Third Monday catches a great speaker, Paul Wells

February 5, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

We have a great speaker lined up for the February Third Monday, Paul Wells of Maclean’s Magazine.

Paul’s Inkless Wells blog is an agenda setter in Canada’s capital. He posts on events – before they happen, while they are happening and or soon after they conclude – with an immediacy, insight and wit that makes him a must-read for other political bloggers, journalists and politicians. For many people, it’s Paul’s blog that sustains top of mind awareness for Maclean‘s, the weekly news magazine for which he writes a column. And to keep a weekly outlet relevant is a real accomplishment in the post-deadline age.

Paul’s first book, Right Side Up, was published in late 2006. I’m only about a quarter way into it. But so far, it’s a pretty interesting, pull-no-punches read.

If you plan to be in or near Canada’s capital on February 19, treat yourself to an interesting evening of discussion with Ottawa’s social media community and a journalist who’s straddling social media and main stream media. Sign up to attend at the Third Monday social media meetup site.

Third Monday social media meetups to resume on January 15

January 9, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

We’re kicking off the 2007 Third Monday season with a special panel of Ottawa-based social media experts who will lead a discussion of what’s hot, what’s working, what’s not and what’s ahead.

Colin McKay, Ian Ketcheson and Brendan Hodgson will prime the discussion with their views and perspectives. Then it’s over to us for a wide open discussion of what we think is on the horizon for social media this year. In government. In business. What lies in store for PR and marketing?

New location: We’ve moved this session to the Clocktower Brew Pub on Bank Street south of the Queensway.

If you’re in Ottawa on Monday, January 15, please join us for this discussion. You can let us know you’re coming by RSVPing at Third Monday on meetup.com

Reality Check: Don't overestimate the rate of adoption of social media

December 15, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

So, there I was, delivering a presentation on “Sustaining a Successful Blog: If You Build, Will they Come?” The crowd of approximately 30 attendees had each paid $2,000 to attend a two day conference on new media.

Learning about social media As I began my presentation, I asked a few questions to gauge the knowledge and engagement level of the audience. And of these thirty people who had paid a lot of money to hear my presentation on sustaining a successful blog – how many actually had a blog? None. Zero. Nada.

Note to self: Don’t overestimate the rate of adoption of social media. There’s a lot of curiosity. But it’s still early days.

What do you think? Is social media breaking into the mainstream? What is holding back broader adoption?

A session I'd like to see at Mesh 07 – Social media, Corporate Brand and Personal Brand: The Employer's Dilemma

November 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Mesh 06 was a seminal event for Canada’s social media community. Happily, Mark, Mathew, Mike, Rob and Stuart, have decided that one good event deserves another. And that means there will be a Mesh 2007.

Mesh Conference Here’s one session I hope the organizers include in this year’s program: “Social media, Corporate Brand and Personal Brand: The Employer’s Dilemma.”

In the past year, we have seen several prominent bloggers and podcasters leave their old companies for newer pastures. Some examples: PR uber blogger Steve Rubel left CooperKatz to join Edelman. Podtech made Microsoft’s prize blogger Robert Scoble an offer he didn’t want to refuse. Blogging reporter Mark Evans decamped the National Post for the excitement of new media startup, b5media. And close to (my) home, Fleishman Hillard recruited David Jones from my company, Thornley Fallis.

In each case, these bloggers had been encouraged (or permitted, in Mark’s case) to blog by their original employers. In each case, they built up their own personal brand. And in each case, their personal brand and their employer’s brand were closely linked.

Then they left. And their now former employers were challenged by this departure. What did it say about the company that they had chosen to leave? What did it do to the company’s brand? Did it diminish it? How did each company react?

I think a discussion on this topic could yield some valuable insight into how employers should approach the challenge of encouraging blogging employees while recognizing that their success makes it more likely that they will be more mobile than other employees. What attitude should they take to employee bloggers? Can companies develop enduring brand equity through the activities of these bloggers or will their equity and good will depart with them? Do traditional approaches to Intellectual Property apply or do we need a new set of rules?

I hear these questions from many of the business executives who discuss blogging with me. I think that a good panel of employers and bloggers who have already experienced this social media effect would provide insight that others can apply in future.

What do you think? Would you attend a session like this? How about panelists? Who would you like to hear discussing this topic?

CaseCamp: Now in Second Life

November 15, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

CaseCamp Second Life

Word today that the next CaseCamp will be held in Second Life.

Throughout 2006, marketers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver have come together at CaseCamps to share some of their best work and to exchange advice on how it could be made even better.

The concept is simple. A marketer has 15 minutes to present a case study with a maximum of eight slides. Then the audience spends fifteen minutes discussing the case, asking questions and offering comments.

Bryan Person talks about how the background to this initiatve in a dedicated episode of his New Comm Road podcast. Kate Trgovac, C.C. Champman, and Eli Singer, the founder of CaseCamp, are the other organizers of this event, which is being hosted at Crayonville.

If you’re interested in experiencing the Second Life CaseCamp, you can register at the CaseCamp Wiki.

Getting the Most from Your Website

November 6, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Eric Hagborg is a man with a mission. He wants companies to make their websites work for them. And he told Ottawa CaseCamp how he does this.

What makes a strong corporate Website?

Design is the first thing that people judge your website on.
Second, is it relevant to what they are looking for?
Does the navigation scheme help them to find the content they want once they’ve arrived at your Website?

How can you support these things?

Qualify your visitors as they come to the Website. Feed them information in small doses. Start off with basic information. If they want more, provide them with additional layers of information.
Accommodate all kinds of learners. Balance text, graphics, pictures, graphs, and other kinds of information being provided.
Demonstrate the value up front.

How can you do this?

Start with a professional designer.
Build in User-centric navigation. Don’t focus on yourself. Focus on the needs of your visitors. And design your navigation scheme to respond to their needs. You’ll need to research the needs of your visitors. But this is a worthwhile investment.
Ensure your content is concise and succinct. You’re not writing a novel.
Build in lots of supporting graphics.

Eric illustrated the effectiveness of this approach by citing the experience of his client, ipMonitor to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website. Following a reworking of their corporate Website, they increased visitor retention by 59% and increased conversions by 128%

Pretty good results. And a pretty good presentation from a guy who knows his business.

Alec Saunders Wows CaseCamp Ottawa

November 6, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

VOIP wunderblogger Alec Saunders wowed the inaugural CaseCamp Ottawa with a boffo presentation on how he has used his blog to promote the profile and credibility of his company, Iotum.

He started with three benefits to corporate blogging:

Thought leadership. Trying to magnify a point of view and thought and to get other people to pay attention to it.
To try to get communities to grow around your product. A blog is a fabulous tool for creating a conversation around your product and your company. Microsoft has done an extraordinarily good job with this.
Pure visibility. A blog is a way to create more visibility for your company, if properly tied to your corporate Website.

After twelve months of working on his site, Alec’s blog is generating over 184,000 visits a month. He likens this to the equivalent of a small magazine. He ensures that this generates traffic for the Iotum corporate site by crosslinking regularly to the Iotum site.

Why does this work? In a nutshell:

First because blogs are optimized for search engines.
Second, as you post good content, a community of like-minded individuals will begin join your conversation and link to you. Alec has built up over 23,000 links from other blogs to his site – generating great Google juice.

What do you have to do to be a good blogger?

Write frequently. Every day. At least once. Better twice or more.
Participate in “the conversation.” Find where the conversation to your market exists. Read those blogs. Comment on them.
Write meaty posts. Don’t waste people’s time with a series of one lines. You must generate posts with interesting things.
Ask for link love. If you’ve written something good, write to your community, tell them about it and ask them to join the converstion.
Ping. Make sure that your blog software is pinging the search engines each time you post.
Use your blogroll to generate links and community to the people who are part of your community.

And just as importantly, Optimize for Google:

Optimize your pagecount with WordPress.
Use a Google Sitemap. Make it easy for Google to find and index your site.
Give your posts titles. Interesting titles draw visitors.
Give em GOOD titles. Good titles draw even more visitors. Make it interesting.
Link and Trackback: Be part of the community and feel the love come back.
Get a top level domain: Don’t bury your content with an obscure domain.
Tag, tag, tag. Help people to find your content through linking.

Alec closed off his presentation by citing his post on the Voice 2.0 Manifesto. In the past twelve months, 1.6 million posts have been indexed by Google on Voice 2.0 – a topic that Alec coined. Clearly, this guy is onto something good.

Other presenters included: Ian Graham on competitive intelligence; Mitch Brisebois’ on marketing software as a service and Eric Hagborg on how his company, Axionic, helped a client to dramatically increase visitor retention and conversions on its website.

About 40 people attended this first Ottawa CaseCamp. It appeared that most were drawn from web design firms. A much different crowd and a much different atmosphere from the Toronto CaseCamp, which has a much stronger advertising and marketing flavour to it.

Congratulations to Peter Childs for the initiative in launching this in Ottawa.

Can you see the future of blogging?

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Matt Mullenweg and Liz Lawley closed out the Blog Business Summit with a look ahead to The Future of Blogging: Tools and Trends.

Liz Lawley:

Transparent functionality will be built into all tools. The easy integration of photos, videos, books, audio and collections that is offered in Vox, launched yesterday by SixApart, represents the new standard.

Liz also looks for a trend to Low Overhead Blogging: tools that enable you to easily add information into your blog. An early example of this type of tool is ShoZu, which enables you to easily move videos, photos and music while you are on the go.

The idea of Global Input will be hugely important. The ability to input from a mobile device. She points to Microsoft Aura! as the type of tool that will support this.

Selective Sharing will become an essential function. Sharing based on user defined groups. This also relates to Selective Publishing. As more people blog, they will demand a tool that enables them to selectively publish to one or another of their blogs.

Socially Filtered Search, the ability for me to filter my search results through my social network. When I am searching, I care more about what the opinion leaders in my space or my network think that I care about the universe as a whole. We need tools that let us build our own network for this purpose. And early entry into this space is the “Add me to your network” badge on del.icio.us.

Matt Mullenweg:

Blogging technology was developed ten years ago. What is different today is that there is a mass audience that is using and reading them.

It’s not about the technology. It’s about the audience. And with the larger audience, we are increasing the opportunities to publish.

Before, the publishing Internet was restricted to 1%. Now, more people are able to join in.

And this expanding audience and subset of authors will shape the future.

Discussion:

Liz Lawley: I predict that within five years the word blog will become as irrelevant as the word homepage has become. This will simply be a part of what we do.

Dave Taylor: The future of the web is conversation and social networking. This will not be tied to any single tool.

Matt Mullenweg: If we are successful, in five years you won’t know what WordPress. It’s elements will be incorporated in all platforms and their operation will be invisible to the user.

And the final word on design goes to ZeFrank.

Blogging and SEO Tips from the Pros

October 27, 2006 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Following his keynote, John Battelle returned for a panel with Tris Hussey and Dave Taylor on Blogging and SEO Strategies.

Dave Taylor kicked off the the presentation with some tips:

Keyword research pays dividends. Use tools like WordTracker, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google AdWords.
Keyword density: Be sure to use your keyword periodically (although not unnaturally frequently) in a post.
The Secret to inbound links? The way to get inbound links is to give outbound links.

SEO Best Practices.

Good titles. The headline of the entry should also be the title in your browser window. Put the title of the individual entry first ahead of the blog name.
Good headlines: Make them active and catchy.
Reasonable Keyword Density
Occasionally emphasize a keyword with bold or italics. This will reinforce the importance of that word or phrase.
Good category names. Do keyword research on your category names to find terms that people look for most often.

A great place to learn how to do this is on Google’s Webmaster Central.

Is it worthwhile to include keywords in URLs? Notice that when you do a search, if the term is located in the URL it will be highlighted.

Two useful tests to determine that you are showing up in search engines is to type into the google search bar “site:[your domain]” and “link:[your domain]”.

Persistence is also a virtue from the perspective of the search engines. So, when beginning a new blog, recognize that you must blog for a sustained period of time before the search engines will start to rank you.

By installing code from HitTail, you can track the keywords that people search in coming to your page.