In all the hoo-haa about broadband in Australia at the moment, there is an important element that seems to be missing from discussions.

We all want to download material from the internet faster, of course. Movies on demand, video material, pdfs, ebooks… being able to download these much faster would be a boon to productivity. Especially for we here at BetterComms Towers – we only have ADSL1 and cannot get ADSL2.

But as Genevieve Bell pointed out in her ‘Thinker in Residence’ report from 2009, ‘Getting Connected, Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia’s Digital Futures’ [pdf], there is equally the issue of upload speed.

Arguably, Australia is increasingly a productivity economy reliant on the flow of information and knowledge – the faster the information flows, the faster knowledge can be created and the faster, hopefully, the benefit flows.

But for us to be players in the world game, we must not only consume but also produce – we must produce content that others around the world are willing to download, and content compelling enough that others are willing to pay to do so.

Which means we must have upload speeds equivalent to our download speeds (or as near as possible). Already we are slipping further and further behind in our broadband speeds compared to the global stage; according to Akamai, the world’s net traffic reporters, Australia is now down at 50th spot of global broadband speeds.

It is going to be up to us, the public, to keep the pressure on politicians and broadband providers to ensure that upload speeds are closer to download speeds in the future than they currently are (and I can’t think of a reason why the gap is so big at the moment).

——-

Hat tip to @KristinAlford for reminding me of Genevieve’s report

The fabulous Aaron Uhrmacher has compiled a list of 30 new examples of corporate social media usage, to accompany his previous list of 35.

Examples include:

• Domino’s Pizza (using Foursquare)
• Monique’s Chocolates (using Foursquare)
• The Red Cross (Flickr and blogs)
• Cisco
• Colgate and
• Warner Brothers (on how NOT to do it!)

Aaron’s post is definitely worth checking out!

The Social Media Club is holding its 1st annual conference, happening November 10-12, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, USA.

There’s a whelter of big names presenting there: David Meerman Scott, Katie Paine, Tom Foremski, Jason Falls, John Hagel III, Nic Adler, Tara Hunt, and Amber Naslund.

But even more important than the presenters is the opportunity to network and share ideas and experiences with your peers from around the world.

I know that for me, that opportunity was a highlight when I spoke at the IABC World Conference last year; I have no doubt that the networking and idea sharing (and saying to yourself, “So that’s what she looks like in real life”) will be a far greater value for you than you might at first realise.

If you have the funds available, or can persuade someone to release them as part of your training and development, you really should get your registration in now.

The whole event is being put together by the Social Media Club, of which Adelaide is a new and proud chapter.

As the SMC say on the University ‘info’ tab:

This is also the first ever membership meeting for Social Media Club, the association for social media professionals. We will be discussing the rise of social media as a true profession, determining the course of our organization in 2011 and beyond. We will be nominating a new board, ratifying our bylaws, choosing programs to support and sharing our lessons learned.

To tilt or not to tilt, that is the question, ladies (and gentlemen too!)

My favourite source for fonts, FontShop.com, has some luverly new fonts for the connoisseur of all things fontastic.

Witness the email I just received from them [it’s a large graphic so it may take a while to load into your browser]:

• 57 Social Media Policy Examples and Resources | davefleet.com
  As it happens, lots of organizations publish their social media guidelines online, ready for you to review and use yourself. Here are 57 61 great social media policy templates and resources to use when building your own. (thanks for the suggestions in the comments!)
  (tags: socialmedia policy guidelines resources social media business list policies)
• How the top ten airlines in the world use Facebook | Tnooz
  US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook. Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook.

  The answers to all of these take nothing away from the fact that Delta is taking Facebook seriously and its move is likely to trigger a wave of similar applications being launched by other airlines.

  (tags: facebook social travel pages)
• 25 brilliant examples of Facebook brand pages | Econsultancy
  Which just goes to show that any brand—be they catering to expensive tastes or not—can take advantage of Facebook Pages to connect with their evangelists. Will you?
  (tags: facebook marketing socialmedia branding advertising casestudy inspiration design fanpage)

Well, first off, it’s only rolling out across the US at the moment.  Like Foursquare before it, we have a little time to assess its utility, or otherwise, before we have to consider whether to engage with it or not.

But what is it?

Places is a location-based application. As Facebook says,

“Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.

“You have the option to share your location by "checking in" to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.”

This is the essence of the location-based applications like Foursquare and Gowalla.

What value are such services to me and my business?

These services allow companies to reward frequent users of their services (think of the reward card at your local coffee shop).

They are also a great way of tracking where on-the-road employees are. For example, are they at a particular client at the moment, servicing a photocopier or fixing a leaky roof?

Privacy implications

It’s also a potential privacy risk; a mutual friend can disclose to you and your boss that your own personal sick day could be re-classified as ‘a day at the races’.

Naturally, after the recent kerfuffles around privacy, the team at Facebook have built in some on/off buttons to switch that and other features off.

Geolocation apps and business promotion

Foursquare is the leader is developing development relationships with a business focus in mind. According to Simon Salt on ReadWriteWeb, so far, the most developed app is placewidget, which allows owners of a location to promote, via a website widget, the "Mayor" of their location on their website. Until now, any real marketing revolving around Foursquare was offline, and had to be location-specific. By bringing the ability to market both their involvement in the Foursquare community and promote a loyal customer, this widget gives a lot more power to businesses looking to leverage this type of social networking.

According to Simon, Foursquare also recently announced it had signed two deals with media outlets. The first is an agreement with Metro, Canada’s number one free daily newspaper, to have content for venues provided by the newspaper. The second is with Bravo TV, which will include Bravo Celebrity Tips and Bravo-branded badges for over 500 locations.

A game like Foursquare is great, but a content-rich social network is something a lot more valuable. Thus, adding in Facebook’s 500 million-plus users into your database gives businesses a lot more flexibility when it comes to marketing their business through social media.

Imagine being able to reward not just the ‘Mayor’ (the person who visits your business the most), but also the remaining top four out of the top five. Handled correctly, goodwill can stretch a long way on the internet.

Conclusion

Geolocation applications like Gowalla, Foursquare and Facebook Places are just taking off in popularity. As more and more tie-ins with these services are developed (and they will be now that Facebook has joined the game), I am comfortable in predicting that in two years’ time most businesses will be wanting to harness the power that comes from people sharing their location.

N.B. See also Julian Cole’s views about Facebook Places in Australia; and also TheBusinessInsider’s thoughts. John Paul Titlow back over at ReadWriteWeb has a great article on the implications of Facebook Places for small businesses, too.

I’ve long held the view that our job as professional communicators is to be agents of cultural change – either within the organisation or within its constituents.

Mentioning that at a lunch the other day, I was asked to provide some ways of managing that process, especially when communicating to employees.

One of the roadblocks in any change program is the person who will only move forward once they have the security of having all of their questions answered, sometimes at a microscopic granular level.

As a way of working with and moving forward with these types, try these phrases:

I know we don’t have all the information or answers to every single question that may come up.

I appreciate how thoroughly you think your decisions through before making them. You obviously understand that we need to make the best decisions possible but that sometimes we have to move forward without knowing all of the potential risks and rewards. Sometimes not moving forward is riskier than waiting for all of the answers to come in.

These are challenging times and no one here knows all of the answers. But we are relying on the wisdom, creativity and ingenuity of our teams to find a way forward that works for everyone.

Give it a go.

At a presentation I gave yesterday I was put on the spot to explain the difference between Facebook and Twitter, and particular what the difference was between a Facebook status update and a tweet.

Thinking on one’s feet can be an energizing experience, or a slow and painful death, depending on a whole swag of circumstances.

How many times have you been asked a question that you think you can answer easily and then turn out to stumble over it, baffling the person who asked the question? Your own hard-won knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I stumbled my way through an answer, but I wasn’t happy with it, and the question nagged at me all the way home.

At its simplest, a Facebook status update is different from a twitter update (aka tweet) because only your Facebook ‘friends’ can see your update, whereas the whole world can see your tweet should they so wish.

But that is also an incorrect definition, because any one of your friends can ‘share’ some of your updates, particularly if you have links to a video or webpage in them. This then enables your message to be seen by more people than just your immediate circle of friends.

So by this circuitous route I was brought back to the reason for the original question: which has a better ROI? Which would be better for a busy marketer to focus their attention on?

As Steve Thornton and a zillion commenters point out, the two are very different and come with pros and cons (see Steve’s post for a useful list).

In the context of the audience on the day, I think that the best one to use is the one you feel most comfortable using, because I see two main pros and cons for each:

Twitter
con: small user base
pro: populated by higher-educated, influential and socially well-connected individuals (see Roger’s work on innovation for my justification for this; in a nutshell the early adopters of technology are most usually socially well-connected and influential individuals).

Facebook
pro: massive, segmentable audience numbers (9.3m in Australia as I type)
con: it takes time and a concerted effort to create a Page that is enticing enough that people will want to ‘like’ it and thus give you permission to market to them, plus you have to consistently and repeatedly use that channel, offering compelling content (which can take time to create) which hopefully they will like so much they will ‘share’ with their ‘friends’.

The costs involved with either channel are not hard to determine: Time and Money.

Time
It can take time to pull together content that will engage others. Let us not forget that unless you have a brand that your audience already adores and are hungry to interact with online, you are dealing with a faceless and cynical audience (particularly so in Australia). It takes time to build up credibility and trust in you and your organisation/brand; it cannot be bought cheaply with give-aways and competitions.

However, once you have your online content creation processes in place, the amount of time it takes to create content can be reduced (as long as the quality of the output doesn’t suffer). Tweeting links to great content can take as little as ten seconds.

Money
Both Facebook and Twitter cost nothing to use and be a part of their respective online environments. But where Twitter continues to cost next to nothing (you can spend the first 15 minutes of the day finding something to tweet about and tweet it, leaving the rest of the day to your ‘normal’ activities, and services like SocialOomph allow you to create your tweets in advance of their release date/time), Facebook requires on-going investment of money in the form of human resource to create the content (videos, white papers, news updates, inter alia) and post it online.

The answer I gave to the client

In the end, the answer I gave to the client regarding their ROI question is probably the correct one: there is no answer, at least not yet.

Social media is such a new communication landscape that the rules are being made up as we go along, and what worked last month may not work this month.

Does that create confusion and frustration for marketers and result-hungry CEOs? Absolutely. Does that create pressure for consultants to promise ‘golden results’? Absolutely, and you will no doubt find any number of ‘experts’ who will promise you dazzling results from a social marketing campaign (and do I want to strangle ‘experts’ who think in ‘campaign’ terms when it comes to social media, rather than seeing that social media is an on-going conversation with the marketplace? Absolutely!).

But here’s the thing: as any marketer will tell you if you ply them with enough alcohol and fool them into thinking that you’re not listening, marketing is an inexact science; no-one can predict what the market place will do because the market place is populated by those annoying creatures called human beings. These human beings come with all manner of idiotic errors of judgement, emotional buttons (most of them hidden from view) and flawed logic circuits.

Marketers cannot tell you the exact ROI of their brochures because there are just too many variables that lead to a purchasing decision.

And so social mediarists like myself cannot give your CEO an exact ROI because human beings create the variables that befuddle even themselves. The best we can do is look at online behaviour, help you decide what it is you want out of your social media activities and help you determine if you have got there yet.

But what we can’t do is tell you in advance whether Twitter is going to be a better bet for you than Facebook. Sorry.