Who is in control of your brand?

Our second to last event for 2011 is an exciting one, and you only have a couple of days notice (apologies)

Over the last two years the world has gone casual gaming mad, with 5 million hours of Angry Birds being played every day and 200M people playing Facebook games for over 40mins each per month. Facebook is set to make a huge $1B from gaming in an industry set to make an incredible $70B in 2015.

This broad adoption of gaming has driven the rise of branded gaming & gamification as a marketing strategy. At this event we dive into the opportunities, examples & challenges for brands entering the gaming world.

We have an esteemed panel that will cover:

• Media opportunities in social gaming on Farmville (Zynga) & Pop Cap
• The process & thinking around game creation & gamification
• How to integrate gaming into marketing strategies

This event is a limited ticket release due to the venue size.

RSVP’s are essential click here http://socialgaming.eventbrite.com/

The Panel

Event location

The Order of Melbourne

2/401 Swanston Street, Melbourne

http://www.theorder.com.au/

Follow Social Media Club Melbourne

Website: http://socialmediaclubmelbourne.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smcmelb

Twitter: http://twitter.com/smcmelb

Hashtag for event #SMCMELB The Social Media Club Melbourne is a volunteer not for profit and events are organised by @nikski, @inBloome, @gutta, @simontsmall and @timbeveridge.

LinkedIn third social networking site used by Marketers

What I find interesting about this study of how marketers are using social media is that over 80% are using Facebook & Twitter, followed very closely by LinkedIn at 78%. Why I’m surprised is that from my experience LinkedIn is a very difficult channel to achieve the objectives they listed in the diagram above (right). LinkedIn is mostly a place to improve your personal career, not your employers brand.

Social Bookmarking a priority over MySpace

It’s also funny how we’re all still interested in social bookmarking site but so bored of MySpace, when the ability to use Social Bookmarking sites to achieve marketing outcomes at any scale is extremely hit and miss and you can build a MySpace page, buy some media and have an effective reach of 100,000-1,000,000 in Australia. Maybe it’s because it was once so mighty and now that it’s not number one we’ve all moved on.

The full report is available here in video and PDF formats, thanks to Social Media Examiner.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2010

Thanks to Flowtown for turning data into pictures, again.

Doing some simple analysis of Facebook users in Australian confirms the belief that we want to be younger (or older); and we’re happy to lie about ourselves to the world.

It also reinforces the uncomfortable feeling I get when researchers (including people in my team) do focus groups, surveys & other prompted research – when you ask someone about their values, views or habits it’s likely that they’re going to lie.

So back to Facebook where we have a very unique scenario, 46% of all Australians 13 yrs+ are on Facebook and they have to answer a series of questions to create an account, resulting in a very large sample size of data, although not many ways to cross tabulate the data.

Using Facebook’s advertising system, where you can build demographic profiles based on all kinds of attributes; you can estimate the number of people in any given segment on Facebook.

Using the tool I discovered the following audience sizes, 25-34 being the largest, and more women than men in every age group.

Australian’s on Facebook (blue) vs. Men (red) vs Women (green)

For kicks I compared these numbers to the actual population in Australia with the intention of understanding the % of Australians in each segment on Facebook. Instead I discovered that Australian’s want to be younger (or maybe older) and are happy to lie about it.

Australian’s (red) vs. Australian’s on Facebook (blue)

The graph above shows the number of Australians in each age group compared with the number of people on Facebook who claim to be the given age.

Digging a little further it was clear the discrepancy was only with the women.

Australian Women (red) vs. Australian Women on Facebook (blue)

And the discrepancy isn’t tiny, it adds up to over 257,000, even with some margins of error that’s a big gap. Another way of looking at it is that there’s 115% of Women aged 25-34 on Facebook, an awesome stat, if only it could be true.

% of Australians on Facebook (blue) vs. % of Men on Facebook (red) vs. % Women on Facebook (green)

I’m making a big assumption here, as it could be an error, 13 year olds wanting to be 18 or something else, but I believe it’s a reflection on the pressure from society, media & our peers to be and live more youthful lives.

It highlights the impact of the new world we live in where Facebook (and social media generally) plays an interesting role in our social & professional lives, giving us more power to manage our own brand, reputation & image, unless someone else takes control, uploading those awkward photos of us from our best friend’s birthday party.

Oh, and to point out the obvious and the reason I actually did this analysis, 46% of Australians are on Facebook. Just for good measure here’s another pretty chart of visits to three sites in Australia from Google Trends to confirm traffic is trending up or down, and it’s up.

Last night’s Social Media Club Melbourne (@smcmelb) we brought together Simon Goodrich from Portable Content, Suzie O’Carroll from YouTube & Nick Bolton of Viocorp to discuss why the advertising dollars aren’t following the audience, how marketers are doing it right and how Australians are consuming the medium. (Full bio’s of the speakers below)

Bradly Giblin MC’d the event that discussed concepts such as

• A Richer Experience for Youtube Ads
• Content Is Important
• Growth In APIs and Multi-Formating
• Seeding Advice
• Maximum Impact for Video
• Youtube Celebrities’ Cross-Over
• Viocorp & Accenture’s Partnership Delivers Malaysian Portal
• Youtube Does Not Deliver / Build / Allow Porn
• Youtube Partners with Brands
• Competitor Vimeo
• Portable, An Online Channel

(List & photo above thanks to a great review by Kim Ong)

Here’s the video for those of you who want to see the whole event.

A sample of the Tweets

KimberleyL

Kimberley Lee

@KimberleyL: YouTube celebs crossing into mainstream - exciting stuff! #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:38 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

EmmaStirling

Emma Stirling

@EmmaStirling: Tip from #SMCMelb - click on downward right arrow on YouTube number of views for detailed analytics including referrals.....

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:54 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

ryanspanger

Ryan Spanger

@ryanspanger: RT @Stweeve Ideal length for online video: 2-4 minutes. Ideal length for a punk song: 3mins11 seconds.. Correlation? #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:49 AM from web Powered by Tweeted

kellycmillar

Kelly Millar

@kellycmillar: YouTube insights to understand more about your specific video metrics #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:43 AM from Twitterrific Powered by Tweeted

OzAutoSocial

Auto Social Media

@OzAutoSocial: It was a great evening at @smcmelb last night. I highly recommend these type of events to enhance your #sm knowledge. Follow #smcmelb #in

Aug 19, 2010 @ 05:01 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

dascottonline

David Scott

@dascottonline: Was good to finally catch up with @amcal @KimberleyL & meet @kimongsk at #smcmelb last night. Cheers for the good convos!

Aug 19, 2010 @ 02:17 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

SPEAKER BIOS

Nick Bolton – General Manager Viocorp – Melbourne

Nick has in-depth Industry expertise having delivered numerous high profile web events on behalf of Viocorp.

Over the years Nick has also handled several Internationally significant projects including the first ever live stream direct from the Vatican.

He has been working in the webcasting space for almost eight years, and has managed several hundred webcast productions for most of the top corporates in Australia. Previous to this Nick was an Account Director for a leading healthcare advertising agency in London for 5 years, winning two Gold Medals at the Pharmaceutical Marketing Awards. Nick has also run his own business, and has in-depth understanding of the benefits of online video for clients.

Nick has: BA (Hons) 2:2 Marketing and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester UK, a Diploma in Marketing, Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK, and Diploma of Market Research, Market Research Society, UK.

Viocorp is Asia Pacific’s leading full service Internet broadcasting company. The company has worked on major events, like the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race on Yahoo!7 and Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Barcelona, and has supported major brands such as the Australian Rugby Union and Tennis Australia.

Simon Goodrich, Managing Director, Portable

Simon is co-founder and Managing Director of Portable, a digital studio creating websites, mobile applications and video with offices in Melbourne and New York. Portable has grown to be internationally recognised as one of the most innovative companies in its field, creating products such as the Portable Film Festival, the world’s leading online film festival, and Portable Shops, an online e-commerce service for fashion designers. Clients include Adobe, Getty Images, Oxfam, Red Cross and the AFL Players Association.

Simon is the National President of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the country’s digital peak body. He is also a judge and Australian Ambassador for the US based Webby Awards, the Oscars for online. Simon sits on the board of Design Victoria, the Victorian Government initiative to promote design in industry.

He has been recognised as one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Anthill Magazine.

Suzie O’Carroll – Industry Manager – YouTube Australia

Suzie has worked in online media for over a decade! Starting during the heady days of the boom, with Excite Europe, where she worked in a team setting up ops teams in the new offices across Europe.

Then over to Australia, and Yahoo! AUNZ looking after their content partnerships with Drive, Seek and Domain.

A move agency side followed with three years at Mindshare Sydney, heading up the digital team there. Suzie worked across all key clients, from ING Direct to Diageo, Land Rover to LG.

After a short sabbatical in Central and South America earlier this year, Suzie joined the YouTube and Google team in May. In between watching videos, she’s been educating clients on content online, and developing video strategies for key accounts.

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)

Video of the night

All the photos are up on Flickr…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcmelb/sets/72157624574722582/

To find out about our next event follow us

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http://twitter.com/smcmelb

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