Two Cents

At lunchtime on Tuesday, Brisbane went from a sunny 29°C day to a stormy, flash flooding mess. It was some crazy weather which caused some major disruption throughout the city. So, how did you find out about the damage caused by this little storm?

Was it through a mainstream news outlet?

Or was it through a social network such as Facebook?

For me, it was through Facebook (yes, I was on Facebook during work hours… but that’s what I get paid for). In fact, one of my friends posted a video of the flash flooding outside her office in Milton to Facebook. This was then taken from Facebook and uploaded to the Yahoo!7 breaking news.

It highlights the different way in which we consume our news. We are less reliant on major news outlets to deliver news to us. The ease and speed of spreading information means we are likely to see breaking news through our online networks before a camera crew, reporters, editors and publishers can hit the ‘publish’ button.

But it’s not only content we are creating which is changing the way we consume our news. Content we are sharing on social networks is influencing what we are exposed to. Research released this week by Compete concludes that Facebook drives more traffic to news portals than search giant Google does. According to their research, Facebook drove 13 percent of traffic to portals such as Yahoo and MSN while Google accounted for 7 percent. Even though we may not be seeking this information out, we are more likely to view it because it has been recommended from a credible and reliable source.

It’s obvious that news is becoming more social in the way we create, consume and share it. And that’s no surprise is it? Current affairs have always been central discussion points around dinner tables, BBQ’s and water coolers. Social networking just means we want it faster, personalised to our interests and from people we trust. In that order.

And you thought Facebook was just for drunk party photos…

Nathan Bush is an Interactive Strategist at BCM

As each natural disaster happens in the world I watch with interest the ever increasing role that digital and mobile technologies play in driving disaster relief efforts.

Take the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January. The response for aid was astounding and more rapid than other recent natural disasters.

Social networking certainly played a key role with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all involved. A survey conducted by Facebook and The Nielsen Company in the week following the earthquake revealed 39% of Facebook users in the US, UK and Australia had already donated money or goods to the relief efforts (24% from Australia).

In addition, 21% of Facebook users who had not yet given to the cause planned to do so. Meaning an incredible 60% of Facebook users in the US, UK and Australia had donated or planned to donate money or goods, which clearly shows the growing importance and effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing tool and its power to activate people.

According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy in the days immediately following the Haiti earthquake more than $150 million in relief had been contributed. This is said to be five times the amount donated in the days immediately following the 2004 Asian tsunamis and more than the $108 million received in the first four days after Hurricane Katrina.

Another significant issue in this latest relief effort is that the relatively new method of text message donations really took off. The Red Cross campaign was promoted on Twitter and Facebook. On the Thursday (48 hours after the earthquake) text message donations hit $3 million and by Friday morning this figure had more than doubled to $8 million, with Red Cross among the 10 most popular topics on Twitter. To put this in context, in all of 2009, the Red Cross received $4 million in mobile text donations.

And even more interestingly, the Big Four mobile operators in the States (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile) reportedly not only waived fees on text message donations, but they advanced the transfer of verified donations (rather than just passing along the funds once the monthly bill was paid).

Is this a significant business opportunity for telecom companies that could lead to a big shift in financial services? Futurist and Chairman of the trends forecasting company Global Change Ltd, Dr Patrick Dixon, certainly thinks so:

What do you think?

Tracy Straughan is an Account Director at BCM Brisbane

2009 was a tough year on the career front for many Australians. Redundancies were widespread as companies endeavoured to cope with an uncertain economic climate.
 
The employer marketing and recruitment advertising sectors were highly sensitive to the economic slowdown, with reduced marketing budgets calling for smarter thinking, greater ROI and diversification across the board. The job market had taken a big hit, shifting the dynamic for HR professionals who had previously been dealing with skills shortages and a candidate short market. Inevitably, print media suffered a free-fall in advertising revenue.

From our own agency experiences with employer marketing, the job market appeared to be in recovery late last year – hopefully a barometer of an improving economy – even prompting expert comments of forthcoming skills shortages in some sectors. The credible medium of print, still preferable for sourcing the elusive ‘passive’ candidates, should continue to perform when targeting the baby boomer and senior executive markets but for the rest, the migration to online looks set to continue.

Companies and recruiters alike are continuing to use popular job boards such as SEEK, CareerOne and MyCareer to advertise vacancies, as well as many other niche and industry specific boards.

Mirroring a shift in B2B and B2C communications, we are also seeing social media assist recruiters in candidate vetting and appraisal (so watch those privacy settings on Facebook!). Equally, job seekers are using networks such as LinkedIn – where it really is in their interests to publish (rather than hide) as much relevant information as possible – all to improve employment prospects.

A recent innovation, Brazen Careerist, allows the modern professional to not only showcase their CV but also share ideas and engage with peers in their field, giving them control in a social network that they are happy to share information with.

Another interesting site is KODA, the imaginatively titled “opportunity community”, where employers can take a closer look at young professionals with talents beyond posting a CV in Word format.

This brings me to the latest example: Hire me, HeadBlade (which unsurprisingly led to the sequel, HeadBlade Hired Me!).

This recent success story in how to score your dream job in the new economy is further proof that people can create their own cut-through in competitive fields if they treat job seeking like an industry project or campaign. The bottom line: identify what it is you want to do and where you belong, and go the extra mile.

With innovation and increased usage of social media channels by job seekers, so too increases the need for businesses (as employers) to understand and be actively using these channels to their benefit to source the best available candidates. As the economy improves and, if as predicted, skills shortages make their presence felt, so the spotlight will turn back on employers as they strive to position themselves ahead of the competition. We might then see increased traffic to employer review sites such as JobVent, Glassdoor.com or Vault – and a return to larger budget employer marketing websites and campaign microsites as employers work harder to attract the right candidates.

As every employer would be aware, their human capital is the most important asset they have.

Steve Jennings is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

If you are a regular Facebook user you may be wondering what is going on with all your gal friends.

Status updates stating a particular colour are currently the rage but if you are part of that 50% of the population that have the Y chromosome, you are probably clueless as to what is going on.

Here is what it’s all about….

We’re not really sure where it started. One theory is that it’s very clever marketing from one of the hundreds of Breast Cancer organisations across the globe (really??).

The fact is that this game of Chinese Whispers has massive potential for commercial use.

The precedent has been set with Twitterer Kim Kardashian being reportedly paid $10,000 US to Tweet brands to her 2.8 million followers.

Could this be the way to embrace Facebook as a channel and spread brand loyalty?

What do you think?

Sarah Ferguson is an Account Director at BCM Brisbane

In Britain, a lot of emphasis is placed around having the #1 selling hit of the Christmas season. Novelty songs dominated for a long time. Over recent years the biggest seller has always been released by the winner of Simon Cowell’s X Factor. It’s accepted that winning that competition guarantees you the smash hit Christmas song for the holiday season. This year’s winner Joe McElderry was almost assured of the same success.

However this year a couple from Essex, Jon and Tracy Morter, were determined to buck the trend. Via their Facebook group called Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No.1 they recruited half a million people to purchase an old Rage Against the Machine song specifically to outsell the X Factor winner. They put their social networking efforts behind RATM’s classic from the early 90’s ‘Killing in the Name’.

It sold 502, 672 copies, outselling Joe McElderry’s song by about 50,000 and so has won the bragging rights as this year’s UK Christmas hit.  It’s also the UK’s first download-only Christmas number one and has achieved the biggest one week download sales total in British chart history.

What a great example of harnessing the power of social media.

Having seen how successful this was I’m proud to announce the launch of my own personal crusade to influence the UK’s music chart across next year’s holiday season.

It’s time for Dave Warner’s seminal 1978 classic ‘Just a suburban boy’ to get its long overdue recognition and make its way onto iPods everywhere.

If that doesn’t appeal (as if it wouldn’t!!) then I wonder what will dominate next year? Was the Rage Against the Machine reaction a one off stunt or is it the start of a trend where weight is thrown behind more and more bizarre choices just to upset the establishment?

Maybe it has more far reaching implications than the UK music chart.

Does anyone else like the sound of the Brand Power lady winning next year’s Gold Logie?

Alan Kewley is an Account Director at BCM Brisbane

Has the world of social media grown so big and so quickly that the rules and protocols haven’t quite caught up?

What’s acceptable? What’s not? Where are the lines drawn?

Well, to answer this let me pose some questions.

• Is it OK for your boss to ask to be your friend on Facebook?
• As a ‘40 something’ married man, would it be ‘weird’ if one of your daughter’s school friends started following you on Twitter and you her? Is it less ‘weird’ if she initiated the contact?
• Would you modify your normal activity on your Facebook profile if you knew some of your company’s customers, who are friends of yours, were watching your posts?
• Is it standard practice to say no to a work colleague who asks to follow you on Twitter?
• Do you have to think about what you write on a personal blog in case your boss sees it or is your blog your personal business?
• If a prospective employer asked to look at your Myspace page during an interview would you be freaked out by that?
• What would your parents think of the content of your Facebook page?

If you baulked at any of these questions or found yourself struggling to answer one or two then you’ve confirmed my theory.

We aren’t quite sure about the ethics of social media, just as we are uncertain about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

So, should we, the online community, attempt to draw up some ‘rules’ and guidelines or should we let prevailing community standard sort it all out?

Surely, the answer has to be that we have figured out the rules of engagement for social interaction in all other areas in life, so why shouldn’t the same apply to social media?

Maybe?

But let me leave you with another question to ponder:

We’ve had hundreds of years to develop skills in the area of social interaction on a face to face level. We’ve had since the late 1800’s to learn telephone etiquette. But, we’ve only had a handful of years to learn how to deal with each other in the social media. Is that enough?

It is always exciting to talk to a group of marketers and business people about social networks and how they can be effectively utilised from a corporate perspective. Which is why I was delighted to speak last week at the Interactive Minds event on the topic of how brands are using Facebook to engage in two way customer conversations.

The rise of social media has meant the internet has evolved into a platform for connected activity and conversation that is occurring between people across many web sites. Organisations and businesses need to identify what is already occurring within social media via tools like BCM’s Buzzhound and ways in which they can offer something substantial to connect with users on these platforms while delivering measurable results and acting appropriately within the online community.

With its reach and ability to engage users in different ways, Facebook can be an ideal social network for brands to interact in two way customer conversations.

Since its inception Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rate in internet user adoption with some 200 million users world-wide and over 5 million Australian users. Over the past few years there has been a fundamental shift in how people use Facebook thanks to significant design overhauls. There is now much greater opportunity to communicate in meaningful ways directly with existing customers and engage new ones.

In my 15 minute presentation I identified and explained the Facebook tools available in 2009, spoke about the basics of developing a Facebook strategy and showcased a number of local examples including some BCM clients who are using Facebook well. I then finished with a list of social media etiquette rules that brands need to be aware of before planning their strategy.

I enjoyed the presentation especially the question and answer session at the end. It’s always fun coming up with strategies, engagement tactics and application ideas on the spot.

A big thanks to Louisa Dahl and Jen Storey from Interactive Minds for inviting me to speak and I hope everyone in the audience was able to identify ways in which they could use Facebook to interact with their customers. I’ve included the slides from the presentation below, should you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments.

Sure, social media’s doing its best to bugger up the established media order. But many of the fundamental laws of communication are out the window too.

It’s intriguing that a communication’s success no longer is necessarily determined by things like originality, newsworthiness, currency, relevance or proximity to the receiver.

In the Too-Much-Information Age, stuff that’s inherently pedestrian can become disproportionately saleable, while the serious and the significant and the consequential can come across as so much fluff.

It can happen to the best of us…

The social networking buzz continues with stories and predictions about MySpace, Facebook and more recently Twitter.

But the ‘quiet achiever’ of the social networking world is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn was only launched in 2003 with $25m in venture capital. In its first year it only drew a few hundred thousand users but by 2005 nearly 5 million people had joined.

Now, with over 30 million users representing 150 industries LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social networking brands around the world.

According to the latest data from comScore, LinkedIn’s US unique visitors have shot up 22% t0 7.7million, up from 6.3 million in December.  And total minutes spent on the site (’engagement’ is the new currency online!) doubled in January to 96.8 million minutes, from 47.6 million minutes in December.

But why the recent growth?

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which are largely leisure based networks for sharing personal stories, photos etc, LinkedIn was developed as a networking tool for business professionals.  That in itself has driven interest in LinkedIn from the business world and confirms to the idea of social object theory.

LinkedIn co-founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman summed this up recently “People like to keep their work and professional lives separate from their personal lives. The functions we provide make professionals more effective. We don’t give people a way to spend their entertainment or idle time”

So its single minded focus has certainly helped it carve out a strong position as the professional social networking tool.

But, the recent surge in growth for LinkedIn has no doubt been caused by the global economic downturn and the resulting job losses. A total of 12.5 million people are now unemployed in the US, so it’s no surprise that professionals are looking to tools like LinkedIn to help.

So, will this boom in interest in LinkedIn occur here in Australia?

Australia is certainly mirroring the US with job losses (100,000 in the last 6 months alone) which will almost certainly be reflected in a massive rise in interest in LinkedIn.

As at June last year there were 440,000 LinkedIn members here in Australia.  Current data reveals that the June member base has grown to 637,000 members. That’s a 23% increase in 8 months!’

I predict continued huge growth for LinkedIn here in Australia.   Do you agree?