Hannah Law

49% of Australian content marketers plan to increase their spending over the next 12 months, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA)*. What a mouthful!

Admittedly, for many Australian companies I think they’ll be increasing their content marketing spend from a low base … but it’s an increase nonetheless.

A further 12% of Australian content marketers surveyed claim they will ’significantly increase’ their spending and 28% say their spending will remain the same.

How will 3D printers, tablets, life-saving forks, Google Glasses and the interest graph change the way you do business this year?

In January Thomas Crampton and I ran a webinar with our Social@Ogilvy APAC trend predictions for 2013.  The webinar was  designed to help you understand your customers better, know where and how to target them effectively, and ensure your marketing is more Old Spice than MySpace.

Below is the Slideshare … the slides were accompanied by an explanation so feel free to leave questions in the comments if you want more info on what was actually said about certain slides. Unfortunately we had technical difficulties so couldn’t record the session but I remember most of it!

Does your agency have a social media specialist on the team?

What do they do exactly? Community management, social listening, content creation, socialCRM, creative campaigns, influencer management, social business, social advertising, viral videos(!), on-site social media, social search, offline-online integration, mobile-social, social strategy, blogger relations, and social media reporting?

If it’s anything like the agencies I’m familiar with, they do a bit of everything. That’s a hefty job description!

Could one person really be an expert in all this?

I never used to like babies. In fact, when I was 18, you could have heard me say “they cry, they smell, they rarely smile (the really newborn ones, anyway) – what’s to like?”

I’d see a baby, shudder and walk away.

But a year or so later, I found myself in the same room as a sleeping baby and thought the peaceful little thing in the corner might not be so bad.

New. We talk about it a lot. We like it. We even tell others about it:

Each of these sayings speak to the importance of new.

This blog is about to have a ‘new’ start as a place to share anything new, whether it is experiences, material possessions or people. Not ‘the news’ but anything that’s new to me. Previously I wrote mostly about exercise with a bit of work stuff thrown in. Now I’m going to use this place to motivate me to keep trying new things but also to hopefully inspire you to try something new. It’s probably more of what a blog is ’supposed to be’!

I’d love you to share in the comments or on twitter @hannahlaw the new things you might be discovering. And also if you have a recommendation of something new I should try!

A thank you goes to Scott Drummond for his fastBREAK talk at the start of last year (yep, 2012 – it took a while to sink in!) on creativity which reminded me of the importance of being innovative and helped me crystallize this new blog focus. Thanks Scott!

Courtesy of Anatoliy Bakal, Pinterest

I’ve recently left Switched on Media, my (second) home for the last three years. The change comes because I’ve relocated to Hong Kong, ready to embark on a new adventure!

It’s a bitter-sweet time as I say goodbye to a talented team of search & social marketers at Switched on Media. Particular shout-outs to Andy Jamieson, Scot Ennis, Dan Richardson, Kevin Lo, Hannah Gandevia and Chris Hitchcock who are taking the agency to new heights, already evident with the announcement that STW will take a majority share!

Change is often a time of reflection and it is, as I am in this middle-ground, that I’ve been thinking about traits of the Australian digital marketing industry from an outsider’s perspective.

Today Facebook announced their very own App Centre which they describe as a “a new place for people to find social apps”. It is basically an alternative way to access mobile apps that use Facebook which positions the App Centre as a bit of a rival to Apple iTunes and Google Play.

My team at work and I have been creating Pinterest accounts for some of our clients so they can capitalise on the popularity of this emerging new social media platform and creatively engage with their customers. Stay tuned for more details when the Pinterest accounts officially launch!

In our discussions about Pinterest, we’ve noticed a lot of people actually call the platform “Pin Interest” instead of “Pinterest”. This got us thinking about how many people globally might be making this mistake so we used the Google AdWords tool to find out!

You may have read last week and over the weekend that Pinterest has updated their terms of use and actually divided their policy into 3 sections to make it easier to digest and, ideally, more relevant: terms of use, acceptable use and privacy policy.

There are a lot of sites out there explaining how these changes will affect personal use, some of the more comprehensive articles are by The Next Web and The Blog Herald but do you understand what this means for your company’s Pinterest account and what you can do about it?

Have you ever noticed how a lot of athletes are pigeon-toed? No seriously, if you really pay attention to them as they run, for many their feet don’t hit the ground straight. And yet they are faster. It makes you wonder if being pigeon-toed is an actual advantage for you, rather than just an amusing sight for everyone else.

I was so curious I actually looked it up. I mean it would be a great way for the pigeon-toed of the world to get out there and run in public more often, without feeling ridiculed for the way their feet move. Yes, admittedly there are people with this affliction that would rather play on the latest iPhone game than go for a run along the beach, but some might be inspired to run somewhere that isn’t the gym.