One of the first questions people ask about Twitter is “Why?” Why would I want to use it? There are a number of standard answers to that question. To meet others, to learn from others, to observe, to participate in conversations. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has described Twitter as being, “like a flock of birds choreographed in flight.”

Typically, the “why” is boiled down to the meaning behind each single tweet or status update.

My favorite example: “Do I really need to know what others are having for dinner?”

I’m suggesting that we take the “why” question even further and reflect on our internal need to have followers, friends, contacts, fans and the attention that social media provides in general.  Roll with me for a minute. What if each tweet was really a deeper representation of your psyche? What if by communicating out into the Twitterverse you were demonstrating personal insecurities? The recent “flock” of novice celebrities such as Oprah to the Twitterverse I think speaks volumes, the reality is, we’re a “narcissistic society.”

Either you want a million followers to feed your insane ego or you want a million followers to broadcast large chunky, slimy tweets of spam, it simply cannot be about building meaningful relationships.

I started researching this stance to see if this were true.  In fact, I now believe Twitter to be a real-time narcissism machine that just went mainstream.  I’m stating this despite the fact that I’m a willing participant in the community.  More than that, I’ve been building this social media business in part based on that participation.

With each tweet are we not saying, “look at me, think of me, respond to me, FOLLOW ME?”

When you get new followers or someone commenting, re-tweeting your brilliance doesn’t that make you feel just a little bit better somehow?  Almost like you’re being heard.  I think it does, and so I asked myself, does this mean I’m a raving, screaming narcissist? Some would say absolutely!  Hopefully those in the local Edmonton Twitter community who have come to know me a bit better would say something different.  As for myself, I know I have an ego, as to just how far that goes I’m unsure, I haven’t tested those limits yet.  We all have egos, it’s in our DNA, and I think that most would agree that appreciation from peers generates a pleasant feeling of some sort.

Further, this whole discussion goes to the heart of my dislike for the use of the word “guru.”  “Look at me I’m a guru, listen to me I’m a guru, follow-me because I’m a self-proclaimed Twitter guru.”  I believe the word “guru” screams insecurity.  I guess I do know the limit of my narcissism and it’s well before the use of that word.

Next time you go to send out a tweet, witness the effect the engagement has on your psyche and emotions.  Nothing at all, a pleasant smile because someone is listening or the feeding of an insane desire to be like Ashton Kutcher.

Kutcher explains his competition with CNN was not about his “insatiable ego but the democratization of media.”  Anyone else agree that’s a large steaming pile of dog #$%^?

Don’t think that Twitter is a perpetual narcissism-machine?  See if you can stop using it.  Go cold-turkey and NEVER TWEET AGAIN.  I bet you can’t, you see just like me, you like the tweet of your own voice to some degree and far more importantly the relationships built with it.

By the way, would you like an example of the opposite of a narcissist?  I give you the owner of the Edmonton Oilers, Daryl Katz.  Billions of reasons to be in your face and instead he simply and quietly goes about his business and only speaks when absolutely necessary.

All organizations should apply these thoughts to brand impact and potential brand erosion, employee relations, effect on internal processes and efficiencies.  Think I’m out to lunch?  Want an example of how this social media “ego-effect” and the lure of potential web-stardom played havoc with a major brand recently?  Observe the “dominos effect.” play out as we speak and consider if your organization is prepared for the impact of even one employee’s ego gone astray.

Written by Walter Schwabe

Friday April 3 was the culmination of a big project for fusedlogic: MacEwan BlogCamp. It was Edmonton’s and, as far as we know, Alberta’s first blog contest. It was a unique opportunity to combine business, social media and education in one cool package.

We’d like to congratulate the top three MacEwan bloggers:

1.  Carla Putnam
2. Patrick Finegan
3. Peter Jaffray

The prize for first place was an Apple MacBook. In addition to the contest winners, we’d like to congratulate everyone who participated. Blogging for nine hours is not easy under the best of circumstances and blogging for nine hours in a busy cafeteria would be even tougher.

But, our bloggers persevered and we had a lot of interesting posts. We gave them a variety of topics to blog about and we were impressed with the results.

Judging

The winners of the blogging contest were chosen based on a number of factors. We had a voting system in place that ranked posts based on the cumulative net difference between a thumbs up and a thumbs down rating given by blog post viewers. In addition, we also judged the blog posts based on originality and quality of content.

Sponsors

Our sponsors came through for MacEwan BlogCamp in a big way. We can’t say enough about how happy we are that they sponsored our contest and made a huge contribution to the success of BlogCamp.

The team

We would also like to thank Jana Clarke, Sarah Parker, Laura England, Joseph DiFabio and the rest of the Grant MacEwan College team for giving us the opportunity to help put on this event. It was a lot of work but it was a blast! Grant MacEwan College really put on a good show for everyone involved.

And to the fusedlogic team, thank you as well: Walter did a great job hosting BlogCamp and all the other tasks he had; without Evan and Paul we wouldn’t have had the website or the video running virtually glitch-free; Genoa did a great job keeping everyone organized; Doug kept everyone on track with his project management skills; Krysta did a great job with her video as well.

Ultimately I think we succeeded in our goal of helping to raise the profile of the MacEwan School of Business and we’re confident that will result in more inquiries about the School of Business. MacEwan School of Business really is a good choice for a business degree in Edmonton, Alberta and beyond. We’re looking forward to the next BlogCamp!

MacEwan BlogCamp photos

If you’re interested in having a look at some great photos of MacEwan BlogCamp, have a look at Bruce Clarke’s Flickr photos. He has 166 photos there to look at. Bruce made my job tough to decide on the best photos to post here because they were all good.

Alain Saffel

When I speak to a client and use the word “bravery” in part I’m referring to this trend as a barrier of entry into the consumer’s psyche. Emotional engagement can only happen if both parties are willing and accepting participants, some feel that to get there a spectacle is required and there is definitely truth to that.

Social contract or social investment?

Some refer to this engagement between brand and consumer as the beginning of a “social contract,” I’d like to make the case for the use of the word “investment.” I recently expressed my opinion on well-known Forrester researcher Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and referred to a portion of our recent work with MacEwan School of Business as the example.

Owyang’s post was a higher level discussion about how consumers information was given out via various social network platforms and the ability of an agency such as ours to scrape that data, turning it into meaningful intelligence as the basis for the “contract.”

My point of view is that reaching an emotional level of discussion with prospective clients, consumers or partners is a key event in the relationship and can only happen with certain conditions present. Many efforts within the social web and across many industries do not accomplish this at all, at any level. Others do reach that level but unfortunately the emotion is anger on behalf of the consumer.

So which brands are more likely to embrace the concept of emotional centric “social investment?” I believe those who’s cultures are built on a foundation of mutual respect, giving and caring. More specifically, I think brands with women involved in key leadership positions are more likely to take these sensitivity and psychological issues into consideration when building out their marketing campaigns. This habit should serve them well when engaging the rest of us within the social web.

My personal social media journey started in 2004 and I’ve been studying these types of aspects ever since as well as participating. Certainly, I’ve made mistakes in the past; sometimes I can be a bit forward and offer an opinion when silence should have been my course of action. Having said that, I think that my grasp of the social web, and more importantly people, is stronger for these interactions, good and bad. This I feel, translates into a stronger customer experience here at fusedlogic.

Out of curiosity, a quick tally of all projects past has the number of ones with women as the key stakeholder in the lead. Further, fusedlogic’s best client experience ever (from our perspective at least and I hope theirs too) on all accounts is MacEwan and it was led by Jana Clarke, Marketing Manager for the School of Business.

We’ve been fortunate to have many great clients and this project was a ton of fun, very productive and went off with little to no issues. The organization was phenomenal to work with, as was her team, the majority of them women. Please don’t read anything into this discussion that isn’t there, I’m simply stating statistics. fusedlogic doesn’t specifically target women entrepreneurs or executives; it just seems to have progressed that way. For example, we have recently been asked to supply 3 proposals and 2 of the three are to organizations led by women.

Am I being stereotypical throughout this discussion? Probably. The more important question should be whether I’m off base with what I’m saying. Is my assumption that men are more likely to gravitate towards the term “social contract” vs. “social investment” in terms of general approach correct?

What about the flip side and my belief that in the above context women are more likely to approach business as an emotional “investment,” which I believe then provides them with an advantage over men regarding their social media marketing efforts? Do you think men are more likely to laugh at this E-Trade commercial and even go around calling their friends “shank-a-potumus” afterwards? I know I have, I think it’s hilarious, if you have research to the contrary I’d love to see it.

Ultimately, my experience has shown that the social web is an “investment.” If I forget that fact I’m promptly given my hat and shown the door. What about you?

Written by Walter Schwabe, have a wonderful Easter long-weekend everyone.

It’s an application that you can run on an iPhone or an iPod Touch and it allows you to do mobile surveys. It’s certainly cooler than the old pen and paper method and it tallies all the data automatically.

I’m familiar with the application as fusedlogic used it in a recent Edmonton social media project. It was cool that we were able to post real time survey results to the site. Who knows, maybe you’ll get more people responding to surveys because you get to plunk your answers down on a cool gadget?

Cool sites you’d have never known about

One thing I like about the Social Web Meetup is hearing about all the different projects people are working on and the different, cool websites they run across.

We had an opportunity to share our own site or a cool site we’ve been on, and here are a few:

East West Connect – Tait Lawton does Chinese translation and Chinese online marketing.

Community Intelligence – Tamara Stecyk’s blog. Congratulations to Tamara in her new job at Edmonton’s Foodbank.

Wefollow.com – This site, started up by Digg’s Kevin Rose, and is a Twitter directory organized according to interests. So, if you’re into #socialmedia @mashable is at the top of that category. Of course you should be following @fusedlogic as well! One thing to keep in mind is that just because someone is at the top of the list it doesn’t mean they’re an expert. Not by a long shot! These days I’ve noticed a large number of Twitter users out there who have thousands of followers and are following thousands but have a small number of Tweets. Numbers do not equate to knowledge, as much as some of these instant “experts” might hope.

Utils.me – It’s kind of a fun way to describe your utils, or relative satisfaction. Just add the hashtag #utils 50 or #utils -50 (or whatever number you like). Then check on the utils site and see the graph of your relative happiness over time. Doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose, but I’m sure someone will come up with one!

There were definitely more sites shared than I’ve listed and I probably missed yours. Let me know and I’ll put it up on the list, or just leave a comment with your site URL and a blurb about it.

Off to Brewster’s

After the last few Social Web Meetups we’ve headed to Brewster’s at Oliver Square where we’d reserved 20 seats. We’ve had no problem filling them either! We’ve always got to pull in a few more chairs. I had to laugh after reserving the tables there because they somehow had the impression that we were some kind of online dating service! I assured them we were not. I don’t know if anyone’s ever had a date because of a Meetup or a Tweetup in Edmonton, but you never know. Got any stories?

One thing that I have always enjoyed about the Social Web Meetup is the diversity of the group members. The experience level ranges from novice to veteran. There are some really interesting people who attend and I really enjoy hearing their stories. It’s great to be able to chat more at the pub afterwards too, and last night it seemed like almost everyone from the Meetup made it out to the pub. It’s the day after the Meetup and I’m already looking forward to the meeting next month!

Alain Saffel

We’re in the Grant MacEwan City Centre campus cafeteria right now and the place is busy! We’ve got our bloggers up and running now.

We’ve also got a blogging contest for everyone else on the net too. We’re promoting it on Twitter, and here. So, if you are interested, you can win cash for a blog post. You just need to do one post! Easy as pie, isn’t it? Think you’re good. Give it a shot. You blog, post the link on the page and we draw the winner randomly. Later on in the day we’ll decide if we really like one post and throw some prizes at that person too.

Mike & Lenny videos

We’ve got parts one and two of the Mike & Lenny series up and running. Check them out and let us know what you think.

Mike & Lenny video, part 1

Mike & Lenny video, part 2

Just in case you haven’t heard of Blogcamp, it’s happening April 3, starting at noon at the City Centre Campus of Grant MacEwan in downtown Edmonton. It will run for nine hours, and MacEwan students will be blogging about a variety of business and personally chosen topics during that time.

Blogcamp bloggers will have the chance to win great prizes, with the top prize being a MacBook.

How does this affect you? Well, you’ll have the chance to determine who the winner is. At the bottom of each blog post we’ll have a thumbs up and thumbs down. You get one vote on each post and you can comment as well.

Let those bloggers know whether you agree or disagree with what they’ve got to say. You’re also more than welcome to go to the campus cafeteria. There will be lots happening!

We’ve also got the trailer for the Mike & Lenny video up on the MacEwan Blogcamp site. Check it out and let us know what you think. The full video will be rolled out April 3.

A few days ago I posed a question on Twitter regarding a new application called TweepMe, now widely known as a spammer haven. The answers I was looking for in response to the question focused on the “motivation” behind using TweepMe, and Twitter usage in general. From that I was hoping to draw conclusions as to how that reflected on us as users. The tweeted question is below.

What are your thoughts on “buying” followers? http://www.tweepme.com/

Here’s how the TweepMe site describes its service.

TweepMe is the fastest way to accumulate followers on Twitter. When a new member joins, every other member automatically follows the new member, and the new member follows them back. The process is gradual and happens over the course of weeks or months depending on the number of TweepMe members.

Personally, I’ve always struggled with the concept of “auto-follows and auto-direct-messaging.” Despite being efficient, the struggle for me boils down to “mass-followers but at what cost?” Several questions come to mind in terms of Twitter etiquette. If you follow me and I follow you back, is that enough? If I don’t have time to send a personal direct message “thank-you for following,” would people still prefer an automated pre-fabbed response instead of nothing at all? Not sure about you guys but I’ve never clicked on a link coming in from an automated direct message, not once.

This action says to me: “Hi sucka, thanks for the follow, now go check out my blog and buy my stuff.”

Systems like TweepMe are simply numbers focused and deliberately impersonal, this defeats the purpose and great social upside inherent within social media. In the case of TweepMe, you actually pay for the privilege of being impersonal. Some obviously see the allure to being the largest spam broadcaster on Twitter, I don’t. Clearly, this is a subjective discussion as to what constitutes “value” and how to deliver it to others. Moving forward, here are some of the tweeted responses to my TweepMe question.

• Sirthinks: @fusedlogic followers for the sake of followers. Seems to defeat the whole point SM. Social commentary of like, or intriguing ideas.
  4 days ago from twidroid · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
• 
  Taite11: @fusedlogic Tweepme seems pretty worthless to me. Everybody on there will soley want to push out their tweets rather than read.
  4 days ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
• 
  enThrall: Feed your ego with thousands of followers? RT @fusedlogic What are your thoughts on “buying” followers? http://www.tweepme.com/
  4 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  enThrall: @fusedlogic re:tweepme – Depends on why you’re on here. Nice pkg of ppl to discover, lot of crap. Risks big mktg interest, less SM essence.
  4 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
• 
  eadnams: @fusedlogic only good if you don’t get caught… better question is… what about selling accounts with lots of followers?
  4 days ago from twhirl · Reply · View Tweet · Show Conversation

Do I promote my company and team on Twitter? Absolutely, I’m proud of my company, we’re doing some awesome work within the social web (admittedly not all of it visible), our clients are very happy and we’re growing. Marketing is a part of the Twitter community, how one does it is the key difference.

I’ve been asked to supply some of my social media principles in the past and so this might be a good time to talk about those related to Twitter.

1. Be respectful of others.
2. Be human, even if you are a news feed. Example – @iNews880
3. Promote the work of others, re-tweet and use the (via @method ) whenever possible.
4. Follow others, don’t be a snob. (exclude spammers and profiles of little redeeming value)
5. Think – Would this tweet make my mom proud?
6. Observe, listen and learn.
7. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
8. Avoid “automated” actions that degrade rapport building whenever possible.

Ultimately, just be yourself – “Tweet YOU Edmonton!”

Now sure, that might mean that you’re a spammer like many on TweepMe or a self-serving one-way broadcasting Twitter snob wasting valuable Twitter server power. Regardless, if that’s who you are, then be proud and be aware of #unfollowfriday or worse yet…

I had a comment on my Facebook last night from a friend who had decided to drop me. Nothing personal, I’ve just been Tweeting way too much from #democampyeg! Last night’s Edmonton Democamp 6 was the last straw.

I’ve recently taken advantage of the ability to have my Tweets directed to my Facebook status. It has been good in that it’s allowed me to update Facebook more easily and often, thought it may be a little too often. I have noticed one or two friends dropping off since I’ve done this.

So, should I disconnect my Twitter feed from updating my Facebook status? I have an idea what some of my Edmonton Twitter friends will say.

Is the only option to disconnect the feed? Well, I looked at several options to cut down on my updates so I don’t upset my Facebook friends.

Cut the Twitter/Facebook link altogether

Upside: keep friends who don’t want to see my face in every one of their Facebook newsfeed stories (not that I blame them) from not wanting to be my friend. Downside: I update Facebook less. This also limits the conversations I’ve been having in Facebook.

Limit Twitter updates that go to Facebook

You might wonder how this can be done, but I have noticed that when you respond to another Twitter user, that doesn’t go to Facebook. Normally I respond a lot to other Twitterers. Social media is about the conversation, after all, which I do plenty of. When I attend an event like Edmonton Democamp 6 and Tweet all about it, most of that stuff goes to my Facebook status.

Friends adjust Facebook updates from me

This is the part that has changed. The original post section is left in italics, so you can see what might work again if Facebook changes their mind. Hey, it can happen. They’ve done it before!

The new option in Facebook is similar, but it seems to be an all or nothing approach. Mouse over an entry on your home tab. You’ll see an X in the upper right hand corner of the entry. Click it and you have the option to no longer see updates from that person. I prefer Facebook’s approach from before. It’s not perfect, but at least you can still see something.

The photos above show the process by which you can hide someone from your news feed. I added Jerry back to my feed. I am just using his feed as an example. It’s fairly straight forward to hide someone from your feed now, but if you’ve made a mistake, you can undo it right away.

Notice you also have an option to show your hidden Facebook friends as well so you can add them back into your news feed. If you scroll to the very bottom of the page you’ll see some text “show hidden posts” and “see hidden friends” just in case you’re not quick enough to catch these boxes as they pop up.

If you have some complaints from Facebook friends, let them know how they can adjust your feed so you can keep them happy.

This can be done. When you’re in your home window in Facebook, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you can find the “Options for newsfeed” link. Click on that and you will notice that you can see “more about these friends” or “less about these friends.” Seems like a good idea, but I would be willing to bet that most people don’t even know that exists. It also relies on people making the adjustment themselves. Not a bad option though. Less experienced users, of which there are many, would probably never figure this out.

If you mouse over a Facebook news feed story you’ll notice a pencil appear in the top right of the story. This gives you the option to see more or less about a person.

Twitter box

It used to be stuck in the Boxes tab along your menu bar, but now you can move it to the Wall tab. The problem is Facebook doesn’t allow it to move above some of your other boxes so people can actually see it. You have to look for it. You may as well not even have it. It also only shows the latest Tweet, so if you had something interesting about 10 Tweets ago, forget it.

Limit Facebook status updates friends see

This one is tougher than you might think. There’s no obvious way to do this. Facebook has so many ways to tweak your settings and they’re all over the page. In fact, on this note, Facebook is a disaster.

What Facebook needs is a way for you to be able to determine how many of your status updates go out. I could make it so certain friends can’t see my updates, but this isn’t ideal either.

I think the ideal solution is to be able to stop your status updates from being published but people can look at your profile to see what you’re up to. So the updates are essentially only being published on my page. This allows me to keep my Twitter link active and post away. Those who are interested will come to my page anyway.

Manage social media updates

This is a bit of a work around, but I thought I could post to ping.fm, which I have set to update my Twitter status, as well as Brightkite and Friendfeed. I could set it to update Facebook and Twitter, but cut the Twitter link to Facebook on the Twitter side. I would have to go in and post the occasional ping.fm update to make sure I’m updating periodically. I don’t use Ping.fm all that often, and it would be a hassle to go out and do it this way, even just to remember to do it.

Why bother?

I know some of you must be wondering, why? I think it’s important to manage your social media relationships just as you’d manage your real life relationships. No doubt there’s much crossover between the two.

I’ve decided to tackle the issue because if there’s one person who says something, you can bet there are a dozen others who aren’t. So, it’s incumbent on me to evaluate and adjust how I do things so I don’t make some people unhappy. I think it’s all part of getting along and I really do appreciate the feedback. If I’m doing something that upsets someone, I want to know. Yes, I know you can’t make everyone happy, but if there’s a minor change I can make to keep someone happy, what’s the big deal?

I’m focusing on personal relationships here, but I do have a lot of business contacts in my social media network too. If it was a client or potential client and you were doing something that upset them, don’t you think you’d want to know?

I would appreciate your suggestions on this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s run across this issue. We’re breaking new ground on a regular basis with social media, so I think ironing out these kinds of issues to smooth out those relationships is important.

Alain Saffel

In recent weeks the Edmonton twitter community has grown considerably. Why? Well, some members of the local media have decided to fire-up their Twitter accounts and publicize doing so. Even the City of Edmonton has gotten into the act. In fact, Albertans from many walks of life are joining Twitter, including those in political circles, but that’s another whole series of posts.

So, I’ve decided see where the Edmonton Twitter community feels it fits when compared to the generally accepted best practices described in the well-known social media standard Groundswell. You’ll notice that I’ve thrown in a bit of my own interpretation for good measure as well. Figure 3-2 on page 43 of Groundswell shows The Social Technographics ladder. Many members of the Edmonton Twitter community may fall into one or more of the following technographic groups.

Where are you in the Twitter universe?

Joiners - essentially, you’ve joined Twitter because you were encouraged by something you read, watched or a even more likely because you’ve been encouraged by another Albertan to join. You may also belong to at least one social network such as Facebook or Linkedin. In fact, to be considered a real Joiner you’re setting up profiles in several places.

Just for fun I’ve provided a short-list below of new members within the Edmonton Twitter community that may fit into this category based on current level of followers. These folks are at 100 or less followers (this number is a moving target so it’s not exact). There are many new users but these are a few that happened to use the #yeg hashtag at the time I was writing this post.

If you’d like to add your name to this list to increase follows just leave a comment with your twitter profile name and what category you feel you fit into best.

• http://twitter.com/JenCrosby
• http://twitter.com/michaelbridge
• http://twitter.com/jodinechase
• http://twitter.com/Carywill
• http://twitter.com/eglinski
• http://twitter.com/cfsmith
• http://twitter.com/DavidCronin

Spectators - After joining the community, a lot of observing Twitter and its culture takes place. This is of course a natural activity and, not to worry, everyone does this to some extent as this eco-system continues to evolve. We’re all learning…that’s one of my favorite things about social media in general. The opportunities to learn from others are immense and I consider myself to be a life-long learner. Having said that, as a Twitter user, your updates are very low as are your followers – you’re watching quietly.

Through observation and learning, confidence begins to increase and gradually this impacts activity type and volume. Conversations, exchanges of information, direct messages, link posting all increase. The newest members of the Edmonton Twitter community become more involved in terms of the types of Tweets and level of participation. Generally, an increase in tweet volume tends to happen and a need to “break the story” or “RT” (re-Tweet) interesting tweets also starts to take place. Possibly the courage to post links of their own blog posts or the first Twitpics start to appear – personality really starts to shine through.

Critics - As ones’ personality starts to shine more and more within their tweets. I believe a further diversion of grouping starts to happen. Commenting, taking positions on various subject matter that before may have been considered controversial like politics for example starts to happen. The person has much more confidence now and so rating, reviews and criticism tends to happen more. Further, if the person is sarcastic in nature, a skeptic or generally negative this also presents itself.

Collectors - Personality and confidence allows the newest members of Edmonton’s Twitter community who are remaining active to communicate things like hobbies. Music, photography are two top ways people start to demonstrate these traits. Links to other profiles on sites like flickr and Last.fm are used.

Creators - I’ve left this category towards the end because when it comes to Twitter I think that this group is really a catch all in a lot of ways. If you’ve created even one Tweet you could technically be considered a Creator. However, I define Creators in this case to be Twitter users who are active in almost all of the technographic categories in some way, have several profiles, share numerous types of content from video, audio, photos, links, opinions, etc. The most active of all the groups, Creators are separated by the reason they’re there: to build relationships, to build an army, to build credibility, to build intelligence and observe trends.

Autobots - (I’ve invented this last group.) Twitter naturally has this built in ego-meter that is your “followers” total. Some fall into the “I must have a million followers” mentality and I admit I watch my own numbers too. How can you not? Having said that, some go to great lengths to “monetize” their Twitter activity somehow. For example, let’s say you like to sell e-books, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” However, an Autobot would then employ various automated software apps to auto-follow people and almost certainly auto-direct-message (DM) people with their affiliate e-book selling site link. Now just like with Viagra spam, if the 8% of people who got those spam emails didn’t buy Viagra via this method then the spam industry may not exist.

Be wary of those who are strictly focused on just creating a larger number. Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research tweeted this recently:

@jowyang bloggers are arguing about how much 100,000 twitter followers is worth http://tinyurl.com/c3z6nk I say earn trust, not buy it

Walter Schwabe

That was a lot of fun everyone, that said, I’m tired and now going radio silent.

Walter

Tonight was the first ever ChangeCamp Edmonton meeting where some like minded citizens came together to discuss government and citizen engagement under the umbrella of ChangeCamp.ca (Edmonton wiki is here and the Google Group is here.)

The group included the following folks on Twitter: @Imparo, @ChrisLaBossiere, @JillLaBossiere, @jdarrah, @davecournoyer, @mastermaq, @paulney, @eadnams, @dibegin and myself @fusedlogic

The Steering Committee adopted as a starting point – this question.

“How can we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

What was clear from tonight’s discussion in my mind is that there are definitely people out there who think that the gap between government and the average citizen is wide and consists of too many barriers for real substantive change, meaningful discussion and innovation.

There are pictures and more info to check out @mastermaq’s post on tonight’s meeting as well.

By the way, tomorrow I’m presenting at IDEAfest – 10:05am Room B, Tory Basement 95, University of Alberta Campus and will be giving away cash during my presentation entitled “How YOU can use social media to change the world.” This will be a live “social” experiment that I invite you to be a part of…

See you there,

Walter

It’s not ready for public consumption yet, and the iPhone app will be available through iTunes.

The program seems to be an internal social media tool and with project management elements. It will be interesting to see the final product. I think it’s something that could be quite useful for most companies.

Edmonton social media community expanding

We started out our discussion about social media in Edmonton by watching a CTV story about Twitter, with several Edmontonians featuring prominently in the story.

Media interest in Twitter has grown substantially in Alberta, particularly in Edmonton lately. Many media organizations have jumped on board and are now experimenting with the medium.

With this media interest there has been curiosity among its viewers and consumers, and according to Mack Male, the number of Twitter users in Edmonton has grown by 50 per cent over the last month. Nice!

Social media community changing?

Edmonton has a vibrant social media community and we’re quite friendly. There was a question whether this will change as time goes on and the community grows. One thought was that instead of meeting as one large group as often happens, people will begin to gather in smaller groups.

There were some comments about people joining Twitter and billing themselves as social media experts or social media gurus. Typical hype. Kind of hard to bill yourself as a social media expert when you’ve been on Twitter for a week, nobody’s following you and you’ve Tweeted a couple dozen times.

One person who could legitimately bill himself as a social media expert in Alberta is Walter Schwabe (@fusedlogic). There aren’t many in Alberta, but the number is growing across Canada. Mack Male’s another one here in Edmonton.

Mainstream media and social media

My favourite part of the discussion was also one of the more contentious ones. Recently mainstream media organizations have been going through a lot of difficulty due to the recession. There seems to be some glee in social media circles about their difficulties.

Mainstream media in Alberta is beginning to join the social media community, and Edmonton’s media especially. It’s obvious they’re quite new to the medium and are having a few growing pains. Who hasn’t though? I’m willing to give anyone new to Twitter the benefit of the doubt, except for spammers or the instant social media experts.

My only observation is that Alberta media organizations seem to have jumped into the game without much of a social media strategy. I could be wrong. I they think they could use an effective social media strategy to cut their learning curve and increase their social media impact.

Continuing the discussion about social media

We again made our way to Brewster’s Pub in Oliver Square for drinks and discussion. I had reserved for 15 people but we had many more people than that. Not bad for a Monday night!

We were lucky to have Alberta MLA Doug Griffiths join us at Brewster’s. He’s also on Twitter as @GriffMLA. The Alberta government has made a strong push to get involved with social media. It was good to hear Doug’s perspective on it. He said he’s had lots of good feedback on the Alberta government’s social media efforts. On a side note, I thought it was interesting that he was on the CBC show The Week the Women Went.

It’s interesting because there’s been kind of a long running conversation on Twitter about breaking news and the mainstream media. Twitterers have been trumpeting their successes in breaking stories, leaving traditional media flatfooted. Twitter users have also taken some photos that mainstream media could never hope to get on the spot.

Smart phones with digital cameras mean that anyone can break news. It’s impossible for the media to compete with that, and the mainstream media will admit they just can’t break that kind of news as quickly.

The US Airways crash on the Hudson River photo is a classic example of how quick Twitter can be.

That’s fine in our instant gratification culture, but I think there are a lot of people on Twitter who fail to see the benefits of mainstream media. Twitter, in its construct, is limited to 140 characters per message. There’s no depth to it. You may witness a shooting, bombing or accident, but you are an observer, for what it’s worth. You can’t delve much beyond what you’ve witnessed and experienced.

My friend Patrycja Romanowska (@kamazonka) wrote a very good piece on the troubles in mainstream media recently. She pointed out that those in social media who deride mainstream media organizations tend to forget that the news is reported by those media organizations in the first place.

We’re not just referring to a Twitter user witnessing a plane crash, but to reporters sitting in dull city council meetings and reporting on what’s going to happen to your property tax bill next year, or attending a police press conference, etc.

So, if you’re one of the new media people inclined to gloat over the apparent death of mainstream media, keep in mind where you get the news to comment on in the first place.

This is not to say that people on Twitter can’t break news more quickly, but to understand the limitations of the medium. Twitter has as much depth as a mud puddle, but it is miles wide. You can’t beat its reach. If you want to understand what’s happening, you just won’t get it on Twitter. You need to go to print media, online or off, to get that depth.

Edmonton media on Twitter

I think it’s great to see many local media people getting on Twitter to see what it’s all about (Global Edmonton, Edmonton Journal, iNews 880). I’m sure they’ll find ways to leverage Twitter to help get their story out, and good for them. Twitter is excellent for that and I’ve noticed that when people become aware of local media personalities getting online, they get a large following on Twitter fairly quickly.

I find that fact interesting. If the mainstream media is apparently so irrelevant these days, why are so many on Twitter interested in following them and talking to them? It would seem that there’s more interest in mainstream media than you might hear on Twitter.

Not bashing Twitter

Having been a member of the media and a Twitter advocate, I really understand both sides of this issue. I also understand the limitations of mainstream media and the Twitter medium.

I love Twitter and find it to be an extremely useful tool. I know that I can find basic information out quite quickly on Twitter. Twitter excels at quickly pointing you towards important resources on almost any issue you can think of. Newspapers are where I find depth of understanding and can really learn more about all aspects of important issues.

While mainstream media is experiencing a great deal of difficulty lately, I’d attribute those difficulties more to the current economic situation and the reluctance of management to really take the Internet and social media as seriously as they need to. They’ve managed reactively and have jumped online, with the majority of media outlets not having quite figured it out yet.

So let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater and understand that Twitter and mainstream media are not a dichotomy. They can and will co-exist. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and hear on Twitter that every mainstream media organization is now closed and your only source of information is online. I think some Twitterati would like that, but they live in a dream world.

Entering the social media with a strategy

I will be watching Edmonton media Twitterers to see how they use Twitter and experiment with it. Media organizations are smart to get involved in social media, but they should go in with a social media strategy to maximize the benefit they receive from it.

It’s easy for individuals to jump into Twitter and experiment, but large organizations should iron out some details and really understand the medium before they make the foray. It will save them a lot of headaches and make their efforts more effective.

Edmonton Social Web Meetup

At tonight’s Social Web Meetup, Edmonton’s expanding Twitter and social media community will be up for discussion, along with the media’s expanding presence on Twitter in Edmonton.

It should be an interesting discussion and I think it’s something that we could probably devote an entire Social Web Meetup to.

Get signed up on the Social Web Meetup page if you’re interested in going. It’s centrally located at NAIT at 7 p.m. and we head out afterwards to Brewster’s Pub at Oliver Square (104^th Ave and 116 St.).

Alain Saffel

I believe that your perception of a given situation is reality for you. In other words, if you perceive that the government isn’t transparent, then that’s your reality.

Here’s my perception based on what I’ve witnessed after having worked with government and advised government affiliated organizations on social media. Two internal cultural segments exist within government surrounding the discussion about the social web.

I designate those two segments as “the brave and the fearful.” The “brave” are those who read Groundswell and then attend conferences similar to the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media for Government event that’s wrapping up in Ottawa.

By the way, should you like to observe the conversation on twitter the hashtag is #ALI. Or, try the conversation by links like this PDF by @mikesgene which shows chatter about the usual suspects such as, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Second Life, wikis…etc. The undertone of these tweets is that many are focused on implementing the technology as soon as possible, which is where many begin their social media learning journey.

Heading home to join the conversation

Excited delegates are now heading back to their respective bureaucratic worlds filled with visions of changing their particular corner of the world by inspiring colleagues to “join the conversation.” Many will suggest starting a blog, creating a wiki, shooting pictures, video and as many that attended #ALI did, they’ll encourage others to quickly join the twitter community as well. A sort of “citizen journalism meets public sector mashup” if you will.

People like @pameladawn state on twitter that she is “taking what I learned at #ALI and heading back to Saskatchewan.” Who am I to argue with that? I think that’s great AND I think Pamela and her colleagues are probably in for a surprise.

Why? Because over the next few days all across Canada, as everyone shows up to their respective government offices, so too will the second segment of government in this discussion: the “fearful.” And thus the uphill battle begins with the non-believer. If there’s one thing that makes people in government and especially decision-makers nervous, it’s citizens with an opinion who know how to voice it by way of the social web.

Resistance to social media

To a certain extent I understand the root of the resistance. Afterall, often political careers and/or elections are built and destroyed based on a few well-timed words in the media that the social web picks up and runs with, here’s a real gem- case in point.

Pamela may experience frustration while some of her colleagues defend their resistance as being prudent, careful or even risk averse. That said, many of these intelligent, hard working folks won’t come right out and call their feelings what they really are, which is “ignorance driving fear.”

Regardless of how you perceive the resistance factor, experience has shown that these “anti-change agents” are a large barrier to progress into the social web. Sure there are pockets across this great country of activity where the planets have aligned and progressive thinking and open creative minds prevail, yes, even in government there are creative minds. I just simply wouldn’t bet my entire business on waiting for, as one twitter user @jdarrah called it “moving the glacier,” to actually happen at the speed of social media business.

Essentially, this is the “newly initiated and willing evangelist” trying to convince the “resistant and fearful” that having a transparent and open dialogue with the average citizen in a highly effective communications environment with little control over the end message is a good thing. That within government, there are better ways to listen, learn, collaborate, communicate and share ideas with constituents.

Social web victory

Is there a way forward for the newly initiated brave? Absolutely! Here’s one example of a brave leader who has looked to tackle a very tough world issue and by being incredibly brave has generated this awesome social web victory via youtube. However, Her Majesty Queen Raina of Jordan, despite having initially built up a tremendous amount of “social capital” with the human web, she too has lost momentum and along with it possibly opportunity to continue to build her quest to the next level. Having said that, I suspect we haven’t heard that last from the Queen on this issue of equality.

What many of the delegates at the #ALI conference will likely communicate on the conference wiki in a few weeks is that beyond the technology. The real work is done on issues like cultural differences and understanding, commitment and sustainability. These are the factors the must be successfully navigated in order to build lasting results.

As brand new twitter user @doctornaud said in their second ever tweet which was directed to me in response to my tweet about the fact that our governments are so far behind. “@fusedlogic I totally agree but we need to start somewhere.” Exactly right doc, exactly right.

When asking the average private citizen about whether they feel their government is transparent, chances are you’ll likely get sneers, chuckles accompanied by looks that communicate – “are you kidding me?” Well, ladies and gentlemen there are definitely elements within government that really do want increased transparency and more open communication. They’re excited to share the new knowledge they’ve just learned and would like to implement social media solutions to accomplish that goal. That to me is highly cool and it needs to be supported.

ChangeCamp Edmonton

Those of you who consider yourself a part of this group are not out in the cold. Consider joining us at ChangeCamp Edmonton. I guarantee this journey will collectively test our will, patience, creativity and bravery. Further, I believe it will be incredibly fun and rewarding as well.

Chances are that many are about to learn what I perceive to be the most important thing about social media, beyond the technology, social media takes serious dedication and a long-term commitment coupled with brave and meaningful human interaction in order to be really successful.

Walter Schwabe

guy-kawasaki-interview-pt-3

Click on the MP3 above to hear the third part of Walter’s interview of Guy Kawasaki.

Who do you think is probably one of the sharpest minds in the social web environment today?

“Probably Chris Brogan is one of them. The usual cast of characters like Dave Weiner, [Robert] Scoble, Mike Arrington, those people.”

Scoble has a large audience going back to when he was at Microsoft, so is it really that Scoble’s got that sharp of a mind or is it just that he’s got an audience?

“The two are not separable. I don’t think stupid people have large audiences, although you can’t make that case about some TV shows.”

“You’ll find that smart people have large audiences and large audiences find smart people.”

Walter: “He’s leveraging a multitude of technologies simultaneously to get content out the door, video being a large portion of what he does. We all know that. There’s sometimes a tendency for example to get into just reporter mode, if you will, and just kind of report on stuff that’s happening, as opposed to free thinking and leading the way on an innovation basis.”

Do you think he’s really being innovative in the stuff he’s doing?

“I think so. He’s definitely at the leading edge of social media stuff.”

What do you think of FriendFeed?

“We have Frienderati.alltop for the 50 or 100 most interesting people on FriendFeed. I am almost solely on Twitter. I have a FriendFeed account that all it does is aggregate my Tweets. I never go to FriendFeed in the sense that you mean. I never use FriendFeed. I’m just there. I grabbed my name on purpose in advance.”

“I hate to admit this, and it may be dangerous to admit this, but I primarily use these things for real business use of making Alltop better. Whereas I’m not trying to keep in touch with my friends. I’m not trying to get friends. I’m not trying to meet people and date people and all that other crap. It is a very very strict use for me.”

“I use Twitter, and therefore the FriendFeed aggregation of my Tweets, as a weapon for Alltop. Now to be an effective weapon I cannot simply promote Alltop because then it would just be seen as the Alltop channel, how interesting would that be?”

“So I have to put in a lot of things that are interesting in my Twitter feed about stuff that has nothing to do with Alltop: interesting sites that I’ve found, interesting tools that I’ve found, interesting pictures that I’ve seen, etc.”

“So there’s a lot of human nature stuff in my feed but all of this is because I use Twitter as a weapon, and that is probably not a popular thing to say. It’s probably even a dangerous thing to admit but that’s the truth. I am an anti-social social media person.”

Walter: “You’ve stayed exactly on that type of course. I see one of two types of Tweets from you, generally. One, it’s about something new that happened on Alltop or two, it’s some sort of unusual tidbit of information like someone saw Jesus in a piece of toast yesterday. I would have to give you the award for the most unusual bits of information on Twitter; the most unreal stuff.”

Guy: “That is completely on purpose, I hope you understand that some of that is automated. I take the stuff from Truemors and stick it into my feed using Twitterfeed. So that is on purpose but then I also… I spend a few, I don’t know about hours, but I spend a significant time every day looking for interesting websites and interesting things that I can Tweet about so that people want to follow me. It’s very very conscious. It’s not accidental. I do this so I can make Twitter a useful weapon for me.”

Walter: “One of the things that I’ve been doing, just as my own internal case study is I’ve been measuring my own results in a sense. So what I will do is, for example, I might be slightly negative with certain things about certain people or something, whether I get a response or what kind of response I get back. Then I might be overly happy and positive, so really kind of just simple things like that.”

Have you found there’s a type or bit of information or Tweet that gets you more response or more follows than others?

“I’m not that scientific. I don’t have the time to be that scientific. So basically if I find an interesting story about, like last night I found a very interesting website where it’s a web page and it tells you what time it is where you are, based on your computer and location. Then you can set an alarm and at 6 a.m. this alarm went off in my house telling me that it’s 6 a.m.”

Guy said he’s had problems at hotels where he hasn’t received wake-up calls or there have been issues with the clock radio and every one is different. Those are problems you don’t need at midnight.

“This is a web page that just sets the time and your computer starts chiming at that hour. This ain’t exactly… paradigm shifting, Nobel Prize winning technology, but it’s very useful for a traveller. So I Tweet that.”

“Now 17,000 people could have read that and a handful said this is really cool and useful. So now I just want to keep building credibility that when you read my Tweet or when you follow me, it’s not just Alltop. It’s also interesting stuff like this online alarm clock that is really useful when you travel.”

“Every day somebody sends a message to me that ‘I am no longer following you because you promote Alltop too much in your Tweets.’”

Walter: “I was one of those guys at one point, Guy. I was one of those guys at one point

Walter said he was one of those people and got frustrated with Guy’s Tweets and stopped following him. He blogged about it and Guy responded. Walter and Guy began to have a conversation.

Walter: “I started to recognize ‘okay, there must something else on the go here.’ And so you very quickly restored a positive feeling with respect to what you were doing. I was literally one of those guys at one point.”

Guy: “I think my model is sort of like NPR [National Public Radio] or public television. You know that the content is really good at NPR and public television, but every once in a while they have these donate-a-thons.”

Guy: “I want to have good enough content, interesting websites, interesting pictures, interesting things, whatever, so that you tolerate the advertising for Alltop. That’s the model, and if you can’t stand the advertising and if you can’t stand the fundraising at the public television station, you don’t watch it.”

Guy: “Life goes on. On the other hand, if you do value or humor or entertainment out of my other Tweets, then you tolerate my Alltop Tweets. If one person dropped me a day in 17,000 days I would have no followers.”

In light of baby boomers exiting the workforce in the next several years, how do you thing those organizations that resist change are going to fare versus those that really embrace change and are jumping into social media with both feet?

“This is a question that gets asked every 10 years for the last 200 years. Right? So, the people who don’t embrace change die. That’s why when’s the last time you used an NCR cash register or the last time you used a Data General computer? That’s the way it is.”

“This is not to say everybody has to embrace every thing but certainly if you embrace nothing you will die. …Even the most recalcitrant person who doesn’t want to adopt social media has to realize that to adopt nothing… maybe those people are still on rotary dial phone. Maybe they’re still on telegraph. That’s just the way it is.”

Do you think social media could be an effective HR tool to reduce attrition?

“I guess, conceptually, yes, but compared to what? Having clear goals set with clear functions and clear reporting and well managed? I would say if you do those things you don’t need Twitter and if you don’t have those things, even with Twitter, you’re going to have turnover. So social media is not going to fix everything.”

With the younger segments of the workforce, already labeled as transient, do you think social media can help them stay engaged?

“I think it’d play a role, however, it’s a small role. You’d do much better if you had clearly defined jobs with good supervision, interesting challenges and fair compensation. If you do that, you don’t need social media.”

“If you don’t do that, social media isn’t going to keep someone who doesn’t have a good boss, isn’t well compensated and has a crappy job.”

What about communication, in general, in an organization?

“That’s like saying 20 years ago, if you said do you think organizations with internal email systems will be able to retain people better? Well, yeah, I guess internal email and messaging will help, but the fact is, if you’re an organization that doesn’t communicate, slapping email isn’t going to fix the problem.”

What’s your personal mantra?

“Empower people.”

If you had to explain social media to an un-savvy audience, how would explain social media to them?

“It enables you to have conversations with anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

Feedback?

And that was it. It’s not often you get a chance to interview someone like Guy Kawasaki for such a long time. I’m sure I can speak for Walter in saying that we appreciate the time Guy spent talking to Walter. Long interviews aren’t always so interesting but I have to admit that after I listened to this one for the first time, it really didn’t feel like almost one hour.

Let us know what you thought of what Guy had to say and about how he uses Twitter.

Do you agree or disagree with what he has to say? Do you follow @guykawasaki?

Coming soon

We have an interview with Seth Godin that we’ll be putting up here soon. Keep checking back for that or sign up for our RSS feed.

And if you have any other questions or comments, you can always pass them along to me.

Alain Saffel alain@fusedlogic.com

mastermaq @fusedlogic Check it out, you were one of the top 10 referrers to Techvibes last month! http://bit.ly/153SH 28 minutes ago from web

Alain Saffel (@alainsaffel) has been doing such a great job keeping up with our content, so I can focus more on growing fusedlogic within our industry of social media, make sure to give him a shout out when you can.

By the way, I appreciate you supporting the change in fusedlogic voice on our blog, I will commit to blogging more, we’ve just been really busy negotiating on a new office space, (still pending) and many other deals that will grow our company considerably once they’re in place and of course we continue to work hard on current client projects, followed up by having a tea party with my wife, daughter and special guest “Barbie” and I’m actually exhausted at the end of a 12- 14 hr day.

Having said that, this cool bit of information has perked me right up this morning. Thanks Mack and thanks to all the cool guys at techvibes.com for posting that information, you guys do great work.

One final thought: besides a few direct emails and DM’s on twitter, we’d sure appreciate some feedback and comments on the Guy Kawasaki interview pieces. Even if you hate it, please let us know (especially if you hate it). We’re always working hard to be the best we can, in part, your feed back drives that innovation and polish. Thanks in advance for your time and effort on that.

By the way, the Seth Godin interviews are next…

Walter Schwabe

We were in NAIT’s new Nexen room that had two very large screens. They might give Imax a run for the money. SomethingTV was there chronicling the event and there were so many cameras there you’d think that it was a press conference.

Alberta government successfully implementing Web 2.0 & social media strategy

Our mystery guest was Troy Wason (@imparo on Twitter) and Troy gave us a great presentation about mypcmla.ca. Troy is the Senior Communications Officer – Social Media, for Government Caucus Communications.

That’s quite a mouthful, but boiling it down, Troy is helping the Alberta government with web 2.0. Yes, our government is successfully moving forward in engaging the public with modern new communications tools. That’s a good thing.

He said that there are some people who knock what he’s doing, but people would knock the party in power no matter what they did anyway. Regardless of your party affiliation, don’t you think that having your government open up a two-way dialogue online is a good thing? How can it be bad? As long as it’s a two-way dialogue, that’s a good start.

The site has only recently been rolled out and you should be seeing it change in the future. It’s worth checking out. If there’s something you’d like to see on the site, let them know.

Social media conversation at Brewster’s pub

@ivansf and @yuiIkari

We reserved a couple of large tables at Brewster’s pub in Oliver Square for a little socializing afterwards. At least half the people showed up there and we had a good time. Keeping on the theme of social media we had a good time talking about social media. I think it ended up being a popular choice, partly due to the 32 oz Schooner beers being on special.

Cameras were another popular topic, particularly Bruce Clarke’s new Canon 5D Mk II. I’m partial to Canon as well, having a Canon 30D on hand for the evening.

All in all it everyone seemed to have a really good time and it was nice to put faces to some of the names of people we might already be following on social media such as Twitter.

Next Social Web Meetup

Walter Schwabe of fusedlogic

Local realtor Jerry Aulenbach (@zoomjer on Twitter) sponsored the evening with refreshments. Thanks Jerry!

Our next Social Web Meetup is March 2 and will again be held at NAIT. Make sure you sign up on the site and RSVP whether or not you’ll be attending. Hope to see you there!

Alain Saffel

guy-kawasaki-interview-pt-2

Click on the MP3 above to hear the second part of Walter’s interview of Guy Kawasaki.

What are the top three ways you leverage social web for your business?

“I would make the very bold claim that I get more value out of Twitter than anybody in the world, because Alltop has largely been built upon the shoulders of Twitter in the sense that the Twitter community provides me with ideas for topics and not only that, they also provide me with the best feeds for those topics.”

Guy said his Twitter followers may suggest a topic like ADHD. They may have a child with the condition, are doctors familiar with it or family counselor and already know the best feeds for the topic.

“Not only do they suggest a topic then they send me the feeds and I’m in business. I don’t know how I would have done that without Twitter. I don’t know how I would have reached them. I don’t know how they would have reached me.”

The old way of building Alltop would have been to have created a community interested in dissemination of information and once the community is in place, tap them for more information and help.

“The new way is you just dive into the middle of Twitter and you form no community around yourself in particular to start. You dive in the middle and you get these sporadic sort of gems of and nuggets of information that come to you from the community as a whole; not your community.”

Several days before the interview, Guy mentioned he’d started a Facebook group for Alltop, which he did as an afterthought.

“Before, that would be the first thing you would try to do because you need to get this community to form this community to help you. I didn’t need to do that. I already had this very loosely held Twitter community that is very diverse, all over the world, but I could not have formed a community around Alltop of the magnitude of the overall Twitter community.”

At the time of the interview, Guy had 17,000 followers on Twitter, which has ballooned to more than 55,000 followers now.

“Odds are for every topic that I could possibly come up with, there are five people who are experts in that topic.”

How would a large organization (eg 5,000 people) follow your lead on Twitter?

“I think it would be impossible. (laughs) That’s being facetious but let me tell you why I think it would be very hard. Because in a 5,000 person organization that… with a legal department and a general counsel and outside counsel, they would want to read each Tweet before you send it.”

“They don’t want you divulging anything that’s confidential, that might affect the stock price, that should have been filed with the SEC before you said it. It’s the same reason why I can’t name an interesting blog of a publicly held CEO.”

“Twitter is not a company presence on a social media network. It is one person typing something in 140 characters.”

“Probably the best Twitterer at a 5,000 person organization is a summer intern. How palatable is it to tell a 5,000 person organization ‘rest your reputation on Twitter on a summer intern that you’re paying 15 bucks an hour to who is going to be gone in 60 days’?”

“The way to be successful on Twitter is to establish yourself as an interesting person.”

Guy suggested having a focus, for example baseball. If you’re an expert, you could eventually develop a following of baseball fanatics.

“You always have to ask yourself this question: in the infinite conversations going on in Twitter or any social medium, how do I stand out and be interesting? Some people choose to do this by being assholes and flame the most. So you may get a few followers for that, but I don’t think that’s optimal.”

“The best way is to be seen as a content expert in a niche, whatever that niche is.”

Do you think that large organizations or industry have managed to figure out social media in general?

“No, not at all. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that most small start-up organizations have figured it out either. We’re at the stage where Alexander Graham Bell is calling the guy in the other room right now.”

“As a first step I think companies on their websites should open up forums and let people who are interested in the company communicate with the company and with each other. But how many companies even have the balls to do that?”

How would you help an organization to accept scrutiny online, react effectively to it and help the customer?

“First, it would take a lot of money. (laughs) It’s all about giving up control and stop being paranoid.”

Using a made-up example of a product with short battery life, Guy suggested that it would be better to be open about a product’s shortcomings and that the company is working on it rather than attempting to hide the problem.

Guy had some problems with his iPhone where it would drop calls. He gave up trying to solve the problem with AT&T and searched “3G iphone dropped calls.” He found in the Apple support forum that around 500 people were having that same problem. The solution was to go from 3G to Edge, or 2G.

“This in itself is rather amazing. I just bought a 3G phone and I’ve been told the way to really make it work for phone calls is go to 2G where 3G is spotty. Holy cow. That’s like you go to Toyota, you buy a Prius and they tell you ‘well, to fix that problem you should really disconnect the battery and run on gas.’”

“So there’s a forum and there’s this thread and it’s probably got 500 messages in it by now. Do you think most people in the world have heard this? Do you think it’s stopped the sale of iPhones? Do you think it’s hurt Apple really?”

“Do you think that Apple should fix this problem? Absolutely. You could make the case that Apple now knows the severity of the problem and they cannot deny it. They have to fix it.”

“It’s better that Apple has this open forum and they have seen that 500 people are already pissed off about this and they have to fix it.”

“Even in the worst case, at least I know now that if this occurs with me with my phone I know all I have to do is switch from 3G to 2G and the problem will go away. And then when I’m back in an area with good 3G I just turn 3G back on.”

“That’s a lot better than wondering is it me? Is it AT&T? Is it AT&T’s coverage? Is it something is wrong with my iPhone? What’s wrong here?”

“A great example of social media.”

I would have been astounded if the AT&T operator would have told me the same solution, Guy added.

“The first thing they would have said is ‘are you sure you have the current software installed?’ And the second thing they would have said is ‘we show no outages where you are.’ And the third thing is ‘it’s probably your phone is faulty. You should go back to the Apple store where you bought it.’”

What are some of the other barriers you see that organizations are bumping up against when they contemplate a social media strategy?

“Besides the legal, or the perceived legal risk, is that it’s very difficult to quantify the return. If you allocate a certain budget to social media. Let’s say you get past the legal department, which is a big if, but let’s just say you do.”

“So now you’re past the legal department and you’ve allocated this budget, how do you quote unquote prove that this was worthwhile doing, and I don’t know how you do it.”

“How do you quantify the impact of a social media strategy? Wow. It’s hard enough to quantify click throughs and click actions and TV buys and media buys. I don’t know how you would quantify social media. It’s something you just have to believe it to see it.”

Walter talked about some of the difficulties in being able to quantify the return on investment in social media strategy.

Walter: “Maybe then it’s something more vague. Maybe it’s something like just measuring the amount of sort of interest in a brand or a brand’s products or services after, for example, relationships and rapport have been built up. Because one of the things, I think, obviously somebody like yourself on Twitter who has thousands and thousands of followers is doing is essentially building rapport.”

Walter: “And that is having an effect on your business. By extension, these people who you have some level of rapport with are supplying you with, as you said earlier, ideas and feeds for Alltop. So, in a way you can measure some level of response in terms of success there.”

Guy: “Yes, but I am a unique situation, right? I can measure this because I have a real tangible result. People send me a feed or send me a topic idea. What if you’re Frigidaire refrigerators? What are they going to send you that’s tangible? I don’t know. What if you’re Proctor & Gamble and you’re selling a new kind of baking powder? I have no idea how you would quantify the fact that you have a big social media presence.”

Walter: “I think in the early adopter community online with respect to social media, that has got to be probably the single most, toughest, and probably biggest ongoing question that people are trying to put their own spin on right now.”

Guy: “On the other hand, it’s not very expensive what we’ve just advocated. It’s not like we’re saying spend $20 million to do a Super Bowl commercial.”

Walter: “That’s very true. The cost of implementation is considerably lower.”

Part 3 of the interview

We’ll publish the rest of Guy Kawasaki’s interview next week with the last portion of the audio as well. In this last part Guy will talk about who he thinks are some of the sharpest minds in social media today, how he uses Twitter and how organizations communicate.

Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com

]]> http://www.fusedlogic.com/guy-kawasaki-interview-part-2-895/feed/ 0 http://www.fusedlogic.com/840-840/ http://www.fusedlogic.com/840-840/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:32:44 +0000 ASaffel http://www.fusedlogic.com/?p=840 If you’ve been around computers, particularly the Mac, for any length of time, you probably know who Guy Kawasaki is.

When I sat down to write about Guy, I realized I just didn’t know that much about him; time to do a little research about Guy Kawasaki. The one thing I did know about him was that he was an “evangelist” at Apple; probably one of the first company evangelists out there.

I’m not going to bore you with typical “about” details you can find on his website. Guy, as you know, worked for Apple to evangelize the Macintosh computer. He was there for a few years and helped start up some software companies and ended up back at Apple.

Upon leaving Apple once more, he started up Garage which went through a few incarnations providing services to venture capitalists. He recently sold one venture, Truemors, and is doing quite well with his latest venture, Alltop.

Alltop.com is billed as an online magazine rack that pulls in RSS feeds from blogs and other websites on almost any topic you can think of.

He’s no stranger to controversy, and his latest involves his site Alltop.com, something Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch calls a “big pile of nothing.” For a big pile of nothing, Alltop is doing pretty well, with an Alexa ranking of 88,348. Not too bad for a site that’s been around for less than a year.

Of course not all the comments on Tech Crunch are negative. One commenter pointed readers to a quote from Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, with the quote: “Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.”

Guy Kawasaki: the interview

guy-kawasaki-interview-pt-1

Click the above link for the MP3 of the interview.

Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic CEO, got on the phone with Guy Kawasaki for a long chat ranging from his latest ventures to social media and how he uses Twitter.

We’ll give you a synopsis of the interview in print and cover the highlights, but you’ll want to download the MP3s for the full conversation. You won’t be disappointed.

truemors.com, how long did you have it? And what was the inspiration for it originally?

Guy had truemors.com for a little more than a year.

“We truly wanted to democratize information.” Instead of wealthy people and religious leaders having had the power to publish in the past (through scribes, printing presses and then desktop publishing), it’s now in the hands of everyone to post anything, spread information, or disinformation.

Truemors is good for people who might like to set up a blog but don’t have the time or capability to do it, but would like to post information.

Sale of truemors

A few weeks before the interview, Guy sold truemors to NowPublic.com and had breakfast with Leonard Brody, owner of NowPublic, a site where people collect and broadcast news.

“Rather than having several hundred reporters, you have tens of thousands of reporters,” Kawasaki said about NowPublic.

I suppose you could call that crowdsourcing?

“Yes, Twitter might be an extreme example of that.”

“I think today, for most events, the first place you would hear about it is Twitter. Even if there are people who are tipsters, who are professional tipsters, and they listen on their scanners to police, and emergency and fire broadcasts right and then they call up the San Jose Mercury and they say I just heard there was an armed robbery at the Ikea [for example] in Palo Alto.”

Guy said newspapers are the next day, online might be a few hours, but someone could be in that Ikea and be on their cell phone immediately on Twitter talking about that armed robbery 30 seconds later.

Walter talked about a similar situation he went through when his wife and daughter were with family visiting Disneyland in the fall and there was a fairly major earthquake in California. He first heard about the earthquake on Twitter and combined listening to CNN with Twitter to try to find out how bad the damage was. The advantage was with Twitter in that he could talk to people who were actually going through it.

About Alltop.com: how is it different than truemors.com?

Guy said he got the idea for Alltop from Popurls.com that had been aggregating the RSS feed from Truemors.

“PopURLs takes about the top 15 or 20 news sites and puts all their feeds together on one page so that you could see the all the news happening from various feeds in one place rather than having to go to 15 individual websites.”

“We noticed that PopURLs was sending us as much traffic as Google. So I got in touch with PopURLs and I said just ‘what’s the story here? How does this work? How can you send us so much traffic?’”

“I got to be friends with him and I said well ‘you’re covering tech and business do you have any intention of covering things like celebrities, fashion, wine, food, cancer, ADHD, autism, sports,’ going down the line, and he said ‘no, I’m just going to stick with tech and business.’”

“So I said ‘alright, so if you’re not going to do it, I’m going to aggregate the news in all those topics’ and so that’s how we started Alltop.”

What’s happening on Alltop and how big will it get?

Guy said they’re adding three to five topics per week and will have a big software change coming up that will allow them to add three to five topics per day.

Initially the topics started out quite broad, like sports.alltop.com but they soon found they needed more specific topics like baseball, cricket, hockey, etc. This will progress to things like newyorkyankees.alltop.com because there are large number of blogs specifically about them.

“It is kind of endless. Someday we’ll be as big as Google maybe.”

Alltop relies on qualities feeds of information.

“I can’t think of a topic where you can’t find 15 or 20 feeds about it. You could take the most esoteric disease that only 5,000 people in the world have and you’ll find 20 feeds or 20 blogs about it.”

Guy hints at how Alltop might change in the future

“At that point we have a different issue. We have a user interface issue because right now you can come to our home page and it’s an alphabetic index. But what happens when we have a thousand topics. You don’t want to be scrolling through all that, so the next version of our homepage you’ll be able to look at things a la index, which is what it is now, or categorized. For example, sports versus arts.”

The third option he’s looking at is a search feature where you’d type in something like “baseball” and you’d see all the different baseball-related categories.

Criticism of Alltop and Guy Kawasaki

Walter recounted some of the criticism of Alltop and Kawasaki that the site is not breaking new technological ground and it’s the same as POPurls.

“In a sense they are correct. This isn’t revolutionary, patent-pending new technology. Anybody can do what we’ve done. All you need to do is set up a little program to aggregate feeds. So there is no proving them wrong in the sense that, you know, it is revolutionary, you are wrong by not calling it not revolutionary.”

“Where we can prove them wrong is they think that it’s not a big deal. I think it is a big deal.”

Guy Kawasaki gives it to Tech Crunch with both barrels

“Now, to be honest, whenever a story breaks in Tech Crunch or in some place like that. No matter what you do, let’s take a far-fetched example. Let’s say that somehow I invent a new kind of battery that will charge in five minutes and will run a Macintosh laptop for 25 hours with absolutely no impact on the environment that can be made for $5 each… and by the way it only ways two ounces.”

“Let’s just say I did that. The comments in Tech Crunch would be ‘I thought of this five years ago. How hard could this be? I could have done this but I didn’t think it was worth doing. The only reason why Guy is in Tech Crunch is because he’s Guy; it’s not because this is revolutionary.’ And so that’s the nature of Tech Crunch.”

“It’s a bunch of angry little people living at home with their mothers who have never even French-kissed. Nothing you could do would impress the Tech Crunch crowd because, according to them, everything is easy, they’ve already done it, they thought of it ten years ago and it’s no big deal.”

“So the bottom line with that is that you just have to ignore those comments.”

“If there were a Tech Crunch the day that Google was announced, people would have said ‘there’s already ten search engines, I thought of doing a search engine by counting the number of links to a site and prioritizing results that way, there is no business model for this and the only reason why it’s in Tech Crunch is because it’s coming out of Stanford.’ Right? That’s what they would have said about Google.’”

“The bottom line lesson is: we need to ignore the bozos in the world.”

Part 2 of Guy Kawasaki interview

In the next installment of our interview with Guy Kawasaki you’ll hear Guy talk about Twitter and how he leverages it, blogging CEOs, who should be Twittering at your company and how you can be successful on Twitter.

Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com

I’ve done these kinds of long interviews before when I worked as a journalist, and normally the majority is never used in an article.

Considering this is site is far different than a newspaper, it brings up some possibilities. Should I:

1. Put up the audio & a transcript
2. Put up the audio & an article
3. Put up audio, article & transcript
4. Transcript & article only
5. Article only
6. Transcript only
7. Audio only

What would you prefer? I think it’s a really interesting bit of audio. Is it really worth putting up a transcript? It’s a heck of a lot of work, not that this is the issue, but if nobody would read it, what’s the point?

Given my journalistic background, of course I have a preference for articles. They’re more compact and get to the point.

So, I’m in the middle of editing the article and listening to the audio to see what hidden gems there may be in that Guy Kawasaki interview. It’s quite an interesting conversation that Walter and Guy are having.

Let me know what you’d prefer.

Alain Saffel

No doubt this recession will cause a shakeout of so-called social media experts and we’ll be left with a core group of people who are skilled in the field and committed to it for the long term. That’s always the problem when you have a field with low barriers to entry: a computer, internet connection and a business card.

Some people have said to “fake it ‘til you make it” but we’re not fond of that advice. If we are going to give someone advice on social media strategy, it’s because we know it’s the right advice for them at that time. Our team works hard to stay on top of social media trends and we do extensive research, for our clients and for our company. This runs counter to the “fake it” crowd.

What to look for in a social media strategist

In one year there will likely be many fewer social media experts if the recession has anything to do with it, so how do you sort out the wheat from the chaff, or to put it another way, those who are making it from those who are faking it?

Track record – how much experience do they have with social media? Are they actually using social media effectively? Are they walking the walk?

Who are their clients – and how long have those clients been with them? It’s probably a good sign if they’ve got several longer term clients, but they may do a lot of project work too.

What have their successes been – it’s not always possible to boil successes down into hard numbers. It’s nice when you can, but sometimes success is nebulous. Successfully getting a company into the social media space and using it regularly might be a spectacular success though there are no numbers associated with it. It’s even better when you can show hard numbers. Ultimately it’s about successfully engaging their audience or community.

Social media campaigns, like regular marketing campaigns, do fail. But why do they fail? A good part of it is because many companies don’t understand web 2.0 and social media. They want to use old-style push marketing in social media and it just doesn’t resonate with the web community.

Companies fail to see that they really are part of a community and the most important aspect of the community is conversation and listening. They just see the web as another marketing vehicle with more customers.

It requires a cultural and attitudinal shift to really succeed in web 2.0. That doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed at all without it, but if you want to be the best, you have to change cultures and attitudes.

As the recession shakes out the makers from the fakers, one thing is clear, fusedlogic will still be making it in social media one year from now and for years to come.

With a smaller group and a few new faces to the group, we engaged in a discussion about the social media people are using, the tools they use to augment their social media experience and some of the issues surrounding social media. The discussion this time was led by Mastermaq.

Of course Twitter was the main topic of discussion, as it usually is. Everyone at the Social Web Meetup was on Twitter. Normally I’d be tweeting about the discussion, but because it was such an active discussion, I wanted to make sure I caught all of it. Do you prefer to actively tweet what you’re hearing or to listen, reflect and respond or tweet?

Peoplebrowsr was recommended as a good tool to be able to track multiple Twitter streams.

How do you use Facebook?

I thought one of the more interesting discussions was about Facebook and how people use it. Some people have a real issue with having an open profile, with worries of identity theft or at the very least doing some data mining. Having pictures of relatives, particularly children, was an issue with one of the meeting attendees. Do you keep your profile open and add everyone?

My profile is limited to friends and family, but I do have some business contacts on there. One of the meeting’s more active Facebook users said he had thousands of friends on there!

Some of the other social media tools we talked about: LinkedIn, ping.fm and friendfeed. Randy Troppmann from runningmap.com was there and talked a bit more about his site.

Free versus paid social media tools: how much would you pay?

One question I brought up was: At what dollar amount are you willing to go beyond the free account and into a paid account?

Most people said it really depends. I was thinking of my recent purchase of a pro account on Flickr, which is $25. One other person said $25 as well. Would you be willing to pay $25 per year for Twitter? I’d be willing to pay more, but I know a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to pay anything.

It’s actually quite an important question because the majority of social media tools out there are free and many people stick to the free ones. As the economic downturn continues, more and more companies are likely to ask themselves that same question about how much the market will bear in terms of subscription fees or ads. Their will likely depend on finding that balance.

Our next Social Web Meetup is February 2 at NAIT. There’s plenty of room, but make sure to join the group and RSVP. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are with social media. The point of the group is to share. I am a fairly experienced social media user and I learned a lot at this Meetup. I’m looking forward to the next one and hope to see you there too.

Alain Saffel

First of all, we would like to thank all fusedlogic’s clients for a great year. We appreciate your support and are looking forward to continuing our work with you in 2009.

2008 was a growth year for fusedlogic and we have a number of initiatives on the go for 2009. It might be doom and gloom out there in the economy, but we don’t seem to feel it in the social media strategy field.

I think that part of the reason for that is because people know this economic downturn, despite the non-stop negativity in the media, is just a blip on the radar. Smart companies know that they have to continue to keep on top of business trends and ground-shifts. Social media is not simply a trend and many organizations realize that they’re ill-equipped to deal with this new paradigm.

Some of the highlights of 2008 include launching the fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge. In support of Edmonton’s Food Bank we’re attempting to get one million photos of one million food bank donations in one year. Our deadline is the end of 2009 and we’re already off to a good start with many people adding photos to our Facebook food bank group and our Flickr food bank group.

If you haven’t added your photo yet, please get out there and make your donation. Food banks are in need of food year round, so let’s keep the spirit of giving throughout the year.

It was also a big year for Twitter in 2008, one of our favourite social media tools. It went from complete obscurity to prominence on networks like CNN. A quick search of Google News for “Twitter” reveals just how much it’s being talked about.

2009: an exciting year ahead

There are a number of new faces at fusedlogic and we will be adding more in 2009. Many of the team members at fusedlogic will be working out of our new office that we’re moving into in February. Stay tuned for a grand opening celebration soon to follow. Our office will be located in Sherwood Park, on the outskirts of Edmonton, Alberta.

In 2009 the fusedlogic team will continue to grow its social media intelligence capabilities. We’ve been working on a number of interesting projects that have helped expand our clients’ social media intelligence and knowledge, but have also helped our team’s knowledge base grow too.

FusedlogicTV will also make its appearance this year. At fusedlogic we’ve always had an affinity for video and we’re not slowing down. Expect to see more interviews, testimonials and fusedlogic social media presentations in the new year.

We’re positive about the new year and we hope that you are too. We’ll finish this post with a little wisdom that we hope will help guide you through the coming year.

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

William James

We are making progress towards that goal. Our Facebook food bank group has grown to 92 people. We have many new donation pictures on our Flickr food bank page too.

If you haven’t made a donation and taken a picture yet, please do so. It’s for a great cause. It can be as simple as getting someone to take a picture with your cell phone while you make a donation at a food bank box at the grocery store.

It’s not about the quantity you give. If you can give, that’s what counts. Canned and non-perishable food items really help out the food bank, as do cash donations. Your donations now will really help the food bank get through the next few months.

It must be a nerve wracking job for food bank workers to keep just ahead of the growing demand for their services. After checking out the food bank here in Edmonton, I was surprised just how large an operation it is. They send out more than 10,000 hampers per month!

We’re lucky in Alberta to be blessed with an abundance of resources and we thank everyone who takes the time to give, whether in goods, cash or time, to their favourite charities. It’s surprising the number of charities there are in this city that need help. I hear about them all the time when listening to local radio or reading the newspaper.

Let’s hope you and your family are not in need of the help of the many charities in Edmonton and that you’re able to help them out a little.

From everyone at fusedlogic, we wish all the best to you and your family and hope your holiday has been a great one so far.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I want to thank the folks from CPRS Edmonton from the bottom of my heart for not only inviting me to speak with them today but more importantly for supporting Edmonton’s Food Bank and the fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge in particular.

As many of you can tell from our blog and (even a bit of press, yeah baby!) or the section entitled “Food Bank” we’ve got something going on with Edmonton’s Food Bank.  As mentioned above it’s the fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge.

This really is exciting because outside of our daily client work we can focus on having some fun with our social pals, friends and acquaintances and explore our collective desire to give back.  Contrary to what others may think, I think it’s in our human nature to want to give.  This exercise will help prove my hypothesis.  1 million pictures of 1 million donations in 1 year.  WOW, talk about being able to measure results.  Regardless of where we end up (past our goal…) this will be a great learning experience for all concerned.  Human nature, social conversation and even the advantages and disadvantages of some of the technology…lot’s to observe and learn from.

Plus, for the gadget freaks we get to play with our digital cameras too.  Speaking of which I’ll ensure we get lot’s of photos of the donations made by the Edmonton’s PR society today and post them on our Facebook group

Oh and by the way, look out Calgary, Edmonton’s gunning for ya…I know that my pals in Calgary who are reading this right now are shakin in their space boots (it’s in their nature).  You better go take some pictures of your donation drives before we here in Edmonton get too much of a jump on you…and Flames fans this goes double for you.  Oilers fans will never stand for it…

Welcome to the new Battle of Alberta!

Walter Schwabe

Help us help food banks around the world. Post your picture of your food bank donation.

Edmonton has thrown down the gauntlet! fusedlogic has kicked-off the fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge.

The goal is 1 million pictures of 1 million food bank donations in 1 year. It’s a busy time of year for food banks and we met with Marjorie Bencz of Edmonton’s Food Bank to get started.

Christmas is such an important time for every food bank. I was surprised to learn that much of Edmonton’s Food Bank’s fundraising supports the food bank well into the new year. Cash and canned food donations are an important contribution.

Food bank needs don’t stop at Christmas. It seems obvious to say it, but people aren’t thinking about it much in the middle of the summer. At fusedlogic, we’re hoping that this joint effort with Edmonton’s Food Bank will get people thinking about helping people throughout the year.

Please join our groups on Facebook and Flickr. Take a picture of you, your family, your coworkers and your friends making a food bank donation. Our goal is to get one million pictures by the end of 2009, but with your help we think we can do it much sooner.

Walter was on SomethingTV yesterday talking about the food bank challenge.

Challenging other cities: Milwaukee. Anyone else?

The goal is to have one million pictures by the end of 2009.

“We” (Edmonton) believe that we can put up more pictures of individual donations to Edmonton’s Food Bank than Milwaukee can. Now certainly this challenge isn’t limited to Edmonton vs. Milwaukee, here in the Edmonton region, well over a million strong ourselves, we’re formidable people. We’ll take on anybody.

I’m sure Edmonton’s southern neighbour, Calgary, may be up to the challenge. Canada’s other major cities like Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Saskatoon and Winnipeg should be able to find a few people to add photos too. Sorry if we’ve missed your city, but you can join in as well!

Our press release on the food bank challenge went out this morning and the Edmonton Journal has already interviewed us. Now we’ll see if the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is also up to the challenge. I call upon Tannette Johnson Elie (despite being on holidays) to rise to the challenge and get the word out in Milwaukee about the fact that the great City of Milwaukee has been challenged, in a friendly Canadian manner of course.

Because this is almost entirely designed as a social media event, we anticipate that early on it will be the Edmonton tech community that will rise to the challenge. Organizations such as Techvibes may want to blog about it.

Anyone from Techvibes or TechCrunch want to take on the challenge? Alberta bloggers such as Ken Chapman, Dave Cournoyer, Mack Male, Chris LaBossiere, Brad Grier, Dean Owen and many others have also been a big help in talking about this and helping us promote such a great cause.

If you’re in a position to help, please do! No donation is too small. They are all important. Help set a great example for your family, friends and coworkers. We know it’s a busy time of year and it’s easy to forget that there are many who are much less fortunate than we are.

Thank you and Merry Christmas! : )

In case you missed it here’s the press release.

Randy described how he started Runningmap, a map site that allows you to plot your jogging routes. He delved into how the software worked and I think everyone was pretty impressed. I think a few people were surprised that he used Yahoo for his maps and not the seemingly ubiquitous Google.

Yahoo got nothing but praise from Randy for their approachability and willingness to work with him to make changes to their software, something that Google might not be so willing to do.

Looking at his software from a user perspective, I can see why people would like it. It allows you to easily draw up customized route maps and view the elevation and distances. I haven’t used the software (not being a jogger) but I plan to tinker with it. The social media element to the software is that you can share the routes and upload photos.

While I may not be a jogger, I don’t see why you couldn’t use this same software to plan walks, hikes, mountain climbing, cycling, automobile trips and more. Why limit it to jogging?

It sounds like there are some interesting plans afoot for this cool site. It is definitely worth checking out.

Smibs ringing the Doorbell

Peter Urban gave us a demo of his Doorbell software, explained what Smibs is all about and gave us all a copy of his “unbusiness plan.” Peter’s approach to everything seems a little unconventional which, when you’re trying to grow your business, can be a good thing.

It’s kind of a collaborative tool that is useful for keeping track of what you have to do every day. I like the idea of being able to keep track of projects in one spot. I’ve found it to be a bit of pain working on different projects simultaneously because everyone uses a different project management tool.

There’s a lot more to it, and I plan on exploring it. I’ve signed up and haven’t had a chance to really tinker with it. It’s in public beta, so check it out. I’m curious what you think of it, and I’m sure Peter would love to get your feedback too.

NAIT

I almost forgot to mention the great location for the Meetup. This time it was at NAIT’s HP Centre. It worked really nicely because it seems like it’s only a five minute drive for me. That’s not the only advantage. It was a good, central location, though the weather didn’t seem to be cooperating. Parking, my eternal frustration, was certainly not an issue at NAIT.

Not sure where the next Meetup is, but I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be nice to get out in January and try to avoid cabin fever.

Alain Saffel

You have to wonder if governments are paying attention to what’s happening in social media these days, and if they are, how seriously do they take it? Today, participating in social media is like sitting in the proverbial coffee shop. This is grassroots politics at its best.

“If you’re within the federal government or any provincial government without a social media plan and, despite that, are actively engaged in social media at the moment, you’re playing with fire in a room full of gun powder,” said Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic’s chief evolution officer.

That’s usually the way it is when you don’t have a plan. It’s one thing to be listening to the conversation, but it’s another thing to know how to engage with people in social media, especially if you’re in government.

It’s a good way to listen to what people are saying. Governments of all stripes have been accused of not listening to the public and they’ve got a great opportunity to do just that in social media.

What’s happening in the blogosphere?

It’s been interesting to hear all the differing perspectives on what’s happening with the Canadian political situation. NowPublic, the Vancouver-based citizen journalism site, had an interesting article with comment on the “black swan effect.” Hadn’t heard about that before

At the right leaning Small Dead Animals blog there’s been plenty of vitriol on both sides of the issue. If you’re interested in getting in a political debate/argument, then this is probably a good place to do it. There are a huge number of comments on the Stephane Dion video.

This popular Liberal blog, from Calgary as it happens, also has a great deal of debate about what’s been happening. Calgary’s not normally thought of as a location of any Liberals, or Alberta for that matter.

Canadian Parliament prorogued

The conversation has been pretty busy on Twitter too. If you do a search on Twitter for phrases like Dion, Harper, coalition or prorogue, you’ll find a lot of Tweets. It’s like political Nirvana right now. The fall has been great: Canadian election, U.S. election and now the Canadian crisis. What’s next?

The banter about Canadian politics is likely to slow down by the time the budget is read in Parliament in late January, but it ought to pick right up again. I’ll be curious to watch how the conversations change up to that time.

And who says Canadian politics is boring?

]]> http://www.fusedlogic.com/social-media-debating-canadian-politics-663/feed/ 0 http://www.fusedlogic.com/marketing-strategy-during-the-economic-downturn-660/ http://www.fusedlogic.com/marketing-strategy-during-the-economic-downturn-660/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:15:53 +0000 ASaffel http://www.fusedlogic.com/?p=660

Offline marketing cut during recession while online marketing increases

According to a survey done by Marketing Sherpa, it would seem that online marketing is going to jump during the economic downturn. Offline media such as print, direct mail, radio, television and events are going to be taking a big hit the study indicates.

Not surprisingly, online marketing such as social media marketing, email marketing are going to be seeing increases. For paid search on Google and Yahoo, the results are mixed, with some marketers cutting back and almost an equal percentage increasing that marketing tactic.

Online marketing vs. offline

But why would there be an increase in online marketing rather than offline forms of marketing? Well, one of the big advantages to online marketing is that through web analytics, it’s far easier to measure the results of your online efforts. It’s much tougher to measure the return on investment of a television, radio or other type of ad.

Online marketing is generally less expensive, although you could spend just as much if you really wanted to. One banner ad in an Edmonton daily newspaper could cost you thousands of dollars per day. Ouch! Take that same budget online, and you can do a lot with it.

That’s not to say that offline marketing methods don’t work. They do, but more and more, people are going online because it’s easy to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, get comparable (if not better) results and in the end, spend less. It does depend on your market though.

Social media strategy

It’s one thing to increase your social marketing efforts, but doing so without a social media strategy in place might not be the most effective thing to do. Like any marketing effort it really pays to set the groundwork and have a good plan.

As much as social media marketing is about conversations and engaging with your market, you need to know information about them. Do you know who your audiences are? Do you know what messages you’d like them to come away with? Do you know what forms of social media your market is most likely to use and what forms might be most effective for you?

This is the groundwork for your social media strategy. Once you’ve got this, then you can start looking at the most effective ways to engage with your market. Which would work for you? Twitter? Facebook? Blogging? A combination of these or maybe other social media?

The conversation

Knowing your audience and the messages you’d like them to take away doesn’t mean you can’t have a natural conversation. You just have those messages in the back of your mind about what you feel is important for your audience to know.

Even more important than that is to make sure you listen to your audience. The whole purpose of social media marketing is to engage with your audience. They have a lot of valuable things to tell you, so make sure you’re receptive to them.

Just using social media marketing with old-style push marketing won’t work. Push marketing is part of the reason traditional marketing is on the wane and online marketing is becoming more popular.

Your audience will begin to tune out if you’re only pushing out messages without listening. There’s still room for a certain amount of push marketing, but if that’s all you’re doing, you might be a good candidate to develop an effective social media strategy.

Marketing in a bad economy

Marketing is often the first expense to be cut when the economy turns sour. It is certainly an easy target, but that’s a risky strategy. Why not consider keeping your marketing budget at approximately the same level, but look for more effective marketing methods?

If your competitors are cutting their marketing budgets while you keep yours the same, it’s almost like water draining out of a lake. As the level decreases, islands become visible. Your company can be like that island: more visible.

Right now might be the perfect time for your company to take a serious look at its marketing plan and make sure those marketing dollars are being allocated to marketing methods that are most effective. There are many good ways to market online, and social media is one of them.

Is your company planning to change its marketing because of the economic downturn? If so, what kinds of changes are you making?

Alain Saffel

Can you really afford to chill when it comes to your online marketing & social media strategy?

I read yesterday that online shopping by Canadians hit $12.8 billion last year. That’s pretty impressive, but you have to look at the numbers that form part of the story to find the really interesting data.

One third of Canadians 16 and older made purchases online and even more interesting, Alberta led the country with 51 per cent of people making purchases online. Why that is, I’m not sure. Just over half the people from 25 to 34 in Canada made purchases online as well.

According to StatsCan more retailers are offering online shopping, which makes sense. What retailers should also know is that 43 per cent of Canadians have used the Internet to research their purchases, with 64 per cent saying they’ve gone to a “bricks and mortar” store to make their purchase.

How businesses can respond

What it means is that if you’re a business that doesn’t have a solid web presence, you may be missing out. The Internet is an incredible research tool, so make sure your company has the information people are looking for.

For retailers it’s important to have the basics down: solid website, good design, good search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads, but what else? That’s not going to guarantee online marketing success, whatever business you’re in.

A good social media strategy can help tie all your marketing together. Engaging with your market in other ways such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social media can help your business in many ways.

By listening to your clients and potential clients, no matter what type of business you’re in, you can gain valuable information to help serve them better. A good social media strategy will help you do that, and is a win-win for you and your client: you’re doing more business and your client is getting what they need and want.

A good social media strategy is important for online retailers, but also to those companies that are being researched online and contacted off line.

Alberta social media strategy

It’s remarkable that Albertans are leading Canada in terms of shopping online. It should be a wakeup call for those Alberta companies who are ignoring their online marketing.

I would really like to know more about why Alberta leads the country in online shopping. Could it be the booming economy here? Not sure. According to what I’ve been reading though, Alberta’s economy is still strong, possibly the strongest in North America. It’s still a good place to do business.

Online marketing will continue to be a growth industry. It might be a good idea to examine your online marketing efforts and social media strategy to make sure you’re part of the growing online research and shopping trend.

I read an article on CNN about the Dos and Don’ts of Social Networking. I thought I might critique the article and throw in a few more suggestions.

22 per cent of employers check social media sites

If you’re in job search mode, the article suggests that you don’t advertise that fact if you are already employed. That’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it? There must be a few people out there who didn’t think word would get back to their boss.

You can limit profile access to only those on your friends list in Facebook. Make sure you do that to keep prying eyes out, particularly if your friends like to post pictures of your weekend antics and tag you in them.

Another thing to consider is that some of your friends might not be such good friends. You know the old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer? If you think your updates on Twitter, Facebook or other social media are protected, well, they just might be. What’s to stop those select “friends” to look at your Tweets or status updates as an opportunity to send you to the unemployment line?

It’s not all negative. Apparently a quarter of those potential employers liked what they found and that information has convinced them to hire based on what they’ve found.

Update your profile regularly

Provided you have your profiles open for public view, this is good advice. Really, it’s good advice for anyone. If it’s out of date, people wonder how much you care about your presence online. You are your best public relations person, so treat it that way.

An important part of your personal social media strategy should involve keeping things up to date and keeping on top of social media trends.

Make sure your information is accurate, and don’t go badmouthing anyone. No, not even if they deserve it. I suppose there might be good reasons to do it, but think about how future employers might view that. You think a potential employer might not want to hire you because they think you might do the same to them?

Don’t be like many companies that establish a token presence and then forget about it. Pick a few social media sites you’ll do well.

If you are in job hunt mode, LinkedIn is like an online resume. It can also help to advertise your current employer, so it’s good for everyone.

Keep your friends list private

I thought this was one of the most interesting points of the article. And, it’s so obvious!
“Connecting to five people at Company XYZ after a day of vacation is a sure sign you are interviewing.”

I’ve opted to keep my friends lists open. Social media is an important part of my business and my personal social media strategy.

In the interests of openness, why not keep your list open but don’t add a pile of people from companies who may be interviewing you?

Cleaning up the dirt

If you’ve got a closed profile and protected updates, it might not be such a worry. On Google it might be tougher. I would advise against running your updates through any type of RSS feed like Friend Feed if you’re really worried. You could have a closed profile but effectively open it up that way.

If you have negative Google results, there’s probably not much you can do to eliminate them. What might work is to get your name out there as much as possible to drive negative results down as far as possible. Rely on employers to not be thorough and go 10 pages in when searching your name. Blog commenting works well for this.

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to eliminate past mistakes. The best public relations strategy is to deal with negative news preemptively and directly. If you volunteer a negative item that someone might just run across on their own, they might appreciate the honesty.

Thinking about it another way, do you really want to work for someone who would hold a minor indiscretion against you?

It’s always easier to have a successful personal social media strategy when you’ve minimized any problems or simply avoided them in the first place.

Social networking as a job search tool

If you’re already out of work, social networking sites can be powerful allies. I know from experience that sites like Twitter and Facebook can bring you job opportunities and support. It really depends on how big your network is.

Don’t just look at your social network as a job bank though. It is the kind of thing you only want to use when you have to. Don’t pester your network so much they begin avoiding you like an insurance salesman.

What message are you sending?

While this article and my suggestions are general advice on how to approach your personal social media strategy, it’s really an individual thing.

When I talk to companies about their public relations and Internet marketing, I have to tailor it to their unique attributes. That’s how you should treat your personal social media strategy.

You should ask yourself, what message are you sending? Ask those around you to have a look at your online presence. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know you and analyze everything.

Is it consistent with the message you’d like to send? Are your Google results acceptable? If not, take the time to start cleaning everything up.

Do I really need a personal social media strategy?

It seems rather mercenary to view your social networking in this way, but potential employers are, so you ought to as well. Just be prepared for the consequences if you’re posting pictures of your weekend escapades or Tweeting that you’re in job search mode.

Developing a basic personal social media strategy might be the best way to land that next job, business opportunity or simply to elevate your profile in your industry. You are always a good investment.

Alain Saffel

Broadcasting live from St. Albert!

Last night was the second Social Web Meetup. We were out in St. Albert, the guests of Inside and Out Naturally.

They’ve got a great facility out there. Unfortunately a few people had some difficulty finding the location due to a Google Maps marker error. With so many coming from Edmonton. where the grid system rules, the curves in the road were too much for some of us. I got lost too, but a phone call to Inside and Out put me on the right path.

The guys from somethingtv.net were there doing a live broadcast. It was interesting watching it. They interact with their chatroom but I’m not sure if they’re used to a live crowd. They were mostly talking about politics and the recent U.S. election, so that was good. Some of us are suffering from withdrawal!

I just checked and the video from the episode is up on the site. It streams nicely. It’s definitely worth watching. It was great to be there seeing it live and checking out what happens behind the scenes in one of these productions.

As usual, there was some great food and really interesting conversation about social media. Using social media is a lot of fun and I really like it when I can get out and meet the people I talk to online. My social media of choice is Twitter, but I’m also a fairly regular user of Facebook. LinkedIn is another good one, especially for business people.

Every attendee at the Meetup was even treated like an Oprah guest, receiving a free radio from Brittney of iNews880.

The next Social Web Meetup is scheduled for December 4. I will definitely be there, unless we have a blizzard. It may be time to get set up with some snow shoes and make sure there’s plenty of hot chocolate available at that meeting.

See you there!

Alain Saffel

]]> http://www.fusedlogic.com/social-web-meetup-2-in-st-albert-633/feed/ 0 http://www.fusedlogic.com/edmonton-tech-community-impresses-democamp-audience-598/ http://www.fusedlogic.com/edmonton-tech-community-impresses-democamp-audience-598/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:54:24 +0000 ASaffel http://www.fusedlogic.com/?p=598

Great turn-out for DemoCamp 4...

Edmonton’s fourth DemoCamp event happened last night at the University of Alberta and it was a great chance to see some of the visionaries in the Edmonton technology community.

Voting seemed to be the theme of the evening with Surveyor , an iPhone survey application, kicking off the show. We heard about Election Buddy, which is built for running small elections. The audience joked they should contact the U.S. government and see if they might be interested in both of these applications.

If you’re trying to manage multiple email accounts, Pure Inbox could be the application you’re looking for. Many people are interested in putting themselves in the history books, and we got a look at The History Books project by Aaron Jones, who came in from Regina. Apparently they don’t have anything like Edmonton’s DemoCamp.

Reg Cheramy demonstrated Edistorm, an interesting program for collaborative brainstorming. And then we got a chance to see the Flash projects Grant Skinner is working on for major companies all over the world.

What really impressed me was the diversity of ideas and the hard work people are putting in on some really interesting projects. So far I’ve attended two DemoCamps and have seen a lot of great ideas with definite commercial potential and some that are actually going ventures. I get the feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Edmonton tech community.

Estimates varied, but there were approximately 150 people attending the event last night. At the Windsor Pub afterwards I heard people say that Edmonton consistently has higher attendance at its DemoCamp and BarCamp events than other camps they’ve been to.

As much as I like the cool applications being demonstrated, I really enjoyed being able to sit and talk with the movers and shakers in the Edmonton tech community. Networking forms an important part of DemoCamp and I hope to see even more people at the next event. It’s fun to hear about the exciting projects the attendees are working on too.

When I moved to the city I wasn’t sure how big the Edmonton technology community was, or how vibrant it might be. From what I’ve seen so far, Edmonton has a very bright future ahead, and it’s going to be driven by its very vibrant tech community. Edmontonians are lucky to have a large group of talented visionaries in its midst that will be a major force in the city’s economy now and into the future. Great job!

Alain Saffel

In the spirit of sharing some business news during Small Business Week (and condensing posts because I’m so busy lately,) here’s some interesting new information for you.  Some of you may remember a video I shot earlier this year with Peter Urban of Smibs (featured below.)  At the time, SmibsNet (a collaboration and networking software for businesses) wasn’t ready for public beta.   That all changed last Tuesday with the launch of the public beta and Peter asked me while on Twitter the other day if I’d blog about it.  Peter provided me with a personal invite to sign-up for the beta and fusedlogic is now listed on the site.  This software is very cool and helps to solve the business development collaboration issue that many companies have.  I suggest that you consider signing up and trying it out.

Sidenote: Peter did agree to call me so I could asked him some specific questions as prep for a more in- depth blog post but if you know Peter, he’s hard working and a beta takes a lot of effort.  I’m sure he wasn’t going out of his way to ignore me.   Besides we bump into each other all the time at events and around the neighborhood.  Maybe he’ll bring his SmibsTV crew down the Web 2.0 meetup and present SmibsNet there on Nov 6th.   Below is the video interview with Peter some months ago on Whyte Ave in Edmonton.

Also, Peter if you’re reading this and I know you are, Smibs needs to be a Sherwood Park Chamber member right away…expect me to be relentless on this point.