AIMIA (the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association) has recently announced the finalists for the 18th 2011/2012 Awards.

  1. Best Advertising or Marketing
  2. Best Application on a Tablet or Mobile
  3. Best Children’s
  4. Best Classifieds
  5. Best Cross-Platform
  6. Best Cultural or Lifestyle
  7. Best Enterprise
  8. Best Entertainment
  9. Best Financial Service
  10. Best Government, Science, Health & Environment
  11. Best Integration with an Offline Campaign
  12. Best Learning & Education
  13. Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing
  14. Best News, Media or Reference
  15. Best Non-profit
  16. Best Retail or Online Commerce
  17. Best Sport
  18. Best Tourism or Travel
  19. Best Use of Social Media
  20. Best Use of Video
  21. Effectiveness Award
  22. The Innovation Award

One of the companies that I worked for, Brisbane Festival is up for a Best Integration with an Offline Campaign as well as The Innovation Award.  I find that checking out the case studies for each of the Finalists can provide a unique insight behind the work.  The Awards night will take place at the picturesque Cockatoo Island in Sydney on Friday 16th March 2012 and you can buy tickets online here.

Click on the image to check out the galleries

 

I seem to be getting a lot traffic for a semi-joke post Ten Cool Careers for Media and Communication Majors last year.  Here’s another one for 2012!

1. Social Media R&D (Research and Development)

Test, evaluate and determine if the latest social media Whizz Bang! is of use for the organisation.

2. Traveling Blogger, Seeker of Awesome in Far Away Places

Most likely working for a travel agency or startup, you get to live the location independent life!

3. Just Manic Enough Entrepreneur

Show me the money and I’ll show you the world.

4. Content Curator, Digital Storyteller

Decide if the slew of tweets, blogs, posts and link is worth appearing in The Story

5. Hybrid MediaComms

Use special powers and ability to connect related and unrelated stuff to make art that also speaks to both brand and consumer.

6. Ghost Writer

Ghost tweet and blog and pretend that you are someone really famous, but officially anyway.

7. Copywriter – the Dating Kind

With many living their lives online, or their working life is slowly eating in the personal, they may need a little bit of help in terms of writing a compelling pitch.  In the online dating scene.

8. Political Campaigner

When someone searches on Google, you want to make sure the right results pop up…of their competitor, such as their DUI charge back in 2007.

9.  Undercover Social Media Spy

Applied for a house, but not sure if they are the clean cut type? Or what about if they claim that they love animals, The Financial Review or Pink Floyd?  Fear not because business owners, recruiters, laywers and real estate agents need someone like YOU to trawl through their social media profiles for The Truth.

10. Online Reputation Manager

With social media, it’s hard to jump into another country and claim that you are a princess or a Tahitian prince. Worry no more.

Yesterday, I went through a couple of examples on how folks can track social media activities during a workshop for ABAF (the Australia Business Arts Foundation) “Making the most of social media”. Here’s a follow-up entry with yesterday’s walkthrough (in screenshot form!) and reference links.  If you were unable to attend yesterday’s workshop, you can view the presentation online here.

Google Alerts

If you don’t have time to regularly monitor social media feedback, Google Alerts is a great way to bring the results to your inbox via email alerts delivered as-it-happens, once a day or once a week.

If you are planning to monitor a large number of key terms (more than 20), create a list first before submitting these key words.

1. Go to Google Alerts

2. Add your keywords/keyterms in the main search bar.  You can preview results to see if the keyword/keyterms provide the most relevant search results.

3. Choose the type of result you are looking for.  I usually choose ‘Everything’ because the emailed alerts are divided by content type anyway.

4. Choose the frequency of the alert.  I usually choose ‘As-it-happens’ but only because I’m interested in finding the results straight away.

5. Choose the volume.  I usually choose “All results” because I have to time to monitor and go through all results but I trust “Only the best results” would be relevant if you don’t have the time.

Tips:

  • Include variations of your website links (ie eventsinbrisbane.com, twitter.com/eventsbrisbane, facebook.com/eventsbrisbane) of your search results as well – it’s interesting to see if there are any mentions to these links.
  • To avoid cluttering up your inbox (especially if you have a large number of alerts set up), it’s a good idea to create an inbox rule to automatically forward Google Alerts into a specific folder.

Twitter

I’ve monitored Twitter searches manually because the keywords/keyterms that I want to monitor are constantly changing.

If you have a Twitter account, sign in, search for the hashtags, keywords, keyterms and press “Save this search”.  You can also set up Google Alerts to monitor mentions of a Twitter name/hashtag, which is what I did last year.

There are third party websites/apps available (ie Monitter) but they pull out the search results from the Twitter site anyway.  Some of these third-party sites are helpful beyond just pulling out tweets.  One of the sites that I’ve used before is Twazzup which pulls out results according to media type, influencers, related hashtags and more:

Twazzup is great in monitoring mentions/hashtags related to specific live events because of the TPH (Tweets Per Hour) on the top right. I have used Twazzup to monitor Riverfire (an large scale event in Brisbane) since 2009, you can read a blog post here.

Facebook

Facebook is constantly adding to their platform.  Some new finds recently…

Facebook Pages

For Page administrators, Facebook Insights is a very useful tool. Go to the Page that you administer and click on ‘Insights’ on the left menu:

You can also access your Insights tool via ‘Edit Page’ and ‘Insights’.  However, note that:

On 15 December 2011 this tool will stop collecting data. All your information is already being collected for you in the new Pages Insights. All data from this page will be deleted on 15 February 2012, so please export anything that you want to keep.

There are extra metrics on top of the number of Likes – buzz (who is talking about the page) and check-in’s (if users can check-in on your location via the Facebook app).  This is found in the left-hand menu of all pages.

Facebook also has a new Page Recommendations feature which is really great to view messages/recommendations by users.  I can’t seem to find in the Pages (?) but screenshots are available here.

Facebook Search

Facebook Search is really versatile – you can search for and obtain results from public posts, group posts, and more around a particular event, topic, link, brand.  I can’t take a screenshot of this, by do a search for a website link (either yours or a popular one like guardian.co.uk) to see the amount of times users have shared links of that particular site. You can also public posts of your site link or search term via “Public posts” (on that note, I pretty much made a beeline to double check my settings…).

More links

There are a number of social media monitoring tools available – some are free, others are freemium or available for a trial period.  It really depends on what you are looking for – corporates such as Virgin will have full-time staff members for Twitter to deal with the amount of feedback whereas early-career creatives will be doing it DIY all the way :)

Pamorama: 20 Top Twitter Monitoring and Analytics Tools

30 Useful Social Media Monitoring Tools: Out of that list, I recommend that you check out: Hootsuite, Social Mention, Tweetdeck and Facebook Search.

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools:  Do check out Klout, Topsy, TweetReach (note: if you are planning to monitor event-centred tweets, download the full report straight after the event to get the most out of it).

Essential

Google Analytics! Not mentioned in the workshop but GA provides a lot of insights into your website traffic from social media and other sources.

Any more?

Would love to know any other recommendations that you have of sites and services to use, especially the packages such as Radian6 and Dialogix.

I recently finished doing a workshop for ABAF (the Australia Business Arts Foundation) “Making the most of social media” and quickly went through the ‘Content Rules’ on creating more engaging content.  Here are some really quick screenshots based on each of those rules to get you thinking about what these may mean to your business or organisation.  Any additions? Let me know!  PS: Non-attendees can view the presentation online here.

Content Rules (or how to be more awesome online)

Be sticky

A friend thought of ABC News as a possible example – a good one, due to the constant updates which encourages her to visit the site daily..

Be spreadable

TED.com videos are all about ideas worth spreading – the website also contains functionality (ie sharing buttons) to help spread the links.

Be engaging

The Sims on Facebook attracts 4.6 million people playing daily – definitely a great idea of engaging through social gaming.

Be open

Be interesting

Here’s a pic taken using the Instagram iPhone app of Circus Oz artists involved in the show “Steampowered”.  Always find opportunities to create interesting content for your followers…

Be relevant

The Good Guys have some good guts in monitoring and responding to social media feedback around Kyle Sandilands’ attack on News Ltd journalist Alison Stephen on November 23 2011 – by withdrawing sponsorship of the Kyle and Jackie O show.

Be findable

In the competitive online deal / online group buying space, being findable through search engine marketing and search engine optimisation is the key focus.  Is your site easily findable on the web?

Be accessible

QPAC (the Queensland Performing Arts Centre) released a mobile website enabling mobile users to access information on the go.

Be authentic

Serial entrepreneur Richard Branson’s authenticity online

Be social

Check out this page for a list of social media sites to look into.

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