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.

For those of you who didn’t make it you can check out the on the couch discussion from the night on YouTube. (Playlist embedded below, or go to http://youtube.com/smcmelb)

Video of the night

All the photos are up on Flickr…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcmelb/sets/72157624574722582/

To find out about our next event follow us

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44323312214

http://twitter.com/smcmelb

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What did I end up choosing?

I’ve ended up with a shortlist of four themes, hopefully I can make a decision today and get blogging about food before you know it. (The new blog’s going to be all about food – logs, reviews & recipes – because I just love food. It’ll be called TummyCrumble.com when it’s up, hopefully today!

“Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there’s a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it.” Christopher “moot” Poole

4chan is the source of many of today’s internet memes (two you might have seen are Lolcats & Rick Rolling), only 6 years old the site gets 70m visitors per month, producing 700,000 posts per day. It’s a force to be reckoned with. In April last year the community hacked the Annual Time 100 Poll to get ‘moot’ to number 1 spot AND coordinated the top 21 first names to spell out ‘marblecake also the game’ (lost more on this here). The community also use their power for good, in Feb last year a young guy posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube, the community didn’t like it and using a number of techniques the had figured out his name in 24 hours and the guy was arrested in 48 hours.

Unusually, moot recently spoke at TED explaining the ‘case for anonymity online‘ this 11 mins is a fascinating insight into an unusual yet gigantic online phenomena.

The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet “memes” it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power — and price — of anonymity. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 11:24)

Do you regularly visit 4Chan, or have you heard of it before? Is it good, bad or otherwise?

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

Thanks to David Neiger for video production.

The tweet stream was thick and fast and this word cloud gives you a taste of what was discussed. Here are just a select few of the tweets

amcal

Anna

@amcal: Yes 'cause you meet interesting people with similar interests RT @aaronroach #smcmelb can running a popular blog pull you chicks?

Jun 8, 2010 @ 11:55 AM from web Powered by Tweeted

haikugirlOz

Kim Tairi

@haikugirlOz: #smcmelb yay @meetmeatmikes pip suggests tagging & categorising your posts so peeps can find my librarian heart went pitterpatter!!

Jun 8, 2010 @ 09:32 AM from Echofon Powered by Tweeted

kylielewis

Kylie Lewis

@kylielewis: @problogger: use email subs to drive blog traffic and loyalty < totally agree! Worked for me too (feedburner great for this IMHO). #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 09:30 AM from Twitter for iPhone in reply to problogger Powered by Tweeted

tonyprysten

Tony Prysten

@tonyprysten: Why treat bloggers differently to say magazine publishers when it comes to 'selling out'? These guys have a right to earn #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 10:04 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

laramcpherson

Lara McPherson

@laramcpherson: Cynics who think social media will stop people from communicating with each other should be @24moons tonight witnessing #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 10:08 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

UPDATE: Some more event reviews have started popping up

• Chloe from TechFluff.tv
• Samantha Bell
• Sharon Nathani

Online Shopping in Australia is at an all-time high, with 37.6% of us spending a total of $23B. Yet so many big brands are so late to the game. We’ve reviewed a range of studies that will help you either enter the eCommerce game or improve your current platform.

There are many important areas that impact sales, today we focus on some critical components that fall under User Experience & Shopping Experience. Applying just one of these learnings has proven to increase sales by 257%.

I’ve summarised the most important & impactful findings on the VJ Blog in the following categories.

1. User Experience
   1. The checkout process
   2. Checkout load time
   3. Make it easy to fill out forms
2. Shopping Experience
   1. Shipping & Handling costs
   2. Price & Product comparisons
   3. Free & easy returns policy
   4. Choice of delivery time
   5. Ratings & reviews

See my full post on the Visual Jazz Blog: http://blog.visualjazz.com.au/strategy/getting-the-most-out-of-ecommerce/

Here’s how it went

1. I’ve got an iPhone.

2. They just sent the following SMS promoting their iPad plans.

3. Good concept…

4. They promoted a webpage to view the plans

5. The webpage wasn’t compatible for mobile

6. Good concept but Optus DM Fail!

A simple solution & lesson for us all.

When sending an SMS to your database with a URL make 1 or 2 pages compatible for mobile.

And not to mention…

The SMS doesn’t even make sense, although I guess that’s what telecos do well… complicated bills and apparently now strange iPad plans too.

“…Get Unlimited Data within Australia for $50 recharge…”

When you look at the plan webpage there’s nothing about $50 or Unlimited Data.

I’m confused.

Register your ticket here

A very special Social Media Club Melbourne evening where we will be privileged to chat with two globally recognised bloggers (…who also happen to reside in Melbourne!)

When: Tuesday 8th June, 6-9pm

DARREN ROWSE (@problogger) – a legitimate ‘rock star’ of the world of blogging, Darren has been making a full-time living from blogging since 2004/05 and is sought after as a speaker at major international events such as SXSW (Austin, Texas) and BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. His Problogger and Digital Photography School blogs attract numbers most of us can only dream of! This is a story you won’t want to miss!

DUNCAN RILEY (@duncanriley) – an original part of the team that put together the b5media company, in 2007 Duncan joined TechCrunch, one of the world’s most popular tech blogs. In recent times he has devoted his energies to a start-up website called The Inquisitr, which was founded in May 2008 and has grown from humble beginnings to become one of the world’s most popular blogs (Top 100 according to Technorati.)

MC for the evening will be Yvonne Adele (aka @IdeasCulture), a popular blogger and prolific Twitterer who also happens to be one of Australia’s most sought-after speakers on the subject of ideas generation.

This will be a great night – BOOK NOW AS SPACES ARE LIMITED! Register your ticket here

LOCATION

24 Moons
AC/DC Lane (off Flinders Lane)
Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

Register your ticket here

Keep in the loop about more Social Media Club Melbourne events & news by connecting with us onFacebook or Twitter.

Thanks for your interest in this event from the SMCMelb committee @lucio_ribeiro, @nikski, @trevoryoung, @simontsmall and @timbeveridge Follow us at @smcmelb

This episode kinda reminds me of Seinfeld.

Laziest blog post ever.

Although, being the one who had experienced Agile (ish) I could relate to both, much more easily than they could. I realised that we do have a broad Waterfall approach to project management but in the early and late stages of the project a more Agile approach is used, which rapidly speeds up the project development.

I happened to stumble upon this Ted Talk this morning, which illustrates some really interesting principles and how they effect team success. You may have heard of the concept of the Marshmallow Challenge.

Some of the things I got out of it were…

• Having 1 plan with no trial & error was less successful
• Mixed skilled teams were more likely to succeed
• Kindergarten children naturally use Agile approach
• Kindergarten children were on average, nearly the most successful

The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.

For standard paid media they found a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent, compared to a control group. And where it get’s interesting is the impact of having both Earned and Paid which resulted in an increase of recall to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

The most powerful outcome from this study was their ‘other’ finding, that purchase intent increased in similar ways.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.

And to all you digifolk, clicks only made up a small proportion of the whole picture. (Digifolk are those that have grown up in a world of focusing on click throughs, not good old fashioned reach.)

Only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them

And why’s this so important?

For years we have worked hard to get in front of our audience for 30 seconds, or half a page, with pretty profound results, reaching millions, building great brands and generating revenue. Sure now, with social media, we try to get consumers to tell each other about our message, but that’s still the same outcome – REACH.

As I’ve discussed in other posts our growing addiction to clicks is taking us away from the very valuable outcome of reaching our audience. Yes, if they click it’s great, but we all know how few do, so studies that discuss and highlight impact of digital reach – be it display, search or otherwise – on brand awareness, purchase intent and other metrics add value to our good old friend REACH. It’s not the first study of it’s kind, Nielsen released one last November – funny to see I reacted in a similar way…

Thoughts?

I’ve just arrived back in Melbourne after 4 weeks in Vietnam, it’s an awesome country, be sure to check out some of our photos on Flickr, here are a couple of them…

I’ve posted a few articles on the VJ blog in case you’re interested… The VJ blog is worth subscribing to, interesting stuff coming out every week

• 05.02.10 Little things make all the difference
• 14.01.10 100 most discussed brands of 2009
• 12.01.10 Outsourcing Your Interesting?

The event’s all about getting together, talking, networking and drinking. Designers, SEO, Recruiters, Developers, Games, Journalists, PR, eBusiness, Media – anyone is welcome.

No formalities, name tags, speakers or sponsors.

Next Event Details

Date: 9th April 2010
Venue: Lagerfield, Crown Casion
Time: 5:30pm-10:00pm

More details

For those on Twitter use #NMBMelb
To get future invites join the Facebook group
RSVP to the event on Facebook
Lagerfield Bar website
Map/street view

This event was started in 2009 by myself, Zac & Lucio.