NEW BLOG PAGE

Check out my new Blog. I am a abandoning this one for this now look. Hope you like it.

THE NEW BLOG

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Book Review Podcast Blog

Get More People to Look at Your Blog

But will they listen?

If you have a blog or plan to start one you should keep one thing in mind. A blog is a product, regardless if it's information based.

There are a lot of blogs out there, so yours better be good. If you want people to read it, then you should start promoting it and when they come to read it they better be blown away or entertained... or whatever you have written will quickly be forgotten and your blog will join the millions of other blogs that no one reads regularly. Here is some great advice from Lauren Hatch who has a great blog that people read.

Consistency
Readers want lots of posts, and "neglected content may inadvertently translate to neglecting your readers too."

Eloquence
Read a lot, write well and proofread. Weinberg's favorite bloggers "always have something insightful to say," and "their content exudes intelligence and occasional wit."

Uniqueness
Channeling Darren Rowse, Weinberg argues that being unique "requires not doing what everyone else does." I.e. don't repeat the news with nothing new to offer.

Specific
Focus on a niche and master it.

Personal
Let readers get to know the person behind the screen. Write "personal stories as it relates to your mission in blogging," Weinberg says.

Analytical
"People love data, and they love knowing how data can be aggregated to make conclusions. They love charts and graphics, and they love the findings that can be made from this data in aggregate," Weinberg says. So give it to them.

Detail
Details take a regurgitated news story and make them your own. The more detail, the better.

Thought-Provoking
Leave your readers thinking about your post long after they click away.

Passion
If you are passionate about your blog, readers will notice.

Instructional
Teach your readers how to do something interesting and useful, and it will be impossible for them not to share.

Networked
Be active in your quest to attract readers. "In order for people to find you," Weinberg says, "you need to be able to market your blog to them. How does one do this? Comment on other bloggers’ posts consistently. Send tweets out to the bloggers with your own commentary."

Does social media actually work? The White Paper Report

Paper paper everywhere but not a piece to jot...

Michael Stelzner at the WhitePaperSource has produced a pretty in depth report on the social media marketing whitepapersourceindustry. The industry now has enough years on it that this research is becoming more valuable to help make sense of this fast growing and often unwieldy area of the marketing mix.

The report is based on interviews of over 900 social media users of varying degrees. The findings are interesting in some areas and not so surprising in others. Some highlights include:

• The Top 10 social media questions that marketers want answered
• Experience levels are low with 72% of the marketers questioned having just started or only being involved in social media for a few months
• As a surprise to me, owners of 2- to 100-employee businesses were the most experienced (29.3% reporting doing social media marketing for years)
• Another startling finding was people aged 60 to 69 were significantly more likely to be just getting started with social media marketing than other age groups. In all honesty, I can’t imagine my parents on Facebook or Twitter!
• After only a few months and with as few as 6 hours a week, more than half of marketers have generated qualified leads with social media marketing
• The top 4 social media tools were Twitter (81%), blogs (79%), LinkedIn (78%) and Facebook (77%) topping the list of the Top 10. Owners preferred LinkedIn.
• The least understood outlet are social bookmarking sites

As it is with all research it is important to see how it measures up to your particular situation. These are interesting bits of data and can be convincing to the many new users that are currently just feeling their way around. It’s probably fair to say that almost everyone is feeling their way around social media though because the rules are being written and rewritten even as you read this.

Food as Art

Yummy in My Tummy

I had an awesome culinary experience tonight with a couple of special friends from China. The chef from green-t-house created some awesome food and the presentation was breathtaking.

One of the most interesting things about this haute cuisine is that all the dished utilize tea as an ingredient. The Shrimp with wasabi was amazing and the dessert came with tea infused dark and white chocolate slabs... yummy.

Next time you're in Beijing, do yourself a favor and treat your test buds and eyes to an amazing dining experience.

Check out there flash driven website here.

The Power of Persistance

Reminds me of days at art school

As an art project this is pretty ambitious. Check out what the student says regarding the creation of this great piece of work.

"This is the final piece for my AS art course, a flipbook made entirely out of biro pens. It’s something like 2100 pages long, and about 50 jotter books. I’d say I worked on and off it for roughly 3 weeks."

Google Maps and the Vancouver Olympics

Where are the bars?

Check out this great map.

Olympic Reporter's 2010 Winter Games

Vancouver Sun 2010 Olympics reporter Jeff Lee's comprehensive listing of Olympic venues, hospitality events, pavilions, sponsor houses, road restrictions, Flag Walk & more for the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

MAP ICON KEY
Snowflakes - Official celebration sites
Green tents: Official competition & practice venues
Red dot tags: Canadian official houses
Red tags: Other countries' pavilions
Yellow tags: Sponsor sites & events
Yellow pins: Vancouver Sun offices & house
Pink dot tags: Media centres
Green dot tags: City Halls
Green tags: Special Olympic sites
Blue flags: Official IOC sites
Trains: transit & Amtrak
Ship: SeaBus, ferries, Norwegian Star, RCMP cruise ships
Airplane:YVR, Harbour, Helijet
Blue dot tags: Olympic bus network,
Purple dot tags:free bicycle valet

Google View on Whistler slopes!

Where are the Mars Bars...

Leave it to Google Maps to take it to the next level. Yep they have done a street view of Whistlers sky runs just in time for the Olympics. Check them out and see where you would like to sky next year when the slopes have less competition.

FaceBook Fan-page Analysis

But what about Canada?

With the emergence of several new sources of data this week the lowly analyst is bringing fascinating new insight into the world of Data Mining and social applications like FaceBook. Check out this cool little web-data page to get the lowdown on fan-pages.

Here is part of a fascinating article "The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul"

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

If you think that's interesting you will really enjoy these defining zones in good old USA.

In a nutshell, Warden’s data analysis showed that Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:

Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.

Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.

Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.

Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.

Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.

Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation.

G-mail Still the Best

If only it did the dishes too...

If you didn't already know... Gmail is a free webmail and POP email service provided by Google, known for its abundant storage and advanced interface.

It is known as Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany and recently aggregrated Google Talk to its online service as well, providing users with an online chat feature for quickly communication from any computer in the world.

It currently offers 2GB+ of disk storage for emails and attachments and it’s fully integrated with Google Calendar. The account memory increases the longer you have the service.

Now, if you know all that, you might be interested in super charging your g-mail skills using Firefox (don't get me started on how good this browser is) . Check out these 2 great locations. If that's not enough then check out this blog post at lifehacker.com for lots of great posts.

TED Continues to Amaze All

But now I have to think more!

"There's a flip side to everything," the saying goes, and in 2 minutes, Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect.

Why you should listen to him:
Derek Sivers (link to his blog) is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too.

CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients.

In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company, MuckWork, where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their "uncreative dirty work."

"Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold. A musicians' savior. One of the last music-business folk heroes."

Esquire Magazine

A Message for All the Thinkers Out There

This makes me want to try some more...

Who can’t use a little dose of inspiration in the middle of the week? Christian Borstlap recently finished these deliciously simple animated illustrations for Dutch children’s charity, Kinderpostzegels.

Paul Postma did a great job of bringing Christian’s colourful illustrations to life, complimenting them with a playfully restrained animation style to really let their personalities shine.

Auto-Post Tools for Social Medias

Can you change the concept a bit?

Thanks to Jennifer Stalford for his original blog post.

1. HootSuite 2.0 allows management of multiple Twitter accounts with tracking capabilities, scheduling features and feeds blogs to Twitter. It now also interacts with LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, and Pingfm.
2. Ping.fm - ”Post From Anywhere – To Anywhere”. This can auto-post to 49 different social medias. The biggies included are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Delicious, and WordPress. Users can also use this on their SmartPhone.
3. Posterous is “the dead simple place to post everything”. This is done directly through your email account. In addition to having it auto-post to 10 social medias, users can attach url links, files, photos, video, blogs, and MP3’s. The largest social medias it works with are Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.
4. Twitter Feed - This works with Twitter, has analytics that are viewed on a personal dashboard, rss capabilities, works with blogs, and improvements have been made to the login process.
5. Friendfeed states that it’s ”the easiest way to share online”. Users can post something on their phone, Facebook or email and it disperses it to their friends.
6. Facebook allows users to auto-post to Twitter but only works with Facebook pages so it is ideal for businesses.
7. EzineArticles has a feature that auto-posts a message on Twitter that indicates a user’s article has been published.
8. WordPress to Twitter rates very well by users, shortens links and is compatible on WordPress blog versions up to 2.8.4.
9. Twitter Notify is a blog plugin created by Windows Live Writer Microsoft for Live Writer. It posts to Twitter and shortens the link to a blog post.
10. xPollinate is another free blog plugin for Live Writer. This can auto-post a portion or an entire blog post to multiple social medias including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more through Ping.fm.
11. Socialooph is a free social media management site for managing your Twitter account.
12. Postling is “social media management for businesses”. It allows multiple people to manage multiple accounts. You can create accounts for your team or your clients and control their access, including which brands they can interact with.

La Mime After My Own Heart

...., .... .., .. ... ..... ...!

This has got to be the best Mime on the planet. La Mime has figured it out how to be a funny mime. He also keeps in the tradition of being a bit creepy with his since of hummer too. This one particularly poignant because of the new laws in BC regarding cell phones and driving.

Be warned you could be watching this guy for hours.

Great Tweeting Tips for 2010

Tweeting all the way to the Bank

Be more innovative with Twitter this year. Here are 10 useful tips.
Thanks to Andra Picincu for her great blog post.

1. Expand Networks
Using Twitter, you can join topic groups related to your business and career and gain valuable information from scanning others’ tweets. Your company will gain new customers and potential partners. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow the users.

2. Build Credibility
If you hold free workshops, seminars or web meetings; let people know that it’s starting soon, how to participate and join in by tweeting about it.

3. Highlight Your Tweets
Twitter allows you to share the latest news and events related to your business in 140 characters. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in.

4. Look For Leads On Twitter
Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients or employers to enhance your reputation.

5. Communicate With Employees
Twitter is a great collaboration tool, which can be successfully used to save time and money.

6. Deals & Promotions
Offer incentives to those who follow you on Twitter. You can give them free coupons, discounts, package deals and samples.

7. Customer Complaints and Service
By accepting customer complaints in the open, other consumers can see what kind of company you really are.

8. Interact With Your Competition
You can read the tweets of your competitors daily and stay in touch with them. Although this rarely happens in the real world, Twitter has changed it all.

9. Organize A Local Tweetup
Twitter can help you organize meetups. All you have to do is to send a message announcing the time and place of the meeting. It’s an informal and effective way of planning a meeting.

10. Brand Loyalty
With Twitter, you can always stay in touch with your followers. All these people are potential customers, so you must help them get used to your products and services. Participate actively to conversations and tweet constantly.

Social Marketing is still marketing: know your audience

Are you talking to me? ...are you taking to me?

Check out this great blog post that takes you through a wonderful example of how to approach your social marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. The original blog post was written by Heidi Cool and can be found here.

Social Media Marketing is hip. It seems like everyone wants to get involved, call themselves an expert and use the magical powers of social media to triple sales, recruit students, etc. But social media isn't magic. Social media, like advertising, direct mail and telemarketing is but one of many tools in the marketer's toolbox. Like any tool it needs to be used in the proper context—in conjunction with other marketing strategies. As such social media—when used for marketing—still relies on basic marketing principles such as understanding your target audience, the features and benefits of your product or service, brand awareness and so forth.

Taking the time to narrow your audience to an easily defined niche makes marketing more cost effective. People think of social media as being a free alternative to traditional advertising or direct mail, but making successful connections requires time and labor. By targeting your audience you can focus that labor on connecting with the people who matter most to your goals.

Once you've found that audience you need to connect with them on their own terms if you want to achieve any level of success. Study the usage patterns of the social media services/platforms you intend to use. Find out how your audience uses these tools, then follow their lead. If you put as much effort into tailoring your communication methods to your market as you put into developing a product or service that suits their needs you'll have a far better chance of establishing connections than you would with a more generic approach.

It doesn't take magic, just time, research and work.

Time to Get Ready For 2010

I see great things happening this year...

Time to start your marketing and advertising for 2010 today. Check out the new trends that are being talked about for this coming year. Thanks to Robert Passikoff for this great post. Predictive loyalty metrics measure the direction and velocity of consumer values 12 to 18 months in advance of the marketplace and consumer articulations of category needs and expectations, they identify future trends with uncanny accuracy.

1) Value is the new closing point 

Consumer spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This spells trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.

2) Brands a surrogate for "value"

What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what's wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for. So make sure that you aligh yourself with other great brands.

3) Brand differentiation is Brand Value

The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to plague the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for success meaning sales and profitability.

4) "Because I Said So" is so over
Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but they must believably exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can't just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.

5) Consumer expectations are growing

Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations now. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive - and prosper.

6) Old tricks don't work work anymore
In case your brand didn't get the memo here it is, consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim "we're all in this together" when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies.

7) They won't need to know you to love you
As the buying space becomes even more online-driven and international, front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street cred can go viral in days, with awareness following, not leading, the conversation.

8) It's not just buzz
Conversation and community is all; ebay thrives based on consumer feedback. If consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. Not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This means the coming of a new era of customer care.

9) They're talking to each other before talking to the brand

Social Networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. Look for more websites using "Facebook Connect" to share information with the friends from those sites. More companies will become members of Linkedin. Twitter users will spend more money on the Internet than those who don't tweet.

10) Engagement is not a fad
Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods including Platform (TV; online), Context (Program; webpage), Message (Ad or Communication), and Experience (Store/Event). But there is only one objective for the future: Brand Engagement. Marketers will continue to realize that attaining real brand engagement is impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.

Santa Gives the Winter Olympics a Pass

Santa was quoted in Miami earlier today, "Ho Ho Ho.. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to go because I am not an official corporate Olympic sponsor, so my lawyers told me to give it a miss... but I will be back next year!"


The official "West Coast Canada Santa Visit" went to Lolloowet area this year. The Mayor of Vancouver was disappointed that Vancouver was not honored with Santa's presence but he says, "The Value of the Olympics far outweighed the downside...."

NORAD and Santa Team Up

Can I Open One Now?

If you're like me waiting for Santa to make his way down your chimney and deliver all those cool new toys you need there is a great new tracking tool from Google Maps.

Santa Snacks
Santa takes breaks during his Christmas Eve trip around the world – especially for snacks left by children. Do you put a snack out for Santa? Kids all over the world do. Some even leave carrots for Santa's reindeer. (Carrots are their favorite food.)

Leaving cookies for Santa is a tradition for many families. Imagine eating that many cookies in one night (burp)!

What the Heck is Google Wave

But can it wash the dishes, answer the phone and get rid of all my spam...
Edited version from Bob Moss blog post.

If you have not checked out Wave (invitation only, since September this year) you are missing out on one of the coolest and probably most innovative collaboration tool available on the market today..

Oh yea... it FREE too!

Wave is a revolutionary new way to keep in contact with people and collaborate on documents and could completely replace email. The theory is that email is beginning to look a little antiquated, especially when we could be using the features of Web 2.0 with 'waves'.


What exactly is 'waves'?
A wave is best compared to a conversation in an instant messenger, but in the case of a wave, you can chat to yourself or to a whole group of people. Each wave contains a subwave called a 'wavelet', which focuses on a particular aspect of the main wave, and can be manipulated in much the same way. This means one wave can branch out into a number of other waves, but keep all the original associations. Each wavelet contains entries, known as 'blips', posted by the various collaborators, extension apps, or even automated robots you converse with. These can contain anything, including text and video, and mean that your wave becomes diverse and dynamic, with content that's constantly updated, either from an external source or your fellow collaborators. A document, in wave terms, contains the content of each blip. You slowly build up and manipulate the various blips to produce in-depth conversations or collaborative papers. You can then embed your wave document into a webpage, so it can act like an interactive and automatically updating wiki. It's also possible to export everything into a final file for printing or sending to your fellow collaborators.


Spell checking that think for you.
You are less likely to suffer from spelling mistakes or grammatical errors than you would with a wiki, thanks to Google's innovative natural language tools. These adapt depending on the context of your writing, and pick the most likely suggestion when it compares against the text that came before. This means you could type "I have bean eating beens" and have this automatically corrected to the sentence you expected as you type, without the need for any further intervention.

Waves have full support for you to drag and drop files, text snippets or any web content. This will automatically be added to your document as a blip. This makes things much more interactive. As expected, you can also embed other Google services such as calendars, YouTube video, Picasa images and so on into your waves. As a document creator, only the people you explicitly specify as collaborators can alter your work. You can remove collaborators at any time and cycle back through the changes they might have made.


Expect lots of great new plug-ins and applets
Google has open-sourced the open-transport layer as well as large swathes of the main code, so developers can build their own extensions using the Wave API. One such extension enables you to embed Twitter feeds into a document, thereby creating a 'twave' and enabling real-time communication over another protocol while still integrating seamlessly into the interface. This can then be extended by programming robots. Developers can program robots that create blips and respond in particular ways to content in other waves and external websites. They can even respond to you sending them messages, which means you can ask your robot for the latest sports scores and be told instantly. To include your robot in any wave, just add it as a collaborator, and off you go.

OK so how do you get a Wave Invitation. Find someone who has a Gmail account and ask them. If they are using their Gmail account properly they already have a Wave account setup and it not then they will thank you when they get all set up in Google Wave.

More great info:
Complete guide Blog on Google wave

Take 2 Asprins and Get Marketing Now

I have a headake just thinking about these numbers.

One of the few industries that have actually increased their marketing budget (2.457 Billion) over the last several years is "Big Pharma". Even though they are making billions in profit they are aware that in the cut-through industry of pharmaceutical wonder drugs R&D does not guarantee success. One company has increased its advertising budget by 160 percent and most are ramping up their budgets as we exit the recession.

If they see that the only way to get a great product (or idea) to market is to spend more of marketing and cut budgets in other places should send a strong signal to all businesses. If your not aggressively marketing your business than you are fighting a loosing battle against the companies that are.

Now is not the time to go crazy and overspend on ineffective marketing ideas. If you have limited funds in marketing then you should be rearranging your cash flow to get more marketing and advertising campaigns moving sooner are rather than later. If nothing we have learnt that the business that comes out of a recession with a strong well executed marketing plan is often the leader in their segment for years and sometimes decades.