EyeSee

Facebook is where Canadian’s spend most of their time. The same goes for a significant percentage of the population globally. Facebook is not just for teenagers anymore.

As a business how do you get the attention of your customers? Since they are spending their time on Facebook and not necessarily watching TV or reading newspapers.

Facebook Marketing is an interactive workshop to help businesses to use Facebook effectively as a marketing tool.

Space is limited so sign up and take advantage of the Early Bird specials.

You will learn

• how other companies are using Facebook to Market themselves
• advertising tool box
• leveraging Facebook to better deliver your message
• how to drive direct and indirect sales
• ways to improve customer service and increase customer satisfaction

Take aways

• how to use Facebook for marketing
• i’ts not just about Ads
• Building a relationship with your customers
• Having a conversation with your customers
• Building a community on Facebook around your Brand

The end result will be better brand exposure, growth of customer base and the final result will be increase in revenue.

Space is limited so Sign up. Don’t miss an amazing opportunity to grow your business.

Mother’s Day was last month and to celebrate I hosted a special evening, Social Media Moms Nite out. In researching this event I found out that there were a lot of Mom bloggers in Ottawa. The reason mom blogger was that they were moms of different ages but blogged about their kids or hobbies not work or business. Now that it’s Father’s Day I thought that I would see what the Daddy bloggers’ are up to.  So with the same criteria in mind I trolled the web and Twitter.

So here’s a few dads that I came across.  Not a whole lot, it seems that Dads don’t seem too keen on talking about their kids and fatherhood they seem to talk about everything else but.

I did find a few so here’s some of them.

How using social media has helped me be a better dad

This is a great blog post by Jeremy Biser from the Remarkable Parents site.

“A few years ago, I didn’t even know what “social media” was.

I read the newspaper, a few magazines and when I went online it was for work or to manage my fantasy sports teams. I thought a blog was something that people used to share pictures with their family members, and My Space was the place where pervs and wannabe musicians hung out to seduce young girls.”

He talks about his ignorance about social media and how he wouldn’t have grounded his daughter for signing up for My Space. He would have still grounded her for lying about her age.

He is now a tech savvy parent teaching his friends and neighbors about social media.  He talks about the social media that he uses on a regular basis. He then states how does all this social media stuff help me be a better dad?

It’s a great read.

Discovering Dad

Family and Parenting

Husbands and Dads

The Life of a Father of Five

7 Green Dads

Now a list of Twitter Dads. And finally Dads do make time for play.

Enjoy, Happy belated Father’s Day.

Early Jan. 2009 brought a very interesting Facebook application called the Whopper Sacrifice. This application took the world by storm and there was a lot discussion in social media as well as traditional media. What made it so controversial was the uniqueness of the campaign.

The case study was presented at Facebook Camp in Toronto earlier this year, see notes from this session.

If you never heard of this or saw this application here are further details.

Refresh Partners have also given further details on this in terms of the PR and some stats.

Was this campaign successful? That’s up for debate. The goal was for 25k coupons to be given to customers in the U.S.A. They got as far as 23k. That’s close enough and why stop there and not go all the way to 25k?

There were a number of interesting reasons for this. The one aspect of the application was that it violated the Facebook terms of service. There appears to have been discussions between Facebook, Burger King and the other parties involved in the campaign. The application was terminated by Burger King as there was no further desire to invest in changing the application.

So we will never know how this application would have done in the long term however in the short term it generated a lot of publicity for Burger King and set the bar high for creative Facebook Applications.

2009 is the year of change when it comes to marketing research. The age demographics have very distinct preferences as to which medium they prefer. Here’s what I am talking about.

The 45 plus category love the phone and paper. If there is a problem their first reaction is to pick up the phone to have it resolved. They are also huge consumers of paper products like glossy brochures, magazines and newspapers.

The 30 plus generation are the ones with busy careers and starting families. They are big on Green and recycle all that stuff that comes in the mail box. They absolutely hate to be disturbed at home by telemarketers and are the first ones to sign up on the do not call list. They consume their information online on their own time and love forums, FAQs etc..

Then you have the 2o somethings that like to text, share and always have their camera phones on hand.

So as a company that specializes in market research just how the heck are you supposed to do your research? It’s a tough economy and everyone is cutting down on their budgets. How can you provide your clients with good data when there are very different mediums.

I will be shedding some light onto what tools are available online to achieve these goals. Come on out to the Marketing Research and Intelligence Associations Season Finale - Meeting the Challenges Ahead

When: Thursday, June 11, 2009
Time: 1:30 pm to 5:30 pm (registration starts at 12:45)

Followed by networking “hors d’oeurves”

Where:Sheraton Hotel 150 Albert Street, Ottawa, ON The Penthouse Room, 17th floor

“As consumer behaviour is evolving rapidly and new technologies emerge seemingly daily, marketing and public opinion research as a discipline and an industry faces important challenges. Hear from leading marketing researchers how the field is changing and how we can meet these challenges over the next decade. Conference participants can ask questions, discuss solutions and network at this half-day conference organized by MRIA’s Ottawa chapter.”

Schedule

I read a recent article about Women in the Open Source world which lead to this post. Being a geek I love to attend various geek related events. They usually tend to have a high ratio of men to women so it was very refreshing to find out that there are some really cool geek women out there that are making amazing contributions to open source.  Here are a few, check them out.

Here is a list of some of these women. If you do know of any more do let me know.

Chani is a Canadian programmer and student… for SoC 2008 she did widgets-on-the-screensaver, and for SoC 2006 she did oscar filetransfers for kopete. She had a separate blog for that.
She discovered the internet and programming because of a game called Creatures. She faded out of that community several years ago, but once in a while she makes some attempt to revive her big project.. then gets distracted and abandon it again.

Lydia Pintscher is a software enthusiast and dedicates a lot of her free time to Amarok, KDE and Kubuntu as Community Manager of Amarok and by doing advocacy and promotion for Amarok, KDE and Kubuntu.

Stormy Peters I currently work as the executive

director of the GNOME Foundation. I also am an advisor for HFOSS, OpenSource World, IntraHealth Open and OpenLogic, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries.

Brenda writes and uses opensource code for telcos. She works with SMS, WAP, and embedded applications for cellphones and PDAS, realtime billing, remote data access and phone number portability. She wishes she had more Erlang projects. She sometimes talks in the 3rd person. Brenda knows life is too short to use java.

Mackenzie is a student in Washington DC. I’ve been doing Java and C for a couple of years now. I’ve worked with Python, PHP, and Javascript a little too. I’m using various GNOME apps as a way to practice C and learn GTK+ programming.

Valerie Aurora works part-time for Red Hat as a Linux file systems developer. I spend the other part of my time writing (about science, not fiction). I have a consulting company as well, VAH Consulting.

Miriam Ruiz is a Spanish engineer and a Developer in Debian, a Linux distribution. The best one, in her opinion. She is quite involved in the Games packaging, as well as in the Debian Women project. She is also quite involved in the feminist netsphere, belonging to groups like LinuxChix, Ubuntu-Women, WikiChix, ChicasLinux, Indymedia Women or Systers. She doesn’t really do that much stuff in them, mostly because she doesn’t have time to be so active everywhere, but  she fully supports them.

She is also an editor in Barrapunto, one of the most important weblogs in Spanish, and currently one of the bests sources of information about technology and geek culture in Spanish in the network.

The first ever Social Media Moms Nite Out was a blast. I have to say that most moms thought it was a great idea however it seemed very hard to get them to come downtown and away from all their responsibilities. Being a mom I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For those moms that did come out I wanted it to be more than talking about Social Media so I took some extra steps to make it special.

So we had some wine, cheese, chocolate …. and Social Media Mom Adventures. Here are some photos that I took before we started.

There was a lot of material to cover as I wanted to go through the basic tools and show how other moms use it either for personal expression, business or interact with other moms in the online communities.

Here is some information on social media moms and how they use these tools.

Social Media Moms

I had a great time and I will definitely have more of these types of events however it will have to be where the moms are.

I hope that I inspired the moms to observe, participate and create their own social media identities and express themselves via social media.

I am super excited as in a few hours, 3 hours to be specific, I will be hosting the 1st ever Social Media Moms Nite Out.

I shopped earlier today and got a tonne of goodies to eat and drink. Wine, chocolate, brownies,  other drinks and much much more…

So stay tuned for updates on this fun and exciting events. I hope to have more in the up and coming months.

Just in case you have don’t know what I am talking about here is a bit of background on this.

59 slides in 2 hrs…..

Social Media can indeed be used beyond Brand Marketing and The Ottawa Network will be addressing this topic this evening.

Cutting Edge focus on Social Media for Business

“Social Media – its here, now, and ubiquitous – but how can you use it effectively in the business context.

Learn about the  role of social media in driving market conversations to understand the voice of the customer, and how a Social Media Press Release differentiates from a traditional Press Release. When it comes to implementation, you will also learn how to build your own enterprise social network using new social networking open source web applications.”

I will be speaking at The Ottawa Network this evening about Social Media Press Releases. Here are further details on this event.

Wednesday, May 27, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
Algonquin College, Woodroffe Campus just south of Baseline,
Building T, Room T130

See you there.

No communications endeavour is rish free. That didn’t come out right and it’s a dialogue. You have to listen first, these conversations are happening wheather you are listening or not. Then you push the news releases to the rest of the department.

Where are we going with all of this? As a push medium and p to p we are there. What is going to be the feedback and have to be baked into the system as well. Translate into action. How do you start it and what do you do?

How influencial can that feedback be? It’s never going to replace formal communication with the mass media, committees, taking conversations having in the pub etc.. and now have a chance to see what’s going on. Another way of getting information from citizens.

The answer is to just try it. The tools are free so it does not cost a lot. E.g wikipedia had misinformation on department, has had to get approvals to correct this. Wikipedia is a wiki and therefore trying to apply old rules to new technology. Go and make changes and if someone does not like it then they can change it.

Government should warm itself into consultation and online voting.

Think about what you want to do first then pick the right tools. It’s easier to go where the conversation is rather than tell them to come to where you are.

I am at Change Camp Ottawa and there are a lot of very good sessions lined up. I am currently blogging from the Social Media in Government session.

For live blogging check the Apt 613 Blog.

Public Health Agency of Canada, during swine flu they were using twitter to keep folks updated.

There are tonnes of folks complaining about government agencies on twitter, but is anyone watching them and responding? It seems that there is currently no mechanism to respond to these complaints and help out.

Fisheries is using twitter to send out releases, this is just the first step, working in both French and English in one feed, took a seven page plan to describe how to use to 140 characters.

Tweet Congress - degree on conversation happening with their consistuents.

The government is trying to use social media with policies that were created before all this technology was available. Tho shalt not use any other thing than windows being one of them.

How do you deal with the innundation of messages that are flooded in social media. Those are technical issues that have been addressed.

Identi.ca is a Canadian opensource microblogging platform that would solve all of these integration issues.

Educating the public is a great use of social media for government. News media are now picking their stories from Twitter.

Know where your audience is and go there.

Part of Canada 150 connect 150 public service people. Ideas fair at NAC on June 3rd. Everything was done using web 2.0.

Summary

Performance metrics - managing the expectations. Successful in managing the email capacity on implementation. That gets reported every year. The idea is that citizens need to know that their money is being used effectively. Followers is not a good measurement. Communication with peope to figure how to use web 2.0 to drive change.