Inside PR 2.08 – I'm up in the air + Social Media Trends

I missed the recording of this week’s episode of Inside PR. Both Martin Waxman and I were en route to Regina, Saskatchewan for the Canadian Public Relations Society‘s national conference. However, my plane developed mechanical problems (thankfully, while it was still on the ground) and I was still up in the air at recording time. So, Martin and Gini Dietrich went ahead without me. That’s one of the real benefits of three co-hosts. We can still have a discussion if one of us misses a recording date.

Inside PR 2.08

Inside PR Show Notes

This week on Inside PR, Martin and Gini discuss trends in social media.

0:30 Martin opens the show.

2:10 Martin mentions that Joe was unable to join them this week, and that they are presenting at the CPRS Conference in Regina, Saskatchewan.

3:10 Martin addresses listener comments from last week, the first from Ed Lee, congratulating Martin on the merger.

4:08 The second listener comment comes from Rob Jeanveau about the jeans issue that Gini brought up last week.

7:01 Martin introduces this week’s topic: 5 social media trends. He kicks off the discussion with the first trend, video.

10:00 Martin introduces the next trend: search.

13:42 Martin and Gini discuss the next trend: location based applications.

16:30 The next trend discussed is mobile payment applications.

18:58 Gini discusses the importance of the last trend, social media policies.

22:00 Martin wraps up the show.

Thanks to our Producer, Yasmine Kashefi, for preparing these shownotes and the great work she does producing and publishing Inside PR.

Eqentia – a new social media monitoring tool for enterprises

Eqentia is a social media startup headquartered in Toronto Canada. In this week’s episode of Social Mediators, Eqentia’s CEO and Founder, William Mougayar, joins Dave Fleet and me for a discussion about Eqentia, what it does, who its aimed at and future plans for it.

Eqentia is positioning itself as a team-based knowledge dashboard that can be managed by one or two users, freeing others from the need to set up and refine searches. William hopes that managers will turn to it each day to answer the question, “What’s new that I need to know about?”

Eqentia’s text mining engine promises to deliver content to users in near realtime, providing them with an up to the minute picture of conversations and references to their brands and issues of interest.

William sees Eqentia becoming a productivity tool for medium and large enterprises. Initially, power users can curate the content to ensure that the highest relevance and most valuable content is featured, saving time and effort for the rest of the team. Once the principal user has set up the tool and refined the settings so that it focuses on the company’s specific interests, other team members will have access to the data without the need to manage the sources, relevancies and advanced filters and settings that make all of this possible.

Eqentia will be most attractive to teams that have both power users and executives who don’t care about how to use the tool, but just want to see its output. The power users can publish the information in user-friendly form for the end users – via email, Twitter, RSS feeds, or by giving end users access to individual topics.

Unlike many other social media tools that focus on providing users with the ability to build folksonomies by applying multiple tags, Eqentia incorporates predefined taxonomies to standardize searches and make it easy for end users to find the same data set with a simple search.

Still to come in Eqentia’s development – a comprehensive approach to social media metrics.

The company has some potential client deals in the works and hopes to be able to begin to announce these in the near future.

Eqentia has been seed funded by Extreme Venture Partners, who also funded Bump Top, which was recently acquired by Google. William says that he had the funding to carry on with the development of the product and to explore its marketing potential.

Have you tried Eqentia? What are your thoughts about it?

Why you should attend the Social Media for Government Conference in Ottawa

For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of chairing the Social Media for Government Conference in Ottawa. And I’ll be chairing the next conference to be held in just one month, from June 21 to June 24.

A great learning experience

This conference is an opportunity to learn about how social media is being used by government and to discuss the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Speakers from all levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – will be sharing their experience with social media and the insight they gained. Organizations presenting case studies include: Public Safety Canada, Alberta Environment, Army Public Affairs, the U.S. Department of State,  the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Office of the Ontario Ombudsman, the Public Service Commission of Canada, the Ottawa Public Library,  the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Norfolk County and the cities of London and Ottawa.

I’ll be speaking as well. On the day before the conference proper, I’ll be presenting a Social Media 101 Workshop and on the first morning of the conference, I’ll be co-presenting with Pierre Killeen about public engagement in the age of social media.

Save $400 off the registration fee for the Social Media for Government Conference

If you’ve read this far, it’s fair to say that you’re interested in learning about the adoption of social media by government. So, here’s a great offer.

People who registered for the conference before April 30 were eligible for an Early Bird Discount of $400. But April 30 has come and gone and that discount has expired. That’s the bad news.

Now the good news. Just mention my name when you register for the Social Media for Government Conference and you’ll receive a $400 discount off the registration fee. That’s the equivalent of the Early Bird Registration – and you can use my discount right up to conference day. It doesn’t expire.

Why I attend the Social Media for Government Conference

I chair and participate in this conference as a volunteer. I do it because it’s one of the best learning opportunities available to me in Ottawa.

Based on my experience over the past three years, I know you won’t regret attending this conference. You’ll learn a lot and meet some smart people. What more could you ask for?

Canada's Consumer Privacy Consultations: Location-based/Geospatial Tracking

The afternoon panel at the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Consumer Privacy Consultations dealt with location based/geospatial tracking.

The panelists were:

  • Keith McIntosh, Director of Regulatory Affairs, Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
  • Dr. Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law, University of Ottawa
  • Jesse Hirsh, broadcaster
  • Prashant Shukle, Director General of the Mapping Information Branch, Natural Resources Canada
  • Michael J. O’Farrell, Mobile Marketing Association

Lisa Campbell, Acting General Counsel, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, moderated.

I used CoverItLive to capture the highlights of the discussion from the Twitter stream.

Consumer Privacy Consultations – Location-based / Geospatial Tracking

Canada's Consumer Privacy Consultations: Advertising Panel

Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart and her office assembled a panel of industry and academic experts to explore issues relating to advertising and privacy.

The panel:

  • Elizabeth Denham, Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada
  • Paula Gignac, President, Advertising Bureau of Canada
  • Dr. Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
  • Dr. Avner Levin, Director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute, Ryerson University
  • Jules Polonetsky, Director, Future of Privacy Forum
  • Anne Toth, Chief Privacy Officer, Yahoo

I’ve used CoverItLive to curate the Twitter stream around this event to pull out the highlights.

Advertising: 2010 Consumer Privacy Consultations, Toronto

The Social Media Content Creation Gap. Does it matter to you?

Is our view of the world distorted by the uneven distribution of content creators? And for those countries and groups who lag in creating content, do they risk invisibility and marginalization?

Social media has enabled anyone with access to the Internet to create and share content. And this makes it possible for us to see the world as we have never seen it before. Not through the eyes of elites, but through the eyes of ordinary people like you and me.

But there’s a problem. Some parts of the world are more visible than others. And some areas risk being marginalized.

There are significant variations in the rate at which people from different countries participate in the act of content creation. And the countries with the highest levels of participation may not be the ones you expect.

The Forrester Social Technographics country profiles vividly illustrate this issue. Forrester’s Social Technographics profiles demonstrate that people participate in social media in a range of ways and with varying degrees of engagement, from simply consuming through to actively creating content.

When you compare Technographics profiles on a national basis, a “content creation gap” can be seen between the most prolific content creators and the laggards. Most important is the proportion of the online population who self identify as Content Creators, the top rung of the Technographics ladder.

There’s a huge gap between the leaders and the laggards – ranging from over one third of people online creating content in South Korea, Metro China, Japan to less than one in five people creating content in countries like Canada, the UK, Spain and Sweden.  And barely one in ten people who use social media in France and Germany create content.

Add to this the impact of search engine algorithms. Search engines return results that reflect content that is most popular, most linked to, and most read.  That favours the most popular creators.  It also favours those countries and regions that are most populous, most connected, and most prolific.

What happens to those creators who come from smaller countries and who reflect a more distinct perspective?  Will they be found or will they be relegated to page 200 of the search results?  A place that guarantees invisibility.

Should countries like Canada or the UK be concerned that the number of active content creators isn’t higher?  Especially given that the means of content creation are accessible for free to anyone with a broadband connection?

Do we accept that 20% of people will create 80% of the content and that’s just the way things are?

Or by doing nothing, do we run the risk of losing sight of ourselves as other more prolific content creating countries generate ever more content?

Social Media Zeitgeist, April 13, 2010

This week, I found my Social Media Zeitgeist in posts by John Battelle, Steve Rubel, Cory Doctorow, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Geist, Liz Gannes and David Armano.

Foursquare: Headed to bigger things – or a potential flame out?

Could Foursquare be the next shiny object that fails to live up to its initial glitter? John Battelle’s post, Foursquare, I wish it was better for me, highlights some hurdles that Foursquare must overcome before the service is likely to break into the mainstream. Whether it’s the feeling that it’s targeted at a specific demo (what the heck am I doing on it?), the lack of engagement beyond checking in, poor search or an unclear function in the social sphere, there’s a lot of work to do to ensure that Foursquare doesn’t flame out.

Living – or not – with the iPad

It’s the week after the excitement of the launch. Now, people are reporting their experience living with the iPad. And some could do without it.

Steve Rubel spends a week working with only the iPad. While he seems to love the device, he calls out Apple for undermining the Web as we know it: “Seemingly overnight the Information Superhighway (does anyone call it that anymore?) became littered with potholes. In the last week Apple sold nearly 500,000 iPads, none of which support key technologies that we have come to rely on, including Adobe Flash, Windows Media and others. (Adobe and Microsoft are Edelman clients.) …For the last week I have been using my iPad as my primary device. I enjoy the slate format and think it’s the next big thing for computing – one that will see lots of winners. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. I don’t get to experience the web like I used to, but a version of it that only Apple approves of – one that’s peppered with potholes that turns it into the swiss cheese web.”

Writing on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow called it this way: “The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

“If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

“If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

“If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.”

And Jeff Jarvis, saying he doesn’t see a good use for the iPad, put his money behind his convictions, paying a restocking fee to return his unit after less than a week.

Copyright no longer an esoteric subject in Canada

Michael Geist tallies up the Canadian Government’s consultation on its proposed copyright reform bill, C-61: “There were ultimately more than 8,300 submissions – more than any government consultation in recent memory – with the overwhelming majority rejecting Bill C-61 (6138 submissions against, 54 in support), while thousands called for flexible fair dealing and a link between copyright infringement and anti-circumvention rules.”

The power of letting yourself be known

In a post on GigaOm about the current troubles at Digg, Liz Gannes makes the case for why signed comments trump anonymous comments for credibility: “A place where you use a silly moniker as your user ID just doesn’t feel like true socializing in these days of Facebook, Google, OpenID and (to some extent) Twitter. There’s a value to anonymity, but true social interactions are the kind of powerful things that keep you coming back. Endorsing a piece of content with your own name in the context of your known interests for an established group of friends or readers is quite powerful.”

There’s something happening here

David Armano keeps thinking deeply about what’s really going on in social media. In his post, Media = The Ways We Engage in Context, he brings together the concepts of owned, earned and paid media with engagement and context.

What caught your eye this week?

Well, that’s my take on this week’s social media zeitgeist. If these interest you, please share the links on Twitter, delicious, Facebook or the social media platform of your choice.

And let me know what caught you eye this week. I want to expand my reading list too.

Social Media Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: the attitudes and ideas that are generally common in a particular place during a particular time. These ideas and attitudes show up especially in literature, popular culture, philosophy, and politics.

I’m starting a weekly series of Social Media Zeitgeist posts  in which I’ll point to of articles, podcasts, videos, or events from the previous week that I think capture the mood and concerns of the social media sphere.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that my interests encompass social media, communities of interest, the evolving relationships between people and institutions, communications, marketing and the impact of emerging technologies on all of these things. And I read many different sources on these subjects each week.

I share articles that I find noteworthy through shared items in Google Reader, my delicious tags, and also via links on Twitter. However, they’ve been absent from ProPR.ca. I’m about to rectify that.

So, if you share my interests, I hope you find the weekly Social Media Zeitgeist posts useful and worth reading.

After all, social media is all about sharing.

Social Mediators 5 – Jeremy Wright and SxSW

It’s only episode 5 and already we’ve broken the Social Mediators mold. Neither Dave Fleet nor I could be part of this week’s session. So, Terry Fallis recruited Jeremy Wright to stand in for both of us.

In this week’s episode, Jeremy talks with Terry about the South by SouthWest Interactive conference (SxSW) in Austin and what has drawn Jeremy to attend 7 times in the past 10 years. And for Jeremy, it’s the open culture of the conference – the friendliness of people and the fact that the meetings and encounters in the hallways can be much better than what takes place in the formal sessions.

You’ll hear them talk about the fact that I too would be at SxSW. Well, it didn’t happen. The night before I was supposed to leave, I spilled a glass of wine on my computer and I had to head home to Ottawa to meet the “man from Dell.” He showed up in my office Friday with a new mother board, touchpad, screen and keyboard (yes, the Complete Care insurance was worth every penny I paid for it.) But if you’ve ever tried to get a last minute flight to Austin during SxSW, you’d know why I never made it there. Having missed my originally scheduled flight, I was out of luck.

One more thing. A big thank you to Mike Edgell for recording and editing this week’s episode. Although he’s on the road the entire week for a video shoot, Mike found the extra time to produce Social Mediators. Thanks Mike for service above and beyond.