the grass is greener on the internet

So I feel incredibly lucky right now…because Standard Chartered has selected me to be the World’s Coolest Intern!

It’s an honour I wasn’t really expecting to receive, because the calibre of other candidates in the Top Ten was so high!

If you’re a smart company looking to get into social media…you’ll snap up one of these kids right now.

Just by the fact that all of these people have gotten to the Top Ten, you know that:

1. They love social media
2. They’re willing to go the extra mile
3. They can execute a social media campaign and do it well

Need further convincing?

Here they are…

First runner-up…Farah!

You’ve already seen my post on Farah – the more I talk to her, the more I’m impressed by the class with which she handles communications. Some would put it down to that Masters in Comms, but she has a professional attitude that can’t be taught.

Why you should hire her: She’s shown from day one that she’s a strong communicator. She’s fun but also dedicated to her work, with flawless execution.

Since the competition she’s already landed herself a couple of gigs to propel herself to social media expert status, including Penn Olson and ITChannel.

Campaign highlight: It’s tough to pick from such a consistent campaign, but her solid following on Facebook (800+) deserves a mention. She also managed to churn out a tweet an hour for the EconomyWatch.com banner ad!

Second runner-up…Sarah!

Sarah was a competition favourite from the moment she entered, with some very impressive stats and of course status as co-founder of Penn Olson.

Why you should hire her: Well, how many other students do you know that have started an incredibly successful tech + business news site and now advise companies?

Campaign highlight: Flattening everyone else to the ground with a reference from a Mashable editor…who is just one of the people in her 1.6mill Twitter reach!

And in a different order to usual (see if you can figure out what order I used)

Jen

Jen’s bubbly personality bowls you over even when you’re viewing it over the internet. And it’s not just her – all of her supporters were tripping over each other to show more enthusiasm.

Why you should hire her: she’s fun, enthusiastic, creative and comes with a load of experience and a loyal following.

Campaign highlight: To demonstrate her creativity and addiction to social media, Jen took a series of photos showing what it would look like if we used social media actions in real life. Double points for daring.

Robyn

She was one of the few to create a blog exclusively to enter the competition – not that it would have been very difficult for her, if you look at the slew of other websites she owns.

Why you should hire her: Ask yourself how many female engineers you know. With first class honours. And…who are strong enough communicators that they can work in marketing. Yep, that should give you an idea of how rare she is. She’s got a great eye for web dev, though you’ll have to whisk her away from being the ‘resident nerd’ for Peek.

Campaign highlight: When SCB asked us to whip up a top 10 video within 3 days, she rose to the challenge beautifully. Colour me very impressed.

Duane

Duane was also hotly-tipped, with an entire microsite devoted to his campaign. He was always pushing the bar, with a campaign team, plenty of ideas and even a hunt for a secret page!

Why you should hire him: activating other people to go all-out to support you shows a personal quality that not many people have. Add that to the ideas this guy has and you have a fairly potent combination.

[But you might have to fight Qais Consulting for him right now ;)]

Campaign highlight: I hear that one supporter was so enthusiastic in promoting him that they were nearly banned from Facebook… It’s one thing to be able to promote yourself, but to be able to activate other people to promote you and have strangers across the world photographing themselves with your name is an incredible skill!

Stooffi

So her real name’s Stephanie, but she’ll somehow always be Stooffi in my head – from the moment I saw her campaign I knew she’s make Top Ten. Stooffi brought all of the applicants together, both online and offline!

Why you should hire her: she’s a Twitter MACHINE. She’s absolutely dedicated to social media at all hours and occasions…and also advises on it at Penn Olson. She’s also shown that she can learn quickly – she’s only been on social media for less than a year!

Campaign highlight: Another unshakeable image is the exploding marshmallows promised by one of Stooffi’s many supporters if she didn’t get the position. I think her mobilisation of Twitter followers was one of the best, with 170+ of them adding a badge to their profile pictures!

Jonha

She’s incredibly sweet but there’s more to Jonha than that – she puts social into social media and promotes herself with ease and efficiency.

Why you should hire her: Jonha’s a natural networker, with a whole string of happy clients and loyal followers. If you need to engage with your customers, she’s your girl.

Campaign highlight: 7 blog posts popped up in support of her campaign within 24 hours of her asking, from clients to friends to strangers.

Gaurav

When I think Gaufire, I think entrepreneur. Every time I’ve spoken to him, he’s suggested new ways to push the business agenda forward.

Why you should hire him: every company needs people to drive their new projects, seek out new opportunities and make the most of those opportunities.

Campaign highlight: Gaurav was the first entry I discovered using Google and stayed in the first few pages fairly consistently, which is not an easy task!

Soshi

She’s been dubbed the enigma of the competition, but only in a good way – Alicia was the only person to use haikus and graphs with such devastating communication accuracy.

Why you should hire her: she’s a concise communicator, strong writer and uber creative. Her offbeat personality may not suit all companies BUT she would be perfect for some niche markets where others wouldn’t survive.

Campaign highlight: Convincing SCB to put her in the top 10 without ever showing a photo…how did she do it??

The World’s Coolest Intern will be announced tomorrow – that is, Saturday Nov 20!

It’s been an amazing ride and the experience of applying for it was almost an internship in itself. Even if I don’t win, I’m still learnt a lot and met some great people along the way!

One of those people is the lovely Farah:

Even if our universities are competing for fourth place in Australia, we agreed to interview each other about the competition and why we should be the World’s Coolest Intern!

What was your main reason for entering the World’s Coolest Intern?

The main reason was that I was attracted to the competition was the social media training that would be given to the winner. Receiving coaching and training from the top social media gurus in Singapore is extremely invaluable (something you can’t sign up or just pay for) and would go a long way in coaching me to great social media marketer in the future.

Give us three reasons why you should be the World’s Coolest Intern…

(1) I am always curious and willing to learn. (2) I believe I can create content that attracts and engages the audience. It helps that I have a strong foundation in writing and communicating which is essential for the job. (3) I’ve got some great ideas that I could bring to the team. Essentially, Willingness, Content and Ideas = WCI.

What’s the craziest thing you’d do to get the job?

The craziest thing I would do to get WCI is to dance my signature Single Ladies dance for the job. Though my moves are likely to horrify Beyonce, the laughs that it usually gets would be priceless?

[Ed note: I’ve gotta see this.]

What’s one thing you’ve learnt from social media that you would never have learnt otherwise?

Well, from the top of my mind, with Breeze having over 2000 followers, it shows that even banks can break out of the traditional view of being stereotyped as being too corporate, and actually be fun and engaging.

What would be your first action as the World’s Coolest Intern?

My first action as WCI would be to get to know the Breeze team well since they would be the ones I’m working together with. I believe it would be important to build rapport with them, learn their expectations from the intern, and set achievable objectives for the short time frame of six months.

Ideas.

They’re elusive.

They’re powerful.

Ideas are what make us human.

Ideas are what make us successful.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that ideas can change the world – maybe not on their own, but they’re the spark that makes it happen.

Here’s just one of the ideas I have for Standard Chartered’s mobile banking app, Breeze.

I have many other ideas on many other things, but all I’ll say is this:

I have the ideas to create change, the drive to make it happen and the knowledge to do it well.

Marketers are always trying to come up with new models – and I know, there are better models that apply when creating social media strategy.

But here’s a thought on applying the old ones…

Product = Content

Far be it for me to say that content is king, but at the end of the day your content is the product that your customers get by signing up to you or engaging with you. You might take a luxury approach with the best content in the market. Or maybe a mass-market strategy, or a niche. Whatever it is, it will affect…

Promotion = Relationships

Like traditional marketing, this is usually what people think of first in social media marketing. Like traditional marketing, you can do a lot with amazing promotion – the Apples of this world, for example – but too much of it can kill a strategy. We’ve all seen the ‘please RT me please share me please like me’ promotion. That might work for you, but promotion really includes building relationships, getting to know people and (to use the buzzword) engaging.

Price = Inconvenience

Other attempts to apply the traditional model usually fall down at price. But I propose that the price paid is the inconvenience of reaching content. Do I have to navigate your entire site to find it? Are there lots of flashing ads? Is there just a huge block of text? [Ed note: Oops.] That’s the price.

Placement = Platforms

Some platforms are better than others. Don’t write it as a blog if it should be a website. Don’t write it as a website if it should be video. Are you targeting Google when your target market is on Yahoo?

That’s my 2c…what do you think?

I’d been eyeing off their Masters of Management (Digital Business), so when I heard there was a speaker from IE (Madrid) was in town I had to go and meet him.

IE specialises in entrepreneurship and creativity, so it made sense that AP rep Dirk Hopfl was speaking on ‘creating creativity’.

Honestly, after law study all week it was a breath of fresh air. He covered a lot of aspects, including:

• the creative process + rules (yes, there are some rules for being creative! ‘don’t assume you know the answer’ is a good start!)
• the important of creativity for business and business leaders
• some techniques for getting better creative results
• examples of using creativity

In particular, I love this example of the creative process IDEO applied to the Spanish bank BBVA and their ATMs.

The presentation was incredibly relevant to a lot of the things I’m doing right now (like making my World’s Coolest Intern app awesome).

It’s not only directly relevant – making banking a more intuitive and enjoyable customer experience – but the process is one that you can learn from no matter what you’re doing.

I really like the approach they’ve taken. You can’t design a customer service without putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. At the same time, you need to draw ideas from outside the existing customer experience in order to make good customer service great.

I never thought I’d say ‘I can’t wait to try that ATM’…but that’s the effect of creativity.

Hits, likes, shares, follows, adds – what do these have in common?

There have been many complaints about creating verbs out of nouns; to Google, to party, to wiki…or to go further back, to hoover (so commonplace that it has dropped the capital letter).

But more insidious – online, anyway – is the conversion of verbs to nouns.

All of these are metrics which might be used to judge online social influence, but what do they say? They’re merely the physical manifestation of what we’re really interested in, which is the change in beliefsand the emotions of the people viewing the content or meeting the people we’re measuring.

Let me make a comparison…

Take the common cold.

We’re all familiar with the symptoms; coughs, sneezes, runny noses, watery eyes, wheeziness, sore throats and if you’re unlucky, a fever.

They’re all caused by the spread of a virus in the body, and show us that the body is fighting back. They’re therefore a good way of telling us how the infection is progressing and when it’s gone away.

So we know that infection always leads to these symptoms. But we can’t use reverse logic to say that these symptoms always mean there’s infection.

Coughs for example – they can be caused by a different infection, dust, choking on food or irony.

What’s that got to do with metrics?

Marketing metrics have really taken over, especially online. Sure, it’s probably the only way to measure influence, and in a lot of cases it IS a reflection of the actual situation. However it’s possible to have high offline influence with bad metrics, and low offline influence with incredibly good metrics. Even though we do now have tools which measure sentiment, with all of the twists of language (especially sarcasm) they’re never going to do the job of a human.

Just like you can make a cough better with cough syrup, you can improve hits with a quick-fix like a link, a stunt, or spam.

But just like cough syrup doesn’t cure your infection, suddenly getting more hits doesn’t mean you’re growing goodwill.

[It does, however, make you feel a lot better in the short-term.]

Got a better idea?

By all means – use metrics. Just don’t live and die by them. Know where the numbers come from and never, ever forget the human factor – because that can never be quantified.

And stop nounifying verbs.

The ‘Greatest Job in the World’ competition inspired dozens of similar competitions around the globe. And who are we to complain if there are suddenly a lot of cool jobs on offer involving lots of money and deserted islands?

There are two which have caught my eye recently; Westfield Insider (Australia) and World’s Coolest Intern (Standard Chartered, Singapore).

Both involve social media, but approach it in different ways…

The Westfield Insider (get paid to shop!) asks fashionistas to prove their fashion know-how, then expects them to blog/tweet/facebook for a year about their shopping journeys.

The World’s Coolest Intern (get paid to tweet!) asks SM addicts to show their social prowess and tell a story about why they should win.

In terms of execution, I think one wins over the other.

Even though fashion sense is important for the Westfield Insider, the strategy (that $150,000 is riding on) depends on a person who already has contacts, a great sense of how to promote online without spamming and a dedication to the ongoing growth of the blog – these are qualities you can’t tell from a process. I feel that they should have targeted existing fashion bloggers, as there’s some amazing Australian blogs which have already established themselves.

The Standard Chartered competition gets entrants to do what they would be doing on the job, so they can see how well they would do. The brief is to talk about yourself on social media, but it’ll be interesting to see who walks the talk.

Overall I think the World’s Coolest Intern has been done better – both are getting the positive ‘buzz’ generated by such a competition but one will be more effective in the long run.

The team video also brings an unusual level of honesty to the table, getting them to comment on their favourite things, the worst things they’ve done and (strangely) who they would save; wife or daughter? The lion creeping up on the side as Aaron tries to think of why he would want to be a lion cracked me up more than I’d like to admit.

So I’m entering the World’s Coolest Intern – check my entry out here! And if you want to see how I’m doing it, friend my Facebook entry.

It’s always fun to take a trip down memory lane…

I was recently asked to speak at an AIESEC gathering about what I learnt from my time as a leader in the organisation, which prompted a lot of reflection.

It’s an experience which has had a huge impact on the way I think and do business. It’s just ironic that learning to think is something you do without thinking about it.

One thing which has struck me time and time again is that what I learned went beyond getting practical experience of ‘what to do’ in the corporate world, but also the huge number of things that can go wrong.

My leadership term on the executive board of our local committee was a year; it’s an environment where you have a short time to make a lot of things happen, nobody is full-time or even gets paid and if you fail there may not be anyone to pick up the pieces. No pressure.

Three years later, I’ve never found it more true that miscommunication is one of the biggest problems – not just in business, but everywhere.

Failure to communicate, conveying an idea in a confusing way or deliberately overstating are all brilliant recipes for things not getting done or relationships being destroyed.

It’s therefore interesting that there is a rapidly-growing number of electronic tools claiming to make communicating easier. When they say ‘easier’, they mean ‘faster’ or ‘more reliable’. What they can never rectify is the fundamental difficulty we all seem to have with putting ourselves in someone elses shoes, understanding their ideas and level of knowledge, then translating what we want to say into a form that will be understood by them, ie. communicating.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, to be honest. But I’ll tell you what I’ve observed:

• as a freelancer, I receive tasks by email regardless of whether I’m working at home or in the office. But projects move a lot faster in the office because we get to clarify things or build on ideas immediately
• having a department work on its own makes it more productive, but also more disjointed with the reality of a company
• the interviews I do in person lead to much more interesting profiles than the interviews via email
• even going from one English-speaking country to another, communication is suddenly more difficult

So to go back to my earlier comment…communication, like learning, is something we tend to do (or not do) without thinking about it.

But perhaps we need to think about it more…