Teamwork Travel

Travelling in a team can be a bit of lottery with the best of company at the best of times. Many of us will remember fateful school tours to a monument of some significance. Though the memories are often more aligned with the super silly antics of one or two of your fellow students.
Others remember trips with groups of colleagues on business conferences in far flung towns. Chances are the dramas involved leaving people in bus stations or airports, of lost visas or rapidly changing timetables. Where is Jenny !

Though these days you're more likely to be sitting at a free internet kiosk checking in of your FB status. In the mean time your group has taken the mini-bus to the conference centre in the middle of said foreign town.

This is where a little bit of experience in the form of team management software and methods can make a team trip memorable for the impeccable organisation and e'spirit . We've tried all sort of solutions over the years. Mixtures of email, SMS, document vaults and other free SM solutions. Though keeping it all simple was a challenge. Until we came across a tool originally designed for sporting and construction teams. it works on every platform and is easy to include people and assign delegations. It uses the vTeam engine and comes in many flavours.

vTeam software is used by 10s of 1000s of people in all walks of life to keep the groups ticking over on time and on song. Closed and private there's room for documents, videos, links and event calendaring and with the handy teamSMS you'll seldom be out of touch. vTeam takes the lottery out of organising team travel. www.organise.net.au

Lorde: A Weather Vane for Social Media Culture

A 16 year old New Zealander, Lorde has shot to unprecedented popularity in the global music race recently, topping the US & UK charts. She's a phenomenon that may be a much broader weather vane, signalling a wind of change in the online world. Challenging one of the founding tenements of the current pack of social media platforms; love of self. If so, teenagers like Lorde will again lead change as in the 50s & 60s.

There is evidence in Lorde's poetic song texts that indeed she may be heralding a major shift in our explosive interest in self focussed social media. If the popularity of of her online downloads and messaging is anything to go by this young woman may have pointed out one of those great shifts in online behaviour. One towards a desire for a more constructive, collaborative online reality.

Lorde. A weather vane? Pic by Thatboyrion

Lorde, AKA Ella Yelich-O'Connor is a particularly astute representative of her generation, in her own words she's no white teeth teen. A lover of poetry thanks to her mother and of music thanks to her father seems to have provided the ideal environment for a positive artistic questioning of the popular paradigm.

Her first & incredibly popular album named the double entendre 'Pure Heroine' is laced with strong subtexts that the(her) digitally native generation is tiring of looking at glam bang social media posts & ads.
Forbes magazine journalist Liv Buli (@lbuli), a specialist in online data analysis of the music industry published a revealing insight into Lorde's popularity last month in @Forbes. In it she cites an explosive weekly download from Sound Cloud of 825,000 for one song on the album Royals. A song with a strong generational critique of contemporary glamour culture with words like ".. That love just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz" and "My friends and I have cracked the code". There seems to be an emerging commitment to working together for something more real, more satisfying in her texts.

Maybe her prophetic words "We're on each other's team" is a deeper cry for people to work together collaboratively rather than endlessly shout and brag to each other through contemporary social media sites.

Whether her honest observational song lines are game changing influences like Bill Haley's '54 recording of Rock Around the Clock is a matter for the future, Lorde's early popularity suggests she may very well be. It is possible that in being supercharged by today's internet world, her change could be more influential and spread more quickly than in the 50s & 60s.

The internet with it's ability to connect people together certainly can spread cultural change quicker than at other times in history. The internet constantly seems to surprise us. Who would have imagined a FaceBook or a YouTube being a billion people strong in such a short time. Or that Social Media would be a part of national revolutions. Though pretending that the online world will always look the way it does at the moment is foolhardy at best.
Lorde's "I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air" and "all my fake friends and all of their noise" or "Maybe the internet raised us" taps into a feeling for change in the way teenagers perceive things. Perhaps in much the way teenagers of the 60s used the music of their age to change the prevailing culture.

If the seeds of change are germinating online we should not expect to predict it with specifics. Instead we should be ready for the change by reading the shifting winds, expecting to find the signs in unusual places. Perhaps in the musical poetry from teenagers is a place to keep an eye on.

I'm not sure of the exactness of the sort of changes that will happen, yet there's a sense of a new examination of reality and how the internet can help better reflect that. It's early days, though research & development that OI's been conducting point to a desire emerging of a more collaborative context. A context that creates a more satisfying online reality. Granted a new reality may seem impossibly small as I write. The all consuming strength of FaceBook, YouTube & Twitter are pervasive.

To paraphrase Lorde's song Still Sane "I maybe little but I'm coming for the crowd". That crowd may very well be turning toward a renewed online reality as her songs suggest. If that is the case we've all got a lot to look forward to from her generation and the online tools that they will use.

In the mean time download and/or listen to Pure Heroine

Dave Abrahams
@digitdave - @OrganiseInt

5M4GBK7NY8T5

Data download heading skyward

You'd think that we'd had enough of downloading data, it seems that we've just started...

Freshly analysed data by OI from the Australian Bureau Of Statistics has found that in the 6 months from December 2012 to June 2013 Australia's data consumption rose  18%, making the annual data download growth rate over 30%.
"This is a staggering rate of growth that everyone in business should take note of" says Dave Abrahams, Principal Consultant at Organise Internet. "To put this in perspective if you had 30% more people walking through your business premises in the last 12 months you'd probably start rejoicing and investing in ways to meet the demand" .
With the debate still raging about broadband infrastructure investments this incredible dataset may help guide the background assumptions.It seems growth in this sector of the economy has only just started to be realised.

Aussie downloads skyrocket | Create infographics

Media commentary can be organised by contacting via twitter @OrganiseInt or by contacting Organise.net.au directly via their website.

Search Gravity rules revealed

Search Gravity™

When Isaac Newton founded his ideas about gravity under the apple tree little did he know that in the new cyber world the same rules would apply.

While 'gravity' may seem a strange way of approaching the impact of your online assets. It's one of those concepts that makes more sense the more you work with it.

OI Organise Internet's successful search methodology is focussed around the realities and rules of online gravity. "We've been developing this methodology for 10 years now and it works. The methodology helps us keep ahead in the often shady world of SEO" Says Dave Abrahams, Principal Consultant of OI Organise Internet an specialist Australian search innovation firm.
Clearly the firm isn't going to reveal it's latest innovations it is keen to spread the word about their  research & development.

The first rule of Search Gravity™ is about QUALITY. 

We make clear to all our clients that when they are building assets in cyber space they need to be quality assets, everything from websites, Social media, videos, blogs needs to be good quality. Using dodgy tricks to attract hits, likes etc simply ruins your online reputation and effectively acts like anti-matter. Likewise poor marketing efforts degrade your organisation, poor grammar and oversized images have negative effects too. Quality is the magic formula of the building gravity in cyber space. Quality differentiates you from the space junk and white noise out there online.

The second rule of Search Gravity™ is about creating MASS.

To use an obvious pun "It's not rocket science" to create online or cyber mass. It is however difficult to achieve in any organisation. Competing agendas and diverse responsibility chains make the task a challenge. You really need to establish common links and reference rules .This will sew together an organisation's assets and not tear them apart. For example when the Marketing department launch a new Social Media campaign they may be inadvertently diluting your online mass by creating parallel offerings. "We see this a lot in our business" says Abrahams "Many campaigns have different names and syntax to the original product or service. The names may seem cool but they play into the hands of competitors who can take over a top search ranking".

Rule three of Search Gravity™ is about Attraction & Acquisition

Just like any aspiring planet you need to attract mass to get bigger. In the cyber world this can be facilitated by partnering with organisations that not only link to your offerings; blogs, product specials or campaigns but also apply the quality and mass rules that you've created previously.
"We often negotiate on behalf of clients with third parties for positive cyber partnerships. Naturally it's up to the clients to sign off on the partnerships but more often than not this works out to be mutually beneficial" says Dave "In some cases we've even started partnerships that lead to mergers or buy outs"

These are OI's three rules of creating Search Gravity™. Sure they are not the sort of thing that NASA will be adopting anytime soon but gee they are an easy way to conceptualise, organise and report to clients. We're developing new tools and techniques all the time that use these metrics and methodologies. Feel free to talk to us about advanced ideas or campaigns.