If you want to learn about social media and modern marketing then look no further than Age of Conversation 3. In one book you can hear from 171 of the World’s leading bloggers and marketers as they discuss 10 fascinating topics such as Conversational Branding, Measurement, Influence and Pitching Social Media.

For the third book in this series, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan undertook the mammoth task of attracting, editing and compiling in a wonderful example of modern collaboration. Fifteen countries are represented with authors coming from places as diverse as Oman, Finland, India, Mexico, Portugal, Ukraine and of course Australia and the USA. It truly is an International effort.

I think John Rosen says it best on the back cover:

Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan have created a true phenomenon – one that will be studied for yours and be recognized as a turning point in our vision of the author……the author of the future will be a coordinator, conductor and guide who directs a global workforce of the best and brightest in completing the ultimate endeavour.

Age of Conversation 3 is now available on Amazon in hardcover, softcover and even a Kindle version. Once again, all proceeds from sales of the book will go to children’s charities.

I am extremely proud to be a small part of the Age of Conversation for a third time. Please buy a few copies for yourself, your clients or your company. Spread the word and help us raise some money for children’s charities. But most importantly – get busy and join the conversation.

Meet the authors:

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A friend of mine is organising his high school reunion using the Posterous blogging platform. He’s hoping that everyone will be able find and follow the information, and start a bit of a dialogue in the lead-up to the party.

If you’re interested in the Kotara High School Reunion 1983 then check out the site. It has some funny posts already that clearly set the tone for the event.

The last five years has seen traditional media, especially the press, suffering a steady and painful decline. One by one, media business models have been dismantled as the booming digital world has exploded.

In the 90′s it was presumed that the Internet economy would be very similar to the traditional business world and that the existing empires would be able to easily transition online and maintain their dominant place in the world.

Then it was assumed that maybe a new generation of Goliaths would arrive to take over or sit alongside the old players. To some extent that was true as Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Amazon and others grew and grew.

But the reality has been that the old media titans aren’t being toppled by one or two major new players, its more a death by a thousand (or probably a million cuts). Major news and entertainment sources have been replaced for many consumers by and endless array of blogs, microsites and alternative online service providers. Tiny niche content providers are able to provide deeper, more specialist information into anything imaginable and the old media models have no hope of competing.

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A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs, homework or trivia nights.

• At the end of 2008, there were 189 million mobile-broadband connections generating on average 175 megabytes of traffic per month. A year later the respective figures were 312 million and 273 megabytes – a growth of 158%. Source: The Economist

• China has 400 million internet users compared with America’s 240 million and India’s 80 million. Source: The Economist

• Around 20% of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems – bypassing banks and credit cards. Source: The Future of Money Magazine

• In America, the number of advertising pages in magazines dropped by 26% between 2008 and 2009. Source: The Economist

• The average profitability of companies using the internet has increased by 2.7%. Source: BBC News

A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs,  homework or trivia nights.

• 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month.  Source: BBC News

• For the week ending March 13th 2010, Facebook accounted for 7.1% of the America’s web traffic, compared with Google’s 7.0% – the first time Facebook has had a weekly lead. Source: The Economist

• Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but even that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones in 2009.  Source: The New Yorker

• By 2020 the internet will add $3.8 trillion (£2.5 trillion) to the global economy, exceeding the gross domestic product of Germany. Source: BBC News

• BBC’s website receives 20 million British visitors a month – a third of the UK population and around the same as the proportion of Americans who log on to Facebook. Source: The Economist

The first Newcastle radio survey of 2010 has been a very good one for the ABC but costly for the commercial broadcasters.

AM talk station ABC1233 increased their Monday to Sunday share by 1.2% to claim third place overall, dislodging 2HD. Aaron Kearney’s breakfast program had the biggest gain, moving to second place with a gain of 2.3%. ABC1233′s weekend results were similarly impressive as they became the Hunter’s favourite Saturday / Sunday station with a gain of 3.9%, leaping past both NXFM and KOFM.

ABC’s national youth network, Triple J also had a great survey with a 2.4% gain overall to take it in front of  NEWFM.

The survey wasn’t a good one for Newcastle’s 4 commercial stations.

KOFM dropped 0.2% overall but lost 2 points in the crucial breakfast slot, losing their #2 position along the way.

NXFM retained their #1 position overall but dropped 4.3% in doing so. Likewise the NX breakfast had a big drop of 4.3%. In fact, NX had big drops in every slot, which must be of concern to station management.

2HD continued its long slide but the biggest issue is their breakfast show. Luke Grant was controversially sacked as 2HD breakfast announcer late last year and his replacement Brent Bultitude has seen the show fall further in the ratings to now be a distant 4th. SIDENOTE: Luke Grant is now on air in Melbourne at MTR as part of the biggest radio re-launch of 2010.

Longtime struggler NEWFM was the only commercial station to actually see gains, rising 1.5% overall and 0.9% in Breakfast. This will be encouraging for the station but the fact remains they are still a very distant 6th in this market and have a long way to go until they are competitive.

Its been a strange survey and the question seems to be: why are the commercial stations falling while ABC rises?

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NLYZR website analysis tool

I’m very proud to announce that the latest, fully-automated version of our NLYZR website analysis tool is now live.

The team at Sticky launched the original NLYZR 12 months ago and in the ensuing year we tested and reported on over 3000 websites from around the world. Using that experience, we have been able to fine tune and improve our NLYZR reporting to the stage that the Free Web NLYZR is now a fully-fledged web application.

Free Web NLYZR provides a detailed report in around 30 seconds. The report is more SEO focussed than the previous version, covering your site’s on and off site optimisation plus factoring in your results for a nominated keyword search. Basically it tells you how well optimised your website is.

The Free Web NLYZR is just one part of our overall NLYZR Suite. Clients use the full range of tools to receive detailed website reporting and advice such as:

• Keyword selection and ratings

• On-site analysis and recommendations

• Off-site analysis and recommendations

• Rank reporting

• Competitor analysis

We use these tools to assist clients to significantly improve their search rankings, build website traffic and convert traffic into sales, leads and inquiries.

Please feel free to use NLYZR to test your site any time and if you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear it. The more sites we test, the more feedback we gain, the better the system becomes.

How does your website look on an iPad?

Here’s a little test to do when considering an agency for your digital marketing.

Grab an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone and enter the agency’s URL in the browser. If the agency understands web marketing then their website will display seamlessly.

Unfortunately many agency websites will not display seamlessly, in fact they may not display at all. That’s because they have built their websites in Flash and Apple products are not Flash enabled.

We tested a bunch of agency sites on our new iPad yesterday and the results were alarming. Here in Newcastle 4 of the leading agency websites couldn’t be viewed at all while another 2 had serious formatting issues.

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Source: Adnews

Australia has the second highest social media penetration in Asia Pacific region (89.6%) with Facebook the number one site, according to new figures from comScore.

Australia fell just behind the Phillipines for social media penetration (90%) with internet users averaging 21 visits in February 2010 at 3.8 hours per visitor.

The report into social networking activity across the Asia-Pacific region – excluding China – found half (50.8%) of the total online population in the region visited a social networking site in February, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors.

Facebook.com was ranked as the top social network across most regional markets including Australia, however the site was pipped to the top spot by Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Wretch.cc in Taiwan.

Across the region internet users averaged 2.5 hours on social networking sites during the month and visited the category an average of 15 times.

“While social networking continues to be one of the most popular and fastest growing Web activities in the world, its dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region exhibit significantly more individual market differentiation than in other global regions,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for Asia Pacific.

“In some markets, such as the Philippines, Australia and Indonesia, social networking is one of the most popular Web activities reaching nearly 90% of the entire Internet population, while other markets report less PC-based social networking penetration, which can often be attributed to the high propensity to engage in social networking via mobile devices in these markets.”

The Toowoomba property market received a significant boost when Dan Dwan and Markus Eames established the Colliers International office last year.

Colliers International Toowoomba specialises in Commercial, Industrial, Retail & Residential property in Toowoomba and surrounding areas. They represent property investors, developers and occupiers in local and global markets and offer service ranging from Facility Management, Project Marketing to Sales and Leasing.

Toowoomba is a diverse real estate market with everything from modern offices, pubs and clubs to rural retreats, resorts and retirement villages. Dan Dwan and Markus Eames focus on delivery the best reals estate advice and service in the region.

Note: this post is a search engine optimisation test.