Conversations in gigatown

Now that gigatown is almost over, I find myself reflecting back on the mammoth effort it has been over the last year to get gigatownnsn to where it is now in the competition.

Some lighthearted moments while tweeting for #gigatownnsn, my gorgeous grandkids get in on the act!

Many interesting conversations were started in keeping with the hashtag, this one on virtual reality (VR).

Quizzes with wonderful prizes donated by local businesses.

The excitement when we started moving up the social media leaderboard! Only to be shattered when it was discovered we were being attacked by bots!

It was really cool meeting up with people I knew in real life who had joined the Twitter movement.

The final day dawned and things were getting desparate between the top towns as they went head to head.

And then the almost bitter sweet end, when it felt quite unreal to drop the hashtag.

 

Please note: the images of my grandchildren on this blog are copyright and may not be copied and/or used for any purpose.

 

Vote on the Gig Plan for Nelson

The Plans for Gig Success are out!

Dunedin, Gisborne, Nelson, Timaru and Wanaka. May the best town win, so long as that town is Nelson of course!

This is the final challenge and Nelson’s last chance to become GigaTown.  After a year of building a strong online (and offline) community and chasing the leaderboard so hard, we need this win!

Scroll down to read the infographics in the Nelson plan.  The Plan covers how Nelson will leverage giga when it becomes NZ’s first Smart Town.  This in turn will provide a working template for other towns to adopt when giga is pushed out to the rest of NZ.

Check out the Funding and Investment graphic, which uses a Monopoly board to get the messsage across, very cool.

I love the format of GigaNelson’s logo with the WiFi above the eye, very creative yet simple and effective.

Become part of the Gig Club!  Go here to read the plan and vote. 

Read earlier posts about gigatownnsn – an online community, the finals and the final challenge,

This blog post was automatically posted to Facebook, Twitter,  Google+ and LinkedIn to spread the word and encourage people to vote

 

gigatownnsn, the final challenge

The Quiz, Social Media, Supporters and Instagram challenges have all finished!  The last and final challenge is the Plan for Gig Success which makes up 50% of the total points.  The Quiz is 6%, Supporters 13%, Social Media 25% and Instagram 6%.

Nelson was second for Supporters (12 million points) and the Quiz (6 million points)!  We won’t know where we sit for Social Media until Chorus has sorted through and weeded out any spam for the final result.  Same with the Instagram competition.

The Plan for Gig Success first place is awarded 60 million points!  Each of the 5 towns has created a Plan for Gig Success.

As per the Gigatown website:

This is a written submission and video summary that describes how their town plans activate the economic and social benefits of town-wide access to gigabit fibre.  Points for the Plan for Gig Success will be awarded by an external judging panel (35%)and votes from the NZ public (15%).

Voting on the town Plans for Gig Success is open from 19th November to midday Monday 24th November.

Register to vote for Nelson’s Plan for Gig Success here.

Keep up with the news by following GigatownNelson on Facebook and keep in touch with the #gigatownnsn community on Twitter.  You can reach me on @NanasHype.

The Gigatown winner will be announced on Wednesday 26th November, and no matter who wins there will be one big PARTY!

 

I passed my first SCM501 assignment!

This was a nerve wracking wait, as a first time adult student I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  It’s been a long time since I was at school LOL

I got an A+.  And a score of 98/100.  Totally chuffed!

For this assignment we had to write on the following and publish our responses as blog posts.

1. Managing your online identity – read Beginnings .. The Theme, Discovering My Personal Brand and Why I Changed My Theme.  This was really enlightening for me and turned into Personal Development 501 rather than Social Media 501!  We had to describe how we have personalised our online presence, which social media platforms we integrated with our blog and why.

2. Participating in a community – read Gigatownnsn – An Online Community and Gigatownnsn – The Finals.  This is where I lost my 2 points.  I understand where I went wrong though, which is a learning outcome by itself, I concentrated more on the rules of the competition than the rules of the community.

3. Online safety and privacy – read Online Safety And Privacy.  This was a real eye opener.  I bet you don’t know half of this stuff!  Once I’d been over it all, I made a lot of changes to my online presence and am very conscious of keeping myself safe against identity theft now.

4. Protecting Intellectual Property – read Protecting Intellectual Property and Copyright.  I was intrigued by Copyleft and the Creative Commons options for licensing your work.  The internet really does open up a can of worms on this subject.  Not only does it change everything but it challenges everyone’s perception.  What is your take on copyright?

So one assignment down and two to go.  Have I set the bar too high?  Will I be able to achieve consistent marks for the remaining two assignments?!

 

Developing a strategic social media marketing plan

Strategic =  the identification of goals and how to achieve them

Social Media = virtual communities where people can create and share information, ideas and images

Marketing Plan = the blueprint of a business’s marketing efforts

Put simply – work out what your business goals are and how you are going to achieve them in Social Media with a list of actions. Sounds easy right?

Assignment 3 – Demonstrate your understanding of social media marketing by developing a Social Media plan for your own business, a SME or NFP organisation.

The easy part was choosing the business to use.  Travel HQ.

Requirements for the Social Media Plan and associated report:

Complete a Competitor Analysis for Social Media on identified direct competitors

This was difficult!  Because Travel HQ is a niche business, there is not a lot of direct competition.  Therefore I used Google to research who my competitors may be, then cross referenced to their Social Media channels.  I ended up choosing a sports travel agency, a travel agency that has a group division and a tour agency, all quite different but all with similarities to my business.  Two had 7 social media channel and one had 6, so I had 20 social media channels to analyse!  That seemed to take forever, but the longer I spent on it, the more I understood, and as I jotted noted into the template provided for this exercise it started to take shape.  It’s still not completed, but provides a good framework and just needs a bit of spit and polish.  This comprises 30% of the mark, so I wanted to get it out of the way first.

Develop a Social Media Framework you would suggest reaches the target audience and/or target market for your chosen business

The first thing I did was research collaborative partnerships.  The obvious one is TAANZ.  I had to do some thinking about others, but once my mind wandered outside the square I realised I was already dealing with some, so the others could be Sport NZ, NRO’s, NSO’s and RST’s.

The Social Media Framework is going to involve a bit of work yet as I need to incorporate community, influencer networks, reputation, conversation and engagement as well as clearly defining the target audience and goals.  This part of the assignment is 20% of the total mark.

Develop a brand strategy or promotional strategy to cover the next 12 months for the business

I have jotted down a lot of ideas already but now need to find a suitable GANTT chart to put my Social Media Plan into.  This accounts for 30% of the mark so I’ll be hopping on to this next.

Integrate at least two social media networks in your plan

I’ve done the competitor research so these are looking like at Facebook and Twitter and either YouTube or a Blog.

Short Report

All of the above needs to be summarised and integrated into a report (no more than 1,000 words – that’s going to be hard for me LOL).  Headings are Terms of Reference (which I currently have no idea what this means!), Purpose and Objectives, Findings, Social Media Plan and Recommendations.  I think the easiest way to do this will be to let my mind run free with my fingers on the keyboard and then collate it all into suitable headings.  This accounts for 20% of the total mark.

I’ve put a lot of work in this weekend and still don’t feel like I am where I want to be (with a fully completed competitor analysis).  I guess I’ll be going for a few more hours tonight and there’ll also be some late nights this week working on the other parts of this assignment.  There’s still 2 hours of class on Tuesday and another on Friday too.

The good news is that the assignment has been extended by a week and is not due in until Monday 17th.  The bad news is that the final assignment is due in on the 21st!  But that one is the ongoing growth of our Blog and so long as we’ve been posting regularly and it has been evolving it should only need a bit of that spit and polish (or a quick check of the marking schedule to ensure I have covered everything off!).

Wish me luck!