Ignite Social Media’s Jim Tobin is writing a series of posts on ‘Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them‘ on the SMC blog. His first post, of a total of six that he’ll eventually write, is about listening.
Tobin will probably give us some really valuable insights over the next few days or weeks so make sure you follow the series.
One of my favourite professors at Melbourne Business School was Mark Ritson with whom I took the Brand Management course. One of the reasons I liked him so much was because of the wealth of real-world knowledge that he brought to the class. In fact, that was one of the reasons quoted when he was voted our (i.e. the full-time MBA students’) favourite teacher at this year’s MBS Valedictory Dinner.
One of those bits of real-world knowledge was his advice on how to pick the right marketing or branding agency for your company. Actually, it was more about which agency not to pick. Should an agency talk to you or show you a PowerPoint slide about any of these three things, he said, they will have instantly demonstrated the ineptitude:
I was actually going to write about these three things in more detail some time over the next couple of months but, fortunately, Ritson has written about them himself in a post called ‘Three Telltale Signs of an Agency’s Ineptitude‘ on The Branding Blog. It’s a great read that I highly recommend you check out.
[Via Trevor Cook]
Ian Ayres wrote a really interesting blog post on deconstructing advertisements on the Freakonomics blog yesterday. Having taken a course on Consumer Behaviour (with Brian Gibbs) at Melbourne Business School last term, reading Ayres’ post was a lot of fun because, as we learnt in quite a bit of detail in that course, marketing tactics do play a significant role in influencing consumer behaviour.
Danger = Cool
The kind of influence being used in the Silk Cut ad, as Ayres rightly points out, is of this kind:
[...] Silk Cut may even intend for viewers to think (subconsciously) that it is cool to smoke because you do it knowing its risk; smokers are courageous, risk takers who are willing to try to cheat death.
The ad agency may be trying to take the biggest product defect and re-spin it as a positive attribute. Sun-screen is for wimps, smoking is for the intrepid.
Which is pretty much standard operating procedure for advertising stuff that has the potential to be harmful to you, particularly if used in excess; such as alcohol, carbonated beverages, or energy drinks.
The rest of the blog post, which is about an earlier Silk Cut ad, goes into the fascinating area of semiotics and talks about the difference between metaphors and metonymies.
Style = Cool
All of this is, of course, a shift from the old “come for the style, stay for the taste” type of ads that tobacco companies used to run in developed countries and still do run in developing ones [1]. That particular line, for example, is from a campaign that Red & White ran in Pakistan for a number of years [2]. Pakistan has done quite a bit to limit tobacco advertising since then but, as always, it’s more an issue of enforcement than of simply formulating legislation [3]. Still, it’s a big step in the right direction.
Freakonomics, The Book
By the way, if you haven’t already read Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, you must. It is quite awesome. And once you do, make sure you subscribe to the Freakonomics blog as well.
Postscript
Funnily enough, I have a long history with Silk Cut since both my parents smoked that brand for about fifteen years. Apparently, it is ‘smoother’ than most cigarettes though, of course, not any less deadly: both of my parents stopped smoking it thanks to health scares and strong recommendations from doctors. My mother switched to a ‘lighter’ brand before dying of cancer in 2005 (she’d been smoking since she was in college) while my father now smokes the Dunhill brand despite an incident of heart failure in 2004.
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[1] Though one can argue that, thanks to Hollywood, developing countries still strongly associate smoking with style, the successful completion of a difficult task, and stress relief.
[2] For more on tobacco advertising in Pakistan, read ‘Why Tobacco Promotion Should be Banned in Pakistan‘ by the Tobacco Free Initiative’s Ehsan Latif.
[3] See the Dawn.com article on ‘New Restrictions on Tobacco Ads‘.
Phil Rosenberg wrote a great article in Social Media Today called Stop Writing Cover Letters and You’ll Get MORE Interviews.
He argues that it’s your resume that needs to include key words from job postings since it’s those that get placed into recruitment databases and, as a result, searched. Cover letters, meanwhile, don’t even make it to the database so there’s no point in putting keywords (or, according to Rosenberg, any effort at all) into those. In other words, resume search engine optimisation (SEO) for job description keywords is crucial. In fact, that is precisely what will get you through to the interview stage.
He has a point and I wonder how true this is for Australian companies and recruiters. It sure sounds plausible enough. That said, this is not going to stop me from writing cover letters. Doing at bit of SEO work on my resume may get me past the first cut but I’m pretty sure my cover letter will have a bigger role to play in subsequent stages. The resume SEO tip is really useful, though.
As you might know, I recently took a course in Business & Sustainable Development with Jeremy Baskin at Melbourne Business School. In it we learnt that two of the biggest themes in sustainability these days are the concept of limits and the idea of sustainable consumption.
Thanks to a reference from a friend, I came across this website called The Story of Stuff that talks about both of these issues in a very approachable and easily digestible way (i.e. in plain English).
In a brilliantly-produced 20-minute video, Annie Leonard (who is behind the whole concept) tells us about the consumption-based system we currently live in: where it came from, why it’s wrong, and what we should be doing instead. The video (which you can download from this page) is a little oversimplified, of course, but if you go to the Resources section you’ll find a lot more information on limits and sustainable consumption. Leonard also writes a blog on the site, which is another really good information resource.
Anyway, since the point of the video is awareness raising, please tell as many people as you can about both the site and the video. The topics that are being discussed there are among the most important issues facing the world today and the video is definitely worth a watch.
That’s it. I’m done. I have graduated!
As of this morning, I am an MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School…and I can prove it:
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I’m even wearing the University of Melbourne lapel pin! And in case you’re wondering why that’s so important, that pin is given only to UniMelb graduates (exclusivity works, eh?).
This is what I looked like in full graduation regalia (fun to wear, a hassle to sit in):
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Graduating Ceremony
The ceremony was good — despite the fact that today was the rainiest and coldest day Melbourne has had this winter (non-stop rain, temperatures dropping to three degrees overnight).
We heard from the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Glyn Davis, who started the ceremony with the traditional welcome address in which he talked about the privileges and responsibilities that come with the degrees we were being awarded. We also heard from MBS’ Dean, John Seybolt, who introduced our occasional speaker, REA Group’s Simon Baker (an MBS alumnus who I’ve mentioned before on this blog). Baker talked about his top ten business tips that he didn’t learn in his MBA (good speech).
Associate Dean Mark Crosby (from MBS) read out the names of the postgraduate diploma and masters students while we walked on to the stage and got our degrees from the VC (with much hat doffing). Crosby did an excellent job with name pronunciations. Associate Dean Ron Slocombe (from the Graduate School of Research) then read out the name and citation of our single PhD graduate for 2008 who, appropriately enough, got the longest round of applause from us mere MBAs when he went to get his degree.
We then had an excellent celebratory lunch at MBS during which we ate, caught up, and met friends’ families. All in all, it was an awesome day.
Valedictory Dinner
Oh, and since I haven’t blogged about this before let me quickly mention that three nights ago we had our valedictory dinner. This was held at Ormond College, one of the University’s oldest (founded in 1879) residential colleges. It also has the most castle-like building on campus, complete with Hogwarts-style dining hall (yes, that’s an actual photo from our dinner!):
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You can read about that, including details of the awards and prized conferred, in a news article on the MBS website (which is also where I got the photograph from).
All I can say now is: All’s well that ends well and thus endeth my MBA.
Add another MBS blogger to the list:
Alanna’s been blogging about her Melbourne Business School MBA since October last year but I came across her blog only recently. (Hmmm…maybe I should write a SEO primer for MBS bloggers).
Her blog is both informative and really fun to read so, for all those interested in what the MBS experience is like, hop on down and take a look.
Update: I’ve started to maintain a list of all MBS or MBS-related bloggers that I know of on a static page on this site. That way, people looking for MBS bloggers won’t have to hunt through my old blog posts, they can just look at that one page. (Though I will continue to publish a blog post every time I find a new relevant blogger.)
Melbourne Business School recently appointed John Armstrong as our first ever Philosopher-in-Residence.
Though this news was covered in the press, I didn’t write about it here because I was really busy at the time and figured I’d mention it later. That later came about yesterday when The Guardian published an article about it. So let me do a quick recap of the news coverage that Armstrong and his appointment at MBS have received so far:
Though Armstrong hasn’t started teaching his own courses yet he did guest lecture in our Business & Sustainable Development course which was both fun, as guest lectures always are, and eye-opening, if you hadn’t yet looked at consumption from that point of view before.
Now that I’ve graduated, however, I won’t be able to attend any of Armstrong’s courses. Fortunately, he has given talks to MBS alumni in the past and I hope he will do so in the future as well. Regardless, I wish him all the best and hope he makes the students graduating from MBS better thinkers, philosophers, and, ultimately, leaders.
My Google Alerts tell me that we have a new Melbourne Business School MBA blogger to add to my previous list:
He’s only just started blogging, with two posts so far, and is a part-time student (our only full-time intakes are in January and September). Let’s hope he keeps it up and tells us the story of his entire MBA journey.
Of course, like the rest of us, he’ll probably go silent during the last couple of weeks of each study term while he struggles to juggle work, study, home life, and (if possible) a social life…but that’s to be expected :)
The Community Manager role is still relatively new and somewhat hard to pin down:
Because of its newness, the confusion surrounding its place in the organizational hierarchy, and the many different ways in which companies are engaging their customers and employees, this role is handled in different ways by different companies.
However, increasingly, the Community Manager role is becoming an entirely separate job position. That is, as social media has increased in usage, importance, relevance, and impact, community management tasks can no longer be simply added-on to a communications person or marketer’s job description.
Okay, Now What?
But now that companies are creating these roles, they want to know how much they should pay Community Managers and, more fundamentally, what the job position’s ROI is.
The latter question is harder to answer and, even if you work through the numbers, sometimes the best answer is “If you don’t have someone dedicated to engaging your customers or employees, you will get left behind.” Which is much like the answer to a question that a lot of companies were asking themselves in the 90′s: “But why should we have a website?” :)
Of course, all this depends on how strategically important customer interaction is to your company. Theoretically, the more important customer interaction is — and assuming your customers are increasing their social media usage — the more you should be investing in a social media manager.
Theories aside, however, Connie Benson recently conducted a social media-based survey on what Community Managers are being paid these days and how companies are arriving at that figure. She wrote that all up in a blog post which concludes that, in the US, Community Managers are paid anything from US$60,000 to $110,000 (about AU$64-117k). Presumably this variation represents the amount of strategic importance placed by companies on customer engagement and the social media usage of customers.
What About Australia?
However, based on the few (and far between) community management-type job openings I’ve come across over the last few months, I can safely say that the Australian salary range for Community Managers is significantly lower. That’s mainly because social media still doesn’t figure in most Australia companies’ strategies. Oh well.
Hmmm…I wonder how much Telstra’s Now We Are Talking site or its competitors’ Tell The Truth Telstra site pays its community managers :)
