The American retail company Gap recently changed their logo. They went from sophisticatedly classic to amateurishly craptastic:

[Source: Brand New]

To quote the Brand New blog (‘Don’t Mind the Gap, or the Square’):

I’m not one to critique something by saying it looks as if it were done in Microsoft Word but this one is just too unsophisticated to warrant anything more than that.

I couldn’t agree more.

Fortunately, the Internet responded and Brand New have followed up with another post: ‘Follow-up: Gapgate’.

I never expected the Gap logo to be such a lightning bolt of attention. Yes, it’s bad and yes it’s a popular brand, but to have captured the attention of the whole internet, even reaching meme levels wasn’t something I ever expected the grilled chicken of retail brands to achieve.

:)

Speaking of the Gap logo meme, check out:

• Gapify
• Make Your Own Gap Logo
• @GapLogo on Twitter

Also check out Your Logo Makes Me Barf’s reaction – ‘New Gap Logo is a Box of Fail’ – and call to action – ‘Tell Gap to take their Spec and go to Hell’.

The next few days and, indeed, weeks and months should be interesting.

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

More on the Experience Melbourne blog.

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.

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

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

Michael Specht just completed a blog post series on ‘Social Media as Part of Background Checking’ during the recruitment process:

• Part 1 (Access to a unique view)
• Part 2 (Research into cultural fit)
• Part 3 (Legal issues)
• Part 4 (Bringing it all together)

I personally think that social media checks – or, at the very least, Google searches – are an essential part of recruitment. And I think that goes both ways:

• recruiters and companies learn all they can about candidates
• candidates learn all they can about recruiters and the companies they’re applying to

This is important because:

• both parties get to find out more about each other
• both parties get to assess cultural fit
• candidates get to show off their online portfolio and social media participation

While the last point is certainly vital for people working in Internet-related industries, it is also becoming increasingly relevant for people working in other industries (as more of their lives move online).

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:

• MBS in Review: The Core Subjects
• MBS in Review: Electives

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 colleague at work recently asked for some advice on using Facebook, specifically Facebook Pages vs. Groups. I dug up some resources for him and here’s what I came up with.

Group or Page?

The first thing you have do is figure out what you want to use Facebook for. Depending on your answer, you’ll want to use a Facebook Group or a Facebook Page:

• If your primary purpose is communicating with a known, closed group of people (e.g. you want to manage communication/interaction with a special interest group) then the better option is a Facebook Group
• If your primary purpose is marketing and awareness-raising (e.g. you want to interact with Facebook members like a brand or company would) then the better option is a Facebook Page

For more information on the difference between Groups and Pages, read these two articles:

• Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better? [Search Engine Journal]
• Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? [Mashable]

Information About Facebook Groups

Since my colleague’s needs were more Group-related, I also collected these resources for him:

• Part 1: Tips and Tricks for Facebook Groups [Media Mensch]
• Tips for Starting your own Facebook Group [Virtual Marketing Blog]
• HOW TO: Manage a Facebook Group [Mashable]
• How do I make my Facebook group or fan page interesting? [Ask Dave Taylor]
• Facebook Groups: How to be Successful [Web Analytics World]

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:

• Twitter for Beginners
• 13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners
• Twitter for Business
• Other Twitter 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.

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:

• SymondsGSB blog
• Matt Symonds on Wikipedia
• Matt Symonds on LinkedIn