Who is in control of your brand?

New Media Beers (#NMBMelb) is a low key get together for anyone interested in digital, online or mobile to catch up.

The event’s all about getting together, talking, networking and drinking. Designers, SEO, Recruiters, Developers, Games, Journalists, PR, eBusiness, Media – anyone is welcome.

No formalities, name tags, speakers or sponsors.

Next Event Details

Date: 9th April 2010
Venue: Lagerfield, Crown Casion
Time: 5:30pm-10:00pm

More details

For those on Twitter use #NMBMelb
To get future invites join the Facebook group
RSVP to the event on Facebook
Lagerfield Bar website
Map/street view

This event was started in 2009 by myself, Zac & Lucio.

It’s been some weeks since my last blog post, all I can say for myself is within 2 months my team has doubled in size from 2 to 4 and two more are in the pipeline… So I’ve been busy. Oh, and I’ve started doing some posts at the Visual Jazz Blog.

Back to the point at hand: Can digital agencies LEAD planning & creative?

It’s no new debate, however, I think it’s still unclear how it will all fall. Two opposing articles on AdAge argue for and against the topic.

Jacques-Herve Roubert summarises his views nicely:

Perhaps the synergy and balance between exploitation and exploration is off kilter for digital agencies, but more and more we’re starting to see the agency structure itself change with new hires in technology and social media. And marketers are noticing:

• According to Media magazine, AKQA was named the lead agency for Nike India earlier this year.
• Precor named Ascentium its agency of record in October 2009. According to Forrester’s Q2 2009 Interactive Agency Wave, Ascentium “received the highest client satisfaction scores in this year’s review.” The assignment with Precor includes strategic planning and execution of all offline and online campaigns.
• McAfee hiring Tribal DDB as its agency of record in 2008. This assignment included all TV, print, outdoor, and digital.

Jacques-Herve’s post is in response to the opposing view earlier last year by Ana Andjelic

If digital agencies excel at exploration, traditional agencies thrive on exploitation. A traditional agency is risk-averse, accountable and systematic. It knows its business inside-out. It knows its clients’ businesses and executes campaigns reliably. Its people hang out with the CMOs. A typical traditional agency has decades of experience.

This, too, comes at a cost. A traditional agency, organized around exploitation, ends up doing the same thing over and over again. For every marketing challenge, their solution is “better creativity.” This is not surprising: If an agency spends all its time making sure that everything goes efficiently, that leaves it with little time to experiment. And then, even if it wanted to do things differently, it would be met with its own organizational inertia.

In my opinion they’ve both got valid points, however, having the name Jacques-Herve Roubert makes him sound just that little bit more intelligent.

In all seriousness, I’ve seen media, digital & traditional agencies all work in various magical and wonderful ways together, and sometimes pretty poorly, I believe some traditional agencies will adapt, some digital agencies will become more strategic, media agencies will continue to grow in size and more nimble strategic media agencies will appear on the scene. At the end of the day, the advertiser has a big say in who leads who, sometimes they’ll organise their agencies based on what’s right & logical, sometimes they’ll do it based on what they’ve done before.

A couple of nights ago Zac, Lucio and I had great fun catching up with some industry people. We thought it might be a good idea to give it a go on a more regular basis.

Here’s the low down, basically come along if you’re into media, marketing or comms.

New Media Beers Melbourne
Friday 25th September / 7.00pm
The Cabinet (we’ve reserved the balcony facing Swanson Street)
11 Rainbow Alley (left off Little Collins Street heading to Russel Street)

New Media Beers is all about getting together, talking, network and drinking ! Designers, SEO, Recruiters, Developers, Games, Journalists, Pr’s, everyone (besides James Duthie ) is welcome

Please help to tell others, we do have a balcony fully reserved…

#NMBMelb twitter

See you there. Ps Props to Zac for the rad logo.

UPDATE: 28th Jan 2010

The details for the first New Media Beers event of 2010 are here

UPDATE: Social Media Club Melbourne

SMCMelb are running the first event, full details are here

It’s sometimes hard to find valuable, insightful and new information online. If you’re into marketing like I am, these blogs should all be regular reads. Whether they’re an industry voice, thought provoking or factual, each of these blogs/news sites will help you stay at the forefront of marketing. (Some are organisations and some are individuals)

These are my top 14 marketing thought leaders:

• A Digital Perspective – Jye Smith on social media, marketing and the internet
• a shel of my former self – Blogging at the intersection of communications & technology
• acidlabs – Conversation. Collaboration. Community.
• Ad Age – CMO Strategy
• Chris Brogan – Solving business strategy challenges with social media
• Laurel Papworth – The business of being social
• Marketing Charts – Charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• Marketing Magazine
• Mumbrella – Everything under Australian media & marketing umbrella
• Servant of Chaos – A blog by Gavin Heaton
• Seth’s Blog – A blog by Seth Godin
• The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.
• Web strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – Social Media, Web Marketing
• Love Digital – A weekly interview podcast – digital marketing
• Come Together – Thoughts on community and conversation

Is there something you read regularly that you would add to this list? Or do you disagree with one of my recommendations? Post a comment.

I visited a site where lots of people are able to contribute content about Twitter. I posted the content below on the 14th of April and to my surprise there haven’t been any since.

1. Twitter should be an extension of your social media communications plan, and a connector throughout the plan

2. Just because you’re followed by 45,052 people, it doesn’t they all want to buy your product

3. Aim to be followed by ONLY people who could buy or influence to buy your product/service

4. Twitter is becoming more populated, everyday there is more quality content for you to compete with

5. It won’t be the marketing magic you’ve been looking for, but it will extend your current activity

This is a very comprehensive guide (56 pages) on getting into social media – a must read. It combines a lot of what we’ve all heard before – resulting in a considered and easy to consume story.

It brings together some online heavy hitters:

• Randall Rothenberg, IAB
• Pete Cashmore, Mashable.com
• Gregory Galant, Shorty Awards
• Jeff Pulver, The 140 character conference
• Jeremiah Owyang, web-strategist.com

And covers:

• Training
• Strategy
• Platforms
• Building a fan base
• Managing/preventing fumbles
• Measurement
• Checklist to get started

[scribd id=16256776 key=key-2d8y14vvqbcivtv2ur2v]

Moving away from the tech crowed, Twitter has become THE buzz word of marketing managers over the last two months – and I mean old skool marketers, who haven’t used any form of social media before…

One of many reasons why Twitter isn’t going to solve your marketing problems is that of the definition of followers… It might sound fantastic that I, some guy from Melbourne, have 920 followers and that I have the power to reach 920 people with any given tweet – right?

If it was an email database, which achieves 20-25% open rate, you’d expect to reach 230 people at most.

If you’re talking about a Facebook page you might get 1-2% interacting with your page after a message, so 10-20 people.

But with Twitter, due to its nature and the speed at which it moves, you’re only going to reach anyone who is on Twitter at the moment that you post the message, which could be from 0.1-0.2%. Which varies massively depending on the day of the week and time of the day. However, 920 followers might result in 5-10 people viewing your Tweet. (This all assumes you’re posting boring content, that those 5-10 people wont ReTweet on to their followers – which is the true power of spreading your message on Twitter)

Now if you’re not focusing on reaching lots of people, then good, great, you understand social media and the importance of building strong connections, however, if you’re looking to reach thousands of people, Twitter aint for you.

On top of that I would estimate that 20-30% of my and everyone’s followers are spammers, they’re people who follow anyone and everyone and don’t really care about you…

There are a few reasons why people might follow you on Twitter, TwiTip thinks there’s 6:

1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.

2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!

3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com

4. You’re one of the people that Twitter automatically recommends an user adds when they first sign up for Twitter. Basically meaning your one of the “Toms” of Twitter.com

5. You were tagged in the #FollowFridays train. Which in this case you probably have internet fame and just joined Twitter.com or either have something VERY interesting to say or your friends were tired of you stealing all their followers and/or watch your follower count lingering below the double digit count

6. Because you used a Twitter spammer site like twitterfollower.com or the others. If you don’t understand that refer to “Real” reason number 1.

All this means, is that 10,000 people following you on Twitter isn’t the same as 10,000 people on your email database or Facebook group.

UPDATE (20/5)

Jack Dorsey comments on the difference between Facebook & Twitter users here, including this comment from O’Reily

The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement — netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account’s first week since being featured, O’Reilly writes. But it’s not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said.

In this last 3 weeks I’ve given little love to my humble blog and it’s because I’ve been busy at a new exciting job. I’ve been working hard giving clients advice, reviewing campaigns, developing strategies and other work related things.

It’s no news to anyone that there is a difference between doing and talking, and a combination of the two is great. However, in the Australian social media arena talking out weighs the doing, see example #234 of 237 from yesterday.

Doing vs talking over time

Are you a blogger or a consultant, an entreprenuer or an academic? Or a combination of them all?

Social Media Marketing in Australia needs all of the above right now, but bring on some more doers. Being a blogger doesn’t make you a Social Media Marketer, using Social Media to spread a mesage for a brand makes you a Social Media Marketer – a doer.

Idea of graphing my thoughts inspired by Jye Smith.

UPDATE (13/04/09): This video is semi-relevant but moreso a nice example of doing, by Honda.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS8S_OJMzh0]

Leave comments here or on Twitter @simontsmall