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

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• http://wphacks.com/best-premium-wordpress-themes-gallery/
• http://www.wpthemespress.com/
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• http://www.darrenhoyt.com/topics/wordpress/
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• http://www.inspiredm.com/2010/01/03/best-wordpress-themes-2009/
• http://www.levoltz.com/2010/01/06/100-best-wordpress-premium-themes-of-2009/
• http://www.antsmagazine.com/2009/03/100-superb-wordpress-themes-for-free/
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Paid WordPress Blog Themes & Templates

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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. (We’re waiting on part 4 & 5 to upload to YouTube)

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 http://twitter.com/amcal/statuses/15700945467 http://twitter.com/haikugirlOz/statuses/15694959704 http://twitter.com/kylielewis/statuses/15694899386 http://twitter.com/tonyprysten/statuses/15696207710 http://twitter.com/laramcpherson/statuses/15696331815

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.

PayPal

There are some definite questions around security, cost and many others, but I’m sure they will work through those and come out the other end with a game changing business. Think of the applications in developing worlds, SMEs, borrowing money from friends.

This video explains it pretty well.

Tangent

On a side note, if you like the main dude in that tutorial video, check out another one he’s done for a Twitter app. It’s a refreshing way to explaining technology, go dude!

Hat tip

These gems came via some colleagues at Visual Jazz, Harley Donaldson and Nick Sturgess. Harley is a great source of interesting internets every week with kettlevision.

First Event – LONELY PLANET: a digital journey

Our first event has three speakers from Lonely Planet who will talk about their very open business model and how social media has taken it to the next level.

Hear Gus, Venessa and Johnny chat candidly about Lonely Planet’s social web experiences, from crowd-sourcing of ideas through to user-generated content and fan engagement via social media channels and online promotions.

Event time & date: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Location: Denmark House, Level 3, 428 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne

Space is limited, so get your RSVP in quick smart RSVP here – at Eventbrite

About Social Media Club Melbourne

Social Media Club Melbourne has been established to educate organisations about Social Media. We’ll be running a series of events throughout the year on various topics that relate to various types of organisations. We hope that these semi-formal events will help build greater understanding of Social Media and create a place for people to build connections.

If you’ve got any ideas for topics, speakers or styles of events that you’d be interested in attending let us know. Post a comment below, on the Facebook wall or send us a message on Twitter.

You can connect with Social Media Club Melbourne (SMCMelb) on Twitter & Facebook

New Media Beers Melbourne

Friday 29th January / 7.00pm
The Cabinet (we’ve reserved the balcony facing Swanson Street)
11 Rainbow Alley (left off Little Collins Street heading to Russel Street) – 03 9654 0915

Please help to tell others, we do have a balcony fully reserved…

If you want to be kept in the loop of future events, join the Facebook group.

ANd for those on Twitter, #NMBMelb
http://twitter.com/#search?q=nmbmelb

UPDATE: Social Media Club Melbourne

SMCMelb are running the first event, full details are here

Back to the point at hand: Can digital agencies LEAD planning & creative?

It’s no new debate, however, I think it’s still unclear how it will all fall. Two opposing articles on AdAge argue for and against the topic.

Jacques-Herve Roubert summarises his views nicely:

Perhaps the synergy and balance between exploitation and exploration is off kilter for digital agencies, but more and more we’re starting to see the agency structure itself change with new hires in technology and social media. And marketers are noticing:

• According to Media magazine, AKQA was named the lead agency for Nike India earlier this year.
• Precor named Ascentium its agency of record in October 2009. According to Forrester’s Q2 2009 Interactive Agency Wave, Ascentium “received the highest client satisfaction scores in this year’s review.” The assignment with Precor includes strategic planning and execution of all offline and online campaigns.
• McAfee hiring Tribal DDB as its agency of record in 2008. This assignment included all TV, print, outdoor, and digital.

Jacques-Herve’s post is in response to the opposing view earlier last year by Ana Andjelic

If digital agencies excel at exploration, traditional agencies thrive on exploitation. A traditional agency is risk-averse, accountable and systematic. It knows its business inside-out. It knows its clients’ businesses and executes campaigns reliably. Its people hang out with the CMOs. A typical traditional agency has decades of experience.

This, too, comes at a cost. A traditional agency, organized around exploitation, ends up doing the same thing over and over again. For every marketing challenge, their solution is “better creativity.” This is not surprising: If an agency spends all its time making sure that everything goes efficiently, that leaves it with little time to experiment. And then, even if it wanted to do things differently, it would be met with its own organizational inertia.

In my opinion they’ve both got valid points, however, having the name Jacques-Herve Roubert makes him sound just that little bit more intelligent.

In all seriousness, I’ve seen media, digital & traditional agencies all work in various magical and wonderful ways together, and sometimes pretty poorly, I believe some traditional agencies will adapt, some digital agencies will become more strategic, media agencies will continue to grow in size and more nimble strategic media agencies will appear on the scene. At the end of the day, the advertiser has a big say in who leads who, sometimes they’ll organise their agencies based on what’s right & logical, sometimes they’ll do it based on what they’ve done before.

You can donate through their website, or install a widget on your blog, forum, facebook page to encourage your mates to help raise funds.

The research also revealed intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%.

Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1% while prompted awareness increased by 3.5%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%.

This leads me to 2 main thoughts

1. How does this compare to TV, print & radio? (using the same benchmarks & research approach)

Without context these numbers might be under or over valued as it could smash or be smashed by these other channels? It would be good to put them side by side to see how they interact. And what’s the impact when multiple touch points occur, say TV & Online, does it improve, reduce, increase, change the impact of the communication?

2. More importantly can marketers drop their addiction to clicks?

Clicks, performance & data are both the power and the Achilles heel of digital media. Thanks to many publishers, like Google, you can buy a visitor to your website. This is great because it reduces the risk, it’s not so great because the value of the exposure to media (banner, search result, edm, etc) is missed, all the focus is on the click.

So what?

I recommend clients establish an ROI (return on investment) calculator, where you add up all the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor. (I’ve explained how to create an ROI calculator here)

One piece of the ROI puzzle should be exposure, it may not be as valuable, but it has to be considered.

This kind of research helps us understand the value, however, we (marketers) need to assign value to it first, both rationally and in our guts.

The basic premise is that you can add up all of the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor.

The numbers themselves are not particularly meaningful and are arguable, however, the value is when you COMPARE one campaign to another.

Here’s an example of using an ROI calculator

The Apple Co. ran two campaigns at separate times of the year. The goal of an apple company is to sell apples on their website (who’d have thought).

Campaign 1 achieved 10,000 visitors to the website, 200 orders, 12 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $13k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.27.

Campaign 2 achieved 9,000 visitors, 400 orders, 50 enquiries & 500 email sign-ups. It cost $50k to run & delivered $24k of value, which equates to an ROI of $0.49.

Now you can more easily compare the performance of each campaign. Campaign 1 returned $0.27 and campaign 2 returned $0.49, so campaign 2 was nearly twice as effective.

How to create a digital marketing ROI calculator

Step 1. Create the measures

- Visit to your website
- Subscription to email database
- Enquiry
- Online order (or booking, or request)
- New facebook friends

Step 2. Assign values to the measures

For example, a visitor might be $0.10 and an order might be $50. (Or the value of the order might actually be the sale value, or profit margin. Google Analytics can report on this, read their blog here).

Step 3. Track & add the values

Collect all the data, how many visits, orders, enquiries etc and multiply them by the value you assigned in step 2. For example, 500 orders would be 500 X $50 = $2500. (Based on example above). Then add all of these values together, this is your Outcome Value.

Step 4. Divide that value by the cost

If your final outcome value is $2500, then divide that by the media spend, assume it was $4000, that would be $2500 divided by $4000 = $0.62.

Step 5. Compare campaigns

As I mentioned earlier, the ROI value you come up with is kinda meaningless, unless you compare it to other campaigns.

Step 6. Get sophisticated

If you want to take it to the next level, you should have different calculators for different campaign objectives. For example the above is very sales focused, however, your objective might actually be awareness of a new product or service. Have an ‘awareness’ calculator would put more value on the reach & visitors, less on the orders. Then you can fairly compare awareness campaigns separately to conversion campaigns.

Also, you can apply this methodology to each piece of activity, for example, you could compare the ROI of search to the ROI of banner, EDMs or Social Media.

Here’s a template

This template should get you well on your way:  http://www.box.net/shared/i6x105jfil