Friday last week was Headshift Australasia's first birthday. :-)

To celebrate, the 'team' - Anne, Stephen (Executive Director at Headshift Australasia), Shelley (more about Shelly another day) and me - headed over to the MCA Cafe for lunch. It was a beautiful sunny autumn Sydney day, very similar to the weather on the day Headshift was launched in Australia last year at this very same location. It was a time to reflect on what Headshift has achieved in Australia during this twelve month period - including:

• Developing a social media 'conversation' monitoring service, that is now being used by a number of consumer brands to help them listen to their customers who are using social media more effectively (if you're interested to know more, please ask);
• Helping a national health-related organisation overcome collaboration and information sharing challenges with an innovative social computing based solution;
• Setting up a number of innovation social e-learning networks (and watch out for some more innovations in this space coming soon!);
• Facilitating an online community for EPA Victoria; and
• Developing a social networking strategy, based on Facebook, for a local University.

And of course lots of conferences, key notes presentations and webinars too, ranging from talking to small business about engaging with social media to conducting workshops at the national marketing conference for a large consumers brand.

By coincidence, an interview with Anne about social networking was also published as part of an article in the May edition of the Australian Financial Review's BOSS magazine ("Beyond Twitter" , pp.36-38). Being interviewed along side other experts such as futurist Mark Pesce  and social network commentator Laurel Papworth is a sure sign for us that already within the first of year being established in Australia, we are being recognised here as a leader in social media and social computing.

Anne talked about the opportunities for companies to use social networking and also some of the mistakes that have been made along the way. About the positives, she described the benefits Headshift have seen with our clients in the legal industry:

"Knowledge-intensive firms get huge benefit from social bookmarking, aggregating what others are bookmarking and articles of interest into a central area, seeing what people are reading and sharing information. Large legal firms, particularly in the UK [clients include Allen & Overy and Dewey & LeBoeuf] love it, because it creates efficiency and more billable hours."

She also commented:

"[Australian companies] know they should do something about social media, but they don't know what. They need an enormous shift in thinking to go into this really open space. Legal is terrified of it, PR is terrified of it, advertising and marketing is concerned, because they no longer control the message. And there's the threat of public shame for getting it wrong. Motrin took that ad off TV, but you can still pick it up anywhere; whole stacks of people have copied it onto YouTube. If you make a mistake and don't fix it, it will haunt you."

If you didn't pick up your own copy of BOSS magazine on Friday, it might be worth tracking one down as not only is this a great article (ok, we're biased!) but it also includes two other relevant articles:

• The Power of Community, from Harvard Business Review - The idea of building up a group of consumers into a brand community attracts plenty of myths; and
• Media Mix for Tough Times - Like the consumers the target, marketers are learning to do more with less.

BTW A great case study to read with all these articles is Headshift's work for Castrol and the Motoraddicts community site.

We would love the opportunity to tell you more about our ideas and experiences with social media and social computing - just let us know.