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.

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

If you don’t keep up with large traditional media’s continued efforts to remain both large and traditional you might have missed Rupert Murdoch’s latest thoughts on the topic. Here’s what Mashable’s Pete Cashmore had to say about them:

Microsoft and News Corp in Discussions to Remove Newspaper Content from Google

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch’s crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company’s sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead.

The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch’s claims that Google is “stealing” content rather than simply helping people find it.

A number of people have responded to Murdoch’s proposed (threatened?) business model but Arianna Huffington really hit the nail on the head in a talk she gave at a recent journalism conference in the US.

In responding to Murdoch and traditional media, she said:

In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They’d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.

[..]

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works.

[..]

In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law — and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web’s DNA. Period.

She then went on to talk about what the future of journalism will (and is starting to) look like:

We hear lots and lots of talk these days about saving newspapers — Congressional anti-trust exemptions, perhaps? — but we mustn’t forget: the state of newspapers is not the same thing as the state of journalism. As much as I love newspapers — and fully expect them to survive — the future of journalism is not dependent on the future of newspapers.

Indeed, the future of journalism is to be found, at least partly, in the rapidly growing number of people who connect with the news in a whole new way.

News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

It’s an excellent speech that’s well worth the read.

The University of Melbourne has revamped its alumni magazine — called, appropriately enough, Melbourne University Magazine — and is now publishing it online as well.

I’ve only read a couple of articles (like Peter McPhee’s ‘Investigating the Melbourne Model‘) and have skimmed through a few others but, judging from what I’ve seen so far, it’s looking good.

I haven’t been blogging much these last few months. That’s because three months ago my wife and I moved into an apartment that has no land line and only a satellite cable TV connection. (We didn’t think to ask about the former before moving in here because, really, when was the last time you heard of a house that didn’t have a land line connection?) What this means is that, till just recently, we didn’t have Internet access at home; certainly not cable and ADSL, but not even dialup!

What Happened Then?

It took Telstra (the only phone company that services this area) about six weeks (yes, six weeks) to give us a connection from the telephone exchange to our apartment building. However, we don’t have an outlet in the wall for a phone jack so we can’t actually use that line. Even worse, the electrician who came in to install that outlet couldn’t find where in the wall our telephone wire was so he wasn’t able to connect us. That was about a month ago and, since then, we’ve been waiting for our real estate agent to do something about this – specifically, getting the building plans from the owners and giving them to the electrician – but nothing’s happened yet.

I finally got sick of the situation so, a couple of weeks ago, I went and got us a mobile broadband connection from 3 (specifically, a USB wireless modem) and that’s what’s letting me access the Internet now. We then went a step further and bought a wireless router for the modem so now both my wife and I can access the Internet at the same time. It’s slow, but at least it works.

What about blogging from work, you ask? Unfortunately, work has been really busy (though incredibly enjoyable) so I haven’t had the mental energy to do any writing in the evenings (whether at work or offline from home). The only blog posts I have managed to finish are the ones I wrote on a weekend and published from the office the following work week.

So, Catching Up…

What all this is leading up to is the fact that I have lots of catching up to do. The way I’m going to do that is by giving you a bulleted list of all the stories I’ve wanted to talk about these last few months but haven’t been able to discuss. The stories range from basic, on-the-ground advice (and lists) to more high level discussions on a particular topic. They’re all good to read, though.

Jobs, Careers, & MBA

• You Suck, Interviewer [Ask a Manager]
• It’s here: the You-Suck-As-An-Interviewer Automatic Letter Generator [Ask a Manager]
• Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring a Manager [Ask a Manager]
• 4 Dumb Job Interview Questions (and 3 Possible Answers) [Clue Wagon]
• How to Make Sure You Don’t Take a Job That Sucks [Clue Wagon]
• Schmoozing 101: Tips for Shy Techies [Computerworld]
• How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups [PsyBlog]
• Latest research reveals the business schools employers prefer to recruit from regionally strong business schools [AME Info]
• 100+ Career Blogs ALL Professionals MUST Read [Career Rocketeer]
• State of Australian Corporate Career Websites [Michael Specht]

Social Media

• The Manager’s Guide to Social Media [SmartCompany]
• Facebook privacy: a guide [Ars Technica]
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging [Smashing Magazine]
• The Big List of Big Brand Corporate Blogs [Debbie Weil]
• 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer [Copyblogger]
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online [Lateral Action]
• Writing a Social Media Comment [PR Communications]
• Twitter 101: A Special Guide [Twitter]
• 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business [Web Worker Daily]
• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design [useit.com]
• The Importance of Social Media Audits [Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang]
• The Five Biggest Mistakes in Measuring Social Media [ClickZ]
• 360i Publishes Social Marketing Playbook [360i]
• 2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009 [comScore]
• A new connection for Australians [Sensis]

Online Design, UI

• 8 Dimensions of Excellent Landing Pages [Search Engine Land]
• Building Respect for Usability Expertise [useit.com]

Online Marketing

• Do You Know Where Your Audience Is? [Search Engine Watch]
• A Checklist to Choose Which Internet Marketing Channel is Right for Your Business [seomoz.org]

General Life Advice

• How to Make Your Packed Lunch More Appealing [Lifehacker]

The University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communications is hosting a global conference called ‘Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity’:

Journalism in the 21st century is being rapidly transformed, not only through the globalization of media and new media technologies, but also through the growing ubiquity of the Internet. These ‘transforming’ agents are reshaping newsgathering processes, and redefining the role of national news media in the context of a new transnational news space.

The conference will thus provide a broad platform for the discussion of these emergent issues, issues that are having an effect upon journalistic practice not only in Australia, but in the international context shaped by globalization and the ‘network’ society.

The conference’s plenary speakers include some big names:

• Nick Couldry, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
• Philip Seib, USC Annenberg, California
• Sarmila Bose, Oxford University
• Michael Delli Carpini, Annenberg School, Philadelphia
• Malek Triki, Al Jazeera, London
• Christoph Lanz, Deutsche Welle, Berlin
• Christoph Wimmer, SBS, Sydney

Overall, it sounds really exciting and I’m hoping I’ll be able to attend. Further details on the conference (e.g. how to register) will be posted to the website soon. Right now all we know are the conference’s dates (16-17 July), registration cost ($150), and venue (the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus).

The BBC has just announced plans to launch a new weekly show, called Your World News, that will feature the best of user-submitted news content (mainly photos and videos):

Thousands of videos, pictures and emails are sent in to the BBC every week and we are now choosing the best ones to make it onto a new show called Your World News.

So what do you have to do to make it on the programme? Quite simply, get out there and send us what’s happening in your world.

I hope that, like CNN’s iReport, they also make this content available on the web once the show has been broadcast.

This new initiative sounds really exciting and here’s hoping it’s a big success.

Speaking of Melbourne Business School, I’ve been very impressed with the way MBS has been building its online presence over the last few months. For example, I was immensely pleased when I found they’d uploaded audio clips of the talks given at the Dean’s Circle launch event that I attended last month.

I’ve already mentioned on this blog the SouRCe student newsletter that is now available online. Here, then, are two more things you can find on the MBS website:

• MBS Leadercasts: These are videos of recorded presentations by MBS faculty members on the various topics of expertise that they possess.
• MBS Today: This is the monthly newsletter that MBS publishes for “alumni, past faculty, and friends in the government, corporate, and community sectors”.

Both are good though the MBS Leadercasts — much like the University of Melbourne’s Up Close Podcasts and Visions Video Podcasts and a little like TED talks — are lots of fun to watch. I highly recommend them. (I was actually going to tell you my favourite three videos but I can’t narrow it down to just three!)

What happens to all the cognitive surplus that exists in society today? A lot of people spend it on watching television…but a lot of others don’t.

Read the transcript of an awesome speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 conference a few days ago.

In the wake of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, Amy Webb from mydigimedia has updated the Who Owns What list to version 2.1 (available for download as a PDF). It includes the important recent acquisitions by Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL, News Corporation, and IAC and makes an interesting read. [Via Download Squad].