Not a week goes by in the Bang the Table office where we don’t have heated discussions on the pros and cons of web anonymity when it comes to the world of online community engagement. So when this infographic from Namesake.com (via Visual.ly) popped into my Facebook feed discussing the very topic, I thought it [...]
Like many others I was pretty perplexed by the shameless attempt by Kenneth Cole to promote his shoes using the #Cairo hashtag on Twitter. I thought it ill judged and crass. But the reaction was also a touch disproportionate and perhaps played into the offenders hands. There were so many tweets, he gained so many [...]
This morning I read a blog post by Mark Drapeau that neatly said in a very eloquent way lots of things I have been thinking but failing to express very well for a long time. Please go and read the orignial article entitled Government Social Media: Five Questions for 2011. I couldn’t resist reproducing a [...]
I have been getting increasingly alarmed at reports of central purchasing initiatives for Gov 2.0 where contracts are signed at a whole of government level. Central purchasing seems like ever such a good idea to drive down costs. If the Government buys all its pens from one source then the pens are cheaper – is [...]
My thanks to Lisa Schiff of Narracoorte Lucindale Council in South Australia for bringing this article (below) from the Adelaide Advertiser’s Adelaide Now Website to my attention. This is about the beautiful Barossa Valley region rejecting an application to open a McDonalds in the area. Astonished as I am that anyone could reject the healthy [...]
I am sometimes confronted by a prejudice in my travels; that the relationships developed through online community engagement are less real than those created via face-to-face engagement processes. Like most prejudices I believe it is based on fear and misunderstanding. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be asked to chair a mini-conference in [...]
I’ve been preparing a presentation for an Australian Marketing Institute conference this week and have been a bit perplexed by the representation of the use of Facebook and Twitter by young people. Twitter stats are difficult but there seems to be general acceptance that young people are underrepresented on the platform. Stats from the blog [...]
Community Panels are rapidly becoming recognised as a valuable community engagement tool by many Councils across Australia. Anne Sharp and Katherine Anderson from the University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science have published an article in the latest edition of the (Australian) Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance titled “Online citizen panels as an [...]
A query popped into my inbox yesterday that I thought might be relevant to anybody trying to build an online community from scratch. An Australian state government agency established an online community of practice some six months ago. Over the six months some 200 people have signed up to the portal but not one has [...]
After speaking at NSW Sphere the other week I checked the tweets made during my talk and found that a key point of disagreement was my suggestion that public forums should be anonymous. On Bang the Table all our users have the option to be anonymous. At the outset there was some debate about this. [...]