I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

It has already presided over one of the biggest PR disasters of the year and now Vodafone faces being sued by potentially thousands of its customers over poor network performance.

Sydney law firm PiperAlderman is seeking out disgruntled Vodafone customers to form a class action lawsuit over dropped calls, reception issues and poor data performance that have left customers fuming.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has already said it is investigating the matter.

Vodafone initially blamed software bugs and argued that there were no serious problems with its network.
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In the courts of Public Opinion, it appears some people think that the means justifies the end.

Depending on what you believe, you’ll think that man-made climate change is either “the greatest moral challenge of our time” (aka, Kevin Rudd) or the biggest con of our time, just follow the money trail, it leads straight to Al Gore and those scientists on the receiving end of multi-million dollar grants.

Thankfully, some blokes at Futerra were up to the challenge to develop its Rules of The Game blueprint which outlines the communication strategy for the scare-the-bejeezus-out-of-you man-made climate change movement.

It begins by “blowing away some myths” such as the ones it identified below.

If you want to know how the doomsdayers convince YOU that the planet is about to end, polar bears are becoming extinct and all seaside homes will be under water in the next few years, read on.

Read on and be really, really offended that they insult your intelligence this way.
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So there’s this story in The Australian about a fake memo that has been doing the rounds of the Internet claiming McDonald’s stores deliberately rip off customers.

The Australian says that it has been revealed to be the work of the same prankster behind an infamous email about a seven-legged spider (which is very funny if you haven’t seen it.)

The document, mocked-up with an official McDonald’s Australia letterhead and signed by fictitious managing director “Robert Trugabe”, outlines a secret plan to save money by leaving items out of drive-through orders.

“If the girls leave one item out of every second or third order, this adds up to several thousand dollars per week revenue,” it says.

“We need to work out if there is a way of making this a procedure without making it documented.”

The memo became a viral hit, and has prompted to the company issuing a front page alert on its website that denounces the fake memo as an “email scam”.
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Need publicity?

Here is what works in Melbourne, Australia.

This is a story that has made front page news for Australia’s biggest selling newspaper.

(Must be a slow news day.)

HUNDREDS of Melbourne’s most tech-obsessed geeks plan to smash the world record for robot dancing next week.

Robot lovers are already practising their moon walks and ‘pops’ for the official Guinness World record attempt at Melbourne University, but organizer Marita Cheng denies the effort smacks of being a nerd.

“Actually, I’m more of a geek.”

The third-year Carlton mechatronics engineering student has already locked in 400 robot dancers, but wants to hit 1000 to make sure the quirky world mark stays here.

The current world record is held by the University of Kent in the UK, which convinced 276 dancers to perform a robotic “Macarena” but Ms Cheng promises Melbourne’s effort will be a lot funkier.

Ms Cheng and her cohorts are part of Robogals, a non-profit group of young engineering undergraduates teaching robotics to schoolgirls to lift the profile of science in schools.

And if you’re interested in how robots are going to dance their way into the record books, you can buy the largest selling newspaper in Australia or view the rest of this story online.

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A wake-up call to PR people.

This is the report that outlines online communications skills that employers want, therefore candidates need, in today’s PR and Marketing job market.

This report provides insights into the specific strategic and tactical digital communications skills that employers are seeking from public relations and marketing job candidates.

The research report is intended to help public relations, corporate communications and marketing professionals better understand and appreciate how organizations are integrating online communications into their business practices, and what online communication skills they need to acquire to be competitive in today’s job market.

Some of the key insights include:

• Very high levels of adoption in online communications, demonstrating that new media and social media are now a core part of the web-based communications mix. They have become integral to organizational communications.
• Social networking adoption out ranks natural search engine optimization, with 70% utilizing them compared to 66% for SEO. The report found it is counter-intuitive for organizational communicators to not rank web content management higher in importance since social networks and micro-blogging services are frequently used to distribute hyperlinks into websites.
• According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, a company’s own website is seen as more credible than business blogs, social networking sites and advertising.

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Hands up who has seen new brands launched by advertising? Yep, hundreds of times over, right? But advertising is not, and never has been, the best way to launch new brands.

Public relations has, and still remains, the best way to launch new brands.

Why? Because the basic underlying factor you need when launching a new brand is credibility and you cannot achieve it by telling everyone how good you are.

You might be Honest John but nobody expects you to say your products are crap.

So you need to leave it up to others to talk about you – such as influential social media commentators and mainstream media, like newspapers.

So a few days ago, I commented on the decline of advertising spend in broadcast media.

(The same decline is not being felt online, but it will happen eventually. The trust consumers have in online advertising is dwindling.)

Don’t be surprised. For a long time advertising has ceased to work, it’s just taking the marketing world a bit of time to catch up to where its consumers are at. Your customer is bored with you telling them how good you think you are. They’re not listening anymore. Come time to set your marketing budgets, you’d better be rethinking where you spend your cash.
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When I compile posts for my blog, sometimes I have ideas about what to write and other times I check out different places to kick start my thinking.

So this morning, I went to Google news to check out the business and technology section.

Not much there I was interested in talking about (except that someone else thought Apple was doing it better than Microsoft).

(Glad to see it’s not just me that is critical of Microsoft’s marketing behaviour.)

Next I visited some favorite blogs including Copyblogger and came across this item I want to share.

It’s a good read, entirely free, called Authority Rules: 10 Rock Solid Elements of Online Marketing. Check it out for yourself, it’s worth the few minutes of your time.

But first, I’ll set the scene.
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So I was snooping in a book store when I uncovered one of those $5 bargains that’s too good to pass by.

It was simply called it! with a sub-head that read “9 Secrets of the Rich and Famous That Will Take You To The Top”.

Native New Yorkers know its author well. For everyone else, Paula Froelich was, until very recently, the number two writer for Page Six (NY Post).

So, given her background, if there is a person on this planet that knows about stardom, it is Paula.

Let’s face it, after grinding out daily gossip columns for almost a decade, fielding dozens of PR rep calls every day, she’s somewhat the expert in the inside machinations of the celebrity world.

Now, according to Paula, celebrities are made not born.

So if you’re planning to be the face of your brand, or chuck in your marketing day job for a spot in the limelight, grab your designer coffee, find a comfy armchair and get yourself settled.

For here are the 9 Rules you’re gonna need to know and follow:
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