CaseCamp is coming to Ottawa

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CaseCampHot on the heels of successful CaseCamps in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the first CaseCamp in Ottawa has been scheduled for November 6.

CaseCamp brings the marketing community together to explore best practices and exchange tips with one another.

The formal program centers on the presentation of case studies.A case is presented in a maximum of 8 slides over 15 minutes. Following presentation of the case, the floor is open to the other participants to ask questions and offer comments and suggestions regarding the approach taken in the project under discussion.

CaseCamp Toronoto3 CaseCamp is the brainchild of Eli Singer. The driving force behind the Ottawa CaseCamp is Peter Childs.

The rules of CaseCamp are based on those of BarCamp. The spirit is one of generous sharing. I attended CaseCamp3 in Toronto and found it to be a great experience. I’m very much looking forward to the first Ottawa session.

Go to the CaseCamp Wiki to sign up for CaseCamp Ottawa. I hope to see you there.

A case study of a viral post

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HP’s Eric Kintz has posted a case study blogging viral marketing effects that is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding social media.

Eric based his case study on an earlier post regarding the importance of posting frequency. Eric’s post on his belief that blog posting frequency doesn’t matter anymore was referenced on other blogs close to 150 times (make this more than 150 times) and continues to be linked to more than four months later. (Darn, I’ve just done it again!)

Eric points to other factors that contribute to viral success, including strong content that was relevant to the blogging community, early links from level one influencers, tie-ins to blogging micro-communities, pick-up by mainstream media and newsletters, and localization/translation into other languages.
Eric Kintz's Influence Ripples

In an earlier post on the dynamics of viral marketing, Eric stated that, “Viral marketing does not spread well. In epidemics, high connectors are very critical nodes of the network and allow the virus to spread. In recommendations networks, a few very large cascades exist but most recommendation chains terminate after just a few steps.”

He finds support for this in the case study of his own post. “In this specific case, the post did not get linked to by more than 3-4 blogs in specific communities. This reinforces the well known rule to reach early on level 1 influencers, i.e. bloggers with more than 1000 links according to my blogging friend David.”

But it’s not just all A listers/Level 1 bloggers. Kintz was surprised to see his post picked up in an unexpected place. “Connectors are absolutely essential to spreading word of mouth, but they should not necessarily be confused with so called “A-listers”. The rapid scaling of the blogosphere with a doubling in size every 6 months (see my post on this growth) has triggered the development of micro communities around very specialized topics. Word of mouth can spread by connecting to the connectors in those micro communities. My biggest surprise has been to see this post spread through word of mouth among Christian church bloggers and Washington political blogs.”

Eric’s post is well worth tagging and sharing.

Thanks to KD Paine for pointing to Eric’s post.

Blue Dot: Better than del.icio.us?

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Blue Dot is a new social bookmarking site

I’m a regular user of del.icio.us. I use it to bookmark postings for later reference and to share these with others.

At first glance, Blue Dot seems to offer a useful improvement over del.icio.us.

Users can add a note to an item that they save. This small enhancement would be most useful to researchers and team workers, enabling them to add information regarding their thoughts about the item, to place it in a larger context, or even to draw attention to specific content in an article.

My Blue Dot home page

One area in which Blue Dot could be improved is sharing. Blue Dot enables users to share their items selectively – making items available only to themselves, to everyone, or only to the people who the user designates as “friends.” However, most people have different circles of friends who cluster around different interests (e.g. work friends, family, baseball league). Blue Dot would be even more useful if it recognized this and enabled a user to designate different subgroups of friends who would share in different Dots reflecting the focus of their “friendship circle.”

UPDATE: Oops. After playing around with Blue Dot some more and adding some friends, I discovered that I can indeed create different lists of Friends that can either be private – seen only by me and the members – of public. There’s a lot more to this service. I plan to use it alongside del.icio.us for the next while to compare the two sites.

Thanks to Robert Scoble for having pointed to Blue Dot.

Thanksgiving

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It’s the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada.  Watch out you turkeys!

I’ll be offline for the next couple of days.

Best wishes for a safe, peaceful and happy long weekend.

Mark Evans leaves the Post, joins b5media

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Blogger and National Post Technology reporter Mark Evans is now former National Post Technology reporter Mark Evans.

Mark Evans and Shel Israel at Third TuesdayToday, Mark announced that he has left the Post to join b5media as Vice President Operations. Now I understand why Jeremy Wright was at the inaugual Third Tuesday when Mark interviewed Shel Israel!

Congratulations Mark. We’ll want to get you to speak on your own at one of our Third Tuesdays. I’m sure you’ll have lots of interesting things to share as you embark on this great new adventure.

Thanks to Alec Saunders for being the first to point to this news.