Grounding

I have been back home just over a week and trying to adjust to being back in Australia, back at work and trying to refocus my energies.

The garden is not too much of a job catching up, the mulching and weeding we did before we went away was effective, though as any garden, needs attention.

Our little cat Sooks (Genji) has not come home, which has changed the energy of the house somewhat, he is truly a member of our little family and his presence is sorely missed. When we travel and I get homesick, it was always for our little unit of four, thinking of sitting together, out the back on a beautiful Spring day.

Trying to refocus includes a desire to be more routine about writing, starting small, hoping that by regular attention to the practice of writing, that the writing will flow.

In all the blogs I follow is there a consistency about the writing, a discipline that I need to adopt. Writing regularly engages readers, which is the purpose of writing a blog after all.

The thing I love about writing for mediakult is that I can play across many professional and personal areas of interest: media, technology, environmental sustainability, arts, culture and ideas of place (which are also published on geokult.com).

I am also hoping that writing in this public context will help me with writing in a personal context, like as Virginia Woolf describes writing a diary as “a method of practicing or trying out the art of writing.”

Although the practice of writing sometimes frustrates me, it is also driving me in a way, there is a need to get better, to explore more, to learn as a writer. One thing is to learn balance, between the passive activity of writing and to be actively discovering new experiences and places.  Also, how to write while travelling, is a skill I would like to improve on. I have not yet perfected the art of regularly writing every day and I blogged very little on our last trip overseas, which was unusual compared to earlier journeys.

Being grounded I find is both a positive and negative thing – it gives you a chance to breathe, to take stock and clear one’s mind for fresh ideas and energy. On the other hand it can grind you, bringing you down by slipping into the repetitive routines and behaviours lived at home.

My little writing effort is to avoid that monotony one experiences about the every day grind, it is a chance to explore possibilities and think outside of the routine of working life.

Resources for Public Relations students and professionals

Recently I did a scan of recent articles and texts focused on current best practice and theory in the broad field of media and communications.

One list I came across recently was very useful – A Partial Reading List for PR Students, mainly targeted at students with some very good resources.

Another one worth a look is Public Relations: Theory and Practice, a text designed to understand the varying roles for Communications and PR professionals. The text is targeted to students providing information on a broad range of communications areas including digital strategies and community relations. The description states that:

They show how to develop effective public relations strategies and tactics and explain how to research, run and evaluate a successful public relations campaign. Drawing on a range of communication and public relations theories they discuss how to work with the media and how to use print, electronic and other forms of communication for maximum impact.

There is so also a lot of information about writing for online audiences, which I think is a critical area of communications and public relations. Check out this article from 4syllables titled Managing distributed publishing, part 1: The challenges.

Here is some other good posts about PR resources:

• 10 Must-Read Public Relations And Marketing Books
• 13 Books every PR prof should read

A comment from one of the posts also mentioned that “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Burger, is a “great book” on viral marketing based on research. Might be worth a look.

Anyway, lots out there!

Some new ones to read and some which would be worth a revisit 🙂

Strategic communications

Recently I attended the joint Australian Government and Australian National University workshop focused on ‘Strategic Communications and National Security’ at the National Security College, ANU 13-14 June 2012. The workshop participants came from a broad range of government agencies that work with matters of national security.

There was a solid introduction into the definition of strategic communications (strat comms), which stressed the following principles:

• Integrity and Truth
• Persistent and consistent
• Independent of media and electoral cycles

From here, participants were walked through the key components of strategic communications. These included:

• Determine communication objectives
• Environment Scan
• Audience and Influencers
• Emotional intelligence
• Key messages
• Delivery
• Timetable
• Evaluation

What was very interesting to note from this presentation, was the strong preference for using an environment scan rather than a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses/Limitations, Opportunities, and Threats). The argument for using this approach was that often a SWOT analysis is too ‘mechanical’ in nature and valuable information slips through because of the need to categorise the information. Some of the benefits of environment scans are:

• Taking stock of what the rest of the world is doing
• May influence objectives and actions
• Opportunity to improve communications
• Chance to forecast issues
• Can feature a SWOT as part of the overall assessment

It was also noted that to effectively deliver strat comms objectives is often resource heavy, and that past evaluation processes have often focused on the outputs, rather than the outcomes. It was also highlighted that strategic communications is not the same thing as media liaison. In other words – strat comms is proactive, media relations is often reactive. Also, it was very interesting to see that the work of Doug McKenzie Mohr (behaviour change expert) was discussed as an excellent source of information for agencies interested in fostering behaviour change as part of strat comms.

Many of my colleagues have attended Mohr’s workshops in the past, so it is very good to know that some of us have already had exposure to his proactive thinking and strategic approach to fostering behaviour change. One of Mohr’s key approaches is to use ‘influencers’ or community leaders as a means of instigating change.  The rationale behind this strategy is that more people pay attention to and will follow influencers. Though care must be taken when selecting ‘influencers’ to support strat comms agendas – the backlash against Cate Blanchett  in the  ‘Say Yes’ campaign was a very relevant case study presented at the workshop.

A number of other very useful case studies demonstrated the power of being strategic with communications agendas.  Jim Cannon spoke about the ADFA Reputation Retrieval exercise; Michael Player from NZ Police discussed managing international media during the Christchurch Earthquake Crisis and Kym Charlton from Qld Police discussed how they have very successfully used social media during the SE Qld floods and Cyclone Yasi. We were also very fortunate to have former ABC journalist and media expert, Prakash Mirchandani as one of the facilitators. He gave the group some great take home messages – ‘you can never start too low when thinking about strategic communications’, an encouraging thought and one, if followed, allows for many perspectives on an issue, not just a top down or media reactive approach. The other take home was ‘you can’t sell a dud policy’ or more crudely put – ‘you can’t polish a t@rd!’.

My only other comment was the success of the practical exercise in demonstrating the effectiveness using the key components to come up with the messaging and communications channels for addressing a matter of national security. We were given a scenario, split into three groups, with each having a number of components to cover. For example, group one was responsible for the first thee components – determining communication objectives, undertaking an environment scan and identifying the audience. Each group had 1.5 hours to address the issues. When we came back each group went through the findings in order. What was revealing was the similarities and linkages between the issues and how they should be addressed. The practical exercise demonstrated that it is possible in a short amount of time to come up with a plan that is interconnected and pragmatic.

Personally, I think the big benefit is that this method could be useful in  situations outside of crisis situations and matters of national security. In many ways it is an agile approach, designed to quickly get to the issue and how to resolve it.

New social bookmarking obsessions

For some time, I have been curious about pinterest as I love the idea of collecting resources online and love images even more! Last night I took the plunge and activated my account, and then spent the next three hours building 10 boards – loved every minute of it!

For a number of years, I was an avid social bookmarker with Delicious, until I discovered packrati.us on twitter. Since then I have used twitter as a way of both sharing links I like as well as saving them for later. Although I know I already have them in twitter, the thought of them stockpiling in delicious is strangely comforting, though the task of reorganising tags and stacks after two years is daunting.

Anyway, one of the things I like about pinterest, aside from being able to share images easily (irrespective of  copyright concerns), is that you are visually bookmarking, much in the same way you would with delicious but with images. I don’t know why copyright owners would be upset about this tool as pinterest drives the traffic back to the original website where the image was located.

my pinterest boards

This is a complete contrast to Facebook, who actually own every photo on the website – even if you thought you owned the copyright. Annabel Crabb sums it up nicely in her recent article You might not like it, but you and Facebook are worst friends forever.

In recent times it looked like linkedin was on the rise, but now the twitter feed function has been removed, it will be interesting to see how that impacts on the site’s popularity. It is also worth noting that pinterest has a much higher proportion of women users, check out this infographic about gender preferences and spocial media platforms.

Social Media commentators Mashable had this to say in a recent article:

Pinterest is social media’s rising star — and now has the traffic stats to prove it.

The darling network of brides-to-be, fashionistas and budding bakers now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January, according to a Shareaholic study.

Well, there you go  – sounds like the place to be if you are interested in building interest in your brand and driving traffic to your website.

Anyway, for now I am content to just pinterest the things I like looking at, and thinking about.

Growing a local social media presence

Ideas about how to best engage with communities have been central to a number of my ongoing projects over the years. For example, the geokult collaboration focuses on notion of social and cultural mapping, another project Remote connections which explores technology uptake in remote Indigenous communities, and of course in my work with livinggreener.gov.au.

Recently, I have been considering how social media impacts on the concept of local, specially within the context of a postcode for example. Linda Carroli’s Placing project resonates for me – particularly as Aspley is a place I know intimately. I spent a number of formative years living in the Brisbane suburb and a range of creative work has been based on my experiences and perceptions of this suburban space – see Scalpland.

So what is happening in my local community? There are community noticeboards at the library and child care and family centre, but there appears to be little social media presence that has currency on the ground. We have the tools but not the engagement it would seem. Gumtree classifieds has reasonable listings for my suburb, and local Canberra online news website The RiotACT did have some recent stories. Some of these were a bit disturbing with a number of recent reports about shops and people being threatened with knifes. It wasn’t all bad news, there were also stories of developments that benefits families with a new childcare centre and new playgrounds being built.

The online factiods about my suburb do little to really give a sense of a place, excepting the obvious need to provide safe and creative places for children and young people. Over the time we have lived here we have seen many signs of growth in the west Belconnen area. New suburbs, much more traffic (though less public transport), and the local shopping centre is becoming busier and busier. Last week Coffee Club opened at Kippax and signs a McDonalds will be opening on the now vacant block indicate that there is much more  development to come. More people are moving to the area, but I still don’t know my neighbours that well after four years. Is it Canberra, or suburbia or just modern life?

Many ‘community’ building websites offer empty promises of being connected at the local level. For example, urban farming and sustainability facebook group LocalBlu https://www.facebook.com/localblu sounds like an amazing initiative, although when I go to the website there is nothing for my community or any of the other 6 Australian postcodes I submitted (including city centre of Sydney and Melbourne).

Facebook has three pages that could be starting point for local conversations – Kippax Fair, Woolworths Kippax and a page for suburb of Holt.

Community Engine is another community building website that uses Facebook to promote its message about growing your local community. When I went to the Community Engine website and plugged in my postcode, there were a lot of returns in the search, so it would be worth learning more about this tool.

At geokult we are developing a series of workshops and a ‘toolbox’ of tools for exploring and mapping communities. The aim is to promote and facilitate a more connected community. What we realise is that social media will not promote the project alone, it is important to remember the old school ways of raising community awareness – leafleting, letterbox drops and local stalls are highly effective ways to get to know people F2F. Over the coming months, I will be monitoring how my local community is engaging online, and experimenting with a range of techniques, with a purpose of developing a strategy for other community engagement projects.

New Blog – Remote Connections

To support and document the Remote Connections project, a new blog has been established. This blog will focus on a range of issues related to online and computer arts and literacy in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. For more information go to the Remote Connections blog.

Remote connections

Remote connections is a project I am currently developing that explores connectivity in remote locations.

It is in the early stages of production and I am very keen to find some people in remote Indigenous communities to work with – to collaboratively design online tools for flexible delivery.

If you would like to participate, or know some people who would be interested, please email me at bytetime at gemail dot com

For more information and updates go to the Geokult blog.