Australia

That is a familiar image, isn't it? The well-traveled, world-weary suitcase, littered with stickers from places visited from Alaska to Zimbabwe. The trusty suitcase that is lugged from state to state and country to country: it may be battered and bruised, but it serves its owner well as they globe-trot across the world.

I used to be envious of the owners of those suitcases. That image motivated me to have my own beat-up, decorated travel companion to visit far off places with.

I have been living outside of America for almost nine years now. I lived in Sydney, Australia for just under five years...

Over the next several weeks, I will be publishing a series of posts about the basics of social media. These aren’t in any specific order, but if followed they will help you to monitor and respond to your fans and followers effectively. The posts in this series will be:

• Do Not Delete
• Remember, You’re Talking to People
• What’s the Reason for Your Social Media Presence?
• Your Customers are Talking. Listen to Them!

Do Not Delete
You might be tempted to delete negative posts from your Twitter and Facebook feed, but don't do it! It might seem counter intuitive, especially if you have a plethora of negative...

When it comes to the marketing industry, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. Not long ago, digital marketing was only a whisper within corporate marketing teams – now it’s here, it’s as competitive as ever and it’s completely changing the way we do business. Here are my predictions for what’s to come over the next year.

Smart, personalised content
It’s time to stop being oh-so-frightened of data capture and start taking advantage of the fact that personalised content makes browsing the web an absolute pleasure! Take Linkedin, for example – simply log in and you’re presented with the...

Is your brand on every social media platform under the sun yet mastering engagement in none?

The virtues of having a social media presence are blindingly obvious. After all, what brand wouldn’t want to connect with their customers, build brand reputation and ultimately increase sales? But all too often this desire to engage online gets side-tracked and you find yourself staring down the barrel of multiple social media profiles with no notifications. So how can you optimise your efforts on social media and increase engagement with fans and followers?

Let’s take a look at some best practice...

You’ve all read the stats and seen the infographics: consumers are awash with technology, and mobility is leading the charge. Many marketers already have mobile marketing strategies in place--but for those who don’t, now is the time to prioritise. It’s no longer a matter of just being mobile-friendly. You have to think mobile first.

Remember, you’re up close and personal

Consider how you use your phone. You keep it in a special case, use it to take and store personal photos and communicate with loved ones. You work with it. You play with it. Heck, most of us even sleep with it! The smartphone...

The first thing most aspiring marketers learn is the importance of identifying and subsequently engaging those beautiful people called “the audience” no matter where they live online. This lesson gains wholehearted acceptance from everyone in the marketing world. However, the execution becomes complicated, and soon we all learn that feeding something like a blog everyday just simply isn’t enough.

We must put ourselves on the customer's online path.

Think goals first, campaigns second and tactics third.

What’s the goal? Always start there. That’s what the university lecturer taught you a long time...

David Cowling from Socialmedianews.com.au has released his Social media Statistics Report recently and the numbers are interesting.

The ten most popular networks in Australia are as follows:

Google+ was in 11^th position, with approximately 340 000 users.

The key take away from these...

(Warning: Sarcasm ahead)

Sometimes it’s just too easy. The power to communicate through email, mobile and social is all right there waiting for someone to start flooding the world with information. So you strike out into the world with your content and expect great results.

Using email for monthly news, SMS for quick bites of information and social media for event announcements might seem like a good idea, but you can easily end up with a bunch of disconnected content aimed at way too many targets. At this point, you're just sitting and back hoping for results without a specific goal in mind.

Misu...

It was no suprise to us that Australians are leading the world in their adoption of technology, and in partiular how they connect with brands on mobile devices. The unparalleled adoption of smartphones in Australia (49% of us own one!) means that today’s always-on, hyper-connected consumer is placing demands on marketers that can often seem bewildering. What was once seen as the "multi-channel opportunity" is now a "cross-channel imperative" as our audiences continue to adopt technology that opens up an increasing array of brand engagement mechanisms.

SMS is just another way to adapt to the...

Digital channels have revolutionized the way we communicate with our customers. We’re all in hot pursuit of new and innovative ways to effectively deliver the right messages, through the right channels, at the right time.

At ExactTarget, we recognize that creating and maintaining relationships with consumers requires more than clever writing and glossy marketing materials. To truly connect with customers, marketers need to understand both consumer behaviors and motivations. That’s why we went straight to the source and asked consumers how they view and use each unique communication medium.

Five...

There’s no doubt that today’s consumers are mobile. They’re constantly on-the-go, sending and receiving communications of all types, and they’ve come to expect that information be (literally) in-hand at all times. Consumers are no longer sitting at their computers searching for information—instead, they expect information to be available all around them. At the same time, they expect that information to be relevant to their lives.

It was no suprise to us that Australians are leading the world in their adoption of technology and in partiular how they connect with brands on mobile devices. The...

Hashtags have been used in various social media channels for years. Many chat sites have used hashtags for years but Twitter was the first mainstream social network to use the hashtag in August 2007. Google+, Pinterest and Instagram have since followed suit, making the hastag ubiquitous with social media. Now, news of Facebook looking to introduce hashtags has surfaced.

This means that marketers will be able to use a common hashtag across social networks and plug into real-time events and conversations on Facebook, as they do with Twitter today. It will also make it much easier to categorise...

In the digital industry, it’s easy to talk about the fall of traditional advertising. While these sources certainly aren’t disappearing forever as many like to suggest, they are most certainly evolving. The Associated Press has long been linked with the print industry. The nonprofit news agency that has worked to fill newspapers is now adapting to the new digital world. In an ironic twist, this longtime print powerhouse is now asking: Are You Adapting?

This video points to the 2012 London Olympics as the tipping point in the sporting world’s digital evolution. We may not have noticed it while...

March 27 is observed as the festival of colour, Holi, by a large number of Indians across the world. This holiday is a particuarly interesting social experiment, and one I've grown up observing since early childhood.

It’s a day celebrated not just with friends and family, but with pretty much anyone you can get your hands on--neighbour, neighbour's dog, et al. The key is dousing your victim in either coloured water or colourful powder dyes. In fact, it's not unusual for prim and proper suited office workers refusing to get into the spirit of things to be hit with water balloons thrown by school...

Organisations have been using social media for a long time now. The focus seems to be on pushing content out to the audience and expecting them to consume. But how often do you consume the content that your customers are sending to you and act on it?

Conversocial recently released some data stating that “88% of consumers are less likely to buy from companies ignoring social complaints” and that “90% of upset customers can be retained with great social customer service.” You can see the details here.

This is occurring due to the focus on marketing in the social space. Traditionally, Facebook...

As a member of ExactTarget's Global Support leadership team, I see a lot of examples of how not to do things. Most of the time, my team can help you reverse-engineer the issue and align your work to industry and ExactTarget best practices. There are some mistakes, though, that even we can't help you come back from--and that can be disastrous to your marketing program.

Here are the top five that I've seen from my time at the support desk, and how you can avoid being a victim:

1. Location location location: Know your source of truth for subscriber information. Is it your internal CRM database? Is...

These days, nearly everyone I know owns a smartphone. People (and myself included) are switched on 24/7. We can access email, social media, and other online content anytime, anywhere.

Marketers are finally catching on to this trend worldwide and are starting to target mobile devices in their planning. According to The State of Digital Marketing in Australia, marketers will be dedicating up to half of their marketing budget to digital activities in 2013. How incredible is that? And for a channel that wasn’t even on marketers’ radar five years ago. Anyway, here are the three themes from the...

I'm pleased to announce the release a new collection Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013, specific to Australia. The guide features predictions for emerging trends across email, mobile, social, cross-channel, and marketing automation from industry leaders, including Jeff Bullas, Chris Baumann, and Iggy Pintado, as well as thought leaders from Adobe, Microsoft, ExactTarget, and the Direct Marketing Association.

“The new year provides new opportunities for marketers to create innovative customer experiences that build loyalty and deliver business results across email, mobile, social media,...

Tennis is often viewed as a sport for purists. Wimbledon whites, proper etiquette, and winning with grace are some of the defining characteristics of the sport that dates back to the mid-1800s. For a sport as historic as tennis, it is easy to understand why it may be slow to adapt. The Australian Open is not only adapting but it’s changing the tennis world with its use of social media marketing.

The first Grand Slam of the 2013 tennis season is setting the bar extremely high. They are simply going above and beyond the typical social media interaction. The Championship is executing small details...

As our Global Marketing Manager at ExactTarget, it's a privilege to work with each of our different market locations: North America, Australia/APAC, Brazil, and our EMEA locations which include the UK, France, Germany, and the Nordics. Working with each of these talented teams around the world means that I get to see interactive marketing in action.

In fact, there is a lot planned for this upcoming quarter: ExactTarget will be making a grand entrance into some of our relatively new offices with exciting positioning of our cross-channel capabilities. This week alone we had a group of global...