Third Tuesday is back for Movember

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Odd-looking, but for a good causeEvery year, men like me embarrass their wives, partners and friends during the month of November by failing to do something that they want us to do – shave. And why? Because simply by growing a moustache, we can remind people about a very important cause and raise money for it.

That’s the basic concept of Movember. Raising awareness and raising funds to fight prostate cancer.

Since it was founded in Australia five years ago, Movember has become a global movement. And Canadian men have been enthusiastic in embracing the opportunity to participate. The results are impressive. Movember Canada membership grew from 35,000 to nearly 199,000, and donations increased by 280%, to $23 million, good for #2 in the world.

It’s truly a case study of building an online community to do public good, across borders, across time zones, across oceans.

 

So, I’m really pleased that our October Third Tuesday Ottawa and Third Tuesday Toronto will feature leaders from the Movember movement. Peter Bombaci, the National Director of Movember Canada, , will speak to at Third Tuesday Ottawa #3TYOW on October 18 and Adam Garone, the CEO and co-founder of Movember, will speak at Third Tuesday Toronto #3TYYZ on October 19. They will talk about how Movember grew from its founding on the other side of the world in Australia to become a Canadian success story. How they used social media to spread the word and then to form an online community of mustachioed men who are prepared to look odd for a good cause.

As most people know, I lived through prostrate cancer myself – ten years and counting. So, I know from personal experience that this disease is not a death sentence. And more can be done to improve the prospects of men afflicted with this disease.

I hope that you’ll join us for this evening. It’s for a great cause. And to make it even more so, we will donate 100% of the admission proceeds to Movember. So come out to Third Tuesday Ottawa and Third Tuesday Toronto to hear about the Movember story. By attending you’ll be a contributor

Thank you to our sponsors

We’ve been fortunate to have great sponsors who have enabled us to bring top speakers not just to Toronto, but also to Third Tuesdays is Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. Thanks to them, we’re back for our sixth season. Yes, that’s six years of smart discussion with thought leaders.

I want to thank the sponsors of Third Tuesday: CNW Group, Rogers Communications, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Radian6 and Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Thanks to these sponsors, we are able to program great speakers in cities across Canada, including Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.

And a special thanks to our newest sponsor, Cision Canada. They not only helped to underwrite our costs, but they also lined up our speakers for this month.

Please join me in welcoming Cision as a sponsor to Third Tuesday. You’ll have a chance to do this in person, because Cision Canada’s new President, Terry Foster, will be attending both the Ottawa and Toronto events.

Inside PR: Intranets and the new face of Facebook

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Inside PR 2.70 [ 20:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this week’s Inside PR, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about Intranets and the recent changes to Facebook.

At Thornley Fallis, our Intranet is built around a Wiki to host content, Present.ly to support publishing and linking to content and Windows Live Messenger to enable one to one video calls. We encourage people to use these three tools to divert content from emails (we all suffer from inbox glut) and to channel communications from broad publishing through to one to one communications via video. For us, video is the best communications channel. Unlike email and text, it enables us to read facial expressions, posture and all the physical clues that add nuance to communications.

Martin Waxman points out that we have so many “places to go,” so many channels of communication, that managing these different channels can become a challenge unto itself.

And then there’s Facebook. We received a comment from Liza Butcher, who suggested that, “With the changes made this past week, I believe facebook it is trying to be too many things in one space, and ostracizing generations of people that may not be as tech savvy as others. … Facebook was a place for everyone, and now it is becoming too technical for the masses.”

Gini and Martin talk about their impressions of the most recent Facebook changes. Gini points out that it will be important to decide what you want to include in your timeline. Sharing everything won’t be for everyone. And it’s important to be aware of what the timeline automatically shares so that you can filter out the info you wouldn’t want to see there. Martin suggests that we all should become familiar with the “view activity” panel that will enable us to remove content from our timeline. Other neat features: the cover photo we can add to our Facebook profile and the ability to add “milestones” to fill in our timeline.

As for me. I still can’t be enthused about Facebook’s effort to move us away from the open Internet toward the walled garden of Facebook. Bah. Humbug.

And one final reminder: Inside PR will be recording live from the PRSA International Conference in Orlando on October 16 and 17. We’ll also be interviewing speakers and participants. So, if you’re planning to be there, let us know and we will grab a sound bite with you.

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cross-posted from the Inside PR podcast blog

 

We're recruiting a new Senior Web Developer

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We’ve just had one of the best summers we’ve had in years, adding new clients every month through the summer. That’s not bragging. It’s just the background that explains why I’m writing this post. 76design is busy, busy, busy. And we are looking for a Senior Web Developer to join our team.

Here’s the job description from the 76design careers page.

SENIOR PHP WEB DEVELOPER

76design is looking for an experienced Web Developer to join our Team.

The winning candidate should be prepared to work in collaboration with other developers, graphic designers, marketers and public relations experts towards the development and implementation of industry leading solutions.

LEADERSHIP

  • Maintain visibility and respect in the online community
  • Contribute to the development of the Studio’s culture and quality standards

STRATEGIC AND ANALYTICAL THINKING

  • Understanding of fundamentals of new marketing and communications principles
  • A solid understanding of informational architecture practices
  • Gathering, reviewing and validating project requirements

SKILLS AND ASSETS

  • Demonstrated experience with the following: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP5
  • Experience with a modern MVC web framework like Zend Framework, Java Spring, etc.
  • Background in web API programming; do you prefer api.twitter to twitter.com? code.google to google.com?
  • Polylingual programming beyond PHP considered an asset (Java, .Net, Ruby, etc)
  • Comfortable with use and function of a variety of modern CMS: WordPress, Drupal;
  • Direct experience with social media tools and platforms, such as WordPress, Google+, Twitter, etc.
  • Work with tiered deployment environments.
  • Experience with a version control system like SVN.
  • Experience with automated deployment using tools like Phing, Ant considered an asset.
  • University degree in computer science or software engineering
  • Use of OO and design patterns
  • Working knowledge of web standards, SEO and accessibility
  • Front end development experience working with XHTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax
  • Agency experience an asset
  • A relentless and visible passion for and participation social and community engagement
  • Experience and confidence presenting to clients

BONUS POINTS

  • Unix system maintenance, shell scripting
  • Apache web server configuration, virtual host management

SUPER BONUS POINTS

  • Experience with Microsoft SilverStripe CMS
  • Experience with modern ORM such as Doctrine
  • Knowledge of Apache Software Foundation Projects: Lucene / Mahout

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Go by foot, by bike, by skates, by bus or by car. Our centrally-located office spaces in downtown Toronto and Ottawa are easy to get to.

SOMETHING IS ALWAYS BREWING

You’ll never wonder how long that pot of coffee has been sitting there. Our Starbucks coffee machine grinds fresh beans for every cup, and it makes a tasty cup of cocoa.

TGIF

At TF & 76, TGIF starts first thing in the morning with breakfast treats, the team then caps off the week by kicking back with a few drinks in office. Frequently, this spills over into one of the many nearby watering holes.

INSPIRE US

We’re an agency of talented, passionate, creative individuals. We want to create amazing work and solve our client’s problems in the coolest ways possible. This means we’re looking for people who are also talented, creative and passionate about the things they do. We’re looking for people who inspire and make us better.

Is this you?

If so, please contact Laura [at] 76design.ca to let her know that you’re interested in joining us.

 

 

Inside PR Podcast returns from summer hiatus

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August couldn’t last forever (too bad) and neither could our vacation from the Inside PR podcast. So, as September ushers in cooler weather, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I are back in front of our microphones to record this week’s Inside PR.

Inside PR 2.67 [ 17:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

Be a mensch

We start off with a discussion of corporate social responsibility – an issue Liza Butcher raised in a comment last week. Gini talks about the preference people have to work with a company that gives back. I cite Guy Kawasaki’s suggestion in his new book, Enchantment, that you “should be a mensch.” Among other things, this means that you should “help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.” Martin underlines this point with an example of a company that risked appearing self serving and self congratulatory in acting upon their social responsibility.

We the People

We also talk about the We the People site that is being launched by the White House. I compare it to the British Prime Minister’s Number10 Website, which also has a petition function as well as links to policy consultations. I’m skeptical of the value of pure crowdsourcing for policy development. I believe that it can lead to unfocused conversations. The best results are achieve, I think, when the policy makers are prepared to guide the conversation, being up front and honest about parameters, practical limits and secondary objectives. In other words, I think that the best public policy emerges when policy makers channel pure crowd sourcing into “purposeful discussion” through their active and open participation in the conversation.

Gini argues that the site falls short of its potential by making the culmination of the process a response from policy makers in the White House. Martin wonders about the requirement for 5,000 expressions of support as the threshold at which petitions will receive a reply. Is it an arbitrary number? Or is there some rationale for this?

Darwin for measurement

Finally, we talk about the recent news that monitoring service VMS shut its doors recently. Katie Paine published a thoughtful post on why the service failed. One of her arguments that rang true to me is that some longstanding suppliers are focused on giving their customers what they feel comfortable with. Newer entrants like Radian6 and Sysomos are innovating to provide the marketplace with new insights. Services that don’t match them will fall by the wayside.

So, that’s our first post-summer IPR. Please give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Why I'm hooked on Google+

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Mark Ragan asked on Google+: “Why do you like Google+ or dislike it? What are its greatest strengths? Weaknesses?” I wrote a longish answer, which I’d like to share here as well.

Why I keep returning to Google+

I find myself looking at and replying to the posts in my Circles at least daily. You can see my public posts Why have I added it to Twitter and RSS feeds as a principal source of information?

1) The organization of comments with the original post enables an intelligent, longer form conversation. A step above the declaratory statements that Twitter’s 140 character limit make possible.

2) The absence of the “traffic building” gimmicks that caused Facebook’s interface to become a junkyard (on the way to being he next MySpace in terms of a messy interface?)

3) Google+ Hangouts and Chat provide instant communications options – from every page.

4) Circles, of course! Think about organizing your interests in different circles the way you’d sort your clothes into different drawers by category and season. It makes it possible to focus on the conversation about the subject  you are interested in at any given time.

It still could be improved

Not every thing is perfect. Google+ is still a channel-in-the-making. The biggest disappointment so far is the Sparks feature. I can only hope that Google is going to give us more refined search controls on this feature. Once they do, it too could be great.

My public profile on Google+

If you’re interested in following what I have to say on Google+, check out my public profile.

The Fragmented Social Web: Where have our communities gone?

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I’m looking for case studies and best practices to describe how leading practitioners of social media are tracking conversations about organization and issues across an increasingly fragmented social media landscape.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of blogging. Back then, online conversations thrived in the comments sections of blogs. In the open for all to see. Search engines loved it. Blogging had great “Google juice.” We could publish our content on a personal or corporate blog and watch the comments and trackbacks as people responded. And our content would rise in search engine rankings.

Those were simple and satisfying times. But the online world has moved on.

Today, blogs still exist. But a greater volume of online posting and conversation has moved over to places like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

So what’s wrong with that?

Many of these conversations aren’t readily visible to us through simple searches. Facebook is a walled garden with privacy controls. Google+ encourages people to post only to defined “circles” of friends. When they do this, their posts are not viewable through search. And Twitter moved in the summer to make its full Twitter stream available only through Bing, not Google, adding to the work we must go through to search for references relevant to us.

And as the conversation has gone onto these social networks, the comments on most public blogs have decreased in volume.

More and more people are using social media – but much of their interaction is fragmented in walled gardens or available only to their friends and circles.

So, what’s a marketer, community manager or corporate reputation manager to do? Do we give up on seeing our community? Do we spend endless hours and resources tracking every conversation everywhere?

How do you find the conversations that matter to you when they are spread across numerous social media and networks? When they are playing peek a boo in the Facebook walled garden or within limited distribution Google Circles?

I’m looking for case studies or interviews with practitioners for a presentation I’m preparing and a companion series of blog posts. If you’re willing to share how you’re dealing with the new fragmented social Web, please let me know. I’d love to feature your case study or tips.

 

What makes a conference worth attending?

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Why do you attend conferences? I attend primarily for two reasons.

First, I want to meet in real life the people who share my interests and whom I follow online. I get to know them well online. But still there’s no substitute for real life, in-the-flesh contact. So, I always consider who else will be attending a conference when I’m deciding whether to invest the time and effort to attend.

Second, I want to be exposed to new ideas that I can think about and learn from. I consider a presentation worthwhile if I get at least one thought-provoking idea from it. So, at a great conference, I might take away four or five great ideas for each day I attend.

I discussed this in a short video interview with Johna Burke from Burrelle’s Luce when we bumped into one another at the recent PRSA Counselors Academy Conference in Las Vegas.

Inside PR: Hanging Out on Google+

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Inside PR 2.62 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s two weeks since Google+ launched and the Inside PR hosts, Gini Dietrich, Martin Waxman and I, have been testing it for its strengths and weaknesses. This week we  talk about our experience so far.

One of the things that has caught most people’s attention is Google Hangouts, the feature that lets Google+ users set up video conference calls with up to ten users. So we thought that we’d use this feature for our recording. Well, as you’ll hear in this episode, there’s a reason why Google+ is still in the “test” period. Not everything works the way that you’d like it to. We lose Gini part of the way through. But she rejoins us by the end. We also experienced the same problem that Shel Holtz noticed when he and Neville Hobson recorded a special episode of the FIR podcast using Google Hangouts with Camtasia studio. The video recording had several defects – frozen screens and video that lagged behind the audio. Hangouts is quite ready for this use. But we’re hoping that Google will keep improving this feature and we’ll keep testing it. Eventually, I’m sure we’ll be able to produce a video version of Inside PR to accompany the audio version.

Have you ever sat down with a long time partner and said, if we could do it over again, what would we do differently? So far, I think that Google+ is the Social Network that’s doing it over and is doing it right.

For me, Facebook started as a place that suggested we could have private conversations with friends and family. But as Facebook developed its business model, it broke the faith with us on that. Bit by bit, it pushed our information onto public feeds – and it wasn’t always up front about what it was doing and didn’t provide us with easy control over how we could control our information.

Martin has been focused on rebuilding his network on Google+. And he’s found that it feels like the early days of Twitter, before the celebrities invaded it and the network became obsessed with numbers of followers. Martin’s finding that he can connect with his real community of interest on Google+ and have much higher quality conversations than he’s experienced on the other networks.

So far, I’ve had an experience similar to Martin. I’ve found that I share the interests of most of the people who have followed me. And by using the Circles feature to sort people by topic, I can dip into different areas just as I would if I were choosing between sections of a newspaper. A great way to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Martin also finds that a strength of Google+ is the ease with which users can adjust their privacy settings – on a general basis and on a post by post basis. It’s intuitive and clear.

Gini also points out that the Circles approach is different from the asymmetrical following on Twitter and the symmetrical friending on Facebook. And this means that we’ll have to develop a different way of figuring out how to manage ourselves in a way that takes full advantage of the unique properties of Google+

So, that’s our Google+ discussion this week. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened in social media in the past couple years. We’ll continue to test it and share our experiences in future weeks.

And what about you? Are you using Google+? What do you think of it? It’s strengths? Its weaknesses?

Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joe Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

This week’s episode was produced by Kristine Simpson.

 

An A- for Google+

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I’ve been using Google+ for several days. So far, I think that, by and large,  Google got it right this time.

On the Plus Side:

The combination of video Hangouts with a Friendfeed-like Stream provides a natural conversation platform in which I can easily move back and forth between posting and live video conversations. It’s unlike anything else that so far exists.

The concept of Circles provides a fresh-start to those of us who found something wanting in both the Facebook symmetrical friending and Twitter blanket-followership. Circles should take the focus away from the blatant pursuit of large numbers of followers and place it back on finding others who truly share our interests – and want to engage in conversations about them.

On the Minus Side:

Search? How do I find things? Believe it or not, Google+ lacks a proper search function. The closest it comes is a feature called Sparks, which includes a search bar that suggests “Find stuff you’re interested in…” Surprisingly, it offers only basic search. It doesn’t offered the Advanced Search functions we’d expect of Google.

A pretty darned good start.

So far, an A- for Google on the early days of Google+. And given that I’m talking about a service that’s still in its trial phase, that’s a pretty good mark.

 

Kobo: My favourite eReader app just got better

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I logged onto iTunes this weekend to discover that my favourite eBook reader app just got better. Kobo introduced version 4.5 of its iPad app.

This version includes something I’ve been eager to see: proper handling of footnotes. With this feature, I can simply click on the number of an end-note to be taken directly to it. Once I read the note, I can click on its number and I’m returned to the main text. Simple. A great timesaver.

This feature adds to an already great application that allows me to:

  • Highlight passages in the text and add my own notes to them;
  • Share passages that catch my attention via both twitter and Facebook; and
  • Download books in ePub format that I can read on virtually any device – a Kobo eReader, my iPad, my Sony reader, an Android device.

Kobo’s slogan is “eReading: anytime. anyplace.” They make good on that promise. Having used iTunes for my music and now realizing that Apple’s strategy is to keep me locked into their products, I’m reluctant to go down that path with eBooks. So that pretty much rules out both iBooks and Amazon for me. I like Kobo’s commitment to openness. It’s good for competition. It’s good for the publishing industry. And it’s good for me, the reader.

Of course, nothing is perfect.

I have had one problem with the Kobo eReading app on my iPad. On three occasions over the past year, the application has frozen. The only way that I could get it to work again was to reset the iPad. Each time, I lost all of my locally stored data. That means my highlights and annotations. For someone like me who writes a lot of notes to refer back to later, that’s a big problem.

I hope that Kobo is looking at making it possible for readers to back up our notes on their server. This could have the added benefit of enabling me to download my notes to any device on which I’m reading – syncing my notes between devices. I think this should be feasible for Kobo. Already, we are able to share our notes with friends via their servers. It should be a relatively easy thing to enable us to save those notes to be download the next time we resync a second or new device.

If they’d do that, they’d make their already great app almost perfect.