But the latest issue on the professional speakers checklist, and very much on ours, is not what did your audience think ‘after’ the presentation and what will they say about you ‘back at the office’ – now we have to think ‘What are they going to say during the presentation and how will this talk look in the social media space’.

I read a great article from  Drew Neisser who blogs on Fast Company in which he shared he ‘new rules’ of presenting that add a social layer the old rules like ‘don’t bore the shit out of your audience with powerpoint’.

Drew’s article deals with ‘Real Time learning distribution’ and audience engagement through social media.  Or put simply, how to use your audience that is present onsite to connect with an audience that is present online.

Here’s the top tips (full article on Fast Company):

1. Don’t Panic if They Aren’t Looking at You

2. Stifle the Temptation to Ask for a Device Moratorium

3. If You Aren’t Nervous, You Should Be Now

4. If You Don’t Speak Twitterese, It’s Time to Learn It

5. Congratulations! You May Be Speaking to Millions You Can’t See

6. The Reviews Are In–In Real Time

7. When All Else Fails, Surprise the Audience with Honesty

I have had mulitple experiences of people tweeting and posting content real time but still haven’t mastered the ‘on-stage’ reply. 

Some good food for though….now I’m off to post this to our facebook.…

- Todd

Well it’s no fluke and good marketers know there’s existing media hype everywhere ripe for the picking.  Keeping a keen eye on existing media hype around particular themes that relate to your brand and piggybacking
off this hype is a really cost effective way to get your message to the masses.

Over the past three months the team at Threesides has been working closely with the marketing team at NSW National Parks and Wildlife, and their incumbent PR agency Starr PR to roll out a marketing campaign to increase visitation to coastal national parks during a traditionally quiet winter period.

The annual migration of whales from Antartica to
warm water breeding grounds provided the perfect
platform on which to hook the campaign.  The whales swim right past many of the coastal NSW national parks
gaining significant media coverage as they go, so why not tap into this hype to further the reach of the marketing messages for coastal national parks
and turn the whales into the biggest billboards you’ve ever seen!

So what does an 18metre long billboard with a tail actually look like -  it looks like this:

• A new website
• Customised Twitter feed with tweets on latest whales spottings up and down the coast
• Customised Facebook presence with video and data capture
• Electronic Direct Mail to exsiting database of over 20,000
• Pay per click advertising to capture existing search engine traffic
• Development of a whale watching mobile app
• Point of sale presence in visitor centres
• National media coverage and ongoing media coverage

You didn’t really think we spray painted a bunch of whales with the national parks logo did you?

Some more info below and you  can register to attend on their website:

The Dollars and Sense of Online Marketing and Communications – How to Back Winners in 2011

Websites, Social Media, Search Engine Marketing, Online Direct marketing — there is no end of online activities competing for your time and money in 2011. But what’s worth it, what’s not and what’s missing from your plan that you should in fact be budgeting for?

Current trends indicate that consumers are increasingly directed to the web by the organisations with which they interact. This is not only for information, but for a number of transactions, be it buying your groceries and white goods or even updating your details with government departments. In an age where most transactions occur online, how can you utilise these tools to increase business awareness and exposure in your targeted demographic areas?

This AIM Hot Topic will challenge attendees to look at their budget from a different perspective and start involving other areas of the company in the conversation. This session will cover:

* The big 5 — activities every online marketing plan needs

* Which online activities are most often missed in the budgeting process

* In-house or Outsource — how to tell when it’s time to get help

* Good ideas — but who’s going to do it all – the value of people in your plan and what is their time worth?

Get the full information on the Australian Institute of Managment website.

Despite the entertainment factor, social media is a powerful tool for business and I’m not talking big businesses.  In a recent survey conducted by Millward Brown in conjunction with World Federation of Advertisers (see the SlideShare presentation at the bottom of this post), found that smaller social media sites (owned by SMEs) achieve higher fan ratings in comparison to larger social media sites.

The report showed that the five basic expectations from fans are (1) regular posts, (2) trustworthy brand news, (3) new product information, (4) contests and (5) special offers.

Here’s our take on it from the perspective of some of our clients and social media sites we use in the office.

1. Regular posts

When you’ve built a fan base on facebook or a twitter following, those people expect to be engaged with, they expect to engage with fellow fans and at times expect to have their views & comments challenged.  Whether it’s hourly, daily or weekly is dependent upon the receptiveness of your community.  This requires testing and monitoring until you find the right balance.

The content that you use should be engaging and relevant to your fan base.  It doesn’t mean it should be 100% of your own product information.  Add comments which will get responses, open-ended questions to initiate conversation is a good place to start.

2. Trustworthy brand news

Authentic brand news gives your page a sense of credibility and worth.  It gives your fans the ability to consume up-to-date relevant content.  Outside of your own business news, insert links to articles, links to credible news & information sites, links to video channels and photo sites, podcasts and webinars, ensuring you are crediting sources.

Build your page by liking businesses within your sector, and Government pages, and other SMB pages to give fans an added value.  The Visit Young facebook page has liked several different business and organisations.  The Visit Young page will then cross promote news between each of the pages.  As a user I’m getting news from Visit Young and information on different festivals and events, outdoor movie listings, hotels.

3. New product information

As a fan you do expect special treatment for following a brand.  They want new information which acts as social currency; they would like to boast to their friends knowing they’ve received exclusive information before them or the wider market.

Kicks entertainment who holds the Foreshore and Warehouse music festivals in Canberra will announce all new event information on tickets, artists, employment opportunities, photos through their facebook page first.

Another example from a larger business is NIKE ID.  Not only do they release new product information but those products are designed and voted by the public and in return professional athletes will wear the apparel.

4. Contests

The rise of social media is not without the content creation by fans and followers across the globe.  We all love creating and being recognised for it.   Grill’d a franchise burger restaurant currently has a contest targeting students to win a scholarship.  Students have to highlight why Grill’d should support their studies.  In return students are creating new and innovative product ideas.  This may or may not be used but to have your idea recognised is a win in itself.

The We love the Gong facebook page recently ran a competition to give away tickets to a Roller Derby.  They required fans to come up a creative Roller Derby alias.

Crust Pizza a gourmet pizza outlet incorporates the Crust free pizza Friday.   Followers on twitter will tweet that comment for a chance to win a free pizza

5. Special offers

Incorporating special offers for your fans and followers is an easy win.  It’s a nice way to acknowledge them for being the brand advocates that you love.  A good example is Bums up modern cloth nappies.  Previously they’ve encouraged their fan base to help the page reach a number of fans by asking them to personally promote amongst their network of friends and family.  In return the company offers more prize packs and competitions to enter.

Clearly contacts, an online retailer for contact lenses and glasses, use exclusive facebook deals for their fans.  To track ROI they use a unique coupon code, to allow them to track back to the facebook promotion.

You don’t need to apply these tactics in unison or following a sequential order.  You could use a couple of points once and maybe applying another down the track.  It is about testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to get your fan ratings up – What works best foryou?

This is not a photo of Craig and Todd but we wanted to make them seem cooler than they really are. They are a bit shorter than the guys in this pic. Credit: sofachip.com

Canberra can be a small place.  Having been with threesides for just a few weeks, it was great to hear that Todd was giving a presentation with one of my former colleagues from the Department of Health and Ageing, Gov 2.0 guru Craig Thomler, on the growing role of social media in government communications.

The presentation was at the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research as part of its Graduate Development Program.  The guys spoke about how prolific social media use is in Australia (everybody’s doing it!).  Todd talked about the thinking behind social media and the ‘nuts and bolts’ of getting involved, whilst Craig provided an outline on the innovation that’s been happening within our government departments.  You can find the presentations (and a video of the guys doing their thing) on the DIISR blog here.

Just for my two cents, and having spent the better part of the past decade working in a range of communications roles in government, it’s been my experience that whilst the majority of communications people know social media is important and cost-effective and potentially very powerful, it can be very hard to get it across the line and make it ‘business-as-usual’ communications, particularly in government.

Now that I’m safely ensconced in the private sector, I feel I have a bit of perspective to discuss the issue and think it’s a result of a few different factors:

1.      Old habits die hard. I have found it slightly strange how a single letter to the editor in a newspaper criticising an organisation can cause senior management to run around looking extremely concerned and serious, with closed door meetings and carefully crafted responses and briefing notes, and yet the organisation could be absolutely SLAMMED in a blog read by tens of thousands of people and it would just slip under the radar, never to be mentioned.

2.      Organisational structure (read ‘turf wars’). Social media clearly spans multiple areas of communication — online, PR, marketing etc.  Which is fine if you have just one area handling all of these functions.  But if you have these areas segmented (as so many organisations do), the lines of responsibility are blurred and it can be easy for social media to either fall in the cracks or for resentments to arise.

3.      Risk-averse (to put it mildly). I have regularly worked with areas where every single sentence on every media release was analyzed extensively for any possible signs of misinterpretation.  Sentences were re-written, re-written again, and then taken out all together.  And this was a process that would take days and days.  Social media needs quick responses, relaxed language, real people, and this freedom is completely at odds with the regimented, anonymous approval processes that so many government departments are used to (and feel comfortable with).

4.      Lack of resources. Government marketing and communications people are busy people. Forget the stereotype of the lazy public servant – people in government communications WORK HARD.  It can be a challenge just to accomplish the essentials. And social media continues to be seen by some senior managers as a bit of a luxury, a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we had time/the people to do that’ kind of thing.  Getting extra resources for staff to undertake this function is just a pipe dream for some government organisations.  But without it, their social media efforts are likely to be either misguided or potentially damaging.

Disgruntled former public servant?  Perhaps, but what do you think?  Are things improving out there in government land?

The campaign was originally designed to be a community torism pride campaign that aimed to influence locals to focus on promoting what makes Wollongong such a great tourism destination to their family and friends. It was also born from an idea to get the Tourism Wollongong staff blogging internally about what they love about the Gong.  But for anyone that knows Greg Binskin – if he’s sniffs half a good idea in something small like this  – it doesn’t stay small for very long.

With unpreecendented (but not unexpected) local community and business support, the campaign really took off and through the use of a well timed television, print and outdoor advertising campaign combined with a multi channel social media campaign, we love the gong has easily broken the mould for destination marketing in Australia.

The highlights of the campaign from our perspective were (and continue to be):

• Active industry engagement – this wasn’t a “buy a 1/6 page ad in our print publication and send us your material” project. This campaign included social media training for operators, wide industry consultation, the local council was onboard from the start and the product was a ‘fun’ proposition that business owners could easily understand and get behind.
• Active media involvement – the conversation with local media outlets resulted not in big ad spends, but created smart alignment and use of resources that resulted in true partnerships – not just free ad spots or endorsed advertising spots that got onsold to everyone else.  This campaign had a small but well leveraged budget that delivered results well above what only big dollars can normally buy.
• Active and well supported multi channel social media engagement – this campaign didn’t just set up a facebook page – it started with a strategy that focussed on the message and the audience and the best tools that could reach them with the available internal time and resources.  Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, facebook, Google maps and a wordpress blog combined to deleiver the message in the way that the audience wanted to consume it.
• Actively engaged audience – 3 words sum up this for me “PEOPLE TALKED BACK”.  This wasn’t fake one way broadcast media designed to look like social media.  this campaign got people talking, engaging, owning the message and wherever they could and when they needed to, Tourism Wollongong engaged with the audience and talked back.  True social media at work.  Sure it took time and effort, but so does every form of good marketing.

Threesides are proud to have have worked with Tourism Wollongong in the developing the website, providing social media training to local industry operators, campaign social media strategy, and ongoing tips and tools to make this campaign a success.

We also engaged the website development guru’s at Osky Interactive to help us build and deliver the technical aspects of the campaign with a smart looking and functioning wordpress site and social media integration.

[Quick shout out to Wisdom Advertising and Design in Wollongong who delivered the campaign logo too - check out the specs on their website - who continue to deliver consistently good looking campaign creative to Tourism Wollongong]

Great ideas combined with motivated people and engaged partners is what we know has made this campaign a success and raised the bar that little bit higher for tourism destination promotion in NSW and Australia.

So one question left – do you love the Gong now?! We do (and now we love the award winning Gong just a little bit more…….  

1. Open your ears before you open your mouth
2. Social Media can be measured  - but measuring isn’t sexy right
3. Privacy still matters – but nothing has really changed
4. Keep being creative in how you use social media
5. Who is your target market:  are they digital immigrants or digital natives?
6. You can spend money in social media – Free is just the beginning
7. Real Time requires Real Time
8. You still need a plan and goals
9. Don’t follow fads
10. The best social media policy: START

To see the full presentation view it on Slideshare or better yet just view it below!

Did you attend the presentation?  Appreciate your feedback below.

What isn’t there to love about the place:

• ‘peak hour’ lasts for 25mins (20 mins without road works) – you’d be lucky to get to the corner shop in Sydney in that time.
• We get real seasons at the time of year they are meant to happen – unlike Melbourne that you wake up in winter, go to work in summer, lunchtime has fined up to a nice spring day and by 2.00pm you have the winter blues back again.
• We are located 2 hrs from the Snowy Mountains and 1.5 hours from the NSW South Coast – a 14 hour drive to the snow from Brisbane.

…and at this point everyone from interstate is going to start telling me that we don’t get massive concerts, we don’t have a grand prix, beaches or 1400 cafes down pokey little laneways.  I’m cool with that, that’s why I go on enough holidays to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and everywhere else in Australia because I love my whole country. We also have great clients across this region that gets us out the door and travelling all the time (NSW National Parks and Wildlife, Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk, Tourism Wollongong to pick a few).

But what I love most about Canberra is that we are the centre of attention for people that want to “love Canberra in Disguise” - also known as Canberra Bashing or Canberra knockers.  You get it in the media all the time “Today Canberra sent 1,000 more troops to Iraq” – “Canberra has set up a new immigration detention centre” – “Canberra plans new taxes on the poor”.

I AM CANBERRA as much as any politician and I didn’t decide any of those things.  Politicians from Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney decided those.   They are Australians, we are all Australians (time for a song??).  Canberra is a place where you can get a great cross section of what it means to be Australian – it’s where I love to live regardless of what politicians say or do all day up on the hill – Canberra is full of much more goodness than that.

The point of this blog post you ask?  A pro-Canberra rant? A stop Canberra bashing rant? A shameless plug for six of our clients? No – the whole point of this post was to give you a great lead into a really funny video (aired on ABC’s Hungry Beast TV show) that one of our friends at the Australian Instititue of Sport sent me through (We worked on their Tourism Award win with them).

This made me laugh – it’s got all the good bits of Canberra in it and does a great job of taking the piss at the same time – Truly Australian Humour.

Enjoy – Todd.

Actually, come to think of it their ads on TV have always been a bit over hyped for me, can Boost Juice really make you jump off the walls and run around and have fun? Is that giving a bit much credit to the energy value of a bit of ice and fruit juice, this ain’t Red Bull you know.  But TV advertising aside, I like the experiential marketing of the product on site, the price is right for me, they have a simple loyalty program (VIBE club), and the product is straight forward and consistently good.  My juice is the same in T2 Sydney Airport, Melbourne CBD and the Canberra Centre.  Wait a minute….consistency, service, young kids – this is starting to smell like that shop with the funny clown looking guy and the golden arches…..

So finally here is something to set Boost apart - a new adults only version of their advertising – with puppets. Yes, Puppets.  Boost’s new campaign introduces Mary Mango and Ron Banana to the world.  Styled off Entertainment Tonight presenters with a bit of Ron Burgundy ‘anchor man’ thrown in, these ads bring a new grown up Hollywood hype to the brand.  This campaign that has been launched using a social marketing mini site ‘Inside Juice’ http://www.insidejuice.com.au/ which sees a blog, facebook profile and no doubt there’s a twitter feed in there somewhere(wait – found it!) feeding juicy goss to the world.

Below is the 3rd in a series of Boost commercials and this one goes ‘ behind the scenes’ in the studio.

4 hours into the campaign and some of the blogs comments are interesting.  What interests me is if they are going to moderate, respond or engage with these comments or if just  a hang it in the wind and see what happens campaign (interesting comment about the yank accents).  Would love to see some onsite integration of the campaign in stores with Mary or Ron’s twitter feed being displayed on the plasma screens they have in most stores.   Taking online to the streets, come on Boost – you know you want it!