PART TWO: How to be a successful blogger and why you and your company should blog

This year Fenton Communications hosted a Fenton Innovation Series Lunch with Alister Cameron, Blogologist and Head of Digital at World Vision Australia. Alister has an impressive standing in social media with 385, 000+ twitter followers (with 500 new followers a day!). Within his first six months of blogging, he was ranked as the fifth most read blogger nationwide.

If you haven’t yet read Part One: Optimising social media impact. Get up to date here.

Humanising your company
Alister Cameron states the main benefit of blogging is in its ability to humanise your company. Social media is all about “humans, feeling more human” and with its ever-building popularity it is more important than ever to be able to create that humanising link to your company.

As Alister says, a blog is essentially a content management system (displayed in reverse chronological order) that allows interaction through commenting and sharing. A blog is the perfect companion to your web page, as it allows you to “say more, and say it better” through more regular interaction with potential clients or consumers.

The narrative form of a blog is a very efficient way of engaging consumers, and by having multiple bloggers contribute, you can spread the workload and increase the sense of involvement in the company. In saying that, Alister says to make sure you have a staging function where all posts can be edited before being approved and sent out. Consider creating a blogging guideline document for your staff, it is important to first set your expectations for your blog and then stick to them.

Alister’s Top Tips for being a successful blogger.

1. Find your voice and create your brand.
2. Remember, blogging is 10% writing and 90% networking. Comment on other people’s blogs and always leave a link back to your own.
3. Figure out who the experts in your field are and follow them. Create an RSS feed (Feedly is a great service) with all the important blogs you should be following and understand who and what they are talking about.
4. Find out who the mega bloggers are and attempt to be the “FIRST!” to leave a witty and insightful comment on their blog post. Readers of their blog will often read the first few comments left, especially if they found the post interesting or controversial. Note: writing FIRST in all caps does not count as a witty and insightful comment, see this website for more hints on what not to do.
5. In your posts, follow on from a topic initiated by another blogger, rather than plucking a topic from nowhere. This way, you can link to the other post (which the blogger will appreciate) and by also posting a comment on their original post, direct their loyal followers to your page.
6. Utilise all the tools available to you, including video (YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google) and keep up a steady pace of activity. Alister recommends at least 1-4 updates per week depending on the size of your company, the more regularly you update, the more you encourage clients and customers to check back in with you.

Without a doubt Alister Cameron’s advice and knowledge were of great benefit to all those who attended the lunch, we look forward to the next event in our Fenton Innovation Series.

You can follow Alister Cameron on twitter @alicam and check out his blog www.alistercameron.com.

In case you missed it, the Federal Budget was revealed this week with Treasurer Wayne Swan announcing a surplus for the first time since 1990. Nicknamed the Battlers Budget, highlights include bonus payments for parents of school-aged children, the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and an increase in the tax-free threshold. Savings were made by cuts to defence spending, abandoning the planned company tax cut and delaying an increase in the foreign aid budget. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s budget reply accused the Federal Government of  “playing the class war card.”

Universitas21 has released its rankings of National Higher Education Systems with Australia coming in 8^th, ahead of the UK at 10^th. The report revealed Australia is among those with the largest proportion of workers with higher level education as well as the highest proportion of international student numbers. The success of the education systems are measured in four main areas; resources (expenditure), environment (gender balance, policies), connectivity and output. What Australia lacks in resources, it made up for in other areas.

The long-running class action against failed property group Centro will be settled for a record $200 million, the biggest settlement in Australian legal history. The deal will be first explained to the 6,000 participants in the class action and return to court in a months time, where it will have to be judged as ‘fair’ before being approved. The ten week long trial racked up around $50 million in legal costs alone, and it is yet to be determined how much of the $200 million will filter through to shareholders.

Link shortening and tracking service bit.ly has revealed the best times to post online, and it’s different for each network. In their blog post, they identified that Twitter and Facebook get more action during the week – peaking early afternoon, whilst Tumblr was drastically different with most activity from Friday night right through the weekend. Bitly likens social networks to neighbourhood restaurants, with each having their own culture and behavior patterns. They say by understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, content can be published at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.

It’s the battle of the banks after RBA reduced the cash rate by 0.5% this week. National Australian Bank reduced their mortgage rates by 0.32 per cent and Westpac cut theirs by 0.37 per cent, in response but Commonwealth Bank trumped their rivals by handing down a 0.4 per cent cut. Eyes are on ANZ now as who are not expected to announce their decision until next week.

The Federal Government announced funding for NDIS will be brought forward a year to be included in next week’s federal budget. Support groups have welcomed the announcement with Prime Minister Julia Gillard revealing the service will operate in up to four locations, helping 10, 000 people with disability.

Every leap year the same important debate is reignited, it centres around what the Australian Olympic Team will be wearing at the opening ceremony. For the first time, the uniform has been revealed ahead of the ceremony – at fashion week no less! With a few exceptions, the uniform has been well received. The retro sports jacket and customised volley’s making up the “classically Australian” outfit. Athletes were given the opportunity for input into the London 2012 uniform, aiming for comfort and the ability to suit all body types.

It’s been a big week for Facebook, but then it always is. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans for initial public offering (IPO) of Facebook shares at a price range of $28 to $35 each. Selling 30.2 million of his own shares, this could make him up to $1bn richer. In other Facebook news, users in the US and Britain can now sign up as organ donors and advertise their decision to family and friends on their timeline. Already Donate Life California has seen a 1,300 per cent increase in online registrations since the technology’s introduction on Tuesday.

Anzac Day fell on a cold and misty Wednesday this year, though it didn’t deter the 10, 000 marchers who braved the weather to march from the National Gallery of Victoria to the Shrine of Remembrance. In Gallipoli, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that Anzac Day has grown beyond it’s military roots to represent all that the nation embodies, and held more significance for most of the nation than Australia Day.

Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper stood down this week under allegations of fraud and sexual harassment laid by former aide James Ashby. The Federal Government supported Mr Slipper’s return to his chair if cleared of criminal charges of fraud and will allow him to continue to work during the sexual harassment proceedings.

The News of the World phone hacking scandal continued to flood media this week as Rupert Murdoch accused senior employees of his News of the World newspaper of running a deliberate cover-up. He has also been locked in dispute with former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown over the souring of their relationship, claiming that Mr Brown “declared war” on his company in 2009.

Historians are using Twitter to re-enact the battle for the Gallipoli peninsula during World War I. In a world first, historians are Tweeting all the key events of the eight month battle to the exact minute they occurred 97 years ago. The @Gallipoli_Live account started on March 18 and will continue through to January 9, 2013. Is this the first step towards virtual reality?

By Alex Haddon

The Victorian Ombudsman, Mr George Brouwer this week released his findings on the inquiry into the prison system, following the murder of gangland leader Carl Williams whilst incarcerated. Mr Brouwer reported there were failures and dysfunction at the highest levels of the Victorian Justice system, though no prominent decision maker has been made accountable yet.

This week is National Youth Week with a number of events happening around the country. The celebration of youth has highlighted a number of issues facing youth today including homelessness and unemployment. Mission Australia’s State Director Emma Cassar called for more integrated services to assist youth into the workforce due to the complex needs of young people.

The Federal Government has announced a $1000 bonus for employers who hire and retain workers over the age of 50 in an attempt to counter age discrimination. The bonus, announced as part of the government’s response to the report Realising the Economic Potential of Senior Australians will be available to 10, 000 workplaces from July. The report found that failing to harness the potential of older workers was costing the Australian economy $10.8bn a year.

An online survey shows job hunters and employers are turning to social media in increasing numbers. The report found LinkedIn to be the most successful service at getting candidates into jobs and Twitter drove double the job views and triple the applications that Facebook managed this year. A more competitive job market means that prospective employees resort to as many means possible to give them the edge over other applicants. Employers are finding that social media enables them to reach a broader audience with their message. Perhaps soon we’ll be tweeting job offers!

PART ONE: Optimising social media impact.

This week Fenton Communications hosted a Fenton Innovation Series lunch with Alister Cameron, Blogologist (not biologist!) and Head of Digital at World Vision Australia. Alister has an impressive standing in social media with 385, 000+ twitter followers (with 500 new followers a day!). Within his first six months of blogging, he was ranked as the fifth most read blogger nationwide.

Who better then to help Fenton staff and clients understand how to optimise social media impact and understand its role in a strategic communications campaign?

Proving the worth of social media
A key point of discussion was the need to validate the time and money put into social media campaigns over more traditional methods. Alister cites the old adage “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Unfortunately with social media, it’s not as simple as correlating dollar in – dollar out amounts as Internet space can’t be physically measured.

So how do you convince your CFO or CMO that it’s worth the time and money it takes to invest in developing a social media program? Alister’s advice is simple, start with the metrics that you have access to and present them in persuasive visual graphs (with lines to demonstrate growth, impact and value!).

The most basic charts should correlate revenue figures against key social media activity. More in depth data can be sought through a number of analytics programs available to identify where consumer traffic is coming from.

Convert visits to action
Whilst data demonstrating increased traffic flow to your website can seem positive, Alister says the real focus should be optimising what traffic you already have. This is known as Conversion Maximisation. If your page has one thousand visitors a day, a 50% increase in action once on the page is far more beneficial than five hundred new visits to the page.

This means that your website or page must have a clear call to action or sales pitch, and your e-commerce functions should be simple and up to date. Alister says that while being followed on Twitter or liked on Facebook is a great step, an email address or mobile number is worth much more. In a live feed, a tweet lasts an average of five minutes, and a status update on Facebook an average of five hours.

With an email address your information far more likely to be seen and you have the luxury of targeting your information and distributing it on your own schedule.

Going viral
With the theme of this lunch it was of course impossible not to touch on the Kony 2012 phenomenon (See previous post : What SM/Marketing/PR people can learn from the Kony 2012 campaign). Alister says the power of the campaign was in Invisible Children’s knowledge of the important people, and the tools necessary to utilise them.

Their method was to first build relationships with thousands of school-aged children, and use the sheer power of numbers to reach all the important and influential people they could- starting with Rihanna. Of course Invisible children could have asked Rihanna to retweet their message directly, but what was far more powerful was asking thousands of her fans to bombard her all at the same time, making it a message impossible to ignore.

With viral campaigns, Alister says it’s not important whether your information reaches your target market directly, as the aim is just to reach critical mass and raise your profile. He cited the “Will it Blend?” videos by BlendTec as another example of a successful campaign (see BlendTec’s YouTube channel).

Stay tuned for PART TWO: How to be a successful blogger and why you and your company should blog.

For a while there it looked as if kangaroos and meat pies would be on their lonesome but thanks to a $275 million federal and state government assistance package, Holden cars will stay on the quintessentially Australian list. This is in return for a $1 billion investment and a promise to produce two new cars in Australia in the second half of the decade. South Australian MP Jay Weatherill who contributed $50 million on behalf of the state said that the money came with conditions and they are going to “hold their feet to the fire”.

In memory of the passing of AFL Legend and all-round good guy Jim Stynes this week, the Gillard Government has committed $3 million to establish a new scholarship for disadvantaged children. There will be 37 annual scholarships in total in recognition of the number Stynes wore on his footy jumper during his playing days. The AFL will partner with the Government to offer the scholarships to “young kids who come from indigenous or multicultural backgrounds or suffer from disadvantage and need a leg up in life” Ms Gillard said in a statement.

According to a report released this week by Mission Australia (Fenton client), Young Aboriginal people value getting a job more than non-Aboriginal youth, rating it as third most important after family and friends. More than a third (36.2 per cent) of Aboriginal people aged 11 to 24 consider getting a job of major importance, compared to about one in five (21.7 per cent) non-Aboriginal people. This is an increase of 10.6 per cent on the previous year and the highest value young Aboriginal people have placed on getting a job since the survey began in 2005.

And in social media news, it’s time to update your Facebook page as some major changes will come into play late next week. Timelines will become the norm for all company and personal pages alike giving a more homogenous viewing experience. While most elements of a page will transfer over easily, landing pages will become defunct and snazzy headers will need to be sought pronto. For a nifty example – check out the ABC’s Facebook page which has details on its timeline stretching back 80 years! For more information on how you can prepare your Facebook page check out this great blog article by (unrelated) Fenton Communications in the US.

Generation Y, often lambasted as being apathetic, celebrity driven and shallow could lose that tag and be known for something else, unfortunately not something better. According to a new study, one in three Gen Ys will have diabetes by 2025. Type 2 diabetes is potentially preventable in many people by improving lifestyle but Type 1 is also continuing to rise at about three per cent a year in Australia, among the highest in the world.

While mining continues to provide truck-loads of jobs, construction and retail are likely to feel the pinch in a big way. A report reveals that more than 118, 000 traditional retail jobs could be lost thanks to the online shopping boom. The construction industry isn’t looking any better; losing 244 jobs a day in the past three months with predictions it will continue to contract a further 10 per cent.

The National Health and Medical Research Council has come out swinging against homeopaths warning that it might declare their work baseless and unethical. A draft public statement concluded it was “unethical for health practitioners to treat patients using homeopathy, for the reason that homeopathy (as a medicine or procedure) has been shown not to be efficacious”.

In social media news, the hottest new hardware product has just gone on sale – the iPad 3. Although it only offers incremental improvements, fans camped out late into the night to be the first in Australia to have the hot new product. Despite being labelled 4G, it won’t be compatible with the 4G networks of both Telstra and Optus.

If you are reading this now, I’m willing to hedge my bets that you have in some way come across the Kony2012 campaign. The campaign run by not-for-profit Invisible Children has had blanket coverage across all mediums and has brought attention of an atrocious issue to a new audience. As with most things that are successful (especially in Australia with the tall poppy syndrome) the campaign and Invisible Children have some strong critics about what they are actually achieving and how their money is being used. Surely what is undisputed though is the effectiveness of the Kony2012 campaign in gaining mainstream awareness.

This post will look at why this campaign has been so successful in raising awareness of an issue and what public relations, marketing and social media lessons can be learned from it.

Lets start by looking at the campaigns achievements so far:

-       Youtube views: 43 million in four days.

-       Facebook : 2.3 million likes

-       Trending on Twitter for two days in a row

-       Twitter: 365,000 followers

-       Whole documentary shown commercial free and a special edition of The Project dedicated to it on Channel 10 during prime time.

-       Coverage on the ABC News Online, The Age, Herald Sun, Channel 7’s Sunrise and all other major media outlets.

So why the success?

Concept:

‘Lets make Kony famous’ is the crux of the campaign. It’s easily understood, easy to action and very simple. The political instability, cultural infighting, power struggles and oppression for the last 30 years in Uganda has been simplified into a very simple message – here’s a bad guy, lets make people know about him. It is very simple, people can understand it and more importantly, people can easily get involved with it. Kony2012 also uses the ‘limited time offer’ technique by saying that 2012 is THE year for action – urgency is key to getting a response.

Directness:

After bombarding viewers with emotional heart wrenching content, the filmmaker then spells out to the viewers exactly what they can do to help – even more simply than when he explains the situation to his four year old son.  People are directly told to submit their support, order a promotional pack and share the content online. If you want people to do something with your idea – telling them exactly what to do is often the best way to go about it.

Shareability:

Invisible Children gave people something that they could share. If the campaign had asked people to write stories to each other about atrocities in Uganda it would have failed – people don’t have the knowledge or drive to create content on their own. Instead they were given a tidily packaged video that is custom built to be shared via their online social channels. Minimum effort – maximum feel good factor.

The initial phase of the campaign has been a resounding success in creating awareness but it is not over yet. On April 20^th Invisible children is encouraging people to cover their cities with marketing collateral to bring attention to the cause. It will be interesting to see how this eventuates and how long the campaign lingers in the public interest.

As the Labor pains give birth to a whitewash of media coverage of the leadership spill – it’s particularly worthy to keep an eye on the stories that are filling the later pages in the newspaper.

The industrial action planned by Nurses in Victoria for instance has had the oxygen sapped from it’s flame of newsworthiness and not even the intervention of Federal Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten could gain it further attention. Despite this attempt 300 nurses walked off their job from several hospitals in Melbourne for four hours this morning. Three new hospitals will join the movement until the dispute is resolved.

It was a massive week for the education sector with a report by David Gonski arguing that $5 billion in annual recurrent funding is needed to address a two-tier system of advantage and disadvantage. The report highlights the importance of educational outcomes not being as a result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions. In the past 10 years, Australian children have slipped from being equal second in reading among OECD countries to being equal seventh and from  equal fifth to equal 13^th in maths.

New South Wales has beaten Victoria to become to ban smoking in outdoor eating areas, however the bans themselves won’t be felt until 2015. The bans will also include smoking in playgrounds, public sports grounds, swimming pools, transport stops and entrances to public buildings.

And in social media news this week we might delve back into the political foray to compare the Twitter styles of Rudd and Gillard.

Rudd interacts with his followers and family, is personable, jocular and appears to write personally. “Sorry to anyone (those of you who have a life) watching the cricket on TV. Promise not to do it again. KRudd”

Gillard’s tweets are much more policy and action based and are also partly written by her team of supporters. “Right now: The PM is holding a press conference in Melbourne. Watch it live here”

While both styles differ, they are importantly both quite authentic and there are positives to both approaches. What sets them apart are their intended audiences and their number of followers show the difference JG 186,955 – KR 1,071,252.

The evaluation of public relations activities has been a hotly debated topic for as long as many of us in the profession can remember.

With no one campaign being the same, there is no set methodology that can be applied to measure the success of every campaign. It is therefore important that measurement tools be devised and agreed upon between anagency and client at the start of any campaign, which directly reflect the objectives of that campaign.

It sounds simple but if a campaign has been designed to raise awareness then the measurement tools required to assess the success of that campaign should measure awareness. A folder of media clips does not measure awareness.

Instead, it might mean a dip in research to gain an understanding of what the desired public know prior to the commencement of a campaign and then again post the campaign – has the level of knowledge grown over the campaign period?

If the objective is to drive traffic to a website, metrics should be used to measure traffic to the nominated website and then the questions asked – has traffic increased to the website during the campaign period? Has the audience visited the appropriate website pages and how long was each visit? Have they done what we wanted them to do during their visit?

In many instances a pile of clippings or what is referred to as “columns inches” is mistakenly used as a method of evaluating the worth of public relations. While this is used to place a dollar value on coverage, it does nothing to measure campaign success unless the objective was to raise a certain value of media coverage (And even then this evaluation method is flawed as we will explain later).

The measurement of columns inches is generally calculated by way of the AVE or ‘advertising value equivalent’.

AVEs are calculated by multiplying the size of an article for print and length in time for broadcast achieved during a campaign, by the cost it would normally be to purchase that space in advertising.  In many instances it is perceived that editorial coverage is of a different value to advertising and this figure is therefore multiplied anywhere between three to 10 times and in some instances even more, to get an overall value. There is no consistent rule for this calculation.

The Public Relations Institute of Australia issued a position paper in 1999 on research and evaluation that stated:

“The PRIA does not recognise Advertising Value Equivalents of editorial media coverage as a reliable or valid evaluation methodology. Editorial and advertising cannot be directly compared.”

                                    PRIA Australia

When looking at a true measure of success AVE doesn’t get to the heart of a campaign to understand how this media has helped achieve objectives.

As stated, no one campaign is the same and therefore the methods of evaluation will differ across each campaign. When devising evaluation metrics;

1. Consider your evaluation at the start of your campaign – don’t wait until the end.

- The end it is too late to understand what the situation was at the beginning (Eg: awareness levels)

- You may need to implement specific tools throughout the campaign period to help measure success – considering these at the end will be too late

- You don’t want to get to the end of a campaign only to disagree on how the campaign should be measured – Agreeing upfront can also help fine tune the tactical execution

2.  Get to the heart of what you are trying to achieve and devise and implement the best tools to measure this – Remember media clippings do not demonstrate a change in awareness or perception

Demonstrate the success of your campaign by measuring exactly what it is you set out to achieve and in doing so, put the value into your evaluation.