Guest post by Urthboy. It’s a pleasure to have Urthboy back to pen some thoughts. You can read his previous post about family stories here, and you can also listen to his track “Black Dog” below.

Click the link to play the song without leaving the page:
Urthboy – Black Dog

I don’t know much about Man Week but it sounds like a few beers: something to open men up.

The fact that we need a few beers, I mean, a Man Week raised a couple of questions. Is it a sign that we’re thinking forward, or at least stopping to assess where we’re at? Or is it something that gets in the Matthew Mitchams but turns off the Barry Halls, and therefore over before it began?

Most of us are far from perfect so I tend to agree with the positives behind Man Week, especially its modest but daunting goal of encouraging more dialogue from blokes. A lot of the characteristics defining men and women weren’t meant to flip 180 degrees – men are no closer to breast feeding; women no closer to reading on the toilet – but we live in different times now so it makes sense to move with them.

It used to be assumed that men inherited a default authority role (not necessarily deserved but always expected) and the strong man wouldn’t volunteer weaknesses like Samson and his hair. They were expected to lead us through incredible times: great depressions and world wars. These events and our management of them didn’t exist in isolation: they leaked into the lives of children, who picked up cues and tried to unscramble them into lessons to impart on their children. They had kids like me who assumed that everything would be explained when we got ID.

It’s helpful to understand why older generations didn’t talk, so we don’t feel bad for being more forthcoming. We’re all complex: compassion equals weakness only in simple minds.

Acknowledging my own fallibilities isn’t easy, but containing them doesn’t bypass my shortcomings either. Shiiiit, what self-respecting rapper can ever completely front on the philosophical directives of Kool G Rap! By the same token, that hip hop side worked with a turbulent upbringing to never properly shut me up, for better or worse.

Is the latter preferable to holding it in? Who can be certain? I tell myself: at least the leaky tap gives water.

I respect people who shy away from harsh realities cos who knows where they’re coming from? For me though, I prefer to know the truth of something, however unpleasant. I believe you need to deal with what’s in front of you otherwise the risk is you pack it away for later, to pass on. Sure, us men are tough (ahem), ruggedly handsome (umm..) and generally charming (Ok I’ll stop it now), but by and large we defy generalisations. Giving us a moment to think about who we are and what our role is, helps us and those around us. This is why Man Week is cool: everyone needs reminders.

I’ve always wanted this song to speak to fellas who’ve experienced depression or struggle from time to time. It doesn’t have any answers – it’s just a song called Black Dog. Mark has put it up here for you to listen and share. Hit me up on Twitter I’d be happy to send you an mp3 (@urthboy).

Click the link to play the song without leaving the page:
Urthboy – Black Dog

Photo courtesy wsilver.

Got thoughts on what Urthboy has to say?
Or even a thought about Man Week? Leave it below. Be honest.

Guest post, Urthboy. Many of you will already know Urthboy (website, Twitter). As part of The Herd and one of the key brains behind record label Elefant Traks, his lyrics and music have been heard around Australia for close to a decade. Often socially aware, sometimes political and frequently self-reflective, I’ve always enjoyed his perspective on things… and am very proud to have him share some of his thoughts directly with you here.

In primary school I used to write poetry – not soul searching poetry but crass nursery rhymes that upset my relatives. I recall my aunt shutting me down as I read out a colourful reimagining of ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’. Strangely enough my talents never spilt over into other forms of literary expression (or anywhere for that matter).

In my late teens I picked the pen up and started writing again. They were sporadic half-arsed ditties that I felt compelled to create, rather than deluding myself that it’d be part of my future. I’m good at not grasping things initially, but I’m also good at not being so disappointed that I give up.

The more I wrote the more people listened, and slowly an audience grew. I’ve often marvelled at why anyone would listen to my songs and their lyrics – but I understand that people get caught up in; or relate to; or just like the sound of the songs. In music, a story doesn’t have to be a narrative; it can be a collection of thoughts, phrases or even, ahem, a vibe.

My mum has just completed a brief story of her life for a book that involves the mini-biographies of a number of women. Mum has undergone some serious obstacles including blindness and deafness; single parent; fulltime worker; yada yada – she rocks. Reading her history solidified vague childhood memories I knew only small details about, and it fascinated the shit out of me! I was awestruck by her joys and sadness, yet much of the interest lay in the small scraps of info: the places she visited and the events she experienced. I found out she saved someone’s life for god’s sake!

It got me thinking about how fortunate I am that I’m documenting my life in my music cos my kids will hear the exact thoughts I had when I was their age. I also reflected on how glad I was to ask my grandma questions about what life was like when she was young; how wartime felt in the 40s; and what her hometown of Lakemba was like. There is a massive amount of information about these times but none of it from my grandma’s perspective and her history forms part of my identity. The value is not in her status, it’s in her experience – so even if it’s never published I want to know about it. She’s dead now and we have fading letters and fond memories – if only she could have understood then, how priceless her story is to us now.

There should be more encouragement to write summaries of our lives. The writing doesn’t need style and finesse, but it should be true. Convince your grandparents to do it. Tell your parents to write it down. It’s impossible to underestimate its value.

Say hi to him on Twitter or listen to his music on Last.FM.

If you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment. Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Genevieve Robey is the editor at Wotnews. It’s a news monitoring and aggregating service that I’ve been playing with for a while now and find that frequently it delivers the best of the professional journalism and blogging world to me in an easy-to-scan-then-click kind of way. It also has an Australian focus and the emails are well and cleanly designed. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, it’s no secret that the old school journalistic world is at a cross-roads. People don’t trust journalists like they used to – scandals, money for comment, lies, opinions masked as fact, copy and paste of press releases as ‘news’… none of it has helped their cause. But it’s also an exciting time, a time to reinvent. The internet has levelled the playing field and changed not only what’s possible but also what people want.

As a monitor and aggregator, Genevieve, in her role at Wotnews, gets to see in real-time the dynamics of this change through access to two key chunks of data:
1. What people are actively monitoring, what they care about, and
2. What content type and approaches to writing get clicked on.

In the 30 days prior to this post, Wotnews received over 475,000 unique visitors so Genevieve has a tonne of insight at her fingertips and I thought I’d ask her to share some of it with us.

1. Headlines are the great equaliser
Bloggers, industry associations and large news organisations are often on equal footing – if their headline and description are compelling and relevant.

2. Fluff don’t fly
Fluffy stories don’t get very far among quality news articles – they are still quite prominent in publications though.

3. Keywords are Superman
News providers are realising the importance of relevant keywords and less rubbish in their headlines and descriptions – this is a benefit for the reader too.

4. Go to 4th base with your readers
‘Relationships’ and ‘connections’ in the news are visible and allow people to explore further avenues related to the particular news issue.

5. Write deservingly
Publishing2 wrote a great article addressing ‘Why not writing a story is innovation‘. They refer to “innovation-by-omission” saying that news organisations “need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written. …. Readers will simply go somewhere else.” So while we often talk about ‘information overload’, aggregation and analysis provides a good tool to get to the quality.

6. Make yourself easy to expose
It’s surprising how many people are still unaware of how to give their news decent exposure or even have the capacity/knowledge to get news onto their own websites. Obviously it’s fantastic to be covered by a news organisation or prominent blogger, but you shouldn’t just rely on that. You make it easier for bloggers to talk about you and link to you if you provide updates on your site.

7. Stop hiding in your PDFs
I still see so many organisations that don’t produce news in any way other than uploading a PDF media release to their site and/or emailing it out to their usual list. These PDFs are often quite cumbersome for people who want to then click through to the ‘about’ or ‘contact us’ section of the website to understand the context in which it has been written.

8. The first click is just the start
Too many organisations are still not linking to relevant information within their article. Corporates need to keep in mind that we’re driving traffic to their news and they need to:
- think about how to continue engaging with the user
- realise that webpages are not pieces of paper! (this may seem so straight forward to many, but there are still so many people who have not learnt to love the link!)

Bonus insight:
The two most monitored people are Kevin Rudd and Gail Kelly (Gail Kelly was leading Kevin Rudd until recently). The two most monitored companies are Telstra and ANZ.

/ End

Many thanks to Genevieve Robey, Editor of Wotnews, for taking the time out to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that the news aggregator plays with daily. You can find her on Twitter: @genrobey.

Got any content tips or gripes to share?
Let’s hear them!

Photo courtesy of Juliot.

If you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment. Feel free to follow me on Twitter

How hard could buying an event ticket online be?
Too hard, if you ask me.
Sean Smith, what’s up with that?

The past few Christmases, I’ve spent hours trying to work through the rabbit holes that are Australian ticketing websites only to throw it in and stand next to a temporary DOS-like computer workstation in the nook of a small newsagent to get tickets as gifts. Not happy, Jan.

Funnily enough, I came across Sean Smith last year at a conference. He had lots of great ideas that made so much sense – I just wanted to see them in action and soon.

At the time, Sean was the Head of Digital Marketing at Ticketek. He’s since moved to Hotelclub (Orbitz) as the Global CRM and Online Manager. But I still felt a duty – on behalf of every Australian – to take my frustration firmly in hand to Sean and to corner him about the state of affairs with online ticketing because either I was stupid or someone was making too much money out of things being broken.

(BTW it is my assertion that ticketing in Australia is broken, not Sean’s)

1. Why do so many ticketing websites in Australia suck?

Sean Smith: Ticketing websites have the unfortunate position of not being able to please everyone for a number of reasons that I’ll try to explain.

SCARCITY:
For “hot” events that are likely to sell out, there is the issue of scarcity. A national tour may have 250,000 tickets, and 2 million punters trying to get them. This means that there will be a group of people who will use their ticketing site well to get their tickets of choice and will be quietly happy. The other 1.75 million punters who missed out will be angry, vocal, and blame the ticketing company or website.

SEAT VISIBILITY:
This is the most complained about “feature” missing from most ticketing sites, and one that ticketing companies have been spending considerable time on trying to find the right solution. There are two issues here, technical and supply, which I’ll try to explain as simply as possible.

In the technical realm, a company like Ticketek or Ticketmaster may have 800 venues, each capable of hundreds of different venue formations, most of which are then customised on an event by event basis. Then take a hot show where thousands of tickets are selling every second, and the issue of “currently available” becomes contentious because huge slabs of tickets will be visibly going offsale (ie sold) before a punter has the chance to choose them. The necessity for real-time rendering against ticket inventory with the ability to hold areas of tickets for purchasers to choose in real time becomes apparent. That being said, a certain big ticketing company is well on their way to building a solution – keep an eye out for it in 2009.

From a supply point of view, there is the issue of visibility as a deterent to buying tickets. For sell-out events this is less of an issue, but for events that need to sell more tickets (and most events in Australia & New Zealand fall into this category) allowing people to choose seats will mean that less-desirable seats simply won’t sell. The issue of yield (and therefore profitability, and for many events viability) raises its ugly head and event promoters will actively seek venues/companies/sites that do not allow individual seats to be chosen this way.

CONFLICTING B2B/B2C NEEDS:
Ticketing sites have to meet the needs of both their consumers and their suppliers, which don’t always meet in the middle. Suppliers are crucial, because without them ticketing companies have no inventory to sell and it is impossible to force best practice for consumers if this isn’t in the interests of event promoters. For example, if a ticketing company was to build in [customer] Reviews to their event pages, and bad reviews damaged sales, then that event promoter may actually stop future supply of tickets.

2. Why are answers to ticketing businesses’ questions not always in the data?

Sean Smith: Ticketek’s internal positioning mantra is “Connecting People to their Passions” and what is important in this statement is that event tickets are an emotional commodity, a gateway if you like to an emotional experience and likely long-term memory. Ticketing companies are well run businesses with enormous amounts of historical data with which to explore and learn from, but that data won’t tell you the likely success of an event because it is very much determined by its emotional connection to the public at a particular moment in time. Measuring demand levels therefore becomes difficult, regardless of the best modellers and forecasting – I’ve seen an event sell out 40 shows nationally in two days, only to come back two years later and struggle to sell half that.

3. Who really gets intangible e-commerce (ticketing, services) around the world right now, and how?

Sean Smith: Creating an excellent bespoke one-to-one user experience across a large enough consumer-base would be my key judging criteria, and I’m not sure anyone is doing it really well just yet. I’m very impressed with the online travel industry for its combination of innovation and scale, although in terms of bespoke one-to-one service there’s a fair way to go. “Professional branding” services such as LinkedIn offer a good intangible service although I’m not convinced of its long-term sustainability with the likelihood of free competitive offerings entering the market soon, if not already. Some airline companies do a middle-to-good job of it, and I was recently surprised at the purchase pipeline for Virginblue and its method of building different services into its basket.

4. What bad checkout practices that you have seen have forced the most drop-off?

Sean Smith: Nothing shits me more than a checkout service that appears in real-time only to end with a “we’ll manually process this on the next business day and come back to you”. Hiding taxes and fees until the moment of transaction is another annoyance. Forcing purchasers to sign-up as a member is another (and one I’ve been guilty of my entire online career). Harvesting too much personal data via “required fields” will increase drop-out rates substantially. And lastly, a fulfillment timeline that is too long will kill off transactions more than any other practice.

5. What website content gets people to buy?

Sean Smith: Reviews are the stand-out. The average online transaction involves (in simplified form): search & explore, identify target products, validate the potential purchase decision via reviews, and finally purchase. I don’t even think all reviews need to be positive, as long as they appear honest and “un-sponsored”, and you’d be surprised how many people continue to read reviews post-purchase (which can either alleviate, or exacerbate, post-purchase dissonance!). Outside of that the key is to stimulate an emotional response to push possible-customers past the line of apathy, and that can take either a positive form (eg the Apple site having working online demo’s of apps on iPhones) or a negative form (eg showing disturbing images of home-invasions to sell security products).

/ End

Many thanks to Sean for taking the time out to give us some insight into the online ticketing business. You can find him on Twitter (twice): @NakedBearMedia and @HotelClub. He also writes a blog at www.nakedbearmedia.com.

How would you fix ticketing in Australia?
Got ideas? Let’s see them!

Photo courtesy of PD Photography.

If you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment. Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Hello, there.

My name’s Mark.

I make strategy. It’s hard to explain: information architecture, wire frames, SEO, e-CRM, email, social media stuff, brand strategy, positioning, creative briefs, channel plans, ideation… you know, that sort of stuff.

I’ve been online since 1996 and built my first website in 1997 when Netscape was a rockstar, IRC and ICQ were online socialising, and telcos made way too much money from my modem auto-dialling back in 20 times per day on a reaaally slow connection.

My first job was at Liquid Vision (in 1998) where I ran Levi’s online content portal. In 1999, I moved to one of Australia’s infamous dot-coms, K*Grind, as network editor. Since then, I’ve worked at places like Tribal DDB, Singleton Ogilvy & Mather, Massmedia Studios and Leo Burnett.

Things have been going well.

In November, I picked up a gold trophy from the Account Planning Group for my strategy for McDonald’s NameIt Burger (we invited Australia to name a burger and sold 4.2 million of them in 2 months) – NameIt Burger also took out the ADMA 2008 Grand Prix.

And, yesterday, I joined McCann Sydney as Sydney Strategy Director. I’m really excited about it. They’re a smart crew with grand ambition but also with the determination and practical ability to pull it off.

I’ve written for years but have focused mostly on putting my self-expression into my old radio show, various magazines and street press, as well as my own magazine, Stealth Magazine.

Finally, I’ve bitten the bullet and set up my own blog (here). I’m currently working on the full version. The posts will start when it’s live (hopefully in February). The focus:

Action-oriented blogging about online marketing, brand strategy,
social media marketing and smart thinking.

You can read these 3 guest posts to get a feel for what to expect:

• An incredibly cynical take on 10 blogging strategies Julian Cole uses on you
• 9 trends to look for in 2009
• 7 things hip hop taught me about community

If you like them, subscribe to my RSS feed. I promise you ultimate happiness and infinite wealth – but not simultaneously. You must choose.

Thank you. You’ll be hearing from me soon. A lot.
Mark

PS If you’re in Sydney on Thursday 22nd January, come down to Ignite Sydney. I’m going to try to entertain you for 5 minutes with no more than 20 PowerPoint slides. Eek!