Socialising the enterprise: a chat with Ogilvy 360DI’s John Bell

John Bell, global managing director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, visited Australia last week and spoke to BNET about the concept of socialising the enterprise.

John shares his thoughts with BNET’s Phil Dobbie on the opportunities and challenges that business leaders will likely encounter when devising and deploying social media strategies. He also explains the reasons why it’s important to make social media part of the corporate-wide strategy that promotes long term engagement.

Listen to the interview here:

Calling all Foursquare Mayors! World’s first ‘Office Mayor Meetup’

To launch Microsoft Office 2010 in Australia, Microsoft is hosting the world’s first ‘Office Mayor Meetup’ via Foursquare at Martin Place next Tuesday!

So come on down. For your chance to win a copy of Microsoft Office 2010:

• Be a Foursquare Mayor of your office, business, home or school (or wherever you do your work!)
• Show up at Martin Place Amphitheatre area and look for the Microsoft Office 2010 signs
• Check in on Foursquare at the Office 2010 Mayor Meetup
• Leave a message when you check in saying why you want to win a copy of Office 2010

So if you’re a Mayor of your workplace, mark your calendars (Outlook, of course) and head down next Tuesday for the Office Mayor Meetup at Martin Place! Join in on the fun and don’t forget to follow the hashtag #OfficeMayor

Look forward to seeing you there.

Howorth adds new talent for 2010

We’ve kicked off 2010 with some great new talent joining Howorth.

Fresh off the boat from some of the top tech PR firms in London, we have two Account Managers – Ellie Shaddick and Georgina Bonner. Both have decided to leave the cold and damp London lifestyle to set up home in Sydney. We look forward to drawing on their experiences working with some big brands include BlackBerry, T-Mobile, Business Objects and Rentokil Initial.

In addition, but closer to home, we welcome senior account manager, Le Tran, who joins Howorth from a local technology PR firm. Le is looking to build on her corporate communications experience and is playing a key role in our emerging corporate and B2B practice. Having rapidly settled into Howorth, Le is currently taking a four-week sabbatical in Vietnam for some humanitarian work in an orphanage, cancer hospital and women’s shelter.

After five years working as a high school English teacher, senior consultant Lauren Sewell sought a more creative outlet and has decided PR is will satisfy her career goals. Drawing on her experience in the education sector and her excellent writing skills, Lauren is a valuable addition to the team.

Finally, we welcome Alice Ridgway to Howorth, who joins as a senior consultant with more than three years’ PR experience in technology, consumer and not for profit. Alice previously worked on brands including Fairfax Digital, 3Com, Tipping Point and Parrot, as well as consumer clients such as pet food manufacturer Hills Pet Nutrition. Most recently Alice worked for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as a writer during the 2009 Earth Hour – Vote Earth campaign, where she gained valuable experience in executing a global PR campaign with a strong social media focus.

Ogilvy Sydney Event With Radian6 Co-Founder Chris Ramsey

Charter for Compassion

Today the Charter for Compassion was unveiled to the world. To help raise awareness of this event, we have created a video about what compassion means to Australians. Please show your support for this worthwhile cause by blogging and tweeting!

TweePR: Australia’s PR practitioners on Twitter

I just spotted TweePR.com.au, an interesting initiative driven by the school of marketing/communications at the Queensland University of Technology.

TweePR aims to “give a bird’s eye view of what the nation’s public relations gurus are tweeting about. Watch myriad issues unfold – as interpreted by the nation’s masters of PR – all in one place.”

The river-of-news format is a nice touch, enabling you to see real-time messages being tweeted.

There’s also the tweepr top 100 list, which ranks Australia’s PR practitioners from 1 to 100, calculated based on the number of followers, updates and how recent their tweets are.

Howorth-ians in the list are @bdgiesen, @GWhiteOz, @Ofagirl and @deelau.

What’s hot in 2010?

It is getting to that time of year when the industry analysts get out the crystal ball and start to highlight some key trends and forecast for 2010. First cab off the rank is Gartner, and this is their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010:

1. Cloud Computing
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Client Computing
4. IT for Green
5. Reshaping the Data Center
6. Social Computing
7. Security – Activity Monitoring
8. Flash Memory
9. Virtualization for Availability
10. Mobile Applications

The list is considerably different from Gartner’s forecasts for 2009 — Green IT, which was named as the number one priority in 2008, and dropped down to number 10 in 2009, is now back at number four. Virtualisation was number one in 2009, now at number nine. We assume Advanced Analytics is another name for Business Intelligence, which sees it climb from number nine last year to number two. Other technologies dropping in priority include enterprise mash-ups, servers beyond blades, specialised systems and unified communications, which all fall out of the top 10 list.

Gartner goes on to say that CIOs will be challenged to balance cost, risk and growth in 2010. The demand on IT organisations will be greater transparency and accountability. Gartner predicts few IT leaders will receive budget increases in 2010, which may mean more of the “mend and make do” approach.

It is agreed that 2009 will go down as the worst ever year for the IT industry, but 2010 will see spending increase with 3.3% growth. Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, said: “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011. While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012.”

Sondergaard adds that business intelligence, virtualisation and social media will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010.

How much of this holds true, only time will tell. We’ll update on what the other analysts say for 2010 as soon as the details are published.

Preference-based consumer marketing. Why do we ignore it?

There is a vast amount of research that has been conducted recently regarding the consumers’ preferred method of receiving marketing communication. A recent study by Forrester Research, and commissioned by ExactTarget, highlights that the majority of consumers today still have a strong affinity towards email.

The important take out: Consumers prefer email at a rate of three-to-one when compared with any other avenue for marketing communications such as social media, Instant Messaging, phone and SMS!

Despite the abundance of research that all points towards email being the marketing method of choice for consumers, why do marketers continue to ignore this?

Despite the spike of Internet users using social media, for example three quarters of Australian online adults use social technologies (Forrester: Australian Adult Social Technographics Revealed 2008), consumers in general are NOT open to receiving marketing communication via this channel.

As social media continues to boom with new channels for communication being created everyday with new social networking sites and the like popping up, there is an overreliance and tendency to use this medium for all-purposes in order to reach the masses.

Unfortunately we forego the very fundamental principles of Marketing 101. We need to stop, think, plan and go back to basics:

• Who are our customers?
• Where are they?
• What are their preferences for receiving marketing messages?
• What are the right messages for each customer segment?
• What channel do we use to reach them?

A quick Google search and some top line research is enough to reveal where our customers’ preferences sit. It’s all very simple. Follow the basic principles of marketing and target the appropriate marketing messages to the appropriate consumers based on their preferences using the appropriate channels!

Sadly, we are missing the point! We’re frustrating consumers and, ultimately, not getting the outcomes that we desire!

Can Radian6 be used to prevent suicides and murders?

I’ve been thinking lately that we could potentially use social media monitoring tools to prevent suicides and mass murders. The idea struck me as I was working with some clients on a couple of issues / crisis management projects lately.

In the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye­. Killer George Sodini went berserk in a Pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. The thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. That’s when the idea sparked.

So I did some digging

It’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. With a quick search, I found Paul Zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on Facebook and did. More interestingly though, I found Hsu Yu-sheng.

Hsu Yu-sheng

Hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in Taiwan, who on August 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in English. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. Friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

Police arrived at Hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

The idea

We use social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. It’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

How it would work

1.       Radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords

2.       Suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. Radian6 is has a automatic Sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments

3.       Results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

There would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. What it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.

Spotted: Twitchiker and the Feats of Tweet

Earlier this year, a freelance journalist by the name of Paul Smith (no relation to Paul Smith from the AFR), embarked on an adventure to get from Newcastle to New Zealand in just 30 days.

He put in place a few rules for his journey and unless these were followed, the whole adventure is over and he goes home:

• He’ll only accept help (lifts, a place to stay and food) from other people on Twitter
• He can’t make any plans further than three days in advance
• He can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in his suitcase
• If there’s more than one offer on the table, he gets to choose which he takes. If there’s only one, he has to take it within 48 hours
• If he’s unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and he goes home

Fast forward to September, he’s halfway across the globe in much more interesting places than NZ (…sorry Kiwis) and with a whole heap of amazing stories to tell about his travel adventures.

He has also recently embarked on a new project, Feats of Tweet, with an aim of using social media to change the world – one tweet at a time.

These are both great example of social media – used the way that social media is supposed to!

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