Popular goat farmer @vaughndavis wrote Tweet This Book, a book about social media.
I wanted to interview him for Telecom’s co. magazine, so I put new batteries in my dictaphone and suggested we meet up for a chat. Vaughn gently suggested I was clearly off my tits on printer’s ink, and that we should do the interview through social channels.
So we did. Here it is so far.
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.
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.
I’d been waiting for April Fools for a while in my place of work – here’s my AFD effort, a bit OTT, but I enjoyed it.
“You’ve heard of Ultra Fast Broadband – well this is UFP – Ultra Fast Predators! Ha Ha! Hahahahahaha!” said a spokesman, who didn’t give their name.
The new cabinets feature a layer of salt water with capacity for everything from Great Whites to Makos. Chorus technicians will feed the new cabinet residents a diet of fish while making routine repairs. There is capacity for access seekers to house their own sharks if they wish.
Here’s a sample of the first shark’s Twitter feed:
@bitey – crumbs. Sorry about that lol
about a minute ago
@bitey – It’s OK, found something to eat
about five minutes ago
@bitey – really hungry.
about two hours ago
@bitey – Hungry
about three hours ago
This Great White, nicknamed ‘bitey’ by its trainers, is enjoying the urban environment. His hobbies include flesh eating and swimming.
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