experience.

I think this trend will continue.

Some may argue that social media fulfils the need for interactivity and conversational marketing;  they’re right but I do believe that we’ll see the balance equalise for the following reasons:

• Brands know that social network users are fickle and that sites can quickly fall out of favour. This makes it a risky place to invest in order to establish your social presence online
• Branding is about differentiation – social networks inhibit differentiation by forcing brands to work within templates.  Brands owners will want to regain control of the way they are presented
• The conversations that make up social media will become core to business – the emphasis will shift from social networks back to the branded website
• Brands will become leaders and not followers in social media as they become content producers & media companies in their own right
• Brands will allow the user to create their own experience within the confines of the branded website by adding or removing social objects, content and apps, which the user can then bring into their social network.  The brand website will act as a social hub.

The article ran in today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age: Building a better relationship with online customers