Archive for the 'Social Computing' Category

Upcoming Social Media Events

One of the many benefits of living in Vancouver is that we have a great community of Social Networking experts. In the next few weeks, there are numerous upcoming seminars and workshops which you may want to attend.

Social Media Marketing Training in Vancouver and Victoria

Capulet Communications are leaders when it comes to Social Media Marketing. Following a very successful workshop at UBC Continuing Education this past winter, they’ve now scheduled two new sessions. The first in Victoria will be on April 30 and Vancouver on May 28. Having heard both Julie and Darren speak on many occasions and having read their eBook Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, I highly recommend this workshop to anyone interested in learning how to use their blog, twitter, facebook, etc… and raising their visibility online.
Full details on the workshops can be found on their website.

Mental Health Camp

Following a very popular session at this year’s Northern Voice Conference panel session called Coping Digitally, a few passionate bloggers have put together a full day event. The purpose of the event is to discuss the many ways social media and blogging can help remove the stigma of mental illness. Registration for this event is free and will be held on April 25. Full details and a list of speakers can be found on their website.

THIRD TUESDAY APRIL: Tris Hussey

Next Tuesday, April 21, Republic will host this month’s Third Tuesday event. Tris Hussey, Social Media Concierge and New Media Specialist will discuss the importance of getting your message out. He will look at the different ways to get your message out and which ones work best. Third Tuesday events are also free of charge and you can sign up by becoming a member of the meet up group.

Registration for Northern Voice 2009 is now open

This year’s Northern Voice organizers have kicked the doors open for registration. This will be my third year attending and I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about blogging and social media. If you are at all interested in attending, I would encourage you to register soon, as past conferences have sold out in a matter of days.

Hope to see you there.

Smart Podcasting

I’ve had the opportunity to download a few podcasts and think that podcasting is a great. Walking down the street listening to the BBC Radio 4 makes me feel like I’m back in Slough. Beyond downloading them from either iTunes or the podcaster’s website, I don’t really know anything about podcasting.

I’ve listened to experts give presentation and just never had the inclination to dive in and do my own. Perhaps if I was a marketer, the reasons for podcasting would be more obvious. Mhairi at Out-smarts has been podcasting for a few months now and has learned a great deal and she provides tips and advice on her blog. I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mhairi and you can listened to that podcast.

Mhairi has also been working with LeapZone Strategies to position and promote their Rise podcast series. If your company is looking for business advice focusing on branding, efficiency and generating momentum, then you might want to check it out. The Rise Podcast is available on the LeapZone Strategies website and iTunes.

Web Search explained by Common Craft

The web wouldn’t be what it is without the ability to search. My home page is set to Google and use it to search for everything. Finding information is often quite tedious because there are so many web pages out there. Luckily a few tricks are available to allow you to refine your search.

Lee Fever at Common Craft has created this wonderful video explaining how web searches work and offers tips on how you can avoid being swallowed up by the web.

Open ID – easier Internet logins

For anyone who spends time on the Internet and takes advantage of social media technologies in particular remembering a growing list of passwords and login details can be a challenge. Thankfully, there is a solution in the making in the form of OpenID.

Open ID is an open identity system that allows you to use one single identification (or digital identification) across many of your favorite sites. Participant sites include the likes of Ma.gnolia, pbwiki, 37 Signals, Technorati and Plaxo.

With Open ID, you register once for an ID then use that to identify yourself on different sites. The result: you don’t have to remember numerous login and password details. It makes surfing much faster, more secure and less of a pain.

Developed by the OpenID Foundation an organisation that was formed in June 2007 to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community, the group is quickly expanding and some of the behemoths in the industry are now OpenID providers.

To claim your ID use a reputable providers such as MYID, Claim ID or Vidoop and make the process easier by using a downloadable browser plugin like Vidoop’s to manage your standard logins.

At last my brain can take a rest and doesn’t have to store all those endless password details.

How to widgetize your blog or website

Susie Gardner from Hop Studios gave a pretty good demo of how to add widgets to your blog today at Northern Voice. Widgets, also called plugins or badges, are little apps which consist of bits of code that once added to your blog or website, pull in external information. They usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. These widgets could pull the latest news feed from a site such as Voxant, the latest Dilbert cartoon, a list of books you are reading or meaning to read, the weather, or a series of flickr photos.

These widgets can be a fun way to add content to your website. The only downside of adding these, is that you have to dabble in the code a bit which can be scary at first. Additionally if you’re blog is on a hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Typepad, you may not be able to add these.

So how do you go about adding a widget?
First let’s select a widget. Of all the widgets mentioned during the presentation, I found polldaddy.com the most interesting. As the name would suggest polldaddy allows you to create polls.

1. First you need to go to their site and sign up for an account. This is done very easily simply by filling your name and email. (Don’t you love people who don’t ask you for every possible detail?)
2. Next, hit create a poll.
3. Type in your questions.
4. Type in your answers,
5. Select the “look” of your poll.
6. Hit save and Voila!

You will then be sent to a new screen with code which may look scary, but here’s the catch. You don’t need to know how it works. Just copy and paste it. That’s it. And here’s the poll I just created:

Now, for this example, I’ve copied the poll in the body of my text. I don’t really want to clutter my sidebar with more stuff, but if I wanted to, I could have a permanent poll anywhere on my site. The beauty of this widget is that simply by login in to my polldaddy.com account and creating a new poll, the poll on my website is automatically updated.

I mentioned earlier that widgets usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. This is where dabbling in the code gets a bit tricky. If you’ve set up your own blog and have access to the presentation, you can go to the template editor, locate the sidebar.php and add the widget code in there. If you are like me and using WordPress which you’ve downloaded and customized, you can also use the widget editor, but be careful and make sure that you back up all of your files, just in case you mess things up.

I should also point out, that if you copy and paste code into the body of a post, like I just did, save the post and come back and edit it, chances are the code for your widget will need to be updated. The visual editor in WordPress seems to alter the code every time you save and edit. I’m not sure why, but it just does… So just add your code once you are happy with the post and no longer need to edit.

Have fun.

Web Directions North is a Wrap

There are many reasons why one should attend conferences. It’s a great way to meet new people, share ideas, learn from your peers and see what everyone else is doing. But more importantly, for me, the main reason is to convince myself that I’m not alone. Others have had the exact same problem and may have a solution that they can share. This year’s Web Direction North conference did just that.

Josh William, the founder of Firewheel Design and founder of my favourite invoicing system, blinksale gave a great talk on how he took his company from the bedroom to the boardroom. His presentation was very insightful and made me realize that some of the business issues I’ve been casually sweeping under the carpet, will need to be addressed soon.

Tara Hunt presented a series of examples where citizens have come together and created solutions to better their cities, transit and build better communities. Although I wish her talk would have provided more examples of government sites as the title had promised, she managed to convince me that we can’t wait for governments to take action and fix everything. By trusting their citizens, governments can use eager web developers who build websites and web applications and build better communities or change their way of thinking.

Indi Young also demonstrated how people are the ones who need to be listened to and influence the web. When coca-cola came up with their new formula a few years ago, they weren’t fixing any problem, but instead just focusing on their product and the result was a disaster. Innovation doesn’t happen when people create great products, but rather, when they fix people’s problems. Using mental models, Indi Young discussed a series of examples where she showed us that by asking the right questions she was then able to look at marketing and product opportunities. As a result, her mental models enabled me to think of a new way I can visualize web projects.

This year’s Web Directions North conference was a great showcase of how people are using Web 2.0 technology and web apps. The message that stood out for me, was that webmasters no longer have roles to play but every site needs a “community manager”. The Web is no longer about “The Company” or “The Man” but rather about communities. For the past year or so we’ve had a huge increase of requests for blogs and content management systems (cms) at Bluelime Media. As a result we’ve been building more and more sites using WordPress and our clients seem to be happy, but Boris Mann’s presentation made me think that other types of cms may be better or at least worth a look. I haven’t downloaded my copy of Drupal yet and I’m not 100% convinced, but I may need to follow his advice or at least attend a drupal templating meeting just to see what the fuss is all about.

As with every conference, my brain is full and I’m knackered, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Ways to leverage your Facebook network

The first concept in using Facebook (or any social media for that matter) is to stay top-of-mind with your friends/network. You can do that subtly by showing up in their news feed and more overtly by sending various invitations.

Concept 1: Stay top-of-mind in your network

There are a lot of different ways to show up in your friend’s news feeds. Here are a few:

• use status updates as a way to broadcast what’s new with you. Announce an event, a launch, something that interests you, or simply how you feel that day.
• import blog posts, shared RSS items, social bookmarks, etc. automatically into your profile. This also lets your network know about things that interest you.
• post photos of your life, work, events, etc.
• tag other’s photos
• seek your friends’ wisdom: ask questions with the “My Questions” app.

Concept 2: Expand your network

As well as reconnecting/staying in touch with people you already know, social media is a good way to make new connections. Here are a few ways to do that:

• join your Neighbourhood to meet people around you
• join a group that interests you, or start a new one and invite others to join. There’s bound to be a group that interests you.
• create an event on Facebook for a real-world event. You can send invitations and get RSVPs.
• set up a page for your business, product or organization. Invite your friends to become a fan of it. When they do, their friends will see “Jane Smith became a fan of…” in their news feeds.

I think with all social media it’s important to be authentic. If you share information or do activities that feel right for you then your friends are likely to accept it and may be interested in it. But if you post really pushy messages or do stuff that is clearly selling, you might push people away — into filtering your news out of their feed.

If you want to learn more about Facebook and marketing through social media, here are some good places to start:

• Capulet’s social media eBook – these guys know their stuff.
• 12 Ways to use Facebook Professionally
• 24 Ways to market in Facebook
• 6 Ways to promote your cause in Facebook
• How Non-profits can use Facebook

P.S. I wrote this post as part of a series of introductory tutorials on blogging and Facebook.

P.P.S. Tell us, have you observed or tried anything around networking in Facebook? What’s worked or not worked for you?

Don’t Risk Losing Control of Your Brand

At a new media session at CES that I attended last week the panelists cautioned companies to ignore new media (especially blogs and social networks) at their peril. If companies insist on being ostriches with their corporate heads in the sand, they risk losing control of their brand.

Last weeks furore over Tim Horton’s employees and their Facebook antics is a case in point. With over 3,400 members, the “Rules of Ordering and More” group lists 80 or so tips that customers should take to heart if they want good service. Apparently the group is administered by Timmy’s employees unbeknownst to their employer. Its actually quite funny – you should take a read.

Had Tim Hortons (the famous Canadian Donut franchise owned by Pepsico) been monitoring the Internet effectively, the company would have been aware of groups like this much sooner and could have put contingencies in place to protect its brand or HR policies to outline appropriate employee conduct on the Internet. Had it been more proactive it could have channeled the publicity it received last week to its benefit rather than detriment.

Companies cannot ignore web 2.0 technologies any longer. They must, at the very least, be listening to what is being said about them even if they are not ready to be contributing to the conversation: in that way they have a chance at least of maintaining some control over their brand.

Northern Voice 2008

Registration for Northern Voice 2008 is now open. This two day conference is an amazing conference for the price. Sixty dollars buys you two days of conference about blogging and social media. I learned a great deal last year and look forward to it this year. It sells out every year, so if you are interested,hurry up and register.