If you spend much time on social media, you know how easy it is to connect and share with people you identify with.

It has unmistakably revolutionised how we interact and ultimately build relationships with each other.

One of the most significant changes is that we now have the ability to filter the content we are exposed whether by carefuly curating who we are following or searching for a hashtag (or topic, prefixed by a # such as #ausvotes) on Twitter.

While this increases the relevance of the news that we see, it is often the case that the views expressed in our Twitter feeds, blogs and podcasts echo our own, which is the reason we follow them in the first place.

Take for example the recent Federal election. My Twitter stream was filled with tweets supporting the National Broadband Network and decrying the Internet filter – two views I passionately support. If I wanted to know the other side of the argument, I wasn’t going to get it without stepping outside my circle on Twitter.

If you want to truly understand, you need the complete picture. You need to consciously get outside your personal social media echo chamber and follow someone whose views challenge our own and force us to answer the tough questions.

When the Old Spice videos started showing up on social media a couple of weeks ago, I was amongst those who promptly declared it “the best social media campaign ever.”

Now that the dust has settled, I thought it was time to revisit my original assertion (I was wrong) and see what impact, if any, the campaign had and we as marketers can learn from it.

It began with traditional media

LOLing at the hundred or so YouTube videos that were created, it’s easy for international audiences especially to forget that the Old Spice campaign first took shape as a very traditional TV ad. Not just any ad, the spot earned top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Lions Grand Prix and went viral.

For this reason it’s a misnomer to call it a pure social media campaign. Without the mainstream awareness and equity built by traditional media, it’s doubtful that we would have cared as much as we did when Old Spice started creating personalised videos responding to Twitter celebs.

Where’s the ROI?

Cynics were quick to point out that despite the attention, the Old Spice ads had failed to translate to sales.

Turns out they were wrong as well with Procter & Gamble (Old Spice’s parent company) recently announcing a 55% increase in sales of Old Spice over the last 3 months and a 107% increase in the last month alone.

The bottom line is the campaign worked and based on the massive growth over the last month, and while we can’t say for sure social media played a role in this.

Extending the brand with social

So if the Old Spice ads as a whole did what they were supposed to and drive sales growth, what did Weiden + Kennedy (the Portland agency behind the campaign) get right with social?

Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback towards the TV ads and the affinity the public felt towards the Old Spice guy, they identified an opportunity to move the campaign beyond traditional media and bring the character to life with social media.

The idea was deliciously simple and surprisingly low-tech considering the buzz it generated. Essentially, it leveraged on a very simple concept “make a series of 30 sec spots” and used social media to make it relevant to the audience. Read Write Web wrote a terrific piece about how the videos were made.

We should be doing this

Well actually, no.

While it’s a foregone conclusion that client’s will soon be asking their agencies for copycat campaigns (Cisco already tried and failed with Cisco Guy), without spending big bucks to build brand equity and a campaign concept that resonates with customers, it’s doubtful that Old Spice’s success can be replicated.

Even then, for social media marketers, the Old Spice campaign failed to leverage all the good stuff inherent in social media: conversation, community, engagement. As great and as innovative as the campaign is, it remains a brilliant traditional media idea that was very smartly repurposed and repackaged for social media.

Hat-tip to Mitch Joel and Joseph Jaffe who I just found out covered this topic in the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation. I only realised this last night while listening to the podcast and well after this post had been written. If you want to hear their thoughts, you can listen here.

When it comes to hiring digital marketers, it’s a jungle out there.

Even with the number of digital marketing positions on the rise as businesses scramble to avoid being left behind, the growing pool of new digital talent and traditional marketers looking to reposition themselves means that competition in this space is fierce. The emergence of social media, in particular, has altered the landscape yet again making it harder than ever to distinguish genuine talent from the proverbial snake oil salesmen.

With the playing field leveled and everyone now being able to publish and spruik their wares online, what do you need to do to get noticed and ultimately hired?

Over the past few weeks, I have received a number of emails and DMs from people looking for career advice which has prompted me to write this post. However, instead of just hearing from me, I thought it would be even more useful to ask some of the most respected digital marketers in Australia and around the world (including two who have had a profound influence on my career to date),for one piece of advice that they could offer digital job seekers:

Mitch Joel (President, Twist Image; Author, Six Pixels of Separation): Use these channels to become a known voice for whatever it is you’re pursuing. How could someone not hire someone who is regarded in their industry?

Avinash Kaushik (Author, Web Analytics 2.0; Analytics Evangelist, Google): Learn to try new things and play in the real world. There is no better medium in the world for you to try anything you want, all by yourself without the need to rely on your employer to empower you. Tools are free or cheap. Platforms are free or cheap. All you need is a pinch of effort and a dash of desire to learn in the real world. If you do that no one will refuse to hire you because you’ll actually know what the heck you are talking about. If you don’t do that… well…. life will be tougher.

Jason Neave (Managing Director, Via Media): Be visible in the space. If I’m hiring you for a digital marketing role (versus a creative or development one – and even then your online presence plays a huge part), I’ll spend 30 seconds looking at your CV and 30 minutes browsing your social network profiles, blog posts, twitter accounts, flickr galleries, and LinkedIn info. Have an opinion and don’t be afraid to share it. Oh, and if you’re applying, please make the effort to find out who to address your emails/letters to. We get a lot of ‘To Whom it May Concern’ notes. There’s no-one here by that name.

Michelle Prak (Digital Communications Expert, Hughes PR): In whatever you say about yourself online, use keywords. If you’re looking for a job in the digital industry, say so. Don’t just mention the fact that you like cheesecakes and you have a pet dog. Consider how a stranger (and potential employer) would read your profile.

Nic Hodges (Head of Innovation and Technology, Mediacom): Where I see the challenge with talent now is in social and data. Most agencies are still grappling with how they execute and resource social, and that throws up the obvious issue of assessing skillsets and leveraging experience. Add in the plethora of ‘social media gurus’ crowding up the talent pool and there’s a lot of chaff to sort through to get to the wheat. People who can talk social media in real world terms, deliver real business results, and integrate with an overall communications strategy will be highly sought after in the coming years. And whether they go to media, PR, or creative agencies is still up for grabs.

Sarah Thomas (Owner, Carve Consulting): Whilst it is imperative you demonstrate your digital skills and knowledge online, don’t forget about the importance of the real world too. Take your online contacts offline; attend tweetups, industry events, catch up with people for a coffee.

Damien Mair (Principal, Fusion): Be open and willing to try and fail, so you can learn, as following what someone else has done will not provide innovation. There isn’t rules, the people failing will be the ones who leave a path of rules for the followers…to well follow…while you keep evolving….and that is what will make you valuable to whoever you are applying you mind, talents and focus to at the time.

And lastly, my advice: Don’t rely on Twitter to build your reputation. There’s a limit to how insightful you can be in 140 characters. Make the commitment to blog and demonstrate that you not only know your stuff and have some smart things to say but are also up-to-date with emerging trends and have an opinion about the way things are headed.

Did you find this advice useful? What did you think? Is there any other advice you would give to digital job seekers?

Thanks to Mitch Joel, Avinash Kaushik, Jason Neave, Michelle Prak, Nic Hodges, Sarah Thomas and Damien Mair for their generous contributions. If you like what you read, please take the time to check out their blogs/websites, most of which are in my blogroll.

The different ways in which we access media has changed the relative importance that we place on different types of news. The news that we find through traditional delivery mechanisms is no longer as relevant as the news that we actively seek out or that finds us on social media.

Traditional media is losing relevance

In the dark ages pre-internet, there was only really one way to consume news – passively. You either read it  (in hard copy), watched it or heard it, and were (generally) at the mercy of your local publisher.

I remember staying up late most nights just to catch a glimpse of the NBA highlights on Sports Tonight which – if you remember Ten’s programming in the late 90s – meant that I had a better chance of finding a chupacabra.

Thankfully, that is no longer the case and we are surrounded by more media and information than we could ever hope to consume. We can now find endless amounts of information about the things that interest us no matter how esoteric our tastes.

We are  no longer passive but active consumers of news.

It matters where it’s from

With so much news content already vying for our attention and our interest, what this means is that where we heard it determines if we are really paying attention to it.

Search, RSS and email, in particular, have flipped news on it’s head. Instead of going to a single or a few sources and hoping to find something of interest, we simply subscribe to the blogs, podcasts, etc. that interest us. That we actively and deliberately subscribe means that we assign it a higher value than something we happen to see in the paper.

This gets taken a little further when social media gets thrown into the mix. The ability to share and recommend means that we are now also exposed to what others in our network think is interesting. Assuming you actually like and respect that person, you are more likely to click on a link that they are sharing than if it were put to you by an anonymous corporation.

In summary, we are gradually paying less and less attention to news that comes to us pre-packaged. While the morning paper or the 6 o’clock news will still be part of our media consumption, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of more relevant sources such as social media and RSS feeds that directly interest us.

Have new technologies changed the way you find out news? Do you still rely on traditional sources or is the bulk of the news you consume now found online?

If you’ve been following the #socadl hashtag on Twitter the last week or so you would have seen some ranting directed at mainstream journos hating on social media.

The most recent of these came in the Sunday Mail, where tweeting was compared to ‘mind-farting’ and social media is enabling a generation of rudeness and selfishness.

Clearly these are people with no idea about social media and how it works. All they see is what they want to see.

And it’s understandable why.

The power of traditional media is predicated on the fact that the historically, the barriers to entry to become a publisher and thus be heard are insanely high and that being a journalist meant having exclusive access to stories as well as some talent to write. This scarcity meant that you could only find news that the publishers deemed worthy.

The emergence of new technologies including social media, however, has seen this power gradually shift from traditional media publishers to the hands of the people. These tools mean that everybody now has the capacity to be both a publisher and a journalist -  take this blog, for example.

The way we find and access the news has also changed. Instead of waiting for the morning paper or a TV broadcast to tell us the news, we can now find out what is happening anywhere around the world wherever and whenever we want. (More on this in my next post)

This scares the hell out of most traditional media outlets because we no longer rely on them solely to tell us what’s going on. They no longer control the news cycle as it now happens 24/7. In fact, you can expect the number of stories that break on social media to grow.

Traditional media is deluding itself by thinking that social media is irrelevant and/or dangerous. The very fact that these stories are becoming more frequent points to this very fear.

However, the revolution is happening with or without them and if they are to survive they must rethink their attitude toward social media and see it for the opportunity it is to reach out and actually interact with their audience, and not for the negative hype. For every offensive Facebook page, there are a dozen more that are genuinely useful and advance thought and conversation.

That’s right, conversation. Because that’s something traditional media by by being the very definition of broadcaster has very little concept of.

To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”. You only need to look at the furore surrounding the BP and Nestle’s recent disasters to know that social media is where that conversation is happening today.

To me, it’s plenty fun but at lunch with my friend Steve Culgan (@sculgan), we discussed what effects new technologies like Twitter, smartphones and the iPad have on people’s attention and our ability to just enjoy ourselves.

As Steve put it, the sheer volume of information and content that we are exposed to has the potential to make us more neurotic. Instead of being able to focus on just one thing (say, TV), there are now multiple channels competing for our attention. Rarely do we ever simply watch TV. For example, right now I am watching Algeria vs Slovenia on TV while writing this post on a laptop and checking Twitter on an iPhone.

The Argument

The argument is that we are no longer able to live in the moment. Obsessive checking of Twitter and the feeling that you might be missing out on something only contribute to this growing neurosis. The problem is further exacerbated when you take into account the amount of noise when your followers grow.

Our ability to enjoy ourselves diminishes as we constantly worry that there could be something else we could doing.

My counter, however, is that while the tools have the potential to disrupt our lives (let alone our brain patterns), human beings are incredibly adaptable.

Just take a look at a typical high school kid. They are growing up in a world where these technologies and multitasking are the norm. They’ve figured out how to juggle all these competing media and still have a good time.

The Challenge

The challenge is for my generation and older who haven’t always had this in our lives and aren’t quite as adept at the whole multitasking thing.

We must know our limits and how much we can handle before it’s too much. As a parent, there is an opportunity to cost to being constantly plugged in. Family-time means giving them my full attention (or at least a close approximation of it) – not being constantly distracted checking-in or posting status updates. When it’s just me, I’m free to do as I please whether it be playing PS3, blogging, tweeting or generally wasting time online.

The point is, you must accept that there are some things you’re going to miss out on. The beauty of something like Twitter and social media is that the cream will rise to the top. Following the right people or subscribing to the right feeds gives me the confidence that if it’s important enough, I’m going to hear about it.

How do you go juggling multiple media devices? Does something have to give or can you do it all?

A little while ago, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with the amazing Gary Vaynerchuk. Sitting in the Shangri-La Hotel restaurant, overlooking Sydney Harbour we discussed the future of social media and why it’s now all about the customer service.

The first thing that struck me about Gary was that he is exactly as I’d imagined. That is to say no B.S., 100% Gary.

He is passionate, engaging and overflowing with confidence that what he is doing is the right way to do it. His energy is totally infectious and had us hanging off his every word. But even then, he is also incredibly warm and friendly, genuinely caring about what you have to say.

Since most of the Gary V story is already covered in Crush It!, I won’t bother recapping it here. What we did talk about (besides parenthood and the Knicks chances of landing LeBron, amongst other things) was social media and how it profoundly effects business.

From Gary’s point of view, what social media has done is force previously faceless brands to get a personality if they want to succeed. Simply put, social media has fundamentally changed people’s expectations of how they expect brands to interact with them.

So what is Gary’s secret to succeed in this brave new world?

Story telling.

Brands need to tell their story, build advocates and empower them to share that story with their networks. Technology and the platforms aren’t nearly as important as the change in mindset this entails. It is about genuinely caring for your customers and treating them with respect and like human beings.

Following on from breakfast, Wine Australia have actually gone out and done this with their A+ Australian Wines project that went live last week. Worth a look!

Customer service is the new black in Gary’s world – and with his track record who could argue.

Location-based services are also going to be huge according to Gary. A claim he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is by his personal stake as an angel investor in Simple Geo and Gowalla.

Even bigger, Gary insists, will be Facebook credits. This will not only transform Facebook into a legitimate economic force but change how we incentivize and monetize the consumption of branded content.

Despite the storm in a teacup (my opinion) over Facebook’s privacy issues, the simple fact is they are far too big a player with nearly half a billion heavily invested users to go away seemingly overnight (a la Second Life).

With our time over all too soon, he talks passionately about his business Vayner Media and the growing list of A-list clients desperate to cash-in on the Gary V brand and expertise (such as NHL, New Jersey Nets and Campbells). All, I might add, without a hint of arrogance only absolute confidence that he is going to crush it big.

And to his goal of one day owning the New York Jets, I wouldn’t bet against him.

Gary’s response to my tweet, “What could the Australian wine industry do to empower their fans to spread the word and develop overseas markets?”

Thanks to Lucy Anderson and Paul Henry from Wine Australia for giving me this fantastic opportunity to have some one-on-one time with Gary.

Despite already having twice as many computers (including smart phones) than there are people in my house, I’ve still managed to find a place for an ipad.

While it’s true that it doesn’t offer anything truly revolutionary (it is, arguably, a giant ipod touch), it is how it is packaged and the benefits of having a bigger screen that are what makes it indispensable for me.

Here’s why:

The screen is drop dead gorgeous. Nothing looks quite as good as it does on an ipad. Tweetdeck, Wired, even Keynote and Pages.

It’s a great in-between device. For those times (such as this short business trip, where I’m writing this) when you don’t necessarily need the grunt of a laptop or desktop but need something more functional than a mobile phone.

It blends the focused nature of using iphone apps with an infinitely friendlier user-interface. Anyone who’s used an iphone will feel right at home, even if you haven’t it is just so simple and intuitive to use.

Did I mention how sexy it was?

Browsing or in fact doing anything on an ipad is a more communal experience than doing it in front of a computer. Within minutes of firing up the New York Times free app, my wife and my mum were huddled around me interacting with the screen, discussing articles of interest.

The size is just right for so many occassions. On the flight back to Adelaide, for instance, it was so much easier maneuvering an ipad than a laptop with a screen large enough to properly enjoy videos and work on a couple of documents.

Transitioning from one app to another is totally seamless. Waiting at the boarding gate, I could switch from Twitter, to Safari, emailing a link to a colleague and back to watching a video someone sent me without really breaking stride.

Finally, as Craig Wilson puts it, the ipad is a total media convergence.

When I decided to throw my lot in with digital marketing, part of the appeal was working in an environment where finally there was real accountability! Online, data is everywhere – blogs, social media, web analytics, etc. – all with the potential to provide valuable insights into customer behaviour and attitudes towards our brand.

It’s amazing then that few marketers who play in the digital space take the time to truly understand and interpret the data. And if they do, it is often only a cursory glance at Google Analytics. The fact is that Google Analytics and other clickstream tools are only part of the equation. To get actionable insights from your analytics you need to have a full arsenal of tools that also covers (at a minimum) user experience; social media analysis and site surveys.

1. Google Analytics
   The industry standard of clickstream tools, and better yet it’s free. If you have a website you should at a bare minimum be using GA to understand what people are doing on your website.
2. Qualtrics
   Once you understand the what, you need to understand the why. A robust online survey tool that allows you to create on-exit surveys (like Qualtrics) will let you find out from your visitors why they came to your site and if they were able to achieve that.
3. Mouseflow
   Complementing your clickstream data is a tool that visualizes what your visitors did on your website. Mouseflow lets you see how visitors behave on your website by realtime recording and playback of sessions from which you can generate heatmaps for clicks and mouse movements (such as scroll behaviour) as well as some standard analytics.
4. Radian 6
   While it’s great to know what’s happening on your website, it’s also pretty damned important to know what’s happening beyond it too. Radian 6 is my favourite tool for social media monitoring, allowing you to listen in and analyse conversations taking place all over the world about your brand.

So there you have it, some of my favourite tools for analysing online data with the goal of gleaning actionable, strategic insights.

If you want to find out more about web analytics, I highly recommend heading over to the brilliant and inspiring Avinash Kaushik’s blog.

The intersection of music, film and architecture results in an outstanding 3D building projection that is also an excellent example of ambient media. Historic Rochester Castle is shaken apart, brick-by-brick with a stunning visual display bringing together AC/DC and the film Iron Man 2.

If you thought the Northern Lights during the Adelaide Festival of Arts were cool, wait till you get a load of this!