25 November 2008

Posted at 20:44h in adspace pioneers, bigpond, julian cole, telstra by

Before I get into it, should probably talk quickly about the Digital Marketing & Media Summit. It was okay.Julian Cole was kind enough to hook me up with a free ticket, and I certainly would have been annoyed had I paid $990. Even then I only hung around for half a day, the student in me decided to wait until after lunch before leaving.The best thing I got from the day was a couple of ideas for blog posts.For the audience there, they may have found some sessions useful but honestly most presentations were fairly dry. The exception of course was Julian's (it's possible that was only the case because I helped him out on stage).A question asked to Julian was what were some examples of social media marketing being done well in Australia. He talked about Bigpond on Twitter, which is a great case study, but even then they started out as a disaster.Clearly Australia is lagging. But before I get too pessimistic, I wouldn't mind building a list of Australian examples and case studies. So throwing it out to you guys, what Australian brands have used social media well?...

23 November 2008

Posted at 14:57h in adspace pioneers, broadcast, julian cole, response, social media by

"Social media is more than just advertising", said Julian Cole at the Digital Marketing & Media Summit on Friday. So quotable that I wrote it down to blog about. I realised that without even intending to, I accidentally drew the line as to what is and isn't advertising when it comes to social media marketing, based on my two social media strategies. The first is Broadcast, which is in a sense advertising and marketing focused. The second, Response, however is simply customer service. Not everyone needs to market and advertise their product. But everyone should be engaging in and developing good customer service....

04 November 2008

Posted at 20:24h in adspace pioneers, blogging, julian cole, social media by

Juju Cole wrote a pretty neat article a few weeks about about how awesome the Australian social media marketing bloggers are. The article talks about the ridiculous amount of free content and resources available to brands wanting to establish themselves in this space.The only problem, of course, is that brands need someone to tell them they should be adding these bloggers to their RSS Feed in the first place. Just like someone needs to tell them they should have a Google Alerts account set up.Both are free, but to know about them you already need to be inside the social media circle. Getting there isn't hard, but the majority of brands need someone to push them in.So perhaps social media marketers, agencies and consultants should be looking to pull clients inside that circle?...

25 August 2008

Posted at 14:32h in adspace pioneers, bandt, creative is not a department, david gillespie, julian cole, marketing magazine, social currency, social objects, user generated content by

Not quite absolutely nothing. I recently subscribed to B&T Magazine and found interesting the "advice column". Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to respond to the magazine in time, so I thought I'd do it here instead. Here was their question...

11 August 2008

Posted at 17:35h in adspace pioneers, fantastic noodles, julian cole, pimp my kettle, the body shop by

I've received a fair bit of flack over my post about the Pimp My Kettle campaign. Apparently I wasn't constructive enough, which admittedly is true but by saying campaigns like this are ruining my career was apparently going too far. Well here is some justification on what a successful social media campaign should look like. Check out Julian's post on The Body Shop. So not only have they established a blog that actually works quite well, they are slowly looking to build up an authentic community. The best part of this, was that after Julian posted that, the author behind the blog commented. Simply using Google alerts this author has created a relationship that has since grown. But it goes one step further. If you were to check out Julian's post on the Pimp My Kettle campaign there is again a comment from The Body Shop. It was actually rather insightful, fits well with the brand and most importantly wouldn't have shown up in Google Alerts. This means that the author is regularly checking out Julian's blog, continuing to build this relationship. And that's how social media campaigns should work. Building relationships by providing value. Not creating false communities around passions that don't exist that will die in three months anyway. So while this is all new and we are still learning our way around, some rules and guidelines have already been set. Ignoring them does hurt my career and gives me every right to bag your shitty campaign if it deserves it....