Mumbrella report that the Say Yes Australia campaign is shifting to a grass roots approach, which I think is code for targeting the members of supporting organisations (including GetUp!) with direct email.

Anyway, this is a good reminder for me to check the Twitter and Facebook stats on both this campaign and also the government's Clean Energy Future site, which I've been tracking.

In the period 28th July to 6th September:

Clean Energy Future

• Twitter 1,603 increased to 1,725 followers 
• Facebook 1,490 increased to 1,847 likes

SayYesAustralia

• Twitter 1,247 increased to 1,409 followers 
• Facebook 21,644 increased to 24,050 likes

According to Mumbrella the nine groups supporting SayYesAustralia have 3 million members, so based on these numbers it would make sense for them to engage more directly rather than waiting for a viral approach to take hold.

As it happens, I also noticed that a case study was presented today about the Clean Energy Future digital engagement campaign, most of which was managed in-house by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. The total budget for the campaign overall (not just the digital part) was $13.7 million.

One of the highlights from this summary of the case study was emphasis on the videos, so that has also prompted me to look again their popularity.

Clean Energy Future's most popular video (How does carbon pricing work?) has received 17,434 views (30% of all their views). Unfortunately, adding comments is disabled on their videos so they missed the chance to get feedback that way. Meanwhile, GetUp's most popular Carbon Tax video (A Price on Carbon - In Five Easy Steps) attracted 90,887 views - however, another non-Carbon Tax video reached 423,870 views. It is interesting to note that both videos address the same topic.

On reflection, I'm still not entirely clear about the purpose of the social media channels for both campaigns. Clearly, involving an agency in SayYesAustralia hasn't helped their Twitter stats. However, based on numbers their Facebook and YouTube channels have been more successful than the government.

Looking at the actual engagement on Facebook in particular, I'm also not sure either campaign has been particularly good at creating a groundswell of support. The approach of both campaigns appears to be one of post interesting links and then letting the community argue amongst itself (I couldn't find any examples of the moderators from Clean Energy Future joining the conversation). SayYesAustalia's Facebook page gives supporters the ability to add a badge to their profile pic, but other than this there is nothing for people to do for either campaign. Of course, the argument is that you just have to be on Facebook - but without any clear purpose, my question is would anyone have really noticed if they weren't?

Hopefully SayYesAustralia have finally realised this and they are going to finally give people something to do.

the challenge for advertisers and marketers is to stand out above the general internet noise and create what the industry calls a value proposition for their brands. In this, Facebook has emerged as a crucial platform for social interaction with 750 million users worldwide, as has Twitter with 250 million. But simply having a Twitter "hashtag", which more easily identifies subjects being discussed, or "liking" something on Facebook are no longer enough.

"We are starting to move away from the mad arms race of [increasing] fans on Facebook,"

Timely article from the Guardian. There is a school of thought around social media marketing that basically calls for business and organisations to get online and then follow a strategy of what I call, "getting loud with social media". Success will follow if you can overcome your fears of the medium - you just need to be on it for this to happen.

Today I've been browsing around looking at some major Australian brands and organisations that have an active presence on Facebook. Its pretty a disappointing picture to be honest.

For one well known consumer brand, a recent Facebook post attracted well over a hundred "Likes" and about 50 comments. Sounds like a great reaction? When you look at the actual comments, the largest categories were complaints (6%) and wants (14%). The brand itself was absent in the conversation, but at least some of their fans (3.4%) did at least bother to reply to questions and comments from other people. As a potential customer looking in, there is no evidence that the brand actually cares or is listening to feedback - a missed opportunity.

Another well known and family-friendly brand has a wall full of spam posts and in appropriate comments (e.g. mentioning alcohol) in breach of their own community rules, mixed in with genuine fans/customers. However, there is evidence at least of that brand engaging with people on customer service issues. That good work in customer service and the promotions on their page is being undone by poor community management and moderation.

In another example, a major industry association has attracted about 130 "likes" in about 6 months for their page. Sure, its not harming them but its not adding much value in its current form either.

Personally, in Australia at least, I see smaller consumer-orientated companies doing a much better job of engaging but with a smaller audience. Like Frisk Espresso, who I discovered in Perth recently. They only have about 1,500 fans but the engagement is better at that scale. Its important to recognise that their fan base is probably built on an excellent customer experience in the real world and through promotion at their shop front (that's how I found them). Rather than faking it and expecting noise on social media to make their online engagement successful, they are working social media more smartly than many large (and well resourced) brands. And I'll be back at Frisk when I'm next in Perth.

However, I'm prepared to be corrected. Have you got an Australian example where getting loud with social media (i.e. getting lots of followers or likes) has worked? Or maybe you've got a horror story of where this strategy has crashed and burned?

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Certainly interesting to observe how the Clean Energy Future initiative, announced today by the Australian federal government, is using the Web channel as part of its communication mix.

The main Website itself is running on Wordpress, using a fairly conservative layout and few baked in social features other than embedded YouTube videos plus Twitter and Facebook sharing (interesting, considering the business impact that they haven't also included LinkedIn). Commenting, however, isn't enabled.

But while you can't discuss or provide feedback directly on the main site, the channel is open for comments on YouTube, Facebook and of course Twitter (#CEF). I'm not clear if this was entirely by design, because these comments aren't integrated back into the main site. It will be interesting to see what they do with this back channel over the longer term.

BTW there was a slight glitch earlier, which I suspect was required to tweak the home page in order to remove unfiltered tweets from appearing on it. That's fair enough - its far too easy spam - although questionable why it was enabled in the first place.

One feature I do like, although it only appears in the news section, is the 'Elsewhere in the news' feed which links to external news coverage. I'm not sure how this feed is aggregated or curated but personally I think this content actually adds a lot value. It could have formed part of the central purpose of the site (other than providing core information about tax and relief measures) and shifted discussion into those news channels, which ultimately might be more useful than Facebook comments. For example, check out the ABC's news microsite.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone jokingly adds a computer server to his company's arsenal in advance of the royal wedding.

Well, the thought did cross my mind... Google are hosting the official wedding Website and live online broadcast of the event, so I suppose we should be ok ;-)

QPS was one of the first public-facing organisations to widely and effectively use social media in crisis communication, and that came to fore at the height of the floods in January, described by Premier Anna Bligh as the worst natural disaster in the state's history.

The agency's Facebook page became the defacto one-stop-shop for all of Australia, and for journalists across the different mediums who clambered for minute-by-minute updates.

While some tuned into ABC Radio for news, there was no escaping the QPS Facebook address that was constantly beamed on TV, linked on story pages and repeated on radio.

Great to see Queensland Police Service (QPS) generating interest in the practical and pragmatic use of social media for online engagement with the media, the broader community and during emergencies.

James Klint from QPS was also featured on Gov2Radio yesterday.

Also, worth watching are the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, who also engaging in a useful way through Facebook and on Twitter, where they are represented by their National Communications Manager, Sandi Logan. Like QPS they are engaging pragmatically and using social media as a two-way communication channel, rather than simply broadcasting information.

Straight from the horses mouth, how Twitter came about. Love the fact they were sitting on a slide at a kids playing, eating Mexican food, when Jack first pitched the idea to his team (and I never realised the 140 character limit was imposed to reduced their SMS bill).

Also from the past, Michael Arrington wrote at that time:

"There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website."

Really...? ;-)

Hat tip to Jordan Willms.

Learn one thing about Twitter: it is a unique medium of 140 character
or less communications. It's like the haiku of the real-time Web. If
what you have to say is often longer than those 140 characters, maybe
you're using the wrong medium.

Dig this. When you're at a large conference with (say) 20 people live
tweeting every interesting sentence from every speaker, are you
thinking about your audience? I seriously hope not, because you're
often delivering them a bundle of jumbled thoughts. And when you start
retweeting each other, and then people not at the conference start
retweeting *that* everything stops being real-time and becomes
wrong-time. We don't yet have filters and interfaces that can make
sense of this stuff.

Dig this too. There are alternatives. While celebrations of YouTube
and Twitter happen at dedicated events, you're overlooking less-used
social technologies with great features, like Viddler and Posterous.
Look at my last few Posterous posts: they were from a conference I
attended. But instead of burying my nose in my BlackBerry for two
days, I listened and took notes, and when I saw something worthy of
250 or so words, I wrote a short post for Posterous and pushed the
info to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Xanga, Plurk, and more. What's up.

Experiment with Web 2.0 technologies. Think about your audience. Do
what's valuable for your community. Engage.

This was worth quoting in full. Mark Drapeau raises some good points. There is no doubt social media is changing how with interact at conferences and other events. But now that we've had a bit of time to experiment with Twitter, which was fine, perhaps it is time to step back and look at what actually works best?

Hmm. I'm not entirely convinced about this, however there is an argument that if you want to ease the introduction of new information work practices into people's work routines then you need to go where the users are. I was a big fan of Xobni when I was last using Outlook regularly. However Twitter and LinkedIn are very different paradigms to integrate into Outlook - Xobni augments what you are already doing in Outlook with additional information, but tools like Twinbox (the example above) is introducing a brand new information stream in parallel to email.

I also wonder if integration with an enterprise microblogging tool might actually be the better use case for this kind of integration? For example, Socialcast is an enterprise microblogging platform and they have talked about providing plugins for Outlook and Lotus Notes (I'm not sure if they actually came to fruition).

On the other hand, Socialtext's Signals takes a non-email activity stream approach. Their desktop applications (a cross platform RIA) combines microblogging with notifications about wiki page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes.

What do you think? Is an email client the right place for enterprise users to learn about microblogging or are we just reinforcing the email interface. Or perhaps we should just give people as much choice as possible?