South Australia’s Strategic Plan (a state government community consultation initiative launched several years ago) is taking another look at what South Australians want for their future.

There’s a twitter profile, a facebook page, a group on linkedin and of course a regular newsletter. If you are a South Aussie please join and share your ideas!

My good friends at Melcrum have just released a bonza report.

How to use social media to solve critical internal communication issues is a 138-page report featuring case studies, global survey data (over 2,000 respondents) and advice on social media in business.

It features case studies from the likes of AEP, Aviva, BT, CBA, Deloitte, ERM, IDEO, ING, NetApp, Scottrade, Telstra, The Coca-Cola Company, Van Marcke Group and Virgin Media, and opinion and insight from the likes of Euan Semple, Lee Byrant, James Robertson, Ross Dawson, Shane Morris, Philippe Borremans, Gavin Heaton, yours truly and more.

Key topics include:

• Creating the business case for social media
• Developing a social media strategy
• Social media technologies (and CMS integration)
• Governance, policies and more
• Return on investment
• The future of social media and internal communication, including job roles

You can download an excellent and free Executive Report and purchase the full report over at Melcrum’s site. You’ll be glad you did – there is much wisdom and insight on offer!

Tip of the Akubra to Alex Manchester over at Step Two Designs (the intranet wizards) for compiling the 2,000+ responses and making sense of them all!

Well, go to the foot of my stairs!

Who would have thought that the iPad could run Windows applications?

I know Apple fanboys will ask, “Why would you want to?” but for the vast majority of we the computer-using population the ability to use the software we are familiar with on the latest Apple marvel is, well… marvellous.

The technical details to get it all up and running (very simple by the looks of it) are over at WindowsSecrets.com, but in essence all you need is some cheap apps (cheap by business standards: maximum US$30) and a good wi-fi or 3G connection. The iPad functions as a Windows terminal (I’m biting my tongue trying not to type ‘dumb’ terminal [smile]).

It makes me almost run down to my local Apple store, but as I have just ordered a shiny new, much configured Dell desktop I’ll wait and see what they or other pc-based manufacturers come up with to rival the iPad. Not that I’m anti-Apple: my iPhone is the closest thing to perfection I have found in a computing device.

• Web Ink Now: The US Air Force: Armed with social media
  USAF blogger conversation policy, courtesy of a David Meerman Scott interview. I have been using this example for a couple of years, but finally have it in my delicious bookmarks, plus the article links to a bigger, clearer map than previous examples I've used.
  (tags: socialmedia twitter web2.0 blogging blog government social media military airforce usaf conversation policy)

It had a simple docking station that allowed, with one button press, synchronisation with Outlook. My iPhone (equally much loved) has to go through iTunes – a pain.

Will the new Dell Streak have an equally simple sync process?

What would happen if we stopped to consider the longer-term implications of our emotionally-driven social media interactions?

Do we spend enough time considering what the Googleability of our conversations means for our organisation’s ethos and values?

Links mentioned:

• USAF blog comment process flowchart
• Intel ‘good, bad and ugly’ comments/posts:
• “Balanced online dialogue. Whether content is pre-moderated or community moderated, follow these three principles: the Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly. If the content is positive or negative and in context to the conversation, then we approve the content, regardless of whether it’s favorable or unfavorable to Intel. But if the content is ugly, offensive, denigrating and completely out of context, then we reject the content.”

As part of a roundtable group set up by Marty Filipowski here at Dell in Australia and the visiting Richard Binhammer (Dell’s social media architect), I got to catch up again with Mike Hickinbotham from Telstra, as well as meet Tom Bates, who’s doing some cool stuff over at Air New Zealand, and Harry Lowes, who’s the CommBank’s head of Digital Marketing.

Much fruitful discussion occurred about the state of play here in Aus/NZ social media, as well as trends that we see happening, most of which we had time to share with various journalists invited along to ask the tricky questions.

But, for me, the coolest of the cool was getting to actually touch and play with the much-vaunted Dell Streak (see Engadget’s Streak review).

Impressions? Useful size screen (bigger than an iPhone); fits into your trouser pocket (which an iPad won’t) and with the Android application market growing in size every day it won’t be long, I’m sure, before an app comes along that allows you to edit your Word and Excel documents, as well as sync to your Outlook calendar without having to crank up iTunes.

Downsides? It sits in between the world-beating iPhone and the new ‘cool toy the cool kids have’ iPad, kind of not knowing what it wants to be, other than something that can sit in your pocket. As with the two Apple products, its fate will hinge on the application market.

Although Apple have the ‘coolness’ and ‘first to market’ factors down pat, Dell have their massive business customer base on their side, which may make this an interesting space to watch over the next few months.

No news on when the Streak will be coming to Australia, though… Bugger.

Louise Denver (@ldenver) from Deloitte Australia gave an outstanding presentation yesterday at the Social Media Conference organised by Melcrum.

She has so much energy and passion that it was energizing.

One of the slides in her presentation was a word chart courtesy of Wordle. I’d forgotten just how useful and cool Wordle is.

Here’s how Wordle has analysed my recent blog posts and has sorted out the various themes and topics I focus on:

Why not try Wordle on a document (say, a report) to see what the key themes in the document are – you might need to do some copy editing to bring the results more in line with what your original vision was.

Wordle is a cool and very useful app; try it out.

My Canadian communicating colleague and fellow CAPOW member Mitch Joel has written an interesting thought piece on the death of the magazine industry and how it has largely brought it upon itself.

In the end, what transpired was a weird belly rubbing meets self-congratulatory back-and-forth that included name dropping of obscure magazine industry professionals and writers that the general populace has never heard of. It became a session where the advice bestowed practically dismissed the fact that publishing – as an industry – has changed at a fundamental level because anybody, anywhere can (and should) publish their ideas to the world instantly (and for free). Writers no longer have to kneel before the publishing slush pile. It was almost as if the participants (both on the panel and in the audience) were attempting to make the Internet go away. It was almost as if the participants (both on the panel and in the audience) were trying to make the Internet bend to their will. It was if they wished the Internet had never happened. They were all a little too comfortable with the way things were and practically ignoring the world as it is in front of their eyes.

I agree with Mitch, but wish to extend the thought beyond the magazine industry and into the corporate communication sphere (where I belong).

If large organisations are unwilling or, more politely, ‘hesitant’, to embrace this new communication technology (as Melcrum’s latest research, to be presented at their Social Media Conference in Sydney next Wed the 30th June, suggests a significant percentage – 48% – are), then they cannot cry ‘foul’ when their workforce decides to leave and accept positions in organisations that *do* embrace the new technologies, risks and all.

As Mitch says,

Change is hard. Disruption is harder. It’s one thing to be shortsighted when you’re invested in the printers and distribution models of yesterday (like a magazine publisher is), it’s another when you’re the actual vision for the content, but you still act like the game (or money or business) is in the printing and traditional distribution, when the power to publish has been given and granted to all with a story to tell.

When you do it to yourself, you can’t blame technology, the Internet, Social Media (or anybody else).

Hear, hear!

ReadWriteWeb has come up trumps again with a link to Veezzle, a new search engine that trawls the various free stock photo sites.

I have always loved sxc.hu’s site for imagery, but this will add an extra resource for images for blog posts, powerpoint presentations, and so on.

I’ve been spending money over at iStockphoto – and I’ve been very happy with the results – yet it would be nice to also have further resources where the cost is zero.