Why it’s dangerous not to own your own channels

Brands have long used social platforms to connect with and build out their audiences. Collecting fans like baseball cards, they would pour significant ad spend into Facebook’s brand-favouring algorithms, relying on third-party data to deliver ads and reach potential new users. Obviously, this has changed significantly in the last six months as Facebook removed third-party data offerings and updated the news feed feature to prioritise user content vs. branded content. Of course, this isn’t the first time that a social company has shaken things up. When Twitter shut down Vine...

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Defining conversions when you’re not selling anything

A key challenge facing digital marketers within the government sector is measuring success in dollars and cents. How can you go on spending when you don’t know what it has bought you? How can you measure your return on investment when the investment is hefty and the return is, well… ambiguous? This phenomenon can ultimately make it difficult to garner support for digital investment and justify your existence. Finding a currency that doesn’t include a dollar sign is important. Identifying your currency and understanding how it adds value can help justify your current expenditure,...

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Technology and Logistics: The Odd Couple

When I started my career in logistics in 2001, the most impressive piece of technology in our business were the vending machines in the lunchroom. If a customer wanted to know where their delivery was, we would call the driver’s mobile, and then ring the customer back on theirs. If they needed a proof of delivery, we’d fax it through. Two years down the track, we were getting pretty excited about the ability to book jobs online. Warehousing wasn’t much different - our clients were typically wanting to store slow-moving goods, or bricks and mortar retail stores holding replenishment...

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Data disappears during digital transition

‘Digital transformation’ are the words on the lips of every public sector employee whose role involves ICT, online services and record keeping. Touting the benefits of increased speed, accuracy and enhanced organisational agility, federal government has poured $70m in funding to support ICT and digital measures in the 2017-2018 budget. However the total number of IT workers imported into Australia each year have been frozen in time a 2016 due to changes in the methodology for collecting the data of overseas arrivals and departures. Traditional paper outgoing passenger...

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NZ’s bottom line is digital

The benefits of digital transformation to a country’s bottom line have been proven in a recent IDC study commissioned by Microsoft. The report revealed:              Approximately 55% of New Zealand’s GDP will be derived from digital products or services by 2021, compared to 6% in 2017       By 2021, digital transformation is expected to add 0.7% CAGR GDP growth annually        Digital transformation has increased profit margin, revenue from new and existing products & services, productivity, as well...

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Social Procurement: Changing Value

In the race to create greatest value in procurement, social impact has been one of the most poorly understood and captured drivers of value. Recently we worked with one of our buyer members to audit their supply chain.  The objective was to ascertain the amount they were spending with social enterprises. They didn’t believe that they were spending anything at all, and when the audit was complete it showed that they were spending over $1 million with four social enterprises that were delivering packaging services. The reason they didn’t know that social enterprises...

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Transformation - What it means to me...

In my years of delivering small to large-scale change, there are a number of consistent themes and lessons (I refer to them as scars) that I have gleaned. So I would like to share with my network. Now I don’t profess to know everything because as human beings we are always learning and growing, and are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. And I am pretty sure I have not covered everything - so I preface this as a discussion rather than a dictation. Seems transformation is the buzz-word at the moment and has been for some time. Do...

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