Sam constantly adjust my perspective and inspires me to look beyond the day to day. While I don’t have the free spirit he does, he shows me how much there is to do and to explore out there. Check out his blog to read about his experiences (clubbing in Kenya, surfing in California, elephant orphanages in Sri Lanka) and view his amazing photos. Truly inspiring!

The following are my notes from last week’s Marketing Now conference in Melbourne. In no way is it a comprehensive overview of the event or the content but the tidbits that I managed to write down, email myself or tweet.The amount of info for each speaker does not reflect how much I got out of their talk. It is purely what I wrote down at the time. Hopefully there’s one or two pieces of gold you can take out of it…

…the smart brands will take advantage.

And some more that others have seen:

via Cheryl Gledhill
Thanks for the guys below who have mentioned the radio ads, let me know if there are any others we can add to this list. There’s also a few more examples over at Mumbrella with comments.

If you look at Origin Energy’s homepage you would be pretty convinced they are doing their best to help the environment. Yet, if you ask Origin Energy to send your bills via email rather than post as I did, it is not possible. There is no paperless option. Surely this should have been a priority for a corporation focused on ’sustainability’?

After years of buying contact lenses through my regular optometrist, I started shopping around online for some better prices. It was an even money race, a gut decision.

There are many contributing factors to Apple’s success. Go to an Apple fanboy forum if you want to hear about them… see you in a few years. But one thing that they do exceptionally well is hype. Hype turns into conversation which then turns into consumption.

Ever been puzzled by something and had no idea what the solution was? Good chance that in years gone by you would have asked your Dad. How to change the washer in the sink, the best type of home loan to get and why your girlfriend throws out all the reading material in the bathroom.
Dad knew all the answers to these questions (or at least pretended to know).
But then along came Mr.Internet and the Dads of the world went back to their sheds. Never to be consulted again.
For example, it …

It was bound to happen. We’ve copied their toll roads, fake beaches and iconic towers, now we have their coffee mornings. So if you work or have an interest in social media (or digital marketing etc etc) here are the details to talk all the wank you want without fear of glazed eyes:
When: Every Fri morn from around 7am starting Fri 11 Sep
Where: Campos – behind James St markets – here
And that’s it. If you have any q’s get in touch with me (@nathbush) or @mattgranfield. Oh, and if anyone …

UPDATE: The second part about retaining your old user name is not a long term solution. It appears that Twitter hangs on to your old username for a certain amount of time and then releases it. I’m not sure what that time is so if anyone knows I’d love to hear it in the comments. Thanks to Mandi and Ramesh for pointing this out.
This post will show you how easy it is to change your Twitter username and handle. It will also explain how you can reserve handles for …