Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Telstra does Twitter

Telstra recently took up 'tweeting' as a channel for providing customer service.

Discussed via their Nowwearetalking site, there's been a lot of initial feedback on the approach taken.

Telstra has also linked to some of the broader online commentary in their post.

This step helps legitimise Twitter and microblogging as a customer service option for Australian organisations.

It also provides insights for other organisations so they can learn from both Telstra's missteps and successes.

I'm watching carefully to see how Telstra's foray into microblogging goes. The channel has been used successfully in the US.

When executed well I believe it has customer service and marketing/PR benefits in some, but not all, service delivery areas.

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Look for me at the Sydney conference, Advancing Intranet Management in the Public Sector

I am co-presenting the first presentation on Wednesday at the Ark Group's Advancing Intranet Management in the Public Sector conference in Sydney.

My colleague and I will be discussing how our agency's intranet was used to support staff through the recent major reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme and the cultural shifts through the Building a Better CSA program.

If you're attending the conference, please come and say hello at some point.

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Monday, October 06, 2008

Storytelling as a blogging style

There are many different approaches to writing a blog post.

The Lost Art of Blogging provides an example of one of the more effective in The Homeric way of blogging : storytelling.

Humans respond strongly to stories and there is no reason why this technique should be less useful in official communications than in personal ones.

After all, the most effective business cases tell a story, as do many excellent advertisements.

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Selecting a blogging style

This is a useful presentation on different styles of blogging and how frequently they should be used.

I am unsure how the author determined the appropriate frequency of different types of blog posts, however it does provide some ideas of approaches to content.

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Sunday, October 05, 2008

Australian history on show - on Flickr

Thank goodness that another Australian institute has taken the step to start placing a pictorial history of Australia up in Flickr.

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Australian history gets Flickr treatment, the State Library of NSW has begun loading its photo collection into the online image library.

It can require a great deal of hard work and organisation to get archives into a viable state to place online (as the Powerhouse museum has already done so well).

The benefit is that a priceless visual history of Australia becomes visible to all Australians, rather than requiring people to travel to the photos to see them (such an antiquated notion!).

Eventually it may be possible to aggregate all the individual collections into a national view of Australia's past in a way never before achievable. Then through user-based tagging, comments and search, different pathways through the images can be used to tell different stories, bringing the past back to live via the people who lived through it.

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