360DigitalInfluence

On Smartcompany.com.au’s “Lunch With an Entrepreneur” series, Amanda Gome interviewed Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence’s Rohit Bhargava. Rohit talked about social networking, big mistakes businesses have made and his observations from his recent trip to Australia.  You can listen to his podcast on Smartcompany.com.au or read the transcript below.

Where is Australia at on the social media curve?

Australia is similar to a lot of countries: brands are very, very interested in starting to engage and experiment with social media. They want to find ways of proving the value of that to the people within their organisation.

What’s the biggest hurdle they’re having to overcome? Is it a waste of time or resources?

There’s a lot of fear around the amount of resource time, so when you think in terms of return on investment, the investment in social media is very often the time, not so much the budget. So that’s a very real cost. But the other thing is there is the fear of negativity that perhaps people might be negative about your brand or your product. So that can be a barrier sometimes.

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Rohit Bhargava and I teamed up with Senator Kate Lundy to present a half-day government Web 2.0 workshop last Friday in Canberra, Australia. The Gov 2.0 workshop was sponsored by Frocomm Communications and drew more than 50 government and non-profit communications and marketing professionals.  You can download our presentations here:

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.

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