Kate Carruthers has been appointed Strategy Consultant within Hyro’s expanding business and technology strategy practice.

Kate joins Hyro having held a range of senior management and advisory roles with organisations such as GE, AMP, Citibank, Westfield and NSW Treasury. 

Her appointment signals Hyro’s commitment to remaining at the forefront of the digital transformation that is reshaping the way all businesses and governments engage with, sell to, service and interact with consumers.

“Kate is a highly respected leader in her field and her experience at defining enterprise-level business and technology strategy strengthens our strategy capability and complements our existing strengths in the planning and technical delivery of digital customer experiences” said Mark Neely, Hyro’s Director of Strategy. “Kate’s background gives her a unique understanding of the challenges major organisations face in planning and executing business initiatives across digital channels”.

According to Carruthers, “The digital customer interface is now the critical channel for Australian business. We know that around 40%-50% of customer interactions with organisations, their brands and their products and services happen via digital channels. Our clients now realise these channels cannot be dealt with in isolation, or via ad-hoc initiatives. They must be included within all corporate planning activities, and given the priority they deserve. Having the capability to deliver on strategy, creative and technical fronts makes Hyro an interesting place to be. Very few companies have the ability to work with clients to plan and deliver digital services from the 60,000 foot strategic planning perspective and right through to ground-level technical implementation.”

Former OgilvyOne Creative Director, Simon Bloomfield, has been appointed Creative Director at Hyro. He will take over Hyro’s Creative and Visual Design departments.

Bloomfield joins Hyro after being Creative Director at Singleton OgilvyOne/Interactive, Clemenger Proximity and Euro RSCG. Most recently, he’s been consulting to Three Drunk Monkeys and GPY&R Sydney.

Hyro’s Digital Director, Mac Walker, said “Simon is a highly respected creative leader and brings to us a depth of creativity that complements our existing strengths in strategy, customer experience and technical development. Simon joins us at a time when Hyro is expanding on many fronts, and his appointment ensures our digital services will be as desirable to customers as they have always been useful and usable.”

According to Bloomfield, “Digital has become such an important channel for all marketing tasks over the past decade. I felt the time was right for me to bring together my skills in building strong customer relationships with Hyro’s undoubted leadership in the Customer Experience space.”

Hyro’s creative gains last year included Spirit of Tasmania, Buzz Insurance, REST and South Australian Tourism.

The previous post in this series [Rule 1 – Don’t’ Believe The Hype], made the case that Online Social Media represents ‘effect’ more than ‘cause’. In social media opinions are aired, shared and confirmed, but not originated. Social media is the water cooler conversation of the digital age, and even though brands and celebrities are allowed to overhear, and even join the conversation, the reputations of these brands and celebrities come largely pre-formed.

Social media does not represent the uniquely powerful new means of manipulating opinion promised by some*.

However, Social Media is a great place to simply listen.

There are many ways to ‘listen’. You can measure aggregate sentiment, gauge the success or failure of targeted marketing and communications activities,  gather feedback from individual customers on products and features, find out what your competitors are doing right and wrong.

 The good news: the data is rich, high volume, real-time and 100% free.

 The even better news: the opinions of social media users seem to be a very accurate measure of the opinions of the general population. Previously, I poked fun at those drawing a very long [and very wrong] bow based on research data. But in doing so, I found that the same research data showed the responses of active social media users did not materially vary from the responses of the general population, including infrequent users. In other words – what active social media users think and say is very close to what everyone is thinking and saying.

Brands can use social media as a real-time, unprompted focus group, tracking actual, intimate, and detailed conversations about their products, price and service.

Brands can measure sentiment, and derive Net Promoter Scores, across large populations, and track how these measures change over time.

Brands can collect immediate feedback on a product launch or marketing activity, and react rapidly.

These possibilities, and the appetite for analytics tools they will create, have not gone un-noticed by the global technology giants. I have seen a few sneak previews of Social Media Monitoring software to be released in 2010 – including Microsoft’s LookingGlass.

Access to these tools will result in an increasing sophistication and subtlety in the way that marketers address social media.

In the next post, I’ll consider whether the best way respond to social media is by using social media, and discuss the pros and cons of active participation.

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*Nor is any new medium likely to deliver on this promise. Ever again. The 20^th century, one-to-many model of media is in decline, and will continue to decline as long as large numbers of individuals can easily produce content of good-enough presentation quality and access distribution networks like the internet.