We’ll be selecting the prize winner in a couple of weeks, on Friday September 17.

Just in case you haven’t taken part yet, make sure you visit the survey, answer it all the way to the end, and fill in your name and contact details. Then you’ll be in the draw.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/online-marketing-survey

Good luck!

So I went ahead and bought an iPhone 4 a couple of weeks ago. It’s the first smartphone I’ve had. And it’s the coolest bit of technology I have ever seen.

Here’s what I like about it:

• The screen is truly beautiful. Your eyes can’t actually see the individual pixels, so it’s like looking at a photo.
• Cool ringtones. My ringtone sounds just like an alarm at a nuclear power station (as in ‘Core temperature exceeded. Explosion imminent. RUN!!!)
• great apps, e.g.

• Amazon’s Kindle for reading books online (I’ve already read Solar by Ian McEwan and I’m now reading Transitions by Iain Banks)
• foursquare
• angry birds
• itunes/ipod

• Internet Tethering so the iPhone acts as a 3G modem for your laptop. All you do is plug it into your laptop’s USB port and you’re connected to the Internet.
• HD video with YouTube and Facebook sharing

And I’m using it on Telecom’s XT network. I was able to get it working on XT by cutting up my XT SIM card to make it fit the new micro SIM slot (instructions here).

After all the FUD in the media about the aerial being unreliable, I haven’t had any connection issues at all.

Here’s what I don’t really like about it:

• the keyboard is a bit small for my chubby fingers and the autocomplete is terribly annoying
• the kids want to play on it all the time
• the native email app is a bit flaky (but Google Mail is a good alternative).

Has anyone else got an iPhone? Are you sticking with your Blackberry? Or are you waiting for the new breed of Android phones?

This weekend in Auckland it’s WordCamp NZ 2010. Wordcamp is an international event which brings together people who work with and love WordPress.

In case you didn’t know, WordPress is the blog platform on which Fruitbowl is built.

Three of us from Mogul are heading up to Auckland tomorrow to attend Wordcamp. I’ve got a speaking slot at the conference – and I thought it would be a great chance to showcase our little community blog so I’m going to speak about Fruitbowl.

You can find out more about Wordcamp here: http://wordcamp.org.nz/mogul-time/

So get online and start posting some articles and comments so I’ve got lots of recent stuff on the website to show all the people attending the conference!

I’ll post photos and feedback from the conference when we get back.

We’ve got a spare seat in the Hummer limo tonight. If you want to come and party with us, rolling like gangstas in the Hummer, please comment on this post and tell us why you love Fruitbowl.

We will select the person who writes the best comment. You’ll need to be at the Mogul office by 5pm today. Then the limo will take us to a hotel where we have a $200 bar tab courtesy of the Rock radio station. (Please note: you’ll need to make your own way home from Napier).

So let’s see some comments!

If anyone is interested, here, in order, are the top 10 most-read articles since the launch of the site:

1. Restaurant Top 12 – Matt Miller
2. Is Sam Kelt a Bad Boy – Damon Harvey
3. Hastings branding – which one? – Damon Harvey
4. Pacific Fibre – the HB connection – Hamish White
5. The Commuter 50 – Rod Drury
6. Steven Joyce Event – Rod Drury
7. ADSL2 Experience – Rod Drury
8. Is Fruitbowl just another fad? – Damon Harvey
9. Cafenet now at Waimarama – Rod Drury
10. Fruitbowl ICT Gathering a Success – Fruitbowl

About 75 trees and 200 wetland plants recently planted alongside the Karamu Stream around Anderson Park in Havelock North have been stolen this week, spoiling the work of many school children and families.

Schools including Flaxmere College and local primary schools, community groups and families worked hard over a week planting the area in June.

Most of the trees (about 75) on the Mangarau Stream have been pulled out and about 30 metres of wetland plants alongside the Karamu have been taken out, at a cost of about $600.

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council says someone in the area must have noticed something as it would have taken some effort to steal this many plants.  The Council would appreciate hearing from anyone with information.

Most of these plants aren’t much use for private gardens as they are specific to wetter areas.  Some plantings will have to be replaced and the Council hopes that Flaxmere College students will be able to help again with planting, as the students know how to plant well and work hard.

I can think of some illegal plants that people might like to steal, but this is just bizarre. It’s not like you could take 75 trees and 200 wetland plants down to Cash Converters, is it?

So I got one anyway.

And here are my thoughts on it…

The iPad is like an iPod Touch on steroids. It’s about the size of a paperback novel and has a touch screen.
It has 32GB of memory, so plenty of room for music, photos and videos, and Wi-Fi connectivity so you can surf the web, check out Facebook and Twitter, and read your emails.

The touch screen and tilt action makes it much more intuitive than a keyboard and mouse. The games are very cheap. Some really good ones are free or only cost about $3. If you have kids, they will love it, especially the excellent educational games and Angry Birds, a cult classic in which you destroy pigs sheltering in elaborate fortifications by launching birds at them with a catapult.

My mother-in-law loves playing scrabble on it – she’s a teacher so she loves the chance to exercise her vast vocabulary.

The iPad’s niche seems to be couch computer – you can play on it while watching TV or lying in bed – or spending time in your “office”, as the Fonz would call it. Computer is not really the right word for this thing, perhaps it should simply be called a tablet device. After surfing the web for a few minutes with its beautiful high-resolution touch screen, a laptop seems as antiquated as a typewriter.

I’ve already noticed some changes in my behaviour. I’ve never been unable to sit passively watching TV – my attention span is far too short. I need to read the newspaper or a magazine or change the channel every 15 seconds.
The iPad has made watching live sport a much more interactive and enjoyable activity. I watched the World Cup match between the USA and Ghana while following Google’s new real-time Twitter feed and it was like watching the game at a pub catching snippets of hundreds of random conversations. Some of the tweets were funny, like listening to Beavis and Butthead passing snide comments. When the USA lost, I actually felt sorry for some the fans, even though I really wanted Ghana to win. The iPad gave a real sense of community.

We’ve been using it as an iPod to play music through the stereo in the office. It makes it so easy for downloading music, and it’s cheap too ($13 for an album). We’ve downloaded more music in 3 weeks than we have in the least 3 years.

Things to be aware of before you get one:

• It doesn’t have a camera, and it doesn’t have a USB port so you can’t plug anything into it.
• The battery doesn’t seem to charge up from a PC, only from a Mac. If you haven’t got a Mac, you’ll need to charge it up from the wall instead.
• It doesn’t support Flash, but YouTube still works.
• It doesn’t have a phone, but it’s too big to use as a mobile phone anyway. However, it has a microphone so you can use it for Skype calls.
• It’s Wi-fi only so you can’t connect to the Internet outside of Wireless hotspots, although 3G iPads are now available.
• It seems a bit slippery and fragile, and until I got a folder for it, I was always scared of dropping it on the hard floor.

So the big question is “Should you get one?” Hmmmm… The iPad is very, very cool but it feels like it could be better. I would probably wait a while and see what improvements Apple makes to it and then see what else appears on the market. Most of the other manufacturers have devices in the works and some of them look pretty good.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/9-upcoming-tablet-alternatives-to-the-apple-ipad/

Rumour has it that Microsoft’s rumoured tablet device has been cancelled:
http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project

And Cisco has recently announced a tablet device aimed at business customers:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11156/index.html

If anyone wants to have a play with the iPad, I’ve got it here at the Mogul office most days. Come and check it out!

In the past, it was enough to have a brochure website, ensure it was visible in Google, and send out the occasional email newsletter to your customers to tell them about a special promotion you were running.

But this approach isn’t really working any more, especially if your target audience is under the age of 30.

For most web users under the age of 30, the first thing they log into each day isn’t their email, it’s Facebook. The first website they visit isn’t Google or Yahoo or even Trademe, it’s Facebook. When they get up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, they check Facebook – maybe on their phone. You get the picture…

If this sounds far-fetched, here are some numbers:

There are now more than 400 million active Facebook users. ‘Active’ means they use it regularly.

50% of active users log in every day.

OK, so how do you get your website into the social networks so it’s visible to all of these people? They don’t check their email much, and tend to change their email address all the time anyway.

• You could start by creating a Facebook page for your business. But what are you going to put on it? who’s going to keep updating it? And why would people want to visit it?
• You could also create a Twitter account. But how are you going to get followers? And what are you going to tweet about?
• You could put links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts on your website. But why would someone want to visit those if they’re already browsing your website?

We seem to be missing the point of social networks here… if you think pushing out a one-way stream of content is an effective use of social media, you’re wasting your time.

Social networks exist because people like to interact with each other.

If you want to penetrate the social networks with your messages, you need to give people a reason to follow you, share your content for you, and interact with you.

So how do we do this?

• Offer your followers and fans an incentive – e.g. a prize draw, exclusive offers, a free e-book, whatever you think will work for your target audience and get them on board.
• Enable your website content to be shared by placing Facebook and Twitter sharing links on every page and article on your website, so when someone shares or tweets your page, all of their friends or followers will be notified with a link to your website.
• And make it easy for people to interact with your content by asking questions in your social media updates, e.g. ‘Do you like our new website?’ is quite a hard question to answer but ‘Do you like our new website more than our old one?’ is easy to answer. It just takes a Yes or No.

If you want to see some of these social media techniques in action, check out the following Hawke’s Bay sites we’ve worked on lately:

• Need a Nerd
• Lumsden Kindergarten
• Smart
• Rockmybaby (and Rockmybaby Australia)

If you’re keen to find out more about how a well-planned social media strategy can increase the effectiveness of your online marketing, make sure you come along to one of our workshops at the Mogul offices in Havelock North. We hold them every second Friday and places are limited.

Contact us today to register your interest.

The report supports the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) findings earlier this year:

• online advertising is now over 10% of all domestic media spend
• all other media reported declines in 2009

So there’s a definite structural shift of traditional media spend moving to online marketing spend.

This global shift is occuring right here in Hawke’s Bay and the last 6 months at Mogul have given us front-row seats to what is almost certainly the biggest period of transformation in the media since the advent of broadcast radio and TV. Increasingly, our clients are demanding integrated strategies for the new interactive marketing channels, especially blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

The idea of instant success in social media through one-off ‘viral campaigns’ is a dangerous myth. An effective social media strategy depends on a long-term attitude change amongst marketing staff. I ran a workshop this week where the phrase ‘ambient awareness’ was used (by EIT’s Joyce Seitzinger) to describe the effect you want to achieve in this new marketing space. Ambient awareness is the feeling of being physically close enough to someone to pick up changes in their mood from subtle cues. The ultimate aim of a social media marketer is to engage the customer at this deep level. In the past, this has been extremely difficult to do online because of the lack of interaction and real-time updates. A steady stream of well-organised, relevant, and original content delivered through the social media channels is key to building and maintaining your ambient awareness.

OK, I digress. Back to the report…

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Chris Perree said:

“The ‘buzz’ around the online advertising industry continues to grow and we are noticing more knowledge sharing within the industry, and insights into what works well. It is encouraging to see how business decisions and the approach to online spend are changing. These insights translate into greater investment in the industry. The consistent growth in the total market year-on-year highlights the increased support for the industry. Breaking the 10% market share in 2009 for total advertising market spend paves a positive path for the year ahead.”

I’m interested to hear thoughts from all of you marketing, PR, advertising, and web gurus out there. You can read the article here:

http://www.iab.org.nz/news/item/new_zealand_online_advertising_spend_experiences_healthy_growth_in_q1_2010

Try it with some other well-known brand names and see what else you get…