Ross Hill » Reviews

Circus Oz: See It to Believe It

Ross Hill — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 13:02:49 +0000

There is something about stepping inside the big top tent that instantly transports you to another world. Two hours of pure entertainment that includes some of the favourites you would expect (juggling, trapeze, ropes) alongside quite a few of those magical ones that leave you in awe and on the edge of your seat – wondering about the safety and sanity of those involved!

I was at Circus Oz’s ‘See It to Believe It’ opening this week and the show they have put together for 2010 is amazing. The level of integrity and authenticity that was present was really special as the group have taken the art to a whole new level of performance.

After Melbourne they travel across South Australia before heading up to Darwin and then over to Berkeley. Look out for the big top and look up the show dates before you miss out!

Kinfolk Cafe at Donkey Wheel House

Ross Hill — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:13:07 +0000

It is Day 2 of Kinfolk Cafe and I sat down this morning for an awesome homemade muesli, alongside a Di Bella coffee down at the non-paris end of Melbourne (673 Bourke St)!

They have a great space on the ground floor of Donkey Wheel House just over the road from Southern Cross Station, and is primed to become a good community base in the CBD. Kinfolk is a new social enterprise that is designed to run profitably, then direct those profits to a number of local and international projects that you can find described on the wall – based on where people vote for their beans to go towards.

Jarrod Briffa is one of the co-founders and a fellow RMIT Entrepreneurship Alumni, so it is great to see what he has been busy working on for the past year. Here is a video of Jarrod and the team describing their vision for the space.

Get along and have a coffee sometime!

Watching a Yammer network explode

Ross Hill — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:06:36 +0000

Yammer is like an internal discussion board where anybody can post a response to a message. It helps people exchange ideas and send real-time messages in small or large groups. The “enterprise-Twitter” can also help to break down departmental walls, flatten the communications structure of the organisation and help people get more done by being better connected. You might think of it as a backchannel that links all of the staff in the company.

Some of the potential messages you might see flying around include:

Collaborating to solve problems
Discussing projects within Groups
Sharing news and links
Sharing event outcomes and highlights
Connecting geographically isolated staff
Finding local subject-matter experts
File or photo sharing
Keeping updated with project progress
Finding out when there is chocolate around.

How do you implement Yammer successfully without scaring everyone off?

It’s hard to get any form of social media to take off within an established organisation, and Yammer is no different. People already get on quite fine without it and unless you can show that it adds a significant improvement to what they already do they are going to resist.

Yammer is social by nature and will therefore reflect the existing social structures that have grown in the organisation. For this reason for your implementation to be successful you need to get these individuals on board as champions – if those guys find it worthwhile they will naturally share it with others.

At Deloitte Australia it was an email and voicemail from Partner and Deloitte Digital CEO Peter Williams (@rexster on Twitter) that ignited the flurry of growth. Having buy-in from the top is very important. The email was asking staff to suggest tag line ideas relating to traffic lights for a new ad campaign – either through a survey tool or in the Yammer group that had been set up.

The next 24 hours saw hundreds of new members to the network. The activity reinforced the Groundswell Profiling statistics that the majority of people will just watch or share, while only a small percentage participate. As with any venture into social media you need to have champions who can field questions and keep the flow of content steady – these people need to be those who are already socially connected within the group or it won’t take off. Interestingly our Innovation Team are some of the most connected people within the network.

It has to be accepted from the top

If you are trying to establish a new social media communications tool you really need to have buy-in from management. It will really help you down the track, and reinforces whether Yammer really is the right tool for the job. If you have trouble getting management approval then your organisation might not be ready for these types of tools and if that’s the case no amount of pushing will work.

How do you stop all the emails?

One of the first issues that arose was that people get a pile of emails to let them know that people have subscribed to them. This is especially an issue for the most followed people because they get recommended to new users when they sign up – a number of people got 40-50 emails in an hour when lots of people were joining the network. This is where some direction on how to use Yammer can be useful so that you can explain to people how to adjust their email settings, and of course the Yammer team are listening to this feedback and improving the process.

Desktop app

Running the desktop app in the background has a huge impact on usage because you can watch and contribute to the stream in realtime, instead of waiting for the daily digest emails. People are much more likely to contribute through the desktop app because they can join in with the conversations as they happen.

Integrate Yammer with your Twitter

If you list your Twitter username on your profile page you can actually crosspost from Twitter. Just write a message and add the #yam hashtag and in a few moments your tweet will appaer in your Yammer feed. This is a great way to leverage your existing tweets to help build the Yammer content stream.

Integrate RSS

Another good way to build momentum is through the content that you are already publishing. You can set up an automatic RSS feed import to capture things like your company or personal blog posts, search results for your company search terms and much more.

Share your stories

I have spoken to quite a few people who have found starting a Yammer network difficult, but worthwhile. I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

The Hive meets Richard Eastes in Brisbane

Ross Hill — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:27:58 +0000

Last week I flew up to Brisbane for the first Hive Brisbane event. We have been running The Hive in Melbourne for over a year now and when Mike Boyd approached us to start something similar in Brisbane we thought it was a wonderful opportunity. It turned out to be a really fun night!

Richard Eastes from Vroom Vroom Vroom spoke to a crowd of about 60 before keeping them on their toes with a few quick questions from him to people in the audience! Richard spoke about the six things he wishes he knew as he was starting the business:

Choosing a brand name
To share or not to share?
Get online
Innovative staff
Be entrepreneurial within your niche
Build your entrepreneurial network

There was some great coverage on Twitter with the #hivebris hashtag (How to follow events on Twitter), and you can #hivemelb. You can see the full event podcast episode below, recorded by Sarah Moran.

If you want to receive invitations and reviews of our events (both in Melbourne and Brisbane) make sure you sign up at TheHive.org.au and we’ll keep you in the loop. You can see my previous Hive event reviews with Peter Williams from Deloitte Digital and Brendan McKeegan from Emue.

If you liked this post please retweet it or share with a friend!

rt @rosshill Review of the #hivebris event with @eastes http://tinyurl.com/cdr8yc

Revisit Your Old Flickr Photos with Time Capsule

Ross Hill — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:04:51 +0000

Photographs have an amazing ability to induce nostalgia. We capture them without regard for how we will view them in the future. They are sharper than our memories, something to rely on. Why are they so often abandoned afterwards?

Flickr and Facebook and the numerous other photo-sharing websites available today all help us distribute our images to friends but none of them remind us of what happened in the past. That’s where the Photojojo Time Capsule comes in.

Time Capsule scans your account to find the most interesting photos from a year ago and sends them to you by email every fortnight. The photographs are selected based on number of views, number of times marked as favorite, and number of comments.

Signing up is simple – you log Time Capsule into your Flickr account and then tell it your email address. It takes less than a minute and moments later you will have the first time capsule in your inbox. Once you have it running you will get constant reminders of the photos you took one year ago – and they get better with more photos which gives you a great excuse to go and take some more.

Here is one of my recent Time Capsules.

If you tell one friend about Time Capsule today, you’ll make their day.