Zakazukha Zoo

10 Steps to Getting a Job in Social Media

Matt Granfield — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:20:20 +0000

It’s graduation time again. I hate this time of year. It’s quiet for a bit, while all the third and fourth year students drink themselves into comas and pretend for a few more weeks that they don’t actually have to ever join the real world. But, like a Powderfinger song, soon enough it comes - the realisation that it’s now time to get a proper job. In about a week the resumes are going to start piling up. They think a straight-A record and a weekend manager position at Baker’s Delight qualifies them to work in an agency. It doesn’t sweetheart. There’ll be a lull over Christmas and New Years of course. Some travel. Time spent with family. Then the resume deluge will begin again on about January 28, two days after Australia Day. By then it will be too late. Employers won’t be interested and business will be a little slow so thoughts of hiring will be furtherest from our minds.

You, you silly things, have chosen to study a degree in which supply of graduates outstrips demand by, literally 1,000 to one. Your chances of making an impression are about the same as a wave on your favourite beach. You might as well have studied arts and had a good time. You should have done something for society and got into nursing. You’d have gotten paid more as a graduate. As smart as you are, and let’s face it, you’re not dumb, but you’re not Secretary General material, you’re, basically, fucked.

If you can fight off disillusionment for a little bit and still want to hold out hope of getting a job, specifically, a job in social media, here’s what you have to do. And do it quick, before everyone else.

Find an advertising, PR or social media agency and offer to work for free for a little while to ‘learn’ and help out. Make a list of the best ones. Start at the top.
Turn your computer off and network; socially. Facebook is not a social network. Facebook is a place to stalk hotties. Go to industry events and ask lots of questions. Learn how to use a fucking phone and don’t be afraid of it. Phones get things done.
Get good at grammer and seplling before you applies or you will be ignoreded, or worse, laughed at.
Once you land an unpaid gig, give it a set time limit. Have goals you want to achieve. Have obligations they have to meet. Don’t take no shit.
Make sure you get your hands on briefs and your arse in meetings.
Work harder than anyone else. Be proactive.
Prove that you can help make the agency money. Find a way to do this. If you can do this you will go a long way. If you can’t do this, go work in Government.
Be awesome and extremely likeable. Be the kind of person people want to have around.
If you do happen to be a thought leader, you should be blogging.
1. It is highly likely that you are not a thought leader.
Be patient. Do not give up. Hassle, nicely. Hassle again. Do not give up.

Saatchi and Saatchi Website Fail

Matt Granfield — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:39:09 +0000

And yes, I’ve used Comic Sans. View the site in all it’s glory at http://www.cleverfilmcomp.com.au/

Toyota Yaris Social Media Campaigns… So far, Meh

Matt Granfield — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:34:49 +0000

I’m watching the Yaris social media campaigns with interest.

a) Because I run a social media agency

b) Because none of the ideas coming out seem very original or groundbreaking so far. In fact, they’re straight out of AWARD school. Literally. Here’s an idea my girlfriend (who now works at Sapient Nitro) put in her book a few months ago. I’m not accusing One Green Bean of stealing the idea, because they clearly (surely) didn’t, it is uncanny though. I was hoping for better from the pitching agencies. At least One Green Bean are putting people in the car - surely any campaign that doesn’t do that gets an instant fail. Saatchi and Saatchi’s idea of a film contest bores the fuck out of me to be honest.

Google Insights: making strategy obvious since 2004

Matt Granfield — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:56:26 +0000

We were doing some research for a food client this afternoon. They want everyone to buy their product (it’s a fruit) but can’t afford to spend a gazillion dollars raising awareness above the line. If I had my way I’d get them to pay a bunch of celebrities to start spruiking the ‘insert fruit name here’ diet on Rove and Sunrise, but sadly (and for the greater good of humankind) that’s not going to happen. Luckily they don’t need to do that anyway. With five years of search data setting a rock-solid precedent the spike in ‘recipe’ searches on Google caused by MasterChef is impossible to ignore. The strategy is obvious. Gosh I love digital.

Hey Hey It’s Saturday Vs. Celebrity Masterchef - The ‘Twatings’

Matt Granfield — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:45:08 +0000

Crazy isn’t it!

Nathan Bush has some analysis here…

And here’s what we sent the press:

Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s reunion show steamrolled the debut of Celebrity Masterchef Australia in an online ratings whitewash last night, reaching a peak of almost 7,000 Twitter conversations an hour versus 1,600 for Masterchef.

The data, collected by Brisbane-based social media monitoring company Dialogix (http://www.dialogix.com.au) showed that Twitter users mentioned the words “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” and tagged conversations with the hashtag #HeyHey more than 22,000 times while the show screened.

Celebrity Masterchef Australia generated 2,740 Twitter conversations, or less than 15% of Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s total.

The influx of tweets made Hey Hey it’s Saturday the number one trending topic on Twitter, which attracted global attention from the social network’s 19 million followers*.

The #HeyHey tag then became popular with American users throughout the night who noticed the trend and began using the words #HeyHey in unrelated conversations.

Dialogix Director Matt Granfield said Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s Twitter success was given a boost early on in the day when host Daryl Sommers (http://twitter.com/darylsomers) joined the network. His first tweet was “make sure you tweet about Hey Hey tonight, using the hashtag #heyhey”.

“Traditional TV ratings give you the number of people who watched a program, but if you measure people who spoke about a show on Twitter you get a better analysis of who actually ENGAGED with the show,” Mr Granfield Said.

“The show had more than 200,000 Facebook fans on the day it went to air and messages were posted on that network alerting people to the fact that host Daryl Somers had just joined Twitter. Within 24 hours Daryl had 1,383 followers.”

Twitter is the fastest-growing social network in Australia with around 800,000 unique Australian users each month.

Is adding people as friends on MySpace or Facebook considered spam?

Matt Granfield — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:37:44 +0000

According to a client’s legal team, it is.

We’re handling the social media marketing for a fairly large event for 14-17 year olds. We’d planned on using our monitoring tools to find people who mentioned the client’s brand and the bands playing at the event and then adding them as friends on MySpace and Facebook and following them on Twitter. It’s what lots of people do, it’s what brands have done to me. But, according to the legal team, that counted as spam.

In fact, the exact words from the client were:

“The lawyer and I were of the opinion that all these suggestions are in contravention of the Spam and Privacy Acts, but she (the lawyer) checked with a contact who is a specialist in the Spam Act to see if there are any loop holes. There aren’t.”

Have you ever been be-friended by a company that was reasonably relevant to you? How did you feel about it? Has anyone checked their inbox lately and seen that a large corporation has added them? I’m keen to know so I can build a case study for my client. I’m of the opinion that if you’re adding people who have mentioned your brand, or are clearly talking about directly related topics than it’s fine - they can always just say no. What do you think?

The Top 50 Australian Forums

Matt Granfield — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:03:16 +0000

This is, as close as I can figure, the top 50 most used web forums in Australia. Anyone got any additions or a better list?

artforum.com.au
atheistfoundation.org.au/forums
au.reachout.com/connect/forums
aussiebloggers.com.au/forum
aussiemuslims.com
aussiestockforums.com
australianartforum.com
balitravelforum.com
beadingforum.com.au
bigfooty.com
caddit.net/forum
chesschat.org
deafnessforum.org.au
dolforums.com.au
dtvforum.info
fordaustraliaforums.com
fordforums.com.au
forum.auswine.com.au
forum.onlineopinion.com.au
forum.sportal.com.au
forums.homeless.org.au
forums.leagueunlimited.com
forums.mactalk.com.au
forums.matrix.squiz.net
forums.overclockers.com.au
forums.pcpowerplay.com.au
forums.permaculture.org.au
forums.port80.asn.au
forums.pulpfaction.net
forums.vogue.com.au
forums.whirlpool.net.au
frankie.com.au/forum
hotcopper.com.au
http://akff.net/
http://developmentgateway.com.au/forums/
http://flyingsolo.com.au/forums/
inthemix.com.au/forum
kawariders.com.au
ls1.com.au
muslimvillage.com/forums
nationalforum.com.au
parksforum.org
photoforum.com.au
pomsinoz.com
ski.com.au/forum
woodworkforums.com
ziova.com/forum

And yes, I know there’s only 47 on the list.

#vegefail

Matt Granfield — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:12:12 +0000

Kraft went to the trouble of asking people to name it’s new product and they received 43,000 responses. Tick.

They then decided not to ask people what they thought the best name was, launched their choice of iSnack 2.0 and are now drowning in a deluge of social media hate mail.

They began the naming process by engaging. They finished it by ignoring us. Typical.

#vegefail

Microsoft Enters Social Media Monitoring Space

Matt Granfield — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:04:33 +0000

Microsoft have announced they’re running out a social media monitoring tool called ‘looking glass’. They made the announcement at a conferece and posted about it on their blog. Here’s what they said:

“LookingGlass is part of a broader shift under way within the platform strategy group. For the past two years, the group has been driving strategy around how to move marketing and advertising into the software-plus-services arena. “The proof-of-concept we wanted to build was to connect business data with advertising data and bring social media into the equation,” Tisdale told us. That way you can mine social media sites for information and then use that information to act. “If you do that, it settles a hot topic and makes things actionable that weren’t actionable before.”

The first step in making social media data useable is listening to the conversation. LookingGlass, which is built on a number of Microsoft technologies, lets users track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites. For example, the Zune HD marketing team could use LookingGlass to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. Using technology from Microsoft Research, LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.”

It’s no secret that I’m behind a successful Australian social media monitoring tool called Dialogix. You’d think I’d be worried about Microsoft encroaching my space, but I’m not. They’re going to spend money educating the marketplace about the need for social media monitoring. Then they’ll bundle it in with their other products so you need Outlook or something more obscure to use it. They’ll claim they can rate sentiment accurately and they’ll stuff it up. I couldn’t be happier. Good on them though

Farewell to Cos Luccitti

Matt Granfield — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:32:36 +0000

Cos Luccitti, the award-winning Copywriter, Creative Director and eventual CEO of De Pasquale is having his last day at work today. A kinder, more talented colleague and friend could most probably not be found. Good luck Cos, we’ll miss you!