FRANKthoughts

During the last six months we had the pleasure of having around 300 people join us for a two hour social strategy session followed by drinks at FOG. As the year comes to a close we would love all the people who attended to have the presentation handy and the people who missed out to have a taste of the action.

FRANkademy has three parts:
1. twitter for brands.
2. Blog networks eg. Nuffnang.
3. Social business strategy case study – Melbourne’s GPO.

So here it is. Please feel free to comment, suggest improvements, share and tweet if you find it useful.

The improved FRANkademy will be back next year. If you’d like to be notified please put your name + email here.

Thank you everyone. We had a blast.

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.

A big shout out to everyone who attended our fourth FRANkademy on Friday, for what was another very successful social media session.  Thanks to MCN, Hardie Grant Publishing, Yaffa Publishing (AdNews), Carat, iProspect, Keep Left PR, Propeller PR and Austereo for their input and participation.

A special thankyou also goes out to our friends at Nuffnang, for making the big trip from overseas!

The session covered off a broad range of topics, including:

An introduction to the size of the opportunity social media presents
The importance of having an integrated social media strategy and not ‘grabbing at the tools’
What is Twitter?  Who is using it well?
Blogging, Blog Networks and Nuffnang Australia case studies
FRANkVizeum’s approach to bought/owned/earned media – a working case study

For anyone who missed Friday’s session and would like to attend our September event, please RSVP here and we’ll look forward to seeing you!

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 has been a good seven months since we launched Nuffnang a blog marketing community into Australia.  Nuffnang’s Asia Pacific blogger network currently comprises over 100,000 bloggers. Nuffnang Australia has attracted over 700 top Australian bloggers to our community.

Our blog community gives us a strategic advantage in providing brands, social media agencies, media agencies, creative agencies, and PR agencies a one stop solution to connect with bloggers.  We have provided measurability to blog marketing campaigns where clients used to count Technorati and Google Blog search as their only tools to find the best bloggers for their campaigns.  We have demonstrated our ability to implement campaigns in a few days that previously used to take months. Some notable clients that have engaged Nuffnang Australia include ANZ bank, Village Roadshow, Seek Volunteer, and Destination Gippsland.

Building a blog marketing community takes time. We’ve travelled around Australia to organise blog meet ups. We’ve met bloggers that are attracting over 10,000 blog views a day – eclipsing many magazine readerships such as Harpers or Madison. We’re constantly surprised as each fantastic blogger leads us to another even bigger blogger. Our goal is to build a lasting and trusting relationship – ultimately we have built a community of over 700 members. As part of our next growth strategy, we will look at further improving our connections with our blogging community. There will be structural changes to Nuffnang’s touch points (more to come) to better the experience (because it matters!) and a drive to increase our community members.

Meanwhile, we have also been tracking great research coming from Forrester and leading social media strategist Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. It’s interesting to see the trends in brands in the U.S. engaging bloggers in different ways… here is a comprehensive list of sponsored conversations by Jeremiah.

A Running List of Sponsored Conversations

Here is Forrester’s report on the 3 common ways to market with bloggers – something we’re already achieving successfully through Nuffnang.