Digital Enterprise - Tasmania

[Intro music] Tom Campbell: Yeah look it's crucial for businesses to get online now, because even if you personally don't like being online, your customers love it, so it's really important for you to be able to get out there and communicate where your customers want to communicate with you. Tom Campbell: Yeah gidday I'm Tom Campbell from Digital Enterprise Tasmania, and we've got six locations around Tasmania, and they are all key rural areas, so we can get out and give business and community organisations a hand in those areas. [Fast music plays} Tom Campbell: So now what we're going to do is we're going to head up into the hills behind Launceston and visit Ib, from Café on King. I'll have a chat and see what we can do to give him a hand this afternoon. [Car indicates, motor sounds] Tom Campbell: Overall we've helped over 200 businesses and community organizations throughout Tasmania. People come to us with a whole range of concerns, starting with online security, right through to how they can communicate with their customers more effectively online. We find that we also get a lot of businesses that are at a start up level, so people who in some cases have never used a computer before, right through to some of the larger tourism operations in Tasmania. Without the federal government funding to pay for someone like me to actually go out and do this it just wouldn't happen and these businesses would get left behind. Tom Campbell: So putting things like this in here and showing people a bit of personality of yourself, that's really really great. Ib: We've changed the label on that one. Tom Campbell: That's great, so through social media you've been able to alter your product to better suit the needs of your customers. Ib: When the offer came on to go and have some Digital Enterprise training, we took the offer up, it was too good not to say no thank you for that since we have had the new NBN system installed, which we were among the first ones to get done in Scottsdale. It's seemed to work quite well so we did a whole string of training. Sometimes it was between 6 and 8 and 10 people at the training courses and other times I might be the only one. So it's a slow process but it's working. Tom Campbell: Just finished a one on one training with Ib up here in Scottsdale, always a lot of fun, from here we are going to hit the road and visit some other locations. [Music and car sounds] Tom Campbell: One of the things that is really beneficial for my mind about the Digital Enterprise training is that it is not just for businesses, it is also for community organisations, and a lot of the time we get community organisations saying this is just so great because we just don't have the funds to be able to do this on our own, so that's really rewarding for us. Bert Cason: The Digital Enterprise training is probably some of the most useful government funded training I've ever had. It basically allowed us to jump from being Facebook amateurs; I wouldn't say we're Facebook professionals or social media professionals by any stretch of the imagination, but it basically took us from, or took me from someone who had used it socially, but had never used it professionally, even though I knew there were ways to use it professionally I didn't have a clue how to do it and it would have taken very long if I had have done it myself, where as Digital Enterprise allowed me to take it within an afternoon and jump from knowing *** all to knowing enough to actually educate myself, so yeah overall it's working very well, and it gives you an opportunity to actually engage with people who are actually genuinely interested in your brand and build brand ambassadors through that. So yeah it was very very good. Tom Campbell: Another great example of a personality coming through on a social media page is Marika with Coffee Away in St Helens. Marika McGuiness: I am a one person operation, so I need to be out there as much as I can and it was not far for me to travel to access the information I needed to get Coffee Away out there through Facebook. I can also take photos of products I have that might be of interest to my customers, so it's instant they can see the updates straight away it goes out to everyone that is connected to my page, cause social media is so important these days and I'm not as tech savvy as perhaps the young whipper snappers, [laughs] so it was a good way of finding out more information about how my page can be successful. [Closing music]