Mixing it up on Twitter

B2B social media content marketing offers so many perspectives if just a little thought is invested. Our strategy for Twitter at Hoyne was to show a breadth of knowledge and interests. We researched industry news, actively instigated thought leadership conversations, demonstrated our ability to connect to communities, celebrated case-studies and acknowledged individual achievements. All this within the space of a week. All businesses can drive this with the right team, resources and tools. Be sure to remain mindful of messaging across your channel mix to keep things focused.

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Designing a winning Employee Experience

Writing and editing this White Paper for Sydney onboarding company, Enboarder, was a real eye-opener to the complexities of recruitment and people management. No one should underestimate the role that leaders play in the health of their businesses or the extraordinary outcomes that can result if the wellbeing and professional pathways of people, are considered. This report aims to prompt HR professionals to rethink the impact their roles play and the relationship between empowered employees and operational productivity. Let’s start to put some overdue focus on the players who are key in creating and affecting real cultural change, and ultimately business success.

To read how onboarding is an integrated HR practice with the involvement of hiring managers executives and staff members, click to read the full paper here.

Real leaders collaborate

It’s the businesses that can assess their culture’s health that have a tendency to produce the best work. It’s the teams, lead by values driven leaders where ego has no part to play, that are the happiest and most productive. Collaborative management, consumer focused products and services, marketing communications which target dialogue and engagement as central to achieving objectives, satisfied and inspired employees – today these form the blue print for business success. Interesting that whichever way you look at it, it all starts internally.

“My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team.” Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson, No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy and Creative Teams.

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Making the magic happen: the complexities of property branding

Nick Sammut, Managing Director, Toast Creative uncovers the complex process of selling the dream.

The property development market is thriving, and as it incrementally changes the face of every Australian city, it’s inevitable that we consider its implications. The current pace of the sector has triggered our personal enquiries about how we want to live and why, while also radically transforming communities culturally, socially and commercially. Understanding these shifts in perceptions and knowing how to tap into the needs and expectations of a specific market are key to our role as a creative agency working in property branding.

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Public relations professionals should listen to Fairfax

I came across this in my inbox today. A subscriber value-add from Fairfax. Quite nice. Raw and passionate. Believable. Senior journos explaining the meaning behind their craft, what drives them and its importance to contributing to social good. Journalism must be independent. It’s Fairfax’s mantra – ‘Independent. Always.’

Few professions can offer the same amount of integrity and purpose.  But if you’re a communications person, as I am, and work in public relations dealing with the media, listen to their words closely.

Unless you are approaching your media relations with the same energy and intent to impart knowledge and information that is useful, relevant or interesting – I’d have to agree, you’re treading dangerous waters if you want to catch a serious journalist’s attention.

“For every one journalist there’s probably about a dozen PR people who are trying to hide the truth, says Adele Ferguson.

Don’t be one of them, I say.

The profitability of customer-centricity
Move Fashtronics

Design Your Own Phone Case

There is sheer power in a strategically crafted master brand. Not only can it be used as a guide for all your brand communications, but the brand intelligence invested in it can be leveraged to completely transform your business. The purpose of a strategic branding program is to meaningfully, logically and visually communicate your brand’s offer, ultimately driving profitability. (more…)

Logorama – 2,500 logos in 2009 award winning French animation

Logorama is a 16-minute animated film written and directed by H5/Francois Alaux Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, and produced by Autour de Minuit. It won the Prix Kodak at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. It uses no less than 2,500 logos to show the extent to which brands are embedded in our existence. Logorama is of course a visual hyperbole of our daily branded lives yet frighteningly realistic. On viewing this film you realise our relationship with any of these brands rests almost exclusively on consumer action and direct experience.

Craft your brand to drive business success

Consumers are brand curators in this integrated, experiential, social screen age. What are the questions brand owners need to be asking, and to whom?

The sheer number and complexity of meanings assigned to the word ‘brand’ is a modern marketing dilemma. Add to this consumer expectation of the role we expect brands to play in our lives, and how we want them to behave, and you’ll hear dissension in the ranks.

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More than a logo

LogoHereIn the land of brand (in Australia), some practitioners would agree it is enormously restrictive to align the discipline of branding so closely with the “logo”. The weight we assign this particular brand asset may contribute to a brand’s profitability over time by cleverly shifting perceptions, appealing to the visceral and ultimately affecting consumer purchase decisions, but a brand’s actual success is derived from a more complex application of the term. (more…)

Australian brand and design companies suffer from media invisibility.

Australia has some bright sparks in the brand and design industry, but who’d know it outside of its network?  As a marketing discipline that is responsible for the creation, development, evolution and management of brands, it is curious why design and branding in this country still exists as a mystery to those who are not directly involved.

My prompt for this article comes from online searches (including key industry media) that consistently fail to show much content with a brand and design focus to attract readers in the business, brand management or marketing sectors. The point here is that design and business are intrinsically linked yet there is a clear disconnect between the two. Why? (more…)

Shazam misses World Cup craze

Shazam and the World Cup? What’s going on? Where are you? You came out at the Super Bowl with your most successful campaign yet with a live performance from Bruno Mars, and you’ve been appearing on US TV screens for almost two years. The world’s biggest sporting event launches and you’re almost invisible? (more…)

While Pinterest ramps up analytics for brands, We Feel tracks global mood

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This week’s launch of the We Feel project – http://wefeel.csiro.au/#/ – developed by computer scientists at CSIRO and mental health researchers at Black Dog Institute – http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/ – to map the world’s real-time emotional state, is pretty crazy stuff. This easy to use emotion-barometer revealed some hair-raising emotional insights when I searched for stats on global love, lust, joy, fear, neglect and more. But in all seriousness, this is important work and the application of this technology in the mental health sector is what I’m keen to see play out, both domestically and internationally.
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Leadership and authenticity in a social world

The debate in business circles as to whether senior management should actively use Twitter as a business tool resurfaces consistently and has been the subject of many marketing studies along with its digital cousins. Application of the insights that these studies offer to brands, brand management teams (and to all businesses that understand the power of branding), will most usually be managed in consultation with a communications professional. (more…)

You’re not you when you’re hungry.

The 2014 launch of the latest instalment of Snickers’ long running ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’ campaign, received much attention on social media, but possibly not for the right reasons. Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly in 2019 that campaign is nowhere to be seen online, even on industry titles. A difficult but necessary lesson learned.

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Helpful communications questions

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Most communications problems tend to be complex.The following probing questions may help you to generate even greater ideas for your next communications task. Perhaps you’ve devised a system already, but you can never ask too many questions, right? Click on the following link to view – Communications questions