Taurus and Beyond Digital Media to host the “Not just another” Social Media Seminar on 12th November in Sydney, at the Observatory Hotel

Sydney, 4th November 2010: Beyond Digital Media and Taurus Marketing have announced today an exclusive partnership to cement the TaurusEngage™ offering and the TaurusBDM brand.

The partnership is in response to increasing demand from customers, organisations and leaders in Australia who struggle to understand how to implement social media effectively to deliver to business objectives. Over 40% of Australian businesses are dipping into social media however many are still struggling to fully realise the potential opportunities and risks it presents.

Sharon Williams, CEO of Taurus comments, “We are finding with clients and new business that a greater understanding of social media is needed to deliver strategies which show a real return on investment. We see a gap in the market to deliver effective, tactical social media strategies that cut through the jargon. This partnership allows us to give our clients an extended social media offering to compliment our award winning communications expertise. The Beyond Digital Media team’s core values are in perfect synergy with our ‘No Bull’ brand.”

The new partnership will see Taurus enhance its existing trademarked award-winning social media offering, TaurusEngage™. Under the agreement, Taurus and Beyond Digital Media will combine capabilities around the provision of digital services with an emphasis on strategy, social media engagement and ROI.

Chris Bishops, Head of Digital Strategy at Beyond Digital Media comments. "By working with Taurus we add further firepower to our marketing offering which already boasts the experience of people like Iggy Pintado. With our strong digital expertise we are able to close the gap that exists within many organisations between marketing and technology. Our partnership with Taurus creates a unique entity able to deliver relevant strategy, training, advice and creative solutions to make social media a powerful tool for tangible business solutions."

TaurusEngage™ offers corporates a strategic approach to social media engagement ensuring they receive relevant, practical and measurable advice to meet their business objectives. TaurusEngage™ cuts through the hype and jargon and helps individuals and companies engage in conversation.

TaurusEngage™ was launched over 12 months ago and has already developed and implemented successful social media strategies for clients such as Bible Society NSW, winning the PRIA and AMI State award recently as well as servicing individuals such as Emanuel Perdis, Managing Director of Napoleon Perdis.

The Beyond Digital Media team consists of marketing, digital and social media experts, including Iggy Pintado, Heidi Allen and Chris Bishops.

TaurusEngage™ will be holding a social media breakfast ‘Not just another social media seminar’ at The Observatory Hotel, Sydney on Friday 12th November. Iggy Pintado (Author ‘Super-connector’ and marketing specialist) and Tim Molloy (MYOB evangelist online) will be key note speakers.  

If you would like to attend please contact rachel@taurusmarketing.com.au

I was asked recently about my experience with the iPad and how it impacts on my use of the iPhone. The question was related to this Nielsen research on Who is Buying the iPad, and Will They Also Buy an iPhone?  Here are my thoughts:

I now use my iPad for most of my media browsing (online magazines, video, newspapers, websites, other new media) and even presentations, particularly when I'm mobile. However, I leave my iPad at home or the office when I don't want to lose or damage it when I'm going somewhere like to the football, or out for the night. That's when I'm quite comfortable reading and surfing on my iPhone, as I have been for a few years now. I'm happy to check my email or social media on whatever device is closest at hand or most convenient.

As Steve Jobs said, the iPad is the third device, and more people are starting to understand what this means.

The Nielsen report said, "Twenty-five percent of likely smartphone upgraders who have not yet owned an iPhone or iPad, indicate that they would purchase an Apple iPhone as their next smartphone. But when we asked iPad owners who do not have an iPhone this same question, this number more than doubled to 51%. Clearly, exposure to Apple’s iOS creates a very positive pre-disposition to purchasing an iPhone."

This is not just a factor of liking the Apple iOS. It is understanding the power of syndication between the iPhone, iPad and MacBook. I'm typing on my MacBook Pro, my iPhone is sitting next to me waiting for calls, and my iPad is ready to take to the cafe or even pick up and use as a separate media browsing device (that includes email, calendars etc). All devices are synchronised with contacts, calendars, mail, files and presentations. This is not an Apple fanboy story, it's about synergy and productivity. PC and Android producers are looking to create the same smooth, integrated model. Apple has just beaten them to the line... yet things change very quickly in technology. What is coming next?

Finally I have logged into Flipboard with my Facebook and Twitter accounts and created personal digital magazines based on the comments, images and links of my friends and colleagues. This is wonderful stuff. (See my previous post and video here.) And even more, Twitter Lists, which have been around for a while allowing me to organise the people I follow into categories, suddenly have taken on a new, powerful role acting as a content feed for a Flipboard magazine. Yes, I can create my own personal iPad magazine, and act as Editor-in-Chief by choosing the magazine topic and the contributors.

I have just tested it out and called my first digital title 'Social Web', the name of my Twitter List. You can look at my growing list of contributors here, and even follow my list. (Thanks everyone and sorry to those I've forgotten!!) Sometimes people will contribute great stories on social media, web 2.0, mobile devices and the digital space. Other times they'll chat about the impacts of the internet on politics or the clean feed. Or even about lunch. And if they talk about lunch too much I can drop them from the Flipboard feed. That's the nature of Twitter and Social Media that people will get used to as digital Editors-in Chief using crowd sourced content.

Twitter is where millions of professionals exchange ideas and links to high-quality content because they want to stay at the cutting edge of their industry. And most industries in the first-world are moving at fast, if not exponential, rates driven by significant advances in technology.

Currently there are 2.5 million Twitter accounts in Australia and just over 9 million Australians using Facebook. Flipboard allows you to take this crowd-sourced content, aggregate it in a neat - can I say beautiful? - way and consume it much more easily than Twitter or Facebook has allowed up to now. Because, let's face it, that's what it's about: the form factor.

Within 10 years we have come a long way, or perhaps completed a full digital circle. Content exploded onto the web in the 1990s and early 2000s, searchable on Google and other search engines. Social media and web 2.0 technologies created the opportunity for crowd-sourcing and aggregation of content so we became exposed to 'trusted' streams of information flowing to us through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and more. Now the iPad has allowed Flipboard (and I'm sure other solutions will follow) to turn those streams of content into a magazine-like format, a form we have always loved to kick back and consume (now digital and highly interactive), and to make us our own editors.

For those of you who have been asking about the video of our recent tour around Australia where we talked about social media and the impact of the iPad on publishing, here it is:

 

We flew back into Sydney late on Friday evening 14 May, after our ‘four cities in four days tour’ of Australia. We had spent nearly a week discussing the impact of both social media and the iPad with almost 200 magazine publishers in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

Iggy Pintado from Beyond Digital Media led each lunch session with a 50 minute presentation on ‘social media for publishers’, which was followed by presentations from Creative Folks, Realview and Quark, demonstrating ways to deliver magazine products to the game-changing, tablet-industry-creating, iPad.

Thanks to Iggy Pintado and Chris Bishops from Beyond Digital Media, Alan Sarkissian from Publishers Australia, Andrew Lomas from Creative Folks, Richard Lindley from Realview and Alex Nemeth from Quark for forming an excellent touring-party.

Feedback from the Publishers Australia Lunch attendees has been hugely positive and we look forward to further events of this kind.

Busy times at Beyond Digital Media. Iggy Pintado is interviewing Max Markson for A List Entrepreneurs tonight and I'll be speaking at the Sydney Googleplex about how we use Google Wave at BDM. Heidi Allen is still returning from the UK after speaking at NOI 2010 about using social media in health and medicine.

And we're having a great time working with clients in the digital space when so much is happening with major players, especially Twitter and Facebook over the past few weeks. Any company that wants to take advantage of the digital, mobile and social space needs to be aware of the rapid changes that will continue into the future.

Consumer expectations increase over time. Now that's an obvious observation. A decade ago your hotel customers were very happy with dial-up internet access, as Gary Vaynerchuk says in the video below, yet now they are so outraged by having to put up with the beep-beeping slow-speed of dial-up they will ring, tweet, email everyone they can, to tell them NOT to stay at your hotel EVER.

However, it's the speed at which consumer expectations are increasing that will catch sleepy businesses unawares over the next couple of years, argues Vaynerchuk. The exponential increase in consumer expectations will have people moving from a state or being exited when a Superstar sportsperson "hits them up" on Twitter or Facebook or a Brand contacts them for interacting with their social media campaign, to people being disappointed or outraged when celebrities or brands don't share the love. So companies are going to have to learn how to "scale their caring", as Vaynerchuk puts it or people will be saying, "where are you?"

The combination of exponential growth of consumer expectation with social media can be a killer for any business that doesn't stay on top of trends and scalability or it can be a marketing boon for those who manage the system well.

Here's Gary Vaynerchuk's version.

I have finally found a moment to sit down and write about the wonderful experience our BDM team had at the Googleplex, Sydney on Wednesday night (3 March) with the Google Wave Sydney User Group (#gwsug) and the Google Wave Team.

For those unfamiliar with Google Wave, it is essentially "an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more," to quote Google. It is currently in a "preview" release and being trialed by inviation only.

For all the misinformation and confusion running around the inter-waves at the moment about what Wave will become or not be, it was refreshing to see inside the collective mind of the development team and the respect they held for the comments coming back from the floor about user issues and problems "beginners" were having getting involved with Wave. This included lack of tutorial videos and on-page instructions. It was clear, however, this is all coming soon and that Wave is being improved on a fast paced week-to-week development cycle.

We had both Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (Senior Wave Product Manager) in the room taking questions and explaining the thinking behind each element of Wave, showing genuine interest in the feedback they were receiving from a highly motivated and digitally aware audience.

Thanks to Pamela Fox and Dan Peterson from the Google Wave Team, Frances Jones (@FrancieJones), Tony Hollingsworth (@hollingsworth), Mark Anson (@nowWw - who has developed a snazzy email notification app for Wave which we are using), BDM's Iggy Pintado (@IggyPintado) and Tony Consentino (@thewordpressguy) for their presentations, and to Brett Morgan (@DomesticMouse) for organising the event and his wise words over our late dinner at BBQ King!

Inspired by Pamela's presentation on how the Wave Team use their own product, Sean Carmody (@SeanCarmody) and I decided to use Wave to manage a project we are working on - and I can report that Wave shows its business benefits immediately. You can add users to your Wave, edit entries like in a wiki, adding "blips" (additional comments or sub-comments), all of which can be edited, deleted or played-back to find earlier versions, as well as link-to or upload relevant files and then create a final file for storage, emailing, or whatever. I won't go into all the gadgets and other innovations because it will just make it seem complicated. It is certainly a sophisticated product that needs to be used, and maybe even demonstrated, to feel comfortable with it at this stage in its development. However, email must have seemed daunting to those used to just picking up the phone or sending faxes.

For more comments about the evening and a video of Pamela Fox talking about her experience on the night have a read of Roger Lawrence's blog on Channel 42 (@chnl42)

Here's a picture of our Heidi Allen (@dreamingspires), myself (@cbishops) and Frances Jones by Tony Consentino concentrating with laptops open. I'd say he sketched it himself, but I believe he used an iPhone app called ToonPAINT.

And here's Iggy Pintado addressing the room about the business applications and necessary approaches to maximise the benefits of Wave. (Sorry about the quality of the image, that's me using an iPhone from the back of the room.)

((tags: Google Wave, Google, #gwsug, Lars Rasmussen, Iggy Pintado, Sean Carmody))

Altimeter strategist and partner, Jeremiah Owyang neatly sums up the impact of disruptive social products such as Facebook Connect, Open Social and Google Sidewiki. He touches on the need for businesses to develop new social strategies, ensuring social entities are centralised on corporate websites rather than allowed to "float out there" and why they need to stay on top of the significant information being produced about their brands across multiple web 2.0 platforms.

2010 is a time to understand your presence in the online world and involve your staff and customers in your communications strategy.

I had lunch last week with a client who had just returned from attending the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) before heading on to New York to visit a number of his own high-profile media clients. His impression was that many larger print media organisations in the US were waiting with great anticipation for the official announcement this week of the Applet Tablet, and were hoping that Steve Jobs would direct them forward through one of the most confusing business periods of their history, much like he did for the music industry. The same can be said of Australian publishers, although our market is about eighteen months behind the US because of the late introduction of the iPhone, Kindle and other eReading devices. That gap is closing rapidly and after tomorrow (depending on Australian access to Apple iSlates, iGuides or iPads) it could slam shut and the Australian publishing industry may end 2010 entirely transformed and shaken out.

I have included two recent posts from Mashable that summarise some of the current thinking about the Apple Table and its potential impact.

Apple tablet confirmed in McGraw-Hill interview

The idea of the Apple Table vs the reality

http://plus.cnbc.com/rssvideosearch/action/player/id/1396376379/code/cnbcplayershare