Tonight’s speaker, Colleen Young, founded and sustains the #hcsmca  Health Care Social Media Canada weekly twitter chat. And she knows how to develop a successful online community of interest. I first became aware of the #hcsmca Twitter chats a couple years ago when doing a social media audit for a health care client. As I looked around at the various discussions, I discovered that media professionals, policy makers, at least one provincial Minister of Health along with health care communicators were all gravitating to #hcsmca to exchange their views on issues relating to the provision of health care in Canada.

So, I’m very much looking forward to tonight’s session.

N.B. When I checked this morning, there were still eleven open spots for this evening’s Third Tuesday. So, if you’d like to participate, click over to the Third Tuesday meetup site and register to attend tonight’s event. I’ll be hopping on a mid day plane to Toronto so that I can be there in time. And if you see me there, I hope you’ll say hello.

Thank you to our sponsors

I can’t close this post without thanking Third Tuesday’s sponsors - Cision Canada andRogers Communications - who believe in our community and help us to bring speakers not just to Toronto but to Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver as well. Without the sponsors we couldn’t make Third Tuesday a truly Canadian affair. So, thank you to the sponsors of the Third Tuesday 2012-13 season: Cision Canada and Rogers Communications.

We want students to be able to attend

One more thing: Third Tuesday is a great opportunity to hear about the latest developments in social media and to network with business and thought leaders. And we don’t want students to miss out on this opportunity. So, if you are a student and would like to attend, don’t let the admission fee stop you. Simply present your student ID card at the time you sign into Third Tuesday and we’ll refund your admission fee, courtesy of Thornley Fallis.

However, I can’t get over the feeling that, if you and I had a billion dollars to spend, we’d probably aim a little higher.

Chris Hadfield returned the magic to social media. This week, @Cmdr_Hadfield returned to earth from the International Space Station. “At a time when the the world’s second favourite social network is courting the corporate world in its bid to establish a viable monetization strategy, Hadfield has reawakened some of the excitement created in the the early days of Twitter and he did it by tweeting in the moment,”  Sherrilynne Starkie wrote. “Canadians, and people around the globe, are more than engaged…they are enthralled. They feel as though they have been part of the mission and they adore Hadfield for taking them along.”

Social media as a channel to reach the “Mass Affluent.” Katie Charbonneau reported on a survey from LinkedIn and CogentResearch of social media use by the “Mass Affluent,” the approximately 40 million American investors with assets of between $100,000 and $1 million. This is a target group for many upscale products and services. And there’s some good insight here into their expectations and use of social media. Among the insights: “There is a 25-40% opportunity gap between the information the “Mass Affluent” want and the information actually provided by banks, brokerages and credit cards.” A gap between expectations and delivery is a great opportunity waiting to be exploited.

The case for motion graphics videos. “Today, consumers are bombarded with content.  Brands are pushing to be more creative. While live action video footage is arguably the best way to humanize a brand, viewers also want something that is visually appealing, entertaining and informative,” wrote Ashlea LeCompte. And that need is often filled by motion graphics.

Thornley Fallis: Graphics & Animation Reel 2013 from ThornleyFallis on Vimeo.

Are you gender biased in your listening and retweeting habits? You may not know it, but you probably are. “Twee-Q is an experiment from a Swedish organization called Crossing Borders that … calculates a Twitter Equality Quotient that they describe as a simple score derived from how often you retweet men or women,” wrote Diane Begin. “The tool takes your last 100 tweets to come up with a score. The closer you are to 50-50, the higher your Twee-Q.” I tested it on my @thornley Twitter feed and discovered that I retweet women 60% of the time, giving me a Twee-Q of 6.6. Hmmm.

Five steps to success in online public engagement. A great post by Pierre Killeen, who has built a highly successful practice helping organizations develop purposeful discussion with their communities of interest. Unlike the car commercials, you can do this at home.

Thank you to my colleagues at Thornley Fallis for these entertaining and informative reads. The time I spent with your posts was well worth it.

For me, this is like moving around in a darkened room. We know we’ve had contact with something, but we can’t really see what it is. Judgment and speculation become overly close neighbors at times like these.

How do you decide where to place your trust when news is breaking online?

But I really do believe this.

Inside PR » Blog Archive » Inside PR 3.29: Google Reader, Feedly, and the perils of a dominant competitor.

Are you like me, still testing a number of possible Google Reader replacements?

Well, it appears that Feedly is emerging as the popular Reader alternative. TechCrunch reported that Feedly “became the No. 1 news app across all three top mobile platforms (iPhone, iPad and Android) this week. It even climbed into the “Top Overall” section within all three stores.” This follows news that Feedly had picked up over 500,000 new users within days of Google’s announcement that it would shut down Reader.

Oh Oh. Is Google lavishing the same indifference on Google Alerts that presaged the shutdown of Reader?

Rob is a serial entrepreneur. And he will share with us the lessons he has gained from founding two social companies – MyMusic.com and, before that, Overlay.tv.  What he has learned about creating something real from the germ of an idea. About building and sustaining community with the people who care about you. About creating a social business – one that listens to what people are saying about it and adjusts its actions and structure to act upon what it hears. About building a team that can create something extraordinary. And about marketing what you’ve created through both social and traditional channels.

In a nutshell, Rob Lane is a smart entrepreneur who has a lot to share and will do that with the Third Tuesday community. If you’re in or near either Ottawa or Toronto, click over to the Third Tuesday Toronto and Third Tuesday Ottawa Meetup sites to get your ticket to hear from and meet Rob Lane.

About MyMusic.com
If you’re like me, music is a constant in your life. We listen actively and passively. It surrounds us. Reflects our experiences, environment and friends. And it’s also all over the place. In books we’ve read. On entertainment Web sites. On an MP3 player. Or a Facebook page. The radio. In magazines. Our contact with music is spread everywhere and we have to go looking in many places to pull it all together.

“MyMusic was founded by three guys who love music but hate mindlessly scouring the web to unearth the best content available. We want all the great music content that we know is out there to come to us. We want it sifted, sorted and filtered so that we get exactly and only the stuff we are interested in. We also want a beautiful way to access all that content, anytime we want, anywhere we are. We couldn’t find anything like that online, so we built MyMusic.

“MyMusic.coms’ mission is “to be a single place where you can go to find, discover and share everything that makes your online music experience fresh, exciting, and uniquely you.”

You can use MyMusic to can save images, videos, music, articles, etc. in “magazines”  that reflect your interests. Specific artists. Genres of music. Places where music is played. Your collection of music. Whatever you want. And the site watches what you post so that it can suggest content that matches your interests. The more you post the smarter it gets.

If you’re interested, check out the Thelonious Monk page I made on MyMusic.com. This took me all of 10 minutes from the time I found my first clip to the time I published it. Very user friendly.

Social Media Breakfasts too

One more thing. Rob also gives back to the social media community in another way. He’s the co-founder or Social Media Breakfast Ottawa. Rob and his co-organizers, Ryan Anderson and Simon Chen, have given Ottawa’s social media community an opportunity to meet and hear from smart speakers for the past four years.

Thank you to Third Tuesday’s sponsors

Third Tuesday is supported by great sponsors - Cision Canada and Rogers Communications - who believe in our community and help us to bring speakers not just to Toronto but to Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver as well. Without the sponsors we couldn’t make Third Tuesday a truly Canadian affair. So, thank you to the sponsors of the Third Tuesday 2012-13 season: Cision Canada and Rogers Communications.

The public relations industry is not immune from the impact of these changes. And this has disrupted the competitive marketplace.

Over the past year, I found my company, Thornley Fallis, repeatedly competing for assignments against non-traditional competitors. Ad agencies invading our turf. Digital boutiques. Marketing agencies. Management consultants.

An increasing proportion of the assignments we won from clients incorporated digital communications as a core element. Throughout 2012, we saw the budgets for these assignments shift away from traditional public relations activities to digital. The budgets didn’t shrink. The allocations against digital activities increased.

In a world like this, if you want to be a Public Relations Survivor, you must be willing to reinvent yourself constantly. That’s what the most successful firms in the communications marketplace are doing. And that’s what we’re doing at my firm.

And here’s the indicator that drives this home. Today, only about half of Thornley Fallis’ revenues are from what would have been considered traditional public relations services. The other half? Video production, public engagement, content marketing, design and development.

You’ve probably noticed the absence of social media from that list. Where’s social? Integrated across everything we do. What was hot a few years ago has become simply the common entry fee.

What’s hot now? Content marketing. The creation of social objects that people will connect around. Understanding and building public engagement. Making connections with people who care about our products and services and the things we care about.

We see ourselves as much different from the public relations practitioners of old. We don’t define our horizons within the constraints of earned media. Most of our programs include paid keyword advertising to seed awareness among those most likely to be interested. As the  traditional media distribution deteriorated, we realized that placing great content and counting on organic search simply wasn’t good enough. So we moved into the territory of the advertising agencies. Not as advocates of advertising first, but as advocates of a true integrated solution in which each medium has a role to play.

Yes, we are still a PR agency. But when people ask me what we do, I answer in a way that is much different from the answer I provided a few years ago. Today, we “provide insight, create remarkable experiences and connect people to the things they care about.”

And that’s how we make  sure that we are Public Relations Survivors. Not by clinging to the past, but by evolving with the changing communications environment.

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If you found this post interesting, these sources provide even more to think about:

PR Agencies’ Lost Year by Peter Himler

10 Things I’ve Learned from an Advertising Agency by Ed Lee

When the Corporate Social Strategist Role Goes Away by Jeremiah Owyang