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.

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.

As a brand, whether you’ve decided to set up a twitter account, a facebook fan page or a blog to get closer to and engage with your community the following top tips on how to love your community (well, it is nearly Valentine’s Day) from social media monitoring company Radian 6 are worth a read.

In many ways, a healthy relationship between your brand and its community parallels that of a healthy relationship between two people. Both relationships rest on simple tenets like respect, and both should be celebrated whenever possible. When thinking about the connection you’ve built with your community and its members, remember these 10 truths of a healthy relationship to keep your community feeling loved and appreciated.

1. Remember to say ‘Thank you’ – People generally enjoy saying or doing nice things for others and tend to do it without expecting to be thanked for it. However, we all know how great it makes us feel when we are recognized for our efforts. When your community says something nice about you, it’s always a wonderful idea to say ‘thank you’.
2. Celebrate their successes – This is the age-old principle of thinking of others before yourself. If you do so, then you will probably notice the great things members of your community are accomplishing. Congratulate them and share their successes with others whenever you can.
3. Be a good listener – This is probably some advice we all received at least once from a parent in our lives. Like Stephen R. Covey points out in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Great relationships are also built on the idea of give and then, perhaps, get. Invest in your community by listening and understanding their needs.
4. Ask for their opinion – There probably isn’t a person alive who doesn’t like being asked for their opinion. Collaboration on a project almost always produces a better end result. Social media has given brands an amazingly simple and effective way to engage with those who have thoughts and ideas about them and their products and services. Remember to ask your community for its opinion.
5. Don’t forget about the little things – Sometimes it is the smallest of gestures that can mean the most to someone. Focusing on the little things that matter can show a person that they are indeed worth your time. When approaching relationships from a long-term frame of mind, it is very possible to make the time along the way for those important details without getting overwhelmed by the idea. Look out for the little touches to help each community member.
6. Be patient – In any relationship, making things work means working through the occasional misunderstanding or frustration with one another. Life is not supposed to be simple; if it were, it wouldn’t be all that exciting. It’s important that you take a step back and look at every challenge from the other’s point of view. Your patience and willingness to try to understand will be appreciated. Be known for your abundant patience and caring approach with your community.
7. Admit your mistakes – Nobody is perfect, and holding onto your pride will never do you any favors. When you invest in building relationships within your community, members get to know your brand’s human side. You will make errors but, while members may be disappointed, your community generally has the ability and willingness to forgive. Be quick to admit your mistakes and be genuine in asking for forgiveness.
8. Share a common passion – Brands and people are more than capable of setting up daily routines to get things accomplished based on things that need to be done. And while working side by side on something does create a bond, it’s usually not a bond that is sustainable over a very long period of time. Finding a common passion, something you both enjoy doing and talking about, creates the strongest bonds. If you are passionate about what you do, then no doubt there are others out there that feel the same way you do. Find them, invite them to your community, and enjoy learning and sharing together.
9. Show respect and gain trust – The strongest relationships are built on mutual respect and trust. But getting to that point should ideally start with you. Be willing to respect the views of your community even though you may not entirely agree with them. Community members have reasons for their views and it is up to you to understand, or at least accept, them. And, when making commitments to your community, make sure you meet or exceed their expectations. Being willing to compromise, or give and take, will help your brand demonstrate respect and earn a community’s trust.
10. Celebrate Valentine’s Day everyday – Giving your community a Valentine once a year is definitely a nice gesture, but finding ways to show them how much you love them on a regular basis should be what you strive for. Apply your creative energy to think of new ways to accomplish goals 1-9. Most companies are still just awakening to this idea of focusing on their community, so anything you do to show appreciation for your community now can help your brand stand out in the crowd. And, heck, who doesn’t enjoy making someone smile with an unexpected gift?

You can read the full post here.

Three of the top five most engaging brands in the UK (as judged by research agency Hall & Partners) are brands that have defined how we interact on the internet and been at the frontier of the social media revolution so much so none of them actually exist outside the internet.

The top five include Google (No. 1), Amazon (No. 3) and Facebook (No. 5). We’ve written quite a lot (and ahem, yes, some have talked even more) over the years about how you can use social media to engage with your customers, so this was no real surprise.

The other two in the Top 5 include Cadbury and the BBC - both who have embraced social media and seem to be reaping the benefits according to this study that looked at a range of indicators including integrity, the importance of ’sensing’ in shaping shopper preferences, stock market expectations, profits as well as purchase intent.

Read the full article here from Warc.

Below are links to some related posts:

Top 10 most engaging brands

The most engaging brands in the world and how they got there

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.

The first of a series of worldwide Media 140 mini-events was held in London last week - here’s an interview with Carve’s Managing Partner, Paul Harrison, by Glenn Le Santo from the night.

Paul talks about how many corporates are now realising that social media will not go away and are being driven mainly by fear and the idea they are missing an opportunity. The fear, he says, is that their brand is being defined by people external to them. Paul also says that companies are realising that if they get social right, it is the most powerful, unprecedented opportunities to engage their customers in dialogue and the best ones are starting to get it.

Here’s a bit of background about the Media 140 mini-events from the Media 140 website:

These mini-events will focus on journalism, brands, advertising, media, technology, politics, the third sector and education. They are aimed at getting individuals from diverse backgrounds together to share their experiences over good food and drink, meet industry professionals and learn from case studies.

Media140’s meeting in the Square Mile was attended by some of social media’s top minds, personalities that may one day turn out to be the Jobs, Wozniaks or Gates of this brand new industry’s future.

Here are my picks of the best reads last week about things you should consider if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online.

Please note: A big hat tip to Gavin Heaton (or @servantofchaos) who provided the insipration for this post. His weekly “5 must read posts from last week” are great reading which is probably why, totally unwittingly when I posted this last night I managed to completely (almost) plagiarise his blog post title - funnily enough, that being the topic one of the must-read posts he links to on an earlier list.

1. How brands should manage their reputation online

Some of the biggest names in social media gathered together at Blogworld expo last week. This post covers highlights from one of the panel sessions including some level headed advice from Amber Nasland at monitoring specialists, Radian6 such as “social media didn’t invent criticism” and that organisations should have emergency plans in place (Vegemite’s iSnack 2.0 leaps to my mind here).

2. The Top 10 free tools for monitoring your brand’s reputation

One of the most important things to do if you are responsible for your brand’s reputation online is to know what people are saying about you and this article reviews some of the easily accessible, free tools to listen to online conversations.

We must remember that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent. That means we can choose whether to be observers, participants or outcasts

3. Top 5 Twitter Trends to watch right now

Once you start monitoring conversations going on about you / your brand / your organisation you’ll realise quickly that many of these are taking place on Twitter.

Here’s a great article that includes insights about Twitter trends from blogger, author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki as well as PR2.0 guru Brian Solis.5.

4. Managing your reputation through search results

This post from the Google blog has some tips on what to do when you aren’t that happy with what you find when you type your company’s name into Google. These include thinking twice before you publishing anything online and if there’s something you don’t like - contact the source of the information (and there are some tips on how to do this) as well as proactively publishing positive information.

5. Damage Control: Social Media Reversals

Renowned web strategist Jeremiah Owyang identifies and analayses three case studies in this post looking at how organisations should respond to a social media crisis: “assert themselves and be proactive - even during a crises”.

I just discovered Gary’s social media count (when I saw his tweet that it has, quite literally, been an overnight success - 400 RTs in last 24 hrs). The awesome little app shows just how amazingly fast the social web is constantly and rapidly growing:

Here’s a bit of background from Gary Hayes blog post about the count below:

More about the Count - I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009. The design will be finessed and I will be adding extra functionality (such as week, month & year lookahead/backs plus dynamic data input).

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)

• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)

• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)

• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)

• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)

• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)

• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!

• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)

• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)

• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)

• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)

• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Okay so these are US figures (from Forrester) but it is still pretty compelling: 3 out of 4 adults who use the internet fall into this ’spectator’ social media category - those who consume social media but don’t contribute. How many people do you know who don’t use the internet?

Even if your friends, colleagues, boss claim not to use Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, chances are they fall into this ’spectator’ category (watch videos, read blogs, customer ratings etc) which Shel Holtz looks at in his post, “Less than 20% of online adults don’t use social tools”, so over to him.

As someone with a PR background, I have to say I thought this survey that showed PR people leading social media engagement in most companies in the US was pretty interesting but I did have a little giggle when I saw it was carried out by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) and ipressroom (an online PR tool). The headline result was unlikely to ever be, “IT department leads social media use in companies”. Does a survey lose credibility when it clearly supports the proposition of the people who paid for it?