Archive for March, 2009
I am pretty impressed with this Terms & Conditions page. I got the link from reddit.com (Wired’s version of Digg) and the board lit up with positive feedback. Don’t confuse your site users – inform them.
*FTW: for the win. Do not use in spoken conversation.
I used to delete my cookies all the time. I didn’t want anyone collecting data about me; my privacy was vitally important. I never really gave any thought to what a business might do with collected information, but I assumed it must be something sinister, perhaps replacing me with a clone, or even worse… Read more
Canadian Interactive Futures Roundtable
IAB Canada visionaries give their perspectives on industry development in 2009 and beyond
To preface the talk, Paula showed the audience the 3.0 edition of the “Did you Know” series. If you haven’t been watching these until now, all 3 versions are available on youtube.
I took some audio of this event, but most of it picked up too much ambient noise. Next year, I will not be a chicken and I will go right up to the stage. The pieces that I did get are available here for your listening pleasure:
Last week was the IAB’s spring Mixx conference in Toronto. Lynn Hoffman, Derek Leverington, and Roslyn Kozak joined me from Regina to add Western credentials to the show. Following several years of cookie-cutter Ontario/national centric road show presentations from the IAB, I was unsure of what to expect from this talk. I had been very vocal about my discontent with presentations that had been brought to Vancouver in the past and figured if I was going to continue to have a leg to stand on that I should attend the larger functions that require paid-entry. The local road show presentations are free, and I usually suggest people who are new or getting into online attend the show when it arrives in their town.
The event was held in the Carlu Theatre in downtown Toronto. Early morning (really early for me…), we headed over to the theatre and prepped ourselves for a day of live-tweeting and blogging. If you were following my twitter account, you may have followed my notes and comments about the presentation throughout the day. New to twitter?: simply click on the follow me icon in the left hand sidebar and you’ll see my historical posts. #mixx was used for the event, so if you’re interested, you can sort the hashtagged tweets from the day (March 5th); however, be aware the #mixx is usually used for a tech news site and will contain tweets that are not relevant to the conference. It was pretty funny to see our table set-up to live-tweet, since I am constantly looking to the audience when I present. I wouldn’t know what to do with a room full of twitterers paying more attention to their tiny keypads than my circus performance on the stage.
On Monday, I headed to Burnaby to give a talk to Les Dames d’Escoffier about social marketing. A client and friend of mine, Angie Quaale, invited me to speak
and told me that I would be served an excellent (vegetarian) meal at the Pear Tree Restaurant. Since I already had a workshop published from a few weeks ago, I was happy to exchange some tidbits for some tidbits. Even better was the Booster Juice gift certificate as a thank you!! I have been hopped up on Macha Monsoons ever since.
The talk was called “Top 10 social tools that small/medium businesses should have on their radar”.
1. Facebook
2. Flickr
3. YouTube
4. Twitter
5. WordPress/Blogger/LiveJournal
6. Digg/Technorati/Boingboing/Fark (social aggregators)
7. Meetup/LinkedIn (other social communities)
8. RSS feeds
9. Tumblr & browsers that integrate social tools into one place.
10. Skype/Instant Messengers
Since I wanted the talk to be very casual and conducive to conversation, I avoided slides and powerpoint presentations and instead hand-drew each of the “top 10″‘s logos. Any excuse to pull out the felt pens is a good one. I talked about what each tool was, what it was for and how small/medium businesses could integrate them into their marketing plans.
I was often asked the following questions: “Are my peers really using this tool?” and “Who has time to manage all of this?”