On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to attend Wiki Wednesday at Google HQ. When I was RSVP’ing, I noticed that the format was short round robin talks of 5 – 15mins. One of the suggested topics was “How wiki’s integrate with Enterprise 2.0 tools such as Yammer and Blogs”. I thought to myself, if I am going to be there, I might as well do a short presentation on Yammer.
I had originally planned to talk about all 3 and how they work together. Given the time restriction, Peter (@HubertusB) suggested that it would be best to focus on one topic. So I decided to focus on Yammer, the concept of microblogging and presented a short case study on how Next Digital was piloting its use.
I enjoyed all the presentations and I particulary liked the interactive exercise we did for “sharepoint v wiki”, and the insights we gained from that. I had fun presenting and I hope it was of interest to everyone on the night. The presentation has been uploaded onto slideshare for others to view it. As I actually have to do another training presentation on Friday to show everyone how to use Yammer, it was killing two birds with one stone =)
I also got to check out Google HQ, and it looks like a pretty cool place. Also, thanks to Jamie, Vincent, Walter and Aaron for coming as well and providing some moral support!
Here are some various twitter feedback and comments on the night.
Came across this story via techcrunch. Facebook now has open stream API’s, similar to how Twitter has developed their API’s and let it loose into the developer community. I’ve seen two instances of cool facebook API integrations today. I’m using Seesmic desktop and got the email update this morning and it was one of the top trending topics on twitter. Check out the facebook API using microsoft silverlight – its very cool!
With Seesmic, the facebook integration is something that I’ve always wanted. A way for facebook to dynamically update using Adobe AIR. In the past, i’ve often found myself refreshing the page to find out there’s new updates. Now, I can just use facebook via Seesmic desktop. I’ve been using it for the past couple of hours since it was announced. Although they say that there is “full integration with the feed”, you can’t respond to status updates (i.e. comment). All u can do at the moment is check the ”like” box. if you want to comment, it opens up a new window in your browser and may need to login again. Which is annoying.
On Monday night, about 300 people gathered for the inaugural launch of the social media club in Sydney. The event was held at the Polo & Supper Club in Oxford St and the event was well attended by the masses. By the masses I’m referring to marketing people, the digerati, the twitterati, PR people, etc…or whatever you want to call them. The key note speakers were the fake Stephen Conroy aka Leslie Nassar (love your work!) and Adam Ferrier of Naked Communications. The MC for the night was Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella. The topic for the night was “authenticity & transparency in social media” – one of those airy fairy marketing topics.
At 6.30pm when I arrived, the place was pumping. They had two levels booked out, and the bottom level where the main arena was, was absolutely packed. Standing room only! (Well bars are made for standing room).
Man with the $349 jacket
Adam Ferrier went first and spoke about their infamous “girl in the jacket campaign”. This campaign was created for Witchery to launch their mens range and they had a budget of zero (emphasis) and wanted to generate a lot of buzz. So they created a fictious story where girl sees boy in cafe she fancies, boy leaves jacket, girl wants to find boy. Girl then goes to the enormous length of posting a video on youtube. The story then got amplified as the main stream press picked it up and they showed that Sunrise breakfast program, newspapers, etc… Their intention was to get the brand noticed and get people talking about Witchery Man. Check it:
As of now, 212,100 views in youtube. Pretty impressive for a budget of zero. I’ve watched the video for the first time, and although I have the benefit of hindsight, I would have been highly skeptical of it at the time. The way that she goes to great lengths to describe the jacket and how the “perfect guy” would be wearing it. In fact its not a bad jacket. Subliminal advertising must work on the weak.
Then the press started asking who is this girl, is this a marketing campaign, who is behind this? They eventually got outed. Naked & Witchery came clean and posted a video response saying yes it was us. I’ve only seen the videos now (after the talk) so here it in all its glory:
Man, I cringed when I saw this. It could have been executed a lot better and definently with more class – the way that Heidi turns it into a ad for the jacket. In fact, the only time I cringed even more in the last 24 hrs was when I heard Adam Ferrier’s response as to whether Naked was arrogant.
Its all about generating conversations
It seemed that for most of the night Adam was defending Naked’s actions. He even had stats to back himself up. But at the end of the day, I think he was convincing and I agree with Tim Burrowes comments on Mumbrella that he did help to sway the crowd onto his side.
Honestly, I don’t have a problem with this tactic of creating a false story or building a mysterious story to get customers engaged and talking about a brand. Brands do it all the time. It’s what we do as marketers. Can Jordan really fly? (Wait, there is doubt?), are pure blondes really made from pristine rivers? Brands make up stories and fantasies all the time to get customers talking and excited. All they want to do is generate buzz. If that’s the objective, then Naked slam dunked it.
Was the public misled about Girl in the Jacket. I have no doubt they were. Was their a line that was crossed? Yes – only when they made that cringeworthy followup video. If Naked did not do the followup video like that, I think it would have been a great campaign. Consumers are smarter than what we give them credit for.
Was it groundbreaking? Of course not. In fact some guy in the audience asked “Did the Witchery Man campaign helped increase the popularty of social media?” – dude are you kidding me? They posted a youtube video about a fake story and it got picked up by the press. It’s not as if they created Twitter. When the story was being told, I immediately thought of the real life campaign of NY girl of my dreams, the cybersearch by one NYC man for an aussie girl he met on the subway. I came across this when I was travelling in the States, and I had actually thought about it when I started reading about this campaign and the connection became even more clearer last night.
I agree with Adam’s insight that social media is a communication channel. It could be more than that, but at the end of the day that’s primarily what it is. Yes it is democratizing media (see Ashton Kutcher). However, it does make it a lot harder for brands and marketers to do something similar now because people think they got screwed over.
It nots really Stephen Conroy?
I love Leslie’s work as the fake stephen conroy. Dude is funny but a walking PR disaster. He didn’t have a lot to say on the night and Tim was trying to involve him as much as possible by asking him questions as well. But he definently had a couple of good insights – that not everything created by companies on social media is great. Everyone does go nuts when they see a brand do something on social media.
If you want to see more of the Witchery Man campaign check the video from the night.
Linkedin is being used a lot more these days for networking amongst professionals. Increasingly, more discussions, groups, and job opportunities are popping up on there too. We are also seeing a lot more events being posted onto Linkedin, to take advantage of the social networks that people have.
I’ve made a slidedeck of how to post an event on Linkedin. It’s actually quite easy, though a lot of people are unsure how to do it. There’s a Q&A on the Linkedin website, but not a step by step guide with pictures. So I did one =)
I also included some slides at the end for eventbrite. Eventbrite is being used a lot more now to manage registrations for events. The way it works is that they take a slice of the ticketing fees. If your event is free, then using it is free too. So they work on a commission basis. It’s really cool and simple to do up as well.
Some great features of eventbrite:
- Print out a list of the attendees
- accepts payment via paypal (no need for you to create anythign in the backend)
- ability for attendee to print out tickets
- there’s a barcode on the event ticket, and if you use a web cam, it acts as a scanner!
- listing of all events for cities, upcoming. You can also tell it to publish in search engines
- listing of all attendees on the registration website
Overrall, Eventbrite is great especially for small time promoters, non profit organisations as it gives them the infrastructure to manage ticketing and its looks very pro. Plus its very simple to use. In my slides, I’ve done a demo to show you how easy it is to do.
Just signed up to blellow today. I saw it on techcrunch a few months ago, but I’ve been procrastinating hard all day and decided to do this instead of what I was meant to do!
blellow looks interesting – like twitter meets yammer. users are organised into groups like for joomla, ruby on rails, accounting & finance, entrepreneurs, etc…
So people with common interests or need help with a certain topic can speak to each other. I’ve joined a couple of groups, so will let you know how that progresses. In the meantime, check out the video below:
Rarely do I come across something so funny and so well done. The fail blog is da bomb as it has pictures and videos of fail situations. It’s titled “FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments“. All it has is a very simple layout with pictures and vids, and a bunch of social media links to digg, stumbleupon, etc.. to rate it. It might be simple, but by golly does it do it well!
If you hadn’t realised, the word “fail” and “epic fail” has slowly crept into our vocab. I’m not sure where it came from, as well as the words “Owned”, “Pwnd”, but I recall friends using it ages ago when referring to computer games moments in Warcraft, Counterstrike, etc… So that could be the origin and now its in everyday use. Anyhow, prepare to ROFL with these pics from the fail blog.
fail-owned-firetruck-fail
fail-owned-education-fail
I found this blog via the “top blogs today” section within wordpress. There was also “fastest growing blogs”, and top posts”, etc… I have seen them all the time, but I never looked at them or clicked through. I think I might start doing that now! It’s a form of social media recommendation similar to Digg or Stumbleupon as you can see what blogs are popular.
