Digital Tip digital and social media advertising

Digital Tip

Digital advertising & social media marketing, Sydney, Australia

social networking

iPhone, AFL and social media

Being a big Australian Football League fan, (and Sydney Swans member), I was chuffed when the ultimate AFL application Aussie Rules Live was released. It has pretty much everything you need to follow your team and all the others, including live scores when the games are on.

AFL is a social game, with footy tipping giving you a reason to have a competition between your friends to see who gets through to the top of the ladder. You can extend your network outside of your immediate network to others who are also passionate about sport. It adds another dimension to use a tool such as Twitter to keep in touch with your favourite team for me its @sydneyswans, and your real and online friends live while the game is on.

How iPhone shapes social media

The infographics display from Apple’s WWDC conference has generated a lot of buzz. What’s really interesting is what it represents:

* There are now 50,000 + iPhone (and iPod Touch, so iPhone OS) applications less than a year since release of iPhone 3G.
* The displays are representing 20,000 of the most downloaded applications
* More than 1 billion apps downloaded, the milestone was reached in April 2009, again less than a year since iPhone 3G
* 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute
* New iPhone 3G S is faster, with video capabilities & even edit your video on the phone and share it straight to YouTube

I am an unashamed iPhone champion, I got one the day it was released in Australia. However, there are loads of detractors who keep looking for an iPhone killer, lauding Android, Blackberry and various Palm and Windows OS devices. The figures from Apple are significant enough to keep the competition at bay at least for the moment:

10 Twitter strategies for Australian brands

With all the mentions of Twitter in mainstream media, one could be turned off by the hype but Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks in Australia. Twitter is also very adaptable to long term strategies in social media marketing and there are some brands that use it well, and others who are virtually invisible.

I’ve identified 10 Twitter strategies now being used by Australian brands. I’ve divided them up arbitrarily into “Talking” and “Listening” and low interaction (one way) and higher engagement (two way interaction) and plotted some of the types (and the examples) in a matrix diagram.

Social Media Club Sydney plays nice

Authenticity and Transparency in Social Media Part 1 from SocialMediaClub Sydney on Vimeo.

We got over the hurdle of the initial Social Media Club Sydney inaugural event with a packed house of people who came to see Adam Ferrier talk about the Naked Communications Witchery Man “Girl in the Jacket” campaign and Leslie Nassar talk about his alter ego, the fake Stephen Conroy.

Beach Meet was on the week before and there were waves of hostility directed at PR agencies (accused of hijacking Twitter) and Social Media Club Sydney (accused of random stuff) was at an all time high. So much so that Kelly Tall was prompted to name the Twitter/blogosphere sniping and bitchiness a “feral sandpit”
Leslie already had a cult Twitter following, so he was likely to be OK. Given that the Witchery Man launch had already copped it on from the social media set, as well as digital marketing/regular advertising commentary, we were all steeling ourselves for some serious stoushing.
We never expected what happened.

Is it customer service if you’re not a customer?

When you’re interacting with brands using social media marketing: is it customer service if you’re not a customer?

With all the brands using social media to outreach and build up relationships, there are many paths to becoming a customer beyond the traditional one to many, company to customer “traditional” marketing model. Social media is causing a major rethink of the one way conversation. I found this great summary of the degrees of relationships in social media marketing…

Don’t believe the celebrity Twitter hype

This excerpt from E! Channel’s The Soup is from one week of Twitter mentions on prime time TV in the US. Even though the celebrities have been drawing the masses onto Twitter, Nielsen reported yesterday that around 60% of users signing up to Twitter “fail to return” after a month. The report has been picked up verbatim by the ABC & SBS and has been retweeted throughout the day. In Australia, the report hasn’t been given any kind of analysis or insight by people who actually use Twitter

In one corner we have “celebrities are bringing the masses to Twitter and ruining it for early adopters”. In the other corner we have “Twitter has only 40% retention rate for new users and won’t keep exponential growth”. Reality is somewhere in the middle, but do celebrities amplify the Twitter hype?