The event itself was orchestrated by the American Chamber of Commerce Canada West, Edmonton Chapter.  Representing “AmCham Canada West” was Norman Leach, Executive Director, and the Edmonton Chapter’s new Managing Director Leslie MacDonald.  

 The luncheon was sponsored by PCL, represented by Doug Stollery, introduced Ambassador Jacobson. Carrying a folder with the Presidential Seal on it, took the podium and spoke about the importance of maintaining a strong relationship between our two countries.  Strengthening security at our border by increased use of the Nexus program, and of course, “a trip to Alberta wouldn’t be complete without discussing the Keystone XL Pipeline”, stated the Ambassador.  He spoke of the fact that US President Obama couldn’t approve the pipeline project without an approved route.  Seems the Republican Governor of Nebraska objected to the proposed route and the hearings held in that State obviously didn’t go well for TransCanada.  He estimated that should there be another application by TransCanada the soonest it would most likely be in a situation to be approved would September or October of this year, not before.  

I enjoyed the event, it was a great opportunity to network, and meet-up with old friends and colleagues.  Further, it accomplished the goal of announcing AmCham to the Edmonton business community.

I have no doubt that with Leslie McDonald at the helm of the Edmonton Chapter the next time Ambassador Jacobson comes back to Edmonton the room will need to be a lot larger to accommodate all the members and he may attend yet another Oilers victory over the Hawks as was the case last night.

Does your Edmonton business currently use social media?  We’d be happy to help you get started and develop a plan to properly implement social media.  Whether your Edmonton area business is a one person operation or has 5000 employees, we’ve created digital strategies for all types of businesses.

In the meantime, check out the cool Flowtown infographic called the Social Media Cheat Sheet.  The complete infographic is at this link: Social Media Marketing: An Easy Guide

This is true of any large event, the best ways to follow them online is by finding good curators of the information.

Good content curators are:

1. Proven Trustworthy
2. Knowledgable
3. Aware they ARE curating for an audience
4. Familiar with the individuals/companies/government involved

The Verge

This is a relatively new site, but created by many previous employers of several popular tech sites. Here’s their own description: 

The Verge is a technology-focused news publication founded in 2011 by Joshua Topolsky and Marty Moe in partnership with Vox Media and its CEO Jim Bankoff. The Verge’s mission is to offer breaking news coverage and in-depth reporting, product information, and community content via a unified, modern platform.

I recommend this site to anyone who is interested in consumer electronics/tech

TWiT Live/Leo Laporte

I had the privilege of visiting the TWiT studio over this holiday, they were prepping for CES even then. TWiT comes live from CES every year. If you want the ‘On The Floor’ experience, watch their live streams and podcasts this week, alway informative, entertaining and interesting to watch.

Robert Scoble (The Scobeilizer)

You can find Robert Scoble EVERYWHERE. Twitter, Google+, his website. The Scobileizer will be roaming the CES floor and talking to as many people as possible. He is great at sharing useful and interesting information, but not being TOO overwhelming.

Other useful CES links:

• CES Website
• Keynote Schedule
• Conference Program

Thats my list of curators, there are many others. Who are some of your favorite content curators?

Interestingly, this issue touches on a few points I think you’ll find interesting.

1.) Many get excited about the technology first.  This isn’t really a “twitter” issue, despite being the primary social technology platform used for communication in this case.  Evidence within the sentiment of this online discussion state it’s a “moral” issue for many.  ”Do you like drunk driving?  Do you want drunks on the road?  No, then don’t tweet locations.”  Based on retweet evidence within the #yegtraffic and #checkstop hashtags on Twitter, this is the majority sentiment, punctuated by Lindsey Robin.

The response is ghost accounts created simply to tweet #checkstop locations, and snub those who speak out against the practice.  As with different issues in the past, this inevitable pattern persists. 

2.) Another popular but minority sentiment stated, is that since it appears to be acceptable to broadcast photo-radar locations (which are provided in advance to print media by policing services) that it should be acceptable to broadcast checkstop locations.   As always, what you tweet reflects on who you are, and what you stand for.     

Social media etiquette

With respect to protecting your brand and business here’s a tip.  Always remember to provide recognition for someone else’s work if you’re going to reference it or try to benefit from it.  

For example, if we were going to create a video in the hopes of generating awareness for our brand.  Say in this case, a video about this checkstop discussion.  First, we wouldn’t want the message to appear as if we had really been the first ones to recognize a pattern of behaviour, because in reality, it was CTV.  The professional thing to do is to give credit, and reference those who did the original heavy-lifting. 

Credit here is due to CTV Edmonton and Sean Amato for first identifying the discussion and doing a segment on it. (Disclaimer: a segment that I was in)  Anyone who positions themselves as being ahead of the curve on this issue, and doesn’t give CTV recognition for doing the ground work is suspect at best.  Common courtesy and etiquette should always come first.  Not providing credit or recognition says something negative about your brand.  If you see this tactic being used, my recommendation is to stay away.  

Once again, my sincerest thanks to all of those too many to count who retweeted me on the weekend for thanking CTV Edmonton about their efforts to raise awareness of this issue.  I believe this entire issue serves as an important reminder to be responsible in our decisions, whether that’s when consuming alcohol, tweeting or conducting business.      

Your sacrifice will never be forgotten. 

In Flanders Fields

As you may or may not know, we are giving away four 15 minute productions to four non-profits. I thought it would be nice for you to come down to the studio to see what that entails first hand!

So come on down this Thursday (Sept 22) anytime after noon, and we’ll show you what it’s all about.

Where: fusedlogic Studio: 213-65 Chippewa Rd, Sherwood Park, AB

When: Thursday Sept 22nd, noon to 4:00pm

RSVP: evan@fusedlogic.com

Simple, you can add live streaming content to your website which will provide a unique content advantage for you at no upfront cost.

Also, if you’d like to create your own content on fusedlogicTV, we can help you with that too.  Just contact us: info[at]fusedlogic.com or 780-640-9339

If you want to embed the live stream simply copy and paste the code below into the HTML for a page or post for your site:

The first question I have is, are you invested in this process or are you absent?  You must invest, and below is a series of ways you’ll need to expend effort, and in some cases budget in order to have any possibility of driving new sales for your business via social media.

For us at fusedlogic, it’s a different story than those really big household brands I mentioned.  We’re not about consumer goods or point of sale items.  The sale of our social media related services primarily happens based on relationships, referrals, awareness too and great customer service.  If we mailed you a flyer stating that fusedlogic is your answer for social media strategies, would we get any business from you?  Maybe, but doubtful since we’re not business to consumer.  Having said that, our client Terry Paranych has done a show on fusedlogicTV and spoke about his “flyer program which nets him huge business results.  Terry understands the need for an integrated unique approach to marketing to consumers.  He understands the value of building relationships in numerous ways, added to things like direct flyer marketing (not really about relationships) is the use of social media – all about relationships and communication.

Social media allows for you to reach out directly to the fusedlogic team, to our clients, and to potentially millions of people in a meaningful way.

Here’s how properly increasing your sphere of influence can increase your sales regardless of what industry you’re in.

1.) Search Engine Optimization – your content if properly positioned will be found by new prospective clients, giving you a shot to start a sales discussion.

2.) Reputation Management – we may have met at a business luncheon, or other networking event, social media allows us to maintain our discussion inbetween face-to-face meetings.  Keeping in touch allows for acquaintances to turn into friends and advocates.  Big difference.  When the time is right, this fact alone will lead to business opportunity.  Chris Brogan’s book Trust Agents speaks in many ways about being that trusted source.  Good book, you should download it.

3.) Realtime Customer Service – rather than wait for hours on a phone line, many companies can improve customer service through options like Twitter.  A great customer service experience here and it’s passed on to multiple networks, screw it up and the same result is true.

4.) Targeting Trends – things happen in a flash in social media, and if you blink you could miss real opportunity.  Being timely and relevant is often critical.  Many people parachute in to Twitter once a day for 2 minutes to push out a tweet and then leave and wonder why their phone isn’t ringing off the hook.

5.) Not a Silver Bullet – sales comes from credibility, value, trust, awareness, rapport, relevancy, convenience and time investment among other things.  Especially, if you’re relatively unknown.  If you’re Google, well that’s different.  Using social media can provide you an opportunity to do all of this work more efficiently, as long as, you commit to it and have a plan.  Be patient!

6.) Content Creation – you know why Terry Paranych will continue to dominate in Real Estate awareness online in his markets?  Even more so since he became our live streaming video client?  Increased content creation relevant to his target audiences.  He’s literally out-gunning his competition.  Add to that his commitment, hard work, listening to customer feedback, learning and of course a budget and you’ve got a recipe for a win.  The Real Estate market in Edmonton was unprepared for Terry to take this next step, he’s changed the game again!  There is no other agent, Re/Max or otherwise certainly in Alberta and possibly beyond with their own series of live weekly streamed shows.  When a consumer goes to do research on the Terry Paranych Team Re/Max Elite, they’ll quickly realize that his marketing plan is more advanced than the others for lots of reasons but especially his live shows.  Ultimately that will translate into new business.  What scares me in a good way is if Terry starts to promote his shows in other areas of his marketing efforts…

7.) Routine – this doesn’t mean “automation” so much as working a plan of what works.  I’m guilty as the next person for not always doing this, as life gets in the way sometimes.  That said, when I can correct my course and get back on track, we see results.  What do I mean by this?  Simple, there are lots of examples of suggested daily routines and Chris Brogan has put out some dandy examples.

Be human not a robot!  Engage and support one another.  Respect others, and for goodness sake, do what you say you’ll do.  That is so rare, people will respect you for that alone.  All of this is definitely hard work, but worth it in the end.

The signs they are a changing.  Secretly, many Strathcona County employees have been chomping at the bit to start Facebook fan pages, YouTube channels, twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles and blogs.

This is terrific and yes, it’s clearly early days for the County, and it’s exploration of social media.  However, this shows a small cultural shift internally towards what I hope is the foundation of a more digitally engaged Strathcona County community.

How do we get there?  Simple, we connect on and offline.  We hold events like this social media workshop in Council Chambers tonight that I’ve been invited to participate in by Councillor Roxanne Carr.  Thank-you Councillor Carr this is going to be fun.

Keys to building the Strathcona County community online.

1.) Train everyone! If people don’t understand why they should engage online, where the value is for doing so, they won’t.  Proper training will empower people.

2.) Self-organize. Don’t wait for Strathcona County employees to drive this initiative.  Come together offline at regular tweetups and meetups to connect with your community and then follow-up online.  The County employees should look to attend.

3.) Tell stories in your own way.  You may like photography like I do, so you may want to use Flickr as your photo-sharing hub.  Many simply use Facebook for this purpose.  Look at your world from these four primary content areas.

Text:
Micro-blogging http://www.twitter.com
Blogging http://www.wordpress.com
Presentations http://www.slideshare.net
Document collaboration http://docs.google.com/
Bookmarks http://delicious.com

Images:
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.facebook.com
http://picasaweb.google.com/

Video:
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.vimeo.com
http://www.viddler.com/
http://qik.com/

Audio:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com
http://www.podbean.com/

Social Media Sources:
Alltop http://social-media.alltop.com/
Mashable http://mashable.com/
Readwriteweb http://www.readwriteweb.com/
emarketer http://www.emarketer.com/
Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/
gigaom http://gigaom.com/

And of course, http://www.fusedlogic.com and http://www.fusedlogic.tv

4.) Develop an Open Strathcona County Framework. Open Government is the next step, using social media doesn’t constitute an Open Government.  Collaborative discussions on this should begin right away.  I hate to say it because the word “camp” is so overused, however, “County Camp” should happen and we should invite folks from the Greater Edmonton area to participate. The purpose of such an “unconference” would be to discuss Open Data here in the County, as well as, a framework for process improvements within government based on case studies from here in Alberta and from around the world.

Here’s the prezi that I presented tonight at the Strathcona County tweetup so that everyone can review.  Thanks for all your questions tonight and contributions to the event.  Great job by Thelma Scammell and the entire Strathcona County Communications team, there’s lots of great things ahead.  It was terrific to meet everyone in person and I look forward to the next event.  Special thanks to CrowdMap.com for their great map on the wildfires in Slave Lake.   This prezi was built from this presentation on slideshare.net.

Pre-Game Warm-up

I went live earlier than expected as we pulled the show together and prepped, while I did this I took time to mention OpenGovWest in Portland, Oregon on May 13th.  Looks like it will be great fun.

OurSay.org and O’Reilly Media

We had Lihn Do, (@lmdo) one of the co-founders of OurSay.org out of Australia Skype in from the United Nations in New York City.  We also had a last minute addition of Alexander Howard, (@digiphile) Gov 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media out of Washington D.C.

This was a lot of fun, we discussed several things surrounding citizen engagement, showed several examples like OurSay.org, our own futureedmonton.ca, as well as, a post by Alex on a new Online Identity framework brought forward by the United States Federal Government.  We also inserted a video of Chris Moore, City of Edmonton CIO that we shot last year on the topic of Open Data.

We talked about building frameworks in general, and both Lihn and Alex held my feet to fire while clarifying a couple of things on different topics through the show which I appreciated.  I did mention that I would like to see more transparency from our provincial government in this area, but the point I was trying to make about old school methods and new methods got mixed up a bit, it wasn’t my best delivery I must say and I’ll work harder next time to get it right.

That said, I emphasized the need for an Open Government framework here in Alberta and wished we had a Minister of Open Government just like the Province of British Columbia.

All in all, I think it set the foundation for a great series moving forward.  The feedback has been very positive thus far, and I’m looking forward to next week when we’ll have even more great contributors on the show and lot more to discuss.

Oh and I almost forgot to tell you, our inaugural episode will be translated into Portuguese by a team led by Francisco Cavalcante, CIO for the municipality of Fortaleza, Brazil.

Here’s his tweet.

As you might expect, this has been a very trying time in my life, draining every ounce of energy I have most days since his passing as I miss him very much.  He was the Chairman of my Advisory Board and provided me with council and support as a father does with his son.  He was also the inspiration and reason I became an entrepreneur, and I cherished our talks about business and life.  There’s no doubt I wish I had more time with him.

I’m writing this very personal blog post as a form of remembrance, and also, as a public thank-you to all those, including our cherished clients and vendors who have supported me, my family and our team as we press on, just as the Chairman would have wanted.  As you can expect it has had a profound effect on all of us in many ways.  I am slowly returning to full speed, I’m interacting more online, starting to deal with more each day and feeling a bit more like myself.

If I’ve not been responsive to you these past few weeks it’s not because I don’t care, just that I’ve been consumed with other thoughts.  Thank-you for understanding and for your patience.

I also want to specifically thank Evan, Maria, Michael, Dan, Derrick and Brenda for their strong support and hard work while I was away from our office.  You guys are terrific.

(iPhone 4 adjusted for the nice and bright Samsung flat screen)

Some reports have this year’s South By Southwest with a 100% increase in attendance.  Not having a frame of reference from past years, I just assumed that this is how “South By” rolls.  For more on the attendance question watch this interview of USA Today’s tech writer Jon Swartz, done by my new friend from San Antonio, Texas as part of his Storify – Dale Blasingame – @normalguyguide

As Dale and Jon discuss, estimates have the attendance of this year’s South By Southwest exceeding last year’s total of 13,022 as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

That would put the 2011 attendance numbers somewhere north of 26,000 attendees.  I believe it.  There’s no avoiding the lines anywhere, not for power, coffee, food, exclusive VIP parties, or the free beer and grilled cheese.

I’ve met more than my intended goal of 200 people here at sxswi with the countries represented as Canada, US, Belgium, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, France, England, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Australia and counting.

Some of the most fun I’ve had has been by hanging out in the Samsung Blogger Lounge.  This is a great mix of opportunities to learn, network, eat, drink and of course blog.

There’s an eclectic group of people that come and go from this hub of influencers.  From Michele Price – @prosperitygal who helps authors and speakers promote themselves while also being the host of a successful radio show called Women In Business out of Houston.  She’s also a prolific networker and always on the go meetings someone.

However, probably the most prolific networker here is Josepf Haslam (in the hat) who hasn’t stopped meeting people every minute of the conference, the man is a networking machine.

Of course the risk of writing about specific people is that you run the risk of offending every single blogger, business person, presenter that you didn’t mention.  I’m here to tell you, please don’t take offence. I’ve really appreciated hearing everyone’s story about what they do and their company.  There are so many that I haven’t been able to do justice to and when I get back home tomorrow, I’ll be able to rest and reflect on all the great memories that you helped create here in Austin.

Like all conferences, it’s all about the people.  However, at a uber-connected conference like South By Southwest, it’s often about unplugging for a period of time from checking in on foursquare or Gowalla, registering for that next start-up app or RSVP for that killer hyper-exclusive VIP party and just be human.  Being willing to engage in conversation with the blogger next to you can propel you into interesting discussion that can lead to business.  I’ve had an amazing human experience here at my first sxswi.  I’ve stayed true to my philosophy of just letting it flow and not beating myself up for missing anyone session, party or opportunity to connect.  Now I’m not professing to be saying anything new here.  Relationships and human connections has always been what social is about…however, sometimes we forget.  We forget that our word is our bond, we forget that if we say we’re going to follow-up with someone after the conference that we’re supposed to mean that.  We forget that behind every business deal there’s a family that is supported.  Behind every app there are people connected in one format or another, emotions generated and hopes and dreams created. Being true to your human existence first, means your online experience should be richer as a result.  At least that’s been my first sxswi experience.

Staying true to my word, I’d like to re-introduce you to James Laughlin, co-founder of mycod.es, a start-up that was launched during sxswi.  I had suggested to James on day one that we should do an interview and then in true “let it flow” style we didn’t meet face to face again until today.  The two of us were moving around so much it seemed like we were always missing each other. Thanks for your patience James and I’ve very excited for you and the mycod.es team.  I predict great things in the future for you.

Human, it’s what sxswi is all about.  It’s where the human “backchannels” exist.  There are definitely several Twitter backchannels here, including the one started by Jeff Pulver at the 140conf sxswi 2011.  So many conversations on the go, one per session as there’s a custom hashtag per session, some die out right after the session and some endure.  Just like the personal meetings I suppose.

My experience thus far has been one of exploration, openness and free wheeling.  Wrap all of that with intense opportunities to learn from and network with others and I end with an exhausted smile on my face each day.  The people have been energizing, refreshing, and open to sharing.  There is no air of unapproachability and I want to thank everyone for being so open to meeting others.  There seems to be an underlying trust that when you meet someone else at the event it’s genuine, this of course is very dependent on the individuals but certainly that’s been my experience thus far.

Gould-Davies from Sapient Nitro stated in their session that “60% of people need to hear something about a company 3 to 5 times before they believe it.”  They claim trust is on the downward trend.  The assumption of trust when one meets someone for the first time online is eroded.  I believe that to be true in many cases.  Gould-Davies defined trust as “confidence in the future, it’s a guess of what is going to happen.  We review the potential of the consequences and if there’s something at risk it becomes much more important.”

Do you have a sense of trust with the people you have met here at SXSWi?  I’ve had no untrustworthy introductions and exchanges to date.  The one poor experience I’ve had was with an Austin Pedicab driver.  I asked how much to go to the Hyatt?  I was told by a different driver in the group that they worked for tips.  Then when I got to my destination at the Hyatt, the driver said, ” I know we didn’t discuss a fair, but typically it’s $20 to go over the bridge.”  I found that incredibly dishonest and opportunistic, either they work for tips or there’s a stated fair.  I can only hope this is not a true indication of all Austin pedicab operators.  See his picture below.

Here are some of my experiences many positive experiences from yesterday and today where I met some great people and learned a lot.

I was on my way to another session when I bumped into Kris Krug – @kk and his significant other Danielle Sipple – @fiercekitty while they were rushing to his session.  Glad we were able to say hi, it’s been awhile since we’ve chatted offline.

Tim O’Reilly and Jason Calacanis had a great chat, it was interesting to hear Tim’s sentiment on is almost obsessive pursuit the “big idea.”  As it turned out due to location, I was the first to step up and shake his hand and say hello.  When it came to taking a quick picture I picked the one guy at sxswi who didn’t know how to work an iPhone camera and he didn’t get the shot. Below is one I shot afterwards.

Here are some of the “ebbs and flows” of sxswi.

Next it was on to a panel on a proposed Social Media User’s Bill of Rights, my thanks to moderator and OpenGov advocate Alex Howard – @digiphile

Working left to right is lawyer and Quora admin @LisaBorodkin, USC Law Prof @JackLerner and tech policy geek @gagnier

The panel was discussion our rights as users of the social web and provided a website to review the proposed bill of rights.  You can vote here: http://snubillofrights.com/ This was a fascinating discussion around what we as “data centers” need to do differently to be better stewards of our own data, as well as, businesses and how they should develop processes that will allow for better privacy, access to our data when we want it and not use in ways we don’t approve of without our approval.  IE: Facebook.

After the sessions at the Hyatt, I bumped into the NYC start-up contingency and while at the Iron Cactus I met Elizabeth Fuller – @jumpingship who’s just started a company with a friend called domainful.net which is designed to allow you to register web domains by SMS texting.  Kind of cool and a very simple concept.  I’ve run into a lot of people from New York and have come across some terrific start-ups and people.  New Yorkers here are much more friendly than their reputation suggests.

After the Iron Cactus, I walked over to the Driskill Hotel, a magnificent historic hotel and awesome networking opportunity. There I met several people, too many to list here but it was great networking.  Then on my walk down 6th street to pick up a shuttle I came across this little staged event.

Please share a sxswi experience regarding trust.

Do you trust the sxswi people that you’ve met?  Is there that gut feeling of credibility or one of mistrust?  That hasn’t been experience, it’s been quite the opposite.

Despite the bad res on the above instagram and the expected long wait time to get the badge all went really smoothly.  Now this was in no small part due to meeting my new found Austin friends.  First up is @JoeyMcGirr, who I first shared a chat with on Twitter prior to heading south.  We agreed to touch base once I got on the ground and set-up a coffee meeting this morning before standing in line for our sxswi badges.  As there was no conference shuttle running today, I was on my own for transpo and Joey immediately volunteered to come pick me up.  Such a cool thing to do, so obviously I had to buy coffee at the very least.  The line-up was great I was able to meet @abbisiler from Arkansas and @laughlinjames from Austin.  Coincidently, James told me about his new start-up mycod.es which launched into public beta yesterday.  The company will allow QR code creators to “redirect” or repurpose existing codes instead of having to generate new ones all the time.

Just before leaving for the ATX Start-up Crawl

While sitting at the Chevy Volt power up centre, I introduced myself to Orian Marx, the head of a new start-up called Siftee out of NYC.  He asked me not to elaborate on what he was doing but did share a private beta experience with me and let me say, I love his Twitter related app.  After that fascinating chat it was time for some @srcasm or Jesse Middleton, another NYC native who’s a part of another supercool start-up called GetMinders.com. GetMinders will help everyone remember their meds and medical needs, this is really well positioned as our population grows older and more tech savvy.  He was actually down at sxswi as part of #hashable’s contingent.  I was quickly introduced to many hashable users including the CEO Mike Yavonditte.  This is what your profile looks like on hashable.  I would describe this as a person to person connection engine, and the top connector is the man in the hat speaking with Mike in the image above.  Josepf Haslam, a very friendly guy, who helped organize a group of us for the ATX Start-up Crawl.

First up was 3-D Porch and moodfish.com, stereowagon.com all working to carve their piece of the net up.

It was nice to also touch base with Michele Price, but you may know her as @prosperitygal on Twitter.  We had a nice chat but as I was checking out the first location on the crawl, she and some others stopped for a bite to eat, we’ve agreed to touch base again later this week.

While on the crawl shuttle, the girl to the left in the picture was taking a picture with her friend, and Amber Osborne (a.k.a. @missdestructo) photobombed these folks.  She’s also a game piece in a local meet-meme.com scanvenger hunt and the photobomb is listed as her superpower.  Indeed!  I’ve set a goal to try to photobomb her during the conference if the opportunity presents itself.  We’ll have to see, she’s a cagey veteran at this…

This is a very large bird’s nest meeting room at Smiley Media, an ad network in the Omni center here in Austin.  Great offices, notice all the smiley stress balls on the floor, they were everywhere.

I had a short stop at Mutual Mobile who are some custom app developers with Google, Audi and others as clients, and then it was off to Gowalla HQ.

I wasn’t able to speak with CEO Josh Williams about our missed chance to have him on my radio show as he was busy with other folks but it was fun to see the offices and meet some of the folks.

My thanks to all the companies who put on a great party during the ATX Start-up Crawl here at South by Southwest Interactive.  That was a terrific first day on the ground here in Austin.

The official day one of the conference and here’s my vantage point at the moment.

So far I’ve met 22 people on my quest to get as close to 200 as I can.  Sorry if I missed you in this post, but I’ll usually really good at following up after a conference.  So if you’re interested in having a conversation or meeting here at sxswi this is me – @fusedlogic. Reach out on twitter…have any great stories or blogs to share about your experience here, I’d love to seem them, leave a comment and a link…

So how does your behaviour on the micro-blogging platform Twitter spread an idea, and how can you learn more about it?  You may have a different opinion but I believe that one needs to examine the pattern details of sharing, influence and technology.

The two-way flow of influence

There has been a lot of political unrest in the middle east, especially Egypt as everyone knows.  Main stream media tells stories which in turn influences our online publishing behaviours, and an idea spreads online.  Conversely, Web 2.o technology enabled digital communities and the individuals who comprise them one at a time become aware of things happening in the world as they participate on the ground as citizen journalists.  Which in turn makes main stream media aware of the story, who then tell forward the story thereby influencing the non-technically savvy and which reaches the coffee shops and boardrooms and away we go.

Back in 2000, when I started fusedlogic this effect as explained above was almost non-existent.  The technology didn’t exist to support this type of sharing cycle.

Micro-tribes of people still shared ideas, thoughts and concerns and looked to influence opinions but it was still done more face to face, via email and rarely but increasingly through static websites.

Why do governments, businesses and organizations need to respect social media?  How do you position a message or specific platform so that many can see it?  There are many principles simultaneously that could be examined, however, today we’ll focus on watching what happens when people get emotional online, which is often the fuel that drives viral responses.

On twitter today I was made aware of a”gephi” graphical representation made by Andre Panisson of how the Egyptian Revolution spread on twitter using the hashtag #jan25, the suspected date of Mubarak’s resignation.  Although preliminary, this shows how an idea or story, (in this case an national uprising) can spread on twitter.  Ultimately this is about patterns of behaviour and influence.  Nothing new for social media explanations really but for those who are working on better understanding this “social media thing” it might help and I really like cool visuals.

Things to watch for.  Pay attention to how micro-tribes form related to key influencers and how others look to spam and don’t end up getting much retweet momentum.  As a single individual, one couldn’t hope to know each one participating in this discussion personally and as a result of a offline relationship.  However, smaller groups carry things forward.

The Egyptian Revolution on Twitter

Obviously this type of impact doesn’t happen with every idea, story, blog post, sales pitch or tweet in general, a revolution within a country is a unique occurrence to say the least.  Most of the time people’s reach online looks something like this truthy project pattern image.

The above image is closer to the reality of your personal network interest level at any given moment.  Maximizing this effect is about allowing others to take ownership of the message or idea and spread that across their sphere of influence.  Corporations and governments typically fear this effect because they want to control what you see, hear and think.  That’s a mistake and is the perfect recipe for a revolution.

THANK-YOU FOR A GREAT 2010!

MacEwan University, NorQuest College, Government of Alberta, City of Edmonton IT Branch and Communications, Parkland County, Aggression MMA, City of Grande Prairie, Randal Clark, Lutheran Church Canada, Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research, Mary Ann Stanway, Health Canada, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dorward and Company, Yardstick Software, crazedCoders, Fluik Entertainment, Edmonton Humane Society, Well and Wise Online, Microsoft Canada.

I’d also like to thank our team for all their hard work. Evan Adnams, Maria J. Politti, Derrick Bradley, David Bates, Sunita Kaul, Michael Kryton and Tracy Schwabe.

See you in 2011!

fusedlogic would like to invite you to our Holiday Open House on: December 10th, 2010. We’d love for you to drop by to catch up with us and enjoy some awesome tasty Christmas drinks, coffee, and treats.

We are also proud to announce the launch of MICHAEL KRYTON LIVE, with host Michael Kryton, a new live show on fusedlogicTV debuting December 10, 2010. Come down between 3pm – 6pm to be a part of this livestreaming video experience on fusedlogicTV.

If you’re unable to make it out, we’d still love to have you tune in to MICHAEL KRYTON LIVE from our website at http://fusedlogic.tv

Please RSVP by leaving a comment and join us at #213, 65 Chippewa Road, Sherwood Park, for a little Christmas “social” cheer and good times between 12 noon and 7:00pm.

Please reply by end of day December 8, 2010 to – tracy [at] fusedlogic.com

We’re looking forward to see you!

Government 2.0 evangelist Adriel Hampton is on the show to help everyone better understand how this is changing how government is using Web 2.0 technologies.

A continued special thanks to Dorward and Company Chartered Accountants for sponsoring the show.

Subscribe in iTunes

Women are influential, but in what ways?  Tamara Plant, Founder and Publisher of MOMMagazine.ca is on the show to speak about her unique brand of Mom focused digital publishing and community building.  The Internutt speaks about how men and women communicate online and Evan Adnams explains the impact of Google Analytics.

We would also like to thank our new show sponsor Dorward and Company Chartered Accountants for their support, they really are great people.  I’ve also learned that this team will act as your outsourced CFO, that’s a very unique service.

Download on iTunes

This time last year we were seeing the same rumors flying, especially after the appearance of leaked screenshots on the Boygeniusreport website. The photos are included below for those looking for a recap of the last round of rumors. It is time once again to speculate on when Apple will fully embrace social media.

The reality is that iTunes has not had a real significant change in its functionality in years, it is a music store at heart and it is a very popular. A change to introduce social media integration could be a minor one or it could amount to a complete overhaul of the interface we all know and have accepted. As it sits the rumors are pointing to the integration of social elements as a way for users to share not only information on what they are listening to but also for them to share recommendations with others. That sadly doesn’t mean that we will be able to share our favorite songs with our friends, but it is still a step towards making music and iTunes a friendly place.

The positive side of the rumored updates, assuming they are true, will be a new way to share music with friends. What worries me is the possibility we may see millions of “ (name) is listening to (blank) on iTunes” posts on Twitter… Then again there are easy and simple ways around that issue. Other music providers such as Last.fm already offer social media updating without the annoyance of thousands of posts about your listening habits to your friends and family. The model is in use already and works without issues.

Rumors of increased social media integration have been flying for a long time, iTunes is the logical first step if they are really intent on following through. The technology is there and services such as Facebook and Twitter are already in use by hundreds of millions of people. My personal bet is that Apple will bring some form of integration, tomorrow, I don’t know, but certainly it is on their radar.

Come tomorrow we will see if its going to be true and if Apple is really going to make a move into social media with iTunes.

“I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically.”

This got me thinking. Do we NEED paper books anymore. Certainly there is a nostalgia in walking into a room full of books, the smell of a library, or in the art that is publishing. However, as Seth asserts, is it all just a bit outdated now?

This story may seem like an old one; people have been predicting the end of traditional publishing for years now. What makes this different is that Seth Godin is more than just another blogger or pundit. He is a best selling author with more than 12 books to his name. He, if anyone is a person you would expect to be supporting the traditional print media industry. Instead he has come out and been soundly supporting a move towards a digital future for the publishing industry and for authors.

As Seth states:

“I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread. “

And I certainly can see his point, books are not easy.  They take a huge amount of time to publish, they are not something that one can do overnight or in a few hours. With the way the world is today, we need overnight. It is a side effect of the digital age, information can be updated and changed on a moments notice. Ideas and information a few hours old can already be out of date. This is exactly the reason that people like Seth are now signaling the demise of the traditional book.

New technology such as the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad among the other e-book readers, which have made great leaps in usability and content have only increased the pressure on traditional publishing. It is impossible for me to ignore the impact being made by these devices when I ask the same questions that Seth seems to be asking about the future of the paper book.

So the question to you is, are hardcopy books a thing of the past? Do you agree with Seth Godin that we are moving to a society without traditional publishers?  Are you already a part of the digital publishing revolution?

To hear more from Seth Godin including a review of his book – Tribes, tune into Getting Social with Schwabe for his interview with Walter Schwabe this Saturday at 7:00 am on TEAM 1260, or if you prefer to listen now, as a Podcast here on our site or on iTunes.

I’m announcing that we have been asked by Envision Edmonton to provide social media help and since this is a service we provide, we’ve agreed to help.  I wish we would have had more time, however, we’re here to help our clients and we don’t shy away from tough projects, as in a heated debate like this one, that just means we’re going to have to work hard and quickly.  The bottom-line is our services are needed by an honest client and we’re going to provide the best service possible.

Consider us on the “Demand the Vote” side of things.  Even if you’re for closing the airport, you should still support letting democracy rule the day via a public vote.  Volunteer to help collect signatures, if you’re undecided take a look at the documentation and the facts.  If nothing else, read Kevin Libin’s column today in the National Post about recent developments.

I registered so that I could investigate the site and see what it was all about.  I found myself in a live chat with Kelsey Grammer himself within the site, discussing his recent goal to achieve 1 million followers.  This is truly the interesting thing about the social web.  One minute you’re reading a blog post about the future of the social media, or at least one perspective on that topic at AdAge and the next you’re live chatting with the same person who portrayed a slightly neurotic psychologist.

Here’s a shot of the site.

While chatting with Kelsey, he mentioned that he’s in New York City right now in the middle of a Broadway show entitled “La Cage aux Folles,” and he shared with me that the show is nominated for 11 Tony Awards, the turnout has been “fantastic,” he said.  With an 8 show per week pace I find it even more amazing that Kelsey Grammer was up as late as he was and building community at what was past 3AMin NYC.

My impression of the TODHD live streaming network is overall positive AND yet there is work to do.  This is a stand alone newly formed online community that has some interesting content deals in place with major sports leagues mixed in with folks I’ve never heard of before and then stars like Kelsey Grammer, which I think makes it really unique in its own way.  I will be interested in learning more and watching some content over time.  Finally, I want to applaud and thank Kelsey Grammer for the opportunity to chat.

Frankly, I found the whole interaction a bit surreal, this was Dr. Frasier Crane for heaven’s sake…and HE WAS LISTENING…!

Everyone was pretty good about the little slip-up, although in true social media fashion, there is a tweet explaining the mistake I made and I couldn’t resist and also had to blog about it too.

The Giant is Asleep

In a room of just under 50 professional people, (2) were on Twitter, that’s not entirely unexpected for this industry after my preliminary research.  There were also (2) self-proclaimed bloggers in the room, one of which I found out later was actually a teacher.  That too was lower than expected.  However, I believe that many started putting serious thought into taking some action towards becoming a “social accountant.”  I can extrapolate this from the questions that were asked after my presentation was completed.  Discussions of how to reduce white noise or irrelevant information flow, pilot projects  and where to start, this was a very friendly and engaged group.

Admissions of the beginning of Linkedin profiles and Twitter accounts.  By enlarge, this industry is dormant in terms of social activity.  Certainly with respect to Alberta, we have a long way to go before anyone could state that our regional accountants of any designation are truly invested in social.  My hope is that for one person or organization, yesterday’s presentation was enough inspiration to take action.  I did receive a little feedback from folks which I always appreciate as it helps me improve.  That despite the faux pas mentioned above was quite positive and I feel really good about the experience as well.  We’re all human after all and prone to mistakes, it’s how we learn from those experiences that is the real story.

I want to thank the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Alberta for the chance to speak at their wonderful event at the Jasper Park Lodge and for the wonderful speakers gift too.

Click Here to get access

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 12, 2010

Edmonton – Internationally acclaimed psychic, Chip Coffey, will be interacting online with fans on May 6, 2010 in an exclusive pay-per-view event, in partnership with Trixstar Productions and fusedlogic inc, Coffey will be answering audience questions via chat and Skype in an online live-streaming two-hour show.

In addition to his psychic abilities, Coffey is also a paranormal investigator, lecturer, and writer. He has been featured on numerous television programs, specifically Paranormal State and Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal, both on A&E Network.

“I’m really looking forward to interacting with my fans! This is the first time I’ve ever done a live webcast,” exclaimed Chip Coffey.

This one-time event will launch Coffey’s Canadian tour, which begins May 7 in Edmonton at the Myer Horowitz Theatre. This tour is part of the Edmonton-based Trixstar Production’s “Behind The Icon” series. Trixstar has previously worked with Coffey and fellow cast-mate from Paranormal State, Ryan Buell, for a different Behind the Icon event.

“It’s great to be working with Chip again. I’m excited to be able to give fans a unique online experience with Chip, thanks to fusedlogic,” said Mike Anderson, Executive Producer, of Trixstar Productions.

“Being chosen by Trixstar Productions to provide this unique live-streaming experience with Chip Coffey is extremely exciting. We anticipate that Chip’s fans, and those of A&E’s Paranormal State, are really going to enjoy this,” stated Walter Schwabe, Chief Evolution Officer, of fusedlogic inc.

Interview inquiries for Chip Coffey can be made through Mike Anderson at Trixstar Productions.

About Trixstar Productions

Trixstar Productions is a full spectrum event production company specializing in Celebrity Engagements.

Contact:

Mike Anderson, Executive Producer

Trixstar Productions

mike@trixstar.ca

http://www.trixstar.ca

780.478.1566

About fusedlogic inc.

fusedlogic is one of Canada’s leading social media engagement and Web 2.0 strategy firms, also specializing in high-quality live-streaming web events.

Contact:

Walter Schwabe, CEO

fusedlogic inc.

walter@fusedlogic.com

http://www.fusedlogic.com

780-640-9339

This announcement is about a number of firsts in many ways and it will be great for the Edmonton region.

Personally, I believe that in this age of social, many organizations lost an opportunity to engage.  Doritos seems to be the clear winner of this year in terms of laughs and online conversational footprint among consumers.  With one clear exception, there’s no one talking to me or anyone else for that matter about Doritos online from Frito-Lay.

Bridgestone Tires has a SuperBowl specific section on their site but that’s not enough.  Here’s E-trade’s Youtube Channel as listed in their continuing baby commercials and NO online interaction that I can find.

Gary Vee quickly pointed out this issue and I find it clear evidence that many a large enterprise and their ad agencies for all their tweeting and Facebook groups and fan pages are still living in the…

“build it and they will come, bolt it on rather than bake it in mentality.”

They still don’t get it.  This is the difference between having accounts and using them effectively to build brand presence and social capital.  I’ve enjoyed many of the commercials this year, and I wonder if the lame ones like Boost Mobile could have improved their status through online engagement?  I’m watching the game as I type this so if someone finds something interesting regarding some online engagement let me know…

Check these Twitter accounts out: @vizio & @dockers – disgraceful…thanks for pointing this out – @josephaldrich

Here’s the Youtube AdBlitz 2010 channel with all the ads from the SuperBowl so you can check them out.

To kick off 2010 with a bang, we just launched our iPhone transit app Route 411. Check it out here:

http://www.route411app.com

The team at fusedlogic would like to wish all of our clients, colleagues, friends and families all the very best during the Christmas season. We have a lot to be grateful for in 2009 and appreciate all of your support and the opportunity that has come our way.

We would like you to know we’re excited at the prospect of helping you achieve a massive 2010.

See you on January 4th, 2010.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

US Department of Health and Human Services

The US Department of Health and Human Services is the department responsible for communicating information about the H1N1 flu virus. The department has recognized the need to communicate within the social web so they have their own dedicated social web team.

Beyond that, they’re listening and taking action as required.

Yesterday on twitter I mentioned that I appreciated the positioning of information and the URL of “flu.gov.”  Today Andrew Wilson, a member of the HHS new media team responded and thanked me for spreading the word.  Please keep in mind this all happened on a Halloween weekend.

Clearly it’s one thing to monitor online discussion and another to have a dedicated team of responders who are community building and socially managing relationships.  President Obama has put his trust in his administration to communicate necessary information and those decision-makers are in turn putting their trust in front-line communicators with a “funded mandate” to communicate directly and in this case “internationally.”  Pretty cool if you ask me and there is evidence of this model deployed throughout the US government. The HHS site is listed below.

http://www.newmedia.hhs.gov/about.html

Here’s a short list related to the US H1N1 online infrastructure:

http://www.flu.gov/

http://twitter.com/flugov

http://www.facebook.com/H1N1flu

The facebook fan page listed above was updated on this past Friday with up-to-date flu vaccine supply status information.  I would consider this a positive example of a government agency working and operating effectively within the real-time web.  Could they do more?  Sure but clearly there’s a willingness and a plan.

The GOA is by enlarge, sticking with a standard broadcast model to mass-communications.

Especially but not solely surrounding the delivery of  H1N1 related information.  There is definitely a segment of any jurisdiction’s population that responds to the approach of traditional media and mail out brochures.

Back in Alberta, yesterday we were provided a press conference by Alberta Health Services on Halloween.  One hour prior to broadcast as per Simon Ostler of Global Edmonton TV on Twitter to inform us of the clinics being shut-down and a refocusing of resources towards high-risk patients.  No other official approach online within the real-time web directly from the government could be found.  (If you find something let me know here so we can get the word out.)

Evidence suggests that the premier’s office ensures that whenever possible Mr. Stelmach is not in a position to personally interact with the general public in any way online unless it’s a one-way broadcast approach.  That is the prudent approach used to limit exposure, limit interaction and allow a team who’s experience clearly resides outside of the real-time web to remain in control.

Top of mind penetration

Yesterday I posed an informal challenge on Twitter:

Quick test – without using google can someone tell me the URL for GOA #h1n1 info in #AB off the top of your head? No cheating. #ableg

The result: Not one person was able to come up with the GOA’s website address for H1N1 information off the top of their head.  The process of effectively and regularly informing Albertans via a multi-channel process probably isn’t getting through.  I’m focusing in on the open dialogue and communication that should be happening in-between press conferences?  In the most recent 5 posts there’s nothing H1N1 related on the “Your Alberta” blog for example.

The GOA might suggest that the basic information Albertans need is already provided by them and they would be right.  Here it is: http://www.health.alberta.ca/

Something I like is that if you look around the site, it’s fairly easy to navigate and there is some great information there and some direct commentary by Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer.

I cannot directly attribute the facebook group listed below to the GOA, I believe it is an Alberta Health Services effort and I know Todd Herron from his work related to Alberta Wellnet so I believe this group to be credible.  Despite that, Herron hasn’t updated the group since Oct 28th and we’ve had a fair amount change since then.

Public Health Alerts

Ultimately what I’m finding and others may agree or disagree, is that there’s a fragmented approach, a continued lack of social strategy, that in itself is a basic flaw in the overall GOA communications strategy.

My recommendation

The GOA should have a dedicated and top-notch social web enabled communications team distributing this important information in real-time via multiple channels supporting all key stakeholders through their efforts.

Here’s the problem, governments operate with all sorts of political agendas.  Certain folks are threatened and want to justify and protect their jobs. This is often done by controlling the message internally and keeping activity within the limits of their skill-sets.  This is rampant throughout all levels of government bureaucracies.  IT departments want control, consistency and get territorial over their particular area.  Many get bogged down in auditing processes that act as barriers to progress.  Public relations wants to direct and control messaging via their department and the social web represents a chaotic eco-system.  Ministers want control over the message and activities of their portfolio which can directly conflict with government effectiveness and its ability to deliver services to you and I.

A shift in thinking is required

This quick and dirty comparison is really talking about the difference between the US government’s online strategy involving a recognized need to manage the online relationship with the general public in a social web context.  That compared to the GOA’s less socially inspired approach which has a near zero commitment in this area when compared to what is possible across the entire government.  The US has a sustainable social web relationship management strategy for communicating in the real-time web.  The GOA is content to continue to leverage the traditional public relations model with a couple of isolated efforts on behalf of brave insiders.

Frankly, it’s not much of a stretch to think that this blog post might not sit well with Mr. Stelmach, Ron Glen, Tom Olsen and the rest of his team within the premier’s office.  Despite that fact I want to be very clear, my team and I are here to help this province and our fellow Albertans by leveraging our skills in this area.  Some will attempt to twist these words as adversarial or negative – that’s not my intent. Rather the point is to simply communicate information that could be of help.

Links:

www.happymind.ca

Happy Mind Edmonton (Facebook Fan Page) www.facebook.com/happymind.edmonton

fusedlogic Food Bank Challenge (Facebook Group)

Fusedlogic has organized Happy Mind Donation Day to take place on September 30, 2009. This day-long event will provide a central location for donations to be collected, located at 213, 65 Chippewa Road, Sherwood Park.

The influence doesn’t stop here. The power of social media allows the Happy Mind Donation Day to take on a global perspective. A partnership in Sedona, Arizona has been developed via Twitter and Facebook, and they will also be collecting donations for their local food bank on September 30 as well. The word is continuing to spread, and other global projects are in the works for later dates. The goal has a deadline of December 15, 2009.

Food banks have suffered a decline in donations over the past year and an increase of approximately 20% in those who need food assistance. In 2008, food banks across Canada served more than 700,000 people each month.

###

If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview, please contact Genoa Adnams or Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic CEO, at 780-640-9339 or email genoa@fusedlogic.com or walter@fusedlogic.com.

Frankly, this is not a new concept.  Communicating ideas online has been happening for years in all sorts of ways.  What we’re suggesting is that this process can be chaotic and unorganized.  Our solution is to provide a very simple series of websites that empowers the everyday citizen.  There are so many citizens who may currently make limited use of the Internet in their lives.  We hope this very focused concept that’s easy to use will inspire them to contribute their great idea for their local city or town in just a click or two.

These sites will be providing the ability for local citizens to participate at their local level and potentially affect change on a macro-level.

Every time there is a new idea posted, the Twitter accounts for each site are updated. If you’d like to follow from Twitter, the usernames are @futureedmonton, @futurecalgary and @futurereddeer.

Here’s the twist:

We’re loosely tying these sites together to provide a macro perspective on the ideas of what Albertans are contemplating. Everything will be crowd-sourced, right down to “functionality requests” of the sites themselves and how they evolve. We believe the elegance of this concept is in it’s simplicity and we encourage you to participate by voting, commenting or submitting your own idea for your city.

We’re also launching a special offer for towns and cities in Alberta today so tune into Global Edmonton at 5pm.

We designed this because many public transit users have expressed a desire for a full featured Public Transit Application for smart phones.

Should you want to have this for your city, please let your local transit authority know about this application.  As always, we are appreciative of all suggestions, questions and feedback. Feel free to become a fan at our Facebook Group if you’d like to stay on top of development.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below or take a few seconds to answer this poll (lent to us graciously by the Business/IT Alignment blog)

If our challenge helps one more person, child, family eat- it was WELL WORTH the effort.

Many may have thought that we forgot about this charitable social media project, the Facebook group and flickr groups have seemingly been ignored and it’s all over before it really got started…WRONG!  Our work has been to inspire and organize and then inspire and organize some more. Starting with keeping Edmonton’s Food Bank in the loop, which has led to a discussion at the provincial level with the Alberta Food Bank Network Association, we hope to involve the national and international organizations shortly.

Achieving a “happy mind.”

The fragmented photo group approach wasn’t going to work.  So we found some great and very giving people for the construction of a centralized website to house all the photos.  This is being donated by Victor Rubba and his Crazed Coders of Edmonton.  Victor assures us that the site which is to be located at www.happymind.ca will be fully operational on August 15th, 2009.  We chose “happymind” by the way because it represents two things:  One, the state of mind after donating.  Two, D-DAY or donation day for this challenge will be in support of and coordination with the central message from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who is scheduled to speak in Calgary, Alberta on October 1st, 2009.

We want to get his attention by scheduling this on September 30th, 2009.

SIDEBAR:  I was invited to meet with and speak to the University of Calgary steering committee on the topic of social media at one of their meetings this summer.  This great group of people responsible for inviting the Dalai Lama to speak inspired me to align this challenge with their efforts around actNOW and what we’re doing perfectly supports the message from the Dalai Lama of achieving a “happy mind.”

Trying to collect 1 million photographs representing 1 million donations from people around the world predominantly via social media is a daunting task and one I know we’re all up for.  There have been many social media initiatives for the purposes of charity that have done very well in the past.  Twestival comes to mind, I attended the Edmonton event and that model is brilliant and we’d love to inspire a similar effect in cities around the world.  The 12 for 12K gang continues to do great work each and every day as well.  The real challenge here is to get folks not only to donate food but then take a picture and upload it.  We hope you’ll agree, that in this day and age of uber connected citizens, donating a picture is not too much to ask in order to achieve a “happymind.”

Our plan remains simple.

Go out to the universe and ask for your help.  To support you, we’re working through Rotary International and still need to reach higher within that organization.  Anyone know John Kenny President of Rotary International?  By the way, Rotary has 1.2 million members and great communication channels within their organization, Rotarians are very special people and their help would be spectacular.  We’re also approaching other organizations with considerable size such as the Lutheran Church of Canada and Edmonton’s World Trade Centre organization.  We’ve had numerous discussions with Share Our Strength on their ability to help promote and support this initiative.  They have agreed to promote this to their 40 thousand newsletter subscribers and we are very grateful for that.  Wouldn’t it be fantastic if President Obama, Prime Minister Harper made a donation and posted a twitpic?  They both have twitter accounts, so does Premier Stelmach for that matter.  What about other world leaders?  How about the United Nations?  There are people out there with connections to get folks like this involved.  Please reach out and touch them…

Does anyone know somebody at Feeding America or having anything to do with the Pound for Pound Challenge?  Please contact me at walter[at]fusedlogic.com your help is greatly appreciated.

What about brands?  How can your corporation benefit?  Simple, own this event, put your brand behind it, your marketing message of inspiration.  We want to share this experience with you, it’s about feeding the hungry for us and we know we cannot do it alone.

How can you help?

1.) Donate, take a picture and upload it to www.happymind.ca once it goes live or the facebook, flickr groups already in place today.

2.) Inspire everyone in your personal network to donate food and a picture at work, home, friends and family and the world at large via all means possible on or before September 30th, 2009.

3.) Be creative, persistent and inspirational in your communications regarding this world changing challenge, we won’t stop after September 30th and we must surpass the 1 million photos.  Hold tweetup food drives in your city on September 30th and post the pictures.  Write a song, make a video to inspire others and post it on Youtube, (our channel).

4.) Be an Ambassador!  Get your local organizations like the food bank, Second Harvest, Rotary Club, chamber of commerce, church, mass media, politicians, schools etc involved.  Send them the link to this blog post or others that explain the goal and what to do.

5.) Use Social Media: On Twitter (@fusedlogic) please use the hashtag #happymind, on your blogs please consider posting a “happymind” badge.  Spread the word through Facebook, with well over 200 million people, we can do it folks, take minute to inspire others.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please tag your photo with “HAPPYMIND.”

Regarding the redesign of fusedlogic.com, we’d love to hear your comments, suggestions and ideas to ensure we have a great site.

Think the logo should be relocated like was suggested by @ivansf   

@ivansf @eadnams grats. You should center the logo #fusedlogic 

Let us know.  That’s not a bad idea actually Ivan, thanks, have the entire logo centered would probably look better.  What about sections or content you think is missing?  Let us know.  This also includes the type of blog content that is important to you.  Essentially, we’d love to hear from you on all topics and please include your concerns as well.

Finally, you’ll notice that we’re working on changing how we describe ourselves too.  Soon gone will be the word “strategists” from our midst.  Why you ask? Simple, ultimately we’ve always been about “engagement” and we intend to continue to demonstrate that fact. We’re Alberta’s only 100% dedicated social media engagement firm.  Over the past 10 months of our 9 year total history, we’ve worked with the MacEwan School of Business, ATB Financial, Government of Alberta, Edmontonians Magazine and several small business owners to name a few. Further, we’re proud to announce Edmonton’s Fringe Theatre Adventures as a new client, more to follow on that announcement soon.   

Regardless, we’re excited about the short-term and very excited about the mid-term…Thank-you for your support and friendship, we look forward to the conversation including your comments ahead.

Discussion over the weekend covered the social web from several angles – monetization models, culture and demographics, and search metrics to name a few. Monitors with Tweetdeck rolled along tracking the hashtag #nextMEDIA throughout the venue, keeping conference-goers up to date on the most recent chatter in and around the event. Discussions regularly fell to differentiating between the hype of social media and its more productive uses.

Judging by the current viewer-minute totals for the fusedlogicTV channel, many of you know we were doing our best to broadcast live from that majestic castle in the mountains – the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Most “castles” aren’t known for their blazing fast internet connectivity, and this one was no exception. The one (slow) connection shared between the entire hotel complex was regularly too slow to even check one’s email; something that turned into a common point of contention among attendees. That’s right folks: one of Canada’s premier tourist destinations is essentially an internet “dead zone.”

Is this a relevant or fair criticism? Actually, it highlights a problem somewhat rampant through many of Alberta’s well-used structures. Infrastructure is lagging behind requirements in many cases, and is further held up by venue owners and managers who think things are “good enough.” Conference organizers run the risk of tainting an event for nothing more than failing to provide decent internet access. Spotty connections aside, the fusedlogic team was still able to get some great interviews broadcast live and recorded for the interview-ees to embed on their own websites. By the second day, the amazing staff over at Achilles Media (the event organizers) were able to obtain a better connection and pipe it out to the rest of us. With that taken care of, the event flowed on seamlessly.

Even before these issues were sorted out, we were able to to do some pretty exciting things. With most of our time spent interviewing conference delegates, politicians, keynote speakers and special guests, we got a great look at the culture that surrounds online media and some of the traditional media that have jumped on board. Chats with personalities like Shira Lazar (a prolific content producer from the US) or Nadja and Joshua from B360 Media (who won the award for Hottest Emerging Digital Property for their Cooking, Lifestyle and Culture website) helped renew our faith in the online digital scene and the amazing content that can be produced there.

One of our most interesting interviews of the weekend was with a Canadian photographer and entrepreneur named Kris Krüg (check out his Flickr group). Kris built an online resource to create easily deployable, throw-away websites for groups like sports teams, churches, or other community organizations that needed a quick and simple online presence. After selling that company in 2007, he has gone on to publish his photography in such places as the LA Times and Rolling Stone Magzine and to speak regularly about online creative licensing. Based in Vancouver, but spending much of his time in Shanghai, he was recently asked to speak at the Ted Talks Shanghai event. Walter had a fascinating talk with Kris, which we would invite you to check out below:

Author: Paul Ney.
Contributions from Edmontonians article by Walter Schwabe.
Images are used under Creative Commons license from Kris Krüg. View originals here.

The folks that attended fusedlogic’s latest event digested something of the social media variety.

Held on Tuesday, June 2 at the World Trade Centre Edmonton in the wee morning hours, Twitter for Breakfast was a micro conference for business professionals looking to learn the basics of the popular social networking site, and specifically how to implement it into their marketing and communication plans.

And of course, thanks to our free wi-fi, Twitter was utilized during the event with live tweeting by the attendees, the fusedlogic team and special guests @carlapr and @difabs. Thanks for coming out, guys!

We were very pleased to have two of our clients in the room. Special thanks to ATB Financial and MacEwan School of Business for coming out.

We also had some other great companies in the room:

City of St. Albert

Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA)

Arrow Engineering Inc.

Pursuit Placement Group

Alberta Blue Cross

Heritage Collaborative

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend! And thanks to the WTC for being so accommodating at such an early hour.

What’s next on the event list? Twitter for Lunch?

Stay tuned! It’s going to be an exciting summer!

Many have walked into the Alberta legislature and stood in awe of the building, the staircases and marble columns. I feel a little sense of majesty every time I go there. However, I must admit, to never having the pleasure of being in the Premier’s office. From the pictures, I think it sends a message of “old world” power and respect.

Interestingly, as soon as, Premier Stelmach’s staff send out a status update on the web, we welcome him and his team into another office of power and respect. The Premier has entered our virtual office within the social web.

Now one might suggest that the playing field is level in that case, but I wouldn’t. Actually, I firmly believe the playing field remains seriously tilted in the citizen’s favor. In recent weeks this “tilt” has applied considerable pressure on the government. Starting 19 days ago with Paula Simons (@Paulatics) of the Edmonton Journal writing a hard-hitting article on the use of a Northumberland, England picture in the Alberta Brand project. That article was referred to by Jeremy Fritsche (@jeremyfritsche) who tweeted the following which alerted the Alberta Twitter community.

jeremyfritsche Authenticity should be the key to a good brand – where is Alberta’s? http://tinyurl.com/c6ery7 #albertabrand #YEG #ABLeg

Of course, applied pressure is not unique to social media. The example above of citizens within mass media exercising their right to “free speech,” has also been a key. The difference here is that the social web amplifies the conversation around each issue. The social web enables many more people to organize, voice their opinion and share it in near real-time.

The Premier, despite having this pressure applied to him and that of his government, has a tremendous opportunity. I believe the majority of hyper-connected Albertans would embrace Premier Stelmach reacting personally online and thereby increasing access. Further value could be generated by directly sharing ideas, building relationships, learning and inspiring Albertans personally with every tweet. The following tweet doesn’t quite qualify in that regard.

@premierstelmach Photos of Premier Stelmach enjoying pulled pork sandwiches on the Leg grounds — http://twurl.nl/v47jwv #ableg

And citizen’s counter the above with Tweets with sentiment similar to below.

dblacombe @premierstelmach does no one monitor this account “Steady Eddie”? You should take a page from @g_campbell who actually speaks here!

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. – Albert Einstein

Prediction: Albertans updating their status online on Twitter and else where will continue to influence public opinion, and ultimately government. Hyper-connected Albertans are learning to inspire action.

Due to this combined pressure from all sides on the government regarding a number of issues, such as the new Alberta Brand and the continued dust raised over Bill 44. Don’t be surprised if there’s a “cabinet shuffle” after the current session ends.

In effect, one might say that with every tweet, the “statusphere” is playing a key role in re-defining Alberta’s authority.

Listening and immediate response – B+

The following kind of open communication and engagement will need to continue in order to build and sustain credibility, below is a small bit of evidence that this point is beginning to be understood.

@youralberta (account started on Apr 23rd 2009) started engaging yesterday and responding.

@YourAlberta @fusedlogic @debraward @tphogan @rachelatventure thx 4 warm welcome to Twitter. Looking forward to engaging & will try 2 reply when we can.

DaveHancockMLA: posting a new blog http://tinyurl.com/d35j8v (expand) on the Origins of Speciousness. Alberta is a modern progressive cosmopolitan society. #ABleg

Social media strategy – C-

The Government of Alberta is now encouraging more open and free discussion with the average Albertan – social media wise.  This has taken a very long time and I’d be happy to see even more.  Albertans are now able to reach out directly and “publicly” to a few ministers, MLA’s, the public affairs bureau and the premier via Twitter, a blog or two and Facebook groups with a few Youtube videos sprinkled in but are hard to find.

Establishing the use of some of the most popular platforms is a good start.  That said, “Albertaonyt” isn’t the right name for the Youtube channel – search “Alberta” on Youtube to see what I mean.  Further evidence that the general understanding of online culture and how to effectively deploy content within a chosen platform across the government is low.

The reason?  Simple, as of yet there isn’t a clear social media strategy for this government.  The result is a fragmented approach.  What’s required is immediate standardized training, right from Premier Stelmach down through the ranks.

Authenticity – C

Overall those within government and on Twitter represent themselves.  Not everyone is tweeting for themselves however, Premier Stelmach (@premierstelmach) still is not, all his tweets are in the third person.  All indications are that Governor Arnold Schwarenegger (@Schwarzenegger) tweets for himself, so it is possible.

“Premier Stelmach, if I could be so bold as to request on behalf of all tweeting Albertans, to have you communicate directly with us, we know you’re busy and having said that, a tweet or two would show Albertans a lot of respect in this regard.”

Relationship building – B-

Traditionally, meeting with those in power has been a long and sometimes arduous process.  However, social media has provided the premier, ministers and others within government another highly effective way and opportunity to build rapport with Albertans.  (As we all know, government works for us.)   I would say that on average I’ve seen this type of interaction increase online through various discussions that may not have otherwise taken place.  We as Albertans deserve more responses to our questions asked respectfully and social media opens that door.

Probably the best MLA at rapport building is Doug Griffith, (@GriffMLA) who is quite engaging and has recently entertained Alberta with his “trivia competition.”  Well done Mr. Griffith.

Ability to adapt – C+

In the social web, things move pretty fast.  Within government?  Most would agree, not as fast as constituents would like.  So how do the two cultures mix?  Frankly up to now, like “oil and water.”  Clearly, this government has not been the social media proponent that President Obama has been within his administration.  However, above is meant to be constructive criticism and support of the fact that I believe we are seeing signs of that changing.  Engagement is the key, and in the last day we’ve seen tweets, blog posts and this CNBC video posted quickly to get the word out about Premier Stelmach’s trip overseas.

My hope is that our thirst as Albertans for increased information sharing and more open communication with government stakeholders will be quenched on a sustainable basis upon Premier Stelmach’s return.

Voters have been “calling for change” for as long as modern democracy has existed.  The difference today?  We as voters now have the capability of starting a Facebook group as an overt politcal statement and demonstration of free speech against a piece of legislation, in this case Bill 44. (Twitter thread here)  Measuring the reach and direct impact of this particular act by Lou Arab within a social network of over 200 million aside, the fact remains, the world has changed and left many government officials, politicians, their parties and the standard political communications playbook behind.  

Struggling to stay in touch, look informed and react with social media savvy is a challenge and an uncomfortable exercise for the majority of government power players.  The new “Alberta brand” is evidence of this.  I believe that the Government of Alberta’s communications brain trust as they continue to live through it, should contemplate the impact of the “humanizing-effect” social media has had to date and apply that knowledge to their future actions.  For example, had this already been the case, the government would have considered asking Albertans for “permission” to market the newly minted Alberta brand before unleashing the Freedom to Create – Spirit to Achieve on us, thereby actually demonstrating the “Alberta advantage.”  Should someone suggest that this was actually done, I would immediate reply that those efforts failed to reach a critical mass.  Success needs to be defined by more than a global banner ad buying campaign.  The social web should have been a set of global communications power tools building positive rapport for Alberta 2.0 from the outset.  Instead of result being more of a chamber of branding horrors with a 20th century foot print. 

For example, the new brand launch was closely timed with a deficit budget announcement.  A strong reaction and perception of over-spending was immediately communicated in numerous ways and amplified within the social web, by enlarge the sentiment was negative.  (To understand my point here in more detail I recommend reading “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell)

Part of the Brand Alberta team is non-Alberta company – Identica who some suggest are responsible for the “brand book” and as part of the team, they need to also bear some responsibility regarding the “beach-gate” picture of Northumberland, something that Sheelagh Caygill, Northumberland Tourism is quite proud of, and rightfully so, as the real winner so far in this Alberta 2.0 branding exercise.  These activities were no doubt approved in advance by Olga Gurthrie of the public affairs bureau at minimum with Calder Bateman almost certainly at the table as well, which constitutes the bulk of the project team.  

The fact is, this government is grappling with the “humanizing-effect” of the “human-web.” In fact, I would submit the new reality is that the communications playbook is being rewritten by the hyper-connected voter, now more than ever.  This fact is no doubt unsettling to the powers that be.   

In actuality, we are witnessing and participating in a new form of democratization of government – Alberta 2.0 beyond the new less is more logo. Unfortunately, the ones who have yet to recognize this via their actions are the ones who should have been leading the charge in the first place.  I remain optimistic that this fact will change and that possibly attending this event will help.

Sharp increase in online activity

The above graph shows the sudden increase in posts around the release of information related to the Government of Alberta’s Alberta Brand controversy related to the beach scape picture used from Northumbria England.

The recent Alberta Brand firestorm has started to taper off, that’s not to say that there’s nothing going on.

Below is a quick look at some of the story highlights surrounding the government’s activities over the past 7 days.  It’s been a busy week, if we’ve missed something let us know.

April 22nd:

Bill 42

Tasers

Greenhouse gas reduction

Precision Drilling investment

April 23rd:

Tax policy in Alberta

Alberta Brand

California low-carbon fuels

April 24th:

Alberta Brand – “We screwed up”

Northumberland comparison

MLA’s barred from Government House

April 25th:

Precision Drilling and AIMCo

Alberta Brand – UK continues to talk

April 26th:

Alberta Brand – more comments

April 27th:

Libraries get funding

Alberta Brand talk in the UK continued

Nuclear reactors

April 28th:

Bill44 – Alberta human rights laws

More Bill 44

April 29th:

Bill 36 – Land Stewardship

Online camping reservation system

Alberta Brand – more commentary re kid model Kelly Preston

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.

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 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

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 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.

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

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.

Mark Woods:

http://www.gigglechick.com
http://www.gigglechick.com/erin/blog/index.htm
http://www.iwilldare.com/
http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/
http://bingfutch.blogspot.com/
and of course my own: blog.tikitender.com

Bertrand Leseigneur:

I can’t have a good day without visiting:
http://www.psfk.com/
http://infosthetics.com/
http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/
http://www.yankodesign.com/
and of course the blog I’m working on for my company
http://www.snitts.com/blog/

Michael Davis:

http://www.lifehacker.com
http://www.ken-jennings.com

Hariharan N.N.

http://eerththathil.blogspot.com

Meredith Gould:

My own, of course! Favorite to write and read.

But also:
Links:
http://meredithgould.blogspot.com
http://www.chrisbrogan.com
http://concordpastor.blogspot.com/
http://blog.beliefnet.com/pontifications/
http://ironiccatholic.blogspot.com/

Charlene Davis:

So many blogs, so little time! I love to read blogs and I can’t wait to check out the ones listed here. In the meantime, I will list some of my favorites in different categories:
Busy Moms Recipes (cooking/recipes): http://www.busymomsrecipes.blogspot.com
Jacquelyn Lynn, Business Writer (small business and entrepreneurs): http://jacquelynlynnbusiness.typepad.com/
Cyber Journalists (latest news and developments for journalists): http://www.cyberjournalist.net/
Pragmatic Communion (inspirational): http://pragmaticcommunion.wordpress.com/
5 Minutes for Going Green (green living): http://www.5minutesforgoinggreen.com/
Perez Hilton (hysterical celebrity gossip): http://perezhilton.com/
Things That Make You Go Hmmm: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/

Craig Dunham:

http://editalk.com
http://blogs.Inovis.com

Marie-Claire Jenkins:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
http://glinden.blogspot.com/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Daniel Thornton:

http://www.thewayoftheweb.net
http://www.140char.com

Alla Staroseletskaya:

www.allastar.net/blog

Jeff Carr:

http://battellemedia.com/
http://www.avc.com/
http://boxesandarrows.com/

Wade Muri:

http://www.matthewgood.org

Mari-Lyn Hudson:

www.heartatworkonline.org
www.love4.wordpress.com

Steven Cherry:

http://www.detroitblog.org/
http://hamtramckstar.com
http://www.snowsuit.net/

Dustin Miles:

http://happinessisbetter.com
http://techcrunch.com
http://simpledollar.com

Dennis Smith:

http://www.recruitingblogs.com

This is a busy week coming up which is leading into a very busy couple of months.  October is looking like the busiest of 2008 thus far including a trip to Seattle Washington and Winnipeg Manitoba potentially, with November not that far behind.  The first week of Nov, I’m scheduled to speak four times in seven days on social media.  That said, I’m really looking forward being able to speak and engage the diverse audiences…this is really going to be fun.

New team members as mentioned in a previous post are on-board and capacity is increasing substantially which is good because we need it.  More of my articles are scheduled to be published shortly in October including one where I was interviewed for an upcoming article coming out of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Pardon me if I’ve already mentioned this, it’s the cough syrup.  Have a great start to the week.

Also, please feel to comment on our new fusedlogic site.  What do you think?  How could we improve?

Also, fusedlogic has signed an MOU with Mack D. Male of Paramagnus Development Inc.  Mack (@mastermaq on Twitter) has a deep knowledge of the Internet and social media in particular, Mack will be adding his expertise in a multitude of ways including application development,strategy development and in particular thoughts on blogging, podcasting and many other areas related to community management.

As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve added Doug Kyle of Lucid Avenue, (@dougkyle).  Doug’s background is in IT project management and so he’ll obviously be keeping all of us on the straight and narrow regarding projects specifics.  His toughest job ahead clearly is with corralling me.

fusedlogic also has videographers here in town, NAIT grad Krysta Martell takes care of a lot of that locally.

We also continue to have our writing team and project specific contractors in the US, brand monitoring team out east and in California, SEO guys in Edmonton, Romania and also elsewhere in India for project specific work.  Further, our Mobile application development team in China is always ready to help and we’re expanding our reach into Indonesia and Singapore as we speak.  Finally, I have two executive assistants in Winnipeg MB, Rhonda and Colleen that are doing some heavy lifting on some exciting things for the company as we look eastward a bit too…

Social media is a global opportunity as I see it for fusedlogic inc and so the plan is to continue to grow and sooner rather than later put a Chief Operating Officer in place for the company.  I intend to grow to no more than 15-20 people at our max, less even if possible.  So every new team member is key and every client continues to be very valuable.