for W3c validation

Friday last week was Headshift Australasia’s first birthday. 🙂

To celebrate, the ‘team’ – Anne, Stephen (Executive Director atHeadshift Australasia), Shelley (more about Shelly another day) and me- headed over to the MCA Cafe for lunch. It was a beautiful sunnyautumn Sydney day, very similar to the weather on the day Headshift waslaunched in Australia last year at this very same location. It was atime to reflect on what Headshift has achieved in Australia during thistwelve month period – including:

• Developing a social media ‘conversation’ monitoring service,that is now being used by a number of consumer brands to help themlisten to their customers who are using social media more effectively(if you’re interested to know more, please ask);
• Helping anational health-related organisation overcome collaboration andinformation sharing challenges with an innovative social computingbased solution;
• Setting up a number of innovation sociale-learning networks (and watch out for some more innovations in thisspace coming soon!);
• Facilitating an online community for EPA Victoria; and
• Developing a social networking strategy, based on Facebook, for a local University.

And of course lots of conferences, key notes presentations andwebinars too, ranging from talking to small business about engagingwith social media to conducting workshops at the national marketingconference for a large consumers brand.

By coincidence, an interview with Anne about social networking wasalso published as part of an article in the May edition of theAustralian Financial Review’s BOSS magazine (“Beyond Twitter” , pp.36-38). Being interviewed along side other experts such as futurist Mark Pesce  and social network commentator Laurel Papworthis a sure sign for us that already within the first of year beingestablished in Australia, we are being recognised here as a leader insocial media and social computing.

Anne talked about the opportunities for companies to use socialnetworking and also some of the mistakes that have been made along theway. About the positives, she described the benefits Headshift haveseen with our clients in the legal industry:

“Knowledge-intensive firms get huge benefit from social bookmarking,aggregating what others are bookmarking and articles of interest into acentral area, seeing what people are reading and sharing information.Large legal firms, particularly in the UK [clients include Allen &Overy and Dewey & LeBoeuf] love it, because it creates efficiency and more billable hours.”

She also commented:

“[Australian companies] know they should do something about socialmedia, but they don’t know what. They need an enormous shift inthinking to go into this really open space. Legal is terrified of it,PR is terrified of it, advertising and marketing is concerned, becausethey no longer control the message. And there’s the threat of publicshame for getting it wrong. Motrin took that ad off TV, but you canstill pick it up anywhere; whole stacks of people have copied it ontoYouTube. If you make a mistake and don’t fix it, it will haunt you.”

If you didn’t pick up your own copy of BOSS magazine on Friday, it mightbe worth tracking one down as not only is this a great article (ok,we’re biased!) but it also includes two other relevant articles:

• The Power of Community, from Harvard Business Review – The idea ofbuilding up a group of consumers into a brand community attracts plentyof myths; and
• Media Mix for Tough Times – Like the consumers the target, marketers are learning to do more with less.

BTW A great case study to read with all these articles is Headshift’s work for Castrol and the Motoraddicts community site.

We would love the opportunity to tell you more about our ideas andexperiences with social media and social computing – just let us know.