richardirvine.com

Author: Richard

  • iStrategy 2010

    OK, so it turns out I’m a Social Media conference slag. Hot on the heels of the last one, I packed my little bag and headed to Sydney for iStragegy 2010. Travelling with work is still a novelty to me, I haven’t really got that whole, jaded “Oh GOD, not Sydney AGAIN!” thing down – I was very excited to go. We stayed in the lovely Sheraton On the Park, as part of the conference, and while it was a fabulously well appointed hotel, we didn’t see much of Sydney itself at all. Next time.

    The speakers were slightly more international, as you’d expect, with representatives from Microsoft and Google, as well as Australian companies like Red Balloon, Fox Sports, Commonwealth Bank, Earth Hour and Contagious Communications, to name just a few. Topics were skewed toward marketing online, as well as using social in corporates, the bit I was interested in.

    I learned heaps – main points were these (your views may vary, depending on your context, etc):

    No one person ‘owns’ social media in a corporate – it sits across too many disciplines. You can have people there to guide it, but it’s a team effort

    Facebook and Twitter are just tactics, your approach and strategy need to be broader than just having a presence in these channels

    Often social values of openness and sharing are diametrically opposed to corporate values of intellectual property and retaining information to gain commercial advantage – it’s a big leap to make to be a truly social organisation

    Agencies can be hard – they’re not there every day. We need to challenge agencies to think end to end, and long term, not just by campaign; customers need the same message from us no matter what channel, ie web, social, bus shelter, mobile, video game, tv, radio, print, PR

    One of the most interesting presentations was from Myspace – yes, Myspace. If you haven’t had a look at their site lately, go have a look, it’s changed loads, going from 130 logos and 170 templates to one logo and seven templates, add their agreement with Facebook mean your profile can auto-populate with your Facebook likes.They’re attempting to become first social network to turn around a huge failure. Worth a look.

    Other stuff:

    Check out @kellynoble’s twitter updates to find out pretty much everything that happened at the conference. Good god, this woman can tweet.

    Gatorade Replay was one of the case studies – this looks awesome.

    Adam Burns MC’d the conference with style and a dry wit. Give him a TV show! Hang on – he has one!

    I won a totally sweet Four Square apron, for leaving the best iStrategy tip. Ahem. I am now mayor of wherever I go, pretty much.

    Four Square apron, courtesy iStrategy 2010

  • Paneled

    Thoughts from Social Media Junction.

    I had my first experience at *talking* at a conference in my new role as Telecom’s Online Community Comms Manager – that’s community manager in less words. The theme was “Kiwi brands and social media – differing ways to achieve ROI”, along with folk from Hell, Tui, Bullet PR and the awesome @simonemccallum. I thought I went OK – I got to say most of the things I wanted to, and tell our Online Response Team story. I worry about the wild variation in the companies involved, ie two corporates, a PR agency and beer and pizza. Different perspectives I guess.

    Non-attendees were tweeting they didn’t want updates from a conference they weren’t at – and taking the piss. That was funny, because I was, ah, taking the piss last time. Ah har. To me, the most value in conference tweets comes from people adding their own commentary to what’s going on, and even having conversations with each other, not parroting what the speakers are saying. I appreciate that non-contextual tweets are annoying if you’re not involved. I guess the options are to do some kind of clever blocking thing in tweet deck, or just, like, skim over the tagged ones – aren’t we web 2.0 types meant to be information scanning ninjas?

    There was a projector displaying the hashtagged tweets up in the wall, in full view of us panelists. I tell you what, I was watching that thing like a hawk for ‘@telecomnz has fliez down lol’ or the like. Distracting. Luckily it went down only a few minutes into our preso…

    My top three presenters were Louise Denver from Deloitte (check out their preso), Simon Wakeman from Medway council, who has similar issues with Facebook groups to us (“Medway Council are fuckin shit” was one that caught my eye) and Darren Whitelaw, who presented on Victorian bushfire crisis comms. For me, shit hitting fan usually means it’s going to be an exciting day at work, so Darren’s presentation was very valuable. In all three, it seems these organisations were experiencing similar issues to us.

    No-one’s got measurement sorted out. Felt like people were waiting for a silver bullet, but you’d be better off with this. Drawing board.

    I’m crap at networking. I like talking to people, I don’t like saying ‘excuse me, I want to stop talking to you and go talk to… those people over there’. Still, I didn’t get to talk to everyone I wanted to – next time.

  • Mad, man

    madmen_widescreen

    You, too, can Mad Men yourself

  • Frankenstein cakes

    2010-10-27_12-22-24_38

  • Brisbane and the Gold Coast

    Queenslanders are nice, goddammit. Walking around Brisbane during the day with my son in his stroller, I couldn’t so much as approach a set of stairs without someone immediately stopping what they were doing and helping me out. People in cafes and shops were breezy and interested, in a way that only people with the twin luxuries of living in a lovely city and a lovely climate can be.

    IMG_2946

    The most extreme politeness I saw, however, was the young man who was violently sick on the pavement in broad daylight then, instead of running away as quickly as he could, asked sheepishly at the nearest cafe for a bucket of water so he could clean it up. He did a great job.

    Brisbane is hot, easy to get around and has beautiful buildings, old and new. It offered plenty to do for a two year old and his dad, including the museum, Southbank beach & fountains and hiring a bike with a child seat for a spin around the river paths. We enjoyed it a lot.

    IMG_2973

    I’m often told our family beach stomping ground is turning into the Gold Coast. This is bullshit. The Gold Coast proper boasts miles and miles of shopping malls, theme parks, cafes, restaurants, sports clubs and golf courses, every one of which packed with men in shorts, jandals and impressive moustaches talking real estate, before climbing onto their Harley and roaring off very fast. The rule seems to be that if your vehicle doesn’t produce at least 120 dB, then in all likelihood, you’re a homo. Mate.

    IMG_3022

    We stayed in the amusingly-named Labrador, and had a great time. You couldn’t walk anywhere without hitting three or four awesome kids’ playgrounds. Seaworld was a real highlight, as were the cafes conducting a price war on the ‘cheapest bacon and eggs’ front. No-one loses in a war like that.

    We took a car to Byron Bay, a fantastic little place that gave the impression of being a laid back sleepy beach hideaway, but was actually packed to the gunnels with impressive shops and cafes. It was populated mainly with Canadian backpackers lazing on the beach swapping notes on where to score pot.

    IMG_2943

    The day we went to Byron Bay, the storm the size of Australia was due to hit – but didn’t show up, leaving us to enjoy our day. Turns out that if you live in the lucky country, storms like this don’t bother turning your life into a cold, rainy, depressing mess for weeks on end like they do back home – they just pass harmlessly out to sea. They are lucky over there.

  • Two short book reviews

    Holly wood Animal: A memior by Joe Eszterhaus

    Basic Instinct writer Eszterhaus stars in his own life history, a life divided between his two children and wife he was steadily growing apart from, and Hollywood, where he ruled the roost by producing hot script after hot script. I preferred reading about his time in the movie business, which seemed to consist of hanging out with Don Simpson, living next door to Bob Dylan in Malibu and taking meetings with studio execs dressed in shorts and flip flops (all the better to tell those lousy suits to go fuck themselves), and not the lengthy, messy breakup with his wife. He started a second family with his current wife, survived a cancer scare, moved back to his hometown Cleavland and  and, according to Wikipedia, is now a born again catholic. Recommended.

    The Discomfort Zone – Jonathan Franzen

    This series of autobiographical essays reads like The Corrections’ DVD extras. Franzen’s warm prose examines Charlie Brown, selling his deceased parents’ house, church youth groups and bird watching. Recommended.

  • Came A Hot Friday – short book review

    This book has everything – heavy drinking, sex, violence, crime and gambling, all packed into one weekend in a couple of small towns in Taranaki. The characters and writing are colorful, to say the least, and there’s some surprisingly evocative passages about the atmospheric countryside, and portraits of minor characters’ lives. Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a musician, carouser and writer, lived his whole life in Hawera and wrote thinly veiled versions of his fellow Hawerans into his books, making him an unpopular member of the community, even to this day. Hawera took its revenge soon after his death by bulldozing the Morrieson family home and putting up a KFC. Came A Hot Friday is recommended, and I will be tracking down RHM’s other books, quite quickly.

  • Motorola Milestone review

    My review of the Motorola Milestone, which appeared in Telecom’s co. magazine.

    I have a perfectly good mobile phone. It texts, it emails, it takes photos. I can even ring people. But when I was offered the use of Telecom’s whizzo new Motorola Milestone, running Google’s Android operating system that’s knocked sliced bread off its ‘greatest thing’ perch, I was keen, real keen.

    I was out to lunch (so to speak) recently with our Online Response Team, and listened as the guys debated the philosophical and technological differences between the iPhone and Android. Basically, the iPhone is like Steve Job’s famous black turtleneck – warm and comforting, but slightly restrictive, while Android is like a Che Guevara tee-shirt: hip and revolutionary.

    But first, a disclaimer: if you want to know how many megarings a phone can omni-vate per quasi-spagbot, read Pat Pilcher on the page opposite. But if you want to know how a grown man can get sucked into farting about on a smartphone when he’s supposed to be supervising his two year old son in the bath, that’s where my tech analysis strengths lie.

    I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening swearing loudly at mobile phone manuals, but Android denied me this cathartic pleasure (don’t worry, team, I took my latent anger out on a missing remote control later) by setting up my contacts, email, my gmail accounts and twitter in about ten minutes flat. I was impressed.

    The first thing that stuck me was this phone is FAST – the Milestone takes full advantage of XT’s HSPA+ upgrade, so there’s minimal waiting about while your email downloads. You push a button, stuff happens. Easy.
    Then, I had a saunter through the Android Market, where you buy ‘apps’ or applications – I chose a Flickr photography app, a few games for the bus and the Kindle e-reader. There’s loads to choose from, and I could see myself loading up like a Harrods boxing day sale.

    The web browser was a revelation, working like computer browser you ‘zoom into’ with your fingers to make the text bigger and readable. On Saturday, me and my partner spent twenty minutes or so on the couch surfing websites on the phone – not having to get up and ‘go use the computer’ to use the internet was cool. This was doing stuff together, and it was nice.

    Did the Milestone make me more productive? I’ll say yes. Did it make me more popular? I’ll say no. Despite its bulk, weight, a slide out keyboard I found a bit superfluous and voice performance that’s a little… crackly, I thoroughly enjoyed using Android and the Milestone. You’d love it too – take it from a guy that knows next to nothing about phones.

  • Confess nothing

    My great uncle Alan, when he left his architecture practise, wanted one thing – this quote from his boss’s wall. He got it. You can click it to make it bigger.

    2010-07-10_11-48-18_863_null.jpg

  • Two more very short book reviews

    Chad Taylor – Heaven

    Again, Chad Taylor puts you right into a fictional Auckland that makes it seem much more dangerous and sexy than the one I live in. Apparently Taylor was doing a long walk along K Road and New North Road every evening when he was writing this, and it feels spot on, right down to the 90s (when the book was written and set) details. The plot meanders along as we get to know the characters, and just wallow in Taylor’s moody Auckland again. Recommended.

    Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22

    As I wrote to a friend, reading this made me feel I should do less reading novels about self absorbed people and sport books. Hitchens has a big brain, and has been all around the world trying to help the less fortunate. He’d also be great to go drinking with, and one of my favorite bits is the pithy ‘drinking advice’ section. Honestly, I was looking forward to more stories about going drinking with Kingsley and Martin Amis and Clive James, but that’s just me, I’m awfully interested in drinking stories. Recommended.