Last week’s Social Media Club Melbourne event was a huge success we got great feedback, loads of Tweets and all learnt a bunch from the lovely ladies from Holden (Andrea Matthews) & General Motors (Annalisa Bluhm).
For those of you who didn’t make it you can check out the on the couch discussion from the night on YouTube. (Playlist embedded below, or go to http://youtube.com/smcmelb)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcmelb/sets/72157624574722582/
Personal privacy has become a hot topic for Facebook, however, full anonymity is the ultimate in privacy and creates some interesting human behaviour. The biggest anonymous community is 4chan.org an image board, inspired by a Japanese image board, 6 or so years ago, created (apparently) by Christopher ‘moot’ Poole.
“Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there’s a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it.” Christopher “moot” Poole
4chan is the source of many of today’s internet memes (two you might have seen are Lolcats & Rick Rolling), only 6 years old the site gets 70m visitors per month, producing 700,000 posts per day. It’s a force to be reckoned with. In April last year the community hacked the Annual Time 100 Poll to get ‘moot’ to number 1 spot AND coordinated the top 21 first names to spell out ‘marblecake also the game’ (lost more on this here). The community also use their power for good, in Feb last year a young guy posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube, the community didn’t like it and using a number of techniques the had figured out his name in 24 hours and the guy was arrested in 48 hours.
Unusually, moot recently spoke at TED explaining the ‘case for anonymity online‘ this 11 mins is a fascinating insight into an unusual yet gigantic online phenomena.
The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet “memes” it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power — and price — of anonymity. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 11:24)
Do you regularly visit 4Chan, or have you heard of it before? Is it good, bad or otherwise?
Stephen Johnson, from Draft FCB has just launched an interesting initiative to save 140,000 lives from Malaria. The initiative turns traditional TV & telephone fund raising on it’s head relying on individuals to pass it on.
You can donate through their website, or install a widget on your blog, forum, facebook page to encourage your mates to help raise funds.
Yesterday Toyota announced that they’d selected 5 advertising agencies to pitch for their social media activity where the community would determine the winners, the two best performing agencies would get more work in 2010.
B&T Today revealed last week that Toyota is running the social media pitch, pitting eight agencies against each other with four agencies then to go head to head with their ideas in the public domain. Following on from this, the two best will produce further work in the new year.
Background
Having worked on the digital account for Holden (held by Visual Jazz) for some time now, I’ve been keeping a close eye on who’s doing what. Interestingly enough, Toyota have recently been putting a lot of effort into Facebook – in particular – buying advertising and growing their fan base.
Toyota
They have also developed an application, called ‘Toyota Promise Forest‘, aligned with the Prius. The concept looks good, one of the best in Australia, however, it doesn’t work – and it hasn’t for quite some time. You’ll see when you use the app that YOUR NAME is TIMOTHY and the friends aren’t my friends, and you can’t actually use the app.
Now we assumed, when we first found the application, that it was new and being repaired, however, it’s been a couple of months now, and still it’s not working.
It makes me wonder why Toyota are ramping up their social media when their current efforts are so broken? That aside, how can you have 5 campaigns in market and effectively measure the performance of each activity separately? Would you run 5 TVCs at once to see which one works best?
Ford
I’ve also heard rumblings that Ford have also just selected an agency to roll out a social media strategy. Whilst at the same time they’ve developed ‘MyFord‘ a social media hub for their brand, however, it’s kinda broken…
Others
Lots of the other auto’s are in the space, but nothing noteworthy at this stage.
Summary: the Australian auto category will be an interesting one to watch in the coming 6-12 months
You may or may not have seen this little story blow up into a fairly heated debate on Mumbrella today.
An agency came under fire today for doing what I, and most others believe to be unethical and wrong. They advertised this job on Gumtree.
“The job requires you to have very good search skills to find conversations online. You will then take on a supplied persona and join in on the conversation.
“You will have to be clever and adaptive, if you don’t know about a subject then you will have to learn how to “sell” yourself as authentic.
“This is NOT spam, you are adding value to the conversation. You are respectful and knowledgeable and most importantly having fun.
“If this sounds like you and you have strong English writing skills, then please I want to hear from you.”
If you’ve got an opinion or want to read the full story, go to Mumbrella, I’ve collated the many heated comments and summarised the views below.
| Leslie Nassar | Against | ||
| Alex Campbell | Against | http://www.alexjcampbell.com/ | |
| David Jackmanson | Against | http://bit.ly/djackmanson | |
| David | For | http://thelostagency.wordpress.com/ | |
| Stuart Sheridan | Against | ||
| Sam Granleese | Against | ||
| Ben Shepherd | Against | ||
| Nick Holmes a Court | For | http://www.buzznumbershq.com/ | |
| Stephen Collins | Against | http://www.acidlabs.org/ | |
| Justin Hind | Against | http://www.justinhind.wordpress.com/ | |
| Il Jung | Against | ||
| Cheryl Gledhil | Against | http://www.moltn.com/ | |
| Smithee | Against | ||
| Stilgherrian | Against | http://stilgherrian.com/ | |
| Karalee | Against | http://justanotherprblog.wordpress.com/ | |
| Riley Batchelor | Against | ||
| Will Hughes | Against | ||
| Melinda | Against | http://www.thecontentagency.com.au/ | |
| Gnoll110 | Against | http://twitter.com/gnoll110 | |
| Damian Guiney | Against | http://www.visualjazz.com.au/ |
Respect to Oliver from Brand Builder (@thebrandbuilder) for this charming and no-bull preso.
I totally support this approach, and glad that he’s articulated it so well. Social media isn’t about followers, twits, comments or visitors, it’s about achieving marketing outcomes, generally SALES – directly or indirectly.
FOX provided 4 case studies for reference, I was not involved in them I simply want to share them with you. I’ve also included a case study on the highly debated Pimp My Kettle Campaign at the bottom of this post.
The four presos cover campaigns Red Bull, My Name is Earl, Crest & Tourism Australia. They’re very basic examples, and difficult to measure ROI but it does illustrate the potential.
This campaign is a personal favourite of mine as ‘the industry’ (whoever that is) got so stuck into it so hardcore, yet the campaign actually worked. A friend of mine was involved in the research and said that the focus groups showed that there was an increased perception of quality taste after the campaign, along with the stats in the YouTube video.
I must preface this post with the fact that I love the concept of FriendFeed, bringing all my online world together, hence why I jumped on ages ago. Jimmy Wales also named me “more famous that scobleizer” a couple of months back thanks to a conversation I had with him on FriendFeed AND I do & will continue to use the service…
There has been SO MUCH NOISE about Facebook buying FriendFeed which makes FriendFeed seem like a fantastic service. However, since I’ve been using it I’ve realised it’s fairly useless in a real & practical way; i.e. if I removed my account today, my life wouldn’t be any different.
So here are the three reasons why I think Friend Feed sucks:
If you do like FriendFeed, tell me why & how I can use it differently to realise it’s awesomeness.
If you haven’t tried it, maybe give it a go.
Here’s my profile http://friendfeed.com/simontsmall/
And here’s FriendFeed’s biggest advocate and international nerd superstar, Scobleizer, on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer. Clearly he’s doing something I’m not.
