Untukmu Para Pengunjung

My friend Meg Rayner is a journalist at The Courier in Ballarat (Victorian Country Town). In March, Meg reported about an upcoming auction for a local girl Layla Wright who has been battling cancer for the past 2 years. Through Meg's article she turned the projected small auction into a grand event which helped raise $20,000 for Layla, this allowed Layla to achieve her one wish of going to Disneyland and help pay for her chemotherapy. Meg last year was a university student, this year she raised $20,000 for a child in need, WOW!!!!

As Bloggers we are in fortunate position to have the time and reach to a large audience which sometimes can rival traditional media. What we do with this ‘time/reach’ is up to us.

Some blogger that are already giving back is Gavin Heaton and Isadore for Article 39 Concert and Body Shop Activist Blogger Adam Valvasori who blogs purely about bringing about social and environmental justice.


What other bloggers do you know who are giving their time to promote great causes?

My new BFF Joseph Jaffe (sorry Zac) is coming to town. The king of the Social Media will be sitting down and helping us hatch a plan to start the Australian Social Media Marketing Revolution.

There will be some local heavyweights there too, Gavin Heaton (arguably the leading thinker in Social Media Marketing), Scott Drummond (Online Editor of Marketing Magazine) and I am sure Top 10 Aussie Marketing Bloggers Laurel Papworth and Katie Chatfield will be attending too.

So in the famous words of Australian Hip Hop Juggernauts Hilltop Hoods,

‘ We have a whole lotta superstars on this stage here tonight.‘

The stage is set, Blue Hotel Bar Woollmooloo,Sydney, the time is set Tuesday August 19th (9:30pm), come along and help shape the revolution.


Hilltop Hoods - The Blue Blooded

1. Amazon Review Section May 15th 1997*
One of the antecedents to ‘Web 2.0’ people were given the facilities to produce content online, in the form of reviews for products. This little application would change the way that people would buy products and the way that marketers communicated their products.

2. Friendster March 22 2002
The launch of the first of the big social networking sites, the site was modelled on dating sites and lost its popularity when they started banning music bands and fictional characters from creating profiles. Myspace encouraged bands to create music and the fans moved with the decision.

3. Technorati 20th November 2002
Technorati launched and helped to create a metric that goes beyond traditional measure of effectiveness of media channels (reach measures). They help to measured the influence of a media channel (blogs) through how many people were speaking about a person ideas (Authority), a very BIG step in the right direction.

4. Mysace Fox Interactive Media pays $580 million for Myspace July 16th 2005
Booyah, Social Media is worth money! ... or is it?

5. The first viral Youtube clip - Evolution of Dance April 06 2006


6. Jaffe Juice holds Curry to ransom September 7th 2006
Jaffe Juice holds Adam Currie to ransom for not giving any link love to Jaffe after Adam appeared on his show and made no mention of the episode in his own podcast. Only Joseph Jaffe could peform such a stunt and get away with it. Read story here

7. Transmedia Planning: Idea Propagation October 3rd 2006
Not really about the content (which is an amazing piece) but through the propagation of the message, he published the idea on his blog in the form of a post and it spread across the internet like wildfire!
October 3rd 2006

8. Dove Evolution Viral wins Cannes Ocotber 7th 2006
Dove Evolution helped to show that social media was valued by the old advertising heads picking up the Grand Prix Cyber Lion.

9. The first flog:Fake McDonalds Monopoly winners blogOctober 31st 2006
One of the first cases of abuse of Social Media by a Advertising Agency. The interesting thing was not that marketers would do such a thing but the punishment that was dealt to McDonalds at the hands of real bloggers. People now have more power to make your mistakes visible.

10. Dell Ideastorm launches February 16th 2007
Dell capatalised on the power of masses to help innovate and develop new ideas for Dell products. Social Media is now seen to change the research and development stage for businesses. The product was a creation of Salesforce who created the platform for themselves first with Salesforces Ideas

11. The Age of Conversation March 22nd 2007
The post between Drew McLellen and Gavin Heaton which was the catalyst for the book The Age of Conversation. Taking the Dell Idea one step further and created a product from the collective content of social media participants.

12. Power 150 ranking moves to Ad Age August 7th 2007
Todd And Power 150 moves to AdAge and boasts over 700 blogs now, a huge step in connecting the Marketing Community.


Anyone got any other great moments to add?

13. Time Magazine announces YOU (Social Media) as the 2006 Person of the Year December 13th 2006
Thanks for the hat tip Mike Kuhl

*May 15th 1997 was the launch date for Amazon, not the date that the review section was created.

Armano and his famous cowboy hat

A new A-Lister to my iGoogle RSS Reader is David Armano's blog Logic + Emotion

I was inspired by Gavin Heaton's Mining the Gold section to have a look at Armano's Greatest Hits sections and I found 5 really great quoutes on company blogging in a post Why Blogging matters: 6 Degrees of Perspective from 2006,

Here is the Top 5 must use quotes on company blogging.

1. Blogosphere Economics-
The blogosphere has disrupted the economics of publishing, dramatically lowering the costs of content creation (most bloggers are not paid), content production (free blogging platforms) and circulation development (free links by other bloggers).

Eric Kintz, Global Marketing Strategy at Hewlett-Packard

2. Touch Point Discontinuity
The biggest risk for brand in initiating corporate blogs is creating what I’ll call “touch-point discontinuity." At the end of the day: we need present ourselves consistently across all consumer touchpoints.

Pete Blackshaw is Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics

3. Blogs as catalyst of change
Blogging is a great way to put a fresh new face on a corporate structure, but the rest of the organization can't be too far behind. As corporate leaders, we need to develop the right strategies and tactics to ignite and catalyze positive change leveraging blog tools and methods while keeping the rest of the organization in tow

Pete Blackshaw is Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics

4. Blogs are Consumer Affairs
A blog should sit within consumer affairs department, customer service wants to reduce attention to company where marketing and PR want to increase attention.

Pete Blackshaw is Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics

5. Blogging is the ultimate Marketing Challenge
Anyone who runs a successful blog should consider themselves a marketer even if they are not. The reason for this is simple. The blogoshphere is filled literally millions lf blogs—over 55 million and growing. That’s a lot of noise and clutter. It’s not very different from the traditional marketing challenge which entails developing content and experiences that break through clutter and connect with the consumer. And further, most influential bloggers act as “personal brands” meaning that they connect with their readers on a personal if not emotional level and foster “brand” affinity and loyalty. So if you’ve been able to do this a blogger, then you’ve learned something about the meaning of brands and relationships

Daivd Armano, VP at Critical Mass

Do you have any good quotes on blogging to add?

Read more about Platform Creation here