FRANKthoughts

KeepCUP, originally uploaded by FRANkVizeum.

We all have degrees of environmental engagement exemplified by Tamir’s excellent slideshare .
An easy environmental new year’s endeavour is to buy your own KeepCUP .
For years there has been the guilt of tossing out the used ‘disposable’ coffee cup each day. No longer. We bought five medium cups @ $12.20 each.
Chucking some numbers around….we now pay 50c less per coffee per day so in 25 days the KeepCUPs will have paid for themselves. Great.
From an environmental point of view the collective impact of the five of us (assuming 1 x coffee per day) over a year will be to save

* 1600 paper cups
* 4kgs plastic lids
* 23kgs landfill
* 76 KeepCUPs-worth of plastic
* 0.2 of a tree…

Not bad for just five people. So let’s kick off 2010 in a sympathetic way. I feel 2010 is going to be good to us all so let’s be good to 2010.

As a marketing communications company we owe it to ourselves and our loyal clients to stay abreast of the ever evolving communications-shift that is in play. One of my solutions to appear knowledgeable is to surround myself with people and companies who are pioneering change.

One such company is Lookout Mobile who make iphone apps, jointly managed by Patrick and Daniel. One of their hero app is Aussie Rules Live and they are one of the leaders in this emerging market.

I was talking with them yesterday and they remarked that app development is now in its third-wave, which intrigued me. Wave One…all the way back in July 2008 largely came from 3G backyard developers and in hindsight were kind of crude, but fun. Wave Two emerged with 3GS. The “S” is for speed and gave birth to funkier apps such as the compass, improved gaming and augmented reality. A great example of the latter is in this clip.

Wave Three is capitalising on “second-mover advantage” which revisits existing apps and simply improves upon them. Weather apps are a good example with Pocket Weather emerging as one of the most popular.

From an iphone owner’s point of view there are so many new apps emerging and that awareness of the best apps is largely through friends and “have you seen this app?” conversations. It occured to me that aside from itunes there is no destination which provides independent, user generated, reviews and views. Apps are currently ranked in the app store by 1-5 stars which is fine but limited. I thought such a site might be called iphoneappreview.com.au. To my surprise i was able to register this url, which i did yesterday. Dot com was taken and takes us here, a site developed by doshdosh and the wrong advice  it has over 14,000 app reviews and currently ranks 328,000 on alexa.

The iphone app market is in early stages of development and penetration and i figure with the right collective attitude and experience now is a good time to explore the opportunity to provide a UGC app-review platform as a destination in a market that is destined to grow dramatically. So is  there anyone out there who agrees with the opportunity and would like to contribute at this formative stage in the life-cycle of apps? Please let me know.

1234 Telstra assist ridiculous ad is made even more ridiculous after you try the service. This Saturday I called the 1234 number in distress. I wanted to get phone numbers of clinics near my area as I was searching for a doctor (I was offline for a few hours so couldn’t do this properly). The pleasant operator told me of several clinics in my area. When I asked for the numbers she said she could only give me one number per call. One number out of 5-6 options. I felt like I was just put in prison with one phone call to make. After picking one clinic randomly and calling the number I realised I got to the Massage clinic. A Massage clinic when I was looking for a doctor. 1234 couldn’t even tell me this number wasn’t what I was looking for. It’s such a shame this important service makes you feel you’re talking to a sock and I wish Telstra will learn from some smart people at the end of this post and a bit from Zappos.

Zappos was sold to amazon a few weeks ago for around $900 million. Why did Amazon paid so much for it? it wasn’t for the distribution channels, for the stock or for the technology. It was for a secret sauce – their culture. Zappos has an amazing customer service department which provides word of mouth in abundance. People hear about Zappos from other people. People also hear and talk to Zappos on their Twitter account – this is a feed from all their employees who tweet (more than 400). Oh and Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO has more than one million followers on twitter – Maybe there is a relation between number of followers on twitter/employees twittering and business worth?

Who do you think is the most advanced and friendliest customer service company/brand in Australia? Who do you think deserve an “Australian customer service” award?

Yesterday i made it to Marketing Now @ the Sofitel in Melbourne. The flavour of the event was “How to use Social Media and Online Marketing to reach customers directly, and keep them.” Here’s Dave and myself courtesy of David Armano, as are all these shots gratefully borrowed from his twitpic

Some spectacularly credible speakers sharing their wisdom yesterday were Gavin servant of chaos Heaton, Laurel silkcharm Papworth and Darren problogger Rowse.

As someone who is hungry for social business learnings i found Laurel and Darren (unfortunately i missed Gavin) both generous and inspiring. I came away enriched and wondered why every seat wasn’t filled. The entry price was a $100 donation, $50 of which went towards thankyou water so it was all very affordable and worthy. One of the concepts Laurel touched on was COI, the Cost of Inaction…worth bearing in mind.

I would say that the majority of marketing directors out there are tussling with the concept of infusing social media into their businesses and brands. With a few exceptions the results so far are indifferent and yet if they’d broken away from the slavery of emails and meetings their understanding could have been mightily accelerated. I wonder if in 12 months the same speakers are assembled there will be a queque to attend?

Moving on…i took the opportunity to promote Nuffnang by stickering the venue at strategic points as in the photo…nicely spotted by Mr A.

For those who missed the event here’s Darren talking about how to promote a blog. This is from his blog not yesterday’s session, but similar content. Laurel’s presentation is available here. Many of her slides are minimalist and need Laurel to do them justice but my favourite slides are 18-24 inc. Judging by the comments flying in on twitter David Armano’s session is along these lines.

The social business challenge as we see it here at FRANkVizeum is to take social to market pitched at a level that integrates a brand’s current investment in paid for media activity and does not leave marketers thinking “What are you talking about?” and “How is this possibly relevant to my brand(s)?”  We have our social media infusion process, some case histories and we run our free FRANkademy session each month to introduce social thinking within a traditional media context. It’s working for us and our clients and i would encourage any brand with just their toes in the water to dive in and splash about.

Anybody who went to MarketingNow (or didn’t) want to add their thoughts?

A year ago, I hadn’t heard of Nuffnang and yet next month I am very honored to be on the judging panel of the inaugural Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards.

All thanks for our partnership with Nuffnang must go to David Lee, my fellow Director in Nuffnang Australia. Dave approached Ming and Tim, Nuffnang’s co-founders, about our potential involvement, about 11 months ago and since November 2008 we have been building Nuffnang’s blog advertising community in Australia. Today we have over 1,000 bloggers who have signed up to our network with ads seen by 90,000 people daily.

However our numbers are dwarfed by the collective might of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines who have over 100,000 blogs with ads seen by 3 million people daily.

The awards have created a frenzy with over 400 bloggers, plus partners, being flown to Singapore for a grand Gala Dinner and accommodation at Nuffnang’s expense. The sponsors are Pringles and The Singapore Tourism Board.

There are 12 blog awards in total Best Blog Shop, Best Food Blog, Best Fashion Blog, Best Parenting Blog, Best Travel Blog, Best Geek Blog, Best Celebrity Blog, Best Entertainment Blog, Best Original Blog Design, Most Influential Blog, Best Hidden Gem and the top award of Region’s Best Blog.

Nominations have closed so now it’s down to the serious job of judging.

As the need for sound social business strategy becomes more apparant in Australia its fascinating to observe how brands are trying to engage with bloggers. Australia is at a relatively early stage of development in terms of engaging the blogosphere and it’s good to be at the forefront of the understanding process. The key consideration in social media is to originate and sustain a healthy dialogue with the view of building a long term relationship.

The challenge for many brands is to recognise this and not to approach the blogosphere with the intent of ‘taking’ or ‘using.’ The opportunity is to give and share, as with any healthy relationship.

The inaugural blog awards is part of Nuffnang’s commitment to our blogger community and i can’t wait until i visit Singapore for the first time in October to witness first hand the raw energy of our Nuffies.

Thankyou to everybody who attended our third FRANkademy session on Friday.  We really appreciated having an inquisitive audience, and the active discussion about an exciting area of communications strategy.

A recap on what we focused on in the session:

We started out by outlining the size of the opportunity social media brings; with its unique reach now higher than email.  We then introduced the bought, owned and earned media integrated approach to communications planning.  Bought – is media you can buy like TV airtime, radio, billboards, magazine space, online banners and so on. Owned includes assets of the business – logo, packaging, website, retail outlets.  Earned is the conversation you engage with your customers, the word of mouth you generate, customer feedback and comments etc.  Traditionally the first two have budgets, strategies and timelines.  But what about earned?  Shouldn’t everything be aligned?  We made the analogy that jumping at social media tools as solutions is like walking into the toolshed, grabbing a drill, a saw and a hammer, and trying to paint the back fence.  It doesn’t work!

We then moved on to two areas of interest in the social media space – Twitter and blogs.  We looked at how businesses are using Twitter to connect to their audience, harness the power of positive word of mouth, enhance customer service, build communities, and align their bought/owned/earned output. In our blog section we explained what value blogs and bloggers can offer brands through some contemporary case studies, and the best way brands can work with bloggers.  We presented guidelines employed by our own blog network Nuffnang , the biggest blog advertising network in Australia.

After the drinks break we went through a case study for Melbourne’s GPO. This showed FRANkVizeum’s focus on building a long term social media strategy, as opposed to a short term ‘campaign’, through the process of immersion.  This involves listening and learning, developing a strategy with budget and timeline, allocating resource to manage the brand community, and implementing the plan to agreed measurement metrics.  We ended by quoting Google analyst Avinash Kaushik – “Social media is like teen sex.  Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it is not better”.

Thanks again to our audience from TTF, Taboo, Full Circle, Austereo, MCN, Simply Energy, GoSwitch, Channel Ten, RMIT, and all other guests including Richard!

Now… has everybody done their homework?  Visited our Twitter account?  Looked at Twitter 101 For Business?  Played Brandwars?  If not, you can redeem yourselves by commenting on the blog post below, or contributing your own!  What was most interesting about the session?

It seems like the new FRANkVizeum hit a big nerve last week. The amount of accusation, slant and bad mouthing we got will make you think we murdered a koala. No, we simply did some harmless chalk/potato+water graffiti on the sidewalk outside media agencies and clients.
But web mobs don’t bother to find out. They simply burn before reading. We love to hear feedback, especially if you disagree. But we expect an adult discussion, with no anonymity.
OK, enough about the trolls, the thing that really bothers me is when someone I respect is heading the mob for no apparent reason. mUmBRELLA, our favorite media news blog got all stirred up about FRANkVizeum.
Tim, I’m really not sure what got you so upset. Is it about the graffiti? About the PR release that in your opinion could have been better written? Your post from the 21 June is full of “clever” phrases that belittle FRANk and Vizeum and most of it is referring to something that happened in 2003! None of it, except your opinion on the PR release, is of any real value. It’s a personal slant. Your post from the 22 June is equally surprising. Is it the legal issue that bothers you? What a stretch. Both posts headlines are so tabloid they’re more suited to appear in The Sun than mUmBRELLA.
Wait a sec… did you also have a crack at our logo for using capital letters? When was the last time you looked at your own logo? The final nail was quoting a troll comment from our blog. Did you bother to check the source? I didn’t think so.
None of the people who commented on this “epic fail” has bothered to read more than one post. No one seems to look at what we do or who we are. No one is following us on twitter.
If you did bother to take a deeper look you’ll know that Martyn, head of FRANkVizuem started an agency blog and twitter in October 2007. This makes him one of the earliest adopters of new technologies and “social media” in the Australian media landscape. All of the FRANkVizeum team is blogging. We have photos and names of contributors, we answer comments and we even have an option for ANYONE to write a blog post. We offer free online strategy sessions (FRANkademy), we’re helping non profits (like Movember) and we constantly writing about environmental and social issues.  Is this your idea of wanking?
FRANkVizeum is different and we’re proving it every day. We are on the cutting edge of what you call “social media” and no, we don’t think using graffiti once every couple of years makes us not relevant, old or “cool”. But hey, it’s easier to light the torches and go burn a monster. It’s easier to order a death sentence than to examine the facts. It’s easier to post a slant comment than to give feedback, offer an opinion or start a conversation.

European mobile phone network T-Mobile have continued their trend of ‘flash mob’ marketing, with 13,500 people joining in a karaoke singalong at Trafalgar Square, London.  On the 30th April, BBC radio DJ Vernon Kay hosted the event, which was pre-promoted via SMS messaging and a YouTube teaser video.

The event featured 24 cameras, 2,000 microphones handed out to the crowd, professional dancers and singers, and even a guest appearance from pop star Pink.  One hour of popular karaoke hits were filmed, with ‘Hey Jude’ from The Beatles condensed into a primetime two minute ad on ITV 48 hours later, breaking in ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

It follows the mobile phone company’s ‘Dance’ ad that took place at London’s Liverpool street earlier in the year, which has been viewed on YouTube more than 11m times.

This recent event reinforces T-Mobile’s dedication to community building, through their ‘Life’s For Sharing’ YouTube channel, and the other social networks it uses.  Hundreds of user comments, thousands of YouTube channel subscribers, and millions of video views supplements their bought media presence, and enables them to communicate with their audience beyond a 30 second TV commercial.

Here is a case of using social media to turn negative word of mouth into positive one and getting a lot of credit for it in the process.

From news.com.au (and Tamir from Digital Seed) comes this local story: “A TWO-line Twitter post pushed my mortgage application from the Commonwealth Bank’s “to do” list to an urgent priority. The post said simply: “CBA f#$&ked up our loan approval so we’re still waiting to exchange contracts”. One hour and 17 minutes after it went live I was contacted by someone offering help to solve my problem. That person was the head of Commonwealth Bank’s customer service team. He told me the message made him “feel like crap” and the bank was only just beginning to understand how crucial social media sites were in maintaining the corporate giant’s image. By 3pm the next day, my loan was formally approved.

Here’s what a twitter search for “commonwealth bank” brings back:

Not bad ha? As twitter becomes more like a word of mouth search engine it’s crucial for any brand to have their ear out there and listen. It’s even better if you have someone that can react quickly and fix things up in real time, out in the open. How much is this kind of positive publicity worth? and how much it’s going to set a brand back for not getting it right? Yes, there is fear from washing the dirty laundry in front of everyone but in making it public you can also demonstrate how clean your brand can be.