Social media, we all know it. Most of us probably use it on a personal level – Facebook, Twitter, Bebo… It’s an online, interactive, community-building wonder world that’s not a craze; it’s here to stay.

Despite the genius of social media sites dissolving the distance of communicating with friends anywhere in the world, what I find totally fascinating is what social media can do for businesses.

With some know-how, forward-thinking digital marketing plans and an active (read: daily or every couple of days) dedication to social media forums, businesses and brands of all sizes can grow their brand, engage with their target audience in online discussions, promote events, and reap the benefits of viral marketing.

Let’s look at the leaders first. The big guns are switched on and obviously have the dedicated resources to achieve such results. I applaud the brilliant Facebook Fan Pages of big brands like Pringles and Red Bull. They are definitely leading the way in successful digital marketing initiatives and all have fan bases in the millions.

While their social media strategies differ - like Pringles focusing on clever use of video and Red Bull by streaming their athlete’s tweets through Facebook – their results are the same. Their Fan Pages showcase loads of interaction, the roll out of creative branding exercises, and perhaps most importantly, an active, online community thirsty to engage in discussions and forums.

Perhaps one of Facebook’s most popular Fan Pages belongs to Coca-Cola. As I type, they have clocked up a staggering 4,626,432-fan base, and unlike most other big guns, two Coke fans started the page. Coke’s marketing department then blessed the duo, added their assistance and now their page is run by user-generated content. Clever.

Aside from these recognisable, universal brands reaping the rewards from social media, companies of all scales can benefit from social media marketing. And it seems quite a significant number are already catching on. It’s now becoming a case of, ‘well, why shouldn’t we be involved’?

Yours in design,

Julia-saurus

Classical Design

I was looking forward to Kevin McLoud’s version of a European Grand Tour on ABC 1, but nothing had prepared me for the jewels of architecture that he is uncovering in Italy.

He is visiting places I never got to on my less than extensive tour, though there are some familiar cities and building to be admired along the journey.

The explanation and models showing how Palladio won his first contract to remodel a medieval building in the northern Italian port of Genoa, by designing a two-tiered floating arcade across the façade, was fascinating. Even more interesting was the fact that his fee was approximately 10% of the more senior designers and architects who had been invited to compete for the job.

Palladio inspired Inigo Jones, the Englishman who, on his own Grand Tour, was shown many designs that influenced the next two centuries of English architecture, and then of course, garden design. Jones was shown through villas and allowed to take copies of theatre designs away with him when he finally returned to his homeland.

The fascinating matching of detail between the Place de Vosges in Paris, which Jones had visited, and the great piazza at Covent Garden, which he designed, was typical of the visual feast to be had with our Kevin.

Tune in next week, and the one after; he is driving south through Italy in a Fiat 500 Bambino from the sixties!

Yours in design,

Richard-actyl

The season premiere for So You Think You Can Dance has become a launching pad for a new advertising campaign for bananas. Random? Not really. It has been quite cleverly integrated into the theme of the popular television show, using the banana’s rich stores of energy and nutrients as a selling point for dancers.

There have been many advertising campaigns for Aussie bananas, the most famous being the ‘make those bodies sing’ commercial. The commercial, created by husband and wife, Janet and Ralph Hogan, was first shot in 1994. It was then shot again, seven years on, with the same child actors, grown into teenagers. This was actually an advertising first and it created a trend where an industry would follow a core group of Australian children from birth to adulthood. The commercial has also recently been shot another seven years on, this time with the original actors taking part in their vocations and still loving bananas. Visit the website here.

There have of course been many other commercials in between, the current spin-off involving a series of pictures; an unhealthy habbit, labeled a ‘no-no’, and then a picture of a banana, or ‘na-na’. The SYTYCD sponsor campaign has used images of bananas disguised as pills and sports drink bottles to push the idea that bananas are nature’s best source of energy.

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I think bananas are an amazing food; tasty, versatile, full of nutrition and they come pre-packaged! They are quite the advertiser’s dream.

Beautiful Scenery

Over-used font

Everyone knows that Avatar is a great movie. It really is a breakthrough in filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and steroscopic film making with cameras that were specially designed for Avatar’s production. The acting is wonderful and the scenery is beautiful. The official budget for the film was $237 million. It took four years to perfect the alien language ….. WHY THEN has James Cameron allowed the use of PAPYRUS for the entire movie’s subtitles?? Papyrus is without a doubt the most over-used / improperly used fonts of all time. Even the person who designed this font agrees that is is over-used. Surely the budget could have included time for a custom font design. Why go all out in every aspect of the film, but totally overlook the hideous font floating in the foreground of Pandora’s lush, intricate jungle…

It’s Internet evolution - super-savvy scientists have designed an extremely fast information network capable of downloading data at 10,000 times the speed of a typical broadband connection.

CERN has designed the network - The Grid - to cope with the staggering amount of data it’s new particle accelerator will produce. CERN’s particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - has been built to shed light on the origins of the universe, and will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The scope of the task meant scientists at CERN needed to create a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data. An epic task.

The Grid is a kind of parallel Internet, consisting of 55,000 servers connected to each other using fibre optic cables and modern routers. The Internet, in comparison, relies on technology originally designed for telephony, which slows the transfer of data. Fibre optic cables run from CERN to 11 other research institutes around the world. Each of these centres connects to existing high-speed academic networks. Computers on the grid are able to send entire movies to personal computers in seconds, rather than minutes or hours, and could enable holographic video calls and online gaming involving hundreds of thousands of people.

The Times quoted David Britton, a physics professor at Glasgow University, as saying the grid technologies could “revolutionise society” .

“With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot imagine.”

Want to know more? Click here.

Yours in design,

Jorja-saurus

The world of web-browsers is an exciting domain of intrigue and drama.*

And I know you want your fill! Wait no longer as I divulge the some of the more juicy happenings with web browsers…

Microsoft continued their almost comical free-fall from relevance with Internet Explorer declared unsafe by governments in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.

Australian security companies that make a motza off cleaning up after Microsoft’s incompetence predictably defended their livelihood by sprouting industry cliches: ‘You don’t achieve security simply by switching. That’s security through obscurity…” hmmmmm not quite! There is a massive, gaping divide between the impoverished internet explorer and the innovative, industry-leading browsers in Firefox, Chrome, Safari + Opera.

In other browser news, Firefox and Google Chrome continue to borrow ideas off each other. Mozilla Firefox released their latest version, 3.6, with one new feature being the ability to skin your browser, ala Google Chrome while Google Chrome has released its latest version, 4.0, with more support for extensions, ala Mozilla Firefox!

Working within the browsers like the little warrior it is, javascript usage in today’s web environment has received another boost with the latest release of the ever-popular, accessible and standard-compliant-enabling javascript framework, jQuery (version 1.4).

Something probably happened with Opera too. I just don’t have time for the Norwegians and their creations at this point in my life.

* I am NOT a nerd.

Yours in design,

Ben-ycneme

I know this advert for Air New Zealand’s cut-price website grabaseat.co.nz is pretty un-PC, but it sure is funny. From a marketing perspective I think it works: it was memorable, I was entertained and consequently showed it to my friends. Before this advert Air New Zealand wasn’t even on my radar. It just shows how hard advertisers need to work to get your attention these days and how it’s often about entertaining first and selling second. And with viral campaigns the ’sell’ needs to be so subtle you can barely see it. The more controversial the better, people love a banned advert! Enjoy!

Yours in design
Janet-eratops

Australia is one of the top countries in the world in terms of spending on communication and IT as a percentage of income. In short, we love spending money on gadgets. It’s out with the old and in with the new, with mobile phone users changing handsets on average every one-and-a-half to two years.

Believe it or not, this is highly relevant to the wellbeing of gorillas in Africa. To understand where gorillas come in you have to look at the life story of gadgets. Today we ask where do your mobile phones come from, where do they go when they die, and what on earth does this have to do with gorillas?

Mobile phones are complex devices with many different components made from a wide range of materials. A typical mobile phone is made from an assortment of plastics, ceramics, copper and copper compounds, iron, nickel and its compounds, zinc and its compounds, silver, flame retardants, and even gold. In fact recycling 50,000 mobile phones reportedly yields one-and-a-half kilograms of gold. Other materials used that are under 1% by weight include tin, lead, cobalt, aluminium, tungsten, antimony, manganese, lithium, phosphorous, beryllium, palladium, and tantalum. It’s this tantalum that brings us closer to the gorillas in question.

Tantalum is a rare, hard blue-grey chemical element. An estimated 64% to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves are in the Congo, right in the midst of natural gorilla habitat. Coltan mining, trade and smuggling has been a major contributor to war and conflict in the Congo, and this conflict and mining in habitat areas, along with poaching and disease, are having a major impact on gorillas, destroying their forest habitats and threatening the survival of the species.

Recycling programs are being developed for many types of e-waste, both to prevent pollution and to recover still functional second-hand devices or the useful and valuable component materials such as rare metals. Re-use and recycling programs are already established in Australia for computers, toner and ink cartridges, and mobile phones. With an estimated 14 to 16 million inactive mobile phones stored in cupboards or drawers around the country, the real challenge is getting people to actually use these programs.

Think of the gorillas in the Congo and answer the call to recycle your old mobile phones.

Yours in Design,
Tanya-zinosaurus

Read more about it at www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2749087.htm
More information on recycling your mobile www.wwf.org.au/act/takeaction/recycle-your-mobile/

Semi-Permanent 2010 is already shaping up to be an awe-inspiring event with a wide range of professionals from all over the globe: visual artists, photographers, illustrators, graphic designers, typographers…

The latest to be enlisted for the Sydney event is Craig Schuftan who is actually a Sydney local. He is an author and broadcaster specialising is 80s music. This is a new style of speaker for Semi-Permanent but I’m sure it will be an interesting topic to be engaged in as he takes a journey through the history of album covers.

Watch out for the line-up for the Brisbane Semi-Permanent which will be held on Friday 4 June: www.semipermanent.com

Yours in Design,
Amber-saurus

Chalkfest and Youngcare join forces

Brisbane entrepreneur and owner of the Chalk Hotel Jason Titman has always believed in making a contribution to society aligning himself and the Chalk Hotel with many local, Brisbane, and national charities. Towards the end of 2009, Jason had the vision of putting together a music event called Chalkfest, that is designed to bring together some great Brisbane bands in an indoor festival environment. Along with this idea he saw the opportunity to involve Australia’s largest growing charity Youngcare. Jason says “I saw the opportunity to assist raising awareness through live music whilst working to raise funds to aid Youngcare in its goal to deliver quality care for young Australians. Youngcare gives back dignity and hope and that’s why they have our ongoing support”.

Chalk Hotel is offering an experience that no other hotel in Brisbane is offering in 2010. Chalkfest will be located within the 4 zones of Chalk Hotel, featuring 3 stages of music with turf laid out throughout the venue to create that true festival experience, “We are going all out dirt & all, just to make your festival experience come alive”. ChalkFest off with kick off with a bang! Literally! On Sunday 24th January Philadelphia Grand Jury, Numbers Radio and many more Australian artist’s will perform a booming set and come together with Youngcare to help raise funds for young Australians with high care needs. Jason says “music is about celebration of life and what better time than the Australia Day weekend for us to come together in support for this vital cause”. Chalkfest is set to be a regular event on the Chalk Hotel calendar and has some impressive line ups set to blow you away in 2010 “it’s going to be rock solid full of Brisbaneand Australia’s best rock bands, as well as some of the country’s hip hop, breaks, funk and dance acts”.

For tickets visit MoshTix at www.moshtix.com.au or through Moshtix outlets such as Rocking Horse Records, Butter Beats, Kill The Music, The Music Shop & Atlantis. Tickets are selling fast and a limited number of tickets will be available at the door on the day.

Or to learn more about Youngcare or to donate funds and support please go to www.youngcare.com.au.

Yours in design,

Jorja-saurus