Yesterday was my first day as Social Media Manager at Jetstar. Yes, that means I have a new job :)

For those of you who might not know, the Jetstar Group (usually just referred to as Jetstar) consists of four low-cost airlines:

• Jetstar Airways, based in Australia,
• Jetstar Asia Airways, based in Singapore,
• Jetstar Pacific Airlines, based in Vietnam, and
• Jetstar Japan, based in Japan.

Jetstar was launched in 2004 and, with its 79 aircraft and over 7,000 employees, currently flies to 56 destinations in 17 countries across the Asia-Pacific region.

My job is a Group role (i.e. it’s a corporate function that works across all four airlines) and is based at the Jetstar corporate headquarters in Melbourne, Australia.

Why did I change jobs?

For a number of reasons:

• I love the airlines/aviation industry and working for an airline is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
• Jetstar is a great brand that is run by good people who provide a valuable service. It’s a brand I respect and is a brand whose values I share (i.e. providing good value for money, making smart use of technology, and making travel to popular destinations accessible to lots of people).
• I’m making a career path adjustment that sees me changing my focus from building and managing websites to helping companies and customers communicate better with each other using social media. And while this is a slight narrowing of focus (e.g. in my current role I won’t be looking after the Jetstar website) it is also an increase in overall responsibility (i.e. I get to work on more strategic corporate communications objectives).
• My new role is more challenging because the scale and scope of customer engagement is greater (e.g. it’s across the entire Asia-Pacific region as opposed to just within the state of Victoria) and the aviation industry is more exciting, more innovative, and moves much faster than the water industry.
• I have a greater opportunity for personal growth because I now get to employ my social media skills to their fullest. I had been wanting to increase my social media focus at Melbourne Water but, with all the other work I was doing there, this wasn’t something I was able to do.

I also get to work with one of my former managers who I really like and work really well with. And finally, as someone whose family is spread across multiple countries, the travel benefits of working for an airline are important to me personally.

What does the new job involve?

Broadly speaking, my overall objective is to improve the communication, engagement, and understanding between Jetstar and its customers. Specifically, I get to do this via social media. Though, practically speaking, this engagement will be integrated across multiple communication channels.

How exactly I go about doing all this is something I will share on this blog (and probably also on Twitter) over the coming weeks, months, and years so stay tuned.

I love using pictures, charts, diagrams, and infographics to illustrate and explain complex or hard to visualize ideas, concepts, and relationships.

Using Charts and Infographics at Melbourne Water

Since we deal with pretty complex subjects at Melbourne Water it makes sense for us to use well designed charts and infographics to explain what we do and how we do it. So, over the last year or two, we’ve been working with various vendors to produce graphics and animations that help us communicate better. We’ve also been improving our own chart-making capabilities so we can explain things more effectively to our more interested (which usually means more nerdy) audiences.

Here are some of the things we’ve done.

Explaining Systems

To explain how a system like Melbourne’s Water supply network works, you can use a static and somewhat technical map like this:

Or you can use an animated map to really show people what’s going on (click through to see what I mean):

That animated map has proven to be very popular: over the last year it’s been viewed over 40,000 times with visitors spending an average of two and a half minutes going through it.

You can explain complex systems without animations, too – like we’ve done with our Eastern Treatment Plant’s sewage processing diagram. This diagram comes in two parts. First, there’s a high-level overview:

And, then, there’s a more detailed explanation of the steps we take to process sewage at this plant (including the tertiary treatment bit that’s currently being built):

Explaining Relationships

Another important use for graphics is in explaining relationships between things.

For example, the Melbourne Water website gets about about 10,000 visitors per day. However, this figure jumps to 25,000 when it rains and over 40,000 when there’s a big storm in Melbourne. This happens because people want to know what effect the rainfall is having on our water storage levels.

To explain this relationship, we first used a simple column chart to show the basic trend (though the figures in it are from about a year and a half ago):

We then drilled down into a more detailed example and plotted the amount of rainfall recorded in Melbourne in August 2010 and compared that to the number of website visits received over the same period. The relationship between the two is quite obvious when you look at this graph:

These diagrams were made to be printed, by the way, which is why the text size on the axes isn’t all that large.

Telling a Story

At times, though, all you want to do with a graph is tell a story.

For example, we used this simple graph to explain the how Melbourne’s dams staged a remarkable turnaround in 2010, jumping from 25.6% full in July 2009 to 53.7% full in December 2010:

And we used this graph to explain that Melbourne’s total system storage depends a great deal on how full Thomson Dam is (because Thomson is almost 60% of Melbourne’s total dam capacity):

More generally, we use this graphic to explain to Melburnians just how big Thomson really is:

Showing Cause and Effect (i.e. Explaining More Complex Relationships)

Recently, though, we’ve gone one step further and have used a couple of charts to explain what, at the face of it, seems to be a strange result: rainfall for spring 2011 was 28.5% above average but water flowing into the dams (i.e. streamflow) over the same period was 22.4% below average. This happened because of what we call the ‘sponge effect’ and we used this graphic to explain what happened:

Now this type of graph isn’t for everyone to read and understand but, that’s okay – we know that a lot of our website visitors are water nerds just like us and that they appreciate the extra effort we make in explaining these results to them.

Hopefully, this use of charts and infographics to explain complex things is something Melbourne Water continues to do in the future. I know I certainly will.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked the Melbourne Business School full-time MBA at #1 in Asia and Australasia and #32 globally in its 2011 full-time MBA rankings.

MBS is already ranked #1 in Australia by AFR BOSS and #46 globally by Times Higher Education.

Drilling down to the detailed profile for MBS, you get some interesting results.

Missed Networking Opportunities

For example, the school ranks well for networking:

• Potential to network: #5
• Breadth of alumni network (i.e. ratio of registered alumni to current students): #2

But ranks poorly in the use and perception of its alumni network:

• Alumni effectiveness (i.e. student assessment of alumni network): #89

I’m not sure why this might be the case. I can make a few guesses, though. For example, international students might find that, while there are tonnes of MBS alumni that they can network with in Asia and Australasia, there aren’t enough of them around the rest of the world. There might also be some missed opportunities in the students’ use of the alumni network. Or of recent alumni themselves not networking much with each other.

Career Services is Improving

MBS also ranks really well for its careers service:

• Jobs found through the careers service (i.e. percentage of graduates finding jobs through careers service): #2

But students and alumni don’t seem to give it enough credit:

• Student assessment of careers service (i.e. did the careers service meet expectations and needs?): #98

This suggests that, while the MBS Career Centre is doing a good job, it suffers from some perception problems. This might be because perception change among alumni who no longer need or use the careers service lags the reality of the careers service having improved in recent years. I do know that the MBS Career Centre in 2008-09 had a challenging time placing graduates from my full-time MBA batch because we were the first group to come out of the new September intake. This meant the Career Centre had to find jobs for twice as many students (many of whom were international) right at the beginning of the GFC. And, since the EUI’s ranking has memory – i.e. it’s a weighted average of results from 2011 (50%), 2010 (30%), and 2009 (20%) – this alumni perception would still have an impact on perception scores.

Overall

Overall, though, this is a good result and I’m glad that MBS continues to improve its quality, reputation, and ranking.

The Australian Financial Review’s (AFR) BOSS magazine has, once again, ranked the Melbourne Business School MBA at number one in Australia.

• ‘Australia’s top MBA programs’ by Rose-Anne Manns [AFR]
• ‘Financial Review BOSS 2011 MBA Rankings’ [AFR BOSS]
• ‘AFR BOSS: No.1 MBA Again’ [MBS]

According to these rankings, the top five MBAs in Australia are from these business schools:

1. Melbourne Business School
2. University of Queensland – Business School
3. Monash University – Department of Management
4. QUT Graduate School of Business (Queensland University of Technology)
5. Australian School of Business – AGSM

BOSS conducts this research every other year and its results are based on two components: an alumni survey (weighted 55%) and data supplied by schools (weighted 45%). 21 business schools participated this time and 19 of these made it into the rankings (two didn’t, due to insufficient alumni responses). 1,600 b-school alumni from the graduating classes of 2008-2010 (inclusive) took part in the survey.

Digging Deeper

Looking more closely at the results:

• The AGSM and MBS MBAs have the highest tuition fee ($64,800 and $64,000, respectively) followed by Monash and Macquarie ($57,260 and $56,000, respectively). The rest of the MBAs have tuition fees under $50k.
• 96% of MBS alumni reported that their MBA provided them value for money.
• MBS, AGSM, and Macquarie MBAs have the greatest number of class contact hours over the entire degree (720, 686, and 640 hours, respectively). As it happens, these are also three of the four most expensive degrees. The others all have fewer than 600 class contact hours. 
• MBS was ranked 3rd for satisfaction, 5th for value for money, and 1st for research.
• When survey respondents were asked which school they would attend if money and location were not an issue, MBS came out on top again.

International Rankings

The two most notable international rankings of business schools come from the Financial Times and the Economist. In their latest rankings:

• The Financial Times ranks AGSM at #35 and MBS at #53
• The Economist ranks MBS at #44, Monash at #58, MGSM at #64, Curtin at #76, UoQ at #81

FT will be kicking off research for its 2012 b-school rankings later this month.

Matt Symonds recently wrote a good article on the importance of diversity in MBA programs:

…business schools seek to encourage not only more women and ethnic minorities to do an MBA, but also those with more diverse backgrounds including media, military, not-for-profits and entrepreneurship

…

But is it important for business schools to also strive for professional diversity? Many academics, administrators and students would say so. In fact, it’s been argued that restricting the MBA course participants to a limited range of experience means that traditionally accepted patterns of thought go unchallenged. They argue that a wide-ranging group of students helps to put business decision-making into a wider perspective, and thereby reduce the risk of a herd mentality that leads to ill-informed decisions. Perhaps Wall Street should take note?

Diversity in the student body – particularly a good mix of international students – is one of the main reasons I applied to Melbourne Business School for my MBA; and I was certainly not disappointed. In my intake (the full-time MBA intake of  September 2006) we had about 65  students, only seven of which were from Australia (the rest were from about 35 countries) and a quarter of which were women (for MBA programs, this is better than most).

MBS also goes out of its way to acquire diversity through its various scholarship programs. In my case, I was awarded (what is now called) the Dean’s International Management Scholarship. Every year, that adds about three financially-limited international students to a mix of people who are fortunate enough to have other means to paying for their studies. I, for one, will be forever grateful to MBS for giving me that opportunity.

I didn’t blog about this at the time but Melbourne Business School is getting a new Dean: Professor Zeger Degraeve, who is currently at London Business School, will be taking over from current Dean, Professor Jennifer George, in September.

From MBS’ news item on the appointment:

Prof. Zeger Degraeve at a glance:

• Inaugural chair, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Chair for Innovation, London Business School
• Founder and faculty director Dubai-London programs, London Business School in Dubai, UAE
• Former deputy dean, London Business School.
• Visiting professorships at Columbia University, Tuck School of Business
• PhD, Business Administration, The University of Chicago
• MSc in Engineering and MBA, Universities of Ghent and Leuven, Belgium

Today, The Independent published a profile on Degraeve which is worth a read because, in it, he talks about his plans for MBS:

“Business schools are big ships to turn,” comments Professor Zeger Degraeve. “Often it is a dean’s successor who will enjoy the realisation of his or her long-term strategy.” Professor Degraeve, who will take up his initial four-year term as dean of Australia’s Melbourne Business School (MBS) in September, is undaunted by the prospect that many benefits of his tenure will only mature after he has gone.

“My long-term strategies include fundraising, raising the profile of the school and ensuring that it achieves prominence on the global scene. Short-term I plan to re-think the MBA curriculum and develop the executive education programme.”

Sounds exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing how things at MBS change and get even better over the next few years.

Every two years the Australian Financial Review ranks Australia’s “top MBA programs” based on a survey of recent business school alumni and data from a questionnaire that’s filled out by the schools themselves.

They publish this ranking in BOSS Magazine and, in 2009, Melbourne Business School was ranked #1.

This year’s alumni survey is now open for input from business school graduates who completed their degrees within the last three years (i.e. 2008, 2009, and 2010 grads only). If you fit that category, please fill out the survey so that this year’s results reflect the most accurate opinions of recent Australian b-school grads.

The 2011 survey results will be published in the September issue of BOSS. Of course, I’ll blog about them when they come out, as well.

FYI: If you’re an MBS alumni and have any questions about the survey, get in touch with David Mitchell who is the alumni and community relations manager at MBS.

Last week I attended the WebForward Conference in Sydney (which itself is part of the larger CeBIT Australia Exhibition). It was a really good event during which I got to hear from and meet a lot of interesting people.

The conference had two streams: social media and mobile. I hopped in and out of both streams and here are my notes from the talks that I attended.

Latest trends and techniques in the on-line marketing space and a look into the future

• Speaker: Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology – Australia/New Zealand, Google
• Why is there still a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ marketing in a corporation’s budget? Why is digital still considered to be “new” media?
• There’s a huge correlation between offline marketing and online searches
  • For example, if you were to place your ad on a number of city buses you could tell, by analyzing Google search on the relevant phrase (assuming its unique enough), when those buses first hit the streets
• Predictions for the future:
  • 80% of screen time will be digital
  • Mobile devices will enable two-thirds of purchases and pay for half of them
  • Consumers will have more power and 80% of future engagement will be opt-in and 2-way
  • Real-time will play a big role; already 30% of Australians consumers access the web via their mobile phones while in a physical store
• Use evidence-based marketing; don’t assume you know what the market wants
• Don’t be scared to experiment with new things and try new ways of doing things (it’s okay to fail, stop what you were doing, and move on to other ideas)
• 12% of all Google search queries in December 2010 came from mobile devices
• Location marketing is key: A third of all searches conducted on mobile devices are location based
• In the US, a quarter of all searches conducted on mobile devices were voice based
• Think about doing how-to videos on YouTube
  • 2.4 million search queries per month on YouTube for how-to content
  • 32% of videos watched on YouTube are of how-to content

Integrating a mobile strategy into your marketing plan to cover multiple channels

• Speaker: Antonio Addario, Manager – Direct Channels Strategy, Efficiency & Innovation, ING Direct
• The online magazine Mobile Marketer is a great resource
• Some of the steps you need to take to figure out your mobile strategy are:
• Do lots of research (e.g. find out which apps people are willing to pay for in various app stores)
• Know your customer really well (both the people and the technology they use)
• Define your success
• Identify the key capabilities of all your online and mobile offerings; then select the ones you want to offer on your mobile platform
• Evaluate your development options (i.e. reuse/buy/build)
• Do plenty of promotion for your new offering
• Get your mobile offering to upsell for you (e.g. tell people to your other services from within the app)
• Measure success (KPIs, adoption, etc.)
• Listen to your customers and make the improvements they want

Utilising mobile marketing to promote your product or service

• Speaker: Julian Peterson, Marketing & Online Director, Time Out Sydney
• Time Out is 40 years old in London but 3 years old in Sydney and 6 months old in Melbourne
• A branded app can work well if your brands are similar and have the same core target audience (Time Out’s app is cobranded with Smirnoff)
• Time Out Australia used the app platform already built by London (which, as it happens, was work done by an Australian firm) so that made life easier for them
• The app does curated content and is really popular with their targeted audience

Recognising the benefits of mobile marketing to drive innovation and growth

• Speaker: Nandor Locher, Manager e-commerce, Virgin Australia
• A lot of the time, when you’re doing mobile marketing, you’re not really being ‘innovative’ in the true sense of the word
• It’s critical to focus your efforts on the unique advantages offered by mobile technology
• Mobile offerings are becoming part of a company’s larger product offering and are not just another marketing channel (e.g. like being able to check-in to your flight from the web, being able to do travel stuff on your mobile is now part of the broader travel services product offered by airlines)
• Mobile is becoming a ‘hygiene factor’ in the travel industry; i.e. if it’s not there, people will go to your competitor
• The ROI from the mobile offering is low so, for Virgin, their offering is largely a medium- to long-term brand and product augmentation investment
• It’s important to have a brand presence in the various app stores
• Integrating mobile with social media is important; particularly since social media is used so heavily in the travel industry
• Thanks to mobile devices, downtime has become the new uptime (e.g. Virgin increased sales by 150% by moving their happy hour sales to a downtime period for the target market)
• Depending on your offering, the usage and usefulness of mobile websites is sometimes greater than that of native phone apps (which many people download and then never use)

Understanding how to drive your brand via mobile

• Speaker: Stephanie Carrick, Senior Producer, Triple J Unearthed
• Triple J Unearthed is one of the largest online communities in Australia (250k registered users)
• They had to had a mobile presence (18-35 is their target market, after all)
• Their app focuses on users listening to music (i.e. they focus on their core value proposition)
• All their music content is available for downloading (for free)
• The app is a huge success, with over 420k downloads in 18 months
• Because of the app, they’ve seen a 50% sustained rise in traffic to their website (i.e. they’ve tapped a whole new audience that was inaccessible via radio)
• It’s crucial to have app maintenance budget because you will need to update it regularly from now on

Using Augmented Reality Technology to promote your business

• Speaker: Glenn Cooper, Executive Chairman, Coopers’ Brewery
• Brand and brand history plays a huge role in the decisions companies make (particularly in family owned businesses like Cooper’s)
• Doing a mobile app – that too, an augmented reality app – was a huge change for the business
• This worked well for them because they used it to promote their low carb beer which itself was a huge change for the business (as they are known for their dark beers)
• The app helped their marketing promotion be completely under their control (i.e. not under the control of the physical store retailers)

Joining the social media conversation about your company

• Speaker: Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra
• There are different types of social media programs (i.e. they have different objectives); for example:
• Listening
• Customer Care
• Thought Leadership
• Marketing & Sales
• The most important part of a listening program is to actually listen (and not jump in every time you’re mentioned or talked about)
• A key phrase to remember in social media engagements is “What’s the gift?” (looked at from another angle, that’s the answer to a customer who wants to know “What’s in it for me?”)
• Social media is an ecosystem: you must treat it with respect (i.e. don’t pollute it)
• In order to get stuff done, you need to have a burning platform
• Social media has worked really well for Telstra: 31% of all their online conversations now happen on Twitter
• All employees at Telstra have to take and pass their online social media course (yes, all 40k existing employees had to do this)
• Sentiment tracking is good, but make sure you provision for human coding in your budget because algorithms don’t understand sarcasm (of which there’s a lot online)

Developing social marketing strategies to transform your organisation

• Speaker: Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
• 3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook per month (globally)
• Australians spend an average of 7.5hrs on Facebook per month
• Facebook in Australia
• 10 million active users (i.e. use the site once in 30 days)
• 68% return daily, 86% return weekly
• 53% of users are female
• The age spread is about even (approximately 17-25% for each of the five major age brackets)
• Facebook lets people connect across borders really easily
• Facebook is about reorganizing the web around people
• In the 80s, the web was all about browsing
• In the 90s, it was all about search
• Now, it’s all about people
• Even gaming is reorganizing around people
• 43% of all news sharing now occurs in social media
• Businesses are reorganizing around people as well; this includes new product development, customer service, and marketing
• There are three types of marketing:
• Paid (e.g. newspaper ads)
• Owned (e.g. websites)
• Earned (e.g. word of mouth)
• Earned is the hardest to get, but is also the most powerful
• Facebook lets you do Earned marketing at scale
• ‘Fans’ are the new popular metric to quote (like ‘Hits’ was popular in the 80s and 90s)
• ‘Social’ is not the salt in the fries, it needs to be baked into the product

Panel Discussion: Maximising the opportunities given by social media strategies

• Speaker: Joe Millward, Innovation Manager – Social Media, Gloria Jeans International; Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra; Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
• Ask yourself: What is it that the social media platform can do for you that other platforms can’t?
• Telstra has three rules for new social media ventures:
• You need a six month content plan
• You need someone to run the conversation (interacting at least twice daily)
• You have to have a back-end system to deal with questions, complaints, etc.
• Remember there are two kinds of social media interactions:
• Individual (e.g. my bill is wrong)
• Institutional (e.g. your billing system is wrong)
• These need to be handled differently (e.g. you need to be prepared to have individual interactions after hours as well as during work hours)

Introducing location-based mobile applications into your marketing strategy

• Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia
• Surf Life Saving needed to get the beach safely message across to high risk beachgoers (specifically, males aged 16-35)
• Their app has two messages:
• Primary: be safe
• Secondary: get involved/donate (they are a non-profit that is run by volunteers and relies on donations to function)
• The app uses the phone’s GPS location to deliver targeted messages
• They use web services in the back-end to collect all the information that gets presented (e.g. they get weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology and beach data from their internal Surfcom system)
• Build into your app the ability to collect feedback – this will be vital to future app development
• A good mobile site is more cost effective than creating an app because the latter needs to be constantly updated

Panel Discussion: Keeping up with latest techniques and trends to gain competitive advantage

• Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia; Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology, Google AU/NZ; Andy Ridley, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Earth Hour
• Google’s big bet is mobile (hence Android and Wallet and all their other mobile related services)
• Three key elements for location based services:
• Local
• Social
• Mobile
• Evidence based marketing is very important
• It’s important to go where you users are (e.g. websites, devices, platforms, etc.)
• This includes following their usage-time patterns; e.g. mobile web usage drops at 9am, spikes during lunch, then drops again till 5pm

Concluding Thoughts

The conference was well organized, well executed, and quite valuable in terms of what I got form it (both information and contacts). I look forward to attending it again next year.

NOTE: All speaker photos were taken from the WebForward website.

Times Higher Education (THE) recently published their ‘2010-2011 World University Rankings’ and, in it, they have a new rankings based perceived reputation.

To build this Reputation Rankings they surveyed an invite-only list of over 13,000 academics from around the world. The opinion of those academics suggests that six universities (or ‘super brands’, as they are being called) have, by far, the best reputation. These are:

1. Harvard University – 100.0%
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – 85.0%
3. University of Cambridge – 80.7%
4. University of California Berkeley – 74.7%
5. Stanford University – 71.5%
6. University of Oxford – 68.6%

The rest received a score of under 40%.

The University of Melbourne is the highest ranked Australian university (yaay!) and it comes in at a joint number 45 (along with the University of Edinburgh) with 6.5%.

Reputation matters quite a bit in academics but these rankings don’t come as a surprise (certainly not for the top 20 or so). Though, really, once you go below #9 or #12 on this list (both of which are followed by noticeable drops in percentage points) it doesn’t matter as much which university you are associated with. Unless you’re looking for rankings by subject or region, of course, in which case the picture might change a bit.

You can read more about these new reputation rankings here:

• World’s best universities ranked by ‘reputation’ [BBC]
• Six ‘super brands’: their reputations precede them [THE]

I’ve been really busy at work these last few months which is why I haven’t blogged here much. Unfortunately, it’ll probably stay that way till early next year.

What’s prompted me to write today, however, is Penny McLeod who wrote in The Australian an article called ‘A Degree You Can Bank On: MBA’ – that says:

Australian companies are knocking down the doors of leading business schools to secure the best master of business administration graduates.

The article goes on to explain how demand for MBAs has increased in Australia this year. Further, this demand isn’t coming just from the financial sector but from other sectors as well (including, for example, utilities and not-for-profit organizations).

That’s great news because, in my opinion, the MBA is undervalued in Australia and I’m glad to see that perception change.