We were thrilled to have been at the launch of the community consultations for the update of the South Australian Strategic Plan today.

It was inspiring to see so many community groups, businesses, individuals and government come together for the common goal of making the place we live the best it can be.

Launch of South Australia's Strategic Plan community consultations

South Australia has been really innovative in its approach - which has been recently acknowledged with an international award.

Carve has been working hard alongside the SA Plan team to develop a social media strategy that raises awareness of the plan, its relevance to everyday South Aussies and ultimately encourages them to ‘join the conversation’ wherever it suits them.

This also involved putting the tools in place to allow as many South Australian as possible to engage in the consultation process including a website that allows debate and discussion, a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and more to come as the consultations progress over the next few months.

Its been a great week for Carve in Australia - I thought Tuesday was a good day - today’s even better.

We’ve made it to the finals of the 2010 PRIA (Public Relations Institute of Australia) Golden Target Awards - the first award we’ve ever entered down under.

Our entry, ‘At the cutting edge for 125 years’, for the work we did with Adelaide’s oldest girls’ school, Wilderness School, last year when they celebrated their 125th anniversary, has made it to the finals in the Special Event / Observance category.

The PR strategy focussed on maximising the success and exposure of the school’s 125th anniversary celebrations, using the opportunity of the significant milestone to ‘tell the Wilderness story’ to articulate its values and education philosophies, reinforce its strong sense of community, reconnect with old scholars and past parents and raise awareness of its position as one of Australia’s leading girls schools.

It was a busy year (although this year seems almost as busy!) but we loved (and continue to) working with Briony and the hard-working team at Wilderness.

The Australian, February 18, 2009

I’ve just got back from an amazing (and enlightening) trip to London where I was lucky enough to receive a sneak preview of the new features coming soon to Radian6 (just one of the social media monitoring tools we use) which will make the interface super powerful for organisations.

It made me realise just how significant the advantage will be for those companies who are listening to, and joining in this online conversation. And it isn’t just about marketing, it can and will sometimes involve customer service, HR, corporate affairs and legal and perhaps every other division of an organisation.

An article in today’s South Australian Business Journal by Cameron England highlights the urgency for organisations to do ‘get social’.

It quotes Andrea Matthews from GM Holden which is a great example of an organisation that  has done it the right way. The team, headed by Andrea, placed a huge emphasis on active listening and monitoring before engaging in this space.

We started with a relatively extensive period of listening and identifying where consumers, our customers and enthusiasts are participating on line so we could fit a strategy around that. Andrea Matthews, GM Holden

Organisations will all be on different points along the path of adoption of social media - but the one thing we at Carve believe every organisation should do is start listening today. Below are some some very good reasons why they should do this and here’s a link to the full document we’ve summarised from by Radian6.

Top 10 reasons to monitor your brand in social media

1. The compliment - equivalent of testimonials or references, they deserve your attention
2. The complaint - respond early, turn into a positive
3. The expressed need - monitor keywords related to your product or service area - it’s an opportunity to reach out
4. The competitor - realtime competitive intelligence
5. The crowd - knowing what issues your customers care about
6. The influencer - spread opinions on brands fast, their views rank high in Google - where your customers will see it
7. The ROI - easily track and measure the effectiveness of a campaign
8. The crisis - an early warning system
9. The audit - ’score’ a brand’s overall user sentiment, rank social media channels, competitive analysis, uncover brand advocates and potentially pinpoint most valuable / engaged audiences for ad placement
10. The thread - connect the dots between the often splintered social media conversations on Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc.

We’ve written before about the growth of LinkedIn in Australia so we were interested to read about the organisations’ plans to increase the headcount in the Sydney office in The Australian newspaper today.

And as I was writing this post the below email from the fairly new MD, Clifford Rosenberg, just popped into my inbox as I imagine it will in every one of the 1 million Australian users this morning.

In addition to the appointment of Clifford Rosenberg as MD late last year, the company has also appointed a recruitment director, is looking for more staff and a media partner.

Mr Rosenberg said the decision to expand LinkedIn’s Australian operation came after a year of double-digit growth pushed its overall local audience beyond a million users.

“It’s a great starting point to set up this office and there’s a lot of exciting things we can do over here,” Mr Rosenberg said.

It is not clear how much the company plans to increase its local headcount. “I haven’t got a fixed number in mind. I’m not really at liberty to disclose our numbers by region. I don’t envisage a massive office but I do picture a group of highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals.

“We’re in a number of good discussions with telcos and media partners already, but it’s still very early days.”

You can read the full article from The Australian here.

The latest technology and internet report from Nielsen shows that Australians’ internet consumption in 2009 increased by 9 per cent from 2008 but not at the expense of TV or any other traditional media that you might imagine.

I’d love to know where we are finding the time to do all this - obviously watching TV or listening to the radio while using the internet can explain some of it but according to the report, simultaneous media consumption is on the decline also.

The only plateau or decline I can see is in watching DVDs and exercise - oh and there’s a decline in accessing the internet via mobile phones which seems surprising given the huge take up of iPhone’s.

2008 - Green, 2009 - Orange

The article in The Australian Financial Review today which covers this also highlights some other interesting stats from the report:

• 84 per cent of Australians use the internet
• 93 per cent of those use it at home
• 98 per cent have broadband connections
• Facebook accounts for 21 per cent of the time spent online
• 41 per cent of internet users download videos (compared to 25 per cent in the UK)

NB For those who don’t have a paid subscription to AFR.com which the link takes you to - the story is also covered on Mumbrella.

Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.

Over the last few hours we’ve seen the newish Twitter lists feature disabled and vanish from our screens only to return again apparently completely back to normal. It caused ‘Twitter Lists’ quickly became a high trending topic and quite a lot of concern for many.

During the outage I spent some time meeting with Brenton Cannizzaro from an amazing digital agency in Adelaide, enpresiv, which came about entirely from a Twitter connection and my inclusion on one of his lists. Whilst I’ve now got his business card and therefore his personal details, prior to that, the only place I had stored his details were on Twitter - if they vanished, so too would Brenton from my database.

All is obviously good now with Twitter Lists and it was only a tiny window of downtime but, it got me thinking about what would happen if:

a) Twitter lists never came back

or

b) Lists returned but some of the people on it had been deleted or altered in some way

All that hard work categorising your friends on Twitter, creating a list that had just totally vanished and there’d be little you could do about it because you don’t have any control over Twitter.

It also reminded me I’d promised to post some highlights from Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith so this first one fits perfectly:

The authors talk about the importance of social networks and working at connecting with people on the web as a means of increasing opportunities for you / your business / organisation.

You Live or Die by Your Database

This section discusses your own personal database of connections, the representation of your personal network in a searchable form. Even if you’re a cog in a corporate machine, if you’re not in the business of building your own database of contacts, then you have to start. Now.

…one’s personal database was an asset as valuable as gold, if nurtured and maintained.

However, they stress it is important to maintain your own database away from online platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because you can never fully trust that your database online will be accessible, that your account will stay up, and that your data or account won’t become corrupt.

To us, storing a local copy ensures that you control the database at all times. If, as we say, you live or die by your database why would you trust a third party with its ultimate intergity.

So, the short lived AWOL Twitter Lists are back but what would happen if your LinkedIn contacts vanished? If you’d like to start your own personal database, here are some tips from the book that might help you get you started:

What should go into a personal database?

• First name
• Last name
• Title
• Company
• Email
• Phone number (preferably cell phone)
• URL
• State/Province where you reside
• Notes

Written by Sarah Thomas, Managing Director, Carve Consulting (Australia)

We’re always talking about how consumers are more savvy than they’ve ever been, that they can see right through all the brilliant, creative advertising campaigns, marketing efforts and stratgic PR placements.

So, it was not surprising to see the results of this recent report on marketingmag.com.au that showed 54 per cent of Australians can think of an organisation they don’t trust anymore. And aparently banks and telcos have suffered the greatest dip in consumer trust. Paul Gardner from Grey who created the report with Sweeney Research says:

Consumers want proof that a company is what it purports to be.

The good news is that the web now allows organisations a way to engage with consumers on a different level and really show them that they are what they purport to be and begin to re-build that trust.

There is no better way to build trust - or perhaps no more risk-prone way - than doing it online. Your online reputation is quickly becoming the most important one you need to be aware of and manage. The growing popularity and transparent nature of social media allows consumers to see right through an organisation.

For those organisations with nothing to hide - this is a good thing. Its those who have been using advertising, marketing and PR to portray an image that does not reflect their core values who will be unmasked when the web gives consumers x-ray vision.

A brilliant book by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents, has some great insights into how to do just that. It is highly recommended reading - I’ll post some highlights from it soon.

Written by Sarah Thomas, Managing Director of Carve Consulting (Australia).

With now more than 1.1 million Australians using the corporate social networking site, LinkedIn, it is great to see  an Australian office open with Clifford Rosenberg as Managing Director.

Mumbrella has more details here.

By Hamed Saber

In a recent post I questioned if a survey’s credibility was damaged if its results supported those who have paid for it. It generated some interesting comments like this one:

It does boil down to how the survey results are presented and the prupose behind this. And that’s coming from some one who surveys for a living. You can easily judge how much credence to give by the willingness to set out the parameters of the survey and openness to scrutiny of the methodology used. Media outlets also have a lot to answer for in reporting especially if they do so without investigating those fundamentals or should we blame the need to fill column inches? Frank

The Sun Herald (as well as The Age and The Australian) ran this story which covered the results of some research commissioned by the Vic Government revealing:

Melbourne is Australia’s most liveable city

Now I’m not disputing the results - Roy Morgan ran it and I also LOVE Melbourne (the fact my small children adore their four grandparents who are within 10 minutes drive of our home, means for right now I’m very happy in Adelaide) but I’m just shining a light on how often these surveys, generally done purely to generate good headlines for those commissioning them, are so often picked up by the media.

There are more and more survey’s being used as a PR tool and some make really interesting reading but most of them have such obvious results I’m often surprised they get the coverage they do.

Anyone else feel the same way?