EyeSee

Thanks to all the organizers, Social Media Week in Toronto was a huge success. A special thanks goes out to Eli and Jyotika for making all the arrangements. A big thanks to both Michele and Shannon for live blogging via Facebook and CoverIt Live.

I had a blast and thanks to all for attending the Navigating User Generated Content presentation. There were well over 130 people signed up therefore I was not able to offer the interactive workshop I had originally planned, instead I went for a discussion and presentation.

With over 100 peeople in the room it’s always a challenge to know where to start as everyone’s level of understanding will be different. My strategy was for everyone to leave with some new ideas. For the young, it was to raise awareness to the fact that older people did not grow up with this technology and that media was a high budget production by the experts which took a long time. Social media has now changed that by making it available, in real time, byanyone for everyone.

This was followed by some exploration of tools followed by an indepth case studies. I ended with a group discussion on how to use these tools to gain exposure on a tight budget.

So how did I do? Well it’s always hard to tell, I know there was a fair bit of note taking, followed by light bulb moments from the audience during the case studies. So it’s safe to guess that the beginner and intermediate group had some take aways’. It was hard to say if I had something new for the advanced in the room, if any.

To top it all off I was interviewed by Jennifer Hollett from CBC and we had a blast playing traditional media rocks vs social media rocks.

Here’s the segments where they talk about smw on CBC, Connect with Mark Kelly. It’s long but here are the segments when there are mentions 00:01:11-00:01:20, 00:21:38-00:21:48, 00:52:00-01:55:02, Enjoy

There is a really awesome event happening globally….Social Media Week. So Toronto, New York, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo, San Franscisco all having amazing events simultaneously at the same time.

I’m here in Toronto participating in the fantastic event, at the Rivoli currently listening to Nelson Ko talk about the world ofWikis.

I will be on at 3:30pm talking about Navigating User Generated Content.

We will be attempting to live blog this event (dependent on the internet connection here). If you can’t make it here but do have questions please let the moderator know. She will relay the message and I will answer your questions.

There is a really awesome event happening globally….Social Media Week. So Toronto, New York, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo, San Franscisco all having amazing events simultaneously at the same time.

I’m here in Toronto participating in the fantastic event, at the Rivoli currently listening to Nelson Ko talk about the world of Wikis.

I will be on at 3:30pm talking about Navigating User Generated Content.

We will be attempting to live blog this event (dependent on the internet connection here). If you can’t make it here but do have questions please let the moderator know. She will relay the message and I will answer your questions.

See you online at 3:30 pm.

You can also follow the conversation on Twitter via #smwto

For photos/videos check out Facebook and YouTube.

See you online at 3:30 pm.

You can also follow the conversation on Twitter via #smwto

For photos/videos check out Facebook and YouTube.

Social Media is not just for marketing. In the early days it was used by the big brands for marketing. They typically had large budgets and therefore were always open to experimentation. Now that this technology is part of our daily lives it can be used for all kinds of purposes.

One area that it’s being used very successfully is for social change.  Jeremiah Owyang, from Forrester,  used his blog to raise awareness to the after effects of the earthquake in China.

Twestival was an event that took place on Feb. 12th 2009 in over 100 cities around the world to raise awareness and $$ for charity:water.

GenY Ottawa is featuring Susan Murphy who has been involved in numerous social media for social change projects.

Event: #GenYOTT — Ring in 2010!

Date: Thursday, January 14, 2010 from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM (ET)

Location:
Foundation
18B York Street
Ottawa, Ontario K1N5S6
Canada

It’s sold out however do follow the conversations on Twitter

#GenYOTT

@Japman_Bajaj

@JenButson

@MattRichling

@lkerton

@SuzeMuse

Back by popular demand, I will be offering another workshop in February, called Soical Media Fundamentals for Business. This is a half day workshop that is geared towards Government, businesses, executives or anyone wondering what this all means and how it fits into a business.

This one half-day Social Media for Business teaches:

• History and evolution of Social Media
• Commonly used terms and definitions
• Social Networks
• Blogs
• Twitter (microblogs)
• Social Bookmarks
• Photo sharing
• Video sharing
• Podcasting
• Social websites
• Case studies

Participants will leave with a good understanding on what social media is and how to use it from a business perspective. They will be inspired to be creative and use their new found knowledge to use these technologies to communicate with their peers, customers and more.

Space is limited and is available on a first come and first served basis so sigh up to not be disappointed.

Happy New Year I hope you took time to eat drink and be merry. 2009 was a challenging year for many with the economic crisis still having it’s effects on businesses. This year should be better for everyone.

As a social media strategist I find that customers generally ask the same questions. During the course of the year I will be answering these questions. The biggest one that I will discuss today is the business case for participating in social media.

My answer to that is that it is no longer “should we participate” but how should we participate. Or communications mix has increased significantly since the old days.  We now have

• print – newspapers, trade publications, magazines
• radio
• TV
• website
• micro sites – site for a specific product or promotion
• social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn
• micro blogs – Twitter, Identi.ca
• video sharing – YouTube, Vemio, Blip.tv
• photo sharing – Flickr
• wiki – pb works, Tiki wiki, media wiki

As a communicator it’s now a challenge to pick the right channels to participate in. Although most of these are free your time or your employees’ time isn’t. There is no one tool and it’s usually a combination of tools that are needed in order to communicate effectively.

Communication can be internal within an organization (intranet) or externally. If it’s external communication then it’s easy however if you are interested in internal communications then Facebook, YouTube, Flickr are not the appropriate channels for you.  There are open source and commercial applications that enable you to achieve the same goals.

So what facts do I have to back my claim? Just take a look at your habits at work and in your personal lives.

• How many emails do you get per day? How many of them are directly related to what you are doing vs spam?
• How much mail do you get? How much of it do you read vs put in the recycle?
• Where do you spend your spare time? Is it online playing games, looking at videos, photos etc…

The answers to this is pretty simple we have way too much stuff to read whether it’s email, bills, letters etc. therefore we are very good at filtering. So then as a business who needs to communicate externally with customers or internally with employees how do you get your message through?

It’s through use of these social media tools, photos, video and audio.

I will leave you with this.   Pepsi Skips the Super Bowl, Spends on Social Media Instead!!!!

Everyone has been super concerned about privacy within Facebook for a long time. So here’s the latest scoop on this.

In other words you do have the choice of making content available to friend, friends of friends and everyone.

What these changes mean for you

• You can now control who can see every post you share, from status updates to photo albums.
• Regional networks (like London or Australia) have been removed.
• A common set of information for all users is now publicly available.
• Facebook-enhanced applications and websites now have access to a limited set of information when you use and interact with them: your publicly available information and information you’ve made visible to Everyone.
• No changes whatsoever to ads on Facebook. We do not give—and have never given—anyone’s data or personally identifiable information to advertisers.

From your home page, you will be sent through a transition tool that will help you select your new privacy settings. Remember, you’ll always be able to change your privacy settings from the Privacy page.

So you can customize who sees which post. So take the time to customize your settings based on what you are comfortable with. As always do give Facebook your feedback so that they can improve on this.

Further details are provided in Facebook’s privacy guide.

Quotable quotes

Social media is the invitation to your house party!  (Your house is your website)

The importance of tagging…

“Google juice”

diigo – social bookmarks – a way of tapping into social knowledge-base of Web content

Tip: for your company’s wiki page don’t have it written by the marketing dept. Have employees, customers do it instead – for a better sense of authenticity.

Blogs – company blogs should be integrated into the company website rather than being standalone

Social networks – Facebook. How do businesses participate

- pages – access to ad network

- groups

Remember there are other social networks besides Facebook and LinkedIn, think about where your markets are and find out which SNs are strongly present.

47% of all online users in Cda are on Facebook

Microblogs e.g Twitter. Good for marketing research.

It’s social media so start using the media!

Understand the psychology of social media. e.g. Intel put up photos of their trade show people and speeches because seeing photos brings people closer, makes the customer link stronger.

Use a video to increase survey participationl

Natasha d’Souza is giving a talk about Social Media at the ClockTower Pub. It’s the perfect venue, cozy for our friendly little gathering.

We’ve just finished an ice breaking game – everyone was an ‘ingredient’ in a recipe and we had to find our fellow ingredients to make a recipe for hot dogs and hamburgers.

I’m quickly drafted to be part of a team and it looks like we’re winners.  But now it turns out that I’m the wrong ingredient!  I get kicked out of the recipe team. (snif!)

The presentation is starting.

Natasha’s got a cool idea to get us involved in social media.  She’s got us using vidcams and digital cameras, blogs and tweets during the seminar.

Everyone is introducing themselves and other folks are taking pictures and video!  We’re hearing some amazing career stories:  investors, NGO people, quadrilingualists, PR, high tech, National defense, HR, consulting, startups, fitness.

More snacks have arrived!

/wynn

Although Facebook popularity was exploding globally they were still in start-up mode as a company, with negative cash flow.They had to borrow to expand and maintain their data centers, which cost about $25 million to run.

Sheryl Sandberg came on board about a year ago and things began to take a turn. Facebook was no longer a company run by a bunch of kids but had a COO that was there to turn Facebook into a very profitable business.

So who is Sheryl Sandberg anyway? She is a Harvard graduate who was the V.P. of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.  I think that about sums it up.

Facebook has finally announced that it is cash flow positive this quarter which means that they are no longer relying on investors to fund their development and growth but are generating revenue themselves.

How are they getting this revenue as Facebook is still FREE. This revenue comes via their ad network, Facebook Ads.

I have tried this a few times and have to say that I quite like it. I have the ability to target very specifically to age, gender, geographic location, profession and more. They have gone up in price from 23cents per click to 43 cents per click, however still much cheaper than most forms of advertising out there. They offer analytics and tools to track various campaigns, goal setting and much more.

The virtual gifts are still a high runner, $75Million this year.

So if you are a traditional business and your target market is on Facebook then it’s worth your while to participate there and run a few ads.

I have seen this message on my Facebook friends profiles.

“On Friday, Facebook will start using your photos in ads that will appear on the profile page of your contacts. It’s legal and is mentioned in the fine print when you create your account. If you want to prevent this from happening, do the following: Settings, Privacy Settings, News Feed and Wall. Then Facebook Ads, choose “No one” and save changes. Copy this and use in a status update.”

I was somewhat skeptical as to this new direction by Facebook so I decided to try it out.

Here’s what happened.

Settings

Privacy Settings

News Feed and Wall

Facebook Ads

The result is Facebook RUMOUR!!!

So this is a very challenging situation as you do trust your friends however how do you know that it’s not a virus that automatically updates their status vs them just passing on a message without checking if it’s true.

The best way to know what’s going on is to go to the Facebook blog.