Social Media Tips; The little things about the Obama Campaign

February 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

My take on the speech to the National Press Club by Ben Self, from the agency Blue State Digital, who managed Barack Obama’s campaign online.

Ben’s speech to the NPC highlighted several important items in using electronic communication, although some might say all forms of communication should follow the same methodologies.

There has been a lot of high level and deep writing about the campaign and how effective the online campaign was for Obama’s campaign.

Here are some key items I picked up from his presentation:

There is no secret sauce.

  • There isn’t 1 magic thing or tool to use
  • It is about simple, effective use of technology

The key items behind any successful online campaign is to build relationships:

  • Regularity
  • Be Relevant
  • Authentic
  • Transparency
  • Lower the barrier to entry
  • Measure everything

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What made me smile today? A Cover letter!

February 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

Recruiting in a small / medium business can involve trawling through a lot of unprepared or unsuitable applications.

Many can be close to the mark, but require a bit of digging to see exactly where the gold nuggets are hidden.

As I wrote in “recruiting with a little help from your friends“, I try to look for the people part when sometimes the documents have little life of their own.

Currently we are interviewing for a PHP programmer, and no offense to any programmer, but there are a few who happily would live without social contact, or lights for that matter, and just love to be in small groups coding furiously for hours on end.

Thus finding who has the great skill sets and can also fit into a group like ours is not always readily apparent from the applications.

Our current advert is summarised here on our recruiting site [view advert]. I won’t go into the why of that particular site (it works for us), but today I got back an application that made me smile.

I had a good chuckle for nearly 5 minutes and appreciated the effort that went into it. You need to have read the position description to see the humour, but I felt I would share this as I enjoyed it!

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Teamwork is a great thing to watch

February 13, 2009 By 1 Comment

Last night we (ireckon) were part of #bnetwestival (The Brisbane Twestival), which was a great bunch of young (and some not so young) Volunteers pitching themselves together to get a result for someone else.

What motivates people, already busy and challenged enough, to have 4 weeks to plan a public event designed to raise money for charity with a budget of zero?

I can’t answer that, they all have their own motivations, but big Hat Tip to Greg (@lexiphanic), Nicole (@nicolejensen), Kate (@kateedwards), Nic (@nicodonnell) and all the other tweeps who are a bit too numerous to mention. There will be a credit roll sometime over next few days from @bnetwestival.

These folk did it just because! What have you done recently to help others just because?

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When free turns to paid. Twitter for Brands (business).

February 11, 2009 By 1 Comment

Over the last couple of days the news is out of the box, that Twitter is considering charging brands (this is still to be adequately defined) for using twitter and possible related services.

Those of us that have been tweeting and observing for a while have wondered what Twitter’s first play would be in commercialising this empowering service.

We all know it can’t be free forever (sadly), but exactly how it would first change its positioning was always hotly debated but never clear.

twitter-for-brands

Our brand your twitter.

So why a brand? Well obviously some of the larger ‘personalities/celebrities’ on Twitter use a lot of Twitter resources, e.g. @GuyKawasaki and his alltop blasts, @stephenfry with his huge following and many fully blown commercial brands.

Whereas a business by definition is not necessarily an individual and many could hide behind the distinction.

Questions and comments are raging across the blogosphere as to what / who would constitute a brand, and how exactly would they be targeted. The obvious assumption is heavy users who are benefitting in promoting their brand or utilising Twitter (either directly or via API) would be charged in some form of user pays model.

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Politics at the Coalface

February 5, 2009 By 2 Comments

Today at February’s Queensland Leaders forum there was a lot of reference, understandably, to the Global Credit Crisis, Queensland’s mining industry and of course, with guest speaker Lawrence Springborg, how poorly Queensland Labor are handling matters.

I had hoped, albeit naively, that from the LNP leader we might see less politicking in this smaller forum, than Premier Bligh, and Wayne Swan, when they visited.

Alas, that wasn’t the case. To give ‘The Borg’ credit, he arrived before any of the speeches commenced, stayed until well after they finished and was more than happy to take questions. Unfortunately, that was quite in contrast to the Premier when she visited.

Several interesting questions were thrown up to the Opposition Leader, one being his position on Climate change and Energy sources, given Queensland’s heavy dependence on Coal Mining and export for its  income.

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