Interesting Google stat:
MikeG1 Mildly scary: http://www.google.com/searc… 5 minutes ago from twitterrific
johncarson @MikeG1 cool — 1,460 results for “social media” compared to 19,200,000 today, wish I had bought more URLs, ah well…. 1 minute ago from web in reply to MikeG1
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Mark Cregar has listed what he believes is the top five digital marketing cliches. He cites them as The Social Network Page, The Second Life Storefront, The Online Ad Contest, The Social Network and The Online Branded Entertainment Series.
In that case, I’m sure 99% of PR firms in social media have used a cliche, as the list runs the gamut of what a lot of companies are implementing in their campaigns. What’s new these days? When does something become so popular that it achieves cliche status?
To be fair, Cregar does offer alternative angles to his top five that you may want to consider. It’s a good read.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Todd Defren posts about a practice that is just plain wrong: commenting on people’s blogs under a false name, with the intention of driving “traffic” back to a client’s own blog or website. I put the word traffic in “” because it can’t really be called that. It can be called a stream of pi**ed off people being deceived into visiting a brand, the reputation of which they will associate with these sleazy, cheap tactics.
Not smart.
So, the “SEO” guys get called out, and lo and behold, come back with this recommendation: “Instead of the blog spam, we could have our employees post anonymously on blogs about needing a service similar to your offering … and then return a day later, posing as a customer who’s been happy with your services.”
Shudder.
Three words that a social media campaign does not make: spam, anonymously and posing.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
[*Just Americans? More I expect, but it is a survey from an American strategy and communications agency.]
Still, it’s encouraging news: “According to the survey, 93 per cent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 per cent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 per cent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”
This part got me all a Twitter: “… of younger, hard-to-reach consumers (ages 18-34), one-third believe companies should actively market to them via social networks …”
So, is this the green light for PR companies to recommend building Facebook widgets, niche social networks and dedicated blogs on behalf of their clients to push their brands to the masses? I think it is, in the right circumstances. But don’t do it just because you can. Make sure it’s the right strategy for the right brand at the right time. Don’t set up a Facebook group or blog just because it’s the flavour of the month, and then watch it die a slow death. Someone has to manage it, engage people to use and interact with it, monitor what people are saying and respond to them in a timely manner. It needs a lot of effort and commitment if those 18-34ers are going to be receptive. Don’t use them to justify the budget, and then discard them. They’ll remember!
[Update to my thoughts above: Alex Hillman thinks along the same lines, although I’d disagree with him on the “Joining the conversation means you’re adding more noise …” statement. It’s about talking to each other.]
And if things don’t work out, it might be time to tweak your profile on LinkedIn. They seem to be doing well from the curent credit crunch landscape. [Hat tip: Jemima Kiss.]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Here’s the latest Twitter listening tool with a weird name: Cherpa.
Anyone want to help me code an application that just repeats what other people are saying and call it Parrotr?
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Our GCI Canada business cards are very nice, always get a good response when handing them over. But you know the deal, right? You go to a lot of conferences, pitches, business meetings etc… and don’t want to carry a ton of cards to hand out.
Try Dropcard. It’s a very simple system. You simply text 41411 with a command like: “drop jcarson@gcicanada.com” and the recipient gets an e-mail with all your contact info and social networks. Sweet.
I like the founders’ philosophy too: “We’re three students who didn’t want to enter the business world armed with tools that were centuries old. Not to mention the number of trees we’re saving by preventing the production of physical business cards.”
[Update. I asked co-founder Anton Bernstein about what happens to all the e-mails being sent by text: “We don’t harvest e-mails, nor do we sell e-mail addresses for marketing or anything like that. We make our money by selling premium versions of the basic free service. The only partners we work with are Textmarks (every SMS is processed through them and they don’t store any SMS content) and authSMTP, which processes our e-mails so that they don’t get stuck in spam. Otherwise, you can rest assured that we would never, ever give or sell our database of e-mail addresses to any entities outside of Dropcard.”]
Hat tip: Web Worker Daily.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
E-newsletters are still a great way to digest what’s going on out there if you need more info than just 140 characters.
An article by Rebecca Lieb (Vice-President & Editor-in-Chief, The ClickZ Network) popped into my inbox this morning, jostling for space among Google Alerts, Radian6 reports and other client-monitoring tools. Lieb talks about young bucks in the publishing industry moving into management positions, and quite rightly asking for digital tools they need to move the business forward, only to be met with a “Huh?” from the older guys. (I can say “older guys” by the way. I’m in my ’30s, yeah.)
Here’s a succinct quote from the article: “Clinging to Luddism and deliberate blindness in the face of the digital revolution (no understatement there!) may have been cute 10 years ago. Today, it’s inexcusable.”
It seems that the PR world has leapfrogged publishing. Traditional press releases are soooo 2007. The digital editors and reporters of Today 2008 need to be pitched more directly, thoughtfully and in a timely manner. They don’t want to be scooped by a competitor who happened to check their Twitter followers five minutes sooner.
End quote from Lieb: “Because friends can no longer allow friends to remain digitally illiterate.” Yes! It’s not a competition. Encourage your colleagues, contacts, sources, and online network to dip their toe into the digital world. It’s very cool, makes the job a whole lot easier and will move the media industry forward in big ways.
[Update: Just ran across this quote. Very interesting. “Of course there’s no doubt that our generation is taking advantage of the Web 2.0 craze — with countless social networks, start-ups, application developments and a million other projects that are making young little geeks rich quick. However as savvy as we may be, it is the chronologically advanced who are especially successful at solving the problems we increasing — and desperately — need solved. In other words, the high tech future may belong to the over 30-set.” Source.]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
I thought this video was a spoof viral attempt when I first watched it. But no, it’s for a real law firm who have seen the social media angle that can be taken when advising fathers in their custody battle for their children.
As the guy in the video says: “You have to do this investigation on the down low; you have to keep quiet about it, otherwise it’s pointless. Within a matter of minutes the MySpace or Facebook page can be changed or shut down or made private. So keep your mouth shut if you’re doing this type of investigation.”
So, what I believe is being advised here, is find your ex-wife’s social network, take some screenshots of her getting drunk and friending a lot of weird people, and then you have some evidence for the custody battle. No?
Hat tip: Social Times.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
It’s Canadian National Digital Media Day in Canada, and there’s a lot of cool things happening around the country for those who work in the digital space.
Details here.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
I’m a big advocate of being judged on results, and not by the amount of time it took to achieve those results. Some days it takes longer, and you stay late, other times it’s accomplished faster than you planned, so then you can go off to the bar — err — stay late and start something else.
My busy little RSS reader introduced me to ROWE today. That stands for Results-Only Work Environment, which in my mind, is a pretty cool concept. From the Personal Branding Blog: “Why work 9-5, when you can achieve the same results working when you want to work? All that really matters in business is that you get the job done on time. Successful employees will get the job done before the due date and at a higher quality.”
This concept is obviously much easier to follow if you are not employed full time, as you can’t stroll in to the office at 11 a.m. and leave around 3 p.m. just because you finished a project. ROWE is a boon for teleworkers though, and those who like to work odd hours — especially if they deal with varying time zones.
More from the blog: “Technology has advanced to the point where we don’t, by any means, need to be sitting in a cubicle or in an office building to get our work done. It comes down to this: Your company is providing you with a paycheck and possibly other benefits. They’re giving you a job and, in some cases, a path to a career. For that you absolutely, positively owe them hard work, focus, and dedication. More important, you owe them real, measurable results.”
Agree on all that; a job is a relationship between you providing your knowledge and skills to better a company, and them for paying you for that personal commodity.
“You owe them your work; you do not owe them your time. You do not owe them your life.”
Agree on that too. As long as both parties know where the boundaries are, and what needs to be achieved, who for, and when by, then everyone should come out of the relationship feeling content.
It’s quite a long blog post I refer to, but well worth the read. I am a Generation X member adapting to working in a Generation Y environment and social space, especially in the online world. It’s cool because everyone can speak the same language.
That’s a nice segue into a shout out to my colleagues in the London, U.K. office and whether any of them are attending the Harvest Twestival tomorrow? (These days it’s cool to start social media stuff with a “tw” or rhyme it with Twitter.)
And to finish, this ad is for anyone who wants to see YouTube destroyed. Very clever.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
From the site:
“Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and micro-blogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.
“Search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixed as a single stream of information. The data is fresh, which means you can track conversations as they are happening in real-time.”
Tried it on dell, iphone and beer — error results. Hmmm, someone must be talking about at least one of those somewhere?!
Keeping an eye on it too. Hopefully not Cuil part 2.
[Update from Jon @ socialmention: “Yesterday, our servers went down due to overwhelming usage after a Mashable article was posted.”]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Technorati released its State of the Blogosphere report yesterday and I took a look at the stats. From a social media PR perspective, I found this paragraph interesting:
—
Brands Permeate the Blogosphere
Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the blogosphere. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers. Companies are already reaching out to bloggers. One-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.
—
Here’s my translation for the real world:
—
Brands Permeate the Blogosphere [Brands Realise They Are Now The Customer]
Whether or not a brand has launched a social media strategy, more likely than not, it’s already present in the blogosphere. [By being criticized for its poor customer service by disgruntled consumers who don’t like waiting 45 minutes on the phone and then being cut off after being passed to three different departments.] Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. [Because they feel that is the only way to be heard these days, by discussing the problems with their peers.] 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). [Mainly hate. It’s easy to vent on the Internet, especially anonymously.] Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers. [Old news.] Companies are already reaching out to bloggers. [”Wow, that was a harsh blog post. How can we get you on our side?”] One-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates. [”Try our camera for a few weeks, you don’t have to blog about it — really. Be nice if you did though.”]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
The guys at blogTO have put together a nifty little diagram showing who owns who in Toronto’s media scene.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
So, it’s happening — mompreneurs are taking it away from the blogs and into specialized Twitter social networks. Twittermoms is only 15 days old and already has over 5,000 members.
As Amit Bhawani says in the comments, “This shows there is a good future for twittergals.com , twitterguys.com , twittercousins.com, seniortwitters.com, twittergays.com and more.” Maybe this will be the new URL gold rush? [I just checked and they’re all still available, apart from one. Get in there quick!]
It seems an ironic concept to me; joining a social network to chat about what you’re chatting about on Twitter. Seems like an extra step. Ah well, who am I to guess the future — would be a billionaire if it was that easy.
And talking of billionaires, here’s Sergey Brin’s new (and very personal) blog.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
If you can’t laugh, what’s left? For everyone who has been in a client pitch.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Been following these guys for a while — especially StartupNorth.ca — so thought I’d give a mention to their latest venture, StartupNation. Being an entrepreneur at heart, it’s great to see these type of conferences come along in Canada.
[There’s no social media point to this post, but today’s startup could be tomorrow’s Twitter. (So, well, there is a social media point I suppose.)]
[Update: Rebranding.]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Great question, David Cushman, who asked it via LinkedIn today, and is now inviting answers.
“ROI can’t come down to increased traffic. Traffic is just eyeballs — it’s just the page impression number. ROI has to get closer to and be more comfortable with the smaller, but more important numbers, of engagement,” he writes. Nearly a perfect answer.
In my opinion … some companies do want increased traffic. To them, a page impression is a successful ROI for their purposes. I don’t understand why; it just means they pay more for hosting costs, but if that’s their measure of success, then good for them.
So, how do you convince the disconnected that they need to engage, not just look at the bottom line? You have to scare them a little. Spend an hour — that’s all it takes — to do some monitoring. Find 10 disgruntled customers who are criticizing their products or customer service. Who feel unheard. Do a trackback search to those posts, and see who is linking to those 10 non-advocates. Find out who those people are, and who their audience is. Repeat until the client gets depressed.
But! All is not lost! Ask for their trust … go in on their behalf, contact those original 10 people as fast as you can, and ask if you can help them with their problem. In probably 60% of those cases, it may be too late. Mr. Disgruntled has already made his mind up and is off to spend his $$$ elsewhere. So, by simple math, that leaves the other 40% who do appreciate the feedback. Shocked even that Corporation X has bothered to take the time away from the boardroom, and is actually talking to them, the customer, the person that has put $$$ into Corporation X’s piggy bank.
Those 40% are now, with the right engagement, happy that their problem has been solved — maybe with some tech advice, a free coupon, a personal e-mail out of the blue — and will possibly blog about their positive experience.
Maybe social media will do away with the cold term ROI, and it will become ROE — return on engagement?
[A quick and dirty way to track a lot of stuff at the same time.]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Chris Brogan is hosting a free webinar today; see you there!
- How some of the world’s leading organizations are successfully leveraging social media for their marketing programs.
- Case studies and real life examples of successful social media programs.
- The strategies and tactics behind social media initiatives.
- How to implement a solid social media strategy in your company.
- 5 ways you can begin using social media in your company tomorrow!
Register here.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
A large part of my job here is to monitor the Internet for what people are saying about a certain subject, brand or client. That intel is then compiled and compared to assess whether the trends are positive or negative, good or bad, going up or going down. It’s normally 50/50 — it’s rare to see someone blog/tweet, “Hmm, I’m so undecided about this product … check back tomorrow to see whether I like it or not.”
It’s relatively easy to check a handful of key sites and services, and get a snapshot of the online community’s sentiment about something.
My colleague Stephanie blogged yesterday about being surprised by someone commenting on her blog who is working on the Marilyn Churley campaign. These days, it’s surprising not to be tracked, I believe. Assume what you blog about is being read by someone affiliated to that company, name, service or product.
I won’t list names here for fear of being accused of linkbait — and certain people know I’ve communicated to them about their blogs via private e-mail (weird … unjoining the conversation) — but a simple look at the blog stats and you know who’s reading, what company they’re checking from and how many posts they read. People say you should tailor your posts to who’s reading, but I tend to disagree. You can’t please all the people all the time, so write what you think is interesting in your subject matter and visitors will come back.
This post actually veered off the track of what I intended to cover: blog monitoring, but for clients. As mentioned, there are tools out there to take the donkey work out of it for you, bots that scurry around the Internet looking for a combination of keywords, and then ranking those results based on different criteria (depending on what tool you’re using) of number of comments, incoming links, mention of the keyword, who is actually talking about that keyword (influencer) and a host of other options.
That’s all great. It’s a good starting point then for the real work of a human being to sift through those results, and separate the wheat from the chaff. Spam bots are always advancing, and it’s easy to get taken in by a link that looks very authentic, even to the extent of having a regular template wrapped around it, but once you examine the page you notice the odd “viagra” or “ebay” slipped into the body of the text that is totally nonsensical.
So, you have to read most of it, check the ads around it, click on some of the links in the fake blogroll and so on to actually determine if that is a real “mention” that is valuable to the client, or something that needs to be weeded out. You can rush through the results and erroneously include worthless ones, or you can take your time and examine them to make sure they really are relevant to the outreach you are trying to achieve.
As it says on the top, this is a post about blog viagra monitoring.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Matt Hartley’s recent series regarding the perils of social networking had me thinking. If you read his article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, he had several examples of the scary amount of personal information he was able to acquire based solely on posts he’d found on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace — information that members were willingly putting on their sites with seemingly no thought to who could see it.
We’re talking cellphone numbers, addresses, dates and times of parties. It was frightening, and another reason why I was hesitant to join Facebook in the first place. Mind you, I’m fairly certain I’m more cautious than high school kids when it comes to putting my personal information online.
Still, I’m always surprised when strangers post comments on my personal blog, and how quickly. I recently mentioned Marilyn Churley on my blog (as she’s running for election in my riding) and found a comment a few hours later from an individual working on Marilyn’s campaign.
On Saturday night I had dinner with a couple who have a young daughter, and the thought of online predators makes them shudder. The things parents have to worry about today in comparison to when I was young blows my mind! And although the couple said they would easily lay down the law with their children about Internet use, they also know that by the time their daughter is old enough to be using social networking sites, technology will have advanced to the point where they’ll be as ignorant as parents today when it comes to protecting her.
~ Stephanie Sayer, Account Coordinator, GCI Canada
I have been e-mailing back and forth with a well-known social media news website, and they asked me to fill them in on the scene and what’s happening in Toronto/GTA right now. Having suggested they stop off in Toronto on their annual summer tour, they asked what start-ups and established companies are based here? It’s an exciting question, and one I will start to research.
Need some help though from the community – please e-mail me your contact details and/or website link if you are a recent start-up or have been around a few years; blog about social media; work in social media; organize meet-ups (online or offline); are in your basement inventing a Twitter-killer app; or just feel like Toronto’s social media passion needs more of a boost on a worldwide stage.
E-mail: jcarson @ gcigroup DOT com
Twitter: johncarson
Thanks in advance! This could be very cool.
[Update: Thanks to Maggie Fox for the reply.]
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
It’s great to be out there in the World Wild Wide West Web and raising the profile of brands and clients. But, in doing so, you’re also putting your own personal brand on show for others to discover. Especially potential employers.
The Globe and Mail picked up on that subject yesterday and wrote about the fact that bosses are now increasingly screening applicants for how they act online, especially in social media. The writer states that: “Other areas of concern to arise from social network sites were poor communication skills, lying about qualifications, candidates using discriminatory remarks related to race, gender or religion, and an unprofessional screen name.”
I can understand the “lying about qualifications” and “discriminatory remarks related to race, gender or religion” red flags, but — come on! — bright people, star employees of the future, may not get considered because they write shorthand style or slang on Facebook, or in a blog? Or their screen name is “bigdawg” or “heavymetalforever” instead of “supersalesman” or “always_early_working_late_guy”?
How can someone’s not-on-the-clock, not-being-paid, personal and private life that is being conducted using social media be relevant to the effort and professionalism they put into their job? I think it’s pretty disrespectful to equate that, actually.
I write for a living, and take a LOT of pride in putting together coherent, interesting and typo-free work, but so what if I use slang or “lazy” ways to communicate with my friends in other ways? Will a future employer use that against me as a snapshot, or actually take the time to research my resume, chat to former colleagues, get a more intense picture of my qualifications, skills and past success?
There is no perfect candidate for any job, seriously. You can’t hire God. From my experience, people hire those who have 80% of what they’re looking for — the rest can be gained by training, learning on the job, advice from new colleagues and so on. How many times have you heard someone say in an interview, “I’m looking for a new challenge.” Challenge = “it won’t be easy, there’s some aspects I need to brush up on, but I’m keen and willing to do my best for the company who has trusted me with its reputation.”
There’s different horses for different courses. Party people head to Facebook; professional people head to LinkedIn; those who like to work and enjoy life at the same time use both, or straddle the line on Twitter.
I think it will be a very sterile workplace of the future if people are hired because they fit in a certain list of checkboxes. Employees have lives, and should be allowed to conduct those as they wish.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
I heard about Yammer, been trying it out today with my work colleague Stephanie, tweeted about it just now and a few minutes later was being followed by Present.ly — seems like they are monitoring their competitors in real time.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
It’s great that social media offers a way for people to join the discussion, but this is taking it a bit too far.
(Hat tip.)
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Social MEdia. It’s all about ME! ME! ME!
MEdia has always been about the individual. People absorb it, and then ask themselves: “So, what do I think about that? How does that affect ME?”
Social MEdia is just the latest way for providers and takers to MEet in the middle. There’s information, opinion, products, buyers and sellers out there on the Internet, all swirling around, linking to one another — but social MEdia collects it in a form I can easily digest … in my browser, RSS feed, “follows,” tags, webinars, tweets and other notifications.
People become the hub of all this information, picking and choosing what they want to see, read, listen to, comment on, and ignore. Do you know what I MEan?
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
The guys at Bad Pitch Blog waxed lyrical yesterday on whether old journalism (read: traditional media) is dead. I touched on that in a roundabout way in this post a couple of weeks ago. [Disclaimer, I have worked as a journalist in the U.K. and Canada, so it’s a subject close to my heart.]
The author of the post, Richard Laermer, lists a slew of venerable publications that have laid off staff or cut costs by closing office space. My colleagues and I were discussing the art of pitching recently and the fact that the beat reporter is a dying breed, so it pays to keep up-to-date contact lists.
I disagree with Laermer on this point: “You need to look for every other place but the print media to pitch, because ink-stained pages are only picked up if you step on them after they are dropped in public places.” There’s still value in seeing a client’s name in print; it’s what they expect, and we’re not doing our jobs if we don’t strive for that.
I agree with Laermer on this point: “PR practitioners have to go for newfangled online sources. If you’re (still?!?) spending all day pitching old media, you are soon going to be stuck with very little to do.” Blogs, online outlets, microblogging platforms, social networks, forums — these are all just as important in a PR pro’s arsenal of getting coverage, boosting a brand and maintaining a client’s good reputation. The work actually takes up most of my day, so it’s a very valid strategy, and it works. The ROI is not immediate, but once people get it, the effects can be clearly seen.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
Mashable and TechCrunch recently had redesigns, and are now cleaner, load faster (probably due to less cluttered ad areas) and are easier on the eye. I think they look pretty similar though in their layout; maybe it’s the nav bar and search box placement.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
BusinessWeek had a story last Saturday about how companies are using Twitter to monitor themselves online, find out who is tweeting about them, and then jumping into the conversation to address those (usually negative) issues. “Is this a creepy trend?” asks the article.
No! Is my resounding answer. It’s about time companies started listening to their customers for a change instead of selling to them. The ROI will come in time; people like to be respected.
The story mentions Jonathan Fields’ experience of spotting William Shatner waiting to board a JetBlue flight. Fields wrote about it on Twitter, and within 10 seconds (I find that part hard to believe, it’s an ultra-fast response!) was being “followed” by JetBlue.
[cut] “It totally startled me,” says the 42-year-old author, who initially worried that JetBlue might be monitoring his use of the Wi-Fi connection. JetBlue employee Morgan Johnston quickly explained that wasn’t the case. JetBlue keeps tabs on what Twitter users say about it, using a scanning tool, to find customers who might need information, say, on flight delays or cancellations, Johnston said. [paste]
If users of these microblogging services realise that anything they put out there is in the public domain, searchable and fair game for comment, then the element of being surprised — if a company or person chooses to pick it up and run with it, or follow them, or link to them, or lambast them, or refer them to others — … on and on … — is totally gone.
In fact, these days, if someone doesn’t react to what you’ve said, then, that is surprising. It’s turning 180 and customers better get used to it and get excited by it.
[Hat tip for the lead to Laura Fitton.]
So, if you’re now prepared and comfortable with being “followed,” you better learn about personal branding. This could be the best 15 pages you’ll read today on that front.
~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada
I am constantly blown away by the pace at which the world of digital media is changing. Just when you begin to think you know enough and have learnt enough about a new media tool like, say, Twitter, something new is already on its way to becoming the new buzzword in the social mediascape. And while everyone scrambles to learn the new way, get heard, seen and noticed in this new virtual world, the impact on traditional media is becoming more and more visible.
Sometime ago I came across this Flash video that was created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson for the Museum of Media History. They named it Epic 2014. It’s a short film attempting to capture the history of the Internet, the evolving mediascape and its impact on traditional media like newspapers.
The film unveils a hypothetical future of the media with extreme personalization of content (which is already a reality). The makers of Epic 2014 have also posted a new updated vision of the future with another film Epic 2015.
Though the films are a little out there with the implausible future they propose … I can’t help but think these might just be the reality given the fast and crazy pace of change we are living with everyday. Watch the films and make up your own minds.
~ Akshata Kalyanpur, Consultant, GCI Canada
