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

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

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

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

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

Why did I change jobs?

For a number of reasons:

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

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

What does the new job involve?

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

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

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.

I’ve been at Melbourne Water for over six months but haven’t yet blogged about what I actually do there. So, thanks to the end-of-year holiday season that has given me the time to get back into blogging, here goes.

What Do I Do There?

My job title is ‘Websites Manager’ and that role sits in the External Affairs team which itself is part of the broader Communications & Community Relations group.

My tasks include:

• Managing all of Melbourne Water’s websites (i.e. the main site and various sub-sites)
• Developing and implementing a Web & New Media Strategy for organization (this includes getting the organization involved with social media)
• Helping knowledge specialists from across the business create and maintain their web content
• Proactively seeking content to place on the web (this includes content that site visitors want to see and content that we want site visitors to see)
• Liaising between our web solution provider and the rest of the business (including, sometimes our own internal IT department)
• Managing the Website Advisor (who focuses primarily on the online needs of the Waterways group)

More generally, my job involves three things:

• Tactical management: Managing web content and being the go-to guy for everything related to the web (and, increasingly, multimedia and social media).
• Strategic management: Finding out what our current online presence is, determining what we want that online presence to be over the coming years, and figuring out how we’re going to get there. This includes doing things like a complete site overhaul and pursuing new online models of stakeholder engagement (specifically, social media).
• People management: Overseeing work done by the Website Advisor and managing the web team’s relationship with the rest of the organization.

That’s a lot to do but I’m having an awesome time doing it. If it didn’t keep me so busy, I almost wouldn’t call it “work”.

What’s it Like to Work There?

It’s awesome. I love the people, I love the culture, and I love the commitment everyone has to their work, to Melbourne, and to the planet in general. It’s really great to work alongside people who are experts in their fields (many of them are geeks like me) and who love the work that they do.

I really appreciate the fact that the organization truly cares about, and cares for, its employees. And I love that we don’t have to leave our lives (and the rest of the world) at the doorstep when we step into the office.

I love the range of work that the organization does – everything from:

• sourcing and storing water,
• treating and providing water (to Melbourne’s private water retailers), and
• taking care of our rivers, creeks, wetlands, and (soon) coastline,
• to collecting, treating, and safely disposing of our sewerage.

Finally, I am impressed by the importance and emphasis the organization places on good communication and stakeholder engagement. Indeed, excellent stakeholder engagement is a core strategic objective for Melbourne Water. I am particularly empowered by this focus because so much of that communication and engagement is moving into the online space (including social media) and that’s specifically what I am responsible for (and really enjoy doing).

So, You Like it, Then?

Yes, very much so!

Excellent slideshow on social media by Marta Kagan (of the The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius blog). Language is NSFW…well, depending on where you work and what your team/organization’s culture is.

Enjoy :)

[Via A Blog Around the Clock]

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]