I could not resist this one today!  But I still say Free The Chickens too!

Source: Trollcats

In recent times I had parallel customer service experiences with two different universities: Queensland University of Technology and Charles Sturt University.

It was very strange to hang up from one phone call only to have a diametrically different conversation on the next call with the other university.

Also, it seemed bizarre to be having a completely different customer service experience to the excellent one with QUT pretty much simultaneously.  My experience with Charles Sturt University was a horse of a different colour.

Many courses in Australian universities now require students to pay full fees, in particular for post-graduate courses.  It was in one of these that I enrolled at CSU with high hopes.

But my hopes were not realised.  Everything seemed a little hard to work out and the website provided little help. These were small dissatisfiers, of the kind that can easily be dismissed until something tips the scales.

The something that tipped the scales was the online forum.  I noticed that it displayed my official full name (the one that only a cranky parent or the Australian Tax Office call me).  Usually at other universities this is something easily fixed – a quick change to display my preferred name and all would be well.

Well that’s how it was at other universities I’ve attended (University of Sydney, MGSM, Macquarie University, Queensland University of Technology) – each easily accommodated use of an official name for use on testamurs and a preferred name for everyday use.

But, after several unhelpful phone interchanges with different people, a person in the student centre at CSU simply told me (in a very rude manner) to either put up with it or change my name by deed poll.  It was at that moment that I replied that there was a third option – one could choose to withdraw from that particular institution.  And it was this last option that I selected.

Once you start charging commercial rates for educational services a commercial relationship is created.  The fundamental principles of customer service must become part of the equation.  Of course, this is not to say that academic principles should not also be upheld.  But in matters of administration the customer has rights where a commercial fee is charged.

Here I’ve voted with my feet, not willing to give my hard earned cash to a place that did not treat me with the consideration due to a paying customer. Not a very good brand experience, and thus not a good word of mouth advertisement.

So here’s my recommendations:

• If you are thinking of distance education, QUT has been great both academically & administratively.
• For onsite education I also had great experiences with University of Sydney and Macquarie University.

These are places where I’m happy to spend my hard earned cash on acquiring an education.

A recent study in Scientific American about How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy discusses advances in neuroscience that are giving rise to a new field of neuromarketing.

The article cites the famous example of Coke v. Pepsi – where blind taste tests showed a preference for Pepsi, whereas visible labels gave rise to a preference for Coke.  Brain imaging shows that different parts of the brain are activated for each result.   This kind of technology enabled insight into our feelings will revolutionise focus groups.

It seems that as neuroscience advances it will inevitably inform our marketing practices. This means that marketing will begin its transition from black art – in the hands of the creative folks – to science – in the hands of the boffins.

We are moving into a time of Pavlovian marketing where stimulus + response = results based on scientific and quantifiable principles.  No more will people say “I know 50% of advertising works, I’m just not sure which 50%”.

It will be interesting to see how long this transition takes.

I attended the afternoon sessions for day one of the  Media 140 conference in Sydney today as a live blogger/twitterer and have  been consolidating my thoughts. Here’s a summary of the speakers that resonated for me in the afternoon sessions:

Julie Posetti (a.k.a. @julie_posetti) did a nice job of chairing the panels – a warm and friendly style

John Bergin (a.k.a. @theburgerman) displayed a splendid vocabulary and deep insights into the interplay between traditional media platforms and new media platforms.  He noted that the “the act of speaking should not be privileged over the act of listening”and that “passive news consumption is all but extinct”.  Wish he’d been able to share his thoughts for longer.

Bronwen Clune (a.k.a. @bronwen) discussed the changing nature of a journalist’s place in the world, admirably encapsulated as: “journalists – the audience formerly known as the media” (and she wore some fabulous red shoes ).

Leigh Sales (a.k.a. @leighsales ) talked about the how she approaches having an active social media presence and some of her techniques for balancing personal and work personas online, noting a simple rubric “if in doubt, leave it out” (she also wore some extremely funky white shoes ).

Stilgherrian (a.k.a. @stilgherrian) spoke about his puzzlement as to what journalists actually do, and noted that “90% of what journalists and bloggers do overlaps”. He pondered the decline of the 19th century style “media factories” and the rise of “social media” and did not mention #goats at all. The full text of his talk is available here.

Kudos to the ABC and to all the sponsors for a very thought provoking conference so far. Overall the logistics of the conference were great – well organised plus a nice venue with good parking & transport nearby. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.

Still pondering why none of the men wore interesting shoes or clothing & was delighted to finally meet @wolfcat in real life.

#media140

There is not just one interesting Kate to follow on Twitter.  Here’s a few interesting ones I follow – we do know each other real life (having met mostly via Twitter). These women are all intelligent and forthright, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

@katiechatfield – articulate & thoughtful creative strategist, social activist and bonne vivante

@katetribe – knows all about understanding your tribe with quantitative research, also a crazy cricket fan

@ZebraBites – qualitative market researcher extraordinaire, good dining companion and thinker

@katekendall – savvy writer with a focus on marketing & strategy, passionate advocate for social media and community

@kategamble – SEM guru, self described “Social Media Wanna-be”, all round thinker about social media ecosystems

The Media 140 Conference in Sydney has offered a vast amount of food for thought my brain is buzzing with ideas, issues and concerns.

The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one. For example in the session titled How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting Caroline Overington and Chris Uhlmann both seemed close to arguing that the end of the free world as we know it is nigh should one of the major east coast newspapers in Australia fail.

There seemed to be little idea amongst these panelists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.

This notion that unless “proper journalism”, that is journalism as we have known it since the mid-late nineteenth century as practised by employees of the great media barons, exists then no valuable news will exist seems odd.

When one considers why news came to be produced in that particular way in that particular time it seems clear that technology and cost constraints prohibited new entrants to the news creation and sharing market.

However today those barriers to entry are rapidly disappearing and ordinary people are creating their own news. But, while the need for professional production facilities is diminishing, there seems to be ample space for journalists and news organisations to explore business models based on aggregation, curation and clarification of issues and perspectives.

Caroline Overington also discussed the News Ltd plan to charge for content. It will be interesting to see their plan and how it unfolds. My experience indicates that online micropayments are not as easy to use and intuitive as they need to be for mass adoption. Also the nature of the content must be compelling enough on a continual basis for people to subscribe.

Amusingly at the same time as Ms Overington was delivering her apologia for News Ltd they announced a revenue slump of 4.1%.

#media140

see more moar lolcats

Have been chatting online with Evan from Sency.com and decided to experiment with his new gadget using the Media140 Twitter feed:

#media140

Joel Postman argues that A Blog is a Better Social Media Hub Than Twitter. I tend to agree, especially from a business perspective. His post got me thinking about the critical elements for a business social media toolkit.

1) A Blog or a Website (it’s the same thing really)

A business or personal brand needs to have a home base – it’s the virtual equivalent of an office or post office box.

However, the reason that a website (powered by a blogging tool or by handcrafted HTML or whatever) is a necessary part of your social media arsenal is that you control it and all of the content therein. This assumes that you to host your own site & have access to all the data. If it is hosted or managed by someone else then your data is at risk if the relationship breaks down or their business has a failure.

Many businesses put their websites/blogs into the hands of third parties & often don’t even know the passwords to access their own information. This is a huge risk!

One thing that is rapidly becoming apparent to me is a convergence between blogs and websites. Someone asked me the other day: what is the difference between the two? It really made me think. And the answer was they are the same thing. This is because the platform – blog as content management system – does not matter any longer.

What is important is the content delivered on the site. We can also see this convergence in the number of websites that now use a blogging platform as their content management system.

2) Social media & social network presence

Social networks and social media are the elements that bring website or blog content alive.  These are tools that enable sharing of messages with communities of people who are interested.  They also provide an opportunity to move from a monologue publishing style to a conversational dialogue style of interaction.

Even if your business does not want or need to use social networks it makes sense to own your corporate identity. What happens if someone who hates your business registers “YourBusinessName” on Twitter and starts sending out messages?

Also it is worth setting up a social networking presence as a low cost distribution channel for your website content. Think of the website as a publication platform while social networks are the distribution channel.

A big challenge for websites until now has been letting people know that they exist and have useful or relevant content.  Social media helps to solve this problem for businesses and personal brands.

The other important thing is to store the content of your social networking interactions for later analysis and reference. For example, on Twitter it is possible to create an RSS feed of a particular user’s or hashtag’s Twitter stream. Just go to search.twitter.com, enter your search term & there is an option to create an RSS feed of that search.

Also a number of plugins are available that enable posting of social network activity to a website/blog. And if all this information goes back to your website it can be backed up and remain available even if the original source network is ephemeral.

3) Social media reputation tracking
Once you take a brand out to play in this socially connected world monitoring what is going on becomes important. I’ve written about this before, giving a few examples where social media has both helped and harmed brands.

An implicit social contract is created by brands when they participate in social networks. Your brand becomes more accessible and people will interact (even if you would prefer that they did not).

There are some great paid services that can monitor your online reputation. However, here are a few free tools that are available:

1. Google Alerts
2. TweetBeep
3. Social mention
4. Google search

This kind of monitoring should be setup and reviewed regularly.

Regular participation, care and feeding of social media is necessary as it is now part of the marketing mix. Social media and social networking are part of both the place and the promotion of a brand or product.

Online should be monitored similar to the way we used to monitor customer feedback, newspapers and magazines in the past.

I recently had a thought provoking note from a buddy, Sheetal Patel, who’s not really a fan of social networking apart from LinkedIn.

He commented that “perhaps this increasing human need to relate is being perpetuated by Web 2.0 enablement technologies standing on (and encouraging even greater dependencies) the shoulders of the mobile phone and the internet”. And he cited some modern examples of how important being or feeling connected is becoming, for example:

• “Schoolchildren checking mobiles for missed calls & SMS texts every few minutes.”
• Old style “Internet content writers wanting to be the top search result in internet search engines (disconnected follower-ship)”  versus “the new notion of creating passive ‘as it happens’ Twitter follower-ship.”
• “Psychologically for people to want to be constantly visible amongst their peers, and as Maslow’s hierarchy might dictate, ultimately perceived as the metaphoric rock/movie star that everyone must follow in every great detail, any way they can, as soon as they can.”

This interests me because of the growing phenomenon of what I refer to as the hive mind experience that many Twitter users have had.

That is where one becomes so used to being loosely connected to a large number of people that disconnection from the group induces feelings of mild anxiety or “feeling weird”.  I often joke about it with friends but their laugh sometimes tells me it’s not really a joke – we do feel a bit strange when disconnected from the collective.

We do not know yet what kind of impact this level of connectedness will have on social interaction.  But there is already evidence that this connectedness enables mob-like activity – such as mobilizing people for a cause (e.g. Cotton On Kids or Motrin Moms ). My friend Mark Pesce contemplates some of these themes on his blog and in particular in his Nexus post.

But Sheetal also raised another issue, that we might be developing a “population of individuals who are extremely connected and incredibly well-followed (predominantly in the Twitter third-person context) but suffer from fundamental inabilities to create and maintain physical relationships and oblivious (or in self-denial?) of the daily need to maintain and develop first/second person interactions as part of everyone’s physical daily existence”.

That is an interesting question.  It is also the complete opposite of my own experience with Twitter. Instead, through meeting people on Twitter and over time getting to know them in real life, I now have a much richer set of personal relationships.

At dinner the other night I was discussing just this issue with a bunch of people who had all met initially via Twitter but were now good friends in real life. We maintain those relationships – both on and offline – using time honoured techniques such as having conversations, sharing ideas and opinions, and getting together to share meals or attend events.

What I suspect is happening is that people without social skills in real life find it just as difficult to build and maintain relationships in other places too, including online.

Further, the network amplification effects of social network relationship matrices serve to amplify the knowledge of any social failures.  Thus, where once a social failure was constrained in time and place, it might now be recorded digitally forever. Also that social failure has the potential to go viral and become known more widely than ever before – such is the power of YouTube and its ilk.