Are you a uni student or recent graduate with some sort of degree vaguely related to public relations or advermetising? Do you update your Facebook status more than once a day? Are you the Mayor of something other than your house on FourSquare? Do you want complimentary backstage passes to rock concerts, long boozy lunches and the envy of your peers? Do you like, stuff? Sweet. Come be our intern. We’ll even pay you from time to time.

We do stuff like:

• this
• and this
• and this
• and we made this
• and we have lots of other cool clients, like famous bands, fizzy drinks, football teams, fashion labels, Government departments and banks

We need someone to come and get a foot in the door and help us out with:

• Coming up with fun things to say on our clients Facebook pages
• Keeping up with fashion trends and tweeting about them (if you like that sort of thing)
• Media list compilationing and media liaisoning (not technical terms)
• Media release writing
• Writing pitch documents (fun)
• Media Monitoring (we’ll even pay you a decent amount of money for this bit)
• Maintaining Databases (yuck, we don’t want to do this but, hence: you)
• Campaign evaluating
• Media alert background briefings
• Event management

If you’ve got a passion for PR and want to come work in an agency that specialises in social media, this is your open door. We’ll be frank, we’re not guaranteeing we’ll hire you when the internship is up, but our last two interns ended up working for us. Hint.

Who are we?

We are DP Dialogue and we work very closely with the PR division of GDP. You’ll be working with both of us.

Where! Where! Where!

Brisbane, and the Gold Coast from time to time

How long is this for?

How long do you want? Maybe 100 hours. Maybe 3 months, depends on what works for you.

What will I learn?

You will leave the internship with a CSMEC (Certified Social Media Expert Certificate*).

You’ll also get your foot in the door at a cool Brisbane agency and get hands-on experience working on actual, real-life social media and PR campaigns with some of Qld’s biggest brands.

*Valid only at a Tweetup near you

How do I apply?

Send something which demonstrates your awesomeness to info (at) dpdialogue.com.au and make the subject line ‘Internship Awesomeness Application Thing’.

According to data released by ComScore this month, 800,000 Australians visited the Twitter website in June. Most of them had less than 10 followers and many had no followers at all, but regardless, 800,000 is a big number. It’s about 4% of our population, which makes it a critical mass. Twitter is here. It’s going to stay. It’s not a fad any more and, as of three months ago, its popularity was growing at a rate of 6000% per annum. Look at the chart of Twitter growth compared to Facebook growth and you’ll get the picture:

But just how popular are Facebook and Twitter going to get?

Twitter’s growth-rate of 6000% is, of course, completely unsustainable. If the site kept growing at that rate the entire population of Australia would be on the site by Christmas. That isn’t going to happen. Twitter is currently in the middle of the biggest growth spurt it’s ever going to have and basing predictions on the current rate would be pointless.

What we do know is that 6 million Australians now use (or at least spy on their grandkids using) Facebook and that figure is about double what it was last year. Twitter will never be as popular with the general population as Facebook because it’s nowhere near as handy for stalking potential bed-fellows, spying on your teenage children or organising parties. For that reason, Facebook seems likely to remain the social network of choice for those interested in, well, socially networking. Which is pretty much everyone.

MySpace, let’s face it, is like a virtual shopping mall where awkward teenagers congregate after the movie has finished and before they’ve found someone to pash. MySpace should have used its momentum, when it had some, to become an entertainment network. It could have rivalled YouTube, but it was being run by old media folks who were too scared of being sued, too worried about pissing off advertisers, and didn’t understand that everything is now free. Watch those same old-media folks push News Corp into the grave by charging for online content.

For that reason, Facebook, in my humble opinion, will continue to dominate. And when an organisation dominates online, when a website becomes the market leader, all the other players fall by the wayside. Look at Google — Microsoft can’t even claw 5% market share and they own the fricking operating system AND the most popular web browser. Amazon is killing the competition, Seek.com.au rules jobs, eBay stands alone (except in New Zealand, where TradeMe stands alone). Facebook is in exactly the same position. Facebook will continue to grow because its market share is now so great it will be too inconvenient for people to go elsewhere. At least for the next few years. Look at the following Google Trends chart if you don’t believe me. The blue line is MySpace, the red one is Facebook. The blue line is actually going down pretty steeply, it’s just not going up as steeply as the red one:

Google Trends: MySpace vs. Facebook

My prediction is that Facebook will peak in 2010, by which time it will have around half the Australian population as regular visitors: 10,000,000 unique visitors a month. It will level out from there and most likely decline if the next big thing comes along. And keep in mind, that may not happen. There has, so far, been no ‘next’ Google. Fads replace fads, but useful tools just stick around. (Remember when people thought the Internet was a fad?)

Geocities was ‘the next big thing’. MySpace was ‘the next big thing’. Blogs were ‘the next big thing for business.’ But they all fell by the wayside because something better came along. MySpace replaced personal website building tools like Geocities because it was easier and it connected people. Facebook replaced MySpace because it had better tools, did a much better job of connecting people and was so simple even your parents could use it (damnit). Twitter replaced blogs for business because blogs were hard work. Blogs took time, effort, and they’re long. Twitter is quick, easy and short. Any business owner with a computer can setup a Twitter account and even an illiterate monkey can keep it updated.

People will soon get sick of Tweeting among their friends because it’s too limiting. It’s no secret that I’m not a big Twitter fan and I prefer Tumblr, but for businesses, Twitter is the ultimate communication channel. Dell have made $3 million from retail offers on Twitter and Starbucks use it as an EDM solution. It’s a complete no-brainer. Every business should be on Twitter right now. Even if they just use it as a news feed.

Where will Twitter go from here? It’s hard to say. The model is flawed, all they’re doing is providing an easy-to-use news feed. They have zero competitive advantage and no real USP. All they have is a brand; a cute little blue bird; but the brand has the equity of an eagle. My prediction is that within two years 70% of Australian businesses with a website will also be on Twitter. There’ll be around 3 million account holders, but more importantly, I think Twitter is going to have more unique visitors than Facebook, just. By 2011 you won’t be able to interact with an Australian business without coming into contact with their Twitter feed. I’m calling it 10,000,001 unique users a month.

What do you think?

Yves Klein Blue are a band. They’re from Brisbane, they’re friends with the band I’m in and I happen to think they’re awesome. Their album came out on Friday and, as I suspected it would be, it’s bloody marvellous. You may know the song ‘Polka’ from that Mitsubishi Lancer commercial, and if you don’t know it, that’s OK, they’re probably not overly concerned because 75,000 other people have listened to it on YouTube, which is rather a lot of ‘reach’. I talk about music every so often on this blog because it’s one of my top four favourite things (the others being marketing, cooking and vintage motorcycles), but the reason I’m talking about Yves Klein Blue today is because they are a marvellous case study of how you can use social media to market things. At least, they could have been…

You see, Yves Klein Blue aren’t a particularly huge band. They’re signed to a major independent record label called Dew Process, they’ve been doing the rockstar dream thing and have just recorded their album in America with a big-name producer, they’re playing all the right festivals, but they’re certainly a long way behind some of their other label contemporaries (The Living End and Ben Lee, for example) in terms of popularity and chart success. As a marketing case study, they’re starting from a reasonably clean slate, which is a good place to start from if you want to do some quantitative analysis.

The trouble is, despite bringing The Population on board to kick-start their album launch with a wonderful, if not entirely original, idea for a Twitter application and a competition to win tickets to the Splendour in the Grass festival by mentioning the bands name and what you’d do to win the tickets, they don’t seem to have created much of a splash. I’m certainly not knocking The Population’s work mind you, I think the ideas were great. I’m just surprised that for a band with over 75,000 views on YouTube they haven’t created a bigger buzz so far. Check out this graph which shows the number of Twitter mentions (positive AND negative) each day since the campaign launched and you’ll see what I mean:

Before the Twitter campaign launched Yves Klein Blue were being mentioned a small handful of times a day. In the week since the campaign launched, they have been  mentioned 234 times (Twitter Search’s figures aren’t historically accurate as they don’t count people who tweeted and then deleted). That’s a lot more than a handful, but it’s not exactly overwhelming. Cabbage is more popular than that.

Perhaps it’s too early to judge, perhaps this is the calm before the storm, but right now, the graph of people Tweeting about Yves Klein Blue seems to be going nowhere. Seth Godin (if it’s still cool to quote him) would call that a ‘dip‘. I’m wondering just exactly what sort of success they were aiming for? I’ve giving a talk at this month’s Sydney Social Media club about measurement in social media marketing. One of the great things about having a social media monitoring tool so close at hand is that it becomes a lot easier to calculate the reach of social media marketing campaigns, which makes it much easier to justify ROI to marketing managers.

Whichever tool you use, you can calculate the reach of the first week of Yves Klein Blue’s album launch Twitter campaign in a number of ways:

1. Calculate the number of people who downloaded a song (presumably that was the primary goal)
2. Calculate the number of individual people who tweeted about Yves Klein Blue (that’s the number of people who actually engaged with the campaign, they’d be more likely to go on and make a purchase)
3. Calculate the number of tweets which mentioned Yves Klein Blue (a handy figure for charts)
4. Calculate the number of people who saw tweets about Yves Klein Blue (this will look way impressive when you do your powerpoint presentation at the end of the month, but in reality, if any of these people were interested enough they would have then tweeted about it themselves and we’d know who they were)

I don’t know how many people actually physically downloaded a song but the record company will; although I can’t imagine they’re suffering bandwidth problems at this stage (it’ll be around 100). Anyone can count the number of individual people who tweeted, and the total number of tweets that mentioned Yves Klein Blue was 234.  The overall exposure to those tweets (what traditional media planners would traditionally call ‘reach’) you’d calculate by multiplying the number of mentions by the number of followers each tweeter had at the time of tweeting. If you were being honest, you’d also subtract the negative mentions multiplied by the number of people who saw those. Danica Davis from Brisbane was actually the only naysayer of the bunch and remarked to her 94 followers “omg how bad are yves klein blue“. While Danica doesn’t bring the overall total down too much (hint: it’s at the low end of the five figure scale), at the end of the day, this is the digital world and traditional reach doesn’t count for much - not when you can get precise figures for the exact number of people who actually engaged with the campaign and took an action of some sort.

The campaign is hardly a ‘fail’ (hell, as much as I like them, they’re not Radiohead), but it does go to show that you just can’t trust ‘reach’ as an indicator of campaign success, no matter what the medium.

What do you think?

I just got this email newsletter from my brother’s cafe. He has no formal training in integrated marketing communications, but bloody hell, he’s doing a good job at it. I’ve made some notes below on why it’s such a great newsletter. Have a read…

Hey everyone,

It’s been a week or two since our last update and it is definitely time for a new business of the week.

[Regular updates are great, especially if they add value to the readers]

In about 20 minutes, we are going to be changing our single origin roast to a Columbian Supremo. This Smooth and mellow bean has been roasted a bit darker this week and it is giving off this amazing caramelized citrus flavour. Usually a fairly acidic coffee, roasting this a bit further has given it that sweet caramel that it needed and the mouth feel is thick and delicious! One espresso wasn’t enough and I fear that I’ll have too many while trying to chase that flavour again.

[Bang, straight up you can tell this guy loves his coffee, so you trust his opinion, and there's something timely right at the top to keep regular readers interested. News in a newsletter, fancy that.]

For the coffee adventurists, I have got my hands on a blend called ‘The mother of all coffees’. This is packed full of a wickedly strong Robusta and it is going to knock your socks off! If you feel like a big perk to your morning, come in and ask for some. It won’t be available to the public but I will let you in on my private stash! I just spent a week in Melbourne and I’m proud to say that the coffee we are getting roasted for us is well up there with some of the countries finest. I dragged my girlfriend around the cities laneways in an espresso nirvana and found some great little eateries; if you are heading down that way soon, drop in and ask me where to get lost in the city, you won’t be disappointed.

[Helpful, personal; this is value. This guy actually cares about you and your love of coffee. You won't find this level of personalisation at a Starbucks]

This week’s Business card winner is Linda McKewin from Style Magazines. Linda needs to contact either by email, in person or by phone to claim her 5 FREE DRINKS. Remember, you need to read these emails to be in the running for the free drinks and if you have ever placed your card in the draw or if you receive these emails, you are still in the running to win them for yourself.

[What a great touch - promoting the business that wins your lucky business card draw to your whole mailing list. It's a win-win situation and a real incentive to enter.]

This months Trivia night is this Thursday night and it is booked out already. We had an amazing response after the last one and were booked out two weeks ago. If you want to be involved in July’s event, then get in touch with us soon and book your team of four.

[Trivia nights are lesson one in Cafe Marketing 101, clearly it's working too, turning a usually slow night into a packed event. This isn't a desperate plea for someone to come, it's a genuine word of advice that you'd better book early]

Ok, I’ll let you get back to work now, Remember though to sign up to our twitter page for daily specials on coffee and food.

[A Cafe on Twitter isn't anything new, but Dave is doing it particularly well, offering daily specials for those who stay tuned. He tells me it's working really well too - the Twitter followers feel like they're part of a special tribe]

Cheers,

Dave Granfield [owner]

Star Gardentown Cafe

Cnr. Margaret & Victoria St

p. 4637 8744

[Nice work bro!]

OK, so that’s an attention grabbing headline, but I don’t think it’s far off. We’ve launched a social network for ABC Learning Centres you see, and I think it’s pretty on the mark in terms of community engagement and potential results. It’s called Childcare Chat. All the boxes are ticked - transparency (tick), involving an existing community of interest instead of trying to concoct a fake one (Pimp My Noodle anyone?) tick, quick response times from the community managers (tick), engaging content (tick).

ABC Childcare Centres, if you weren’t already aware, have been through a rough patch of lately. (I’m being conservatively liberal with the term ‘rough patch’ there by the way. Saying ABC have been through a rough patch is a bit like saying General Motors is going through a little turbulence). After borrowing a heck of a lot of money to buy day care centres around the world (I think they have debts of $1.5 billion) the company is now in receivership and their hands are tied by the administrators who run the show. The ‘colourful’ (my liberal conservative use of adjectives continues) former CEO Eddy Groves no longer has anything to do with the organisation and the new management team is keen to move forward, but as bad press is about the only media coverage they get, life has been tough for their marketing department, even for an organisation that has a bigger presence and takes up more real estate in this country than McDonalds.

The core problem is that parents who have children at ABC are generally quite happy with the service (I’ve sat in on the research sessions myself and have seen their joy first-hand) but when they go to a barbecue and get asked about where they send their kids, the rumours and negativity have made it hard for them to justify their decision to their peers. Word of mouth has been identified as one of the biggest influencers for parents when it comes to deciding which centre they should send their kids to, but with such a huge amount of negative press around, finding positive reviews ain’t easy. The solution? A social network/video forum where parents, potential parents and staff can ask questions, share experiences and report problems. The result is www.childcarechat.com.au - take a peek, it’s open to the public.

Obviously by opening up lines of communication to anyone who wants to chat, ABC aren’t going to get all positive reviews (in fact, the balance has shifted towards the negative side), but most of the issues so far have come from former staff, or people who’ve had a misunderstanding. However, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t really matter. Potential parents  who wouldn’t ever consider going to an ABC Centre to check it out for themselves now have the opportunity to snoop online, and instead of seeing the usually corporate ‘we’re the best’ yaddah yaddah, spun from the desks of the PR people, they can see honest discussion about the company, its customers and its staff.

Not many corporations are willing to be that honest about themselves, but in the case of ABC, who don’t really have a lot to lose, it works out. The effect negative reviews had on online book sales was evaluated in a September 2005 study by researchers from the Yale School of Management. They, not surprisingly, found that mostly negative reviews for a product on a site like Amazon.com translates into less sales. However, if a book had a lot of positive reviews and a few negative ones thrown in the mix, customers appreciated the honest feedback, felt re-assured that the reviews weren’t rigged, and accepted the fact that you can’t please everyone. Negative reviews actually made them more likely to purchase the book.

Whilst buying a book is a completely different sort of purchasing decision to choosing a company to raise your first-born-child, the end goal of each consumer is the same - to find out what your peers think. The worst case scenario here for ABC is that people will read what they already know - that there are a few people out there with gripes about past practices, staff levels, wage rates and the like. At best, potential parents who would never have considered ABC as an option can jump online and see some honest stories from real parents who are actually quite happy with the level of care they get. Furthermore, existing customers can also take comfort knowing that they aren’t ‘bad’ parents for sending their kids to ABC and that they’re not alone. The end goal should be increased positive word of mouth and, ultimately, more enrolments.

Given that the site was only launched last week it’s too early to tell if we’ve achieved that yet, but in terms of providing a platform for community engagment that will ultimately lead to a better bottom-line for one of the largest commercial organisations in this country, Childcare Chat could well be one of the best uses of social media in Australia.

If you’re interested in reading more on the project, Nathan Bush (A.K.A. Another Advertising Wanker) played an integral part in the site’s development and he’s written up his take on it at his blog. Mumbrella also did a pre-launch article on it here. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece on it yesterday, which blogger Matt Crozier was quick to call out as a beat-up.

What do you think? Is a social media platform the right solution for ABC?

The Internet is a largely unregulated place. Sure, corporate lawyers try and throw their muscle around when they sniff a suit, but the reality is, there are no rules. Rotten.com still exists over a decade on; spam continues to infiltrate from the darkest corners of the globe and short of selling kiddie porn, you can get away with anything you want; no matter how bizarre, how random (WTF?), how sick or how depraved. It’s the interwebs. That’s the way we like it. The less rules, the better, just as long as you’re not hurting anyone.

Daniel Oyston, my favourite Canberra-based writer since the late (great) Matt Price, wrote a lovely little piece yesterday about the rules of social media engagement - the ones that have been made up by social media commentators along the way. He questioned whether we should try and follow them, or just give up and let the marketers do what they want.

He knew the answer of course; dumb marketers will corrupt anything to make a quick buck. As former Naked exec Mat Baxter said over at MumBrella the other day: “We’re aware of the hypothetical rules in this sphere - there are a lot of people out there who claim to have the rule book. But the reality is that it will be shaped by what the consumer will tolerate.”

If a client ever comes to me asking for a stategy their consumers will ‘tolerate’, I will resign, on the spot (not once the press gets hold of it, not after no-one can believe what I’ve said anymore because I’ve lied to them in the past) because I will know right then and there that I have failed in my fundamental role as a marketing consultant, whose fundamental job is to build relationships with people; long-lasting ones. Profitable ones. Ones built on mutual respect.

Go to any party and the most popular person is the one who talks the loudest. They’re the one with the best stories (even if you know they’re lies); the one you tolerate because they’re good for a laugh after a few beers. They have the most friends when everyone is drunk and doesn’t care, but when people need someone to rely on, when they’re moving house, breaking up, falling in love and falling over, they’re the person you call after you’ve spoken to your real friends. If you want people to rely on your brand, you don’t want to be that person. You don’t want to lie to people.

You want to be the first person they call.

I’ve been lucky in the last few months to work with a bunch of clients who understand that fundamental value - that in an age where customer recommendations fly around the planet at the speed of light, 87% of people trust their friends opinions and only 14% trust ads any more (Source: Neilsen Global Trust in Adversiting urvey, 2007), any marketing strategy not built on trust is doomed to fail. I get to launch two massive social media campaigns in the coming months. One involves a company with a bigger presence in this country than McDonalds - another one involves a drink brand that outsells Coke in Queensland. It’s going to be interesing to put my money where my mouth is for those, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share the rules of social media engagement as I outline them to clients. These rules were born out of The Cluetrain Manifesto (a must read for anyone who thinks customers are happy to ‘tolerate’) and have grown up quickly after watching countless stupid marketers fuck their clients over by recommending social media strategies that take consumers for granted.

If you’re running a social media campaign, or a business for that matter, forget any other rules you’ve heard. Forget what the latest, greatest theory is, forget what your new Twitter hero said last night, forget what your lecturer said at uni, forget what your mate said at the pub, forget what your boss recommended, forget what the client says they want. These are the rules you need to obey:

Rule 1: Treat your customers the same way you’d treat your friends.

That is all.

Three thoughts:

1. One of the gifts I bought myself for Christmas was the latest hardcover edition of Kotler’s standard textbook, Principles of Marketing. Nowhere in the index or table of contents does it mention Christmas. This is a good thing.
2. I was given the board game Mastermind as a present. It’s cool. They have an official iPhone app, which is nice to see. By having Mastermind at my fingertips, I will have more exposure to the brand and the iPhone app will most likely make me want play the board game more. If only the Scrabble people would cotton-on to the idea.
3. Merry Christmas!