• This months charity partner Reachout
• A Customer Service Delivery Consultancy
• An IT & Networking Service Delivery Organisation

Perhaps you have an another pitch to add? Add your comment or DM Digital Citizens on Twitter

Looking forward to Katy, Paul and Mike distilling these challenges to provide some interesting, measurable and successful solutions on Tuesday night.

Have you got your tickets yet?

It’s Beaney here, running this month’s liveblog, covering Crisis and reputation management Digicitz. I’m filling in for Warlach who is your usual CoverItLive-er-er for Digital Citizens.

I’ll be pulling in tweets which use the #digicitz hashtag, or you can participate below. If you’re wanting to ask the Panel a question, please use the #digicitz hashtag, and also chuck in a #question tag so we know it’s for the Panel.

I’ll catch you at the event tonight (either IRL or on the interwebz)!

~ Beaney

Gavin Heaton, well known as Servant of Chaos, and a Social Media practioner within his own organisation will MC a Panel of experts discussing the topic.

The panel will include Dr. Glen Fuller, Assistant Events Manager at Gleebooks, and Napoleon Biggs the Hong Kong Based founder of Web Wednesday from Fleishman-Hillard.

We expect another vigorous yet respectful debate.

Questions might include;

• how can you turn a lone cheerleader into a Mexican Wave?
• how do you get buy-in from the CEO as well as opt-in from the overworked frontline team?
• Can you effect change on multiple fronts at once, or is it a case of picking your battles?
• Is using social technologies to share knowledge internally the most effective way to demonstrate their potential?

Feel free to add more in the comments section below!

In addition to our top-notch panel, we are delighted to announce our Charity Partner for this months Event.

This month’s donations  will go to Fictillimanjaro. Evan Smith is climbing Mt Kilimanjaro to help raise funds for the Humpy Dumpty Foundation and is using Social Media to document his efforts

The Humpy Dumpty Foundation purchases vital medical equipment for children’s hospitals right across Australia and now also in East Timor. Check their website to see more about their work.

Tickets for Digicitz 4 are available now for just $10, half of which will be donated to the Humpty Dumpty Foundation.

About our Panellists

Gavin is the author of Servant of Chaos, one of Australia’s leading marketing blogs. He is the co-publisher of the ground-breaking collaborative marketing book, Age of Conversation. Gavin has worked in agencies, but is currently holed up on the client side.

Gavin is an in demand speaker on topics around Social Media, Marketing and Community. Recently has spoke at the following events:

• MarketingNow! – lead generation, community and social media
• ADMA – diving into social media
• AdTech – the relevance of twitter

Napoleon has worked for 17 years in media in Asia, 13 years on the Internet, 4 years in social media, 9 months in Fleishman-Hillard and 2 days in Sydney.

As the founder and host of Web Wednesday, an independent networking community for Asian digerati, with monthly gatherings in Hong Kong, Singapore, Guangzhou, Beijing, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, Napoleon is more accustomed to moderating than speaking.

He heads up Digital Integration across Asia Pacific for Fleishman-Hillard and is based in Hong Kong.

One of Napoleon’s key topics will be “Will Social Media Kill the Corporate Intranet?”

Company intranets are typically clunky and badly structured. It’s an ongoing challenge to get users to effectively engage with them, share information, brainstorm ideas, and find relevant content. Will social media become a more effective way to share ideas and manage knowledge within your company?

Our MC’s

Our Panellists

What’s Hot?

Next Up

Don’t Wait!

(You may need to use headphones for this video. Sound is a little quiet at points.)

Darryl Adams,  government worker and internet tragic, argues that social media is just another tube – and ‘social media experts’ merging it with advertising are getting it wrong.

Senator Ted Stevens (R Alaska) was lampooned for his infamous “The Internet is a series of tubes” speech.

He may have been onto something.

One thing that many people on twitter do is promote social media, and their “skill” in navigating it professionally. They heap praise on companies and high profile people who “get it” (that is, use it in a way they feel is appropriate) and lampoon people and companies who “don’t get it”.

For me, social media is just another channel available on the internet, another tube you will.

Look at Twitter as an example. You send 140 characters at a time to every user. Other members of the twitter community can chose to focus on your “tweets” by “following” your profile or by filtering via search teams or “hash tags”.

Is it hard system to learn? Not really; it is Simple Message Service (SMS) on steroids. You’re sending an SMS out to the wild. The effort is for other people finding your messages and focusing on it (again by following or searching).

So Twitter is a data pipe. To make it useful, the users tune it by adding and removing users based on the content or belief systems. Users are filtering the content to suit individual taste.

Facebook is the same. You select people you want to follow and groups you wish to get information on. The people you follow have an option to allow or disallow access to their data, and you have the same control (leaving aside the distressing tendencies of Facebook violating privacy for profit).

Now if you’re supplying content, the skills needed to get your content consumed is the same as most over media. The good news that there is demand for any type of content, from serious political and social debate to fart jokes. The bad news is that you need to make your content appealing in Social Media so that people can actually find it. There is a whole industry that specialises in doing just that: the Advertising Industry.

And for me, that is the issue. Social Media experts are not promoting the technology, or teaching people the skills to develop their self filtering skills. They are trying to merge advertising with social media. By selling social media as another advertising outlet they seek to tap into the large amount of cash the industry commands. By charging for advice on how to promote your content, they seek to expand the people viewing it. This to me is the wrong way. User count is a broken metric, as I would prefer 6 engaged followers than 6000 passive followers. Using number of followers looks impressive, but follower count is meaningless if the content in not what they are after. Too many followers and your content get swamped again, this time with a high noise to signal ratio, buried under a plethora of messages. If I want to produce content, the users who gain value from my content are the people I want following me.

Social Media is just another delivery system of content. It is a progression from email, IRC and websites that create networks of people, with an added bonus of having an outlet that is totally unfiltered. And companies like Google and Microsoft realise what the unfiltered content of social media is worth. These are the companies who will use the data in search, in advertising delivery, in focusing and fine tuning on user needs and desires.

There is no good or bad way to use Social Media. Social Media is a pipe. The value for users is to filter to suite their tastes, and the value for companies is to aggregate and analyse.

But the internet is not a truck. Wise words, Senator Stevens.

Darryl Adams is a government worker and internet tragic. A former IT worker, he still pines for the days of IBM keyboards that go CRUNCH and the glow of green screens.
He can be found on on Twitter, blogging here or on Facebook.

N.B. The views expressed here do not reflect the views of his employer, the ATO.

Comment from:

It’s ok to admit you failed. It’s ok to admit you learned some lessons. And it’s ok to admit you would do things differently.

Sounds like a life lesson doesn’t it? But that was one of the insights of Tuesday night’s Digital Citizens event, which got me thinking.

There were many more, and I’d encourage you to visit the event’s Coveritlive blog and the forum to have a discussion on the topic. But I was so impressed by the calibre of the night’s discussions that I wanted to try and capture some of them here.

Social media for social good

200 plus people packed into a pub, 4 panellists and a moderator, a cheeky Scott’s-man and a passionate Irish-man plus a couple of gorgeous ladies = digital citizens’ Social media for Social Good event.

The event, the second in Digital Citizens’ newly established lineup, was awesome. There were many insights gleaned from some pretty inspirational men as well as an incredibly engaged audience.

Thanks go to Gavin Costello, Scott Rhodie, James Fridley, Cathie McGinn and Heather Snodgrass for the kind invitation to participate in the panel. I had a blast, and met a lot of wonderful people most of whom I know through social media.

Social media for social good is just one piece of the pie

This seemed to be the common theme from the panel. David Hood (Greenpeace), Mark Chenery(Action Aid) and Nic MacKay (The Human Race) all touched on the need to support your social media activity with other strategies. David explained that Greenpeace have a range of online tactics, as well as more traditional lobbying tactics, when they begin a campaign such as the recent Nestle one.

This is indeed my understanding of the use of social media. It is an earned media, and works best when approached with an integrated strategy. We know there are below-the-line and above-the-line tactics. Social media is a through-the-line tactic (in my opinion). So, to look at it in isolation would be a mistake. Organisations, and in particular non-profits, should look at how they can extend their marketing or community awareness strategy and include a social strategy.

<-Read the full article here