It’s odd writing a history for something still less than ten years old, but there’s a common theme emerging in discussions with our clients in 2021. For many, we were there at the beginning of their social media adventure, helping design social media policies and supporting them in discussions with risk averse senior managers, still

As regular readers will know, I spend a fair bit of time working with Government departments across Australia helping them to really get to know their customers. Customer research is for some parts of Government still a very new area. As indeed is the notion of customers. I’ve seen the users of Government services described

In the two years since I launched GovCom, we’ve observed hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the pursuit of innovation, seen thousands involved in Government hackathons, hundreds of thousands more involved in community engagement programmes and a stream of new Government service initiatives announced from digital licences in NSW to the formation of Service

A recent report by Sensis in Australia confirms what many of us have started to presume. Social media in Australia is no longer on a steep growth curve, but mimicking the product lifecycle some of us remember studying, has now started to plateau. The report suggest that over 80% of all Australian businesses have a

The last few months have reminded me again how every single aspect of business is changing in the digital age. In the middle of strategy season, running discussions and workshops for large and small organizations, I’ve been struck by how easily people are quickly moving on from outdated marketing playbooks about competitors to customer centric

As we enter that quintessentially Australian “caretaker” period in the run up to the election, thoughts turn again to politics. The Daily Telegraph in Sydney yesterday ran a piece about ad agencies being the major benefactors of the rumored $100m spend on political advertising and the first ads ran on TV last night. For what

It’s easy to be seduced by the stories of 70 million, or is it billion users of Facebook and how Kevin Rudd and Shane Warne each have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter (if ever there was a death knell for a brand…) but the most overlooked virtue of Social Media, especially for the

Having spent something like ten years now working on advertising campaigns for Government departments, everything from drink driving to tourism and recruitment to tenders, it seems that the most common question I get asked nowadays, often sitting precariously on a stage in front of an expectant audience, is something like “what’s Government doing with digital?”

News today that the NSW Government are appointing an expert panel to look at the myriad back office structures and systems of affiliated entities and corporations operating throughout the state. All of our recent work at GovCom would support the argument that in the digital age there are likely to be enormous efficiency savings to

There’s little point blogging at 3.30 on a Friday, so I will keep it short. This week I’ve had so many conversations about technology. And digital. I’ve taken part in two public debates about “digital marketing”, desperately making the point that the word “digital” is redundant in that two word phrase. On the flip side,