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My colleague in arms and good all-round Aussie girl Danielle Crofts has a cracker of a job going in London that she’d love to see filled asap:

Event Producer

Job Details

• Reporting to: Group Manager, Event Production
• Working hours: 35 hours per week, exclusive of meal breaks, plus as many as required to fulfil the needs of the post
• Location: Michael Faraday House, Six Hills Way, Stevenage, Herts, UK (25min train trip from London Kings Cross)

Job Summary
To research and produce events within one or more sectors which not only contribute to the sharing of Science, Engineering and Technology knowledge amongst members and the wider engineering community but which are also commercially viable.

Main Duties and Responsibilities (not necessarily in priority order)

• To produce a specified amount of events per year in one or more sectors
• To follow research and event production processes and meet key event deadlines
• To carry out telephone and web research into each event to ensure its commercial viability and that the target delegate number is achievable
• To be responsible for identifying and inviting speakers for events
• To be responsible for writing and proofing all material for web, email and print marketing channels
• To liaise with the Sponsorship Sales department to ensure that sponsorship opportunities are maximised for each event
• To liaise with the Marketing department to ensure that each event is effectively promoted and publicised using all appropriate channels
• To be responsible for managing the budget for individual events, liaising with the Event Services department to ensure that budgeted costs are not exceeded
• To liaise with the Event Services department to ensure the smooth running of your events
• To liaise with the relevant TPN Community Manager where you are responsible for producing an event proposed by members
• To work with magazine and journal editors where appropriate to use their market knowledge to identify speakers and presentation topics for your events
• To build up industry knowledge and a network of contacts for the sector(s) in which you produce events
• To maintain an awareness of events produced by other Institutions and commercial competitors for the sector(s) in which you produce events
• To undertake duties and projects at the request of the line manager
• To be familiar with the Health and Safety and Fire policies for the organisation and to attend mandatory updates where required

This job description is intended as a general guide to the scope of the post and may change in line with the needs of the service or at the request of the line manager.

Person Specification 
Essential Criteria: 

• Educated to degree level with an interest in engineering and technology
• At least two years’ commercial experience, preferably in a research-based job role
• An ability to assimilate complex information quickly
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• An ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
• Good level of IT literacy

Desirable: 

• An established network of contacts in an industry sector served by the Institution
• Previous conference production experience
• Budget management experience
• Conference topic generation experience
• Knowledge of additional languages

All correspondence to Danielle:
E:
Tel: +44 1438 765 661

Message out.

Filed under: housekeeping
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Courtesy of a tip-off from my favourite tech blogger, Amit Agarwal, GoDaddy is now selling .me domain names.

Get in while your name is still available; you’ll only regret it later if you don’t.

Filed under: customer service, housekeeping, tools
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Just when all my efforts to bring back Australianism’s into the conversation of regular Australians seems to be paying off, in comes news that we are now actually located in North America. Bugger - you think someone could have told us (perhaps Rudd and Swan did know and that’s why SA did so badly in the budget).

A pop-up advert from Classmates.com shows that we sit in with Arkansas (is that pronounced like ‘R-Kansas’?) and Illinois (is that pronounced like ‘Ill-in-noise’?) and Connecticut (pronounced ‘Connect-eye-cut’?). You liddle bewdy!

Personally, I’m wondering exactly where Jefferson High, Lincoln High and JFK High are located; any Adelaidians want to guess which suburbs?

Seriously…
If you are going to try database marketing on a mass scale, like classmates.com is doing, for goodness sake conduct even some preliminary research!

[...and the US wonders why the world seems to always laugh at its expense and hate it so much. Personally, I love the people, but hate its cultural imperialism and sheer geographic and historical stupidity. How can you expect us to take you [as a country, not directed at any individuals] seriously?)

Filed under: PR, customer service, ethics, housekeeping, marketing
2 Comments

Following up on my earlier post/rant about rankings over on Meg’s counter, here’s the stats for this month and the last few, both for this blog and the main business communication articles website.

• BetterCommunicationResults - the blog
  • Apr 08 Unique Visitors 6,616
  • Mar 08 Unique Visitors 9,482
  • Feb 08 Unique Visitors 7,118
  • Jan 08 Unique Visitors 4,645
  • Dec 07 Unique Visitors 4,411
• BetterCommunicationResults - the article website
  • Apr 08 Unique Visitors 9,632
  • Mar 08 Unique Visitors 10,278
  • Feb 08 Unique Visitors 14,842

It shouldn’t make that much of a difference, but fyi I was subjected to a DoS attack —— heaven knows why —— one day on both sites.

Filed under: ethics, housekeeping
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I’ve launched an affiliate program for the products I sell over on the BetterCommunicationResults.com.au website.

You can earn 50% commission on

• my monthly newsletter
• my social media flash cards
• my better business writing course

It’s there if you want it…

Filed under: housekeeping
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Meg Tsiamis over at the rather splendid ‘Dipping into the Blogpond’ has put the cat amongst the pigeons.

Or rather, my cat amongst my own pigeons.

It appears that Alexa, one of the earliest site monitoring and comparison engines, has put fresh batteries in its trusty pocket calculator and as a result some Aussie sites have improved their rankings, whilst others have gone backwards.

As the 20-ish comments point out, Alexa is so bizarre and illogical a monitoring tool that using it is just about a complete waste of time.

Meg herself acknowledges the irregularity of Alexa and that some of us prefer to assess our ’success’ or otherwise by visitor, subscriber and comment numbers, rather than Alexa’s bizarrely tortuous calculations. This has long been my ‘beef’ about her stats — I argue that how can a site with large subscriber numbers be considered ‘less’ than a site with relatively poor subscriber and comment numbers? Meg herself suggests that until we are open and transparent about our site traffic, our ‘true’ popularity or otherwise cannot be accurately assessed.

So, in the spirit of openness and trust, here’s my blog’s stats and my Web1.0 article website’s stats:

Click on the images to see a larger, clearer version…

Make of them what you will… but I wish more bloggers/pod/vidcasters would put their Feedburner subscriber numbers up; that at least would help the ‘bean counters’ in their number crunching.

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, housekeeping, marketing, podcasting, tools, videoblog
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I am stunned!

Over at MyRagan there is a 20-something who writes that even she feels ‘overwhelmed’ sometimes by social media and struggles to keep up, which is why she attends conferences, seminars and workshops on the subject.

After her post–and yes, I agree with Sue Johnston that the headline of the article was exceedingly cheap and misleading; shame on you Mark et al–there is a plethora of fellow business communicators whining about how they can’t cope.

Give me a break!!!

The whole point is not whether you feel swamped or not, the whole point is that you can no longer afford to be uninvolved.

Drew Mendelson points to ongoing research by Universal McCann [pdf] that comes up with interesting stats and comments, some of which I repeat here:

• Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.
• If you are online you are using social media
• Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
• All social media platforms have grown significantly 
• Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
• 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content
• 55% of users have uploaded photos
• 22% of users have uploaded videos
• Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and as a collective rival any traditional media
• 73% have read a blog
• The blogosphere is becoming increasingly participatory, now 184m bloggers world-wide
• China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined

As a business communicator you no longer have the luxury of burying your head in the sand and pretending that this will all go away. It won’t. And it will just get bigger and bigger and go faster and faster and if you don’t leap onboard now you will never catch up.

KPI your bottom, Mr BeanCounter

As I explained to a client in Brisbane yesterday, Social Media doesn’t replace any of the more traditional channels of communication, instead it adds significantly to your burden. You need to throw resource at it and you need to forget about any dumb-arsed KPIs and ROIs. It is a set of ‘relationship’ tools, not easily shoe-horned into neatly fitting your CFO’s ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis’ metrics.

Every businessperson worth their salt knows that taking clients out to lunch, or to golf, or the cricket, or whatever, is beneficial in the long term for the relationship betwixt company and client. No one stands with a clipboard and a calculator outside the CEO’s office when they return from a golfing day and grills them about the ROI of their golf.

As Alex Manchester once said to me, “how much is a good relationship with your customer worth to you?” THAT is your bloomin’ ROI, Mr BeanCounter.

Social Media Burnout

Yes, there is such a thing as Social Media burnout. My good friend Iwan Winoto at IBM pointed me to an interesting article from the New York Times. It seems that they are not alone in worrying about ‘blogger burnout’.

Yes, the demands of this never-off Internet are incredible. I feel under pressure to blog something intelligent every day (Mrs BetterComms would argue that I rarely have one intelligent thought a week) less I lose my audience and subscriber numbers. I know that employees of companies equally feel under pressure to perform, to meet ever-tougher KPIs.

Yes, there is a new ‘must see’ Social Media tool released every week (sometimes several a week).

Yes, it can be an incredible drain on your time evaluating them, let alone joining them.

But who says you have to do it all yourself? Doh!

Be uninvolved; be unemployed and unemployable

I’ve had very legitimate concerns expressed to me about the whole Social Media thing; not in terms of whether it will stay, but where does one find the time to get up to speed on it?

The answer is simple: how do you learn ANYTHING within a corporation? Answer: you go to a seminar, attend a workshop, invite a guest speaker in to your meeting, bring in a consultant to help you strategise and roll-out your strategy…

Is it expensive? Yes. Well, at least I am, but then again I’m also one of the very few experts in Australia who understands this stuff and is available to help you grow. Laurel Papworth is another. Trevor Cook is another. So is Gary Hayes. So too is Stephen Collins.

We don’t come cheap. After all, do you expect ‘bargain basement’ pricing from, say, PwC or McKinsey and at the same time expect the top level of intelligence and insight that they are able to bring to your company’s benefit? In business life you very much get what you pay for. But you already know that.

What you probably don’t wish to acknowledge to yourself is that if you don’t keep your own skills current you will be unemployable within five years.

Yes, unemployable. Second-rate. The business communication world is moving at such a pace that if you don’t have a few Social Media campaigns and successes under your belt you will be passed over for promotion/head-hunting/a new job by someone else who does.

Survival of the fittest.

Remember all that HR bumpf about ‘life long learning’? They were telling the truth.

Says Anna:

Just last Sept I attended some teaching workshops for working with students at the university level and social media issues were brought up several times. I was shocked when I was informed that I would most likely find it difficult to relate to new students as a recent graduate myself because the typical generation gap has now shrunk to about 4 years. The availability of cellphones, laptops, wireless internet, ipods, msn, facebook and basically social media in general is a major factor behind just how differently these students interact. Although I’m hardly older then these students, I am somehow now old.

Just don’t be one of the whingers (that’s Aussie-speak for ‘whiners’) over at the MyRagan site who are whimpering about it all. Either be part of the problem or be part of the solution; either skill up or get out of the way. Tough love.

Think that’s a bit harsh? As we say here in Australia,

“build a bridge and get over it.”

Filed under: PR, Second Life & 3D virtual worlds, blogging, customer service, ethics, housekeeping, internal communications, marketing, micro-blogging, miscellaneous, nonverbal communication, podcasting, tools, videoblog
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