In one day at The Insight Exchange’s SME Tech Summit you’ll learn the practical steps to steer your business to success in 2010.

SME Technology Summit held on December 1 at Waterview, Bicentennial Park, Sydney will cover deeply practical technology issues including:

• Using social media to attract customers and generate sales
• Building an online presence so customers can easily find you
• Generating revenue while you sleep with eCommerce
• Selling effectively with email marketing
• Leveraging your relationships with powerful CRM

The SME Technology Summit agenda is highly flexible, so you can ensure that you’re learning what’s right for your business.

So register now for the one day that will give you all the information and inspiration to take your business to the next level.

Cheers,
The Insight Exchange Team

The SME Tech Summit agenda is packed with inspirational speakers and practical teachers. The day also features in depth workshops and a networking drinks event.

But it’s not just the SMEs getting in on the act. You can benefit too.

By forwarding information about the SME Tech Summit to a friend in an SME, you could receive a free transferable pass to one of The Insight Exchange’s luncheon events in 2010. That’s $200 value for free! Here’s how it works.

1. Forward information about the SME Tech Summit by email to your SME contacts

2. Tell your contacts to email The Insight Exchange

3. If your contact forwards this email (showing your name as the original sender) and registers for the event, you will receive a FREE pass to attend one of our 2010 luncheon series events

It's that simple. We hope to see your SME friend at the Tech Summit and you at one of our 2010 lunch events.

No? By passing on this email, you can get a FREE Insight Exchange luncheon series pass to any of our 2010 TIE Luncheon events!

About the event:

The Insight Exchange is proud to announce the SME Technology Summit taking place on 1 December 2009 at the Waterview Conference Centre at Bicentennial Park in Sydney. At the SME Technology Summit, SMEs will learn how technology can help make their business more successful!

Free Insight Exchange luncheon series pass:

So, how does this work? It’s easy…

1. Forward this email to your SME contacts
2. Tell your contacts to email me Beth Etling, bethe@theinsightexchange.com to register
3. If your contact forwards this email to me (showing your name as the original recipient) and registers for the event, you will receive a FREE pass to attend one of our 2010 luncheon series events! That’s a $200 value for FREE!!

The SME Technology Summit will bring together top technology speakers to provide SMEs a brief yet concise education on how technology can enhance their business.

Confirmed speakers include:

Suzi Dafnis -Community Director, Australian Busineswomans Network
David James – CEO & Director, Brassiere Bread
Tim Pethick – Entrepreneur & Founder, Nudie Juices
Mark Pesce – Inventor, Writer, Educator and Futurist
Willie Pang – Head of Yahoo! Search Marketing Australia & New Zealand

With many more to come….

Check out our flexible and comprehensive AGENDA giving SMEs the ability to create their own schedule and gain the education they need.

Register today or forward this on to your contacts to receive a FREE pass to one of the 2010 TIE Luncheon Series events.

Cheers,
The Insight Exchange Team

Influence and reputation are now key issues on the agenda for any organization. At the Summit, we began to tease out the many issues that will be critical moving forward. I will spend some time digesting what was discussed and pull together some structured thoughts in the next little while.

We will also post videos of a couple of the sessions soon.

For now, it’s worth reviewing what attendees at the event captured on social media during the event – together these provide a great overview of the Summit.

Twitter stream for #foi09

Blog posts: (In no particular order – more coming soon I believe):

Mick Liubinskas: Live from Future of Influence Summit

Daniel Young: My highlights from today’s Future of Influence Summit

Erin Byrne: Future of Influence Summit

Brad Howarth:
Live from the Future of Influence Summit 09 #foi09
More from the Future of Influence 2009 #foi09
Cross-continental panel discussion #foi09
Final cross-continental panel #foi09

Ross Dawson:
Tara Hunt on You can’t eat Whuffie, but it’s harder to eat without it
Panel discussion: Business models for influence and reputation

Xavier Vespa: Future of Influence Summit

Brandsplat: Regular Joes and Janes are changing the way we advertise

The Letter Two: Separating The Difference Between Influencers & Evangelists

Gerd Leonhard and I have been trying to do something together for a few years now, so it was great The Insight Exchange was able to take advantage of his first visit to Australia to run this event. In addition to Gerd’s far-reaching insights and global perspective the event brought together top-level views on the world of content from Agency, Brand, and Publisher perspectives.

Below are my rough notes taken during the event. In addition definitely read Gerd Leonhard’s blog post Creating value with Content: The Future of Marketing and Advertising (my Sydney presentation), and see his presentation slides here.

We’ll shortly add links to the other presentations made at the event.

NOTES FROM CREATING VALUE WITH CONTENT

Gerd Leonhard, Media Futurist

We can only begin to understand the huge consequences of the shift from Disconnected to Connected. We will need to acclimatize ourselves to this new world.

0.6% GDP growth per 10% mobile penetration increase.

Total reset for the content industries. We are not ready for these changes.

We are consuming content differently in many ways: Google Latitude, Kindle for iPhone, Google providing free music in China, and more.

It used to be: dominate to get the dollars. Marketing 2.0: No long captive customers, but empowered users. Sharing is the key driver. This world is a meritocracy – the best wins.

The current economic crisis is not cyclical – it’s structural. We will have to get used to monetary value being derived in many new forms.

A key issue is creating content in formats that are easy for people to disseminate. The trick is now how to get people to want to follow you and your content.

Click trails and data exhaust. Data is the new oil. Control is quickly being replaced with Trust.

It’s a drug addict model – you need to make people want (need) to come back. From push objects to pull objects. Get your users hooked first – and THEN ask for their money. Young people will migrate to a new level of premium content. So at what point do you place the tollbooth?

Craig Davis, Co-Chairman & Chief Creative Officer, Publicis Mojo

No one has a crystal ball. I far prefer the word ’story’ than ‘content’. I have no hesitation saying the future of content is bright. We

The world is made of stories – the word ‘content’ devalues and dehumanises. We must be authentic.

The days of lying and spinning are over. Brands need to get comfortable telling stories, participate in difficult conversations. Technology facilitates storytelling in new ways, but Twitter is not a strategy.

Three enduring principles:
* Great communication has always been interactive.
* The media isn’t social, stories are.
* The audience is the network.

Paid, owned, and earned media.

“Stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” Moving on from having a parasitic relationship on media.

The Adventures of Freddo, created by Publicis Mojo, gained 130,000 registrations in two weeks, with longer view time than Disney.

Justin Lam, Group Brand Manager, Cerebos Foods

Asian Home Gourmet – bringing authentic food into supermarkets. It had poor brand awareness.

People’s associations of Asian food are highly sensory, about travel, markets, smells etc. One of the strongest brands in this space is Lonely Planet. With their agency they created on online micro-site within the Lonely Planet website, and nowhere else. The food of six countries featured, both on the website, and special downloadable Mini Travel Guides on the local food. Free samples were also offered online.

Results: High double digit increase in brand awareness during the campaign, and well after the campaign overall up 20%. Average session time on the micro-site was 5 minutes, 8000 downloads of the Mini Travel Guides. Click through rate of 8% from the Lonely Planet to the brand site was over 8%, and their free samples ran out due to far higher than expected response.

The Internet provides an opportunity to build engagement. You have to think long-term.

Example of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album.

You have to give away control, even of your brand.

Louisa Bayles, Digital Sales Manager, BBC Worldwide

Louisa began with an excerpt with this YouTube video from Topgear which has had well over 5 million views.

BBC is having to dramatically shift what it is doing. BBC Worldwide is profit-driven – it’s objective is to supplement funding for the core organization. Australia is a key market.

BBC.com is the international-facing revenue-generating arm of BBC news. The content is the same as in the UK. A medium-term strategy is to provide more local content. Advertising is geographically and behaviorally targeted.

Created YouTube channels for major BBC brands such as TopGear or streams such as food.

In Australia TopGear has customized TV show, website, magazine, game.

Need to:
* Find your audiences
* Rework your content
* Market locally
* Monetise your traffic

Louisa Bayles, Digital Manager, BBC Worldwide

In preparing for the 18 August event, Creating Value with Content, I spent some time on the phone with Louisa Bayles from BBC Worldwide understanding a bit more about the distribution of content and how it ultimately gets to the consumer.  Although Louisa will touch upon this briefly in her presentation at the event, what I found more interesting was the approach BBC Worldwide took in launching the premium content for Top Gear Australia to the local market. This will be the case study example Louisa uses to help us see the value in adapting content for distribution.

Louisa walked through the 360 degree partner approach BBC Worldwide took in adapting this international content to a local market outlining the overall shift of bringing content directly to the consumer. Via numerous distribution tools, such as mobile, video, digital and of course television, Louisa explained how leveraging the right distribution methods and how acquiring and recreating content in a timely fashion to a specific audience can enhance consumer engagement while attending to the company’s bottom line.

To hear more, register today!   Come with your questions and get ready to share insights with Louisa Bayles from BBC Worldwide on 18 August at our exclusive 1/2 day event, Creating Value with Content.

Aisha Hilary, Communications Specialist, New Media and Brand, SBS

Social media is the use of electronic & internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with others.

It’s not niche any more – there are 5.1 million Australians on social networks, 7 million sharing photos, 3.6 million sharing video, 4.5 million reading blogs and 1.5 million with their own blogs.

So why engage? To each out and connect to customers and audience, building awareness, providing unique and relevant content, and building loyalty.

Overarching principles of strategy:
Listen & Understand
Context & Commitment
Create & Deliver
Listen, Engage & Facilitate
Evaluate, Learn & Listen again

SBS’s Insight program uses Twitter feeds in their live shows, and Facebook to identify topics and people who can speak on the program.

For Top Gear Australia, they used social media feedback on Series 1 to make changes to Series 2.

Sustainable engagement is critical – accessible, available, transparent, building a community around your brands or content.

The road to engagement is a cycle of
ENGAGE – LISTEN – CONTEXT – CREATE

Kate Leaman, Brand Communication Manager, Premium Beer, Fosters Group
Con Frantzeskos, Digital and Social Media Strategist

Beer is a crowded and fragmented market, and Cascade needed a reinvigorated brand, so they redesigned the bottle for Pale Ale to appeal to a broader audience. Incidentally the bottle was smaller.

Many people were unhappy about this, spurring the creation of 8 anti-Pale Ale Facebook page with a total over 2,000 members against the change. Sales went down, including for draught beer, with Cascade’s home of Tasmania the worst impacted.

The Cascade team engaged in a social media 101 session with Edelman PR, and worked out what to do.

They monitored online conversations as a necessary first step, and used that to mould and inform their response. They could get insights into the degree of feeling on specific issues.

The first part of the response was to say sorry. The next step was to create content including Twitter and Facebook pages. Cascade was the world’s first brewery to be on Twitter. [A claim later disproved on Twitter – LovellLager beat them by almost three months.] This enabled Cascade to communicate directly to their community rather than through the media or advertising.

Frantzeskos engaged in social media on behalf of Cascade, making his role completely transparent.

It was a media campaign done backwards, starting with social media, then communities, and finally hitting the mainstream media, which quoted the positive things the community was saying about the relaunch.

The campaign was successful in terms of generating sales higher than before the disastrous initial change.

This was the first time the Fosters Group had engaged in social media, so there was much nervousness, with the legal team seeing the strategy as high risk. There are additional constraints in complying with alcohol advertising regulations. For example their Twitter site has a disclaimer.

Lessons:
* Continually monitor what’s being said
* Be transparent and respectful
* Make sure all information is correct
* Ask permission to engage in existing communities
* Influence by participating not pitching
* If you don’t have the expertise seek the advise of experts
* Set realistic benchmarks – expect that there will be negative sentiment
* It is an ongoing commitment – maintain the relationship/ conversation
* Be ready – if you need legal signoff to respond do as much as you can beforehand
* Have fun!

Chris Noble, General Manager, World Nomads

Listen, Learn and Respond
WorldNomads is a travel insurance company. It started by providing audio lessons and reference for languages.

They made it into an iPhone app which has had 550,000 downloads.

They use their community on Facebook, Twitter, and their own website to get feedback on any ideas they have for products and engaging their community.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami they created a contribution site, asking for $2, and found specific projects to support so that they could provide feedback on results to the contributors. They have created an API to enable other sites to bring in contributions.

When you monitor your brands online, often messages are misunderstood – it gets very complex. It is a can of worms, so if you do it you can’t be half-hearted.

Direct business has gone up from 30% to 40% since engaging in social media.

* Be stubborn with your Social Media Vision, but flexible with your plan
* Social Media provides an opportunity to engage and listen
* Engage through the channels where your customers are
* Respond & deliver relevant products and services that meet their needs – that’s what will drive positive word-of-mouth

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION
One of the most prominent discussion topics after the presentation was about who to get from within the organization to participate in social media. One of the issues is finding the people who are both enthusiastic and responsible. Another key issue is giving people the latitude to contribute to social media as part of their role without it adding to their workload. People don’t want to commit to blogging or Twittering or otherwise engaging on behalf of their company if that’s then an ongoing commitment. They want to feel that they have support, and it doesn’t up in their lap only. In many cases social media initiatives never get underway because no-one puts their hand up.

Aisha Hillary, Communications Specialist, SBS

“Social Media is about adding channels to get the message across”, Aisha said as we started our conversation.   Although this is true, I wanted to dig deeper and find out why then did SBS create an engagement team and not a social media channel team?  It’s more complex than adding just another communication channel.

In my research, what seems to be throwing companies into such a tizzy is that fact that this new communication channel talks back! AND it talks to others!  When I asked Aisha how she is handling this “talk back” from her audience, she gave me some amazing insights into how SBS views social media and how she’s handling the phenomenon – she’ll be addressing this at our event, Social Media Strategies on 21 July.

Another communication channel, yes.  That’s the core of social media – to communicate.  But what else needs to be considered before jumping into the pool?

During our luncheon event, Aisha will talk about her four points for engaging in social media.  But more importantly she’ll discuss the aspects of a social media strategy that need to be considered within the organization.  Aisha is finding at SBS that by educating employees on how social media can benefit the company, their relationships, and their service it’s having an amazing affect on employee retention and loyalty.

Aisha will kick off our Social Media Strategies event talking about the fundamentals of social media and how important it is to “make the commitment” to make it happen.  Yes, it’ll talk back – but that’s the biggest benefit social media channels can offer.

Register today!

Chris Noble, General Manager, WorldNomads.com

I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Noble, General Manager of WorldNomads.com (@worldnomads on Twitter) last week and boy was I inspired.  Here’s a guy whose company sells travel insurance, a very unexciting product, on the phone with me passionately explaining how social media is all about taking advantage of opportunities, being innovative, and striking the right balance with your customers, audience, and community.  You’ll no doubt be blown away by what he’s accomplished.

By starting with a blog, moving to podcasts, and most recently developing an iPhone app, Chris seems to have done it all and, I should say, successfully.  He explained how business is moving to a “CoOp-petition” environment and by understanding that social media is part of the fabric of an organization, any company can succeed.

At the Social Media Strategies luncheon taking place 21 July in Sydney, Chris will go through his philosophy of Listen, Learn, and Respond and THEN analyse approach to social media and how not having a rigid strategy has worked for him.  You’ll hear how he’s been able to develop new initiatives (and new companies) from the use of social media and create a competitive advantage within his industry.

Perhaps NOT having a structured social media strategy is the best strategy of all.

Register Today!

Kate Leaman, Brand Communications Manager, Fosters Group

It’s pretty amazing how passionate consumers can get around a brand. Kate Leaman, Brand Communications Manager at Fosters found out first hand the importance of implementing a social media strategy to corral consumers passions allowing them to become advocates of the brand.

In Tasmania, consumers were upset with Cascade for distributing their Pale Ale in smaller bottles for the same price. Feeling cheated and taken advantage of, a group of angry consumers got together and created a Facebook group AGAINST Cascade, which ultimately made it into the traditional news headlines. This immediately prompted Fosters to do something to get these consumers back on their side.

Kate’s challenge was simple: figure our how to manage the bad press, the animosity, and the disgruntled consumers by using online means. Quickly, Kate went online and saw the anger and realised that she had to get to the root of the problem to be able to solve it. With an understanding of the issues, she called on Con Frantzeskos to help her design, implement and monitor a social media strategy.

On 21 July, at the Social Media Strategies luncheon, Kate will walk us through the steps she took in creating the successful Cascade social media campaign. She’ll explain the importance of listening, monitoring, chosen language, and tools used to really dive into the community and make a change. Her case study will give you a first hand look at the importance of getting it right the first time and help you understand, as Kate says, “it’s about the intentions and the relationships, not the tools and the platforms.”

REGISTER TODAY!