Economist Ranks MBS MBA Regional #1 and Global #32

Ameel Khan October 20, 2011

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.

MBS MBA Again Ranked Number 1 by AFR BOSS

Ameel Khan September 11, 2011

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:

Melbourne Business School
University of Queensland – Business School
Monash University – Department of Management
QUT Graduate School of Business (Queensland University of Technology)
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.

Diversity in MBA Programs

Ameel Khan August 24, 2011

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.

Profile on Upcoming MBS Dean Zeger Degraeve

Ameel Khan June 16, 2011

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.

AFR MBA Survey 2011 is Open for Alumni Input

Ameel Khan June 14, 2011

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.

Notes from WebForward 2011 Conference

Ameel Khan June 6, 2011

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.

Melbourne at #45 in Global University Rankings by Reputation

Ameel Khan March 13, 2011

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:

Harvard University – 100.0%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – 85.0%
University of Cambridge – 80.7%
University of California Berkeley – 74.7%
Stanford University – 71.5%
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:

Things Looking Up for MBAs in Australia

Ameel Khan December 11, 2010

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.

MBS By Numbers

Ameel Khan September 13, 2010

Melbourne Business School (MBS) have produced a video called ‘MBS By Numbers’ as a thank you to the alumni of MBS:

Web Fun at Melbourne Water: iPhone App, Maps & Social Media

Ameel Khan May 10, 2010

I joined Melbourne Water as their Websites Manager just under a year ago and, since then, I’ve done a lot of fun and exciting web-related work there.

We recently hit a few important milestones so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do a quick roundup of what I’ve been up to.

Web & New Media Strategy

All the exciting work I’m doing has its foundations in the Web & New Media Strategy that was kicked off in early 2009 and involved a few months of research, analysis, and decision-making. The actual “strategy” ended up being a three-phase plan for building and enhancing the organization’s online presence over the next 2-3 years.

The first phase (basically, quick wins) took less than six months to do and involved plugging the holes in our existing online presence. This included numerous web tweaks, getting a better understanding of what worked or didn’t work on our site (via Google Analytics), and, generally, making better use of the website (e.g. more cross promotion on high traffic areas). We also bought a Google Mini search engine to remove one of site’s biggest pain points which was a crappy search engine.

The second phase (6-12 months) is finishing up now. This addressed a whole bunch of other web tweaks (like content rewrites and information architecture adjustments) and launched projects in five major areas:

A complete site overhaul (redoing the site’s content, design, and information architecture and getting a new web content management system)

More multimedia (specifically illustrations, photos, and videos)

More and better online maps (the more useful and usable the better)

More information provision via mobile phones (through SMS, mobile applications, and mobile web sites)

Getting into social media (for information provision and stakeholder engagement)

The third phase (1-3 years) involves more complex projects that can’t be started till we have everything else in place (like a new organizational GIS and a web content management system). Phase three work includes the automation of customer-facing business activities, which means things like building online forms and applications, providing custom information via SMS, and so on.

What’s Exciting Now?

Right now, though, we’re nearing the end of the second phase and we’ve made great progress in all five of the areas mentioned above:

We’ve kicked off a project to get a new web content management system and have started the website redesign and reorganization process.

We’ve started to place photos on Flickr (including ‘Photos from the Field’ which are from Melbourne Water employees) and videos on YouTube (almost all of which were produced in-house).

We’ve got some really basic maps on our site but have kicked off a project that will move all our old and clunky maps to a better platform over the next year or so. Meanwhile, we’ve developed an interactive map that explains in simple terms how Melbourne’s complicated water supply network works.

We’ve launched an iPhone app (link to iTunes store) and will be launching a new mobile version of our website in the next few weeks.

We’re quite active on Twitter and will get further into social media when appropriate.

All in all, we’re tracking quite well and the work we’re doing is lots of fun and really quite exciting.

Culture of Innovation & Effective Communication

What I love most of all, though, is how much on-board everyone at Melbourne Water is with these enhancements. This support and appreciation of innovation and effective communication starts right at the top, too. For example, it was our Board who originally suggested that we develop a simplified water supply network map for the website. They wanted a simple way of explaining a complex system and realized that the web would be a great place to do just that.

In my opinion, the foundation for this is laid in Melbourne Water’s Strategic Framework document which explicitly lists the support of “innovation, achievement, and good ideas” and the need to “understand, manage, and meet or exceed customer expectations” as success indicators for the organization. At Melbourne Water these aren’t just phrases on a company brochure but actual, practical goals that all of us aspire to every day. In fact, to give you an example of how this is implemented practically: Every project that’s proposed at Melbourne Water has to explain and justify which of these strategic goals it’s addressing before it’s allowed to start.

So the work that I’m doing there both matches the direction the world is moving in (i.e. information provision and customer engagement is moving online) and is brilliantly supported by the organization itself. That’s yet another reason why I love working there.

ConnectNow 2010 – Thoughts & Notes (Part 2)

Ameel Khan April 13, 2010

I gave a quick overview of the ConnectNow conference in Part 1. Here are my thoughts and notes – along with links and other information – on each of the talks given during the first two days of the event.

Gavin Heaton

Topic: Lead Generation, Community Management, and ROI (blog link)
Website: http://www.servantofchaos.com
Twitter: @servantofchaos
Big ideas:
- 10 years on and the Cluetrain Manifesto is still relevant and is still not accepted business practice
- There are different types of social networks and these are used by different types of people, of different ages, at different stages of their lives; see Groundswell’s Social Technographics report that talks about 6 types of social media users
- There are 5 impacts of new/social media (read Gavin’s blog post for details)
- There is a convergence of markets: there used to be just the consumer market (mass production) and the enterprise market (custom-built) but now there are enterprise-level products and services available at lower prices (e.g. Software as a Service) and the consumer space is being extended into the enterprise (e.g. smart phones like iPhones in the workplace)
- You need to have a continuous digital strategy (details in blog post)
- You need to share the message, but own the destination (case in point: I’m sharing Gavin’s message but sending you to his home base, which is his blog, as the source/message destination)
- Social media is not about influence, it’s about trust (details in blog post); your trust and reputation can have a ‘fat value’ (details in blog post); 75% of your “fans” are already connected
- From the Q&A session that followed, a good idea: Consider converting your company’s brochure content into a series of YouTube videos that tell a great story and can also be shared

Katie Chatfield

Topic: Do You do your Best Work at Your Desk?
Website: http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com
Twitter: @katiechatfield
Big ideas:

Human behaviour is a function of a person in their environment (Lewin’s Equation); you can change behaviour by changing the person (very hard to do) or their environment (easier to do)
Before you can get into social media, you need to have a more social business
Giving people a tool doesn’t make them craftspeople; i.e. it’s about the people, not the technology
Remember that competent people resist change because it makes them less competent
Short form stories (3 minutes long) are a great way for employees and teams in an organization to tell each other what they’re working on [“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein]
In those short stories, you should tell people: (a) what it is you’re working on; (b) why you think it’s awesome; and (c) why it’s useful for them to know about it

Tara Hunt

Topic: Yes, I do Mind the Gap
Website: http://www.horsepigcow.com
Twitter: @missrogue
Big ideas:
- There tends to be a gap (sometimes a big one) between what businesses and communities value
- For example, truth, beauty, freedom, and love are not usual business values; though notable companies like Google, Apple, Craigslist, and Zappos (respectively) present exceptions
- The businesses that share more community values tend to do better
- Most businesses are online community tourists: they watch, but they don’t participate (they’re not from there; they’re just looking at the ‘natives’)
- Watch Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk on the loss of practical wisdom
- Many businesses create strict guidelines to follow, thereby instilling robot values over human values into their staff; why?
- We need to de-robotize; we need to start the human revolution
- From the Q&A session: Why not ask your fans what’s important to them? What do they value?

Hau Man Chow

Topic: The Future of Mobile Apps
Website: http://www.motherapp.com
Twitter: @motherapp
Big ideas:
- You can convert any site into a mobile application using MotherApp

Brian Solis

Topic: The Human Network in an Interconnected World (presentation notes)
Website: http://www.briansolis.com
Twitter: @briansolis
Big ideas:
- All we know about social media is based on opinion; it could all be wrong
- Executives don’t usually get into social media because of an ‘a-ha’ moment; they often get into social media because of an ‘uh-oh’ moment (read ‘Championing Change from Within’)
- We – the people in this room – need to be the conductors of our organization’s social media
- Who in an organization owns social media? Everyone.
- Your organization needs a style/brand guide for social media
- Talking back and forth with people if fine, you need to show that your organization has empathy
- Become the people you want to reach and inspire
- Conversation is bigger than any social network; check out the Conversation Prism
- Social media is more about sociology and psychology than it is about technology; we’re becoming digital anthropologists
- Check out the Brand Dashboard

Laurel Papworth

Topic: Social Media: Where’s The Money?
Website: http://laurelpapworth.com
Twitter: @silkcharm
Big ideas:
- Reputation and trust are crucial in the online world
- When you calculate the ROI (return on investment) on community engagement don’t forget to calculate the COI (cost of inaction of community engagement) as well (details in blog post)
- You can monetize social networks via numerous revenue streams (details in blog post)

Jim Stewart

Topic: Video for SEO and Inbound Marketing
Website: http://stewartmedia.biz
Twitter: @jimboot
Big ideas:
- Watch the video, ‘How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer’
- Old media missed lots of opportunities with online news; such as reporting on local trends, creating time-sensitive local ads on the web, and real community-building
- Video creation isn’t very complicated or expensive: light it up from above ($20), mic it up ($100), frame it up, use good software (free to $300 for screen capture software like Camtasia Studio)
- When making a video: (a) tell a story, don’t ready a script; (b) try to have a point
- Distribute content far and wide via services like TubeMogul (which is good, but still buggy)
- Make sure your video includes a call back to your home base
- Make sure you transcribe your video

Darren Rowse

Topic: Blogging for Dollars – Do You Have What it Takes? (presentation notes)
Website: http://www.problogger.net
Twitter: @problogger
Big ideas:
- Blogs often make money indirectly (i.e. not through straight ads or affiliate marketing)
- There are ‘4 Foundations of a Successful blog’ (details in blog post; also see presentation notes)
- But, if you want a long shortlist: you have to (1) listen; (2) identify goals; (3) build a home base; (4) build trust; (5) be useful; (6) build community; (7) be personal; (8) tell stories; (9) be unique; (10) build a network before you need it; (11) leverage what you have; (12) craft your content well; (13) be playful; (14) be transparent; (15) be accessible; (16) be passionate; (17) promote yourself, but not too much; (18) be prolific; and (19) persist
- Remember: sometimes the money comes later; don’t just make money from your blog, but because of it

Gary Vaynerchuck

Topic: Crush It! Cash in on Your Passion and How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business (presentation notes part 1, part 2)
Website: http://garyvaynerchuk.com
Twitter: @garyvee
Big ideas:

The cost of entry to build a brand has collapsed; e.g. to build WineLibrary.com, it cost $4m in advertising over a number of years while, to build WineLibraryTV.com, it cost almost nothing
The value of content has never been higher; “When your content is shit, you’re fucked”; that said, monetizing content is tougher than ever
Spend time in communities; you have to love your community before they’ll love you; this is the thank-you economy
Customer service via social media is key; the price of your product can get neutralized by caring
The cost of entry is: (a) caring, (b) social media customer relationship management
The only three things that “move the needle” are: (a) price, (b) convenience, (c) customer service
Social media spokespeople for your company need to know your brand story cold
Two ways to solve the personal vs. corporate brand issue for company spokespeople and customer service people: either (a) don’t let your people develop a personal brand and become heroes or (b) become a platform to make heroes (under your logo) and attract increasingly better people when/if current heroes leave the organization
How do you convince people (e.g. in an organization) to do something (e.g. participate in social media)? Don’t spend any time on selling to people who don’t want to do it. Spend all your time and effort on people who want to do it and then promote them. The rest will come around.
Focus on social trends and culture shifts; the big trends these days are virtual goods and currency (e.g. via Facebook); smaller and more mobile is better (because we’re lazy); geo-location
The money these days is in restrictions (e.g. Apple and Facebook)

Deborah Schultz

Topic: It’s the People, Stupid (earlier presentation version; presentation notes)
Website: http://www.deborahschultz.com
Twitter: @debs
Big ideas:
- There is a blurring of our work and personal lives; social media is becoming our ‘third place’
- The social web is not about information provision or telling and selling, it’s about relationships, people, and making connections
- We’re weaving the social web together; it’s an explosion of the personal in an online environment
- We live in a culture of sharing, and sharing is easier than ever before
- We live in a relationship economy in which transactions are by-products of healthy relationships
- Through the social web, we’re seeing the death of the grand gesture; e.g. companies will ignore you all year till they launch their seasonal/annual advertising campaigns, after which they’ll ignore you again
- There’s a new framework for the new social web: (a) organic over static; (b) emotion over data; (c) relationships over transactions; (d) continuums over grand gestures; (e) intentions over attention
- We’re all becoming, looking for, and aspiring to be Tummlers (also see TummelVision podcast)

Stephen Johnson

Topic: Social Media Monitoring and Building Brand Advocates
Website: http://arcanelogik.com
Twitter: @huxley
Big ideas:
- The first and most important thing to do when you get into social media: listen
- Do you know what motivates your customer?

Panel Discussion

Big ideas:

It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure (Clay Shirky)
What’s important is your company’s reverse elevator pitch; i.e. what your customers say about you and your brand after you have left the elevator

ConnectNow 2010 – Thoughts & Notes (Part 1)

Ameel Khan April 13, 2010

Last week, on 6 & 7 April, I attended the ConnectNow conference in Sydney.

ConnectNow is a spin-off from the MarketingNow conference and it focuses on social media as a business, marketing, and communications tool.

I was fortunate to be sponsored by Melbourne Water to attend the event. Though, even if I hadn’t been, I would have gone there on my own anyway.

How Was It?

The conference was excellent and definitely worth the attendance.

The Good Bits

Excellent speakers from around the world, all of whom are considered to be thought leaders or, at the very least, major successes in their own particular areas.
Excellent talks and presentations that excited, inspired, and seeded discussion. I particularly liked the talks given by Gavin Heaton, Tara Hunt, Darren Rowse, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Deb Schultz. More on all the talks in Part 2.
Great attendees, all with their own social media experience that they could share.
Great conference organization.

The Not-So-Good Bits

Some talks could have been shorter or structured better. As someone who loves making presentations (and thinks he makes pretty decent ones) it irks me when people don’t make excellent presentations, particularly at events such as this. There were a few times during a 3-4 presentations when I caught myself thinking: “Okay…so you’ve made five great points in succession but you haven’t linked them together (at all) and, even after re-reading the notes I just took, I don’t see how they logically follow each other”. In most of these cases the presentations would have been drastically improved if the speaker had either (a) told a story to string the ideas together or (b) simply grouped and named logical content sections, summarized thoughts at the end of each logical content section, or simply written better slide headings.
I wasn’t able to socialize/network as much as I wanted to because I was recovering from a bad cough and would induce a coughing fit if I talked for more than a couple of sentences at a time.

For More

I’ll be writing my thoughts (based on my notes) on each of the talks in Part 2.

Meanwhile, check out:

Tweets from the conference via the #cnow hash tag
The MarketingNow blog
Information about the awesome new Berocca Twist bottles that were being spruiked (highly successfully, I might add) at the event

Courses at MBS - Core & Elective

Ameel Khan March 21, 2010

Scott Arbeitman, who is nearing the end of his MBA at Melbourne Business School, has started writing a series of blog posts in which he’s reviewing his time there.

Last week he wrote about the core (i.e. mandatory) and elective (i.e. optional) courses offered during the MBA:

FYI: What I call ‘courses’ are called ‘subjects’ at MBS.

His posts make a great read for anyone who is doing, or thinking of doing, an MBA because the issues he’s talked about are relevant to pretty much all b-schools degrees out there.

(By the way, I wrote my end-of-MBA post almost two years ago. I didn’t realize it had been that long!)

A Quick Intro to Twitter

Ameel Khan March 14, 2010

I recently collected a list of resources for some colleagues at work who wanted an introduction to the Twitter microblogging service. I thought it might be useful to post those here as well.

There’s a lot of Twitter-related information out there, by the way. Most of it is crap or says what everyone else is saying, just in a slightly different way. Fortunately, a few social media heavyweights have made our lives a lot easier by compiling that information for us.

That said, Twitter is an evolving platform so you have to keep up with the way it’s being used in order to stay relevant.

Twitter in Plain English

Let’s start with the very basics. Here’s ‘Twitter in Plain English’ by the good folk at Common Craft:

Also check out their ‘Twitter Search in Plain English’ video.

Twitter Guides

There are a handful of good Twitter guides out there. My favourite are these two:

‘The Complete Guide to Twitter’ from MakeUseOf.com, which you can download as a PDF
‘Twitter Guide Book’ from Mashable, who have many other awesome social media how-to guides

Twitter Tips

If you want something quicker to read, however, the TwiTip blog has lots of useful tips:

TwiTip is worth subscribing to because they’ll keep updating us on how Twitter is evolving and what we should, could, and can do with it next.

Also nice is the ‘Chris Pirillo’s 140 Twitter Tips’ e-book which you can buy for US$1.40.

Theory vs Practice

Ultimately, though, the best way to learn about Twitter is to use Twitter.

You can read all you like but, until you actually get in there are participate, you won’t know exactly how it works and just how awesome it can be.

Symonds on Creative MBA Programs

Ameel Khan February 11, 2010

Matt Symonds recently wrote an article in Forbes called ‘How Creative MBA Programs are Overcoming Bad Times’ and, in it, he talks about Melbourne Business School (MBS):

If there is one thing the less well-known schools where M.B.A. applications are holding up have in common, it is an ability to offer something different.

…

Melbourne Business School, one of the leading institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, has also seen its latest M.B.A. class grow. Dean Jenny George seems to share Antal-Mokos' view that the secret may not be location, ranking or history but a unique underlying structural model. "We have the luxury of being what I'd term 'quasi-independent,'" she says. "We have a strong link to our local university, but at the same time as a corporate body we have free rein to do what we think is best. That means we have the credibility to attract really good faculty but can hire people who don't always fit the traditional, conventional picture of an academic. And that in turn means we can put together a learning experience that pulls in the very best students."

It’s a good article and I recommend you read it.

More about Symonds:

Microsoft Case Study on Melbourne Business School

Ameel Khan February 3, 2010

Microsoft have a good case study on how their technology helps Melbourne Business School with their information management and stakeholder management needs. With the tagline of "Business School Enhances Reputation Through Improved Constituent Service" the executive summary reads:

Melbourne Business School (MBS) was founded in 1954 through the University of Melbourne, and its graduate degrees have been ranked in the Financial Times’ list of Top 100 Global MBAs since 2005. The school wanted to strategically align its brand positioning message, ‘Global. Business. Leaders.’, to every facet of its business. Its well intentioned but departmental approach to managing data on students (called ‘constituents’) hampered efforts to deliver services and develop relationships to a standard that was commensurate with its brand. In 2007 MBS began a comprehensive process of organisational change. It introduced a customer relationship management (CRM) system based on Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. By introducing a common platform for data management and taking a life-cycle view of constituents, MBS improved communications with applicants, students, participants and alumni and projected a more professional image.

You can read or download the case study from the Microsoft Case Studies website.

I know this project well because I worked on it as a Content & Governance Consultant on the MBS Direct (i.e. web portal) side. It's good to see that the project has been written up really nicely.

MBS's CIO, Ric Lamont (who is quoted in the study) was one of my MBA classmates and a lot of credit goes to him and to Carl Joseph (Manager, Information Services) for pulling this off so succesfully.

(FYI: I read this case study when it was published last year but remembered today that I'd forgotten to link to it back then. If you're wondering why I remembered it now that's because it came up in my "melbourne business school" Google Alert this morning; presumably because its web page was tweaked or republished in a new format.)

Marketing 101: Overview of the Marketing Process

Ameel Khan January 25, 2010

I took a number of marketing courses in my MBA at Melbourne Business School (MBS) and it was during my Consumer Behaviour course with Brian Gibbs that we got the best, single-page overview of the marketing process.

Framework for Marketing Management

Gibbs called this the ‘Framework for Marketing Management’ and it’s an excellent summary of how marketing is done:

[Note: The diagram above is one that I made based on my notes from the course.]

It works like this:

The marketing concept says you begin by looking at your customers, company, and competition – these are the three Cs. Let’s say your company makes pens:
- Ask yourself what it is that your customers need. How can you satisfy that need? In real life a lot of research would go into answering questions like these. Then consider what your customers do to satisfy those needs. What factors contribute to their decision making process? Again, more research would be done.
- Also look at your company. Can you make the pens your customers want? Do those types of pens fit with your company’s corporate objectives? For example, if you’re Montblanc, you won’t be making cheap plastic pens anytime soon even if some your customers say that’s what they want in a writing instrument.
- Don’t forget to analyze your competition as well. How will your competitors respond to your product (say, when you introduce a new version)? Also ask yourself who else satisfies the needs of your customers. For example, should you be looking at companies that make markers and pencils as competition?
Once you’ve done that, you segment your customers according to primary bases, such as their identified needs. For example, Group A wants cheap plastic ballpoint pens, Group B wants fancy liquid ink pens, and so on. You also segment by secondary bases, which are often things like demographics. You keep slicing and dicing using a combination of bases till you get useful segments; i.e. those you can target properly. For example, you could further segment Group B by age bracket and annual income.
Next, you decide which specific segments you’re going to target (and why). For example, Montblanc may be targeting only, say, richer and older people from Group B. They know they can communicate well with these people, they can defend this segment from the competition, and ultimately that’s the area of the market they want their company to operate in.
That sets you up with the positioning of your product. Getting your positioning right is incredibly important because it’s the key to your entire plan. So, for example, Montblanc may position themselves in the luxury space as a company that sells excellent writing instruments that have the highest level of craftsmanship. In effect, their pens are high-end gifts, much like hand-crafted jewellery. They would then position themselves appropriately in the luxury gift jewellery markets, but not in the broader writing instruments market.
Once you’ve got your positioning done, you figure out how you’re going to to create, capture, communicate, and deliver value to your customer. This value is created by the existence of your product, captured by its price, communicated through your promotion, and delivered by where you place (or how you distribute) your product – these are the four Ps.
Finally, as the market grows and develops, you will need to tweak these four Ps to maintain your positioning. Then, at regular intervals, you will need to re-do your three Cs because the market will change and you will need to change with it. Repeat ad infinitum…well, at least as long as your company continues to exist.

It All Comes Down to Positioning

As you may have gathered, a good way of remembering the entire marketing process is to think of the just the three Cs and four Ps. However, if you want to distil it further, you can bring it all down to positioning.

Positioning is a summary of the first part (analysis & strategy: the three Cs) and a guide for the second part (planning & implementation: the four Ps).

From the consumer behaviour point of view, it is also the psychological epicentre of the marketing process. That’s because positioning – with the help of the four Ps – is what translates the ‘actual product’ into the ‘perceived product’ within the consumer’s mind (they are often not the same).

So while a Montblanc pen is in essence just a writing instrument, in the mind of the consumer, it is much more than just that. And it is the pen’s positioning that will determine what qualities above its ability to put ink on paper set it apart from its competitors.

Thanks for Sharing, But What Was the Point?

This one-page overview of the marketing process is useful in many ways:

It provides a great sanity check for what you’re doing in your job. For example, the Web & New Media Strategy that Melbourne Water developed over the last year followed pretty much this process. That strategy now forms the basis of my day-to-day work. So, if we hadn’t done the three Cs right, for example, I would have had a hard time getting the four Ps done properly.
It’s a great way to analyze the marketing, branding, and product positioning that’s going on around you all the time.
It brings good overall project management and business strategy rigour to whatever it is that you’re doing.

Oh, and if you’re a job seeker, it’s particularly useful because it provides a good framework for when you get asked questions about the company’s products or services.