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Ralph Mackie, CEO of The Mackie Group, Lord Mayor Robert Doyle and representatives of a consortium of Victorian community groups came together this morning to announce a proposed new ‘vertical village’ development to be built on the former grounds of the J. H. Boyd Girls’ School in Southbank.

Pictured: Ralph Mackie, CEO of The Mackie Group and Lord Mayor Robert Doyle

Also present was Will Anderson, a 40-year-old ex-serviceman from the Australian Defence Force, who was injured in an army exercise that left him blind. Mr. Anderson will be one of the first residents of the commercial and residential development.

The aim of the development, named Cairo, is to provide an exciting blend of social and housing diversity, with a mix of residential apartments, affordable housing and housing for people with an acquired or life-long disability.

MEDIA RELEASE: Australia’s first ‘vertical village’ set to transform Southbank

A landmark new tower in Southbank is set to transform high-rise living by creating a vertical village for students, city workers, young professionals, retirees and people with a disability.

The residential and commercial development, known as Cairo, will be built on the grounds of the former J.H. Boyd Girls’ School and completes the City of Melbourne’s plans to transform the site into a key civic centre.

The Mackie Group, working with Haven; Home, Safe and a consortium of community agencies led by Scope and MS Australia, is creating a new paradigm in community development, having won the contract with City of Melbourne to redevelop the site.

The first building of its kind in Australia, Cairo comprises commercial and retail space and 220 residential apartments to be divided between the retail market, key worker housing and accommodation for young people living with a disability.

Cairo will also be home to The Australian Ballet School’s student residence (pending funding), providing accommodation for 90 students. Approaching its 50th anniversary in 2014, the Australian Ballet School hopes to celebrate this occasion in the state-of-the-art facilities Cairo will provide.

Ralph Mackie, CEO of The Mackie Group, said the development is a groundbreaking innovation for community living and caring, set among the City of Melbourne’s urban facilities and a new community park.

“Our vision is to create a thriving village centre for this important and high profile site, while introducing a striking architectural addition to Melbourne’s skyline,” Mr Mackie said.

“The building will provide an exciting blend of social and housing diversity, with a mix of residential apartments, key worker housing and housing for young people with an acquired or life-long disability.”

Mr Mackie said that Cairo is a major step forward in meeting the need for dedicated residential places for people with disabilities and sets a new benchmark for integrated living and care within the City of Melbourne.

“The inclusion of the Cairo residential tower on the J.H. Boyd site will provide Southbank with a fully integrated ‘neighbourhood heart’ and complement the community’s art, social and family health facilities,” Mr Mackie said.

“Cairo is, in essence, a ‘vertical village’ that provides a mix of residential types as well as retail stores, boutique cafes, a school and numerous community services.

“This variety of uses, combined with the facilities provided by the City of Melbourne, is a shift in how inner-city neighbourhoods are developed.

“We hope it will be a beacon for the Southbank community and a model that other councils will adopt,” Mr Mackie said.

Both MS Australia and the Young People in Nursing Homes national alliance have come out in support of the construction.

“Apartment living, in concert with Cairo’s onsite support, will enable young people with disabilities to access the city’s cultural, social and economic opportunities to the full,” said Dr Bronwyn Morkham, National Director of the Young People in Nursing Homes national alliance.

“And in doing so, Cairo will set a new benchmark in support and accommodation excellence for young people with disabilities in one of Melbourne’s premier residential locations.”

Cairo commences construction at the end of 2012, with residents expected to move into their new home in early 2015.

Will Anderson, a 40-year-old ex-serviceman from the Australian Defence Force, will be among the first residents to move into the purpose-designed apartments for people living with a disability. After sustaining an acquired brain injury while on an exercise in the Northern Territory that also left him blind, Will has struggled to find the accommodation and support he needs to engage with his local community.

Combining The Mackie Group’s private development expertise with the community agencies’ collective experience in providing services to people with disabilities, Cairo will afford people like Will an opportunity to move out of the family home and live in a safe environment with reliable support, while still being able to live as independent adults.

Aside from Cairo’s unique residential and operating model, Cairo is also an aesthetic architectural addition to Southbank, designed by Mackie Group company MSM & Associates. Michele Cobelens of MSM & Associates said Cairo will be a striking addition to the Southbank streetscape and new urban park.

“Cairo will be a new Melbourne landmark occupying a prominent corner position at the intersection of Kings Way and City Road. It has been designed to facilitate innovative community and vertical village living as well as to achieve a 5 star Green rating,” Ms Cobelens said.

Victoria’s Department of Business and Innovation (DBI) has appointed icon.inc and sister agency icon.pr to review its Multimedia Victoria (MMV) website following a competitive public tender.

icon.pr will conduct a review of the MMV website and make recommendations on the options for redevelopment of the website to ensure that it meets the needs of Victoria’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector.

The work icon.pr has been engaged by DBI to conduct will include stakeholder consultations and a complete analysis of the current website in relation to its role, content and management.

We look forward to reviewing such a historically innovative government multimedia website. 

By Amy Mullins, PR Account Coordinator (Social Media)

Instagram is a social media success story, a fairytale, if there ever was one. First released in October 2010 on the iTunes App Store, it gained more than 1 million users in three months. As of December 2011, it had 14 million registered users and continues to grow and evolve. To cap off a truly outstanding year, Instagram cemented its place in the digital hall of fame when Apple named it ‘iPhone App of the Year’ for 2011.

So what exactly is Instagram?

Instagram is a free photo-sharing application for iPhone (though an Android app is currently in development). It combines the best of Twitter and Facebook, whereby users are able to follow and be followed, as well as ‘like’ and comment on photos. Recent photos posted by users you follow will automatically load into a visual feed to scroll through. And those handy push notifications will let you know when somebody likes or comments on your post so you don’t have to keep checking it like a paranoid social media addict. Note: I might (definitely) have been guilty of this pre- the existence of push notifications.

In practice, Instagram connects friends, acquaintances and strangers across the world with each other and allows them to instantly share snapshots of their life and what captures their imagination. Any person can be creative with Instagram, though I’m a little skeptical about the urban myth that claims you can never take a bad photo with Instagram, I’ve taken a few ordinary shots in my time.

Instagram is really about sharing your world and how you see it, visually. The natural correlate to this is that Instagram builds intimacy, connections, insight, closeness, understanding, curiosity, involvement, respect and ultimately leads to an investment in relationships.

Its efficient functionality and ease of use has been key to its success. You can post a photo on your account simply by completing these steps:

Step 1: Take a photo or select a pre-existing photo

Step 2: Preview photo with a selection of 17 filters (below is an example, but is missing the new Sierra filter)

Step 3: Choose the final look and write a caption

Step 4: Upload to your Instagram feed and automatically distribute through personal social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous and Foursquare.

And now, the hook… why should your business be using Instagram?

On the surface, it would seem that Instagram is only a personal photo-sharing platform, but that’s just not the case. For any business, Instagram can play an essential role in building relationships between its staff and its potential customers by appealing to their shared humanity.

It seems obvious, but the most successful businesses recognise that some values have universal currency and that they are generally based around our humanity and experiences of it. By taking this into consideration in real life business conduct, these savvy companies build a reputation as a friendly, caring, reliable, loyalty-creating and customer-focused organisation. The same thing can be done online with a visual social media platform, like Instagram. It is the one simple tool that can soften and help bypass the ugliness that is the harsh transaction of commercialism. I’ll show you what I mean…

To illustrate just how powerful Instagram can be for a business I have chosen Melbourne’s The Hungry Workshop as a case study.

The Hungry Workshop, initially based in Brisbane, moved their letterpress printing business to Northcote, Victoria towards the end of last year. How do I know that? Because I’ve been following ‘thehungryworkshop’ on Instagram for a year now and saw the relocation process, including the cranes required to lift some remarkably old and heavy printing presses, via my Instagram feed.

Each day, Jenna and Simon Hipgrave enticed me and their 513 other followers with the business cards and wedding invitations they were designing and printing. They took photos of fluoro yellow paint blobbed onto a spatula, or some metallic plum-tinged rollers, or a moth camouflaging itself on the wooden windowsill of the studio, or some quirky new Valentine’s Day cards they had just printed and put up for sale on their website. This simple, intimate and artistic sharing of moments demonstrates how ‘Instagrammers’ can begin to feel, to some degree, part of each others’ lives. This is how I felt about The Hungry Workshop and when I realised it, I was certainly surprised.

I often think about ordering business cards from The Hungry Workshop just so I can have my own piece of art to hand out to people I meet. It has taken a gigantic amount of self-restraint and the reluctant recognition of my budget to stop myself. That said, I can’t help but share my enthusiasm for their work with friends, designers and businesses.

And this is what I like to call, ‘The Instagram Effect’; that true and often subconscious investment in a person or business from following their Instagram feed, that causes gushing excitement and prompts a person to share and recommend them to their friends.

I’d bet you a blog post on MySpace that you’ll feel the same way about The Hungry Workshop too.  Take a look at a selection of their Instagram photos and tell me you don’t drool over the thick grainy card and that debossed inky perfection.

In all seriousness, Instagram isn’t about pictures, it’s about people.

The way he took that photo of the Empire State Building peeking over the top of some dilapidated shop fronts in New York City and then filtered it through black and white fascinates me. The fact that he saw an intimate moment between a couple on the Paris Métro and framed the shot so that their intensely expressive faces were the only visible part of their bodies. That her golden retriever puppy means so much that she takes photos of it as though it were her child. And that a picture of an orange sunset over the ocean sums up the warm and admiring feelings a Londoner feels towards their new summery home, of Melbourne, Australia.

Businesses can, in fact, do the same. Take our shared icon.inc and icon.pr office, for example. The people who design your marketing and advertising material and the people who devise and implement your PR strategy are a diverse bunch of people with interesting personalities and hidden talents. These people care about each other and they care about their clients. I know this because, among other things, I work with them. I have a drink with them every Friday afternoon and funnily enough, I follow their personal Instagram accounts. But how could other people come to know this?

What if your business had its own Instagram account that shared with its followers those funny, beautiful or memorable moments that happen in the office, at the work Christmas party or on the way to work? Instagram photos can even offer insights and glimpses into the behind-the-scenes energy that is required for a pitch, the crazy ideas that come from a big brain-storming session and the effort and heartache that goes into designing a shiny new logo that represents a company in just the right way.

"Look at the magic Luke, our print designer, just weaved on InDesign with his Pantone colour charts. Guess which soft and mischievous baby canine just visited our office? It's official, Penny makes a mean sundried-tomato cous-cous salad. Check out our funky new hand-painted boardroom table. And look who just turned up to work wearing mismatched high-heels to work (the identity of that person shall remain unknown – though I’m sure they found it just as funny as we did)."

For the most part, a business is its staff and that is the rationale behind Instagram for businesses. It personalises a company and enables anyone looking to buy from or request the services of that company to feel confident in, reassured by, and even invested in, the people who work there.

Instagram isn’t for every business and personal discretion can be used to figure that out, but it can be the essential layer of social media, fed through Twitter and Facebook, that shows the human side of a brand or business. Common sense tells us a major commercial motivator is that people buy from and support people or businesses they like. Instagram is one un-tapped way businesses can embrace the digital age of social media to connect with and relate to people locally and globally.

In the meantime, check out some Instagram photo’s Rom Anthonis, ‘romnine’ on Instagram, our resident photographer has taken of the recent Melbourne "summer" weather…

A special thanks to Simon Hipgrave of The Hungry Workshop who gave us permission to reproduce a selection of their Instagram photos in this blog post. Thank you also for the personal inspiration they have given me.

You can follow them on Twitter: @HungryWorkshop

You can like their Facebook page

You can visit their website

And of course, you can follow them on Instagram – search ‘TheHungryWorkshop’

Photo credits (in order of appearance): Instagram Filters - created by Jessica Zollman, Instagram Workshop Photos - taken by The Hungry Workshop, and The Melbourne Rain - taken by Rom Anthonis.

 By Amy Mullins, PR Account Coordinator (Social Media)

There are some exciting changes happening at icon.pr. In December, we moved into a new office with a beautiful modern fit-out and now we are welcoming six new members to the PR team.

On behalf of the everyone at icon.inc and icon.pr, I can confidently say that we are very pleased to be working with such bright and talented colleagues. They have come from diverse professional backgrounds and what we’ve learnt from each other already has been invaluable.

Without further ado, let’s get on with the introductions!

(L-R: Michelle Coffey, John Lindsay, Amy McAlister, Amy Mullins, Karen Pickering, Kate McKenzie)

Michelle Coffey, Director of Strategy

Michelle brings to Icon more than 20 years'  experience in strategic communications leadership, reputation management and media relations. An award-winning print journalist with more than a decade's experience at the Herald Sun and The Australian, Michelle has worked at Haystac Public Affairs (now part of the Aegis Group), the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games and most recently headed up the City of Melbourne's Corporate Affairs and Strategic Marketing branch. In her role as Director of Strategy at icon.pr, Michelle collaborates with Managing Director Joanne Painter to drive strategic insight across the Icon business, to deliver the most effective communications solutions for icon.pr's clients.

John Lindsay, Account Director

John's extensive experience in high profile reputation management, media relations and communication spans leading international brands across a diverse range of sectors including sport, education, NGO and corporate. Since arriving in Australia 11 years ago, John has headed up the communications teams for GM Holden, Oxfam and Tennis Australia, which includes the Australian Open. In his native Scotland, John led communications for the national government advisory body Sportscotland, and internal communications for the University of Edinburgh – one of the UK's leading research universities. With each organisation a brand leader in their respective sector, and offering very different challenges, John brings to icon.pr's clients a wealth of communications expertise honed at the highest levels.

Amy McAlister, Account Manager

Amy joined icon.pr in January 2012 in the role of Account Manager, responsible for building strong relationships with clients and providing strategic advice and oversight to PR programs and strategies. Amy has a broad range of experience across the government, consumer, healthcare and financial services industries, having worked for high-profile organisations including Coles, South East Water and Australian Unity. With close to five years’ experience in the corporate sector, Amy brings expertise in corporate communications, copywriting, media relations and strategy. Before joining the team at icon.pr, Amy was a Communications Adviser at Coles.

Karen Pickering, Account Executive

Karen joined the icon.pr team as an Account Executive in January 2012. She has a strong background in corporate communications, community relations, internal communications and events management. In her previous role as a Communications Officer at the Royal Women’s Hospital, Karen worked on a number of key projects including restructuring the hospital’s internal communications strategy and managing the Royal Women’s Hospital Gala Ball fundraiser.

Since joining icon.pr Karen has work across a range of corporate and consumer clients including Lifestyle Communities, GWA Bathrooms & Kitchens, Europcar, Fleet Partners New Zealand and G.J. Gardner Homes. She holds a Bachelor of Communications (Public Relations) from RMIT University and a Diploma of events Management from William Angliss.

Kate McKenzie, Account Coordinator

Kate began working at icon.pr as Office Manager and subsequently, took up the role of Account Coordinator with the PR team. Kate is a graduate student at The University of Melbourne, currently undertaking a Master of Publishing and Communications.

During her Bachelor of Arts (Communications) at Monash University, Kate served as Contributing Editor at the independent magazine Esperanto who published her writing and photography. She has also contributed feature pieces to a Melbourne lifestyle blog throughout the year. As well as her background in print media, Kate has gained experience in media relations across many sectors including retail, government and industry with clients such as Moose Toys, WorkSafe Victoria, and the Australian Institute of Architects Victoria. Her strengths include internal and external communications, creative thinking and attention to detail. 

Amy Mullins, Account Coordinator (Social Media)

Amy joined the icon.pr team as an intern and took the position of PR Account Coordinator (Social Media) towards the end of her internship in January 2012. Amy is completing a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy and History) at The University of Melbourne.

Concurrent to her studies and work at icon.pr, Amy has cultivated an online profile writing about Australian politics and the media for ABC The Drum and is best known as the (formerly anonymous) blogger, Get Shortened. She has become a leader in debates around issues of gender, social inclusion, public policy and progressive politics online and on Twitter.

She has appeared on ABC Radio National, Triple RRR radio, and was an invited guest at the Progressive Australia conference, held by the Chifley Research Centre in Sydney. Recently, Amy contributed to a chapter on Australian female political bloggers and gender dynamics in social media in a yet-to-be-published book by Scribe Publications on social media: politics, policy and journalism.

We'd love to say hi, so send us a tweet on Twitter: @iconpr