Hi, yea, so it’s been a while since my last post, apologies. Things have just been a little mental at work (in a great way) with some travel thrown in for extra measure, and even this post is pretty lazy.

It’s lazy because I wrote it for Marketing Mag, and all I’m doing is pointing you back to the original article – HOW LAME-ZY!

But I do hope you like it, seems to have struck a chord with some people.

Marketing Magazine asked me to give my analysis of the question ‘Is going viral more trouble than it’s worth?’ and here it is.

The challenge facing brands that want to ‘go viral’ is that without skills and experience in creating compelling content, it’s a high-risk strategy that most likely won’t deliver a return on investment.

What consitutes ‘viral’ will be different for every brand. Typically, we define it as content that generates ongoing reach without any paid media support.

From an idealistic standpoint, making content that goes viral means you’re truly connected to your audience and know what they’ll share. Realistically, you’ve got to balance business objectives with reaching the right audience.

Successful brands have a long term content strategy that engages their community and influencers. The famous Old Spice campaign was an amazing piece of content engineering that delivered real business results. It’s one of the few viral campaigns that has been accountable.

Read the full article here

Here are some interest facts about Facebook when considering it’s value. One VERY misleading stat is where they compare Google and Facebook ad revenue at the bottom, Facebook is bigger than Google’s but it’s not taking into account the very important Paid Search advertising which makes up nearly all of Google’s revenue.

(As a side note, this infographic was put together by accountingdegreeonline.com in what seems to be a very smart SEO link baiting strategy)

Over the last two years the world has gone casual gaming mad, with 5 million hours of Angry Birds being played every day and 200M people playing Facebook games for over 40mins each per month. Facebook is set to make a huge $1B from gaming in an industry set to make an incredible $70B in 2015.

This broad adoption of gaming has driven the rise of branded gaming & gamification as a marketing strategy. At this event we dive into the opportunities, examples & challenges for brands entering the gaming world.

We have an esteemed panel that will cover:

• Media opportunities in social gaming on Farmville (Zynga) & Pop Cap
• The process & thinking around game creation & gamification
• How to integrate gaming into marketing strategies

This event is a limited ticket release due to the venue size.

RSVP’s are essential click here http://socialgaming.eventbrite.com/

The Panel

Event location

The Order of Melbourne

2/401 Swanston Street, Melbourne

http://www.theorder.com.au/

Follow Social Media Club Melbourne

Website: http://socialmediaclubmelbourne.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smcmelb

Twitter: http://twitter.com/smcmelb

Hashtag for event #SMCMELB The Social Media Club Melbourne is a volunteer not for profit and events are organised by @nikski, @inBloome, @gutta, @simontsmall and @timbeveridge.

Tonight I discovered Facebook ‘lists’ which directly combats the Google+-Circle-mania that’s been going on. But it’s a whole bunch better because FB knows so much about YOU that it can recommend lists (i.e. your work place, or your suburb) and who’s on them. (Seems to have been rolling out over the last 6 days)

This is FB’s second attempt at grouping contacts, their first was back in 2007 and didn’t really get traction.

From what I can see there are a few standard ‘friend lists’

• Close friends
• Family
• Work
• High-school/University/College
• Who live near you

Here are some examples that came up for me…

It’s also integrated into your friend’s profile pages, suggesting which list they fit into if you haven’t assigned them already.

And it’s very helpful when creating lists

Hmmm… Google+ destroy’s Facebook? Anyone?

I also read an article tonight from ReadWriteWeb with “5 Things Google Plus Can Do To Outbox Facebook“ which provides some interesting observations. However, the FIVE things will really only bring G+ up to speed with FB, not outbox them.

I hope these points bring some kind of sanity to the current public debate about how G+ is going to solve global warming and dramatic demise of Facebook.

And if I’m being a completely hypocritical ass tell/punch me.

** I’m not saying G+ isn’t great and plays a role, but anybody predicting anything about what’s going to happen is lying.

It’s really easy to do, just like Facebook’s Like button, simply add two lines of code to your HTML. (Here’s the low down on how to do that: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html)

What it does for you as a business isn’t 100% clear, yet.

Google does say (in the video below) that it’ll tell your friends if you like something (not sure how) and seems to infer that it’ll be effecting search results too. Either way it’ll be as big or bigger than the the Facebook like, so get on board.

And here’s how Google are explaining it to consumers.

Answer: A kid plus a switch and a security gate.

It’s being investigated but it seems like a little kid switched off a security scanner letting 16 people get through without being scanned.

End result: Traffic jam, frustration and sad faces

It just seems a little weird/simple for a switch and a kid to be able to cause such havoc.

At least it gave me an excuse plus the time to write a blog post, even if it’s got nothing to do with digital or marketing or anything, although I have been traveling weekly for the last few months, so it’s kinda an insight into my life (of exciting airports :[ )

What I find interesting about this study of how marketers are using social media is that over 80% are using Facebook & Twitter, followed very closely by LinkedIn at 78%. Why I’m surprised is that from my experience LinkedIn is a very difficult channel to achieve the objectives they listed in the diagram above (right). LinkedIn is mostly a place to improve your personal career, not your employers brand.

Social Bookmarking a priority over MySpace

It’s also funny how we’re all still interested in social bookmarking site but so bored of MySpace, when the ability to use Social Bookmarking sites to achieve marketing outcomes at any scale is extremely hit and miss and you can build a MySpace page, buy some media and have an effective reach of 100,000-1,000,000 in Australia. Maybe it’s because it was once so mighty and now that it’s not number one we’ve all moved on.

The full report is available here in video and PDF formats, thanks to Social Media Examiner.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2010

Thanks to Flowtown for turning data into pictures, again.

digital ninja from moon stuff on Vimeo.

Johann explained how important computer accessibility is for people with vision impairments and how there are some amazing technologies being researched to help overcome these problems.

Touch screens are inherently flawed.

Touch screens and other input devices are taking over our lives, we’re ditching the keyboard, tap, steering wheel and other fundamental input devices for the sleek and simple.

While this is improving the way we interact with devices and technology in many ways, there’s a fundamental issue. Simple put current Touch Screens are inefficient.

For the touchscreen mobile phone users out there you’ll know what I’m talking about, when you’re typing a message to a friend, doing a search or playing a game you have to actually look to find the keys, taking your eyes away from whatever else you could be looking at.

Remember back in the good old Nokia 5110 days you could talk to your friends, send an SMS in class walk and see where you were going because you knew where all the keys were, you could feel them.

We’ve actually lost touch.

This means we’re using Sight, a very important sense, to do the simple function of finding the keys. And as a result it’s causing lots of errors, it takes much more focus/concentration and the accessibility issues are obvious.

Lots of people are trying to work around this issue.

Aden found this interesting new approach to touch screen keyboards called 8pen, although I’m not sure if it’s the best solution. (Hat tip @gavinheron)

And there are plenty of techniques being developed like…

Thankfully there’s a solution to the original problem.

The concept used is called Piezoelectricity which can send tiny highly targeted vibrations that actually emulate a raised surface. It doesn’t tickle, hurt or zap you, it just feels like the surface is actually raised.

In theory (and it’s being tested by research master minds in a few universities around the world) as you touch the emulated raised areas it actually feels exactly like a button and you can feel your way around the keyboard.

The Piezoelectic technology can raise an area quickly then just as quickly remove the raised area. This means software designers will be able to change the surface of the screen in whatever way they want to give you the best user experience.

Awesome. I reckon.

Practicality issues that come to mind.

• Can it made at a viable price point?
• What will it do to your battery life?
• Can it break?
• How accurate/sensitive will it be?
• Does it need extra processing power?
• How much bigger will it make my slim touch screen device?

I don’t know, it just seems like it’d make using touch devices a whole lot better.

I wonder if I’m just losing my mind or if it would actually help.

Disclaimer: I’m not a scientist, UX expert or design guru, all the opinions are based on some brief research and chats with my colleague Johann. If somethings wrong, comment to correct me just don’t judge me. Please.

Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

More on Qwiki

Follow Qwiki on Twitter or their blog

See their company activity

Meet the people behind it

The Next Web on why Qwiki will succeed

And the award the controversially won

The most important concept to understand is that Google see’s it your website very differently to you. Google loves text & links, images & videos are OK and flash (as a general rule) is BAD. Without getting into the details of how to develop content, links and a site structure that helps your ranking in Google (there are many people who talk at length about this) I’ll show how you can quickly see your site how Google sees it, and the results may not be pretty.

Once you’ve done the quick audit below the best way to resolve any issues is to talk to an SEO consultant or your digital agency or web developer, they will help you understand what keywords should be in there, how to structure it and write the content for you.

Approach 1 – Quick and dirty

1. Go to Google.com

2. Search for a term your know you already rank on

3. Click ‘cached’ just below your listing in Google

4. Click ‘text only’ in the top right hand corner

5. Now you’re looking at the text & link component of how Google see’s your site. If there’s not much there, or it’s not accurate then you’ve got some work to do.

Approach 2 – More detailed analysis

1. Go to http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

2. Add your website URL to the Keyword Density Analyser

3. It will provide a comprehensive analysis and provide some direction for you

Approach 3 – Employ a SEO specialist

You can spend days, months and years analysing and optimising your website, if you want to be at the top of your category you may need a team of them.

It also reinforces the uncomfortable feeling I get when researchers (including people in my team) do focus groups, surveys & other prompted research – when you ask someone about their values, views or habits it’s likely that they’re going to lie.

So back to Facebook where we have a very unique scenario, 46% of all Australians 13 yrs+ are on Facebook and they have to answer a series of questions to create an account, resulting in a very large sample size of data, although not many ways to cross tabulate the data.

Using Facebook’s advertising system, where you can build demographic profiles based on all kinds of attributes; you can estimate the number of people in any given segment on Facebook.

Using the tool I discovered the following audience sizes, 25-34 being the largest, and more women than men in every age group.

Australian’s on Facebook (blue) vs. Men (red) vs Women (green)

For kicks I compared these numbers to the actual population in Australia with the intention of understanding the % of Australians in each segment on Facebook. Instead I discovered that Australian’s want to be younger (or maybe older) and are happy to lie about it.

Australian’s (red) vs. Australian’s on Facebook (blue)

The graph above shows the number of Australians in each age group compared with the number of people on Facebook who claim to be the given age.

Digging a little further it was clear the discrepancy was only with the women.

Australian Women (red) vs. Australian Women on Facebook (blue)

And the discrepancy isn’t tiny, it adds up to over 257,000, even with some margins of error that’s a big gap. Another way of looking at it is that there’s 115% of Women aged 25-34 on Facebook, an awesome stat, if only it could be true.

% of Australians on Facebook (blue) vs. % of Men on Facebook (red) vs. % Women on Facebook (green)

I’m making a big assumption here, as it could be an error, 13 year olds wanting to be 18 or something else, but I believe it’s a reflection on the pressure from society, media & our peers to be and live more youthful lives.

It highlights the impact of the new world we live in where Facebook (and social media generally) plays an interesting role in our social & professional lives, giving us more power to manage our own brand, reputation & image, unless someone else takes control, uploading those awkward photos of us from our best friend’s birthday party.

Oh, and to point out the obvious and the reason I actually did this analysis, 46% of Australians are on Facebook. Just for good measure here’s another pretty chart of visits to three sites in Australia from Google Trends to confirm traffic is trending up or down, and it’s up.

Bradly Giblin MC’d the event that discussed concepts such as

• A Richer Experience for Youtube Ads
• Content Is Important
• Growth In APIs and Multi-Formating
• Seeding Advice
• Maximum Impact for Video
• Youtube Celebrities’ Cross-Over
• Viocorp & Accenture’s Partnership Delivers Malaysian Portal
• Youtube Does Not Deliver / Build / Allow Porn
• Youtube Partners with Brands
• Competitor Vimeo
• Portable, An Online Channel

(List & photo above thanks to a great review by Kim Ong)

Here’s the video for those of you who want to see the whole event.

A sample of the Tweets

KimberleyL

Kimberley Lee

@KimberleyL: YouTube celebs crossing into mainstream - exciting stuff! #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:38 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

EmmaStirling

Emma Stirling

@EmmaStirling: Tip from #SMCMelb - click on downward right arrow on YouTube number of views for detailed analytics including referrals.....

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:54 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

ryanspanger

Ryan Spanger

@ryanspanger: RT @Stweeve Ideal length for online video: 2-4 minutes. Ideal length for a punk song: 3mins11 seconds.. Correlation? #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:49 AM from web Powered by Tweeted

kellycmillar

Kelly Millar

@kellycmillar: YouTube insights to understand more about your specific video metrics #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:43 AM from Twitterrific Powered by Tweeted

OzAutoSocial

Auto Social Media

@OzAutoSocial: It was a great evening at @smcmelb last night. I highly recommend these type of events to enhance your #sm knowledge. Follow #smcmelb #in

Aug 19, 2010 @ 05:01 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

dascottonline

David Scott

@dascottonline: Was good to finally catch up with @amcal @KimberleyL & meet @kimongsk at #smcmelb last night. Cheers for the good convos!

Aug 19, 2010 @ 02:17 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

SPEAKER BIOS

Nick Bolton – General Manager Viocorp – Melbourne

Nick has in-depth Industry expertise having delivered numerous high profile web events on behalf of Viocorp.

Over the years Nick has also handled several Internationally significant projects including the first ever live stream direct from the Vatican.

He has been working in the webcasting space for almost eight years, and has managed several hundred webcast productions for most of the top corporates in Australia. Previous to this Nick was an Account Director for a leading healthcare advertising agency in London for 5 years, winning two Gold Medals at the Pharmaceutical Marketing Awards. Nick has also run his own business, and has in-depth understanding of the benefits of online video for clients.

Nick has: BA (Hons) 2:2 Marketing and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester UK, a Diploma in Marketing, Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK, and Diploma of Market Research, Market Research Society, UK.

Viocorp is Asia Pacific’s leading full service Internet broadcasting company. The company has worked on major events, like the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race on Yahoo!7 and Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Barcelona, and has supported major brands such as the Australian Rugby Union and Tennis Australia.

Simon Goodrich, Managing Director, Portable

Simon is co-founder and Managing Director of Portable, a digital studio creating websites, mobile applications and video with offices in Melbourne and New York. Portable has grown to be internationally recognised as one of the most innovative companies in its field, creating products such as the Portable Film Festival, the world’s leading online film festival, and Portable Shops, an online e-commerce service for fashion designers. Clients include Adobe, Getty Images, Oxfam, Red Cross and the AFL Players Association.

Simon is the National President of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the country’s digital peak body. He is also a judge and Australian Ambassador for the US based Webby Awards, the Oscars for online. Simon sits on the board of Design Victoria, the Victorian Government initiative to promote design in industry.

He has been recognised as one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Anthill Magazine.

Suzie O’Carroll – Industry Manager – YouTube Australia

Suzie has worked in online media for over a decade! Starting during the heady days of the boom, with Excite Europe, where she worked in a team setting up ops teams in the new offices across Europe.

Then over to Australia, and Yahoo! AUNZ looking after their content partnerships with Drive, Seek and Domain.

A move agency side followed with three years at Mindshare Sydney, heading up the digital team there. Suzie worked across all key clients, from ING Direct to Diageo, Land Rover to LG.

After a short sabbatical in Central and South America earlier this year, Suzie joined the YouTube and Google team in May. In between watching videos, she’s been educating clients on content online, and developing video strategies for key accounts.

Completely off topic. Hat tip to @lukekowald

This game was released today from the Liberal Party at http://www.givelaborawhack.com.au/ what d’ya reckon, would games like this influence your vote? Although I’m not saying your vote counts, unless your one of the 500,000 living in a swing seat, generally in regional NSW and QLD.

Here are my favs…

And one for this particular blog post!

Hat tip @mumbrella

(Checkout the Old Spice You Tube channel to get up to speed, and how they wrapped up the campaign here)

The great thing about this case study, unlike many, is it highlights the impact on the bottom line.

Here’s the Old Spice campaign by the numbers, watch the video below for the background.

• On day 1 the campaign received almost 6 million views
  (that’s more than Obama’s victory speech)
• On day 2 old spice had 8 of the 11 most popular videos online
• On day 3 the campaign had reached over 20 million views
• After the first week old spice had over 40 million views
• The old spice twitter following increased 2700% (probably off a lowish base)
• Facebook fan interaction was up 800%
• Oldspice.com website traffic was up 300%
• The old spice YouTube channel became the all time most viewed channel (amazing)
• The campain has generated 1.4 billion impressions since launching the ads 6 months ago
• The campaign increased sales by 27% over 6 months since launching (year on year)
• In the last 3 months sales were up 55%
• And in the last month sales were up 107% from the social responses campaign work
• Old spice is now the #1 body wash brand for men.

One thing they missed was the number of searches for ‘Old Spice’ on Google, which increased nearly 1000%.

Here’s the video

But it’s not over yet

I agree with Niall, that it’s not over yet, the results of this brand shift will have a long term effect on their revenue and opportunities in the market, if they choose to leverage it.

And although the spoofs were rife throughout the campaign (even World Vision had a crack), they may continue to pop up.

Thanks to Aden at Digital buzz for posting this case study of the massive Old Spice campaign.

Here are a few that rung true to me and may be relevant to you too.

1. Seth Godin, SethGodin.com – “Make promises and keep them. So obvious, it’s become a secret.”
2. Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer – “Attracting is the new selling. It is the least-visible, and least-examined principle behind most companies today that are growing quickly through word of mouth.”
3. Andy Birol, Author of “The 5 Catalysts to 7 Figure Growth” – “In striving to please their customers, too many marketers believe they must exceed expectations. Better yet, marketers should just ask and listen, for what they will learn and hear is often a different, more modest need, which when fulfilled, will profitably delight the customer.”
4. Siamak Taghaddos, GotVMail Communications – “People don’t like to be sold. If they did, they would spend all their free time in car dealerships. Instead, people want to be informed, they want to be educated. You’ll find your best customers are those you educate about your product or service and who then decide to purchase it because it is a good fit for them.
   Prospects who buy your product/service but are not educated about your offering will be disappointed. They will not be return customers. Worse, they will tell others how they got ‘sold’ by you. In the Internet age, this can quickly be very destructive to your business.”
5. John Battelle, Searchblog – “The best kept secret in marketing is to invest your time in eliciting and responding to your customer’s feedback, even if it’s negative. It’s the secret to building a network of evangelists who keep on giving back to your business ….”
6. Guy Kawasaki, Truemors – “Do the opposite of what bloggers think you should do.”
7. Matt McGee, Small Business SEM – “SEO is just like traditional marketing. In the “real world,” you want to create a great product and get people talking about it. Online, you want to create great content and get people linking to it. Same theory, and often the same techniques. Develop relationships with journalists offline; do the same with bloggers online. Engage with customers offline; engage in social communities online. Give people something to talk about (and link to), join the conversation, and you’re on the road to SEO success.”
8. Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot – “The power of second-order Internet Marketing: Small businesses should consider the positive marketing impact of “second order” effects in Internet marketing. A second-order effect is when you do not promote yourself directly, but help promote others who have mentioned you, linked to you or referenced an idea or concept that you agree with. The simplest example is when a blogger mentions your business in an article they write (even if you are mentioned only incidentally). If you like the article, you should help promote the article in the social media sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.). This is better than trying to promote yourself and can often create significant traffic, PR and marketing good-will.”
9. Ivana Taylor, Strategy Stew – “Target those markets and customers that you love that love you back. In other words don’t work with jerks or people you don’t like. There are enough customers out there for everyone and the ones that love you value what you do and see so much value that working with you is literally priceless. The first step in doing this is knowing your strengths and special gifts that make you irresistible to your target audience. The next step is to love them enough to know what they want and then just give it to them lovingly and from the heart.”
10. Tim Berry, Planning Startups Stories – “One of the most expensive myths in marketing is that lower price produces higher volume. That might be true for coal or gasoline, but not for most businesses. Lower price means, well, ask yourself: do you always eat at the lowest price restaurant? Buy the lowest price clothes? Do you drive the lowest priced car? Pricing is your best statement of value.”

They’re all so simple, but I think they’re often forgotten in the day-to-day chaos.

It is a result Julia Gillard will hope repeats itself on election day.

Being popular isn’t just about noise

Getting high volume on Twitter doesn’t mean you’re going to sell more widgets, or get more votes, it just means more people are mentioning you.

What you’d want to know is how much of that volume is positive, if it’s mostly positive that’s a good thing, if there’s lots of negative that’s a bad thing.

How do you track sentiment?

It’s something the social media industry has been struggling with since social media listening tools we first created. Each of them has their own patent pending sentiment algorithm that somehow tells you if a particular mention of a brand is positive, negative, neutral or mixed.

We’ve been doing listening for clients for a couple of years, and still to this day have found NONE of the sentiment tools reliable, so we take a large sample, read and categorise them.

Why’s it so hard?

Slang, sarcasm, jokes, responses to positive, saying one brand is crap but the other is better… and the list goes on.

So I’ve run a few tests, using some freely available tools, to illustrate the point, but you should decide whether Julia’s achievement is actually a good thing or not.

Twitter Search – The latest mentions of Gillard

Twitter Sentiment by AppSpot

Social Mention (Searches more than just Twitter)

TweetFeel

Twitrratr

Twends

So don’t blindly trust the latest sophisticated sentiment algorithm, test the heck out of it and probably just do it manually.