New Job: Social Media Manager at Jetstar

Ameel Khan January 10, 2012

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.

Communicating with Charts and Infographics

Ameel Khan December 7, 2011

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.

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.

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

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.

Working at Melbourne Water

Ameel Khan January 1, 2010

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!

Huffington on Journalism, Response to Murdoch

Ameel Khan December 3, 2009

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.

Editors are Useful

Ameel Khan September 20, 2009

Melbourne Business School professor Joshua Gans has a funny post on his Core Economics blog about an attempted…er, criticism of his research.

What happened was that Gerard Henderson from The Sydney Institute decided to trawl through Gans’ blog in an attempt to cherry pick items that would question the credibility of Gans’ work.

Unfortunately for him, Henderson picked a humorous item in which Gans linked to a Randall Munroe blog post on ‘Urinal Protocol Vulnerability’. Munroe, for those of you who don’t know, is the author of the brilliant xkcd webcomic. For some inexplicable reason, Henderson believed this study to be (a) trivial and (b) carried out by Gans himself.

Henderson wrote in his Media Watch Dog article:

Here’s hoping that Mr Holmes and his Media Watch team will publish much more of Joshua Gans’ ground-breaking research in future editions of the program. MWD is particularly impressed by his work on, er, male urinals. Gans’ paper “Urinal protocol vulnerability” attempts to answer one of the key questions of our time. Namely: “When a guy goes to the bathroom, which urinal does he pick?” Good question, don’t you think?

Gans, in reply, suggests that maybe Henderson needs to brush up on his Internet researching skills:

Mr Henderson mis-attributes various amusing quotes written by Randal Monroe to me. He then invites Media Watch to take a closer look at “my research.” I’d invite them to take a closer look at Mr Henderson’s posts. How can someone purporting to watch the media not understand the point of hyperlinks? That said, his post doesn’t seem to contain any itself so this web-stuff might not be his thing.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Update: Check out Andrew Leigh's exchange with Gerard Henderson on this topic.

Catching Up

Ameel Khan August 29, 2009

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.

Internet Usage at Work is a Good Thing

Ameel Khan April 4, 2009

Finally, there’s a study that shows empirically what most of us have known all along: personal Internet usage at work actually boosts employee productivity.

The study was conducted by Dr. Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and you can read about it here:

University of Melbourne Media Release – Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure
Ars Technica – Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity
Michael Specht – Internet usage at work makes you productive

According to Coker’s research:

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”

It’s About More Than Just Productivity

But it’s not just about productivity, as Specht points out, it’s also about trusting and respecting your employees.

I personally dislike companies that prohibit what Coker calls Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) with the justification that when you’re at work, you should be doing nothing but work. That’s just silly because it’s a completely unrealistic notion of what work is. Work is a subset of life, not the other way round. So you can’t exactly ignore the rest of your life – or, indeed, the rest of the world – while you’re at work.

[There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. It’s okay to apply principles of Taylorism to, say, when you’re working in the kitchen at McDonalds. It’s just that you shouldn’t extend those principles to when your employees are not doing those specific kinds of tasks.]

The problem with a lot of companies is that, while they understand this basic principle (i.e. that there is life outside of work, even between the hours of 9am and 5pm), they aren’t tech-savvy enough to see that this also applies to using the Internet. Companies will, for example, do things like allow flexible working hours so you can do your banking during your lunch hour or go as far as to provide coffee machines and televisions in their kitchens and lounges so you can take a really good break during the work day. And yet, these same companies will block the use of webmail services, social networking sites, and online video sites which, to people like me, are pretty much the virtual equivalent of the kitchen and lounge (and sometimes the preferred equivalent).

So What’s the Problem?

Part of the problem, as has been pointed out in the past, is the generational disconnect between the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y. That is, there exist numerous members of older generations who don’t understand that, for some members of the younger generation, a good work break could be eight minutes of e-mailing and checking on your social networks, four minutes of going through photos of your newborn niece, and three minutes of watching the latest viral video that’s making the rounds. And this disconnect is understandable. However it is then the job of middle managers to convince senior managers that this kind of personal Internet usage is actually okay.

Another part of the problem are the reports written by generally Internet-clueless analysts on how much companies are “losing” by letting employees access social media or online video sites during work hours. What tends to happen is this calculation:

Think of an average employee who earns 50k a year; that’s $25 an hour.
If this person spends, on average, 30 minutes a day on Facebook and Gmail. That translates to $12.50 per day “lost”.
So, for the 250 days a year that this person works, the company is “losing” $3,125.
If this company had 400 employees, the company would be losing 1.25 million dollars per year on employees accessing webmail and social networking sites.

Company executives look at this calculation and exclaim: “What?! We’re paying our employees $1.25m to access Facebook and Gmail! Block both those sites!”

The problem, of course, is that while the calculation is essentially correct, the reasoning behind it is flawed. The reasoning being that you are paying your average employee exactly 41.6c per minute to work for you and that every minute this employee does something other than work your money is being wasted. Now if this person was working on an assembly line, your loss-per-minute-not-worked calculation would be valid. But for every other employee, it’s not.

Why is it not valid? Because your employee is human – who has human wants and needs – and it is unreasonable to treat this person like a work-producing automaton upon whom you can do this kind of dehumanising calculation.

To Conclude

My point, then, is that studies like Coker’s are really useful because they empirically demonstrate that you can’t blindly apply principles of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) across an entire organization.

And because these studies come from a business department of a large and well-respected university – and they use terms that businesses understand (specifically, ‘productivity’) – they will probably do some good.

If nothing else, reports like this tend to make their way into business magazines and give executives something to think about. This particular study may not get companies to unblock access to webmail services and social media sites, but it’s a start.

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P.S. What’s almost funny are the companies that are so completely disconnected for what’s going on online that they don’t even know what Facebook is and therefore don’t have a policy on whether they should block it or not!