FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa

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We presented FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa8. This was our first public coming out of these apps and it was a real thrill to stand in front of our community and talk about our idea and how we’re brought it to life. On top of this, we got some great feedback from the DemoCamp attendees, including some suggestions for improvements that we’ll definitely incorporate in future releases.

For those new to the story, Friends Roll and Toplinks are free WordPress plugins that we hope will revitalize the blogroll. TopLinks uses your internal WordPress database to show the blogs and websites you link to most often in your posts. FriendsRoll lets your readers show that they are part of your community. Both plugins display this information in your blog sidebar. You can see my FriendsRoll and TopLinks in the sidebar of ProPR.

Steve Lounsbury, who was the principal developer of FriendsRoll, and Julie Haché, who played the same role for TopLinks, joined me in the DemoCamp presentation. I hope that this video of our presentation gives you a better sense of what we are trying to achieve and also a sense of the atmosphere of DemoCamp.

Thank you for Ian Graham , Peter Childs and the whole crew of volunteers who organize DemoCamp Ottawa . Your efforts have brought our community together in the best of ways.

More about DemoCamp Ottawa

Ottawa DemoCamp Roundup

DemoCampOttawa8

Terry Fallis talks about The Best Laid Plans and the Leacock Medal shortlist

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Terry Fallis, the Fallis in Thornley Fallis, isn’t content just to be a successful public relations executive. No, he feels the need to scratch his creative itch in others ways. Most notably, by writing, publishing and promoting The Best Laid Plans, a political novel set in Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

And clearly he not only writes, but he writes well. The Best Laid Plans has been nominated for the Leacock Medal for humour.

Terry took some time to talk to me about the experience of writing The Best Laid Plans and using social media to promote it and what the Leacock nomination means to him. Some of the things we talked about:

  • How did he manage to write a novel and keep up his very demanding work commitments? Writing at night, Saturday mornings and on airplanes. (Boy, I wish I had his discipline.)
  • For those of us who know Terry, we shouldn’t be surprised to see elements of Terry in the two principal characters of the novel. He drew on his own experience and character traits to construct these two very believable, fully realized characters.
  • How does a first time novelist get his novel published and discovered by an audience? By self publishing and using social media to promote it. Terry podcast the novel – reading it one chapter at a time in 20 episodes. He hosted the podcast on terryfallis.com and discovered that readers talked to him about the novel. And in fact, some created promotional content, including pictures of themselves in front of state capitals in Melbourne, Boston, Austin, Ottawa and elsewhere.
  • What has the shortlist for the Leacock Medal done for him? Well, no movie offers yet. But, one of Canada’s more prominent literary agents, Beverley Slopen, has agreed to represent him. And it looks hopeful that the novel will be picked up by a mainline publishing house.

You can watch the interview with Terry below. It lasts about 10 minutes.

What is "social media?"

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I frequently conduct workshops for organizations interested in understanding social media, how it will affect them and how they can embrace it.

One of the first questions people ask is, “What is social media?”

I used to refer to the social media article in Wikipedia. However, over time, this section has had a tortured history of revisions and struggles over its content. As I write this, the Wikipedia article on social media opens: “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.” Let me read that again: …”technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.” Huh?

I can’t use the Wikipedia definition and expect people to be any clearer on what social media is. So, I’ve developed my own plain language definition of social media:

Social media are online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author. To do this, they use social software that enables anyone without knowledge of coding, to post, comment on, share or mash up content and to form communities around shared interests.

What do you think of this definition? Is it clear? Can it be improved upon?

Further reading:

Brian Solis, What’s Wrong with Social Media

Robert Scoble, What is Social Media?

David Meerman Scott, What the heck is Web 2.0 / social media/ social networking and how do these concepts relate to the new rules of marketing & pr?

Inside PR live at Third Tuesday Toronto

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The next Inside PR podcast will have a distinctly different sound to it – the hum and crackle of a live audience.

Terry Fallis, David Jones and Inside PR panelists Martin Waxman, Julie Rusciolelli and Keith McArthur recorded Episode 106 at Third Tuesday Toronto. And the room was packed with members of the Toronto social media community who participated in the episode, asking questions, offering comments and generally cheering on the production.

Episode 106 will be posted next Tuesday. To whet your appetite for the complete show, here’s a video segment of the panelists setting up and opening the podcast. The lighting is poor and from the rear (audio producers don’t always set up the room with video in mind.) But one thing you can see is that the only apparent element of advance scripting is David Jones reading the opening sequence from notes in his Moleskin. They really do make this stuff up as they record it.

FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa

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FriendsRollTopLinksSteve Lounsbury, Julie Haché and I will be presenting FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCampOttawa8. This will be our first public presentation of these plug ins. So, we’re hoping for some good feedback on both the concept and how we could improve the implementation.

DemoCamp PresenterThe other presentations include: chide.it, LoyaltyMatch, GlobeEx Pro, Trade Wars Rising, DevShop and FaveQuest. Thanks are due to Ian Graham and the other organizers who are making it possible for the Ottawa tech/startup community to gather and celebrate innovation.

If you’re in Ottawa on the evening of March 31, come out to DemoCamp and join in the discussion.

Read More about FriendsRoll and TopLinks:

The BlogRoll Reinvented – FriendsRoll and TopLinks

Launching FriendsRoll and TopLinks

FriendsRoll and TopLinks Case Study Part 1

Terry Fallis' Best Laid Plans novel short-listed for the Leacock Medal

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Steven Leacock MedalTerry Fallis‘ novel The Best Laid Plans has been short-listed for the 2007 Steven Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

Terry and his novel are keeping some pretty impressive company. The other short-listed novels and authors are: Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief, Will Ferguson (Spanish Fly), Scott Gardiner (King John of Canada) and Ron Wood (And God Created Manyberries.) Past winners of the award include: Robertson Davies, Earle Birney, Pierre Berton, Harry Boyle, George Bain, Richard J. Needham, Max Ferguson, Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler, Stuart McLean, and W.O. Mitchell.

The Best Laid PlansTerry originally launched the novel through a podcast reading.

I read the book when Terry published it and I have to say it kept me chuckling well into the evening.

Congratulations Terry!

(I guess this means I’ll have to go through your agent to book lunch with you. Today the Leacock Medal. Tomorrow, an option on the movie rights?)

Inside PR to kick off its Third Year at Third Tuesday Toronto

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ThirdTuesdayTorontoWe’re planning a special Third Tuesday Toronto on April 2.

For the past two years, David Jones and Terry Fallis have recorded the Inside PR podcast every week without fail. That’s 104 episodes without a single missed week. And throughout this time, they’ve enlightened and entertained us with news, insight and humorous reflections on social media and the world of public relations and corporate communications. And not only are they still going strong, but with episode 101, Dave and Terry gave the podcast fresh energy by adding an Inside PR panel. So far, the panelists have included Martin Waxman, Keith McArthur, Julie Rusciolelli and Michelle Sullivan.

David and Terry also were among the original group of Third Tuesday Toronto organizers, along with Ed Lee and Chris Clarke.

Inside PRSo, what better way to kick off the Inside PR’s third year of podcasts than by recording Episode 105 live at Third Tuesday Toronto?

Register to attend to join Terry, Dave and the Inside PR panelists, for the recording of the 105th. episode of Inside PR. Bring your questions and comments and plan to participate in what should be a fun and memorable podcast.

As always, a special note of thanks to our sponsors, CNW Group. CNW covers the hard costs of Third Tuesdays, making it possible for us to stage these events free of charge to participants. Thank you CNW!

Michelle Sullivan talks about Third Tuesday Montréal

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3e Mardi / Third Tuesday MontréalRecently, Montréal joined Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and New Brunswick in having its own Third Tuesday social media meetup.

I had an opportunity to talk with Michelle Sullivan, the driving force behind Third Tuesday/3e Mardi Montréal, about why she wanted to have these events in Montréal. Michelle talked about the bilingual community that makes Montréal such a vibrant city and the unique opportunity to bring both English language and French language social media enthusiasts together in one room to talk about their shared interests.

By the way, the second Third Tuesday/3eMardi Montréal is taking place tonight. According to Michelle’s post, tonight’s session will feature “‘la gang’ de Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires. Trois des dix auteurs de cet ouvrage collectif, dont Marc Snyder, Claude Malaison et Martin Lessard, nous parleront de l’importance grandissante des blogues.”I plan to be there tonight. If you see me, please make a point of saying hello.

FriendsRoll and TopLinks Case Study Part 1

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FriendsRollLast Friday, we launched FriendsRoll and TopLinks, two WordPress plug ins that the development team at 76design and I hope will give new life to the blogroll concept.

This is the first in a series of posts in which I plan to write about our experience launching these plug-ins and what we learn through this experience.TopLinks (If you are looking for background, you may want to check out my two previous posts about the launch and about our objectives and how we will measure success.

What we did in the first three days since launch

Monitoring and Analysis

We intended to promote FriendsRoll and TopLinks exclusively through social media. So, our first step was to set up the analytics and tracking tools that would help us monitor conversation and traffic.

  • Installed Google Analytics to provide us with insight into how the FriendsRoll and TopLinks site is performing and where our traffic is coming from.
  • Set up Technorati and Google Blog searches for FriendsRoll and TopLinks and subscribed to the RSS feeds for these searches so that we would be alerted to conversation relating to the plug ins.
  • Set up a profile on Radian6 to provide us with the ability to conduct additional analysis of the conversation taking place through social media.

Promotion

We set up the FriendsRoll and TopLinks Website the week prior to the launch, testing it and refining the copy.

On Friday, March 7, I wrote an initial post on ProPR about the plug ins and how we hoped they’d help bloggers to effortlessly show up to date information on the blogs they link to most often and also enable readers of their blogs to join their FriendsRoll.

I also sent out a Twitter message pointing to the post.

Then I hopped on a plane to SXSW. And that explains a question you’re probably asking. Why would we launch something on a Friday? I had hoped that we’d be able to launch at least a week earlier. However, the code just wasn’t ready until Friday. And because I was going to be seeing so many blogger friends at SXSW, I wanted to be able to tell them about something that had passed the vapourware state. So, a Friday launch it was.

(I’m not really upset about this because I never expected we’d make a big splash. We’re expecting a very gradual take up rate on the plug ins. Like other things in social media, word must spread and people will want to try it out. That can take time.)

Social Media Conversation

In the first few days, we received positive posts from Jevon MacDonald at StartupNorth, Parker Mason at Blog Campaigning and MartinHoffman, pick up in Sarah Wurrey’s PRBlogJots, and a link from Mark Evans. (Mark even installed the plug-in; more about that below.)

So far, nothing from my blogging friends attending SXSW. But I hope that’s because they all have moved onto Twitter or Utterz which seem to have become the preferred means for reporting on SXSW this year.

Site Statistics

Some noteworthy stats:

  • 30 unique visitors to the FriendsRoll site on the Friday launch day, 18 on Saturday, 9 on Sunday and 21 on Monday;
  • 67% of the traffic to the site was attributable to referrals from other sites, 31% was direct and 2% came from search engines. 47% of the visits to the site came by way of my posts on ProPR;
  • The TopLinks plugin was downloaded 7 times and the FriendsRoll plugin was downloaded 4 times.

User Feedback

Two people who installed the TopLinks plugin on their blogs – Sandy Kemsley and Mark Evans – contacted us to offer comments, ask questions and report problems. Their feedback was particularly valuable because they spotted problems with the initial implementation of the FavIcons feature and the anomalies in the look and appearance of the plugins when installed. Sandy was a particularly thorough tester and gave us several rounds of feedback.

Observation: The culture of generosity really does prevail in social media. The feedback offered by Sandy and Mark was invaluable and even more appreciated because of the positive way it was offered.

Others who didn’t install the plugins left comments on my post or sent us emails. Their feedback included:

  • When will we make the plugins available for other platforms? (Answer: we’d like to. But first, we want to see how this works out on WordPress.)
  • Can the colour and dimensions be varied to fit custom templates? (Answer: Not yet. But we’re planning to introduce this in a subsequent release.)

Release 1.1

As a result of Sandy’s and Mark’s user feedback, Steve Lounsbury and Julie Haché, crunched through the weekend and were able to produce release 1.1, which addressed the issues reported to us. This was posted for download late Monday.

We’re still not 100% happy with the way we’ve solved the FavIcon problem and we’re discussion other approaches that may be taken in the next release.

Summary Thoughts (for today)

We’re happy with the early reaction to these plugins.

In a way the small numbers of visitors and downloads have been a blessing. The people who tried it out proved to be generous and helpful – ideal Beta Testers. As a result of their feedback, we were able to fix problems before they became a problem for others.

Yes, we have very small numbers and limited attention so far. But we weren’t expecting the world to issue a collective gasp. What counts to us is the experience of those who find these plugins useful. And we’ll also learn from people’s reactions whether we are addressing a real pain point.

Your Turn

What do you think of FriendsRoll? Of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it?

This is an opportunity for us all to learn together. So, please leave your thoughts, suggestions and questions as comments on this post.