This year the National Folk Festival (NFF) will celebrate Valentine’s Day by reminiscing about a love that blossomed inside its gates.

Craig and Simone Dawson are two well-loved performers who have contributed to the success of the NFF over the last several years since their first romantically charged performance together 12 years ago on the NFF stage.

In 2000 Craig was set to perform in promotion for his latest album, ‘The Malfunction Room’, but was unable to source any of his studio musicians to accompany him. He asked Simone to join him on stage on the recorder and this would provide the catalyst for not only the conception of a dynamic musical pairing but the love of a life time as well.

“The festival is such a great place to meet people,” said Craig. “You get people from all walks of life coming together to get excited about music. At the end of the weekend you look back and realise you’ve not only caught up with old friends but you’ve connected and formed bonds with new people you may not normally have had the chance to meet.”

“This was certainly the case with me and Simone. When I asked her to play the recorder on stage with me at the NFF back in 2000 I had no idea we would end up here!”

Their initial NFF performance was so successful, Craig and Simone formed a musical duo producing their first recording, “Jenny’s Flowers”, just months later.

The couple wed in 2006 and continue to cement their love for each other by performing on stage together at a variety of music festivals across Australia every year.

This year they will once again offer their voluntary services to the 2012 NFF as well as sharing their love on stage by performing their blues, roots and folk inspired mix of vocals, flute and guitar.

This year’s festival is sure to provide the ideal environment for other couples to ignite their passion for music and each other with acts such as Flamenco Fire and Gleny Rae and her Tamworth Playboys providing such a sensual atmosphere.

Early Bird 3 tickets are now on sale until Monday, 2 April. To purchase tickets and create your own romantic memories at the 2012 National Folk Festival visit the website at www.folkfestival.org.au or call Venue Tix on 1300 235 849.

By far the most inspiring conversations about the NBN have been with the under-30s, the generation who, as kids, spent more time than was healthy playing massive multi-player online games when they should have been studying for their exams.

I speak, of course, from experience. Two of my boys spent a good part of their adolescence at local area network (LAN) marathons, getting together in friends’ living rooms or in large halls to play online all weekend, living off pizza and soft drinks, or in their darkened bedrooms playing online games all night.

Unbeknownst to their long-suffering parents, the boys were competing at a professional level in Counter-Strike (CS). They played at the first Cyberathletes Professional League (CPL) in Sydney, with my eldest son captaining both of the ACT teams. They also played in the regional qualifiers for the World Cyber Games. I had no idea of all this online activity until it all came out at dinner one night recently, many years after the events.

It’s this generation—the Counter-Strike Generation perhaps—that has the clearest insights into the future of broadband in Australia (check out http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/). While politicians of all persuasions continue to view the NBN as a political football, the CS Generation is powering ahead, anticipating the day when broadband is ubiquitous, when their upload and download capacity is many times faster than it is now, when multi-user, highly realistic, high-def videoconferencing and high speed exchange of information and services (most yet to be dreamed of) are the norm.

Despite (or more likely because of) their “misspent” youth, many of these people are now gingering up the IT industry as they move into middle management. They see the NBN as the key building block for the development of a highly innovative Australian IT industry that will become a centre of broadband excellence with global reach. When caps on usage are way bigger (or unlimited) and when upload/download speeds are almost instantaneous, the tyranny of distance disappears and the possibilities for free-ranging exploration of potential new applications (apps), new platforms and as yet unimagined technologies is huge.

They see that many of the biggest economic benefits from broadband will come from both entrepreunerial IT start-ups being able to innovate and scale-up successful products and services, and from the results of collaboration between broadband innovators and existing industries.

They will be looking to Governments to create more purposeful enabling environments to support these IT start-ups and to encourage entrepreneurship. They see the benefits of Governments, industry and academia using global capital to build on the broadband network to establish Australian cities as a Digital Cities. They will look to Governments to provide the legal, regulatory and tax frameworks to encourage investors to commit to the Australian IT sector for the long game. The trashing of the fledgling Australian games sector with the pull out of US investors, spooked by the high Aussie dollar, must not happen again.

Already accustomed to cross-border multi-user collaboration in the online games world, they see Australia is well-positioned to establish itself as a centre for collaborative broadband innovation in the Asia-Pacific region, providing new opportunities to deepen our economic engagement in Asia and to attract young IT talent to Australia. And they are watching how the Chinese online market, once saturated with US-produced English-language product, is now being steadily penetrated by Korean language material generated by that other huge broadband consumer, South Korea. The case studies are being assessed with a view to future application.

Yet the politics of the NBN has spawned a rhetoric around broadband that downplays the potential. At the moment the talk is all about the pipes and more efficient delivery of government services. The focus is on the promotion of local services via NBN-enabled apps and platforms to encourage take-up at the community level. It’s all very worthy but hardly the stuff to inspire a new generation of courageous entrepreneurs, mathematicians, researchers and blue sky thinkers. And, as Ian Chubb has told us, we need these people and we need them now.

What might motivate our young people to move into maths and science is a bold and ambitious vision for the NBN that seizes the collective imagination and unlocks inventiveness and ingenuity.

I suppose all of this raises the important question of where the development of the NBN, beyond the pipes, holes and satellite dishes, should rest.

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is to be commended for all the difficult policy and practical work it has done to get this nation-changing infrastructure up and running. It has not been easy, particularly in the current political climate.

But perhaps the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, with its brief to to encourage the sustainable growth of Australian industries, encouraging innovation, cutting-edge science and research, international competitiveness and greater productivity, needs to play a more active role in efforts to exploit the massive potential of the NBN, even as the pipes are being put in place.

Zena Armstrong
General Manager

Photo: DreamHack Sapphire AMD Championship 2011 Source: www.itsgosu.com

Here at contentgroup, we are all about telling the story and we help our clients to inspire by content, to lead via content and to engage their audiences through content that resonates.

According to the PR Report (www.theprreport.com), in 2011 there were 20 top trends identified for PR practitioners to pay heed to. The top three were certainly noteworthy:

1. The growing importance of narrative
2. The (consistent) business narrative….
3. The (changing) government narrative…

When this report came out, contentgroup was well placed to take advantage of all of them. After all, content is the narrative and vice versa.

But we move fast too – and at the beginning of 2012 we are even more excited about our capabilities to advise and deliver to our clients their content needs, in order to make a discernible difference in their organisational goals.

The new 2012 PR Report will no doubt be released shortly, but at contentgroup we have our own ideas. Ideas which are born of engaging with our clients, serving their content needs in a measurable, valuable, doable, time and resource effective manner; all the while knowing what the big picture is out there – Right here! – Right now!

So we have seen some of the most significant trends emerging with absolute clarity.

There is no doubt that social media opportunities are right up there in 2012 and our social media training is in high demand as organisations realise the need to be informed.

Secondly, the adoption of engaging video clips as a channel for telling your story is the most rapidly developing media today. Some clients are “vodcasting” their blogs (i.e. blogging with video instead of text), and others are telling success stories of their clients or customers, educating their clients or customers, or simply sharing their own “passion” story within the context of their organisational aspirations.

Indeed, video is expected to become the main drive of content by 2015 largely due to the opportunities offered by Broadband.

“The explosive growth in Internet data traffic, especially video, creates an opportunity in the years ahead for optimizing and monetizing visual, virtual, and mobile Internet experiences,” said Suraj Shetty, Cisco’s VP of worldwide service provider marketing.

(Source: http://blog.delvenetworks.com/2011/06/03/1591/

At contentgroup our newly opened production studio certainly hit the ground running! The demand is strong and if you can produce video content that is of high quality, incorporating engaging narrative, then your results are not only dramatic, but also measurable in terms of ROI.

The rapid growth of mobile devices also enhances the value of interactive content and social media sharing and according to research by IPSOS & Google ***Australians are the second largest adopters of mobile on the planet.

What does this mean for all of us who want to engage our audiences? It means that our content not only needs to be vibrant and interactive, but suitable for viewing across platforms and mobile devices.

The growth of mobile is something that simply can’t be ignored.

So the big picture is important. contentgroup is firmly focused on it. Are you?

Suzanne Kiraly
Manager
Digital Media, Education & Training

Mixing the personal and the professional for the purposes of a blog is no easy task for me. Many years ago I started my working life in journalism and plundered my private life to write a book without a qualm, yet my colleagues will tell you that these days I’m pretty old school–18 years of diplomatic training in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade almost knocked the journalist out of me. But every now and again something comes up that leaves me thinking, hmm, I’d like to blog about this. So I’m slowly sloughing off my reticence and rediscovering the gossipy old reporter I used to be. This is my first blog post for contentgroup.

I’ve been seized by the story of Marcus Kelson and Virginia Cook, two senior Canberra public servants, who have taken up a challenge thrown down by the National Folk Festival to learn an instrument. Marcus has taken on the mandolin and Virginia has picked up the fiddle. Not only have they agreed to start learning an instrument, they have also gamely agreed to perform what they have learned in front of an audience at the Easter Folk Festival. They have just three months to pick up a bunch of tunes from scratch.

The National Folk Festival is a contentgroup client that stages an inspiring festival of music, dance and performance every year at Easter at the EPIC Showgrounds in Canberra. In 1983, my new partner Pete took me to my first ever National after breaking the news that he was a piano accordionist who wore a silly hat and played music for Morris Dancers, when I had been thinking he was simply a Federal Press Gallery journalist who played a mean blues piano. I’ve attended every festival since with Pete, apart from a seven year hiatus in the Nineties when I was on a diplomatic posting in China.

After that first time, it didn’t take long before the creativity inspired by the Festival became a much-desired countervailing influence to the public service job. Every Festival was fresh, magical and out of time, a welcome contrast to the rigours of Ministerial Submissions, Senate Estimates, PPQs and relentless interdepartmental wrangling.

I picked up sticks and bells and took up Morris dancing. I danced at the Sydney Opera House (on the steps) and across Lancashire (the spiritual home of Morris clogging), at weddings and many national Folk Festivals. I have danced up the sun on Mayday and have spent hours hanging off the edges of Irish sessions soaking up Irish trad. But 20 years of street dancing has taken its toll on the knees, pushing me out of dance and looking for a way to participate that doesn’t involve extreme high stepping in wooden clogs.

Just over two years ago I finally overcame decades of nagging self-talk that had convinced me that musicians were ‘born and not made” and started learning the Irish whistle. Learning from scratch has been challenging – learning an instrument at a late age seems so audacious when all the messages are “start young” and ”it takes 21 years to learn an instrument to any level of proficiency” (subtext: so why, when you’re over 50, would you even think about it?). Where do these messages come from? Yes, the fingers are stiffer, the delay between thought and action is much longer, committing tunes to memory can be painfully slow and the frustrations are endless but the pay off is huge.

Though still a rank beginner against the giants of Irish traditional music, I am now at a place where I have the start of a respectable traditional repertoire, can play in Irish sessions and even start a set of tunes or two. I go to all the festivals I can find to get my fill of tunes. I play bodhran in a ceili band and have started to accompany the occasional easy jig with the whistle. Playing tunes with a group of people around a campfire with the Milky Way stretching endlessly overhead is a pretty special experience. Marcus and Virginia have it all in front of them.

So what’s this got to do with work and contentgroup? Well, I guess it’s about being open to new things, looking beyond the comfort zone and getting the life balance right. I love the fact that Marcus and Virg are both public servants, Marcus with the ABC, Virg with Prime Minister and Cabinet, wanting to turn a lifelong interest in music into something that they do themselves rather than simply consuming the art of others. I love them for taking on the folk genre, giving the stereotype of folkies being old bearded blokes a good thrashing along the way. I admire them for agreeing to take on this challenge, pushing themselves into a new creative space.

Here at contentgroup we have an inspiration board. It’s the first thing you see when you step into our office. One of the messages is “Try New Things”. We love it when our client’s values line up with our own and the National Folk Festival is passionate about encouraging people to try something new and different. They hope everyone who goes to the festival will come away having experienced something new, whether trying a whistle for the first time, whacking sticks at a Morris dancing workshop or exploring harmonies in a singing workshop.

The best festivals in my view are not about simply being a consumer or spectator – but much more about being participating and having a go – rather like life really.

Zena Armstrong
General Manager

Photo source: Carly Vaughan

The Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve is a fantastic example of this, and guess where I found myself this week? Correct!

The reserve is just 45 minutes from the city, but it is easy to forget how close you are to civilisation when you’re in this beautiful setting. There are no fences or glass panels here, in fact the only thing separating you from the flora and fauna will probably be the viewfinder of your camera. In the coming months the people of Canberra will have access to a new track that leads up to the Gibraltar Rocks, thanks to Darren and the MakinTrax team.

MakinTrax have been commissioned to build the track, and I think they are on a winner. Now on the home stretch of the construction they have crafted a superb pathway through this beautiful area, leading up to some of the most stunning views I have had the fine fortune to see. Soon enough, you will be able to walk this amazing track and see them too.

Just don’t wear your dress shoes like I did.

David van Dijk
Content Producer

Photo Source: David van Dijk..permission granted: www.makin-trax.com.au

He certainly is a practitioner and has been successful for quite some time now, due to the work he puts in and the value he gives to his followers.

We can learn much from his advice and I was particularly impressed by his recent post on the “The Three Keys To Social Influence”.
The advice is clear and sound, in my opinion and also through my own experience in social media.

My own take on Jay’s post and the three keys is here:

1. You shouldn’t use the social media platforms to flagrantly flog your goods and services in some kind of attempt to “sell, sell, sell”, at all costs! This is the old “push” technique, which should have been left behind in the past. Today we have evolved and so has the consumer and your audience. Today we need to be the content creators of the 21st Century. Our content needs to “pull” our audience to entice them to engage with us.

2. Nothing worthwhile is without effort on our part. Social Media is no panacaea or silver bullet, fired at speed. Yes the social media world moves fast, but Jay is right when he says it takes time (and persistence) to make your presence one of significance and influence. The same was said in the days of Web 1.0 in the early 90s – there was an internet goldrush mentality, where people thought that they could build a website and then the customers would flood through their ethereal portal. The catchcry then was: “Build it and they will come.”
They were wrong then and they are wrong today, if they think that social media is an overnight success!


3. I agree with Jay on the third key too – yes, anyone can build social influence online, but they have to have enough focus to make it work. They have to love it enough to put in the required effort to make it happen.


You can read Jay’s original blog post here:
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/personal-branding/the-3-keys-to-social-influence/ and I suggest that you follow him in social media too. I do.