Reprise Media Australia CEO Craig Ellis named Dennis Wong as national operations manager, a new position. His primary role will be to ensure the highest standards of processes and efficiencies across the agency’s four Australian offices. Wong will relocate from Sydney to Reprise Media’s Melbourne office, which has now grown to 18 people.  “Dennis is the right person for this new role and he will thrive under this new challenge,” said Ellis. Prior to his new appointment Wong was an account director at the Sydney agency.

Harjit Rana joins Reprise Media as social communities and analytics director, a new position. Rana previously had a nine-year career with the BBC in the UK in digital marketing, where she has been at the forefront of the corporation’s digital expansion both in the UK and overseas. She played a leading role in the launch strategy for the global BBC iPlayer app in 16 markets across Europe, Australia and Canada.

Wayne O’Brien has joined Reprise Media to lead the Hyundai and Kia accounts. He formally worked at M&C Saatchi on CommBank and spent four years at the Ogilvy group working on major accounts including Telstra and St. George Bank, specialising in direct marketing, engagement development, staff communications as well as off-line and online media.

“Dennis, Harjit and Wayne are high calibre individuals, who have key roles within the agency and will play a significant part in the future of our business,” said Ellis.

The post Reprise Media Names 3 to Senior Roles in Sydney and Melbourne appeared first on Reprise Media Australia.

• Facebook Graph Search has launched as a public invitation only BETA today, in what Facebook are describing as a very different alternative solution to searching content online.
• Following on from Mark Zuckerberg’s comments at TechDisrupt 2012 regarding the development of the Facebook search team, today we saw the announcement of Facebook’s entry into the search space.
• Facebook Graph Search returns results based on people, places, photos, actions performed and content shared across a Facebook user’s network of contacts & friends. All these factors influence and provide personalised search results which are unique to the individuals based on their Facebook friend’s opinions & actions.

Facebook Launch Graph Search

What Does This Mean?

• Whilst the BETA launch of Graph Search will not affect brands activities on Facebook immediately, it is an indication of the imminent changes to the ways that users discover content through Facebook. Individuals won’t just use Facebook to see what’s happening with their friends but they will now be able to use it as a source to query any questions they have.
• The launch of the tool sees a focus on people, photos, places and interests, but plans to shortly include posts, and open graph actions. The search function is soon to be ported to all platforms after initially being launched on desktop, and in a video accompanying the release, Mark Zuckerberg sees the feature becoming a pillar of the Facebook Platform
• Ultimately this functionality provides marketers with other ways to quantify or measure the impact that Facebook investment has on their brand or product, adding tangible value to likes, comments and shares.
  For example users search experience is likely to shift from typing “KIA New Car Reviews” in Google to a much more socially orientated peer-peer search in Facebook; “Which of my friends owns a KIA?”. This means brands will need to give more love to their pages and content they publish to realize the benefits through increased searchable value of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’.
• It is our view that Facebook is solely focusing on the search lens which encapsulates “My World,” whereas Google predominantly focuses on the lens of “The World” despite moves that it has made towards personalisation of search through its mobile, local and social products. Facebook currently has access to the stronger social dataset but Google has a far stronger lineage in providing the right search results through diversity of sources. Which is the better solution of personalized search is yet to be seen based on user experience.

Friends Recommendations On Restaurants

What Actions Should Brands Take?

• Facebook recommend that brands complete all information in the Facebook business profile section of their page, and publish content that encourages sharing and likes.
• Reprise recommend the linking of all brand pages with locations such as stores, as this will ensure all peer-peer recommendations/actions will show up when individuals search across Facebook
• Ensure that content shared within your Facebook feed is derived from the content people are searching for along with linking to your own website which will result in increased visibility for your brand and product suite.

In conclusion the task of optimising the reach of your brand in Search & Social has just expanded; the focus still remains on creating relevant & compelling content and closer to deriving the value of this effort in terms of brand loyalty, marketing reach and actual sales.

These are exciting times as the gloves are off in the Social Search space, whilst Google Plus search is increasing it doesn’t have the scale of Facebook in Australia but it does have the greater cross device experience. In short the race is on!

We would love to hear what you think. Ping us a comment

Additional Images

New Facebook Graph Search

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Craig Ellis, CEO of Reprise Media has today named Andrew Hughes as innovation and technology director and David Coats as SEO director at the agency. “The rapid evolution of SEO dictates that we continue to expand our skills base and business momentum,” said Ellis. “These new senior appointments will add substantial weight to our team and bring new thinking and expertise to our clients’ business challenges.”

Hughes’s role is a new position at Reprise Media, part of IPG Mediabrands Australia. His primary focus will be to ensure strong product development and innovation across channels and to resource clients and agency teams with the best use of technology to bring new ideas and approaches to client campaigns. Prior to taking his new role, Hughes was SEO director at the agency.

Ellis said Coats was a highly accomplished SEO professional and team builder. He was a key driver of growth at iCrossing, one of the UK’s highly regarded SEO agencies before relocating to Australia two years ago. Prior to joining Reprise Media, Coats has been Director of SEO at Mediacom. He joins Reprise Media toward the end of October.

Coats said: “Reprise has made major waves in the Australian SEO industry with their reputation for embracing integration with social media and technology as the future of search. I’m extremely excited to be working alongside Andrew and such a broad range of talent in the Mediabrands agency family and look forward to leading the outstanding SEO team.”

Andrew Hughes (L) and David Coats of Reprise Media

For more information, please contact: Richard McGowan – +61 412 277 141 or richard@rmgcoms.com.au

The post Hughes, Coats in New Role at Reprise Media appeared first on Reprise Media Australia.

I think 4 me one of the clearest messages to come out of the summit is that having a content strategy and a narriative 4 any marketing activity are key to winning and delivering world class work that has impact and delivers results.

With this I also thought we would share some of the notes and outtakes we have taken through the summit so far.

The first presentation by Bruce Rosengarten focusing on leadership really spoke to the fact no matter what channel you operate, delivering world class work comes down to the team you have and how empowered they all feel.

A leader needs to inspire and provide a vision that everyone can feel challenged by and develop from.

The second presentation by Stuart Bartram and Sarah Vaughn which focused around the amazing results Microsoft has been able to get through it’s Developer community really spoke to identifying a sales force in your customer. The presentation really demonstrated the power of listening to customers through online channels of which Microsoft found 700,000 people who listed themselves developers on LinkedIn and secondly the power of building a community based on passion point as opposed to a company agenda. The best quote of this presentation by Sarah was “If I had a chance to do things differently I would have setup the community sooner!”.

The third presentation by Professor Duane Varan covered the setup and thinking that went behind setting up the Disney Advertising Lab. There was so much covered and it was such an insightful presentation which covered some new fundamentals:

-  Research has evolved from just looking at the past 4 trends to looking at continuous data that takes into account interaction and emotion that is happening now

-  Don’t select some research techniques and tools but use them all because you want to know everything

-  Having the same message across multi-screens really has no impact because “all channels are created equal” but having a narrative which crosses channels and engages interaction certainly impacts results. Best yet Dr Varan had research to back this up.

The fourth big presentation 4the day was by Leo Roberts from Coke taking us through insights in the construction and delivery of the “Share a Coke” campaign. It is always truly amazing to have someone taking you through the in’s and out of a case study rather than just sharing results. Some key outtakes 4 me from this were:

-  digital still comes down to having a true insight which touches on a passion point

-  collaboration and responsibilities are key and Coke did a great job at dividing and engaging all its agency partners and internal staff, so they were clear on responsibility but also suitably excited and passionate about what they were creating

-  it takes a lot of determination and passion to deliver something good

-  your customer can be your real sales force

-   social media is a channel which helps share stories and when integrated into the narrative of a campaign can deliver amazing results

-   the work you produce still needs to come down to an objective which in Cokes case was to increase sales which they did amazingly

We’re looking forward to today and keeping the learning going! Oh and by the way I way I hope you found the clue in the top two paragraphs !

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When scanning  the QR code  on your guide you will be driven to a clue.  Each one will test your knowledge of a different digital channel and will result, if done successfully, in one digit! Four clues will be released over the 3 days of the summit, each providing one digit which will add up to a 4 digit code to crack the safe. Only the most social sleuthing guest will be the first to solve all daily clues and correctly guess the code to open the safe, winning not only the mystery prize but also the coveted title of iMedia’s ultimate code cracker!

If you have missed any of the clues here is a list of the ones that have been shared:

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I can’t believe I am tempted to refer to Google as a challenger brand, but in social media there is clearly a big task at hand for Google + in order to compete evenly with the Facebooks, Twitters and Link-Ins of this world. Watching how this unfolds will be one of the most fascinating dynamics in social media evolution in the foreseeable future.

Last count in Australia there were more than 11.4m users of Facebook  and 13m unique visitors; 11m unique Youtube visitors users; 2m unique LinkedIn visitors, 1.8m Twitter visitors, 1.6M WordPress Visitors, etc[1]. So it is fair to say that in a country of 22m+ people we are at a point where Social Media as a platform has scale. While we are watching how Google + fairs there are some other dynamics for marketers and agencies to keep an eye on.

Social Data Insight leading to Actionable Insight

The challenge and opportunity is how to take large data sets and convert the 40-50 page reports into actionable insights that businesses can employ.  It is important to benchmark and know the sentiment of your brand against your competitors but it is even more powerful to know what is important to your customers; what is your share of voice and is this increasing for the important brand pillars; third, how fast is your community growing and are you aware of its media value & basket size?

Social Attribution and the ROI of Social Media

Social attribution will become one of the key ingredients of Social Media as retailers battle to ensure they are hitting their numbers and exploring emerging channels. The consumer is available and willing to engage in Social Channels and putting in place a Social CRM program will be key to identifying the impact your activity has in terms of brand, customer service and sales.

A new set of Media Amplification Tools

Media amplification tools like Blogger Outreach, Video Seeding and Cost Per Fan acquisition will become impact players in the marketers’ arsenal. These media tools will also become more sophisticated, measuring beyond reach and going into engagement and acquisition.

Community Management will get sophisticated and companies will need to have a content strategy

If you have an attribution model in place and realize that the value of your community could be in the millions, companies will understand they need to put the right talent into a content strategy. Having a uni graduate managing these channels will no longer stack up.

Google + will expand exponentially

As I mentioned, Google +  will be pushing hard to compete amongst the Facebooks, Twitters and Linked Ins. With search implications for companies that don’t have a presence we will see a willingness to invest in creating engaging content.  On the other hand the game changer for the consumer will be the mobile functionality, being able to organize a 3 way chat, distribute content across devices including TV, do it really fast and share it with my friends are all reasons to now sign-up.

Gamification & Socialisation

Gamification is set to rule as one of the key buzz words in most strategic marketing meetings. Allowing consumers and employees to co-create with your brand is the art of using your marketing dollar for a purpose. This is the year where marketers look employ gamification across every campaign they run.

Like all emerging mediums this is the year where we see a bit more science applied to the craft of Social Media. It’s certainly going to be a dynamic year. Stay tuned!

The post What can we expect from Social Marketing in 2012? appeared first on Reprise Media Australia.

Craig Ellis, CEO of Reprise Media in Australia, said the agency’s social media business had grown 126% from second quarter 2011 to the same period in 2012 and the new talent would fast track Reprise Media’s capabilities to deliver innovative, socially enabled business solutions for clients.

Justine Read, Digital Marketing Manager for Brown Forman Australia, said: ‘’We have worked with Reprise for the past two years on our digital strategy and execution. The team is dedicated, passionate, loves social media and has worked hard to understand our brands and our needs, incorporating strategies that deliver as well, to scale. I believe that they have proven their ability to deliver on strategic digital campaigns that support the brand architecture, achieve specific brand objectives and resonate with our online audience.”

Maria Casas is joining Reprise Media Sydney as social media strategist. She previously worked at creative agency Arnold Furnace focusing on digital and social media strategies for clients such as Warner Bros and Procter & Gamble.

Richard Dalke has joined Reprise Media Melbourne as social media manager. He is formerly a strategy planner and account manager with UK-based social media agency Fresh Networks where he worked on clients including American Express, Telefónica, Jimmy Choo and 3M.

Cam Bisley joins Reprise Media Melbourne as community manager. He is formerly a video blogger, social media manager and more recently content manager for Saatchi& Saatchi New Zealand where he worked on the Defense Forces NZ account. A former radio announcer, his skill sets include web content management, social media management, video presenting, radio presenting and audio editing.

“These three executives have highly skilled, diverse backgrounds that recognise the skill sets needed to drive social media’s impact on our clients’ businesses,” said Ellis.

For More Information, please contact: Richard McGowan – +61 412 277 141 or richard@rmgcoms.com.au

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The growth in Queensland and Western Australia is in addition to Reprise Media’s substantial operations in Sydney and Melbourne, with total national staff now in excess of 50 people involved in client service, performance, SEO and social media.

Chris Pahor joins Reprise Brisbane as key account manager to work in client service and he reports to recently appointed Brisbane office leader Robbie Aoukar. Pahor previously worked for Traffika as a search engine marketing manager and more recently as a social media manager. He will work on clients including The Ardent Group (Dreamworld, Goodlife, AMF), RACQ and News Queensland. In Western Australia, Reprise Media specialist Stuart MacDougall has relocated from Sydney to Perth where digital media spending by Western Australia based clients has increased 100% on 2011 levels.

“By the end of 2012 we expect the business will have grown by 300% since its launch in 2010,” said Reprise Media CEO Craig Ellis. “Our multi-channel approach and positioning of search and social as a hand-in-hand fundamental business necessity is resonating exceptionally well with clients. Pay per click search has been the principal area of growth in the past two years, but social media and SEO continue to accelerate rapidly and we expect both to grow more than 110% this year alone.”

Among Reprise Media’s major clients are Federal Government, Wesfarmers, Hyundai, Kia, ING, Microsoft, Brown Forman. Reprise Media is part of the Mediabrands group of businesses in Australia.

About IPG Mediabrands Australia

IPG Mediabrands Australia is a full-service marketing communications group designed for the new era of consumer and brand engagement. Its businesses include major media communications agencies Initiative, UM and MBThree; barter company Orion; intelligence and investment specialist MagnaGlobal; search and social media specialist Reprise Media; analytics business Marketing Sciences Australia; digital and creative agency Airborne; branded entertainment specialist Ensemble and Cadreon, an independent online performance platform.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about increasing traffic to a website by optimising it analytically and understanding its use from a consumer/customer perspective. In simpler words the website needs to be user friendly with relevant content, easy to navigate and provide requisite information to the user. Optimising web-pages for search engines and users may sound identical, but are very much different in principle. The main factors to be taken into account while optimising web-pages for users and search engines are:

1. Web page loading speed: Latency is important for a website and its optimisation. A search engine might also look at how quickly pages load and render in a browser. It also accounts in terms of how much time users might expect the page to load and how good experience it might deliver to their users. Faster sites are more likely to create happy users. However, if a site responds slowly, visitors might become impatient, spend less time and leave the page.

Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates. Google has researched the impact on number of searches by slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds and found decrease in searches by 0.2% to 0.6 % for less than half a second’s time.

The speed of a page can be tested at https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/. A higher score in the speed test will require less improvement but, for a page with lower score, recommendations such as minimising URL redirects, combining images into CSS sprites, efficient coding and compressing images can save many bytes of data, are to be considered.

2. Content Allocation on Page:  In regards to content, both users and search engines have similar perspective; they want the information to be in-order and prioritized rather than being scattered.  As the users scan the page for the relevant information, similarly search engines prefer most relevant information at the beginning of the page with clear sign of the heading what the content is about. Thus the content on the page should be organized with appropriate headings, paragraphs and points.

3. Appearance of Content: It is preferred to have a right contrast of colour scheme, text size and style on the web page. Users should have the ease of reading and understanding the content on the page. If the content on a page is not formatted properly it might result in increased bounce rate and more likely less returning users. For example, if a page has 4 paragraphs and all with different font size, then the users might lose interest because of the unusual page structure. Also, it makes it difficult for users to read and consider that website as spam and more likely to leave the page which will result in higher bounce rate. Therefore, use of appropriate colour scheme, font style and size should be carefully considered.

4. Images on page: Communicating information through visual effects have a better impact on the users, as images are eye catching and are easy to understand compared to just text. On the other hand, search engine bots work on algorithms and they can’t index images. Therefore, it is required to add Alt attributes, keywords in the image file name, right anchor text, to images which gives search engines more information on the image content. Adding alt text gives the user a better understanding and description of the image.

5. Navigation: The navigation on your website should be clear and concise. The unnecessary complex website navigation might confuse users as they don’t want to think and try multiple options to find the information they are looking for. Make sure you use appropriate keywords and hierarchy to navigate to a product page. Similarly, search engines look for the keywords to navigate and index the pages accordingly. From search engine perspective, complicated navigation can result in poor indexing as crawlers might not be able to crawl all pages due to many internal links present on a page. Hence, too much confusion can lose the interest of both user and search engines.

Source: SEOmoz

6. Prioritize significant content: With increase of access to World Wide Web through smart-phone, tablets and other forms of smart gadgets, the website should be compatible on all form of devices. If a user is accessing website on a small screen or on a smart phone, they expect important content to appear in the beginning of a page. Similarly, to increase chances of indexing the page by search engines, the best practice is to place the important content in beginning of the HTML code of the web page.

7. Importance of Meta title: Title of the page is one of the key elements for both users and search engines. Self-explanatory and a descriptive page title will assist and increase the chances of users clicking on the web page when searching for a particular keyword. In addition, when users search in their bookmark for the website, it raises possibility of revisit. Likewise, search engines give a lot of consideration on the title of web pages which contains clear title with keywords as it helps in increasing the ranking for those keywords. Significant keywords should be covered in the title of a page to give clear understanding of the web page.

8. Web page URL’s: Everything related to a web page should make sense to users. A clear, concise URL increases the chance of recall by users. It should be short, clear, relevant to page and represent a clear flow of navigation and category. For example: www.example.com/services/social-media-optimisation/ implies that social media is one of the services provides by “example”.

On the other hand the URL: www.example.com/services/232social_d.aspx is a complex URL structure, as it is difficult to remember by users and it provides few information for average users as what actually the page is about.

In addition to the usability benefits of structured URLs, SEO can also gain benefits. URLs containing topic related keywords have a constructive result on search engines as they can help in improving keyword ranking, increasing traffic and indexing the web page. For example, www.example.com/used-cars-sydney/ can target both “used cars” and “used cars Sydney” keywords in URL and can help in improving the ranking.

As mentioned in above 8 factors, it is very important to optimise a website from both users and search engine perspective. A well optimised website is more likely to achieve high traffic, increase in conversion rate with a good user experience. Optimising a website is not about putting bulk of content, colourful images, and using complicated navigation with many options. It’s more about providing relevant information with the right structure, choosing appropriate title and many other factors as discussed above.

The post How to Optimise Website for Search Engines and Users? appeared first on Reprise Media Australia.

It has only really been in the last few years that mobile smart computing has really taken hold. The success of the Apple iPhone and iPad suggest that people are more than willing to pay out for exciting new high tech devices such as these so long as the price is reasonable and the product offers a real convenience or entertainment factor. Now, with the release of the new Sony/Google Smart TV from just US$300, it looks like digital convergence and highly anticipated concept of Web TV and the Networked or ‘Smart’ Home may finally, be on our doorstep.

Sony-Google-SmartTV

Ubiquitous computing involves intelligent learning capable systems that provide a personalised digital service to the end-user. In SEO, the personalisation or socialisation of search and advertising are popular terms of late. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are clearly interested, very aware that this technology will provide a range of new ways to attain and provide much more relevant and personalised information in so many new ways. The partnering of Facebook’s social and Bing’s search services matched against Google’s +1 Button highlights the emphasis these companies are placing on developing a more personalised or informed search experience. In some recently published research regarding Facebook and Google, it is revealed that although Facebook is still the most prominent service in terms of social links and social plugins, Google’s +1 Button is gaining in popularity.

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