The dramatic changes in the Australian media landscape over the past week finally recognises the economics of the digital transformation that has been underway for several years. What will be fascinating to watch now is whether our large media players can effect their transformations quickly enough against engrained print cultures and vested interests.
 

The power of customer feedback should not be underestimated. The rise of social media for business has also seen the necessity for real-time marketing and fast response times. Word of Mouth marketing has always been a powerful tool for businesses, however now when someone has a bad experience with a brand and talks about it within their social networks, that brand has the opportunity to intervene and turn that negative customer experience into a positive one.

As more and more businesses start using social media to market and talk to customers, understanding the reach and influence of those customers is becoming more important. This has seen a wave of start ups developing algorithms to help brands, social media managers and PR agencies identify influencers and highlight their online reach. However measuring online influence is no easy task and can't be seen as a one size fits all solution; instead it should be taken as a benchmark to help inform but not dictate your social media or blogger outreach.

Here are the main players:

Resonate hosted the 6th Australian Community Managers Roundtable in conjunction with Quiip on Monday 26 March in Sydney. The event was organised by the irrepressible Sue Cash who put together a great agenda and kept everything humming along throughout the day.

Like most people working in Social Media, I believe it is not just a fad and is capable of generating real ROI.   But I am a realist.  I know that Social Media is competing for marketing budget from other more tried and tested ways to “sell stuff” and it needs to prove itself with reliable measurement.  That measurement will depend on the type of activity taking place.

Let’s take a minute to think about the main reasons why measuring social media can been difficult.

There have been a string of high profile social media disasters lately, which is not surprising with more and more businesses embracing social media, but it highlights the issue of how important it is to learn from our mistakes. This got me thinking about my ultimate social media no-nos.

The continued obsession with social media channels like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter makes it easy to overlook the role of content marketing in your brand’s customer engagement activities. Using these channels to start a conversation with customers is an important first step but the novelty can soon wear off if you stop feeding your customers a regular diet of quality content that draws people in and keeps them coming back. A good digital marketer knows how to develop content that serves a human need, solves a problem or inspires passion.
 

Having spent the first 10 years of my career working in Direct Marketing, I am well versed in the idea of marketing as a campaign. 

The process is:

1. Client briefs agency “we need to sell 2,000 mortgages this quarter”
2. Creative staff work on the design and data planners work back from that 2,000 figure (with expected response rates and conversion rates) to identify how many prospects need to be contacted/exposed to the ad.  If they are more sophisticated, they will have data (triggers, profiles and predictive models) to help them identify the best prospects.
3. Campaign is launched and after a period of time, the number of new mortgages is calculated
4. The agency can calculate the ROI from the campaign and then rest easy with a G&T at the nearest swanky bar

In exactly one month I will be off on a 4 week trip around South-East Asia with my partner. We’ll be covering 3 countries (Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam) and stopping in at least 8 different places which means a whole lot of hotels, transport, tours & activities to be organised.

My first big overseas trip was about 7 years ago, a 3 month stint in South America, and back then most of my travel planning was done by consulting my trusty Lonely Planet guide. Things have certainly changed over the past few years and while I’m still not ready to ditch the Lonely Planet guide, most of my planning for this trip has been through social networks.

Facebook has once again raised the ire of privacy advocates with the wider roll-out of facial recognition software that invites people to tag photos of their friends in the wildly popular social network.