There are more than 30,000 non-executive members of company boards across Australia. If you are one of them, what are the questions you should be asking about how the business you manage is handling social media?

We’ve put together five “starter” questions that corporate board members should ask to gauge how well the companies they oversee are managing the risks and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by social media.

What other questions should board members be asking?

Ogilvy On: How To Use Foursquare for Business

Here are the slides from the latest presentation by our team at Ogilvy, presented as part of the series done with The Wall Street Journal and GoToWebinar on Social Media for Business.

Hurry! Space is limited for this 30-minute webinar and registration is required.

Join the award-winning Social Media team from Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide for a free 30-minute online seminar powered by Citrix GoToWebinar and done in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Asia.

This webinar will provide concrete examples, action plans and case studies, including:

· 5 key steps for a business-to-business strategy;
· How to build and engage a community of potential and current customers;
· Real-life case studies from successful business-to-business strategies;
· The highly popular – and now extended – Question and Answer section;
· Much, much more…

The seminar will be led by Brian Giesen a senior regional strategist in Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team and moderated by Graham White, Managing Director of Howorth Communications in Sydney.

Join us Wednesday, 3 March at 11:00am (Hong Kong time):

http://bit.ly/aWsvrI

Shouldn’t you learn how to leverage social media?

Join the award-winning Social Media team from Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide for a free 30-minute online seminar powered by Citrix GoToWebinar and done in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Asia.

This webinar will provide concrete examples, action plans and case studies, including:

· 5 key steps for a business-to-business strategy;
· How to build and engage a community of potential and current customers;
· Real-life case studies from successful business-to-business strategies;
· The highly popular – and now extended – Question and Answer section;
· Much, much more…

The seminar will be led by Brian Giesen a senior regional strategist in Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team and moderated by Thomas Crampton, the team’s Asia-Pacific director.

Hurry! Space is limited for this 30-minute webinar* and registration is required.

Join us Wednesday, 3 March at 11:00am (Hong Kong time)

To register go to wsj-asia.com/webinar

Brian Giesen, Regional Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence APAC, and Tim Ho, Regional Digital Strategist will be holding a “lepak” (malaysian slang: casual hang out) session in Kuala Lumpur to share their views on Social Media in Asia.

If you are in KL and would like to have some interesting conversations with our regional experts, please join them in La Bodega in Bangsar Mall at 7pm local time on Thursday 10th Dec.

Below is the address for the venue:

Please sign up here:

I am attending the Digital Marketing and Media Summit in Melbourne today and just attended a great session from Mark Higginson, Director of Analytics at Nielsen Online.

Mark shared some interesting new research from Nielsen Online today about Facebook and social media usage here in Australia:

• 8 hours/month:  Australians spend on average 8 hours/month on Facebook
• Australia Leads: Australians spend more time on average per month using social media (any social media site, not just Facebook) than any other country (7:12 hours/month per Australian on average)
• 8 million Aussies: the current number of facebook.com users is 8 million Australians/month
• 13.7 million overall: there are 13.7 million active monthly Internet users in Australia

I think these statistics are remarkable because they show that Australians are doing more than checking out sites like Facebook and Twitter, setting up an account, and then abandoning the sites after a short amount of time. That’s a common refrain of non-believers out there. We Australians are, as Mark correctly observed, addicted.

Here are some resources for anyone interested in learning more about the landscape of Facebook + social media here in Australia:

• Facebook for Business:  presentation created by myself and Thomas Crampton on business strategies for Facebook. This was tailored to Asia Pacific and delivered as part of our partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia.
• Australian Social Networking Jumps:  link to a Digital Media news story about how Australian social networking jumped by 29% – from Comscore, Ausgust 2009.
• History of the Australian Social Web: much-Dugg interactive timeline of the Australian social media and digital evolution
• DMMS09 Twitter Stream: feed of Tweets from the 2009 Digital Media & Marketing Summit
• Asia Digital Map Australia + Social Media Posts: all of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence posts on Australia

Coming under sponsorship of the US Embasssy (Press release below) Brian will be talking about Obama’s campaign and social media, among other topics.

If you are in Indonesia, be sure to attend!

PRESS RELEASE FROM US EMBASSY, JAKARTA:

U.S. Embassy Supports Freedom of Expression in Indonesia by Sponsoring Pesta Blogger 2009

Jakarta – For the second consecutive year, the U.S. Embassy is sponsoring Pesta Blogger 2009, Indonesia’s only national-level bloggers’ gathering. The event will take place on Saturday October 24, 2009 in the exhibition hall of the SMESCO building. Four U.S. bloggers, including Arsalan Iftikhar, a prominent American Muslim blogger and Mark Frauenfelder, founder of a leading technology blog, will participate.

U.S. Ambassador Cameron R. Hume said: “The Embassy is proud to support and sponsor Pesta Blogger for the second year running. Freedom of expression is an integral part of any sustainable democratic system. Indonesia has a strong, vibrant democracy, and the robust growth of its blogging community indicates this.” Ambassador Hume blogged for the first time himself shortly after Secretary Hillary Clinton’s visit to Indonesia in February of this year on the State Department’s official blog.

The U.S. Embassy also sponsored a series of blogging workshops in 10 cities across Indonesia over the past three months, in order to encourage more Indonesians to blog and to impart the principles of citizen journalism. Over one thousand people participated in the programs, which were held in Malang, Semarang, Balikpapan, Samarinda, Makassar, Medan, Bandung, Surabaya, Palembang and Yogyakarta.

The U.S. Embassy has recently embraced technology and social media to conduct public diplomacy in Indonesia. The U.S. Embassy now has its own YouTube channel, featuring over nearly 200 short videos covering a wide range of topics about the United States, including American culture, society, education, religious practice, politics, tourism and English-language education. Located at www.youtube.com/pasjakartaindonesia, videos featured on the video-sharing website are in Indonesian or have Indonesian subtitles.

In January, the Embassy was the first diplomatic Mission in Indonesia to create a Facebook fan page, www.facebook.com/jakarta.usembassy. It now has nearly 15,000 fans. The page features unique content, including photos, videos and contests. All U.S. visa appointments are now made using an online application system, and recently, American citizens living in Indonesia wishing to renew their passports are now required to make online appointments. For further information on Embassy activities visit http://jakarta.usembassy.gov or follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/usembassyjkt.

American Blogger Bios for Pesta Blogger 2009

Brian Giesen is a Digital Influence Specialist with over five years of experience with Ogilvy PR and is an Interactive Marketing Manager in Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. He specializes in developing online marketing programs, including search engine optimization, email marketing, online PSA campaigns, content syndication, media outreach, and more. Previously, Brian was a legislative assistant for Congressman Jay Johnson (WI-8), where he Brian tracked healthcare-related legislation, and organized special events in the Congressman’s district.

Mark Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. He co-founded the technology blog BoingBoing.net and was an editor at Wired Magazine from 1993-1998. He is currently the design columnist for Mobile PC magazine, and has authored several books, includeing a science experiment book called The Mad Professor. BoingBoing started as a underground magazine in 1988 and it covers technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, and politics. It became a website in 1995 and was relaunched as a blog in 2000, and has been described as a “directory of wonderful things.”

Arsalan Ikhtifar

Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com blog, and a contributing editor for Islamica magazine in Washington DC. Arsalan is a weekly contributing commentator for National Public Radio (NPR) and a regularly featured contributor for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. His interviews, commentaries and analyses regularly appear on CNN, BBC World News, NPR, FOX News, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, USA TODAY, NBC, The Washington Post, ABC World News Tonight, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, and The New York Times, among others. TheMuslimGuy.com is a blog that attempts to shed light about Islam to an American audience, and was launched on the seventh anniversary of 9/11.

Corvida Raven is the author of SheGeeks.net, co-author of EverythingTwitter and TheSocialGeeks Podcast and provides consultation on strategies for social media and community management services to technology companies and consumers. She previously produced content and managed the communities of the Blog of Mr. Tweet, ReadWriteWeb, The Industry Standard, and Guidewire Group. Her work has been published and referenced on several major websites such as TechCrunch, Mashable, AllThingsDigital, LifeHacker, and Fast Company Magazine. SheGeeks.net is a social media blog covering a host of topics including, social media tools, web services and applications, mobile applications and community management.

For further information on Embassy activities, visit http://jakarta.usembassy.gov

Join me, Josh Mehlman (Editor, NETT Magazine) and Suzi Dafnis (Community Director, Australian Businesswomen’s Network) and find out!

Next week Wednesday, we’ll be running a 1-hour session on Facebook for Business.  Here are the details:

Lunch+Learn Webinar
Title:    Using Facebook to Build Your Brand
Date:    Wednesday, 14 Oct 2009
Time:    12 noon Australian EDST

REGISTER HERE!

During the session, we’ll be giving practical tips and covering:

• 5 ways to a rapid-start strategy in Facebook
• How to engage your Facebook community
• Real-life examples of how businesses of all sizes use Facebook to build their brands
• And more…

Earlier today I had the opportunity to be part of a Webinar that covered how IT managers could use Twitter to help solve some of their day-to-day challenges. The Webinar was sponsored by our client Citrix Online and featured some great speakers, including Leslie Nassar of Fake Stephen Conroy fame, Richard Binhammer from Dell, Glenn Dobson of Citrix, and Nate Cochrane of Haymarket Media.

I kicked off the presentation with a quick 101 of Twitter, how to use it to achieve a specific business or communications objective, and how to get started in Twitter in a strategic way using a 3-step methodology:

1. Follow:  First start off by following people who are relevant to whatever it is you’re talking about on Twitter (e.g., IT staff, your customers, etc.)
2. Create:  Tweet on a regular basis and share things that are going to be of interest to the people you’re talking to and, equally importantly, on-topic (or at least of interest).
3. Engage: Once you are following people and listening to what they’re saying, are Tweeting on a regular basis (creating content), then engage by replying to others by asking questions, re-tweeting people who are saying interesting things, etc.

Based on a quick audience poll that we did early on into the Webinar, it seems that nearly 3/4 of IT managers here in Australia are considering using Twitter to address IT issues – but not currently using it for that purpose.  What was most interesting to me and the other panelists, however, was that 6 percent of the audience were using Twitter “unofficially” – in other words going out and solving IT issues that customers are having on a personal basis.

Here are some interesting discussions and take-aways from today’s session:

• @ksantolin: #twitter4it @richardatdell believes that existing code of conduct and employment contracts should cover social media confidentiality
• @ksantolin: #twitter4it dedicate certain personnel to answer queries on twitter (eg helpdesk) as part of their usual helpdesk duties @glenndobson
• @MartyAtDell: @bdgiesen said in #twitter4it webinar that the Australian growth rate of Twitter outpaces other countries
• @adriankhall: #twitter4it – follow; create; engage – customer service
• Dell’s @DellOutlet Twitter account is driving sales and revenue on new product at Dell.com according to @richardatdell
• IT departments should skill up staff on handling issues, the same way they deal with people by phone and email

And for all who are interested, you can download the full Twitter for IT Managers presentation deck over on Slideshare.

Brian Giesen |  Rohit Bhargava |  Senator Kate Lundy

If you’re someone who looks after communications for a federal or state government agency here in Australia or across Asia Pacific, here are 15 reasons why you should be moving toward including social media into your communications programmes starting now and for 2010. Here they are, in no particular order:

1 .Citizens Trust Each Other:  Today, Australians are trusting each other more than what they read in a newspaper or see in an advertisement. Faith in a trusted “citizen stranger” is on the rise.

2. The Postal Rule. Joanne McGovern of GovGab once said at a Government Web 2.0 event in Washington that agencies should be active in social media for the same reason that the Post Office builds post offices in city centres – because that’s where the people are. That’s true here in Australia, with 84% of online adults having visited a social network in the past month.

3. Expectations Have Changed. Web sites are no longer the final destination online. People expect to find organisations and agencies across the social Web – on sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and others.

4.  Search is The New Homepage.gov.au. What happens when you enter in your agency’s name into Google? Are you responsible for 100% of the top 10 results? You should be. Social media sites now filter up and account for a large percentage of search results, so if you’re being proactive your search “share of voice” will be closer to 100%.

5. Listening Can Make Your Communciations Smarter. If your agency oversees tourism or curbing youth violence, you can use a technology and the mind of a strategist to unearth some great insights by listening to what people are saying on blogs, Twitter and forums about those topics.

6. Answer Constituent Questions. Through listening, you might find many of your constituents are talking about your agency, or perhaps posting questions about the services your agency offers, online in social media. By responding or offering answers through your Web site, you can build goodwill, better serve the public, and fulfill your agency’s overall mission.

7. Generates ROI. While most government agencies are not in the business of selling products, it’s important to be aware of the positive cases where businesses are using social media to generate significant revenue.

8. Motivate People to Take Action. For a major restaurant here in Australia, we drove more than 85,000 to become fans of the restaurant on Facebook in one week and created lines wrapping around the block to launch a new type of chicken burger. The lesson for is that we can use social media to drive people to take action offline – whether that’s changing a health behaviour, or taking steps to help the environment.

9. Extend the Reach of Events. Many government agencies organise events throughout the year and could be using social media to expand the reach of what they’re doing – whether it’s Twittering from the event, shooting video interviews with people who are attending, or sharing photos from the event on Flickr.

10. Agency Staff are Hungry for Training. From workshop sessions that I’ve held from Canberra to Kuala Lumpur, I have seen firsthand how interested government agency staff members are for training in social media. Creating an internal training culture/program for your agency can go along away toward building understanding and capacity.

11. Listen Instead of Monitor. Listening implies that you’re both looking for insights and are willing take action upon the information you find by listening to what the public is saying about your agency or a topic in social media.

12.  Offer Real Time Information. Use social media tools – whether it’s Twitter or Facebook – to provide useful real-time information. The Washington DC Government’s Inauguration 2009 Twitter account is a great example of a government agency that used social media to get the word out in real time about major events.

13.  Share the Positive Stories. Many agency communicators wonder what they might Tweet about, but in addition to sharing information from your agency you might share the positive stories that are out there by simply re-Tweeting good things that people are saying about you.

14. Engage People Where They Are. Knowing that people are using social media more and more, it’s important to engage people where they are – which could be Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or other social media sites.

15. Pilot, Pilot, Pilot! Start out by trying out managable projects that require smaller amounts of resources but have the potential to generate large numbers of discussions online. As an example, your agency might start out by launching a one-month group blog, or Tweeting a fact-a-day for 24 hours during a major health observance.