I’m a big fan of side projects. Particularly those that support your main gig, even if it’s indirectly.

It goes without saying that the most successful people in this industry are the ones that do something on the side. Launching a line a bottled water, managing a band, running a resource for Juniors and a building a fashion blog are a few that come to mind from people I’ve worked with.

I’ve tried to have a few of these projects over the years. I built and sold a website which taught me some crazy good stuff and I’m pretty sure my local hockey club is the only one in Australia to have an SEO strategy.

In fact this blog was too once a side project while I was a student that resulted in my first job. Sadly when your side project essentially becomes your full time job it’s hard to keep passionate about a little old blog in my case. Hence why I’m lucky to post once a month these days.

With that said, this year I’ve got two major side projects I want to tackle. Within the next few months I want to launch a product, and after that develop a mobile app. That should be enough to keep me busy, and give me some time to think about what comes after that.

So what’s your side project and how does it support your main gig?

Maybe I’ve been in advertising too long, but I can’t help but feel brands get it pretty tough.

Especially brands that actually contribute toward a customer’s life. Some of them meaningfully.

Yet all we see is brands being criticised and abused. Particularly on social media.

But what would happen if consumers thanked the brands they liked? Or recognised the role they played?

Turns out most people are pretty skeptical. Although my posts did generate some ‘random’ likes.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing ‘Thank The Brands You Like Day’ anytime soon. But I think it’s an interesting concept.

Last month I wrote about how I think email is not used enough by brands. This month I’ve been thinking about other channels and platforms marketers don’t leverage enough.

And the big one that keeps coming back to me is why have we never seen a brand use torrents?

Yes it falls into a gray area that not a lot of brands could get way with, but we need to remember of course that torrenting itself is not illegal, only the torrenting of illegal content.

Although most media usage reports seem to ignore it, we know video consumption through torrents is prevalent, and in many demographics ubiquitous. So why don’t we see any brands playing in this space?

Even if they don’t have quality branded content to release through torrents, why are no brands leveraging torrent sites through display media? Surely the lack of competition makes them fairly cheap placements and I imagine a “real” banner ad would stand out among the rest of the spam.

It would be pretty ballsy for a brand to do either of these, but it would be pretty effing awesome.

We regularly talk about the distribution of content through YouTube, blogs, social networks and other digital bits and pieces. But I think we often overlook a hugely under appreciated platform; email.

Take this example sent around a few days before the Brownlow.

Philip Brown, a Quantitative Strategist at Commonwealth Bank, put together a report with a model and analysis on who he believed would win the Brownlow Medal using a few seasons worth of data (which you can download it here if you’re interested). He emailed it to a few of his colleagues where it was quickly forwarded on around the industry and then on to broader audiences (where I received it).

It’s well targeted, interesting and shows how smart the brand is with data. And it doesn’t even matter that I dropped $100 on it and lost my money because the predictions were wrong.

And if you’re even remotely interested in footy, you probably received the  ‘Red Carpet Analysis’ PowerPoint the day after the Brownlow from a friend. Another piece of content distributed very successfully via email.

Email has this crazy potential for amplification (and sometimes longevity) being forwarded again and again and again. As a platform it’s ubiquitous, not going anywhere and cheap to leverage. And personally, I think it’s way underused by brands for distributing content.

Clients are increasingly getting better at digital. It’s taken some time, but we’re now at a point where most clients understand digital’s potential role, importance and place. And this is only going to get stronger (particularly as younger marketers step into decision-making roles).

As a result, many brands now have the basic digital hygiene factors covered. They’re in social media, creating content, leveraging video, thinking about SEO and search, using analytics and are across mobile.

And I think a lot of people who call themselves “Digital Strategists” are going to start sweating when they get asked what to do next. What happens after a brand ticks off the digital basics?

Because once they play the “Let’s use Pinterest” card, I think they’re going to start running out of answers.

Dare I say it’s time for Digital Strategist 2.0s.

Yesterday I finished up at George Patts.

I started my first day as an intern with a mohawk doing community management. Two and a half years later I leave as a Digital Strategist, with a lot more on my head, and hopefully a bit more in my head.
And on Monday, I start a new gig at CumminsRoss.

For quite a while now, a mate and I have been homebrewing. We’ve had varying degrees of success ranging from exploding bottles to pouring entire glasses of head to great (drinkable) beer.

It’s great fun and a cheap way to drink. But one of the frustrating things about it is how slow the process is. From step one to drinking a cold beer you’re looking at two to three months, more than enough time to forget the small things you’ve done along the way to improve/ruin the beer.

So on a recent batch, we decided to do something different. Instead of brewing twenty bottles of the exact same beer we brewed ten variations in one batch.

Normally it would take two months to know if putting in an extra spoon of sugar has a positive or negative impact. This time, we put one spoon in a bottle, one and half in another and two in a third. Then we tried the same with raw sugar. And again with brown sugar. Then we tried one bottle with honey.

In two months, we’ll be able to easily analyse ten variations, which under the previous approach would have taken ten times longer.

And you should take a similar approach with your highly trafficked website. I’ve been doing a lot recently around split testing and optimising and here are a few things I’ve picked up:

  • Every visit is an opportunity to learn something (big or small)
  • Never make assumptions (there’s no need with so much data)
  • More often than not, change is incremental (there’s no such thing as a silver bullet)

Without even realising it, I massively improved my “test and learn” process and inadvertently started split testing my beer at the same time.

Funnily enough, those bullet points above apply to homebrewing too.

Last night I gave a group of Monash students a tour of our office. Funnily enough, exactly three years ago I was the student walking through George Patts hoping to one day get a job there.

It reminded me of how after my tour as a student I bumped into Russel Howcroft shortly after and he told us during a presentation that sometimes marketers needed to “build things and they (the consumers) will come”.
I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But today I can’t help but think it’s a completely underrated and underused digital strategy. This idea of building something rad that’s relevant to your target audience and then using them to spread your idea.
You don’t need to stress about amplification strategies/sharing user journeys/going viral/influencer seeding and all that other nonsense. Instead you be awesome and the rest comes naturally.
Intel did it here, and Coke are trying it out with things like this.
And of course, it makes an amazing brief for the ad agency.

It seems like even the laggard brands are now finding their way on Facebook. And what better way to kick things off than running a big promotion with a big prize.

Wrong.
Brands are relying too heavily on “going viral” and “amplification through social networks” and “sharing”. As a result there are far too many social media promotions happening at the moment producing less than average ROIs. Big budget promotions are only receiving very little uptake.
It’s pretty much the reason I recently won a car. In fact right now I am in with a pretty good chance to win $10,000 in a video competition… where less than 30 people entered.
Brands fail to understand that to run a big social media promotion you either need a cracking idea, a big media buy, or an already established audience. You can’t launch and expect big results from your small community.
Instead, start with small, regular promotions until you’ve built up a sizeable audience. Then start giving away cars and large sums of cold, hard cash.

What a year I’ve had, two media ‘scandals’ in six months. In May I was accused of writing offensive tweets that supposedly meant I couldn’t do my job and just last week I apparently cheated my way into winning a new car.

Between the two ‘scandals’ (and I use the word lightly) I’ve managed to be the most read article on The Age website, the lead story on Channel 10 news and even had a joke made about me by Dave Hughes on The Project.

Here are the five things I’ve learned about handling what is quite a daunting experience for a 22-year-old.

1) Anything can be a story
What I didn’t realise until recently was that anything could be a story.

It doesn’t matter if it’s pointless or what I would deem ‘a non story’. It particularly doesn’t matter if it’s a scandal for the sake of being a scandal.

You might think the content of the story isn’t newsworthy, but you have to ask yourself, “What is the headline?”. Because if the situation can be condensed into a scandalous headline, the rest of the article doesn’t matter. And that’s why something as innocent as a tweet or a mention of the word ‘BFF’ three years ago can apparently be news.

2) Don’t feed the trolls
It’s quite incredible how crazy some people can be. Despite being ill informed and unwilling to be informed, social media has allowed these people a voice.

It’s tempting to respond to their blatant stupidity or cruelty, but don’t. Trolls don’t argue with logic so you’re just wasting your time, and more importantly any response can be used as fodder by journos to make things worse.

Trolls are best left in silence.

3) Don’t feed the journos (some of whom are also trolls)
Again it’s hard not to, but by doing so you’re throwing fuel on the fire and potentially getting yourself into another news cycle.

The quality of journalism and research in both of my ‘scandals’ were incredibly poor, yet the best option was to remain quiet and let the story die as quickly as it came.

No one ever got in trouble for not making a comment.

4) Do the ground work to win the SEO game
Articles and ‘scandals’ like these hurt people, especially when it comes to their Google results. One news piece could cost you and your reputation years down the track when a potential employer (or potential date) runs your name in a Google search.

To avoid this as much as possible, you’ve got to be proactive. Thankfully I’ve got this blog that I’ve been writing for four years and a number of other platforms that help my search results. They will (hopefully) always trump a rogue journalist who decides to use my name.

It’s unreasonable to assume you’ll never be a front page story (just ask 21-year-old Zac!). The best defence you can have to protect your page rank on Google against shoddy journalism is a quality blog or website. If you don’t have one, best you get started.

5) Ride it out
Once the story breaks, you can’t do anything about it.

If you’ve followed the advice above then the story should be dead within a news cycle and the damage won’t be too extensive. You can’t control how you’re portrayed or what people say about you, so you’re best to ride it out and remember that in a few days no one will remember or give a shit.

It’s been a crazy few experiences, certainly not something I want to repeat. Hopefully I don’t have to follow these tips myself ever again.

Two scandals is enough for one lifetime.