In Year 9 after two years of bullying, I admitted defeat, I trudged into the school counselors office and made an appointment.
Asking for help in my eyes was seen as a weakness. I was an independent soul. I disliked playing in team sports and I got annoyed at group projects. Even more embarrassing about the defeat was that, I was going to a counselor! Going to the counselor meant that I must have massive problems.
So with reluctance, I sat down and talked about my bullying problem, the counselor told me that I cannot look like a victim, next time I walk past the bully, look him straight in the eye and keep walking.
I didn’t believe that it would work. I gave it a shot anyway. To my surprise it bloody worked! I was so surprised that I ran back to the counselor’s office and recounted the event.
From that week out, I started rocking up at the school counselor every week. He was a sounding board for all my thoughts.
I never thought anyone would be able to help me with my personal problems. I thought, as men we were meant to be able to deal with all that emotional stuff by ourselves. I thought that my problems were too small. I was wrong.
Today, I worry that a lot of men still think that asking for help with personal problems is a sign of weakness. To me an attribute of a modern man is someone who is not scared of their feelings and understands when they have a problem and is not afraid to ask for help.
I cannot recommend seeing a counselor enough. Counselors are great because they are not involved with your life so there advice is always impartial. If you have kids, make sure to let them know that they can talk to a school counselor about anything they like.
I was nervous about writing this post, but I found the guts to write it from seeing fellow bloggers Mark(who has a post on becoming a man coming up in the next few days), Matt and Gavin who have shared their feelings in the public forum of online. Thanks guys!
This post is part of Man Week organized by Reach Out. I urge others to lead by example and share your stories about what it means to be a man.
Remember at school when you had that Librarian who was able to point you in the direction of all the good books for your assignment? Well, that is what I am planning on doing when I speak at AIMIA Connect next week.
I am going to keep the presentation layout, pretty loose. I am going to ask the audience what sector they would like to hear case studies from and then go from there.
So the following is a list of the sectors I am thinking about; Entertainment (Music/Film/TV) Finance (Banking/Insurance) Telecommunications Technology Products and Online Sites Fashion (Clothing/Make Up/Designer Brands) Tourism (Travel locations/Airlines/Hotels) Advertising Agencies Not For Profit Real Estate FMCG Automobile Government
I want to get 3 examples for each sector and I imagine I will get through about 3 sectors.
There are 1,001 social media case studies so I have a simple ranking system to get the most relevant ones for this presentation.
Firstly, I will include all the case studies from The Population as these are the ones I will have the best knowledge on. Then any Australian examples for that sector. To round it out I will find the most effective SM examples from around the world
Can anyone think of any other sectors I may have missed? or know of any good Australian Social Media case studies?
This is a story of multi-national chasing down the elusive Melbourne Hipster market.
In December 2008, beer Goliath Foster Group decided to take on the unattainable beer drinking market of the Melbourne Hipsters. They hired their brains, Gen-Y focused agency The Taboo Group. They were set to work on creating a lifestyle beer brand for this fickle market. Their first move caught the Hipsters by surprise, Taboo dropped white cooling containers (normally used to transport human organs) into influential media and creative offices across Melbourne. The coolers had no description on them just the beer inside. It created chatter and hype about the beer. They then went back to these people asking how they could make it better and on the naming of the beer?
Then it was time for a big reveal, they got some shit hot designers (Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney) to come up with the design on the bottle and they threw a party for the launch.
The beer was then released in a small section of hipster bars (the likes of Revolver, Mr Wilkinson, Electric Lady Lounge, Trunk, Nevermind, Windsor Castle).
In the latest chapter, they have teamed up with local/international band The Temper Trap to come up with a limited edition bottle design.
If your blogs main subject is 'marketing' and you are not on the list, shoot me an email julian@thepopulation.com.au and I will put you on the next update that I do (December 2009). Thanks to Zac Martin for doing all the counting for this one, if there is a problem with your submission please shoot me an email.
A tip, if you would like to improve your Technorati Authority score make sure that you register at Technorati.
I have been working at The Population for just over 9 months now, In this time I have worked on a number of campaigns. I learn something every project I do. The following are six learnings from working on these campaigns;
The best conversations occur in online forums We looked after the Al Bino - Beautiful Day for Cancer online properties, what we found was that the best conversation around the topic were occuring in forums. Blogs and Twitter are rarely as engaging as forums.
News Portals still break and hold most news stories People who say that they will only read blogs in the future are joking, what we found when doing the online audit for Listerine after the Cancer scare was that all the chatter was occuring around the major news portals, people would just repost the stores on their blog or twitter links to the stories. No one was actually discussing the matter except on the news sites.
Facebook Pages work after the transaction. Working on the My Year Without Sex fanpage, we saw that it was very hard to get people to become a fan of the page before they had seen the movie, people needed to see the movie then become a fan.
In online publicity it is all about the subject line Doing the blogger outreach with Dosh Wallets and Skins we found that we needed to get straight to the point, long emails will get no response, you need to get your information across in one paragraph.
Getting video content into newsportals will significantly boost your audience We created the video content '5 things that stop sex' for the movie My Year Without Sex, when it was picked up by Fairfax blogger 'Ask Sam' we saw a dramatic increase in views.
The most important lesson of all is; Social Media does not work on its own it needs to work as part of an overall digital strategy
Have you had an learnings from working in social media? I would be interested to hear them.
1. AC/DC created a 7 part online documentary series, Fannation about the band getting back together. Amazing use of Facebook, Youtube/Vimeo and Twitter.
2. DJ Paul Van Dyk created an iPhone App to help out DJs, check out the tutorial with the man himself here.
3. A Twitter application for Trav$dJam which allowed you to download his latest single if you retweeted about the launch of the deal.
4. DJ Tiga created a satirical interview about the launch of his new c.d
7. Shoot The Player films musicians playing in interesting locations around Sydney. The idea has been around for awhile, here is the latest video starring Reggie Watts.
9. Kitsune are giving people the chance to feature on the cover of their new compilation. All you have to do is email your self potrait sketch in and one lucky artist will go on the cover.
10. Possible the best Australian band using social media Short Stack have been amazing with growing their band through Myspace and Youtube. They have a channel on Youtube where they have over 20 episodes from the band.
11. Short Stack also held a flash mob concert in Pitt St Mall earlier in the year.
12. Short Stack have just announced their SMS pre order deal where you will not only get a copy of the new single but if you are in the first 1,000 they will give you a personal phone call.
Thanks to everyone on Twitter who gave suggestions and if you have any other great uses of social media by musicians please share in comments and I will add to the list.
I am no expert in online security but these are six tips that I have in terms of making sure that I have just a little bit of control over some of the information that is going out there about myself online.
1. Groups and Pages Although you may have your profile on private, people can still see the groups and pages that you are a part of by a simple google search. Maybe think twice about joining the 'I hate work' page
2. Australia Network This is a real catch a lot of people are on the Australia network and unless you change your settings then a lot of people will have access to your full profile.
3. Detagging does not work Most photo albums are set on public, so if you detag yourself in one photo from a night out there is a high chance that you will be found by just looking at the other photos in that album. Make sure you detag yourself from all the photos in that album.
4. Twitter is not a narrative Your Twitter profile in your head is a narrative, your last tweet is an inside joke from a day ago however for most of your audience it is just a statement that is out there. So a lot of what is said will be judged out of context.
5. Myspace the backdoor Most people have a Myspace profile, it was one of the most public networks. If your profile is not on private probably about time you put it on or delete it if you do not use it.
6. Google your name properly Always check the Australian Google and put “” around your name to get exact results. If anyone else has any tips please share!
7. Blocking on Twitter (via Tip) Twitter, if you have a public stream, blocking will only be effective when that person is logged in. They can still see your updates if they log out.
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and she was giving me a little bit of constructive criticism on my blog (she told me that a lot of the time, I have too many videos that she doesn't watch them and if she cannot see to the end of the post she doesn't not read it).
This is invaluable feedback, so I was just wondering what you guys enjoy about my blog? What annoys you about it? How could I make it better?
Guest post from Oscar Nicholson, who runs a film production company, but whose professional life began in biochemistry and is a subject off never completing a Masters in Intellectual Property Law. Creative Commons may be one more reason he’ll never finish his Masters.
Innovation is not its own reward. Like musos of the present, the Cro Magnon man drumming a beat on the skin of a cave ostrich drawn taught between the ribcage of a sabre-toothed orangutan also performed for tribal esteem and the promise of poon tang. Without reward, innovators are less inclined to share their ideas or go to the trouble of realizing them. Without reward, the human propensity for innovation alone might only now have us tentatively climbing down from the trees.
Every development in the framework supporting intellectual property has been driven by new commercial and social forces arising out of historical epochs. Cultures continually seek ways to encourage creativity by protecting creator’s work and income. The file sharing nirvana of the internet is now provoking a massive paradigm shift in the dynamics and economy of creativity. To look forward, we need to look back...
3000 BC The shekel, a unit of currency and weight, replaces bartering and gift economy as the first known system of money in Assyria with the advent of the Bronze Age
3200 BC Marks are used by tradesmen to identify their work in Mesopotamia and Assyria, the first known instance of individuals establishing authorship over work. Connect the history bullet points; the first introduction of a monetary system coincides with the first use of marks. The sell-out artist is born.
50 BC Roman sword-makers use trademarks to identify their product for export to customers throughout the expansive Roman empire.
1439 Johannes Gutenburg builds the first movable type printer, accelerating the dissemination of knowledge. The Renaissance proliferated in print and the subsequent Scientific Revolution got to a cracking start with the widespread publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543.
1449 Exclusive rights to a process for manufacturing coloured glass are granted by the Catholic Church to John Ulytman. A monopoly on stained glass supply to the cathedrals of Europe made him a very wealthy man.
1474 Venice passes a patent statute, building on the craftsmens guilds’ guidelines, establishing creativity as a commodity protected by the state and instituting fundamental tenets of present patent rights. Already a powerful trading state, the statute attracted foreign investment and development to Venice. Some guy called Galileo files a few patents
1710 The propagation of printing brings widespread unauthorized reprinting of works, leading the Kingdom of Great Britain to pass the Statute of Anne, the first copyright law.
1883 Western nations sign the Paris Treaty, the first unilateral agreement for harmonizing intellectual property rights internationally. It is now one of the most widely adopted international treaties, presently administered by the WIPO, an agency of the U.N.
1936-1937 Alan Turing demonstrates the first working mechanical computer, humbly named the “Turing Machine”, by validating algorithms still theoretical at the time. The following year George Stibitz built the first electronic computer utilizing relay controlled binary circuits capable of arithmetic. In the same year, Claude Shannon’s seminal MIT Masters thesis A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits heralds the Information Age. The first generation of computer geeks involuntarily chortle in utero.
1971 IBM commercially releases the first floppy disk, enabling transfer and propagation of digital information. Phallocentric humour ensue.
1973 The Xerox Alto is released, the first PC available commercially. Although only 1000 were sold, both Apple and Windows based systems subsequently derived from what was the first desktop with a mouse, graphical user interface and network capabilities.
1990 ASCII pr0n, pornography illustrated with 98 text characters, is distributed over the fledgling internet by those impatient for the bandwidth to handle images of real porn with women not made of hashes with zeroes for nipples. This is believed to be some of the first online file sharing for recreational purposes.
1994 After development of the internet in the 60's by the US military and refinement thereafter by the education community, the World Wide Web becomes widely, publicly and easily accessible with Netscape‘s release of the first commercial web browser.
1995 With the popularity of Navigator, Netscape releases the SSL encryption protocol to secure transfer of data, preventing tampering and eavesdropping. As SSL was free, it is believed development was funded by online porn entrepreneurs.
1999 Napster brings file sharing to the masses. Having founded their careers on outlaw appeal, Dr Dre and Metallica now turn to the law to stop piracy of their music. Will the ironies never end?
2001 Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University and a prominent figure in the free software movement, founds Creative Commons. Dissatisfied with rigid “all rights reserved” copyright laws, he devises a system of licenses for authors to define the rights in their works that they reserve and waive.
All of us infringe copyright simply by using a computer, every installed program or opened web browser copies information to a computer. You are infringing Julian’s proprietary copyright just by reading his blog. IP laws have either had to adapt, which they tend to do slowly due to corporate interests, or turn a blind eye to these innumerable infringements.
Lawrence Lessig‘s book Free Culture criticizes outdated IP laws and the political influence of corporate interests, where profits take precedence over a free exchange of ideas. Lawrence Lessig unsuccessfully challenged the constitutional validity of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (I’m serious, being married to Cher is akin to joining the dark side), a statute allowing the extension of copyright protection for works falling under old copyright law. Disney was a strong opponent to the repeal of this statute, as their early groundbreaking animation would now be public domain otherwise. Uncle Walt would do backflips in his grave if anyone mashed up Steamboat Willy with gangsta rap.
Its pretty obvious by now that vehemently maintaining copyright only benefits lawyers. Record companies made a fatal mistake wasting money on file-sharing lawsuits when they should have bought Napster and developed models for online music sales. A mash up of Steamboat Willy would bring the outmoded Disney icon into the 21st century for free. Sesame Street’s Bert & Ernie rock even harder since they started rapping in this mash up.
It is also increasingly apparent that embracing free culture is a profitable business model. Radiohead released In Rainbows online independently of a record company. They may have been inspired by the pre-Assyrian gift economy; fans made whatever donation they thought appropriate for the album. In a market where music piracy is rife, Radiohead permit users to download an album for 10 cents and they predominantly pay full album price! Trent Reznor releases Ghosts with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license and tops Amazon’s album sales for 2008.
Some corporations are already embracing aspects of the free culture movement, probably without even knowing it. The marketing potential for user generated content has not gone unnoticed by savvy online strategists. Doritos received 2000 submissions to their You Make It, We Play It competition, that’s a lot of free content bearing their brand. But nowhere in the terms and conditions or competition rules does it mention permissions for use of the Doritos trademark protected by Trademarks Law, Copyright Law, Section 53 of the Australian Trade Practices Act 1974 and the common law of Passing Off. So Doritos are inviting users to infringe their IP and then turn a blind eye to it?
Should corporations be more flexible by Creative Commons licensing some of their IP, giving users free reign to mash up content and getting free branding in the bargain? Online goodwill is increasingly important to corporate public relations and as the social media folks reading this will better articulate, conversation is preferable to simply being spoken to like a self-important buffoon. Despite recently getting on the Hulu bandwagon, Disney has copped a lot of flak for being a copyright curmudgeon. They could have turned that public scrutiny into love by being a little more generous with their IP. The Disney corporation may have created and distributed content, but its public enthusiasm that made it a cultural phenomenon.
There is still considerable debate about the changes forced upon intellectual property laws and enforcement. Andrew Keen is a vociferous proponent of traditional IP and critic of the cultural damage caused by widespread online IP infringements resulting from what he describes as the “Cult of the Amateur”. He calls Lawrence Lessig an "intellectual property communist", although unfortunately not while being interviewed on The Colbert Report:-
Have I missed any milestones in the history of creative dynamics? Can anyone suggest ways of compromising existing IP with the free culture movement? Does anyone have any interesting anecdotes regarding IP or Creative Commons? olson
